What If? (Luke 22:39-54)4/17/2025
What if? These past few days, I’ve been swimming in a deep sea of What Ifs? Even though I know it’s wiser to deal with what is; Even though I know that, especially in the face of chaos, loss, and grief, what if’s are almost universally more destructive than they are helpful…. I can’t stop myself.
Because this is The Night to which Lent leads us all, and this is the place where all our time and energy given to fasting and self-reflection, to contemplation and prayer culminates; the place where our story both ends and begins: In the garden with the disciples who have just been washed and fed; and given Jesus’s final and foremost Commandment to love others as He loved them. Here, the disciples will make the choices on which the rest of the dastardly story turns. And we, too, will be asked to decide who we are, whose we are, and what we’ll do when the Ruling Powers come for Christ among us. So I’ve been wondering what they might say now -- these twelve men who spent three years living and serving and ministering with Jesus, and learning how to Be from God Incarnate. What if they could go back, knowing what we know? What would they do?
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Good morning, Beloved of God. Have you ever met someone who’s appearance, titles, or social status had you thinking they were one kind of person, only to learn they were the precise opposite? Or maybe you’ve been the person others assumed certain things about -- They saw your clothes, or your hairstyle, heard your accent or learned your job title, and their expression changed or they said, “Oh, you work there?” Have you ever heard people whispering about you behind your back, spreading rumors that couldn’t be further from the truth, while you had no way to set the record straight without making everything worse? It’s like when people find out I’m a pastor -- you, the bald lady? With tattoos up her arms and on her chest? Piercings all over her head? A PASTOR? Or this meme of Martha Stewart with Snoop Dogg -- “One of these is a convicted felon.” We all know who those who’ve never heard the backstory will assume is the One, right?
If you’ve ever categorized others or been categorized by them, and judged poorly according to untrue or inaccurate labels, then you’re in good company with the man at the center of today’s gospel. His name is Zacchaeus, which by the way means “Innocent and Pure” -- put that in your pocket -- His name is Zacchaeus and from the jump, Luke wants his readers to know what the crowd knew about him: He was an agent of the Roman state who, having risen in rank to chief tax collector, was living high on the wealth he’d stolen from the poor public. Let It Be (Luke 13:[1-5] 6-9)3/24/2025
Good morning, Beloveds. So, for those who don’t know, I am the youngest of four girls born within six years of each other. My mom and dad, who was a pastor, were well-known and beloved in our community, schools, and churches, and my sisters were all smart, gifted, dutiful daughters who excelled at most everything tried, which means I was born and raised simultaneously in the shadow of giants and under a microscope. At school, I was always welcomed as Melani, Michelle, or Charis’s sister and weighed against the standards they set. And anyone who saw or heard that I was a “Courts kid,” immediately clocked me as “Sam and Mary’s daughter,” a pastor’s kid, and graded me accordingly.
The problem was, I’ve always been the black sheep, from birth and even before. My conception was a profound and shocking accident -- or, like my mom always corrected me -- a miracle so determinedly willed by God that nothing could prevent me from becoming, and believe me they tried. I was born. Instead of being the boy they all hoped for, I was just another girl, but a weird one who dressed oddly, was overly-sensitive, and was insufferably dramatic. So I worked hard to fit in: I was a model student who excelled academically. A model PK who immersed herself in church and theology. And within our family, I became a shapeshifter, moving like smoke or water to fit into and fill whatever cracks, clefts, and crevices were left after everyone else took their place on the family stage. But I still didn’t. So I worked even harder to self-differentiate, and become a person with her own name and identity, instead of one who only existed in relation to someone else. I figured if I was gonna stick out like a sore thumb, I might as well paint the nail too. Instead of joining choir, I joined marching band. Instead of joining theater, I joined winterguard. Instead of singing the songs my sisters already sang better, I made up my own. I earned a degree in theology and then took my songs and myself to Nashville. And over time, I excelled at being different. But those times when I failed to meet the standard crushed me and stuck with me. The pressure to succeed was heavy, but the burden of failure was unbearable -- especially when my failure wasn’t something I did, but something I was. So, I think, friends, that I know something of what our beloved Fig Tree is going through in today’s gospel, and I bet some of you do too.  "Elegy" ©Jules Olitski (2002) It is Lent 2017. I am the office administrator at Redeemer Lutheran Church in north Minneapolis where I am a decidedly agnostic Lutheran still very much in the process of composting old beliefs, unsure if any type of faith might ever grow again. After two years in the congregation and one on staff, Pastors Kelly and Babette Chatman still faithfully welcome my unanswerable questions and deep doubts. They ask nothing of me but myself. Wounds are beginning to heal, scab over, and even scar. But I am fallow ground.
We are at our mid-week check-in and I am lamenting to P.K. how distant I still feel from Easter or any kind of resurrection hope. Everyone around me is marching triumphantly toward Sunday morning; I seem to be marching toward a sure and un-raisable End. I tell him I’ve long-since surrendered to the disintegration of my faith and am committed to letting it run its course, but I am scared. What happens when faith dies? I have had so many of these conversations with P.K., but I am still taken aback when he simply asks, “Why?” “What do you mean?” “Why do you lament feeling distant from resurrection? Why are you afraid of a dead faith?” The Apostle Paul’s words from I Corinthians 15:14 ring in my ears as I stumble over my own: “Well…? Because…? You know…isn’t that the whole point of all this?” He shrugs. “Amy, you can’t rush resurrection.” Neighbors, Not Heroes • Luke 103/12/2025
Tonight I want to talk a little more about what it means to be and have neighbors, and what “neighboring” can look like in real life, because, as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said when he preached on this text, that’s what Jesus did in this parable: He removed the Greatest Commandment from the thought exercises of theologians, and gave it bloody skin and broken bones instead. I’m going to dwell a lot on Dr. King’s lessons here, but first I want to tell you a story from my own life about a night that found me as both a neighbor to someone in crisis and as the someone in crisis who needed a neighbor.
It was sometime early last winter when my family and I were all jolted awake in the middle of the night by a major crash in front of our house. Someone had driven into the light pole and wrapped the front of their minivan around it, knocking it over.  Miércoles de Ceniza | ©rpphotos (flickr) This sermon was originally preached on Ash Wednesday (March 5, 2025) at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN. The service may be viewed in full here. The sermon may be viewed below. Gospel Text: Luke 9:51-62 Good evening, Beloveds. We are gathered tonight to confess our limitations, to renounce all pride and pretense, to remember our mortality as we embark on a 40 day journey following Christ to the Cross, where humanity’s faithlessness and duplicity will be laid bare and laid waste in Christ’s passion. I have always loved this season of the liturgical year, not because it ends at the Resurrection, but because it takes us to the very foot of the cross. To where the blood spilled by the powers and principalities of the earth and ether alike pools at our own feet and we are forced to reckon with the folly and fragility of flesh, and our brazen will to conquer it.
It is a journey to the deadest of centers, the holiest of in-betweens, that dark day when what was is gone and what will be has not yet risen. When God is dead, and we must bear its totality. It is not sexy. It is not hopeful. It is just, in the guttural poetry of Leonard Cohen, a cold and broken hallelujah. “Even here, even now, when all is lost and not yet found: God be praised.” These 40 Days are a practice of faithfully walking toward the most ruthless truth that whatever accolades or appraisals, felicities or failures, friends and foes we accumulate across however many hours or days or decades we have on earth, we are dust, and to dust we will return. No one — not even God Incarnate — escapes death.
Good morning, Beloved of God. Because today is all about how and when and to whom the Call of God comes, I want to start with the plain truth, that this week has been one of the longest years of my life. I have been overwhelmed by all that’s happening in the world and in this nation. Paralyzed by the enormity and rapidity of changes being made. I am deeply concerned for the safety and well-being of myself and my disabled family members, for my Black, Indigenous, Asian, and immigrant neighbors, trans and Queer friends and family, and so many colleagues for whom the growing litany of executive orders are indeed threatening to undo them. I am afraid -- afraid of speaking too boldly for fear of causing offense, and also ashamed of my own cowardice to speak Truth in a moment that demands clarity of vision, purpose, and direction for the sake of the most vulnerable. I don’t always know what to say, what to do, or how to do it all in love. And I am just as scared as a lot of you are.
None of this bodes well when you’re trying to write a sermon about the three call stories of the three radical church answers today’s lectionary texts. Beloved: Be Loved, Be Love (Luke 3)1/12/2025
If you’ve heard me say that before, it’s because these words have been the anchor of my life, my personal mission statement, for years now -- ever since October of 2014, in fact, when a dear friend asked me to write a song from one of her poems reflecting on the fragmentation caused by the years of abuse she suffered as a small child. As I wrote, I grieved -- and the song became a conversation between her truth of what is and my hope that her Beloved self would learn to Be Loved. And as almost always happens when I set about writing a song or a sermon, the words that come are as much if not more for my own hearing than anyone else’s.
So those words-- Beloved: Be Loved -- became the rooting affirmation of my life. And the invitation to Be Love, which so seamlessly follows, became its guiding aspiration. The Beginning is Near (Luke 1 & 3)12/8/2024
begin by orienting us within the framework of Luke, because each gospel is written a particular way for a particular audience in a particular place. Matthew, we know, was written by and for Christian Jews who’d broken communion with Pharisee-led Judaism; and Mark’s addressed a community of readers within the Roman Empire but beyond Palestine and the reach of Jewish Customs.
In contrast to both of those, the Physician Luke is a highly-cultured, well-traveled Gentile convert, educated in classical Greek philosophy, literature, language, and logic whose general audience are Greco-Roman Gentiles. More specifically, though, according to the opening dedication of his gospel, he writes to and for the Most Excellent Theophilus, a high-ranking man of considerable wealth and status — possibly a governor or other political leader — who’d been financially supporting Luke’s dear friend the Apostle Paul, and who had learned a little about Jesus, but needed some assurances from a trusted source. And having himself investigated everything carefully from start to finish, Luke sets out to provide an orderly account of Jesus’s life and ministry, with a literary elegance and artistry his highborn friend and wider Greco Roman audience would appreciate. It is, in equal measure:
The Stories We Are (Mark 10:35-45)10/20/2024
"But it is not so among you." So begins a yet-unwritten post-apocalyptic epic where worlds are resurrected, redeemed, and rebuilt; full of restored relationships and radical reciprocity, of deep reverence for how all life — from the deepest roots in the earth to the wildest winds hovering over distant planets on the cusp of life’s first breath — cooperates in communion in order to create, rather than destroy. We’re still in the prologue, though — the part in which Jesus’s backward teachings about greatness precede his days-away triumphal entry and crucifixion. The part in which power and greatness are measured by the ease and scale of the destruction done. And where the disciples, God help them, still think they have a chance at defeating the empire and transcending its “greatness” on its terms. We know that this story which began with John the Baptist declaring, “Prepare the way for the LORD; Make straight the path before him,” will end with that Lord’s death march, crucifixion, and burial; with a boulder removed from his empty tomb, and a trio of terrified women fleeing from the one who brings word of the impossible: Resurrection. And From a narrative standpoint, Mark’s gospel is the best kind of prologue, because it begs a turn of page. But we’re not there yet, and the disciples aren’t even close to being able to metabolize that fantastical a story. AMY COURTSSermons + Songs + Poems Archives
March 2025
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