It happens all the time in big ways and small ways and sometimes on purpose. Like when my son Elijah says “thank you” in German -- Danke -- and I immediately reply Shein because of that old Neil Diamond song.** It drives him bonkers because he’s told me over and over that the appropriate response to Danke is bitte schön. But that is, of course, why I do it: It’s a game we play, and I love it. I think he does too, though he probably wouldn’t admit it.
It happens in hilariously scripted and honest ways, too, when two people think they’re talking about the same thing but clearly aren’t, like in that old Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First” bit. And, of course, it happened a lot while we were in El Salvador, as I tried -- and failed -- to pull enough Spanish from memory to be conversational with our beloved siblings who don’t speak English. Sometimes, I knew just enough for them to get what I was saying, and to laugh as we all acknowledged I know un poquito Español. Other times, everything was lost in translation and we had no choice but to communicate through smiles, laughing, dancing, and that sacred unspeakable language of the soul that connects us when words cannot. But there are other times, still, when the misapprehension seems intentional. I’ve seen it a lot on social media where it’s so easy to hide behind avatars and forget that we’re relating to real humans on the other side of a screen. It’s easier, sometimes, to double down on ridiculous arguments even after we’ve been proven wrong, than to admit our mistake and move on. We try to save face but end up cutting off our own nose to spite it! I suspect that in today’s text -- which is the culmination of Jesus’s Bread of Life discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum -- that intentional misapprehension is at play, and Jesus knows it.
0 Comments
Grandma's Bread (John 6:24-35)8/5/2024
Good morning, Gethsemane. You probably don’t know this about me, but as a born-and-bred Denverite, I grew up traveling to Crosslake MN at Christmases or in the summer to visit my grandparents who owned a little motel right on the lake. When family came, the motel was all but shut down to travelers and became instead the Courts Family Rambler Home. It was awesome. Those vacations were my favorite, not just because they were always big family reunions involving all my seven aunts and uncles, their spouses, and all us bazillion grandkids, but because driving into Crosslake and crossing the bridge to their motel on the other side, always felt like coming home.
I haven’t thought about those vacations in a long time, nor even my grandparents really, and never in such depth -- but when I began to wonder about what made Jesus’s bread so special in today’s text, it wasn’t the sourdough sensation of 2020 that sprang to mind and lingered. Nor was it the memory of thinking my mom was sending me to school with cheap wheat bread when all I wanted was other kids’ fancy expensive wonder bread -- I know better now; God bless her. Instead, what swirled into my mind and stayed is the memory of standing in my Grandma kitchen up at that Crosslake motel and jockeying with my cousins for the first slice as she pulled a loaf of fresh, hot bread from the oven -- which would be devoured in literal minutes by us minions at her back. That bread was made of some kind of magic: It was the softest, warmest, spongiest, sweetest bread ever, from all eternity. Not even Garlic Texas Toast -- a true delicacy to my still uncultured taste buds -- could compare to my grandma’s bread smothered in her homemade rhubarb jam.
Good morning, Beloved of God. As always, it is good to be together today and it’s my hope that you were able to enjoy this week’s holiday with family and friends, on the lake or at home. But I have to admit that, for me, the day was as dispiriting as it was rainy. The truth is, it’s become increasingly difficult in recent years to celebrate the 4th of July when, as James Baldwin said, “you know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early.” To be brutally honest here -- and I mean this from the deep love and desperate hope that agitate me daily: Between climate chaos, the rising costs of living, stagnant wages, corporate greed, multiple ongoing genocides, and the impending season of political chaos that looms over everything right now here in the US, I am left with nothing but to confess I find little to celebrate. Instead, I find a deep need to gather, grieve, rage, and together in community IMAGINE SOMETHING MORE SACRED, something beautiful and liberating, that will compost this mess into life-growing gardens.
Because -- and I will recite these words of Maya Angelou’s over and over, like a prayer and invocation, until they sink all the way into the marrow of our bones as Christ’s body in this world -- None of us are free until all of us are free. There are very few all-or-nothing truths I will plant my feet and dig my heels in on, but it is my firmest belief that all us humans, and all that lives, really, are intrinsically, inexorably, and indivisibly connected to God and each other by breath and water, and so we only get free together -- and this, we do, in the fundamentally interdependent community of the Beloved by cultivating in the here and now the upside-down Kin-dom of God that Jesus preached and the Disciples spread, and whose seeds we see planted in today’s Gospel.
A preface: This sermon did not come easily. In fact, it didn't really come at all. After literal days of mulling and chewing and writing all the notes and ideas and plans, and spending eight focused hours into the wee hours of Sunday morning when I finally gave up, I still showed up to worship with maybe five of the paragraphs you read below. So I invited the Spirit to move as She willed, to speak as She wished, and this is what came out. For this reason, it's longer by a lot and doesn't read the way my typical sermons might. But it is precisely what was needed, and even garnered applause at the end -- which never happens. Thanks be to God and the Spirit! So good morning! I wasn't kidding when I said that Louis could preach today because it would probably be better than what I came up with in the last 20 minutes. The reality is this week has been a mess, I have been way too in-my-head, trying to find exactly what I needed to say and find -- There's a lot of verses on this page! Where, what am I looking for?! What am I going to find?! That has been the stress, along with like driving to and from other states, so I am here, we are here together, and that is the good, that is the good beautiful, joyful thing that I am clinging to right now, even as I beg the Spirit to come and be with us and breathe through whatever it is that comes out of my mouth. Amen.
So today, we do begin our sermon series through the book of Philippians on Finding Joy in the Ordinary, and I get to start us off by simply acknowledging that joy is often hard to find. Pastor John mentioned a couple weeks ago -- last week? -- we did this Enneagram thing. How many of you know the Ennea- Anybody? There's like three of you and half of you are staff. It's this personality thing that kind of shows you where your passion is, where your focus can be, and kind of what drives you internally. And for me, I am an Enneagram 4: I am the Individualist. I am the Creator. I want everything I say to be perfect and special. And I love sad things! I love feelings, I love big feelings, I love getting really deep -- really deep -- in the yuck and pulling it apart and going, “Where is the life here?” So that's what I get to do today. We'll see if it actually gets done! The reality is that especially within the the Queer community, of which I am part, in the United States we know deep in our bodies and our bones how hard it can be to find joy and to be full of joy in a world that so often hates us and wishes that we would just not be this. Paul knew it too. The people that he spread the gospel to and who took that gospel and spread it further -- they knew this in their bodies and their bones. And so I am going to begin at the end of Paul's teaching here, in verse 27 where he says, “Only live your life in a manner worthy of the Gospel, so that I will know you are standing firm in one Spirit, striving side by side with one mind, for the faith of the gospel." And I start here because this is the instruction, the commendation, that anchors everything else that Paul is going to say to the Philippians in the coming chapters. And it can anchor us as well, as we move into the rest of it, and as we move into our days. Christ Our Mother (John 17:6-21)5/12/2024
“Feminine face of the Holy One, you are known by many names, but all of them mean Mother.”✧ Hold us now in your tender care.
Good morning, Gethsemane, and blessed Mothers Day to all of you here, whether you come in celebration or sadness, closeness or estrangement, grief or joy in relation to your own mother or to motherhood. I know that as often as this day is full of joy and gratitude for the mothers among us, it can also be fraught with much complexity, heartache, and loss. And so I offer that opening invocation from Mirabai Starr, even as I honor all the ways you enter worship on this particular day, and invite you into the comforting warmth of the Great Mother, Birther of All Creation, from whose eternal womb all that is has its being, in whose care all find comfort, and who comes to us this day in the prayer and passion of Jesus the Christ. I offer all this as one in need of it, because, in truth, I am tired, overwhelmed, and depleted of energy by deep grief over the escalating genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; by my profound joy over my son who just entered teenagehood (God bless me); and by general exhaustion from the busyness of life within a capitalist economy that says our worth is not intrinsic, but depends on how hard we work and for how many hours and dollars we do it -- which puts stay at home moms in an undervalued, unappreciated category, and those of us who work in the center of the particular tension between whatever it means to be a good, unpaid mom, or a paid-but-not-present-enough one. It’s difficult not to feel strained and depleted in an economy that worships and depends on labor for its own sake, and views rest as laziness. Faithful Thomas (John 20:19-31)4/7/2024
Peace be with you, beloved of God.
This morning we get to peek into the mind, body, and heart of a man who’s been veiled in a very particular reputation over the millennia since Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. We all know him as “Doubting Thomas,” and in all honesty I was not thrilled to preach about the disciple I was taught never to be like but who I seemed to mirror anyway, in all the wrong ways. I’ve always doubted and always wanted proof because my faith has never been an easy blessing but something I’ve worked out in such fear and trembling that I was well into my 20s before I permitted myself to entertain what author David Dark calls “the sacredness of questioning everything.” It took a few more years after that to lose god altogether, which I did, about nine years ago. And when I tell you I lost god, I mean it in the most literal sense: In the midst of the asking some of the heaviest and hardest questions of my life about evil and suffering and why God never did anything about the world’s unmitigated grief and violence, I woke up one morning with an overwhelming clarity that it was because, simply, there is no god. It’s not that I stopped believing, but that god had never existed to begin with. And my life was a lie. JUDAS (New Version)3/29/2024 As I contemplate again Maundy Thursday, and Jesus's giving of his whole self to betrayers and deniers, I am reminded by his command to love as he loves just how impossible that is to do in everyday life. Maybe one day. "JUDAS" (c) 2022 Amy Courts Music
Good morning, beloved of God. Today we enter into Holy Week, into the final few days of Jesus’s life. As I read this familiar story again this year, I was drawn to the ways in which it begins and ends with the presence of Christ’s closest friends. Throughout this recounting of Jesus’s last days, hours, meals, and moments, I can't help but notice the real people who showed up in fearful and risky, costly, and cowardly ways.
And so As I think about this story and all the ways it invites us to witness grief, the first thing I am conscious of is our culture’s general aversion to the process of grieving, mourning, wailing, and witnessing -- especially publicly. We tend to be stoic people, uncomfortable with grief and intolerable of the quiet, steadfast presence mourning requires. So when we are grieving, we offer apologies for feeling like a burden, and when our friends grieve, we offer platitudes, like “everything happens for a reason,” and “God never gives us more than we can handle” (which are both garbage by the way). We do not like, nor do we understand the purpose and power of grief, so we often interrupt it and speed it along. We rush through the passion to the Resurrection, skipping some of the most important and transfigurative moments along the way. And so today, I am inviting us to do the opposite, and to do it together.  This message was originally given on the fifth Wednesday of Lent, March 13, 2024, at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN. The livestream of Holden Evening Prayer lenten worship may be viewed here. This evening's scripture text is Colossians 1:17-23a (below) “HE GIVES ALL THINGS THEIR FULL MEANING 17He is the one who is in first place and the head of all things. It is in him that all things come together and find their full meaning and purpose. 18He is also the head of his body on earth, the sacred family. He is in first place before all other things, the first2 to rise to life from among those who have died. In this way, he remains chief in all things. 19It made our Great Father’s heart glad to have all that he is living in his Son. 20Through his Son he brought together everything in the spirit-world above and on the earth below into harmony with himself, making peace through his lifeblood poured out on the cross. OUTSIDERS BECOME INSIDERS 21At one time you were outsiders, separated from Creator by your hostile thoughts that led to evil ways. 22But now in the physical body of the Chosen One, through his death, he has turned you from an enemy into a friend. He did this so that you can stand without shame before the Great Spirit as a people who have been made holy, washed clean from guilt and free from all accusation. 23Yes, all this is yours as you make your path straight on the road that leads to this hope, trusting in the good story that you have heard.” — First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament by Terry M. Wildman In the fall of 2017 when autumn trees were bursting with color, Osage Theologian George E Tinker stood before a Lutheran audience in St Paul and said, “Beautiful place y’all have here. So how’d you get it?” He recalls it landing as intended -- awkwardly and uncomfortably -- but his query was and remains important: “How did Lutheran folk end up with so much Indian land across the northern tier of the U.S., including in Minnesota? [It] is,” he writes, “a theological and ethical question that most American folk (not just lutheran folk) never get around to asking themselves.” I want us to meet George Tinker precisely because he’s an American Indian who asks the uncomfortable questions about the history of this Place and its people, from the particular “perspective of Native Peoples who were displaced under the Doctrine of Discovery and all the anti-Indigenous laws it birthed” for the benefit of euro-christian settlers, including us.
But first I want to root us in why exploration of Indigenous Christian Wisdom is so important in this Place: We are a predominantly white-bodied Lutheran congregation in a state that was settled by a largely Scandinavian lutheran population. We live in that historical context, in community with the displaced, in this Place with a capital P. So it is crucial for those of us who benefit from European expansion to examine how our culture has interacted and at times clashed with others, across generations. And to get there, we have to understand the “Doctrine of Discovery” and its impact on Tinker’s Native ancestors and living relatives. Mary the Tower (John 11:17-27)2/21/2024
Good evening, Beloved of God, and welcome to Lent, and to this journey into some of our historical church roots through ancestors of the faith you may or may not know. As we’ve mentioned, over the course of the next 6 weeks, we will be introducing you to towering ancestors from each continent whose witness and ministries have shaped the church eternal and guide us even still, whether or not we knew their names before now.
And it’s my honor tonight to peer into the life and ministry of one of our most misunderstood, misidentified, troped, and erased ancestors whose life offers deep roots in the ground and wide-ranging perspective at its spire. Her name is Mary called Magdalene, or -- literally, in the Greek -- Mary, the Tower. Hold on to her name, and let’s begin where we meet her first in the Gospels, which is not John 17 but Luke 8:1-3 where she is named in brief alongside “many women” who became Jesus’s disciples after he healed them of illnesses and demons. These women, according to author Cynthia Bourgeault, form an “opposite and equal female presence” among Jesus’s followers which tells us “participation in Christ’s inner circle was determined not by gender but by their degree of understanding and commitment. And all four gospels infallibly place Mary called Magdalene within that inner circle.” Back to Luke 8: Mary called Magdalene’s particularity here is that she was “liberated from seven demons.” Now, further into Luke 8 we meet the only other possessed person whose demons were also named with particularity -- he’s the man so tormented by the demons named Legion that he’s literally been living in a graveyard. I’m naming him here to underscore that demon possession ravaged a person to such a degree that those who were freed from many at once, be it seven or Legion, would’ve had a uniquely powerful understanding of what it meant to be liberated and transformed. We’ll come back to this. The next time Mary Magdalene is named is when all four gospels, which rarely agree on anything as a quartet, place her as a witness to Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and as the first person to Jesus’s empty tomb. Already, we can see that her importance within Church history has been diminished; her roots -- our roots -- haven’t been well-tended. AMY COURTSSermons + Songs + Poems Archives
August 2024
Categories |
RSS Feed