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12 February 2012

2012-02-12T14:59:00.000-08:00

“Living letters of recommendation”
2 Corinthians 3:1-6 / Mark 1:40-45
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
12 February 2012

Our Epiphany season long journey through the first chapter of Mark’s gospel comes to an end today with the third story (in three weeks) of Jesus healing people.
Two weeks ago it was that outspoken man in the synagogue in Capernaum, from whom Jesus cast out an “unclean spirit,” while last week’s text told of Jesus healing Simon Peter’s mother in law, as well as “casting out demons” from many people.
Ah, but in both of those stories, the people involved behaved much as would have been expected of them, in that place and time. Jesus – the healer – he encounters … he has brought to him … people who were sick or suffering some kind of debilitating condition which prevented them from living life as God’s good and gracious will would have it be for them, for us … full, rich, abundant. And so Jesus acts, to restore this life to them.
But there’s been this interesting comment thread, in the Gospel text, the past two weeks. That man who came to Jesus, saying “I know who you are … the Holy One of God” … Jesus wouldn’t let him keep speaking, but ordered the unclean spirit to come out of him. The demons which were cast out weren’t allowed to speak, either, because as the text says, they knew Jesus.
Now this week, in our final healing story of the chapter and of this season, Jesus heals a leper from his dread skin disease … and once again, tells him to say nothing to anyone.
Why all the secrecy, Jesus?
Perhaps it’s all a matter of supply-and-demand. If the word got out about Jesus, he’d be overrun by people wanting to be healed, cured, dis-possessed. By keeping things quiet, he wouldn’t get slammed by the sick, dinged by the demon-carriers.
The Gospel last week, at first glance, seems to bear this out … it says he cured, not all, not everyone, but that vague word many.
So does Jesus want to put limits on himself … put a qualifier on his opening words in Mark’s gospel that “the kingdom of God has come near” … I- Jesus- I’m just near to some, FOR some, but not for all? Does it mean that he wants to be deliberately vague, slipping in and out of town like a spectre, healing, de-demonizing one minute, gone the next, leaving people asking and wondering, “hey, who was that guy?”
Well, if that’s the case, then why does last week’s Gospel text end with these words: And Jesus went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons?
Something else must be going on here.
And so we must return to this week’s story of Jesus and the leper.
Now, as it begins, we probably don’t hear this story as anything particularly strange, out of the ordinary. Why wouldn’t a leper beg Jesus to heal him?
Ah, but that’s precisely the point. The leper, by simply coming to Jesus, asking, imploring, daring Jesus to heal him … If you choose … if you are wishing / willing / wanting / desiring … you can make me clean …in saying, in doing this … the leper is going outside the legal code of Israel, outlined in Leviticus 13 and 14, which is very clear about how the leper is to conduct him or herself:

• A leper is to wear torn clothes and let the hair of their head be disheveled.
• A leper is to cover their upper lip and cry out, “unclean, unclean.”
• A leper is to live by themselves outside of town, and remain alone and apart from other people.

So right here, in the very first chapter of Mark’s gospel, this leper crosses the boundaries, steps outside the Law … he calls Jesus to his side and dares Jesus to heal him … though, still giving Jesus the “out” of his religion … leaving Jesus room to escape, through observance of his Jewish ritual rule system, to just walk away from this leper.
But he still dares Jesus.
And Jesus – he doesn’t take the easy out. Jesus takes up the leper’s dare. “I do choose! Be made clean!”
And the leper is healed, and made whole.
Though … note that, as in the earlier healing stories in this first chapter of Mark’s gospel … Jesus remains consistent. He tells the leper not to say anything to anyone, but to remain within the rules and laws of the religious system.
Go, show yourself to the priest.
But this doesn’t happen. The leper goes out and tells everyone about what happened to him. It’s a natural reaction to this leper’s supernatural encounter.
And so this is the outcome … Jesus could no longer go into a town openly.
So why does Jesus want this leper to remain silent?
Because this leper has only a one dimensional picture of Jesus … to him, he’s simply the rabbi who healed him. And that’s what he goes and tells everyone, so that people came to him from every quarter, wanting to be healed or to see him heal others.
It’s a one sided letter of recommendation for Jesus, that the former leper gives in his healed body.
Now we know something about letters of recommendation. Especially these days … especially at this time of the year … with college and grad school applications due … with more people trying to come back into the job market, to find a new job or just get employed.
I’m glad to write letters of recommendation for people. And I often get asked to do just that.
Most of the time, the one asking me to write a letter of recommendation, I know them well, so it’s not difficult to write a well-rounded letter. Occasionally, though, I’m asked to write a recommendation for someone I don’t know well at all, a community member, an acquaintance, and that’s tougher … you can only write truthfully about what you know, and if that knowledge is limited or one sided … well, the letter shows it.
The Apostle Paul in our reading from 2nd Corinthians today is writing to his friends in the congregation in Corinth about their recommendations of him and for him. Itinerant missionaries at that time needed to carry letters of recommendation from one place to the next … in much the same way pastors and congregations today provide references to and for each other, as they engage in that delicate dance known as the call process. When you interviewed me eight years ago, you provided me with some character references for this congregation, and I did the same for you.
What Paul is saying here in these verses from 2nd Corinthians, though, is something like “letters … schmetters!” You, people of Corinth, you are my letters of recommendation, letters written on your hearts … and more, you, people of Corinth, you are living and true letters of recommendation to the world of the love and grace and forgiveness and peace given by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Paul could say this because he knew that they … through Paul … had more than a one-dimensional image of Jesus. He knew that, through his … Paul’s … preaching and teaching, the Corinthians had seen the Christ of the Cross … the cross, The Defining Moment for Jesus, his life, his ministry, everything he said and did. And so Paul could confidently say, if you’ve seen and heard me, seen and heard me bear witness to this Jesus, you know him in the One Way you need to know him … as Paul wrote to that same Corinthian congregation in an earlier letter, I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Truth-telling. Honest. Brutally convicting. And awesomely freeing.
And so back in Mark’s gospel … the most clearly cross-shaped of the Gospels … everything in this Gospel is meant to be seen, and be heard, through the Cross.
In the next few weeks, as we end this season of Epiphany and begin the season of Lent … we’ll see this play out … in next Sunday’s Transfiguration story, as the disciples see and experience Jesus in yet another, new way, high on the mountaintop, standing and talking with Moses and Elijah, and the voice from heaven proclaiming Jesus my beloved Son …
… and, in the following week’s start of our Lenten journey, the story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness and his Temptation … all of these are little glimpses, vignettes, previews, steps in the journey to the Cross.
We who live on the other side of Jesus’ cross, we have the advantage of knowing already how the story turns out. But the people in these stories, early witnesses to these pieces of Jesus’ story … they only saw one side of him, so Jesus asked them to stay silent … they didn’t have the whole picture of Jesus, so they couldn’t be those “living letters of recommendation” for him … and as they spoke, the world got the wrong impression about Jesus.
Today … that struggle continues. Some would try to limit Jesus to one or another aspect of his life … their “letters of recommendation” for Jesus come off one sided … “Oh, he’s a great moral authority” … “he’s my best friend” … “he’s a healer” … “he’s a judge.”
But it’s only through the Cross that we see, that we experience, that we receive the whole Jesus … the depth of life’s emptiness, and the fullness of God’s salvation … and it’s only through these cross-shaped gifts for us … Baptism … Holy Communion … that we receive all of Jesus into our own lives.
Through the cross-shaped gift of baptism … we receive Jesus, as he calls us to die to what we’ve been and then, he raises us up to what we shall be, in him, once, and every day of our lives …
Through the cross-shaped gift of Holy Communion … we receive Jesus, forgiving, freeing us from our diseased, distressed, even demon-riddled pasts … here, this and every week, Jesus comes into our lives, into our very bodies, and he makes us new …
And then, made new, dead and alive, buried and risen, we are sent out, watered in the Word, walking wet in the baptismal hope and promise Jesus gives us, fed and strengthened in his meal, we are given grace and peace for life … his cross, planted firmly in the crossroads of our lives, as the questions of life come upon us … Jesus, his cross, stands squarely in the gap for and with us.
Why illness? Why are the bad things of life happening, to me, to us?
Only in the Cross do the disturbance, and peace, of life meet for us … total abandonment, and full reclamation … utter despair, and highest hope … and only in the Cross, Jesus standing in the gap there, with and for us, are we given the strength, wisdom, power and authority … to be his “living letters of recommendation” … to and for others, our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers and families … to and for the sake of the world.

Jesus asked the leper to remain silent, because he didn’t have the whole picture.
But you do. And to you he’s given a name, a charge, a calling … beloved child of God, my living letter of recommendation … go and show, go and tell, go and proclaim, go and be … for me … for life … for you … and for them.
Amen.

5 February 2012

2012-02-05T16:20:00.000-08:00

“Bedeviled by demons”
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
Mark 1:29-39 / 1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Confirmation of Devon Williams
10.30 am sermon
5 February 2012

As we continue through this first chapter of Mark’s gospel here in these first Sundays of the new year … the Epiphany season … and what the church calls “Ordinary Time” … we are hearing some stories which are far from ordinary.
There is a thread of illness and healing here. Last week, Jesus healed a man who, as Jesus entered the synagogue in Capernaum, met him with these words:

Just then, there was a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

That man’s loud words, they probably caused embarrassment to those people there, honored as they were to have Jesus be there among them.
Ah, but this week’s text, picking right up where we left off last Sunday, this text is an embarrassment to many of us, we who gather in worship every week hoping, praying to hear a word that speaks to us in our own situations, a word we can freely share with others without fear of embarrassment or ridicule, or sounding like we’ve checked our brains at the church door.

That evening, at sundown, they brought to [Jesus] all who were sick OR POSSESSED WITH DEMONS … and he cured many who were sick with various diseases, AND CAST OUT MANY DEMONS; and he would not permit the DEMONS to speak, because they knew him.

Demons. That’s an offputting word for us, post modern mainline Christians … moderate to liberal Protestants.
It’s offputting and offensive to some of us, because it reeks of … primitive culture. A time and place, back then, long ago, people who didn’t understand illness and health the way we do today, and so they blamed mental, physical, emotional illness on the work or possession of demons. You can see something of this line of thinking portrayed in this artwork inside our bulletin today … the scene depicting, in medieval painting, Jesus casting a demon out of a woman … you can see the little black winged figure flying out of her as she collapses in a heap, and someone has to come to her aid.
Talk of demons causing people to feel or behave badly today probably sounds plain stupid and foolish to us … nowadays we have names for these illnesses, like schizophrenia and depression, cancer and colitis; and medications which can control, treat, or even cure people of these chemical imbalances or bacterial or viral infections.
Labeling truly ill people as “demonically possessed” brings up all sorts of painful memories. Here in the Northwest in particular, we’re reminded of our reprehensible history in dealing with and treating the mentally ill. Oregon and Washington have an absolutely atrocious record when it comes to how we’ve chosen to work with the public health issue of mental illness. My father used to tell me stories of driving through Salem, Oregon’s capital, in the 1940’s, and being scared to death when they went past what was known just 60 years ago as the State Insane Asylum, the inmates leaning out the barred windows, yelling and screaming at anyone and everyone who would hear them. Others of us remember the stories of Frances Farmer or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” … coincidentally enough, that movie just aired on channel 9 Friday night.
These are parts of our Northwest history we’d certainly rather forget … today, we aren’t this horrid in how we treat the mentally ill, but we still have a long, long way to go in serving these brothers and sisters with the dignity and compassion which they most certainly deserve.

To others of us, though, talk in an ELCA Lutheran church of demonic possession aligns us far too closely with our evangelical brothers and sisters (and here, I use that word not in the classic but the received sense, in which it is used today … referring to conservative, literalist, even fundamentalist churches) and the way they use that word, demonic … (even though in our own theological history, Martin Luther used the word in the same way)… pointing to Satan as Devil, evil incarnate, in the body, in the flesh, an opposite to God, a dualist demiurge, if God is the source of all that is good and right and true, then the Devil is the source of the exact opposite. And so the Devil or his army of demons gets blamed for everything bad we think or say or do … “the Devil made me do it” … and worse, far far worse …our enemies, “them,” those who see things differently from “us”, politically, economically, morally, they get the label of “Devil” or “evil” slapped on them, too … this or that is labeled “the work of demons” or “demonic.”
A story from my own recent past comes to mind.
Several years ago, you may remember that a tattoo business opened a little way north of here, on 140th. Though I thought this location rather odd, I didn’t give it much more thought.
However, some did. Shortly after the tattoo business opened, I was visited by a member of our community who was trying to rally all the pastors in the area to stage a boycott and protest against the tattoo parlor because of what “they” were doing, “foisting off on our community,” “tempting our young people” with what was positively “demonic” and it had to be stopped.
I listened politely (all the while thinking of the many Lutherans … parishioners and pastors … I know who themselves are tattooed … one of whom I know quite well … none of them have sprouted horns or are spinning their heads around as they spit pea soup)… I thanked this neighbor for her visit … and that was it.
There was no protest. No boycott. No campaign of terror against another neighbor-business.
And that was because … there was nothing inherently demonic about that business up the road. The woman who came to visit me, she just didn’t like the idea of a tattoo shop opening up in our neighborhood, so she demonized them, to try to run them out of the neighborhood and out of business.
But that is so NOT how we as Christians are called to be politically active. You may have heard that yet another Christian pastor is in the news this week, demonizing a Certain Large Local Coffee Company, encouraging a Christian boycott because of a political view that Large Coffee Company holds.
Again, that’s just plain wrong. In our free-enterprise democracy, if it’s a political point of view with which you don’t agree … please, don’t bring demons into it.
We Christians, like everyone else who lives in this country, will rely on the market to make the decision, as to whether a business fails or succeeds.
If you’ve noticed, the tattoo parlour up the road went out of business. Not because of demonization and boycott by the local Christian clergy. But because their business just didn’t fit in here in Fairwood. The market took care of things. Or, as we Lutherans would say, the First Use of the Law … supply, demand, How Things Work in the World.
But what about Martin Luther? you might ask. After all, he called his opponents “Devil” and “demon,” especially the Roman Catholic church and the Pope.
Luther certainly wrote and said and did many good things in his work as one of the founders of the Christian Reformation. His pejorative use of the label “devil” and “demon” against his opponents is not part of that good work. These words of Luther have caused much harm. Modern Lutherans separate ourselves from, we condemn, Luther’s pejorative, damaging writings … his demonization of Roman Catholic clergy … and especially Luther’s writings against the Jews; which we could indeed label as demonic, for they laid the foundation for Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

So what do we do with a text such as this, which is before us today? Do we just throw it out, as a backward relic which embarrasses us because of its simplistic explanation of larger problems … or worse, words which cause us much grief over the harm they have caused, and continue to bring upon our world?
Well, I don’t think we need to be that drastic.
If we return to the core meaning of “demonic,” we find that it’s simply “that which goes against or blocks God’s good and gracious will for the life of God’s creation.” “That which goes against or blocks God’s good and gracious will for the life of God’s creation.” Or, in the words of another definition which I found this week: “Anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be, is demonic.”
Now a LOT of stuff can fit in this broad, deep basket … illness, disease, war and suffering, hatred, fear, crime, economic poverty, spiritual anguish and pain, death itself. Everything, anything that comes to us as “bad news,” bad news for us in this life here on earth.
Many of us get that … and thus we can more readily, compassionately understand how people and cultures without the medical and technological advances we have today used the word “demon” as a way to comprehend and communicate this bad-ness which was greater than what they could deal with, what they could fix.
We also “get” that bantering around “demonic” as some kind of a sledgehammer against our opponents on the one hand … or, on the other, saying that God sends what is truly “demonic” … illness, tragedy, global catastrophe … upon his beloved creation … both those extremes are not Christian behavior. They are anathema to Christians … the total opposite of what we’re about … and we shall not cease to speak out against such blatantly slanderous, sinful words and actions being done in the name of Jesus.
But there is an even greater Word for us here.
Note that what the text says Jesus does with the demons of his day is “cast them out.” Jesus “casts out” demons … he sends them away from the people to whom he ministers and for whom he cares and loves and shares his life.
As God’s chosen people through the waters of Baptism, Jesus has entered and daily enters our lives with a name for us and a claim on us … “beloved child of God” … that is our first name and our first vocation and our first calling in life. And so the “demonic” forces in life … “anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be” … those forces have been dealt a death-blow and put on the run from us, “cast out” by the Watering Word sprinkled, poured, enveloped around us through God’s gift of Holy Baptism.
Every day as we hear Jesus’ call to remember our Baptism … every time we dip our fingers in this font and trace the sign of the cross on our foreheads … every time we confess our sins and hear the words of forgiveness … every time we gather around this table and eat and drink that Word into us … Jesus casts out the demonic … “anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be” … Jesus casts that out from us.
Jesus casts out … the fear which holds us back from making life choices that draw us closer to the Kingdom of God for us individually… career choices, relationship choices, economic choices.
Jesus casts out … the fear which holds us back from life choices that draw us closer to the Kingdom of God corporately … choices about giving and serving, witnessing and standing in justice and love with and for others, especially the others who are under the thumb and pressed down by the selfish powers of this world and this life.

Devon, this is what it means for you when in a few moments you stand up here and join with all of us, in the historic words of our Christian liturgy, as we renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God … the powers of this world that rebel against God … the ways of sin that draw you, draw us from God … and then, turning, affirming your Baptism, confessing your Word-Watered faith which Jesus has planted in you and which your parents have nurtured and for which this faith community has worked and prayed and which you have wrestled with and tossed around and thought about and will, we hope and pray, continue to wrestle with and toss around and think about and grow in all the days of your life. Confirmation … your public affirmation of your Baptism … means we draw around you and uphold you and support you and walk with you … us, together, against the demons … yours, mine, ours, and the world’s.
When they draw close to you, know that Jesus Christ is closer, and that he has the ultimate power over everything, everything that would hold you back from becoming the person our God would have you be. And know that, wherever you are, wherever you go, you carry this Word of promise and hope with you … for you, and for the sake of the world God loves … baptized, beloved, child of God, one with us in God’s promise, sealed by God’s Holy Spirit, and marked with the Cross of Christ forever.

Jesus still casts out the demons of this world. Whatever we choose to call them … poverty, injustice, mental, physical and emotional illness, political strife, economic slavery, untrue words about God and God’s people … Jesus calls and sends his Word-Watered people into those places and to those brothers and sisters who need to hear the Good News that in Jesus, God is calling us to bring the Word of love that life is more than our bad situations, more than being defined by our illness or disease, more than being trapped in a series of bad choices, more than being frozen or strangled by fear … Jesus calls and sends us there to point to, to enflesh, to be the hearts and hands and feet of the Kingdom of God come near
… until that day when Jesus Christ is all and all is Jesus Christ and everything is made right.
And until that day, we all have something to say … we all have something to do … in Jesus’ name.
Amen.

15 January 2012

2012-01-15T18:09:00.001-08:00

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
Psalm 139 / John 1:43-51
15 January 2012

“What should I do with my life?”
It’s a question that comes to us, all of us, at many different times in our lives. Child, worker, new parent or grandparent, retired, elderly … “what should I do with my life?” is a universal question for us.
And the change of the calendar, the move into a new year, can accentuate that question.
Thankfully, as we move into this season of Epiphany, these weeks of God showing forth what God is all about in the life and ministry of his Son Jesus Christ … we have some texts, psalms and stories, which are all about shedding light … Epiphany light … onto that question.
Our Psalm for today begins in our questioning, wondering and wandering in life … with the answer that we are known by God.

Lord, you have searched me out; O Lord, you have known me.

Many of us might have that terribly Lutheran streak of being meek and quiet, content to sit in the back row, not wanting any attention called to ourselves … but even in that, deep down, it is good to be known. To be known by friends, companions, fellow travelers on the journey. For us, church, especially a smaller church, a cozier worship service, is just right because this is the Cheery time and place where “everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.”
But this word in the Psalm is stronger … better … wiser than even that comforting word.

Lord, you have searched me out; O Lord, you have known me.

The words of the Psalmist bring a rush of Biblical images … God, searching for us in all the circumstances of life … the times when we feel so close to God, God’s words and God’s ways for us … and the times when God feels a million miles away. But there is the Lord, and here is the Lord, searching for us, the Light of his Word of love and care searching us out, like One in the darkness, searching with a torch or flashlight for that which is lost yet beloved to them … that is the image the Psalmist word-paints for us this morning.

O Lord, you have known me.

In these words, we also have a rush of images … “you have known me” here has the sense of action, begun once in the past, still in effect now. “Knowing” in the Old Testament sense of how a lover is to their beloved … that closeness, that proximity, physically, mentally, spiritually, that is also what the Psalmist is referring to here. A God who wishes and wills and works to be near his beloved, always, in all ways.
And as we move further into the Psalm, that language becomes more and more secure and sure, for us.

You trace my journeys and my resting places and are acquainted with all my ways.
Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, but you, O Lord, know it altogether.
You encompass me, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

This is guiding and mentoring language … not controlling and manipulating, but a “hand on the shoulder” word … God, here, searching us out in the dark places of life … God, there, lending an ear, a Word, subtly, surely, guiding us, through the little “voice in our ear” we hear in many different places and times of life … in the quiet of worship … through the words of a hymn we sing together … in the presence of faith-friends offering us their care and support, encouragement and love. That mentoring hand of God, leading and guiding us through life.
This talk of guiding and mentoring also reminds us of a part of last week’s story about Jesus’ baptism … his rising up out of the water, and the Word from heaven descending up on him … You are my beloved.
In our baptism into the dying and rising of Jesus … our dying to sin and our rising to forgiveness and new life … in our baptism God calls us, too, by that name … beloved. We are God’s beloved … adopted, named, claimed in our baptism … formed and shaped through water and Word, worship and witness, the bread and wine of communion … through all these, we feel ourselves being guided and mentored, molded and created into the body of the beloved of God.
In our Gospel reading for today, we get an initial glimpse of what that “body of the beloved” looks like for Jesus and those he calls to follow him. In John’s gospel, the story moves rapidly from John the Baptist’s description of Jesus’ baptism to Jesus’ gathering a community of the beloved around him.
Jesus knows them.
Nathanael asked Jesus, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.”
Jesus’ seeing Nathanael “under the fig tree” may not sound like it’s that big of a deal, either to Jesus or to us. But elsewhere in the Bible spending time under the shade of a tree often means the one who is there is thinking … contemplating … perhaps feeling troubled, or alone, or just simply needing some time out, time away … to meditate, to find solace. So Nathanael’s cutting, perhaps even negative response to Philip’s invitation to “come and see” Jesus … can anything good come out of Nazareth?… Nathanael may not be aiming that word so much at Jesus, as he is being brutally honest about how he feels about his own life.
Jesus calls Nathanael “an Israelite in whom there is no deceit” … he’s honest … about himself, life, the whole situation … while others are out working, fishing, mending the nets, Nathanael is under the fig tree, thinking, contemplating, perhaps asking that very question we ask ourselves, “what should I do with my life?”
And Jesus knows him. Jesus knows him and calls to him through Philip’s invitation, come and see. Nathanael gets up from under his fig tree and goes, and feels known through Jesus, known in Jesus, and becomes part of the beloved community.
We are part of that beloved community. As our Prayers of Intercession begin and remind us this morning, “As God’s beloved people made radiant by the light of Christ …” We are God’s beloved, made so through our baptism into Jesus, called by Jesus, gathered by Jesus, known intimately by Jesus, not for his manipulation, but for our transformation ... our transformation, through this worship, through water and Word, bread and wine, the comforting and welcoming presence of our brothers and sisters in Christ … and then, and then, as that beloved community, we are sent forth, as our prayers continue, to “pray for the church, the whole human family, and God’s good creation.”
That prayer can and does take many forms … certainly, asking God to watch over those who especially need our prayers … all those we regularly hear of and mention … the sick, the suffering, the poor and oppressed, the unemployed and underemployed, the discouraged and despondent.
But more … our prayer can and must take other forms … whatever actions we can work on our part, where the gifts God has given to us to share meet the world’s great need … we, beloved by God, beloved of God, are called to go and share this Word about Jesus, into the world … so that others, through us, will “come and see” Jesus.
“What should I do with my life?”
It all starts with our being God’s beloved.
You are known intimately by God. You are loved thoroughly by God.
We are washed and made right with God through our baptism into his Son Jesus Christ … fed and filled in this worship … and then … then, we are sent out, to answer that question, “What should I do with my life?” in as many different ways as there are “us” here … but all, so that others will “come and see” Jesus through us, his beloved ones. Amen.

08 January 2012

2012-01-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

“Baptism: The front door of the Church”
Baptism of our Lord
8 January 2012

Even though we began our year-long focus on Baptism back on the first Sunday in Advent, November 27, today, this Baptism of our Lord Sunday, this really feels like the Sunday we begin with this focus, this theme, in earnest. There’s so much baptismal imagery that’s before us today … from the Scripture-story about Jesus’ baptism … to the congregational affirmation of our own baptisms (and our receiving the sign of water as a remembrance of our baptism)… to the font and Paschal candle, being right here, up in front … there is, indeed, a lot going on about baptism, here, today, this Baptism of our Lord Sunday.
And so it seemed appropriate to make the message today a Catechesis, if you will … a learning time together, for some of us, a review; for others, a hearing and taking in something new about baptism.
With our renewed emphasis on baptism, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit some of those catechetical words … liberally sprinkled with the wit and wisdom of Martin Luther … once again. So here it is … “Baptism: The Front Door of the Church.”

In our shared confirmation classes which we call “Faith Thinking,” we have a Friday to Saturday weekend retreat on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism segments on Holy Baptism. I start my part of the retreat by asking, “How do we come into the church?” And, of course, you can guess the usual answer ... “through the front door.” But that’s not the answer I’m looking for. So I ask again, “What other item here in the church might be described as the ‘front door,’ the way people come into the church?" The back door? No. The windows? Uh-uh. Try the FONT. Ohhh.
The baptismal font is really the "front door" of the church, when you think about it. It's how people come into the church, become members ... it's a public marker and milestone for where the life of faith begins in us. It’s how Jesus’ public ministry began, as we hear in this morning’s Gospel reading … with his baptism. That's why the font has such a prominent place in many congregations.
I think that Martin Luther would like how our font is prominent … most of the time, right inside the front doors to the worship space … for the season of Epiphany, right here, up front, so we can see it and be reminded of our baptism. For Martin Luther loved to talk and write about baptism. To Luther, baptism was and is central to what being a Christian is all about. Hear these words of Luther, from the Large Catechism, on Holy Baptism:

You should not doubt...that baptism is of divine origin, not something devised or invented by people. As truly as I can say that the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer are not spun out of anyone's imagination but revealed and given by God himself, so I can also boast that baptism is no human plaything but is instituted by God himself. Moreover, it is solemnly and strictly commanded that we must be baptized … we are not to regard it as an indifferent matter, then, like putting on a new red coat. It is of the greatest importance that we regard baptism as excellent, glorious, and exalted.

Excellent, glorious, and exalted. That’s a very lofty setting for baptism. But that may be something new for many of us ... maybe we’ve never thought of baptism in that way before.
And why is that? Well, let’s return to that front door analogy for a moment.
Front doors have become an ornament on newer homes ... they often open onto a “non-porch,” ... most of the time we go in and out of our houses through the garage or side doors.
At our parsonage in Pennsylvania, the front door hadn't been used in over 30 years. It was in an awkward place from the driveway ... it was very pretty, a beautiful cherry wood which everyone admired, rounded at the top, opening onto a nice little alcove...but nobody ever used it. We and everyone else used to go around to the side porch, or the kitchen door.
The state of baptism among many who follow Jesus is much like that front door on our former parsonage. Baptism is often treated as a nice ornament but not central to what we do or who we are. The sacrament has lost much of the significance Luther believed it should have.
And why is that? Perhaps, because baptism is seen many times as something that we, people, do. Like the treasures of our unused front doors, we may ignore baptism, or try to control it to conform to our needs, our desires....the baby gets "done,"...or, in the case of adult baptisms, we may come to the font after we say we “chose Jesus,” rather than acknowledging that Jesus always chooses us first. In either case, we say "I was baptized," just remembering that one time event, perhaps so long ago, that event which made me a church member, so that a church name may appear after mine in the paper when I die because "I was baptized."
But that's not what baptism is. So what is baptism?
Baptism, in the words of Luther’s Small Catechism …

… is not simply plain water, but it is water used according to God's command and connected with God's word.

I can turn the water in our kitchen off and on quite easily. But according to Luther, I can't do that with baptism. Something else is connected to the water...God's Word...which commands that we go and make disciples of all nations, and BAPTIZE them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Baptism, then, is water with God's word behind it. People did not invent baptism as some sort of a silly ritual, like a club membership initiation or secret handshake that gets you "in" to the church. Uh-uh. Baptism is from God...and God alone. We don't control it.
And why do we need baptism?
Again, as Luther writes, because

… baptism gives forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the power of evil, and grants eternal salvation to all who believe, as the Word and promise of God declare in Mark’s gospel -- "The one who believes and is baptized will be saved."

Baptism can be thought of as a rescue of sorts ... again, in Luther’s words …

God rescues us through baptism from sin, death, and the devil, and promises us salvation.

The problem is, we go through life thinking we are better than those medieval guys like Luther … that hey, we’re 21st century people, we’re in pretty good shape, we don't need rescuing, we have an app for that. And when it does get rough, well, when that time comes, I'll have what it takes to get out alive. I am in control, after all.
Well, since we are talking about rescues, let's think of one that happens a lot ... a rescue from drowning. Let's just say that our life situation is like that of a drowning person. We are in the deep water and floundering. Along comes our rescuer. How wonderful! Just throw me a rope or a life preserver, and I'll grab on and everything will be fine.
OK -- let's move the scenario to the ocean … there’s an undertow … and rip currents … and now, we’re being pulled further and further away from shore, the water’s getting deeper and we’re in danger and sinking fast.
But once again, here comes our rescuer! Just tie a rope to a person on the shore, tie the other end around the rescuer, and out they come after us … I’ll grab onto that one, and I’ll be fine.
But what if there isn't any way to get anything or anyone out for you to grab onto? Then what? One of the scariest pictures I’ve seen this past year is the image from Long Beach, of the 12 year old boy who got knocked down by a rip current and pulled out to sea. He was underwater for 20 minutes until divers found him. They pulled out this limp body, all rubbery ...a boy, just like any kid...as close to death as anyone could ever be. It was awful and tore you to the heart.
But that, brothers and sisters, that boy is us. We can't grab on to anyone because, despite all our good intentions toward living, our valiant attempts and brave starts … we are in bondage to bad choices … downright wrong living … sin … whatever you choose to call it. And at the end of it all, for each and every one of us, death is as certain for us as it was for that kid.
Luther talks of that "Old Adam" in us -- the sinful, selfish part of us that is bent on destruction...

What is the old man or woman? He or she is what is born in us from (the beginning) … irascible, spiteful, envious, unchaste, greedy, lazy, proud, yes, and unbelieving; we are beset with all vices and by nature have nothing good within.

That’s me. That’s you. No matter how hard we try to live a “good life” … eventually, sometime, somewhere, one of those descriptive words on that list will convict us.
There is ONE thing that, according to Luther, we are good at … each and every one of us … and what that is, is death. Each of those words Luther used describe a death of sorts … a end to relationship … between us and others, between us and God. And life ends up having waaaay too many deaths in it … up to and including that final one, that final separation, the last in the long line of separations and endings.
That’s the bad news … that’s the reality of life for us.
But here’s the Good News.
God has given us baptism. The Prayer of the Day on Ash Wednesday puts it so well, "God, you hate nothing you have made." God wants to save what God has made -- us -- you and me. So he sent Jesus to live among us. And even though we didn't want Jesus ... God still wants us, relentlessly wants us, so Jesus is raised from the dead, so that his promises would hold true. AND GOD’S WAY OF MAKING THOSE PROMISES REAL TO US AND FOR US IS HOLY BAPTISM.
Baptism is God's way of claiming us as his own, and uniting us with Jesus, to share in his promises for us, for this life, and for all of life to come. When we are baptized...Luther called it a two-part observance, which

… consists of being dipped into the water, which covers us completely, and being drawn out again. These two parts, being dipped under the water and emerging from it, indicate the power and effect of baptism, which is simply the slaying of the old Adam and the resurrection of the new person.

This is not something we can do on our own. This is not even something we can add any of our own power to "helping out." We are helpless to do anything to aid in our own rescue ... because we are near drowning.
That's why we baptize infants. There is no person so helpless as a little baby. It pleases Christ to see babies baptized, Luther says, because it shows the power of the Holy Spirit to work faith in us, starting on a day when we are totally helpless, and continuing our whole life long.
Our whole life long? I thought baptism just meant ten minutes out of my life? Not as God intended it, Luther says.

Thus a Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, once begun and ever continued.

That's what the "slaying of the old Adam and the resurrection of the new person" means -- this is a daily battle. Just because I was baptized one day fifty years ago doesn't mean that I have lived a perfect life since then! Ask anyone who knows me well. And you must say the same, when you look at your own lives! We mess up -- we fall short of what God wants for us -- remember those ten little, simple commandments -- we fail to keep them perfectly, as God calls us, every day of our lives.
So, if after baptism, we are turned loose to "do" the rest of life by ourselves, all depending on us, well, we are as lost as the boy who fell into the ocean. But we can rejoice that all does not depend on us ... because we cannot shake, we cannot lose, our relentlessly loving, promising God.
Through Jesus, we are offered second, third, and many more chances in life. Jesus calls us to repentance – simply, the act of turning around, and confessing our sins to God; then, hearing the words of forgiveness once more. And when this happens, Jesus gives us the same promise that we were given at our baptism -- "your sins are forgiven." To Luther,

… if you live in repentance, therefore, you are walking in baptism, which not only announces this new life but also produces, begins, and promotes it. In baptism we are given the grace, Spirit, and power to suppress the old person so that the new may come forth and grow strong.

Every day of our lives? Every day of our lives. So it's not, "I was baptized," but, "I AM BAPTIZED!" Those words Luther said every day should be our words, too, as we live each day, struggling, falling short of what God wants and expects of us, but all the time holding onto the promise we have been given in baptism, that we have been claimed by God in this dying and rising, not for death, but for forgiveness, salvation, and life … both in the world to come, and the world in which we live NOW, with friends and family, strangers and acquaintances, neighbors who need us to be in relationship with them … serving them … living as Christ to them … you and I, called by Jesus to “walk wet” into their lives.
Holy Baptism really is the “front door of the church.” And what a beautiful front door it is. It’s not there to ignore, or hide, or to be there just for looks. It needs to be used as it was intended ... “excellent, glorious, and exalted” ... every day of our lives ... by the one who puts it there...who gives it to us...who calls us through it to come, and follow him.
Amen.

01 January 2012

2012-01-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

New Year’s Day / The Name of Jesus
Luke 2:15-40
1 January 2012

Those of you who were at the 7 pm worship service on Christmas Eve may have heard me offer a short quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer during the Let the Children Come time … though it may have gotten lost in the midst of everything else which was going on in the children’s message, but it bears repeating today, this First Sunday of Christmas …

[The central message of Christmas is that] God turns toward the very places from which humans turn away.

Today’s Gospel story … what we might call “the rest of the Christmas story” because it completes the Bethlehem portion of Jesus’ life narrative … is full of those “God-turning” moments:

• God turning toward the shepherds as they hear the angels’ word first and hurry to see Mary and Joseph and the child Jesus;
• God turning toward the Jews, a point particularly emphasized in the rituals described, as well as the stories of Simeon and Anna;
• And in and through it all, God turning toward Jesus.

Let’s spend some time this New Year’s morning taking note of these.

First, the message about the shepherds. It may be an old saw from so many Christmas Eve sermons, but it bears repeating: shepherds were and are outcasts, living on the fringe of society, out in the wild, away from “decent, God fearing people” … they, ritually unclean by the rules of Hebrew religion; they, the low ones in a social system heavily stacked against them … yet they, they are the ones who first hear the message of good news from God … “this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known” to them.
To these people on the outside, God has turned first with the Good News of Jesus. It is still as earth-shattering a message now as it was then … echoing Mary’s words in the Magnificat; right here, those words are being worked out in human history … God is bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly … the Good News of Jesus Christ does not come first to the halls of power or into the lives of the rich and famous … but to backwards country bumpkins … and smelly ones at that.
It is a worldly slap in the face … an insult, an affront … of the first order.
God is not going to play by our human orderings and rules.
God is turning toward the very places from which humans turn away.

The same can certainly be said of that second point … that here in these words God is showing a particular turning toward the Jews. The story moves rapidly to the words of Jesus’ naming, and Mary and Joseph’s obedience to the most ancient of Jewish rituals and laws.
Still, despite these clear words … and this never fails to amaze me … still, many, many Christians forget the fact, Jesus was and is … a Jew. Though our western European and American portraits paint him to appear as someone who would easily fit in on the streets of Oslo or Munich or Minneapolis / St. Paul … they’re just plain wrong. Jesus was a child of the Mideast, born to Hebrews of the area, so he would have looked like … everyone else from that Mediterranean area of the world. Dark complected. Dark haired. Short and swarthy. And eight days after he was born, he was circumcised, so to keep the law of the Hebrew people.
Luke spends a lot of time in these verses emphasizing Jesus’ Jewishness … from his circumcision and naming, to his mother’s purification ritual, to his presentation in the Temple in Jerusalem. We recall that Luke’s gospel, and its companion volume, Acts, were likely written to Gentiles (non Jews) in the Roman world, so that, as Luke states at the beginning of the Gospel, “you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”
Unfortunately, part of that instruction was likely derogatory words and actions, discrimination, persecution, hatred of the Jews, even then, among Christians, even then, in the Roman world. Perhaps Luke saw this anti-Jewish belief and behavior, and wanted to set early believers straight … reminding them that Jesus was himself born a Jew, and began his life fully within the customs, laws and rituals of the Jewish religion.
And that’s a good reminder for us, as well, when we try to make Jesus over from “God for us” to “God like us.” When we say in the Creed that Jesus was made “truly human” it means just that … that Jesus was fully a person of his place and time in the world … he wasn’t a 12th or 18th or 21st century person; he wasn’t Chinese or Botswanan or American. He was born and lived his earthly life as a 1st century Jew … which serves well to remind us that God chose to become human in a particular place and time … to show us that we, too, are called to live fully engaged in this life which we have been given; not wishing and hoping that we’d be living sometime, somewhere else … dreaming, hoping to be beamed up or blasted out or raptured away … no, we are called to live right here, right now, engaged with life as it is for us, and for our neighbor.
This is also a reminder that ritual can serve us well, as a reminder of the sacred, the holy, in this life, and can enhance our engaging in it, rather than escaping from it. We have become an increasingly de-ritualized society … who prays before meals anymore? Who reads the Scriptures around their meal table anymore? Who eats together as a family anymore, conversing about the events of the day just past? Jesus’ full engagement with his Jewish religion meant his full engagement in the ritual of what it meant to be a first century Jew, honoring God in all of life … from one’s rising up to lying down, going out and coming in, in how one dressed and ate.
In some ways we Lutherans have been much to blame for the de-ritualization of Christianity. Though it was never Martin Luther’s intent to wholesale throw out many of the rites and rituals of the Christian faith … from making the sign of the cross in remembrance of our Baptism … to the differing colors and vestments of our corporate worship together … to individual and family prayer at our waking up and going to sleep … those who followed the Great Reformer “cleaned house” of many of these rituals because they were “too catholic.” So we became a church devoid of many of the rich traditions which taught generations faith, and as the first Protestants, we passed this sterile faith along to other Christians as “what God really wants.”
Thankfully … we Lutherans have been recovering many of these rituals and traditions in our corporate worship together … from making the sign of the cross … to weekly communion … to a renewed appreciation of our Baptismal heritage. But our individual and family faith traditions may still be lacking.

R. Alan Culpeper in his commentary on Luke’s gospel makes a valid point, in bringing out what we have lost as God’s people by removing ritual from our lives:

For many, religious rituals are reduced to church attendance at Christmas and Easter and to socially required ceremonies at births, weddings, and funerals. The marking of both daily and special events with rituals that recognize the sacredness of life and the presence of God in the everyday is practically extinct. The result has been that God has receded from the awareness and experience of everyday life. [People’s] lives … move in a secular realm devoid of the presence of the holy. Little room for mystery remains in the everyday …

Yet the message of Luke’s gospel here, is that God unmistakably turns toward these very places from which humans turn away. God is calling us, you and me, back to life which reflects the giftedness, the holiness, of God For Us … that Jesus came into the world means that this life is different for us, and we are called to honor and recognize this in our lives … individually, corporately, among friends, in families.
Here’s one ready way for you to try that in the New Year.
Every week we offer these little “Taking Faith Home” fliers so you can do just that … take faith home, to engage in some practice of that which we preach and feed on here in this one hour each week, to take it into the 167 remaining hours of your week. There are prayers, there are readings, there are blessings, there are caring conversations and devotions, service opportunities and rituals and traditions in which to engage each week.
I’ll be blunt. We have got a great thing going here corporately as Nativity people and congregation. Our attendance, our giving of ourselves, through service, through financial stewardship, it’s all growing. God has blessed us tremendously in the year just past and we give great thanks for that even as we look ahead with eager anticipation to what 2012 will bring to this community of faith.
But all of that good feeling pales with the joy of the Lord of which we will each be a part, as we grow personally in our faith journey, in our own devotion life, in prayers and caring conversations in our homes and in our families, outside these walls. I know some of you already engage in these rituals and faith practices, and that’s great … we have and will continue to ask you to share with us, and help lead us, into growing in our own discipleship journeys. For those of you who have yet to begin … may I encourage, commend, exhort you to make a New Year start, by trying just one of the ways these little helps list, to engage your faith outside of worship, during the week? Please. Give it a try. I will be praying for you as you give it a try.

One thing you find, as you go on this discipleship journey with Jesus, is that it doesn’t mean everything is going to automatically go well and right in your life from now on. Far from it. Sometimes the walk of faith, the discipleship journey with Jesus, seeing life through the eyes of faith, obedience, submission, confession and repentance, means that it’s just plain harder, the path is rougher, there are more boulders in the way.
It was this way for those there at the outset. Note the strange ominous words of old Simeon:

This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too.

Note how Mary pondered in her heart all these things which happened and these words which were said.
There will indeed be falling and rising, there will be opposition and swords piercing souls, that is for sure. We rehear and rehearse that story in Jesus’ life beginning next week, on Baptism of our Lord Sunday, as the story told in worship of the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry … sent forth from his baptism, God turning toward and sending forth Jesus, to bring his Word into the world … here, next Sunday, that story begins once more, among us.
And in our own lives, we rehear and rehearse those words … God’s turning toward Jesus, God’s turning toward us … in our own lives, we rehear and rehearse these words as we remember our own baptism, God’s lavish gift to, on and for us … a lifelong sign and symbol of our dying and rising with Jesus, a remembrance of our “walking wet” through life, our Lord with us, through all the swords and boulders … and blessings and rejoicings … of this life.
Our baptism … and the rites and rituals given us which we are called to follow … are palpable reminders … every time we dip our fingers in the font, and make the sign of the cross on our foreheads or over ourselves … every time we confess our sins and shortcomings and hear the words of forgiveness … every time we eat and drink at this lavish feast of faith and community, spirit-blessing and filling … we are reminded that our Lord is with us ... all ways … and most especially, in the places and through the times from which others might turn away.
In our sorrow and in our thanksgivings … in bad times and in good … whatever this new Year of our Lord 2012 has in store for us … we will rest assured and work assured, go out assured and come in assured, lay down assured and rise up assured … that our Lord is with us … always, in all ways.
Baptized, We Live … fully engaged in Jesus for the life to come, we go forth assured in Jesus … to fully engage in this life we are given to share, to live and serve and give Jesus-life with all, in his name …
… to Rejoice, rejoice, with thanks embrace another year of grace.
Amen.

24 December 2011

2011-12-25T06:45:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve 2011

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

December 24, 1968. The world sat spellbound that Christmas Eve, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 sent back pictures to earth that had never been seen before – the bright blue planet from which the three men had come, hovering silently over the grey lifeless landscape of the moon beneath them. They were the first humans to orbit the moon, and that day being Christmas Eve, one astronaut was so moved by the sight of the earth from so far away that he read from the beginning of the book of Genesis.
The Apollo 8 astronauts chose those words from the first chapter of Genesis because they so clearly fit the scene they saw that Christmas Eve. Beneath them lay an utterly desolate, grey, lifeless moon. Yet over it rose the earth, a bright blue dot in a black sky, a place of life in the emptiness of space. The factual arguments of the story, creation versus evolution, faded away before them, as they grasped the truth of the story for them … the same truth of that old, old story for us, no matter whether you believe it factually or as a human way of explaining those things which can only be fully understood by the divine.
To those of us here on earth, those old words took on new meaning, they gave people hope, hope and optimism about our country at the end of a year when so much had gone wrong … in the midst of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Vietnam … we could still grasp the wonderful significance of what the astronauts were seeing and doing, so far away. Even those of us who were the little kids of 1968 could still realize that we were growing up in a time and place in which we were beginning to learn about the very beginnings of life … big, big stuff … stuff that previously had been so far beyond us, we hadn’t even dared to think about it.
It was as if a window into God’s eternity was thrown wide open, then and there, that Christmas Eve of 1968. I’ve been told – by those who were gathered there with them that night – that even the most unspiritual, just the facts and figures moon rocket scientists of that time were brought to a state of awe, and wonder, and prayer.
Now, I know that many of us here tonight don’t remember Christmas Eve 1968 … as one who was there said to me just days ago, “well, you’ll lose half your audience with that old story.”
Perhaps.
But we’ll all come back together and re-connect, with all of this.
Year after year, we still come here and see and experience Christmas Eve … we come to church tonight and see the candles burning and the decorations shining and sing the carols and hear the Scriptures read and … even us, practical, realistic, common-sense, double-tall-latted and I-padded Seattleites, we get all warm and fuzzy and even cry, if we have it in us.
And why is that?
Because we know, we trust, we feel with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, that the window into God’s eternity is wide open tonight. Our past and our present and our future are all laid out before us. These words and this music and these sights and smells remind us of Christmases past, times when we’ve been together with family and friends, times when we’ve felt safe and secure and loved. There’s a opening into the souls of even the most serious of us, where we can all be touched by the significance of what we come together to celebrate.
That’s the personal side of this night.
But we also have a collective story in which we share, one which touches us in an even better way.
It’s a story which starts far in the past … God speaking through the words of the Old Testament prophets, in the readings we’ve heard, speaking words of comfort and hope to a people who were suffering and thought that they were abandoned by God.
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” the prophet Isaiah said of his people … a people who were oppressed and suffering under social, economic and political injustice.
“A child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders;” these words spoke the hope of a people looking forward to a new, more powerful, earthly king in David’s line … and, beyond that … to a king who would rescue his people from sin and evil and death forever.
And the story continues … with God keeping his promises through that old but ever new sign of a child. First a baby born to the old Elizabeth and Zechariah – John the Baptist. Then an angel coming to Mary and promising her that she would bear God’s son - Jesus.
And then that special night when the window to eternity opened wide … a birth in a backwards town in a forgotten corner of the world, a baby born to an unlikely couple. An infant lying in straw … angels singing, shepherds hearing and seeing, God’s glory made visible to us in the birth of Christ our Lord.
And it is a story with a future … the child grown to be the man Jesus, who suffered and died on a cross but was raised again so that the window to God’s eternity might be open forever. “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory …” Jesus’ gift to us is that we have a future and our future is together … in him. Together, with all those who have gone before us … some we never knew … and some whom we knew and loved very much and miss every day of our lives. Christ’s promise is that we will be together … one day … with him and in him … no more suffering, no more crying, no more pain … no more death … forever.
Tonight, that window to God’s eternity is wide open. The theologians may well call it the communion of saints, as we are surrounded by the angels and the past, present and future of the Church, on earth as it is in heaven. But we … we with our limited, finite understanding of the infinite … we might just call it “that Christmas spirit,” or feel it in a burst of gladness and tears that washes over us as we see a child’s face tonight … or sing our favorite Christmas carol … or look at the beautiful decorations … or remember a particular Christmas past, spent in happiness and warmth and safety. It’s our finite human way of experiencing God’s wide open window into eternity tonight.
For that is what Christmas Eve is all about.
And because of that gift of gifts, this night of nights, we can truly sing with those in heaven and those on earth, the saints and the angels, “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” Not just at that nativity 2000 years ago. But in this Nativity of 2011.
May you feel the window to God’s eternity wide open to you tonight. May you be blessed with that feeling … the essence of Christmas Eve. May your faith be strengthened through this worship … through the word and song … through being fed and strengthened by Jesus’ words of promise and hope in this meal we will soon share.
And, most important, as your heart and spirit are warmed by God’s Spirit … may that feeling of warmth and hope, joy and peace stay with you as you go from this place … to share with others this great news of the Birth of our Savior … until that day when he comes again and the window to God’s eternity is thrown wide open forever.

18 December 2011

2011-12-18T14:47:00.001-08:00

What is baptism? It’s an Advent Conspiracy.
“Love all”
4 Advent B
The Magnificat – Luke 1:46-55
18 December 2011

We’ve finally made it.
Yes, today we come to the end of our Advent journey … and granted, it’s been a bumpy one.
We began three weeks ago with the usual First Sunday in Advent words of apocalypse … Jesus’ warnings and encouraging about The End, his coming again.
Then we had our two weeks with John the Baptist … this year’s visit, some might say, mercifully short, no cursing the people, “You brood of vipers,” but still, there he was, hair shirted, ranting in the wilderness.
But remember … this year, we’ve laid two other themes on top of the Scriptures. Both are faithful to the texts … both are faithful to the sense of the season.
The first – our year-long focus – is on Baptism.
And the second – perhaps controversial to some – is the reform movement known as Advent Conspiracy. We’ve heard so far three of the four points of that reform of this season … Worship Fully, Spend Less, and Give More.
Maybe … with those texts, with those prominent themes; combined with life as it plays out for us, personally, corporately … maybe it hasn’t felt like, maybe it hasn’t been a happy Advent for you.
Not that the season of Advent – as Lutherans and other liturgical, church year cycle following Christians mark it – is ever really a “happy” time … as in gleeful and giddy. Apocalyptic Scripture isn’t usually part of the “feel good” hit parade of Bible readings. Neither does the hair shirted bug eater John the Baptist get everyone in a warm Yule mood.
But then, Advent was never supposed to be, as the song goes, the “most wonderful time of the year.” What Advent is all about … is joy … deep, abiding joy … trust and hope in the coming again of the Messiah to earth, the One who came once, who lived our life and suffered our suffering and died our death but rose again … to give us the promise, the hope, the deep joy of eternal life THEN … one day … which gives us the courage to fully engage in this life, to live, to risk, to share with others NOW.
Ah … but that was the past three weeks.
Today we are at the final stop in our Advent journey … the fourth Sunday in Advent … and, most certainly, happiness and cheerful holiday spirit are definitely among us.
Why, our Advent Conspiracy message for today is certainly one of warm holiday fuzziness for us … LOVE ALL. Certainly that’s a beloved, blessed outcome of our baptism, walking wet in God’s forgiveness, that we would LOVE ALL. It sounds like one of those Christmas carols we hear … “Why can’t it be Christmas the whole year long?” meaning that, ah, people just seem to be nicer and warmer and more loving and love-ly this time of year, and wouldn’t it be nice if that feeling lasted, at least into February.
And our text for today … it’s the lovely story of Mary; first her conversation with the angel Gabriel, the words of promise and hope coming to her, that she is the chosen one of God, chosen to bear God’s Messiah, God’s deliverer to the world … God for us, Emmanuel … and then, the song we’ve sung so many times, throughout Christian history and our own history here, Nativity, people of new birth, people who love these words … the Magnificat … “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
How could we not be happy with this theme, these words before us?
How indeed.
So why don’t we take a deeper look at this text … there’s no harm in that, is there?
Yes … it’s true … we do know these words of Scripture quite well … but normally, they are inseparable from the music to which they are sung. There are many, many musical settings of Mary’s Magnificat … quite a number of hymns we have sung which include these words … but of course, it’s our dear favorite from Marty Haugen’s Holden Evening Prayer that likely rings in our ears loudest.
Today, though, different from past years, we’re deliberately not singing this Scripture-song … because I didn’t want the music to get in the way of our hearing what is, and isn’t, here for us.
So what is here?
There appear to be many deep contrasts in Mary’s words.

He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant
Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly

He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty

For Mary, these contrasts are directly related to the deep contrasts she saw in the world around her, and that she was experiencing personally.
First, in her own story … the visit from the angel, that great and terrible announcement to this poor little teenage girl … “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son … he will be called the Son of the Most High.”
Second, what she saw in the world of her time … the kings of the world, the wealthy and powerful rulers of Israel and the equally wealthy and powerful Roman occupiers, lording it over the poor and powerless of this backward corner of the world … especially this little rural backwater known as Nazareth.
We know Mary’s situation. It’s been painted and poured out in art and word and song for hundreds of years … God comes to poor lowly country girl, to announce that she will bear the Messiah.
The world is about to turn.
Those words … they are words of promise and hope, especially to those who are on the short end of things in the world … people like Mary, people who are poor, oppressed, suffering. Some would like this world-turning to happen on a speedier timeline … and on their own political terms. Mary’s words have of late been co-opted … watch out world; God’s deep reversal is going to be at work, cosmic Robin Hood-Jesus is coming to take from the rich and give to the poor and throw everything topsy-turvy … from the sound of some, you’d think Mary was the first century spokesperson for Occupy Nazareth.
Ah, but wait just a minute.
Is that what Mary’s really saying here?
We might think we live in a particularly unjust time in world history … but there have been plenty of other times when the inequality between rich and poor has been particularly striking.
Martin Luther’s, for example.
In 1522, right as he was being called before the Diet of Worms and the emperor Charles to defend his work in setting the church free from the tyranny of its powerful oppressors, Luther wrote a commentary on the Magnificat. From its early sentences, readers knew it would be a blockbuster.

[In these words] God breaks what is whole and makes whole what is broken.

With a start like that, people thought that here, Luther would write a work that would fan the fires of peasant revolt, turning servant and slave upon their master in revolution and world-turning.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he wrote of humility.

Those of low degree [of which Mary sings] are here not the humble, but all those who are contemptible and altogether nothing in the eyes of the world. It is the same expression that Mary applied to herself: “He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” Nevertheless, those who are willing to be nothing and lowly of heart, and do not strive to be great, are truly humble. Now when God exalts them, it does not mean that God will put them in the seats of those God has cast out any more than that when God shows mercy to those who fear him, God puts them in the place of the learned, that is, the proud. Rather God lets them be exalted spiritually and in God, and be judges over seats and power and all might, here and hereafter; for they have more knowledge than all the learned and the mighty.

Humility, then, is the guiding light of these words of Mary. Not ‘revolution.’ Not a call for a violent moment when “the world is about to turn,” at least, in a political or economic sense. But instead, here is a Word to encourage those who are willing to be nothing for the sake of God, for the sake of their neighbor, for the sake of the world. Those who put place, power, prestige aside, and live, as Mary did, “Let it be.”
A quote from Mother Teresa here comes to mind:

A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.

Humility … and here we see a tie in, a link, with both our seasonal series as well. For what, indeed, is “Love All” but a call and a cry for humility … setting aside our own agendas for the sake of being a vessel for love, a servant in the journey of Jesus.
To put it in the vernacular … who is the person who you can’t stand the most? Your boss? That jerk who cut you off in traffic? Your teacher? A student? Newt Gingrich? Barack Obama?
Humility calls for an emptying of that hatred, a humbling of ourselves, a setting aside of even our most self-righteous anger … and loving … not just the ones we find loveable, not just the ones we view as “mild inconveniences” on our path … but the most annoying, obnoxious, downright opposite-to-our-nature-and-way-of-living people in our lives.
Ah, but you might say … look further. There’s more of the Magnificat.
Yes, there is.
So don’t these verses call forth some kind of “world about to turn-ned-ness?”

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.

Again, I’ll let the words of Luther speak:

Those who are lowly … are those who are willing to be in such a state … especially if they have been forced into it for the sake of God’s Word. On the other hand … what hindrance was their riches to the holy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Or their high station or great riches to those who had them or who have them today, provided they do not set their hearts on them or seek their own advantage in them? “The Lord weighs the spirit,” that is, God judges not according to the outward appearance, whether one is rich or poor, high or low, but according to the spirit and how it behaves itself within.

Our wretched unbelief always hinders God from working [good works] in us, and ourselves from experiencing and knowing them. We desire to be filled and have plenty of everything before hunger and want arrive. We lay up provision against future hunger and need, so that we no longer have need of God and God’s works. What sort of faith is that which trusts in God, when all the while you feel and know that you have goods laid up to help yourself? This is to esteem temporal goods more than God and to put them in God’s place as an idol.

You see, Luther says, the beauty of the words of the Magnificat, are that they are all about God’s work, not ours. Here, in the words of Mary, God is not laying out some kind of world-turning revolution, taking from the rich and filling the poor … “everything for everyone” … no, to God, wealth and power have no standing whatsoever. In the coming Kingdom of God … the Kingdom which has its here and now start with the announcement of the birth of Jesus … wealth and power have no place at all.
So all the stuff we count as being of worth and value … all the things we end up spending our whole lives scratching and clawing after … place, power, prestige … status, honor, rank … the number of years one has served in a place as pastor, or been members of a church congregation … it doesn’t count for diddly squat, folks.
That’s the message of the Magnificat.
See, this is God’s justice at work … God’s justice, not ours … it’s not about the lowly clawing up and pulling down, or the wealthy and powerful hanging on to what they have rightfully earned … God cares for us, but God doesn’t care at all for our stuff-lust.
And you get that from Mary’s words here … if we have eyes to see and ears to hear … they most certainly are forward looking words.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.

Certainly, for anyone paying attention to the daily news of Mary’s time, this wasn’t the case. Certainly for anyone paying attention to the news of our own time, it’s not the case either.
That’s because these words are about life, life as seen through the lens of the Cross … yes, the Cross … here, even here at the height of the Advent season, we are called to view everything through the death of Jesus … the death of Jesus, into which our baptism has inextricably joined us …
in the words of the apostle Paul, “YOU, you who follow Jesus, you who are baptized into his baptism, YOU ARE DEAD, buried with him in baptism” … dead to all this, this worldly clawing and clutching, grasping and grabbing for place and honor … and stuff …
and “YOU ARE MADE ALIVE” … alive with Christ, for in your baptism, you have also risen with him, risen to a new life full of truth, forgiveness, giving and peace … in which you must LOVE ALL because nothing else matters anymore.

The beauty of the Magnificat is that Mary’s words make clear that God isn’t in the business of worldly revolution … but rather, the cosmic revolution of changing hearts forever. God’s politics are no more “Occupy Wall Street” than they are “Let them eat cake.”
Though … God hopes, God prays, God wills … in Christ … who calls us through our baptism into him to LOVE ALL … God calls us all to something new, a new way of living, here and now.
Again, Luther puts it so well:

How could one bring a more damning accusation against riches, or more grievously terrify the rich, than by saying that God sends them empty away? On the other hand, how could one be more strongly and comfortably moved to willing endurance of hunger and poverty than by these fine words of the Mother of God – that God will fill all the hungry with good things?
We have here such a promise of God and such strong comfort … for God’s own beloved people [us], for whose sake God also became man, to redeem [us] from the power of the devil, of sin, death, and hell, and to lead us to righteousness, eternal life, and salvation. That is the help of which Mary sings.

God’s promise … God’s help … God’s call, in Jesus, to a new way of living. For God is in the business of changing hearts … not changing politics … though, as hearts change, politics will surely, necessarily change too.
In other words … true love, God’s love, is a matter of faith. We don’t see it now fully, we don’t experience it now fully; and this life surely as we live it, will be more sad than happy, always, in all ways. This is the truth and reality of life in this world …
…Mary’s world, where the angel’s announcement to her, that she, an unmarried girl barely in her teens, would become pregnant with God’s son … this Word would bring her anything but happiness …
… and our world, where the words and actions of justice and peace, comfort and hope, are always, always in the minority.
But we have a deep abiding joy … a joy which will not be taken from us …
… for Mary, as Mary sings, as Mary says, we have a merciful God … or rather, that merciful God has us …
… and for us all, that same merciful God wants and works and wills that no one would be condemned to the hell of being sent away empty … neither the poor of this world nor the poor of the next … but instead, that God’s good and gracious will is that all … both the empty, and the full … the poor, and the rich … the powerful, and the meek … that all would be saved, to live, then in the future, and now as well, to live in the full-ness of God.
And so Mary’s song must be our song … Mary’s words, our words … heart changing words of Gospel truth … as we are called and gathered here to WORSHIP FULLY, fed on forgiveness and grace, sent forth to risk and to serve, to SPEND LESS but GIVE MORE, to tend relationships and not stuff, not just Conspiring together to overturn the Advent chaos and mess which we’ve made of this season … but to carry into the world a good Word, the best Word, of deep, lasting Hope and Peace, Joy and Love …

Blessed indeed are they who believe that there will be a fulfillment of what is spoken to us by the Lord.

Happiness is overrated but LOVING ALL is not … it is our call, our cry, our mission, not just in Advent, but all year through.

And so there’s nothing left to say this Advent … nothing more than … Merry Christmas …
… blessed Good Friday …
… Happy Easter …
… and may Jesus come again soon, to make IT, and US, ALL right. Amen.

4 December 2011

2011-12-04T13:35:00.000-08:00

What is baptism? It’s an Advent Conspiracy.
“Spend less”
2 Advent B
4 December 2011

Last week we began the season of Advent, and our “Advent Conspiracy” series, with a remembrance of a television series – in that case, Seinfeld, and how it launched a whole new holiday, Festivus, created especially for people who have grown disgusted with what Christmas has become in our culture. Overblown, drawn out forever, and dollar-driven … many, many people have said “there’s got to be another way.”
That way for the creators of the Advent Conspiracy was our initial focus … Worship Fully … meaning that, the holiday begins, and ends, in Jesus … and by worshipping fully, by following our baptismal calling to live fully into the preparation and anticipation of the season of Advent … preparing for, anticipating Jesus’ return to earth once again, rejoicing in the Good News that the kingdom of God is coming “on earth as it is in heaven,” … and we ourselves, dying and rising with Jesus, joined with him in our own baptism … we are given freedom to reject the death-bound ways of worldly living (like overbloated Christmas) and instead, embrace real, authentic, faith-filled life, so we can truly receive and celebrate Christmas as God intends it … GOD, FOR US.
But that was last week.
This week, this Second Sunday in Advent, we move ahead … move ahead, with the word of … another television show.
It’s one of those “train wreck” kind of reality programs … presenting situations so horrible and awful, you feel like you have to turn away … but we don’t … we’ve got to watch because we just can’t believe it’s true. Perhaps it’s one of your “guilty pleasures.”
I’m talking about “Hoarders,” the series on A&E which focuses on people who are literally surrounded by their stuff.
Many of us save things … some of us more than others. We collect t-shirts and baseball hats, ticket stubs and commemorative plates. My dad was a “saver” … not a hoarder, but he kept an inordinate amount of stuff in his basement shop … some of it, things he’d fished out of the trash that my mom, my brother and I had thrown out. So the three of us – all “throwers” … we learned the neat trick of setting things in the outside trash can right before the garbage got picked up.
“Throwers” don’t save much … we give it away or recycle it or sell it or just plain get rid of it because we like things neat and tidy with lots of room to move around.
But I digress … we were talking, not about savers and throwers, but “Hoarders.” These are the extreme people who have massive problems with massive amounts of STUFF.
One recent episode of “Hoarders” showed a man who had somewhere between 50 and 60 cars in his yard, all in various states of disrepair and decomposition. Another woman’s house had every room filled with bins and bins of videotapes she’d recorded on her 10 or 15 VCRs. And many of the hoarders simply have houses crammed full of … STUFF … you name it, they have it, piled so high they can’t get through the doorways of their houses, and when they do manage to crawl in they can’t get in bed, can’t use the dining table, can’t even hardly move because of the sheer amount of STUFF. So each episode follows the trials and tribulations of these hoarders … most of them, in some kind of life crisis (usually a demand from a family member or the local authorities) to clean up their place, to reduce their piles of stuff, to throw things out, recycle, just plain GET RID OF IT. And the “train wreck” comes in the watching, the seeing, how they (usually) just can’t do it … can’t bring themselves to part with any of it.
The show points out, that there are more and more hoarders, more and more people in crisis over having too much stuff, all the time.
Really, it’s the nightmare scenario of the American way, isn’t it? This end result of the consumerist merry-go-round we all are on … hoarding, throwing, saving, losing, it really doesn’t matter, because it’s still all about our STUFF, isn’t it?
To have STUFF to give or throw away, we have to have bought the STUFF in the first place.
We buy a lot of STUFF at all times of the year; the economists and politicians are all very happy when we decide, to heck with our budgets, LET’S GO SHOPPING.
But at Christmas, even in the worst of times, we pull off the brakes and go all out.
The good folks at Advent Conspiracy know this … and here’s what they have to say about it:

We like gifts. Our kids really like gifts. But consider this: America spends an average of $450 billion a year every Christmas. How often have you spent money on Christmas presents for no other reason than obligation? How many times have you received a gift out of that same obligation? Thanks, but no thanks, right?

And so in this second week of our participation in the Conspiracy, they present us with this challenge:

We’re asking people to SPEND LESS … to consider buying ONE LESS GIFT this Christmas. Just one. Sounds insignificant, yet many who have taken this small sacrifice have experienced something nothing less than a miracle: They have been more available to celebrate Christ during the Advent season.

Spend Less this Christmas? Why, it sounds positively un-American!
I mean, haven’t we been told by our leaders, exhorted by our authorities, that the way we’ll get out of our economic mess is TO GO SHOPPING????!
I can just hear the economists and politicians now: “Why, in our economy which is almost totally built on consumption, if everyone Spent Less, we’d be plunged into recession. Maybe even, depression. Hundreds of thousands, millions, would suffer because of that ONE GIFT NOT PURCHASED.
Well, probably not.
But, maybe?
AND SO WHAT IF IT DID put a little dent into our economy?
Might that actually point out that what’s really messed up isn’t the suggestion that we buy one less gift this Christmas, but OUR mindset and OUR behavior instead … credit-carded, buy it now, pay for it later, endless consumption of more and more AND MORE STUFF.
So why do we do it, anyway?
It almost seems like, like, we’re looking for meaning in our STUFF.
Certainly that’s true for those television show-“Hoarders.” Each program always features a psychologist brought in to help provide the hoarder much-needed therapy. And the first thing we hear from the psychologist each week, is that the Hoarder is initially unable to give up even one little thing because to them, it means giving up part of who they are.
But I’m probably being too hard on the Hoarders. For we all try to find identity, meaning, in our stuff. Part of why we buy STUFF is because of what we believe the STUFF says about us. The kind of car we drive, the house we live in, the labels on the clothes we wear, the ZIP code in which we choose to live, that’s the way we believe we show our identity to the world.

What a contrast to the texts we have before us today. Yes, they are also about identity, who people are, who WE are, but they’re sure not focused on STUFF.
Isaiah’s word comes as to us as pure grace. It’s not the harsh prophetic word of judgment for God’s people that we hear in the first chapters of this book. No, here the people Israel have already lost the war and been hauled off into exile in Babylon. They’ve had the land of God’s promise taken from them because of their greed and idolatry.
Everything bad that they feared has come to pass. What their living has gotten them into is a wilderness, for sure, a place where all that they’d been certain and sure of in their lives, their very identity, has been snatched away from them.
So Isaiah’s word comes to them, helpless, hurting people, to remind them of WHOSE they are, so they can once again know WHO they are:

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand fast forever.

Despite your search for identity away from me, Israel … God says to them … despite your wandering away into a wilderness where you have felt abandoned and become hopeless … despite all this, God says to them, my promises to you remain true and FOR YOU. I will once again rescue you from the ‘fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into’ because I am your God and you are my people, and I will be your shepherd, your caregiver, your help and your hope, and I will never leave you.
Then there’s our Gospel text. It starts out The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and at first, it certainly sounds like good news, quoting word for word what Isaiah said to his people centuries earlier.
Ah, but the one we encounter in these words isn’t a comforting Isaiah, but a hair-shirted John the Baptist, calling people to repent, to turn from their sins, to turn around and follow God’s call to holy living.
But once again, we hear a word about identity … knowing whose we are, so we can know WHO we are.
John is calling people to baptism, to be sure … but his is a baptism of repentance, for forgiveness. It was an ancient Jewish practice still done today, called Mikveh , a ritual bath of immersion for purification. This kind of baptism which John offers would have to be repeated time and time again, as many times as people sin and become impure, they would need to be immersed.
Yet John points beyond himself … to the one whose way he is preparing … the one whose Good News is being proclaimed in these opening verses of Mark’s gospel:

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

The good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is that his baptism will inseparably link his people with him, forever … his people, US, WE will be baptized with the same Holy Spirit with which he, Jesus, is baptized. And so we recall the words we heard last week about that baptism:
• On the one hand, Baptism = death. Being joined to Jesus in his baptism means dying to the old ways of sin and death. Dying to the death-bound ways of the world. Dying to how far short we fall from where God calls us to live and be, to and for others.
• On the other hand, Baptism = life. Being raised with Christ, we are raised FOR something. And that something is life … full, rich, and abundant … free from the fears that we’re going to lose out on something … whether it’s place or stuff or whatever other gods, other idols we’ve placed in our path along the way. In Baptism, we have DIED to the death-bound ways of the world, and been RAISED to life together, in Christ, forever.

The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which we received from last week’s text is that we no longer fear “the End” because our End is in Jesus Christ, the Lord of life and forgiveness and salvation, … and he is in God and with God, forever.
The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which is for us this week is that our identity, our True Identity, is … baptized child of God, brother or sister of the one who brings Good News in his very self, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
In other words … our STUFF is not us, whether that’s a fancy car, piles of video cassettes or clothes or papers hoarded away … or pride in a clean, tidy house, an organized desk, or a showroom-condition car. We are not saved from our sins by our hoarding or our throwing, our saving or our recycling.
OUR STUFF IS NOT US.
No, we are given our indelible identity in our baptism … though the water evaporates, it leaves its mark on us permanently, because, as Luther tells us in his Catechism,

Baptism is not just water.

The Good News for us here this week is that Baptism is Identity for us … we are part of God’s Kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven, what will be perfect then, is not yet perfect now, but still in the works nonetheless. We are walking wet works in progress … dead in Baptism, alive in Baptism, sinner-saints, sent forth to bring wet footprints of God’s love into the world.
And Advent is the perfect time for us to focus on “walking wet,” all our Baptism means for us.
In the old, old church days … Advent was seen as a ‘little Lent,’ a time of repentance, preparation before the festival of the Incarnation of Jesus … Christmas. Though we use blue as our liturgical color for Advent now, we still have a vestige of that Lenten link in the purple and pink candles of Advent … purple being the liturgical color for Lent.
And that’s not a bad thing. We hear the Baptist’s call for repentance today, and we heed it … heed it by repenting from our overspending, overconsuming ways that have marked Christmas for us in the past. We can turn from that poor way of marking the Advent, the coming of our God in Jesus Christ … turn from it, if even a little, hearing and following the Advent Conspiracy call to a simpler celebration this year.
And in the Baptist’s words we’re also given freedom … freedom from our fears and courage to take risks … little risks (like not giving in to the needless ‘well, she bought me something, so I need to buy her something’ cycle), but meaningful ones nonetheless … giving us more freedom, more time to spend in our true calling as disciples of Jesus, to continue to go and grow in faith …
So here’s a suggestion … with the time you’ll gain from doing less shopping … why not take up a devotional life?
Here’s a Word for you which doesn’t have to cost you a cent. The Daily Texts are a great way to engage with the Scriptures every day, brief readings and prayers which millions of people have used worldwide since the 1700s to begin their day with a Word of faith and life.
Yes, they are produced by the Moravian Church, one of our ecumenical church partners … but millions of Lutherans use them, too. They were Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s constant companion throughout his life, including his time in Nazi prisons. And they can be yours, too, just by visiting the Moravian Church’s website (I’ve run off copies of the web page and they’re on the round table – with the url listed) and signing up for email delivery of the Daily Texts, each day.
If you’re more a book person, you can also order your own personal copy of the Daily Texts for a little more than $10, by using the order form which is attached.
I ask you, Nativity, God calls you, Nativity, to go deeper in faith … not just “going to church,” but BEING CHURCH.
For Jesus has given us an indelible identity, our true identity, in our baptism.
And we are called to set aside that masks that identity … hiding behind our STUFF, our
busy-ness, in fear of going deeper prayerfully, spiritually, in faith … we are called to set that all aside, to unmask, to cease hiding … and walk wet … fearlessly, in faith, in love, in service … walk wet into God’s future … where all that matters is that we are IN HIM, brothers and sisters of our Lord, given his same Spirit, beloved, baptized children of God.
Amen.

27 November 2011

2011-11-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

What is baptism? It’s an Advent Conspiracy.
“Worship fully”
1 Advent B
27 November 2011

One of my favorite episodes of the old TV series “Seinfeld” – maybe yours, too – is the one in which George Costanza’s dad Frank relates the creation of the holiday known as Festivus.
That character, played by Jerry Stiller, relates in the show how and why he decided to create another, alternative wintertime celebration, one without the commercialism and pressure of Christmas:

"Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way. [The doll] was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born: a Festivus for the rest of us!"

And so another moment in popular culture was born; all over the country, unadorned metal Festivus poles have sprouted ever since; and people mark the date (December 23) with “Seinfeld”-inspired events such as “Feats of Strength” and the “Airing of Grievances.”
It’s not hard to figure out why people would reject tradition and choose a made-up, sitcom-spun wintertime celebration instead. Christmas has in many ways become a commercially bloated, disfigured, even mean-spirited shadow of itself. And every year, it gets worse … holiday decorations going up in mid-October … Christmas music plays on the radio right after Halloween … “Black Friday” slops over into Thanksgiving … shoppers pepper spray, trample and even shoot each other to get that One Great Bargain.
As for we liturgical Christians who mark the church year … today doesn’t begin Christmas, but Advent … a time of preparation, looking forward to Christ’s return to earth even as we anticipate the coming celebration of his birth … we don’t jump right into singing Christmas carols, we don’t have the sanctuary decorated with tree and lights the moment Thanksgiving worship is over, because we mark Advent first …
…well, we may mark it in here, but the light from our one, two, three, four Advent candles … it’s easily snuffed out the moment we get out the door, and are swamped in the tide of wall to wall Christmas.
Advent preparation and anticipation, it seems, has no place in the world anymore.
It was this realization which brought pastors from three different churches together to take a stand in their congregations, and create what’s now known as Advent Conspiracy. Rather than caving to the culture … which wipes out Advent altogether in a sea of wall-to-wall Christmas from October through December … rather than creating a new holiday like Festivus to show disgust with what Christmas has become … these pastors decided to, ahem, Occupy Advent, if you will … they decided to take a stand for the origins of the season and the traditions of the Church, and create a movement which would help people in their congregations fully engage in what these seasons are really all about.
The opening paragraph from the Advent Conspiracy brochure makes these intentions clear:

The story of Christ’s birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love. So, what happened? What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a Savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists. And when it's all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling of missed purpose. Is this what we really want out of Christmas? What if Christmas became a world-changing event again? Welcome to Advent Conspiracy, a movement calling us to proclaim Christ in how we celebrate Christmas.

The Conspiracy “takes back” the holiday by encouraging us to engage it differently than does the rest of the world. Sorry, there are no “Feats of Strength” or “Airing of Grievances,” but there are these four revolutionary actions :
• Worship Fully
• Spend Less
• Give More
• Love All

Now, admittedly, the churches in which Advent Conspiracy originated aren’t traditional Western catholic liturgical churches … Imago Dei in Portland, for example, is an emergent Evangelical worshipping community. But that there are four rallying points for the Conspiracy … corresponds nicely for us who do follow the liturgical year … four points; four Sundays in Advent.
And especially for us of Nativity, as we being to mark this year of special focus on the Sacrament of Holy Baptism … these four marks of Advent Conspiracy will guide us, as we move through these four Sundays of Advent, these Sundays of preparation and anticipation; guiding our thoughts and words and prayers and, I hope, our actions as well, here as we gather, and there as we are sent into the world.

So today, we begin, right where we are supposed to begin, for us, our first, last and always call as we walk the discipleship walk, following Jesus: Worship Fully.
Worship. The main activity of the Christian church is gathering on each Lord’s day for worship. It’s been this way ever since the beginning … we stand firmly in the tradition of our Jewish brothers and sisters, and come together in community to hear God’s word, sing God’s word, be fed and strengthened on God’s word … from the Scriptures, from the tradition, from the preacher who is prayerfully guided by God to stand at the intersection of all of them and proclaim a message of engagement and relevance to us, here, today …
… and we also stand firmly in the Word of Jesus, who calls us from the ages, and from this table, to gather each week around Jesus’ very self, in bread and wine, given to and for us to feed and strengthen us, food for the journey of our lives as his people.
Fully. The call, God’s call to worship is not an ornament or bauble, a nicety which fills out our resume or is something we “do” once we get done with everything else which fills our schedules and calendars … no, God’s call to worship is one of full, undivided presence …
… God’s full presence, here, with us, as we are called and gathered, fed on Word and Meal, and then sent forth for service to our neighbors.
And our full presence, too. Worship isn’t the last thing we do at the end of a long week … it is the FIRST thing we do at the beginning of a new week, it sets the tone and stride for us, all week. That’s why St. Paul , when he describes the Sacrament of Holy Communion, that’s why St. Paul writes “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” THAT means we are to do it OFTEN, and FULLY, engaged with all our heart and soul, mind and strength.
Worship Fully … it means, like the other Sacrament around which we gather, the one which will guide our worship in this liturgical year, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism … Worship Fully, like baptism, implies that this is not just a “one and done” thing. As Baptism is a mark, a sign, a beginning of the life of faith within us, a work of God which fills and empowers us for our doing God’s work in the world … so Worship Fully is a word emphasizing just that … worship is a posture, a lifestyle, a way of living into which we are called … walking wet, baptized people of God, spreading our water-signed footprints everywhere we go.
It’s been said that the Church is the only organization which exists solely for the sake of those who are not part of it yet.
Well, that’s a little extreme, but you get the point. We … God’s people, the Church … we are called and gathered by God’s Word to worship God, fully, engaged fully in that worship, as part and parcel of who we are … and then we continue that worship in serving and proclaiming to others.
Our focus … in worship, for worship, is not ourselves … our motivation … in worship, for worship, is not ourselves … but God, and God’s call to GO and SERVE and PROCLAIM in word and action, the coming of God’s kingdom.
When we start focusing on ourselves, we stand in judgment … God’s judgment … the place of needing to be corrected, in our worship, in our work as God’s gathered and sent people.
That is what our Scripture readings on this first Sunday in Advent are all about; words we commonly refer to as readings about “the end.”
The words of Isaiah do come at the end of that book, but aren’t necessarily just about God coming down at the end of all things. They are more about repentance … the repentance of God’s people, God’s people who have returned from their forced exile out of the land of God’s promise, God’s people who have returned to that land once again, but life has not turned out for them as well as they had hoped. Looking inward, looking at what they have done, how they have sinned … the gulf, still wide between them and God … their call, their cry to God, “Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever,” these are words of worship, corporate repentance, a plea for forgiveness, a prayer that God would hear them.
The verses from Mark we commonly refer to as “Mark’s Apocalypse.” “Apocalypse” simply means “of the end;” each year on the first Sunday in Advent, we hear words of Apocalypse from one of the chronological Gospels (Matthew, Luke; this liturgical year as we are immersed in Mark’s Gospel, those are the words we read). Despite all the fear and foreboding surrounding words of Apocalypse, these verses simply illustrate that one, potent verse of our Creed which we confess together as God’s people: that we believe that Jesus Christ will come back, bodily, to earth, to establish God’s reign fully, on earth as it is in heaven.
Granted, these words from Mark’s apocalypse aren’t popular ones. They stand fully opposed to where the culture lives, right here, right now, one month out from Christmas Day but fully tinsled and decorated nonetheless.
And yet, we need these readings, coming as they do each year, heralding to us the beginning of the Advent season … because they point out so well the two ditches into which followers of Jesus can easily fall at this time of the year:

• Focusing on ourselves … Christians hear the words of Apocalypse and judgment, and either worry about our own salvation to the neglect of everyone else; or we smugly assume, “Oh, that’s not me Jesus is talking about, I’m one of the saved, not one of the sinful ones who aren’t.”
• Or, another focus on ourselves … we ignore these words calling us into Advent meditation, preparation and hope of final restoration of it all, as we go pedal-to-the-metal toward Christmas.

But both of these are just wrong.
You see, what these words of Scripture really introduce to us, is that Advent is a four week miniature course in what it is to be a baptized child of God, claimed by Jesus, and marked with the cross of Christ forever.

• On the one hand, Baptism = death. Being joined to Jesus in his baptism means dying to the old ways of sin and death. Dying to the death-bound ways of the world. Dying to all that those words of Isaiah point out, how far short we fall from where God calls us to live and be, to and for others.
• On the other hand, Baptism = life. Being raised with Christ, we are raised FOR something. And that something is life … full, rich, and abundant … free from the fears that we’re going to lose out on something … whether it’s place or stuff or whatever other gods, other idols we’ve placed in our path along the way. In Baptism, we have DIED to the death-bound ways of the world, and been RAISED to life together, in Christ, forever. We no longer fear “the End” because our End is in Jesus Christ, the Lord of life and forgiveness and salvation, with God, forever.

And so what do we do in this life now? We Worship Fully. The point of Church isn’t that we’re just another social club of the like-minded or an all fun, all the time feel-good organization … nor are we a little holier than thou gathering of the piously religious, who lord our “betterness” over the rest of the world …
No … though there are churches and Christians who do behave that way … that isn’t what we’re called to be about …
and this is not what we will be about.
Our call as baptized children of God, brothers and sisters of our Lord Jesus Christ … in whatever season of the year … was, is, and always will be … to come together as dead-and-alive redeemed sinners who worship fully, exalting God for God’s sake, and serving God’s people for God’s sake … and theirs.
That is what “being church” is all about … first, last and always … Worshipping Fully.
And yes, even though it’s true that we exist as Church for the sake of those who are not yet part of us … we still get something “out of it” too. Of course we do.
What we “get” is real and right and true … the anticipation, the preparation, for the real Advent of our Lord … his making fully, on earth as it is in heaven, the realization of all that our Lord has in store for our neighbor and for us, giving us the faith and freedom to risk and try NOW, to go deeper in faith, deeper in discipleship and faith friendships, deeper in prayer and study and service, to live our worship outside these walls as richly as we receive it inside them …
God’s people, people of Water and Word, take your wet footprints forth from this worship this week, and leave your mark out there, Worshipping Fully even as you have been fully filled, fully blessed, fully saved FOR the sake of our Lord and the life of your neighbor.
Amen.

24 November 2011

2011-11-24T07:02:00.000-08:00

“No mood to be thankful”
Thanksgiving Eve 2011
Deuteronomy 8:7-18 / Philippians 4:4-9 / Matthew 6:25-33

I like Thanksgiving. The holiday, that is. The food and family, the togetherness, yes, the football, too. It’s a great day. Probably, you’d say so too.
I also like Thanksgiving (the theological concept.) Giving thanks to God is a regular part of my prayer life. Probably, yours too.
But preaching on Thanksgiving … well, that’s a different story. I’ve managed to avoid it since 1998 … until tonight. Thanks to my friends.
Now, it’s not that I don’t enjoy having the opportunity to share the Word with you. That’s always a privilege and honor.
It’s just that, well, what word about Thankgiving should I share with you?
After all, Thanksgiving Day isn’t a church holiday. It’s not on our liturgical calendar. In our shared Western catholic liturgical tradition, it falls between Christ the King (the end of one liturgical or church year) and the First Sunday in Advent (the beginning of a new liturgical or church year).
But the National Day of Thanksgiving (the official name for tomorrow) is a civic holiday, declared so by the President of the United States each year. Even though we might want to credit the Pilgrims, it’s at the proclamation of the chief executive that we celebrate this day, ever since 1789, when George Washington penned these words at the end of the Revolutionary War, and declared the first official United States day of National Thanksgiving:

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor-- and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.
Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.

Note that he got both houses of Congress to agree to this. That in and of itself would be a reason for thanksgiving.
Washington’s Thanksgiving was for just that one year, 1789, only. It would be left to Abraham Lincoln who, in the midst of the Civil War, set the last Thursday in November as a National Day of Thanksgiving. In 1863, he did so with these words:

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God ... No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.

Ever since then, the President has kept the tradition of Lincoln alive by declaring a National Day of Thanksgiving. And tonight and tomorrow, thousands of churches will hold services on this only civic holiday which is also recognized as a day of worship by the Church.
Perhaps I would just be better off to recognize that this is a civic holiday, and leave it to the words of the statesmen and women, of the ages and of today. There have been years when I’ve done just that. But I think you expect more than that tonight.
So maybe I should look to the Church for some symbol, some mark of this day to honor and speak of. But the Church has no particular symbols for this day ... unlike Christmas, with the juxtaposition of Santa and baby Jesus ... that doesn’t happen at Thanksgiving. That probably has to do with the fact that people of many faiths observe this day. So we all think of the little pilgrim girl, the little pilgrim boy, the turkey. They are cute, warm and fuzzy reminders of the day.
Still, that's a little odd, when you think about it, because those first Thanksgiving Days were far from warm and fuzzy. The legendary Pilgrims – they to whom we say, we owe this day – the Pilgrims had suffered famine and disease and poor harvests, and many of their number had died. The memories and wounds of the Revolutionary War which Washington had won were still fresh. And Lincoln was in the middle of a horrible Civil War. It’s hard to see how anyone could have seen “the ever watchful providence of Almighty God” at work in that.
But they did ... this nation at those hard times in its history nevertheless took the time, dedicated a day to giving thanks to the Creator for all the blessings it had received.
Perhaps they ... our thankful forebears ... perhaps the reason for their desire for national thankfulness ... was that they were familiar with the text from Deuteronomy which was our reading tonight ... and that they drew parallels between the experience of the Israelites and their own experiences in establishing the American nation.
Certainly Washington’s and Lincoln’s words in their Thanksgiving proclamations, they strongly echo what we just heard read from the Old Testament.
So perhaps here is our symbol … in the Word, where the civic holiday crosses over into the theological concept.
Moses and the Israelites had been through a lot ... the Exodus from Egypt ... hopefulness turned to whining and disobedience in the wilderness ... years of wandering. Now Moses was preparing them to finally come into the Land which God had promised to his people so long ago. Once more they heard the story of how God had been faithful to his people as they traveled through the desert ... the “ever-watchful providence of Almighty God” was at work, as their clothes did not wear out nor did their feet swell during those forty years. They were fed, and protected from the dangers of the trip. And once more they heard the promises of God about how wonderful the land would be ... “a land with flowing streams ... a land of wheat and barley ... a land where you will lack nothing.”
It all sounded so wonderful ... a place of great wealth, riches, and success for them. They would be at last able to “build fine houses and live in them” ... to see their herds and flocks, and their silver and gold, and all that they had, be multiplied. But Moses knew how fickle God’s people could be -- himself included. So he reminded them once again, when they had realized all these blessings, to give credit to whom credit was due for all of them ... to their God, who had brought them to this place and who was the source of all that they had.
“Remember,” Moses said. “Remember the Lord your God” when you are tempted to think that all your blessings have come from your own hands. “Remember,” Moses said, for all that you have is just God holding up God’s end of the deal, the covenant of blessing God made with Abraham ... and in your wealth, your end of the covenant is to be “blessed to be a blessing” -- to bless God and praise God for all you have been given, and also, to use what you have been given by God to help the orphan, the widow, the resident alien in your midst.
Well, certainly Israel waxed and waned in its “remembering” of God, honoring God and giving God the credit, the praise for all their blessings. And there did come a day when God’s people grew fickle, causing God to seemingly withdraw “His protection and favor” from them, as they went into exile.
But God remained faithful to his people even when they were not; they were brought out of exile; they were even sent a Savior, his own Son, who continued to echo this call to “return thanks” to God for all that he gives daily, even life itself. And praise and thanksgiving became a chief focus of Christian worship ... even our own in this day and time, as our shared Western catholic liturgy still includes a “Glory to God,” and many of our hymns reflect this theme of praise and thanksgiving to our creator.
We know this. We know as Christians that we’re supposed to give thanks … as the words of our Philippians reading exhort us, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” Our most simple prayers, the ones we first learn, are ones of thanksgiving: “God is great, God is good … let us thank God for our food.”
We Lutherans hear this call to thankfulness loud and clear in Martin Luther’s explanation to the First Article of the Creed:

I believe that God has created me together with all that exists. God has given me and still preserves my body and soul: eyes, ears, and all limbs and senses; reason and all mental faculties.
In addition, God daily and abundantly provides shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and farm, spouse and children, fields, livestock, and all property – along with all the necessities and nourishment for this body and life. God protects me against all danger and shields and preserves me from all evil. And all this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all! For all of this I owe it to God to thank and praise, serve and obey him. This is most certainly true.

Giving thanks has been so drummed into us as Christians that we maybe, probably do it by rote and without thought.
And that’s just the point, isn’t it? By rote and without thought would get us through those other words of our Scripture readings tonight: “Do not worry about anything” … “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or wear.” We could just blissfully pass over them on the way to another wonderful Thanksgiving feast, waiting for us at home, the Turkey Day of our hopes and dreams.
Ah, but then it would be more than just the Israelites crossing DeNial, wouldn’t it?
Maybe that’s the reason I find it so hard to preach on Thanksgiving, especially these days, especially with these texts. For what kind of a cheap shot, callous word is this, in these miserable days of unemployment and budget cuts, economic uncertainty, desperation for so many? Today we just received the word from the 2010 Census that one in three Americans is either in or near poverty. “Don’t worry?” “Give thanks to the Lord with all your hearts?”
Sorry, God, I’m in no mood to be thankful. Not today. Not this year. And in fact, I’m pretty hacked off at those words, right there. They seem downright mean for so many, “don’t worry, be happy!”

But what if God’s rejoicing, God’s worry-less living, is not meant as some kind of knee-jerk response, not simply magic words we speak to “cover our bases” before we inhale our turkey and dressing … but rather, what if God’s thanksgiving is a state of being, a way of living, that we truly experience only through … that which signifies the loss of everything?
What if … real thankfulness … comes only … through the Cross?
Listen, O people of the body of Christ here tonight … Lutherans, Methodists, United Church of Christ and Disciples … we have been gifted by God to be in a unique place. We worship in churches which mark the liturgical year … the cycle of readings which follow Jesus’ life cycle. Tonight … and every Thanksgiving … we stand at the crossroads, between Christ the King Sunday and the first Sunday in Advent … between that which has been and that which will be.
On the one hand, we recall Christ the King’s Scriptures about Jesus, his final words and instructions as he makes his way to the Cross, which is his total emptying of self, the end of his earthly life, his total abandonment, the place where he cries “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
On the other, we anticipate those texts yet to come, the First Sunday in Advent, Jesus’ words about that which will be, after his death and resurrection, after his ascension to his Father and our Father in heaven, after these days of working and worshipping and waiting on our part … that great and glorious day when Jesus will come again to earth in his resurrected body, come to earth to make all things “on earth as it is in heaven,” to make all things new, finally and forever.
For us who worship under the sign of the Cross, we receive this National Day of Thanksgiving … a civic, a civil, holiday of our Government and Nation … we receive this day through the Cross … the Cross of Jesus Christ which puts to death … puts to death greed and want, hoarding and poverty, the sinfulness of how we humans treat each other, treat and steward God’s good creation, and treat God … the Cross of Jesus Christ puts it all to death, everything, once and for all, forever.
And this Cross of Jesus Christ also raises up … raises us up to see that, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, because he will come again to make all things new, because of this … we who have died along with Christ to the old ways of sin and death are also raised up to a new way of life … life in which we can say, “I have enough … enough to live … and enough to share” …
… we are raised up to generosity and giving to those who God especially entrusts to us, in our care … the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger and resident alien in our midst …
… we are given strength and courage to stand alongside them against the sinfulness and selfishness of the world … to give them hope … to give them material gain … so that they, too, may live, and know, and feel, the love of God through us.
We who have been claimed and named by Jesus Christ as his own … put to death through our Baptism into his death … raised again to life because of his Resurrection … we have been saved FOR something, and given this new life FOR something …
And that something, right here, right now, on this eve of the National Day of Thanksgiving, is a call to action … a redemption of Thanksgiving … not just one day of excess which kicks off a whole season of excess … but, instead, we hear Christ’s call to a simple and whole way of living, living which shows our death-and-resurrection-life to the world …
… living through Christ the King who claims us as his own, …
…living into the Advent of the One who has given us the real freedom to live, in the words of Luther, as “little Christs” here on earth.
Here is true, and real, Thanksgiving … a posture, a lifestyle, a life … in which we point compass-true to the One who gives us the real reason to be thankful … and gifts us with life and freedom to give so that others may be blessed through us … so that the words of that old, old prayer might have new life breathed into and through them, through us, not just tomorrow but through every day of our lives …

O Lord … Lord of the Cross, Lord of the empty Tomb, Lord of the Resurrection … for what we have received, for what is ours now, for what we are about to receive … MAKE US TRULY THANKFUL.

In Jesus’ name. Amen.

20 November 2011

2011-11-21T15:29:00.000-08:00

“Famous last words”
Matthew 25:31-46
Christ the King Sunday
20 November 2011

If you knew that the next words out of your mouth would be the last opportunity you would have to … make a public proclamation … try to influence others’ hearts and minds … make a lasting impression on others … what would you say?
Would it be something like Lou Gehrig’s famous retirement speech, words of gratitude offered to the crowd at Yankee Stadium: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Maybe you’d try and be humorous, like The Beatles in their final public concert, after recording “Get Back” on top of the building in Saville Row: “On behalf of the crew and ourselves, I hope we pass the audition.” Or perhaps you’d be more poignant, like Johnny Carson at the end his last broadcast: “I wish you a heartfelt goodnight.”
Today’s Gospel reading gives us that moment for Jesus. His days of public ministry have come to an end; the next verses begin the story of his passion and crucifixion.
So what do you think Jesus should say?
Should he leave us with a stern lecture about “pure doctrine,” exhorting us to lay out every bit of our faith in systematically intricate, well-constructed confessional theological statements with which no one can argue?
Should he implore us to liturgical correctness, emphasizing “right worship,” the proper way to pray, praise and give thanks to God?
Certainly he should focus on naming moral rights and wrongs, laying out what’s sinful and what’s not, so that we can congratulate good behavior on the one hand, and judge and condemn on the other.
But surprise! Jesus pulls a fast one. In these his last words of instruction before his Passion and crucifixion, he says … hey, what the kingdom of heaven is all about, what it’s going to be like when I come again to you … is … justice, love, service. Concern for the poor, the sick, those in prison, those on the margins of our society. That’s what it’s all about, Jesus says.
Now … it’s not that Jesus doesn’t care about that other business. He gave us pure doctrine already in the Great Commandments, earlier in Matthew’s gospel – “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart … and soul… and mind … and your neighbor as yourself. On these … hang all the law and the prophets.”
Right worship? He set that straight in a passage shortly before today’s … Matthew 23.23: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.”
And as for morality … Jesus’ words of the Sermon on the Mount up the ante. He calls suffering and sacrifice for others a God-blessed state; saying that those who practice meekness, making peace, and being persecuted for his sake are truly blessed; and also exhorting us not to resist an evildoer … if anyone strikes us on the right cheek, turn the other also … and to love our enemies, praying for those who persecute us.
But it’s here in the 25th chapter of Matthew that Jesus makes his real point. What truly concerned him then … what truly concerns him now … and what will truly concern him on that day when “The Son of Man comes in his glory,” is how we treat “the least” of our brothers and sisters in this life.
Right doctrine, right worship, right morality … they all take a back seat to this: how we treat the hungry, the poor, and the prisoner … the disenfranchised … the ones who don’t fit in, most of the time, with “nice people”… in fact, these are the ones whom the “nice people” would probably rather avoid, and ignore, sweep them under the carpet.
We might want to forget them. But Jesus doesn’t. Like all the prophets who came before him, from Isaiah and Amos right on through to John the Baptist, the ones who are usually the last on everyone else’ mind are the first people on Jesus’ mind.
Those who care for the poor, the powerless, those without a voice in this life, he says that they are the righteous ones… for in caring for them, they are really caring for Jesus. This is true religion … this is what right worship of God is all about … this is proper moral behavior.
And what of those who reject the poor and the powerless and those without a voice in this life … ignoring them, forgetting them, shoving them into the background, providing for themselves first at the expense of those who can least afford it, leaving them isolated and abandoned? Well, they are the ones who stand condemned. “Truly I tell you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
A Lutheran colleague of mine says that last sentence is precisely why he has a hate-love relationship with this text. He hates it because it seems to make what we do into the requirement for being blessed by God. And indeed, it sure seems that way. Where’s the grace?
But he also loves these words … because the ones who Jesus calls “righteous” are surprised. Here’s the grace. The ones who have been “doing to Jesus” don’t even realize it.
And that’s because their whole life attitude, their posture for living … doctrine, worship, morality … it comes as second nature to them … it’s just part of who they are. Their “doing to Jesus” doesn’t earn them heaven because they never understood faith to be this way.
And the goats … the ones who didn’t “do to Jesus” in this life … they are equally surprised, but for the opposite reason … they were so intent, so conscious of their posture of “rightness before God” … in doctrine, in worship, in morality … that they spent all their earthly time paying attention only to themselves, and missed the real opportunities to serve the Lord by serving “the least of these” … their neighbors who were truly in need.
It is like posture, after all … when “standing up straight” becomes second nature to us, we do it without thinking. When we’re always looking in the mirror and checking and rechecking “how we look,” we miss real life … it goes by us.
In he same way … our salvation, our being made right with God in Jesus … isn’t given to us so that we would stand around and preen and point out “how good and right we are.” No … our salvation is to be our very motivation for our neighbor’s emancipation … we are saved so that we would go and do for the “least of these” in the same way that Jesus comes and does for us, sinners that we all are. We have been given freedom and forgiveness from God in Jesus Christ, so we are to go and give – to the hungry, the poor, the sick, those in prison … in our pledges, our offerings, our prayers and our service.
You and I are saved for something … we are called to live justice … the gift of salvation is a call to go and do to and for “the least of these.”
And not some day in the future. You and I are called to do it now. We are called by our Lord and Savior to do it now. Right now. And every day from now on. Our posture … our doctrine, our worship, our morality … is to make sure that “the least of these” are not forgotten. We are called … called, not to sit, not to get comfortable, but to stand up straight and get to work.
This is Jesus’ way. This is Jesus’ work. This is Jesus’ faith. This is his final word to us … and the way he wants to find us when he comes again … our posture for living … not checking our selves in the mirror, but suddenly seeing in the mirror of the faces of our neighbors … that in serving them, we have truly been serving our Lord. Amen.

23 October 2011

2011-10-23T12:45:00.000-07:00

The Lord raised up deliverers – a series on Judges
“Natural law”
Conclusion: Judges 17 to end
Matthew 22:34-40
OT 30A / Time after Pentecost
23 October 2011

If I was to pick a one-word description for today’s theme, it would be interim… both our texts today are about being in an interim time … meaning, that they describe people and events who, which are between what has been, and what will be.
You and I … many, most of us, know this term well. In the church we most often associate it with interim ministry … the time between one settled pastor’s leaving, and another settled pastor’s arriving … Nativity, in our history, has had several interim pastors, most recently, for a three year period, from ten to seven years ago … a time which allowed this congregation to sort through and discern the bad and the good of who and where you had been, who and where you were at that “now,” and into what kind of future God was calling you to be.
Our Judges text for today is an interim text. It’s set in the time between the final judge … Samson, who we met last week … and the time of the kings which begins in 1 Samuel. A time between the “was,” “is,” and “will be” for Israel.
What I’ve selected for today is long enough … it’s actually just a piece of the concluding five chapters of Judges … the complete story there being far too long for us to cover in a Sunday worship service … but even with this briefer selection, we get the feel for what it going on in this interim time for the Israelites.

In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.

Samson was dead. He had not been a successful judge – indeed, he was the worst of the judges, a selfish swaggering goon, in it primarily for himself … unsuccessful in throwing off the Philistine yoke of oppression.
That’s the backdrop for our text today. The Israelites might be whining and crying to God for relief from their oppression, but God is almost totally silent.
Who can blame God? God has lived through many repetitions of this cycle which set off every judge-saga:

• People forget about God;
• People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
• People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
• People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
• God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
• Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways.

A quote from Martin Luther does well to sum up where God is through these remaining chapters of Judges:

The god you imagine is the God you get.

Meaning that … since the Israelites imagined a god who just stood idly by while they went after idols, the “gods” of their neighbors … the Canaanites, the Philistines … God would cheerfully oblige their desires, by going on vacation. You don’t want me around … fine … see ya later!
Of course, in the judge-sagas just prior to where we’ve been in the book, God hears the whining and crying of his people, and sends a judge – a human deliverer – to deliver them. Ehud and Deborah, Barak and Jehu, Gideon and Jephthah, and yes, Samson … these all arrive on the scene and bring some level of deliverance and peace to God’s people … well, all except Samson.
But here … how many times is God’s presence mentioned? Once. And then, just in passing.
The god you imagine is the God you get. The Israelites imagined a God who didn’t want to be intimately involved -- in close relationship – with the people of his choosing, the people whom he went so far to save … so, indeed, that’s what they got.
What happens as a result? Another awful story. This time, because they aren’t willing … or just plain can’t … do anything about the larger problems of the world before them … the Israelites turn on themselves … each other.
I left out the most salacious parts of the tale – though you can certainly go to Judges chapter 19 and read it for yourselves … a incident which is bad enough is made worse by the lies of the unnamed Levite … he who is willing to put the entirety of God’s people on the line to cover up his own poor choices.
The object of the ire and rage of the majority of the tribes of the Israelites is their brother-tribe, Benjamin … (you will remember that Ehud was a member of this tribe) … there is an incident – an awful incident – and a horrid response … a decision is made for civil war, and civil war is indeed what the Israelites get.
And then God shows up… the one mention of God acting in this history is that the Lord defeated Benjamin before Israel… but I don’t believe we should read anything more into this text than that it is the outcome of a battle which we would expect, when an army of four hundred thousand takes on an army of twenty-six thousand. It is a natural law, a sure and certain outcome, based on sheer numbers and logic.
One thousand men of the tribe of Benjamin are left.
The outcome of the battle – successful as it was – turns out not to be what the rest of the tribes really wanted – that they’d now be down a tribe, from 12 to 11.
So a cockeyed scheme is hatched by the rest of Israel for the repopulation of their brother-tribe, which allows them to get around their own rule that they shouldn’t give their daughters in marriage to the remaining men of the renegade tribe of the Benjamanites.
And it works … at least, as far as this book is concerned.
And the whole book ends on that hopeless note which began this section …
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.

It’s a sad end for a book which gets off to a bad start … and maybe that’s why we don’t read from the book of Judges much in worship, in this or any other Christian church. In our lectionary-cycled way of things the liturgical churches ignore all the stories but the first part of the Deborah saga … but a quick survey of the Internet shows that our evangelical brothers and sisters, neither those of the more serious Mars Hill-like mindset, nor those of whom one of my colleagues calls the “happy-clappy” churches, they don’t read from or preach on this book any more than we.
Why is that?
After all, Judges is part of our heritage … our shared story of life with God, as God’s people, along the way.

Perhaps it’s because of the truths that this book makes so evident about ourselves.
Namely, that people … we … stink … as creators of our own destiny.
As Luther said, the god you imagine is the God you get. The people of Judges imagine a God they don’t really need, until things get so bad they see no way out. The downward spiral hits rock bottom (or so they think … because as the book points out, there is always a lower bottom to hit.)
It’s a depressing world view … and one in which salvation is seen as God’s answer to the people’s cry, “get me out of this, please!”
No wonder God is so absent through this book. God goes to all the trouble of bringing his people from slavery and bondage to freedom, gives them a good land and great potential ahead of them … and all they do is make a mess out of things … and end up whining for a ticket out. Save us, Lord. Get us out of this mess, Lord.

Two thousand years later … Jesus faces the same cries … desires … longings of his people, in our Gospel text today. Salvation … the Messiah … was the one who was going to come and “get them out of the mess they were in.”
The Pharisees, for their part, are still looking for someone to deliver them physically, like the judges of old, a king in the shape of a David, someone who would be Superman and “get them out of this mess” they had found themselves in … under Roman oppression, military occupation.
But Jesus isn’t going to buy into that old human pattern of salvation as escape from this present darkness. No … he points out that salvation is for the here and now of life.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

In other words, don’t love God as payment for a trip to a heavenly hereafter … don’t work for “God” or whatever image of God you cook up in your head, that you imagine, is going to be the one who “gets you out of here” … Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here … Jane, stop this crazy thing.
That may be the God you imagine … it may even be the God you try to put over on the world … creating lies like that Levite, fabricating the truth to make yourself look good …
… ah, but in the end, the end of the ‘natural law’ which Jesus truly lays out here … in the end … that is NOT the god you or I or anyone else will get.
Indeed, it is the end of “God as we imagine God” and the beginning of “God for us.”
Because the salvation of our God is ALL about living in the here and now, the kingdom of God coming on earth as it is in heaven … justice and mercy, fairness and blessing for all … you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
In other words, don’t look for salvation in anyone or any thing other than God … the God who sends his very self to us in Jesus … the God who comes to us as one of us, to live our life in all its suffering and joy, to die our death, but to rise again … to give us back life … full, rich, and abundant … life in this world, here and now, lived loving God and loving others … indeed, loving God through loving others … this life is not to be escaped from or rescued out of, but redeemed for us to live into completely, fully, naturally … naturally, the way God created it for us.
What a word for us as we are called to follow Jesus today.
For we are most certainly in a time, among a people, brothers and sisters who claim the name of Jesus, but who have so twisted the word of faith that the word about Jesus the world hears through them … their voices, being the loudest, shout “we don’t care about our world, God’s creation, or our neighbors … their poverty, their suffering, the abuse of this planet … Jesus, just get us out of here!”
But that is not God’s Word for us.
It is a lie … about God, about Christ, and about ourselves.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, our call is to lovingly, but firmly, steadfastly, and without backing down … to drown out their lie with the truth of God’s word … “No, I’m staying right here, in the thick of it … no matter how bad it gets … because Christ is here in the midst of it with me, and he calls me to be here, too, not just for his sake, but for yours.”

Sixty years ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, sitting in the Nazi Tegel prison, penned these words in a letter to a friend … Bonhoeffer, a man in a time most certainly worse than our own …

It is only by living completely in the world that one learns to have faith. By this I mean living unreservedly in life duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely in the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?

Indeed. The call of God is to be natural … naturally living into the law he gives us, to love God in and through loving others, in the here and now, even as we are saved for the here and now, even as we gather in the here and now to worship, to hear, to eat and drink God’s word of salvation, forgiveness, and new life.
We do not ignore the present for some future paradise … for Jesus says, all you need, all I give you, is right here, right now … my very self, given and shed for you, to go and live fully, so others may fully live.

In his name, and with his Word … Amen.

16 October 2011

2011-10-16T15:50:00.001-07:00

The Lord raised up deliverers – a series on Judges
Samson – Judges 13 through 15
Also including 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
OT 29A / Time after Pentecost
16 October 2011

And so we have come to the last of the judges from the book of that same name … and oh, what a leader we have before us today! Such might and strength, such bravado and swagger, such a womanizer … no, it’s not a certain Austrian bodybuilder turned actor turned governor of California … but Samson. Samson is the final judge in this series of human deliverers God sends to his people Israel.
Samson’s story is also the longest of the judge-sagas … spanning four entire chapters of the book. That makes it far too long for reading in its entirety during Sunday worship … so I chose some selections which would fit within our time frame today.

We begin in chapter 13 with the same old refrain which has started each new judge saga … “The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord …” and this time, the enemies at whose hands they begin to suffer are the Philistines … a name which should be quite familiar to us today, as we pronounce it Palestinians … here is a rivalry for the land which goes back thousands and thousands of years.
And so the usual cycle of things, apparent in each judge-story, is also present here:
• People forget about God;
• People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
• People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
• People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
• God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
• Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways.

What we have before us today, though, as our printed portion, doesn’t include all these steps. Since these “missing” are the more well-known parts of the Samson saga, I chose to leave them out. So what did we miss by not including them?

• Samson, like so many of the patriarchs before him and at least one prophet after him (Samuel), is born to a childless woman … and when she does become pregnant, Samson’s mother vows that he will be a Nazirite, citing the sixth chapter of the book of Numbers, which outlines the procedures for being one “consecrated to the Lord” (for that is what Nazirite means). The two main requirements are that the Nazirite will not drink wine or strong spirits, nor will a razor ever touch their hair.
• … and, for those who know the Samson story, that hair piece (ha ha) becomes vitally important for Samson later on in his story … the story at the end of his story, the most well-known part, Samson’s falling for Delilah … which leads to the breaking of his Nazirite vow, the loss of his superhuman strength, his blinding by the Philistines, and his violent death … in which he took out more Philistines than he did in his whole life.

But those parts of Samson’s story, well-known as they are … to which you may return on your own (they are in chapters 13 and 16 of Judges) … that’s NOT what’s before us today.
What we DO have here … are stories which point out why Biblical scholars call the Samson saga “the moral low point of the book.” Indeed, the Bible I use most often, the Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version, puts this summary-note on this story:

The final “deliverer” is the moral low point of the major judges. Samson broke his Nazirite vows, had intercourse with non-Israelite women (something forbidden by God), never associated with other Israelites in his conflicts with the Philistines, and did not deliver the Israelites from the Philistine oppression.

As we take a closer look at these selections from the 14th and 15th chapters of Judges, we see this unfold.
These three stories, joined together as they are today, do have a common thread. Samson is a Lone Ranger kind of judge, to be sure … whereas the other judges may have lit the fires of rebellion in a similar manner, they always went back and enlisted the aid of their fellow Israelites in continuing the battle to throw off their oppressors. Not Samson. His is an “hasta la vista, baby” go-it-alone swagger-style.
At first, God is mentioned as a reason why Samson does as he does … violating God’s law by taking a non-Israelite for his wife. His parents know God’s rules, and protest. But Samson prevails, “Get her for me, because she pleases me.” It is said that this was from the Lord, for he was seeking a pretext to act against the Philistines.
But that’s the last mention of God in any of these sections of Samson’s story. In the whole of the Samson saga, God is mentioned only three more times … passages not before us today … and in most of those, times when Samson called on God to rescue HIM, because his swagger-style had gotten him into trouble.
So what shall we make of Samson, then? Obviously his is a tale far worse than the Sunday-school-image we’ve passed along over the years … far more PG-13 or even R-rated than G … this womanizing, petulant, faith-fraud, short-fused flier off the handle … unwanting, unwilling of the help of any of his countrymen … a go it alone “my way or the highway” kind of guy …
… and yet, and yet, THIS is the one God chose for the task at hand. Yes, he failed at it … he didn’t shake off the Philistines … and his judgeship was one of endless war with them … but still, God chose him for the task.
Why?
Well, again, we need to go back to that six-step process which tells the tale of each judge-saga in this book of Judges … the Israelites always sin, and that sin ALWAYS has to do with their dissing God … their real deliverer, the one who not long before had rescued them from their Egyptian oppressors … they Israelites diss God, and so God says … OK, you don’t want me around, I’ll oblige … you’ll see what life will be like without me.
Now, God always hears the Israelites’ cries, and God always sends them a human deliverer … a judge … to rescue them from themselves and their ways which led them once again into servitude and subjugation at the hands of other nations … but we must note this about those judge-deliverers … each one of them had shortcomings … failings … some kind of behavior which would make us question their fitness to be worthy of that name … deliverer.
Ehud was plain gross. Deborah, Barak and Jehu upset the social norms of their … and our … time. Gideon questioned God’s choosing him. Jephthah made that horrible vow which cost his daughter her life. And Samson was a great big jerk.
And that’s precisely the point God’s making here. Do not totally trust in human deliverers … human rulers … for they will fail you totally. We see this here in these judge-sagas … we continue to see it in the stories of the kings of Israel and Judah which follow, in the books of Chronicles and Kings … we’ve seen it throughout history … the history of kings and queens, princes of the church and reformers of the church, politicians and presidents … yes, even and especially today.
DO NOT PUT YOUR FAITH IN LEADERS OF FLESH AND BLOOD, FOR THEY WILL FAIL YOU.
God knows this about us. God saw it even then … during and through the times of the Judges, the kings … the exile and the return … the takeover of Israel by Rome.
So God decided to make a change. God decided to send One of himself … his own Son … for a personal delivery of humanity from all that we bring upon ourselves.

That’s the message Paul brings as he begins his first letter to the Thessalonians … a message coming in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction… we need no human deliverers because in Jesus, God has sent himself to deliver all of humanity, all of creation. Jesus – fully God so that where human deliverers have failed, he will not … but also fully human so that he gets what is going on with us … living our life, suffering as we suffer, rejoicing as we rejoice … dying our death … yet, raised to new life, to give us the same promise and hope.
We need no human deliverers, no human rescuers … because in Jesus, God has sent his very self to rescue us. Wrath … bad stuff … has happened and is happening and will continue to happen … to be sure … and it will always be tempting to turn to human rescuers … smooth talkers offering easy solutions to the difficult, complex problems of living in the 21st century. Swagger and bravado can be quite appealing to us.
And yet … as Paul writes … our God says, don’t choose rescuers with hearts of stone and feet of clay … for these can become false gods, idols … instead, turn to God, and THE rescuer he sends us, the fully God-fully man named Jesus Christ … who will guide us in our living in these difficult days … guide us to work while we wait … to live out our calling to go and tell, to do his work … his work, which we discern as we read his Word, worship in his Word, eat and drink his Word … a Word which exhorts and implores us to be his feet and his hands in going to those who the world rejects … the poor and the powerless, the downtrodden and despised, the meek and suffering, the ones the world considers of little account … to these we are called to go and serve, to live with and love in the name of the Son of God, who comes to us and claims us as his own … without swagger, without bravado … just quietly, patiently, working his will in the world.

Will we stumble? Will we fail? Of course. But that’s no excuse to not get up and get going. Remember that God called Ehud and Barak, Jephthah and Gideon and yes, even Samson, to his task … since God called those to his Word, and was with them … God will most certainly be with us, too, as we share in this most blessed of callings … to serve a living and true God, THE living and true God, while we wait for his Son from heaven, who he raised from the dead … Jesus … our rescuer, in whose name we worship and work and live.
Amen.

9 October 2011

2011-10-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

“What do you say???”
Judges series – “The Lord raised up deliverers”
Jephthah / Judges 11:1-11, 29-40 // Matthew 22:1-14
OT 28A / Season of Pentecost
9 October 2011

Perhaps, by this point in our sojourning with the book of Judges … as the reading began, you heard what was read and you said, Hey, wait a minute … this story sounds different than what we’ve heard so far.
And yes, just going by what we have before us today, a condensed version of the story of the next judge in the series, Jephthah … you would be right.
For where, o where, is the usual cycle of things …
• People forget about God;
• People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
• People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
• People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
• God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
• Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways;
• Repeat steps 2-6.

Well, don’t be disappointed … all of these elements are once again present in this judge’s story as well … I just chose not to include them in today’s reading portion. Judges chapter 10, beginning with verse 6 …

The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord … they abandoned the Lord and did not worship him … the Ammonites crushed and oppressed the Israelites for 18 years …

so on, and so on …
So where we begin our encounter with Jephthah’s story is, indeed, where everyone meets him …

Jephthah the Gileadite, the son of a prostitute, was a mighty warrior.

Now, if we’ve been paying attention previously, just hearing that little bit of the story should get us far along in understanding what is happening.
Once again, God is going to choose one to lead his people, who we … his people of then, and now … would consider ill-prepared for the task. Jephthah’s mother was a prostitute … and because of his mother, Jephthah is judged by his brothers to be morally unworthy … unworthy of the family name (and inheritance) … and he’s rejected and driven out … Jephthah becomes a frontier bandit, living among outlaws on the eastern border of Israel.
Ah, but soon enough circumstances cause the elders of his people to recruit this outlaw for a different purpose;

Come and be our commander, so that we may fight with the Ammonites.

Not so fast, Jephthah responds:

Are you not the very ones who rejected me and drove me out of my father’s house? So why do you come to me now when you are in trouble?

If this sounds like déjà vu all over again … it should. Jephthah’s response sounds like how God might well respond to the Israelites, each time they come weeping to God asking for a deliverer. The irony most certainly is not lost on Jephthah … nor would it have been for the original hearers and readers of these words … nor should it be lost on us.
So despite being thrown out of his father’s house, Jephthah takes on the mantle of deliverer of his people. Though … note the order in which Jephthah becomes a judge.
Who selects Jephthah? The people do.
God simply ratifies the people’s choice.
It’s a strange reversal to what has been happening in the judge-stories before this … it’s been the Lord who raises up the judge … that’s what was said of Ehud … what was implied of Deborah … God even made a personal appearance and plea with Gideon.
But here, it’s the people’s choice for judge to which, God gives the OK … and maybe, maybe we shouldn’t make too much of this, because the Lord’s name is invoked all the way through this story of Jephthah … and at first, Jephthah seems to be no worse a choice than the others who have judged Israel before him.
Indeed, the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he goes to war with the Ammonites. The people’s popular choice … unusual though it was (the son of a prostitute; the head of a band of thieves and outlaws) … the people’s choice is God’s choice as well. God can and God will work through those whom we might least suspect worthy of the calling.
EXCEPT.
And Jephthah’s EXCEPT is huge. Shocking. And awful.
It should have been enough confirmation for Jephthah that the Lord was going to be with him in battle, when the spirit of the Lord came upon him. But no … he has to make that awful vow.

If you, Lord, will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the LORD’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering.

The Spirit of the Lord was with him. Jephthah would have won the battle with the Ammonites regardless. And yet … and yet … he makes this oath.
Why? Jephthah had to know that whoever would come out of his house to meet him upon his return would be someone he loved very much … a family member, possibly his wife or his child.
Why did he do it? What do you say to such a terrible word as this? It’s so blatant, so amoral, that it defies explanation.
I think Jephthah’s vow shows the declining state of things in Israel. In many ways, Gideon’s story is the peak of the Judges cycle. From Gideon, it all goes downhill. After Gideon dies, his son Abimelech kills all his brothers so he can take over as judge … actually, the people crown him “king” … but it’s a brief, bad reign … and puts Israel in the place they are in as Jephthah’s story begins.
With Jephthah, we have a judge with swagger and bravado … feeling so full of himself that he makes this awful vow to God.
Of course Jephthah is victorious over the Ammonites. Not because of that vow, but because the spirit of the Lord came upon (him).
Because of that vow, though … Jephthah is put into a place which never entered his mind, when he shot off his mouth.
His daughter … his only child … is the first one he meets when he returns home. Jephthah’s daughter … she will bear the terrible burden of her father’s vow.
Of all the stories in Judges, this one truly earns the title author Phyllis Tribble gave it, a “text of terror.”
Why? Why did Jephthah need to carry out this vow?
The words he utters… “I have opened my mouth to the Lord,” and the response of his daughter accepting it … perhaps that’s a place where we might huddle for some justificating comfort, Well, he did promise God.
Yes, Jephthah did.
But would God hold him to his words?
We’ll never know, because Jephthah never even asks God about it.
His daughter, hoping against hope, gets her two month reprieve.
But at the end of those two months, Jephthah still does the awful deed.

What’s happening here?
It’s all about honor and shame; and Jephthah living in an honor and shame society.
It’s tough for us to understand, as 21st century Americans, what living in such a society is like. We got a little taste of that this week; perhaps some of you read the article in Rolling Stone on the Amanda Knox trial, an article printed just prior to her acquittal. Italy … especially the Italian “justice” system … is a modern example of an honor/ shame based society … the author of the article speculated that probably the best outcome Amanda Knox could have hoped for would have been a slight commutation of her sentence, because the judge in the appeal would not want to do anything to make the prosecutor in Perugia look bad … because looking bad, in the Italian justice system (as in most honor / shame based systems) is a far worse sin than being wrong.
Thus, that the judge and jury threw out Knox’s original sentence was quite astounding … though, if you’ve read any of the prosecutor’s words following the decision, he simply won’t accept the verdict, won’t reopen the investigation, will appeal based only on the evidence he’s submitted already … because, to do otherwise, would make him look bad.
When your life is centered around honor and shame, looking bad is a worse sin than being wrong.

Honor and shame is why Jephthah’s brothers do as they do to him … kick the “son of a prostitute” out of the family, left to wander as a thief and an outlaw. Honor and shame is why Jephthah does what he does, in not going back on his oath … he wants to save face before all those who heard him utter those words. Honor and shame is why Jephthah’s daughter does what she does … a woman in that honor / shame society would suffer no greater disgrace than to die childless … though, here, as in so many other places in the Bible … not God’s plan for us, but because of human sinfulness … here, Jephthah’s honor and shame trumps his daughters … he’s a man, she’s a woman, end of story.

So where is God in all of this?
Silent.
God doesn’t say anything.
And although an argument from silence is no argument … we can’t decide strictly from this text whether God approved of Jephthah’s oath, or not … elsewhere the Scripture … and God speaking through it … is not silent.

Leviticus 18.21 …
You shall not give any of your offspring to sacrifice them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord.

Molech was one of the gods of the Ammonites … the god to whom the Ammonites (the enemy of Israel, whom Jephthah had just defeated) … the god to whom the Ammonites offered their children in sacrifice.
So God doesn’t need to say anything here. Jephthah … his words, his actions, his inability to move beyond his honor / shame culture … and the idol of human pride which was, is behind it all … that false god of self-justification … Jephthah says it all … the Judges system of leadership for Israel, it’s not working anymore … the irony behind Jephthah’s words, Jephthah’s choice … they speak that word of truth loud and clear. Because of their sinfulness, because of our sinfulness, God’s going to have to do something else to save his people … to save us.

This is a text of terror, to be sure. There’s not much … some would say, there’s not any … good news in it for us. Other than God delivering his people once again … which ends up being a temporary deal, as with all the other previous judges … other than that, the horizon is dismal and bleak.
Scant pickings for a preacher who would want to give a perky, positive pontification of pious platitudes.
Ah … but you’ve got me this morning, and more, these texts.
You could surely call our Gospel reading a “text of terror” too. The perky preacher of positive pontifications and pious platitudes would never, ever say that “God’s grace has limits.”
But I will.
That’s because Jesus does, too, in these verses of Matthew.

It’s another awful story that begins innocently enough. The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.
Unfortunately for the king, he rules over a kingdom of ungrateful wretches, people who are unbelievably callous … and stupid. What way indeed is this to treat your king … making fun of him, paying no attention to his generosity, even murdering his slaves.
Certainly the king has every right to do what he does next … The king … sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.
And … I think … that’s where we need to leave those words … as merely a reminder that “God certainly has the right” to deal with those who disobey him, on his own terms. Some speculate that this could be the original community of Matthew’s gospel … those Jewish Christians who were being booted out of their synagogues for confessing Jesus … some speculate this could be their commentary on the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD … certainly we shouldn’t miss the political overtones here.
But this is not meant as the central focus of the story. It was important for Matthew’s original audience to hear … as with Judges, there needed to be a theological word given as to “why is all this bad stuff happening to us now” … but this is not the most important word for us.
It’s not the word the king in the story … the one we would say is God the Father in the story … it’s not the word the king chooses to emphasize.
That’s reserved for what he says next.

Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.

That’s the point of this story, right there. The slaves’ call … our call, we who follow Jesus … our call is to invite everyone we find … both good and bad, as the story goes … our call is not to judge, but to invite, period. The Good News in this story … granted, it’s scant, but there is Good News … the Good News here is that God wants everyone to be at the party. At the party. Worship, studying the faith, prayer, baptism, communion, service to neighbor … everyone is called to be there … to be here.
Simply put, it’s not our call to discern who we invite and who we don’t … our criteria for who should be here, who will fit in with us, that’s unimportant. Everyone is called … and we are to call everyone we find to the banquet … the party … the discipleship walk with our Lord.
Still … however … the invitation does not come without responsibility. The parable ends with another word of terror … about the guy without the wedding robe.
Note that, once again, in a situation of shame, there is silence. This guy knows he’s messed up. He’s most likely one of the “bad” who got invited in … but that doesn’t really matter … what matters is that, like the people at the beginning of the story who rejected the king’s invitation, he has made the king look bad.
Here is a rightful place to feel shame. The king is rightfully due honor. This guy, in his own moment of bravado and swagger, doesn’t even take the time to show the minimum amount of respect due the king … wearing the proper clothes to the wedding feast of his son.
Granted … this guy doesn’t out and out reject the king’s invitation as the others did in the beginning … this guy at least recognizes the goodness of the king (by showing up for a free meal).
But … there’s more at stake here than a free steak dinner. This guy recognizes the king’s goodness and generosity … but he openly disregards the king’s authority… by showing up at the party in his work clothes instead of a wedding garment … indeed, he’s no better than the ones who rejected the king’s original invitation because he’s openly disdains the feast while still attending it.
In other words, it’s not enough to simply acknowledge the goodness of the king … the goodness of God. One also must acknowledge the authority of God.
This guy does not. He openly dishonors the king … and the king is swift to reciprocate … bind him hand and food, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
As one commentator says about this text:

To come… in response to the gracious, altogether unmerited invitation of Christ and then not conform one’s life to that mercy is to demonstrate spiritual narcissism so profound that one cannot tell the difference between the wedding feast of the Lamb of God and happy hour in a bus station bar.

God’s grace … abundant, extravagant, amazing … still, God’s grace has limits. It’s the final word of this tale … not the main word for us, to be sure … because that’s most certainly GO … GO and invite everyone … because all are welcome, the king wants, desires everyone to be part of the joy and delight of the marriage feast of his son … but this word stands as a reminder, a reminder to individuals, to congregations and church bodies, to societies who readily claim the goodness and generosity of God … but, who forget about the authority of God.
The authority of God … who reminds his followers of his Good News that all are invited, all are welcomed to the wedding feast of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
The authority of God, who reminds us that he is a God of justice … a God whose reign, whose kingdom is one of unfettered good news to the least of the world … an end to punishing greed, the suffering of the poor, and the powerful lording it over the powerless.
The authority of God, who sends his son as his Good News for us in flesh and blood … his son, who comes, not as the angry judge of retribution and punishment … but as the Prince of Peace.

May we, who have been called to this feast, called and gathered to this feast, called and gathered and sent to bring others to this feast … may our lives be ones of unashamed submission and obedience to the goodness AND the authority of our God … our God, whose will for us is not woe, but blessing … not shortage, but plenty … not death, but life.

Amen.

25 September 2011

2011-09-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

“Outsiders on the inside”
Judges series – “The Lord raised up deliverers”
Deborah, Barak, Jael / Judges 4:1-10, 12-23; 5:1-2, 10-11 // Matthew 21:23-32
OT 26A / Season of Pentecost
25 September 2011

It’s now the third week into our fall exploration of the book of Judges – for many of us, one of the most unfamiliar books of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. So what have we seen – and heard – so far?
First – that the book of Judges is made up of a series of cycles, one following the next, which lay out the “why and wherefore” of each judge’s story …

• People forget about God;
• People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
• People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
• People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
• God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
• Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways;
• Repeat steps 2-6.

We’ve seen how the misfortune that the people suffer is not “because God is punishing you” but rather, “because of your sins.” The people behave as if they don’t want God around, and so God obliges … God leaves them to their own devices … for a while … and things soon enough go bad. But God always sends a judge, a human deliverer, to rescue them from the “fine mess they’ve gotten themselves into.”

In last week’s story … as you may recall … the cunning left-handed Ehud did a number on fat King Eglon of the mean captor Moabites, while Eglon was, ahem, sitting on the throne. It was a humorous story … highlighting that God is most often with those who we would not expect (Ehud, a left handed man in a right handed tribe (for that is what Benjamin means) in a right handed world, stands for all those who may not seem like the wisest choice for God’s work … by human standards … but God thinks otherwise. In other words … don’t trust in your birthright, your earthly position or place … to get you in good place with God. God’s standards of fairness and justice are different than ours … a point which our Gospel parable, of the workers being paid the same wage no matter what time of the day they were hired … a point that story reinforced.
Recall too that the story of Ehud was meant to give some cheer to the original readers of this compilation, stories most likely told for hundreds of years earlier by the Israelites but only written down by those we now call the Deuteronomist authors, Israelites who had a particular theological stance … a Word about God, a Word of explanation and also a word of comfort, to the Israelites as they suffered under their Babylonian captors in exile. These stories of the Judges … superheroes, if you will, of Israel’s primeval history … the authors wrote these stories down in such a way that the captive Israelites of that much later time and place would hear these words both as a conviction via the Law (you are here in exile because of your sins … it really is your own fault, for you rejected God) but also, as a word of Gospel hope (despite your rejecting God, God has not rejected you; God’s story for you has always been one of deliverance, back then and … we trust in God’s promise … now, and in the future as well).

Now … this week … we continue in this theme of God going “outside the box” in choosing judge-deliverers … but this time … God’s really going out there … in this story of Deborah, Barak, and Jael.
The story of Deborah and Barak … the next two judges in sequence … is the only one which appears regularly in our Sunday lectionary reading cycle … every three years in mid-November … but only if we’re using the alternate readings … and we only get the first seven verses of chapter 4.
That’s hardly enough to understand what’s going on here; thus our selection today spans a couple of chapters and a whole alphabet soup of difficult ancient Israelite place names.
This is a story of “outsiders on the inside,” to be sure … the theme we heard last week continues and is reinforced here … in that God is blatantly doing something against the grain of what we humans would say is “proper.”
Deborah is a woman … the only female judge … and although to someone with purely a late 20th / early 21st century world view, this probably doesn’t sound like a big deal … to any of us born before 1970 we know what a big deal this is. Just imagine what it was like for those in a highly patriarchal … male-dominated … religion and society … to hear, to read these words about a woman chosen to lead her people, not just women, BUT MEN TOO … lead them out of desperation, into deliverance. This was a radical word … an outsider, chosen to be the ultimate insider of the time … the one who would bring God’s good news of rescue to her people.
Barak is a man … yes … but he is put into – and puts himself into - what would have been considered a dishonorable place for a man of his time … let alone, a military leader of the Israelites. Barak must take orders from a woman. Deborah calls Barak … she summons him and tells him in no uncertain terms, what he is supposed to do. And Barak … he ups the ante by telling Deborah that he will not make a move without Deborah accompanying him.
This would have been seen as a sign of weakness by the people of this time … of the time of the writers of this text … and, I daresay, even today … at least, in this country. In most professions … including mine … a man who acknowledges women as equals, or, indeed, has one superior to him in any way … well, let’s just say that the societal voice about that … from both men and women … sounds a lot like that old Saturday Night Live routine, “look who’s the girly man.”
And yet … yet Barak doesn’t care. He knows, he sees, how God is at work here, through Deborah. He deliberately makes himself an “outsider” for the sake of God’s Word … and through that, he becomes an “insider” in this story, in the lives of the Israelites.
Those first two stories would have “pushed some buttons” for the original hearers and readers of these words. But the third one would have definitely sent them over the edge. And … perhaps … it does the same for you.
Jael is an outsider in two senses of the word. First, she’s a woman, and we have already heard about that. But second … and more important … she is not an Israelite. She is the wife of Heber the Kenite … the Kenites being one of the aboriginal tribes living in the land of Canaan, traditionally descended from Cain … yes, that’s right, Cain, the bad son of Adam and Eve.
Jael has much to overcome … a real outsider, outside the world-rule of men, outside the salvation of God promised to the Israelites. And yet … and yet … she is the one who strikes the fatal blow for salvation of the Israelite people, when she kills General Sisera of the oppressing Canaanites.
In effect, Jael conquers two men … Sisera, with the tent peg … and Barak … by taking away his due right of killing Sisera himself.
Outsiders on the inside. Once again … God’s Word, God’s plan, God’s justice and fairness, they are not as ours … indeed, in these cases, they are the exact opposite of what would be seen as the worldly-right decisions.
Outsiders on the inside. And once again this week, our assigned Gospel reading echoes, reinforces this point precisely … as Jesus tells another parable, pointing out how far the religious establishment of his time … and, I daresay, ours as well … how far off the mark the religious establishment can be, when it comes to the justice and fairness of God.
It’s a two part story, these verses from Matthew, but they interrelate and interconnect.
The first half has to do with authority … that old saw, when someone new comes into human systems … whether that’s a business or corporation, a school or political venue, a church or religious establishment … whenever someone new comes in, and starts to make changes, the question always arises, Who or what gives you the right to behave as you are?
Last week’s Gospel, the parable Jesus tells before this passage, before his entry into Jerusalem for that final week’s world-shattering events of his Passion … last week’s Gospel began this theme … in God’s kingdom, Jesus says, there is no place for human ‘place,’ length of time, service, membership … those have no place in the Kingdom of God … you might get a certificate or a pin here, but in God’s kingdom those who have lived and served faithfully for thirty or forty years get the same reward as those who showed up at five minutes to five … well done, good and faithful servant. To our cries of “It’s just not fair!” Jesus responds … hey, don’t make something bad out of something good. In God’s eyes, you’re all sinners … it’s my forgiveness and grace alone that makes you right with God, don’t you ever forget that … and don’t you ever forget to pass it along, just as generously as I have given it to you.
It’s kind of a backhanded Gospel word … but Gospel, just the same.
Here this week, Jesus’ authority is in question by the religious leadership because he’s not one of them … to them, he’s an outsider … not part of their club, their social gathering and business they call “religion.” But Jesus traps them in their own political web, and points out that the only “authority” these leaders have, comes from what people have ceded to them … in other words, it’s only human authority. So strangled by the politics of it all, the chief priests and elders fall silent … in the face of real authority, Jesus’ authority, which comes from God.
But it is the second half of the story, another parable of Jesus, which makes this point clear, and ties it together so well with our Judges text.
“Which of the two sons did the will of his father?” “The first,” the chief priests and elders answer, and thus seal their deal. For this is precisely the point of the Judges text … of the parable last week … and, truly, of the Gospel … those who do the “will of the Father” are the ones who go into the Kingdom of God first.
Here, Jesus points out, the tax collectors and prostitutes … two groups of people, on the outside of human society of their time (and most certainly, ours too) … these outsiders … in God’s Kingdom … as they turn, and hear the Gospel word for them, repent, and believe … in they go … into the Kingdom of God where justice and fairness come through God’s grace alone … in they go first, ahead of you religious establishment folks, who only give lip service to God.
Had Jesus been putting things into the context of our Judges reading, he might well have put it like this: Deborah, Barak, and Jael … in they go, into the Kingdom of God, ahead of you. Deborah … a woman! … Barak … one who treats women as equals… and Jael … a non-Israelite!!! ... in they go, ahead of you, religious leadership, establishment … in they go.
Now, note carefully what Jesus does … and doesn’t … say here.
He does say, in the Kingdom of God, those who hear the Word, who repent and believe, they get in … for the Word of God is the only criteria here … again, no place, rank, status … these count for nothing in the Kingdom of God.
But he does not say, and you religious leaders, you’re out.
He says, truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.
Ahead of you. You’ll still get in, insiders, but these outsiders get in first.
Or, to put it in Jesus’ words from our Gospel reading last week, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

So what do we do with such a word, for us here, today?

Well, first of all, we need to ask the question, who are our outsiders? Who do we “in” the church treat like those who are “out?” And why? Who are our “tax collectors and prostitutes?”
In some cases, it is truly the tax collectors and prostitutes.
But more.
It’s people who don’t look like, or talk like, or live like us.
People who are new … strangers … with a different background than us.
People who didn’t grow up Lutheran, or even Christian.
This text convicts us, when we realize that part of being “insiders” in any organization, including this one, means that we bring our own stuff to the gathering and we do, we will most certainly impose that same stuff on others who show up new … or, more important, on those who are on the outside, who Jesus is calling us to go to and share the Good News of forgiveness, grace, peace, and new life … this text convicts us when we put our agenda on that calling … well, only if they seem like they’d fit in with us.
It’s natural. It’s human. And it’s full, through and through, of stinking rotten sinfulness.
And Jesus is calling, pleading with us, to repent of this … to set it aside, and welcome as he welcomes.
Because where Jesus is … is out there … out there, with those on the outside, who are doing his will, living his will, in spite of and despite what “the church” or “the faithful” or “the religious” have to say.
The tax collectors. The prostitutes. Deborah. Barak. And Jael.
He calls us to repent, and change.
Not because we’re going to lose our salvation if we don’t.
Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.

But why wouldn’t we want to be there from the beginning … from the start … to work with and rejoice alongside of all these brothers and sisters who the world has rejected … why wouldn’t we want to be there, right there, right now, with them … to strengthen them, to encourage them, so that we can be encouraged, with and for each other … to be there NOW, as the world starts to turn … turn to and for Christ, his way, his truth, his life … his cross, his forgiveness, his salvation.

Indeed. Why would we not?

And so we pray …
Come, Holy Spirit, come and fill us, fill us your church, to be your vision-filled people, your agents of change, change toward God in Jesus Christ, in this world. Remove us from our politics, our envy and jealously, our grasping and clawing after the sinfulness of place and status … forgive us, heal us, and make us whole, and one … one so that there would be no more “outside” and “inside” but only Your Side … which is with and for the world … in Christ Jesus. Amen

18 September 2011

2011-09-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

“Fairness and justice … !”
Judges series – “The Lord raised up deliverers”
Ehud / Judges 3:12-30 // Matthew 20:1-16
OT 25A / Season of Pentecost
18 September 2011

Many of us spent our Saturday nights in the early 1970s watching TV’s “All In The Family.” Although my brother and I were too young to get much of the political satire, that didn’t mean we didn’t enjoy the show. Far from it. There was usually at least one moment in each show for us … when Archie would “go upstairs” – Edith would make some passing reference to him in absentia … and then, the next thing you’d hear was a .
Ah yes … the ever popular toilet humor … howlingly funny to every twelve year old boy out there … or those whose funny bones haven’t grown beyond that point.
Certainly that is a level at which we can engage with this story of Ehud and Eglon today … the second in our seasonal exploration of the book of Judges … and one, quite frankly, I’ll bet very few of you knew was in the Bible.
Pastor Lou Flessner – who was the admissions director at Luther Northwestern Seminary when we began there in the early 1990s – and who preached (in seminary chapel) the only sermon I’ve ever heard – before or since – on this text … he referred to it as “one golden opportunity to show confirmation youth that the Bible is cool.”
Certainly that’s one way to engage this text … as the Biblical equivalent of Archie Bunker’s toilet flushing. Big fat Eglon … his name literally means “heifer” … Eglon “goes upstairs” to “relieve himself” (har har har) and cunning Ehud (that is literally what his name means) tricks everyone into leaving him alone with the king … at the appropriate moment, Ehud stabs fatso in the gut and he makes a run for it … the servants get embarrassed at how long it’s taking Eglon … finally they go in and find their king dead, but Ehud’s long gone, getting his army ready for a big battle which they win.
Believe me, after the years of confirmation retreats I’ve been on … Scout campouts … youth trips … and the, er, humor I’ve endured and, yes, participated in … this is a story which can really connect with boys on their level! Boys of … all ages.
I think it’s a fine example of how we can see that the Bible was written to engage many different people in their own place and time. Some stories, like last week’s introduction to the book of Judges, are obviously deep theology. On the surface at least, this story isn’t … what we hear initially is a rough-and-tumble gym locker room kind of story which was intentionally written to poke fun at the Israelites’ close neighbors, the Moabites … and give them a little chuckle when they heard this, as you recall from last week … these stories in Judges were likely first compiled during the time of the Israelites’ exile in Babylon.
This is an earthy story for earthy people. And we all know that some people are just more, well, earthy than others … most of the time, it’s the boys, but you will find an occasional girl who can belch the alphabet along with the best of us … I happen to know several.
And there’s nothing particularly unholy about earthiness … witness Martin Luther … the dear sainted founder of this faith tradition … even Luther enjoyed a good line or three of “potty humor.” Here are some examples of that from Luther’s Works:

And yet they call themselves “nobles.” Nobles indeed! The excrement of the eagle can boast that it comes from the eagle’s body even though it stinks and is useless; and so these men can also be of the nobility.15 We Germans are and remain Germans, that is, swine and senseless beasts.

“I mark well where (my opponents) came from; the lazy, idle lords and princes emptied (them) from their bowels.”

Shall we frivolously despise this might, blessing, power, and fruit (of proclaiming God’s Word) — especially we who would be pastors and preachers? If so, we deserve not only to be refused food but also to be chased out by dogs and pelted with dung.

(The last quote – from the Large Catechism – my preaching professor at seminary, Sheldon Tostengard, said of it … “Well, at least he didn’t say that bad preachers should be chased out by dung and pelted with dogs.”)

But … but … I would argue … there is another level at which we can engage this text, beyond Archie Bunker, if you will.
And it has everything to do with another number 1 and number 2 – God’s top two, if you will – fairness, and justice.

We’re first tipped off to this by a brief textual note … that Ehud was a left-handed man. Maybe that word sailed right past you … but it would not have for the original hearers of this story … people who knew that “Benjamin” – the tribe of Israel from which Ehud was said to come – “Benjamin” literally means “son of the right hand.”
Right hand – left hand. How many lefties do we have in the room?
You of all people know the meaning behind the meaning of “right hand” and “left hand” … the “right hand of God” is the place of honor, favor, co-reigning even … we confess Jesus to sit “at the right hand of the Father.”
So what of the left hand of God? Hit the road, Jack.
The Latin word for “left hand” tells it all … “sinistra” … as in, sinister. Yeah, you lefties, you are sinister … something must be wrong with you … thus all the mothers throughout history who have confused their children, finding that they were developing left handed, who made them be right handed instead.
But discrimination against you continues far beyond the theological word. It’s always been a right handed world. You lefties know what I’m talking about. My friend Kent – the pastor at Grace Point Church in Tukwila – when we were in grade school together in Portland, Kent was one of the “lefties” and so whenever we had cutting out projects to work on, Kent needed to find “the left handed scissors” … of which, in our entire 700-student elementary school, there was seemingly only a few pairs … which all happened to be in crabby Miss Holiday’s room. Kent still shudders when he remembers having to go knock on Miss Holiday’s door, to ask her for a pair of left-handed scissors … a request she always seemed to resent.
Ehud was a left-handed man in a right handed tribe in a right handed world. Certainly not one you would guess God would have in mind to lead a revolution and overthrow of a government. And yet, Ehud was the one God chose to do his work and will.
Cunning Ehud came up with a cunning plan to get to King Eglon, the occupying Moabite king. He fashioned a short dagger and fastened it on his right side, and then went to see the king.
This allowed Ehud to sneak it by the Moabite Department of Homeland Security … those servants of Eglon knew Ehud to be a left-handed man so they only patted him down on the left side … why on earth would he carry anything on the right side?
Precisely.
So Ehud and his delegation of fellow Israelites presented their tribute to King Eglon and went back home … all except for Ehud … who turned back at the “sculptured stones” (which likely were idols – false gods – which the Moabites worshipped, and encouraged their vassals the Israelites to do the same) … Ehud turned back and said he had a private message … actually, literally, a “thing” for the king. Greedy Eglon probably thought it to be some kind of a bribe … and so Ehud got his private audience with the king – a king whose name meant “heifer” but perhaps “pig” would be a closer meaning … note that Eglon thought so little of Ehud and his people that he received him while he was literally “on the throne.”
Ah – but Eglon got his in the end – Ehud not only sacrificed the unholy heifer Eglon, but then he led the charge against those Moabite oppressors, and won – and, as the text says, “the land had rest for eighty years.”
God once again worked through one, who people would likely say “wasn’t up to the task” – here, the sinister, left-handed son of Benjamin was the one God chose to deliver his people. God’s fairness, God’s justice, coming to the world through one we would least expect.

And, curiously, that’s the same message we get from our appointed Gospel text for the day. God’s fairness, God’s justice works out differently than we would mete it out … in God’s reign, there is no “place” given to disciples … whether you’ve been on the discipleship walk for fifty years or fifteen minutes … whether you’ve worshipped and served every week of your life or just started today … a “Lifelong Lutheran,” “thirty year plus church member,” or you just came through the doors this morning … it doesn’t matter in God’s eyes.
God’s fairness, God’s justice, is different than ours … through God’s eyes, we are all alike, all the same;
… all sinners, all saved through his unconditional love and forgiveness, no preference given to age, length of service, degree or pedigree assigned.
Even no difference between right handers or lefties.
It’s a word, a way which brings offense. It offends our sensibilities of how things should be. I’ve been here longer … I have more status … yes, everyone has an equal voice but “some voices are more equal than others,” … that’s the way we think, and do, in this life.
Certainly in daily life that’s the case … at work, at school, on teams, clubs, community organizations … length of time spent in “active service” brings benefits.
And the church – as part of the world -- is no exception. We might laugh at the story about the first time worshipper who gets glared at for coming into church and “taking someone else’s pew” (thanks be to God we don’t have pews here!) but the larger truth behind that old joke is truly painful as we see it play out, again and again.
The text convicts us.
Especially this verse … “Are you envious because I am generous?” the landowner asks of the angry workers. Literally, what he says is “Is your eye evil because I am good?”
Robert Smith writes in his Commentary on Matthew’s Gospel,
“It is simply a fact that people regularly understand and appreciate God’s strange [calculation] of grace as applied to themselves but fear and resent seeing it applied to others.”

Oof. That word comes like a knife to the gut.
When we discount God’s goodness to all … through our sinful human way of excluding … excluding the poor, the powerless, minorities, newcomers, those with less knowledge about our customs and ways … when we treat these with scorn, these who are also God’s beloved children …
… when we build ourselves up while tearing others down … begrudging them, not wanting them to have life the way God intends it for all … full, rich, and abundant … enjoying God’s great generosity for all …
… when we do that, are we not making something bad out of what is truly good … the rich, bountiful love of God for everyone?

It’s a lesson which Eglon had to learn the hard way … certainly … the theological “point” of that story was to “poke some fun” while bringing good news in the midst of a bad place and time for the Israelites …
… and the Gospel’s word … less violent, but just as directed in its meaning, came to a church which even in the first century of this era was experiencing division between the Jewish Christians (who had been around longer) and the newer Gentile converts … the word here, no less pointed at “oppressors” (those who would begrudge others the goodness of God’s free, welcoming, gracious love) and those who were being “oppressed.”
And that word which both readings bring … that word is BEWARE … beware having an “evil eye” toward God’s goodness … beware seeing what is truly good, and pure, and right, as anything other than that …
Just as in last week’s Gospel text on forgiveness and mercy… we are called … called in Jesus’ name to be just as free in our giving to others that which God has so freely, generously, lovingly, given to us … the Word of forgiveness, life, and salvation which has rescued us … we are charged to pass it right along … without any taint or stain, prejudice or qualification of our own added …
… and in that freely received, freely given word … freely passed along, freely lived along to all without judgment or begrudgement …
… to the right handed and the left …
… to those who showed up at the crack of dawn to work and those who came at five minutes to five in the afternoon …
… in living that Word, we will show the judging, grading, segregating, separating world, another way … the way of Christ … the way of the Cross … the way of mercy, and grace, truth and love and light …
The way in which the world WILL turn … turn from the ugly separation, labeling, name calling we lay on it …
… and turn … and oh yes, IT WILL TURN …
… turn to Christ, his Cross, his life, his Way …
In Jesus’ name.
Amen.

11 September 2011

2011-09-11T17:40:00.000-07:00

“Because of your sins”
Judges series – “The Lord raised up deliverers”
Selections of Judges 1 and 2
Matthew 18:21-35
OT 24A / Season of Pentecost
11 September 2011

So why a sermon series on Judges?
Honestly, it has everything to do with football. Last spring, when it looked like there wouldn’t be an NFL season this year (because of the lock out) I happened to see a news story … an old grizzled guy, reacting to that news, said, “Well, if there’s no football, maybe I’d better head back to church.”
I wanted to make this choice worth his – and your while – so I chose perhaps the roughest, most violent book in the Bible for our soon to be Seahawk-less Sundays – I was going to call the series “Missing blood and guts? – A look at Judges.”
Then the lock out ended … but plans has already been made. And why shouldn’t we look at Judges? After all, we don’t hear much from the this OT book in our regular Sunday lectionary – only one brief reading, from chapter 4, is included. The most familiar story from Judges – that of Samson and Delilah – doesn’t even make it into our regular weekly rotation of Scripture texts.
So most of us probably don’t know a lot about this book – the 7th in numerical order in the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament.
So here’s a little background.
Judges is part of the history sections of the Old Testament which also includes Joshua, 1st and 2nd Samuel, and 1st and 2nd Kings. It’s called the “Deuteronomistic history” because these authors center their theology on the Torah of God which is laid out in the book of Deuteronomy. Most scholars believe these books of the Old Testament were written around the 6th century BC, after the Israelites had been taken away into exile in Babylon … and they were written as theological treatises, trying to explain to the Israelites why this terrible misfortune had happened to them.
Indeed, one could put a universal heading on these books: “You are here because of your sins.”
The authors of Judges put this theme out there, for everyone to see, right from the start.
We see it in our reading today, taken from the first two chapters of Judges.

Things start up where the previous book, Joshua, leaves off … the Israelites under Joshua’s leadership (Moses now being dead) were ready to take their new homes in the land God had promised to them, “the land flowing with milk and honey” which had been their dream and goal for a generation … while they were in slavery in Egypt, while they wandered around in the Wilderness, while they received final instructions from Moses before he died.
Now, they were finally there … so they went off, found places to live, settled down … and forgot about their God.
Another generation grew up after them, who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.

And thus began the people Israel’s problems, once again.
The authors, looking back across the centuries from the misery of their current bad situation … their exile and slavery in Babylon … they were looking for a theological explanation for their misfortune. And so they found it, in these stories of Israel in an earlier time and place … “Because of your sins” (“your” being a catchall term referring to the people Israel of all time)… “Because of your sins we are here, suffering, in slavery, in exile, in Babylon.”
There is a cycle to the collective life of Israel which begins here, in Judges:
*People forget about God;
*People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
*People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
*People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
*God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
*Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways;
*Repeat steps 2-6.

Because of your sins … it’s the overarching theme of these books of history, and serves as a good summary for most of the actions which happen within them.
Because of your sins… God had to send judge-deliverers to his people. The Torah, what we Christians slap-dash label “law” but really, it’s so much more than that, “Torah” being God’s wholistic way of life for his people Israel …
… Torah – if people followed it, lived it, the way God set it out, there would be no need for judges because God would be with and lead his people, and they would live as his people, and that would be that. But because of your sins, Israel … God had to send human deliverers, judges to rescue them from their enemies.
And later, because of your sins, Israel … God relents and sends kings to rule over Israel. Of course, because of your sins, Israel … the kings don’t work out either … and they end up conquered, hauled off to Babylon, into exile.
Because of your sins.

The authors of these books – beginning here in Judges – they are very clear about who is … and who isn’t … to blame that the whole enterprise of God and his people Israel has gone wrong.
It’s not God’s fault.
No – the authors insist - it’s our own. You and I, we did this to ourselves, and we have no one else to blame for it but ourselves.
What, then, of God?
Well, note from our portion of Judges today what exactly God does – and doesn’t – do.
God doesn’t go in and start smiting people right and left, sending floods and earthquakes and hurricanes upon them because of their disobedience.
No, it’s all because of your sins that bad stuff happens.
God, for God’s part, keeps his promises, despite the people’s disobedience.
What does God say in all of this?
I will never break my covenant with you.
That’s what God says.
So what does God do?
God just gets out of the way … and lets what would happen (without his preventing it), happen.
You could say, that the Israelites create their own sad reality, don’t they? They don’t recognize God as God, therefore, there apparently is no God there for them anymore. The levee against the flood, the wall against the invaders, that is God, is gone, because of your sins, and now, it’s all up to you, Israel. You want it? You got it!
EPIC FAIL.
That’s what that phrase “I am a jealous God” really means. What, who God is here, is all about relationship. And when God’s people don’t want God around anymore, for them … well, that’s precisely what happens.
Because of your sins.
This is also the message of our Gospel reading this morning.
Peter comes to Jesus asking a question which follows Jesus’ words to us last week, Jesus’ instructions on how he wishes us to repair and rehabilitate broken relationships between us.
It’s the immature question … Peter wants to know what the bare minimum is, which he must do, in order to be “in good” with God. How many times must I forgive … once again, not a ‘member of the church,’ but instead ‘a brother,’ meaning, anyone with whom we are in relationship. Peter shows how immature in the faith he really is.
So Jesus’ answer, seventy seven times, isn’t to be understood literally … hey, this is time number 78, so long, sucker! … but again, taken in the context of his words from last week, it represents a large number … a number which isn’t supposed to be counted … there is no end to forgiveness, Peter, because forgiveness starts with God and comes to us, God’s forgiveness for you has no end so neither shall yours have an end for your neighbor.
And the story – the parable, really, which Jesus tells next – lays this out so clearly.
The debt the slave owes his king is insurmountable … representing millions of dollars … a figure so high that the slave could never pay it back.
Thus the forgiveness which the king gives to the slave is just as immense.
In comparison, the amount the other slave owes him is petty. Three or four month’s wages would pay it back.
Yet the one slave refuses to “pay it forward,” pass along the forgiveness given him, if you will; he gives him the punishment he himself deserved for the enormous debt he owed the king … the debt he was now forgiven.
So what happens?
Once again, it’s an outcome because of your sins. Because of the sins of the one slave … his inability to forgive his fellow slave, especially and even after he himself was the recipient of the lavish and extreme forgiveness of the king … because of his sins he is now “in bondage and cannot free himself.”
The Word of God sticks a pin in his … our “blame” balloon … and pops it.
When we … we, who have been forgiven everything … EVERYTHING … by our God … when we who have been forgiven everything, withhold that forgiveness from others … because of our sins … we place ourselves into bondage, the bondage that leads to death, the bondage from which we cannot free ourselves.

It is curious … at the very least … that both these texts come to us on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001. Yes, I chose the Judges text, it’s true … but the Gospel text is the one regularly assigned to this date in Ordinary Time on the church calendar. And so … as a people who believe that the Word of God isn’t just a dead letter on a page, but a word which speaks to us, here and now, today … we must consider what this Word has to say to us here, on this particular day.
Although it’s hard to picture it now, once upon a time, right as the events of that awful day unfolded, and in the first few days which followed … we Americans were a far more introspective people, more as one in our grief, not racing to point fingers in blame but rather, wondering and considering and praying about what all this meant for us, and for the world.
Though it didn’t take us long to embark on the long, slippery slide we’ve been on ever since then.
At first we had righteous anger, certainly, at the ones who planned and carried out the initial acts of our national tragedy. But then came … Freedom Fries … discrimination against Arab Americans … death threats to the Dixie Chicks! … a deeply divided Red America, Blue America in which everything bad which has happened and is happening to us is the fault of someone else.
I’m not to blame… it’s their, it’s your fault … for… the deficit. The bank failures and corporate bailouts. The wars. The economic crisis and job losses. One side blames the other, the poor and powerless bear the greatest burden of it all … and some, in their utter hubris, make God out to be their own personal heavenly avenger, sending everything from the DC earthquake to Hurricane Katrina upon us because they don’t agree with the President or the wars or some court decision or another.

I was the preacher on Sunday, September 16, 2001 at Glenwood Lutheran in Minnesota. My colleague, Art Montgomery, had flown to New York to be at the first 9/11 memorial service, as his cousin Lee Ludwig was one of the 3,000 killed in the collapse of the Twin Towers. This past week, I went back to that sermon … and found these words … consistent with today’s text and theme … I close with them now.

If there’s anything the events of the past week have taught us, it’s that evil is a reality. Evil has always been a reality in the world. Some among us already knew that … some of us have tasted it personally … in the sights and the smells of a liberated Nazi concentration camp … in the streets of Little Rock in the late 50’s and Birmingham in the 60’s … or, perhaps, in the faces and actions of people we thought we knew so well, but really, didn’t at all.
And some of us continue to see it, in exclusion or discrimination against people whose are a different color, or speak a different language, or live their lives differently than “the majority”; in a nation divided, politically, economically, socially.
Somebody asked me on Tuesday, “How could this have happened? How could people do this to other people?” Many of you know I just returned from a trip to Germany, where I visited not just the Luther sites, but also Buchenwald Concentration Camp … where I was left with this similar question: how could more than six million of our Jewish brothers and sisters be gassed and shot and burned to death by the Nazis? For what I’ve found is that those German people weren’t any different from you or me. They lived their lives and worshipped as Lutheran Christians, and loved their country, and flew their flag too. Yet … what they did stands as the acme of evil for the past century.
Hate and evil starts in one heart, and spreads, to consume; its goal, destruction of everything. And anyone who denies that, who wants to avoid it or shelter themselves or their children from that reality, is doing themselves more than a disservice … they are lying to themselves, and to God …denying the cross of Jesus Christ.
God knows us. God made our hearts so that we could choose to love him freely, and not be puppets on strings – God wants our love for him to be from the heart, that we would eagerly choose to be with him. For what kind of a love is so tightly controlled that there is no freedom? It is no love.
Yet God also knows that, given the choice, we will choose our own way, to better ourselves, to line our own pockets, to believe we are the ones in control, in charge … every time.
God knows this about us. God’s Word for us, for the people of his creation then as well as now, is that this behavior, this sin, this evil, will lead us and all creation back to the chaos from which we came.
Except.
Except that the God who claims us as his own … not our money, not our stuff, not ourselves … not church nor flag nor nation … God is the only God who keeps all promises. None of those other ones can rightfully claim that.
And God’s Word of promise is this: “I will never break my covenant with you.”
Though we do. Our actions would lead us to total and utter destruction of everything we know. But God’s promise, is that this shall not happen.
God’s Word for us is the Word of the Cross … the Word that does not deny pain, or suffering, or death, but looks them straight on, and says, yes, there are these things in the world … and I, your Lord, your Savior, have been there myself, I have also walked through the valley of the shadow of death.
I was there.
I was there at Auschwitz, and Dachau; in Little Rock and Birmingham; in Oklahoma City and Columbine.
And I was there on Tuesday in Manhattan, and in Washington, and in Pennsylvania.
I was there.
I was there on the cross, the ultimate victim of a human thirst for sin and evil. I died there. Yet I did not stay dead. I am alive. I beat sin and evil and death; once, then; and one day, forever.
Look at my cross. See me there. See my cross in the sin which is part of what it is to be human. See my cross and lay down before it. Your sin, your evil, they would lead to your destruction. “Yet I will never break my covenant with you.”
Hate, and sin, and evil, start in one heart.
And so we pray, O Lord, we ask, O Lord, we beg, O Lord, that it may not be in ours.

And so we are called to repent … a repentance we must make every day of our lives, dying to the sin that lies in each one of us … and rising, renewed in Jesus’ baptismal promise of our forgiveness … a forgiveness we are called to share just as freely as it has been given to us.
And now, having been set free by Christ to live new lives in him … now … and only now … can we go forth in Jesus’ name to fight that evil outside ourselves … using the weapons and the might God alone can give us … praying and working and living God’s Word … the Word that inexorably calls us to lay down everything we have and are for the sake of our neighbor … our poor, tired, suffering neighbor … all the while knowing that we will never see the end of sin and evil and the suffering they cause in the world, until that glorious day when falling buildings and failing hearts and all the loose ends of life are tied together in his mighty end of all endings … the end of sin, and evil, and death itself; and eternal life with the Father and the Son forever.

God promises it … I will never break my covenant with you …
… and God alone will deliver us. Amen.

4 September 2011

2011-09-04T12:25:00.000-07:00

“For mature hearers only”
Matthew 18:15-20
23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Pentecost
4 September 2011

A classic Peanuts comic strip from the first day of winter many years ago, has Charlie Brown and Linus walking along on a dark afternoon – and Linus says to Charlie Brown, “You know, the days start getting longer from here on.”
Suddenly a bunch of the other “Peanuts” kids walk by, doing their usual teasing and insult-hurling at Charlie Brown. After they leave, Charlie Brown turns to Linus and says, “I’m not sure they’re getting longer, but they sure seem to be getting a whole lot wider.”
Immaturity … the immaturity of people … this does make our days “a whole lot wider.” And there seems to be more and more immature behavior going on … from petty partisan political bickering … to the ever increasing immature reactions of how people choose to live in our complex time.
Today’s scripture readings may be a turn off to many because they are unashamedly mature, in their speaking, their outlook, their world view. Maybe, like the old motion picture rating system, they should be rated M, for “mature hearers only.” Because they deal with a mature question, namely, “how do Christians treat others … and each other when there are problems in relationships?”
Of course, to get to that question, one actually has to admit that Christians can be and are just as sinful and misbehaving as everyone else. Which, of course, is true. The church is not perfect. Christians are not perfect. Luther called the church “a hospital for sinners.”
And the ‘medicine,’ if you will, which is put forth in these words … it doesn’t go down easy … in fact, it’s about hard work that make most of us so uncomfortable that we ignore it. We conveniently forget this part of Scripture, and so when we do have trouble, we stay clear of it like it was a toxic spill on I-5, choosing instead to do the avoidance thing … either ignore or remove the offending party or parties from our communities and our lives.
Now why is that?
Jesus’ words here in Matthew 18 are not difficult to understand.
Up to this point in his life, he had lived in family, small groups and communities of friends and relatives his whole life, in a much closer, interconnected lifestyle than we independent, self-assured 21st century Pacific NW Americans know.
He had to get along with others.
And so, he could advise his disciples about the same.
“If a brother sins,” Jesus begins in his own, original language of this passage … and almost immediately, there’s controversy. For the translation we have before us – If another member of the church sins against you – those words, “against you,” could well be a later addition to what Jesus actually said … meaning that, you only go and approach a person if they offended you personally, not if they acted up against or hurt or defamed someone else.
There’s a big difference between the two translations. Should we as Christians only be concerned about ourselves? No … we are called to look out for the well-being of everyone who is our neighbor; so much so that when we see someone else getting out of line in a situation which Conventional Wisdom would say “doesn’t concern us,” we are called to be concerned, because it affects another child of God.
So point one: be concerned … another’s misbehavior does affect you; we are called to care. Cross that “against you” part right out of your Bibles. Because in Christ, we are responsible, one for another.
But there’s more than just thinking responsibly here. Read on.
Go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.
But, if you are not listened to, take one or two others along.
If the brother refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.
Here we enter into the part of the Scripture which most of us would rather avoid. Direct confrontation of misbehavior. Conflict. Discipline.
This is where most conflicts between us … in the church, in families, in jobs and workplace, among friends … this is where they usually end up running aground.
We usually take one of two approaches.
Either ignore the problem and hope it goes away.
Or triangulate. Don’t go to the other person directly with the problem, but instead complain, manipulate, go behind their backs to two, three, or many more others.
Those of us who have gone through “Healthy Congregations” workshops or training know how destructive triangulating can be. But it is the most common way we go about dealing with conflict – with friends, at work, in families, or in a congregation.
Here’s an example. See if you can spot someone you know … or even yourself … in it.

Karen is a supervisor at a certain large airplane manufacturing company. Ray is one of the key employees in her work group. He’s expecting a promotion, because he’s been working there longer than anyone else in the group. But Karen doesn’t like Ray’s condescending attitude toward her or the other workers, so she promotes Janice instead – without ever explaining to Ray why.
What happens next? Ray undercuts Karen’s authority by spreading false rumors about how she’s stealing from the company … “She’s taking home titanium coffee mugs for free for her own use.” Karen tells Janice to “shut Ray up” and take care of the problem, without ever talking to Ray directly. Morale in her work group suffers, and some employees start looking for jobs elsewhere.

Triangulating. It’s like a virus to systems of relationship … whether they are work, school, between friends or in a congregation.
No, Jesus’ solution is the opposite of triangulation. He is in favor of dealing directly with things.
Go alone to the offender. If they’ve listened … really heard, enough so that they change their ways, great! But if not, take two witnesses.
Take two witnesses … this is the requirement of Jewish law; according to Deuteronomy, no one could be convicted of a crime without the testimony of two witnesses … take two witnesses and see if that helps.
Having two witnesses along also ensures humility, and prevents hubris … pro-humility, and anti-hubris on our part … having others along to “hear the whole story” keeps us honest … reinforcing us if we’re in the right, correcting us if we are actually the ones in the wrong … and then, encouraging us to admit our own fault, to repent, to forgive, so that relationship may be restored.
Take along two witnesses. Other ears, other minds can help clear things up.
But if, even after all that, things are still not resolved, then take it to the whole church … the whole assembly … the legal judicatory which is there to settle such matters.

Yes, it may sound painful and messy, something we’d rather avoid, but what is going on here is that Jesus wants relationship to be saved at all costs. Reconciliation is of the utmost importance to him, and he wants to make sure that nothing is left undone in pursuit of mending relationship.
To Jesus, the community is the seat of the Holy Spirit – God’s Spirit creates the community of believers, God’s Spirit maintains the community of believers. God’s Spirit is manifest in the community of believers. To give up without trying everything possible to save that community – even if it’s just the community that exists between two people – this is quite like turning one’s back on the Spirit of God. It’s something that shouldn’t be done, ever.
In Matthew’s time, the infant Church consisted mainly of family groups of twenty or thirty believers … we can understand how important maintaining community would have been then. But in Jesus’ words here, we find no less importance for us today in the task of maintaining community wherever and whenever it is found.
And so, when we come to the third point of Jesus’ words to us today, we need to get beyond the knee-jerk reaction we may have, when we hear let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector … read beyond to hear the sobering truth that, when all looks lost in mending relationships, we must work that much harder to make them right.
Gentiles and tax collectors were the lowest of the low to the original hearers of these words of Jesus. They were outside the community of faith, unclean, and collaborators with the awful Roman invaders.
Yet, to whom did always Jesus go during his ministry? The Gentiles and the tax collectors. He sought them out when others wanted to cast them off as common trash.
And so Jesus’ words here hold special meaning for us. In a day and time when we might well throw away people and relationships rather than do the hard work of reconciliation and peace-making … Jesus says here, “No, you stick with these people and try to mend relationship with them no matter what.”
But … do not divorce this phrase from what follows.
Because pursuing reconciliation and relationship with others, no matter what, does NOT mean letting them off the hook for what they’ve done wrong.
Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
The fourth point … and perhaps the most importance … is that even as we pursue forgiveness and reconciliation, we still hold others accountable for their harmful actions. Our Christian love for our misbehaving brothers and sisters doesn’t give them a blanket “that’s OK.”
That’s when we are called to “bind ones’ sins to them” … to hold people responsible for their actions … we hold up a mirror and saying to them, “You are the woman … you are the man.” We call a spade a spade, a sinner a sinner, stand up in the face of wrongdoing and evil and saying “We’re not going to take it any more!”

Church consultant Bill Easum once wrote an essay titled, “On not being nice ‘for the sake of the Gospel.” In it he says,

Maturing Christians love so deeply that they will do anything, even not be nice, “for the sake of the Gospel.” Jesus was so compassionate toward others that he could not remain quiet when he saw people holding others in bondage. And for a bit of trivia, the origin of the word “nice” comes from the Latin “to be ignorant.” Perhaps when bullies hold people in bondage … in congregations, in communities, in any gathering of people … “niceness” is really pretending not to know the problems they are causing.

God does not call us to stay in dangerous, abusive relationships … whether that’s personal, occupational, in friendships or family, in congregations or even larger systems and organizations. We are called to hold others accountable for what they say, and do, that has harmed and continues to harm others, whether it affects us personally or not … because, as Jesus says, we are all part of each other, and what’s done to a brother or sister anywhere affects each and all of us.
Their stubborn denial, their refusal to hear the call to repentance and renewal of life is really bondage, you know … as in “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.” So even though we might have to physically separate ourselves from them for a time … we continue in relationship with them through prayer, until that day when we can safely, and joyfully, be reunited with them.
It is all part of the radical hospitality of Jesus, his “doing the opposite” of what common sense and conventional wisdom would tell us or have us do, because he is ultimately concerned with relationship … the relationship between people, and the relationship between us and God. His “doing the opposite” for the sake of love … love which, as Paul states in our reading from Romans, does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
Love … so much so that Jesus’ radical hospitality means going all the way for us, taking on the condemnation we all deserve for being “in bondage to sin and unable to free ourselves” … going down to death itself …. so that we might have life, and salvation, and health in all our relationships, with God, and with others.

Yes, working on relationships is hard … between friends, in families, at work, in congregations and communities, within and between nations.
But the One who calls us to live in these relationships, whose Spirit creates and fills these relationships and brings us together in community around him, expects no less. And he gives us the Word, and the Will, and the Way, to do it.

Faithful God of love, we gather the needs of ourselves and others, and offer them to you in faith and love. Shape and transform us by your grace so we may grow in wisdom, confidence, and maturity, until we have done all which you desire to bring your reign of peace, healing and wholeness to fulfillment, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

7 August 2011

2011-08-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

“Walk on water … with beautiful feet”
Romans 10:5-15 / Matthew 14:22-33
19th Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Pentecost
7 August 2011

There’s an old joke / story told among pastors – about ourselves – based loosely on this most familiar of Gospel readings that we have before us today – and it goes like this ….

The highly effective pastor – the one who does everything right, who can do no wrong – that is the pastor who walks on water.
The fairly effective pastor – for whom things “go right” most of the time – that is the pastor who can tread water.
The slightly above average pastor – this covers most of us – that is the pastor who can recognize large bodies of water.
The average pastor – can at least drink and pass water.

Now that I’ve told it – I realize how dumb a joke it is – but what’s true about it, even as dumb as it is, is that it too often reflects reality … at least, as to how people view their pastors or church staff. Another version of the story I’ve heard is one told by bishops, about congregations in the pastoral call process, describing what kind of pastor they want versus who is actually available for them … in other words, most congregations want a pastor who can walk on water … while for most of us, the best we can do is drink … or pass … water.
Walking on water is a miracle – that’s for sure – and no one but Jesus has ever been able to do it right. That’s the first lesson we learn from our texts this morning … realistic expectations, not just of pastors but of church leaders, congregation councils, church congregations. Even though it’s strange to say in these days when all institutions are viewed with great suspicion (which is not an altogether bad thing) … but still, many times people view church congregations, church leaders, church people as somehow “above it all” … they come to a church thinking of it as an “escape” from the “nastiness of the world” … and then are put off … disappointed … hurt … when they come to find out that the church is less a place of perfection and more, as Luther rightly called it, a “hospital for sinners” where people can and do act pretty much in the same way as they do in every other aspect of human life … perhaps we start out fine, but then, like Peter, noticing the strong wind rising up around them … around us … we start to sink, and cry out, “Lord, help us!”
Jesus … the rescuer … he is the only one who can walk on water.
And yet … and yet … that shouldn’t stop us from trying, either.
The second thing we who follow Jesus should note from these texts is how Jesus approaches things.
He begins from a time and place of rest.
Which, when you think about it, is the opposite of how we usually approach things.
I’m going on vacation after worship today for three weeks. So of course the past week has been jammed full, with trying to get everything done and completed so I can take the “time off.” I’ve worked so I can rest. That’s the way we usually approach things … do do do … work work work … often times, totally wearing ourselves out … so we can vacate … empty … do nothing for some time to come.
We work hard with the dream ahead of retiring … for people of my age now, a far more distant dream, but still … working so we can eventually rest.
Even the words we use … vacation … retiring … they imply emptiness … vacancy … rest … as the reward of hard work.
But this isn’t how Jesus does things. He rests first … so he can go out and do his work. He approaches his work from a posture of rest … being refreshed, refilled, reconnected with God in prayer and worship … it’s from rest that he goes to work.
It’s a fine lesson for us, too, as we are on this discipleship walk with our Lord.
The balance Jesus exemplifies here … proper time for rest, and work … proper perspective from both rest and work … rest, a time spent in prayer and meditation, even coming in short increments, as it did here for Jesus … good rest is necessary for good work … it’s a rhythm, a cycle, into which we are called to live by our Lord … in all aspects of our life, separate and together …
… from allowing spaces for silence and meditation in our worship together … to making dedicated time at the beginning of each and every one of our gatherings together as God’s people called Nativity, dedicated time for meditating, discussing, praying – not just a perfunctory prayer but 15, 20 minutes of “God-talk,” “how is your faith walk” going talk … in the end, this is far more important conversation for our faith and life together than just “getting the business done.” And the good news for us is that the business will get done … we may not “walk on water” but we’ll certainly do better than just drinking or passing it.
After all … we do, as Paul puts it so well … all of us, have “beautiful feet.”
Feet which are made beautiful in service of the Word about Jesus … as we live out both the rest and work into which we are called … all of it, holy … all of it, given to us to be about bearing the word of Jesus into the world …
… the way we can best reflect the Word and the will of the One Water-Walker is to take our beautiful feet and follow him, working from our own rest, our own time spent to connect with him and each other in Word, Worship and meditation and prayer … following him on our beautiful feet, going out to share his Word in the ways we are best able …doing the best we can, for that is all we can do … sometimes coming close to walking on water ourselves … more often, merely treading it, recognizing or using it for bodily purposes … but in all of that, reflecting our God-given and God-blessed humanness … humanness which reflects the goodness of our God … which is what this Word, this Worship, this Way is all about … that God so loved and still loves the world that he came as one of us … fully one of us … yes, he walks on water but he also knows us so well and loves us so much that he reaches down and rescues, saves us … saves us when we try and fail … he sets us back on our beautiful feet … and sends us out … us, the ones with the feet he calls beautiful, the ones he entrusts to tell others about him.
Amen.

31 July 2011

2011-07-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

“We have what we need”
Matthew 14:13-21
OT 18A / Season of Pentecost
31 July 2011

When our Faith Thinking confirmation youth begin their unit on the Creed – how we introduce them to the concept of Creed, is by making the statement that “a creed is a statement of belief, about a person or an organization” and that “many people, many organizations, beyond the church, have creeds” – and then, we look at them.
The Scouts have creeds – both boys and girls. “On my honor …”
Nations have creeds – “I pledge allegiance …”
And so do corporations, clubs, schools … church congregations and larger church organizations like synods. They’re called mission statements.
One of my favorite mission statements is from the SW Minnesota Synod, from where we came before Nativity:

God places us in cities, farms and towns together under one prairie sky. The Risen Christ surprises us with opportunities to plant God's Word in the world. Walking together in confidence, we cultivate life-giving congregations, nurture partner ministries, and cooperate in the life of the ELCA.
By God's grace, together we have what we need.

What makes that creed – that mission statement – so memorable to me … is that, honestly, it doesn’t at all describe the state of reality in many of the cities, farms and towns, and church congregations of SW Minnesota. Far from it … often, it’s a huge contradiction. Driving through Glenwood and Willmar, Marshall and Pipestone can be quite pleasant, but you also notice how the farm economy is suffering … small towns are drying up, people are moving away because there’s no work, and those who remain are often the least confident … elderly with no where else to go, and the young unemployed and underemployed … the poorest of the poor. And life together in that synod – particularly in these past few tumultuous years in our ELCA – has been anything but cooperative and life giving.
And yet, what I love about that mission statement comes in the final sentence … “By God’s grace, we have what we need.” Those words, they are like a flag planted in unclaimed soil … stating a reality which is not yet fully realized … bold, forthright, it says what it means and means what it says … that as people of God, congregations of people of God, a synod of congregations walking together as people of God … there is enough, we have been given, we have been blessed with enough for God’s good and gracious will to be worked out, in and among us, right here, right now.
By God’s grace, together we have what we need. Those words, they are a full-on volley against the life-draining word of scarcity … the greedy, setting neighbor against neighbor word which runs rampant, not just through the SW Minnesota synod, but all through our church and our nation. Because the word on the street is that, most certainly, we don’t have enough and so we have to cut … cut everything from our personal spending to corporate budgets to church ministries. Even the political game in Washington DC going on over the national debt … has everything to do with a mindset of scarcity … prophets of doom and gloom abounding on both sides …there’s simply not enough to go around, and so YOU will have to suffer the consequences (YOU … but not me, of course) … And we all know who the suffering YOU will be … the ones who can least afford to lose.
By God’s grace, together we have what we need. Most thankfully, it’s that word – not the despicable word of scarcity, but that word, that balm of blessed abundance … that word is The Word which comes to us this morning in our Gospel reading.

The miraculous feeding of the crowd by Jesus is the only miracle story which is shared by all four Gospel accounts. That in itself should cause us to pay particular attention … if this was important enough for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to have it in common … so should it be vital to us, as we read and hear the story of Jesus they share with us.
The rampant abundance in the story should also grab us. All there had enough to eat … no, more so … they were all filled … and there were twelve baskets full of the leftovers. So much from so little points to the lavish abundance of God, in caring for his people … in caring for us.
But the main point we should come away from this text with this morning … this morning, deep in this season of scarcity … is that by God’s grace, together we have what we need.
Enough for Jesus. Enough for ourselves. Enough for others. Enough to share.
The disciples, for their part, are wallowing in scarcity. “Send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”
But Jesus knows better. “they need not go away; you give them something to eat.
Jesus sees what the disciples, what all those who live in the season of scarcity, there’s not enough to go around … we’ll never be able to do this … he sees what they, we do not … that we have enough.
Jesus knows the disciples have always had enough to meet the demands of their days and their nights. He knows because he’s the source and ground of all they have ever had … have now … and will continue to have.
And so his word to them …. “YOU give them something to eat” … this is not a crazy-speaking word, not a word putting forth an impossible demand … no, it’s merely a statement of fact, coming from the One who knows them all so well.
The disciples still don’t get it.
In their scarcity mode, all they can do is count what they don’t have.
“We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”
“Bring them to me.”
And, amazingly, there is enough.
But should we say “amazingly?” I wonder.
Because if we’ve been following Jesus’ story along … we should have come to expect, to know, this ending, even before it came to pass. By God’s grace, together we have what we need isn’t just a mission statement word from the SW Minnesota Synod of our ELCA … no, it is the theme word of all Scripture … of every Word that the Church has been given about Jesus …
… it is the Word behind the Word of Holy Baptism … that through this little water and short Word, here is another forgiven, freed, redeemed from evil and death child of God.
… it is the Word behind the Word of Confession and Forgiveness … child of God, even though you fail to live as I call you, yet I, your creator and redeemer, yet even I who make and call you holy, I forgive you this day, again and again.
… and it is most certainly the Word behind the Word of Holy Communion … this meal, this sign of God’s goodness and love past, present and future … this bread and wine sign of Jesus With and For Us … this preview of what life together in God’s reign of perfect community, perfect justice for the poor and oppressed, hungry and downtrodden, perfect peace for all … this preview of all that is to come in Christ, where all are the same before God and with God and in God forever.
By God’s grace, together we have what we need.
This is Jesus’ word for us, people of Nativity, this morning.
By God’s grace, we’ve always had what we needed. In 1969, when this congregation formed, we had what we needed. In the mid 1970s, building a new building here, we had what we needed. In the 1980s, through numerical success and leadership failures, we had what we needed. In the 1990s and into the early 2000s – even as the congregation physically suffered and declined – we had what we needed. Through the season of rebuilding, physically, spiritually, numerically – we’ve had what we needed.
And today, that word is just as true for us here … by God’s grace, together we have what we need.
True enough, Jesus has come to us over the years, and even today, he comes to us, asking us to do what may well appear to be a difficult, impossible task … feed these people … feed those people … feed them on the food of the Word and the physical food for bodily nourishment … a word which speaks to us of Christ’s call and expectation of growth for us … spiritual, physical, economic. It is a tough word in tough times, especially now, when the byword, the watchword, for all of our life, is scarcity, there’s not enough, cut, cap, delete, end.
And yet, Jesus does not call forth from us any more than he has given to us, to spend, to use, to feed the people. When we say “we have nothing here but five loaves and two fish,” Jesus provides abundance, from the God-given abundance we’ve always had with, in, among us.
By God’s grace, together we have what we need.
Into a world stuck in scarcity, shredded by the cutback knife … we who follow Jesus are called to move, and proclaim a different Word … into a government, a society, at times even a church mired in the word of death … we are called to joyfully proclaim this Word of life, life as God wills it for us, life as Jesus provides it for us, life as it will be for us.
Oh yes … hear it loud and clear, you prophets of doom, you voices of gloom and despair among us … the only deficit which is to come upon us is a deficit of death … as our future together is bright, and clear, and abundant. God’s abundance … enough for each one of us … enough for us to share … not just in a future to come … but now … now … NOW!!!
Amen.

10 July 2011

2011-07-10T17:05:00.001-07:00

"Parable of the Sower"
15th Sunday in Ordinary Time series A
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
10 July 2011

Listen! A sower went out to sow.

There are many stories about seed, planting and growing grain in the Gospels. That's because Jesus, and the people who originally heard him speak, were so closely tied to the earth. Jesus used images of sprouting and failing seed because the difference between sprouting and failing meant life or starving to death for the farmers of first century Palestine.

But, as in other parables, Jesus had another message in mind for his hearers...a message which was true for them in the first century, and is just as true for us today. Perhaps we work with seed on a daily basis, in the yard or garden. Or maybe we don't bother with seeds at all. No matter.

All of us have seeds we sow...seeds of a future we plan or plant for ourselves or others. When they grow and bear fruit, we rejoice. But what about the unsprouted, withered, scorched seeds in our lives?

Maybe, for some of us, that could be someone very close to us, maybe in our own family, maybe someone we’ve decided to share our life with ... someone with whom we've spent lots of time, trying to show them in love an example of living that is inspired by what we have heard, and sung, and learned in this place.

But, despite all that ... the loving teaching ... or maybe ... the preaching, and the scolding and the yelling, perhaps they still don't turn out the way we hoped ... or change like they promised they would. And that question burns within us...where did we go wrong? What happened to the seed we sowed?

Maybe for some of us, that's the question we ask of ourselves. We come here and get filled from hearing the word and singing hymns and songs and sharing in Jesus’ supper of Communion … and leave feeling that seed of faith sprouting in us and beginning to bear fruit. But then ... not out of church more than ten minutes and we may feel that sprout withering in the heat of an unkind word we say, plucked away by an unwholesome thought, or choked out by a reckless act that hurts someone else. And that question comes back to haunt us ... where did we go wrong? What happened to the seed that was sown within us?

But then ... even in the midst of our confusion, our hurt and suffering, our sin, hear the word of Jesus, as he comes to us ... and asks us to listen!

Listen! A sower went out to sow.
Listen to the good news first of the seed that the sower plants. The seed is very persistent. It always wants to come up, to become a plant that has the potential for bearing fruit. No matter if it falls on the rocky ground, or in thorns, or on good soil...it does sprout.

This year we planted a small garden … it’s nice, but a shadow of the monster vegetable garden I had once upon a time, in South Dakota on internship. That one gave us an excellent return … everything we planted did well. But so did those seeds we didn’t plant. I can remember, in May and June, when all the silver maple trees started to lose those little spinners, how many more of the little maple trees there were in the garden than plants we wanted to come up. But it wasn't just in our garden where those crazy maple trees came up -- they were in the lawn, in the flower beds, even in our gravel driveway! I even saw them growing out of gutters and downspouts! And just when you thought you had them all pulled up, then they started showing up again! The seeds are very persistent.

And what about the good seeds -- the ones we wanted? Despite the heavy rains, hail and tornadoes of that flooded summer of 1993, that garden did great. Despite the heavy rains, hail and “Ukrainian spring” of 2011, our garden this year is doing great, too. The seed's whole purpose is to sprout.

Some of you may have read the book "Giants in the Earth" by Ole Rolvaag. It's set during the pioneer days of the 1870's in Minnesota and South Dakota. One of the parts of the book I remember well comes when Per Hansa, the hero of the story, plants his first crop on the freshly-plowed virgin prairie. He spends all the money he has...money he saved from trading in animal skins with the Sioux Indians in the winter...he buys bags of wheat seed and plants his land.

And what happens? The weather turns bad. The warm early spring suddenly turns into a late winter snowstorm, and all of Per Hansa's fields are covered with snow. Fearing the worst, he goes to a corner of the field and turns over the snow and earth...only to see his precious wheat seed, appearing to rot in the cold, wet ground.

Well, Per Hansa is frantic. What will he do now? For days he tries to figure out a way he can earn some more money so his family won't starve. But it's getting too late in the winter for good animal skins. Perhaps they'll have to pack up and move back to Minnesota, feeling like failures.

But then one day, after the snow has melted, one of the boys rushes in, asking his father to go out and look at the fields. And Per Hansa can't believe his eyes. The dead brown earth has suddenly come to life with thin, green shoots of wheat! The seed he thought was rotting was actually germinating...and preparing itself for another warm spring day when it would sprout and begin to bear fruit. The seed is persistent...its whole purpose is to sprout.

And the same is true with the seed of God's word of love for us, in our lives, in the lives of our loved ones, in the lives of all who hear it. We like Per Hansa may look at the snow covered ground of our lives, or that of our friends or families, even turning over a spade full of ground and thinking all that's there is rotting seed...but God's word, like Per Hansa's wheat seed, will sprout. It may sprout at the most unexpected time. We may never even live to see it sprout. But the promise of this parable is that the seed...God's word...is persistent.

What about when the seed gets snatched away? The seed is still persistent. Our landlord recently cleaned the moss off the roof of our yard shed. I looked up after he finished and noticed a kernel of corn, defying gravity, seeming to hang onto the roof by nothing. So I pulled on it. What I didn’t see … the roots … snapped off. Some crows must have dug it out of someone else’s garden, and dropped it on the roof of the shed … and that corn kernel was sprouting on the shed roof. And so it is with God's word. The seed is persistent ... its whole purpose is to sprout.

Listen! A sower went out to sow.

Listen to the good news that the sower is persistent too. The sower does not care where the seed falls...it is thrown on the path and in the rocks, in the weeds and on the good ground. The sower's whole purpose is to sow the seed.

In the same way God wants all of us to hear the good news that Jesus came so that life might be different for us. God is persistent, and will stop at nothing ... NOTHING ... not our shortcomings, not our failures, not even death, to let us know how much we are loved. God wants us to hear the good news that Jesus came to forgive our sins. And God wants us to hear the good news that in Jesus there is always new life.
And just as the sower waters and fertilizes, mulches and tills, so God cares for us. When we are baptized we are given all the water we need for new life...and when we remember the promises made by our parents and by God, we are watered again. As we gather here to hear the story of Jesus told to us every week, and when we join Jesus at the table of communion to taste his love for us, we are fed and tilled and given encouragement to grow.

And someday we may even grow so that the seed God has planted in us bears fruit. We might not even realize it, and the seeds from that fruit may not even fall close by, but far away.
Sometimes we'll see the seed fall and start to sprout. Sometimes we won't. But wherever they fall, the sower will tend them too, just as the sower has cared for us.

Wherever the Word of Jesus' love for us may fall, God will tend it too, just as God has cared for us.

Listen! A sower goes out to sow...and sow...and sow.

The seed is persistent. The sower is persistent.
We are persistently loved.

Thanks be to God! Amen.

3 July 2011

2011-07-03T21:16:00.000-07:00

“A recipe for a blessed 4th … 5th … 6th … and beyond”
14th Sunday in Ordinary Time series A
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
3 July 2011

Happy Independence Day weekend!
Maybe that strikes your ears as a strange greeting for this morning … because the polls say that, as a nation, a people, we are celebrating one of our unhappiest Independence Days ever. Political unhappiness … economic unhappiness … family unhappiness … religious discontent … many of us don’t feel like we have much to celebrate this 4th of July.
Now, I don’t know what it will take to “fix” our national situation … and frankly, you didn’t come here today to hear that anyway … you could have stayed home and tuned into Sunday morning talk television, where the wide array of presidential candidates will gladly give their wide-ranging opinions.
But I do have an idea of where each of us can start in our own personal quest for renewal … the pursuit of true life, authentic liberty and deep, abiding happiness.
Our Gospel text for this morning points the way, Jesus beginning with a description of “his generation” which sounds strangely like our own:

But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn.”

Jesus is describing a children’s game in which the boys and girls “play grown up” – the first part of the sentence refers to what happened at a first century wedding; the second, at a funeral. The point is that children who cannot respond positively to any suggestion end up playing nothing.
And this is precisely where Jesus goes next in his biting criticism of “this generation.” John the Baptist they criticized for his ascetic ways – they called him crazy, demon possessed … yet of Jesus himself, he who lived a “normal” life among people, eating and drinking as any typical person of his time would … “this generation” called him “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”

To put it in the vernacular, Jesus is saying “I can’t win with you people … there is no satisfying you!”

How similar Jesus’ “generation” is to ours, eh? Frustrated, confused, troubled – decentered - people making irrational judgments, statements, choices … of this we are all witnesses, indeed, we’ve probably made, done them ourselves.
Ah, but Jesus does not leave us without a way out. Again, his answer isn’t one for “how do we fix this generation … this nation … this civilization?” It is, however, highly personal, a Word with and for, one-person-at-a-time.

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.

“Weary” is too light a translation for what Jesus means. Many of us are tired … tired from the very circumstances of our lives … but Jesus’ weary indicates something deeper, “those who have lost heart, who have given up.” They haven’t totally given up because they, we’re still carrying “heavy burdens,” but these “weary” are well on the way to exhaustion.
God knows what those burdens are. They might be due to health. They might be financial. They might have to do with relationships … or aging … or change … or the fear that surrounds them all.
So Jesus is saying, right there, right here in the midst of all that burdens and troubles you … all that causes you frustration and anger and confusion and decenters you from life, life rich and full, as God wills and wants for you … Jesus says, right there, right here … I’m here to take your burden.
Now, this isn’t a “wave the magic wand and it will all be better” Word … such as that which some of our mis-guided brothers and sisters assume, “when you turn your life over to Jesus it’ll all be OK and wonderful and one material blessing after another.”
No, far from it.
Jesus is calling, expecting us to apprentice with him in the life-lesson of burden-carrying.
When Jesus says, “learn from me,” he really means, “learn with me.” Follow my four-step program, he says, which I lay out clearly all through the Gospels:

• I do, you watch.
• I do, you help.
• You do, I help.
• You do, I watch.

Now, the thing about apprenticing with Jesus, is that it’s a life-long process, and it doesn’t go in a straight line of “progress” as we Americans might like to draw it … you know, “every day in every way we’re getting better and better,” we can always pull ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and make something better of ourselves.
But you know as well as I that those words are a lie. Sometimes we can’t pick ourselves up. Some days it just keeps on getting worse and worse, not because of our fault … and it’s nothing we can help.
And so here’s a tough word for US Independence Day … one of those “American values” we may cherish the most – total independence, believing that I can do it all – anything – by myself, that I can make it all better, without any help from another … and so should you, and you, and you … that value is in direct opposition to the reality of life as Jesus acknowledges it and claims and redeems it for us.
And we know this, as we walk in faith. It has to do with being a saint and a sinner at the same time, as Luther put it so well. Saved by grace, we still and always mess up, hurt others, sin. So the most important part of apprenticing with Jesus is to drop to our knees and repent … each and every one of us, each and every day.
Repenting is the most important part of apprenticing because you have to admit that it can’t be “me-right or wrong, always.”
Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn – one of my favorites – puts it so well in his new song, “Call Me Rose” --

I was the boss of bosses the last time around
I lived by cunning and ambition unbound
The suckers said they'd stand behind me right or wrong
As if they thought that hubris was the mark of the strong…

That ideal … stubbornly holding our place, our ground, right or wrong … that puts us -- and anything else we say that sentence about – family, employer, political party, nation … that puts something or someone else in the place of God. That’s the literal definition of hubris. And you can’t apprentice with Jesus if God is decentered in our lives … because then we’re decentered … we’re no better than the whiny little children who can’t play the game correctly so they end up playing nothing.
And so we always start our apprenticeship with Jesus with repentance. Always. Each and every day.
And then … then, after we rise from repenting … as we feel ourselves lifted by the arms of Jesus … we receive refreshment … the forgiveness we’ve been lacking in our lives … patience … trust … encouragement … and the easing of our burdens, as we turn and see Jesus next to us, bearing the same yoke along with us … teaching us … we, apprentices at discipleship, apprentices at faith, apprentices at life, yes, life …
… and we receive … we receive from Jesus … because apprenticing also means receiving … we learn to be gracious receivers as well … as Jesus does for us … Jesus, sometimes helping, sometimes teaching, sometimes just plain doing it all for us … depending on how life is for us … that’s precisely how Jesus wants and wills to be for us.

Here is a recipe, a calling, for not just a blessed 4th of July … but also, a blessed 5th, 6th, and beyond.
So Happy Dependence Day … today, and every day, as we walk with Jesus in his humble, centered, restful way, which is for each one of us. Each one of us, called to total and utter dependence on Jesus Christ … so we can be truly free … with freedom from our life’s burdens … liberty to live to and for others, sharing their burdens as well … and happiness in Christ … full, rich, abundant life … life in Jesus, life with others.

Amen.

26 June 2011

2011-06-26T12:38:00.001-07:00

“Meetings, reports, budgets … and welcoming”
Matthew 10:40-42
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time – year A
26 June 2011

Hooray! It’s annual meeting day! We’ve made it through another year – together.
That news – in and of itself – is cause for rejoicing, for those of you who, ten years ago, were called anything but prophetic – as this congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in the Northwest Washington Synod, appeared to be fading fast, going away, joining the ranks of St. James and Riverton Heights and even Lord of Life, Duvall this weekend … congregations of our synod which have and are closing their doors for good … unlike Bethlehem and Renton Lutheran, where re-vision has led and is leading to something new, the “voice of reason” here was “let’s close the doors and sell the property.”
And so – as one might expect, you who said “no, we’ll not close” received “a prophet’s reward” of sorts from some, as friends and neighbors scoffed at your foolishness and departed for other area congregations. But you stayed and re-visioned and re-worked this place … chucking the old models of how you had done church in the past, using our round structure as a way of guiding us forward into mission and service and, yes, growth – spiritual as well as numerical.
So ten years later here we are … half of you, keepers of that part of Nativity’s story … the other half of us, having come after that prophetic decision … we who were, are welcomed in Jesus’ named, taken into the life and mission and service of this congregation of the body of Christ.
And so today … fully ten years after that momentous annual meeting of June 24, 2001 in which Nativity made the prophetic decision to step forward in faith … today, we come together this afternoon to celebrate a decade of rebirth and growth … and also … to take a look ahead .
Now the business of an annual meeting of a congregation doesn’t usually look, or sound, that exciting. Meetings, reports and budgets … to some, even many … that’s a simply dreadful way to spend an hour, hour and a half, on a nice sunny June afternoon.
So I invite you … instead of seeing the annual meeting as “something we have to suffer through every year” … instead, let’s look at it through the lens of our Gospel reading this morning, the text given us today to think on and ponder, and take into our lives for this week. This week, which includes our annual meeting.
What might God be trying to say to us through Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel?

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward;
And whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous;
And whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.

Let’s consider the annual report itself. Inside are notes and minutes, budget reports and write-ups of the meetings and ministries which have been part of Nativity’s life over the past twelve months.
Much has happened. Much has been accomplished.
But remember our text. Read through that lens. Consider, and ponder.
Were we inviting and welcoming to the stranger … the outsider … the visitors and neighbors around us, in and through what we’ve done?
When Nativity re-visioned church ten years ago, you made a distinctive choice … using our round structural shape as a model for what everything around here was to be about … with Christ at our center, as we receive him in the proclamation of Word and Sacrament … the goal of our leaders was to reach out, from that center, to the outside … so that as many as possible could, can be touched by the welcoming, centering, calming, healing presence of Jesus Christ … through us … reaching out to those outside the “inner circle” … working, praying, serving to “bring those on the outside in” … not because “we need more young families and children,” not because “we’re scared that our church is going to close,” no … we do not reach out to save the institution of the congregation.
We reach out because Christ has saved and is saving us … and this is such a joyous, life giving word that we cannot help but share it with others.
And so as we read these reports and budgets and think back on the year just past, we are called to consider … have we welcomed? Which means, not just staying here within our comfortable walls and waiting for, expecting others to “show up,” no, it means actively taking that cup of cold water out, and giving it away, for the sake of Jesus, and for their sake.
Have we been prophetic in our ministries? Have we used the blessings God has so richly given to us as a congregation to boldly serve, to reach out and bring the word of forgiveness and hope, grace and peace and radical welcome to those sitting in the midst of pain, despair, suffering and hopelessness? If not, why not?
When we reach out, we bring the true “prophet’s reward,” the “reward of the righteous” to those who need to receive it … we bring Jesus, Jesus’ word, Jesus’ presence, in our presence.
Why in Jesus’ name would we deprive a brother or sister in Christ of that, Jesus’ blessing to them, coming through our voices, our hearts, our hands?
And what of the future? The one “looking ahead” piece of our annual report today is our proposed budget for 2011-12. Granted, a budget is merely a blue print for ministry and mission for the next year … much work has to take place between the figures on the page and the actual work and service done … but still, it is a place to start for the year ahead.
My pastoral colleague in Maryland always says that “budgets are moral documents.”
What is the morality that our church budget is proclaiming for the next year?
Does it strike that careful balance between serving ourselves … maintaining our facilities and paying our staff a just wage … and, on the other hand, maintaining, increasing the priority of reaching out, and serving others – especially those who God calls us to look out for with particular care … those without others to care for them, those who haven’t heard about God’s love in Jesus Christ, those going through particular hardship caused by disaster, famine or flood?
Our teams and council have prepared and recommended a path for our future. But it is just that … a path … and a path is pointless unless people use it to get somewhere. That somewhere starts with each and all of us prayerfully considering our place in and on that path, in the mission and ministry of this place called Nativity.

Annual meetings are usually looked at as one of those necessary things we don’t at all like, but need to be about … like a root canal or a colonoscopy … and so we usually try to get through them as rapidly as possible. But I would hope and pray that today, we enter our annual meeting with the words of our Gospel reading in our hearts and on our tongues …
… and, even as we give thanks for the past ten years of visioning, working, growing this place back into a vital place of Word, worship and work for God’s people … we would also prayerfully, carefully ponder and consider what we are still being called into being about here, people of Nativity, people of place of new birth and new life, people being called into God’s future, together, in Jesus’ name, for the sake of our friends and family, our parish neighborhood, our community and state, our nation and world, and yes, ourselves too.

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward;
And whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous;
And whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

12 June 2011

2011-06-12T19:25:00.001-07:00

“THAT’S the power of love”
Numbers 11:24-30 / Acts 2:1-21
The Day of Pentecost
12 June 2011

I don’t know if you paid attention to the weather last Monday with a particularly liturgical eye … but if you did, you noticed that we had our own little Pentecost moment around here.
It was quite windy for a day in June … the “onshore flow” took over again after some nice, sunny, dry few days … and the moist air off the Pacific rushed back inland to give us our more usual cloudy, cool June mornings.
Trees bent. Leaves blew off them. Birdhouses and feeders came un-hung. Even some tender shoots on rose bushes ended up breaking off and blowing around the yard.
But that is the way of wind, after all. It rushes around and marks a transition from nothing happening, to something’s happening, and you’d better sit up and take notice. Change is coming … change is here … and the wind will bring it in.
Now, whether you pay attention to the weather or not … it’s impossible to have missed the fact that change- life change - is blowing in all around us today.
Our culture is in a place of change.
Our nation and world are in a place of change.
The Church itself is in a place of change.
The holy wind … the Spirit of God … is blowing … rushing in, individually, collectively … change isn’t just coming, a ways off … change is already here.
That much is certain.
So how will the Church respond?
That’s the Pentecost question.
It was the question 2000 years ago, there in Jerusalem, too.
The familiar text from Acts sets the stage … “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.”
Pentecost – the festival taken on by the Christian Church – which some claim as “the Church’s birthday” – it was and still is a Jewish celebration. Pentecost comes – as the name indicates, 50 – Pente - days after Passover. This year it started at sundown on June 7, and ended at sunset on June 9.
In the days of Temple Judaism 2000 plus years ago, Pentecost was one of the three times during the year when all adult men of the faith were required to come to Jerusalem. Pentecost – also known as the Feast of Weeks – in Hebrew, Shavuot, the annual giving or “returning thanks” of the first fruits of the grain harvest – Shavuot, more importantly, though, is the commemoration of the Giving of the Torah … the rules and laws which define Judaism and the Jewish people, the Ten Commandments and all the ways of living which surround them, given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai … that event, the defining event for the Jewish people … that was why “they were all together in one place” on that Pentecost so long ago.
But then God’s holy wind started to blow. And things changed in a hurry.
Now, hear this word clearly … God did not send change because there was or is anything wrong with Torah. Lutheran Christians in particular can have a warped understanding of that word Torah – probably because we acquaint it with “law” and “works” and thus, it’s a “bad” thing.
But Torah was and is a gift from God … not a dead letter on a page, but a living, breathing way of life for God’s people, the way they would live into God’s promise to Abraham, that they would be “blessed to be a blessing” to the world.
No, it was what people did to Torah … making it into an unwieldy system of laws, rules, codes and precepts … that’s what Jesus objected to during his earthly ministry. So much of Jesus’ teaching, his preaching, his doing … was in bringing out the Spirit of the law, breathing life into the dead letter of rule and regulation which was stifling faith, which was working against the very gift of life God so wanted for his people.
Whenever faith is remade into religion … morality, rules, codes, laws … a self-justifying system of “to be a faithful person, you must live like this, or else” … rather than the Spirit-led, freeing “because you are a beloved child of God, God calls you into life lived in relationship, in care, in love and in peace” … whenever that happens, watch out …
… the wind of God, the Spirit of truth and life, will blow in to change things.
The disciples gathered there, on that Pentecost so long ago, just come out of hiding after Jesus’ death … they had been told by Jesus to wait around Jerusalem, to wait for what would come next. Doubtless they were hoping that things might calm down, get back to normal for them … the troubling times of recent memory … Jesus’ arrest, crucifixion, and death … and then the disturbing, hopeful yet confusing times of his resurrection appearances just past …
… and yet, God’s holy wind blew in upon them, blew them into the rush of change, the breath of new life God was breathing into his (even then) old, tired world.
Some who stood by and saw what was happening were surprised. Some were confused. Still others pointed and made fun of them, criticized them, “they’re just drunk.”
Peter saw a moment to step in and say a particular word. And so he did.
You see it there before you, “prophesy.”
It was a scary word for people back then, who tended to listen more closely than we do today, to people who spoke words in God’s name, speaking God’s truth, using God’s name. Sometimes they were false prophets, but if you listened closely to them, paid attention, you could tell, because these false prophets spoke a word like “oh, it’s all going to be OK, every day in every way we’re getting better and better, don’t worry, be happy.”
A real prophet would proclaim a harsh word in smooth times … “repent, listen to God’s Word, hear the voice of the Holy One calling you to life in relationship with him, as his beloved children.” A real prophet would preach a soothing word in hard times … “Comfort, comfort my people, says our God, though it looks bleak now, God is with you, to bring real peace, healing, and hope.”
Prophesy. It’s a scary word for us today, too.
Granted, we do have our goofball “prophets,” having just lived through another time of “someone knows when the world is going to end,” and their being proved wrong once again … but the real prophets are the ones who are criticized – at the least, made fun of … people usually want them to stop doing what they’re doing, saying what they’re saying, because they – we - don’t want to hear the truth, the true word about our world today, our nation, our economic system, war and peace, people’s public (and private) behavior.
The prophets’ words make us … us who seek our own comfort first, last and always … the prophets’ words make us uncomfortable. They cut too close … even as they call us to be about something new – in ourselves, and with others.
I love that Old Testament reading from Numbers for that very reason. The Spirit of God shows up again, and 70 elders prophesy … speak God’s Word of truth and love, in all boldness and no meekness. And then two more of them who don’t behave in the “prescribed” manner start prophesying too. And that young man … I imagine him to be someone’s annoying, obnoxious little brother … the watchdog who makes sure that no one gets a bigger piece of pie than him … he comes running to Moses, and tattles. “Um, Um, Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp!”
Even Joshua wants them to stop – for this is not safe, proper “coloring within the lines” religion happening here … but hear how Moses answers the protests: “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”
The fresh wind, the Spirit of God comes blowing in, rushing around where it wills and where it wants, not necessarily, no, likely not at all coming in a nice, civilized, controlled way that we would choose.
It comes and even those who are “outside the camp” are called to speak about and give witness to the power of God, working in their lives, working for the lives of all.
Centuries later … this scene repeats itself … for that Acts community of believers … when the Spirit of God led them … after the wind blast of Pentecost … into what became anything but calm, peaceful, orderly, nice religion.
Those first followers of Jesus … what the world felt blowing through them … was bold – energetic – joyful – in your face love – THE power of love – the love of God in Jesus Christ, sent from him through the Spirit to believers to share with a changing world.
And just so today … God’s call to the Church – the call to each of us who in sum total are the Church – Church, not “they,” not just the educated and trained professionals, and most certainly NOT those who are using the change-moment we are in to promote their own anti-spirit agenda of division, exclusion, hatred and lies … lies about God, lies about faith, lies about themselves …
… the call of the Church remains the same for us today as it was on that Pentecost so long ago. All around us there is change – the Holy Wind of God is blowing – and so, rather than fighting against the Wind, we are called to claim the moment –
For this is our moment, given to us by God – God is in the midst of this change, God has already gone ahead of us in all this change, God is waiting and watching to see how we will do in it, with and for the sake of the world.
Will we fight it? Will we militantly guard the institution of the Church, jealous of those who try to open the doors to change, so the refreshing Wind of God’s spirit can blow in? Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp! Um, they’re doing something over there that … that … I don’t like … I didn’t think of it … I’m not in charge of it … I’m not part of it …it means change and I just plain won’t change.
Beware that attitude, Church of God.
Trees that don’t bend in the wind, they snap off and break, and become kindling, roadblocks, even killers.
Learn to bend, Church of God … learn to bend and sway … move with the Wind of the Spirit … rejoice with the Eldads and Medads who may not color within the lines, but who are truly proclaiming and pointing to God, God who is already and always active and alive in the world … active and alive in all people’s lives, even those who aren’t part of “the organized church,” the “church as we define it.”
These days, so full of change, call for creativity … Church defined by discipleship action, not just membership status. Church consisting of who shows up to be and do, rather than who merely lay claim on the real estate and the buildings. Church made up of those who live the faith … those who serve … those who give … those who walk in the way of Jesus and call others to walk along with them.
There are some who say that the Church is now in the midst of our second Reformation … that the Church of a hundred or even fifty or twenty five years from now will look nothing like what it does today.
That may well be so … I personally don’t plan on being around a hundred years from now to make sure … but neither will I freeze in fear because I don’t know what’s coming.
Because what’s coming … what’s coming … is the Holy Wind of God. The Holy Wind of God, which has always been blowing, inside and outside the camp, blowing through God’s people with a rush … calling to us from tomorrow, causing women to see visions and men to clear their eyes, calling us, pushing us forward, to God’s future, a future with forgiveness and hope … giving us courage to live that future NOW … to risk, to respond, to reach out in the same forgiveness and hope.
We have nothing to fear from this wind … God’s Spirit, God’s Spirit of Gentleness … moving us, changing us, keeping us in Christ Jesus, sending us out, always, always, sending us out, for the sake of the world.
Amen.

5 June 2011

2011-06-05T13:35:00.000-07:00

“Love the One you’re with”
John 17:1-11 / 1 Peter 5:6-11
Easter 7A
5 June 2011

If you’ve traveled around the country with any annual regularity over the past twenty or thirty years … one thing you have undoubtedly noticed, is that, as a nation we’re becoming more and more alike. Regional differences are disappearing … quaint dialects and phrases are heard less and less. You can hear people call a can of Sprite “soda” here in Seattle just as readily as in New York. People who live in Atlanta don’t sound that Southern any more. Even Minnesotans are losing that brogue made famous by Garrison Keilor in his “Prairie Home Companion” and in the movie “Fargo.”
It’s probably due to television … the monoculture of the tube … and to us being mobile, moving around the country so easily and readily, in a way that would have been unheard of a hundred years ago.
But it could also be due to … simple economics … it’s easier and more profitable to make mass quantities of one kind of thing rather than several different kinds … to package them in the same kind of package … and to sell them at the same store. So shopping malls all tend to look alike. Whether you’re in St. Cloud, Minnesota … or Boston … Columbia, Maryland … or Amarillo, Texas … you can be pretty sure that the local mall will have a Target, Payless Shoe Source, Hot Topic and Panda Express.
Even around the world … things are becoming more and more the same. If you’ve traveled at all you know that McDonald’s and Burger King are everywhere. But so are other stores. When we were traveling in Germany a decade ago we went in a Best Buy-clone in Cologne … and knew exactly where to look for the headphones Kathleen wanted to buy because the store was set up exactly as they are in this country.
Everything’s becoming the same. Identical. Exactly alike.
And so maybe that’s why … when we hear Jesus’ prayer in the 17th chapter of John’s gospel … every year on this Sunday right before Pentecost … it hits us as a “why can’t all the churches be alike” plea by our Lord.
It does sound that way … “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” And later, in verse 21 … “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
How many times have we heard – or said - these words: “Well, how can we as Christians ever expect the world to live in peace and unity when we can’t even get together among ourselves? What kind of an example are we to the world, so splintered and different from each other?”
But is that what Jesus really prays for here in this 17th chapter of John’s gospel, his words, his prayer right before his Passion, suffering, and death? The unity of all Christians?
And what about that unity anyway? Does unity mean … uniformity … that we all have to be alike?
Actually, Jesus’ words here could well be the words of a parent praying for their children … that God would “protect them.”
That is what parents do, you know. Protect us, and pray for our continued protection.
When we’re just starting out in life, our mothers’ very bodies protect us while we grow and develop. After we’re born, our parents continue to work to keep us safe … providing us with food and clothing and shelter. And then … as we grow up … they let us go … well, more or less … but they continue to pray for us, for our protection.
This is what Jesus prays for here – that the disciples … and those who would come after them in the mission of spreading his Word … which includes us today … he prays that they, and we, would be protected.
Protection against what?
Do we even need to ask?
Sickness. Disaster. Trouble. Bad choices. Evil itself.
Our reading from First Peter puts it in words people of earlier times could easily understand … Faith in Jesus resists our adversary the Devil, who prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.
Now, whether you believe in an actual personal devil named Satan … or instead choose to see evil as a force, perpetrated and perpetuated by people, alive and active in the world today … the good news for us is that we can resist the Devil, resist evil, firm in our faith … through Jesus’ prayers for us.
That’s right … Jesus is praying for us to be so firm in our faith that we would be able to stand up to the Devil, evil, and temptation … and win.
In other words, Jesus is praying that we would grow up, and be spiritually mature.
And the thing about maturity is, maturity recognizes the differences in others, and respects them.
When we’re young and immature, we believe everything needs to be alike. If we don’t get the same bowl of Captain Crunch placed in front of us that we get every single morning … but one day, mom runs out and makes us oatmeal instead … well, it’s different, and therefore, yukky.
If we don’t get to wear the same clothes … or hairstyle … or get our ears pierced … or go to the same places and do the same things as our friends … then we aren’t one with them, and we’ll be afraid that we’ll stick out and “everybody will be staring at us because we’re different.”
But maturity recognizes and accepts differences in things which are not of central importance. I don’t have to wear designer clothes like everyone else. I don’t have to watch “American Idol” like everyone else. I can be OK with who I am.

Fine. So Jesus wants us to be mature in our faith. And part of maturity means accepting that everything doesn’t have to be the same identical way for everybody.
But why spend so much time on this one little verse of John’s gospel; one, two little bits of Jesus’ final prayer?
Because, for Lutheran Christians, unity was one of the hot button issues of the Reformation.
Good old Philip Melancthon … the scribe of the Lutheran movement … Martin Luther’s Thomas Jefferson … and the author of the central Lutheran document, the Augsburg Confession … Philip put it so well that I’ll just read his words, Article 7 of the Confession –
“It is enough for the true unity of the church to agree concerning the teaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments. It is not necessary that human traditions, rites, or ceremonies instituted by human beings be alike everywhere.”

It is enough. So what was going on here to cause that kind of a reaction?
Well, the Roman church’s big argument with the Lutherans was that unity meant uniformity … “we walk alike, we talk alike, we sing alike, we dress alike.”
Except … the Lutherans weren’t doing things exactly like their Roman brothers and sisters anymore.
The Lutherans were different. Their worship services looked different. Their priests began to marry. They didn’t wear fancy Roman robes. They sang different songs. They received communion differently.
So, to the Romans, that meant that the Lutherans “weren’t being Christian,” since they were different in these ways.
But good old Philip here said NO … and he came up with a great word that I need you to repeat. ADIAPHORA.
ADIAPHORA.
Adiaphora is Latin for “things of secondary or tertiary importance about which we don’t need to agree.” In other words, they aren’t central to what we’re about, so we can be different.
So it can still be “pop” in Seattle or Minneapolis, “soda” in New York, “tonic” in Boston and “coke” in Atlanta … and be nothing else but a can of Sprite.
And it can be round or square … carpeted or wooden floored … have an organ, a piano, or a band with guitars and drums … be led by a pastor (male or female) or youth or a rocket scientist … singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” or “Shout to the Lord, All the Earth” … reading song lyrics off of a Power Point projection with hands up in the air… or hands on pews or chairs, on red hymnals or bulletins with everything necessary printed inside … and be faithful Lutheran worship.
Being spiritually mature means we can be comfortable with and unapologetic of our own expression of faith … without being critical of others.
And as for the wider Church … it can have the traditions and practices and piety of the Roman Catholics … or Methodists … or Presbyterians … or Episcopalians … Assembly of God … Baptist … or no denomination at all … and still be Christian.
How?
Again, go back to good old Philip’s words …
“It is enough for the true unity of the church to agree concerning the teaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments. It is not necessary that human traditions, rites, or ceremonies instituted by human beings be alike everywhere.”

We don’t have to be clones, one of another, to be one.
Our one-ness is not found in being identical, exactly alike liturgies or hymns, popes, bishops, or pastors, denominations or institutions, or political statements … no … our unity is found only in the One who prayed for us to be protected from the evil one, the One who came and lived our live, and suffered and died for us so that we might have life. We can be different in so many different ways because we are united in Jesus … and receiving his gift of forgiveness and new life through his Cross.
Our one-ness is found in the prayers of Jesus, praying for us, so that we would be mature, resisting the Devil as he prowls around looking for someone to devour … or just looking to start a good old church-dividing fight over things that are not of central importance.
And that will be enough for us, as we go about living out what that means in a world of many cultures and tastes … as we work with other believers and share our gifts with each other and the world. Together we add color to the light of Christ shining through us, like light through a prism breaks into a wide array of colors and hues … so we, through our differences, will enrich each other, our faith, the faith of others … and the entire world.
For our salvation depends on Jesus Christ alone … not on how we pray or praise or organize and govern ourselves as Church. The Church’s One Foundation is Jesus Christ, our Lord, our Beautiful Savior, the One we are called and gathered and sent to love with all our heart.
Amen.

29 May 2011

2011-05-29T13:41:00.001-07:00

“Love will keep us together”
Acts 17:16-34 / John 14:15-21
Easter 6A
29 May 2011

“Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God.”
Fifteen hundred years before Martin Luther wrote those words in his Large Catechism, Paul was surely thinking them as he roamed the streets of Athens, waiting for his friend Silas and Timothy to arrive.
Athens wasn’t the center of the world – that honor now belonged to Rome – but it was the “second city” and the gateway to the Roman Empire’s eastern possessions. It also was the home of the great philosophical movements of the time … different ideas about how to live in the world. And then there was all that history, bearing testimony to the time two hundred years earlier when Greece was the great military and political power.
And so it was into this scene that Paul entered, the apostle to the Gentiles in one of the biggest cities of the Gentile world at the time … and he was fumin’ mad.
Because, besides all that history and philosophy and politics, there was a lot of religion going on in Athens. But none of it was the kind Paul was proclaiming and living.
There were temples and shrines to the great Greek gods, the ones you can still read about in books like “The Odyssey” and “The Adventures of Hercules.” There were temples and shrines to the Roman gods, like Jupiter and Venus. And there were temples and shrines to the gods of the other nations of the Roman Empire … Artemis of the Ephesians; Ra of the Egyptians … as well as synagogues for the city’s many Jews.
But there was nothing … no shrine, no temple, not even a statue erected to the one God Paul knew personally … Jesus Christ, the One who had appeared to Paul and changed his life forever – who told Paul that his mission was to go to places like Athens and speak his name to the people there.
Paul knew he had his work cut out for him there in Athens. There was lots of religion around …temples and statues and shrines on every street corner … but none of these proclaimed God’s truth as Paul knew it to be. There was no church in Athens. Paul was probably the only Christian for miles.
So what did he do?
Did he carry things out in the way much of the evangelism in the world happens today … the three “C”s … confront, convict, and convert? That’s what many Christians believe they need to do in a world, a place and time, a part of the country that looks a lot like Paul’s Athens – not very Christian.
First, confront people and tell them how wrong they are.
Then, convict them by quoting Bible passage after Bible passage, telling them how much they’ve sinned, and that if they don’t accept Jesus as their savior, they’ll burn in hell for eternity.
And then, finally, convert them – bring them to Christ, by force, if necessary.
That’s evangelism for many, many people … many, many churches, in the past right up to today. And lots of people still think that way; some, maybe even our friends and neighbors.
But it’s not the way Paul chose to work in Athens.
So what did he do there? And how might it be helpful to us as we search for ways to share the story of Jesus with others?
Well, first of all, notice where Paul went. Yes, he did go to the synagogue … his own people, the Jews … but he also went to the marketplace, the civic center of Athens, the place where people came and bought and sold and visited with one another, telling stories and sharing the latest news.
Paul didn’t restrict himself to life with like-minded people. He deliberately went out and engaged others who were different from him.
So the first helpful note for us is … if you want to tell people about Jesus, don’t just hang around other Christians. Go to the places where you’ll meet and be with people who are different than you. Understand what’s happening in the popular culture. Be able to speak the language of people today. Christianity was never meant to be a separatist society, breaking off like a cult to be removed from the rest of the world. Christians are called to be engaged in conversation and life with other people, whether they are Christian or not.
Now for our second point, we’ll have to correct the English translation of a couple of words. Paul is said to be “arguing” with the Jews in the synagogue and with the people in the marketplace, and “debating” with the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers – more about those names in a minute.
But in the original Greek language of Acts, what Paul was doing here is simply engaging in dialog … conversing, conferring, presenting his case. He’s not attacking these people for their unbelief, confronting them for what he sees as wrong religion. He’s not ridiculing them for what they believe or don’t believe.
The practice of the time among learned people was to engage in what was called “Socratic discourse,” named after Socrates, the famous Greek philosopher. We might think of a round table or panel discussion on an issue – not a debate or an argument, but a calm dialogue about issues.
And that is what Paul was doing in Athens … engaging them, where they were, approaching them in a friendly manner or being approached himself and asked to discuss what he believed in … his religion, his philosophy of life.
And there were many different, competing philosophies in that Athens marketplace. Among them, Epicureanism … always searching for happiness and ease of life, and avoiding pain and suffering at all costs. And Stoicism … kind of the opposite of Epicureanism; being indifferent to pain and suffering; “taking it like a man” but also not being moved by the suffering of others; being passionless and emotionally solid, like a rock.
These two competing philosophies were so far from what Paul believed, and what Jesus taught and lived, it would have been quite easy for Paul to just lash out at the Athenians, to curse or make fun of them. But he didn’t. He respected their differences as he discussed what he believed.
And that brings us to another point. Paul didn’t assume that the Athenians were not spiritual or religious just because they believed differently than he did. Far from it! Hear how he starts his speech: “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” Just because those Athenians weren’t Christians, didn’t mean they weren’t interested in religion or spirituality.
And this applies particularly to us here in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, on any given weekend, only about 7% of us are engaged in a worship experience. But the majority of us … our friends and neighbors, our family members who don’t worship, who aren’t part of a faith community … still consider themselves to be religious, to be spiritual.
If you don’t believe this, well, what do you think that the primary topic of interest were at the local Starbucks … the bar … the gym, over the past month? May 21 … the Rapture … the end of the world.
So for us, we need to take a cue here from Paul as well. We can’t assume that our neighbor, our friend, our family member who doesn’t worship has no interest or knowledge in things spiritual. Because we would most likely be wrong.
People are in a tender space these days. Unemployment, high prices, economic uncertainty, political uncertainty … people are raw and hurting. They are looking for truth. And you may be the only person they meet who has had an encounter with a loving, accepting, forgiving, renewing faith community in the past week – you may be the only one who can bring them Jesus.
So will you? Will we? In words, in actions, thoughts and feelings that are real and authentic, reflecting, bearing the love of the One who brings us and keeps us together, a love that they can get, they can connect with, that they can take into their very selves?

This is what Paul did with those Athenians, after all. But maybe we’re looking for more help here, with what to say. After all, we’re Lutherans … speaking publicly about our faith is something new and perhaps … no, probably … uncomfortable for us.
So what did Paul actually say to these Athenians … what was his main point, what he was trying to convince them of, what he was “selling” them?
Was it … tradition? Systematic theology? Doctrine and dogma? Worship forms and styles? Hymnals and albs?
Nope.
It was the one thing, the one point that is the heart of the Word about Jesus.
The Resurrection.
The one, unique aspect of being a believer in Jesus Christ is not the tradition, the hymns, the buildings, the institution of the church … none of that … BUT THAT GOD BECAME A MAN, HE LIVED OUR LIFE, HE DIED OUR DEATH, AND HE ROSE AGAIN … DEATH NO LONGER HAS POWER OVER US.
Ouch. That one hurts.
Because, what do we usually say when conversation with another rolls around to matters of faith?
WE TELL THEM ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN JESUS.
We talk about our beautiful buildings … our lovely worship services … our nice pastor.
These all may be good topics for conversation.
But none of these are central to our faith.
Only the Resurrection can claim that spot.
And Paul’s speech to the Athenians does exactly that. He uses quotes from their poets and philosophers. He points out their altar to what they called in Greek “Agnosto Theo” – the unknown god – it was something the Athenians had put up just to cover their bases, to make sure that they honored all the gods, even the ones they didn’t know about yet.
But the main point of his speech is right there in his final words – “Of this he has given assurance to all by raising him” – Jesus – “from the dead.”
The Athenians didn’t know about Jesus – they were AGNOSTICS because they only guessed about Agnosto Theo – the unknown God.
But Paul did know Jesus.
And you know Jesus.
As he says in the Gospel reading, you know him.
Like Paul, you and I have been given the Spirit of truth, in our baptism, in this meal we’ll soon share, in these times of worship together.
We know Jesus. We know him in the very fibre of our being … how he came to earth as one of us, lived our lives as one of us, suffered our lot in life, died our death, but rose again to put death to death forever.
We know Jesus. Here we have seen, and touched him. Felt his splash of grace on our foreheads. Held him close in the welcoming embrace of another. Tasted the goodness of his love in his meal of welcome, forgiveness, new life, and strengthening for service.
And so, like Paul, you and I have no choice but to search out those Athenians and speak about him. Maybe not on the hill of the Areopagus in Athens, Greece … but certainly on this hill and others … Fairwood and Renton and Kent. In Seattle and Tacoma and Tukwila and Bellevue. Anywhere where we encounter those who don’t know Jesus.
Yes, some will scoff and walk away. Others will want to hear more. And still others will join us and become believers.
Everywhere we go, there are empty places …empty hearts … waiting for someone to tell them who is the Unknown God.
You know him.
He abides with you.
He will be in you and with you always.
And the One who has been with you and in you will continue to be with you as you go into the world of the Athenians, to meet them on common ground, and tell them about this One who rose from the dead. For you and me, and them.
For us. Amen.

22 May 2011

2011-05-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

“Love is stronger than death”
John 14:1-14
5 Easter A
22 May 2011

Our Gospel text for today is, in some ways, a curious choice for the 5th Sunday of Easter. In the midst of this season of celebration of resurrection and new life, these are words we most closely associate with … death.
Many different images come to my mind when I hear these very familiar words … perhaps you, too, hear them in the King James English with its rich poetry … “In my Father’s house there are many mansions …”
… many rooms … many dwelling places ...
I remember the time, back in the 1980s, when I toured the world headquarters of a rather prominent religious organization based in Salt Lake City … on the wall in the visitor center, there was a wall of illustrations … depicting this scene which Jesus describes … the “many rooms” where he is going.
I had no idea heaven was furnished in Duncan Phyfe.
What about those of us who like Scandinavian Modern from IKEA???
But more often … these words remind me of the many, many funerals I’ve led and attended … the funeral home services to which I’d be called in Maryland, to perform a ritual for a family who had no religious community connection … the big church-filling funerals in rural Minnesota … each of them, having as a scripture reading, these verses from our Gospel reading today …

“… Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me … I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am there you may be also … Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”

This is the way any number of us usually hear these verses … on a day of grief and sorrow, surrounded by a sad-sounding church organ playing “What a friend we have in Jesus” and “How great Thou art” … these verses, the Acme Lutheran Standard Scripture reading for funerals and related occasions (yes, they are listed that way in the pastor’s manual), chosen because they are to give both assurance and admonition to those in attendance on those days:
… assurance … don’t worry, all is well, your loved one is with Jesus in heaven right now because they were baptized and they believed in Jesus …
… and admonition … It says right there, no one goes to Our Father in heaven who doesn’t believe in him, so you had better believe and shape up, you heathen, or else you’ll never see your dear departed loved ones ever again.

It’s little wonder that one clergy friend of mine calls these verses “the most exclusive in the Bible.” When they are used that way, they surely are. Words used to kill healthy living human emotion (stop crying, grandma’s in heaven) – words used to kill relationship (One Way – Jesus, or else) – words only to be rolled out when there’s been a death.

And yet … this old chestnut of a text, it still has a lot of life in it. Much luster and gleam, if we but rub off the accretions of our sin and selfishness, that’s we’ve put onto it.

First of all, note the context of these words. It is a time approaching death … Jesus is speaking these words as the disciples are gathered together with him after sharing the Passover meal. Judas has just left them “to do quickly what he is going to do.”
The disciples are confused … questioning … wondering … worried. What’s coming? What’s going to happen?

So rub the tarnish off the very first verse.
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.
Do you remember that song, “Bridge over Troubled Water?” That’s the sense Jesus is using here. When he says “troubled” in John’s gospel, it’s the same meaning as when waters get disturbed … in a lake, a pond, a pool. Standing on the side, the shore, you get splashed, you are unsure if you should put your boat in … there’s a small craft advisory.
Certainly this was how the disciples were feeling there, with Jesus, on that night before his death. Troubled, unsure … unsafe waters ahead.
And so Jesus’ responds to their “troubled waters” … not with a hammer over the head “BELIEVE OR ELSE” … but with an invitation … to believe in, literally, to believe into him.
Believing into Jesus on this night when he was betrayed … that surely couldn’t be a one-shot, now or never, do or die affair.
It’s a process … an all-consuming business for the disciples which … Jesus knew … began back when he first called them to join him … continued through all the signs he did … turning the water into wine, healing the man born blind, and raising Lazarus from the dead … and which would next lead them to the cross and tomb.
That’s the way of which Jesus is speaking. Not a literal road, but the Way of the Cross, which he had been on ever since his ministry began.
The disciples surely knew this, didn’t they? They’d been on this way with Jesus for years, together.
So Jesus could say in truth, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.”
But it’s Thomas … yes, the same one who needs physical proof of Jesus resurrected a few chapters later … it’s Thomas who interprets “way” literally, like a road on a map.
So Jesus needs to set Thomas … and the others … straight.
The Way isn’t one which can be plotted on a map.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
The Israelites had been coming to God for centuries, through faith like Abraham’s, through experiencing the divine presence on Mt. Sinai like Moses and Elijah, through God’s presence in the holy of holies in the Temple in Jerusalem.
Here, though, Jesus was offering something different. The close, yes, personal relationship of Father and child like Jesus had, has, can only be entered into through Jesus.

And that word “through” … for that place and time, as close as they were to the events of the Cross … “through” for Jesus must have had painful irony, as he knew the only way he could achieve all this for the disciples, was to be pierced himself … “through” him with nails and spear … this would be the only way he could deliver what he promised … all that he lays out in the subsequent verses … the explanation to Philip … the explication here of what he has just said, earlier … it all will come “through” Jesus, though his death on the Cross, through his being raised again … through “the believing into” him which the disciples will be doing … once they encounter him in the garden that first Easter morning … on the road to Emmaus, in his sharing the bread with them … in his appearing to them and telling them, “peace be with you.”

And that “believing into” Jesus, it continues this day, even for us.
For our hearts, they are troubled too, just as Jesus saw the disciples were that night before he was betrayed.
We, like them, may be unsure of the days ahead … wondering, hoping, praying, “Does God really care for me … for us?’
We’d like that close, personal relationship Jesus had with his Father, too … that assurance that God is really and truly with us.
We would like that good word for our friends, our loved ones, too, that God is really and truly with us.
And so the Good News here, in this good word for us, is that through Jesus, through Jesus, all this comes to us.
Through Jesus. It’s not an exclusive word.
Through Jesus means, the Way of the Cross. Through Jesus … he calls us into his way, his truth, his life, walking the Way of the Cross with Jesus, living for others, sharing this life in all its rejoicings and yes, its pains and sorrows too, sharing with others. Through Jesus, in this Way, he is with us.
Through Jesus means, that through Jesus, we see, we feel, we touch and taste, the Father for us. The bishop sometimes jokes, who has the most authority in the Northwest Washington Synod office? Margaret, his secretary, because you have to go through Margaret to get to the bishop … to set an appointment, to get on his calendar.
In the same way also, we go through Jesus to “get to” the Father.
What Jesus says, goes.
As Jesus said in last week’s Gospel reading, “I am the gate.” We go through Jesus, through Jesus, to get to the Father, to get to life.
Now this is a freeing word!
Freeing, because we aren’t the gate.
We don’t decide who gets in.

Peter Rollins is a northern Irish poet-philosopher-theologian. His friends and colleagues are people such as Rob Bell and Jay Bakker – yes, that Jay Bakker, the son of the former televangelists Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker … they are all part of the “emergent” church movement that is breaking down barriers and trying to undo the damage that the fence-and-wall building thieves and bandits have been doing to the church for the past twenty or so years.
You know who they are, these thieves and bandits.
The ones who keep “troubling up the waters” for us, troubling up more suspicion and doubt among us.
Peter tells a parable – which you can go on YouTube and hear for yourself, just type in the key words “I deny the resurrection” – yes, you heard me right, “I deny the resurrection” – Peter Rollins … the parable goes like this:

A friend named Phil, on leaving church, dreamt that he had died and gone to heaven. And when he got there, St. Peter said, “Hello, it’s great to see you, Phil, welcome, come on in.” And the gates of heaven were opened.
But then Phil looked around, and he saw his friends on the outside … the ones who weren’t Christian … and he asked St. Peter, “what about them?”
St. Peter said, “sorry, Phil, you know the rules.”
So Phil thought of his reference point. He thought of Jesus the outsider. Jesus the friend of sinners. Jesus, the one who would stay with the oppressed.
And Phil decided, and said to St. Peter, “um, I think I’ll stay outside, here, with my friends.”
And St. Peter smiled, and said, “Ah, at last, you understand.”

And then on the video Peter Rollins goes on. “Someone asked me once if I deny the resurrection.” And I said, “yes, yes, I do … I deny the resurrection EVERY TIME I do not serve my neighbor … EVERY TIME I do not help the poor …. But I affirm the resurrection every now and again when I stand up for those on their knees, and I weep for people who have no more tears to shed.”

It’s in moments like those … when we go THROUGH Jesus … his word, his Way of the Cross … that we touch the Father. And we “get” faith. And we experience the Kingdom of Heaven … not just then, not just some far off place and time … but right here, right now.

THROUGH Jesus … we live like every day is our last day on earth … and our first. THROUGH Jesus … we are assured that the Father is with us in all that we do. THROUGH Jesus … we don’t put up more and more fences between us and others … but we point toward the gate … the gate who is Jesus … and HE who is the way, and the truth, and the life. And THROUGH Jesus … we receive the promise that he will go and come again and take us to himself … NOT on a day of our choosing and NOT on a day of someone else’s choosing … a fence builder’s day … a thief and bandit’s day … no, but on the day of HIS choosing, when all we need to know, and hear, is that it is THROUGH Jesus that we do have and we will have forgiveness, life, and a place to remain, with him and his Father, forever.

Amen.

15 May 2011

2011-05-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

“Warm, cuddly love … sometimes”
4 Easter A
John 10:1-10 / Acts 2:44-47 / 1 Peter 2:19-25
15 May 2011

”Jesus used these figures of speech with them ... but they did not understand what he was saying.”

Forget they … we may not understand what Jesus is saying … with all these “figures” before us in today’s Gospel reading:
• Sheepfold
• Gate
• Thief and bandit
• Gatekeeper
• Shepherd
• Sheep

Yes, it’s once again the fourth Sunday in Easter … annually known as “Good Shepherd” Sunday … much beloved by worshippers but received with, well, less than enthusiasm by most preachers I know.
What can one possibly say new and different about sheep, for the seventeenth time in a row, anyway?
But this year’s offering of Gospel text provides us with more than the usual warm fuzziness … while also bringing some treacherous footing for both preacher and hearers.
Jesus is painting a multi-layered, many faceted word picture in these ten short verses of John’s gospel. For concrete thinkers … Biblical literalists … these verses can be nightmarish.

Jesus is a shepherd.
No, no, he’s the gate.
So then, who’s the shepherd? Is Jesus the gatekeeper?
Who are those thieves and bandits?
And what about the sheep?
Baaaaaaa!

Jesus’ words to his disciples here in chapter 10 come right after chapter 9’s drama surrounding the man born blind … if you were in worship on the fourth Sunday in Lent, you heard this story … if not, I recommend chapter 9 to you for reading, a salvation play of several short acts, all contained in one chapter of John’s gospel.
Jesus heals a blind man, and as that man grows in faith, “seeing Jesus” clearer and clearer … those around him … the religious leaders of the day, the crowds, even the man’s parents … they grow increasingly “blind” to God’s truth, God’s reality of goodness, mercy and grace in Jesus, even as he’s standing right before them.
And so, as we continue over into chapter 10, and try to understand the “figures” in which Jesus is speaking … well, if we’ve been paying attention in chapter 9, the answer to one of our questions, “who are those thieves and bandits,” well, Jesus makes this perfectly clear for us.
The thieves and bandits, they are those who, when it comes to matters of faith, stubbornly cling to their own wrong-headed ways … those who feel they must mold and shape God over into their own image of what God is to be like … those who refuse to hear the call of God’s Spirit, through Jesus, to surrender, to lay down their own sin and selfishness … those who must micromanage and control every aspect of faith, God, church, belief, so that it all goes their way, filling their wants, their needs, their desires, their always having to be in the spotlight, in charge, number one, getting their way …
Those are the thieves and bandits, Jesus says. The ones who end up with their pants ripped on the fence, ripped and torn from climbing over, trying to get in, trying to get to the sheep in the wrong way.
Thieves and bandits. Robbers of the pure, sweet word of the Gospel of Jesus Christ alone, robbing that word from those who would faithfully hear and follow it.
Thieves and bandits.
They will always be in your midst, Jesus says. So pay attention, be on guard, and don’t be afraid to call them as you see them … keep them in their place … keep them from harming the flock.
Keep them from harming the flock. In that story of the man born blind, the religious leaders tried to put a stranglehold on religious faith. The blind man, now healed of his blindness a chapter earlier … his own parents refused to believe him for fear that, if they did, they might be put out of the synagogue. They had Jesus right there before them … and yet, they were blind to the light and truth of God … even as their son, now healed, now under attack by those “thieves and bandits” … even as he, disowned by his parents … he saw clearly.
Jesus saw that his flock … his flock of poor, defenseless sheep-people – they were at risk of being carried off by the thieves and bandits – those who wanted to remove them from the place of faith and hope, peace and new life … and so he started to “speak in figures” to his disciples about this threat .
Through those figures, Jesus puts himself in a few different places in this story.
Yes, he is the shepherd of the sheep – that warm, fuzzy, familiar image we hold dear on Good Shepherd Sunday, as we hear and read and sing the words of the beloved 23rd Psalm, “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.”
But Jesus also says he is the gate for the sheep.
And a gate … a gate means that there is a fence, too.
Now maybe we don’t like fences. Maybe to us, fences feel un-Christian … fencing off people from people. Fences … such as … you’re saved and you’re not; you’re going to hell, I’m going to heaven; you can come to the table of the Lord, but you can’t ... you can be a pastor in this church, but you can't.
Ah … but this fence … this gate … this is Jesus … not us … nor our human sin getting in the way of relationship between Jesus and us …
… and just as important … please note that the whole point of the fence, the sheepfold, the gate, the shepherd … this is all about the sheep being led out, to follow the shepherd.
The gate … Jesus … is the way the sheep are led out.
So much for warm cuddly fuzziness.
The whole point of having a shepherd, having a gate, having a sheepfold, being sheep … Jesus says … is not that they … we … get to stay in some soft, cushy, protected, “safe” place of comfort … no, but that we are led out by the voice of our shepherd … the voice of God, in Jesus Christ … leads out into the world.
“The sheep follow him because they know his voice.”
And so … just as Jesus placed himself in multiple places in this story … the shepherd, the gate … so there are multiple places for us as well … we who hear Jesus’ call to follow him.
Sometimes … yes … we are the sheep.
And sometimes … we are the gatekeeper.
The gatekeeper … the one who keeps the thieves and bandits from slipping in among the sheep, as they, we, follow Jesus out into the pasture of the world, to work, to proclaim, to serve.
Being a gatekeeper is an important job.
We have seen, and heard, and experienced what happens, when we let thieves and bandits in, to run with the sheep, to take over the flock, and proclaim their hate-filled message of fear and death … falsely stating that they are speaking for the Good Shepherd … when what they really are, are wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The Good Shepherd needs good gatekeepers, too.
But how are we supposed to know when to open and close the gate? How do we know what’s “gate-worthy” behavior?
There’s where our two other New Testament readings come in.
There’s our reading from 1st Peter … words that are difficult … for they speak of the place of suffering in walking the way of Jesus.
“For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.”
The Way of the Cross … the way of denying ourselves and living for others … it is not popular … indeed, thieves and bandits will do everything in their power to badmouth self-denial, giving and living to and for others, putting them first without regard for our own reward or place.
And yet … the Way of the Cross is most certainly “gateworthy” behavior for us. When we see it … when we encounter in, through the humble words and actions of those who have heard their Shepherd’s voice, his call to follow him … we can open the gates, open the gates of our hearts, open our arms in love and care for our neighbor, open our hands in loving service for the sake of those who most especially need us to live out the love and abundant life of the Good Shepherd, so they may have it in their hearts as well.
Then there’s our reading from Acts.
These words have taken substantial heat lately because, as some have said, “the liberals are using these words to try to prove to us that Jesus wants us all to be socialists.”
It sure does sound that way.
“All who believed … had all things in common … they would sell their possessions and good and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
But let’s cut to the chase here. Acts is not an instruction manual laying out actions for government programs … nor is the author recommending societal laws, to be mandated and enforced by executive fiat … no, what’s being described here is, the organic behavior of Spirit-led believers … in these verses coming immediately after the Pentecost story, God’s Spirit, having come upon these new Christians … that Spirit, God’s Spirit, is guiding them to give and share, voluntarily, willingly… as the Holy Spirit would lead and guide us, too.
These are verses pointing toward an idyllic community … “on earth as it is in heaven” … where believers live and share in the love and light and truth of God’s Spirit, filled with the love of Jesus, filled to overflowing; filled, to give and share.
Was the church really, ever, this way? If it was, how long did life remain like this, because it’s surely not like this now …
That’s true … but our sin and selfishness today need not make us throw these verses out as “pie in the sky” perfection which we’ll never be able to achieve. They remain as a description of “gateworthy” behavior for us … helping us who follow Jesus be good gatekeepers for his flock … when we see and hear that Word of God in action, faith lived out among people, spoken of, commended … we can open the gates, most surely, and let that Word of abundant life come into our faith communities, and into our hearts.
Don’t let the figures of speech throw you. All you need to know, all you need to hear, all you need to see … is the love of Jesus, lived out, acted out, spoken of, around you. And when you do … open wide the gates of your own heart, to welcome in the Good Shepherd of your soul … and be made ready to share him with others.
Amen.

8 May 2011

2011-05-08T18:27:00.000-07:00

“What feast of love”
Luke 24:13-35
2 Easter A
8 May 2011

“When Jesus was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him …”

As we come to this feast of love this morning, how would Jesus open our eyes, to recognize him, and his presence, for and with us?

Perhaps we come tired. Worn out by the events of the week, family situations, or just a miserable Seattle winter. We feel spent, having given it all we can, running on empty.
So here, in this feast of love, Jesus meets us with food for the journey of our lives. In the bread and wine, he says, he promises, “I am with you.” Our Savior who walks alongside us through the tiring, exhausting stuff of this life. Indeed, one who carries us through it when we’re too tired to move.
Here he is. Come and eat and drink.

Maybe we don’t feel worthy to be here. Perhaps we’re carrying around baggage … invisible to others around us … but there they are, suitcases full of guilt and shame, guilt over what we’ve done in the past, how we’ve lived our lives in the past … shame over things that happened to us or are still happening, things over which we may have little or no control, but they’re still there, burdening us, weighing us down.
So here, in this feast of love, Jesus meets us and says, “Here. I’ll take your bags. Come and dine with me, and I will give you a new, fresh start on life. All that was in the past, is past … this is a meal of looking ahead, to what will be, and remember, I am with you always.”
Here he is. Come and eat and drink.

We come with anger. Anger at big, “out there” others which, who we feel are making life miserable for us. Government, presidents, big corporations, politicians. Anger at closer, more personal others … family, parents, friends, boss, co-worker, children. Anger at God … “why did this have to happen to me???”
So here, in this feast of love, Jesus meets us and takes our anger. We come, sulking, pouting, withdrawn, detached, yelling and screaming, even pounding and beating, and he’ll take it. And keep on taking it. He’ll show us his nail-scarred hands, and feet, and side, and say, honestly, truthfully, “I know your pain. I took it to the cross with me, so that it would die there. Now let me show you what I and my Father intend for life … for your life … full, rich, abundant. This is a foretaste of the feast to come.”
Here he is. Come and eat and drink.

We come in fear. We have big fears … what is happening in the world around us … our nation, our state, our city or neighborhood? We have closer in fears … which are just as real to us … will I keep my job? What is happening to my family? I don’t feel as well as I used to … is something wrong?
So here, in this feast of love, Jesus meets us and says, “I know your fears. I have heard them, and I have lived in them … deeply, most dark. And I want you to know I am most certainly with you in those times of fear and questioning. I keep my promises to you. Here in this meal is a down payment on my promise to never leave you, to always be with you.”
Here he is. Come and eat and drink.

We come from the outside, looking in. We feel separate, apart, not connected, living without meaning and without purpose. Unemployed or underemployed, left behind by an economy that rewards those who have more with still more … and leaves those with less, with even less, even less. Retired and bored, sitting in front of the television day in and day out, alone. In school, not fitting in. In job, doing drudge work for a pittance of pay. In a most populated place, we may feel terribly alone.
So here, in this feast of love, Jesus meets us and welcomes us and says, “My beloved! I’ve been waiting for you. Your brothers and sisters, also my beloved, are already here. Come and join in this meal of welcome and abundance, without cost, without price. I’ve already paid the bill in full. Come in, take your reserved place, and celebrate with us.”
Here he is. Come and eat and drink.

Or perhaps we come with joy. Life is good for us; we feel God’s presence, God’s abundance and blessings, and we want to celebrate and share with others … especially others who we know, we realize, don’t have it so good in this life.
So here, in this feast of love, Jesus meets us and feeds us … and then, he takes us aside, and whispers in our ear, “Now here’s what I’d like you to do after you leave my table … there’s a brother or sister over there who needs an uplifting word … there’s a task there among the homeless and downtrodden that needs your participation … there’s a ministry in this congregation of my people that’s just been waiting for someone like you with your gifts and talents to come and take part, to go and serve … GO AND SERVE.”
Here he is. Come and eat and drink.

No matter where we are in this life, from where we’ve come, to where we’re going … in this feast of love, Jesus meets us in all our human conditions, and he gives us exactly what we need.
For this life. And for the life to come.

One size feeds all.
What feast of love, indeed.
Here he is. Come and eat and drink.
Amen.

1 May 2011

2011-05-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

“Love among the ruins”
John 20:19-31 / 1 Peter 1:3-9
2 Easter A
1 May 2011

Though the calendar says it’s the Second Sunday of Easter … our Gospel texts for this and next week remain on the Day of Jesus’ Resurrection itself.
It’s such a monumental event … THE reason for the Church, that We Are the Church, after all … Jesus is risen! …
… it’s such a monumental event, that it takes a few weeks for the weight of what has happened to sink in. We need to hear the story, again and again, told and retold to us … so that, in and through the telling, as John says at the end of today’s text, “so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”
Part of that “again and again” means that today we have our annual reading of the story of Thomas, the story labeled forever as “doubting Thomas,” and sermons and messages repeated ad nauseum on one of two themes …
… berating Thomas for his “doubting,” or
… inviting hearers of this story to live in, and be comfortable with, their “doubts” about the faith.
There’s just one problem with both those interpretations.
Nowhere in this text does Jesus use the word “doubt.”
The words are pistis and apistis … pisteo being the Greek verb for “to believe” … so the similar dichotomy in our English would be, to use another word, like that between “moral” and “amoral.” Literally, “having faith” and “without faith.”
So Jesus says to Thomas, “Do not become unbelieving, but believing.”
But I think we like to use that word “doubt” because it reflects our natural position of having a theology of scarcity … there’s just not enough to go around …
… enough of what, you may ask?
Enough of … anything.
Money. Land. Gasoline. Health care. Parking spaces. Easter candy.
And faith.

If I could just have more faith, and less doubt, things would be all better.
Better for Thomas.
And better for us.
Yeah, that’s it. More faith.

But what this old chestnut of a story is really saying to and for us, is that this whole concept of “more faith” is a total crock.
Thomas either has faith, or he doesn’t.
We either have faith, or we don’t.
A vacuum is only a vacuum while it is totally devoid of everything. Once one little molecule of air is introduced into the vacuum, it’s not a vacuum any more.
And so it is with faith.
This is why in Luke’s gospel, when the disciples say “Increase our faith,” Jesus replies, “if you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
We have enough. Enough money, enough food, … and enough faith.
The theology of scarcity is nothing more than the voice of death, once more, come calling.
And since death met its death on the cross … all there is left for us is faith … hope … love … and life.

And so … to address those who decry “doubting Thomas and his doubts” … since questioning faith necessarily means that there is faith there any way … not a vacuum … then, questioning faith (not doubt, please … just send that death-and-scarcity word right out of our faith-vocabulary forever) … questioning faith isn’t going to harm faith one bit.
Indeed … questioning … testing … tempering faith … can only serve to strengthen it.

And so, with faith, as it is in so many other things we humans abuse, the problem isn’t in the acquiring … it’s in the application.

And that takes us to the often-forgotten first part of this Gospel text … what happens on the evening of Resurrection … when Jesus appears to every other disciple except Thomas … as they’re locked away in fear … shut away for safety … there, among the ruins of all that their lives with Jesus had been … the really dead Jesus, now really raised from the dead Jesus appears personally to them and says “Peace be with you.”

This is, of course, directly connected with the words which come after … and their popular interpretation. If the whole business about Thomas is a story about doubt … don’t doubt, have more faith, more faith to believe more …then, this part of the story, these words, will show us the result of having that more.
Jesus sends those who really, truly believe … he sends them, us … peace.
“Peace be with you.”

There’s just one thing with this peace.
It’s not very peaceful.
Indeed, it’s unsettling.
First, it comes with a directive, to be messengers of the Gospel of forgiveness. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
Second, it comes with a charge … “as the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

If you sifted through everything that hacked Jesus’ opponents off about him … everything Jesus did that got him into trouble … what would be the One Thing that was at the root of it all?

Associating with people on the outside? Performing miracles? Raising the dead?
Well, those were all part of it.
But there was one overarching theme … through everything that he did … that most rubbed people the wrong way, about him.

Jesus claimed to be God.

And how did he do this?
He forgave people their sins.
Why, only God can forgive sins … that’s what the religious folks of Jesus’ day said. How can this man do what only God can do?
Exactly. Except, of course, they didn’t realize that this man was, is, also God.

And so here, when Jesus gives the disciples “peace,” and then sends them out to forgive sins in his name … well, this is no “serenity now” … no “every day in every way, it’s getting better and better.”
And certainly it’s no “just have more faith, more faith, more and more and more faith, and you can do more, believe more, work more for Jesus than if you had less faith … and more and more stuff’s going to go right for you, go your way, then, too. God’s material blessings will shower down upon you … just don’t doubt, but have more faith, have more faith.”

Again, that’s a total crock.
Jesus sends peace all right … but it’s peace that will be most unsettling.
It is peace through the sign of the cross … the sign of truth, the sign of God’s justice, the sign of It All Stops Here, folks … the phoniness, the lies … the theology of scarcity … the endless cries for “more.”

It. All. Stops. Here.

Our reading from 1st Peter … one of the last of the Scriptures to be added to the canon of the Bible … coming somewhere around a hundred years after the words of John’s gospel were written … they point out the reality of what following Jesus meant then … his peace, most unsettling …

In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith – being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire – may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy.

Those to whom this letter initially came, living a hundred years after Jesus’ death and resurrection … none of them had seen Jesus in person … they were well past the events of his life and suffering, death and being raised. But they, also sent in his Spirit, sent in his peace, sent in faith … not more or less, just Sent In Faith … they believed, too, despite the trials and sufferings they were beginning to feel as Christianity became an underground, criminal, persecuted religion in the Roman Empire … they believed, and were sent, to bring the word of forgiveness and peace to people of their place and time …
… leading to generation upon generation, so that this word of peace and forgiveness would come even to us, even to us …
And it is still a disquieting peace. Not a nice peace. But a peace which acknowledges that humans sin, and everything that we humans do … build … assemble … put together … governments, schools, corporations, and yes, the church … all are full of sin … the cry for “more” … and all of us, each and every one of us, we are still and most certainly in need of the word of forgiveness and new life.

Our book group is reading the new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We just finished the section which included his sermon to a group of theological students and pastors at Fano, Denmark in 1934. Though his situation was different than ours … facing the Nazi threat where state would take the place of God … his words in that sermon about peace, the peace Jesus brings, still ring true for us today ... especially on this Sunday, with this text before us:

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture, and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust. To look for guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying down the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.

That is the peace Jesus gave to the disciples gathered there that day.
And this is also at the heart of the question Jesus asked of Thomas, that first Sunday after the Resurrection.

“Do you want more … or do you want me?”

With peace, there is no “safety.” With faith, there is no more.
It’s all about Jesus. His cross, his life, his death, his resurrection.
All for the sake of the world. All for us.

No More and No Less.
His call, to all of us, his claim, on each of us, is for All of Us.
… that we may have life, in his name.

Enough faith. Enough life.
And enough … to share.
…so that they may have life, in his name, too.

Amen.

24 April 2011

2011-04-24T17:56:00.000-07:00

“Love wins”
The Resurrection of our Lord
Matthew 28:1-10, 16-20
24 April 2011

Every year around Easter, it’s the same thing.
The mainstream media discover God.
Usually, it’s the annual onslaught of programs on the History Channel, or Discovery, that have something to do with “God” … “The Search for Noah’s Ark” … or “Archaeological Secrets of the Old Testament.” And there’s the annual cover story on US News or Time or Newsweek packing some kind of “shock value” – “Did Jesus have a wife?” “Was Mary Magdalene Prince Andrew’s ancestor?”
But this year – wonder of wonders – the “hot story” actually has some theological substance to it.
Rob Bell is a Gen-X (read, 40 something) pastor, an author, and a lecturer from “the other side of the aisle” – he’s an Evangelical, which in our modern context most usually equals Conservative Fundamentalist Christian – even though Bell’s been pushing that envelope for years. I heard him speak to a crowd of 20,000 ELCA youth in the Georgia Dome 8 years ago, and he was amazing … he broke through all the stereotypes we Lutherans might have had of our brothers and sisters on that side of the aisle … he had that crowd of mostly Midwestern Lutheran youth in rapt attention … it was so quiet in that huge facility the only thing you could hear was Bell’s voice, just telling us stories about Jesus.
So if you’ve picked up a copy of Time magazine this week, or turned on CNN, or gone to Third Place Books, or even looked on Amazon.com to see what’s new for your Kindle … you’ve seen wall-to-wall Rob Bell. He’s written a new book … to add to his list of titles which include “Velvet Elvis” and “Jesus wants to save Christians” … this one’s simply titled “Love Wins.”
And it’s got conservative Christianity’s collective undies in a bunch.

Of course, the media’s having a field day with all this … “conservative pastor does away with hell,” you may have heard that line on TV. But that’s not what he’s saying, or writing … as usual, when the mainstream media gets hold of something like this, they blow it all out of proportion and distort it and sensationalize it.
The truth of what he says, would they have reported that, is earthshattering enough.
Basically, what Bell’s saying, is that we’ve got to stop defining the Christian faith in judgmental terms … saying “you’re in and you’re out” …being so sure that everyone who reads the Scriptures or walks into a building that has a cross on it, to worship, is “saved” while everyone else, everyone else, who doesn’t accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior is “going to hell.”
The example Bell cites in beginning his book sets the tone for everything that follows.

Several years ago we had an art show at our church. I had been giving a series of teachings on peacemaking, and we invited artists to display their paintings, poems, and sculptures that reflected their understanding of what it means to be a peacemaker. One woman included in her work a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, which a number of people found quite compelling.
But not everyone.
Someone attached a piece of paper to it.
On the piece of paper was written: “Reality check: He’s in hell.”
Really? Gandhi’s in hell?
Somebody knows this?
And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?

Why is it that, whenever people claim that one group is in, saved, accepted by God, forgiven, enlightened, redeemed – and everyone else isn’t – why is it that those who make this claim are almost always part of the group that’s “in”?

It’s no wonder one of Gandhi’s most famous quotes, when speaking of Christians, goes like this: “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
Or, as I heard it recently, put more bluntly: “I like Jesus, just not his posse.”

Those of us who don’t count ourselves as part of that judgmental posse … and Lutherans of our particular flavor … what we call the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America … we would officially be part of that mix … we would NOT utter condemning words such as these … “I’m saved, but you’re going to hell” … perhaps this whole controversy about Rob Bell leaves us scratching our heads.
If it doesn’t, it should.
For the heritage we Lutherans walk and talk and worship and pray within, it’s always been about grace … forgiveness … God’s radical welcome and kindness, love and peace for us in Jesus Christ. We don’t get that judgmental condemning talk because, well, we just can’t find it in the Bible, used this way.
Now, that’s not to say it’s not there. It’s there in spades, when Jesus is talking to the religious leaders of his day, who are more in love with money and power and prestige and political influence than they are with God. When Jesus condemns these religious leaders for their hypocrisy in saying one thing but doing another … saying they love God, all the while they’re stealing from the least of God’s children … the poor, the powerless, the downtrodden, the widow, the orphan, the stranger in their midst.
Hmn.
Things haven’t changed much in 2000 years, have they?

It was, after all, talk like that, that got Jesus killed. When he crossed the line, when he stood with those who needed God most – and more, when he said these poor, who-the-world-says-are-the-most-God-forsaken-people, they … they… are most especially who God is for the most… well, he went right to the top of the Roman terrorist watch list.
Talk like that goes against nice polite society. Talk like that makes the powers that be – uncomfortable … talk like that has to be silenced.
And so it was. Jesus was killed for it. Really killed. Really dead, not breathing, not anything. Dead. And really buried in the ground.
And so on that morning when the few friends who had stood by him through the end went to go see the tomb … just checking, to help them believe that their teacher and rabbi and friend was gone …
… and we know that feeling, after a sudden, terrible loss … we still can’t believe it, but we must …
… so on that morning, when they found that their dead friend was not there … they were told, “do not be afraid.” And when they saw him, as they ran from the tomb, when they saw him, really alive, right there before them, the first words he said to them were also “do not be afraid.”
There’s a reason for that.
Because death’s biggest helper is fear.
Fear motivates. Fear sells.
And our culture, our country, it’s free-flowin’ on fear, right now, more than ever before.
Certainly the fear that’s behind statements like what Rob Bell is writing against … the fear that is behind the loudest Christian religious voices in the public square … “believe in Jesus, believe in Jesus MY WAY, my morals, my laws, my rules … or go to hell.”
But there’s more fear out there.

There’s fear about the future of our country … 70% of Americans now say that “we’re going in the wrong direction.”
Fear that life is only going to get worse, harder, bleaker for Americans into the future.
Fear that we’re going to get cancer from that Japanese nuclear plant.
Fear that a huge mega-earthquake is going to strike the Northwest and level everything.
Fear that we’re all gonna die.

Turn to Jesus … or burn in hell for all eternity!

Precisely.

What kind of living is that?
It’s not living, it’s dying. It’s all about death.
And what is the loudest Christian voice in the midst of this fear?
Hey, it’s sure a good thing I have Jesus. Too bad YOU don’t.

Nothing but … more death. More rotten, stinking, three days in the ground putrid death.

See, the problem is … we’ve who have been given the Word of Life, to live and to share with a world so desperately in need of hearing it, we have abdicated the public stage to the sayers and players of death.
It’s the voice of death that people are hearing. The voice of death that’s stirring up fear among us.
The voice of death which causes people to not like Christians, to not want to “run with Jesus’ posse.”

Friends … the word of life is right before us … it always has been … and especially, most especially, on this Easter day, it rings true and clear and sweet:
“He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said.”
Love, not death, wins. Jesus, really dead, is now really alive. Our God keeps all those promises, for us.
So do not be afraid. Do not be a tool of fear and death any more.
For death itself is dead, and what we have been given is life … full, rich, abundant, overflowing life.
And more … this is life with PURPOSE.
We have this Word … rather, this Word has us … and it, he – Jesus, God’s Word in person, he comes with a Way as well:
“Go quickly and tell … ‘he has been raised from the dead.’”
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations …
Discipling … a simple four part process, shown to us by Jesus, how to share love:
I do, you watch.
I do, you help.
You do, I help.
You do, I watch.
“… go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit …
… teaching them …
… and remember, I am with you always.”

Disciple. Baptize. Teach. Remember.
Words, not of death, for death is dead.
Words of life, to and for the sake of the world.
Words of life, to hear, to eat and drink at the Meal of New Life … Word to give, and share, without apology, without meekness or timidity, without gimmicks or tricks … just honestly, authentically … from who we are … to who they are … with love.
Words of life, which Jesus tells, commands us who follow him to share. To boldly share into a world which needs more than just a feeble “they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
These are Words, this is Life, which breaks through Death itself, and proclaims the New … in Christ … for the sake of the whole world.

Christ has died!
Christ is risen!
Christ will come again!

Love Wins. Thanks be to God! Amen.

10 April 2011

2011-04-10T14:17:00.000-07:00

“Faces of faith – Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead”
John 11:1-45 5 Lent A 10 April 2011

In some ways, it feels like “déjà vu all over again.”
Once again this week, the two people at the center of our Gospel text are not the primary focus of its words and actions. Jesus … and one he is moved to heal … Lazarus, suffering from the ultimate “something’s wrong with him” … he’s dead … they are there ... here … but the story really isn’t about them, is it?
There’s Lazarus’ sisters, Martha and Mary – they send Jesus word that their brother is ill.
There’s the disciples – living through another lesson in missing the point.
There’s the crowd … once again described in John’s “code-language”as “the Jews” … but please, read, hear those words as John meant them … not as another anti-Semitic cultural swipe but merely a term used for what we might say are the “religious professionals” as well as the “professionally religious” … religious leaders as well as laity … today we’d call them “churchy people.”
Yes, there’s Lazarus … sick unto death at the beginning, dead through most of the verses, and then, NO, NOT RESURRECTED, but curiously RESUSCITATED, made alive again in this life for living in this life which would, once again … and, if we believe the words of Scripture, cruelly … end in death for him.
And then there’s Jesus.
Jesus, who starts out this Sunday’s encounter in the Way of and to the Cross in exactly the same way he began last week’s story about the man born blind: saying that everything which will happen here, will happen for God’s glory.

The sisters (Mary and Martha) sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

Last week – as we heard Jesus’ words as they are actually written … he said the same thing … the blind man’s illness would be for God’s works to be done, God’s glory to show through what he- Jesus - would do because of it. While everyone around them fretted and fussed about what this healing meant for them … bystanders not believing it actually happened … Pharisees and “Jews” not believing it actually happened because they said it couldn’t have actually happened, and what they said about religion was the word, after all … even the blind man’s parents, more concerned for their own safety than for the welfare of their son, deciding to remain silent about it … while everyone around them made it all about them … Jesus and the formerly blind man lived into God’s work, God’s glory happening, showing forth through them … “Lord, I believe,” the formerly blind man said, and he worshipped Jesus.
Jesus gingerly sidestepped the whole “pin-the-blame-on-the-sinner” game – despite the all-too-ready nature of those around him … and even, the text translators of our time and place – to make illness, suffering, a game of self-justification (I don’t do that, therefore, I won’t get that, or suffer that, because I’m better than them) or, worse, a place where God enters history to manipulate it to God’s own selfish, capricious ends – willy nilly making some people sick and some well, some to become crippled and maimed in car accidents and others to safely arrive at their destinations.
Ah, but that was last week.
Here, today, we have a whole new set of circumstances. Jesus gets word from Mary and Martha that their brother, his friend, Lazarus, is dying … and yet, he stays away two days longer than he had planned.
What’s going on here? Is Jesus manipulating things here, letting Lazarus die, so he can prove something?
Certainly the cries of Mary and Martha, once Jesus does come to them, sound like that’s where they are, in their thinking and feeling.
And their words, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” are they not our words too, our cries when someone near and dear to us has suffered, is suffering, is dying, right before us?
God seems so far away at the deathbed of a loved one. These words of Mary, of Martha, we know them, we who have been in that place too, we know them well. Why can’t God come, why can’t Jesus get off his can and get here, right here, right now, and DO SOMETHING to make it all right?
We know them, these words, these feelings, but maybe, probably, we can’t bring ourselves to give them voice. Something holds us back. We might fear that words, feelings like this, they just aren’t right.
“Who are YOU to question God?” that little voice inside our heads says. Just accept it … that’s what we tell ourselves … it’s God’s will, the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.
Yet … this story ... it neither criticizes those who share Mary and Martha’s cry of anguish … nor does it intimate that Jesus is just manipulating these matters of life and death for his own benefit.

First, if Jesus would have really wanted to manipulate circumstances, he would have dropped everything and run straight to Lazarus, healing him, preventing him from dying. “The Jews” gathered there at Lazarus’ tomb speak the words for all of them there … and, perhaps, probably, us, here, too … “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
And yet … if Jesus would have done this … he would truly have been manipulating the situation. And so what would have been the outcome if Jesus would have gone to Lazarus before he died and healed him? “When Jesus is around, no one has to die,” that would have been the byword, the catch phrase … in so many ways, Jesus would have been living out precisely what the Devil was tempting him to do, back in the desert, back in that text we heard the first Sunday in Lent.

Just forget this “fully human” stuff Jesus … be Jesus Christ Superstar … superman, superhuman … turning stones into bread, jumping off tall temples at a single bound, and not dying … that was his temptation.
Basically, for Jesus to turn his back on us, our situation, our life-and-death existence, by becoming so totally un-like us that he would have been of little use to us.
Who, indeed, needs a superman God who doesn’t understand what it is like to be me … or you … with all the temptations and trials, suffering and pain, we feel, every day?

So, just as in last week’s text, Jesus doesn’t enter history to short-circuit it. Just like last week, when his message was __________ (you fill in the blank) happens, and yet, I will be glorified in, through, because of it … this week, he says, DEATH happens, and yet, I will be glorified, in, through, because of it.
Jesus refuses to short circuit the natural human life cycle, which ends for all of us in death … because he wants to show us a sign of what God is going to do through death.
Which, granted, is a hard word for us to hear. It confuses us; how can Jesus just seem to stand idly by while his friend suffers and dies … while we suffer and die?
Again … __________ happens. This is the way of our human lives, and Jesus is saying here by his actions that by his coming, he’s not going to do an end run, pull a rabbit out of a hat, make a quick fix, a band-aid, a bailout, of how things must be in this life. Recall that in his Sermon on the Mount … our text for most of the Epiphany season just past, he tells his disciples that “I have come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.” And the law for all life on this earth IS death.
That being said, though … observe, see, watch where Jesus is in the midst of all this.

He is right there alongside those who are suffering because of death … the non-anxious presence, not whipped into a frenzy of selfish self-interest because of the anxiety of those around him … but truly loving, caring, and engaged with them.
He stayed two days longer in the place where he was. This brought him to Lazarus’ grave four days after he died. This is deliberate. Had Jesus shown up sooner, there could have been a chance for Jesus to manipulate things … there was a feeling in those days, that in the three days following death, the deceased might not really be dead … in the Jewish custom of “sitting Shiva,” waiting and wailing with the deceased’s family for three days following death … there was always the hope that the visible outcome might be different. But by the end of the third day, there was no hope. Those who remained “sitting Shiva” for the full seven days … on day four, they knew this death was real. And the mourning would become deep and painful, because the finality of it all would sink in.
“Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died,” says Martha, and her needs from Jesus are spiritual. She needs to hear the Word about a God who brings life through death, resurrection and life and salvation. So that is precisely where Jesus meets her, even before he gets to where Lazarus is buried, Jesus meets Martha and gives her the word of life … “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
“Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died,” says Mary, and her needs from Jesus are emotional. Thus he doesn’t say a word to her, but asks where Lazarus is buried, and he weeps along with her.
“Lord, if Lazarus has fallen asleep, he will be all right,” say the disciples, and their need is faith-cognitive. They need to believe what Jesus is really about, as he makes his way to Jerusalem and the cross, and so Jesus tells them, “For your sake I am glad I was not there (with Lazarus, to heal him), so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”
Jesus is right there, alongside those who are suffering because of death.
It is a prefiguring of Jesus’ own death, to be sure. Did Jesus not have to go to the Cross, not have to suffer, not have to die there at that dark day on Calvary? Of course. And we have heard those words ourselves, Jesus’ own demons tempting him to become the great glorious Messiah-King without going through the garbage of what the rest of us experience as life. Illness, poverty, suffering, hunger … he didn’t need to have any of it … he is God after all.
And yet … what kind of a relationship would, could we have with a God who sets up this world for us, and just lets it spin on, while he looks out for himself, his own best interests, we keep suffering and dying and he just goes on doing whatever the hell he wants. We might worship a God like that out of fear and trembling … appeasement … a sense of “God’s gonna get you if you don’t” … but certainly, there would, could be no love in that relationship.
And so Jesus comes to show that this God, our God, chooses another way. Another way to be with us, as one of us, taking on everything we do and are in this life, for us, for the sake of love.
Make no mistake. The path of what we might see as glorious and god-like, it’s nowhere to be found here. This way of Jesus, this taking on our humanity fully, completely, it literally stinks.
“Lord, already there is a stench because he has been in the ground four days.” The climate of Palestine makes this statement particularly true, but also for us, death stinks. Literally … as we see the pictures of the masked rescuers and recoverers in Japan and Haiti … and figuratively … as we experience the suffering and pain of it all … the pain, the suffering, the tears … death stinks.
And yet … and yet … there is Jesus in the midst of it all.
DEATH HAPPENS. It happened for Lazarus because of his illness …as we read this story beyond the verses provided for us today, we find that it will come again, soon, for him, as the chief priests and Pharisees plot Lazarus’ death because people believe in Jesus after they see Lazarus resuscitated from death.
DEATH HAPPENS. It is the natural outcome of what it is to be human.
DEATH HAPPENS. Although we humans will do everything in our power, spending millions, bailing out that which is terminal, taking all sorts of heroic and extreme measures … to manipulate, to play God ourselves … DEATH STILL HAPPENS.
And yet … Jesus, in resuscitating Lazarus … raising him to this life, once again … is pointing to what will soon follow … Jesus, suffering and dying on the Cross, so that, that time, in that moment, death itself would die. People did and are and will still die after Jesus’ death and resurrection … but this time, things have changed, death itself is in its death throes, and there is the promise, the hope, for us, of eternal life.
Which is, of course, the One Main Thing about our faith. It’s not songs and hymns. It’s not nice pleasant gatherings, potlucks, parties, social affairs. It’s not even synod assemblies and congregational meetings. The One Main Thing about this following Jesus stuff is that we hold onto hope, because of the promise made to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus, that death just plain is not the end.

This is the message of Hope For Us.

And granted, lately, it’s become harder and harder to be hopeful, when pretty much everything around us which we used to count on can’t be counted on anymore. This week I kept track of all the news I’ve heard about “cutbacks” (which, you know, is just another term for ‘death’) … in government, to be sure … but also, in people’s lives, their hopes, their dreams … homes, vacations, retirement plans, career goals.
Those of us gathered at Bishop’s Convocation last Tuesday heard about how the next moves in our ELCA denomination will be … yes, more cutbacks … a coming large decrease in the number of synods and the vital work those staffs do.
It does get depressing, and I’ll admit to my own “Gen X-ness,” taking on of much of this hopelessness. I joked with one of my friends recently that my personal retirement and healthcare plan was to work until I was so old that during worship I drop face first into the chalice and drown. It’s gallows humor to be sure, but there’s seriousness behind it. The reality of life for anyone who is 50 or under these days is that their … our … lives will not be better than our parents, but harder, bleaker … worse.
It is a hard time to be hopeful. And yet, personally, there is one Word to which I cling, sometimes, in my own life, it is the only thing, the only Word which gives me hope, which keeps me going, from day to day.
And today … it’s right here before us: “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” And Jesus began to weep.
Today, it’s right here before us: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

In the midst of death, death all around us, we have The Word of promise and hope … or rather, that Word has us … that death is not the end. And that Word … that person of and in that Word named Jesus … he walks with us through the very valleys of the shadow of death, carrying us from death to life.
But we must not stop there. For, in the midst of so much hopelessness, it is now our blessing to be stewards of this word to the world.
It’s no mistake that Jesus’ final words in this story are to the gathered community … really, to us … to take the once-dead Lazarus and set him free … “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Jesus has unbound us from the hopelessness that binds us unto death. Now we … the gathered community, receiving that Word in Water and promise, Word of forgiveness and promise, Word in bread and wine of promise … we are called to go and unbind others, in their hopelessness and despair, to bring them … in our all-too-human words and actions … fragile and failure-prone though they are … Jesus entrusts us to bring that Word of life, freedom and hope to the world.
In these days of hopelessness and despair … this is a charge we must take on with all soberness, seriousness, and strength of purpose.
For it is only through us … our words, our acts … that the world will receive ANY word of the life which really is life, life eternal, life abundant, life which makes this life worth living, worth risking for, worth taking chances in love for others … for we have been given his Word on how it all turns out… For Us.
Yes, DEATH HAPPENS. And Christ is there … and here … and THERE.
And so shall we be, in his name … for life. Amen.

3 April 2011

2011-04-03T14:41:00.000-07:00

“Faces of faith – Jesus and the man born blind”
John 9:1-41
4 Lent A
3 April 2011

We have spent much time in this season of Lent getting to know people … faces of faith … unforgettable characters along Jesus’ way of and to the Cross.
We’ve had increasing time – each week – to spend with them … the Gospel readings each succeeding Sunday have grown longer and longer … from a mere 11 verses four Sundays ago … to an entire chapter, 41 verses in all, today.
And yet … though you might think, given the length of these readings, these stories, that we would be becoming better acquainted with these Lenten companions … as we have with Nicodemus, and the woman at the well … today, certainly, we do not.
For the story of the man born blind, is so little about this man, himself … he’s another character, lost in his darkness, brought into the light by Jesus … but the bulk of this story, it’s not about him.
It’s about his neighbors, about the Pharisees, about the man’s parents … anyone, everyone else … though the man who was blind, who is healed by Jesus in the beginning of this story, appears all the way through it, we hear very little from him, about himself. The conversation aimed at him, it’s all about his being bullied, cornered, into making a statement which those others want to hear about how they are affected by what’s happened, rather than, how the blind man himself feels now that he’s been healed.
It’s a selfish tale, to be sure. Selfish, self centered, and spinning around and around the two people at the center of it … rather than focusing on them.
This is also a fearful tale, which should give it some real traction among its hearers today, we who live in the most fear-filled of times, fear coming at us from all directions, political, economic, social, natural disasters.
And yet … the two people at this story’s center … the blind man, and Jesus … they are like the eye of the storm …they are calm, collected, not anxious, not fearful, nor breeding anxiety in and among those around them. Which serves to make their hearers even more anxious and resentful.
This is the curious way of what people who work with and analyze human systems … what they call “the non anxious presence.” In any organization or human gathering, the result, the outcome, of one person who remains calm, while controversy and chaos spin all around them, is the same. And this “works” in virtually any situation, where there is conflict … family, school, job, and yes, church. Especially, the church.
The “non-anxious presence” remains calm, cool and together … not disconnected or aloof, but listening and caring … they just do not become anxious … despite the anxious cries of those around him or her, others trying to share their own anxiety, fear, troubled natures. Eventually, the majority of those around them also take on this calm, collected nature … while the real sources of anxiety in the system … are shown in the true light of what they’re doing … likely, becoming more anxious, more fearful in the process … but now the system … the family, the company, the church congregation … is strong enough to resist them, so they won’t do damage anymore.
This is what’s known as “making the system healthy.”
Unfortunately, in our Gospel story today, we don’t see health restored to the whole system … though we assume that some who heard and saw what was going on here, took in the truth of what was going on, and told that story to still others … so that the Word about Jesus continued to spread.
What we do see is health, wholeness, healing, light shining into his darkness, coming to the blind man, in so many ways … and this story, bookending if you will around Jesus’ fervent hope, desire, that what he would do in this encounter would glorify God.
We begin … in the darkness.
At the start of the story, everyone’s in the dark, except Jesus. The disciples and Jesus are walking along, and they see this blind beggar. The disciples, seeing a moment in which they might sound as smart as their rabbi, able to engage him on a theological level, ask Jesus the standard theological question in such circumstances, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
It’s the theological question of the self-justifying … when something bad is encountered … we hear of someone who had terrible misfortune befall them … accident … natural disaster … illness … death … and we must search for a cause.
We humans must search for a cause. Why did this happen?
Sometimes, there may be some nobility associated with this causality quest … a rightful investigation so that this won’t happen again. That is the place of science … the non-anxious presence, if you will, in the investigative process. The NTSB comes out to comb through the airplane crash site and find the “black boxes.” Medical researchers determine this chemical additive or that environmental factor contributes to a rise in cancer rates.
But then … the human side weighs in … and self-justification is the end and goal. Well, she smoked, so of course she got cancer … good thing I don’t smoke.
Did you ever see how he ate? It’s no wonder he died of a heart attack. Good thing I eat better than that.
At times this search for self-justification … building up oneself while tearing down another … becomes downright harmful. And of course we’ve seen this all too frequently … as purported “churches,” TV preachers and political loudmouths all try to explain terrorism, natural disasters, radiation leaks and the like as direct results of equal rights for all, loose morality in the media, liberal politics, “not following God’s word in the Ten Commandments.”
This line of thinking certainly shows up in the words of the disciples here … trying to pin the sin on the sinner … “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Somehow, some way, there must be a cause, a reason, for this man’s blindness. The great religious minds of that time said that physical or mental defect … illness, handicap … was caused by sin, either that of the one affected, or their parents.
You can see we haven’t come too far in two thousand years … have we?
But Jesus … THE non-anxious presence … he won’t have any of it.
Even our English translation … the New Revised Standard Version … needs to, must enter this Hobson’s choice … putting forth Jesus’ words here as “Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.’”
There’s just one problem with that translation. It’s not what Jesus says.
The original Greek of this text nowhere includes the words, “he was born blind.” That’s the anxiety of the translators, trying to keep a shred of self-justification present, even in Jesus’ words.
So what does Jesus really say?
“Neither this one sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God might be revealed – shown – made clear in and through him.”
Jesus refuses to enter the self-justification, pin-the-blame-on-the–sinner-so-I-can-feel-better-about-myself game.
He also refuses to speculate as to why this man was born blind.
The text translation seems to go a third way … like God caused this man to be born blind so that God’s glory might be made manifest in the healing.
But this is also bad theology. Who wants a God who willy nilly makes people sick, or blind, or lame, just so he can be glorified in their healing? A manipulative controlling, capricious God such as this … would only instill fear and trembling in me, not awe, not reverence, not love. And certainly no willingness to be in relationship with him. I would guess it would be the same for you.
But Jesus destroys this falsehood about God as well … not with words, but with silence.
“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Jesus’ answer is … silence. He … the blind man … was just born that way … he is. He just is. In the vernacular, it’s as if Jesus says, “Hey, _______ happens” (you fill in the blank). Sin and suffering is an integral part of what life in this world is all about. If you try to separate it out it’s like peeling an onion, all you’re left with is shards and tears. But I – Jesus – I come so that there might be – will be – a different outcome.
Jesus says that this man’s illness will be changed, so that the result will be God’s work and God’s glory, shining forth, like bright Sonlight into the darkness of human sin and suffering, through this man who had been blind.
And sure enough … by verse seven, the man is healed.
So verses 8 through 37 deal with all the anxiety that this causes … first with the man’s neighbors and friends (Who did this? Where is he?) to the Pharisees (this couldn’t possibly have happened in this way, because we say it couldn’t possibly have happened in this way) to even the man’s parents (if we say that he sees now, and that we believe him when he says that Jesus did it, we might get kicked out of the synagogue … so we’ll just say nothing).
But they’re all blind. Blind to their own anxiety and their fear. So when the religious leaders call the man before them a second time to explain himself … they think they’re going to get him to re-enter their darkness by ordering him to “Give glory to God.”
He does “Give glory to God” … as Jesus predicts he will – for, remember, that’s what his healing is all about … but he does it by reflecting Jesus’ light and love into these anxiety-ridden, fearful lives … as they go deeper and deeper into the darkness … neighbors, friends, religious leaders … this man, who had been blind, truly sees the light and love of Jesus.
And so by the end of the story, when he says to Jesus, “Lord, I believe,” the circle is complete … indeed, God’s work of faith and hope and love have been revealed in him, so that he becomes a “little Christ” himself, to and for the sake of the world.
His is a face, a life of faith, for us to reflect as well.
For we, too, live in times of great anxiety and fear. Fear is all around us, fear is what is used to motivate us, from corporations, politicians of any and all stripes, religious leaders, colleagues, family and friends. Fear fills our world, and sucks the light and life right out of it, and us, bringing more and more darkness.
So when we hear this story … let it be to us a wakeup call and a warning … a wakeup call to see the people and hear their voices of anxiety and fear around us … a warning that these people, their voices, are all too willing to suck us into the blame game … whether you want to call it religious prejudice or racial profiling or economic or churchly fearmongering …
… this word, Jesus’ word to us here, is to walk away from their darkness … to take on his Word, to live in his non-anxious way, to trust, to hope, to be filled with his light and love, grace and peace, forgiveness and life …
Those who follow Jesus live as people of hope … hope that, even in the darkest times, even into the darkest lives, this light will come.
All we can do is reflect it. His Spirit can and will do the rest, bringing others to the place of the formerly blind man, able to confess with their own mouths, their own lives, “Lord, I believe.”
On this we have his promise, and his promise has not failed us yet.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not, is not, will not overcome it.”
Thanks be to God!
Amen.

27 March 2011

2011-03-27T20:59:00.000-07:00

“Faces of faith – Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well”
3 Lent A
John 4:5-42
27 March 2011

As we continue on in our Lenten walk with Jesus , the characters we meet along the way are in an outward progression …
… first, Jesus himself, dealing with his own demons, the temptation to be someone, anyone other than the One who Can Save Us …
… then, last week, Nicodemus, and questions about whether there’s room in the Kingdom for those who come from their own darkness, questioning, seeking, wondering if God is a God of punishment and condemnation, or a God of love and salvation.
Now, this week, we have a story about a woman coming to Jesus from her own darkness … and an explanation, a living out by Jesus of what, precisely, last week’s theme verse means: “For God so loved the world … God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
The darkness in this week’s text is more figurative than literal. Last week, Nicodemus came by night to Jesus. Today, this nameless Samaritan woman comes at the height of the daylight to find Jesus at the well.
Ah … but she brings her own darkness with her.
It’s a multi-layered darkness.
First, it’s cultural. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” And then … that perfunctory, John-the-Gospel-writer-trying-to-be-explanatory note, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.”
It’s not a very good explanation. So I’ll try to give a better one.
Jesus and the disciples were traveling through the hill country north of Jerusalem … “Samaria” was a catch-all phrase used to describe this area. Several hundred years earlier, this was the Northern Kingdom … when Israel split in half following King Solomon’s death, the North set up its own capital, Samaria, with its own kings and royal line, and its own religion … a mix of traditional Judaism and the religions of the non-Jewish people surrounding them. Nowadays we would call it “syncretistic” meaning “mixed together” or “not pure,” and that’s certainly how traditional Jews saw their northern cousins … as “unclean” country bumpkins, deluded, misguided, worshipping another god in their own religious places … not in Jerusalem, and the Temple there, which the Jews held as the center of their religion.
Had Jesus been a “good” Jewish rabbi … first of all, he wouldn’t have spoken to a woman at all … second, he wouldn’t have spoken to a Samaritan woman, let alone asked her for a drink of water.
That’s why the woman acts, sounds so surprised. Here is one, obvious to her by his dress, his mannerisms, his pattern of speech, that he isn’t a Samaritan, but a Jew; more, a rabbi, from the south. Why should he be talking to her?
And so her first layer of darkness slips away.
But there is another, second layer of darkness, which this woman has drawn around herself tightly, as protection … the reason that she’s at the well at noon … the brightest part of the day, but also the time when most people would be home, away, out of the heat of the moment.
Even in the bright light of day, this woman is hidden in darkness.
For Jesus, it is another opportunity to pierce the darkness with the light and life of his Word of love and grace … though, at first, it sounds like “tough love,” to be sure.
“Go, call your husband, and come back.”
“I have no husband.”
Jesus knows what is this woman’s darkness. She slinks around in the bright day-darkness of high noon because she’s one of those women … one that the neighbors point to and talk about, one that the mothers speak of, when they warn their daughters, “you had better watch out, or you’ll end up like her.”
Right here – right now – Jesus reaches deep into this woman’s darkness … and brings her into the light.
Today we’d say that Jesus is “breaking the cycle of abuse and addiction.” Where’s the abuse? What’s the addiction? We don’t know, and the text leaves the particularities in the darkness … maybe it’s alcohol … maybe it’s substances (yes, they had those even back then) … maybe it’s serial monogamy, abusive relationship after abusive relationship …
… it doesn’t really matter, this poor woman, living in her darkness, slinking around in the darkness, being spoken of by others in the darkness … this poor woman, Jesus loves her. And he calls her into relationship with him … and then, necessarily, with others.
Jesus speaks with her – he initiates the conversation. He’s authentic and honest and truthful – he says who he is and isn’t apologetic at all. And he gives this woman the gift of community, where before there was none.
Why does he do it? Why does he go out of his way, go outside of what’s seen as acceptable behavior, risk his own reputation, for her?
Simple. To save her. To rescue her from the mess her life has become. To save her neighbors, too. To create life – growing relationships where before there were none. Here is the Son who won’t glare at her, but who will water this woman with his Word, water which will cause the parched ground of her life to spring forth with newness, “gushing up to eternal life.”

It’s a great story … the woman’s life is changed, and through her, the whole village is given real LIFE.

“Yeah, but that’s Jesus,” we might say. “It doesn’t work that way for us.”

It’s true … relationships take work, community building is an effort. It takes humility and courtesy and honesty and trust and time for relationships to form and community to grow.
And what about the relationships we have already, the community or communities of which we’re already part? Sometimes, because we’re human, we annoy each other … and the relationships that we do have go sour and get broken and need extra work to put back together again … work and energy we might well feel we don’t want to spend – it makes us uncomfortable - we’d rather be doing something else – and so the relationships suffer and community gets broken.
Again, it’s all about our priorities, our life drive. With anything else but Jesus at the center, without life lived in this attitude of humility and worship into which we’re called into … well, it will be difficult to have the kind of relationships and community which will give us life, real LIFE as God intends for us.
The reasons we gather with friends, the times we do form community … it will be more and more about US.
That’s why it’s little wonder that some people who are outside the community of faith sometimes call us “hypocrites” and “duplistic” – saying one thing and doing another. They rightly point out that we who are called by Jesus’ name often are the worst examples of the life he calls us to live – when we’re not disagreeing with each other, we’re drawing tighter and tighter circles of doctrine, denominational correctness, rules and regulations as an excuse to keep us from really reaching out to others.
So how many of us have relationships with people who are outside the church as well as inside? Have we drawn the circle of relationship and community so tightly that we’re cutting ourselves off from the Samaritan women of our place and time?
In the end, “church” is no more and no less than this … being about the life-attitude of worship … hearing the call to repentance, receiving the Word of LIFE, and responding in humble service to others … … and part of that response is being to others just as Jesus was to the Samaritan woman at the well.
Because relationship and community aren’t an option for us who have heard the call of Jesus, who has pulled us into this new way of living.
They are this new way of living.
And what about the benefits?
They’re as rich and full as this LIFE into which we’re called.
Authenticity. In a world of phoniness and posturing, masks and facades, we’re real people. The Samaritan woman heard it from Jesus: “He told me everything I have ever done.”
Mutuality. We support one another. Always.
Sympathy. More than just a card and flowers, we’re there with one another … when one suffers, we all suffer together … when one rejoices, we rejoice along with them.
And mercy. There’s forgiveness aplenty and time for fresh new starts in life, as we who are in this LIFE-giving attitude around Jesus call others to join us … no matter where they are in their own lives, we do not judge and condemn, we just say, along with that Samaritan woman, “Come and see! Come and see!”
It means being open, personally and as a faith community, to the movement of God’s Spirit in our lives. It means things might be surprising … we may well be called to do things, or be led into places, we never thought possible before.
Surprising … but all part of this journey with Jesus … the journey of moving from darkness to light, moving outside ourselves and toward others, responding in love because of the One who gives our lives meaning and purpose … so we can be, will be, the Faces of Faith in others’ lives.
Amen.

20 March 2011

2011-03-20T16:48:00.000-07:00

“Faces of faith: Jesus and Nicodemus”
John 3:1-17
2nd Sunday in Lent
20 March 2011

When we last encountered Jesus – one week ago – it was in Matthew’s telling of the story of Jesus being tested in the wilderness – his “time of trial” with Satan – and Jesus’ proving himself worthy of his Father’s praise, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Now – today – we make the move into the rest of the season of Lent – four Sundays’ worth of stories from John’s gospel – four conversations, visitations, between Jesus and some unforgettable characters in his- and our- faith story; people who, in their time spent with Jesus, come from darkness into the light of the Son of God.
The Samaritan woman at the well. The man born blind. Mary and Martha, and their dead brother Lazarus.
And today … today, the first of those “darkness to light” encounters … between Jesus and the Pharisee, the leader of the Jews named Nicodemus.
Nicodemus has heard about Jesus – the Word about him had gone out, first from John the Baptist; then, Jesus calling his own disciples; and finally, word about Jesus coming into the Temple in Jerusalem – a story which happens at the beginning of John’s gospel, rather than at the end – Jesus’ coming into the Temple and raising a ruckus, overturning tables, kicking out the moneychangers and trying to straighten out the mess that people had made of their religion.
Nicodemus had heard about Jesus … but, being a member of the religious elite, the religious leadership, he couldn’t be seen publicly going to Jesus, listening to him, being discipled by him … his fellow Pharisees did not believe Jesus had any authority to do what he was doing … indeed, they were demanding a sign from Jesus that he was really sent from God.
Nicodemus saw something in Jesus which set him apart from the rest of the religious establishment. He remained in the darkness, but wanted to know more. He was a seeker, a stumbler in the shadows, trying to find out more about faith.
Which, going by the standards of the Pharisees … those of every time and place, who are absolutely convinced of their own rightness and righteousness … this kind of behavior should make Nicodemus a candidate for criticism and ridicule. Faith, so they say, is a matter of certainty. God said it, the Scriptures reinforce it, I believe it, period. No need for questions … just get on with your life.
And yet Jesus welcomes this seeker, this stumbler, this one who is in the darkness and clings to the darkness to protect himself and keep safe. Jesus doesn’t try to rip away his protective darkness … he doesn’t ridicule or make fun of Nicodemus … no, he enters into relationship with him, enters into his struggle, walks with Nicodemus from the darkness to the light.
It is a direct result, outcome, of last week’s story, Jesus’ enduring and conquering trial and temptation.
Fully God, Jesus didn’t need to have that encounter with the devil and the temptations to hubris … he could have taken all these on just fine … for he is fully God.
But he is also fully human … the only way Jesus could, can, save us, rescue us in and through our times of trial, and offer us the forgiveness of God when we give in … fully human, Jesus knows what this search, this struggle, this stumbling in the darkness is like … for Nicodemus, and for us …
… So do not criticize the seeker in yourselves … or the seeker in our midst.
Jesus welcomes Nicodemus as he is, where he is … so please, feel welcomed in your questioning, your wondering, your doubting. This is precisely why Jesus came … for you.
That being said – though – Nicodemus shows how far off he is from the Way of Jesus, the Way of the Kingdom, the Way of the Cross.
But don’t get angry at Nicodemus for this, either. He gets hung up on that phrase which is translated here as “born from above.” He understands it as “born again,” and of it Nicodemus makes a legalism, a rule, which he just doesn’t get how anyone can live into perfectly, as he understands we are to be before God.
But remember … Nicodemus has been raised in a religious system which is all about rules, and acting, and doing from our side of the God / us equation. He doesn’t know anything else.
Jesus hears Nicodemus’ questionings and wonderings, and takes it right back to his fellow Pharisees’ demand for a sign.
“Do not be astonished” – literally, “don’t go looking for a thaumaturge … a wonder worker … here.” Don’t go making being “born again” into some kind of a new law, a new rule or set of rules which must be followed perfectly, literally, to “get into” the Kingdom.
And then … a little later … Jesus makes things even more clear … shining the brilliant light of the Gospel into Nicodemus’ darkness.

“For God so loved the world … indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The conventional wisdom of the age looked for a heavenly Messiah-deliverer to come and enact the Deuteronomic principle onto the earth … that he would come bringing God’s wrath and judgment, to condemn, to eternally punish, even to destroy the masses for their unfaithfulness, while gathering a remnant of the faithful people of God, to save them and bring them home to Paradise.
But Jesus … here, Jesus blows that wrong-headed religious notion away. Yes, it’s an earthquake … not of condemnation … but of Gospel … and a tsunami … not of punishment, but of grace, washing over Nicodemus and all people … if we would but listen to him.
For too, too long … the new Pharisees of every time and space … including our own … so, totally, our own … have commandeered the bandwidth of faith, using John 3.16 like a cudgel, “For God so loved the world … dammit … so BELIEVE IN THE JESUS WE PROCLAIM TO YOU OR ELSE! Turn … or BURN!”
“Be born again … and of course, that means living your life … all aspects … political, economic, social … JUST LIKE US … or else, be condemned to hell for all eternity … YOU HEATHEN.”
And seekers like Nicodemus … lost in their darkness, their doubt or just wonder … they are simply driven away.
To this … we must say … ENOUGH.
It is time … it is high time … for the pure, sweet Word of Grace to once again be heard in our land. Lived out without shame, without apology … even shouted from the rooftops … this is our time … the time for quiet, timid Lutherans to be quiet and timid no more … and stand up to these spiritual bullies, these fearmongers and liars …
… as they speak lies and brood fear about God, the world, our nation … and themselves ...
… it is high time we stood up, to stand and deliver, loud and clear, for God’s Word in Jesus … the truth and love and grace of the Gospel … the true Word in the Word of John 3:16 AND 17 …

“For God so loved the world … indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

This is the Word of a God who welcomes questions and doubt; a God who calls and welcomes sinners … all of us, no one better than another … all of us, to come to him, to confess, to be forgiven, and to believe in him, and in his Beloved Son Jesus the Christ.
This is the Word of a God who takes broken people, struggling people, people like Nicodemus, and makes them whole.
Guess who shows up to help claim Jesus’ body from the cross at the end of John’s Gospel. NICODEMUS. Called and welcomed by Jesus in his questioning, his wondering, his doubt, Nicodemus GETS IT, and receives it, and lives it … that wonderful, amazing grace which flows through Jesus from the heart of God to all people.
This Word is also for you and me. Not to bank, not to protect, not to hide away, not to huddle around in buildings on Sunday mornings … but to carry forth as the light and love of God in Jesus Christ, into and for the world.
Just imagine what we might do, where we might go, who we might welcome, embrace, call to new life, through this amazing grace, grace in Jesus’ name.
Friends, IT IS HIGH TIME.
So LET US DO IT. Let us go forth and speak and live so that the world may truly hear of this One, this Jesus, who comes, not to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
In his love, and in his name. Amen.

13 March 2011

2011-03-13T13:32:00.000-07:00

“Faces of faith – Jesus and the Devil”
Matthew 4:1-11
First Sunday in Lent cycle A
13 March 2011

It is a troubling part of the most familiar, comforting Christian prayer …
“Lead us not into temptation.”
For some, those words are so disturbing that they would just as soon never use the “traditional” language version of the Lord’s Prayer, but rather, always the “contemporary” one … as we are using here in worship during this season of Lent … in which those words “lead us not into temptation” are retranslated as “save us from the time of trial.”
As one who expressed their disturbance to me, once said, “why would I ask God not to lead me into temptation – why, God doesn’t try to pull a bait-and-switch on us, does God?”
Well, does God?
That question, it must be an old one … certainly as old as the time of Martin Luther. For, in his Small Catechism … specifically, his explanation to the Sixth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer, Luther writes thus:

It is true that God tempts no one, but we ask in this prayer that God would preserve and keep us, so that the devil, the world, and our flesh may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief,despair, and other great and shameful sins, and that, although we may be attacked by them, we may finally prevail and gain the victory.

Although we may be attacked by them, we may finally prevail and gain the victory.

That’s certainly a great summation of our First Sunday in Lent Gospel reading, isn’t it?
We have once again begun the liturgical season of reflection and renewal … and, once again, just as in every year on the first Sunday of Lent, our story is about Jesus’ experience away, by himself, in the desert wilderness of Palestine.
And right away, we are presented with the dilemma with which we began our message-time this morning.
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil.”
What is happening here?
Chronologically, we’ve gone back in time … long before last week’s trip up and down SonShine Mountain of Jesus’ transfiguration … before the Sermon on the Mount, in which we spent most of the Epiphany season … even before Jesus called his first disciples … here we are, right after Jesus’ baptism by John, and the first hearing of those words we also heard last week … “THIS IS MY SON, THE BELOVED, WITH WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED” …
So what happens to the beloved Son? Where does the well-pleased Father’s Spirit lead him next? Into the wilderness … the dry, desert places … to be tempted by the Devil.
It is a strange sentence … especially given our understanding that “God tempts no one.”
But that still holds. It’s not going to be God that is doing the tempting.
And second … the word Matthew uses in his Greek language, which we translate as “tempt,” can also mean “test.” Here, I think that’s more the meaning. God’s Spirit, fresh from lighting on Jesus in his baptism, a sign that God is with him and well pleased with him … God’s Spirit is going to lead Jesus into the wilderness to test him … to show him what being God’s Son is truly going to be all about … and, in that other, not as often used sense of “test” – for which we use a similar word, “temper” … the one we used to hear in those aluminum foil commercials that went “oven tempered for flexible strength” … God’s Spirit is leading Jesus into the wilderness to be strengthened for service.
But perhaps we don’t even get that far into the story … maybe we stumble on that name, the personification of the Tempter, the Tester … the one Matthew, here, calls “the Devil.”
Well, we’ll take a look at that in a minute … I don’t want to get stuck on the personification of the Tempter first.
Instead, let’s look at the individual temptations or testings themselves.
They are, really, innocent enough. Not “pushing the envelope” for the Beloved Son of God, not by a long shot.
For, what’s wrong at turning stones into bread to feed the hungry? Would we not expect this of the Beloved Son of God?
What’s wrong with believing the Scriptures so strongly that Jesus would trust the angels to protect him, even in the most severe of situations? Would we not expect this level of trust of the Beloved Son of God?
And what’s wrong with Jesus – the “King of kings and Lord of lords” – assuming control and leadership of all the kingdoms of the world? Don’t we expect this of Jesus at the end of all things anyway? What would be so bad if he took hold of things now, at this point in the story?
These are terribly logical choices, laid out before Jesus.
If Jesus took them, he’d certainly be living into what we would expect of the Beloved Son of God, wouldn’t he?
It’s just that … that’s it.
The reason Jesus is led up by the Spirit into the wilderness is to see how he’s going to go about being fully God AND fully human, in walking in the way of the Cross.
Though we-people might expect a Superman-Messiah, this isn’t what God wants at all. Or, what we humans need.
Because, if you haven’t noticed … we’re not supermen or women. We’re all very, very human.
So we need a fully human Messiah to show us A Different Way out of our temptations.
Actually, I should have said, Temptation. Because if you get to the root – commonality – of these temptations Jesus encounters … they are the same as those we encounter … the core of which is hubris.
Hubris. We hear that word a lot lately, but maybe we don’t know exactly what it means.
So here it is … hubris is “extreme arrogance.” “Not being realistic.” “Overestimating one’s competence or capabilities.”
In other words … putting one’s self in the place of God.
That’s what each of these temptations does. “Oh, just make yourself bread out of these rocks, Jesus, and break your long fast … who cares anyway.” “Go throw yourself off the highest building around, Jesus, … you won’t die.” “Become the ruler of the world, Jesus – who wouldn’t want that?”
That’s hubris.
Of course, for Jesus, fully God … being Godlike was, is, would be OK.
But for Jesus, also fully human … sent to save us from our sins … well, giving in to those temptations would also be totally self-serving … there’s no “for us” in them at all.
That’s why he didn’t give in.
And for us – who give in to temptations to hubris in so many, many ways every single day … Jesus’ not giving in shows us another way … another way through which, as Luther says, “although we may be attacked by them, we may finally prevail and gain the victory.”
Attacked … by …Them. What tempts us to hubris … putting ourselves in the place of God …
Once again, in Luther’s words …
…the devil, the world, and our flesh.
OK – NOW we can talk about the Devil.
Matthew uses two words here -- “devil,” or diabolos in his Greek language … and what Jesus himself calls the “tempter,” … “Satan.” It’s no surprise Jesus uses that word Satan, because it’s Hebrew - Sa’tan – and Jesus was a Jew, of course – Sa’tan is the Hebrew term for “adversary.” In the Old Testament – and this would have been the sense in which Jesus knew and used the term – Sa’tan is that which opposes God and the coming kingdom or reign of God. People are primarily the source of this satanic behavior. So when Peter speaks to Jesus in chapter 16 of Matthew’s Gospel, and says things which oppose Jesus continuing in the Way of the Cross – “God forbid it, Lord, this (suffering and dying on the Cross) must never happen to you” – well, Jesus calls Peter “Sa’tan” or adversary … “Get behind me, Satan!” You – Peter – are opposing God’s will and way, in me.
And that is really all that is going on here, between Jesus and diabolos or Satan. He – Jesus – is encountering opposition as he seeks to continue in the Way of the Cross, opposition which comes in the form of these three temptations ... and, rightfully, he calls it as such.
But something happened with how people used those words, “devil” and “Satan,” soon into the history of the Christian church. Instead of understanding the meaning of those names as descriptors for those who oppose the way of Jesus … Christians soon started using them in another way …
… to label – demonize, if you will … those who opposed them.
Elaine Pagels, in her book “The History of Satan,” outlines this shift. We start to see it in Luke and John’s gospels, where Satan – evil personified – is said to enter into Judas, leading him to betray Jesus. But then other church fathers start using the label for those who opposed what they interpreted as “orthodox Christianity.”
Certainly Martin Luther understood things in this way. His was a very different medieval world view … where demons were palpable and temptation was around every turn. But Luther was also terribly guilty of labeling anyone who opposed the Reformation … or him - Luther, as he interpreted God’s word, as “Satan” – from the Pope and the Roman Catholic church … to the Jews.
And so today- how do we use the words, the terms … devil, Satan? Most likely, either as a “passing the buck” excuse for our own sin – “the devil made me do it” … or, in the demonization of our opponents … Democrats, Republicans, “Religious Right,” “Religious Left,” large corporations, Congress, the Supreme Court, the President … “our opponents” are “evil” … meaning, “of the devil.”
Which, conveniently, removes the personal responsibility of our own shortcomings … wrongdoings … omissions … sins … removes the personal responsibility from us, and slathers it all over “them.”
They did it. It’s their fault.
Which couldn’t be further from what Jesus is intending in our Gospel reading … which is … pointing out the inevitability of our temptation to sin … and his “other way” through it … the Way of the Cross which leads to his reconciling sinful shattered people with a “perfect” whole God.
Contemporary author Jim Crace – he, undoubtedly, tired of the “traditional” approach to today’s Gospel text … leading to people “using” Satan as a convenient scapegoat for their sins … or as a hateful label hurled at political enemies … Crace wrote a book which has become the epitome book for “post-modern theology,” called “Quarantine.”
The title refers to that forty day period Jesus spent in the Wilderness … remember “Quarantine” means “forty.”
In the book, the temptations Jesus encounters while on his Quarantine end up being more of a struggle with his own demons, if you will … Jesus’ time of resisting temptation is truly a battle against himself, and his fully human desires.
Though Crace’s approach is different – even, perhaps, disturbing to some readers – his point is well taken.
Temptation … hubris … wanting to be like God …
… in the end … the one with whom we truly have to do battle, as we fight that tempting, which leads us from the wholeness, peace, shalom of God … is … none other than … ourselves. Me, myself, and I.
And this is why we have Lent. Lent calls us to what theologian Paul Tillich called “the crisis” … the realization that we are all searching for meaning in everything else other than God … that we at base do not want to admit that we are ultimately powerless in the face of everything which tempts us … and that we need God to be God in our lives, not us.
It is the Crisis which brings us back from hubris to reality … that “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves” … that, as we sing in that Holy Week hymn, “twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee, I crucified thee” … that, as we confess our sins and hear the words of forgiveness, as we gather around the table of the Lord, we come back together from our shattered brokenness, our selfish singularity, and form a new community, forgiven, freed, to live, refreshed, reborn, in him.
Granted, that’s not a popular word today … nor, would I offer, at any time in human history. Maybe that’s why the Lutheran Church … those Lutheran churches where the Cross is central and the word of confession and forgiveness is truly and rightly proclaimed …
… those churches are never the humongous cathedrals of the Gospel of Glory and Success … places where we hear that “if we but follow Jesus, it will all be ours” … and where anyone who doesn’t agree with the preacher’s political or social views are demonized as “evil” …
… but rather, we are most often small congregations of humble people, quietly, faithfully living out their, our salvation in service to others.
This is after all, where Jesus is, and does, and goes, in our Gospel text.
Jesus leaves his baptism … arises and goes into the wilderness, the desert, where he successfully navigates the dangerous currents of temptation and hubris … he does not serve himself in his Godliness, but lays that aside for his humanity … for our humanity …
And guess what … Jesus ends up “getting it all” anyway. The bread, the life, the Way of the Kingdom. “And suddenly angels came and waited on him.”
He is surrounded by his community of care, and is cared for, restored, strengthened for the journey … the journey in the way of the Cross, the journey he and we will make together as we continue in this Lenten season …
… and we, too, we are surrounded here by our community of care, as we make our own way through the wilderness of this life … the times of trial … the temptations … the worldly pull to hubris .. the little voice inside our heads which says “you are the master of your own destiny.”
Our community of care in which, through which, we are held accountable to and by the Word of Truth …
… forgive us our sins … even as we forgive those who sin against us …
Our community of care in which, through which, we walk with each other, through the temptations and trials of our lives …
…save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil …
Our community of care, where we are given true food, true life, true leadership, true companionship, to walk in the Way of the Cross, together with Jesus, true God and true human … God for us.
For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever. Amen.

6 March 2011

2011-03-06T14:50:00.001-08:00

“SonShine Mountain”
Transfiguration of our Lord
Matthew 17:1-9
6 March 2011

Hmn.
Perhaps today’s Gospel reading has you confused.
I mean, wasn’t Jesus up on a mountain last Sunday, and the three or four before that … giving “The Sermon on the Mount,” after all?
Why does he need to climb another mountain today, with his disciples, anyway?
Well, in the sometimes wacky way of things that happens when we follow the liturgical year … in one Sunday we’ve jumped from being with Jesus and his disciples and the crowds on top of the Mountain of the Sermon on the Mount … right to the Mountain of Transfiguration, with Jesus, the disciples, Moses and Elijah.
In between … the 10 chapters we skipped … we missed a lot!
We missed the end of the Sermon on the Mount … Jesus’ practical advice for every time and place … “don’t judge” … “beware of false prophets” … “everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.”
We missed Jesus healing a leper … a centurion’s slave … Peter’s mother in law … a man wandering among the tombs of the Gadarenes, possessed by demons.
We missed Jesus’ sending out the disciples to act and preach and heal in his name.
We missed parables like the sower and the seed, and the weeds among the wheat.
We missed a lot!
But regardless … here we are … today … moved from the Sermon on the Mount to the Mount of the Transfiguration. And in breezing over the ten chapters between where we left off last week (Matthew 6) and where we are today (Matthew 17) … we are now at a bridge to what comes next … a bridge out of this season of Epiphany … this season of light, of “letting the Son shine,” now, we move into the introspective, meditative, self-examining season of Lent. A time to think, to ponder, to go deeper in our faith walk with Jesus as he moves, surely, steadily, toward the Cross.
You may remember that we entered this season of Epiphany way back on Baptism of our Lord Sunday, January 9, in much the same way as we leave it today.
Back then, just as today, Jesus, surrounded by friends … then, John the Baptist; now, his disciples Peter and James and John … both then at his baptism, and now up on the mountain … a heavenly voice gives us an epiphany of Jesus … it makes Jesus known … “This is my Son, the beloved, with him I am well pleased” … now, on the mountaintop, the voice adds, for emphasis, and, perhaps, pointing us in the direction of what is to come … “LISTEN TO HIM!”
Listen to him? Listen to him? Why, that’s all we’ve been doing, during these past few weeks of the Sermon on the Mount.
We’ve heard Jesus describe the Parallax view, the light of and from his Word, showing, telling us that in the way of faith, things are not as they immediately appear to us. “Blessed are the meek … the merciful … the peacemakers … those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.”
We’ve heard Jesus speak of salt and light … encouraging those who follow him to be obvious in their “saltiness,” our faithful acts of service and love toward others as we follow him.
We’ve heard Jesus say some hard words, words about divorce, revenge, loving our enemies … words which often get bent around by the prism of how we would rather hear and receive them, than in the Spirit Jesus truly gives them to us.
And we’ve heard Jesus tell us, in the midst of a time, a season of life, in this nation, in this world, filled with words and images, occurrences, happenings which trouble us … we’ve heard Jesus tell us, “don’t worry.”
We’ve been listening to Jesus, that is for sure.
So why does this voice exhort us to more of the same?
Hear how and why it was first given … up on that mountain …
The voice interrupts Peter while he is still speaking … and what is it that Peter’s saying?
Exactly the opposite of what Jesus has been saying, what he and we have heard him saying, in the Sermon on the Mount.
“I will make three dwellings” … tents, really … Peter says, and in saying this, he shows how little attention he’s really been paying to Jesus this whole time.
Because … if we boil down the message of the Sermon on the Mount we’ve heard these past few weeks, and take it in the context of our theme “Let the Son Shine” – what we get is:
The glow which we see coming from Jesus, he gives off to show us … each other.
Jesus hasn’t just spent all this time giving the Sermon on the Mount as a lesson in self-preservation for his followers. Neither does he come and give and do all that he has done to set himself up as some kind of a new Moses / lawgiver or new Elijah / prophet. He comes, as he himself says, “to fulfill the law” and to exemplify the new, “perfect,” whole life of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is en-fleshed and lived out in him.
And so the voice … the voice interrupts Peter because what Peter is calling for is nothing less than a return, a keeping of the old way of things. Compartmentalized, neat, clean religion … not messy, not involved in human foibles or sins or sufferings … “God in a box” which can be rolled out and put on display for special occasions.
As the voice points out, this isn’t the way of Jesus.
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased; LISTEN TO HIM!”
Pay attention Peter … pay attention, the rest of you, you who would keep God in a box, controlled, measured and measurable, surveyed, noted and annotated … good for only an hour here or a day or two there … My Son, the Beloved, Will Not Be Like This. LISTEN TO HIM!
And so we shouldn’t be surprised that the first thing that happens in the verses following today’s text, once Jesus gets down off the mountain, is that Jesus runs into the rest of his disciples, left down there below, they who tried to cast a demon out of a boy, to heal him … but they couldn’t do it … so Jesus does. Jesus heals the boy.
Right away … after his mountaintop experience … Jesus is there, engaged, connected, plugged right in with the messiness of human life.
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased; LISTEN TO HIM!”
And so, down the mountain we go, too, with Jesus, down into the messiness of human existence, down with him into this Lent, this time of sidling up beside our Lord and watching, hearing, observing, learning, being discipled in what life in the Kingdom of Heaven is really like.
And guess what.
We’re going to wade into the messiness right along with him.
The glow of Jesus shows us … not a separate and separated “holiness” … a set apart “otherness” … no, the light of God’s Son shows us … each other.
On our Lenten walk with Jesus this year, we’re going to meet some unforgettable characters … and see, and hear, how they work toward, influence, show forth faith.
Next week, we’ll hear how Jesus receives temptations … temptations common to every person ... and see what he does, in and through them all.
We’ll meet a teacher, scared of being seen publicly with Jesus, who comes to him by night … a woman of bad reputation at a well in Samaria … a man born blind, who suffers the blame and ridicule of his handicap … and Jesus’ friends, Mary and Martha, who along with Jesus, mourn the death of their brother Lazarus.
And we will hear from each other, our brothers and sisters here, as they share with us ways they practice, walking with Jesus, listening to Jesus, as he calls them, calls us, to come out of our dwellings, our booths and tents, separate and separated, and engage … engage faith with life ...
Life, right here, right now … Life which is not at all neat, nor perfect, nor pretty …
But listen to him! We are being given a Word and a Way which is Real …
Real for us who are really, truly Messy as well … sinful, sick, worrying, suffering …
The ones Jesus comes down off the mountain for… are … US … his light, warming and healing us, shining forth so we can see others, and walk with them, in the way of the Cross, in their ways of suffering and death … bringing them the Word of Life even as Jesus has brought us to life …
We … Us … You and I … who may well be the only faces, the only hands and feet, the only caring arms, who ever show them Jesus.
That’s … an awesome thought. A scary thought.
And it is A True Word.
So let us prepare … prepare to Be Like Jesus … together let us take the Lenten path down off Son Shine Mountain.
Take time … spend time with Jesus, as he comes to you in and through your times of Lenten contemplation … through the words of others, calling you, showing you, discipling you, in the Lenten way of going deeper in your faith walk, our shared faith story.
Turn down … for 40 days and 40 nights … turn down the din of a world which drowns out the cry of the poor and suffering, lost in the noise of foolishness and glory, politics and power, denial and lies … turn down, turn off, tune it out … and LISTEN TO HIM! … follow Jesus in the Way of the Cross.
Set aside your Alleluias for a season, and ponder the Who, What and Why which is behind them … the Cross-shaped “gift” which gives us real, true, everlasting life … and allows us to shout them forth in triumph at the Feast of Jesus’ Resurrection.
Let the Son Shine … through you … to and for the world.
Amen.