tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64082714307098396762024-02-20T20:04:26.207-06:00The Undomesticated PreacherA sinner grasped by a living word from GodUndomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-53451359869719172102022-10-14T13:03:00.000-05:002022-10-14T13:03:13.056-05:00Am I the Avocado, or Only the Word Reforms<p> This presentation was delivered at 1517’s 2022 Here We Still Stand Conference in San Diego on October 13, 2022.</p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have to start with a confession. I’m a horrible person, and here’s how you can tell: My dear mother once got us a subscription to </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">magazine, and I read it cover-to-cover every Saturday over my breakfast of soft-cooked eggs. This means I’m fully aware of lurching papparoxysms focusing on poor Prince Harry and Meghan. If </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> magazine weren’t bad enough, I’ve also been gripped by the sordid media conglomerate machinations of the characters on HBO’s </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Succession. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(They’re worse than the British royal family.) And most telling of all, on the Reddit social media platform I revel in reading the “Am I the Asshole'' subreddit. (I also have modicum piety, tact, and good taste, so I think I can get through the rest of this without using that A-word that I learned early on at the feet of my alcoholic little-churched great uncles. Let’s make it easier on ourselves. Instead of doing linguistic acrobatics, let’s just substitute “avocado” for the other A-word.)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The descriptor for AITA on Reddit’s thread says, “</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1a1b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in an argument that's been bothering you. Tell us about any non-violent conflict you have experienced; give us both sides of the story, and find out if you're right, or you're the [avocado].” People submit stories of family drama at weddings and funerals, conflicts with vegan children, and squabbles about making the world safe for high anthropology while being utterly astounded at how low their fellow human beings can actually sink into the mire of a-holery. AITA for making my son eat off dirty dishes? AITA for telling my sister I’m never babysitting for her again? AITA for still being mad my brother stole my daughter’s name for his own child? I have a sinner inside me who loves the feeling of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1a1b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Schadenfreude</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1a1b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> these threads raise in me. I get to pat myself on the back for not being an awful friend or cruel step-sibling. I get to feel good about not having paid people costumed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse to be props at my wedding reception rather than choosing to feed my guests or being angry that the kids blew up condoms and taped them to my Ford F-150 at our reception and ruined the truck’s bright red finish.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1a1b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This year marks 500 years since an Am-I-the-Avocado-eligible occurrence went down in Martin Luther’s city of Wittenberg. Since back in 2017, when we celebrated the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, we’ve had a number of similar anniversaries that have come down the pike including the Heidelberg Disputation in 2019 and Luther’s appearance before the Diet of Worms last year. This year is the 500th anniversary of Luther’s abandoning the safety of the kingdom of the birds at the Wartburg Castle and his return to his home base of Wittenberg that was reeling in his absence.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While the reforming cat was away, the true-believing avocado green-tinged mice played. Luther’s fellow University professor Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt was one of the culprits. Carlstadt was in full agreement with Luther’s teaching on justification and supported his efforts to counter what he thought were Rome’s abuses. He just didn’t think that things were being fixed </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">quickly</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> enough. He and others took it upon themselves to take advantage of the full liberty they’d been given in Christ and, heeding Paul’s dictum in Galatians 5, refused to submit again to a yoke of slavery. Carlstadt led worship without donning the proper pastoral vestments. Academic robes worked just fine for a free faculty member. And the worship service was held not in sacred and flowing Latin (</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ecce homo</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">!) but in the low and guttural German. (</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ach du lieber Gott!</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) What an avocado. At the same time, statues in houses of worship were removed to avoid worshiping graven images and breaking the First Commandment, sub-clause A, as the legal brief would put it. Wittenberg had been left in the solid theological hands of Luther’s friend and university colleague Phillip Melanchthon, who the previous year had produced the best systematic rendering of evangelical teaching yet, but he wasn’t administrator enough, politician enough, or cojones-bearer enough to wangle a solution to the iconoclasm. Eventually, the controversy drew Luther home from the Wartburg.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At an inn on the way home from Eisenach a couple students, who themselves were heading to Wittenberg, encountered Luther. But because he’d grown a Scott Keith beard and pandemic hair, they didn’t recognize him. Whether he’d cleaned himself up for it or not, the whole iconoclastic mess of </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Schwärmerei </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">found it’s conclusion with a set of eight sermons Luther preached at the City Church starting on </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Invocavit </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunday. The sermons are Luther’s way of saying “AITA? You all are. Everyone sucks here.” The </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Invocavit </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sermons are worth reading, especially since Luther decided to be more brief than usual. In the first of the sermons, Luther didn't call anyone out as an avocado by name, but he did advocate a go-slow approach to instituting change in the church. You become the Christian A in AITA when you don’t consider the ramifications of your actions on those who aren’t as </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">advanced</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in the faith as you think you are.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thirty-five years ago I had the privilege of going spelunking at Jewel Cave National Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the third longest cave in the world. That afternoon of cave-crawling was one of the best nature experiences I’ve ever had. There were a half dozen of us, along with our ranger, outfitted with gloves, helmets, and lamps. At the orientation on the visitor center patio, we learned that, along with the stricture to pack everything out of the cave you brought in, including waste of every stripe, there was another important rule. People who cave-crawl follow the dictum that it’s life-threatening to assume that you’re responsible for keeping up with the person in front of you; instead, you’re in charge of the person behind you. In other words, the slowest person in the group sets the pace. That way, no one gets lost and abandoned in the cave.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The iconoclasts and enthusiasts in Wittenberg decided they knew best how reform should happen. They set the pace in the electoral city and assumed others would have to keep up with them. But Luther argued that they’d left behind those who weren’t quite there with them yet and had endangered their faith. The best-intentioned reforms, even though well-meant, did damage. And since justification comes through faith alone, the reforming actions of the iconoclasts threatened others’ salvation. Luther’s take was that even the best decisions need to have the weakest among us at the forefront of our thinking. The work of reform should follow spelunking rules. We ought always consider the laggards and slowpokes, the thick-headed and reluctant. Luther argued that Carlstadt and the leaders of his pack of pace-setter were attempting to feed a nice Iowa corn-fed rib-eye steak to newborns who hadn’t even made it to Gerber strained peas yet. Even if a change </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> due, it gets tabled to make sure there’s time for God to bring folks on board.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A dozen years later in Münster, a city near the border with the Netherlands, a Dutch baker named Jan Matthijs and other virulently anti-Roman partisans led a rebellion of anabaptists against the city’s leaders. They attempted to establish the kingdom of God here on earth. They ousted the mayor and city council and installed fellow anabaptists in positions of authority. The bishop, Franz von Waldeck, was expelled to a corner of Westphalia. With the bishop ensconced in his figurative Volkswagen campervan, earnest anabaptist reforms began to be dictated to the people of Münster.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It didn’t take much time for other besieged anabaptists of the low countries to get word that Münster had become a haven for folks who agreed with the Wittenberg reformers about what they considered to be the faithless and craven policies and practices of the church in Rome. They flocked to Münster, because the newly selected leaders made it not just a haven of the godly but also the exact location where God was visibly breaking in to rule and to bring about the new apocalyptic age they’d expected and naturally knew themselves to be worthy of. That Münster’s population was by-and-large regarded as famously wealthy didn’t hurt matters, which was a draw for the poor of the low countries.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But the Münster anabaptists were also certain that Luther hadn’t gone far enough. To them, Luther had been fairly lily-livered, and he certainly had the whole baptism thing wrong. The Münster rebels established a sectarian government that wasn’t just neutral toward the faith but actively pushed societal structures and laws to ensure the protection of radical reformation tenets. The council decreed that all adults had to be rebaptized, because the sacrament administered to them as infants and children was invalid and required an assent of the will that only an adult believer could give. On January 5, 1534, more than 1000 adults were rebaptized in Münster.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The story gets worse. The property of those who disagreed with the anabaptists and left Münster to protect their lives and limbs was confiscated and distributed to the poor, after which followed a decree that all property was now to be held in common. They made like the Stasi, the East German secret police who once sought to arrest my grandfather, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They started shredding everything: deeds, contracts, loan documents, anything that indicated private ownership. Let there be no Ananias and Sapphira holding onto their beloved stuff in the city of Münster! Like the community of believers in Acts, you’re going to share for Jesus’ sake! Or else. (Although — spoiler alert — later in the story people in Münster would be struck dead by non-divine hands.) When the former bishop returned to besiege the city, Jan Matthijs, who regarded himself as a 16th century Gideon out to judge the faithless, thought merely leading a small procession against the bishop’s forces would do the trick of defending Münster handily. They had God on their side after all. But Matthijs was captured and beheaded. His head was placed on a pike and his “junk,” shall we say, was nailed to the city gate as a warning to present and future rebels.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A new leader was called for. In the place of Matthijs, John of Leyden proclaimed himself the king of the New Jerusalem. Because of the influx of anabaptist immigrants, Münster faced a vexing problem. There were twice as many women as men in the city. Something had to be done to provide for poor females who had arrived with millennial expectations but no male relative to care for them. Leyden now decreed that polygamy was compulsory. He himself took sixteen wives. One report says that a woman, Elizabeth Wandscherer, who’d caught his eye, was beheaded in the city square for refusing to marry him. By the time the bishop’s siege had gone on for a year, food stores had diminished and people in Münster were starving.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On June 24, 1535, about the time Luther was lecturing on Galatians, the siege succeeded. Münster was retaken, and John of Leyden, the so-called king of the New Jerusalem, was arrested along with the anabaptist mayor, Bernhard Knipperdolling, and another leader, Bernhard Krechting. The three anabaptists sat in a dungeon in a neighboring city for months until midwinter when they were trotted out to the Münster </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Marktplatz</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for public humiliation, torture, and execution. Over the course of an hour, they were tied to poles with spiked collars and had their flesh ripped away with red-hot tongs. Finally, their tongues were torn out, and they were killed with a heated dagger to the heart. But that wasn’t enough vengeance inflicted. The three dead bodies were then hoisted in seven-foot-tall cages to hang from the 300-foot spire of the recently completed Sankt Lamberti church on the town square, to rot away for the next fifty years and be pecked apart by scavenging birds. The message was clear: don’t follow these guys’ take on Christian nationalism; instead allow </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">us</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to coerce you to our version. The three anabaptists’ cages hang above the Münster marketplace to this day. Given the empty pews in German churches these days, I’m not sure they’ve had the desired effect of inducing religious fervor. If only John of Leyden had posted a subreddit query about the events in Münster. I’m sure that Reddit readers’ response would be that everyone sucks here, both the anabaptist zealots</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> those who took back Münster. AITAA? Am I the anabaptist avocado here? Yes, indeed. But it’s also possible to be told you’re the evangelical avocado.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the Augsburg Confession of 1530, our old friend Philip Melanchthon gives us a subtle hint about instituting reform in the church and avoiding acting like an avocado, whether of the anabaptist or evangelical variety. After four articles that trace Luther’s foundational teaching about God, sin, the work of Christ, and justification by faith, Melanchthon gives us Article 5: The Office of Preaching. In it he declares that, in order to create saving faith, God gives the word proclaimed in law and gospel and in the sacraments. There’s no other remedy for the condition of sin he raises earlier. All that’s needed is what Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” calls “one little Word” that has the power to subdue the eternal foes of faith.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Luther’s 1522 </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Invocavit</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> sermons, he told the Wittenbergers sitting in the pews in the City Church that the word can do its work without us dictating the terms of its job description, thank you very much. All that’s needed for this saving work to happen is a willing preacher at one end, a gap filled by the Holy Spirit with the word, and finally the Kingdom of God at the other. Luther said, “While Philip and Amsdorf and I sat around drinking Wittenberg beer, the word did everything.” The word didn’t need no stinkin’ Wittenberg iconoclasts preaching in the vernacular with their feet in sneakers and with their shirt tails untucked for contemporary relevance. In Münster a decade later, the word didn’t need a hand from any highly religious and terribly admirable folks who established a sectarian government that determined exactly what the Kingdom of God would look like in their city. The word didn’t need people whose cocksure belief blinded them and led them to trample on weaker believers or less-sophisticated theological rubes, much less unbelievers still shackled by Sin. For this Christ died? Probably not.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What Luther didn’t include in his sermon was how the word’s work happens in practice. It doesn’t happen from within a moral system, from worldly wisdom, and certainly not from a stance of power and control. The story of Bill W., one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, can be instructive for us. When he and Dr. Bill got sober in Akron, Ohio, in 1935, it was just two drunks leaning on each other, admitting they were powerless over their obsession with potent potables. Call it the mutual conversation and consolation of the blitzed and besotted. Bill W. expected his experience of enlightenment and inspirational success would lead others to achieve sobriety. But what he discovered was that telling his glorious story of victory didn’t ever help anybody want to get clean or stay sober. Actual gutter drunks facing their weakness couldn’t imagine being able to achieve such a thing. It was only when Bill W. found drunks on bar stools in saloons and told them his own sordid history, how far he’d fallen, how he’d bottomed out, that anyone could ever imagine not regularly seeing themselves looking back from the bottom of a glass. Then they could see themselves not as people who would quit drinking permanently but as busted-up people who don’t start drinking again…today. They could begin to savor that other fermented delight, daily bread, rather than daily dread.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> obsession — the status, power, and control of Ken Jones — is the primary reason why I get indignant if a worship service doesn’t begin with confession and forgiveness. I walk into the nave of the church with a bound will that wants to settle into a pew with a padded cushion and lay my petty tinkerable peccadilloes before God, decide to reform myself, and later walk out with a newly strengthened spine and perhaps a few tips for building a more successful suburban spirituality gleaned from a winsome pastor’s sermon. But what I really need is the truth that my sin runs deeper than a few minor tweakable quirks. I need to be the sinful equivalent of one of Bill W.’s falling-off-a-barstool drunks who can at last be honest about how messed-up an avocado I am. So I </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">need</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to confess. Not only that, I need more than just speaking a line about how I haven’t measured up. I’ve had it with confessions that don’t confess anything big enough to need the cross to repair. I need to declare my bondage. I have to get real about my obsession with myself and my addiction to all things that will secure the Ken Jones I so carefully curate and present to others. In other words, Ken Jones —the fallow, used up ground for the word that will be preached — must be broken open and laid bare. The sordid truth must be made known.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A couple decades ago in a Luther Seminary chapel sermon, I think it was, Steve Paulson made a surprising statement. He said that there are places where the gospel is more true than in others. What I think he meant was that the gospel is not the gospel when it’s proclaimed to those whose comfort and security provide them insulation from the vicissitudes of life. The gospel isn’t the gospel for those who have no ears to hear. So, when Luther said in the </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Invocavit Sermons</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that the word did everything, it was a specific word with a specific set of auditors. It was only the word that was preached to people living under the burden of their crosses.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is what it means to be a theologian of the cross. The word does no good planted in glory. Like Jesus, the embodied word himself, the gospel comes to and is heard by Robert Capon’s litany of L-words: the least, the last, the lost, the lame, the leper, the lachrymose, the l’broken, the l’captive, and the l’godless. This is why the easiest place I’ve ever preached or taught is St. Dysmas Lutheran Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It’s a congregation behind the walls of the South Dakota State Penitentiary. Its members are, to a person, convicted of crimes, guilty of misdemeanors and felonies: murderers, assaulters, pedophiles, and purveyors of highly desired mood-enhancing substances. No preacher needs to convince people of their sin when they’re known by a number rather than a name and their future is determined by the worst day in their past. To stand at the lectern in a Thursday evening worship service at St. Dysmas is to encounter a bunch of men in tan scrubs who are ravenous for a word that can raise them from the death they live </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> boring day, with every tasteless meal, with </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> demand from a corrections officer, and at the sound of </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> clanging sally port door. To preach to these men who don’t have the luxury of pretending they’re okay like I do is to stand at the mouth of Lazarus’ tomb and deliver the only word that can possibly knit bone to bone in Ezekiel’s valley.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When the word enters the grave, then at long last sigh of relief its public proclaimers can kick back with a Wittenberg beer and trust that the gospel will do its work without their wisdom, understanding, or effort. But if the word is delivered to the self-sufficient, well-composed, and highly-effective, then it will require constant monitoring or, worse, coercion. The bound will cannot choose to change. The law will have to stand over it, less like the pedagogue of Galatians and more as the Egyptian taskmasters threatening enslaved Israelites in Exodus. Even something as well intended as John Calvin’s establishment of a Christian city council in sixteenth century Geneva misses the mark. Certainly, it’s why the Christian nationalism that has been so hotly debated of late is hardly Christian at all. It has no need of Jesus save as a good example. The cross is superfluous. It’s all based on the law, uses </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">only</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the law, and requires the </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">constant</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> monitoring of the law to maintain its sovereignty. As Luther said in the Heidelberg Disputation, “The Law says ‘Do this,” and it is never done.” More law will have to be enacted. Nits will have to be picked. More strictures will need to be laid down. More demands will be placed on already broken sinners. And when it’s done in the name of God, the result is what was felt by an obscure Augustinian friar named Martin Luther who came to despair of ever finding a way out. He was done with a God who placed such burdens on him. Insult to injury. Salt in wounds. Enough of that. If that’s the God you have on offer, better worship at the Wittenberg Starbucks at the other end of Kollegienstraße by the bordello. At least the people in both those places are honest about what’s for sale.</span></div><p dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As Luther argued, better to deal with full-on Pelagian heretics than the semi-Pelagian self-helpers hoping for a </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">little</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> human agency, decency, and initiative, and demanding we do what is within us to do. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of my beloved teacher Gerhard Forde’s book </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">God</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meets</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Man</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I picked it up again last weekend and found this gem among the few rare sections I </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">haven’t</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> highlighted over the years:</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“[Luther] was striving for the whole [person], for a completely restored [person], for an entirely free [person]; we have bargained only for little bits — a little bit of freedom, a little bit of integrity, a little bit of left-over created goodness. And we get, in such matters, just what we bargained for: a Christianity of ‘little bits’ — a little bit of freedom but mostly bondage to legalistic codes; a little bit of devotion but mostly a despising of life and human achievement; a little bit in the collection plate on Sunday but mostly nothing for the larger concerns of human justice and social improvement. Our Christianity is an indication of our theology. We insist on a little bit of freedom and integrity that is all we ever get — and it shows).”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Forde is still on target. We’re left with what often happens when I buy avocados. I stand before a pile of these dark green, unripe things at the supermarket, thinking of the future wondrous creations my hands will create. Homemade guacamole. Bacon, lettuce, tomato, and avocado sandwiches on homemade artisanal bread. I test five or six avocados and find them all hard, but I figure that in three days time they’ll do. All it’ll take is a bit of Mad-Eye Moody’s “constant vigilance.” But my desired vigilance is never enough. My observational acuity always comes up lacking. I am ever the guaca-failure. I slice my avocados open and discover very little luscious green but find instead the fruit are brown and riddled with rot. Instead of being the enjoyer of the gift of green, I am perpetually the champion avocado slayer of North Walnut Creek Drive, left with only a tiny morsel of fatty green goodness. To repeat Forde: “We have bargained only for little bits — a little bit of freedom, a little bit of integrity, a little bit of left-over created goodness.” Sinners starving for grace and mercy are given a little brown mush and go away with empty bellies. The church in our day and its so-called “leaders” by and large deliver moral-therapeutic deism disconnected from God’s actual work of death and resurrection. Jesus, the only word whose work is powerful enough to allow for the relaxed drinking of Wittenberg beer, is a mere dealer add-on to the main vehicle of our plans and schemes, in spite of our sorry history and sordid outcomes.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Years after the </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Invocavit</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> sermons, in 1530 it was only after Philip Melanchthon asserted in the Augsburg Confession that the word of God brings saving faith through preaching and the sacraments that he spoke of reforms. After Article 5 on the Office of Preaching, came Article 6 on the New Obedience. Only when the gospel is delivered in its truth and purity can any honest and real change happen. The gospel is more true when one person drunk on themselves gets it declared to them by another person drunk on themselves but who's been saved from their self-obsession by being pulled into the embrace of God’s word. In the Small Catechism Luther answered the question, “What does baptism mean for daily living?” He said, “It means that our old sinful self with all its evil deeds and desires should be drowned through daily repentance, and a new self arise to live with God in righteousness and purity forever.” Sounds an awful lot like a 12-Step program, with the added benefit of some actual specific good news attached to it.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s interesting that Melanchthon never provided any details about what that new obedience actually looks like. That’s because the Holy Spirit is so blamed unpredictable. The Spirit blows willy-nilly and not only produces faith “when and where it wills” but also produces results in ways we can’t imagine in advance — and often among people my mom would prefer I not associate with. It is a manifestation of my sin to seek reform </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">apart</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> from the word of the cross and to bray and crow with wisdom about what my self-sanctified imagination leads me to envision as the kingdom. When Jesus read from the Isaiah scroll in Nazareth in Luke 4, he told us the gospel would appear at the verge of the grave: “</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Each of the recipients of the Lord’s favor is as good as dead. It’s echoed in Revelation 21: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” The kingdom looks like a freshly filled grave and the church looks like people in mourning attire having a laugh at the ridiculousness of their veils and black armbands. There are countless and varied routes to the City of God, but every single one leads through the cross and grave. If it doesn’t cross those city limits, you’re not using a gospel GPS system.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If I truly want to change the world, I can’t use the Law to coerce anyone into my religious or political camp. The faithful response to sin and brokenness around me is </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> more Law. That’s the move of a theologian of glory. Moses, God love him, has </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">never</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> been our savior. The task, instead, is that of a theologian of the cross: the bestowal of the gospel that brings the barely imaginable future of the lion lying down with the lamb, toddlers playing safely near the adders’ den, and me and my neighbor being raised from the dead. It’s not my business to demand that you contort yourself to my favored political brand, my love of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, or my immaculate taste in cheesy 1970s top-40 one-hit wonders, much less to say your faith has to play out in a specific way. You’re free to be an “Undercover Angel” to bring people to their “Heaven on the Seventh Floor.” As C.S. Lewis said in </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Problem of Pain</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, “[Y]</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ou will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.” God’s kingdom will come in and reforms will happen one way or another. Or to put it another way, the Spirit will do its work whether you’re the avocado or not.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All I can do is give it to you straight: You’re dead in sin, and Jesus Christ is determined to raise you from the dead and swaddle you in his love and mercy. With that said, it’s time for me to kick back with my own Philip and Amsdorf and have a beer or a decaf-latte-whole-milk-with-sugar-free-vanilla and watch what happens in the hearts of all you avocados. You’ll be out there in the world doing the opposite of what happens on my kitchen counter: turning from brown mush, ripening and sweetening, and becoming as green as the paraments in ordinary time. You’ll be voting in a couple weeks. Maybe for a party that’s not mine. You’ll be tweaking the technology you somehow managed to cobble together in the height of the pandemic worship tsunami. You’ll be gathering with family for a Thanksgiving spread, baking Christmas delights. Feeling smug that you don’t live up north in January. Feeling grumpy that you don’t live in El Paso in January. You’ll celebrate love on Singles’ Awareness Day on February 14. You’ll go through the whole year with Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and Neil Sedaka’s “Calendar Girl.” All the while, unbeknownst to you, God’s spirit will keep using the word to work on you and make you into the fruit borne by the Tree of Life. Let’s get back together in this place a year from now and use our hindsight to see if what I’ve given you today, what </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">God</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> gives you in your baptism, what he provides in the Lord’s Supper, and what is proclaimed to you again and again and again is a word — no, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">word — that reforms you, repents you, and resurrects you. Here’s to a coming year of new life and the fact that the Reformation catchphrase remains true: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Verbum dei manet in aeternum</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 16pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the Word of God abides forever.</span></div>Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-83292700422599151372021-04-26T10:32:00.004-05:002021-04-26T10:32:55.778-05:00Luther at Worms: Here I Stand, etc.<p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: x-small;"><i></i></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: x-small;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv218BL3Y_rAo5xxkxGSHETFGG_KP4niZbLUWCQTHMJB_nazjYwTP-6VmPK1bYm9zL0eaPRSjf9N_81rjYHM4yh5d8E7hylkzDxQkXfLBNSuU_k4d-tvQu4m9CAKNUB-RWjD0plNXJteY/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="744" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv218BL3Y_rAo5xxkxGSHETFGG_KP4niZbLUWCQTHMJB_nazjYwTP-6VmPK1bYm9zL0eaPRSjf9N_81rjYHM4yh5d8E7hylkzDxQkXfLBNSuU_k4d-tvQu4m9CAKNUB-RWjD0plNXJteY/w400-h215/image.png" width="400" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /><br /></i></span><p></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: x-small;"><i>This sermon was preached at First Lutheran Church in Ottumwa, Iowa, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Luther's speech at the Diet of Worms.</i></span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Everything
that went down in the trial at the Diet of Worms 500 years ago was about
freedom. No one brought it up when they interrogated Martin Luther about the
books piled on a table in the middle of the room. But the question hung over
everything like a dark cloud. Can you count on Jesus to take on your sin and
free you to live and breathe again?</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Luther had
been on a wild ride the previous 3 1/2 years. His list of 95 questions about
the pious practice of indulgences exploded across Europe, and the friar who
taught at a nothing university in a podunk town in Germany found himself
becoming as famous as Pope Leo and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He
neither wanted nor expected to play the celebrity. Think of how last May the
name George Floyd became known across the country and how since then it’s taken
on a role as a symbol for something he no doubt never imagined.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Luther had
become the fulcrum at the center of change and the symbol for every awful thing
in the church or for every hope counter to the church’s oppressive gaze. Jerome
Aleander, a papal representative, reported back to Rome that Germany was a powder
keg ready to blow. He said the situation had to be dealt with before it was too
late.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The
process had already begun when the previous fall Pope Leo had issued the threat
to excommunicate Luther. The threat didn’t move Luther to recant what he’d
taught publicly and published. So in January, Luther was declared a heretic,
and now the civil authorities were bringing down the other fist.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">From the
beginning all Luther wanted was a serious debate in the church to see if he was
indeed right about what he’d encountered in scripture. He’d discovered Paul in
Romans proclaiming that salvation came on account of Jesus without any
participation points of our own being factored in. In other words, Luther had experienced
exactly what Jesus was talking about in our gospel reading this morning: “You
will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. …If the Son sets you free
you will be free indeed.” Luther had suddenly found himself free of demands to
play nice for God, free of the judgment that it seemed the entire message of
the church was built on, and free of the terror of being found wanting by God
and being sent to hell for eternity.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Late in
his life, looking back on how it all happened, Luther said he raced back
through the Bible and saw that same proclamation of freedom oozed out of every
chapter and verse. It’s like that recent Facebook meme that asks if the sneaker
is pink and white or gray and green. If you’re a pink sneaker person, once you
see it as green, you can’t see it as pink again. Once Luther spotted complete
freedom in Christ how would he ever see Jesus as the divine accountant keeping
track of sin and rendering hellfire as a sentence?</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The aim of
Johann Eck, the inquisitor at Worms, wasn’t an exploration of the wonders of
grace in the Old and New Testament or even a formal debate about theology.
Eck’s one aim was to put a lid on it. Luther was to be shut down for good, so
the only question allowed was this: Will you recant? Eck demanded that Luther
take it all back and fall into line again.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">After
being allowed to sleep on it, Luther was back before the emperor, the prince
electors, representatives of the church, and a bunch of Spaniards in the
gallery who reports say mocked him and flipped him off. Our favorite Friar
tried to make a distinction about the different kinds of things he’d written,
but Eck accused him of stalling and quibbling. So Luther responded with the
famous speech we remember today. We’ll speak those same words as our confession
of faith today.</span></span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“</span><span style="background: white; text-indent: 0.5in;">Unless I am convinced
by Scripture and plain reason - I do not accept the authority of the popes and
councils, for they have contradicted each other - my conscience is captive to
the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against
conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen."</span></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">What
Luther was up against in Worms was our human attachment to “if/then” thinking. </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">If</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> you do this, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">then</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> you’ll get this in return. We human beings love Isaac Newton’s
laws of physics like “For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction”
and “An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by another
object or force.” We see how our use of power in the world brings about change.
We know that we get paid once or twice a month if we work hard, and if we’re
careful we might get our school loans paid off and eventually (fingers crossed)
retire and gain the reward of travel with our beloved before we get too old.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But the
gospel that had so grabbed hold of Luther works a different way. There’s no
“if/then” here. It’s all “because Jesus/then.” Because Jesus was crucified,
died, and raised from the dead, then you have everything you need for
salvation. And when it’s a “because” rather than an “if,” there’s no
uncertainty. When there’s no uncertainty, then you can echo Paul in Romans 8: “</span><span class="text" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background: white;">For I am convinced that
neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor
the future, nor any powers,</span></span><span style="background: white; text-indent: 0.5in;"> <span class="text">neither height nor depth, nor anything
else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of
God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”</span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span class="text" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background: white;">The threat of uncertainty is </span></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">exactly
what Luther was talking about in his speech when he talked about the
conscience. He knew exactly how life works, how we move along at a clip and
then something comes along to trip us up, shatter our confidence in being able
to concoct a future, and bring us to doubt and despair. It happens with a job
loss, or the word “cancer,” or a financial setback, or awful crop and livestock
prices, or a dang global pandemic. It happens with relationships that fall
apart or kids that give you grief or aging parents whose lives you’re trying to
manage. It happens with a bad grade or not making the team or the
day-after-day-after-day gloom of depression.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">When these
things happen, they destroy our sense of ourselves in relation to the world, to
other people, and to God himself. That’s what your conscience is — not a little
angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other like in Tom and Jerry
cartoons. When your conscience is troubled, you sense that the bonds that tie
us to others and to God have frayed or even broken. Luther was dead sure that
landing in that spot was not what God intends for you. He’d experienced it
himself too many times to count, and nothing he tried fixed a darn thing,
whether going to confession, praying more, attempting to keep lusts out of his
head, going on a pilgrimage to Rome, or promising God he’d try to do better.
The more he tried to whip himself into shape and fix his relationships with
God, his neighbors, and the world, the less he seemed to accomplish.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">But when
he latched onto the promise of Christ’s mercy, now he’d encountered God in a
way that required no religious superheroes. He didn’t have to become more
religious, more spiritual, or more moral. All he needed to do was be the
broken-down sinner he knew in his heart he was. That was the very person Jesus
had come to save. But what Johann Eck was trying to get Luther to do was to
turn his back on that confidence and the good news itself.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Eck was
part of system that had more to do with the books in the self-help category on
Amazon than with the gospels. The whole system urged you do your best for God.
If you did, then God would take it the rest of the way. But did you catch the
“if/then” there? All Eck could ever promise in the end was more doubt about
whether you ever actually done your best. What if you didn’t? And how would you
ever know until you were dead and standing at the pearly gates, and it was too
late to achieve any extra credit? That’s why at the end of his speech Luther
said, “it’s neither right nor safe to go against conscience.”</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Luther
regarded the whole business as the Evil One tempting him to turn away from
Christ and trust himself. That’s not much different from what we experience in
the world. Advertising is built on the proposition that you don’t have what’s
needed for a full rich life, and you need to fill the gap with product X,
whether Bud Light, teeth whiteners, or the candidate on the left or on the
right. That’s how social media functions: you won’t be fulfilled unless you can
curate the perfect online presence, posting pics of your truly interesting
life, gourmet meals, and clever memes. The temptation is always for you to
think that God doesn’t or can’t provide you with what you need, especially what
you need to be in his good graces.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Luther’s
advice when such temptation to unfaith comes along was to lift one cheek and
let what my late dad called a “buck snort” rip. In Luther’s mind, the devil
didn’t have a body, and passing gas or drinking beer or enjoying a good meal
was a way to thumb your nose at the tempter and cling all the more firmly to
Christ’s freedom.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">In his
letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul wrote one of my favorite lines in the whole
Bible. He said “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and
do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” When Luther answered Eck before the
Holy Roman Emperor and all the other officials, princes, and dignitaries, he
stood firm. He would let nothing pull him away from the sure and certain
promise of the gospel. He refused to recant. He simply said no.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I know
Luther was more self-aware than I am, and he no doubt knew the gospel more
intimately than I do. In the thick of life, I forget that promise and I keep
turning to my own efforts as the path to security. But we have a Lord who isn’t
going to leave us in the lurch. He’s given us this meal today, the Lord’s
Supper, so that we can hear that promise and have it slide down our gullets
with the bread and wine and become a part of every cell in our body. We have
this promise to remind us: “This is my body and blood given and shed for you
for the forgiveness of sins.” Notice Jesus didn’t say “given and shed for you
as an example” or “given and shed for you as a job description” or “given and
shed for you to prod you to do better.” Jesus gives himself to you for the
forgiveness of sins, which always bestows freedom and a new day, indeed a new
life.</span></span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Luther’s
stood there in that chamber in Worms. He couldn’t do anything else. If he had,
it would have meant denying the very Lord who’d freed him. In the end, he had
to make it all about himself and his own understanding or effort or about the
work that Christ did on the cross. There were no other alternatives, no half
measures, no being kinda or sorta Christian.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">In the same way there’s no halfway for us, even
though we aren’t facing the Holy Roman Emperor. We just face more insidious
temptations that are the harder to resist because they seem so much less
consequential. But the question remains: Are you free? Do you understand what
Christ has done for you? Does that promise have a grip on you? Or are you
looking elsewhere for peace, safety, and security? I tell you this, my friends,
Jesus has promised to give you life and give it abundantly. It’s in him that
you’ll find the same freedom Luther did 500 years ago. May God help us. Amen.</span></p>Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-65662566462090559322020-08-10T09:52:00.003-05:002020-08-10T09:52:59.507-05:00On the role of a bishop in the church today<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b> </b>A
character in Ernest Hemingway’s <i>The Sun
Also Rises</i> is asked how he became bankrupt. He answers, “Two ways….
Gradually and then suddenly.” This pandemic has revealed all kinds of fault
lines and inequities that in the past have gradually and stealthily shaped our
culture, and now with the coronavirus we suddenly see hard truths about our
common life. The church has faced its own gradual and sudden plunge. We’ve
faced a gradual decline, and now the pandemic suddenly forces issues about how
to be church in this place and at this time that have cried out for attention
for decades. All of which means this synod, its rostered leaders, its lay
ministers, its congregations, and its pew-sitters face a time of massive and
urgent change. There is no normal to go back to. There’s only the future that
the Holy Spirit is leading us into without the pillars of cloud and fire we’d
like.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">In a time of change, two things become
the focus for us in the church. The first, of course, is the gospel of Jesus
Christ, and him crucified. As Paul says in Romans (1:16), it’s “the power of
God for salvation to everyone who has faith.” It’s the one thing that
constitutes the church and its mission. It’s the thing that everything else
points to, the reason for every worship service, program, project, and
decision. When we keep our eyes on the center, change is possible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The other focus makes things more
difficult. Around the center lie all the gateways through which we’ve come to a
life of faith and that we associate with the gospel: Sunday school, soaring
music, Bible camp, Women of the ELCA, good coffee, or having every pew filled
for worship. Those beloved things are so strong in our emotions that sometimes
we confuse them with the central reason for our life together.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">When things are changing, the familiar
entry-points shift, and new avenues for bringing people into the center are
called for. Being free enough to risk the new is a hard, hard task. In “Freedom
of a Christian” Martin Luther reminds us that it’s God’s Word that frees us.
It’s individual Christians, congregations, synods, and even denominations that
hold firm to Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever, who endure
change.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">For a bishop to focus only on the
duties of being an administrator is to deal with peripheral matters. Those
things are important, and we’ll need to give serious time and energy to them
across this synod. But the bishop simply has to be the preacher, teacher, and
public proclaimer who holds up the center. As bishop I would value the gifts of
the synod staff, council, the deans, and people in congregations who have the
expertise, the creativity, and the faithfulness to tackle both the old and the
new entry-points. My job would be to help them make distinctions, decisions,
and even tentative steps, all within the context of a public witness to our
Lord’s saving grace for the godless, the sinful, the broken, those who’ve never
heard of it, and those who desperately need to hear it again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">All those gateways lie in the realm of
the law, and we need them for our common safety, security, and order. But they
don’t hold the possibility of changing hearts or bringing people to saving
faith. Whether it’s Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch, Paul speaking to the
Athenians on the Areopagus, Argula von Grumbach and her letters supporting the
Reformation in 16<sup>th</sup> century Bavaria, John Lewis speaking faithful
truth to power, or the pastor who will bring a final word at your grave, it’s
proclamation that God uses to create new structures by forgiving sin and raising
the dead. That’s what allows for change, both in our hearts and in the ways we
live and work together.</span></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I don’t know what my own congregation
or the synod will look like six years from now, much less what the state of the
ELCA and wider Christianity will be. Yet I do know that in that time I won’t
give up as your preacher and provider of pastoral care. I will seek similar
leaders to serve ministry sites. And I will continue to cling to the only hope
I’ve ever truly had: that Jesus is my Lord and yours. You and I will, no doubt,
fail miserably on occasion and, I hope, also prayerfully achieve some success,
but the center holds nonetheless. Christ always has. He always will. Amen.</span><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-51061627877857905402019-07-14T12:45:00.001-05:002019-07-14T12:45:33.111-05:00The Splanchnizomai Samaritan<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<img alt="Image result for good samaritan he qi" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d2/a7/c5/d2a7c5ca97b59c952f022b550b8da858.jpg" /></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>This sermon, based on the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, was preached at Luther Memorial Church in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 14, 2019.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My friend Steve Paulson once began a
sermon by saying, “There are some places the gospel is more true than others.” I
didn’t stand up in the pew and call BS on him, but in my head I thought, “That
can’t be so. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The gospel
can’t shift and change according to our earthly circumstances.” Yet, if our
gospel reading today has anything to say about the matter, as usual it turns
out that I was wrong. Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan shows the gospel as
being less true in some places – especially among lawyers and religious people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This familiar parable gets its
set-up with an encounter Jesus had with a lawyer. This was a particular kind of
lawyer – maybe the worst kind – a religious lawyer. This fella was a Pharisee.
These were people trained in the ins and outs of the 613 laws given by God that
appear in the Old Testament. It was easier to be a Sadducee than a Pharisee
when it can to the law. For Sadducees, if a situation didn’t appear in the
scriptures, that was that. You didn’t have to do any more thinking about it.
But the Pharisees thought that those 613 laws needed interpretation, so they
went to school to learn all about how to deal with the law. Both groups were
equally strict when it came to a person’s religious life and what made them
holy or unholy, clean or unclean, righteous or unrighteous, justified or
unjustified. But the Pharisees had to have the nimblest of minds to see every
facet of an issue. And they loved to debate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That’s what’s going on at the
beginning of our gospel reading. A Pharisee proposed a debate topic: what a
person has to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i> to inherit eternal
life. And Jesus took on the role of Socrates answering questions with his own
questions in order to draw out what was behind the lawyer’s query. He pointed
the Pharisee back to those 613 laws and asked what he could find in there that
would answer his own question. The Pharisee knew those laws inside and out and
immediately rattled off the two big ones that summarize the two tables of the Ten
Commandments: the ones dealing with God and those dealing with our relationship
with other people. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and
your neighbor as yourself.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That should have done it right
there, and the encounter wouldn’t have needed to progress any further. But the
Pharisee understood something important. Those two commandments to love God and
your neighbor are a cruel taskmaster. They demand everything of you: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> your heart rather than a part of it,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> your soul not a portion of it, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> your strength rather than your left
bicep, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> your mind, that is,
every single thought of every waking moment. God requires every single part of
you without reserve. The Pharisee knew it and did what any self-respecting
sinner would do: he looked for a work-around. It’s because the lawyer knew God
isn’t interested in leaving a piece of you to your own devices. If a little bit
of you gets left for you to maintain autonomy over, then you’ll always stake
out the territory with religion, piety, and morality – trying to show how, even
if the rest of you can’t perform up to par for God, at least this last little
bit is good, even if it’s just good intentions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Luke tells us the lawyer wanted to
justify himself. The Pharisee wanted to find some small place where he could
stand before the divine judge with even an iota of evidence that on the Last
Day he should be waved through St. Peter’s version of the TSA security line.
Knowing the impossibility of fulfilling all those <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i>s in the commandment, the Pharisee deflected and asked about the
easiest part. He thought, “If God is so stringent and impossible to please,
maybe I’ll have a better shot at success by focusing on other people who are
just as fallible as I am.” So, he asked, “Who is my neighbor?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Lord Jesus in Luke’s story was
no fool. He knew exactly how things work. He knew the weaselly ways we
unctuously try to slide through the law’s grasp. He knew that the gospel he
came to give – that the kingdom of heaven was at hand in his very person – was
simply not true for the lawyer. So, he told a story that shredded every last
vestige of the Pharisee’s hopes for self-justification. In Jesus’ parable you
have a cast of characters that includes two seemingly fine upstanding religious
people who act like jerks, some robbers who belong in the penitentiary over in
Anamosa, the nearly dead guy the thieves had beaten up and tossed in the ditch
and who would have made anyone who helped him unclean, and a Samaritan.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We have to be careful when we attach
the word “good” to any Samaritan. Samaritans were the people whom good
God-fearing Jews loved to hate. You may not think you know much about the
status of first-century Samaritans in Judea, but here at Luther Memorial we’re
mighty familiar with a particular Samaritan, because that’s who the woman in
our altar painting is. The picture is of the moment Jesus tells her the words
beneath the painting: “Hver som drikke af det Vant, som jeg vil give ham, skal
til evig Tid ikke t</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ø</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">rste. (Whoever drinks of the
water that I shall give him shall not thirst for eternity.)” I know that our
painting is more folk art than a professional study, and I know the artist
didn’t intend for me to do this, but I have an inner twelve-year-old boy inside
me, and every Sunday I look at the woman at the well and wonder why she’s an
amputee. It looks like she only has one leg. On the other hand, I also know
that faithful Jews in Jesus’ day looked down on Samaritans as not having a leg
to stand on, so maybe it’s appropriate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The point, though, is that, if a
Samaritan is the hero of the story, Jesus had raised up a person of no account
as someone to be admired. The Samaritans claimed that they were the true descendants
of the Israelites after Moses, because they worshiped God at Mt. Gerizim rather
down in Jerusalem. And for their part the Jews regarded the Samaritans as
heretics and blasphemers for worshiping the wrong way. For them, even with the
best intentions a Samaritan could never, ever be called good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So, what are we to make of this
parable? If the Pharisee grilling him was going to zero in on the easiest part
of the commandments, then Jesus would turn that into the point of the wedge
that he would drive between the lawyer and his hopes of justifying himself.
Jesus’ aim was to get the Pharisee to despair of his own ability to achieve
acceptability before God. His goal was to get the religious professional to
turn to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">him</i> for life by showing him
the kind of mercy he had to bestow. He wanted to turn him from religion to
faith, from the rigor of law and rule-keeping to a relationship with him, from
captivity to freedom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Who in this curve ball of a story
was a neighbor? Who had mercy? It certainly wasn’t the bad guys. They were the
people St. Paul talked about in Galatians who were all about the works of the
flesh: “</span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">fornication, impurity,
licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger,
quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and
things like these.” The robbers were a law unto themselves. Their boundary was
whatever their dark hearts desired. If that meant beating up a traveler and
leaving him to do, so be it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Then there are the priest and the
Levite. These were the people religious folks looked up to. Seeing the guy by
the side of the road must have forced a dilemma on them. They had important
religious stuff to do. If they even touched the bloody road kill they
encountered, that would make them unclean, that is, unfit for their holy and
sacred Temple duty in the work God had appointed them to. Their own calling
took precedence over helping a fellow human being in need. Someone else was
going to have to mess with the mess in the ditch.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As for the man who was beaten and
left for dead, the Pharisee grilling Jesus would have had the same questions as
those who quizzed him about the blind man he had healed: “Whose sin caused this
to blindness to happen?” He would have regarded the violence perpetrated on the
man as someone’s fault – most likely his own. You get what you deserve, you
know, and this man failed to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That leaves us with the Samaritan.
He applied what first aid he could. He tore strips of cloth from the fabric he
wore and used his oil and wine as the first century equivalent of an
antiseptic. Then he lay him over the back of his pack mule and continued
further down the road. That was no easy matter. Jerusalem sits over three
thousand feet in altitude above Jericho, and the 16-mile road has about a 4%
grade. That’s steep. No RAGBRAI rider wants to bike for sixteen miles on that
grade. When he got to the closest inn, he paid around 350 bucks in advance and
promised to pay even more for the guy’s care and feeding. That means the Samaritan
not only took care of the immediate need, he also committed himself to an
ongoing relationship with a stranger who would wake from his wounded state and
regard him with hatred.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The real telling quality of the
Samaritan in not his willingness to lay out cold hard cash for the man he
spotted along the road. It’s that when he saw the man he was moved with pity. Those
three words – moved with pity – in the original Greek are a single word: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i>. Try that word on your
tongue. Repeat after me: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i>.
The root of the word is “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchna</i>,”
or guts. Maybe a better translation than “moved with pity” would be that the
Samaritan was simply gutted. Chad Bird, who spoke at our Christ Hold Fast event
this spring, says it was “a gut-wrenching, stomach-twisting mercy.” The
Samaritan wasn’t a “good” Samaritan; he was a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i> Samaritan, one who was moved to his core at his
fellow human being’s plight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i> is a strange one. Chad Bird reminds us that it’s a
Jesus verb. It only appears in the New Testament connected to Jesus. Our Lord
has <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i> when he sees the
people of Jerusalem as sheep without a shepherd. He has <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i> for the sick. He has <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i> for the widow of Nain whose son – her only source of
support – has died. And in Jesus’ parables, the characters who represent him,
both the father of the prodigal son and the Samaritan here, feel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By telling a parable about patently
offensive characters, Jesus sought to remove the moral, ethical, and religious
categories that the Pharisee judged the world by. In their place he gave the
lawyer the same thing he gave the woman at the well: living water that would
remove both his thirst and his need for self-justification. If Jesus’ aim was
to undercut the lawyer’s world view, he also wanted to give the world back to
him by giving the Pharisee new vision. That would only begin by being the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i> Lord, the Lord
gut-wrenchingly moved by him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Surely we understand who the good
guys and the bad guys in the parable are. The good guys are the religious
leaders in Jerusalem: the priests in the temple, the Sadducees, and the
Pharisees. The bad guys are those in this world tending to their own lusts and
wreaking violence on others. Of course, Jesus is the Samaritan in the story.
But who is the man beaten up and left by the side of the road? That’s our
Pharisee – and you. Jesus knows what the world does to you. He knows exactly
how beaten and bruised you are. And he knows that the world expects you to take
matters of fixing your situation into your own hands. The world says,
“Physician, heal thyself. God helps those who help themselves.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But it’s the great good news of this
parable that Jesus’ deep <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i>
is aimed at the least righteous, least actively good, and least able person in
the whole story. When the world comes crashing down on our lawyer friend, as it
does on all of us, Jesus wants this crazy story to linger and finally come to
life. When I was growing up my little brother had a toy demolition derby car.
You could wind it up and let it race across the floor. But when it hit
something – and it never failed to hit something – the car exploded into pieces
that would have to be picked up. If we’re holding ourselves together, our hold
is tenuous. There are very real evils around us that prowl around us waiting to
pounce. Many of us aren’t more than one big medical bill away from financial
insolvency. We know that even though we may be fit and healthy today we don’t
have a clue about cancer cells that might be exploding in our own splanchna or
an aneurysm waiting to burst even as we speak. You understand that our security
and safety are illusions at best, because there isn’t one among us that won’t
in the end face a final breath and a last heartbeat. And there’s nothing you
can do about it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But Jesus, our good Samaritan, every
last <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i>-ed cell of him is
the one who regards the helpless one as most deserving of his benefits. That’s
why we see him in the gospels hanging out with sinners, tax collectors, and
prostitutes. It’s why he has no fear of being made unclean by lepers or the
blood of the woman with a twelve-year hemorrhage. And it’s why his mercy
extends to the thief on the cross next to him in his own hour of agony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We should turn to the man by the side of the
road to see that what we have to do to gain eternal life is utterly passive:
You just need to lie there and take what Jesus has for you. That means that, if
you’re in the midst of a situation that feels like it’s killing you, Jesus is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i> for you. If you’re beaten
down, it’s total <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i>. If
you’re powerless over alcohol and your life has become unmanageable, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i>. And when you’re finally
embalmed and dressed and laid in your casket in a hole that a cemetery back-hoe
has dug, Jesus will be even more moved with pity. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Splanchnizomai</i>, compassion, and mercy over and over and over again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And that’s where the gospel is most
true. It’s among the beat-up, the dragged-down, the least, the last, the lost,
the little. It’s for you and your black-and-blue tender spots, your tumors,
your failures, your junk that Christ’s mercy, his compassion, his pity, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i> can finally be seen in
their fullness. Where you’ve got nothing to bring to the table, Jesus can bring
everything. And if he’s brought everything for you, then you, too, can start
looking for your fellow dead and dying souls along the side of the road and
become yourself all <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">splanchnizomai</i>.
Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.” Keep your eyes open for the road kill and be
prepared for a gut-wrenching experience. Amen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-12922230517754083182019-04-29T10:27:00.001-05:002019-04-29T10:27:53.566-05:00The Death and Life of the Horseman Uncle<br />
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<i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I was honored to be asked to speak about my uncle, Bobby Jones, at his funeral at. St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Sturgis, SD, on April 27, 2019.</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">My
uncle Bobby was the consummate West River horseman and rancher, and for his
first four decades a bachelor cowboy at that. The best photo I’ve ever seen of
him is one that my cousin Anna took of him sitting up against a fence at the 2
Lazy J Ranch. Those long legs are all folded up like some cowboy origami, all
elbows and knees. He has a straw cowboy hat on his head, a pair of black boots
with scuffed toes on his feet, and a set of reins in his hands. With his long
face and equally long beard, he’s nodding at the horse, and the horse nuzzling
his hand seems to be nodding right back, as if there’s some unspoken language
they both know – which wouldn’t be surprising when you’re dealing with a horse
whisperer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There’s
a side of Bobby that’s well represented there: silent, stoic, thoughtful,
still. This is the Bobby who would do his ranch chores with an eye to the
horizon, watching for smoke to forestall the disaster of a prairie fire or the
loss of a haystack that had been hit by lightning. Or keeping on top of the
signs that his heifers were about to calve for the first time. Or silently
stoking a stove-full of wood in the ranch living room to keep us warm at least
until the wee hours before a winter dawn. No words. Just do the work. Git ‘er
done. Do it all over again the next day. About the only time before he retired
to town that I saw Uncle Bobby not actively taking care of the ranch was a
20-minute stint each day after lunch, when he and Grandpa Buster would take a
quick nap on the floor in the living room and recharge for whatever haying or
cattle feeding was in store during the afternoon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
don’t expect that’s much different than it’s ever been for the men folk among
the ranches of central Meade County, including Bobby’s best friend Floyd
Cammack, or the Youngs further south, the Mikkudiks at the place north of ours,
or the Bruchs and Vigs heading over to Fairpoint on the Old Stoneville Road.
The ranch women had their extension club where they could connect. But the men
would stand next to each other, leaning on their pickups after fetching the
mail at the Stoneville Store, and say everything that needed to be said, but
with as few words as possible. This is the ranching ethos, and Uncle Bobby
served it faithfully.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Under
that stoic demeanor there was a jokester and an imp. Bobby could get away with
a quick-witted line under his soft voice. He’d say something about his beard
covering up his turkey gobbler neck and then patiently wait for you to catch
on. Healthy ribbing and leg-pulling were skills he’d mastered. The subtle joke
was always better than out-and-out yuks. But when Uncle Bobby heard a good one
he had a smile that stretched wider than a section of land, and he’d laugh with
the best of ‘em.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Uncle
Bobby was a steady presence in my life. He sat me behind the wheel of the old
backward tractor and showed me the clutch and shifting lever, so I could help
scoop up windrows and bring them to wherever he had the cage set up to stack
hay. Later he taught me to drive the John Deere tractor with the hay fork on
the front end. Still later it was that gold Chevy pickup with the plastic seat
covers that left an imprint on your thighs. He trusted me to follow directions,
be safe, and get my task done. It was from Uncle Bobby that I gained a love for
peeing without walls. We’d be out with the cows, and he’d undo the four buttons
on his Levis and let flow. This is an activity I believe we need more of in
this world. He taught me to grab a cow’s teat just-so and showed me the rhythm of
my fingers that brought milk squirting into a stainless steel bucket. He taught
us kids to be careful in the granaries around the ranch and climbing stacks of
bales behind the barn, so we’d be delivered back to our parents alive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There
are so many things in my life that continually remind me of Uncle Bobby. When
I’ve let the lawn go too long between mowings and I think I could bale the grass,
the smell of the new-mown grass takes me back to Bobby cutting alfalfa field
across the road from the Stoneville School. When I catch a whiff of diesel
fuel, I’m right back at the tank west of the garage with Bobby filling up the John
Deere. Whenever I see the arc of something being welded on TV, I think of Bobby
taking time to weld bolts, washers, and nuts together in the shape I wanted to
make some goofball kid art project, which wasn’t far from how he created beauty
from a strip of leather and a few tools. The feel of a rope in my hands takes
me back to the contraption Bobby made to braid baling twine. And each semester
he’s there when I tell my students about Christ the Lamb of God slain from the
foundation of the world, I recount how Bobby and Grandpa would save an orphaned
lamb from winding up on the ranch’s bone pile, by skinning a dead lamb and jacketing
its skin on the bum lamb and presenting it to the dead lamb’s mother.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And
of course there’s Aggie. I don’t know if my bachelor uncle ever had other shots
at love and romance, and he sure waited long enough. But I’m grateful he was
slow on the marriage front, because he and Aggie gave me a model in their long
and faithful commitment to each other. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who
was hanged by the Nazis, once said that your love can’t sustain a marriage, but
a marriage can sustain your love. That’s what I saw happening between Bobby and
Aggie over more than just shy of forty years as they depended on each other,
filled in the gaps, and raised their three kids, Patrick, Anna, and Ted. Bobby
brought me an aunt who understood me, who could talk literature and liturgy and
love of family each time we met up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">These
last years haven’t been easy. Bobby and Aggie had looked forward to traveling.
That didn’t happen, although seeing pictures from Anna and Mark’s Jamaica
wedding proved to me that an old rancher can learn new tricks. From the waist
up Bobby was all cowboy, complete with hat and western-cut shirt with pearl
snaps. But go south from there and find shorts, white legs, and flip-flops
under Caribbean skies. Bobby in shorts? Who knew that my uncle was capable of
it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Whenever
I asked my dad about the ranch or relatives or the history of the clans of
honyockers who homesteaded this West River country, my dad always said, “We’ll
have to ask Bobby.” Uncle Bobby was an amazing repository of lore. He was the
only person I knew who could keep track of who the Shaeffers, the Cales, the
Braziers, the Crows, the Dows, and the Mutchlers in our extended clan were.
With my dad, Aunt Ida, and now Uncle Bobby gone, all those stories have
disappeared. With the lore gone, we’re left with my beloved Stoneville Steadies
history books and whatever paltry information Ancestry.com can offer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">When
my siblings and I were growing up there used to be a billboard for Rapid City
Clothiers along I-90 south of Piedmont. It was a giant pair of bow-legged blue
jeans and cowboy boots. Nothing from the waist up. Just a 20-foot pair of Levis.
Every time we drove past we kids would point to them and say, “There’s Uncle
Bobby’s blue jeans,” because he was such a tall and lanky drink of water.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It
seems impossible that what we have of him fits in this little container. But
we’ll take it out to Red Owl this afternoon and place it in the ground just a
ways from the church where Aggie brought him Sunday after Sunday, like the
paralyzed young man’s friends brought him to Jesus in Mark’s gospel. It’s the
cemetery where Grandma and Grandpa, Aunt Ida Mae, and countless friends and
neighbors have been laid to rest. In a couple months that prairie graveyard
will be surrounded by yellow clover and sit under wide open skies. In a way
we’ll release Uncle Bobby to the elements, the land he loved, the countryside
where he worked tirelessly. And we’ll give thanks for his twinkling eyes, his
unassuming voice, his hands that could fix anything with some baling wire and a
pair of pliers, and his gentle heart that loved with quiet strength. Blessed be
his memory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i></i></span>Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-61089961489987912202019-03-04T10:28:00.000-06:002019-04-29T10:39:54.973-05:00My Uncle Carl: the King of the Pasture<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>I was privileged to write a piece that was read at my Uncle Carl's funeral at First Prebyterian Church in Sturgis, SD, on March 4, 2019.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Dear
Candy, Lisa, and Carl,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’m
grateful for the chance to write a few words about your dad, my uncle with the ready
smile, the barrel chest, and such resilient faithfulness to his work, his
community, and his family. Uncle Carl was a steady presence in my first couple
decades, when we’d gather at the Atoll school for Christmas programs and at the
ranch afterward to open gift, or when we Jones kids would spend a summer week
each year playing or picking potato bugs down in the garden and dropping them
in a jug of kerosene. Whatever we did Uncle Carl was there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
the winter time he’d be dressed in coveralls and a Scotch cap heading out to
feed cattle, in the summer it was a straw cowboy hat and work cowboy boots, and
on trading days when he’d come to town he’d be decked out in that black leather
vest, white shirt, black hat, and black cowboy boots. And along with it came the
badge of a working cattleman: an untanned forehead. That was nothing, though,
compared to seeing Uncle Carl when he took off his pants at bedtime. We’d be
dazzled by the brilliant light show of his tighty-whities in combination with the
brightest white legs that had never seen a ray of sunshine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
my memory Uncle Carl took his work seriously. Successful cattle operations
don’t appear magically, and he came by his hard-working way honestly. That’s
what his folks, Jack and Ella, brought him up to do. And it was the legacy from
his grandparents and your great-grandparents Carl and Liesel who came from
Germany and homesteaded that Diamond-S Ranch in central Meade County. The
spirit of the honyockers remained strong in him, that pioneer generation that
plowed the gumbo and ran the Herefords, making do and often barely getting by.
Uncle Carl was a man of the land, always more comfortable it seemed without a
roof over his head, which might have been the reason behind his buying that red
convertible. I remember him putting the top down and racing north to Jim and
Vicky’s place, with gravel dust billowing behind us but blue skies above.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
never put much stock in the fact that Uncle Carl was on the school board. He
was just my uncle. Besides, no kid understands how those things work, and I
somehow had the idea that my Meade County ranching kin couldn’t have been as
important as bankers and attorneys in the county seat. But I know now that
they’re the salt-of-the-earth folks who actually make life work. And looking
back now I can see the qualities that planted him on that board and rooted him
there for all those decades: his honesty and trustworthiness, his diligence,
and even the example of civic service he no doubt had from his own uncle, Jake
Wahl, who himself served on the school board and in the South Dakota
legislature. Uncle Carl had a commitment to making the world around him better,
more productive, more efficient, more able to bear fruit into the future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Of
course, Uncle Carl had a side that truly delighted in those times when he let
down. He knew how to have rigorous and righteous fun. I remember him at a rodeo
in Union Center pulling a cold Schlitz out of a cattle tank filled with ice and
beer cans on a hot summer day, with a lit Camel in his other hand. And I can
still see him, rifle in hand, shooting rattlesnakes with the other menfolk, or
watching us kids traipse around Goblin’s Gardens, or stomping the snow off his
boots as he carried an armload of Christmas gifts into our house. Every memory
includes his hat cocked a little to one side, a glint in his eye, and sideburns
to spare. Put Uncle Carl on a dance floor, whether at the Red Owl Hall with my
own grandpa playing banjo in the band, or at those early German Club
Oktoberfests in Rapid with a polka band, and you’d see the picture of suave
delight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It’s
been over forty years since I lived in Sturgis, and I’m sorry that I hardly
knew Uncle Carl as an adult. That’s how our regrets work, don’t they? If I
could, I would have asked him about the event that in a round-about way led to
my existence. I’ve heard about the destruction of a car in the mid-50s and some
resulting trouble with the law that involved your dad and mine, and how it led
to both of them deciding that the better part of valor meant a hitch in the
military. My dad’s service took him to Germany, where he met my mom and where I
showed up on the scene. And it’s also the connection that got your mom to
follow us with Vivien in tow back to South Dakota, and why you three also
exist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’m
thankful for your dad, my dear Uncle Carl. Over the years he came to resemble a
big old red-and-white Hereford bull surveying the pasture he’d been given
dominion over. But not even the greatest prize-winning bull ever had Uncle
Carl’s straight line of white teeth that would stretch into a gleaming grin.
When he directed it at me, it was his vote of approval and my own point of
pride. I’m looking forward to seeing his smile restored, along with the rest of
him. I hear the Pearly Gates are really less of a gate than a cattle guard that
keeps the cloven-hoofed from crossing over and allows the rest of us to roll
in. I suspect Uncle Carl is on the other side, refusing the haloes they’re
handing out and demanding his black cowboy hat back. Thanks for sharing your
Papa with Gine, Troy, and me, and with all of us who’ve been blessed to know
him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Love,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Kenny<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i></i></span>Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-54985491571717005092018-09-25T15:33:00.003-05:002018-09-25T15:33:45.435-05:00Is God male or female?<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Chapel at Grand View University this semester focuses on common questions students ask about the faith. This sermon was delivered September 25, 2018.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our question we’re tackling today is this: “Is God male
or female?” The easy answer is “No.” Thank you very much. Have a nice walk to
your next class. And enjoy the extra ten minutes. Amen.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, the answer is no because God is God and not a
creature. Back in ancient Greece, Xenophanes, who lived a few hundred years
before Christ, could have told you that. A couple weeks ago, my Ancient and
Medieval Philosophy students learned that Xenophanes argued that it’s just
wrong to think of the Greek gods as having human bodies. And thinking the sun
is Apollo’s fiery chariot streaking across the sky isn’t much better. If our
own God is going to be God, then we’d also be wise about assigning gender to a
being who’s way more than a binary creature with either internal or external
plumbing or X and Y chromosomes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In
Genesis we hear that God made human beings male and female and that they were
made in God’s image. But that doesn’t mean that we’re male and female because
God is multi-gendered. No, we have to look a few words later and see what God
says about all that was created. When God’s divine identity was expressed out
into the cosmos, God declared that it was all “</span><i style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">tov me’od</i><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">,” or “waaayy good.” God’s creation, including platypuses
and pachyderms, spiny echidnas, and your high school cafeteria lady, is totes
good. And so are you, no matter what body parts you have.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
hard thing about our question is that it assumes we can actually figure out
something about God that God apparently isn’t interested in letting us in on.
If only we knew whether God was male or female, then, depending on God’s
gender, we could decide that women are manipulating she-devils or that men are
full of toxically masculine demonic rage. And whichever one doesn’t match God can go back to hell
where Satan’s spawn belong.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
our Bible passage this morning gives us some hope. In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul
assumes we’re going to ask all kinds of questions that want to get at something
about God’s essential nature. Stuff like, “Why did God let my cousin die so
young?” and “If I prayed so hard for a homecoming date, why am I sitting at
home with Ben and Jerry as my companions?” For Paul, no matter what our
questions, when we try to get beyond the veil, all we’re going to find is
ourselves. “For now, we see in a mirror dimly.” When we ask a question like
ours, the only answer will be a reflection of ourselves. It’s all part of the
limits of our thinking that God established in the Garden of Eden when Adam and
Eve were told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We ask
questions, and God will answer with silence.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But
there’s hope in our verse. We look into that mirror and get a faint echo of
God’s being. That means that we can learn something about God from human
characteristics, even the most grievously stereotypical attributes we slap on
the genders. We can learn about God from muscle-bound dudes </span><i style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">and</i><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> sentimental, weepy guys. We can
learn about God from care-taking women </span><i style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">and</i><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
take-charge women. And those aren’t the only places we can learn about what
God’s like. The opening litany we prayed today gives us a mighty list of things
God has done that open up a vision of who God is. It’s admittedly a dim vision,
but they’re clues nonetheless. It’s as if God were wearing many and various
masks in this creation that show just as many and varied facets of who God is.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When
we get no response to our question, maybe God is silent because God wants us to
look elsewhere. It’s a dangerous thing to get behind the veil and see God’s
full power and might (and maybe even God’s gender). When Moses asked to see God
up on Mount Sinai, he only got to see God’s rear end and, because of it, was so
changed that the Israelites forced Moses to wear a veil over his face. He was
just too scary. So God sends you to encounter God where you can come to know
God’s fullness in a way that God wants to be known: in the person of Jesus. There
you have God made flesh and bone, with all the requisite and specific body
parts real human beings have. Which isn’t to say that the almighty God is male,
but only that God showed up in this one, Jesus. And because he was male in that
patriarchal society, he suffered humiliation and degradation on the cross in a
way that it wasn’t possible to experience for a woman.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But
maybe I’ve misunderstood the question today. Maybe the question is really about
whether we can use language other than male terms to address God. If so, we
have Jesus’ example. Certainly, he taught us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.”
But Jesus also gave us the image of a hen bringing her chicks under her wings
as a way to understand God’s great care for us. And we have the Old Testament
witness of Proverbs that speaks about God as wisdom. In Hebrew, that word is “</span><i style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">sophia</i><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">.” Have you ever heard of a guy
named Sophia? The point is that God doesn’t much care about our little pronouns
and divisions of the creation according gender. God cares about whether you
send your prayers God-ward at all.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Find
a way to talk to God, all the while knowing that your words and images are a
dim reflection of who God really is. If you don’t like calling God “Father”
because your dad is a jerk, then know that God’s definition of father is so
much greater than a fallible sperm donor. Know that a hen and her chicks is
just one aspect of who God is. God is also a rooster crowing his delight at the
sunrise and the rising of Jesus on Easter. The possibilities are endless. But
the beginning comes only when you speak to God. And there you have an entire
Bible to use as your source.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You
can address God by pointing to what God has done. “Almighty God, who answered
King David’s confession of adultery and murder with mercy, grant me forgiveness
as well.” “Gracious Lord God who stayed faithful to the Israelites in exile,
even when they thought you’d forgotten them, help me to trust that you remember
me.” “Holy Spirit who drove Jesus to be tempted in the wilderness, I’m out of
control and ask you to take the wheel and drive me, too.” “Divine One, who came
to Moses in the burning bush, my life is pretty dark, and I need you to burn a
little brighter for me, so I can hang on.” “Good Shepherd, I’m a stupid sheep
who’s gotten lost. Please find me.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">See
how it works?</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">You have resources for
prayer and an utterly human brain with all its limitations. But God delights in
hearing you. If neither heights nor depths, nor principalities, nor angels can
separate you from God’s love in Christ Jesus, then your human language is a
mighty small hurdle for God. However you speak, it’s enough. Give it a go. Just
connect. Amen. And A-women.</span></span></div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-57118933242321987442018-05-09T10:04:00.001-05:002018-05-10T07:59:34.633-05:00The Office of Preaching and the Church Today<br />
This is a link to the lecture I presented to the Augustana District of Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) at its annual convention on May 5, 2018, in Hutchinson, Minnesota. It follows up on LCMC's discussion of qualifications for ministry at its gathering last fall.<br />
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<a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZsquCGMtTkxDrePAL0x8bbB3FAxb94Ft" target="_blank">Click on this link</a>Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-6779884614703143402018-04-07T08:33:00.000-05:002018-04-09T15:58:30.979-05:00A Beloved Aunt, a Grave, and the Two-Lazy-J Ranch, <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i style="color: #454545; font-family: uictfonttextstylebody; font-size: 19px;">My Uncle Arlen Rounds asked me to speak at my dear Aunt Ida Mae's funeral today. </i><br />
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This afternoon Aunt Ida will take one last trip in this world, to Red Owl of all the little ignominious places in this big wide world. There she'll be laid down near my grandpa Buster and grandma Luberta in a fenced off section of West River pasture land on a day as wintery cold as the one twenty-odd years ago when we committed Grandpa to the earth — ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Come spring (yes, that's almost a prayer right now), come spring the snow will be a dim memory, and you'll be able to cast your eyes west and see thunderheads growing over the Hills to stretch over the vast blue sky. And around that fenced-in plot, for as far as you can see the yellow and white clover, the alfalfa, and the purple coneflowers will delight with color and wafting sweetness.</div>
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It's fitting for Aunt Ida to come full circle and await the resurrection in the land of central Meade County that so shaped her, as it did to so many of us. When you drive north and a little west of Red Owl, past Cammack's place and the intersection with the Stoneville school and what was the store and post office, you'll head around the curve at Stoneville Hill, and finally see the specific little ranch that shaped Ida, the 2-Lazy J Ranch nestled down on a creek bed. A ranch house that began as a pioneer dugout in the side of a hill. The garage. A couple granaries. The cabin, bum lamb shed, outhouse, barn. And north of all the buildings, the prairie dog mounds and bone pile.</div>
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In my college office in Iowa, up on the top shelf of too many books, I have a calf skull that came from that boneyard. Every time I glance its way, it nearly nods back, as if to say, "You, old man, come from the dirt and manure of the Jones ranch. You come from the warm morning stove in the ranch house. You come from summers baling hay and winters breaking ice in cattle troughs. Your epigenetic processes are shaped by opening gates so Uncle Bobby can drive the pickup through and by the struggle to get that blamed thing closed again. Your intestinal biome is fed by home canning and milk straight from an actual cow. Your sleep patterns were established up those steep steps in an antiques bed with a chamber pot under it at the ready. You may think you're at home in the world, but you won't be until you drive up that lane, get out of your car, and stand there just above the rusting cans and junk of the trash dump, next to the sandstone face Grandpa carved, creek in front of you and windbreak behind. You will breath in air as it should be and settle in to who you really are." I think you all need your own office skull to remind you of these things.</div>
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None of us ever understands how deeply we're shaped by place. When you take in the ranch you can see what made Aunt Ida. Joneses have always had to ride low to the ground. Ranch life ain't easy. So Aunt Ida became practical and resilient, happy with small pleasures. You don't survive for long in ranch country without the bonds created with those around you, like the Lees, the Vigs, the Orths, Youngs, and more from Red Owl to Fairpoint and Union Center to Opal. Ida knew the importance of those bonds of family and friendship. She carried it out everywhere she lived, in her college days at BH, in Custer, Ogden, Elko, Sitka, and Laramie. You could see her deep dependence on and joy in others in her connections in Does and Eastern Star and her love of the folks at that little congregation in Medicine Bow.</div>
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Last night as so many of us gathered under Dee's gracious roof, I recognized these same grounded, landed, and practical qualities of character around the room. Uncle Bobby's doesn't have much strength for story-telling, and since my dad died, I've depended on Ida Mae's storehouse of prairie family lore. This is, perhaps the one of the last times we'll gather all of us as the product of that land. But Aunt Ida will have been one of the homely channels that made us these people.</div>
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There's another cemetery up Boulder Canyon on a hill above Deadwood, and there's another gravestone marked with the name Ida. She was my Aunt Ida's grandmother, grandpa's mother Ida Cale. This is our other family plot, for baby Jimmy is buried there, too. Today we stand with arms stretched from plot to plot Ida to Ida. Thankful, yes. Sorrowful, certainly. But for me I'm mostly eager to see once again my beloved aunt. She, one of the last who had known me my whole life. Aunt Ida with the ready grin. Ida with Buster's twinkly eye. Ida who knew my parents' feet of clay and showed me how to loved them. Ida on whom the shadow of Grandma's own darkness and that of a passel of alcoholic blue-talking uncles sometimes descended. Ida of the embroidery, the bookkeeping, the following of a tall Forest Service man with eyes twinklier than her dad's, of the scrolling handwriting. Ida of the strong love for her children and now grandchildren, who could only speak that love with a squeeze of a hand, even when she couldn't move the fingers that once played Great Grandma Mamie's Price & Teeple upright piano in the living room at the ranch.</div>
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Oh, we've been loved by her. We give her back, hardly wanting to release our grip. Thank God we can do it by placing her back in the bosom of that land that, even now, holds us all and waits to unfold what has belonged to it all along. Goodbye, Aunt Ida Mae. We'll see you on the Youngest Day, when this good gumbo earth bears its final fruit. </div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-54576898044759042822018-01-20T10:33:00.000-06:002018-01-20T10:33:39.237-06:00Gine's flamingo feather<div style="color: #454545;">
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In my sister Gine and Joe's magnificent teal and turquoise bathroom, there's a picture frame hanging on the wall. What it contains she found on a trip to visit Mary and me and has deep meaning for me.</div>
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Gine had twisted Joe's arm enough that he consented to take time away from his other marriage to RCS and drive the 12 hours across the state through Sioux Falls, where months later she would be gifted with a competent, listening oncologist, an incomparable nurse navigator, and other staff who regarded her as a complete person worthy of their best efforts.</div>
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But that would be months away. On this trip they drove past the signs for Avera Health and continued down toward Omaha on I-29 and east halfway across Iowa. They came for our annual Palm Sunday shrimp boil: andouille sausages, onions, shrimp, and corn on the cob boiled together and dumped in the middle of the table. Around that table were our pastor and his wife, along with their three little girls, still another a couple recovering from addiction and expecting a baby, and, by phone, my brother Troy. Our sister Lynne arrived from Gettysburg a day later. Afterward we engaged in a little Cards Against Humanity and delighted in the laughter that arose at a pastor's wife being forced to say those things.</div>
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You'd think that would have been the utter highlight of the trip. But there's no photo of of us all enjoying ourselves in that frame a few blocks west of here in their house. It contains no family pic or vacation shot but instead holds something just as precious to my sister: one solitary sherbet orange and pink flamingo feather.</div>
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She picked up that feather from the ground at the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines that week as she and Joe played tourist at places we never think of visiting: the botanical center (think Gine's greenhouse but way bigger), Zombie Burger + Drink Lab, the state Capitol, and Blank Park Zoo. The flamingo feather lay on the ground and her sharp eye spotted it, something she regarded as a singular thing of beauty and a rare find for a kid from happily unrefined West River country. </div>
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That she took a feather that probably had lain there next to a gob of decidedly non-pink flamingo poop and back at home turned it into an object of art and pride and joy, and that she placed it in a frame to be honored and valued says something profound about Gine.</div>
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There were easily any number of times in her life where you could have found her down low, waiting and hoping to be picked up, revered, valued. When it didn't happen she built a space around herself with small objects of beauty or created and crafted the beauty herself. The trinkets and tchotchkes invariably connected to places she felt happy or to people who had noticed the feather she was. The crafted cards were sent to those same people.</div>
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My sister Gine loved deeply, starting with that Christmas Eve baby in Manhattan, Kansas, with such an unwieldy name: Brandon Augustus Jones. She was central operator on the line, staying connected with us siblings, Troy, Lynne and me. When her dogs Kramer and Suie died her, grief was a great as the unconditional acceptance she got from them. And when our Papa died just over a year ago, she was inconsolable. Everything around her was something that promised her love, joy, and value.</div>
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And then along came my brother-in-law Joe. He was the third of those things, and I didn't expect much out of such a misogynistic, mullet-wearing Wisconsinite. But what I'm so grateful to come to know is that Joe Mack is the most righteous upstanding husband I'd ever want for her, a man who himself spots flamingo feathers, picks them up, and places them in a frame of honor. My sister's last years with Joe were years of being valued, of Joe walking in the door and catching his breath because of the beautiful woman he saw waiting for him.</div>
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They made quite a pair of feather finders. I thank you Joe for these last months when Gine couldn't bear to look in the mirror because of the ravages of this vile disease but could take your loving gaze. Thank you for putting her in a place of honor in your heart.</div>
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And Brandon, the recipient of 36 years of love, you, too, hold a delicate feather in your palm, for she gave herself to you and lived as best she could to take you into the full, gracious, thoughtful manhood you now present to the world. You know there were lots of opportunities it could have gone crap-wise. If it had, she would have loved you even then.</div>
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We're sure going to miss her laughter, so often aimed at herself, her birthday cards, her garden, her secret place in the back yard, her piles of rock treasures found in the Hills, her retirement job as number one Rapid City Rush fan. Our dear daughter, mother, sister, aunt, cousin, friend, and quirky loyal companion. To day, hold your hand up, and imagine a flamingo feather in your palm. Our Gine. Regine. Gina. Regina. Gine Dean. And now blow gently and let her float away into the utter grace and acceptance where God collects such precious things.</div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-57576239741727402592017-12-27T12:25:00.003-06:002017-12-27T17:58:02.602-06:00My first best friend<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My sister Regine died last night. Gine. Ginchen. Gina. Gina Dean. She was my first best friend. My playmate. My boon companion. My teacher. The lens through which I came to see the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She came into the world sixty years ago in uneasy circumstances, the daughter of an unwed refugee mother, but loved deeply by my mom, who provided all she could. For months she lived in an orphanage. When my dad came into the picture, a GI stationed in Germany and falling for this German waitress, he adopted her. Gine celebrated that day every year as the day of being wanted.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6bt_-ft9pFjYi9kbmoDCMWdB6rceOWspfaqAFlfabCL1sG_walsJ0F7g9ECYImHUX09SWpispqel2eBYeIiNmPnQcZluivOFx9YJd88aHfqw13W5JR6NAEJearfF1BX9BCiw1eQ-BnUQ/s1600/PICT0070.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6bt_-ft9pFjYi9kbmoDCMWdB6rceOWspfaqAFlfabCL1sG_walsJ0F7g9ECYImHUX09SWpispqel2eBYeIiNmPnQcZluivOFx9YJd88aHfqw13W5JR6NAEJearfF1BX9BCiw1eQ-BnUQ/s400/PICT0070.JPG" width="265" /></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The only others who've known me my entire life are a dwindling number, all well into their eighties. For my first seven years, until a preemie brother arrived, and for another decade beyond, my life and Gine's were inextricably bound. The thick of it we gobbled eagerly and with joy. And the thin of bitter cumbersome family insecurity we swallowed down, each knowing the other stood alongside.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Much of those hardest times is stuck in some safe irretrievable quarter of my brain that I'm loath to access. But not Gine, who's lodged in my heart. It's not a place I could use to shield her from the darkest quiddities of her life — and certainly not from those fucking lung cancer cells or finally from from death stepping in to say, "Now." But as she grew weaker and smaller and her breaths became shallower, my heart expanded to see my nephew Brandon step up as caregiver and her husband Joe fight relentlessly for her and unexpectedly become my friend.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My faith starts with the color plates in my mom's German Bible before I could read. But Gine comes next and had even greater influence. She went to kindergarten at our church where they learned and sang hymns rather than kid's ditties like "London Bridge." It was a trickle-down hymnological economy that actually worked. I gained the language of faith from her. Like a tow-headed Paul who handed on what had first been given her. "My faith looks up to thee, thou lamb of Calvary, savior deevine." "Beau-tee-ful savior, king of creation." "Thine is the glory, ris'n conqu'ring son. Endless is the victory thou or death hast won." This was the playlist in the way-back of our light blue 1963 Ford Fairlane station wagon as we drove to our grandparent's ranch for Easter or home with two sides of beef after butchering in November. We sang the words that now have become my stock in trade, my syllabi, my lifeblood.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I was six or so, Gine and I were running through the sprinkler of a blue-skied summer morning alongside our eight-wide trailer house. When she said we should play school under the Chinese elm in the corner of the yard, I demurred. I knew who got to be teacher, and it wasn't me. So I headed in for a glass of Kool-Aid. Coming around the front of the trailer, I grabbed the hitch, and a jolt of electricity discovered my body was the shortest way into the ground. Gripped by literal power greater the myself, I couldn't free myself. All my understanding and efforts, my wits and wrenching were useless. My voice was so weak Gine couldn't hear me yelling. But she came nonetheless. She sauntered over in her leather sandals, safe from the electrical demon. She casually grabbed my arm and pulled me free from death's grip. And she was singing. "I know that my redeemer lives."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Two weekends ago Mary and I heard our son Sam's professional choir perform Handel's Messiah with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. When we finally got to the soprano aria with that same text, "I know that my redeemer liveth," I was in tears. I recognized again the enormity of what Gine had done. Oh, she would never say it was anything at all. But I'm alive today because of her. And it's a life steeped in hope and resurrection.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I know how our Lord works. I know that my sister liveth. My Beloved Ginchen, co-traveler through pine forests and Dakota prairies, enchanted by the delicate and beautiful, creator of her own beauty, lover of snow. She and I are perishable indeed. Yet the perishable will put on the imperishable. And the dead will be raised. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. I know twinkling, for those were her eyes.</span><br />
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Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-13473271791371211902017-10-31T08:34:00.000-05:002018-04-07T08:40:56.363-05:00Mensch Luther: Wittenberg 1517 to Grand View 2017<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This lecture was delivered at the October 2017 faculty and staff colloquium at Grand View University, a monthly forum where colleagues present research for the wider community. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the problems with
understanding Martin Luther and the Reformation is how much of what we think we
know has been handed on without really engaging the Reformer himself. This
week’s issue of the <i>New Yorker</i>
features a lengthy article about Luther by Joan Acocella, a much-lauded dance
critic and a regular book reviewer for the magazine. As happy as I am to see an
article about my home boy, it was all I could do to get through it. Last summer
our colleague Mark Mattes and I were privileged to join a few hundred others at
the International Luther Congress in Wittenberg, Germany, where the world's
best-known Luther and Reformation scholars presented consistently lively and
reliable work that tended carefully to Luther's preaching and teaching, and
especially to his context and nuanced theology. In contrast, Acocella's facile
cherry-picking of secondary sources neglected the first task of the historian,
which is to listen to the primary sources <i>on
their own terms</i>. A Nick Little illustration accompanying the article
showing a pixilated Luther, hammer and Ninety-Five Theses in hand, was an apt
match for the article's content, which sent Luther through a twenty-first
century lens that created a distorted picture of the man that looked little
like the Luther found in his own words.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0mYssWlD4S_o8pVBZbQUQ7N6jUnvH9sB3XiEI6AxcjrGMu6CVaEzzSAcHo64eFljKa-gyq5AYv19mXy1j9kxsqstTxyHf3LWyN5VuEcJkRywl0FvzS64WFQykgWfyIDbXnAh-iH56Z_s/s1600/New+Yorker+Luther+portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="924" data-original-width="681" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0mYssWlD4S_o8pVBZbQUQ7N6jUnvH9sB3XiEI6AxcjrGMu6CVaEzzSAcHo64eFljKa-gyq5AYv19mXy1j9kxsqstTxyHf3LWyN5VuEcJkRywl0FvzS64WFQykgWfyIDbXnAh-iH56Z_s/s200/New+Yorker+Luther+portrait.jpg" width="146" /></a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This, of course, is nothing
new. Luther biographers tend to create Luther in their own image, producing work
that reflects the author's own predilections and suspicions as much as or more
than the Wittenberg friar's. As someone who dealt with the multiple theological
and political issues descending on him and who never developed a systematic
rendering of his ideas like Aquinas before him or Calvin after him, Luther
didn't make it easy for biographers and historians. One can almost hear the
reformer sigh when he said that, after his death, people would make of him what
they will. And we certainly have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It already happened during
Luther’s lifetime with woodcuts like this one of Luther as the devil’s
instrument. In more recent times Luther has been forced through the 19<sup>th</sup>
and 20<sup>th</sup> century historical-critical meat grinder and critiqued for
an approach to the Bible that doesn’t square with our own enlightened and
less-superstitious views. Luther’s scurrilous writings against the Jews
(something no serious scholar or theologian I know today will excuse him for)
have been named a cause of the Holocaust and he himself has become the
ur-racist. Tolerant liberals, among whom I usually claim a spot, have regarded
him as an intolerant hot-head. And if criticism of Luther isn’t your bent, then
you’ve probably been handed the great hero and prophet Luther who held high the
standard of truth against the papal antichrist, the Luther of pre-Vatican II
Lutheran tirades against Roman tyranny.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When you mention Luther,
most people, if they know anything at all about him, will be able to link him
to the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the All Saints Church,
which served as the worship place for the Saxon prince’s castle and for the
recently founded University of Wittenberg. Beyond that event 500 years ago next
week, they might be able to tell you that the Theses exploded across Europe and
led to an irreparable breach in western Christianity. Since this is the
anniversary year, and since the Theses are the usual entry point into Luther’s
life and thought, let’s use them as a way to understand him and, in the end,
find something in Luther that bears consequences for our day-to-day lives at
Grand View.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The first thing you need to
know about Luther nailing the Theses on the door of the Castle Church is that
it may not have happened. We do know with certainty that Luther had them
printed in Latin and sent them with a cover letter to the Archbishop of Mainz
who had authority over the nearby territory the indulgence preacher Johann
Tetzel was working in. But we have no primary evidence that Luther grabbed a
hammer and nails, left his desk at the Augustinian monastery, walked the
quarter mile up Collegienstraße, and posted the Theses. Because neither Luther
nor anyone else at the time recorded the event (sorry, no Facebook live
streaming in early modern Europe), many scholars will tell you it’s all part of
the mythology that arose around the hero Luther. But it’s an argument from
silence. You can’t say something didn’t happen, because you don’t have a record
of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In fact, we know that the
church door did indeed serve as the 16<sup>th</sup> century version of myView
for his university, the city, and the princely court. The Theses were the announcement
of Luther’s intention to hold a scholarly disputation – a debate on the Ninety-Five
statements – at the University. And we know that these sorts of debates were
held on a regular basis (frequently at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning), and
that they would have been announced in a place where all would be notified.
There’s no reason to think that this particular disputation would have been
treated any differently. What I would argue with in the story, though, is that
he used hammer and nails. Scholars I’ve read lately argue convincingly that
Luther would have used wax or paste to post his document. It’s so much better
for doors not to be riddled with nail holes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The usual way the story of
the posting of the Theses proceeds is that Luther had a sudden revelation while
sitting on the cloaca (that would be an inhouse version of an outhouse) and
rushed to put quill to paper, because he wanted to wanted to slap the Roman
church in the face. But Luther was a much more careful biblical scholar than
that, not nearly the rash zealot he’s made out to be. Five years before the
Theses, Luther was awarded his doctorate by being shown a Bible, being given a
biretta (the doctoral cap), and a gold ring. He had to swear an oath to preach
and teach the truth and, basically, to rat out anyone who didn’t. He took his
oath seriously, and over the following years did his best to open his material
for his students. He was, by all accounts, a hugely popular teacher, with
students crowding his classroom (including, according to Shakespeare, a young
melancholy prince from Denmark named Hamlet).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In his own university
training Luther learned the humanist catch phrase “<i>ad fontes</i>” or “to the sources, and saw classical texts like the
ancient church fathers and, especially his own sacred text in the Christian
scriptures as more authoritative than Roman canon law. As he delved into the
Bible to prepare his lectures, he came up against the church’s demand of <i>facete quod in te est</i> (do what is within
you to do). It was part of the particulate that formed when the catalyst of
Aristotle’s idea of ethical perfectibility mixed with medieval theology in the <i>Summa theologica</i> of Thomas Aquinas, for
instance. Luther’s reading of St. Paul helped him see that the demand to
perform sufficient good works was an impossible requirement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So the first shift we see in
his thinking is anthropological: Human beings cannot achieve what God demands
by their own effort or understanding. By October 31, 1517, Luther had already
written plenty against the prevailing approach. In May he wrote Johannes Lang,
his friend from his days as a university student, that “Aristotle is gradually
falling from his throne, and his final doom is only a matter of time.”<a href="file://filesrv/facfiles$/kjones/Speaking%20and%20lectures/Faculty%20colloquium%20on%20Luther.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
And in September he wrote the “Disputation against Scholastic Theology,”<a href="file://filesrv/facfiles$/kjones/Speaking%20and%20lectures/Faculty%20colloquium%20on%20Luther.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
which should have been explosive but ended up as a smoke bomb.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For Luther, the question of
indulgences, though, was more than a mere academic theological question. It was
a matter of pastoral care. He saw the sale of indulgences as a creating a
massive religious front where people were coerced into an activity that did
more damage than good. He was an ordained priest who knew his vocation included
the care of his people. If Johann Tetzel were to bring to Saxony his
fundraising campaign for rebuilding St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and to repay
the debts the Archbishop of Mainz owed to the Fugger banking family, then it
was no different from one of the waves of the black plague that rolled across
Europe to take everyone it could. For Luther, the Ninety-Five Theses were a
prophylactic measure designed to prevent the sickness from entering into his
own prince’s territory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If you think the response
from both Luther’s supporters and antagonists was a wild fire racing across the
Holy Roman Empire, it, too is more nuanced. Printers, who in that day didn’t
have to contend with copyright laws, were free to print whatever they thought
would be profitable. Before Gutenberg and the printing press, the spread would
have moved at the speed of one copyist writing a letter at a time. But movable
type turned something like the Ninety-Five Theses into <i>Flugschriften</i> (flying writings). But the Theses were in Latin, so only
the literate nobility or educated theologians would have had access or
understood the technicalities of Luther’s argument. But a few months later,
Luther prepared the <i>Sermon on Indulgences
and Grace</i>, where he made the same points, this time in German, and with a
winsomeness and accessibility that the Theses lacked. Timothy Wengert, who’s
become one of the best Reformation historians on this continent, says,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">this tract more than any other catapulted Luther into
the public eye and made him a best-selling author overnight. Here Luther’s
clear explanations of complicated theological arguments and his edgy style, in
which he repeatedly attacked scholastic theologians and their “opinions,” made
a splash with the German reading public.<a href="file://filesrv/facfiles$/kjones/Speaking%20and%20lectures/Faculty%20colloquium%20on%20Luther.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Luther reshaped the Theses
into this later sermon because, from the start, he saw this as a pastoral issue
that created troubled consciences and stole money from the pockets of people
who could ill afford an indulgence. In essence the church itself had broken the
Seventh Commandment because it gave no just return on the payments of the
pious. The church took their money, promising a Get-Out-of-Purgatory-Free card
but gave them a worthless fill-in-the-blanks form instead. Luther was certain
that the church had more than empty promises to give and, in abiding by his
doctoral oath, sought to deliver the truth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The goal here was freedom
for those troubled consciences, which Luther saw as a person’s estimation of
their standing before other people and, mostly, before God. If Paul was right
in Galatians 5:1 when he said, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand fast
and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” then a practice like indulgences
forced people into captivity and worked counter to office of the keys Christ
gave the church, that is, its vocation of freeing people and quelling those
consciences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By the time Luther would
write <i>On the Freedom of a Christian</i>
three years later, he’d long left the question of indulgences but had advanced
to his second move: If human beings can’t improve themselves sufficiently, the
righteousness God requires must come another way. For Luther it could only
arrive through language that delivered what it said, in this case the gospel
proclamation about Jesus Christ that, in its declaration, actually gave the
benefits God’s word said Christ came to bestow: forgiveness, life, freedom, and
salvation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">No matter the issue that
cropped up, no matter his opponents on the left or on the right, in Rome or
among the radical reformers, now it became a categorical issue. There’s Christ,
on the one hand, who saves, and everything else, on the other hand, that does
not. Both in Luther’s day and in ours, he would counter anything from that
everything-else category that was presented itself as offering what it had no
ability to deliver on. In October 1517 it was indulgences. Later it was whether
becoming a professional religious person could advance your cause with God.
Another time it was a question of whether Christians could be soldiers.
Elsewhere it was what made for a blessed death. And everywhere it was what
freedom such faith opened for people struggling daily to get things right, in
the world, to be sure, but also in the quiddities of daily life and the web of
relationships we operate in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As a university of the
Lutheran church, we can understand Grand View’s identity as grounded in these three
very Luther-ly things: truth, freedom, and vocation. First, the Reformation and
the role Luther played in it arose from scholarship. Lutherans have been well
aware of our roots at the University of Wittenberg. If Luther and his fellow
humanists sought out the most reliable sources – <i>ad fontes</i> – then our own careful scholarship is an extension of
that rich tradition. Luther swore fealty to the truth, not simply to a set of
facts, but really to a way of being, a stance vis a vis the world. To seek the
truth is to be dissatisfied with the same-old same-old, to understand what
makes each of us tick, to seek solutions for all the little people whose
problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.<a href="file://filesrv/facfiles$/kjones/Speaking%20and%20lectures/Faculty%20colloquium%20on%20Luther.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So a Lutheran university
goes after the truth: From the sub-atomic depths of quantum physics to gravity
waves and dark matter. From the meaning of justice in “criminal justice” to
seeking the connection between health and a nurse’s technique of applying care.
From how a noble goal of standard American English can mitigate against
inclusion to how John Donne’s poems speak to the core of human experience and
how deeply racism has permeated American culture. And in my own discipline,
from the ways religion, wittingly or not, can widen the divide between peoples
and how faith frees people to cross those chasms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Second, if Luther’s actions
to counter the lucrative indulgence market arose from a desire to free people
from binding restrictions, then there’s a direct line from Wittenberg in 1517
to Grand View in 2017 and our entire history as a “school for life” where we
offer an education that frees and advances the lives of all – not just the
privileged few who can purchase access to the levers of change. Our Danish
Lutheran founders were not merely genteel adherents to N.F.S. Grundtvig’s
educational philosophy, they also knew his theology. Luther’s Ninety-Five
Theses is a move was paralleled by Grundtvig’s approach 300 years later. The
great founder of the modern Danish church and culture argued that we are humans
first and Christians second.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What he meant was that human
needs are always present, and Christian proclamation comes to address those
needs. In our particular student population, those human needs and the binding
burdens our students face are astounding. Our new GVCares grant is proof of
that. But the freedom longed for goes beyond financial exigencies. It reaches
out from our individual yearning to escape conflict, uncertainty, and violence
and discover peace, joy, and even liberty from ourselves and our own history.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, Luther’s moves 500
years ago stemmed from his own understanding of his vocation. His view was
nothing like Frederic Buechner’s definition of vocation as the place where your
deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger. Luther wouldn’t tolerate the
self-focused way of hearing Buechner that too often happens in our discussions
of vocation. For Luther, vocation was always seen through the lens of Christ’s
cross. There, he saw selflessness so radical that God’s kenosis, that is, God’s
emptying of God’s very being, suffered utter devastation that matched what
another Dane, Søren Kirkegaard called our “sickness unto death.” For Luther,
vocation was never something that made a person feel fulfilled or affirmed
their gifts and talents. Instead, for him giving was dying, pure and simple.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We have to wonder what could
possibly lead a person to desire such a life of emptying oneself for others.
For Luther it was the enormity of what Christ had done for him. It was a truth
and a freedom that so gripped him that he risked the ire of the greatest
religious power of his age and of the entire Holy Roman Empire. It was a
promise that delivered the goods with such certainty that nothing could
separate him from the love of God that allowed him, in some later accounts of
the Diet of Worms, to say, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is what makes Grand
View part of Lutheranism’s mission in the world. It’s the assertion that
exploration of truth, freedom, and vocation – especially in a context where
matters of faith are part of the mix – are an essential part both of being
human and of being Christian. We ought to see that as something that doesn’t
install a ceiling that limits thought, the sharing of ideas, or the exploration
of any discipline, but is instead an open door that values these things. We’re
not a Lutheran university because we demand that that everyone in this
community of learning adhere to a religious party line, but because our own
values find their genetic imprint already laid out from the Reformation’s
initial spark five hundred years ago this month. Five hundred years of that
business is worth celebrating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="file://filesrv/facfiles$/kjones/Speaking%20and%20lectures/Faculty%20colloquium%20on%20Luther.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a> LW
48:42.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="file://filesrv/facfiles$/kjones/Speaking%20and%20lectures/Faculty%20colloquium%20on%20Luther.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a> LW
31: 3ff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="file://filesrv/facfiles$/kjones/Speaking%20and%20lectures/Faculty%20colloquium%20on%20Luther.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Timothy J. Wengert, <i>Martin Luther’s 95
Theses</i> (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 37ff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="file://filesrv/facfiles$/kjones/Speaking%20and%20lectures/Faculty%20colloquium%20on%20Luther.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, <i>Casablanca, </i>directed by Michael Curtiz, 1942.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-47338728924744453782017-10-19T14:49:00.000-05:002017-10-19T15:00:32.649-05:00Serpent and Savior Lifted Up for You<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizQlpsUFrbxM5tmjZ-VL3eaqSTXpI7L0Rz8oEUlqvJMnUkxzuITk1SqxfPN2kHpS7OQbAVejLPHUv41qO-0vGfDjU5aiW25pEmdjB9n4cjlxElomwVodQlgt8ORqmE5ZILTd-9qpovytU/s1600/rattlesnakes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizQlpsUFrbxM5tmjZ-VL3eaqSTXpI7L0Rz8oEUlqvJMnUkxzuITk1SqxfPN2kHpS7OQbAVejLPHUv41qO-0vGfDjU5aiW25pEmdjB9n4cjlxElomwVodQlgt8ORqmE5ZILTd-9qpovytU/s400/rattlesnakes.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This sermon was preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church (LCMC) in Maple Lake, Minnesota, on Sunday, October 15, 2017, as part of their weekend-long 500th anniversary celebration of the Reformation.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Grace and peace to you my friends, from God our
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Oh, those poor Israelites! Here we go again. They
are the whiniest, most unappreciative people God could have chosen. I can’t
imagine that there weren’t times during their 40 years in the wilderness that
God didn’t think, “Maybe I should have chosen the Babylonians instead.” Here
God has led them out of slavery in Egypt and is taking them to the land
promised to their ancestors Sarah and Abraham. God could have left them back in
Egypt to come under Pharaoh’s bigger and bigger demands: “Make more bricks, use
less straw, and remember your lives are in my royal Egyptian hands. One step
out of line and you’re done for.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">They all knew exactly what conditions had been like.
And they knew the miracles of the plagues, the death of the first-born, and a
walk across the sea that God had used to set them on their way to freedom. But
to them it wasn’t enough for God to show his own gracious hand for them to
believe him. They moaned about having to eat trail mix three meals a day. But
God was patient. God sent quails to eat in the evening and manna in the
morning. Now even the food God sent to keep them alive was good enough. “Oh. We
had it so much better in Egypt. Yeah, we were enslaved, but at least we had
better food than this tasteless freeze dried astronaut food we pick up every
morning. There isn’t even any water to help it slide down our gullets. Alas and
alack. It sucks to be us.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">God usually has a pretty long fuse in these
situations. But apparently not this time. God let loose a herpetologist’s
poisonous dream: snakes like in the Well of Souls in <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i>. Scaly, slithery, hissing snakes. And not
just garter snakes or bull snakes, either. These were snake with fangs and
venom: real killers who could shut down your nervous system or make your flesh
go necrotic. The Israelites were right to shut their whiny traps and turn to
Moses who had God’s ear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I don’t think today we’d dare place the blame on God
for sending fork-tongued adders and asps as his impatient response to our
carping. We wouldn’t to consider for a moment that God, our nice, soft-spoken
God of American affluence, would respond with venom. But the Israelites did.
They had the willingness to look at their own actions and the presence of mind
to see God’s hand in it all. And they knew they were in trouble. This was God
biting the mouths that bit the hands that fed them. They called out, “Hey,
Moshe! Folks are dying here. Go tell God we’re sorry. And for everyone’s sake,
make it stop!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Isn’t that just how it goes with sinners like us?
Captive to ourselves, our will is bound, and we can’t help wanting to micromanage
God’s affairs. It’s been true for us since Adam and Eve thought they should put
together an Edenic supper menu that included fruit from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil – even though God had expressly told them death
would be the result. Nope, we just have to be Burger King patrons who always
want to have it our way. And we don’t leave it at choosing lettuce, tomato,
ketchup and mayo on our cheeseburgers. No, we think we can tell God where and
when disease, disasters, and the doofuses around us should trip up the
well-laid plans of mice and men. Trouble rears its head, and we say, “Here’s a
hint, God: not now and not here. Try it on those people over there at some time
when were far away.” We suspect that God may not really regard us with
kindness. We’re certain that, at the very least, our intentions are good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We’re convinced we know what’s best for us and how
God <i>ought to</i> treat us. His options
are 1. Create pastries that won’t go to our hips and bellies, 2. Keep us going
healthy and strong until <i>we</i> say we’re
ready to be done with life, and 3. Stop acting like you’re God or something (we
know you are, but, God, give us a break already). The Israelites wouldn’t look
to God for food in due season. They wouldn’t open their eyes to see God moving
through the wilderness with their every forward and frequent backward steps.
They refused to acknowledge the one in whose palms their lives and their
futures lay.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When the whining started up this time, the fangs
came out. On the surface it seems like God was inflicting retribution and
punishment for their faithlessness. But something more is going on here. God,
who’d been keep them safe without the Israelites knowing or acknowledging it,
now pulled back the hand that had kept danger at bay. God let the world loose.
In this case it was snakes, but it surely could have been letting government
corruption have its way or an antibiotic-resistant microbe or bad sitcoms or
countless other awful things we’d rather not encounter. But the wilderness
snakes were not the end God was after. Mere punishment is the move of lesser
gods like Baal, Astarte, Odin, and the American god of popularity who runs
passing time in any middle school. Cross the gods and the old karma will kick
in. You’ll get what’s coming to you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But God is after something way more important: The
Greek word for it is <i>metanoia</i>, which
we usually translate as “repentance,” but really means “turning around.” God
wanted the Israelites to turn to him and see just who had created them and had
given them their bodies and souls and all their members and who had preserved
them all along their journey. In short, God wanted their relationship with him
to be one of trust. He wanted them to see what his essence was. The problem was
that, for the Israelites just like it always is for sinners like us, God is the
last place we’ll think of looking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">During Lent we get rid of the alleluia we sing
before the gospel reading in worship and trade it for the Lenten verse: “Return
to the Lord your God, for his gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and
abounding in steadfast love.” How are to return? How are we to look to God when
there are so many more tangible things that might do the trick? God has to
literally grab our heads and physically turn them for us to look where he
wants, to gaze upon a gracious God.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So he told Moses to cast a bronze serpent, put it on
a stick, and raise it up for everyone to look at. If the Israelites wouldn’t
look to him for manna, quails, grace, and mercy, he’d give them something that
would force them. Getting bitten by a Middle Eastern asp is a sure head-turner:
Snakebite, ouch, oh no, what’ll I do, turn toward God behind the bronze
serpent, and ah, new life. The vipers and the bronze serpent wouldn’t have had to
happen. God was happy to guide and protect them, but the Israelites wouldn’t
have it. So by standing behind the sign of the bronze serpent in a time of deep
trouble and danger, God made himself unignorable. The Israelites wouldn’t be
able to look anywhere else.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If not for one thing, this story would be just one
among many cool stories for my inner twelve-year-old in the Old Testament,
right up there with Jael putting a tent stake through an enemy general’s head,
King David dancing naked, and the prophet Isaiah siccing bears on some boys who
were mocking his bald head. Just another Bible story too dangerous for Sunday morning,
except for the fact that Jesus apparently knew and loved it. The bronze serpent
lifted up in the wilderness took on ultimate meaning when Jesus brought it into
his conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus who’d come to him under cover of
night. Jesus told Nicodemus that what he’d eventually see in him was exactly
what happened with the Israelites, the snakebites, and the bronze serpent
lifted up in the wilderness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You’re bound to encounter snakes in your lives. I
grew up in western South Dakota and am entirely familiar with prairie rattlers.
Every year we’d go out to my grandparents’ cattle ranch, all of us aunts and
uncles, cousins, hired hands, and neighbors to go rattlesnake hunting. We’d
park the pick-ups and station wagons around a rattlesnake den, and the men
folks would pull out their .22’s and shot guns and blow away. We kids would hop
out of one pick-up box and run across the prairie grass to another pick-up,
making sure we were dodging anything slithery and heading to another safe steel
island.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That’s great fun-and-games for western kids like me,
but a couple fangs in a calf or through a cowboy boot would have ended the fun.
Then the emergency would have begun. The snakebite kit would have been pulled
out of a glove compartment. An X would be sliced with a razor blade across each
fang mark. Blood and venom would be sucked out and spat on the ground. A
blazing fast car ride the 60 miles to the closest hospital would happen. And
prayers, deep fervent prayers, would be begun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It doesn’t take an actual snake for this to happen.
You’ve experienced it in your own lives: something happens where life get away
from you, where you lose your grip, where suddenly it’s all gone haywire and
you don’t know where to turn. Up until that point, it’s so darned easy to slide
through your days, assuming you’re the one controlling and concocting your
future. But now you’re helpless. God is certainly <i>not</i> the author of evil, but God isn’t above using its appearance in
our lives to draw you away from the danger and into his embrace.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Twelve years ago, my wife’s older sister died
suddenly and unexpectedly from a prolapsed heart valve. Her son who’d just
graduated from high school found her dead in bed in the morning. Her husband
was out of town and wasn’t answering, so my nephew called me for help. To make
matters worse, the day of that phone call was the day we were moving a
truckload of stuff out of storage and another truckload from our apartment into
the first house we ever bought.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We were absolutely paralyzed with grief and didn’t know
how to make the move or the trip to the Twin Cities for a funeral happen. I
tell you, that’s one of the few times that I prayed when it didn’t feel like a
chore. It was a time Mary and I prayed wrapped up in each other’s arms under
the covers at bed time. “God help us.” It was a day when our eighth-grade son
said, “Mom and Dad, we need to pray,” and the proceeded to be the mature and
trusting one in our family, leading us in calling on God to be not just very
present help in trouble, but <i>our</i> very
present help in this trouble.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That’s your story, too. Your captive will and
clouded-over eyes let you think it’s all copacetic. And then the bottom drops
out, and you discover prayer. You can attempt some chemo or radiation for the
glioblastoma in your brain, but you know it’s all in God’s hands. You stand
accused because the truth you’ve hidden comes out, and you’ve got no way out.
You face the stark unavoidable fact of a cold body in a coffin and hope against
hope for a coming resurrection. I could go on and on and on, because the
serpents in our wildernesses are countless.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We can’t ask Moses to help. He’s been dead for
thousands of years. But we have something better, we have a Lord,
God-in-the-flesh, who was nailed to a tree, crucified, died, buried, and
raised. And we have proclaimers like Pastor Curtis, who raise Jesus up week
after week after week. Have you ever noticed that when he says the Words of
Institution before communion he lifts up the bread and wine for you to see? Sound
familiar? God has seen fit to send us more than a bronze serpent. He’s placed
himself in the way of human wrath and violence, to take on the punishment we
deserve. He’s given us the church and its pastors to put before you Jesus who
is the Resurrection and the Life, so that you might look to him and live.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This year marks the 500<sup>th</sup> anniversary of
Luther’s 95 Theses and the start of the Reformation. If we’re going to remember
and celebrate anything about it this year, let’s have it be this gospel promise
that stood at the center of all Luther preached and taught: Christ emptied
himself of all divine power to be lifted up on Golgotha for you, so that your
serpents in the wilderness would have no more power over you, so that you might
be delivered from sin, death, and the Devil, so that, baptized into his death,
you might be raised with him to an eternity where death is no longer a fact of
human existence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If today, life’s bitter fangs have sunk into you,
then you may already know Christ lifted up for you, and can look to him. But if
you don’t yet know that he is determined to fully be your savior and antidote
to venom, then I know a pastor who’s ready to tell you about the gifts of
baptism. If you’re hungry for mercy, Christ’s body and blood will be lifted up
any moment now. If you ache for a community, you’ll find it in those
surrounding you who will provide you the mutual conversation and consolation of
the saints.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And when you hear the Devil’s hiss at your feet, you
can crush that old adder with your heel and say, “Don’t even bother with me.
I’ve been vaccinated against you by the blood and water that flowed from my
Lord’s side. Go try attacking someone with weaker gods. I’ve been given new life
and I’m going to go live it. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.” You
may not have ever wanted to be in a situation where you have to look to your
lifted up Lord for life, but that what he has for you. Both today and the next
time the snakes slither in. Amen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And now may the peace which far surpasses all our
human understanding keep turning our heads to the risen Lord. Amen.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-52668393861640235732017-10-19T07:52:00.000-05:002017-10-18T09:56:06.371-05:00Repentance and the life of vocation<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This lecture was part of the 500th Anniversary Reformation Retreat at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Maple Lake, Minnesota, which is served by a faithful, Confessional pastor, Culynn Curtis.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">We’re going to operate a bit differently than we did
the last hour. We’re going to be a little more active in our learning than we
were with my lecture on the will. Call the 12</span><sup style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.25in;">th</sup><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"> person in your
contacts (or the next one if not appropriate to call now). Tell them what
you’re doing here today, and ask them to look around and tell you one thing
they see. [Wait for calls. Ask what the contact said.] We’ll come back to these
things in a bit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">The Latin word for what we’re dealing with is
vocation. It means “calling.” It’s like when you’d be playing with the
neighborhood kids on a summer evening and, as the twilight darkened, your mom
would call out the back door: “Hoo-hoo!” You knew her call. It was different
from the other parents. And you responded. Vocatio is calling. Luther never
wrote anything specifically about vocation, although the idea is present all
over the place wherever he talks about the Christian life: In </span><i style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">Freedom of a Christian</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.25in;">, in the Table of
Duties in the Catechism, and in its descriptions of how life is lived
faithfully under the Commandment in his Catechism explanations. For Luther,
Christian vocation happens in the world your contacts told you something about –
in all those places that the things they spotted exist. And even more, it
happens within the relationship you have with your contacts or, as Luther (and
Jesus) called them, “your neighbors.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Let’s get some things out of the way
before we go any further. Vocation isn’t your job or career. Grand View
students who have to take a general education core seminar on vocation their
senior year often make that mistake. There’s such pressure for them to get
their act together and know how they’re going to live, eat, pay off school
loans, and, if they’re smart, how they’ll have enough to retire on. If vocation
isn’t your job, your job is still part of your vocation, but just a limited
part. Frederic Buechner once defined vocation as “where your great passion
meets the world’s great need.” That’s nice on the surface. But it leaves me
open to thinking my vocation has to be fulfilling, something that gives me joy,
pleasure, and goose bumps. And then I’m stuck back at the curved-in state with
a bound will and an imagined deed to God’s throne. On top of that, Buechner’s
definition leaves an important party out of the equation: God.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">So let’s see if we can’t tackle what
Luther’s doctrine of vocation is by coming at it from an angle most people,
including theologians to approach it from. Vocation isn’t about your work in
the world but your identity as someone who is dead and risen in Christ. Five
hundred years ago this month, Martin Luther had had his fill of people in the
church ignoring the fullness of what Christ did on the cross. In 1512 the
university faculty had gotten permission from the chancellor to bestow a doctoral
degree on him. As part of the ceremony they gave him an open and closed Bible,
a doctoral cap called a biretta, and a gold ring. And he, in turn, made an oath
to teach the truth and basically rat out others who didn’t.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Luther smelled a rat in the work of Johann Tetzel
who’d been selling indulgences nearby, but he’d already question many of the
main supports for the Scholastic theology he himself had been taught. Indulgence
sellers like Tetzel preached that the pope would grant a reprieve from working
off your sins in purgatory after you died if you’d just do a good work like,
maybe, donating to the Go Fund Me page for St. Peter’s Basilica back in Rome. But
in his classroom Luther had slowly become more direct in declaring that there
wasn’t a single thing you could do to merit even a kind glance from God. The
fact of capital-S Sin was too big. And Luther began to have the sense that that
was true of the bait-and-switch tactics of indulgences: They pull you in with a
sweet deal and take your money, but they can’t actually provide you with what
they said. In this case, it was forgiveness of sins and merit before God.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">So when Luther pulled together the
set of statements, the Ninety-Five Theses, he wanted to debate about the issue,
the one that started everything off assumed that truth: you can’t git ‘er done.
Instead of trying to do something good little thing for God, God required every
last bit of you: bone, sinew, muscle, and ear lobes. The first of the
ninety-five theses that sparked the explosion we call the Reformation was this:
“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, bids us to repent, he intends an entire
life of repentance.” In other words, because sin is about your having grabbed
the gusto for yourself, turning away from sin is going to cost you your life.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Jesus is out to have you, body and soul, and once he
has you your life won’t be yours anymore. You will belong to him, and he will
give you a mission: to unbend and look to him for your life. Did you think your
baptism was just something sweet where Norwegian grandmas says, “Oh, for cute”
when the baby squirms? Luther stood with Paul in Romans, knowing that even
while you were a sinner Christ died for you, and having been baptized into his
death you’ve been raised to new life. Already. Today. When you begin looking at
the world, your neighbors, and your life through that lens, everything changes.
The way you thought the world functioned gets turned upside-down.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">There are two stories at play in
your life: the story of this world and its powers and the story of Jesus
crucified and risen. In the first story you’re taught to understand everything
in terms of cause and effect, like Newtonian physics or Aristotle’s chain of
causation. Everything is caused by something else. You get what you pay for.
There’s no such things as a free lunch. You need to look out for number one. Just
do it. Become an army of one. Every advertising spot you’ve ever seen has this
story at its core. Every action movie that’s come across your screen and nearly
every novel has it as the thing that moves the plot. You have to move forward
and make your life happen. And all those things your contacts told you they
saw? Those bits and pieces of the world are just tools to help you advance
yourself into your desired future. Worse yet, so are your contacts – if you’re
lucky. Because if they’re not tools to use to your advantage, then they’re
either competition for the goods you want to acquire or a threat to your plan
or to your very existence.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">As a character in this story, then, along with Adam
and Eve in the Garden, you can’t help regarding yourself as the centerpiece – a
Copernican sun around which everything and everyone else revolves. And you
spend your days building on sand, advancing your career for who knows what,
mowing the grass every week only to mow again next week, wrinkles deepening,
flesh bulbs sagging, waist expanding, and one day you’re done. All that’s left
will be the set of experiences and unnecessary plastic objects you’ve
accumulated. The plastic will be around forever, but the experiences that
formed you will be gone. As the psalmist says, the grass flourisheth and dieth.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanities, says the preacher in Ecclesiastes, or as
another paraphrase puts it, it’s all just smoke.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The most earthly good you’ll have been, as Luther
once called himself, will to serve as a stinking pile of manure. It such a
hopeless, nihilistic story the world is writing for you. Even the creation
itself, which God made as a blessing, rots and dies. In spite of rainbows and
fall colors and funny kitten memes, it all feels like it’s spinning down as
evil ascends and the good loses ground each day. Like Paul, the good that we
would do, we don’t do. The bad we wouldn’t do, we wind up doing. And we look to
God and wonder when he’ll finally deal with it. It’s an apocalyptic story, less
of a zombie disaster than the slow inexorable grind until things can’t possibly
go any further.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But Jesus’ story offers something different. It’s
the story where you don’t have to wait for the end of the world or the end of
your life to know how the plot resolves. In his cross and empty tomb, Christ is
the end of all things, that is, the goal that everything has been headed toward
and the one who breaks in to say, “Enough, already! I’m in charge now.” Where
the first story is all about meeting life’s demands, this second story is all
about God’s promise from the foundation of the world coming to fulfillment for
you in this person Jesus. In him the plot twists, so that nothing functions the
same way ever again. For he announces the kingdom of heaven at hand, where the
evidence of the end of the world’s death spiral has come: the blind see, the
deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead are raised – imperishable, at the last
trumpet, so that we can look even death in the face and say, “Where is your
sting? Where is your power? My Lord is raised, and he’s promised to make the
resurrection mine.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">At this point you may be thinking we’ve driven off
the vocation map, but we’re closer than ever. That’s because now you are a
citizen of a new realm where Jesus’ beatitudes are true. Those who mourn, who
hunger and thirst for righteousness, and who lose their lives for Christ’s sake
are blessed. This is a realm where the first are last and the last first. This
is a divine government where justice comes as a gift, where control is regarded
as overvalued, and service is the currency of the kingdom. Your story is not
one of endless dreck to slog through, the world around you isn’t a series of
Australian poisonous snakes and deadly jellyfish.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In fact, as Luther said in </span><i style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Freedom of a Christian</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">, in this story you’ve been written into you
are a perfectly free lord of all, subject to no one else. And at the same time
you’ve been given a life of real meaning where you are completely in service to
others. And all you can do is look around in wonder that you were caught up in
it, that it was here all along, and that what looked like demands and disaster
were really blessings and life. All you can do is continually repent, turn
around, turn your back on the sterile old black-and-white meaninglessness. When
our Lord and Master Jesus Christ bids you to repent, you can say, “I’m already
with you. I’ve had enough of that other stuff.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">All this talk is important for us, so we don’t treat
a conversation about vocation as just jotting down a list of things we’re good
at doing. Your new story of life in Christ is one of relationships. That’s what
God was doing when he expressed himself with his word at the beginning: God was
creating and forming relationships with the creation and with his creatures. In
the narrative of God and God’s chosen people, we see the shape of God’s plot
where the promiser keeps making a covenant happen in spite of the faithlessness
of the Israelites. And now for us, our vocation is also tied up in the kinds of
relationships that grow as fruit when we’re trees planted by eternal waters.
The way you know what your vocation, your callings, and your stations in life
are is to look at your relationships in this new light.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Here’s what I’d like you to do. I’d like you to take
your paper and put your name in the middle of it. Now you’re going to create a
map, a web of your many relationships. We’re going to see the geography of your
vocation is yours alone. No one has one exactly like yours. And it’s the
context for your life of faith. You’ve established who’s in your web, identify
the relationships: I’d label mine husband, father, teacher, citizen, neighbor,
etc.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Now think about the tasks that these relationships
call you to carry out. I need to grade papers. I need to attend faculty
meetings. I needs to share household chores fairly. I need to drive safely on
Highway 55 on my way to Maple Lake. I need to pay my taxes. I need to preach
and teach. What are your tasks?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Finally, consider what qualities and characteristics
would allow to carry out those duties well. I need diligence, fairness, and
generosity to grade papers. I need patience with other drivers. I need grit to
go to faculty meetings. I need the willingness to have the word claim my will
whenever I preach and teach. What kind of person do you need to be to do your
tasks within your vocational relationships?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">When you look at your set of lists, now you can hear
what Luther said about our Christian lives. Since we don’t have to do anything
for our salvation and God doesn’t require our good works, now you’ve got
bushels of good works you can aim at more useful places. You have neighbors
around you who need your works for their lives, just as you need theirs. You
all need me to drive safely on highway 55 so that you can arrive home in one
piece. My neighbors in Puerto Rico and Florida and the Texas gulf need my help
to recover, my dollars, my votes, my political pressure. Future inhabitants of
this planet need me to care for the creation. And my dog Millie needs me to
give her food and water every morning after I’ve gotten the paper from our
front stoop.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In </span><i style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Freedom of
a Christian</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">, Luther argued that our neighbors’ needs are the first reason
to do good works. But your last list of qualities needed to serve is connected
to the second reason Luther said we do good works: to control the old person in
us who still suspects the story may be fiction and who still thinks they need
to follow the old path. If you did what AA calls a fearless and searching moral
inventory and then compared it with your last list, you’ll find yourself
wanting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The only way for those qualities to become part of
you is for the old person to be put down. We need to keep finding ourselves in
places where we say, “This stuff is killing me.” This is what baptism means for
daily living. “It means that our old sinful selves, with all their evil deeds
and desires, should be drowned through daily repentance, so that a new self can
arise to live with God in righteousness and purity forever.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">When your bound will is freed by the gospel and
you’re pulled away from your days constructing yourself, then you won’t have it
any other way. You’ll begin to cherish the new story. You’ll want to bear the
fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and all those other qualities
on your list. And you’ll look for opportunities to let yourself go a little, a
little more, and still more, for the sake of your neighbor. You’ll feed the
hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned and
sick.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Think of what a radically different view Luther gave
us is from the one he was handed in the church of his day. True vocations were
only those with religious qualities to them – especially the calling to be a
priest, monk, or nun. And even there, there was a hierarchy that stretched all
the way to the pope in Rome. But this new narrative grounded in the gospel was
like those video clips of color-blind people putting on those special
sunglasses that let them see the full range of colors around them. Where before
the question was “What do I need to do to be saved”, now the question was,
“Given all that Christ has already done to free you, what do you want to do
with your life?”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Isn’t this a vision the world sorely needs today?
We’re steeped in a world of empty celebrities, demands to pull ourselves up by
our own bootstraps, and life whose goodness is judged by how many toys you’ve
accumulated, whether you’re clothed in the proper style, and whether you have
the latest rendition of your handheld gadget. In a life of faithful vocation,
though, you’ve have so very much more. You have neighbors. You have gifts. You
have opportunities to turn from your old self. You have a Lord who sees fit to
give you everything need for this life and its many days of service.</span>Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-14939932867043683372017-10-18T07:41:00.001-05:002017-10-18T09:53:08.907-05:00Sin, sin, and the bound will<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This lecture was part of the 500th Anniversary Reformation Retreat at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Maple Lake, Minnesota, which is served by a faithful, Confessional pastor, Culynn Curtis.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">We’re about to jump into the hardest
bit of theology for most folks in understanding what it means to be Lutheran,
the matter of free will (or not). For some, it’s as poisonous as breathing
sulfur dioxide. But to dead sinners on their last legs like me, it’s the purest
oxygen. And I hope you’ll be there with me when we’re done.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">It all starts with
getting at the truth about us human creatures and our inaccessible God. We’re
involved in a lifelong game of hide-and-seek with God. As hard as we seek, God
stays hidden, and we human beings aren’t very good at being unsuccessful game
players. In our founding Lutheran documents from 1530, the Augsburg Confession,
right after its author Philip Melanchthon tells us about God’s existence in the
First Article he immediately moves to the consequences of our frustrated quest
to get behind God’s veil. He tells us all about sin.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">It is taught among us
that since the fall of Adam, all human beings who are born in the natural way
are conceived and born in sin. This means that from birth they are full of evil
lust and inclination and cannot by nature possess true fear of God and true
faith in God. Moreover, this same innate disease and original sin is truly sin
and condemns to God’s eternal wrath all who are not in turn born anew through
baptism and the Holy Spirit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">That’s a mouthful, and
it sounds a lot like the fire-and-brimstone preaching of the New England
Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God.” It’s not something that sits well on our ears. Whether it’s
mom or a preacher, we don’t like a wagging finger or scolding words.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />The years
before I went to seminary I served as a youth minister in a little town on
Highway 212 in western Minnesota. My last summer in that congregation the
American Lutheran Church had a national youth gathering in Denver. We had a
goodly batch of kids ready to go, but there were two ninth grade boys I had my
doubts about. I knew that when it came down to it Ricky and Jay would always
forsake the group and go their own way. Not such a bad thing in a town of 2000
surrounded by soybean fields. But I wasn’t sure that would be wise for two guys
who imagined they were bigger than the Mile-High City. I found a program that
Lutherhaven, one of our Bible camps in Idaho was offering. It was a
design-your-own high adventure experience, and we opted for the whitewater
rafting trip. So while the rest of the kids were busing out to Colorado, we
hopped in my standard transmission Plymouth Reliant and trekked to Salmon,
Idaho, to meet our camp staff member and our two rafting guides for six days on
the Salmon River that’s more affectionately known as the River of No Return.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />It was just
the six of us on the river heading down that amazing canyon, alternating
between wild rapids and eerily calm stretches. At the end of the first day, we
pulled our raft onto a beach and set up camp. Our guide Bucky told Ricky and
Jay they could splash around in the water but that they couldn’t go past knee deep.
He said that even though it looked calm it was dangerously deceptive. The
river’s current was so strong that it would grab you and sweep you around the
bend to the next rapids, and there was nothing you could do about it. I trusted
that Ricky and Jay would be obedient, but as I was setting up a tent I heard
shouts from the river. My two boys had decided to swim across the river to a
sand bar on the other side, and the current had gotten them.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />I raced over
boulders on the banks trying to keep up with them, urging them to swim to shore
as hard as they could. All I could think was that I would have five more days
on the river, that we were at least 100 miles in any direction from being able
to communicate with the outside world, and that when I finally got to a phone
I’d have to call back home to Minnesota and tell two sets of parents that their
sons’ bodies were somewhere downriver. Jay made it to shore, and my dreaded
phone call was down to one set of parents. But Jay headed back out to help
Ricky. Somehow they were able to get back to the bank before the next rapids. I
tell you, it’s hard to scold a couple cocky kids when you’re crying.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">That evening on the Salmon is tattooed on my brain. And it’s a perfect example
of Luther’s view of the human condition. Ricky and Jay didn’t like our guide’s
warning words and strictures, and they decided they knew their strength better.
They decided to go it on their own. They used their own free will to make a
really bad decision. What else would they have done? How could they not have
been Ricky and Jay? They were stuck with their own hubris, their own
hormone-filled brains, their own desire to conquer all they surveyed, their own
will. What Melanchthon was doing in his description of sin in the Augsburg
Confession was talking about Ricky and Jay and all of us caught up in this
situation find ourselves in. How you understand Sin and free will will make all
the difference in whether you come out of the Reformation with Luther or with
those in opposing camps for the last 500 years.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />When Melanchthon uses
words like “innate disease” and “born in sin,” it’s another way of saying that,
just by being born a human being, we’re stuck on one side of the veil with the
hidden God on the other side. Sin is all about what happens when we try to get
at that God: We’re bound to react by turning to something else that will do
what God won’t. The stories of the creation, of Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden, of the serpent’s temptation of Eve in Genesis 3 and our first parents’
rejection of God tell us the same thing using a different angle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">It all begins with,
well, the beginning – and especially with how God makes it all happen. Genesis
1:1-5 tells us:</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of
the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said,
“Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and
he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the
darkness he called “night.” And there was evening and there was morning – the
first day.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6408271430709839676#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">God uses a simple, ordinary thing to create something out of nothing
(theologians use a Latin phrase <i>creatio ex nihilo</i>). It’s divine
words that create the cosmos. When God speaks, stuff happens: light, seas, the
moon and stars, and creatures that slither, swim and fly. Finally, God’s words
speak you into existence. Those divine words establish a relationship with the
creation. Just like when you’re angry and say, “I’m going to give her a piece
of my mind,” God’s words in Genesis are an expression, literally God’s very
being pressed out as the creation in a way that the whole cosmic schmear exists
in God.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The relationship God’s word creates shows up clearly in the words delivered by
the prophet Jeremiah: “I will be their God, and they will be my people”
(Jeremiah 31). God’s word is about God constantly and eternally creating and
sustaining that relationship, both with you and the whole creation. It’s the
story of patriarchs, judges, kings and prophets in the Old Testament. As we’ll see,
it’s the story of Jesus. It’s the story of Paul and Silas, Peter and Mary
Magdalene, Lydia, Dorcas, St. Augustine and his mother Monica, St. Thomas
Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Martin Luther King, and Johnny Cash. And it’s the
story of you since your baptism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But something went wrong
when the human creatures God made for a relationship spurned the relationship
in a great battle of wills. It goes back to the wide chasm between a hidden God
and God’s human creatures who live in this tangible, earthly realm. In Genesis
2, God puts the man and woman in Eden, smack in the middle of God’s delight
(which is what the Garden’s name means). That tells you something about the
good pleasure God takes in the creation and God’s relationship with it. But God
is also aware of the difference between being God and being human. God tells
our first parents to eat up; everything in Eden is made to please and sustain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">There’s only one thing
God forbids Adam and Eve to eat: the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil. In this one rule, God retains all the great “omni’s” that theologians
use to describe God: omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. God is
all-knowing, all-present, and all-powerful. There are things that are placed
only in God’s job portfolio, ultimate things like life and death, heaven and
hell, and, here in the Garden, the judgment of good and evil. Even God’s great
promise in Jeremiah we saw above (“I will be your God, and you will be my
people”) asserts that God will be God. And in the Garden, Adam and Eve – and by
implication, all their descendants including you – may not cross the
line. God tells them his determination and will to be God and remain God is so
great that the consequence of bridging the chasm by eating of the Tree will be
death.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The problem, of course, is that it’s so very hard to trust a God who remains
hidden. Sure, God is present in the whole of the creation – God made it, after
all – but how are you to find God there? So the serpent in the Garden zeroed in
on that question. The serpent’s temptation in Genesis 3 wasn’t to hold out some
of the Tree’s juicy fruit for Adam and Eve’s hungry mouths to savor. Instead,
the temptation was to not trust the word of a God who wouldn’t be seen. The
temptation was to think that God isn’t good and maybe, just maybe, is holding
something back that you want or deserve – something like the knowledge of good
and evil or other things that would give you power and control in what seems
like a random world and before what seems like an arbitrary God.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">When Adam and Eve were
tempted they found it was impossible to avoid sinning with their mistrust.
Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages said it’s </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">non posse non peccare</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">,
or “not possible to keep from sinning.” This kind of sin is called original
sin. Think of it as the origin of all other sin – a condition that makes the
rest possible and keeps you from ever being able to avoid it. That’s a
different way of thinking about sin than you might often hear of. Usually,
people talk about sin as bad things you do or good things you avoid doing. We
ought to pay attention to that kind of sin, because it has all kinds of
consequences, both for you and your neighbors in the world. But there’s a
deeper way to talk about sin that can lead you to understand yourself </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">and</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> your
Lord in an equally deep way. Thinking about sin as wrong thoughts and actions
comes right out of the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent, but so does
thinking about sin as a condition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The first way to look at
the story is to use the traditional label for it: The Fall. In this way of
interpreting the story, Adam and Eve entered into a Downward Fall by eating the
fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our first parents had an
exalted place in the Creation. God had given them dominion over all things,
after all. But the serpent tempted them to submit to their baser urges. Eating
the fruit of the Tree was wrong, and they became less than what God had
intended them to be. In their bad actions they moved down from their exalted
place and away from God. If God is spirit and the edenic couple was flesh, they
abandoned the spiritual and the godly, and they attached themselves to the
mundane things of the earth – and, as theologians like St. Augustine taught,
Adam and Eve were especially moved by their physical urges, including sex. They
turned their backs on the ultimate spiritual being and engaged in wrong
physical actions. That’s lower-case sin – “little S sin.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Think of the set-up for
this story as a great ladder reaching up to God on the top rung. Every creature
has its place on the ladder, and our goal is to climb up the ladder and become
ever more godly and spiritual. In this Downward Fall, Adam and Eve climbed down
rung after rung, and in every sinful action after that they moved ever farther
down the ladder. If sin is moving away from God and our problem is doing things
wrong, then the solution to our sinfulness is to climb back up the ladder.
Fixing the Downward Fall requires upward striving, spiritual success, more
devotion and lots of religion. Lots! The way to make things right is to start
doing things right. The most important person in your salvation is you. You
have to do the work of turning away from your urges, instincts, and
inclinations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">You have to engage in
spiritual behavior to counteract your flesh-driven sin. It’s a good thing you
have Christ on your side, though, because he can show you how to live right. In
this way of looking at the story, Jesus’ main job is to be a role model, and
his death on the cross is all about giving you an example of how to endure hard
stuff. Christian life in this scheme follows what Thomas á Kempis called the
“Imitation of Christ.” A Christian’s days, then, are intended to be a constant
refrain of “What would Jesus do?” And the power of Christ’s death and
resurrection becomes an after-thought, if it’s thought of at all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">It all hinges on the
assumption that you have a free will. The Scholastic theology Luther was taught
said that you have a spark of goodness left in your fallen, sinful self. All
that’s needed is a little oomph from God’s grace to fan it into flame. Then you
could exert your free will and decide to become the person God made you to be.
You could freely opt for God’s will, fill God’s commands, and merit what Christ
had done on the cross. The catchphrase of that theology was </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">facete quod
in te est</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">, or “do what is within you to do.” Choose to do your best, and
God will do the rest. There were plenty of options for what you could choose:
pilgrimages, visiting relics, entering a monastery, or donating some cash to
the church’s latest fundraiser.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Luther was no slouch
when it came to his scrupulous attempts to bend his free will to become better.
The problem for Luther, though, was that the focus remains on you. It all
devolves into some moral system where God becomes a divine accountant and Jesus
is left out of the equation. And you’d never turn away from yourself. You’d
always swim across the river and get caught in the current. You’d always find
yourself in the rapids with no way out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The other way of
thinking about what happened in the Garden looks at it as an Upward Fall. The
first question Eve hears when she encounters the serpent has to do with being
able to trust God’s Word. The serpent reminds her of the strictures against
eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, particularly
the warning that eating will bring death. Eve is forced to answer the worst
question you could face on this side of the chasm between us and God: Did God
really say this? She and the man start wondering if God can really be trusted.
Maybe God was lying about dying. Shouldn’t they be allowed </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">everything</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> in
the Garden? They deserve it. Why is God keeping something from them? It wasn’t
enough for them to be God’s human creatures. They wanted more. The serpent’s
temptation is to point them to the throne of God and get them to think it’s
empty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Nature abhors a vacuum
and so, apparently, does the human heart. If we can’t see a divine being
occupying the throne, we have a perfect candidate for what we think will be the
cushy divine chaise-longue. Adam and Eve no sooner hear the serpent’s
temptation than they plop themselves into God’s throne. Instead of
turning </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">away</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> from godliness and engaging in bad actions like
in the Downward Fall, Adam and Eve raised themselves to a high position. They
put themselves in God’s place. In essence, they made themselves their own gods.
You could say it another way: Sin is always a disregard for God Word, for the
relationship that God imparts in creating you. This way of looking at your
problem as a creature who doesn’t trust God is upper-case Sin – “big S sin.”
It’s a condition on whose coattails all the “little S” sins float into the
world on. When you think about Sin in this way, it will change who you think
Jesus is, what the remedy for your condition is, and what you think the
Christian life looks like.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">With the Upward Fall,
God doesn’t fix things by simply demanding that you straighten up and fly
right. This way of thinking rejects your free will and assumes instead that
you’re captive to your own will – you can’t escape that your so-called free
will continually chooses its own way. Here God recognizes the chasm and your
terror of the Hidden God and so reveals to you in the person of Jesus exactly
what kind of God you have on your hands. All those “little S” sins are dealt
with at their root when the Word that was the agent of creation at the
beginning comes to you in Christ. At the beginning of his gospel, John tags
Jesus as the Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.” In Jesus you’re given God fully, in the way God </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">wants</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> to
be known.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Now the Christian life
isn’t about constantly improving your moral backbone, being more frenetic in
your religious activity, or becoming less worldly by attaining pure
spirituality. Instead, the Christian life is what the old Shaker hymn, “Simple
Gifts,” says: You “come round right” to “live in the valley of love and
delight.” That involves God bringing you into his divine promise, into the
Word, where you can hear exactly what God is up to with you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In 1525, the same year
Luther’s prince Frederic the Wise died, the Peasants War resulted in 150,000
dead serfs, and Luther found himself a married man waking up with pigtails on
the pillow next to him, in that year Luther got into a bit of a spat with
Erasmus of Rotterdam who had written a treatise against Luther called </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The
Diatribe on Free Will</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> . In Luther’s response to the great Humanist,
called </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">On the Bondage of the Will</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">, he said that by zeroing in on
the matter of free will Erasmus had become the </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">only</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> person in
all Luther’s disputes who’d understood the essential question at the core of
everything: your messed up will. Once you get this business of the captive will
down, everything else will fall in place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In another treatise
Luther argued that the main task of lay people in a congregation is to judge
doctrine. What he means is that lay people need to hold the feet of their
pastors to the fire and demand that the clergy get their theological act
together. I’d argue that the place to start is to begin listening carefully for
how we talk about God, Christ, and the Christian life. Most folks would say the
most important thing to listen for in a sermon, for instance, is grace. But
grace doesn’t ever truly exist if you have a free will. When you have a free
will, the burden is always on you to shape yourself up and then, whether you
admit it or not, deny Jesus’ work on the cross. So you need to be on guard for
any time the free will wants to sneak back into the equation, especially from
the pulpit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But if preachers
understand Sin and the captive will, then something amazing will happen. When
you finally despair of your ability to freely make your future happen, then God
can go to town on you with the gospel and make his will come alive in your
life. That’s the place where God pulls you down the ladder to where you belong,
to be a creature who fears, loves and trusts God, and to serve your neighbor.
When Luther explained the Ten Commandments in the Small Catechism, he assumed
that you have a will that’s captive to yourself. Each of Luther’s explanations
of the Commandments has two parts. Each Commandment means that you “should fear
and love God so that…” and then continues with what you should and should not
do. For instance,</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">[w]e should fear and love God so that we do not
anger or despise our parents or others in authority, but respect, obey, love,
and serve them.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The first half of each explanation shows the kinds of things you’re bound to do
when you place yourself in the divine throne where you have no business being
and then function your own God, even though you’re too lily-livered to admit
it. The second half of each explanation describes what you’ll look like when
God’s word creates faith in you: You’ll trust God to be God. You’ll be content
to remain a human creature. And you’ll serve your neighbors – other people,
other creatures, and the creation itself. In fact, you’ll have your petitions
in the Lord’s Prayer answered. When you pray “hallowed by <i>thy</i> name, <i>thy</i> kingdom
come, <i>thy</i> will be done,” God will make you into the person who
relishes in those things and turns away from your own name, kingdom, and will.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">This is why, in Luther’s little pamphlet on Christian freedom, he said one
thing and one thing alone is needed to become that person. The only thing
needed is the word of God. That means the old you with your
curved-in-on-yourself posture that characterized the bound will must be put
down. Your opposable thumbs need to be loosed from your grip on God’s throne
and your hands instead be placed on Christ’s crucified and risen body. But you
can’t simply decide to do it on your own, like someone who thinks they can just
lick their opioid addiction by going cold turkey. You’ll always fall back on
yourself. And you’ll always fail. You need something stronger that can truly
overcome the devil, the world, and your sinful bound self. You need something
to show you that God has never held </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">anything</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> back from you,
something that shows you God ultimately gives everything. Maybe something like
an execution hill outside the wall of Jerusalem.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">There you get God completely unbound, relentless in divine freedom, choosing to
submit to the wrath of us and our fellow religionists who have refused to let
go of their free will and shout “Crucify him!” And God sets a seal on it by
sneaking into the tomb and raising Jesus’ 15-hour-dead body to new life. There
you see that the only way for God to deal with your captive will and
unavoidable capital-S Sin is to be subject to it and then, surprise of
surprises, absolve it. The only way for you to be truly free is to be forgiven.
This is why the central ways we proclaim the gospel in the church always
revolve around Jesus’ death and resurrection. It delivers the goods in a way
that your fear of God and love of doing it your way now become love of God and
fear and suspicion of your own will.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">When that happens,
something new in your will happen. We call it faith – a simple trust that
Christ has done everything needed for you. As Paul says, God has emptied
himself for you. He became such an empty hollow shell for you on the cross that
there’s room for you inside him. Your life doesn’t need to be concocted on your
own power by twisting your own will but is instead hid in him. You have Christ
put on you as assuredly as you wore a white gown at your baptism or will have a
white pall draped over your dead body at your funeral.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The only thing that now
matters as far as your free will is concerned is whether God has a claim on it
and is binding you to himself. As Luther said at the Diet of Worms, “My
conscience is captive to the word of God.” When it is, a new you will be
created that is finally obedient to God’s commands. It will be God’s will and
not your own that moves you to engage in what we’re going to talk about next:
your vocation in the kingdom of God.</span>
<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6408271430709839676#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Philip Melanchthon, “The Augsburg Confession,”
36, 38.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-46638527943483813602017-10-10T21:02:00.001-05:002017-10-13T12:51:40.988-05:00Two Real Realms<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This address was presented at the 2017 annual gathering of Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ in Minneapolis to lay out the theological basis for a panel discussion on Luther's doctrine of two kingdoms. It's posted here at the request of Deborah Lunde who so graciously asked for a copy.</i> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Luther’s thinking about God’s work in two kingdoms is
something I swim around in daily. In my vocation at Grand View University, I
operate within two realms. I have a letter of call from the church to serve as
a pastor, one of its public proclaimers of the gospel, and to function in that
capacity at our little college of the church in Des Moines. That means it’s my
business to have the gospel of Jesus Christ ever at the ready when the right
moment, the <i>kairos</i>, of a sinner with
ears to hear presents itself. At the same time, I’m also what my doctoral
advisor used to call a “fully-tenured old fart professor.” I have a yearly
contract I sign every spring to teach a certain number of courses, engage in
the shared governance of the university, and do my dangedest to make some
learning happen in my relationships with my students. In the eyes of the
Internal Revenue Service and Social Security, the two aspects of my vocation
are separate. But because of Luther’s doctrine of God’s two realms, I know
that, in spite of an American first-glance separation of church and state, both
the spiritual <i>and</i> the secular realms
operate within the 200-odd pounds of flesh and bone that walks into the
classroom each day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">We could spend hours looking at how this doctrine
connects with and parallels law and gospel, fearing and loving God, the
Commandments and Lord’s Prayer, and all kinds of other theological categories
Luther played with in the course of his life and career. But I want to come at
our two kingdoms through what Luther said about you: who you are, what makes
you tick, and how God pulls you into Christ’s mercy. In 1520, after Luther had
received the pope’s bull of condemnation and while he waited the 60 days for
excommunication to go into effect, he wrote </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">On
the Freedom of a Christian</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">, one of four great treatises published that
year. In his little essay, Luther declared that there are two people inside
you: the old, outer you of the body (that is, the you who walks around in the
kingdom on the left), and the new, inner you of the spirit who dwells securely in
the kingdom of heaven that Jesus declared was at hand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The old you functions under the structures of creation,
the demands of relationships, and the very commands of God. You face this each
day as you work to pay the bills, accomplish job tasks, raise kids, gather
funds for retirement, pay taxes, and try to be a beacon of peace and order and
security in this crazy, broken world. On the surface, it seems like we’re
pretty much on our own out here in left field where Dan Gladden once played
with the Minnesota Twins. Here in the kingdom on the left it seems like
everything runs according to Newtonian physics: for every action there’s an
equal and opposite reaction or, in practical terms, you get what you pay for.
We become these old outer people of the flesh because, in spite of all our
efforts life in this realm seems so insecure. We’re little better off than bees
in their hives who buzz around doing their routine pollen-collecting work with
little worry until a windshield hits ‘em and they’re gone. We sinners from the
sinestral realm must make life work on our own powers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Luther
called this coming under the demand for proper righteousness. And because
there’s no mercy here, only demands for justice, we can say the kingdom on the
left is the realm where Christ is not preached. Apart from Christ, we can only
approach God’s judgment seat where we’ll be declared wanting. What’s more, in
this kingdom God is undiscoverable. Sure God may be omniscient, omnipresent,
and omnipotent, but in this realm the psalmist’s declaration that God is slow
to anger and abounding in steadfast love looks pretty sketchy. Have you watched
the news lately? Disasters, shootings, disease, and Kardashians without end.
This is the realm where Luther said God who allows all this could hardly be
distinguished from the devil. How are we ever to see God present in the way God
wants to be known – as God “for you”?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But
in the dextral realm, the kingdom on the right, this is where you can be found
as the new, inner person of the Spirit, for this is the realm where Christ is
preached. This is the territory chartered as the land of mercy for us godless
sinners. Here Newton and philosophy and psychology and sociology and politics
are set aside, for there is only one around whom everything revolves. This
kingdom has abandoned the project of getting your act together. It sees your attempts
at progress and commitment as irrelevant. It regards your gain as loss and your
loss as gain, because this is where your power has ended and Christ’s has
begun. No longer is active proper righteousness demanded of you, but, as Luther
discovered 500 years ago, righteousness and sanctification in this realm are
given as gracious gift. You can’t even say it’s offered for you to assent to
here. This is a realm where Christ bends from the cross to your ear to say,
“You’re mine,” where he reaches into your grave to say, “Get up,” and where the
gospel says, “Believe this,” and it’s already done for you. When this
justifying faith happens to you, that new you is created and sustained and
draped with eternal life before your tomb can even be carved or your grave
clothes laid out for you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">For
Luther, we Christians live our lives </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">between</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
these two realms. We know well the demands of the left. I have mid-term grades
due at noon today, and boy has that last week been a grading marathon that just
about killed me. I’ve had to obey speed limits coming up I-35 from Iowa. And,
sadly, I even had to put on clothes to appear before you today. It all chafes
on the independence and autonomy of the old person in me. I want to ask,
“Really, God? This is how you’re going to work it?” But the new person of faith
stands within the gospel’s intruding promise in the world and begins to see
things differently</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Because
I don’t have to justify myself, I can let go of my insufferable neediness. I
can let go of my continual desire for approval. I can see my neighbor not as
threat or competition but as gift. And I can see everything in the kingdom on
the left in a new way: as masks God wears to maintain and sustain the creation
made as a gift and blessing. Not only do I see God’s hand behind Minnesota
maples in the Iron Range turning yellow, orange, and red and behind live oaks spreading
their gnarled boughs in New Braunfels, Texas, in faith I can also see God’s
hand killing and making alive in disasters and disease. To be in the world but
not of it is not to veer away from the world, which, after all, is God’s good
creation. Instead, it means we inhabit the kingdom on the left with eyes from
the kingdom on the right. Thus, this awful season of category 5 hurricanes, my
sister’s lung cancer, my bee allergy that could kill me at any moment, and
whatever crosses you bear today are places not where God abandons us but moments
where the old sinner in us loses power and is forced to turn to God’s mercy
seat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Where
faith enters into the </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">simul iustus et
peccator</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> mix of our lives, I can begin to see that my letter of call and my
yearly contract are both places God is active through me. My custodian Jose’s
daily round of toilet-cleaning is no less holy than your Sunday morning
pew-sitting and pulpit-proclaiming, for </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">both</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
realms belong to God. For you to see God active in both realms as wonderful
counselor, heavenly father, good shepherd, bread of life, or Lord of Lords,
Luther says in </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Freedom of a Christian</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
only </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">one</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> thing is needed: the word of
God.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And
if God is going to be the God of </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">two </i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">real
kingdoms and not just one imaginary religious and pious one, then what our
calling is, brothers and sisters, is to deliver the word like Luther at Worms,
to be the leading edge of the gospel’s entry by means of our work, work, and
witness.so that </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">both</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"> kingdoms are
realms of Christ preached, mercy declared, and the Lord’s benefits delivered.
Short of that we will continue to see through a glass dimly. Our engagement
with the world will be befogged. Our vision for the church’s mission will look
the blind man’s “trees walking around,” in Mark 8. And the world will remain
mired in demands, enslaved by its so-called free will, and trapped in its
graves of self-help, therapies, politics, power, and every ism around you.
Luther’s two kingdoms doctrine is a call to action. Now. Today. In your lives.</span></div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-36586177393759038052017-03-12T16:06:00.000-05:002017-03-12T16:11:15.469-05:00Elisabeth Cruciger: Komponistin u. Theologe des Kreuzes<i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">This sermon was preached at the evangelische Kirche in Schney, Germany, while I was part of the Grand View University Choir tour of Germany. The congregation was in the midst of a Lenten preaching series about secondary figures in the Reformation. Because the choir's concert programming included a setting of a hymn by Elisabeth Cruciger, I chose her.. The preaching text was Ruth 1:15-18.</span></i><br />
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Die Predigttext kommt aus dem Buch Ruth im Alten Testament.<br />
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[Naomi] aber sprach: “Siehe, deine Schwägerin ist umgekehrt zuihrem Volk und zu ihren Göttern; kehre du auch um, deiner Schwägerin nach!”<br />
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Aber Ruth antwortete: Dringe nicht in mich, dass ich dich verlassrn und mich von dir abwenden soll! Denn wo du hingehst, da will ich auch hingehen, und wo du bleibst, da will ich auch bleiben; deinVolk ist mein Volk, und dein Gott ist mein Gott! Wo du stirbst, da sterbeauch ich, und dort will ich begraben werden; der Herr tue mir dies und das und noch mehr, wenn nicht der Tod allein uns scheiden soll!”<br />
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Als [Naomi] nun sah, dass [Ruth] sich fest vorgenommen hatte, mit ihr zu gehen, ließ sie davon ab, ihr zuzureden. Here<br />
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Here's the sermon in English:</div>
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I bring you greetings from Grand View University, our president Kent Henning, our faculty and staff, and our 2000 students. Grand Viewis a university of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and was founded by Danish immigrants as a place where both learning and faith are valued. We’re grateful to continue our relationship with your congregation begun so many years ago under Pastor Stefan Stauch. And we’re glad that we now have come to know Pastor Vincent. Thank you for your hospitality this weekend and for your many kindnesses.<br />
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Grace and peace to you, my friends, from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.<br />
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In our scripture reading this morning we have the story of Ruth who leaves her home and goes to a foreign land with her mother-in-law Naomi. She begs Naomi not to leave her in Moab. And she declares that Naomi’s god will be her own god. This is a good passage for us today as we continue the series of sermons you have begun on secondary figures in the Reformation as a way to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the nailing of the 95 Theses and the explosion of the gospel across Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. Last Sunday you heard about Friedrich Myconius, and the next two weeks you’ll learn about Argulavon Grimbach and Albrecht von Brandenburg-Ansbach. But today we meet someone who is much less well known – a woman who, like Ruth, left all she knew to travel to a new place and took up a life with God in an unexpected way.<br />
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Elisabeth Cruciger came from Merseritz in Pomerania, which is now part of Poland. At best she’s usually only known as the wife of Caspar Cruciger, whom I’ll tell you about in a moment. But Elisabeth is important in her own right. She was the first female Lutheran hymn writer, which is number 67 in your Evangelisches Gesangbuch: “Herr Christ, der einig Gotts Sohn.” Elisabeth’s hymn was included in the very first evangelische Gesangbücher in 1524. For centuries scholars have asserted that the hymn couldn’t have been written by her. They said a woman couldn’t have written such a profound text. It must have been some theologically astute man who had the proper training and, apparently, the correct plumbing (Klempnerei) to think so deeply. And so Elisabeth disappeared from view. But when you know Elisabeth Cruciger’s history, a deeply faithful, brave, and intelligent woman comes into focus. With her life and her hymn she becomes a witness, an example, and a preacher to us almost 500 years later.<br />
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In the year 1500 Elisabeth Cruciger began her life in Pommern. She came from Meseritz, which now lies within Poland’s borders. When she was a young girl her parents placed her in a convent. This wasn’t unusual. It was an act of piety to give your child to the religious life as a nun or a monk. It earned you merit before God and would help balance your spiritual accounts so that you could enter the heavenly realm when you died. Elisabeth entered the convent school of the Premonstratensians[Prämonstratenser] in Treptow on the Baltic Sea and eventually took her vows when she was 15.<br />
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Her life in the convent wouldn’t have been much different from what Luther experienced among the Augustinians. The first worship service of the day was at two in the morning, and the rest of the day was full of prayer, study, and work. There was no Feierabend. When the sun went down, it was time for bed. Elisabeth’s order was known for doing work in the outside world. These religious women supported the priests, took care of vestments and paraments, and helped educate the daughters of the nobility. Elisabeth’s life would have extended down the same path, and we would never have known she existed. But she encountered a young preacher who gave her the gospel in a way that ended her old life and awakened her with grace to a new life that wouldn’t let go of her.<br />
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The preacher was Johannes Bugenhagen whom Luther and the other reformers affectionately called “Pomeranus.” He had become known as a lecturer among the Premonstratensians. He had taken up the Humanist educational cause and argued for reforms in the church. But by 1520 Bugenhagen had read what the upstart monk in Wittenberg had been writing, and he came around to Luther’s way of preaching law and gospel. One of the people who heard Bugenhagen’s own preaching was Elisabeth Cruciger. In 1521 Bugenhagen left Pomerania to go to Wittenberg, ground zero of the Reformation explosion. There he received the theological underpinnings that supported the changes he’d sought in the north. Within two years he became the pastor of the Stadtkirche in Wittenberg and served as Luther’s own preacher and confessor.<br />
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We don’t know why, but about the same time Bugenhagen came to Wittenberg, Elisabeth Cruciger left the abbey in Pomerania, abandoning both her vows and the only life she’d ever really known. There may have been other options available to her, but she chose to go to Wittenberg as well. She must have already known Bugenhagen and his family, because they took her in and cared for her. She wasn’t the only former nun who showed up in Wittenberg. We know about the nuns from Nimbschen, including Katharina von Bora who became Luther’s wife. Something had to be done with all these women who came to town for refuge: perhaps a return to their families or work in local households. A good option was to find husbands for them. Elisabeth met and married a brilliant university student named Caspar Cruciger. He was four years younger, but he was quite a catch. Because of her hymn, I think Elisabeth was his intellectual and theological match. Caspar was regarded as one of Luther’s best students ever and become part of Luther’s inner circle. These men helped translate scripture, wrote treatises, advised Luther, and, as Luther said, drank good Wittenberg beer while God’s word did its work. Elisabeth herself become close friends with Luther’s wife Katherina. While the men were engaged in Tischreden, the women would have heard the conversations and been acquainted with all the issues – even if they didn’t have the university training. Elisabeth and Caspar’s daughter later married Luther’s oldest son Hans.<br />
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There aren’t any more details about Elisabeth Cruciger’s life except that she died young. She was only 35. We don’t know the cause of death or where she was buried, but from her hymn we can presume that she died the same kind of blessed death Luther did a decade later. Her hymn is a kind of confession of the promise God brings in Jesus to provide new life not just in the world to come but already in this world, too.<br />
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I suspect that Elisabeth Cruciger followed Bugenhagen to Wittenberg because she was a 16th century Ruth. In the Old Testament Ruth followed Naomi because she had felt her mother-in-law’s love so deeply that she was virtually pulled away from her home country ofMoab all the way to Bethlehem. Our Elisabeth had heard the kind of preaching from Bugenhagen that drew her away from her secure life in the cloister and even from her own will. It wasn’t purposeful change or the possibility of true love or warmer weather farther south that pulled her. It was the magnet of the gospel’s proclamation. Like Paul, she longed to be rescued from the death that clings to us in sin.<br />
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The people who edited the hymnal we use in our congregation at home were faithful enough to include the Cruciger hymn. But they made a grave error that isn’t present in your hymnal. Our hymnal substitutes the last verse with a lovely doxology, but it misses the depth of the verse your hymnal includes. It’s a verse that shows that Elisabeth had absorbed Luther’s theology of the cross almost to the point of it becoming part of her genetic structure. She wrote, “Ertöt uns durch deinGüte, / erweck uns durch dein Gnad. / Den alten Menschen kränke, / daßder neu’ leben mag / und hier auf dieser Erden / den Sinn und allsBegehren / und G’danken hab zu dir.” [Kill us with your goodness, / arouse us with your grace. / Make the old person weak, / so that it craves the new life / and heer on earth / the sense and all desires / and thought be aimed at you.”] In his Heidelberg Disputation, Luther said, “The ‘theologian of glory’ calls the bad good and the good bad. The ‘theologian of the cross’ says what a thing is.” Unlike yours, our hymnal editors were theologians of glory, for they saw Elisabeth Cruciger asking God to kill us as so horrible that it shouldn’t be sung. What God would want the death of his people? But Cruciger knew something important: the old sinner in me wants nothing more than to continue its existence without end and remain in control of every moment of its future. Elisabeth wrote as one who longed for the end of sin in herself and for the beginning of the freedom of the gospel.<br />
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In Romans 6, Saint Paul says that’s exactly what happens in your baptism. “You have been baptized into Christ’s death, so that just as Christ was raised by the glory of the Father, you too might walk in newness of life.” It was 400 kilometers for Elisabeth Cruciger to travel from Treptow on the Baltic Sea to Wittenberg, but that was just a single step compared to the distance between death in sin to new life in Christ. The move made the rest of her life, as short as it was, into a life lived on the verge of the resurrection. She had it already here on earth, and received it in full on the day in 1535 when she breathed her last breath and left her husband and family to continue in God’s Word.<br />
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When Luther explains the Third Commandment [Das Dritte Gebot] about the Sabbath day [den Feiertag heiligen] in the Catechism, he says,“We are to fear and love God, so that we do not despise preaching or God’s word, but instead keep that word holy and gladly hear and learn it.” [“Wir sollen Gott fürchten und lieben, dass wir die Predigt und seinWort nicht verachten, sondern es heilig halten, gerne hören und lernen.”] In his “Freedom of a Christian,” Luther said that, if you want to become someone who serves your neighbor, the first task for you is to go where faith is bestowed through God’s Word. Elisabeth Cruciger shows us how that happens. She got a taste of the gospel in Pomerania and wanted more. So she went to the place where God promises it can be found.<br />
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This is such a place. So is the small but lively congregation next to our university. My wife and I worship there on Sundays and many of our choir members worship there each Tuesday during our weekly chapel service. We do it because we know it’s a church where the preacher knows how to deliver the good news. We show up because we know it’s where Elisabeth Cruciger’s prayer is fulfilled: “[Let us grow in your love and knowledge, so that we might abide in faith, thus serving you in the Spirit, that we might here taste your sweetness in our hearts and always thirst for you.” [“Lass uns in deiner Liebe / und Kenntnisnehmen zu, / dass wir am Glauben bleiben, / dir dienen im Geist so, / dass wir hier mögen schmecken / dein Süssigkeit im Herzen / und dürsten stets nach dir.”]<br />
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The faith and kindness and hospitality we strangers from Grand View have known from you for quite some time now reveals that you’ve also had this kind of preacher among you and that you are a people who know where to find what God has promised to give you: life, forgiveness, and salvation. Thanks be to God. Amen.<br />
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And now may the peace which far surpasses all our human understanding keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.</div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-54756764124385877002016-11-29T10:15:00.001-06:002016-11-29T16:22:43.220-06:00The Shepherds and their Lamb<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This sermon, part of a series on characters in Luke's nativity story, was preached at the weekly chapel service at Grand View University on November 29, 2016.</i></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have a soft spot in my heart for shepherds. This rough-and-tumble lot that the angels appeared to in the hills above Bethlehem are my kind of people. When my dad died a couple weeks ago out in western South Dakota, one thing I learned from relatives is that my Papa's first job when he was fourteen was as a sheep herder. He was so proud of that fact that they thought we'd have the Sheep Herders' National Anthem sung at the funeral. That didn't happen, but I hope you'll indulge me today by singing the first verse: “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow.” <br /><br />So shepherds, we mostly think of them in this story because of all the Christmas pageants we've seen at church or at school. Little ones are dressed like donkeys and cows, as angels with halos and wise men in bathrobes and crowns, and of course a line of little replicas of Linus Van Pelt, like in <i>A Charlie Brown Christmas</i>, with a blanket on his head and a shepherd's crook in his hand, innocently reciting our scripture reading for today. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But the guys on the hillside weren't at all like the cuteness we're used to. Jesus called himself the good shepherd, but that implies that a good shepherd is an unusual thing and that most people in that vocation weren’t so good. Having been around sheep at my grandparents’ ranch on the Great Plains, I know that the job isn’t a clean one, much less an easy one. The shepherds were dealing with creatures prone to brucellosis that causes aborted lambs in ewes and lesions on the rams’ privates, frothy bloat and free gas bloat which do what they say, scabies that causes hair to fall out, and scours where the animals poop themselves to death. It might not be a good idea to shake hands with one of these men. The shepherds in the Christmas story in Luke had to wade through a lot of ick, and they didn’t have the luxury of doing quality craftsmanship like Joseph did. There was no precision or eye for beauty in sheep herding. In this story, these fellas were out in the meadows at night. They’d brought their flock up either to graze on new shoots or to chomp on the stubble from the spring harvest. By day they could see hyenas or jackals approaching and protect the sheep and could maybe spell each other for a nap. But under the stars they’d have had to stave off sleep, kind of like a college student pulling all-nighters to get things done at the end of the semester. <br /><br />What’s more, shepherds didn’t have much reputation as reliable people. The bad reputation started with their affinity for sheep, which are the dirtiest, smelliest, dumbest, and most self-involved creatures human beings have ever domesticated. The kind of sheep they raised were the middle-Eastern broad-tailed variety, whose backside waggers were fat and meaty and regarded as a real dinnertime delicacy to set next to your figs and hummus. While the sheep tails were highly desired, it wasn’t so for the shepherds. They wore no clothes made of finely spun cloth. Instead they may have worn a rough tunic, and probably on these cool spring nights they had on some sheepskin with the wool turned in. And to stave off the cold, they might have been sampling some first-century warming liquid, if you know what I mean, while they stood near their fires. All of which makes the shepherds the most unlikely people to play the role the angels cast them in. <br /><br />One of Luke’s big themes in the gospel is witnessing. The whole story of Jesus and his disciples is told to show what those chosen followers of Jesus witnessed. Usually what they witnessed was Jesus’ care for outsiders, for the disreputable, for the outcast, for people in society’s shadows. And the first witnesses in Luke’s story aren’t good guys like Peter, James, and John. No, Luke tells us the first witnesses were the last people you’d want testifying on your behalf. The first witnesses who heard the announcement that the infinite and almighty God has taken weak, human, and finite form were this bunch of half-snockered neck-beards, scratching their nether regions while telling tall tales around the fire to keep themselves entertained. <br /><br />Suddenly they were surrounded by both angels and the glory of the Lord. And when we’re talking about that glory, we’re talking the presence of God, being wrapped up in God’s very being. Who woulda thunk it? It wasn’t kings and high priests who got the announcement. It was the shepherds. On the other hand, what better people could God have sent the heavenly messengers to? If you’re powerful and people jump at your command, you’ll only have ears for your own sweet voice. If you’ve got your act together, you don’t need a savior, who is Christ the Lord. If you’re perfectly snuggled in your warm bed with its 800-count Egyptian cotton sheets, you’re not going to run off to see anything born in a cold cattle stall. So God chose the ones most likely to hear and go and give witness. These guys were duly impressed and wanted to see the one whom the angel told them about and whom the heavenly host praised. <br /><br />What they found when they went down into town to that stable out back of the inn’s “No Vacancy” sign was something they were perfectly familiar with. Mary had had a little lamb. Outside the sphere of good and upright people, the shepherds saw this woman and man, Mary and Joseph, with a baby who was the Lamb of God. When they stepped up next to the manger, the shepherds did the job they’d been chosen for. They became the first witnesses, handing on what they’d first been given. The angels had told them what God was up to here, and they passed on the news to this set of new parents. In their post-partum exhaustion, Mary and Joseph received the news that their baby, a far distant descendant of King David, was the messiah, the savior, the Lord. <br /><br />And everyone who heard it either went “Whoa!” or pondered it in their hearts. But the shepherds did something utterly unexpected. They didn’t stand around gawking, trying to hold on to the magnificence of it all like we probably would have. Instead, they went back up the hill to work. They went back to their vocations. After all, there was a flock to pull together at the end of the night. Those shepherds were still the kind of people your mom and dad never wanted you to be friends with, but they were also changed. They’d seen the angels’ announcement come true. And as they walked, and watched, and worked, all they could say was, “Man, that was freakin’ cool.” They’d returned to the hillside pastures, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. <br /><br />During this Advent season, as we wait for Christmas and are steeped in all the work we need to do, we pray that God would come to us unlikely people, too. We pray that we’d also know this baby is for us and for salvation. And that we’d be moved to tell as well. If the shepherds can be witnesses, what’s preventing you? Amen.</span></div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-60879429724071840672016-11-27T11:00:00.000-06:002016-11-27T11:00:27.048-06:00People Get Ready<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This sermon for the first Sunday in Advent was preached at Luther Memorial Church in Des Moines, Iowa. It's based on the apocalypse in Matthew 24.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />Here we are with Thanksgiving gone past in a flash. There are three more days in November, including Cyber Monday tomorrow. I don’t do Black Friday and don’t have a single gift purchased because I usually have my mind elsewhere with only two weeks left in fall semester. That’s fifteen hundred minutes of class time until finals. It sounds like a lot, but it’s only six classes that are left. And I still have some month-old papers to get graded. And don’t get me started on the knitting projects I wanted done for Christmas. On second thought, maybe you should get me started, because I might be ready in 27 days. I don’t know if I’m scrambling my legs off like George Jetson on his treadmill or if I’m a deer blinking paralyzed in the headlights.<br /><br /> Whichever it is, I know you know the feeling. The world bears down on you with an accusing finger, saying you haven’t done enough. I tried to warn my beloved freshmen in my first-year seminar about this back in September. I told them there would come a day when they look at the list of course work and papers and test they would have come the end of the semester and wonder how they ever got to that place. Well, both those students and their professor have landed in that spot. Who in the world plans to fall behind? Who puts together a to-do list that will be completed two weeks after a deadline? And yet we all wind up there.<br /><br />At times like that we’re not so sure we’re on board with the Psalmist who was glad when they said, “Let’s go up to the house of the Lord.” The Psalmist was ready and happy to climb the steps to pay the piper and face the Maker of all things. I can’t even get the light bulb over the sink changed, and sure as you’re born or the piling system in my office down the street remains disorganized. How am I ever going to get my act together to be ready for the coming of the Son of Man?<br /><br />Today we begin a new church year with the season of Advent. While the consumer world entrenched in the economy of buying and selling has already begun its version of the Christmas season, in the church we’re a little better a delayed gratification. Christmas carols and gifts and dancing around the tree and stockings hung by the chimney with care, these things can wait, because we need to do Advent in a way that Christmas goes deeper and we’re actually ready to receive Immanuel, God With Us. So we dress things up in blue, the color of hope and expectation. Like the expecting Mary who’s always portrayed in that color, we wait for God to deliver himself to us.<br /><br />He’s already come to us in the flesh once in the manger in Bethlehem. And after his crucifixion and death, he came back yet again in his resurrected body that first Easter. If Advent is about waiting and preparation and readiness, the people Matthew wrote his gospel for were right there with us. They’d been told about all Jesus had done, and they’d been promised that Jesus would come back for them. But it wasn’t happening. Where was the glorious victory over sin, death, and the devil? Where was the day when mourning and crying would be over? Where are the heavenly streets of gold and beryl and jasper and diamonds? All they had was the same-old same-old, the day-to-day plodding through life, the dirty feet in sandals, the hauling of water from a well, the milking of goats, the occupying Roman army. And they had to wade through it all without flush toilets, toothpaste, and deodorant. Some glory, eh?<br /><br />So Matthew gives his people Jesus’ words about when the grand and golden end would come breaking into their world. Christ bids us to hang on, for the resolution of it all is on its way. Hang on. It’s coming. It’s going to break in like the sun creeping up over the horizon. Bit by bit. Ray by ray. For now it may be that it’s still too dark to tell what’s going on. That’s no surprise. Only God has night vision to see it. Before Noah’s flood, no one knew the deluge was coming.<br /><br />Who knows what the future will hold in this day? When I got the call about my father’s death two weeks ago, it wasn’t something I’d planned for, and neither had he. A sudden hole opened up where he belonged. But I’m not broken up over it. As Paul says, I can’t grieve like those who have no hope. What’s more I’m not sorrowful about our relationship. We had all kinds of past hurts and heartaches between us, but they’d been resolved. Nothing was unspoken. Even though I’d decided not to visit him when I had a slender opening in my calendar ten days before, I knew that if he died our relationship stood on solid, loving ground. So while it was unexpected, it also wasn’t something devastating. We were ready.<br /><br />Martin Luther in his “Sermon on Preparing to Die” talked about being ready. He says make sure your family is taken care of. It’s the equivalent of not making your heirs spend days amazed that your home has become an episode of “Hoarders” because you literally haven’t gotten your house in order. Being prepared means not burdening them because you’d never signed a medical power of attorney or a living will. That’s the worldly stuff you need to have in place to be ready to meet your Maker. But that’s not the ultimate readiness. Luther says you also need to have your spiritual eyeglasses prescription up-to-date so you can see exactly what kind of God you have.<br /><br />In that sense, being ready to meet God when God comes means getting the basics down. It means listening carefully to Matthew’s gospel where Jesus says that hehas come to fulfill all righteousness, rather than you. It means hearing Paul declare that you’re saved not by your works but by trusting that Christ has taken care of it all on the cross. Being ready for the Son of Man’s arrival is to take seriously the early petitions of the Lord’s Prayer where you ask for God’s name to be hallowed, God’s kingdom to come, God’s will to be done, all the while prayer that God would take your name, kingdom, and will out of the mix. To be ready and prepared means to have the same certainty as Romans that nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.<br /><br />So many preachers take this passage from Matthew as a dire warning to make a decision for Christ so that, when his unexpected arrival happens, you won’t be left behind in the rapture to spend time in tribulation. But that’s not the kind of Lord we find in Matthew’s gospel. Jesus doesn’t threaten you with the fear of being abandoned behind the plow or left grinding meal or emptying bed pans, cooking supper, or cooking the books. Instead, Jesus is the one who wants to give you confidence and faith. He wants to be so good and so true that you can’t help but trust him while you’re slogging through life waiting for him to come. And while Jesus says the hour of his arrival will be unknown, God is keen for you to know where he’s going to arrive. If Jesus is the Word Made Flesh, then God will come unexpectedly wherever Christ’s promise breaks in from the future on sinners’ lives today, including right now when the Last Day becomes This Day. You may not have expected it when you drove here this morning, but the Son of Man has driven up to the curb to pull you into his limo as he dies for you, makes you his own in your baptism, and gives you all his gifts. (And if you’re not yet baptized, let’s talk. It’s time that you had the certainty the sacrament gives that you are his.)<br /><br />See? You haven’t been left behind. You’ve been chosen, elected, hand-picked. You’re as ready and prepared as you ever need to be, because Jesus has been prepared from the foundation of the world to take you on, sins and all. There’s no telling what’s coming around the bend for you. It might be falling in love and becoming a drooling, slobbering romantic. It might be the hard road of cancer or dementia or a stroke. It might be a Powerball win or merely a three-storm winter with less shoveling. It might be your lingering death or your sudden demise. It might be the same-old same-old of family fault-lines and workplace drudgery. It might be the hoped-for invention of a weight-loss pill that actually works. Who knows? You can never tell. But you can go up to the house of the Lord with confidence and hope, for you can tell who it is who has come before you could ever expect him. You can know who died for you while you were still a sinner. You can be confident that nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Just think about what the passage in Romans 8 says: Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate you from your Lord. That means nothing at all that you can face can be the thing that leaves you in the lurch. Not even the vast powers of heavenly creatures like angels can slice you away or leave you hanging, for they cannot go against God’s will and God’s word. <br /><br /> You see, he’s already come for you. And that means that whatever you face in this life, in field work and grinding of meal, in season and out, in joy and in sorrow, he has already swooped you up, and your life is hid in him. You may not see it yet, but it’s done. You’ll be tempted to want some visible evidence, but it’s been there all along. You’ve been told, just like the shepherds who heard from the angels in the hills above Bethlehem. The heavenly messengers said, “Quit shaking in your boots. Here’s where you can find him. He’s in a manger down in town.” What’s unexpected is that he hasn’t come with a rule book, legal code, or accountant’s ledger. He doesn’t come with a measuring rod, balancing scales, or lap timer. This unexpected Lord comes instead with a word for you: It is finished. You’re in. Fear not. Come what may. Amen.</span>Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-32108264483289340312016-11-16T17:15:00.002-06:002016-11-16T17:16:05.945-06:00Eulogy for Papa<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>My father, Dale Jones, died at 79 on November 11, 2016. This is the eulogy I delivered at his funeral in Sturgis, South Dakota, today.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">How impossible it
is to sum up a life lived just short of eighty years. I’m a historian, scholar, and theologian by trade, and to do the summing up while standing at a far remove of centuries is already
difficult. But when the person you’re describing is so newly gone and when
you’ve shared three-fourths of those eight decades with him, all perspective is
lost. It’s all just a bag of emotions, and almost any one of you would have
better insight than this son today.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But there are some
things I can say. The first is that my mom and dad have loved me every day of
my life. And later, when Dee entered the picture, the love from her direction
came not as a substitute but as a gracious addition. Whatever fault lines there
were in my dad’s inner existence, whatever led him to hunger and yearn for
something greater, for something beyond himself, for something universal and
whole and creative rather destructive, both the push and pull of it came from
love. It was both the source and the ultimate end that wrapped him and carried
him.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Second, for lots
of people in Sturgis, my dad was just that goofy guy on the scooter with a long
grabber in his hand and a basket full of empties he’d picked up on the side of
the road. But that was just his mild-mannered alter ego. He was really a
superhero in your midst. And his superpower was the ability to grab what was
cast-off, starting with those empties but expanding to dumpster treasures and
to actual people. Most of his adult life was written with a pen containing Serenity
Ink. It saw nothing and no one as trash. It saw hope in each encounter. And
when a bit of self-doubt kryptonite landed in his lap, he went to the curing
places that were those relationships: to Dee, of course, to me and my siblings, to his grandchildren, to those whom he and Dee called their adopted kids, to friends like Clay and
Mary Ellen, to people ranging from Australia to France, to whatever fellow
drunk working their program was nearby.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, the
relationship my dad and I had was fraught. And there was plenty of baggage. And old friend had a similar relationship with his father, and earlier this week we
talked about the arc of that father-son relationship. The fraughtness of our
first twenty years, when we didn’t understand each other, and we kept missing the
real and true connection that was hurt by his alcoholism and lots of earlier
hurts he’d faced — that was on <i>him</i>. The next twenty years as he realized he was
powerless over alcohol and every other thing that life consists of, and as he
made a fearless and searching moral inventory and took action to correct things
where possible — these years are on <i>me</i>. I was angry, embarrassed, scornful, and
dismissive while he kept moving forward, trying his damnedest to be alive and
to figure out how to be a both a sober and a loving dad.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But the last
twenty years, give or take a few, have been years of joy and wonder. And that’s
not on <i>either of us</i>. That responsibility has had to come from outside us. He’d
say it was the universe exuding love. I’d probably point to a Judean preacher
from the first century who was crucified. Either way and whatever the source,
it came sneaking in to our relationship through you all, surrounding us with
your own love and care.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">First and foremost, the burden of seeing my dad and me
renewed has been born by Dee for him and by Mary and Sam for me. But it can’t
be limited to them. My brother and sister (and his as well), his grandchildren,
my mom, this vast web of relationships we crawl around in – you’ve all meant
something to the tiny world that was me and my dad. But seeing you drawn together
to share our mourning is a sign that there is more to life than what happens
between a first breath in a maternity home and a last gasp on the floor of a
bedroom.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It’s that
inter-connectedness that my dad loved and relied on. It’s what he reveled in.
It’s the mercy that he bathed in. In spite of his death, it’s what remains when
all are ashes and dust. I learned that from my dad. And I yearn for that to
live on in my relationship with my own son, Sam, who </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">is going to
read the prayer Saint Francis wrote back in the middle ages. This version is
the translation included in AA’s </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Twelve
Steps and Twelve Traditions</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">. Francis himself would have been seen by his
contemporaries as the goofy guy in town, loving his animals, and searching for
life from God. His faith moved him to extend himself. And the words of his
prayer speak to the exact world my dad wanted to live in, and what he hoped
would be bound within the covers of the book of his life.</span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lord, make
me a channel of thy peace —<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That where
there is hatred, I may bring love,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That where
there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That where
there is discord, I may bring harmony,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That where
there is error, I may bring truth,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That where
there is doubt, I may bring faith,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That where
there are shadows, I may bring light,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That where
there is sadness, I may bring joy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lord, grant
that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">To understand,
than to be understood,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">To love,
than to be loved.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For it is by
self-forgetting that one finds.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is by
forgiving that one is forgiven.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is by
dying that one awakens to eternal life. Amen</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-65109796376214118542016-11-06T18:44:00.001-06:002016-11-06T19:20:07.914-06:00The Beatitudes pretty much suck when you're driving a cheap 1972 Chevy Vega and think you're behind the wheel of something bigger<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>I was invited to be the speaker at the Reformation Festival at St. Dysmas Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation behind the walls of the South Dakota State Penitentiary. It's a place where your vision of what the Body of Christ looks like will be exploded. And it's a place I regard as the highest honor to preach at. Today's sermon for a room full of incarcerated believers, seekers, and sinners, is based on the All Saints Sunday gospel reading in Matthew 5:12 — the Beatitudes, from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.</i></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Today’s
gospel reading comes from a string of chapters in Matthew’s gospel that we call
the Sermon on the Mount. It’s an account of what Jesus taught to the people who
followed him one day at the top of a hill. We call the section we just heard
The Beatitudes.</span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Speaking
as an old sinner of long standing, I have to say that the Beatitudes are
ridiculous. If Jesus thinks I’m gonna buy what he’s selling here, he’s wrong.
It’s just not the way the world works. It’s a pitiful evangelism scheme, and it’s
no way to get your fellow inmates out of their cells on a Thursday evening to
make their trek up all those stairs to this prison chapel. Any smart person is
going to turn away. No one wants to be poor inspirit. Who willingly asks to
lose a loved one and grieve or mourn? Being reviled and persecuted?
Fuggedaboudit. But these Beatitudes are just the beginning of the trouble in
the Sermon on the Mount. Before Jesus is done with his work in this gospel, he’ll
have us hoping to receive every single thing in this list of blessings.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
real problem, though, isn’t the list. It’s the person hearing Jesus’ words: me.
Our rejection of what Jesus is up to has been the human story since the Garden
of Eden when our first parents spurned God’s limits on them, mistrusting his
word, and eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The problem was
present for their son Cain who regarded his offering to God as better than the
one God liked that was given by Abel, whom Cain murdered. It’s right there in
Jacob’s grabbing his twin brother’s heel whilst being born and cheating his way
through life. It’s there in King David’s demand that the bathing Bathsheba be
brought to his quarters. It’s right in the middle of Jesus’ disciples when
James and John argued about who’s the greatest, when Peter denied his Lord, and
when Judas sold Jesus down the pike for thirty pieces of silver. Every single
one of them operated on the principle that their own way was the best way.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What’s
God going to do with us? He simply can’t let us be our own gods. Although God
is a loving God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, God demands
that our roles be clearly defined and strictly limited – at least on our part.
God will be God, and we will be God’s people, and <i>not</i> the other way around. And yet we still want the whole
relationship with God, the world, and our neighbors to be about us: <i>our </i>goodness, <i>our</i>, righteousness, <i>our</i>
performance, <i>our</i> actions, <i>our</i> religion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here’s
what Jesus does with it in the Sermon on the Mount: He starts by saying, “Lemme
tell you the things that will make you blessed, happy, whole, full of peace,
and joy and hope.” It’s an unlikely list. But it’s like he knows that we won’t
have truck with any of it, so he turns things around with a bit of ethics that
we’ll for sure go for. He talks justice. I can handle that. I keep good track
of all rights and wrongs, especially when they concern me. Adultery? I’m
married and I’m keeping my pants zipped and my eyes focused on the one I love.
Retaliation? Well, you inmates know how that works. It might’ve been a problem
in the past, right? But you’re good now. At least your intentions are aimed
right. And loving others? We’re right there with Jesus, especially if your
loved ones still want to be in contact with you.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span class="text"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We
like that business. It’s a hidden, arbitrary God who insists on his own way, on
choosing the better offerings, on judging us that we don’t like. So we think, “don’t
just leave me be, God. Don’t hide behind your veil without revealing your plans
for me. Just give me something to do.” But be careful what you ask of the Lord.
Contrary to what lots of pious people say, God will always give you more than
you can handle.</span></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">When Jesus talks about
anger in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, “You’ve heard it said, ‘You shall
not murder.’ But I say it’s bigger than that: One tiny bit of anger is equal to
any murder in the first degree.” When Jesus reminds us of the command no to
commit adultery, he says it’s more than about which body parts rub against each
other and with whom. He says that lustful thoughts are just as bad, and you
should cut off the body parts tempting you (church legends say that St. Origen
obeyed Jesus and castrated himself to prevent those thoughts). Jesus recounts
the old adage “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” but he won’t stand
for justice like that. He tells us to turn the other cheek and give your cloak
when someone asks for your coat. Worst of all, he tells us loving our loved
ones isn’t enough. We need to love our enemies, too.</span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Every step of the way in
this gospel, Jesus pushes our buttons. He tells parables that don’t spare us.
He makes demands beyond what we can do. Finally in chapter 19, the disciples
have had it. And they ask, “Jesus Christ [literally], who can do this?” But
they’ve forgotten Jesus first sermon in the gospel where he announces “I have
come to fulfill all righteousness. </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">You</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">
can’t git ‘er done, but </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">I</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> can.”</span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">As God’s only-begotten Son,
Jesus knows what he’s come for. And he knows how helpless our case is. If you
want to spin your wheels trying to gain traction against the world bearing down
on you, he’s okay with that. But he knows how it’ll end up.</span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaR67zTnigjvvW037QNoYoZiW1_HzqlWtFh_IEFtWdrLtztYIcQKm-cFUQ4is1UjT-6BzvHNQFrWet4wQMfS90Pm26VAuyEiFxSxF-G9Ft-EBvI73BUFtjbuywF_RPg-ZuBubLf78IDYM/s1600/vega.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaR67zTnigjvvW037QNoYoZiW1_HzqlWtFh_IEFtWdrLtztYIcQKm-cFUQ4is1UjT-6BzvHNQFrWet4wQMfS90Pm26VAuyEiFxSxF-G9Ft-EBvI73BUFtjbuywF_RPg-ZuBubLf78IDYM/s400/vega.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That's my 1972 Vega. The red one. Sadly, 40 years later it sits rusting behind the windbreak in a pasture at my grandparents' ranch.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Imagine my friend Neil’s
SUV four-wheel drive with the removable hard top. He’d take us out for a spin
on Forest Service roads back in the late 1970s when we worked at Bible camp in
the Black Hills. Then imagine my very special 1972 red Chevy Vega with a
three-speed stick, aluminum engine, and about two inches of clearance. If I’d taken
that cheap little car out on those trails I would have been toast. The axle or
the oil pan or the u-joint or something else a non-gearhead like me knows
nothing about would have gotten hung up on a boulder. And there I’d be, stuck
on some Forest Service road until the cows come home. If I’d wanted to try
that, Neil would have said, “Go ahead. See how far you get. If you don’t want
to tool around in my truck with me driving, that’s fine by me.”</span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Back in 1518, Martin Luther
understood what it is to get hung up, to get stranded on our own desires and
plans, and, more important, why God relishes it. He said, “Unless we completely
despair of ourselves, we cannot merit the grace of Christ.” What he meant was, “As
long as we’re stuck on ourselves and on our potential, we’ll have no need of
what Jesus has to give us. And that’s what our Lord is up to in the Beatitudes.
He’s pointing to the places in our lives where we’ve lost power, bottomed out,
and encountered the end of our rope. They’re the places where our desire to be
limitless and in control comes to naught, and we find that we’re severely
limited and have no control.</span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">When we get to that point,
then Jesus can do what he’s come to do for you: Be the righteous one for you,
offering himself on your behalf. Imagine you’re on trial (not something
difficult for anyone wearing tan inmate scrubs in this room). God is at the
judge’s bench, and the prosecuting attorney is ripping you apart: “You’ve done
wrong. You haven’t done enough. You’re an out-and-out sinner.” But you’ve got
the best possible person at your defense: Spiritu Sanctu, Esquire, Attorney-at-Gospel. And your lawyer's counsel is that when you stand up to deliver your plea,
plead guilty. But don’t stop there. Look the judge in the eye and pin your sin
on Jesus, the divine judge’s son. You see, Jesus knows you can’t do it, so he
trades places with you and pits himself against God’s righteous demands.</span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Now when we look at these Beatitudes, we have to
say there’s nothing especially noble or saving about grief or persecution in and
of themselves. And God certainly doesn’t want to inflict that on anyone. But
when you land in these places, then you can see. You are already blessed but
have never been able to see while spending the energy on maintaining the illusion
of control or the façade of goodness. But in these moments when all else is
stripped away, then we can turn and spot what God’s doing.</span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">When things are right and good, God has been
afoot, spinning a swift dance step around you, patiently waiting to take you
out on the floor. And when things go bad, as they often do – when you lose your
freedom, when you lose your good name, when you lose all choices, when you lose
a life on the outside, for instance – </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">the blinders come off. Then you can see what
Paul in Ephesians declares: Christ, God’s Son, has given you his inheritance,
his good name, his freedom, his own life. Then he promises one more thing – to take
you through all this loss, all this mess, all the grief and persecution and
death to the other side where you find yourself made new.</span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="chapter-1" style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">If that’s what happens with the Beatitudes,
then, in spite of what a lousy church marketing plan they are, every time we
find ourselves in those places, we will count ourselves blessed and bid Jesus
to just give us more of the loss so we can have the everything he’s ready to
give. Amen.</span></div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-10233362426859632292016-09-15T15:53:00.001-05:002016-09-15T15:54:17.712-05:00The Crooked Lord<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This sermon on the parable of the dishonest steward was written to be preached to the members of St. Dysmas Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation behind the walls of the South Dakota State Penitentiary.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Luke 16:1-13 (f</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">rom </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Message</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Jesus said to his disciples, “There was once a rich man who had a
manager. He got reports that the manager had been taking advantage of his
position by running up huge personal expenses. So he called him in and said,
‘What’s this I hear about you? You’re fired. And I want a complete audit of
your books.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">"The manager said to himself, ‘What am I going to do? I’ve lost my
job as manager. I’m not strong enough for a laboring job, and I’m too proud to
beg. . . . Ah, I’ve got a plan. Here’s what I’ll
do . . . then when I’m turned out into the street, people will
take me into their houses.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“Then he went at it. One after another, he called in the people
who were in debt to his master. He said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my
master?’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“He replied, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“The manager said, ‘Here, take your bill, sit down here—quick
now—write fifty.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“To the next he said, ‘And you, what do you owe?’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“He answered, ‘A hundred sacks of wheat.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“He said, ‘Take your bill, write in eighty.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">“Now here’s a surprise: The master praised the crooked manager!
And why? Because he knew how to look after himself. Streetwise people are
smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They are on constant alert,
looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same
way—but for what is </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">right</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">—using every adversity to stimulate you to
creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so
you’ll live, really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Jesus went on to make these comments: “</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">If you’re honest in small things, you’ll be honest in big things;
if you’re a crook in small things, you’ll be a crook in big things. If you’re
not honest in small jobs, who will put you in charge of the store? No worker
can serve two bosses: He’ll either hate the first and love the second or adore
the first and despise the second. You can’t serve both God and the Bank.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-indent: 48px;">The gospel of our Lord.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />Today is my 26th wedding anniversary today. Mary and I met on January 1, 1990, in a Twin Cities suburb. Our pastors invited a bunch of people to their house to watch the Rose Bowl. When Mary rang the doorbell, our pastor Nancy opened it and said, “He’s here.” We spent the afternoon ogling each other, sitting side-by-side, discovering that this was someone interesting, and decided to go on an actual first date of some kind. Six weeks later we were engaged. That September we had a wedding. And the rest is history. We’ve had all these years of ups and downs, and we treasure our happy little life.<br /><br /> When I look back at meeting all of you here at St. Dysmas, it feels much the same way. It was a kind of pastoral love at first sight. You welcomed me in so heartily that I’ve been telling people for a year that St. Dysmas and my own congregation in Des Moines are the warmest churches I’ve ever known. But more than anything, I’ve treasured the time I’ve spent with you, because it feels like I found my people. Jesus talked about preaching to people who have ears to hear. I encounter college kids in my classroom every day who have that kind of hunger – mostly because, when they’ve had questions about faith in the past, what they’ve gotten in return is a load of bison flop. But you, my friends, my fellow sinners, my beloved miscreants and felons, you whose days are marked by the constant reminders of either the worst things you’ve ever done or the one thing you got caught for, your tan inmate scrubs won’t let you forget you’re literally penned in and forced to face the hardest truths. Now whether you’ll respond with any kind of faith or with more of the same-old, same-old that got you here is another matter entirely. And that’s what we’ve gotta pray for tonight: that God would give you ears for this gospel word and that God would use this Iowa sinner to deliver a promise that gives you freedom beyond what’s held you down.<br /><br /> If that’s what we’re after, though, tonight’s gospel reading is a doozy. And it’s probably not something any suits or whiteshirts in Pierre or on the hill would we regard as very edifying for a room full of inmates with hard histories, anger issues, and neck tattoos. That’s because Jesus told this story of a guy who’s an absolute crook and gets away with it. And then Jesus made matters worse by praising the fella’s moxie at writing off debts that other people owe his boss. There’s plenty of entertainment value in that. I like an anti-hero as much as anyone. But I suspect Jesus didn’t tell the story to give us a role model in a crook who cooks the books and gets off with not even a hand slap.<br /><br /> So often we have a problem when we come to God’s word. We think that this whole bundle of scripture and this business of being a Christian is all about God wanting us to be more upright, upstanding, and on the up-and-up. We think Christianity is about a moral system, ethics, and good behavior. God gives us the Bible to show us how to live. Jesus came to teach us to be better people. And God rewards those who meet the mark with an eternity in heaven with no bars on the windows, eternal internet access, and meals that include more than soy substitute as a stand-in for actual meat. But if that’s where we start, then that’s all we’ll get out of God’s word, out of Jesus, and out of any preacher. You’ll get lessons in successful Christian living. You’ll get three-point sermons that tell you how to be more spiritual. And you’ll hear Jesus’ preaching and teaching as something you need to decipher and find the golden nugget that will finally unlock your potential.<br /><br /> With that approach, this parable Jesus tells in tonight’s gospel will screw you up royally. It doesn’t promote good behavior. It doesn’t give you a solid bro you can model your life on. In fact, this section of Luke’s gospel is full of idiots who can’t figure out that a flock of sheep in the pen is better than one lost in the sage brush, a prodigal son who squandered everything and gets welcomed home, and guests at a fancy dinner banquet who turn out to be the winos, the homeless, the heroin shooters, the whores, and the disreputable. Jesus seems bent on upsetting all our preconceived notions of what God actually wants us to live like.<br /><br /> The religious leaders who heard Jesus tell these stories were none too happy about it. They also thought the project we call a human lifetime was about righteousness, purity, morality, and fulfilling the commandments. It’s no wonder that they started plotting to recruit Judas and to arrest and kill Jesus. Where’s the peace and security in a world where people like you, my friends, are held up as just the kind humans God has taken a shine to? Armed robbers, murderers, meth cookers, pedophiles, your house band, and your inside council members are the most unlikely bunch of reprobates for God to grab hold of. Thank God that’s what he does, though.<br /><br /> The story of the crooked manager contains more than meets the eye. Jesus is setting us up for a life of dishonesty, but he does put before us the prospect of using all the tricks and tools of the streetwise for the sake of faith. Jesus says they’re “smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They’re on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits.” Jesus knows that the tactics of the crooked on their own lead to a hollow life and damage to others. But he understands how wily a person of faith has to be in this world. All kinds of temptations will crop to get you to believe and trust something other than Christ for your future. They’ll pop out at you when you least expect it. And they’ll often look pretty appealing. But even good things like being moral or religious or spiritual can also be a temptation to rely on something other than Jesus. And he’s not interested in us complacently basing our lives and our eternal future on good behavior. There’s more to the abundant life Jesus promises than keeping your head down in the chow line, keeping out of the SHU, and flying under the radar of your CO's. Even if it were, Jesus is pretty sure you don’t have it in you.<br /><br /> So Jesus does something else between the lines in this story tonight. He shows you why he like people like you so damn much. The manager in the story is about to get canned for embezzlement. He’s cooked the books, and he sees what’s coming down the pike. When it all falls apart, he won’t have a place to go for refuge. So he’ll create a group of people who’ll say, “That guy gave me a deal on my debt. I don’t care what his own crime was. He can stay with me.” So the guy goes around and writes off debt. It’s like a governor caught in a crime who decides to commute sentences and issue pardons because he knows he’s going to wind up on the hill and wants friends on the inside.<br /><br /> And that’s exactly what Jesus does for you. At the point in Luke’s gospel, Jesus knows that what’s waiting for him in Jerusalem is an execution on the cross that is the finally accounting by the religious leaders. So he sets his face to the task of forgiving people who owe a debt to society, who don’t meet what’s required by the law, and especially those that religion and religious people have beat up on with their demands for perfect obedience and moral purity. Jesus comes to you saying, “Your accounts are cleared. You don’t have to worry about that sin anymore.”<br /><br />Our Lord is never going to find real friends, followers, or disciples among those who regard themselves as debt-free. They don’t need what Jesus is doling out. They’re sufficient unto themselves. But for people like you and me, Jesus is all we’ve got. We know that we don’t love God or our neighbors as we should and, worse, that we don’t want to. We know how far into the red our accounts with God are. So when Christ comes with this good news of the great divine debt-elimination program, we can only say, “I want what Jesus has to give.” What Jesus is doing is exactly what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer when we say, “Thy will be done.” By being such an irresistible and attractive friend, he turns our will his way. He comes after us in such a way that we can’t help but be open to him. He grabs hold of us so that our old tricks now get turned around for his sake and the sake of the gospel.<br /><br />After all, isn’t that what St. Dysmas is all about? You guys have survived by your wits forever. You’ve had to be on the alert to make sure you’re not caught. But now Jesus has caught you and calls you to use your substantial streetwise savvy to become his very presence behind the walls of the prison and out in the world when your sentence is up. And if there’s no pardon for you in this life, he’s going to make sure that you know exactly what awaits you in his home. There are no cells there. But he says that in his father’s house there are many mansions. And every single one of ‘em has an open door and the best kitchen ever, where there’s a divine chef cooking up the supper of the Lamb of God to fill you with eternal good things.<br /><br />For my money, I’d rather have a Lord who’s crooked, who gives grace and mercy to those who don’t deserve it, than some demanding rule-giver whose relentless rule-giving leaves me in arrears. When you come to the altar for the sacrament tonight, know that you come to Christ who says, “What do you owe?” and who says in response, “Take your bill. Put zero on the bottom line. And scrawl 'debt paid in full.'” He’s done it for you. Amen.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><b>If you'd like to know more about this vital congregation and its members, click <a href="http://www.stdysmas.net/" target="_blank">here</a>. And while you're there, DONATE!</b></i></span><br /> <br /> </span>Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-90628838182691702382016-08-23T08:59:00.000-05:002016-08-23T08:59:25.012-05:00Wedding Lamb for Molly and Ryan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtcDbYt-lJKHfG3JaNz9JOvcZVuW-YSKlxRhdCD9Z7fmcfHvo4A5d2N4dNSqRPrQj1iicwvg84gXUYXGk8pXU3syhYDEBVX6TbDey2UjU-Vn4DrPzX-iA2oZcVEnL0bO3Twzct1DCi9Ek/s1600/Molly+and+Ryan+lamb.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtcDbYt-lJKHfG3JaNz9JOvcZVuW-YSKlxRhdCD9Z7fmcfHvo4A5d2N4dNSqRPrQj1iicwvg84gXUYXGk8pXU3syhYDEBVX6TbDey2UjU-Vn4DrPzX-iA2oZcVEnL0bO3Twzct1DCi9Ek/s400/Molly+and+Ryan+lamb.JPG" width="300" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This wedding sermon was preached August 13, 2016, for Ryan Budmayr and Molly Willbur, who is the daughter of dear friends from my first call in Pierre, SD.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m going to
step out on a limb tonight and take us into some dangerous territory. But I’m
getting older and have less tolerance for preachers standing up front and
spewing religious platitudes and other niceties that out in West River country
where I come from we give a proper name connected to cow flop. So let’s start
with the truth about marriage: : We live in a culture that is suspect. In so
many ways, it presents us a picture of what life should be. Whether it’s a
presidential campaign or an action movie or an inane sitcom on Tuesdays at
eight, our fictional and actual lives hinge on a hoped-for utopia that depends
on our work to achieve it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That’s what we get in campaign ads on
both sides of the aisle and from any given super-PAC. I get hooked by their
vision of the future, of what could be — as long as I vote the right way. I’m a
sucker for the western or the thriller where the individual hero summons the
resources to escape the enemy’s horrors. Hopeless romantics like me are
susceptible to the bended-knee moment in a romantic comedy when love’s buds
break into bloom. This is all part of our culture’s way of operating. It
depends on the sanctity of the individual, on bootstrap-pulling, and on freedom
as our be-all and end-all. All of these are good things that I’d be hard-put to
let go of.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As far as tonight is concerned is that
there’s a constant temptation to romanticize what’s about to happen and to be
all sentimental and ooey-gooey and googly-eyed. It all shapes our understanding
of marriage — especially in those romantic movies, teen magazines, Cosmo, and
bridal publications. They sell a bill of goods that leads to a goal that can’t
be reached with their suggested tactics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Instead of a focus-grouped,
trial-ballooned set of actions, though, the great gifts of marriage require
something more. The joy of your relationship will surely be present in the
things you do together. But much more will it arise in the weathering of storms
side-by-side, in the hindsight of years yoked together, and in the promises
born out in the letting go of yourselves for your beloved.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The reality is that not in every arena
of life, the vibrant gifts God intend for us are colored by our unwillingness
to lose control, or do what my pals working a 12-step problem call “letting go
and letting God.” Sin gives us a false picture of life’s purpose and meaning.
It presents an illusion of the possibility of control, of being able to manage
life, and pushes us into our constant need to get ahead of the curve. Our
sinful hearts begin to think the Utopia of our desires is achievable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The reality, of course, is that life is
this blessed mix of joy and laughter mixed with some messy, gray, hard, stained
days. The reality is more akin to one Thanksgiving of lumpy gravy and dry
turkey after another, each one surrounded by loved ones whose mix is so
important to who you are. Which is why you do well to listen to the words Matt
read from Song of Songs. Although it isn’t as glamorous as romantic comedies, <i>Modern Bride</i> magazine, or sentimental wedding
accoutrements, having a seal set on your heart by your partner’s vows and
promises is way more valuable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you offered for love all the wealth of your
house, all your good intentions, all your Utopian hopes and romantic desires,
it wouldn’t be enough. Or as the reading says, “It would be utterly scorned.”
But what we have in the gospel offers way more. We have a God who shows up in
the hard stuff of actual living.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At my little Lutheran college in Iowa I teach a
first-year seminar, and for all kinds of reasons I make my freshmen learn how
to knit. They get a discount at a local knitting shop, and they get their size
9 needles and a skein of yarn, and they have to knit a dishcloth. My freshmen
have all grown up with awards for participation and have been spoon-fed
self-worth and acceptance, so they don’t much like it when their dishcloth
isn’t perfect. And they complain about how awful it is. And my reply is always,
“Relax. It’s a metaphor for your freshman year.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I made you two a metaphor for your marriage.
I made you a little lamb. I didn’t have a pattern for a Black Angus heifer, so
this will have to do. This lamb is kind of a mess. It’s misshapen. Its legs
aren’t plumb. Its head is off kilter. It’s got cool dreadlocks, but one in back
is too long. The plump body is out of proportion with everything else. On the
whole it’s a pretty lousy job of knitting. But it was all done in love, each
stitch knitted with the two of you in mind. And, messy as it is, I think it’s
pretty perfect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This Budmayr/Wilbur lamb is a reminder of the
kind of God you have, who shows up in the knots and tangles and dropped
stitches of your relationship, who keeps loving from beginning to end, from
Alpha to Omega. What’s more, that it’s a lamb and not a knitted Butte County
cow or Bell Fourche bronc, means you get to remember that the Lamb of God
himself is there in the midst of your marriage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On his account, even with the messes and
brokenness of life, you will stand before God on the Last Day, and he will say
to you, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” He’ll look at the
misshapen marriage lamb you’ll have knit and think it’s the most perfect,
darlingest thing. Ever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You see, contrary to most of what you see
around you about Christianity and about being married, it isn’t about getting
things right or about being more moral-than-thou, or even about happiness being
found in preventing or fixing messes. It’s about the process of living, being
surrounded by mercy, granting one another a future by offering forgiveness.
Instead of getting all the stitches right, it’s a pattern for gaining life in
spite of the mistakes. My prayer for you is that thirty years from now, as you
talked about at the rehearsal dinner last night, Ryan, the two of you will see
how it all came together and how it started with the seal of your vows today.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">So now you’ll start. You’ll use your promises
to each other to make it happen. I bid you to stick with it. Don’t fall for the
cow flop of the world’s picture of life. Grab onto each other and, literally,
love the hell out of each other. Now let’s git ‘er done.</span></div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-31982579538792287092016-07-23T17:15:00.000-05:002016-07-23T17:22:22.479-05:00Called2Serve<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">This is the keynote address delivered at "Called2Serve," the national youth gathering for Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ on the Grand View University campus on July 21, 2016.</span></i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Welcome back from your service projects on this hot and humid day. I hope you all had on Duluth Trading Company moisture-wicking underwear today like I did. I want to start with a couple things tonight. First, a big shout-out to Culynn and Alex for how great their Bible studies have been this week. Let’s give ‘em a hand.<br /><br />Second, I want to tell you about something we’re incredibly excited about here at Grand View. We’ve received a $600, 000 grant to serve the church and young people like you. On your way out tonight you’ll get a flyer about the Nexus event on our campus next summer. We’ll be hosting 150 young people who’ve said “Maybe me” when folks have asked who our future pastors are going to be. We’re looking for 50 kids for each of three weeks who have the gifts, the resilience, the faith, and the guts to think about what being a pastor might be like. Here’s a video from our campus pastor Russ Lackey and others. [They played a promotional video.] <br /><br />We’ll give you a week of fun and learning, sweat and service. And then we’ll send you back to be a servant in your home congregation, equipped to ask more questions, and connected to other kids from Nexus who’ve become some of your best friends. And you know what? It’ll be absolutely free. And all you pastors and youth ministers and parents out there, keep an eye out for more info, because we’re counting on you to nominate kids. You know who has potential. The next generation of pastors needs you to pull ‘em out of the crowd.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /><br />Now let’s talk about other stuff. I want to tell you about our wrestling coach Nick Mitchell. For five years running now, Grand View’s wrestling team has been national champion. That’s an amazing feat for a little college in Iowa. It would be pretty easy for our wrestlers to have egos as big as their guns. But Coach Mitchell won’t let it happen. Before they ever set foot on our campus, Coach Mitchell tells the wrestlers that they’ll have to commit themselves to live the championship lifestyle. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">He says it’s not enough to want to be champions on the wrestling mat. Our wrestlers have drilled into them that they need to be champions in the classroom, in their dorms, in their relationships. What’s happened as a result is that our wrestlers wind up being academic all-Americans. They’re known in the college wrestling world not just for how quickly they can achieve a take-down or pin an opponent, but also for the quality of their character. Coach Mitchell has something to teach us about service. But this profile isn’t about winning or about championships. It’s about how important it is for the rest of your life to reflect your faith. In other words, what we’re up to tonight is to think about what it means for you to be a Christian.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />I grew up in Sturgis, South Dakota. You may have heard of it. That’s the place with all the motorcycles. I couldn’t show you any picture beyond these wheels. It wouldn’t have been appropriate. But when I was a kid, Sturgis was a lovely place. We lived on the outskirts of town in a little eight-wide trailer house not much different from this one. We were part of the tiny-house movement before anyone knew there was such a thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />One summer morning when I was six or seven, my older sister and I were running through the sprinkler to stay cool. We were kids who were always singing. So it was sprinkler spritzing and singing songs. But we didn’t sing your normal kids’ diddies like “London Bridge” or “This Old Man” or “Wrecking Ball.” My sister had gone to church kindergarten where they taught the kids church hymns. Things like “My Faith Looks Up to Thee” and “Beauteeful Savior.” At some point during the singing and splashing, my sister decided it was time to go over to the corner of the yard and play school at the picnic table we had in the shade. I wanted none of that, because I knew who always got to play teacher, so I headed inside for a big glass of Kool-Aid in a 1960’s aluminum glass.<br /><br /> As I came around the front of the trailer, I grabbed hold of the hitch to swing around it like any active kid would. And it was like the trailer house was sucking me into itself. You know what it’s like when you get a shock from a bad outlet? That’s what it was like. But the buzzing didn’t stop. If I used all my strength I could pull one hand away, but the other would come loose. I yelled to my sister for help as loud as I could, but she couldn’t hear me. I was being electrocuted and the electricity was zapping the strength from my voice. At all seemed like it was happening in slow motion. But it ended as quickly as it began. My sister, who was safe because she was wearing leather-soled sandals, grabbed my arm to make me stop what she thought was my messing around. And she pulled me away from being as good as dead. As she dragged me away from the killing electrical field, my beloved sister was still singing. And you know what the words were that came off her lips? “I know that my Redeemer lives: What joy that blest assurance gives! He lives, he lives, who once was dead; He lives, my everlasting head!”<br /><br /> Somehow in that moment something significant happened. A kid’s electrocution became a sermon on his baptism. As good as dead, I had been handed back my life. And it became linked with the fact that Jesus himself lay dead and now lives. My life was no longer my own. Every minute I’ve lived since 1966, every breath I’ve drawn into my lungs, has come on account of someone else’s actions. I couldn’t breathe or pull my other hand away from that hitch to save my life. But death had no power over my sister that day. I was literally grounded in death and given new life. That’s where we always have to begin when we’re talking about our lives as Christian: with the realization and confession that none of this – none of this – happened because of something I did or even had the possibility of doing. It all happened because of Christ.<br /><br /> Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther (from whom we get our name as Lutherans) wrote something called the “Heidelberg Disputation.” In it he was dragging on people who said we could use our free will to choose to be saved. But Luther pushed back. If you could bend your will to decide to be the person God wanted you to be, then we wouldn’t have needed what Christ did on the cross. And saying that was true meant you were dissing Jesus. Then Luther went to say a curious thing. He said “It is certain that we must completely despair of ourselves in order to become fit to obtain the grace of Christ.” Another way of saying that is “As long as you think you have something to contribute to your salvation or bring to God, you don’t get it yet.”</span></div>
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Thirty-five years ago I worked as a camp counselor at a Bible camp in South Dakota called NeSoDak Bible Camp.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Some of you here tonight might even have gone there as campers. In those days developmentally disabled adults who were residents of the State Hospital and School in Redfield would join the fifth and sixth graders for a week of camp. Each cabin of kids would have one Redfield resident staying with them all week. I had the privilege of having Robert Schieffelbein in our cabin. The first night of camp I told my campers about the Robert’s arrival the next day. I told them their job was to be inviters. Whatever our cabin did, they would invite Robert.<br /><br /> Those boys were incredible hosts. They’d invite Robert to the canoe beach, to the crafts hut, to softball field, to breakfast, to campfire. But every time they invited Robert, they always got the same response.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Robert, let’s go swimming.”</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“I can’t do it. I can’t do it, buddy.”</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Robert, let’s go canoeing.”</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“I can’t do it. I can’t do it, buddy.”</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Robert, let’s go to morning worship.”</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“I can’t do it. I can’t do it, buddy.” </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Dear Robert Schieffelbein, who’s probably long dead all these years later, gives us language to talk about ourselves when we come before God: “I can’t do it. I can’t do it, buddy.” All of Christian life begins with our confessing honestly that we come to God with nothing in our hands.<br /><br />As someone who’s been given his life on a silver platter (well, some days it’s a paper plate), but you get the point. I had nothing to contribute. There’s a divide in my history. And in our Christian lives there’s also a divide – between before Christ and after. We Christians begin to see our lives according to two categories.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There’s Christ. He’s the one who saves. He’s the one who gives you life. He’s the one with so much mercy that your cup overflows. And then there’s everything else. That’s all the bad stuff, of course. But it’s all the good stuff in life, too. Your going to worship. Your digging into God’s Word. Your serving your neighbor. Your sitting in a school bus without air conditioning to go do a service project in hundred-degree heat. There’s Christ. And there’s everything else. None of which can save you. Despairing of yourself means understanding what belongs on each side of the divide.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But if nothing except Christ counts for your salvation, then why bother doing anything good? But you ask, surely there’s something that needs doing! Ah, lemme give you a Q-tip. Nothing. Got it? But if it’s nothing for me and everything for Christ, good works still have a place for us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In a little book called “Freedom of a Christian,” Luther said that, since you don’t have to give God a whole passel of good works to prove your worthiness for heaven, now you have lots of good works to spare. And there are two reasons to do good works.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The first reason to do good works is that your neighbor needs ‘em. You don’t even have to go out of your way to find neighbors to serve. You’ve got ‘em all around you.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When I tool down the road on I-235, I’m surrounded by neighbors in other cars. They depend on my driving safely and courteously.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When Oliver was a new-born, Culynn and Meg Curtis didn’t need to go looking for a neighbor to serve. They had one in the baby crying in the middle of the night.When you walk down the hallway during passing time, it’s crowded with neighbors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I came across a Luther quote a couple weeks ago that I’d never read before. Listen to what he said in this sermon: “How is it possible that you are not called? You are always in some sort of position. You have always been a husband or a wife or a son or a daughter or a servant. Imagine the lowest position…[E]ven if you had four heads and ten hands you would scarcely have the energy for such a task. And I guarantee you would not be thinking about making a pilgrimage or doing some so-called ‘saintly’ work.” [</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Martin Luther, “Sermon on John 21:19-24” (1522),
quoted in Mark D. Tranvik, </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Martin Luther
and the Called Life</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 33.]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And when we talk about people needing your good works, I’m not talking about pretend needing. I’m a member of Luther Memorial Church – the big steeple up the plaza from us – and I see it happening there all the time. When my former student Katie lost her parental rights to two little boys and wound up in prison for several months, she was desperate for company, and members of the church visited her every dang Saturday. And they paid off here jail debt when she was released, so she could get a driver’s license. And during the peace, when I lean in to tell Betty I’m praying for her and let her know I’m aware of her grief two years now after her 50-year-old son was hit on his motorcycle by a drunk driver and died, she weeps right there in the middle aisle of our sanctuary. My first year-and-a-half as a newly-minted pastor I had to deal with seven baby deaths. Seven. Those grieving families couldn’t tell you who brought what hot dish to the house, but it kept ‘em moving.<br /><br /> Eleven years ago we bought our very first house. On our move-in morning, my 8th-grade son and I were at our lousy apartment with the movers to get the big furniture loaded up. My phone rang, and it was my nephew Nick who had graduated from high school two months before. He said, “Uncle Kenny, I just found my mom dead in her bed. I don’t know what to do.” That started the most awful day. How could I call my wife and tell her that her sister died? How could I tell her parents? How were we going to move into our house and then be able to drive four hours to a funeral for my wife’s sister?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I called our church secretary, and before I could drive over to the new place she had a group of church folks ready to serve. Our campus pastors and Grand View’s Academic Dean also showed up. By the end of the afternoon, our beds were put together with sheets and pillow cases on them. Our entire kitchen had been unpacked. And my Dean hung my tie-rack in the bedroom closet and carefully hung all my ties, so I could choose some appropriate funeral garb. Do you see what they did? In the face of death, they gave us life. Their eyes could see a neighbor’s need, and they acted. When they were all gone and we were left standing weeping in sorrow and amazement in our living room, they had given us space and life so my kid could say, “Mom and Dad, we need to pray. I’ll do it.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You can think of all kinds of places you have neighbors, because God has placed you in a web of relationships. Your callings from God happen within that web. They’re as common as being a sister or a brother, or as vital as being a voter marking a ballot, or as far into the future as leaving a healthy planet to your great-great-great grandchildren. If you wonder about what you’re going to do with your life, like I did when I was in high school, you don’t have to wonder. Sure, you’ll have to figure out a job. But that’s secondary. This stuff is what truly matters. And the word we Lutherans use to describe it is “<b>vocation</b>.” It’s giving our life to others on account of Christ.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /> But what about that whole business of why we do good works? I told you there two reasons. I think we’re pretty clear on our neighbors needing us. But there’s that other reason. Luther said we do good works…because it sucks doing ‘em. Well, that’s not exactly what he said, but that’s the gist of it. We do good works because God is making us into new creatures every day of our lives, and the old sinner in us can’t stand it. The sinner in me wants it all to be about me. I want it my way or the highway. I don’t want to be put out in any way. I don’t want to give something to someone who doesn’t deserve it or appreciate it. But the new person of faith God is creating with this good news about Jesus recognizes how the Old Sinner in me clings to its ugly, selfish life. So if there’s nothing you can do to earn your salvation, there is something God lets you have a hand in. Whenever you do good works, it blocks the path of sin we so love to saunter down. Good works are one way the Holy Spirit uses to kill off the old sinner in you, so you won’t be hounded by what Luther called its evil deeds and desires. Doing good works, just like reading scripture, engaging in prayer, and worshiping God, work on you. They not only stymie the old you, they’re also ways God forms the new you. The word we use for that is <b>discipleship</b>. It’s what happened to those Jesus called to follow him.<br /><br /> Most people you might ask about what it means to be a Christian will tell you that it’s all about becoming a better person and being a moral example for lesser beings. But that really doesn’t fit with what we know about God in the person of Jesus Christ. Luther said it best when he said the Christian life is about two contradictory things that you have to hold together: A Christian is perfectly free. A Christian is perfectly dutiful.<br /><br /> Okay, I know. You still wonder if there’s something you need to do. After all, isn’t the theme this week “Called2Serve." You’ve had some good preaching and teaching these days. The mutual conversation and consolation of believers has happened on my campus (yay!). And I know the Spirit is working to create faith in you. So my response has to be: You’re free. What do you want to do? You’ve prayed “Thy will be done” in the Lord’s Prayer hundreds of times. God is answering your prayer by molding your will to match his own. That way, when I ask what you want to do, the Holy Spirit is going to shape your answer and grow fruit in you: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. You can count on that happening. That’s the kind of God you have. You have a God who loves your neighbors enough to limit your sin and then give you to them in service. You have a God who loves you enough to die for you and give you life. There’s lots to get busy with. Go to it! Amen.</span></div>
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Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6408271430709839676.post-11314262027982999122016-06-19T21:35:00.000-05:002016-06-19T21:35:01.623-05:00Swine Skins and the Savior's Skin<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This sermon is the final in a series of sermons based on Galatians and the assigned gospel readings for the day. Read the passages at Galatians 3:23-29 and Luke 8:26-39. The sermon was preached at St. James Lutheran Church in Johnston, Iowa, on June 18-19, 2016, while I was filling in for their pastor who was on a pilgrimage along the </i>Camino de Santiago de Campostela<i> in northern Spain.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">I apologize in advance and provide
you with a trigger warning. There’s nudity in this sermon today. But that’s how
it has to be. If Paul’s going to talk about being clothed in Christ in his
Galatians letter, we’re going to have to deal with our sartorial state before
Christ wrapped himself around us. And just in case you were wondering, this
weekend marks the annual World Naked Bike Ride. In 70 places around the globe,
people strip and go for a ride on a course through the city to protest the
automobile culture and car emissions, build awareness of how dangerous it is to
bike around traffic, and, of course, keep potential thieves from ever wanting
to touch their bicycle saddles. Although the guy in our gospel reading shares
his lack of attire with the naked bike riders, that’s about as far as we can go
in spotting similarities.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There he is in the same state he
came into the world, but he had made no choice to be unclothed. What’s more,
he’s also got a demonic spirit that’s taken him over, and he’s been shunted out
of town to keep the danger away from good folks. And as if that weren’t bad
enough, the only place he has to live in the tombs. Two weeks ago we saw what being
around a dead body could do, when we heard about Jesus approaching the bier of
the dead man in Nain as his funeral processed through town. To touch a dead
person was to be declared unclean, unfit for human company. But Jesus had no
fear of it in Nain, and he doubles down when he comes to the man possessed of
evil and as good as dead. We keep getting these stories from Luke in which the
characters are either headed to the grave or are already dead. When it comes to
being able to present something worthy to Jesus, they've got nothin': the
centurion, the dead son of Nain, the sinful woman with the alabaster jar of oil
and now the Gerasene demoniac whose life is so over that he spends his days in
the tombs.</span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">As we’ve seen in Galatians these past few weeks, for
Paul there’s nothing we can do to get it right with God. When he says we’re not
saved by works of the law, he’s arguing that if salvation is to be had, it has
to come by the sheer grace of God in the person of Jesus. The only thing the
law </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">can</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> do is to protect our
neighbors from us, keeping us </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">and them</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
safe by acting as a disciplinarian. All the law can do is put a leash on us and
guide us. But it can’t get us over the finish line. If we think being good or
nice or religious, voting Clinton or voting Trump or even voting Libertarian,
or any other action on our part can save us – even the best thing we can think
of – we’re sadly mistaken. For Paul, we’re dead in sin and can’t raise
ourselves. We may be breathing and our hearts may be beating, but other than
that we’re a bag of bones waiting to be packed off to the nearest
two-and-a-half foot by eight-foot hole. We can’t dress ourselves up in anything that
meets the high demand of the heavenly dress-code. Those of you who are old
enough may remember the ads for the Dream Date game when we were kids. The
girls in the commercial would ask the question, “Will he be a dream date? Or
will he be a dud?” That’s us: the dud. But even if we got dolled up, a corpse
in a prom dress is still a corpse. A tuxedo won’t make a dead guy live. The
demands of this world and the requirements of the law can only take us to the
point where, once again, the only thing the characters in Luke can say is
"Got nothin', God." They’re as naked as the guy in the Gerasene
tombs. And so are we.</span></span><br />
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But once we know our situation, now comes the “Rock
of Ages” moment for all involved. You may remember the words to the old hymn that
we’ll sing in a few minutes: "Nothing in my hand I bring, / Simply to Thy
cross I cling; / Naked, come to Thee for dress; / Helpless, look to Thee for
grace." Jesus won't let us dress ourselves, because every bit of apparel
we could find to put on reeks of the tombs. The naked guy, hounded by demons
and lost in the tombs, stands there with not enough power to climb out of the
tomb, push the demon out of him, and go home. And ironically that’s the point
when the Gerasene man and the Galatians are clothed and fully free of the bound
will that possessed them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The possessed guy in the Gerasene territory isn’t
the only one in the story who’s getting a change of attire. Legion – that host
of demons possessing the nude, tomb-resident? Legion, who controls the man to
the point of tossing places into places where injury is only the best result,
was wrapped up in the man, controlling him from the inside. But Jesus gives
evil a new skin inside a raft of barrows and gilts — a herd of hogs. The swine
were unclean for the Jews, as untouchable as the dead son in Nain and the
demoniac living among rotting corpses. And Jesus sends them over a cliff to drown,
as dead as the bison piled up at the bottom of a Native American buffalo jump.
Where Jesus is present, evil dies. And so do the legalistic dividing lines
between Greek and Jew, slave and free, male and female, and any other
demarcation between insiders and outsiders, godly and ungodly, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">iustus et peccator</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> (as Luther said). But
you? Now you are wrapped up in Christ's skin. He pulls open the spear wound in
his side and slips his skin over you. There's no longer any you old you left.
You're as done as a left-for-dead demoniac. The life you </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">now</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> have is hid in Christ. There's only his purity, his life, his
utter faithfulness, his place at God's right hand, his very name that is now
yours.</span></span><br />
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our friends Bob and Carole are visiting us this
weekend. Bob is the pastor at St. Dysmas Lutheran Church. That’s our sister
congregation behind the walls of the South Dakota State Penitentiary. It’s
named after St. Dysmas, the thief crucified next to Jesus and who hear the Lord
say, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” All the congregation’s members
are inmates. Every single one of them has run afoul of the law. They’ve
committed crimes against the state and against their fellow human beings (some
of them pretty horrendous). If you attend worship with the prisoners on a
Thursday evening, you’ll shake about ten hands as the men of the church council
greet you, and you’ll see that everyone who’s rung out of their cells and
shuffles past the guard to check in to be continually accounted for is wearing
tan scrubs. There are four-inch letters on back of their shirts and on down
their pants legs that say either “inmate” or “maximum security.”</span></span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the prisoners whose name is Christopher talks
about how in prison you never get away from a sense of worthlessness, because
you put on those clothes and instantly feel like nothing. Christopher says it
can overwhelm you. People feel it in the cell halls and bring everyone around
them down. Outside of the chapel where worship happens or with an encounter
with their pastor, my friend Bob, or with another faithful prisoner, they can
never escape being identified by the worst thing they’ve ever done. Inside
those walls your life no longer belongs to you. It’s over. The law holds sway.
You go where you’re told. You eat the worst food you can imagine, at the least
cost to the Department of Corrections, and the citizens of South Dakota. When a
corrections officer demands something of you, you do it or you get sent to the
SHU, the special housing unit where you’re kept isolated and where you can’t do
any harm. These men of St. Dysmas would read Galatians and get what Paul’s
talking about. They’ve put on tan scrubs that essentially the death of them.
Worship at St. Dysmas is the only hour each week where they’re called by their
first names. Otherwise they’re known by their surnames, by a number or by “Hey,
Inmate!” Christopher himself looks back on his time prior to prison as a
dead-end going nowhere and without any kind of life. Another prisoner named Justin
says you don’t get where they are by living in the light. They’ve lived
darkness. Hard, hard darkness for lots of them.</span></span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’ve been privileged to preach and teach at St.
Dysmas, and I have to say there’s no easier place to proclaim the gospel. What
makes it easy is that no one there is under the illusion that there’s some part
of them that’s immune from judgment. Wearing those tan scrubs is a constant
reminder. They don’t get to pretend like we do that the face they present to
the world is find-and-dandy. They’re inmates, plenty of ‘em lifers. They’re
just the kind of sinners Paul liked preaching to. And they’re especially the
kind of people Jesus loved: an unworthy centurion, a dead man in Nain, a sinful
women with a jar of oil, a demon-possessed guy in Gerasene, and you. This word
of God from Luke and Galatians becomes a story about you, not when your
starting point is how good you are. It begins at the place where you finally recognize the emptiness of sin and death.</span></span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What happens to those brothers in Christ at the
South Dakota Pen when they climb up the stairs to the chapel up on fifth floor
is remarkable. Walking into worship for them is like walking out of a tomb once
a week. When Christopher was baptized a couple years ago, he became part of the
body of Christ. That’s the place where the law can have no say. It can no
longer strip them bare of identity, take away hope, or demand utter obedience,
for now they are clothed in Christ. And Christ will brook no other competition
when it comes to you. If you are in Christ, Paul says in Romans, nothing can
separate you from the love of God, neither height nor depth, things present nor
things to come, nor angels, nor principalities, nor anything else in all
creation. Where before you were wrapped in grave clothes or tan scrubs at best,
now Paul says you are clothed in Christ. And in those splendid resurrected
duds, you be lookin’ mighty fine.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">When Jesus tells the newly-freed man and you to go
home and declare what God had done, it's no mission to fix the world. And it
certainly isn’t some job description for how to stay cleaned up and purdy. The
both of you are being sent back into the world that knows </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">no</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> resurrection, that knows </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">no</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
new life, that </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">cannot</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> be released
from life under the law’s thumb. Instead what Jesus bids us to do is exactly
what Luther talked about in the first of his 95 Theses: "When our Lord and
Master Jesus Christ bids us to repent, he intends an entire life of
repentance." To declare what God has done is to continually confess:
"I got nothin'. I couldn't get it right. I couldn't fix it. I still can't.
The old me? There but for the grace of God do I now go. Christ has come to me
when I was still dead and keeps giving me life. Helpless, I was given
everything. Since my life comes in him alone, I can't be honest if I don't
point to him. I may have come home, but it's life from Jesus that's striding
through the front door."</span></span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have to say that St. Dysmas Lutheran Church is one
of the most vital ministries of the entire ELCA. And it’s certainly the
warmest, most welcoming congregation I’ve ever worshiped in. Though it we in
the church have been sent behind the walls of the prison to declare what God
has done. (And let me tell you, if you’ve got money you want to be used for
good, St. Dysmas is a place where it’ll matter. You don’t get a lot in the
offering plate when most of your church members make twenty-five cents an
hour.) But every place where we member of the body of Christ engage the world,
we do it not to fix the world. We simply don’t have the wisdom or the
willingness to really do that. But what actually do in the church with our
service to our neighbors is to give witness to the freedom that’s been given on
account of Christ. We declare by our letting go of the things we idolize like
power and money, security and status, that Christ has clothed us.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That’s
why we dress babies up in white gowns when they’re baptized. That’s why pastors
wear a white alb. That why, when we are at last rolled into this place on our
backs for one final worship service, our coffin is draped in a white funeral
pall. It’s why the color of any church festival dealing with the resurrected
Jesus or with our resurrection is white. Again and again and again, as we open
our closet doors to look for something that’ll make us look nice and declare us
acceptable, the gospel calls us back to say, “Nope. You’re dead. But now you’re
alive in Christ. You’ve got better clothes by the best designer ever to get
suited up in. You were naked, but now you’re clothed in Christ. Those are party
clothes. Let’s go declare what he’s done.” Amen.</span></span></div>
Undomesticated Preacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09031655343362455696noreply@blogger.com0