The Undomesticated Preacher

The Pastoral Call, the Call Committee, and the Lutheran Confessions

2012-02-02T23:27:00.001-06:00

This piece was written to provide guidance to the call committee in the congregation where my family and I are members.

Introduction

Service on a call committee is one of the most crucial arenas of congregational service – and one of the most difficult. What can compound the difficulty is the lack of clarity about what a pastor’s calling really is. The culture around us demands allowance for a wide variety of views about religious matters, and it is no surprise that this would be reflected even on a committee that represents those the congregation regards as both faithful and savvy. The committee will hear many voices and diverse visions for pastoral ministry. The Lutheran theological tradition, grounded in the work of Martin Luther and other evangelical reformers, is a trustworthy compass for them on their call process path.

Because each Lutheran congregation includes a statement of fealty to the Lutheran Confessions in its constitution and because all Lutheran pastors vow to uphold the Confessions at their ordinations, it is important that we understand what the Confessions say about that calling. Such knowledge can serve both the call committee and the pastoral candidate by defining the parameters of the call, even as it educates the wider congregation in understanding what its own call to ministry is.

Ministry and the Language of the Confessions

The Lutheran Confessions are a set of 16th century documents drawn up by the evangelical reformers – particularly Martin Luther. The 1530 Augsburg Confession is the primary guiding document for Lutherans, and its core articles for understanding the pastoral calling are the first eight. They use theological language to tell the same story of salvation we find in the Bible: why we need to be saved and how God accomplishes it.

The Augsburg Confession (AC) begins by speaking about who God is (Article I) and what’s gone wrong with our relationship with God (Article II): Sin has such a hold on human beings that we are captive to ourselves and “by nature” can neither fear nor trust God. In order to free us from this captivity, God takes on flesh in the person of Jesus. The AC recounts what our Creeds say about what Jesus does for us: He died, rose, ascended to God and sends the Spirit to yank us into a life of freedom (Article III).

From that point on, everything in the AC centers on Jesus. He is the beginning and end of every conversation, the focus of every topic, and the one who drives all our activity in the church. To trust Christ to accomplish all the work of salvation without even the simplest contribution of our own is what brings salvation (Article IV) and identifies both the church and individual Christians (Articles VII and VIII). The AC calls that “justification by faith” and argues that, while our own sin-tainted works can’t do the trick (even our best “powers, merits, or works”), such trust in Christ’s work is the thing that saves and releases us.

Then comes a crucial article in understanding what is and is not the pastor’s calling. If Article IV is about justification by faith, Article V asks, “Where in the world can we ever get that saving faith?” It comes in the Office of Preaching, that is, in the proclamation of God’s promise in Word and Sacrament wherever it happens and whoever does it. The Holy Spirit makes faith happen when both our own ina-bility to trust God and Christ’s gracious gift to us are proclaimed.

The implication for a call committee is that this Office of ministry belongs to God and not to a congregation or pastor. It is God doing the work of salvation through God’s ministry. Congregations and pastors are simply the means by which God can deliver the goods. In other words, because God wants to be sure we hear the saving Word of Christ, churches and pastors are given as divine “set-asides” (that’s what being “holy” means). Their sole purpose is to be a guaranteed location where people who are captive to sin can be sure to hear a freeing Word that will create and sustain faith.

When God’s Word brings faith, people who trust God’s promise in Christ begin to see the world and their neighbors in a different light. The AC calls this the “New Obedience” (Article VI). Faithful people want to seek after others’ welfare and see to the good care of the creation. The Augsburg Confession doesn’t make a distinction about serving in the church or in the world, which means the gospel doesn’t necessarily call us to greater religious activity in the church but instead to service where our neighbors are in need (although that service may very well be in delivery of the gospel in the church's ministries).

Implications for a Call Committee

If a call committee surveyed a random sample of a congregation to find out what people think is crucial in their pastor’s calling, they will hear a list of places in the congregation’s life where members have connected to the gospel: in community, music, ordered and creative worship, small groups, youth and family ministry, or adult education. Because the pastor is likely to have a hand in many or even all of those things, people who value them will see the pastor’s calling through that lens.

At my congregation, for instance, the top five ministry tasks the call committee has compiled are the reflection of a congregation with some truly healthy and faithful priorities, and a sign of Faith’s history of vital ministry. And the list of tasks reveals both a community of people committed to what the gospel does and congregational leaders who are diligent facilitators. Even so, what lies behind all these tasks and churchly activities is the gospel itself – the thing that our Lutheran Confessions say happens when our sin is understood and Christ’s benefits are proclaimed.

All the ministry tasks we list are the means by which God’s ministry in the gospel takes place: Music makes the gospel heard. Young people in confirmation learn about the promise given to them in baptism. People in a crisis have Stephen Ministers who visit. The Altar Guild sets up the Lord’s Supper and the Bell Choirs rehearse in order to deliver good news to sinners. The Church Council makes sure our staff members are insured so they can concentrate on gospel work. It all happens in order to reach the same outcome: saving faith, first, and then freedom for faithful service in the world.

It is easy to confuse the means by which the gospel is delivered with the actual salvation God through them. The culture around us is mighty good at putting lots of good things other than Christ in front of us as essentials. This is why the first and most faithful agenda item for both a call committee and the pastor being called is to know what the gospel is and is not. Even the best things we strive after (like being better parents, gaining a stronger knowledge of the Bible’s content, or becoming better financial stewards) are not the gospel. The proclamation of Jesus Christ alone as the one who saves sinners like us is the gospel.

My congregation's call committee has already done a splendid job discerning the congregational context for that gospel work – the essence of the pastoral call. The committee has assessed the congregation’s various activities, sorted through priorities and opportunities, and drafted an orderly description of the congregation’s identity, history and hoped-for future. None of those things are the gospel, though. The call committee must be clear about the central proclamation of the gospel and understand the need for its proclamation in our midst, the call committee works to find a pastor whose clarity about Christ’s work shines brightly and who has other secondary gifts for helping us all make these faithful avenues for the gospel’s delivery happen in my congregation.

After that point, a call committee moves into the ultimate task of discernment: interviewing potential pastors. Before any other discussions of a pastor’s gifts and talents, the primary task of a call committee in an interview is to explore whether any candidate for a pastoral call to its congregation is able to do three things: First, can this pastor speak with clarity, passion and confidence about Christ’s work in his or her own life? Second, can this pastor articulate how God’s demands and promises function to bring us faith in any passage of scripture? Finally, can this pastor discern the places in our community and in our lives that are ripe for hearing the gospel, so that faith might grow in us and move us to serve? (Once they recommend a pastor for the call, these are also questions whose answers we ought to expect the call committee to articulate to us in their recommendation.)

Conclusion

During the Reformation, Martin Luther gave a name to asking these kinds of questions. He called it “judging doctrine” (and regarded it as the primary task of lay people in the church). When it is done, a congregation’s leaders become faithful stewards of the rich gospel treasure entrusted to them and they ensure that God’s work continues among them beyond the tenure of any single pastor. What’s more, in taking on this responsibility they too become part of the ultimate life-out-of-death story of God creating us and making us new, of Christ captivating us with his nail-scarred embrace, of the Spirit spurring us to faith and service.

Home by Another Way

2012-01-10T13:58:00.000-06:00

This Epiphany sermon was preached on Matthew 2:1-2 on January 10, 2012, in chapel at Grand View University, Des Moines, Iowa.

There’s a great old James Taylor song about our wise guys from the East coming to visit Jesus. It’s called “Home by Another Way.” I don’t know what his religious leanings are, but I think he’s on to something about the story in our reading today. He sings, “A king who would slaughter the innocents will not cut a deal for you. Then warned in a dream of King Herod’s scheme, they went home by another way.”

The warning isn’t just for the Magi, it’s for us, too. There’s danger in heading back King Herod’s way. He’s the epitome of power and glory, and once you head down that road there’s no escaping him. That’s the dark underbelly of falling prey to the allure of glory and success as a way to measure yourself and especially as a way to get yourself home to God. Once you step onto that path, it’s a never-ending string of demands that, in the end, are going to kill you. If I glory in the response to my preaching, I’ll only ever be as good as my last sermon. Tim Tebow is only as good as his last game, or even his last pass. You’re only as good as your collective GPA. And there’s always the next thing. You’ve gotta hold up the glorious standard. It’s what lay behind King Herod’s fear. The appearance of another king born in Bethlehem meant he had to work harder to maintain his grip on his future. The easiest way to do that is to eliminate your opponent by killing the innocents in Bethlehem and conniving to kill the three wise men. Even if he’d done it, it though, the demand to keep the illusion of control going would have hounded him until his dying day. Striving, working, fighting – they’re no way to get home to God.

But the three magi going home by another way. The way home is not the visible glory of success or adherence to the Law or performance of any good works, for there is no one who is truly successful, obedient to the Law or absolutely good than Christ. You haven’t got it in you. But the other way home is a strange path and most often unchosen path, because it leads to the cross. It’s the path of the one who says, "I am the way, the truth and the life." You see, God calls you home by an unexpected route. It starts with the unlikely event of God appearing as a real baby, flesh and bone. In Jesus succumbing to the Law's accusation already in his baptism. In his hanging out with sinners. On Golgotha where he who no sin became sin for you. And in the utterly unforeseen event on that third day outside Jerusalem. Where your life is upside down and where you find your cross, you will find yourself linked to Christ. Where you die with him, you will rise with him.

That's your new map home. Your way home to God isn’t through prosperity, NFL touchdowns and end zone prayers, or even in achieving an A in my Ethics course. Instead it leads you down the Christ road. And you’re not alone in the walk down to the cross and to your home with God, for God himself walks with you in Christ Jesus and he provides fellow walkers – other believers who hold your hand as you wander down into ultimates like death, salvation, resurrection and the forgiveness of your all sins.

As a reminder today, that Christ is your way, your path, your other way home, I’m going to ask you to leave at the end of the service not by the doors at the back there. Instead, I’d like you to leave by this door up front. Like Christ’s path that leads down into the cross and into the fellowship of the saints, this way out goes down into the kitchen and out into the fellowship hall and, eventually out into the world. Have a great trip home. Bon voyage. Amen.

Tura Satana and Lina Sandell

2011-02-08T13:59:00.002-06:00

Tura Satana

Grand View University chapel sermon based on Matthew 11:28-30 and Romans 8:31-39

Public Radio this morning included a tribute to the actress Tura Satana who died last week. Just in case you didn’t know it, Tura Satana was the star of Russ Meyer’s low-budget 1965 exploitation movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It’s the story of three strippers-slash-gogo dancers on a crime spree with three souped up cars. Tura Satana was also in The Haunted World of El Superbeasto and The Astro-Zombies and its two sequels. All this is to say that Tura Satana was no Lina Sandell.

Lina Sandell wrote the text of our three hymns today [Day by Day, The Numberless Gifts of God's Mercies and Children of the Heavenly Father]. She’s my favorite hymn writer. If I’m not allowed to have Home on the Range sung at my funeral, give me Lina Sandell’s Children of the Heavenly Father. Her hymns stand quite well on their own. They’re sung to lilting Scandanavian melodies. Their language is lucid, their theology is keen-edged, and they’re just plain pretty. But once you learn Lina Sandell’s story, her hymns become true witnesses to the gospel – to the promises proclaimed in our two readings today.

Lina Sandell’s full name was Karolina Wilhelmina Sandell Berg. She was a pastor’s daughter in Sweden who lived over the course of the last three quarters of the 1800s. When she was twelve, she suffered some kind of paralysis and was told she’d never walk again. In the following years, as she was recovering and regaining her ability to walk, she began writing hymns. Even though it was published later in her life, some people think Children of the Heavenly Father, with its confidence in God’s care in the face of adversity, was written during those years. When Sandell was in her 20s, she took a trip with her father from her town of Jönköping to Gotheborg in Sweden. It required a trip on a boat. The boat hit some choppy water, apparently, and when the boat lurched forward Pastor Sandell fell overboard and Lina watched as her father drowned. Not long afterward she faced her mother’s death as well.

This was a woman who knew how hard life can be. She understood deeply the crosses we bear. Yet what is it that allows someone who has experienced such incredible loss to say, “Day by day, your mercies, Lord, attend me.” “Savior, help me bear life’s pain and sorrow till in glory I behold your face.” “Though he giveth or he taketh, God his children ne’er forsaketh.” How can a woman who has watched her dear father sink beneath the waves want to give God numberless praises for what she regards as God’s good mercies?

Lina Sandell

Lina Sandell could do it because she had been given a promise from God. It came to her in that Swedish parsonage, sitting at her parents’ feet, hearing of Jesus’ care, his death and resurrection, his claim on sinners lost in a world of sorrow. These words of faith and hope in the face of tragedy and loss can only be spoken by one who has met the Lord at the bottom of those chasms. He was there for her, because he’d already been given to her in anticipation of those days. Lina Sandell went through those things with a vocabulary of faith as a treasure in her heart. The words that come shining through her hymns were something she had already possessed. She had been claimed by the promises given to us in words like those in our two readings: We have a Lord who wants to take on our hardships. We have a God who says, “You. Yes, you! I’m the KrazyGlue God. I’m stuck on you and ain’t nothing from here to eternity that’s going to get me to let you go.”

So how about it, then? Do you have the vocabulary of faith? Do you know the Word and promise of God that will see you through and allow you to still believe and praise God? If not, let me start building your treasury of faith by telling you of our Lord, God’s Son, Jesus Christ. He is the sure and certain sign of God’s mercy and grace toward you. Jesus is the one you can count on. He’s the one who took on everything we human beings could dole out, died, and whom God vindicated by raising him from the dead. When the world cannot and will not forgive, Jesus does. When you’re past the end of your rope, you have a Lord who has the strength to hang on to you. This is God’s promise for you, so that when you face the same kinds of losses as Lina Sandell, you can say with confidence, “For I am convinced that 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, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

You don’t need to go faster, pussycat, kill, kill. You can rest in the promise now and live, live. Amen.

Olive Grove

2010-12-20T08:42:00.000-06:00

This is the hymn text I wrote for Paige and Matt's wedding. It's sung to the tune "Martyrdom" ("As Pants the Hart for Cooling Streams"). The planter in the first verse is Paige's late father who planted tree after tree on his acreage in central South Dakota.

In prairie field an olive grove,
Its wind-blown branches sway,
Its planter’s joy to see it grow,
Foretells our God’s New Day.

A tree once stood in Eden’s bowers,
Its fruit the Lord forbade.
Now we in sin, who took and ate,
Are cast from his rich glade.

On Calv’ry’s hill a tree did bear
The body of the Lord.
He is the shoot from Jesse’s trunk;
His blood for us is poured.

Thus, in God’s love, the sinful branch
Is grafted to his Son,
From whom all hope, all joy, all pow’r,
And life eternal run.

O, God, with love these two entwine
And plant them by your flood
That they might serve and trust and know
Your never-ending good.

© 2010 All rights reserved

A Olive Grove Marriage

2010-12-20T08:38:00.000-06:00

A wedding sermon for Matt Bock and Paige Wilbur
First Lutheran Church, Sioux Falls, SD
December 18, 2010

They shall be like a tree planted by water,
sending out its roots by the stream.
It shall not fear when heat comes,
and its leaves shall stay green;
in the year of drought it is not anxious,
and it does not cease to bear fruit. (Jeremiah 17:8)

If you take a drive along the two-lane roads of South Dakota, you’ll come to a gravel road every mile – at least East River where the landforms allow roads to follow the six-mile-by-six-mile grid established in homesteading days. West River the roads are a bit more scattershot, just like the people. But pretty much wherever you go between Luverne, Minnesota, and Newcastle, Wyoming, you will find stands of trees that weren’t there when the first folks from back East pushed their way across the prairies.

When they planted their own roots under this wide-open sky, they also planted trees: the cottonwoods that were native species, catalpa that grew quickly and made for good fence posts when you needed barbed-wire boundaries, and later elms and Russian olives. These stands of trees provided protection from the endless, crazy-making wind. When the blizzards would come (and they always would), these trees could mark the line between life and death as they sent the drifts around and past the tarpaper shacks and soddies, dugouts and barns.

When Jeremiah speaks God’s word in the passage just read, he knows the value of a strong, living tree. In fact, such a tree is so important that it becomes the metaphor for what a faithful relationship with God is like: a tree whose roots are sunk deep in the water, thriving, spreading out branches and (as Jesus says in the parable of the mustard seed) making a home for the birds.

Trees keep appearing in scripture. Jeremiah is just one of countless tree lovers and huggers and planters in God’s word, including the tale-teller who gives us the story of the Garden of Eden. In Genesis the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the picture of our rebellion in the Fall. God set the tree apart, and our forebears in the Garden said, “Maybe God can’t be trusted. Maybe God’s holding something back. Maybe we ought to branch out and see to things ourselves by laying hold of some of that fruit.”

Now all this talk of trees is quite the goofy thing to focus on at a wedding. Shouldn’t we talk about that crazy little thing called love? Shouldn’t we concentrate on how beautiful you are, Paige, and how hunkaliciously cleaned-up you are, Matt? (Yes, I’ve seen Facebook postings of you on the Governor’s Hunt.) And we could focus on the flowers and the attendants’ dresses (will they ever wear them again?), and the wedding colors á la Brides magazine, and yet that wouldn’t reflect either your faith or your spirited and mature sense of what a marriage is.

It’s true — you’ll never be more beautiful or optimistic about life than today, but the gospel of our Lord just isn’t designed to speak to success and prosperity and glory. God’s word on this, your wedding day, comes to tell you who you are and whose you are, so that on some future day when this day is a warm memory, a photo album and a boxed wedding dress under the bed, and you have come to know the limits of your power and strength, this word about a planted and nourished tree comes to give you hope to cling to.

The gospel today is aimed at a future day when you will be undone by life – maybe by the big sorrows, but more likely by the mundane daily slog and the pressing temptation to center in on yourself and lose sight of the two become one. The tree of Jeremiah will be the ideal that you once had and the mirror to what you can’t find, what you can’t make happen on your own.

That will be the day when you must, must, must zero in on the tree of life, Christ’s cross and the mercy made real and given to you there. That is the tree that provides you true protection, because if you can’t create your own future or muster up a rich life together, your Lord does. What looks like a tree that is your own autonomous self in Jeremiah requires that you look more closely. The tree is only in the barest sense, you. There’s a seam there, where you have been joined to your Lord, for he makes you his own in your baptism, grafts both of you to himself, lets his nourishing sap flow into you. As Paul says, “The life I once had is now hid in Christ.”

That true life promised to you is the thing, the one thing, that surrounds and sustains your coming years, for what flows into you is his deep and abiding forgiveness. And where his forgiveness is present, your past missteps and mistakes and petty peccadilloes can no longer be the markers for who you are. Instead his mercy grants, only and ever, a new and eternal future.

When Christ grafts you to himself, he takes away your pride and ambition as operating principles in your marriage. Those things belong to a life that is no longer yours, and in their place the Lord has given you much more to share with each other. Paul calls them the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So even before we ask God to bless you, he’s already accomplished it. It’s just like our Lord to know you so well that he provides exactly what you’ll need to grow in your marriage and into eternity. And when you turn toward one another with his same mercy and overflowing with these fruits, it will be a sure and certain sign of your grafting, of your identity as Christ’s people of the cross, a reminder again and again of who you are and whose you are.

In the end, when the last of those prairie groves dies out and the wind moves unhindered across the grasslands and dilapidated out-buildings, this last tree remains to bear you into the New Jerusalem where you will find a place in an eternal grove. Until then, Paige and Matt, spread out your branches, be fruitful, multiply (and I don’t mean your times tables), bask in the life that flows in you. You shall not be moved, because you belong to Christ, and him alone. Amen.

Judgment and mercy for real sinners

2010-11-13T23:04:00.000-06:00

Malachi 4:1-2a and Luke 21:5-19

It’s that time of year, a few short weeks before Advent begins, when the assigned Bible readings serve up the terror of the end times. I’d rather preach on Jesus saying no to divorce than to have to deal with the threat of arrest and persecution when the authorities sense the presence of Christ in me. I would so very much prefer to avoid Malachi’s warning about the arrogant being burnt up and the evildoers being cut down like Iowa corn stalks reduced to field stubble and no-till acreage. But those passages of God’s Word have been read now. They hang in the air, forcing themselves on us. Now they won’t let us go until God has a chance to speak through them. If God’s Word won’t give us any other option, we might as well go after these passages and see if the Holy Spirit isn’t actually speaking in them.

The prophet Malachi’s words are a dire warning: For the arrogant and evildoers, that is, for sinners like you and me, the future holds very little hope. It’s going to be worse for us than what a menopausal woman means when she says, “Is it hot in here, or is it just me?” No, there’s a burning-up time a-coming. Just a few verses before our passage, Malachi says, “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap.” The refiner’s fire is what a metal smith uses to burn out all the impurities in silver ore or gold ore, so that the only thing left is the purest of metals. Fullers’ soap is full of caustic alkali and in ancient times was used to purify wool to its ultimate whiteness before it could be used for cloth. The smelter burns. Alkali burns. And the Lord himself burns up all the evil he touches.

How is it that I am to be included among the arrogant, the evildoers and the sinful? Surely God would not move against me in such a violent, no-second-chances way! Yet I am included, and so are you. The sin and evil that the prophet rails against grows in the fertile ground of our hearts, for the Lord demands righteousness of his human creatures and, if there’s one thing we’re not, it’s righteous. We are not all God has made us to be. Who among us doesn’t know the foibles and peccadilloes we so slyly cover over daily, the corner-cutting, the getting by with good-enough? When we look at ourselves honestly, who among us has not committed a long list of sins, big and small, sins of commission and sins of omission? “I was hungry and you did not feed me,” Jesus says in Matthew 25, “I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”

And when we hear the prophet speak these harsh words against us, it reveals something even worse. Not only do we sin, but when God sends a messenger to speak the truth to us, we react by becoming indignant. We refuse to confess our unwillingness to obey this almighty God, to confess our constant desire to go our own way, but we pile sin upon sin by questioning God’s judgment and will. “Surely God couldn’t judge someone like me who has such good intentions. God’s the one with the problem. And if it’s not God, then it’s God’s word or his messenger. For certainly the God of love would not turn away from someone who deserves divine favor like I do!” Ah, there’s the rub. Do you see how our very reaction to God’s judgment in Malachi reveals our core? For we, like our forebears in the Garden, have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We have demanded our place in God’s judgment seat, where we will be the determiners of our own future and fate, where we will be the arbiters of our own salvation, where we gather a lifetime of evidence to justify ourselves. As Psalm 14 says, “They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.” And as Paul says in Romans, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

I will often ask students in my courses if sinners get to go to heaven. The kids who have some church background will invariably say, “Of course, sinners go to heaven. A loving God won’t turn them away.” But the students who have little connection to Christianity know better. Their sense of God’s judgment is closer to the view of Malachi and of the rest of God’s word in scripture. These students have heard the rumors that God is a God who judges, who separates good from evil, and who desires righteousness not sin. The almighty God will brook no sin, allow no evil, make room for no self-seeking hearts in his glorious, eternal kingdom. God reserves his throne of judgment for the sentence he doles out. The jig is up: We sinners with our arrogance, our evil doing and lack of doing, our utter unwillingness and inability to focus on anything but our own will, we stand condemned and have a future as eternal field stubble.

Is there no way out? Is there no small bit of allowance from God? Won’t God recognize some two or three atoms of sparkling goodness that remain? We’d certainly like that, but here’s the deal. God has taken on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. He is crucified and risen. And it all happens because there is no other way. God has done the saving deed, because human beings (you and me included) will not change, will not grasp God’s righteousness, and will always try to substitute our own paltry shadowy substitute self-righteousness in its place. In the coming month before Christmas and during the Christmas season itself, we will hear that God comes in Christ for you. If there were something you could already have done or some evidence you could present to God to affect his judgment on you, there would have been no need for Christ. And his excruciating death on Good Friday would be useless, except as a particularly awful role model for how to behave people treat you poorly.

Our Lord Jesus Christ is good news indeed. But he’s good news for sinners worthy of the name. In the gospel reading, Jesus says lots of people will parade themselves before you as spectacular examples of righteous, religious behavior. Some of those people will trot out a conservative view of righteous behavior. Others will send out a religious pop-up ad trumpeting a liberal view of righteous behavior. And yet our readings push back, saying no zealot knows the truth. The arrogant are headed to the refiner’s fire. Those who are cocksure of their worthiness have a burning alkaline fullers’ soap waiting.

But those who confess their sin, their inability to do and achieve righteousness, and their core desire to go it alone, these have another word that God stands ready to speak. In 1518, some six months after he posted the Ninety-Five Theses, Martin Luther was told to defend his teaching at a meeting of his monastic order. In his disputation to his fellow Augustinians, he said that only those who despair of their own ability to gain righteousness on their own are worthy to receive the grace of Christ. With that we come near to the rich, true good news hidden in the cracks and crevices of these harsh readings. Deuteronomy says, “See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god besides me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand.” The hammer of God comes down. The gavel of the divine judge bangs on his bench. The defendant is declared guilty, so that for Christ’s sake, the guilty party might be freed. The judgment comes so that you and I, sinners all, might confess or, as Jesus says in the gospel reading, that you might have an opportunity to testify.

One summer I worked at one of our Bible camps in South Dakota. Along with the new batch of fifth and sixth grader that descended on us each week that summer, the South Dakota State Hospital and School brought a bus-load of developmentally-disabled adults to be a part of our camp community. Each cabin of seven or eight kids had one of those wonderful, memorable people living with us. One week my group of boys welcomed 30-something Robert Schieffelbein to live with us. I remember Robert even though I can’t recall even one of the younger campers in that group. And what sticks with me about Robert Schieffelbein is that every time we invited him to join in on some camp activity he said, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it, buddy.” We’d say, “C’mon Robert.” He’d say, “I can’t do it, buddy.”

Robert’s words are the words of confession, his testimony. “I can’t do it.” And they are the first words of our own confession. We come before God to say, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it, divine buddy.” And then we point to the one who has promised to take us sinners on. The prophet Malachi promises, “But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” To revere God’s name is to be able to name the one whom God established in heaven and on earth to rescue us sinners, the “we-can’t-do-it” folks. When Mark starts off his gospel, he says, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” He’s saying that this good news starts, has its source, and completely stems from Jesus. But who in the world will hear about Jesus and regard it as good news? For whom will Jesus be such good news that they fear no worldly authority or virulent accusation? What kind of person can’t resist the kind of savior Jesus is? On whom does this sun of righteousness rise? Who finds healing in Christ’s outstretched, nail-marked wings? It’s sinners. It’s the ones who bear the badge openly, who confess, “I can’t do it, buddy, but Jesus does.”

While Luther was in hiding at the Wartburg Castle after the Diet of Worms in 1521, Philip Melanchthon, his fellow professor at the University of Wittenberg, wrote to him to ask how he could become a better preacher. Luther responded, “Become a sinner, a real sinner, not a sham sinner – one who knows the depth and breadth of your sin.” And Luther famously said, “Then sin boldly, and trust all the more boldly in Christ your savior.” So, if we ask if sinners in general go to heaven, the answer will always be, “No. Ain’t no room for that nastiness in the new Jerusalem.” But if we ask about real, particular and bold sinners who are up-front about their sin and unabashed about their Lord, then the answer is, “You can’t do it, buddy. Yet Christ does it for you.”

These are the ones for whom the prophet Isaiah speaks, when he announces the word of the Lord, saying, “But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.” Those who wish to stand before God’s judgment seat will only hear a sentence of condemnation, yet those who come fragile and broken to God’s mercy seat, claiming Christ’s mercy, shall hear this good news: The kingdom has been prepared from the foundation of the world, and this kingdom is now yours. Whatever calamity afflicts you, whatever disaster lies in your path, whatever betrayal breaks you, whatever portents indicate otherwise, the gospel of Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, stands sure for you: You, sinner, are forgiven, claimed and restored already and eternally. Amen.

On Being Straightened Out

2010-08-20T11:57:00.000-05:00

Our Gospel reading this morning is a tale of bondage and freedom. The bondage and then the release Jesus provides take us into two different ways of living and believing. They move us from a world of glory to the utter reality of Jesus’ cross-shaped new life. And it all hinges on a single word from our Lord.

This crippled-over woman was useless, good-for-nothing in the shape she was in – all curved in on herself. For eighteen years her spine had twisted so far that she was nearly folded up into a package that looked nothing like a human being was supposed to look. They said she had a spirit in her that made this happen, but we ought to remember that’s the language ancient people used to talk about what causes things. While we look to viruses and pathogens as causes of illnesses, people in biblical times didn’t have microscopes or the scientific method. They looked at insurmountable things like illnesses and saw demons and spirits at work – things they had no control over. At any rate, this woman couldn’t stand up straight. This bit of human origami couldn’t unfold herself into a position that would free her to carry on life.

Just before the story of this healing, our gospel writer Luke tells us a bit about how this woman was regarded. Jesus tells the parable of the fig tree. A man who owns a vineyard also has a fig tree planted there. When he comes to pluck a couple figs for his afternoon snack he finds a barren tree. In fact, it’s happened for three years running. So he tells the gardener to cut it down and use the soil for something more productive. Our crippled woman is unproductive. She can’t bear any fruit worthy of the kingdom of God. She can’t tend her household. She can’t serve on the PTA. She can’t dandle grandbabies on her knee. She’s a drag on society. She’s a misplaced fig tree stuck where productive, useful people might better work. And yet, how does the gardener in Jesus’ parable respond? He says, “Hang on another year. Let me work the soil and add a bit of manure as fertilizer. If that doesn’t do the trick, then it might be a good idea to chop the tree down.” Luke shows Jesus doing that very thing to the crippled woman.

All it takes is a word from Jesus to straighten her out: “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” The ancient Greek word Jesus uses there is apolelusai (apolelusai), and it means to release. Try this with me: Stick out your index finger on one hand and grasp it with your other hand. Now squeeze as tight as you can. Keep squeezing. Tighter. Tighter. For just a bit longer. Now let go. That’s apolelusai – the release of a muscle or tendon that’s being flexed or held tight. What takes us four words to say in English, “you are set free,” is just one word in Greek: apolelusai. To paraphrase “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” one little word subdues her ailment. One little word and this woman was released from the grip of her illness. It’s no surprise that after living all hunched over for eighteen years she did a quick stretch and started praising God for release from her bondage. That woman was no dummy when it comes to the source of her healing. She knew whom to thank and praise, serve and obey.

What is this word from Jesus? What power does it have? His word is simply himself. He gives himself to her, attends to her, lays consoling eyes and powerful hands on her, and claims her as his own. The bent-over woman comes into Jesus’ presence and he transplants her into the good soil of his kingdom. He turns her soil and adds the fertile mix of his coming death and resurrection – which the world regards as pure manure, barnyard leavings. The Word of God himself, Jesus Christ, is added to her dead limbs and spines and, bam!, fruit appears. The woman can’t stop telling people what God has done, and the crowds hear and rejoice.

Did I mention that all this happened on the Sabbath day? Oh, yes, it did. And there’s the rub. Jewish religious law is very clear on this count. It would come to include 39 categories of work that could not be done on God’s day of rest, including carrying, writing, erasing, harvesting, plowing, weaving, cooking, building, tying and thirty others. When Jesus heals the woman, he’s breaking the Sabbath command to rest. And any time you break any of these lesser commandments, you’re also breaking the granddaddy of them all, “You shall have no other gods before me.” By deciding yourself what you can and can’t do on the Sabbath, you’re putting yourself before God who himself commanded the day of rest.

The leader of the synagogue will have no truck with that. He knows the law and knows that it doesn’t give an inch. He lives his entire life within the parameters of this legal system. For him, virtue and piety are the criteria for both future success and God’s good pleasure. If you don’t act as religiously as required, there’s no place for you in God’s kingdom. Jesus blows it all away by assuming his right to bring people into the kingdom when and where he pleases. So the leader of the synagogue calls Jesus on it. And now we get to the crux of the matter.

This story of Jesus healing the woman isn’t really about physical sickness and infirmity (although God does promise to bring healing to all). No, in this story we find the very thing Jesus, the great physician, has come to set right: sin. While the crippled woman had a spine that curved her in on herself, the leader of the synagogue is even more curved in and needs Jesus’ release just as much. Jesus claims all of the creation for his own. He says he wants to “draw all unto himself.” When he says, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” he makes himself the criterion for entry into God’s kingdom. Sinners want nothing to do with that, neither the leader of the synagogue nor we sinners gathered together today. We’d rather be a part of a system where we can determine who’s in and who’s out. So we look to legalities, immutable commands that allow us to rate ourselves and others and, if necessary, work just a little harder to achieve a future for ourselves. Usually that comes down to being virtuous, pious or religious. But when God takes on human flesh and bone in the person of Jesus, he means to end it all. He says, “That religious business of clothing yourself in piety and virtue? Enough! It’s time to stop that folderol.” For the leader of the synagogue, that was too upsetting. Better the ceaseless demands of the law than the danger of letting go.

That rabbi was just as barren as the crippled woman. He too was curved in on himself, constantly looking at his own navel to see if he was good enough, righteous enough, clean enough. If he’d been alive today, he would have fallen prey to the legal scheme of our own day: the advertising and marketing world that demands of you to buy this, accumulate that, wear these, if you want to secure your future. We’re called on to satisfy those demands, and they force us to look inward to see if we’ve achieved the goals they set before us. When Jesus cuts in our dance with the law and insists on being paired up with us for the rest of his divine gala, we object. We say, “I’m not going to polka with you, because God’s orchestra is playing a waltz. The dance goes like this: one, two, three, one, two, three.” But it’s even worse than that. We don’t just refuse to dance, we take our new divine dance partners out behind the dancehall and let the brutes with Budweisers in one hand and brass knuckles in the other teach him what’s what. When Pontius Pilate presents an option for what to do with a lawbreaker like Jesus, our only answer is, “Crucify him!” We’d always rather stick to our schemes of glory, glitz and glamour than succumb to a life where we are nothing and Christ is everything, our all in all.

It sure would be nice if we could just jinn up our courage and muster the wherewithal to simply decide to answer Pilate differently. If only we had it in us. But we don’t. We can’t do it. We and that rabbi are just as stuck as the crippled woman who can’t straighten herself out. If we don’t have it in us, it’s going to take something outside of us. That something isn’t a thing, but a somebody – Jesus, who heals and straightens and makes new. You see he has come for sinners, and not just to restore you to the possibility of doing something good, but to make something new out of the nothing that is you. You know where your life is headed – to a plot of land about seven feet by three feet or to a cardboard container ready to hold some ashes. Created from nothing, you end up as nothing. And yet Christ comes to make something new out of your nothingness. The rabbi refused to let go of his imagined control and came away having been put to shame. The crippled woman knew she had no ability to fix things, to bear fruit or to stand as righteous before God, and she was given new life. The rabbi demanded commandments and obedience, and that’s what he was left with – the judgment of God. The crippled woman ran into God’s promise in Jesus and was made new.

Jesus certainly isn’t polite about these things. In fact, he bids you to run from God to God. That means Christ pulls you away from thinking all of God’s ultimates like salvation, forgiveness and eternal life depend on your fulfilling God’s demands. And he draws you in to his kingdom where it all hinges on his promise to you. And of course, that’s what the Sabbath was always for in the first place. It’s given not just so you can rest your weary bones, but so that your spirit can rest fully and finally in him, the great physician, the divine promise, the Lord of all life. Is this not why we gather together to worship? We worship so we can confess our nothingness, our inability to find any life in virtue, piety and religion, our unwillingness to anything but our own people. We worship together so we can sing, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” We gather together together so we, too, might be set free, so that we, too, might know a true and eternal Sabbath. We gather together to be straightened out from looking at our own navels and so that we can begin looking to our neighbor’s need.

So how about about it? Look at your navel now and repeat after me: I confess. And now straighten up and look my way and hear what Jesus has sent me to tell you: You, my fellow sinner, are forgiven in his name. You, dear friend, are given his unbreakable promise of salvation and new life. Where before you were curved in on yourself and good for nothing, now you are unfolded and made new. You now know Christ’s gift of apolelusai. Now you can sing God’s praises with that straightened-out, good-for-lots-of-things woman and the psalmist: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits – who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.” Now, you former barren fig trees, let’s see if a little fruit doesn’t start growing on your branches. Amen.

Martha running ragged

2010-07-19T00:37:00.000-05:00

Genesis 18:1-10; Psalm 15; Luke 10:38-42
Preached at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Knoxville, IA

Because I teach these days, I’m not a regular Sunday-after-Sunday preacher. I always feel a bit rusty when I sit down to write a sermon. This week I looked at a couple commentaries and some preaching blogs to see what people are saying about our readings today. Here’s what I found out:

Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament reading are to be praised for their hospitality. They welcome in the visiting angels and cook ‘em up a dandy supper.
Today’s psalm gives us line after line of the things you need to do in order to dwell in the Lord’s sanctuary.
And then we get to the story of Mary and Martha in the gospel reading, Jesus seems to tell Martha that her distracted doing is a problem.

So let’s recap. Genesis: Do good stuff like hospitality. Psalm 15: Do good stuff like keeping your oaths, not charging interest, no accepting bribes. Mary and Martha: stop doing good stuff. When we get to Jesus’ words to Martha, the commentators get their undies in a knot. Surely Jesus isn’t suggesting good works are a problem. That would be setting up an unfair and intolerant distinction between the sisters. It makes Jesus look like the bad guy here, when Martha was just trying to get a meal together for him and his hangers-on. It’s a hard word Jesus brings to Martha and to us today. But it’s also a word that contains the sweetest promise hidden in it.

Doing work is a good gift from God. Martha sure was right on that count. There’s nothing wrong with good, hard work – producing something for the common good or to meet your neighbor’s need. That’s something God has made us for. When Luther explained the Lord’s Prayer in the Small Catechism, he told us what daily bread means. He said it includes everything we need in this life – including work and income.

Work is such a part of us that we hardly notice it until it’s gone. Unemployment numbers are important not just because people need to earn money to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. They’re important because they’re a sign of people who don’t have access to the good work God intends for us each day. When we don’t have work, we hurt. When there’s no work to do, it affects what Martin Luther called the conscience. He used that word to described our sense of ourselves. You conscience is your what you understand about your standing before God and before you neighbor. Lack of work wrenches your conscience, because your work helps tell you who you are and whose you are.

Later this week I’m driving out to western South Dakota for a big wingding at the old country school my dad attended. So I’ll meet lots of sheep and cattle ranchers whose last names I’m known for most of my 50 years. I’ll tell them my name and shake a handful of calluses. And you know what the first question they’ll ask me will be? They’ll say, “What do you do these days?” When I tell them I’m a Lutheran pastor and college religion and philosophy professor, they’ll know something about my place in the world.

So Martha’s puttering around the kitchen throwing a kosher casserole together is just a part of how God makes the world. Doing is a good thing. But when sin enters the picture, everything changes. When it comes to doing or not doing, we sinners are an odd bunch.

God’s given us a good batch of things to do and keep from doing: things like having no other gods, honoring your father and mother and remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy. And if that’s not enough God has given us neighbors galore to care for.

But from Adam and Eve in the Garden on down to us, we sinners have wanted it our way. We’re like two-year-olds in a high chair who refuse to let our parents feed us. We say, “My do it myself.” Doing? Yup. We like doing. As long as we get to decide what to do and when we do it.

We sinners treat the gift of doing, God’s gracious gift of work, just like we treat all of God’s gifts. Our sin-clouded eyes aren’t able to see God’s gifts as gifts. Because we don’t trust God to give us all we need for this life, we turn away from the divine giver and use the gifts for our own ends. At best we begin to think of God’s gifts as tools to achieve our own goals. I work so I can buy more consumer electronics. I work to keep my lawn green and mowed, so won’t be an object of scorn at our neighborhood block party. At worst we not only turn away from the divine giver, we also turn the gifts themselves into false gods. We look to the things of the creation, including work, as the be-all and end-all of our existence. We trust them to give us what we think we need. Instead of fearing, loving and trusting God above all things, we look to things to secure our future and stave off the terror of not knowing where we’re headed.

Now we’re at the corner Martha turned in her busyness. Her work had become the source of her security and future. The gift of work became an end in itself and just as quickly became a burden. She started to see all that needed to get done if the evening with their guest of honor was ever going to come together. And make no mistake, getting supper together in first-century Bethany was no easy task. There’s no nuking things in the microwave, no refrigeration, no Calphalon cookwear and no Cuisinart food processors. It’s just constant drudgery. And there sits Mary, hanging out with Jesus and the guys. She’s in the other room sitting at Jesus feet, gazing at him all star-struck like a 12-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert. Isn’t Jesus supposed to be all caring or something? Shouldn’t he notice her burden? Shouldn’t he whisper, “You know, Mary, I think Martha could use a little help out there”?

Martha’s gotten all turned around with work. Stoke the fire. Wipe the brow. Knead the bread. And forget about just who it is the supper’s being cooked for. Martha’s worried about getting the meal together, but even the Devil knows that if he wanted to Jesus could grab a couple rocks and turn them into nice loaves of focaccia. Martha’s forgotten about who she’s dealing with.

So Jesus brings her back to the place of the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin. Doing what needs to get done is great. He just wants her to keep her doing in its proper place, so she can see what’s really going on in the house she and Mary and Lazarus share. The Lord himself is with them, the Holy One of God. He didn’t choose to go to dinner with the Chief Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, he came here to Bethany.

There’s great danger in letting work be the one thing that defines you in any moment. Because you see yourself able to exert your efforts to accomplish something, you begin to think that you might even be in charge. You yourself become the ultimate cause of your days and deeds. You become the game master. It all depends on you. But when you live under that illusion, what happens when you come to a place where no effort of your own, no work, no exertion of effort can change anything?

I suspect there are quite a few people in Pella these past few days are feeling the shifting tides of paralysis and powerlessness. Two boys drowned at an FCA camp pool party and there’s not a thing you can do to change the fact. The history will always be there. And nothing any of us does can create a different future. Life is full of those places and situations. We run along busy as can be and trip on the cold, unexpected truth that we are not in charge of our future. The word “cancer.” The loss of a job. The prospect of an empty next. The cruel names tossed in a middle school hallway. The slow, inexorable pull of gravity on our body’s various flesh bulbs. The inevitable last day and last breath that creep steadily toward us. All these things pull our ability to work out of our hands and remind us that we are not our own gods.

Each of these places in our lives offers a hidden Word from God, speaking to us the same way Jesus spoke to Martha. “You’re right,” he says, “You have come to the end of your rope. What exactly do you think happens when you discover you can’t fix things? Do you think the final catastrophe is at hand? Did you think you were in charge?” So Jesus brings a clear no to Martha and to us. There is a limit to what doing can accomplish, especially when it comes to ultimate matters like your death, your salvation, your verdict come Judgment Day.

But then Jesus turns Martha’s attention to her dear sister. “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” You see, there are lots of things you can do and may want to do. But there’s one thing that rises above everything else, and it’s not even a thing. It’s a person. Jesus. He has given himself to awestruck Mary, to busy Martha, to Lazarus soon to be dead and stinking in a tomb, to Peter, to Paul, to St. Monica and St. Clothild, to Martin Luther, and to you, sinners all. And here he promises that he can never be taken away. As Paul says in Romans, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 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.”

It’s just like Jesus to pull this on Martha. He has a habit of zeroing in our disasters and frustration. He has a way of finding our weak spots, of taking a magnifying glass to our sins and peccadilloes. He doesn’t mind pushing us to the limit and over it, because when we fall he gets to do what he does best: catching fallen sinners. He wants them to know that, work or no work, powerful or powerless, we remain subject to his own mighty affection. Meal schmeal, who cares what you’re cooking up for yourself. He has something better in store for you, the ultimate feast of mercy and forgiveness, the sacrament that bestows a future.

To paraphrase Psalm 15: You shall dwell in his sanctuary and live on his holy hill. No longer will you seek to be blameless in your work and production. Your purity comes from the one who died for you and rose again. He is the one who keeps his oath, even when it hurts. His promise on the cross is for you. Risen from the dead, he will never be shaken. He’s done all the work and now gives you the wages of faith: your salvation, forgiveness and deliverance from sin, death and the devil. For that we might just be willing to let the fires die out and the pots turn cold on the stove. And that’s just why we’re here today, to sit her at Jesus feet and hear him promise to stick with us always.

Calendars and to-do lists get put in the proper place when Jesus is around. Work becomes a gift again. And the invitation stays in place for the rest of our days: “Settle in now,” Jesus says, “And hear what I’m doing for you, always for you.” Amen.

Sam, Andy and Toy Story 3

2010-06-25T10:48:00.000-05:00

In Toy Story 3 Andy is heading off to college (and behind the wheel of his own car, no less). It's somehow fitting that we saw this movie the summer before our son heads off to his freshman year at Luther College, in Decorah, Iowa. After all, he's grown up with Andy. And they're both members of the incoming class of 2014.

We first met Buzz, Woody and Andy in Decorah. We took our son to see Toy Story at the Viking Theater when he was almost three and I was serving as a pastor in Calmar. Now, as Andy leaves his toys behind, Sam leaves his own childhood behind to go back to Decorah for four years at Luther. And we discover that the movies were never about the toys, but about the boy who loved them.

Suffice it to say, sitting there next to the young man who still loves us, tears were shed in the darkness of a movie theater last weekend. But it's been a fun three movies and an even better 18 years of parenting. As Sam posted on his Facebook page, "Dear Andy, Thanks for sharing your toys with us." Thanks for sharing these years with us, Sam.

Beyond flames and tongues

2010-05-22T23:41:00.000-05:00

A sermon preached at Grace Lutheran Church in Adel, Iowa, for Pentecost Sunday 2010.

Happy Pentecost and happy birthday to Christ’s church. This day was an important day even before the one that Acts tells us about. For the ancient Jews, including Jesus and his disciples, this was the day to remember how God gave the Law and Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai, from “You shall have no other gods” to “You shall not covet your neighbor’s manservant, maidservant, cattle or anything else that it your neighbors.” The Law and Commandments were such good things. They were a way to know how and where you stood: In or out? Righteous or unrighteous?

To this day we still like that Law stuff. In fact, it’s absolutely embedded in our consciousness without our thinking about it. Here’s a quick quiz for you. We’ll see how much Law you know. Complete the phrase:

An object in motion [tends to stay in motion unless acted on by another force or object.]
For every action there is [an equal and opposite reaction.]
There’s no such thing as a [free lunch.]
Pull yourself up by [our own bootstraps.]
A stitch in time [saves nine.]
A penny saved is [a penny earned.]
What goes around [comes around.]
Click it or [ticket.]

See how good you are at this? We could go on and on, couldn’t we? Yet this is plenty to remind you that you know exactly how the world works and that your life is conducted under the assumption that all these things are true. The pre-Holy Spirit Pentecost is a celebration of all this stuff, and there’s not a one among those unpronounceable hordes in Jerusalem who doesn’t operate under that same assumptions as you. Which makes it downright hard for them to figure out what’s what when the disciples wander into their midst.

Imagine dishing up the potato salad at your family’s Fourth of July picnic and Aunt Bertha, who’s rarely been out of Iowa let alone gone abroad, starts speaking Mandarin Chinese or Hindi or Swahili to the folks at the next picnic table. If you knew she’d never spoken that language before, you’d try to make sense of it somehow. Maybe she isn’t really speaking it. Maybe she’s just goofing on your picnic neighbors. Maybe she’s had a stroke. Or maybe she’s gotten into the cooler a little early and downed a few too many bottles of hard cider.

That’s exactly what those folks in Jerusalem did when they saw and heard what was happening with the disciples. Those fellas were Galileans. No way could they speak Greek. Everyone knew that Galilean fisherfolk could hardly speak their own Aramean dialect, let alone fancy schmancy Greek. So what are the options if you want to make sense of things? You might decide you didn’t hear right and just imagined you heard them speak your language. You might think your mind was playing tricks on you. Or maybe, just maybe, you might think, “These guys are blitzed to the gills.” And then you’d look at your hourglass or sundial, look down your nose, and think, “Oooh-whee. Drunk at this time of day?” The multiple-language-speaking disciples don’t fit into their categories, so the spectators in Jerusalem find one that fits: public drunkenness. The crowds know the world works according to the law, commandments, structures and powers. Their reaction to the disciples shows how truly strange living by faith looks to the world. Something incredible has happened to the disciples, and the crowds just don’t understand it.

But what happened to those twelve guys isn’t just tongues of flame and foreign languages. For a few hundred bucks you can buy a week of campfires at Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota and have your flames and foreign tongues. The miracle of Pentecost that the crowds didn’t understand goes much deeper. What the disciples experienced with the gift of the Holy Spirit is part of the mystery and wonder of their relationship with Jesus.

These followers for whom things exploded on Pentecost had been hand-picked by our Lord. Not a one among them was someone to be reckoned with. They weren’t people of power or position. All they were was a group of guys who heard Jesus say, “Follow me,” and couldn’t resist him. At first they thought they’d gotten in on the ground floor with someone who was going to make it big, like meeting the winner of American Idol way back at the initial auditions. But instead they wound up following Jesus’ path to the cross. They saw how our Lord’s utter faithfulness and devotion to God freed him, how it gave him power to heal and forgive, and how the sum total of his worldly success was a sarcastic scrawl on a board over his head on the cross: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

These disciples were bound up in a relationship with the Son of Man who lived in full faith, and they saw exactly what it got him. Giving yourself up in devotion to God and in service to your neighbor attracts the world’s scorn, the condemnation of the powerful and the religious, and the shame of an execution by crucifixion. You see, to be the Christ (and a Christ-follower) means chucking your power into the ditch, snipping the apron strings that tie you to comfort and status, pinching off the shoots of success, and, plainly, dying to your own control, glory and carefully planned and managed future. For our Lord, true living means dying.

But if you think a few flickers of fire and speaking the language of the Phrygians and Medes is something, what happened to the disciples’ Lord was too much to believe. When it comes to blowing minds, Timothy Leary has nothing on Jesus Christ. Our Lord lay dead in a borrowed tomb. It looked like his program of bringing in the Kingdom of God was a bust, a complete failure. His followers had fled. And his dying words were a cry of abandonment by God. And yet. And yet. What happened two days later changed everything. The dead, crucified Jesus was alive. God’s raising him up said yes to the very path that looked like the end of all hope. The resurrection confirmed that Jesus’ path to the cross is the path, the only path of faithfulness.

The first part of the true miracle of Pentecost happened somewhere in the seven weeks between the Resurrection and this Jewish festival day. It happened as God’s own word in scripture worked on these lowly followers of Jesus. When Cleopas and his friend walked their grief off after seeing Jesus crucified, they didn’t recognize the risen Lord on the road to Emmaus. They didn’t understand anything about what Jesus meant, what he signified, what difference he made in the end. And they certainly didn’t recognize him. But there Jesus is, risen and new, bringing them the exact same stuff he’d given them all along. He taught them the scriptures, told them why, what and wherefore. And when they sat down to eat with him, they knew who he was and what he had been up to. These followers had a relationship with Jesus that came to be defined by his path to the cross. It was confirmed in the resurrection. And now with the word, it came clear.

Have you ever watched one of those Texas Hold-‘Em poker games on T.V.? There inevitably comes a time when a player puts down the cards, pushes every single chip into the center of the table, and says, “I’m all-in.” The player has such a great hand or such a great bluff that she’s willing to risk everything. What these followers of Jesus had experienced, learned and now were filled with, is the hand the Holy Spirit dealt in the promise of the resurrection to a ragtag bunch of losers. And here on Pentecost Sunday, these guys couldn’t help themselves. They had been released into an all-in life that risks everything for the only thing that lasts. Those tongues of fire were just the sparkly tip of a whole new life that had already begun when Jesus called to them to follow. The flames were the tip-top flickering of a relationship with the Lord who won’t and can’t stay dead, the Christ whom power and religion can’t eradicate, Jesus our brother, savior, high priest, good shepherd, treasure and hope. And now the followers became the forward picket, the rolling edge of the storm of faith.

And what about the Parthians and Medes, the people from Phrygia and Pamphylia, and all the rest? They were not to be left behind in their plodding allegiance to power, in their stuckness on what was comprehensible, reasonable or plausible. Those guys from Galilee weren’t drunk like they thought. It was, after all, only nine a.m. And Peter stepped to the fore to let loose a torrent. And that’s where the second part of the true miracle of Pentecost happened. Peter preached. The one who denied even knowing Jesus now couldn’t help the proclamation of the risen Lord from flowing trippingly off his tongue. He announces the truth of the situation to them, and does it by blasting both barrels: “You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.”

And then the third part of the real miracle of Pentecost happened. The crowds in Jerusalem that mid-morning sabbath in Spring heard this word, this preaching, this ministry of the true gospel…and they believed. They asked Peter how the unvarnished truth of their complicity in Christ’s death might be dealt with. He told them, be steeped in the promise of forgiveness that comes in baptism. And 3000 of them came to believe that very day.

It turns out that that part of the miracle wasn’t a one-off affair. It was the beginning of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing breaking-in and breaking-open of sinners closed to hope, love and mercy. What this means for you, my fellow sinners, is that you are about to be included in that last part of the Pentecost miracle, for God has sent this preacher to you today. For I, too, have been given a relationship with the crucified and risen One. I have been given the gospel word and called to deliver it to you. And I have been given a tongue to speak to ears that are ready to hear.

This is the word for you, sinner, broken one, unbeliever. Listen closely. Jesus, dead for your sin and risen for your hope and joy, has made himself your Lord. He is given to you from the foundation of the world, that you, even you, might know God’s mercy. Not only that, but he has grafted himself to you so that his new life might be yours as well.

And if you wonder what you ought to do with that, well, there’s water in that font. You have a pastor in this congregation, and he is champing at the bit to attach God’s word of promise to that water and give you the kind of cleansing bath that only God can give. And if you’ve known that promise of Christ in the water, there is a meal that’s been cooked up to sustain those dripping wet from their divine bath. It’s a meal of simple bread and wine, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. It is Jesus body and blood. It is the whole relationship he’s established with you, tied up in a handy little, worldly package.

Instead of leaving you harping on the implausibility of it all or slapping a label on the purveyors of this unlikely miracle, today I pray the Spirit gives you the faith that frees you, sustains you, and gives you eternal life. I pray God so works in you that the world may look at you and say, “Humph, drunk,” and that that will be your chance to say, “No, not drunk. But let me tell you about my Lord.” And in that moment, the real miracle of Pentecost will still be alive and new and true – for you and for the world. Amen.

Winter driving

2009-12-30T20:34:00.001-06:00

Psalm 147:12-20 Second Sunday in Christmas

To begin, note two things: First, winter weather in western South Dakota is fickle, not to be regarded lightly. The air never stops moving, even on the most clement, merciful and kind days. Second, when driving the normal three hours on the two-lane black-top from Pierre to Sturgis there are zero stop signs and not many more outposts of civilization.

I had done a burial at Black Hills National Cemetery and caught a ride back to Pierre in the hearse with the funeral director’s wife. I volunteered to drive. As the sun slid behind the mountains at our back, an early November blizzard brought the curl of its system up from the south. The road turned from black top to white top. The edge of the road was more often than not imaginary. Beside me, Trudy prayed and sang spiritual songs. The coffin carrier began to feel like a coffin itself, shrouded in a pall. Burial cloths whipping around us.

The psalmist says, “He gives snow like wool; he scatters frost like ashes. He hurls down hail like crumbs — who can stand before his cold?” (Psalm 147:16-17) Standing I can do. Driving, not so much. Thanks to my winter excursion in the Feigum Funeral Home hearse, I have a winter driving phobia. I fear slick roads and whiteout conditions. Pulling out of the garage in the midst of flurries gets my pulse racing. Who will save me from this auto body of death?

My phobia, of course, is that I will lose control. And if I think I can manage the rest of my life a bit better than I can slick roads, it’s only an illusion. I am out of control, spinning, slipping, sliding through my days. The forecast is for more of the same. The slick lane leads to the ditch. Beware all you other drivers, I may take you out on the way in.

I have no ability to find my way to sunnier climes or drier paths. If I’m to make it home, it can only come at God’s behest. My help is in the name of the Lord. He alone “sends out his word, and melts them; he makes his wind blow, and the waters flow.” (Psalm 147 18)

At the font comes God’s promise of an eternal January thaw. He declares his word and provides more than safe haven from the storm. He is the divine Climate Changer. The weather system sent by his holy wind brings a life-giving Word that thaws the road and the icy, controlling heart, for Christ’s forgiveness and mercy are not fickle. They can be counted on to carry home a dead person like me more surely than any hearse.

So in our winters we pray and sing spiritual songs, even in the most limited visibility, for we are even now being carried home. We pray and sing, even when spinning in the face of on-coming traffic, for the one who is the Way promises to bring us with him to the end, safe and secure. We sing and pray, for our deliverance in Christ Jesus is dawning. The bright day of Epiphany is on its way.

Kicking and Saving

2009-12-16T09:59:00.003-06:00

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Luke 1:39-42 (Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year C)

Apparently encountering Jesus is a real kick. Just ask Elizabeth. He was already at it in utero, John was. Kicking. Goading. Getting sinners' attention — even his mother, old cousin Elizabeth. Whoever knew a baby could prepare the way of the Lord?

But crazier yet, whoever knew a baby could be the Lord? Jesus: God contained, limited, enveloped within Mary's womb. Immortal, invisible, God only wise. In light inaccessible, hid from our eyes. He's limited himself to a warm, wet place. He's wrapped himself up within a package of skin cells. He's hidden himself within our human hide.

The coming of the Lord Emmanuel, God With Us, is to ransom captive Israel, and his first step is to cut us open. His simple coming lays claim to all of creation as his own. He takes what is his, no matter how hard we grasp and claw at it as ours.

Whether floating in amniotic fluid, wriggling in swaddling clothes, or wrapped in his final shroud, he says, "Mine. All mine. Every last bit of it!" And it's a blow to the sinner's solar plexus. All our striving for something beyond ourselves, our doing for God is for naught. Our little plans and projects are now eviscerated. They lie empty and exposed. Elizabeth got off easy with a little taekwondo kick to her insides.

And though you know your life is lost and your salvation project is null and void, there's something that's so much easier to see now. In claiming it all for himself, Christ our Lord turns you to the only one who has the power to give you life and who promises to do it.

If he claims it all as his, that means even a hollow-hearted sinner such as you belongs to him. Now it's you who is wrapped, contained and ensconced. And not just in your own flesh, but in the heart of God. The baby Jesus, the boy Jesus in the Temple, the Jesus tossing the moneychangers on their ear, the risen Jesus revealing himself in the bread at Emmaus -- he swathes you within the very will of God.

Christ is put on you. You are enveloped in his comforter, gathered up in the Holy Spirit.

That's quite a kick.

On Being Lutheran but not "Lutheran"

2009-12-12T00:52:00.003-06:00

A (belated) sermon for Reformation Sunday

Most semesters I get to teach a course called "Dynamics of Christian Faith and Life." Like most of my classes it's usually populated with a good mix of 19 and 20-year-olds, all of whom are at this incredibly important point in their development, exploring who they are, what they believe and what earthly good they might be in the world. About three times a semester in that class we play a fun game called "Stump the Professor." Students get to put me on the spot by writing down anonymous questions on slips of paper, and I get to try answering. It never fails that one of these fresh-faced young adults, looking for a place to be in the world asks the denomination question. "How do I know which church is the best when they all say they have the truth?" I know what's appropriate in a classroom, so I say, "Well, my family and I are members at Faith Lutheran Church, the Best Buy church on University. But you need to figure out what it is you're looking for and land where it's the right fit."Standing in front of you today, though, I can come clean. I'm Lutheran. I can't help being Lutheran. Being Lutheran is like breathing for me. It keeps me alive. And I'll tell you why.

I'm Lutheran because of what I believe. And boy do I ever believe a bunch of stuff. I can believe 30 things before I crawl out of bed in the morning. I believe that I can accomplish anything, if I just want it hard enough. I believe that I'll be able to stave off a miserable death from colon cancer if I eat a fiber-rich diet that gives me happy poop. I believe my future is in my own hands. I believe my wife has stuck with me for 19 years, because I'm lovable, likable and still have most of my hair. I believe that the little bit more in consumer goods that I accumulate every week, every month, every year, is a good thing – sure to make my life happy, because, as I also believe, more is better. I believe that we're in good enough shape financially to be able to have the church do an automatic withdrawal from our account each month. I believe my son is so talented, handsome and bright that there's nothing but glory ahead of him after high school, thanks to my genes. I believe in the aw-shucks cuteness of puppies, in the beauty of trees at the height of fall color and in a piping hot bowl of red beans and rice – all of it a sign of the existence of a glorious, marvelous, awesome God who accepts me just as I am. Oh, I believe. I really do. In all of it. And much, much more. I expect I'm not much different than you on that count. I believe that all of this is true.

And the reason I'm Lutheran is that what I believe, everything I believe, every last single thing I believe...is wrong. I'm Lutheran because not only is all that stuff wrong, it's dead wrong. None of it's true, and believing it has all kinds of possible consequences, but only one that is inevitable, certain and sure. What I believe will get me only one thing – a hole in the ground big enough to lower my body in when my power, glory and potential are over with. I'm Lutheran because day after day, when I look honestly at myself, what I believe in is me. And I want you to believe in me, too.

At first glance that's a pretty fine place to be. Look at me. I'm free to choose the life in front of me. Let's hook elbows and go forward into progress. It'll be sunshine, rainbows and lollipops. Well, there's that ache I get in my right knee when I walk too long. Yes, I know. There's also that time I took my son on a college visit to LA and stood at a car-rental counter at midnight with an expired driver's license. That wasn't my best moment of having my poop in a group. I know I'm not perfect. But the life I believe in will still be good, won't it? At least I've got my intentions rightly placed. I want to get better. I'm planning for my retirement. I got myself tenured at a good school, which means there's a tuition benefit for my kid. And I still have my potential. What's that you say? You want me to remember what the past month has been like? A wife and son sick in bed with colds. And then my son with a five-day fever and a another week of school missed. And my wife healthy one day and then in the hospital for a week with a staph infection. I can't wait to see that hospital bill. Even though I believe we'll be able to deal with it, thanks to our monthly insurance contributions, it's put some fear deep down inside me. I'm just a breath away from disaster. Maybe it'll be deeper cuts in state government that force a lay-off for my wife. Or an illness that hits my son that NyQuil, Tylenol and Mucinex can't handle. Blood coming from a place on my body that hasn't been cut. A lump that wasn't there before. A phone call from a family member that says, "I came home and she was dead." Or the doctor who says to me, "It's cancer and it's a fast one." Or how about the late-night drive home on the freeway and the lights that suddenly come across the median toward my lane. I believe. I believe. I believe. I really believe. I really do. But what will believing in my potential, my value, my promise, my good intentions or myself do for me then?

I'm Lutheran because of what I believe and because of what little good it does me. In our gospel reading today, Jesus says, "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." I'm Lutheran, because the first part of knowing the truth is knowing what is not the truth. Ever since Luther's first hammer-fall on the nail holding up the 95 Theses in 16th Century Germany, we've been reminded of the world's most important distinction. To use Steve Paulson's words, God slices our reality in two, into what is Christ and what is not Christ. There's all kinds of stuff at work in the world, all kinds of intentions, all kinds of talents, gifts and powers, and, no matter how good or powerful any of them are, they are not Christ. They don't have the power to save me. I'm Lutheran because I'm so dang-blasted weary of what I believe, because I'm so tired of having to confect my days, invent my future and secure and protect what is rightfully mine. Once the truth gets told that what I have and hope to be is simply nothing, well, there's nothing to grab onto and keep safe anymore. Sure, my life, my family, my stuff -- it's all a good gift. But in the long run, it's nothing if it isn't Christ. If I keep grasping after my illusions of control and contentment, my actions begin to look like flailing at thin air.

I'm Lutheran because getting that truth out is crucial. It's the crux of everything. The literal cross road. I remember that I am dust and to dust I shall return. I confess that I can't believe enough. I confess that I don't believe. I confess that I won't believe in anything less than myself unless I'm forced to do it. And I finally let go when my powerlessness is clear. When exactly have I ever prayed to God, trusting in more than myself? When has it been that I've resorted to God's Word as the one place I could find hope? When have I ever been able to admit the truth of something like "Footprints in the Sand," which religious sophisticates love to mock? It's only when the bottom has dropped out – when I'm worn down to nothing and the only thing left to believe is that I'm being carried along by the one who carried his own cross. I'm Lutheran because I know the narrow nothingness where I, too, hang crucified with Jesus, with a voice too hoarse to speak my final plaintive cry, "My God. My God. Why have you forsaken me?"

I'm Lutheran because once there's nothing left I can grasp, work toward and assert, there is a Word that comes. One little Word that is not a what but a who. One little Word who has the power of eternity in his little finger and who subdues the devil, the world and my sinful self. This one remaining Word is the gospel that has been preached for nigh these 500 years since Luther, the 2000 years since Paul wrote Romans, and the timeless eons since God first looked at creation and said, "Tov me'od. Way good." Now that I know what is not Christ, what is Christ comes as glorious good news. Jesus is God for me. Jesus is my Lord – not a wimpy God who merely nods and accepts me but one who takes my disastrous attempts to conjure a life and makes the dead, old me new. My being Lutheran has so very little to do with a structure, institution and denomination that carries Luther's name and everything to do with Jesus' death and resurrection – and mine.

I'm Lutheran because Jesus is the one, the only to whom Luther, Paul, Peter, Mary Magdalene and the Ethiopian eunuch could point. I'm Lutheran because when I was a skinny little bed-wetter, my Sunday school teachers June Aldrin and Bob Lee gave Jesus to me, made sure I knew he was for me. I'm Lutheran because even when every attempt at being more religious and spiritual in college, from wanting to speak in tongues to reading my Bible every day, came to naught, I could go to worship and hear my campus pastor Mark Jerstad bring the truth back. I could confess my sin and hear an absolution that broke open a future with forgiveness as its linchpin. I'm Lutheran because if all I had to go on was the potential and power the world says I have inside me, then I would be lost, most to be pitied, and without a shred of hope. I'm Lutheran because the truth sets me free. I'm Lutheran because this is the proclamation given to me. Jesus Christ, true God from eternity and true human being, born of the virgin Mary, is my Lord. I'm Lutheran because it's not something I have to believe. It's not something I can ponder and nod assent to. It's not something I'm called forward to choose and turn my life over to. I'm Lutheran because Christ has made himself my Lord, pulling me out of the drowning waters of baptism and the death that is my life, with no choice or surrender of my own. I'm Lutheran because Jesus wants to feed me the flesh and blood he's given up for my sake. I'm Lutheran because he's not a belief, but the one person, the only one I can fully trust. I'm Lutheran because my Lord promises that where there is trust, I have a future that is better than any I could create. It's eternal. It's rich. It's true. And it keep setting me free.

So that's why I'm here. I'm Lutheran, galdernit, because what I believe is wrong as wrong can be. I'm Lutheran because the only one who is right and just is giving me new life. And how about you? In the face of his truth, are you also done believing, crafting, grasping and creating yourself and your future? Are you also not now drawn into trust and faith? Are you not also his, forgiven and set free? That's not just true. It's life itself. Amen.

A Scepter for Natalie: Pastor Gessert's Ordination

2009-09-11T23:03:00.006-05:00

[Note: This sermon was preached at Natalie Gessert's ordination at Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church in Fairfax, VA, tonight.]

Allow me to bring in a topic that is of a holiness suitable to this sacred event, that is, suitable to the setting apart of an actual sinner to word and sacrament ministry. The holy thing I want to tell you about is truly a sacred realm: World of Warcraft. In case you’re not one of the 11 and a half million subscribers worldwide, World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG. You get to pretend you’re in an alternate world with giants, orcs, dwarves and the like. You maneuver through the world, gaining skills, encountering other players and, when necessary, going into battle.

In WoW it’s always helpful to gain an arsenal of weapons should you need to fight. Along with such things as the Arcanite Steam-Pistol and the Smashing Star of Arcane Wrath, one of the many weapons available to you is the Royal Diplomatic Scepter, which you can get from the Dark Iron Ambassador. You use it one-handed and it inflicts damage in the 37-69 range.

Of course, I really know nothing about World of Warcraft and the Royal Diplomatic Scepter. I’m more of a Candyland kind of guy and leave the online role playing games to my college students. But I do know about biblical scepters. A scepter is a crucial prop in the story of Queen Esther’s rescue of the Hebrew people from certain death. In our first reading tonight, Esther could not help her adopted father Mordecai, because she hadn’t been invited into the presence of the king. It would not do to enter the royal chambers uninvited, without being pointed at by the king’s golden scepter. To cross the threshold into King Ahasuerus’ inner court and go where you didn’t belong meant certain death. Esther told Mordecai that was the one law. It all depended on that single rule, on the royal and arbitrary whim of a king who may or may not look upon you with favor.

Scepters regularly appear in ancient stories as the symbol of royal power. They represent the king’s will. In The Iliad, the weak king Agamemnon sends Odysseus off to treat with the Achaeans. He lends his ambassador his royal scepter, so that Odysseus carries with him the authority of the throne. In Esther, to receive a point of the golden scepter is equal to the king speaking a word of welcome. It indicates the king’s will.

Natalie, I have brought you a glorious plastic royal scepter from our local party good store. Treasure it always, for it required an arduous quest through miles of Halloween paraphernalia-stocked aisles to find it. Come up here and get it, but be careful with it, because this is the equal to Ahasuerus’ golden scepter. It’s a scepter designed for wielding power. This is a scepter that makes demands on the one it points to. It’s a scepter of glory, of required and active righteousness.

Ah, yes – righteousness, it’s a fine, fine thing. As the Israelites in Deuteronomy say, “The LORD commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the LORD our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.” (Deut. 6:24-25) And as Micah asks, “What does the LORD require of you, but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God” (6:8). In order to get the nod, the flick of the divine scepter, you must, must fulfill all righteousness. All righteousness? All. You don’t just get to do a bit o’ honey-flavored justice, or kinda, sorta like kindness, or act humble. No. God requires it all. You want entry into God’s inner chambers? Then love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind.

Go ahead. Choose to do that, okay? We’ve got some time here. I won’t make you come up for an altar call (it’s a Lutheran worship service, after all). Go ahead; say it with Joshua and his family in the Promised Land: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” That’s better, isn’t it? You’ll eat your Powdermilk Biscuits and do what the medieval Scholastic theologians said, “Facere quod in te est” (or, as Larry the Cable Guy translated it, “Git ‘er done”). Will you? Yes, I will.

And there’s the rub, right there in those four little letters, w-i-l-l. Will. Will you? Will you be righteous? Will you be the one your heavenly king requires you to be? In just a few moments, Natalie will be asked four times about her intentions, about what her will is in carrying out the ministry to which she’s called. My guess is that, when you say you’ll love God, do justice and git ‘er done for God, your intentions are not much better than Natalie’s. And I know her intentions are about as strong and durable as a square of Charmin hanging on the spindle in my bathroom at home.

If you are to gain the scepter’s nod, the good graces of your Lord and God, it will take something more than your flimsy assertions of a good will. When you and Natalie say, “I will,” sinners that you are, your will will last about as long as it takes to get that last lingual “L” to roll off your tongue. And then it’s back to the more pressing business of building of your own Disneyfied kingdom where you need not worry about other royal whims or the slings and arrows of outrageous divine fortune. When you’re the one with all the glory, you can be the flicker of scepters.

Natalie, the temptation to pick up that scepter is a strong one for pastors. As you know from putting countless second-year seminarians through their paces on the Lutheran Confessions mid-term, Philip Melanchthon devoted an entire long article in the Augsburg Confession to the temptation of this scepter. It’s titled, “On the Power of Bishops.” Lest anyone think, I’m going to go after present company here, please know Melanchthon was talking about the power God grants to all public proclaimers of his Word. The Confessions are clear. The power of bishops, pastors, preachers and popes lies not in wielding the rod of the Law, not in civil power, worldly might or organizational acumen, much less in winsome charm or psychotherapeutic chops. It lies solely in the one, little, devil-subduing thing that we Lutherans sing with such fervor whenever “A Mighty Fortress” is trotted out on Reformation Sunday.

The power that Natalie has in her hands, before, during and after the laying on of hands, with or without an historic episcopate, from the time that clear water flowed over her in baptism to the last shovel of dirt and “Ashes to Ashes” at her grave – this power is the Word of God and only the Word of God. So let’s get something straight. Your seminary’s mission statement notwithstanding, Natalie, you have not been called to be a leader in the church. You have been called instead to be a servant of the Word, this Word of whom John speaks in the glorious prelude to the Bach invention that is his gospel. It is the same Word who comes to do clean-up at the end of Revelation: the Word of God riding in on his white horse with a sword pointing at sinners from his mouth and his own name tattooed on his thigh (yes, Jesus has a tattoo – look it up in Revelation 19).

Unlike the scepter of Ahasuerus, the Word that God sends via Natalie’s (sometimes too active) mouth is a Word that brings life out of death. My dear and fellow sinner, you have been called out of the baptized to publicly bear this Word in a broken and fallen world. It is a Word who is the last thing we sinners would expect or want. The saving Word of God you will serve is no glorious Ahasuerus condemning the Jews in exile in Persia with little thought or care. This Word, Jesus Christ, present from the beginning, wasn’t even recognized by his own. The folks back home in Galilee wanted to toss him off a cliff. The fine upstanding righteous and religious ones in Jerusalem, who knew they were good enough to enter God’s inner chambers, took one look at him and said, “Crucify him. But take the cannoli.”

It’s an ignominious end. Hanging on a cross hardly makes Jesus look like he’s able to do anything for himself, much less for sinners. And yet… And yet, this cross is God’s very throne. As Hebrews (1:8) says, “Your throne…will last forever and ever, and righteousness will be the scepter of your kingdom.” Everything changes in Jesus. No longer does the divine scepter demand your righteousness. Christ’s righteousness is the scepter that flings it your way. It’s the scepter of his righteousness that makes you worthy. No activity or deed or desire or intention of your own, but his work, his dirty, dying deed done dirt cheap, his cross. His crossbeam-bruised shoulders carry you into God’s holy of holies.

And Natalie tonight you are set apart to deliver those goods. I warn you, though; it’s not a shiny happy job for shiny happy people. It’s grunt work and often dispiriting to bring a Word that runs so counter to the world’s expectations of power. As we say on the prairies of South Dakota where I come from, a lot of times you’ll go home feeling like an excremental epithet. But it will happen way more often if you think you’ve been elevated to some vaunted position because you have a shiny scepter of glory.

So here’s the deal, and a heckuva a deal it is: Your real scepter is one no one would ever suspect. If you lined up all the scepters of the world’s kings and queens, monarchs and muckety-mucks, you’d never pick this one out as able to do the trick. It has neither gold nor silver, nor rubies and onyx. The scepter you are bestowed tonight is made of wood and rubber and little gold paint. As the psalmist says, this rod and staff brings sweet comfort. So come up here again and take this toilet plunger for your office to display alongside your framed copies of “Footprints in the Sand.” And let it be a reminder to you of where you will find ears ready to hear, who are hungering and horny for this living Word.

You’ll find those ears in the most fetid places, in the septic field of sin and brokenness. You will find these ears wherever the demands of life break your people down. You will find them scrambling to cobble together a life, managing calendars and shaky finances. You’ll see them popping zits and fretting about making the team, making the grade or making “it.” You will discover ears to hear when you enter into dark nights of the soul. The ends of the rope, the bottoms of glasses, the real-life versions of crash test dummies’ walls: These are all the places where we sinners come to know the truth: On my own I cannot attain the righteousness required. I believe I cannot by my own understanding or effort even do something as simple as believe.

So, Natalie, you are called to go where Ahasuerus’ legal scepter says, “Off with their heads!” You are called to point your new scepter, saying, “Sinner, the righteousness of our crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ is yours.” In fact, my young Padwan, at this very moment you are surrounded by these very sinners. Stand up and give that scepter a go. Point it at us, for we know our sin. And deliver the goods for we have ears to hear. We’re waiting for some absolution to come trippingly off your tongue. [Natalie speaks the absolution.]

And you my dear fellow forgiven sinners, do you believe this unlikely Word? The scepter of the Law says, “Do this, and it is never done.” But the scepter of the gospel says, “Believe this, and it is already done.” Your salvation is given you both this very night and whenever and wherever the Holy Spirit moves this newly minted pastor to point a plunger, open her sassy mouth and let fly with God’s promise in Christ Jesus. So get busy, Natalie. Fling. Flick. Point. Plunge. Forbear. Forgive. All in Christ’s name. You can count on our good Lord to help and guide you, for the King of Kings has opened his inner chambers just as the stone was rolled away from the tomb. Natalie, it’s time. The Word is given. Sinners await you. Bring us in. Please. Amen.

God's work. Our brands.

2009-03-30T14:41:00.005-05:00

The ELCA is rolling out a series of ads to be aired during television’s sweeps month in May. We don’t know how much developing the marketing campaign cost, but the church’s website does tell us about “our brand” and its tagline “God’s work. Our hands.” Apart from wondering why the verbs haven’t shown up for the tagline party, we should ask what exactly is being sold here. We ought to consider what the ads reveal about the church’s core outcomes.

I currently sit on a faculty committee established to design a revised core curriculum for my school. We have spent the better part of the school year sitting around a table discussing research, best practices, trends in hiring and the like. The committee defined and the faculty as a whole approved four core outcomes for all we do at the University: critical inquiry, communication, global awareness and vocation. Our next task is to design a course of study for all students in all majors that will produce competence in each of those outcomes.

When they walk across the stage at commencement, we should be able to say that we have used the tools of our curriculum to create graduates who are able to demonstrate the outcomes in their personal lives, in work, in community and in church. We ought to be able to show to any accreditation team how the curriculum advances students toward those goals. And the outcomes should be self-evident in the very structure of our primary tool, the curriculum. Surely the leaders of the ELCA and its marketing team must have similarly considered what the church’s outcomes are and the tools of the ad campaign must self-evidently reflect those outcomes.

In the March 16 New Yorker, movie director and screenwriter Tony Gilroy speaks of the reversal as a useful trope. A good script will lead the audience on and then flout expectations by reversing the plot. It’s a trope used in the ELCA’s ads. In the first ad on the church’s website, a nice clean table is set with sparkling dinnerware and white linens. A waiter beckons to the diners and we see a crowd of dingy, ragged people. We learn it’s not really a restaurant but Trinity Lutheran Church feeding the homeless and providing them with “dignity” as their first course. In the second ad, a West African woman walks to a school with a child. We imagine she is dropping the child off for a day of learning, but are surprised to discover that the woman is the student. She is learning to start her own business, and the first lesson is “hope.” It’s all beautifully shot and the reversals are clever. It’s all so very nice and self-congratulatory. Who wouldn’t want to connect with such a cool, caring organization?

One of my homiletics professors in seminary used to ask about our attempts at proclamation, “Did Jesus have to die for this sermon to be preached?” It’s a good question to ask about these ads. The crucified and risen Jesus has always been the center of our faith, from the women at the tomb to the boys walking home to Emmaus, from Paul heading to Rome to Luther standing there doing no other at Worms. Yet in these ads our Lord is given what could charitably be called only a cameo role, if that. A cross floating in a bowl of soup in the first spot and a couple crossed pencils on top of a book in the second are the only allusion to the crucified and risen one.

Jesus simply did not have to die for us to air these ads. The cross in each spot is no different from Josephus’ report in Antiquities of the Jews: The token crosses in the ads report tangentially that a crucifixion happened, but don’t proclaim what our Lord’s death does for either the fictional the sinners in the ad or the real ones watching it. Because the ad campaign the ELCA is flogging on its website and will air does not extend the proclamation of God’s mercy in Christ to the godless and sinful (to me), it is not evangelism. Instead it is marketing. In the web site’s own words, it is branding. It comes across as an effort whose goal is the salvation not of people, but of the denomination – a salvation from the ravages of ongoing membership losses and diminishing benevolence. Intentional or not, the ads seek to further the ELCA’s self-continuity by recruiting from the ranks of suburban do-gooders who want to feel good about being connected to important causes.

It’s not as if do-gooding is a bad thing. Melanchthon, after all, dedicated Article VI of the Augsburg Confession to the topic of the new obedience. But if the ELCA’s public witness sent through our digital television sets begins with good works, we’ve done the potential viewers of these ads a grave disservice – as in, we’ve left them in the grave of unfaith. Like any number of well-meaning preachers, the ads assume that we have all the faith we ever need. All that’s needed is a religious version of the US Army’s “Be all you can be,” or Nike’s “Just do it.” These spots are a glimpse into the job description of successful suburban living and meaningful, relevant engagement with the world that the church holds out for us as our telos.

What’s missed are the first five articles of the Augustana. We can’t begin our public proclamation with a pleasant charity’s proposal you can respond to by hitching up your free will and getting on board the justice train. Instead, gospel preaching begins with an understanding of sin and God’s work in Christ to remedy it. If Article IV on justification is truly the article by which the church falls or stands, you wouldn’t know it by these ads. It’s because they are not what Article V calls the office of preaching, the delivery of the law and gospel described in Articles II and III.

Thus, while our branding and tagline, “God’s work. Our hands,” may produce the outcome of more adherents to the work of the social service agency the ELCA seems to present itself as in its coming marketing efforts, they cannot bring a commensurate increase in the numbers of what Luther, in his sermon in Castle Pleissenburg (LW 51:311-312), called the Heufflein Christi, the little band of Christ. We’ve turned our backs on what Melanchthon declared the church to be: the place where the word and sacraments are present in such a way that sinners like me have come to believe.

I’ve begun to wonder whether my not taking a stand for the sake of the gospel in my church hasn't moved God in his great displeasure to withhold true preaching from this church, from this world and from this sinner.

Transfiguration Sunday

2009-02-22T12:27:00.002-06:00

Today’s gospel reading recounts the Transfiguration of Jesus, and that’s what we celebrate in worship today. The Transfiguration is the epiphany, the revealing of the hidden glory of Jesus. It’s the point in each of the gospels where get a glimpse of the full magnificent power and influence that Jesus has. He simply exudes power, to the point that it looks like he’s wearing shiny happy clothes. And then there are his mountaintop associates, Moses and Elijah. You can’t hob-nob with hoitier or toitier folks in the halls of power or in Hollywood. It’s a media event! It deserves strobe lights, red carpets and actresses who wear body-controlling Spanx under their designer gowns. This is something that calls for hoopla. Keep your eyes on your set, friends, for Jesus is a man of wonders. Why he’s almost Barack Obama!

But be careful what you turn your eyes toward. Jesus in the fullness of his glory is a dangerous thing. You’re dealing with big voodoo here. He has the power to heal using a gob of his spit and a simple word. But he’s also been known to come down hard on people trying to make a buck by trading on God. And he has no problem instantly withering a fig tree because it doesn’t please him. He’s God in the flesh and to come into his full glory is something you want to be careful about. When Moses caught a peek of just a tiny bit of God’s bum up on Mt. Sinai, it changed him physically, to the point of having to walking around with a veil covering his face for the rest of his life. Sure Jesus is glorified in the Transfiguration, but don’t for a minute think it has anything to do with “nice” or “pretty.”

The Transfiguration is the Holy Spirit’s great bait-and-switch tactic. It’s like the store clerk who draws you in with pretty baubles and then sells you something different. Jesus the powerful healer-man, the glorious schmoozer of prophets, the holy herald of all things wise and wonderful? That guy is about to go away and toss his divine Oscar in the ditch. He’s about to give it all up of his own accord in order to give you something better.

Peter should have been ready for it. After Jesus had called him up out of his boat where he was mending his nets, Jesus did some pretty cool stuff, things that would make the most driven cynic say, “Sweet!” But there were inklings that Jesus was up to more than just wonders and miracles, power and glory. The guy kept hanging out with prostitutes and sinners, tax collectors and, I’m sorry to say, people like you, who don’t have their poop in a group. Of course that must have been an anomaly, an odd blip on the radar, especially in the face of Jesus’ pals Elijah and Moses on the mountain top. Peter should have known better, though.

A week before the Transfiguration, Peter had been hanging out with Jesus, who asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are the messiah.” Then Jesus explained exactly what it meant for him to be the messiah. It doesn’t mean power, prestige, success or glory. Jesus gave it to Peter straight. “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” Here at the Transfiguration, Peter wanted to forget what Jesus had said about his coming suffering and death. Peter wanted Jesus’ glory, bright, undiluted and worthy of acclaim. He didn’t want glory to come in terms of Jesus’ ignominious end. Though Peter had gotten a glimpse of what should have been the frightening fullness of who Jesus really is, he didn’t have the whole picture. Both in his confession of Jesus’ identity and at the Transfiguration, Peter had his eyes opened a bit, but he still thought Jesus’ kingship looks like earthly glory rather than the cross. When Jesus chooses to let it all go and show his glory in weakness, in being whipped and scourged and in a last wheezing breath on the cross, it’ll hit Peter like a blow to the solar plexus and knock him out nearly for the count.

On the mountain, a voice comes from heaven: “This is my son, the Beloved. Listen to him!” God isn’t telling Peter to listen in on the conversation going on between Jesus and the prophets. God says to pay attention to what his Son has been saying about the business of dying, for it wasn’t just the cloud on the mountain that Peter would have to face. There was a bank of dark clouds heading straight toward Jerusalem with Jesus, covering up the glitter of religious revivalism and spiritual success with the reality of what’s to come. Listen to Jesus: following him will look nothing like the winning on Jeopardy or American Idol. Our Lord has offered Peter a glory that is wholly unexpected. It will come to this most spur-of-the-moment of disciples when Jesus is arrested and led away for trial. Peter will come face-to-face with his own darkness and sin as he stands in the courtyard of the high priest. A servant girl says to him, “Hey buddy, I know who you are. You’re one of Jesus right-hand guys.” Peter will deny his Lord three times before the cock crows. And hanging on to glory, Peter won’t know what to do with a Lord who dies.

Ah, glory. It’s such a fine thing, but what happens when you have a Lord who gives it all up? How can you hang your faith on glory, when Jesus wants nothing to do with it? If Peter, personally chosen by Jesus, can’t keep his own faith going – even having seen the Transfiguration – it leaves sinners like you and me with a pretty sorry future. Peter’s denial is something we re-enact every single day as we turn away from such an unlikely Lord’s demise, as we seek to protect our futures and save our suburban skins by managing all the details of our lives. Yet we stand with Peter in the dark and accusing courtyards of our lives and await the one thing that can truly bring such an undying faith, that call to dive into death and failure and find our Lord there.

It’s what’s to come in the Lenten weeks ahead of us, for your Lord, God’s only son himself, takes on an upside-down sort of glory as he suffers torment and is crucified for you. His great love is poured out for you that your attention may be turned from yourself, from glitter and glory, from shiny success, to look to him – the humble, drab, torn and wounded one. The depths of his love for a sinner like you are unfathomable and know no end. The disciple who turns away from Jesus will find himself drawn back with the cross. Where there once was a Jesus wearing glowing robes, there will be a naked man crucified as a sinner.

But on the other side of his death, and yours, Peter will see something better than the shining robes he saw on the mountaintop. He’ll see the grave clothes of the risen Jesus and know, truly know, that Jesus’ glory on the cross isn’t something to run away from in fear. He’ll be caught up in it in the midst of his own suffering, loss, guilt and all-too-apparent faithlessness– in the same way that you have been caught up and wrapped up in Jesus’ death and resurrection in your baptism. For it’s there that in those drowning waters that you have been linked to both your Lord’s death and resurrection. You don’t have to deal with mere foreshadowing like Peter did. He stood accused in that courtyard not knowing what was to come, but you have the end of the story in hand. The fullness of Christ’s love for you is poured out for you in the water and the word. And if you’re not yet baptized, let me tell you that same promise and fullness awaits you, along with a pastor champing at the bit to bestow it on you and a congregation waiting to sustain you in it.

Thus God’s word bids you to put away the worldly glory that moves you to seek after short cuts, pipe dreams and the winning number and pray that God would bring on the divine glory that interrupts your expectations, your management plans, your strategies for success. So pray to God to destroy your death with Jesus’ death on a daily basis, so that your baptism becomes a living, breathing thing. In the coming season of Lent, you can look for the divine upside-down glory of Jesus who meets you in your denial and in your tomb to drag you, kicking and screaming maybe, into heaven to spend an eternity with the one whose love for you finds its ultimate glory on the cross: Jesus your bridegroom, Jesus your Savior, Jesus your Lord, Jesus crucified and risen comes for you today, that, in your clouded darkness, you may believe.

Thanksgiving (a little late)

2008-12-02T15:54:00.002-06:00

Better late than never: Here’s a little something about Thanksgiving.

We’re awfully close to the tipping point where the Thanksgiving holiday falls completely into the clutches of the advertising world, where Thanksgiving is treated as just another excuse to get you to buy more stuff, accumulate more goods. Our holy-days have been co-opted by the marketers and the cultural diluters: All Hallows Eve, the feast day of St. Valentine, the Nativity of our Lord, and the festival of Christ’s resurrection. They’re pretty good excuses to sell, sell, sell. But Thanksgiving remains as a small, flickering light, where the elements of a great holiday are still linked to the good and precious small things that make for a deep, rich life: family, friends, a little turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, and, depending on your predilections, a nice Merlot or a glass of Mogen David. As the old hymn says, we gather together as God’s people. And in our gathering we give thanks.

So how about it? Go on now and give thanks. If you read the story of Jesus and the ten lepers in the gospel, that’s what it seems to be about: giving proper thanks to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Jesus meets up with these ten lepers and gets ‘em all nice and clean, with no more rotting fingers and noses, and sends them on their merry way to be declared by the priests as fit for human company again. Nine of the ten former lepers head out presumably to the local gentlemen priests’ club to get their clean bills of health. But that one comes back to thank Jesus who, frankly, seems a bit surprised at the paltry return on his investment of messianic healing power. But give thanks is what the tenth leper does and then gets sent on his way again.

I’ve had any number of chances to preaching on this story of Jesus and the ten lepers. And I’ve been like most preachers who take it as an opportunity to tell my hearers what a fine example that tenth leper is. See! Now there’s a truly thankful fella. If you want to be an upstanding Christian you should take him as your model. Give thanks, my friends, give thanks.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that to speak of this remarkable little story in this way is to come at it with very little attention to my call to deliver God’s word to you in a manner that actually gives you saving faith. For what’s a sermon that tells you to give thanks but a thinly disguised example of yet another demand dressed up in religious language? Because I use the example of someone who encountered God in the flesh, then somehow that must be good news for sinners like you and me. But here’s why such a sermon is unfitting for a Christian preacher, and a Lutheran one at that: It pays attention neither to how your life actually works or to what Jesus death and resurrection have done for you and all creation.

If I were to stand here in the pulpit and tell you to take the tenth leper as your model and be thankful, it would ignore how such thanks actually comes about. It’s the nature of relationship stuff that things like faith, hope and love (the big three that Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 13, the standard wedding gospel) don’t appear as a result of our will. Who in the world has ever become hopeful because they decided to have hope? Hope comes when the thing hoped for is so sweet and rich that a person can’t help but wait for it with eagerness. In Ephesians Paul points beyond the act of hoping to the thing we await: “the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.”

The same is true of love, for has any one you gotten up one day and thought, “I’ve decided to fall in love today”? Try it out for size. Turn to the person next to you. Look that person in the eye and decide to fall in love. It doesn't work, does it? You fall in love because your beloved has so much charm and wit, or a winsome smile and long eyelashes, that you just can’t help yourself. As the old Temptations song said, “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch / You know that I love you / I can't help myself / I love you and nobody else.”

That’s exactly how it works with thanksgiving. You might tell someone thanks because your parents brought you up to be polite, to say please and thank you as a matter of course, because that’s what you ought to do. But that’s not the same thing as having a thankful heart. It’s not the same thing as bursting with gratitude because you know how much you owe the person you’re thanking.

Demands like “Be thankful!” have never done us sinners much good, because, while they can get us to drum up some outward action like shaping air and teeth and tongue into the words “thank you,” they simply can’t make you thankful. Martin Luther liked to tell his hearers that these were words from Moses. They’re the law, making demands, doling out commands. They might be able to pull you into line morally, so you don’t hurt someone else. But the law, even something as nice and good as saying, “Be thankful,” can’t change your heart. Moses couldn't make it happen for the Israelites, and neither can a law-preaching pastor standing in front of a congregation on Thanksgiving Eve.

So if the story of the thankful leper and Jesus isn't meant as an example for you to take up, then what’s it do for you? I’ll tell you: This word from God comes to place your whole life under the light of God’s judgment and Christ’s redemption. Its aim is not to tell you to decide to be thankful, but to make you thankful, to give you faith, to get you to fall in love with your Lord, and to save you from the devil, the world and your sinful self.

These lepers may have had a skin disease that you’re fortunate enough not to be afflicted with, but they’re really no different from you. You can’t say, “Whew! It’s a good thing I don’t have to deal with such an ugly, smelly disease. I’m glad that I’m in good shape.” But leprosy was just the particular form of sinful brokenness that they had to live with each and every day. It simply another variation on the wages of sin that we human beings have been paid since our first mother and father sinned in the Garden.

You may not have leprosy, but the real disease that lies behind it is something you’ve caught. It’s Sin and your Lord has come to cure you of it. But notice this: In this story, Jesus doesn’t come to cure some leprosy out of ten people who don’t have the disease. He is the great physician who’s come to heal the sick, to make the lame walk, the deaf to hear, and the blind see. Christ our Lord comes to take on the raging virus of sin in all its forms, so that you might be healed.

Notice in this story of Jesus and the lepers that not a single one of them was healed because they decided to be healed and the tenth leper didn’t come back because he decided he needed to be thankful. The healing comes simply because that’s our Lord’s nature. Wherever he encounters the effects of sin he’s Johnny-on-the-spot serving up a dose of his power. Jesus heals because he wants to, because that’s what he’s come to do. His healing is valid; it actually happens.

In the world’s eyes, not being a leper anymore is a pretty good thing, just like not being a thief or not being a person trailing the baggage of broken relationships is a good thing. Jesus is just fine making that sort of visible healing happen. But he’s not satisfied with just shining up the veneer of your life or the lives of the lepers or the lives of any sinner. Such a repair job is just a surface fix and won’t last beyond your last breath. Those nine lepers who went off in search of the priests to show off their suitability and their newly regained status as clean people may get permission to enter the synagogues, but the fact that they have a clean bill of health doesn’t mean any real change has happened for them.

It’s an awful lot like having the gospel proclaimed to you in the water and word in baptism and then never having it mean a lick. Your baptism can be valid without having any effect. You can dress a person up in a clean white robe without it actually cleaning up that person’s heart and placing faith where there was only unbelief. No, what Jesus is after is a complete and utter change in the identity and very being of sinners like you and the lepers. He wants to make a new creation out of you, and that only happens when he gets at the truth of the sickness of sin in you.
There’s nothing that any of us truly deserves from God except his wrath and judgment. We come before God not having kept the commandments, not having loved our neighbors as ourselves, not loving the Lord with all our heart, strength and mind.

Instead, and if we’re honest about ourselves, we know that it’s we ourselves whom we’ve put first in our lives. We trust ourselves to make a future, to achieve whatever goals we hope to arrive at in life, to make our next breath happen, and our next and our next. And that’s exactly what happened for those nine lepers. They don’t come back to Jesus because they’re off to live their lives, assuming that they can go on and on and on like the Energizer bunny, under their own power and free will to make new lives for themselves.

But the tenth leper, now that’s a different story. He comes back not to confess his new cleanness like the other nine did to the priests. He came back to the source of the new life he’d been given. He came because he recognized his nothingness apart from Jesus. When you know you deserve nothing and Jesus gives you absolutely everything, when you realize the true state of affairs, there’s nothing to do but give thanks. The leper just couldn’t help himself.

What he did was no different from what Luther talked about in the Small Catechism when he explained what baptism means for daily living: “It means that the old creature in us with all sins and evil desires is to be drowned and die through daily contrition and repentance, and on the other hand that daily a new person is to come forth and rise up to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.”

You see, it’s not in the healing that salvation and thankfulness come for the tenth leper. It’s in having his eyes opened and in the relationship Jesus established with him that his complete healing and salvation happens. Not only is he a leper who was forced to live on the fringes of society, always forced to give people warning of his presence. He’s also a Samaritan, someone who’s seen by the religious folk of the day as an outsider, unable to come into God’s good graces. Not only does Jesus have no fear of the man’s disease, he also doesn’t have a problem with his lack of religious credentials. Christ our Lord is smitten with those who have no shred of evidence to plead their goodness or righteousness.

All the tenth leper had was a true knowledge of his nothingness and the new reality of his life caused by this preacher from Nazareth. It’s in the mysterious combination, in the unbreakable bond of both his living death as a leper and an outsider and his new clean state in Christ that he has the full and complete healing that Jesus is after along. When that happens there’s only the explosion of gratitude that can result, the new healed body lying prostrate before Jesus, saying, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

And this is why a sermon saying you ought to be thankful doesn’t do the trick. It misses the truth of Jesus’ death and resurrection. If all you needed to get better from the disease of sin is an example or a demand or a law, Moses would have been plenty for you. You wouldn’t need a savior. You wouldn’t need the great physician. You wouldn’t need anything but a how-to manual for successful living or moral aptitude or a copy of Godliness for Dummies.

To tell you to be thankful would be to forget the very thing that gives you any life at all: your Lord’s death and resurrection. It would be to leave out the most important part of this story and your story: the event that tells the truth about your sinfulness and death and at the same time raises you up to new life. For it is Jesus on the cross who changes everything for you. It was the empty tomb that declared the emptying of Jesus’ lungs of their last breath as the victory over your sin. It is Jesus crucified and risen who says your divine judgment is condemnation and your hope is in him alone.

As Paul says in Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul’s three words in Corinthians, faith, hope and love, are relational. They happen because you’re compelled to love, to hope and, finally, to trust. At the end of the story, Jesus doesn’t say to the leper that his thankfulness has made him well, but his faith. In the trusting of Jesus, the leper is fully and finally healed both of leprosy and his sin.

It’s all a matter of faith. And if it’s faith that will make you well, then you might just ask, “Where the heck can I get me some of that stuff?” I tell you it comes when true sinners, and not sham sinners, appear before the Lord and hear his freeing word. So gird your loins, sinner, for Jesus is about to come before you:

Stand up straight with your broken lives and your trust in yourselves. Through off your bandages to reveal your rotting flesh like a real sinner and hear our Lord as he speaks to you: You are forgiven in spite of yourself. You are claimed by one who is absolutely unafraid of your darkest secret and deepest shame. He knows you through and through, for he is the one who holds each and every cell, all your amino acids and DNA together. And he is dead and risen that you might have life and have it abundantly. No longer does your future depend on either your past or your resolve to make things better, for Christ comes to raise you from the dead and bring you salvation all on his own power, his own holiness, his own lust for life.

Now you no longer need to decide to be thankful, for our Lord has given you everything and eternity, too. You are given something that elicits your gratitude. And in that new life, suddenly all God’s good gifts come to be seen as our Lord’s horn of plenty. Your sweet potatoes with marshmallows. The warmth of your bed on a crisp November morning. Your beloved family gathered around your table tomorrow and those you’ve lost who are gathered around God’s heavenly table. Your future. Your past. Your every single breath and heartbeat. These come not just as another thing you should be grateful for in life, but an actual part of the salvation that God has set out for you from the beginning of time.

Then the word for you is not, “Be thankful,” but “Get up and go on your way in the new life you’ve been given. Your faith has made you well.”

Glory and the cross

2008-12-02T14:48:00.003-06:00

A Lutheran student at a Baptist seminary wrote me about a statement of faith she had been asked to write. Her professor wanted to her to include something about glorification, an unfamiliar concept to her as a Lutheran. She asked for my input. Here’s my response:

In 1518 Luther presented his teaching in the form of a disputation at a gathering of his fellow Augustinian monks in Heidelberg. In the theses of the Heidelberg Disputation he makes a distinction between a theologian of glory and a theologian of the cross:

18. It is certain that a man must completely despair of himself in order to become fit to obtain the grace of Christ.

19. The one who beholds what is invisible of God, through the perception of what is made, is not rightly called a theologian.

20. But rather the one who perceives what is visible of God, God’s “backside,” by beholding the sufferings and the cross.

21. The “theologian of glory” calls the bad good and the good bad. The “theologian of the cross” says what a thing is.

Luther’s take is that our active righteousness (perhaps we could call it visible glorification) is actually dangerous, because it allows us to fall under the illusion that our spiritual success is an indication of our standing with God. Thus, God's work in us is hidden under the sign of its opposite, that is, righteousness, glory, success and victory come to us under the guise of sinfulness, brokenness, defeat and loss. Christ himself, and his suffering and death, are the clearest place God operates that way. Yet it works that way for me individually as well. It is in my own loss, suffering and death that I am finally able to admit my own inability “to obtain the grace of Christ.” In my failure I see that my only hope lies in him crucified.

Thus, a theologian of glory sees these things and regards them as proof positive of my being neither saved nor sanctified. Instead, the theologian of glory would push me to advance my religious life, become more moral and ethical, seek out glorious, mystical, spiritual experiences, and every day in every way become better and better. So a theologian of glory sees something (all these religious, moral activities) and calls it what it is not, that is, salvific and sanctifying.

The theologian of the cross, on the other hand, regards what the theologian of glory lifts up as not much better than manure. These so-called sanctifying activities lead me away from Christ and into my own self-continuity project. The theologian of the cross regards as holy any moment when I’m captivated by my Lord’s cross, over against my captivation to my own self, my victory, my visible righteousness and glory. If Christ alone is the way, the truth and the life, then it is his suffering and death that are my glory. And whenever and wherever I am shaped to his same cross by the circumstances of life that work to kill my self-sustenance and reliance, I am already glorified.

This is the essence of faith, that we look away from ourselves to Christ for our salvation, and past ourselves to our neighbor’s needs for the real work we’re called to be engaged in. Thus, where faith points to Christ justification is in place and, with it, sanctification. Luther hits this in a couple more theses in the Disputation:

25. The one who does much “work” is not the righteous one, but the one who, without “work,” has much faith in Christ.

26. The law says, “Do this!”, and it never is done. Grace says, “Believe in this one!”, and forthwith everything is done.

In the end, true glory on Christ’s part is active not passive: He does the work of dying for a sinner like me. True glory on my part is completely passive and not active: As Luther says in the Catechism, “I confess that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit calls me through the gospel, enlightens me with his gifts and sanctifies and keeps me in the one true faith.” If Christ has attained my salvation by his work, there simply is nothing left for me to do than trust what’s promised. My nothingness is his glory, because it honors him as the Lord who takes on my sin and is truly able to bring me into the comforting bosom of God’s mercy and forgiveness.

If I’m pushed into any activity aimed at achieving some glory (whether it’s a certain level of religious commitment, engagement in spiritual exercises, buying the right deodorant or showing up at the Jordan Creek mall at midnight on Black Friday), I simply have to reject it as the same proposition Satan offered to Christ in the wilderness. My glory is to take what comes at me in this life, even tremendous loss, and serve faithfully in my various vocations as husband, son, dad, friend, neighbor, professor, citizen, pastor. In fact, my glory becomes visible in those places where I am called to give myself up to those whom Luther called “die Nächste,” the neighbors. In short, when I no longer need to seek after my glory, it’s given to me on a plate in these plain, humble, earthy callings.

(For the full set of theses in the Heidelberg Disputation, check out Clint Schnekloth's blog: http://lutheranconfessions.blogspot.com/2006/10/heidelberg-disputation.html.)

Pixar and preaching, part II

2008-11-07T14:14:00.005-06:00

If we are to preach the gospel “in its truth and purity,” as the Catechism says, then we might take a page from the Pixar playbook. We cannot fall prey to our own skepticism about the ability of a law-and-gospel word to actually do its work, nor can we shirk the task of manipulating the will of our hearer and, thus, draw that one into the realm of faith.

If preachers are to be faithful, then they cannot be so craven as to reject the assertion that faith comes by hearing. The work of the preacher is to be Johnny-on-the-spot appearing in the midst of the Law’s kill zone with a word that does indeed raise the hearer to new life. And if the hearer doesn’t recognize how deep sin runs or how one’s attention to the Law leads not to self-continuity but to the grave, then the preacher must trust the word preached to expose such a denial and bring it to light.

In any event, the preacher cannot assume that faith is already present for the pew-sitter. When that happens, what results is a job description for successful “Christian” living or an action plan for achieving justice or a bunch of dithering on moral schemes. We can use Kent Jones’ assessment in his Pixar article as an analog: This kind of preacher revels in the pleasure of storytelling, either in morality tales and other fables of self-preservation or in the mantra of an all-accepting God.

This sort of self-styled preaching sophisticate is “loath to relinquish enough precious sophistication to fully surrender” to the true power of the word which arrives as both law and gospel. On the one hand, there appears a preacher who is an expert at value-laden living. Whether those values lie on the right or the left of the political spectrum is irrelevant – either way they’re just another appearance of the law dressed up as pseudo-gospel. Such is the word from the lips of a theologian of glory. It sees the law and calls it what it is not: the gospel.

On the other hand, the preacher of all-rightness before God fashions the preaching moment into the homiletical equivalent of Stuart Smalley’s affirmations on Saturday Night Live in days of yore: “You're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, God likes you!” If the word is that God accepts you as you are, then it’s an antinomianism that at its core is really more law. The hearer is left in the same old situation, aware of the reality that something isn’t working, and begins to distrust the power of the word to do something, anything.

How about we gospel preachers make some radical assumptions? Try these on for size:

Those you preach to don’t already have all the faith they need (and maybe aren’t baptized). Your job is to speak God’s word in a way that faith is created – just as that same word created the heavens and the earth at the very beginning. And just because your preaching brings faith today, don’t assume it’ll still be there next Sunday!

Your pew-sitters are smart enough to detect when you’re giving them a load of bull. They may not catch on immediately, but eventually their B.S. detectors will calibrate and they’ll vote with their feet (see, for example, the ELCA, which has experienced tremendous losses in its two-decade-long history). At some point they’ll need a word powerful enough to raise the dead. If you don’t have it, you’ll have left them hopeless and dead. Do you not remember what you swore to do at your ordination?

It’s okay to manipulate your audience – as long as it’s not self-aggrandizing manipulation or teaching them to engage in spiritual self-pleasuring. In the parable of the wedding banquet, the king sends his soldiers out to compel the guests to come in. If Luther’s right about us being beasts of burden ridden by God and the devil, God calls you to take the reins and give your hearers a compelling word – one to which they can’t help but say, “Amen.”

Hear the wonder and know the awe of the gospel that has saved you yourself. To that end allow me to preach to you: “You who organize your days and deeds in order to prolong your life and have just one more day to finally get it right: your days are numbered and all your efforts come to naught. Yet there is one won’t accept what you thing you can bring to the table, for he not only expects more from you, he’s also ready, willing and able to give it to you. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for you that you might have his own new, resurrected life. He’s made himself the foundation and linch-pin of all the good gifts God has in store for you. Open your eyes and see that you are risen from the death of your sin. Look up. He’s come for you. Hang on. You’re in for the ride of your life!”

More to come???

Pixar and preaching, part one

2008-10-31T14:33:00.001-05:00

In explaining why Pixar’s movies are so much better than their competition, Kent Jones (nice name, huh?) in a recent issue of Film Comment* describes the prevailing temperament of the world of digital animation that Pixar works against: He says, “Few big-time filmmakers can muster up the incitement to suspend disbelief….Everyone wants the pleasure of storytelling, but they are loath to relinquish enough precious sophistication to fully surrender.”

Jones says, “Moviegoers have apparently become gripped by a fear of being exposed – as naïve, or stupid, or apt to believe in anything but their own skepticism. And few directors believe that they have the right, let alone the ability, to “manipulate” audiences…[D]istrust is an article of faith. How do you give yourself over to anything when you’re convinced that nothing is worthy of your credence?”

Can the same be said of the public purveyors of the gospel? Have we handed ourselves over to a skepticism about the task of preaching? Have we given up the call to incite a suspension of disbelief? Do we longer see ourselves as having the right to manipulate our hearers? Perhaps we just don’t really see the gospel as something radical and true enough to believe in.

The prevailing homiletical temperament refuses to relinquish the sophistication of our inherent perfectibility and assumed goodness. When “God is love” is the pulpit mantra with nary a mention of sin, death and the devil, the sermon becomes a series of recommendations for better living, deeper commitment and higher spiritual practices. The outcome of the sermon, then, rests on the hard-won wisdom or the individual charm and leadership of the preacher.

When your passel of pews is populated with people whose hyper-ironic sense of skepticism applies to everything but their own ability to believe, you’ve been delivered an audience (rather than a congregation) that is bent on playing church but not on the real death and resurrection of life as a disciple of Christ.

“Few big-time filmmakers can muster up the incitement to suspend disbelief,” Jones says, “Since the Eighties, we’ve seen countless narratives with a dispiriting, built-in self-awareness, tailored for people who know all the twists and turns, all the happy endings and the last-minute saves, who want to be in on the joke but have the story told anyway.”

This here Jones sighs at the tedium that is the sermon that meets my suburban expectations of nice. It’s good to have a shot of cleverness tossed in. And if the preacher has the down-to-earth charm of a dimple, a history of adolescent orthodontia and a cup of Starbucks in hand, so much the better. The ratings ratchet skyward, but my boredom with the old news of warmed-over law is stultifying. Such a sermon plays into the skeptical expectations of the spiritually enlightened, but to what end?

Pixar’s digital animators assume an intelligence, a manipulatability and a sense of wonder and awe on the part of those whose eyes and ears take in their product. What if the preacher were to take a page from the Pixar playbook, and maybe go a step further?

More to come...

*Kent Jones, “Beyond Disbelief,” Film Comment, July-August 2008, p. 24.

Independence Day

2008-10-28T16:28:00.002-05:00

At one point in the movie Sophie’s Choice, Meryl Streep’s character says, “The truth? I don’t even know what is the truth anymore.” In the gospel assigned for Reformation Sunday, Jesus says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” What is the truth? Do we even know what it is anymore?

The truth of Jesus is what, earlier in John, the Pharisees and the eager stone-hurlers and their target, the woman caught screwing a fella she wasn’t married to, experienced first-hand.

The woman, of course, knew the bitter truth. Whatever concupiscence (where I come from in South Dakota we call it horniness) or brokenness got her into that situation, it was clear that her future held only death. There was no getting around it. It was her fault, her own fault, her own most grievous fault.

Jesus needed to bring no light to the woman’s guilt. The truth was clear. But what about the religious professionals and the morally upright preparing for her literal downfall? Jesus trained his judgment on them: “If there’s anyone of you who can step forward when the roll of sinless people is called, then I’ll put the stone in that person’s hand.”

Those folks couldn’t stand the light of this truth, but the adulterous woman remained there with Jesus. She not only knew the truth. She’d lived it and was about to die to it. Our Lord turned to her and gave her the freedom of his mercy: “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way and sin no more.”

Freedom without its opposite, bondage, has no meaning. The gospel of Jesus Christ always and only appears where the law and sin have done the enslaving deed. In John 8, Jesus’ followers said, “We ain’t never been slaves! We’re upright and free descendents of Abraham!” But the truth of the matter was standing in front of them.

The truth (and the way and the life) is Jesus himself. He who knew no sin and became sin, is a bright light shining on our shadowed unwillingness to accord him our trust. “Who was it that crucified thee? It was I, Lord. It was I.” For we are in bondage to sin, enslaved to ourselves, captivated by our endless possibilities. Jesus’ very being judges us as wanting.

Yet he offers more. His resurrection and the little resurrections of healings, castings out of demons and granting forgiveness are all of a piece: God’s own will to work your rescue in this one person’s flesh-and-bone life and death. Those unwilling to recognize and confess the truth of bondage will see and yet not see the resurrection, will hear and yet not hear the gospel. And they will not know the freedom promised here.

The truth? I know what is the truth evermore. You and I and the whole blamed bunch of humanity is dead in sin. All that’s left of your vaunted life is your final role as the target of stoning or whatever else lays you in your grave.

The truth? We confess with Luther as we approach Reformation Day, “I cannot, by my own understanding or effort, believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him.” Yet the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies you, so that in your death you might see, know and live the dawning of something new.

When you trust that it comes in him, your freedom is caught up in Jesus. It’s a paradox: The more you are captivated and bound to him, the more free you become. The more free you become, the more bound up in and captivated by your neighbor you will be.

Reformation Day should have some meaning for more than a ragged bunch of Lutherans. It’s really Independence Day for sinners everywhere. You included.

(For a great image of Jesus with the adulterous woman go to http://www.heqiarts.com/gallery/gallery3/pages/7-WomanCaughtInAdultery.html.)

Render unto Caesar

2008-10-15T08:47:00.006-05:00

Something came to mind a few Sundays ago as I was listening to a sermon on a passage from Matthew in which the Pharisees try to nail Jesus with the question of paying taxes. He says to them, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Render unto God what is God's.

Slow down if you think that's anything but the most difficult thing to do. When it comes down to it, who wants to render anything? It means letting go of those things I've held in my fist so tightly for, lo, these many years. "Give it up for God and the emperor? Do I have to?" Yes, you do.

The thing about rendering, though, is that it doesn't just mean "to give over to." It also means to clarify. Decades ago, when a farm animal died, the farmer would call the rendering man to come. He'd haul your dead horse off to a rendering plant to be turned into glue and dog food. Once, while tooling down the highway I passed a rendering truck that had horse legs and hooves sticking out of its box — not a pretty sight. The dead animals were headed to the plant where they'd be literally melted down to their essences.

To render unto Caesar and to God is melt it all down and understand exactly what's whose: what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God. Jesus' pushes the Pharisees into a clarity that angers them. What it becomes clear to you, you'll likely get angry too at first. But you might also breathe a sigh of relief and even rejoice.

Both you and they are sinners of whom the law demands everything. In this world, you belong to Caesar, top-to-bottom. You are of this world, and in this world Caesar rules. If you don't think it's so, wait a while and you'll finally come to see the world itself open its 6'x4' maw and swallow you whole. Even though we think this passage of God's word is about writing our tax checks, the demand is even greater. It won't be just a tax check you write. You'll be forced to render your entire self to the world and its ruler, whether you want to or not.

It's no easier when it comes to rendering unto God what belongs to him. From our first breath in the Garden, through to the at-last appearance of the New Jerusalem, God claims what is his. Adam and Eve refused to allow God what belongs solely to God and, instead, swallowed up the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Give up to God our control, our judgment, our future, our life and death, our salvation? Fuggedaboudit.

Our good and gracious Lord, however, has taken matters into his own hands. You don't want to give yourself to the world to serve your neighbor's needs and you'll never release your grip on matters that God would rather be in charge of. And if you never will, he'll do the rendering himself. He offers himself up, pours himself out as a libation for sin, jumps into the rendering truck with all the other dead creatures. You can see his nail-scarred feet sticking out.

This rendering is a clarifying business. It melts your illusions to truth. Whomever you're to render to, you can't and won't do it. (Stamp foot here.) To prove our seriousness, you and I and the rest of sinful humankind killed the one calling us. We decided to offer Jesus up both to Caesar and to God.

It's a role our Lord gladly plays. He doesn't stop the yammering demands of the law. He fulfills them for you. He doesn't just submit to your sacrificing him on the altar of righteousness, he makes his very cross the source of your salvation. And he renders you, too. For in your baptism are you not pocketed by God even as you're set apart to be spent on the world?

You are become the new coin of the realm, serving your neighbor. The economy of salvation is established for you to loosen up the credit crunch of grace. You do it, not by lending yourself out to get yourself back with interest, but by being given, being doled out, by being rendered. You are evidence that the divine wallet is open for the world's snatching. You are not saved in order to be deposited in First Christian Bank and draw interest because you're worth it. You're rendered yourself in order to make the economy of the kingdom of heaven run — and run well.

Ain't no credit crunch here.

Dressing down for salvation

2008-10-07T10:38:00.006-05:00

The passage from Matthew’s gospel assigned for this coming Sunday (Matt. 22:1-4) has a couple verses in it that can give us fits. It’s the parable of the wedding banquet in which Matthew adds the bit about the guy not wearing a wedding robe being kicked out of the festivities.

It was hardly fair. This guy, after all, had been dragged in from some alley by the king’s wedding guest procurement posse. How was he to know he was supposed to rent a tux for the nuptial shindig? He winds up hog-tied and tossed back in the alley where he has to spend the night forced to listen to the hootin’, hollerin’ and toast-raisin’ to the groom. Poor fella. Condemned because he wasn’t dressed in the right clothes.

In his letters, Paul loves to use the phrase “in Christ.” In Romans 9:1, for instance he says, “I am speaking the truth in Christ.” He sends greetings to fellow believers who are in Christ. To the Philippians he prays that God would keep hearts and minds in Christ. Paul says it most clearly in Galatians 3:27, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” Could it be that the ill-attired wedding guest was not in Christ? If so, what would that look like? I think it was that he failed to get gussied up in Jesus’ cross.

As a kid, I spent many glorious days and weeks at my grandparents ranch in western South Dakota. In early Spring, when it was lambing season, my Grandma Luberta would let me help feed the bum lambs, which were her charge. The bum lambs were orphaned or the runt in a set of triplets. We’d take bottles of milk to the shed and the bums would go to town on their rubber nipples. Apart from that, they were pretty much goners.

Every once in a while I’d see the opposite situation. A ewe would give birth to a dead lamb or one that was so sickly that it died quickly. She’d nuzzle her lamb and try to get it to stand. It was a situation ready-made for the bums. A ewe with a dead lamb + a lamb with no mother? Brilliant! Bring a bum over for the ewe to adopt.

But no ewe with a nose at the tip of her shaggy snout would have anything to do with a lamb that wasn’t her own. It didn’t smell right. So my Grandpa Buster would pull out his jackknife and slit the dead lamb’s underside from chin to tail. He’d skin that dead little thing and toss the carcass across the fence line for to become a night-time coyote feast.

Grandpa would tie the dead lamb’s skin on the back of the bum lamb with a length of baling twine and bring it over to the mother of the dead lamb. She’d smell her own lamb righteous odor on that bum and stand still so it could get at her teats and drink up. The bum would live and grow because it was wrapped in the dead lamb’s skin, immersed in its death as the thing that gave it life.

The problem for the guy with the wrong clothes is just that. He was wrapped up in something that gave him no entrée to the festivities. He waltzed in and thought it was going to be a reception right out of Brides magazine: pretty gowns, pretty cakes, pretty much happy all the day long. But this is a zombie party, a can of whoop-de-doo for the living dead, for those who smell like the crucified and risen one who’s wrapped himself around their rotting sinful flesh. The life they have, they no live in Christ.

The excluded wedding guest remained outside of Christ, instead of being baptized into Christ’s death, wrapped up in his cross. God can smell the sin and glory of the self from a mile away and will have none of it. They smell too much like their own life and too little like Jesus’ death.

But you, dear sinners and friends, have been baptized into Christ Jesus. The robe is already yours, tied around your middle with the baling twine of God’s eternal word. The party began on the first day of the week when the women found themselves staring into an empty grave. It’s a real barn-burner and the guest of honor has decided that you simply must sit at the head table.

You see, it’s a surprise party, because you’re about to find out that Christ has made you the bride. As unlikely as it may be, you’ve walked into the arms of the one who promises never to let you go. When you say, “Do you really take a sinner like me as yours,” Jesus answers, “I do. I do. I do. This is my body and blood given and shed for you."

My Lying-Sack-of-Sin Pastor Friend's "Basement"

2008-09-25T13:37:00.009-05:00

A good friend (who is also a fine example of a sinner) serves as pastor to a congregation in Wisconsin (emphasis on the last syllable). The congregation began in 1988 and the building went up in 1990, without a basement.

On occasion he's preached an imaginative sermon in which he says he'd been stuck for what to do for a sermon and that he'd wandered through the church basement. He would say he'd encountered the ghost of Martin Luther down there, or found Noah's diary, or come upon an early-1960s piece of kid's Sunday school artwork (with a handwritten note from God attached). A nice bunch of clever dream sequences spun from whole cloth for the sake of delivering the gospel.

How careful we must be with the word we've been handed! My friend just got the news that a parishioner has left the congregation because, "He lied. There is no church basement."

If what comes from the preacher's mouth is not factual, does that make it untrue? Students in my New Testament course grapple with that question when dealing with four different gospels, with four different timelines, with four different points of view, and a Jesus who's almost four different people. "How do we know what's true, then?" they ask.

We so easily fall for the proposition that truth can be gleaned from facts. It's part of the air we breathe in this culture, from dissecting a frog in 7th grade science to the latest article in the journal Nature. We look for truth in facts, in the measurable, in the definable, in the tangible, and in what Paul in Corinthians calls the perishable.

But the preacher of the gospel calls that stuff mere stuff and in turn says what is truly true. It is a relational truth: Jesus Christ, true God and true human being has died and is risen...for you. We know it's true because this promise does something to sinners like us. It's true in its power to change absolutely everything.

Basement, shmasement, I say. You want truth? I'll give you truth: You are dead in your sin, bound and captive to yourself, to your own future and your own narrow life. Jesus Christ comes for you now. At this very moment he is wandering around the basement of your heart to create some new life there.

What? Your heart doesn't have an actual basement? Don't let that cardiac ultrasound fool you. It's there and Jesus has set up his resurrection carpentry shop in it. He is even now grabbing hold of whatever detritus he can find, whatever dust-covered antique hurt or bitterness lie in its corners, whatever bits of trash and rottenness he can find. And he's turning his surroundings there into an exact model of his own heart — with a basement swept clean and fit for eternity.

I'm a sinner who preaches. And I lie about all kinds of things, especially to myself. But I cannot lie about this. As Luther said in the Heidelberg Disputation, "A theologian of the cross sees something and calls it what it is." What the preacher sees is success and power that are truly facets of death and the grave. The gospel preacher sees the foolishness of the cross, the lie of imagination, and the disaster of death as a perfectly satisfied Christ shaping his materials into his risen form.

"When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.' 'Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?'" 1 Corinthians 15:54-55

Wonderful Remark

2008-09-19T16:28:00.003-05:00

Here's Van Morrison's take on bad preaching in his song "Wonderful Remark":

How can you stand the silence
That pervades when we all cry?
How can you watch the violence
That erupts before your eyes?

You can't even grab a hold on
When we're hanging oh so loose.
You don't even listen to us
When we talk, it ain't no use.

Leave your thoughtlessness behind you,
Then you may begin to understand.
Clear the emptiness around you
With the waving of your hand

Chorus:
That was a wonderful remark.
I had my eyes closed in the dark.
I sighed a million sighs.
I told a million lies to myself.

Now, how can we listen to you
When we know that your talk is cheap?
How can we never question
Why we give more and you keep?

How can your empty laughter
Fill a room like ours with joy,
When you're only playing with us
Like a child does with a toy?

How can we ever feel the freedom
Or the flame lit by the spark?
How can we ever come out even
When reality is stark?

Chorus

Listen, how can you tell us something
Just to keep us hanging on
Something that just don't mean nothin'?
When we see you, you are gone.

Clinging to some other rainbow
While we're standing waiting outside in the cold
Telling us the same sad story
Knowing time is growing old

Touch your world up with some colour.
Dream you're swinging on a star.
Taste it first then add some flavour.
Now you know just who you are.

Chorus

Bless God's Name

2008-09-18T13:32:00.000-05:00

“I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you, and praise your name forever and ever.” Psalm 145:1-2

This week Mary and I are celebrating our 18th wedding anniversary. Like any thoughtful, liberal couple in 1990 we faced the dilemma of names: Should Mary change her name? Should we become a hyphenate? Do just leave our names be? If so, then what happens when we have kids? If we hyphenate, what will happen if our children marry other hyphenates? Will they wind up with three hyphens? What about the generation after that?

Our solution was for us to be Joneses and to have Mary’s maiden name, Sundet, as a middle name for both of us. That she took my name as her own meant something to me, and still does. I’m not enough of an Old Testament scholar to say much about what the ancient Israelites meant when they sang of blessing God’s name. But I know Mary blessed my name and all the weight its personal and family histories carried. She set apart my name as a thing of honor and a handle to be cherished. She transformed the name which is me into the locus of her love.

Apart from faith given as a gift, what could possibly have drawn the Psalmist to honor and cherish the Lord’s name? The Psalmist’s song comes as no choice, nothing his will has conjured up from the depths, no option among many. Drawn to the bosom of God, the song is drawn forth. As the old gospel song says, “How can I keep from singing?”

The trust in such a one’s heart is formed from the outside in. Who knows what Mary ever saw in this doofus who noticed her wedding day zit before he noticed the beauty of her wedding dress? But her very being claimed me. I know I could not help but want her name and the name of her family as my own. That required paying a fee for a revised wedding license, but it was worth it.

This is what the Psalmist sings of. God’s name is the sharing of God’s own self: God’s justice and nearness, God’s watch over the downtrodden and destruction of the wicked, and, in the end, God’s very enfleshment in Jesus Christ forsaken and killed on the cross and raised on the third day. Such a name it is that the sinner can only say, “You, Lord, would let me, even me, bear your name?”

The name came to me first in a white clapboard church in Newell, SD, for than forty years ago as God started drowning and raising the baby and full-fledged sinner that was and is me. Eighteen of those forty-odd years I’ve enjoyed God’s name made manifest in a woman named Mary. If that’s the kind of God we have, then the Psalmist is right: “My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever.

(Happy anniversary, MSJ!)

By Grace Alone

2008-09-17T16:45:00.000-05:00

This last weekend I preached at the 125th anniversary of the first congregation I served. Their theme for the anniversary year was "By Grace Alone." Of course that's one of the "alone" assertions that are attached to the Lutheran Reformation: Christ alone. Faith alone. Grace alone.

In this day that phrase, "by grace alone," has often been viewed through an antinomian lens. We treat grace first and foremost as an attribute of the hidden God. It's understood as the nature of a God who operates only out of love and mercy (as if our human vision could ever get behind the veil and see the fullness of God's nature). We think, “Of course God is gracious. What kind of a loving God would be any other way? Of course, God accepts us as we are.” But God’s grace is nothing close to that.

Perhaps if we were able to remove ourselves from our electronic gadgets and gizmos, our prideful attempts at mastering life, our hubris in to manipulating our surroundings, we might come to understand the hidden God as a dangerous bet. Were we to do as our forebears as they washed and dressed their dead, nailed the planks for coffins, and lowered them into the earth, we might well see the limits of our own efforts and the horror of facing this so-call gracious God. With the psalmist we might point to the grass that lasts for a moment and then withers. Some gracious God!

When we speak of grace alone, the starting point is not how good and nice God is. It certainly isn’t something that calls us to say, “God is love. God is love. God is love,” over and over again to reassure ourselves that God might be well disposed toward us. Instead to speak of grace alone is to acknowledge first and foremost that I am truly and utterly incapable of solving the dilemma of my sin on my own. As Luther said in the Small Catechism, “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him.” Or as the confession in the old green hymnal said, “We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”

"By grace alone” is not a declaration about God, but a confession you make about yourself.“By grace alone” means that you’re incapable (no matter how you dress up your own sinful piggishness and slap lipstick on it). If you can't do it, it's left to that hidden God. As Luther advised, we would be well to run from that hidden God to the revealed God who, in Christ Jesus, actually makes a choice about you that you can count on.

The choice is this: God elects to take on whatever your sin can dole out, he chooses to take on flesh and bone and an execution on a cross, so that at last you might know fully and finally what your place is both here on this vale of life and death and in heaven itself. Christ Jesus takes on your sin, your inability and unwillingness to believe and trust God and gives you his own righteousness, purity and life. “By grace alone” means that there is truly no other option, no other way out.

Thus, to speak of grace alone is first to tell the truth, to confess your lack of trust, to pray, “I believe Lord, help thou my unbelief.” It is to ask God to move against you, against your nature and desire, your will to create your own future. “By grace alone” means to pray day-in-day-out that Christ Jesus your Lord would come to rescue you, that he would speak a word of mercy, that he would be forgiveness itself for a sinner like you.