Am I the Avocado, or Only the Word Reforms

 This presentation was delivered at 1517’s 2022 Here We Still Stand Conference in San Diego on October 13, 2022.

I have to start with a confession. I’m a horrible person, and here’s how you can tell: My dear mother once got us a subscription to People magazine, and I read it cover-to-cover every Saturday over my breakfast of soft-cooked eggs. This means I’m fully aware of lurching papparoxysms focusing on poor Prince Harry and Meghan. If People magazine weren’t bad enough, I’ve also been gripped by the sordid media conglomerate machinations of the characters on HBO’s Succession. (They’re worse than the British royal family.) And most telling of all, on the Reddit social media platform I revel in reading the “Am I the Asshole'' subreddit. (I also have modicum piety, tact, and good taste, so I think I can get through the rest of this without using that A-word that I learned early on at the feet of my alcoholic little-churched great uncles. Let’s make it easier on ourselves. Instead of doing linguistic acrobatics, let’s just substitute “avocado” for the other A-word.)

The descriptor for AITA on Reddit’s thread says, “A catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in an argument that's been bothering you. Tell us about any non-violent conflict you have experienced; give us both sides of the story, and find out if you're right, or you're the [avocado].” People submit stories of family drama at weddings and funerals, conflicts with vegan children, and squabbles about making the world safe for high anthropology while being utterly astounded at how low their fellow human beings can actually sink into the mire of a-holery. AITA for making my son eat off dirty dishes? AITA for telling my sister I’m never babysitting for her again? AITA for still being mad my brother stole my daughter’s name for his own child? I have a sinner inside me who loves the feeling of Schadenfreude these threads raise in me. I get to pat myself on the back for not being an awful friend or cruel step-sibling. I get to feel good about not having paid people costumed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse to be props at my wedding reception rather than choosing to feed my guests or being angry that the kids blew up condoms and taped them to my Ford F-150 at our reception and ruined the truck’s bright red finish.

This year marks 500 years since an Am-I-the-Avocado-eligible occurrence went down in Martin Luther’s city of Wittenberg. Since back in 2017, when we celebrated the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, we’ve had a number of similar anniversaries that have come down the pike including the Heidelberg Disputation in 2019 and Luther’s appearance before the Diet of Worms last year. This year is the 500th anniversary of Luther’s abandoning the safety of the kingdom of the birds at the Wartburg Castle and his return to his home base of Wittenberg that was reeling in his absence.

While the reforming cat was away, the true-believing avocado green-tinged mice played. Luther’s fellow University professor Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt was one of the culprits. Carlstadt was in full agreement with Luther’s teaching on justification and supported his efforts to counter what he thought were Rome’s abuses. He just didn’t think that things were being fixed quickly enough. He and others took it upon themselves to take advantage of the full liberty they’d been given in Christ and, heeding Paul’s dictum in Galatians 5, refused to submit again to a yoke of slavery. Carlstadt led worship without donning the proper pastoral vestments. Academic robes worked just fine for a free faculty member. And the worship service was held not in sacred and flowing Latin (Ecce homo!) but in the low and guttural German. (Ach du lieber Gott!) What an avocado. At the same time, statues in houses of worship were removed to avoid worshiping graven images and breaking the First Commandment, sub-clause A, as the legal brief would put it. Wittenberg had been left in the solid theological hands of Luther’s friend and university colleague Phillip Melanchthon, who the previous year had produced the best systematic rendering of evangelical teaching yet, but he wasn’t administrator enough, politician enough, or cojones-bearer enough to wangle a solution to the iconoclasm. Eventually, the controversy drew Luther home from the Wartburg.

At an inn on the way home from Eisenach a couple students, who themselves were heading to Wittenberg, encountered Luther. But because he’d grown a Scott Keith beard and pandemic hair, they didn’t recognize him. Whether he’d cleaned himself up for it or not, the whole iconoclastic mess of Schwärmerei found it’s conclusion with a set of eight sermons Luther preached at the City Church starting on Invocavit Sunday. The sermons are Luther’s way of saying “AITA? You all are. Everyone sucks here.” The Invocavit sermons are worth reading, especially since Luther decided to be more brief than usual. In the first of the sermons, Luther didn't call anyone out as an avocado by name, but he did advocate a go-slow approach to instituting change in the church. You become the Christian A in AITA when you don’t consider the ramifications of your actions on those who aren’t as advanced in the faith as you think you are.

Thirty-five years ago I had the privilege of going spelunking at Jewel Cave National Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the third longest cave in the world. That afternoon of cave-crawling was one of the best nature experiences I’ve ever had. There were a half dozen of us, along with our ranger, outfitted with gloves, helmets, and lamps. At the orientation on the visitor center patio, we learned that, along with the stricture to pack everything out of the cave you brought in, including waste of every stripe, there was another important rule. People who cave-crawl follow the dictum that it’s life-threatening to assume that you’re responsible for keeping up with the person in front of you; instead, you’re in charge of the person behind you. In other words, the slowest person in the group sets the pace. That way, no one gets lost and abandoned in the cave.

The iconoclasts and enthusiasts in Wittenberg decided they knew best how reform should happen. They set the pace in the electoral city and assumed others would have to keep up with them. But Luther argued that they’d left behind those who weren’t quite there with them yet and had endangered their faith. The best-intentioned reforms, even though well-meant, did damage. And since justification comes through faith alone, the reforming actions of the iconoclasts threatened others’ salvation. Luther’s take was that even the best decisions need to have the weakest among us at the forefront of our thinking. The work of reform should follow spelunking rules. We ought always consider the laggards and slowpokes, the thick-headed and reluctant. Luther argued that Carlstadt and the leaders of his pack of pace-setter were attempting to feed a nice Iowa corn-fed rib-eye steak to newborns who hadn’t even made it to Gerber strained peas yet. Even if a change is due, it gets tabled to make sure there’s time for God to bring folks on board.

A dozen years later in Münster, a city near the border with the Netherlands, a Dutch baker named Jan Matthijs and other virulently anti-Roman partisans led a rebellion of anabaptists against the city’s leaders. They attempted to establish the kingdom of God here on earth. They ousted the mayor and city council and installed fellow anabaptists in positions of authority. The bishop, Franz von Waldeck, was expelled to a corner of Westphalia. With the bishop ensconced in his figurative Volkswagen campervan, earnest anabaptist reforms began to be dictated to the people of Münster.

It didn’t take much time for other besieged anabaptists of the low countries to get word that Münster had become a haven for folks who agreed with the Wittenberg reformers about what they considered to be the faithless and craven policies and practices of the church in Rome. They flocked to Münster, because the newly selected leaders made it not just a haven of the godly but also the exact location where God was visibly breaking in to rule and to bring about the new apocalyptic age they’d expected and naturally knew themselves to be worthy of. That Münster’s population was by-and-large  regarded as famously wealthy didn’t hurt matters, which was a draw for the poor of the low countries.

But the Münster anabaptists were also certain that Luther hadn’t gone far enough. To them, Luther had been fairly lily-livered, and he certainly had the whole baptism thing wrong. The Münster rebels established a sectarian government that wasn’t just neutral toward the faith but actively pushed societal structures and laws to ensure the protection of radical reformation tenets. The council decreed that all adults had to be rebaptized, because the sacrament administered to them as infants and children was invalid and required an assent of the will that only an adult believer could give. On January 5, 1534, more than 1000 adults were rebaptized in Münster.

The story gets worse. The property of those who disagreed with the anabaptists and left Münster to protect their lives and limbs was confiscated and distributed to the poor, after which followed a decree that all property was now to be held in common. They made like the Stasi, the East German secret police who once sought to arrest my grandfather, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They started shredding everything: deeds, contracts, loan documents, anything that indicated private ownership. Let there be no Ananias and Sapphira holding onto their beloved stuff in the city of Münster! Like the community of believers in Acts, you’re  going to share for Jesus’ sake! Or else. (Although — spoiler alert — later in the story people in Münster would be struck dead by non-divine hands.) When the former bishop returned to besiege the city, Jan Matthijs, who regarded himself as a 16th century Gideon out to judge the faithless, thought merely leading a small procession against the bishop’s forces would do the trick of defending Münster handily. They had God on their side after all. But Matthijs was captured and beheaded. His head was placed on a pike and his “junk,” shall we say, was nailed to the city gate as a warning to present and future rebels.

A new leader was called for. In the place of Matthijs, John of Leyden proclaimed himself the king of the New Jerusalem. Because of the influx of anabaptist immigrants, Münster faced a vexing problem. There were twice as many women as men in the city. Something had to be done to provide for poor females who had arrived with millennial expectations but no male relative to care for them. Leyden now decreed that polygamy was compulsory. He himself took sixteen wives. One report says that a woman, Elizabeth Wandscherer, who’d caught his eye, was beheaded in the city square for refusing to marry him. By the time the bishop’s siege had gone on for a year, food stores had diminished and people in Münster were starving.

On June 24, 1535, about the time Luther was lecturing on Galatians, the siege succeeded. Münster was retaken, and John of Leyden, the so-called king of the New Jerusalem, was arrested along with the anabaptist mayor, Bernhard Knipperdolling, and another leader, Bernhard Krechting. The three anabaptists sat in a dungeon in a neighboring city for months until midwinter when they were trotted out to the Münster Marktplatz for public humiliation, torture, and execution. Over the course of an hour, they were tied to poles with spiked collars and had their flesh ripped away with red-hot tongs. Finally, their tongues were torn out, and they were killed with a heated dagger to the heart. But that wasn’t enough vengeance inflicted. The three dead bodies were then hoisted in seven-foot-tall cages to hang from the 300-foot spire of the recently completed Sankt Lamberti church on the town square, to rot away for the next fifty years and be pecked apart by scavenging birds. The message was clear: don’t follow these guys’ take on Christian nationalism; instead allow us to coerce you to our version. The three anabaptists’ cages hang above the Münster marketplace to this day. Given the empty pews in German churches these days, I’m not sure they’ve had the desired effect of inducing religious fervor. If only John of Leyden had posted a subreddit query about the events in Münster. I’m sure that Reddit readers’ response would be that everyone sucks here, both the anabaptist zealots and those who took back Münster. AITAA? Am I the anabaptist avocado here? Yes, indeed. But it’s also possible to be told you’re the evangelical avocado.

In the Augsburg Confession of 1530, our old friend Philip Melanchthon gives us a subtle hint about instituting reform in the church and avoiding acting like an avocado, whether of the anabaptist or evangelical variety. After four articles that trace Luther’s foundational teaching about God, sin, the work of Christ, and justification by faith, Melanchthon gives us Article 5: The Office of Preaching. In it he declares that, in order to create saving faith, God gives the word proclaimed in law and gospel and in the sacraments. There’s no other remedy for the condition of sin he raises earlier. All that’s needed is what Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” calls “one little Word” that has the power to subdue the eternal foes of faith.

In Luther’s 1522 Invocavit sermons, he told the Wittenbergers sitting in the pews in the City Church that the word can do its work without us dictating the terms of its job description, thank you very much. All that’s needed for this saving work to happen is a willing preacher at one end, a gap filled by the Holy Spirit with the word, and finally the Kingdom of God at the other. Luther said, “While Philip and Amsdorf and I sat around drinking Wittenberg beer, the word did everything.” The word didn’t need no stinkin’ Wittenberg iconoclasts preaching in the vernacular with their feet in sneakers and with their shirt tails untucked for contemporary relevance. In Münster a decade later, the word didn’t need a hand from any highly religious and terribly admirable folks who established a sectarian government that determined exactly what the Kingdom of God would look like in their city. The word didn’t need people whose cocksure belief blinded them and led them to trample on weaker believers or less-sophisticated theological rubes, much less unbelievers still shackled by Sin. For this Christ died? Probably not.

What Luther didn’t include in his sermon was how the word’s work happens in practice. It doesn’t happen from within a moral system, from worldly wisdom, and certainly not from a stance of power and control. The story of Bill W., one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, can be instructive for us. When he and Dr. Bill got sober in Akron, Ohio, in 1935, it was just two drunks leaning on each other, admitting they were powerless over their obsession with potent potables. Call it the mutual conversation and consolation of the blitzed and besotted. Bill W. expected his experience of enlightenment and inspirational success would lead others to achieve sobriety. But what he discovered was that telling his glorious story of victory didn’t ever help anybody want to get clean or stay sober. Actual gutter drunks facing their weakness couldn’t imagine being able to achieve such a thing. It was only when Bill W. found drunks on bar stools in saloons and told them his own sordid history, how far he’d fallen, how he’d bottomed out, that anyone could ever imagine not regularly seeing themselves looking back from the bottom of a glass. Then they could see themselves not as people who would quit drinking permanently but as busted-up people who don’t start drinking again…today. They could begin to savor that other fermented delight, daily bread, rather than daily dread.

My obsession — the status, power, and control of Ken Jones — is the primary reason why I get indignant if a worship service doesn’t begin with confession and forgiveness. I walk into the nave of the church with a bound will that wants to settle into a pew with a padded cushion and lay my petty tinkerable peccadilloes before God, decide to reform myself, and later walk out with a newly strengthened spine and perhaps a few tips for building a more successful suburban spirituality gleaned from a winsome pastor’s sermon. But what I really need is the truth that my sin runs deeper than a few minor tweakable quirks. I need to be the sinful equivalent of one of Bill W.’s falling-off-a-barstool drunks who can at last be honest about how messed-up an avocado I am. So I need to confess. Not only that, I need more than just speaking a line about how I haven’t measured up. I’ve had it with confessions that don’t confess anything big enough to need the cross to repair. I need to declare my bondage. I have to get real about my obsession with myself and my addiction to all things that will secure the Ken Jones I so carefully curate and present to others. In other words, Ken Jones —the fallow, used up ground for the word that will be preached — must be broken open and laid bare. The sordid truth must be made known.

A couple decades ago in a Luther Seminary chapel sermon, I think it was, Steve Paulson made a surprising statement. He said that there are places where the gospel is more true than in others. What I think he meant was that the gospel is not the gospel when it’s proclaimed to those whose comfort and security provide them insulation from the vicissitudes of life. The gospel isn’t the gospel for those who have no ears to hear. So, when Luther said in the Invocavit Sermons that the word did everything, it was a specific word with a specific set of auditors. It was only the word that was preached to people living under the burden of their crosses.

This is what it means to be a theologian of the cross. The word does no good planted in glory. Like Jesus, the embodied word himself, the gospel comes to and is heard by Robert Capon’s litany of L-words: the least, the last, the lost, the lame, the leper, the lachrymose, the l’broken, the l’captive, and the l’godless. This is why the easiest place I’ve ever preached or taught is St. Dysmas Lutheran Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It’s a congregation behind the walls of the South Dakota State Penitentiary. Its members are, to a person, convicted of crimes, guilty of misdemeanors and felonies: murderers, assaulters, pedophiles, and purveyors of highly desired mood-enhancing substances. No preacher needs to convince people of their sin when they’re known by a number rather than a name and their future is determined by the worst day in their past. To stand at the lectern in a Thursday evening worship service at St. Dysmas is to encounter a bunch of men in tan scrubs who are ravenous for a word that can raise them from the death they live every boring day, with every tasteless meal, with every demand from a corrections officer, and at the sound of every clanging sally port door. To preach to these men who don’t have the luxury of pretending they’re okay like I do is to stand at the mouth of Lazarus’ tomb and deliver the only word that can possibly knit bone to bone in Ezekiel’s valley.

When the word enters the grave, then at long last sigh of relief its public proclaimers can kick back with a Wittenberg beer and trust that the gospel will do its work without their wisdom, understanding, or effort. But if the word is delivered to the self-sufficient, well-composed, and highly-effective, then it will require constant monitoring or, worse, coercion. The bound will cannot choose to change. The law will have to stand over it, less like the pedagogue of Galatians and more as the Egyptian taskmasters threatening enslaved Israelites in Exodus. Even something as well intended as John Calvin’s establishment of a Christian city council in sixteenth century Geneva misses the mark. Certainly, it’s why the Christian nationalism that has been so hotly debated of late is hardly Christian at all. It has no need of Jesus save as a good example. The cross is superfluous. It’s all based on the law, uses only the law, and requires the constant monitoring of the law to maintain its sovereignty. As Luther said in the Heidelberg Disputation, “The Law says ‘Do this,” and it is never done.” More law will have to be enacted. Nits will have to be picked. More strictures will need to be laid down. More demands will be placed on already broken sinners. And when it’s done in the name of God, the result is what was felt by an obscure Augustinian friar named Martin Luther who came to despair of ever finding a way out. He was done with a God who placed such burdens on him. Insult to injury. Salt in wounds. Enough of that. If that’s the God you have on offer, better worship at the Wittenberg Starbucks at the other end of Kollegienstraße by the bordello. At least the people in both those places are honest about what’s for sale.

As Luther argued, better to deal with full-on Pelagian heretics than the semi-Pelagian self-helpers hoping for a little human agency, decency, and initiative, and demanding we do what is within us to do. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of my beloved teacher Gerhard Forde’s book Where God Meets Man. I picked it up again last weekend and found this gem among the few rare sections I haven’t highlighted over the years:

“[Luther] was striving for the whole [person], for a completely restored [person], for an entirely free [person]; we have bargained only for little bits — a little bit of freedom, a little bit of integrity, a little bit of left-over created goodness. And we get, in such matters, just what we bargained for: a Christianity of ‘little bits’ — a little bit of freedom but mostly bondage to legalistic codes; a little bit of devotion but mostly a despising of life and human achievement; a little bit in the collection plate on Sunday but mostly nothing for the larger concerns of human justice and social improvement. Our Christianity is an indication of our theology. We insist on a little bit of freedom and integrity that is all we ever get — and it shows).”

Forde is still on target. We’re left with what often happens when I buy avocados. I stand before a pile of these dark green, unripe things at the supermarket, thinking of the future wondrous creations my hands will create. Homemade guacamole. Bacon, lettuce, tomato, and avocado sandwiches on homemade artisanal bread. I test five or six avocados and find them all hard, but I figure that in three days time they’ll do. All it’ll take is a bit of Mad-Eye Moody’s “constant vigilance.” But my desired vigilance is never enough. My observational acuity always comes up lacking. I am ever the guaca-failure. I slice my avocados open and discover very little luscious green but find instead the fruit are brown and riddled with rot. Instead of being the enjoyer of the gift of green, I am perpetually the champion avocado slayer of North Walnut Creek Drive, left with only a tiny morsel of fatty green goodness. To repeat Forde: “We have bargained only for little bits — a little bit of freedom, a little bit of integrity, a little bit of left-over created goodness.” Sinners starving for grace and mercy are given a little brown mush and go away with empty bellies. The church in our day and its so-called “leaders” by and large deliver moral-therapeutic deism disconnected from God’s actual work of death and resurrection. Jesus, the only word whose work is powerful enough to allow for the relaxed drinking of Wittenberg beer, is a mere dealer add-on to the main vehicle of our plans and schemes, in spite of our sorry history and sordid outcomes.

Years after the Invocavit sermons, in 1530 it was only after Philip Melanchthon asserted in the Augsburg Confession that the word of God brings saving faith through preaching and the sacraments that he spoke of reforms. After Article 5 on the Office of Preaching, came Article 6 on the New Obedience. Only when the gospel is delivered in its truth and purity can any honest and real change happen. The gospel is more true when one person drunk on themselves gets it declared to them by another person drunk on themselves but who's been saved from their self-obsession by being pulled into the embrace of God’s word. In the Small Catechism Luther answered the question, “What does baptism mean for daily living?” He said, “It means that our old sinful self with all its evil deeds and desires should be drowned through daily repentance, and a new self arise to live with God in righteousness and purity forever.” Sounds an awful lot like a 12-Step program, with the added benefit of some actual specific good news attached to it.

It’s interesting that Melanchthon never provided any details about what that new obedience actually looks like. That’s because the Holy Spirit is so blamed unpredictable. The Spirit blows willy-nilly and not only produces faith “when and where it wills” but also produces results in ways we can’t imagine in advance — and often among people my mom would prefer I not associate with. It is a manifestation of my sin to seek reform apart from the word of the cross and to bray and crow with wisdom about what my self-sanctified imagination leads me to envision as the kingdom. When Jesus read from the Isaiah scroll in Nazareth in Luke 4, he told us the gospel would appear at the verge of the grave: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Each of the recipients of the Lord’s favor is as good as dead. It’s echoed in Revelation 21: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” The kingdom looks like a freshly filled grave and the church looks like people in mourning attire having a laugh at the ridiculousness of their veils and black armbands. There are countless and varied routes to the City of God, but every single one leads through the cross and grave. If it doesn’t cross those city limits, you’re not using a gospel GPS system.

If I truly want to change the world, I can’t use the Law to coerce anyone into my religious or political camp. The faithful response to sin and brokenness around me is not more Law. That’s the move of a theologian of glory. Moses, God love him, has never been our savior. The task, instead, is that of a theologian of the cross: the bestowal of the gospel that brings the barely imaginable future of the lion lying down with the lamb, toddlers playing safely near the adders’ den, and me and my neighbor being raised from the dead. It’s not my business to demand that you contort yourself to my favored political brand, my love of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, or my immaculate taste in cheesy 1970s top-40 one-hit wonders, much less to say your faith has to play out in a specific way. You’re free to be an “Undercover Angel” to bring people to their “Heaven on the Seventh Floor.” As C.S. Lewis said in The Problem of Pain, “[Y]ou will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.” God’s kingdom will come in and reforms will happen one way or another. Or to put it another way, the Spirit will do its work whether you’re the avocado or not.

All I can do is give it to you straight: You’re dead in sin, and Jesus Christ is determined to raise you from the dead and swaddle you in his love and mercy. With that said, it’s time for me to kick back with my own Philip and Amsdorf and have a beer or a decaf-latte-whole-milk-with-sugar-free-vanilla and watch what happens in the hearts of all you avocados. You’ll be out there in the world doing the opposite of what happens on my kitchen counter: turning from brown mush, ripening and sweetening, and becoming as green as the paraments in ordinary time. You’ll be voting in a couple weeks. Maybe for a party that’s not mine. You’ll be tweaking the technology you somehow managed to cobble together in the height of the pandemic worship tsunami. You’ll be gathering with family for a Thanksgiving spread, baking Christmas delights. Feeling smug that you don’t live up north in January. Feeling grumpy that you don’t live in El Paso in January. You’ll celebrate love on Singles’ Awareness Day on February 14. You’ll go through the whole year with Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and Neil Sedaka’s “Calendar Girl.” All the while, unbeknownst to you, God’s spirit will keep using the word to work on you and make you into the fruit borne by the Tree of Life. Let’s get back together in this place a year from now and use our hindsight to see if what I’ve given you today, what God gives you in your baptism, what he provides in the Lord’s Supper, and what is proclaimed to you again and again and again is a word — no, the word — that reforms you, repents you, and resurrects you. Here’s to a coming year of new life and the fact that the Reformation catchphrase remains true: Verbum dei manet in aeternum, the Word of God abides forever.

Luther at Worms: Here I Stand, etc.

This sermon was preached at First Lutheran Church in Ottumwa, Iowa, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Luther's speech at the Diet of Worms.

Everything that went down in the trial at the Diet of Worms 500 years ago was about freedom. No one brought it up when they interrogated Martin Luther about the books piled on a table in the middle of the room. But the question hung over everything like a dark cloud. Can you count on Jesus to take on your sin and free you to live and breathe again?

Luther had been on a wild ride the previous 3 1/2 years. His list of 95 questions about the pious practice of indulgences exploded across Europe, and the friar who taught at a nothing university in a podunk town in Germany found himself becoming as famous as Pope Leo and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He neither wanted nor expected to play the celebrity. Think of how last May the name George Floyd became known across the country and how since then it’s taken on a role as a symbol for something he no doubt never imagined.

Luther had become the fulcrum at the center of change and the symbol for every awful thing in the church or for every hope counter to the church’s oppressive gaze. Jerome Aleander, a papal representative, reported back to Rome that Germany was a powder keg ready to blow. He said the situation had to be dealt with before it was too late.

The process had already begun when the previous fall Pope Leo had issued the threat to excommunicate Luther. The threat didn’t move Luther to recant what he’d taught publicly and published. So in January, Luther was declared a heretic, and now the civil authorities were bringing down the other fist.

From the beginning all Luther wanted was a serious debate in the church to see if he was indeed right about what he’d encountered in scripture. He’d discovered Paul in Romans proclaiming that salvation came on account of Jesus without any participation points of our own being factored in. In other words, Luther had experienced exactly what Jesus was talking about in our gospel reading this morning: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. …If the Son sets you free you will be free indeed.” Luther had suddenly found himself free of demands to play nice for God, free of the judgment that it seemed the entire message of the church was built on, and free of the terror of being found wanting by God and being sent to hell for eternity.

Late in his life, looking back on how it all happened, Luther said he raced back through the Bible and saw that same proclamation of freedom oozed out of every chapter and verse. It’s like that recent Facebook meme that asks if the sneaker is pink and white or gray and green. If you’re a pink sneaker person, once you see it as green, you can’t see it as pink again. Once Luther spotted complete freedom in Christ how would he ever see Jesus as the divine accountant keeping track of sin and rendering hellfire as a sentence?

The aim of Johann Eck, the inquisitor at Worms, wasn’t an exploration of the wonders of grace in the Old and New Testament or even a formal debate about theology. Eck’s one aim was to put a lid on it. Luther was to be shut down for good, so the only question allowed was this: Will you recant? Eck demanded that Luther take it all back and fall into line again.

After being allowed to sleep on it, Luther was back before the emperor, the prince electors, representatives of the church, and a bunch of Spaniards in the gallery who reports say mocked him and flipped him off. Our favorite Friar tried to make a distinction about the different kinds of things he’d written, but Eck accused him of stalling and quibbling. So Luther responded with the famous speech we remember today. We’ll speak those same words as our confession of faith today.

“Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason - I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other - my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen."

What Luther was up against in Worms was our human attachment to “if/then” thinking. If you do this, then you’ll get this in return. We human beings love Isaac Newton’s laws of physics like “For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction” and “An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by another object or force.” We see how our use of power in the world brings about change. We know that we get paid once or twice a month if we work hard, and if we’re careful we might get our school loans paid off and eventually (fingers crossed) retire and gain the reward of travel with our beloved before we get too old.

But the gospel that had so grabbed hold of Luther works a different way. There’s no “if/then” here. It’s all “because Jesus/then.” Because Jesus was crucified, died, and raised from the dead, then you have everything you need for salvation. And when it’s a “because” rather than an “if,” there’s no uncertainty. When there’s no uncertainty, then you can echo Paul in Romans 8: “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.”

The threat of uncertainty is exactly what Luther was talking about in his speech when he talked about the conscience. He knew exactly how life works, how we move along at a clip and then something comes along to trip us up, shatter our confidence in being able to concoct a future, and bring us to doubt and despair. It happens with a job loss, or the word “cancer,” or a financial setback, or awful crop and livestock prices, or a dang global pandemic. It happens with relationships that fall apart or kids that give you grief or aging parents whose lives you’re trying to manage. It happens with a bad grade or not making the team or the day-after-day-after-day gloom of depression.

When these things happen, they destroy our sense of ourselves in relation to the world, to other people, and to God himself. That’s what your conscience is — not a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other like in Tom and Jerry cartoons. When your conscience is troubled, you sense that the bonds that tie us to others and to God have frayed or even broken. Luther was dead sure that landing in that spot was not what God intends for you. He’d experienced it himself too many times to count, and nothing he tried fixed a darn thing, whether going to confession, praying more, attempting to keep lusts out of his head, going on a pilgrimage to Rome, or promising God he’d try to do better. The more he tried to whip himself into shape and fix his relationships with God, his neighbors, and the world, the less he seemed to accomplish.

But when he latched onto the promise of Christ’s mercy, now he’d encountered God in a way that required no religious superheroes. He didn’t have to become more religious, more spiritual, or more moral. All he needed to do was be the broken-down sinner he knew in his heart he was. That was the very person Jesus had come to save. But what Johann Eck was trying to get Luther to do was to turn his back on that confidence and the good news itself.

Eck was part of system that had more to do with the books in the self-help category on Amazon than with the gospels. The whole system urged you do your best for God. If you did, then God would take it the rest of the way. But did you catch the “if/then” there? All Eck could ever promise in the end was more doubt about whether you ever actually done your best. What if you didn’t? And how would you ever know until you were dead and standing at the pearly gates, and it was too late to achieve any extra credit? That’s why at the end of his speech Luther said, “it’s neither right nor safe to go against conscience.”

Luther regarded the whole business as the Evil One tempting him to turn away from Christ and trust himself. That’s not much different from what we experience in the world. Advertising is built on the proposition that you don’t have what’s needed for a full rich life, and you need to fill the gap with product X, whether Bud Light, teeth whiteners, or the candidate on the left or on the right. That’s how social media functions: you won’t be fulfilled unless you can curate the perfect online presence, posting pics of your truly interesting life, gourmet meals, and clever memes. The temptation is always for you to think that God doesn’t or can’t provide you with what you need, especially what you need to be in his good graces.

Luther’s advice when such temptation to unfaith comes along was to lift one cheek and let what my late dad called a “buck snort” rip. In Luther’s mind, the devil didn’t have a body, and passing gas or drinking beer or enjoying a good meal was a way to thumb your nose at the tempter and cling all the more firmly to Christ’s freedom.

In his letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul wrote one of my favorite lines in the whole Bible. He said “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” When Luther answered Eck before the Holy Roman Emperor and all the other officials, princes, and dignitaries, he stood firm. He would let nothing pull him away from the sure and certain promise of the gospel. He refused to recant. He simply said no.

I know Luther was more self-aware than I am, and he no doubt knew the gospel more intimately than I do. In the thick of life, I forget that promise and I keep turning to my own efforts as the path to security. But we have a Lord who isn’t going to leave us in the lurch. He’s given us this meal today, the Lord’s Supper, so that we can hear that promise and have it slide down our gullets with the bread and wine and become a part of every cell in our body. We have this promise to remind us: “This is my body and blood given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” Notice Jesus didn’t say “given and shed for you as an example” or “given and shed for you as a job description” or “given and shed for you to prod you to do better.” Jesus gives himself to you for the forgiveness of sins, which always bestows freedom and a new day, indeed a new life.

Luther’s stood there in that chamber in Worms. He couldn’t do anything else. If he had, it would have meant denying the very Lord who’d freed him. In the end, he had to make it all about himself and his own understanding or effort or about the work that Christ did on the cross. There were no other alternatives, no half measures, no being kinda or sorta Christian.

In the same way there’s no halfway for us, even though we aren’t facing the Holy Roman Emperor. We just face more insidious temptations that are the harder to resist because they seem so much less consequential. But the question remains: Are you free? Do you understand what Christ has done for you? Does that promise have a grip on you? Or are you looking elsewhere for peace, safety, and security? I tell you this, my friends, Jesus has promised to give you life and give it abundantly. It’s in him that you’ll find the same freedom Luther did 500 years ago. May God help us. Amen.

On the role of a bishop in the church today

 A character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is asked how he became bankrupt. He answers, “Two ways…. Gradually and then suddenly.” This pandemic has revealed all kinds of fault lines and inequities that in the past have gradually and stealthily shaped our culture, and now with the coronavirus we suddenly see hard truths about our common life. The church has faced its own gradual and sudden plunge. We’ve faced a gradual decline, and now the pandemic suddenly forces issues about how to be church in this place and at this time that have cried out for attention for decades. All of which means this synod, its rostered leaders, its lay ministers, its congregations, and its pew-sitters face a time of massive and urgent change. There is no normal to go back to. There’s only the future that the Holy Spirit is leading us into without the pillars of cloud and fire we’d like.

In a time of change, two things become the focus for us in the church. The first, of course, is the gospel of Jesus Christ, and him crucified. As Paul says in Romans (1:16), it’s “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.” It’s the one thing that constitutes the church and its mission. It’s the thing that everything else points to, the reason for every worship service, program, project, and decision. When we keep our eyes on the center, change is possible.

The other focus makes things more difficult. Around the center lie all the gateways through which we’ve come to a life of faith and that we associate with the gospel: Sunday school, soaring music, Bible camp, Women of the ELCA, good coffee, or having every pew filled for worship. Those beloved things are so strong in our emotions that sometimes we confuse them with the central reason for our life together.

When things are changing, the familiar entry-points shift, and new avenues for bringing people into the center are called for. Being free enough to risk the new is a hard, hard task. In “Freedom of a Christian” Martin Luther reminds us that it’s God’s Word that frees us. It’s individual Christians, congregations, synods, and even denomina­tions that hold firm to Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever, who endure change.

For a bishop to focus only on the duties of being an administrator is to deal with peripheral matters. Those things are important, and we’ll need to give serious time and energy to them across this synod. But the bishop simply has to be the preacher, teacher, and public proclaimer who holds up the center. As bishop I would value the gifts of the synod staff, council, the deans, and people in congregations who have the expertise, the creativity, and the faithfulness to tackle both the old and the new entry-points. My job would be to help them make distinctions, decisions, and even tentative steps, all within the context of a public witness to our Lord’s saving grace for the godless, the sinful, the broken, those who’ve never heard of it, and those who desperately need to hear it again.

All those gateways lie in the realm of the law, and we need them for our common safety, security, and order. But they don’t hold the possibility of changing hearts or bringing people to saving faith. Whether it’s Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch, Paul speaking to the Athenians on the Areopagus, Argula von Grumbach and her letters supporting the Reformation in 16^th century Bavaria, John Lewis speaking faithful truth to power, or the pastor who will bring a final word at your grave, it’s proclamation that God uses to create new structures by forgiving sin and raising the dead. That’s what allows for change, both in our hearts and in the ways we live and work together.

I don’t know what my own congregation or the synod will look like six years from now, much less what the state of the ELCA and wider Christianity will be. Yet I do know that in that time I won’t give up as your preacher and provider of pastoral care. I will seek similar leaders to serve ministry sites. And I will continue to cling to the only hope I’ve ever truly had: that Jesus is my Lord and yours. You and I will, no doubt, fail miserably on occasion and, I hope, also prayerfully achieve some success, but the center holds nonetheless. Christ always has. He always will. Amen. 

The Splanchnizomai Samaritan

This sermon, based on the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, was preached at Luther Memorial Church in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 14, 2019.

            My friend Steve Paulson once began a sermon by saying, “There are some places the gospel is more true than others.” I didn’t stand up in the pew and call BS on him, but in my head I thought, “That can’t be so. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The gospel can’t shift and change according to our earthly circumstances.” Yet, if our gospel reading today has anything to say about the matter, as usual it turns out that I was wrong. Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan shows the gospel as being less true in some places – especially among lawyers and religious people.

            This familiar parable gets its set-up with an encounter Jesus had with a lawyer. This was a particular kind of lawyer – maybe the worst kind – a religious lawyer. This fella was a Pharisee. These were people trained in the ins and outs of the 613 laws given by God that appear in the Old Testament. It was easier to be a Sadducee than a Pharisee when it can to the law. For Sadducees, if a situation didn’t appear in the scriptures, that was that. You didn’t have to do any more thinking about it. But the Pharisees thought that those 613 laws needed interpretation, so they went to school to learn all about how to deal with the law. Both groups were equally strict when it came to a person’s religious life and what made them holy or unholy, clean or unclean, righteous or unrighteous, justified or unjustified. But the Pharisees had to have the nimblest of minds to see every facet of an issue. And they loved to debate.

            That’s what’s going on at the beginning of our gospel reading. A Pharisee proposed a debate topic: what a person has to do to inherit eternal life. And Jesus took on the role of Socrates answering questions with his own questions in order to draw out what was behind the lawyer’s query. He pointed the Pharisee back to those 613 laws and asked what he could find in there that would answer his own question. The Pharisee knew those laws inside and out and immediately rattled off the two big ones that summarize the two tables of the Ten Commandments: the ones dealing with God and those dealing with our relationship with other people. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

            That should have done it right there, and the encounter wouldn’t have needed to progress any further. But the Pharisee understood something important. Those two commandments to love God and your neighbor are a cruel taskmaster. They demand everything of you: all your heart rather than a part of it, all your soul not a portion of it, all your strength rather than your left bicep, and all your mind, that is, every single thought of every waking moment. God requires every single part of you without reserve. The Pharisee knew it and did what any self-respecting sinner would do: he looked for a work-around. It’s because the lawyer knew God isn’t interested in leaving a piece of you to your own devices. If a little bit of you gets left for you to maintain autonomy over, then you’ll always stake out the territory with religion, piety, and morality – trying to show how, even if the rest of you can’t perform up to par for God, at least this last little bit is good, even if it’s just good intentions.

            Luke tells us the lawyer wanted to justify himself. The Pharisee wanted to find some small place where he could stand before the divine judge with even an iota of evidence that on the Last Day he should be waved through St. Peter’s version of the TSA security line. Knowing the impossibility of fulfilling all those alls in the commandment, the Pharisee deflected and asked about the easiest part. He thought, “If God is so stringent and impossible to please, maybe I’ll have a better shot at success by focusing on other people who are just as fallible as I am.” So, he asked, “Who is my neighbor?”

            The Lord Jesus in Luke’s story was no fool. He knew exactly how things work. He knew the weaselly ways we unctuously try to slide through the law’s grasp. He knew that the gospel he came to give – that the kingdom of heaven was at hand in his very person – was simply not true for the lawyer. So, he told a story that shredded every last vestige of the Pharisee’s hopes for self-justification. In Jesus’ parable you have a cast of characters that includes two seemingly fine upstanding religious people who act like jerks, some robbers who belong in the penitentiary over in Anamosa, the nearly dead guy the thieves had beaten up and tossed in the ditch and who would have made anyone who helped him unclean, and a Samaritan.

            We have to be careful when we attach the word “good” to any Samaritan. Samaritans were the people whom good God-fearing Jews loved to hate. You may not think you know much about the status of first-century Samaritans in Judea, but here at Luther Memorial we’re mighty familiar with a particular Samaritan, because that’s who the woman in our altar painting is. The picture is of the moment Jesus tells her the words beneath the painting: “Hver som drikke af det Vant, som jeg vil give ham, skal til evig Tid ikke tørste. (Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall not thirst for eternity.)” I know that our painting is more folk art than a professional study, and I know the artist didn’t intend for me to do this, but I have an inner twelve-year-old boy inside me, and every Sunday I look at the woman at the well and wonder why she’s an amputee. It looks like she only has one leg. On the other hand, I also know that faithful Jews in Jesus’ day looked down on Samaritans as not having a leg to stand on, so maybe it’s appropriate.

            The point, though, is that, if a Samaritan is the hero of the story, Jesus had raised up a person of no account as someone to be admired. The Samaritans claimed that they were the true descendants of the Israelites after Moses, because they worshiped God at Mt. Gerizim rather down in Jerusalem. And for their part the Jews regarded the Samaritans as heretics and blasphemers for worshiping the wrong way. For them, even with the best intentions a Samaritan could never, ever be called good.

            So, what are we to make of this parable? If the Pharisee grilling him was going to zero in on the easiest part of the commandments, then Jesus would turn that into the point of the wedge that he would drive between the lawyer and his hopes of justifying himself. Jesus’ aim was to get the Pharisee to despair of his own ability to achieve acceptability before God. His goal was to get the religious professional to turn to him for life by showing him the kind of mercy he had to bestow. He wanted to turn him from religion to faith, from the rigor of law and rule-keeping to a relationship with him, from captivity to freedom.

            Who in this curve ball of a story was a neighbor? Who had mercy? It certainly wasn’t the bad guys. They were the people St. Paul talked about in Galatians who were all about the works of the flesh: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.” The robbers were a law unto themselves. Their boundary was whatever their dark hearts desired. If that meant beating up a traveler and leaving him to do, so be it.

            Then there are the priest and the Levite. These were the people religious folks looked up to. Seeing the guy by the side of the road must have forced a dilemma on them. They had important religious stuff to do. If they even touched the bloody road kill they encountered, that would make them unclean, that is, unfit for their holy and sacred Temple duty in the work God had appointed them to. Their own calling took precedence over helping a fellow human being in need. Someone else was going to have to mess with the mess in the ditch.

            As for the man who was beaten and left for dead, the Pharisee grilling Jesus would have had the same questions as those who quizzed him about the blind man he had healed: “Whose sin caused this to blindness to happen?” He would have regarded the violence perpetrated on the man as someone’s fault – most likely his own. You get what you deserve, you know, and this man failed to pull himself up by his own bootstraps.

            That leaves us with the Samaritan. He applied what first aid he could. He tore strips of cloth from the fabric he wore and used his oil and wine as the first century equivalent of an antiseptic. Then he lay him over the back of his pack mule and continued further down the road. That was no easy matter. Jerusalem sits over three thousand feet in altitude above Jericho, and the 16-mile road has about a 4% grade. That’s steep. No RAGBRAI rider wants to bike for sixteen miles on that grade. When he got to the closest inn, he paid around 350 bucks in advance and promised to pay even more for the guy’s care and feeding. That means the Samaritan not only took care of the immediate need, he also committed himself to an ongoing relationship with a stranger who would wake from his wounded state and regard him with hatred.

            The real telling quality of the Samaritan in not his willingness to lay out cold hard cash for the man he spotted along the road. It’s that when he saw the man he was moved with pity. Those three words – moved with pity – in the original Greek are a single word: splanchnizomai. Try that word on your tongue. Repeat after me: splanchnizomai. The root of the word is “splanchna,” or guts. Maybe a better translation than “moved with pity” would be that the Samaritan was simply gutted. Chad Bird, who spoke at our Christ Hold Fast event this spring, says it was “a gut-wrenching, stomach-twisting mercy.” The Samaritan wasn’t a “good” Samaritan; he was a splanchnizomai Samaritan, one who was moved to his core at his fellow human being’s plight.

            That word splanchnizomai is a strange one. Chad Bird reminds us that it’s a Jesus verb. It only appears in the New Testament connected to Jesus. Our Lord has splanchnizomai when he sees the people of Jerusalem as sheep without a shepherd. He has splanchnizomai for the sick. He has splanchnizomai for the widow of Nain whose son – her only source of support – has died. And in Jesus’ parables, the characters who represent him, both the father of the prodigal son and the Samaritan here, feel splanchnizomai.

            By telling a parable about patently offensive characters, Jesus sought to remove the moral, ethical, and religious categories that the Pharisee judged the world by. In their place he gave the lawyer the same thing he gave the woman at the well: living water that would remove both his thirst and his need for self-justification. If Jesus’ aim was to undercut the lawyer’s world view, he also wanted to give the world back to him by giving the Pharisee new vision. That would only begin by being the splanchnizomai Lord, the Lord gut-wrenchingly moved by him.

            Surely we understand who the good guys and the bad guys in the parable are. The good guys are the religious leaders in Jerusalem: the priests in the temple, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees. The bad guys are those in this world tending to their own lusts and wreaking violence on others. Of course, Jesus is the Samaritan in the story. But who is the man beaten up and left by the side of the road? That’s our Pharisee – and you. Jesus knows what the world does to you. He knows exactly how beaten and bruised you are. And he knows that the world expects you to take matters of fixing your situation into your own hands. The world says, “Physician, heal thyself. God helps those who help themselves.”

            But it’s the great good news of this parable that Jesus’ deep splanchnizomai is aimed at the least righteous, least actively good, and least able person in the whole story. When the world comes crashing down on our lawyer friend, as it does on all of us, Jesus wants this crazy story to linger and finally come to life. When I was growing up my little brother had a toy demolition derby car. You could wind it up and let it race across the floor. But when it hit something – and it never failed to hit something – the car exploded into pieces that would have to be picked up. If we’re holding ourselves together, our hold is tenuous. There are very real evils around us that prowl around us waiting to pounce. Many of us aren’t more than one big medical bill away from financial insolvency. We know that even though we may be fit and healthy today we don’t have a clue about cancer cells that might be exploding in our own splanchna or an aneurysm waiting to burst even as we speak. You understand that our security and safety are illusions at best, because there isn’t one among us that won’t in the end face a final breath and a last heartbeat. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

            But Jesus, our good Samaritan, every last splanchnizomai-ed cell of him is the one who regards the helpless one as most deserving of his benefits. That’s why we see him in the gospels hanging out with sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes. It’s why he has no fear of being made unclean by lepers or the blood of the woman with a twelve-year hemorrhage. And it’s why his mercy extends to the thief on the cross next to him in his own hour of agony.  We should turn to the man by the side of the road to see that what we have to do to gain eternal life is utterly passive: You just need to lie there and take what Jesus has for you. That means that, if you’re in the midst of a situation that feels like it’s killing you, Jesus is splanchnizomai for you. If you’re beaten down, it’s total splanchnizomai. If you’re powerless over alcohol and your life has become unmanageable, splanchnizomai. And when you’re finally embalmed and dressed and laid in your casket in a hole that a cemetery back-hoe has dug, Jesus will be even more moved with pity. Splanchnizomai, compassion, and mercy over and over and over again.

            And that’s where the gospel is most true. It’s among the beat-up, the dragged-down, the least, the last, the lost, the little. It’s for you and your black-and-blue tender spots, your tumors, your failures, your junk that Christ’s mercy, his compassion, his pity, and splanchnizomai can finally be seen in their fullness. Where you’ve got nothing to bring to the table, Jesus can bring everything. And if he’s brought everything for you, then you, too, can start looking for your fellow dead and dying souls along the side of the road and become yourself all splanchnizomai. Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.” Keep your eyes open for the road kill and be prepared for a gut-wrenching experience. Amen.