I’m on the road this week, preaching and adventuring and eating delicious things and seeing good friends, which is why there was no regular Monday lectionary reflection post. But! Here’s the sermon I got to preach with Manassas Church of the Brethren this past Sunday, a congregation that I love and that has loved me well. I was one of their pastors a decade ago, and being back with that community was real, real good for my heart. It’s one of the great gifts of my life to have been loved into being by several whole congregations’ worth of generous, gracious, thoughtful, hilarious people, and I’m so glad to stay connected.
Sermon 6-9-2024
Manassas CoB
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:3
Have you all experienced the cicada apocalypse this summer? I don’t think the hordes are here in Northern Virginia, and they’re not in Roanoke, either. But my friends down in Durham, in North Carolina, are living through a legit plague.
It’s a rare year when two broods of “periodic” cicadas are emerging at the same time. One brood emerges every 13 years and another every 17, and 2024 is one of the rare years that both are aboveground at the same time. They are EVERYWHERE. And they’re LOUD. My North Carolina friends are complaining that they can’t keep up with the cicada shells - every time they sweep the front stoop, the detritus returns within hours.
And the sound is really and truly sort of unbelievable. I had heard people talking about it, but then I visited Durham a couple of weeks ago and, driving through town, I wondered why so many people were using leaf blowers all over the city at the same time before I realized, OH: thats INSECTS.
My Durham friends are tired of the cicadas after months of crunching through them and listening to them, but cicadas are actually incredibly fascinating creatures. Some kinds of cicadas emerge above ground every year to molt and mate and lay eggs, but this year’s broods only come up for air every 13 or 17 YEARS. All that in-between time, they are living underground in their tiny burrows, growing wings and waiting until it’s time for the big show.
Last summer, on an early-morning walk with the dog, I came upon a cicada that had *just* emerged from its shell, hanging on the concrete curb. The little guy was still and silent, clinging to his exoskeleton as he waited, patiently, I guess, for his new wings to dry out enough for him to move. SO COOL.
There aren’t many creatures on earth that grow by shedding their outer layers like cicadas do. It’s kind of a weird way to grow, if you ask me. Cicadas molt five times in their lives - most of those happen underground. When they finally emerge out here where we can meet them, they do their final molting, squeezing out of the too-tight shell with fully grown wings and are finally considered “adult” cicadas.
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Cicadas are what I thought about when I started reflecting on this morning’s passage from Paul to the church at Corinth, believe it or not. The congregation in Corinth is struggling, and Paul is struggling to relate to them. He started the church, there, but then left to travel around the region starting other churches. And the congregation in Corinth started facing difficulties - which, to be honest, seems kind of expected as they were one of the first communities of Jesus followers and had to forge their own path without the benefit, like we have, of thousands of years of precedent.
Paul got pretty angry at the people in Corinth, and they got angry with him. Paul came to visit the church and had a very rough time. It seems like they reconciled eventually, although this letter that we have preserved includes a lot of Paul’s frustration and chiding.
When he’s not frustrated and chiding, though, Paul is doing some really important teaching about why a life following Jesus can feel so dang HARD so much of the time. Paul is not a phenomenal writer, and he definitely lacks Jesus’ expertise in teaching through story. Modern readers like us have to put in some time and effort to figure out what he’s trying to say.
But when we DO find a way to get on Paul’s level, we discover some of the most beautiful explanations and images for the life of faith that exist anywhere in time.
The Corinthians were struggling, and upset that they were struggling. Paul is trying to explain why there’s so much pain and suffering involved with following Jesus, and he ends up with metaphors. A lot of metaphors.
“It’s like,” he says, “we got this incredible, unimaginable gift of knowing the Divine Creator and living in Her ways, but we have to stuff all of that greatness into breakable clay jars.”
“It’s like,” he tries again, “we’re trying to live out cosmic, eternal realities that span all time and place, but all we’ve got to do it in are flimsy little tents.”
“It’s like,” he says, “we have Jesus’ life and death, all the grace of that, all the glory, all the good news, all the resurrection, all the truth of it, ALL of that living inside our fragile, vulnerable human existence.”
And, you know, when you put it like that, no WONDER it sort of hurts sometimes. The Corinthians were trying to live the truth of resurrection in a world that was really not built for that kind of living. The Corinthians themselves, in fact, were probably not built or taught or formed for living life that way.
There was no Sunday School. Their grandparents hadn’t anchored their lives in resurrection. Torah, yes. Jewish practice, yes. The unbounded love of God, FOR SURE. But dead dude who claimed to be God’s son being arrested, crucified and resurrected? The insistence that God had conquered even death, that they should live fearlessly and joyfully because of it? In THIS economy?
We have the benefit of centuries’ worth of Christians practicing this kind of love-filled way of living. We know stories of saints and martyrs who lived their lives with such faith and integrity even when the world was hellbent on stopping them. We’ve got models and examples and wisdom passed down through generations that help us endure the pain of living with resurrection in our bodies while death marches all around us. And when it comes down to it, it is still very, very hard to do.
Paul gives one more metaphor: “It’s like,” he says, “our outer nature is wasting away but our inner nature - all that truth and resurrection embodied in Jesus - that’s getting renewed day by day.”
And here is where the cicadas enter the chat. Because that experience - of an outer nature wasting away while an inner nature grows, well, it seems like what a cicada must feel when they go through their final molting. Can you imagine the relief, the release, the liberation when that too-small shell finally falls off?
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Some of you know that last summer, the Virlina District Board suspended my ordination because I officiated a wedding for two women in my congregation. That decision did not require me to resign from my job as pastor of my congregation, and my congregation was deeply supportive of both me and the two women. But being defrocked was one more data point in my discernment of where God was calling me.
I left Peace Covenant in October, and even though I’ve been invited to consider several other pastoral positions, both in the CoB and in other denominations, it has slowly become very clear to me that being a pastor is no longer what God is calling me to do. It feels, to behonest, like molting.
It’s hard to say that, here, with you all, the first congregation to call and honor me as your pastor, the place where I learned so very much, where so many of you trusted me with the beautiful and difficult parts of your lives. You, Manassas Church of the Brethren, are the people who ordained me in the first place! The Virlina District Board’s decision to remove my credential is an insult not just to me, and not just to Peace Covenant, but to you all, too, and your generous investment in me as a minister.
I am not exactly *happy* about this new clarity. It would be so nice to have another congregation to love, so fulfilling to spend my life doing things I love with people I love. I know how congregations operate, and the work of ministry is familiar to me. It would be cozy and comfortable to keep doing the same things I already know how to do, to stay tucked up inside the old shell that kept me safe for so long.
But I just can’t. I can’t even really explain it fully, but I can tell you that I feel like what one of those cicadas must feel like right after they emerge from their old, too-small exo-skeleton: relieved to be released from the too-tight shell, but also tired, mushy, unsure about what to do next, waiting for my new, grown-up wings to dry enough for me to try them out.
When the cicadas emerge from their shells up here aboveground, they can’t just immediately take flight, find a partner and make some babies. They have to stay very still, perched on their old exoskeleton, and wait - for hours - for their newly grown wings to dry out. This makes the brand-new adult cicadas vulnerable, both to predators and careless humans. It is hard to be a creature with a wasting-away outer nature and a recently exposed, in-progress inner nature. It isn’t easy, or safe, or comfortable. And it takes time.
I don’t know what kind of exo-skeleton you’re shrugging off these days, but I think they come in all kinds of forms: mid-life crises, leaving jobs, starting new jobs, break-ups, divorce, new relationships, death, grief, parenting, illness…there are so many ways that we get forced to shrug off the old and live out here in the scary world with our tender new skin.
I don’t know what new wings this congregation is busy growing, either. But I do know that these kinds of changes happen not just to us as individuals but also to the systems and structures and institutions that shape our lives. The world around us is shifting under our feet. Church life is changing very quickly right now. I had the honor of preaching with the congregation that raised me in Roanoke a couple of weeks ago. After worship, they voted to move forward with selling the building they’ve inhabited since 1948. They are one of many congregations figuring out what’s next as old traditions and structures prove themselves outdated, insufficient and too difficult to maintain.
If you’re not feeling the tightness of the shell yet, well, I suspect that is only a matter of time.
It is easy to get discouraged in the midst of so much change, when following Jesus feels difficult, when suffering seems to be around every corner. And we’re in some very good company, with that: the Corinthians themselves struggled to be faithful.
But over and over again in his letter to the church at Corinth, in all his attempts to explain why it feels so hard, why we feel so uncomfortable, why carrying around the life and death of Jesus inside our too-small human lives is so…awkward and painful, Paul repeats this refrain:
But we do not lose heart.
We do not lose heart.
Yes, it’s weird. Yes, it hurts. Yes, we’re exposed and vulnerable. Yes, it will take time for our new wings to dry. Yes, change is painful and uncomfortable.
But we do not lose heart. Because, Paul says - and here’s one instance where he rises above his usual dithering and circling: “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”
Have you SEEN what a newly molted cicada looks like up close? Shimmering. Glistening. Delicately designed wings and multi-colored face. Sort of alien but incredibly beautiful. All that glory, hidden inside a crunchy, brown, too-tight shell.
A weight of glory beyond all measure is where we’re headed. So even if we feel stuck in the in-between, in the not-knowing, in the what-is-all-this-for-anyway, even then, even now: we do not lose heart.
May it be so. Amen.
Wow. Wow. Amen.
There are many good responses to this Sermon! Your images of the Church and the life of the Cicada are powerful! I wish you could preach this one at Annual Conference! I am sure you could adapt it!