In Loving Memory of Tsereha Tafere

Originally... Season of Creation: Storm Sunday
Jeremiah 23:23-29 and John 11:20-37

When the storm comes, don’t run for cover…

Don’t run from the coming storm ‘cause there ain’t no use in runnin’.

Yohannes Gabir, longtime member of Christ, stood in my doorway early on Thursday morning and he told us the unbelievable news that he had received a call that his dear friend, Tsereha had died. Tsereha? None of us could believe it… we really couldn’t even put together thoughts or find phone numbers or guess what to do next. The shock was so great that days later we are still trying to take it in… that beautiful, loving Tserha is no longer living and breathing here with us. Like a storm that swept through we are left with loss we can’t comprehend… and at the very same time, we know this truth from these strong words of Jeremiah.

There is nowhere where God is not.

The psalmist prays it too… Where could I go to escape from your Spirit or from your sight?If I were to climb up to the highest heavens,you would be there.If I were to dig downto the world of the deadyou would also be there.Suppose I had wingslike the dawning dayand flew across the ocean.Even then your powerful arm would guide and protect me.Or suppose I said, “I’ll hidein the darkuntil night comesto cover me over.”But you see in the darkbecause daylight and darkare all the same to you. (Psalm 139: 7-12, CEV)

There is nowhere where God is not.

In the earliest gospel, Jesus is sleeping in a boat during a storm and his disciples become terrified that their boat is going to sink and they will all drown… and in the midst of it, they wake Jesus with the words, “Don’t you care that we are about to die?” The first response in the story is that Jesus stills the storm… but the rest of the story is how Jesus answers that question—don’t you care? Jesus acts out the answer through all the rest of the story as he feeds and heals, teaches and restores, dies himself and is raised to new life. (Mark 4:35-41)
There is nowhere where God is not.

In the gospel of John, Jesus meets grief directly. His dearest friends, Martha and Mary, have lost their brother, Lazarus, and they have been sitting in vigil together for days. They are people of deep faith but their emotions run even deeper, why hadn’t Jesus saved the one they loved best? Mary wouldn’t even come out to meet him.Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.
Yet even now I know that God will do anything you ask.

Jesus says who he is - saying “Everyone who lives because of faith in me will never really die. Do you believe this?”

Martha expresses her faith in resurrection and in who Jesus is—Christ, the Son of God – the one that she has been hoping for.

After Martha said this, she went and privately said to her sister Mary, “The Teacher is here, and he wants to see you.” And Mary asks Jesus the very same question - Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Jesus weeps with them, wails with them… and the people said, “See how much he loved him.” Others said “He gives sight to the blind. Why couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?” (John 11)

We wonder the same… why couldn’t God have kept Tsereha from dying?

It’s not that we don’t know the end of the story. We believe, we trust in the resurrection of the body, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and life everlasting… but what is so hard to understand is this separation now, a separation that doesn’t make sense for a couple whose faithfulness gave strength to a whole family, really a whole community.

It doesn’t make sense for a new grandmother who wanted to love her beautiful daughters and sons, her beautiful grandson for years to come.

It doesn’t make sense in a faith community where we wanted to share her beautiful himbasha, receive the cup of blessing from her hands, and hear her voice reading scripture in her own heart’s language… well, we never wanted those gifts she shared with us to end.

And yet… There is nowhere where God is not. 

When the rain falls, let it wash away…

Let it wash away, that fallin’ rain, the tears and the trouble

Just a few weeks ago, we gathered here together for Elijah’s baptism.

I should just pause to say that this baptism and it’s timing was very, very important to Tsereha. In fact, she had Habte call me during the passing of the peace a couple weeks before to make sure that Lydia & Nick & I got to meet in time. We never dreamed we’d need to rely on these promises in this way so soon, but on that Baptism day, I said this, “By water and the Word God delivers us from sin and death and raises us to new life in Jesus Christ. We are united with all the baptized in the one body of Christ, anointed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and joined in God’s mission for the life of the world.” We renounced everything that gets in the way of relationship with God and we said we trust God and God’s promises through whatever life brings.

We prayed, “Sustain Elijah with the gift of your Holy Spirit: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the awe of the Lord, the spirit of joy in your presence, both now and forever.”

We know that this same faith that we prayed for in Elijah was the faith that lived in his grandmother. This is what she lived and taught each of us by her witness. She may have appeared to be small in stature, but she was great in faith. She was shy in some ways but she met life with tremendous courage and self-sacrifice for the good of others.

She has joined the saints, such a great cloud of witnesses, she is held in God’s loving embrace—and I can only imagine her wishing for us to deeply know these words of Jesus, “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” (John 14:18)

There is love within you, there is love all around you… it is the unconditional love of your wife, mother, sister, who would only ask that you take care of one another now; it is the love of God who mysteriously goes with us through the valley of the shadow of death all the way through to the other side, it is the love of people who share our sorrow and help us hold onto to hope when our faith wavers; it is love that never gives up, that never ends.

When that love calls, will you open up your door…

You gotta stand on up and let it in, you gotta let love through your door.[1]

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[1]Wailin’ Jennys, Storm Comin’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OguVb3uSZTs

In the dark, we see farther

Season of Creation: Cosmos Sunday

Genesis 15: 1-6 and Luke 12: 32-34

In the summer, in the north, darkness is in short supply. I usually think about that with gratefulness – I love the long summer days. But, when we wake with the dawn and go to sleep with the sun, in this summer season we’ve been getting a lot less sleep. Those of you who have had the experience of waking with young children at the crack of dawn know this struggle... you get why my sister-in-law (living in far northern Canada with five little ones & another on the way) has invested in room-darkening shades. Others of you – teens, for example – know how hard it is in summer to accumulate 15 hours of nighttime driving, when night doesn’t really start ‘til about 10:00 pm. In summer in Minnesota and especially in the proximity of a major urban area like this one we live in, darkness is limited. And it is only in darkness that we can really see the stars, really see out into the cosmos.

Abram receives a vision and shares a direct encounter with God in this early story from Genesis – the book whose title means formation, emergence, becoming… Abram’s name means “many” but this far in the story, Abram grieves because he is the opposite of many. He has no children. He feels alone. He has given up that he will ever have a descendent and this is the only marker of his worth that means anything to him. So God takes him out to the night sky and asks him to count the stars… it’s impossible.

And then God tells Abram that his descendants will be like that… more than anyone can count. Given that people of three major religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam all look to Abraham (whose name means “father of many, parent of multitudes”) as their ancestor, we know now how the story came out eventually… just as God promised… but way back as they looked at one small part of the cosmos together, Abram had no way of really knowing that. He trusted God, he believable what seemed unbelievable.

What seems unbelievable to us today?

Maybe we can’t believe anymore in an end to violence… 

46 people died in Chicago last week Sunday

In Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas and in Gilroy, California, 34 people died the last two Sundays and 67 more were wounded

My dear friend, a leader in her own local chapter of “Mom’s Demand Action” traveled to Des Moines, Iowa this weekend for the Presidential Gun Sense Forum…

Maybe we just can’t believe anymore in a country that allows people to walk into a Walmart or a City Festival or a restaurant or bar and open fire…

Maybe we can’t believe in a way forward through the rhetoric of fear that keeps things as they are… guns too easily in the hands of the hateful… maybe instead, it’s just easier to blame God for not giving us the vision we need to change things... 

Yet in the night, God points us to the stars. So that we might remember our small place in the universe, our limited vision, our inability to see how the whole story will unfold… yet also, our ability to trust in the promises of God who invites us to place our trust carefully.

Not in the ability to arm ourselves, however valuable that may be, but in the one who gives life and walks with us through death.

In our love of light, in our fear and worry about darkness, about not being able to see, in our lack of trust, we have filled the world with artificial light… and it impacts not only our physical and mental health but the health of many other species, especially nocturnal insects, amphibians, fish, birds, bats and other animals.[1]

Jesus said in sharp contrast to our efforts to control the night, “Do not be afraid… for it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” That word can be confusing because we don’t fully understand what that means—what are we being given exactly? Well, certainly not what we think of first when we hear “kingdom” - not crowns or castles or armies or treasures… because the very next invitation is to sell our possessions. We release the security of things in order to gain something else. But then, the invitation is this—to invest in what doesn’t wear out, what can’t be stolen, what can’t be consumed. Invest in true treasure. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Which makes me think of our Fifth National Night Out last Tuesday. Some of you set up and passed on the Facebook invite. Some of you were here all day, cooking & smoking chicken legs. Some of you donated your tables and chairs and others set them up. Some of you served lunch or invited people to come who were sharing lunch at Shobi’s on the corner of Rice and Sherburne. Some of you figured out how to set up sound outside. Some of you walked up and down Rice Street, inviting neighbors. Some of you invited youth to come & youth, you invited children to join you in games. Certain brave souls got up and sang karaoke; others danced; others listened as one neighbor, then another shared their thoughts—real and imagined. We were about as diverse a neighborhood gathering as any… and a small group of us got up to dance the Cupid Shuffle at one point, led by KICKS counselors from years past and including the two very young SPPD officers who joined us for that part of the evening. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

It makes me think of Three Days of Awesomeness, a Confirmation & youth retreat that also came together this week… also now in its fifth year. For the past four years, we’ve been the guests of the Rahbergs at River Place Tree Farm, a place where when the skies are clear, there is a remarkable view of the stars. Where we reflected together on how God calls us together – calls us to serve, play & share – and then calls us out. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” In the darkness, we can see farther…

There is a reason that we invest our time and resources in these kinds of gatherings—in Shobi’s lunches shared on the corner, in KICKS that gives young people a sense of “home” that lasts year after year, in music & food shared in Peace Garden that brought neighbors back again, neighbors who are learning to trust this community of faith, in Wednesday night suppers & evening prayer shared in Advent and Lent because when our treasure builds community, our hearts grow.

These past weeks, we have been in vigil with Shirley Brekke’s family as she neared the end of her life. As I visited this week, more than one person came in to say some word of advice about what the family should do to ease her journey… maybe you’ve experienced this, too… somewhat unwelcome advice about how you should be navigating the passage with a loved one near to death. One of her children looked into my eyes and here’s what I shared, “I hope you know, you are not doing anything wrong. Death is a great mystery.” Like any part of the future, things do not always unfold in our timing or as we would want or expect, but we wait in mystery, without firm answers, looking to the Creator of the stars of night, who gives us the ability to invest in true treasure together as we welcome God’s good dark that helps us see a bigger picture of our place in the cosmos… and trust in the future that God is creating in and through, within and even in spite of us.

At Shirley’s bedside as she grew nearer to death, I prayed a prayer that I know she loves… a prayer that reminds us to trust in the God who leads and guides us.

Lord God, you call your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending

By paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown

Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

In the dark, we see farther… and step into it with faith, hope, love.            

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[1]https://www.smh.com.au/world/darkness-isnt-what-it-used-to-be--and-thats-not-good-20171123-gzravm.html, Amina Khan, November 23, 2017