The mustard seed was not a welcome addition to a garden. Yes, it was a tiny seed that grew to be a shrub so great that it was like a tree. But it was like a weed. You couldn’t get rid of it easily. Pliny the Elder said that when you tried to kill the mustard seed plant it would release more seeds into the ground. It kept coming back.

And those birds of the air that came to make nests in its branches? They would eat the crops of one’s garden or field. So if you were a farmer or gardener—a person with means—the mustard seed was not necessarily an enticing image of God’s community. It would actually be unsettling because the mustard seed plant brought disruption.

That Jesus would compare the kingdom of heaven to such plantarchy might be confusing to some. Within the cultural imagination the church is a prim and proper model of order and the status quo. Faith is a tidy little garden within one’s life that a person maintains on Sundays and maybe Wednesdays. It is an asset in becoming a better, more successful individual. It is an institution that advocates for how things have been.

Yet Jesus is implying something different here. God’s community takes everything over. It disrupts. It provides a home for the orphans of the air. It invites everyone in. People will try to uproot it and yet it keeps coming back. To borrow a popular phrase about truth-telling, it afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.

God has this knack for showing up in the places we don’t expect. For Jacob, it was in the middle of nowhere when he was on the run. He dreamt of a ladder (or a stairway or a ramp) going to heaven. Messengers of God were ascending and descending. The God stood beside Jacob and reminded this wayward man that the Almighty would be with him wherever he went. “I will keep you,” God said. And I think all that most of us really want is to be kept.

So instead of dissecting this passage or providing some sort of devotional thought, I am just going to share a few of the ladders that have popped up in my life recently. Without any real explanation, these are the places, the moments, and whatever other unexpected things that have reminded me that God is with me. I encourage you do to the same. Write them down even. Where have been those spots where you have felt God with you?

Esau comes in from the field. He’s hungry. Famished. Starving so much that he’s near death, he says. Anyone who is a parent will roll their eyes at that familiar line. His brother Jacob is cooking up a stew. “Let me eat some of that red stuff.” That’s what it says in the NRSV translation: red stuff. Esau doesn’t always come off as the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Jacob on the other hand is probably too sharp for his own good. Jacob says he’ll give his brother the red stuff if Esau sells off his birthright. We go from red to Burgundy because, boy, that escalated quickly. Yet Esau is unaware of the elevated stakes. Again, he just thinks he’s about to die and thus sells off his birthright for some of the red stuff. Esau sells off his leadership of the family, the carrying on of Abraham’s responsibilities for a quick meal.

Red stuff. That’s a really evocative image. Red connotes power, passion, and violence; that’s stuff for which people will readily sell out who they are. Red is the easy shortcut. Red is the stop sign we fly past. There are these things that in the moment seem like they will make life so much easier, they will satisfy us, but they never do.

2020 is just over half over and it has been a lot. I don’t have to list it out for you. You’ve felt it. You’ve experienced it. It is unbelievably overwhelming. Just thinking about the rest of the year can seem daunting.

We don’t know when this pandemic is going to turn in the right direction, but we’ve got to keep trying to do the right thing even as the others do not. We do know that there is a long road we must walk in fighting white supremacy in our country. And who knows what else this year might throw at us? All of which does not even mention all the personal heartaches and sicknesses and fears that each of us face as individuals. It can sometimes seem like too much to bear.

So hear this word from Jesus:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

The psalms give us a language for praise and lament. Usually when I read a psalm of praise, my heart surges because I feel that praise towards God. When I read a lament it is because my own soul is downcast because others have hurt me or I have strayed in some way. Sometimes I will try to get in the mind of the psalmist. I’ll think about what that person was experiencing when they composed their cry to God.

But when I looked at this week’s psalm, it did not connect to my own experience and I did not find myself wondering what the psalmist might have felt. I immediately thought about the family of Breonna Taylor. She was murdered over three months ago and justice does not seem near.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

There is so much going on in the world right now and it all can feel kind of overwhelming. Let us keep it simple and straightforward.

Jesus is with you. Always.

It’s Trinity Sunday and I am not going to strain any of our tired minds diving into the deep end of what that means. Don’t get me wrong. It’s great. Sit under the stars some evening and talk about the three-in-oneness of God the Creator, Son, and Spirit.

Here is what I find life-giving about this mystery way of being called the Trinity: it shows that God loves community. God is always in community, this divine dance. It is not good for anyone to be alone and God proves that within God’s own being.

I can’t remember if the question was “Where is God?” or “Where is heaven?” But it was a question that the pastor of the church I grew up in asked frequently and he wanted the congregation to physically respond by pointing to the ceiling. I remember one time him encouraging folks to hold their fingers aloft when not enough initially responded. He cited this week’s passage—the Ascension of Jesus—as the reason for the belief that heaven is up.

I never pointed up. This is probably my dad’s fault. He drilled into my siblings and me that words and specifics matter. If Jesus ascended to a heaven that was literally up then it would posit that somewhere out in the vastness of space was heaven. It would also be an up that was up from the Middle East at a certain moment in earth’s daily rotation and revolution around the sun. Odds are the up-pointing of a 1990s congregation in upstate South Carolina was lightyears in the wrong direction from the literal up of Jesus’ ascension (this is giving you some insight on what a strange kid I was).

I am not sure whether our pastor believed that heaven was literally up out there in space or in some kind of sky bound pocket dimension or what. It wasn’t a malicious act, but it bugged me. Beyond the logistics of literalism, it galled me that everyone was told to point up as if heaven was some kind of fixed point that we could comprehend. Much later, I also realized that casting heaven as the sky neglected a major theme of what Jesus preached throughout his ministry: that heaven is also breaking through here on earth.

Adaptation has been the hallmark of this weird season that we’re in. The important things in life have to continue even as the world as we’ve known it has ground to a halt. We try to do school from home as best as we can. We reach out and connect with friends and family over FaceTime and Zoom calls. We keep going where we are able.

My ministry with my students is the area where I have had to adapt on the fly the most. I am not always sure how we’re doing. The hallmark of a youth group is community and while we can see each other’s faces on our screen, I know that it is not the same as being in a room together or sitting down to a meal with friends.

But you do all you can to try and meet the needs of your community. We’ve kept meeting on Sunday mornings and nights over the internet. We have Bible studies through the weeks and gather once a week to just hang out and play some games. It has been encouraging to see those faces pop up on the screen to still talk about faith and share stories. You adapt. You keep moving forward.

The first Sunday of May at our church is traditionally Youth Sunday in which our students lead in morning worship. As the days of sheltering in place stretched into weeks, it became evident that we were not going to be able to follow the usual script for this capstone to the school year. But cancelling was never an option in my mind. Our church has been doing virtual services for weeks now, so we were going to put our spin on the service.

Like Thomas
I want to see something
That will make me believe

I have no need for nail-scarred hands
Nor wounded sides
Of a Savior back from the dead

But I want to see something
That will make me believe
Resurrection is possible

For I have my doubts
Not in the risen Christ
But in the rising rest of us

There’s a darkness I see
Inside myself
More often than I’d like

And I am tired
Of cruel avaricious kings
And their power-craving priests

The tomb is silent and cold and dark as a starless night. Sealed on Friday, the grave was the lifeless void that first day, so also the second, and so it began on the third. It would persist undefeated. The cold midnight hush would envelope that space until the world caved in.

Yet something stirred. The flutter of a heartbeat; nearly imperceptible. The silence reasserts its dominion for a time before another pulse briefly flickers to life. This is how it begins: a tug of war between life and death. If what the writer of the epistle says is true and to God a day is as a thousand years then decades elapsed between those first new heartbeats.

A thin line of musty air is drawn in and barely inflates the lungs. A breath more shallow than the damp dust from the first drop of rain touching the ground. The sound is a nearly inaudible hiss. A space of silence. Then another wisp of air is drawn in and then another. For some time he hangs there a breath towards the living and a silence towards the dead.