1 Samuel 1:4-20 † 1 Samuel 2:1-10 † Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25 † Mark 13:1-8
You can view a video of the service and sermon here.

Franz Dolp was a professor of economics at Oregon State University when he began, perhaps, the greatest work of his life. As a young father and professor, his marriage had eroded, and his dream of creating an Oregon homestead with it. When he drove away from the farm intended for “till death do us part,” it was with the good-bye blessing, “I hope that your next dream turns out better than your last.”[i]
He eventually found his way to forty acres on Shotpouch Creek. This logged-out, chaotic hot mess of vine maples, leggy hardwoods, and thorns was in the same Oregon coast mountains where his grandfather had made a hardscrabble homestead.

In his journal, Franz wrote that he had “made the mistake of visiting the farm after it was sold. The new owners had cut it all.”
I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust, and I cried. When I moved to Shotpouch after leaving the farm, I realized that making a new home required more than building a cabin or planting an apple tree. It required some healing for me and for the land.”[ii]

“My work [at Shotpouch] grew out of a deeply experienced sense of loss,” he wrote, “the loss of what should be here.”[iii]

Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of how Franz Dolp, a wounded man, moved to live on wounded land at Shotpouch Creek in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, in a chapter she titles “Old Growth Children.” 

Franz wrote in his journal, “These forty acres were to be my retreat, my escape to the wild. But this was no pristine wilderness.” The land was razed by a series of clear-cuts over the years—first the venerable old-growth forest and then its children. No sooner had the Doug firs grown back than the loggers came for them again.[iv]

Everything is different after land is clear-cut. Sunshine is abundant, the soil is broken open and unstable, temperatures rise, the humus blanket gives way to exposed minerals. Forest ecosystems have tools for dealing with disturbances, of course. Early plants get to work on damage control, quickly. 

Opportunistic plants known as pioneer species have adapted to thrive in these conditions. They grow quickly to take advantage of the light. A bare patch of ground can disappear in a few weeks beneath thickets of vine maple. They don’t bother with making trunks, but invest madly in leaves instead, spreading everywhere on flimsy stems, soaking in the sun’s rays.

We have a beautiful example of this in the Coral Bark Maple growing right outside my office window in the memorial garden. It is a bit more organized than the vine maples that are like bushes in our Pacific Northwest forests.
​
The key to success is to get more of everything than your neighbor, and faster, which works when resources seem to be infinite. 

Of course, they aren’t. “Pioneer species,” Kimmerer explains, “not unlike pioneer humans, require cleared land, hard work, individual initiative, and numerous children. But the window of opportunity is short. So they have developed brilliant adaptations. They use their photosynthetic wealth to make babies that will be carried by birds to the next clear-cut. Many are berry makers, for example: salmonberry, elderberry, huckleberry, blackberry.
​
Kimmerer is beginning to form a contrast for us that becomes constructive for our own human decision- and value-making when it comes to survival and well-being:
The pioneers produce a community based on the principles of unlimited growth, sprawl, and high energy consumption, sucking up resources as fast as they can, wresting land from others through competition, and then moving on. When resources begin to run short, as they always will, cooperation and strategies that promote stability—strategies perfected by rainforest ecosystems—will be favored by evolution. The breadth and depth of these [relationships] are especially well developed in old growth forests, which are designed for the long haul.[v]

Old growth forests sustain life that is incredibly complex and multi-layered. The trees are just the beginning. Mammals, birds, amphibians, wildflowers, ferns, mosses, lichens, fungi, and insects—a staggering variety—thriving together in an intricately woven and deeply stable reciprocity. These were forests peopled with centuries of past lives, with enormous logs and snags that fostered more life after their death than before.[vi]

I’m inclined to think that Jesus is thinking in these terms as he sits on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple imagining the unimaginable but inevitable with his disciples. We, of course, have the benefit of hindsight when it comes to this story. We know that this temple—one of the wonders of the ancient world—was leveled as a finale to the first Jewish-Roman war when the Roman Legions cracked down once-and-for-all on Jewish revolutionaries on the 10th of Av in the year 70 of the common era, 1951 years ago.[vii]

All that remains is a portion of the Western Wall, or what we in the west often refer to as the “wailing” wall where people go to mourn lost hopes and leave their most desperate prayers in the cracks between the massive stones of the ancient ruin. Mark’s gospel made its appearance either right before or right after the destruction of the temple and recognized the unsustainability of the moment. The way things were could not last.

​Likewise:
Industrial forestry, resource extraction, and other aspects of human sprawl are like salmonberry thickets—swallowing up land, reducing biodiversity, and simplifying ecosystems at the demand of societies always bent on having more. In five hundred years we exterminated old-growth cultures and old-growth ecosystems, replacing them with opportunistic culture.[viii]

It’s not that pioneering communities don’t have a place in regeneration. They are just not sustainable in the long run—not like the aboriginal cultures that for 13,000 years before these temple stones were knocked to the ground had been thriving with one foot in the ancient forests of the Pacific northwest coast and the other among the salmon on the coastal waters. If we think they were poor, Kimmerer is quick to correct the record. They were among the wealthiest in the world.

Wise use and care for a huge variety of marine and forest resources, allowed them to avoid overexploiting any one of them while extraordinary art, science, and architecture flowered in their midst. Rather than to greed, prosperity here gave rise to the great potlatch tradition in which material goods were ritually given away, a direct reflection of the generosity of the land to the people. Wealth meant having enough to give away, social status elevated by generosity. The cedars taught how to share wealth, and the people learned.[ix]

So Franz Dolp began his work with machete in hand, clearing pathways through the thickets at Shotpouch. It was not easy. “This is work I should have started in my twenties, not my mid-fifties,”[x] he admits at one point in his journey. But he persisted with a clarity of purpose.

“My goal,” he wrote, “is to plant an old growth forest.”[xi] But he understood this as more than the physical restoration of a plot of land. “To love a place is not enough,” he wrote. “We must find ways to heal it.”[xii] And he understood his own well-being was at stake as he gave himself to the land and learned from it. He wrote of the loving relationship that grew between them: “It was as if I discovered a lost part of myself.”[xiii] “What I give, I receive in return. Here on the slopes of Shotpouch Valley, I have been engaged less in a personal forestry of restoration than in a forestry of personal restoration. In restoring the land, I restore myself.”[xiv]
​
This was a work of forestry, but it was also a work of art. “I could have been painting a landscape or composing a cycle of songs. The exercise in finding the right distribution of trees feels like revising a poem. Given my lack of technical expertise, I could not reconcile myself to the title of ‘forester,’ but I could live with the idea that I am a writer who works in the forest. And with the forest. A writer who practices the art of forestry and writes in trees.”[xv]

Franz Dolp died in 2004. He was killed in a car accident. But the land lives on, now a work of Oregon State University. There’s a hand-drawn map of Shotpouch, with many evocative names. One of the most poignant may be the spot he called “Old Growth Children.”

You see Franz was creating something that he would never see to completion. Like Jesus, who saw the destruction of the temple as a beginning of a birth, like Hannah who staked her life on a reality larger than her own, Franz began to live into the old-growth culture that was healing him and those around him.

“To plant trees is an act of faith,” Kimmerer reasons. “Thirteen thousand acts of faith live [on Shotpouch].”[xvi] And isn’t this the work of faith anyway?—to trust the long work of God and to live a life that is even more generous in death? Isn’t this our work?—to be old growth people?

​Amen.

Notes:
[i] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 282). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.  
[ii] Ibid., pp. 282-283.
[iii] Ibid., p. 282.
​[iv] Ibid., p. 283.
​[v] Ibid., p. 284.
​[vi] Ibid., Cf. p. 278.
​[vii] See “Temple of Jerusalem” in the Encyclopedia Britannica online. Retrieved on November 12, 2021 from: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Temple-of-Jerusalem. 
​[viii] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (pp. 284). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.
[ix] Ibid. pp. 279-280. 
[x] Ibid., p. 280.
[xi] Ibid., p. 285.
[xii] Ibid., p. 286.
[xiii] Ibid., p. 285.
[xiv] Ibid., p. 290.
​[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Ibid., p. 289.

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17 † Psalm 127 † Hebrews 9:24-28 † Mark 12:38-44
You can view a video of the service and sermon here.

Robin Wall Kimmerer tells of an ancient ceremonial tradition among the indigenous coastal people in the Northwest. It always happened about this time of the year. If you’ve been out and about on the rivers in the past month or so, paying attention to what’s been happening in our waters, it may not surprise you.

Kimmerer spotlights the story this way:
Far out beyond the surf they felt it. Beyond the reach of any canoe, half a sea away, something stirred inside them, an ancient clock of bone and blood that said, “It’s time.” Silver-scaled body its own sort of compass needle spinning in the sea, the floating arrow turned toward home. From all directions they came, the sea a funnel of fish, narrowing their path as they gathered closer and closer, until their silver bodies lit up the water, redd-mates sent to sea, prodigal salmon coming home.[i]

​The return of the salmon, the yearly salmon runs was a foundation for life among the First Nations. Around this time of the year, they would camp along the coasts, gather at the mouths of the rivers, waiting and watching. 

​The numbers were astonishing. Rivers filled with silver flashes as thousands upon thousands of Chinook, Chum, Pink and Coho returned after years at sea for their final act.

I remember first being enthralled by stories and old pictures of the precarious fishing platforms above the wild waters of Celilo Falls on the Columbia River near The Dalles, Oregon. For 15,000 years, it became an annual gathering place of the First Nations when the salmon ran. Some 15 to 20 million salmon passed through those falls every year. Celilo was a site for treaty-making and feasting and celebration in this wild context of abundance—nation-building, you could say, in the very best sense of the term. They would come from all over to celebrate the abundance of the earth, to outdo one another with generosity in potlatches, to trade and make treaties and secure peace among their people.
Celilo was the oldest continuously inhabited community on the North American continent,[ii] that is, until March 10th, 1957,

when, within hours after the massive steel and concrete flood gates of the newly constructed Dalles Dam were closed and, 13 miles upstream, Celilo Falls and the settlement disappeared forever.[i]

​Kimmerer tells the story of the coastal people not too many miles to the west of Celilo “standing along the river singing a welcome, a song of praise as the food swims up the river, fin to fin.” But what doesn’t happen is equally telling:
The nets stay on the shore; the spears still hang in the houses. The hook-jawed leaders are allowed to pass, to guide the others and to carry the message to their upriver relatives that the people are grateful and full of respect.[iv]

Only after four days of safe passage is the First Salmon taken by the most honored fisher and prepared for a ritual feast. Kimmerer tells us, it is presented on a cedar plank in a bed of ferns, along with venison, roots, and berries, in sequence “for their places in the watershed.”[v]

Only then are the nets set out. Everyone has a task, including the elders who remind the young, spear in hand: “Take only what you need and let the rest go by and the fish will last forever.” And they mean it. When the drying racks are full with the food they need for winter, they stop fishing.

There is a fundamental understanding of reciprocity at play in these ancient stories and ceremonies. Kimmerer, understands this not only as a grateful recipient of these indigenous traditions, but also as a scientist. She notes that these runs of salmon fed not only her people, but the forests as well. The spent carcasses of spawned-out salmon, dragged into the woods by bears and eagles and people brought much-need nitrogen from the oceans to the forests. 

Using stable isotope analysis, scientists traced the source of nitrogen in the wood of ancient forests all the way back to the ocean. Salmon fed everyone.[vi]
 
I wonder if it’s not the loss of this culture of reciprocity that Jesus laments the most as he sits near the temple treasury seemingly just wasting time, paying attention.

As Mark often does, we have two stories that are placed beside each other for comparison.

The first finds Jesus warning his disciples: “Beware of the scribes.” This would certainly have caught the attention of Mark’s first century audience, for the scribes were the honorable and upstanding citizens of the day. They were the lawyers and teachers and professionals—the respected and the privileged. Yet there was something about them—in them—that revealed a polite society that had so lost its way that they were devouring widow’s houses—leaving people to the streets—and had ceased to care or even notice.

Listen to how Jesus describes these upstanding citizens: they want to walk around in long robes; they want greetings in the marketplaces; they want the first seats in the synagogues; they want the first places at the dinners. The scribes are known by their wanting, they are consumed by consuming, they are kept up by keeping up appearances.

Now, we should note the scribes don’t always get a bad rap in Mark. Only a few verses before today’s text Jesus is impressed by one of them.[vii] 

But then look at the second story in this pair. Like the scribes, the widow also drops a gift to the temple treasury. By all appearances, she ought to go unnoticed. She tosses a couple of coins in the plate that amount to nothing while some of Jerusalem’s finest make notable donations. This woman’s paltry sum wouldn’t have made a dent as far as heating the temple or running the lights goes. But Jesus saw it for what it was. An act of pure generosity, a jaw-dropping act of faith, and a revelation that exposed the fault lines of injustice. Here, for anyone with eyes to see was a sign that the path they were on was robbing the people of their future.

There is a deep structural problem revealed here in this temple of worship that needs fixing, a profane political reality that allows for the rich to walk care-free, basking in the glow of an admiring community while more and more widows’ houses are being devoured. And Jesus sees the writing on the wall. Houses such as these cannot stand. And in fact, this temple won’t. But that’s a story for next week.
If we have ears to ear, Kimmerer and the long wisdom tradition that was here on this continent long before European colonists arrived wanting, helps us to distinguish between a culture of reciprocity and a culture of domination and consumption that is already devouring the future of our children and our children’s children.

These women—at the treasury, facing a last meal—gave everything. These were astonishing acts of agency and wholeness, that fed everyone.

Kimmerer notes that the First Salmon Ceremonies were, likewise, not conducted for the people. They were for the Salmon themselves, and for all the glittering realms of Creation, for the renewal of the world. People understood that when lives are given on their behalf, they have received something precious.[viii] And so, as an act of gratitude, they gave something precious in return. A lamp is lit. A table is set. Loaves and fishes may yet abound.

Notes:
[i] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 241). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.
​[ii] See “Celilo Falls” entry in Wikipedia. Retrieved on November 5, 2021 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celilo_Falls. 
[iii] For more information, see John Caldbick. “Celilo Falls disappears in hours after The Dalles Dam floodgates are closed on March 10, 1957”, February 10, 2012. Retrieved on November 5, 2021 from: https://www.historylink.org/file/10010. 
​[iv] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 243). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.
​[v] Ibid.
​[vi] Ibid., p. 244.
​[vii] Mark 12:34.
​[viii] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 252-53). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

​It took me about two minutes the other day to remember the name for these. I could see them in my mind’s eye, and I knew they were in the fridge right next to me, but I was determined to flex those memory muscles and work past this mind block. Every time the words came close to my consciousness, stupid broccoli kept getting in the way. 

​Bru, bru, bru…broccoli.

​No!
​
Finally, I got it! I conquered! 

​“Brussel sprouts!” I shouted to Barb who I suspect, by that point, was looking a bit anxious. It was almost as if I had to look out of the periphery of my brain to do it, but I prevailed! 

I did it!

Our minds, you see, are not like computers. Computers forget nothing. We do. Well, I certainly do!
Sometimes we are unable to remember things. Sometimes we choose to forget. What we forget about ourselves and about others may be as important as what we choose to remember.
I think about this on a day like today that is all about remembering. It is a complicated thing, isn’t it, memory? In a little while we will light candles for those we choose today to remember, for those who have gone before us. We will remember with gratitude, with sadness. Our emotions, rightly, will be close to the surface, as Jesus’ are in our gospel reading.
​
But there’s more, isn’t there? I heard from someone the other day a little more of their own family story, and it was not pretty. It was filled with pain, with hurt, with gaslighting and rejection that had very little to do with my friend and more to do with injuries that are passed on from one generation to the next in our family systems and in our national life together. 

​Those who will be represented and remembered by the burning candles we will light in a few minutes, those saints were sinners too—sometimes quite accomplished ones—and the work of today is to bring the fullness of these truths, these people, these stories to the redeeming presence of God’s Spirit here today.

Our minds are not computers. A better metaphor, I suspect, is that they are biased curators of our memory. I think the prophet Isaiah is hinting at something of the same thing in singing of this God who will swallow up death forever. Isaiah imagines God as a burning presence that leans us toward life. So we have Isaiah imagining a future in which God will wipe away our tears and replace our disgrace with wholeness.[i] 

To imagine a legacy is not to forget or obscure or misshape the past. It is not an invitation to tell ourselves more lies. If our walk with Job over the last four weeks has taught us anything, it is that we forget our suffering, and particularly the suffering we cause, at our peril.

We have a better option. We can choose to curate our memories. We can construct our stories together in ways that will bless the future that comes to us, that will serve the good news of God’s salvation, that will bring forth the Kingdom of God. With all that we are given—the good and the bad together, we can choose to curate hope.

Take the gospel of John as another example. While no one knows for sure who authored any of the gospels, there are some scholars who have imagined that our friend Lazarus is in fact the author of the Gospel of John. It is an intriguing idea that speaks to the lessons of All Saints—that Lazarus’ experience was so transformed by Jesus, that he understood his whole history, his whole identity to be re-shaped around this story. Even though he would once again die, he was, in fact, reborn.

Our imagination, our creativity, these are some of the most important tools of the mind and the heart that we possess in this enterprise of being church. They teach us that we can be more than we have been, that we can be more than we imagine as we follow the way of the Creative One. We are able, with this Spirit of Life within us, to create who we are and to curate the future: to see, as the writer of Revelation sees, God’s new heaven and new earth.
​
Thanks be to God!

Notes:
​[i] Isaiah 25:8.

1 Samuel 17:57-18:5, 10-16 † Psalm 133 † 2 Corinthians 6:1-13 † Mark 4:35-41
​You can view a video recording of this sermon here.

​I had never before noticed the cushion. Did you catch it?

In the spirit of not making too much of this, ​

We all know something of this from our own experiences. And having seen what we’ve seen these past 16 months of the unequal experience of hardship and suffering, of access to health care and stable housing, generational wealth and simple dignity, and of real sea crossings for refugees seeking a better life, our hearts are surely drawn all the more to our human siblings who have endured what I and perhaps you cannot fully imagine.

That’s one reason I love the story from Samuel in today’s texts. Some of our ecumenical siblings are reading Job today along with the gospel text. We have in past years. In that text, God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, essentially challenging his doubt with God’s power as seen in creation. Mark mirrors this, for sure, as Jesus doesn’t just speak to the wind and the waves. He rebukes them; he silences them—just as he rebuked and silenced the demon earlier. ​

We can see it too can’t we?—signs that something new is possible. We blink and suddenly we have a new national holiday, and a much better awareness, even among we who are more privileged, of our true history and of the work still to be done than we did even a few short months ago.

Let’s go back to that painting one more time, to catch one last detail. Jesus was sleeping on a cushion, yes. We’ve covered that. The story also notes he was sleeping at the stern—the back of the boat. What else do we find at the stern?

It is where the rudder is. It is where the one who is directing things—no matter storm or calm—is located. Truth be told, that’s probably what the cushion was for.

Who is this one who controls the wind and the waves? Who is this one who holds back the storm with a word? It is the very same one to whom we can entrust the storms that rage in our own lives, who makes ways for peace and gets us to the other side.

Thanks be to God.

Notes:
[i] Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996), 66.
[ii] 2 Corinthians 6:4-7.

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 † Psalm 20 † 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17 † Mark 4:26-34
You can view a video recording of this sermon here.

​

Fireweed was one of the first plants to emerge after the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens. Over 200 square miles of forested terrain was blanketed in ash and over 100,000 young trees and saplings perished in that sudden event, yet within one month fireweed seeds had found the ashen soil and its rough green shoots were starting to drive their way to the light. It is estimated, that just a year later, Fireweed represented about 80 percent of all new seedlings around the volcano. Today thanks in large part to the early work of Fireweed and plants like it, the place is coming back to life.

Colonizer plants reestablish what the ecosystem needs to be healthy again. They are nature’s response – and I think they are a good representation of the Spirit of God’s response - to trauma. Fireweed comes in these tiny seeds, seeds that can fly miles and miles, finding their way into the most unforgotten spots, and raising up colonies of plants that can grow up to 9 feet tall and can produce up to 80,000 seeds per plant. Seeds marvelously equipped and ready to fly again looking persistently for the places that need them. 

I had been offered a new story about something familiar to me.  A story that held what I knew and at the same time pushed me just a little off kilter in its suggestion than there was more to things than the story I was stuck in. My body and my mind knew that the time was right to pursue the questions that had been planted and nurtured in me by my experience, and with the help of some wise guides, I found a bigger more life-giving reality. Now, today I know this plant as a beautiful sign of a God who never gives up on us. Who makes a way when there is no way.

With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?  This is what Jesus asks those who have come to listen and to learn from him. In answer to his own question, he compares the kingdom of God in these stories today to the work of little seeds. The kingdom of God is like a seed that has all this potential which we did not create, and which we do not control, and which when ripe will produce for us a harvest. And the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. This tiny seed that grows to produce an abundant home for others.

The writer of this gospel then tells us this:
“With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; 34he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.”

How true this is! The gospels are full of parables and a lot of them start with those words… the Kingdom of God is like…. These parables describe God’s presence amongst us in a myriad of different ways using a host of different images and characters.  And they pack a punch thanks to both their ordinariness and to their strangeness. 

The ordinariness draws us in – their characters and subjects are familiar and we can relate. I don’t know about you, but I am still grabbed by the ordinariness of these stories from 2 millennia ago. They are stories told with love about ordinary lives, things the people of the time knew and cared about and things we know and care about still. ​

So maybe you are feeling strong and ready to give voice and to pursue new perspectives and new questions; maybe you are unsure and need some time to recover and work out what is next; or maybe you are feeling some combination of these or other things. Know beloved, trust that you are where you should be, and the Spirit of God is with you in all of it, all of it. The Spirit of God is with you like fireweed after change making a way, setting the conditions for new life.  May we trust this, and may we be with each other tenderly in this new place nurturing and tending to what is real.  May we, in God’s peace, find the courage and the safe space to name what is real for us and to offer the kind of space that helps do the same as they are ready and able. And as the time is right may we with curiosity and hope catch and follow what is rising up for us, and what needs to be pursued for the sake of widening the story so that we and all others may have the full life that God wants for all.
​
Amen

Isaiah 6:1-8 † Psalm 29 † Romans 8:12-17 † John 3:1-17
​
For perhaps ten thousand years on this continent, long before modern industrial monoculture farming methods became dominant, women mounded up the earth and planted three seeds right next to each other in the ground. ​

You see, the stories we tell matter. They shape our way in the world. They transform it for better or worse. I suspect Nicodemus began to understand this as that strange conversation with Jesus in today’s gospel text unfolded. It flummoxed him. It troubled him. But ultimately it led to his conversion as we can infer when later in John, we meet him again as he, bearing 100 pounds of myrrh and aloes, joins Joseph of Arimathea in preparing his now beloved teacher for burial after he was lifted up on a cross and crucified.[5]

But first, here is the story as Kimmerer the scientist and teacher tells it to us: Once over the millennia these three seeds were planted together in the mounds of May-moist earth, the corn seed quickly takes on water, triggering enzymes under the skin that cleave the starch into sugars and fuels the growth of the corn embryo making it the first to emerge from the ground.

Meanwhile, the bean seed, drinking in water from the soil, swells and bursts its coat, sending a rootling deep into the ground. Once the root is secure, the stem bends into the shape of a hook and elbows its way above ground, joining the corn stalk, by now about six inches tall, in the light.

The slowest sister, pumpkins and squash—take their time. It is sometimes weeks before the first stems poke up, still caught in their seed coat until the leaves split and break free.

The birth order is important to their relationship and essential to the success of the crop. They each have their roles to play.

The firstborn sister corn, grows straight and stiff, laddering upward leaf by leaf. It grows quickly, making a strong stem that will ultimately support its cob, but also to help its middle sister. The bean focuses on leaf growth while the corn gives herself to height. Just about the time the corn is knee high, the bean shoot changes its mind, as middle children often do, and instead of making leaves, stretches itself into a long, slender vine with a mission. ​

Hormones set the shoot tip to wandering, inscribing a circle in the air in a process known as circumnutation. Traveling up to a meter in a day, the pirouetting tip dances in a circle until it finds what it is looking for—a vertical support, her sister corn.
​
All this time the late-blooming sister squash is exploring along the ground, branching out, unfurling broad lobed leaves like a stand of umbrellas. The bristly leaves and vines give second thoughts to nibbling caterpillars while they shelter the soil at the base of the corn and beans, keeping moisture in, and other plants out.

Acre for acre, a Three Sisters garden yields more food than if you grew each of them alone. And the nitrogen fixing properties of beans enrich the soil for all the plants year after year without the need for fertilizers required by monocultural farming.[7]

“The genius of the Three Sisters lies not only in the process in which they grow,” according to Kimmerer, but also in the way they complement each other on the kitchen table. They taste good together, and they form a nutritional triad that can sustain a people.[8]

Mark Taylor, one of our teachers at Seattle University sees Trinity as a story name, much like a Native American story name. Surely Trinity is an experience, a lesson, a moral and relational take on the world and the Spirit’s way within it, more than it is a doctrine.

It is surely true that the notion of Trinity bares a surplus of meaning. It is a mystery calling us, like Nicodemus, to meaning that always escapes our full understanding—hovering over the waters as spirit, cajoling Nicodemus as his brother and teacher, speaking the world into being as nothing less than pure Love in motion that begs to be copied.

It is a mystery calling us to a way of life together that sustains and blesses, that makes room for all and resists what kills us. Like the Indigenous story of the Three Sisters, the story of Trinity is ripe with meaning waiting to be harvested: Reciprocity, mutuality, balance—a full meal for the living. We could devote the rest of our lives to these things, to this dance, and we would never run out of good work to do. 

“For all of us,” Kimmerer writes, “becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”[9]

Indeed, it does.

Amen.


Notes:
[1] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 129). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.
[2] Ibid., (p. 129).
[3] For a comprehensive exploration of this history see Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (REVISIONING HISTORY). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
[4] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 129). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.
[5] See. John 19:38ff.
[6] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 131). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.
[7] Ibid., (p. 132).
[8] Ibid., (p. 137).
[9] Ibid., (p. 9).

Acts 2:1-21 † Psalm 104:24-35b † Romans 8:22-27 † John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
​
​This was not the first time that fire from heaven came down on the earth. It had happened before.

In Exodus[i] we read that fire from heaven descended on the Tent of Meeting. It says, “Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” Amid the 40 years of wilderness wanderings, whenever it lifted the Israelites would move, but when the cloud of fire settled on it, the Lord was in the tabernacle, and they stayed where they were.

The theologian N.T. Wright[ii] reminds us it happened again in 1 Kings[iii]. For generations God lived in the Tent of Meeting, even after David the king had a home of his own. Finally, around 950bce, Solomon, David’s son, had finished the temple. God finally had a permanent home, and on the day of dedication, fire filled the temple in much the same way it had filled the tent of meeting.

“The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness,” Solomon proclaims. “I have built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell forever.”

And so God’s presence was assured for the Jewish people, and, in the thinking of this small tribal affiliation known as Israel, Solomon’s Temple became the centering place of the whole world.

You are the temple of God, Paul tells the church at Ephesus. You are the temple of God, he declares to the Corinthians—a communion, by the way, that was not exempted even though it was a mess—filled with strife and struggle. [iv] And we are the body of Christ in which God’s glory dwells.

Do you believe this? Do you really believe the fullness of this? Do you believe all that it implies?

Do you give yourself to the audacious claim of value and possibility this day proclaims? Or do you wonder? Perhaps you consider it true for someone else, but not for you, not for us.

In our time apart, we have faced an uncomfortable reckoning when it comes to the racial and economic inequities of our society. We have seen the systematic fortification of white lives and the persistent degradation of Black and brown lives. In our time apart, the violence of white supremacy that we who are white, in our inaction, allow to persist, has become impossible to deny.

I know my own inaction. I also know I doubt at times, when it comes to my own sense of self, my own belief in God’s love, my own sense that, as the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton said it, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”[v] And if I doubt for me, I am sometimes more likely to counteract that by dismissing someone else.

But let me repeat that Pentecostal image of fire and light again that Merton first imagined in such a specific place—on a street corner in St. Louis, in a shopping district at the corner of Fourth and Walnut: We are all “walking around shining like the sun.”

So if you’re like me, don’t despair. The pastor Rob Bell thinks the disciples became the disciples precisely because it wasn’t what they were expecting to do or be asked to do. They were not the likely candidates. They were not the elite who had been prepared for it from birth. They were tradespeople with modest goals. They were going to take on the family business, get a decent job, nothing more, nothing else. And then Jesus called them. Jesus saw in them what they couldn’t see in themselves. And they left their nets and their lives behind, and they followed.

And they started a fire.
17     ‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
18     Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
 
That’s how Peter explains it to the astonished onlookers. The fire of God has fallen on you and on all people. This is where our story begins. You are the temple of God. You are Christ’s beloved. You are what the world needs. We are Christ’s body. Holy people for holy people. Holy people for a holy world.

This is what Gandhi and King understood and what the Poor People’s Campaign today claims. This is what the heart of Judaism understood with its mission to mend the world. And this is what the world needs today. But it cannot begin until we know that we are, we all are the temple of God—Jew and Gentile, Palestine and Israel, American and African, rich and poor, cis and queer—in our brokenness, in our imperfection, in our dreaming and hoping and longing. You are the temple of God for the salvation of a holy world.

Thanks be to God.

Notes:
[i] Exodus 40:34-38.
[ii] These ideas are summarized by Richard Rohr in his “Daily Meditation” column. “The Evolution of the Temple” April 20, 2015. Retrieved on May 19, 2018 from http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=7ff2eee8-2a69-48a2-841e-91640c14c09e&c=ee206a20-643a-11e4-a643-d4ae528eaba9&ch=ee257330-643a-11e4-a643-d4ae528eaba9.
[iii] 1 Kings 8:10-13.
[iv] Cf. 1 Corinthians 3:16-17, 2 Corinthians 6:16, Ephesians 2:21-22.
[v] Thomas Merton. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

Let that sink in, for a moment. In comparison to other groups, the divide in the experience of quality of care in childbirth is wider now that it was when Black women and their children were enslaved and counted as property. And the problem is so significant among Black women and babies that it drives up the entire US rate for both statistics.[iii]

The problem, plain and simple, is racism.

When it comes, for example, to infant and maternal mortality, research has clarified what is behind these startlingly incongruent rates. It is not because Black women do not take care of themselves. It is not because they get inadequate pre-natal care either—although they often do. It is not because they are somehow more irresponsible than any other mother. When pre-natal care is equal, Black women still have small and pre-term babies. It also does not have to do with education. In fact, a Black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby or die in delivery than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.[iv] And it also doesn’t have anything to do with genetic differences.

Simply put, something about growing up as a Black woman in America is bad for your baby’s birth weight and threatening to her survival. It isn’t poverty. It isn’t irresponsibility. It isn’t inherited. It is the lived experience of being Black in America. It is the result of systemic racism. A sea of research over the last few decades has clearly indicated that these disparities are directly attributable to bias and to toxic psychological stress experienced as a result of systemic racism. An article in the New York Times Magazine spells it out for us:
For Black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions — including hypertension and pre-eclampsia — that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed in a pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care — including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms — that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of Black women with the most advantages.[v]
 
In other words, it is solvable, even as it goes to the very heart of who we are, the morality of our culture, the story of us we have told ourselves for so long, and our willingness to give ourselves to a new story of reciprocity, to a larger sense that we belong together, that we are responsible for one another. It is, for we who consider ourselves followers of Jesus, a matter of living out our faith.

Jesus’ prayer in John is confusing, and it creates challenges because of language that seems to limit the God who so loved the world, really the cosmos so much that, as Eugene Peterson’s translation The Message translates it, God moved into the neighborhood. But that’s what these texts for today are talking about.

When Jesus says he and his followers are not of the world, but in it, I suspect it is fair to say that we understand ourselves to be committed to a different set of values, a different code that what is generally held in our broader culture—an anti-racist stance that is built on this idea that we belong to each other, that we are our brothers and sisters keepers, that our well-being is tied up in the well-being of others, and that as long as Black women and their children are at risk, or poor people are at risk, or our siblings with disabilities are at risk, then we all are at risk.

We will see this more next week in the story of Pentecost. In that story something new happens. In biblical imagery before this, the glory of God had fallen in the form of fire from heaven onto the temple. At Pentecost it now descends on people. All people! Not just Jews, but Gentiles, people from throughout the world. Insiders and outsiders, poor and rich, slave and free alike.

This, beloved siblings, is the beginning of our story. I suspect it is so important for us to remember that this story did not begin with us. We are the adopted children. This story begins in the fertile crescent we now know as the Middle East. And it began in Northern Africa. It began with Black and brown people, like Jesus. We are the ones who have been adopted into it. We are the ones who benefit from the witness of those first believers. We are the latecomers, the recipients of the generosity of the Spirit of Life.
​
 Jesus prays to his Abba an aspiration we seem to be so far removed from at this point in history: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me so that they may be one, as we are one.”[vi] We are not of the world, Jesus suggests; we are not to mirror its brokenness and toxic zero-sum competition. But we belong to the world and its well-being. We are to be different. We practice a different code, a different set of commitments that refuses to imagine we are not dedicated to its well-being.

I’ve shared with you before a beautiful spoken word piece by a poet named Joseph Solomon. It is a Mother’s Day piece, but I think it illustrates this broader love beautifully, even as it takes seriously the unique dangers that people of Black and brown skin face disproportionately. It speaks to the deep sense of belonging and responsibility that falls in direct line with the truth of Jesus’ life and the faith that did not begin with us, but into which we are gratefully adopted. It was inspired by his experience at an airport. Have a look.

 Acts 10:44-48 † Psalm 98 † 1 John 5:1-6 † John 15:9-17
A video version of this sermon can be found here.

​You likely read the quote from the Robin Wall Kimmerer we included in the invitation to worship. Here it is again, from her book Braiding Sweetgrass: “It’s funny,” she writes, “how the nature of an object—let’s say a strawberry or a pair of socks—is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. 

Gifts, she explains, create ongoing relationships. Were those same socks knitted by her grandmother and given as a gift, she would not only write a thank-you note, but take care of them, wear them when she visits, even if she didn’t like them. She would make her a gift in return on her birthday. “That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage.”

I was thinking about strawberries this week. Like Kimmerer, my mom tells stories about picking strawberries as a kid. As I remember, it was something she did for some pay, to pick up a little extra money to help out her family who knew what it was to be in want. But I think there was a joy there too that resonates with the distinction Kimmerer is trying to make for us.

Kimmerer remembers that strawberries first shaped her experience of a world “full of gifts simply scattered at your feet.”[ii] These gifts move toward you through no action of your own. You can’t earn it. You can’t call it to you. You can never deserve it. The only choice you make is to be open-eyed and present.

She remembers joy-filled days in these giving fields, lifting up small leaves low to the ground to discover small, flavor-filled wild strawberries freely offered.

Those fields of my childhood showered us with strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, hickory nuts in the fall, bouquets of wildflowers brought to my mom, and family walks on Sunday afternoon. They were our playground, retreat, wildlife sanctuary, ecology classroom, and the place where we learned to shoot tin cans off the stone wall. All for free. Or so I thought.

I experienced the world in that time as a gift economy, “goods and services” not purchased but received as gifts from the earth. Of course I was blissfully unaware of how my parents must have struggled to make ends meet in the wage economy raging far from this field.[iii]
 
Kimmerer’s father loved strawberries, so Father’s Day would almost always be celebrated with strawberry shortcake. Her mom would do the baking and the kids were responsible for the berries. They would spend a Saturday gathering berries, more going in their mouths than anywhere, but they would return home triumphant, with jars full, then poured out on the kitchen table to sort out the bugs. “I’m sure we missed some,” she remembers, “but Dad never mentioned the extra protein.”[iv]

That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift of them to our father. The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.[v]
 
Jesus says to his disciples, “I no longer call you servants, but friends.”

I think that friendship, especially as we see it here in these texts is a gift in precisely the way Kimmerer means it. It is empowering to be called a friend and not a servant. And if you are a friend, you are acting out of love. You are doing the work out of love. If you are a friend, you have been chosen as a partner.
But don’t forget those socks. This gift does not come free. Kimmerer looks to the scholar Lewis Hyde: “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.”[vi]

That’s essentially the difference between a gift economy and a wage economy—between the form of relationships Jesus invites we disciples into and the economy of the Western, industrialized, white world—those economies of the colonizers that smothered the gift economies that characterized indigenous life and wisdom on this continent for thousands of years.

Kimmerer looks to Lewis Hyde for clarity in his exploration of the pejorative “Indian giver.” I am glad to not have come across this ugly term for many years, but I knew of it as a white child growing in relative privilege to describe someone who gives something and then wants it back. In truth, it is a story of cross-cultural misinterpretation between an indigenous culture operating in a gift economy and a colonial culture steeped in the concept of private property.

When settlers received gifts from Native inhabitants, the white recipients understood them as valuable, and thus, intended to be retained. To give them away would be an afront in the same way you would give away those socks your grandmother lovingly knitted for you.

But those indigenous people who lived in the context of a gift economy based on reciprocity. It was equally an afront if the gifts did not circulate back to them. “Many of our ancient teachings,” Kimmerer explains, “counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again.”[vii]

This should not be an unfamiliar concept to us with just a glancing view at today’s texts:
First John five: “For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.”[viii]

John 15: “You did not choose me but” like those strawberries scattered in the field, “I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit that will last…”[ix]

“From the viewpoint of a private property economy,” Kimmerer explains, “the ‘gift’ is deemed to be ‘free’ because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost.” It then becomes easy for me to imagine it is mine without obligation to do whatever I want to with it.

But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.[x]
 
Perhaps there is not better day in our Western World than Mother’s Day to illustrate that love always comes with obligation, and at its best, joyful obligation. There is nothing we would rather do within the context of our most deeply bonded relationships than give back and bless.

Our human relationships are transformed by our choice of perspective. Their values increase as we enter into more deeply into the invitation of Gospel; our joy is made complete.[xi]

Now, Kimmerer is not just speaking poetically in all of this, nor are these scriptures. Kimmerer is also a plant scientist, and she understands these realities in the context of adaptive, evolutionary behavior. Those little strawberry plants she remembers from her childhood were not really up all night cooking up a batch of strawberries for her, but they were in fact “up all night assembling little packets of sugar and seeds and fragrance and color,” because when they do so, “their evolutionary fitness is increased.”
When it is successful in enticing an animal such as me to disperse its fruit, its genes for making yumminess are passed on to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than those of the plant whose berries were inferior. The berries made by the plant shape the behaviors of the dispersers and have adaptive consequences.[xii]
 
Just so, our behaviors are adaptive. Our choice of perception that makes the world a gift is adaptive. Our refusal to participate when someone tries to sell the gifts is one way that we might find our joy is made complete.

So, for example: Water is a gift for all. It is not meant to be bought or sold. Don’t buy it. There is something wrong with food that has come to us devoid of any connection to the animals that gave their lives for it. But we can find our way back. Kimmerer one last time:
The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.[xiii]
 
Thanks be to God.

Acts 8:26-40 † Psalm 22:25-31 † 1 John 4:7-21 † John 15:1-8
A video version of this sermon can be found www.standrewpc.org/sermons/5th-sunday-of-easter-year-bhere.

​It is important to notice, when we look at this Acts story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch that it is a story with three characters not just two.

Great detail is provided about the first two—unusually detailed information, in fact. This isn’t like some of Luke’s other stories where people are left in mystery. We know a great deal about Philip from other texts in Acts—he is a deacon: one of seven Greek-speaking Jewish Christians appointed by the Twelve to tend to the needs of others, especially widows in the Greek-speaking portion of the fledgling Christian community. He is known as Philip the evangelist. He eventually settled in Caesarea, a government seat in first-century Palestine. He had four daughters who were considered prophets.[i]

We know perhaps more than we want to know about the Ethiopian. They are in charge of the treasury of the Candace, which is the official title of the queen mother who is head of the Ethiopian government. We know by their chariot that they have status. We know by their scroll that they can afford rare things. We know by their Greek that they are educated. We know by their reading Isaiah that they are devout. We know by their invitation that this Ethiopian is humble enough to know what they don’t understand and to ask for help, and hospitable enough to respond to Philip when he approaches.

And we know, because the author of the two volume Luke-Acts story tells us five times, that they are a eunuch.

I am discovering more and more the gift of this, even as it is such a hard thing to do. Whenever I have the courage and take the time to really listen to another, I discover the presence of God in them. Whenever I find the courage to abide with one who is on the outside, to be an ally, I am drawn more closely and deeply to them. And I am drawn even more to the holiness in me.

The Spirit says, I am the vine. You are the branches. Abide in me. Let me be your source of life. As much as we like to understand ourselves to be the primary actors, our faith makes the claim that the star of this show is the third character in our stories. This Spirit in us, this Spirit that we share, this Spirit that does not belong to us, but we to it, this is the Spirit that draws us into deeper love of self and neighbor. This is the Spirit of life. And we do not flower or bear fruit apart from it.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Notes:
[i] See the articles for Fifth Sunday of Easter in Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 2 (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2008), 454-459.
[ii] Isaiah 52:13-53:12.
[iii] Isaiah 56:4-5.
[iv] These thoughts are drawn from Richard Rohr’s daily meditation from Center for Action and Contemplation. See in particular Wednesday, April 22, 2015 at http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=a8699b88-8be5-4cfe-8544-0f3885d0ce19&c=ee206a20-643a-11e4-a643-d4ae528eaba9&ch=ee257330-643a-11e4-a643-d4ae528eaba9.
[v] See Philip Yancey’s article “Small is Large”: http://philipyancey.com/small-is-large.
[vi] Ibid.