This Is Most Certainly True

Pastor Ryan Cosgrove

Reformation Sunday

I preached this sermon at Trinity Lutheran Church in Burlington, Iowa, on October 26, 2014. Trinity's pastor, Ryan Cosgrove, is a Grand View University alumnus, and we in the Theology and Philosophy Department are extraordinarily proud of him!

Grace to you and peace my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

One of the best novels I’ve ever read and movies I’ve ever seen is Sophie’s Choice. It’s about a young man named Stingo who’s from the South and who moves to Brooklyn, New York, in the late 1940s to take up his calling as a novelist. He rents a room in a big pink rooming house where he meets another resident named Sophie Zawistoski. Sophie is Polish, and we gradually learn that she has a number tattooed on her wrist and that she somehow managed to come out of the Auschwitz death camp alive. She’s wracked by guilt over what she did to stay alive. Late one night, Stingo tells Sophie to just tell the truth. Sophie responds by saying, “The truth? I don’t know even what is the truth anymore.”

Do you yourself know even what is the truth anymore? I’m pretty sure you don’t if you’ve had your television or radio on lately. What was once a reliable source of information about political ads has become an unreliable mud-slinging contest thanks to the big money infused into the campaigns by super-PACs and anonymous donors. The worst of it for us in Iowa is the battle between our senate candidates. You’ve got a decent attorney from northeast Iowa and a decent member of the National Guard from the western part of the state running against each other. But you wouldn’t know it based on the attack ads coming across our screens. And you can’t tell the truth about their policies either. It’s just one ad hominem attack after the other. “Bruce Braley? You can’t trust a Washington insider.” “Joni Ernst? She’s too extreme for Iowa.” Sophie Zawistowski speaks for us all. “The truth? I don’t know even what is the truth anymore.”

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, isn’t it? Our whole way of living obscures the truth for us. We’ve come to believe the snake-oil pitch of our culture. We think life is about getting ahead. We’ve fallen for the quip that “if you just believe in yourself enough, you can achieve your dreams.” We think we’ve gotten to where we are because we’ve pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps and deserve our high status. We see it as evidence of our own moral righteousness and come to suspect the poor as having insufficient grit and gumption. We establish all kinds of measuring rods for assessing others’ eye splinters and allow ourselves to ignore our ocular logs. And we never allow ourselves to see our utter need for the one whose hand flung the stars against the heavens, who holds together the electrical charges within every atom, whose deepest desire is to fill our need, hear our prayers, and sustain us with everything needed for life. We just can’t see our way through to it. “The truth? I don’t know even what is the truth anymore.”

In our gospel reading Jesus lays it out for the religious leaders of Jerusalem who themselves have a bit of a truth problem. Of course, none of them wants what Jesus has to offer, especially not his assessment of where we human beings stand. Jesus tells them they’ve been enslaved. They respond by declaring they’ve never been in bondage. But Jesus is talking about more than simply being owned by another person. Like us and every other human being, the religious leaders are enslaved to themselves. They insist on their autonomy. They want to be self-sufficient. They want to be self-made people. They want to create their own futures through their good choices, intentions, and works. They’re so caught up in the world’s way of operating that it’s impossible for them to see the strength of its grip on them. But Jesus is so bent on providing them with freedom that he tumbles relentlessly and recklessly down the road to a hill out back of the city where he will be condemned to die on account of that very slavery – because of humanity’s willingness to trade his life for their continued much-vaunted control. There are no ears who want to hear Jesus when he says, “The truth will set you free.”

On Reformation Sunday we don’t simply celebrate the work of Martin Luther and his fellow reformers during the sixteenth century. We don’t hold high their glorious works and the amazing outflowing of faith that happened in the face of stiff opposition from the established church in Rome. First of all, none of them, starting with Luther, would want us holding them up as heroes. Luther himself objected to his followers being called Lutherans rather than Christians. Second, the whole business of the Reformation was messy, inglorious, and fraught with set-backs, martyrdom, political wrangling that make our senate campaign pale in comparison, the slaughter of a hundred-and-fifty-thousand protesting peasants, the military defeat of the evangelical princes just a couple years after Luther’s death, and the enduring squabbling among his theological adherents for the rest of the century and down to today. What we really celebrate today is the truth that lay as a foundation under all the reformers efforts. They endured the opposition, the threats, and their own infighting for the sake of the truth so much greater than themselves. They had come to understand the truth and been so set free by it that, like Luther before the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms, they had to say, “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”

Martin Luther unabashedly pointed to the truth in his little teaching book that many of you had to memorize during your confirmation instruction. In dealing with the Apostles’ Creed, each time Luther explains one of the articles he ends by saying, “This is most certainly true.” It’s such an innocuous phrase. It seems like it’s just a toss-away, something easy to say. “This is most certainly true.” Try saying it with me. “This is most certainly true.” It’s not something we have to think hard about, but maybe we should, especially if we gather in a congregation named Trinity Lutheran Church whose middle name came about because of the proclamation of the truth done at great personal cost by person whose name is on at least five signs and banners around the place we sit. So let’s deal with “This is most certainly true.” Let’s go after it, so it isn’t just a Lutheran catch-phrase. Let’s deal with each of the five words.

First off: true. We tend to think of truth in terms of modern history. For us, true generally means factual. We want front page stories in the newspaper to be factually true. We expect our history books to be factually true in a Dragnet just-the-facts ma’am way. But the truth is more than just the facts. Ancient historians like Tacitus and even our four gospel writers knew that. When Plutarch wrote his account of important historical figures, he had no problem putting words into their mouths, because he was more concerned with truth than with facts. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are no different. They tell their separate accounts of Jesus life, death, and resurrection in their own ways, spinning the facts of the story to be able to open up the truth about Jesus for their readers. Knowing the truth isn’t knowing facts, which are actually subjective. Any lawyer will tell you how difficult it is to bring an eye-witness to the stand. Our memories are highly selective, and the facts an eye-witness brings forward are subjective.

So when we talk about truth, it’s better to go a different route. We ought to talk to carpenters about what’s true. When they’re framing a building they want to true their work. They want it both level and plumb, so the house or clinic or office or tallest skyscraper in Dubai will stand the test of time. They want it strong and firm, so that what’s intended to happen within can actually happen. When we say, “This is most certainly true,” it’s true if what God intends to happen does happen. Are we fruitful and do we know our relational multiplication tables? Do we see God as our God? Do we see ourselves as God’s people? Are our lives measured against God’s will from the foundation of the world? Does this truth blow away the chaff and detritus of our lives? Does it hold strong against all other comers? Is it level and plumb? If so, it’s most certainly true.

Next word: certainly. This has to do with our conviction and with what, as Paul says in Romans 8, we’re persuaded to believe. Is what we’re dealing with sand for building our house on or is it the firm foundation of rock?  If it’s built on the ever-changing eddies of our emotions or our checking accounts and investment portfolios or political movements or economic indicators, there can be no certainty. You can’t count on these things to hold true and stand the test of time. We need something more.

Luther said that he was constantly attacked by the devil’s accusation that said, “Who do you think you are, Luther? What gives you the right to battle princes, emperors, and popes? You’re just a piddling, little German friar.” But it was the certainty of the truth Luther had come to see in the church’s proclamation that kept him speaking, writing, and teaching. Luther regarded himself as exactly what the devil said – nothing – but he had the conviction of knowing the certainty of a divine promise made.

When a promise is made, it depends on the one promising to fulfill the promise. If we’re making the promise, all of life inserts itself into the deal as contingencies and exigencies. We can’t count on it. But if it’s God making the promise, then you have certainty. God changes not a whit. Jesus himself is the same yesterday, today, and forever. When the promise is made, you can count on it.

Next word: most. Not moist. That’s the most hated word in the English language. I’m talking about most. This certain truth is beyond anything else in heaven and on earth. The word “most” slices everything in two. There’s this thing at the pinnacle and then there’s everything else. Only this thing is the truth to be certain of. It’s categorical, like Jesus himself, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords (which means he’s the most kingly of kings and the most lordly of lords). There’s Jesus who alone has the power and means to save you, and there’s everything else. Even all the good things in life like morality, good works, and religion are not the most. There’s only Jesus, and him crucified. He’s the one who makes God left-handed by sitting on his right hand. He’s the one who is the Word from the very beginning of things. Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, is the hinge of all history and the turning point of all creation. He’s the most, baby, and for sinners at the limit of their own reason and strength he’s as beautiful as they come. That’s most certainly true.

Now an odd word to think about: is. If something is, then it’s not just an idea or concept. Back in Ancient Greece the philosopher Plato tried to tell us that the world around us isn’t really real. We can easily see that everything changes. Rivers flow. The makeup of Congress shifts. Mountains wear down. And one day our tired old bodies will rot away, food for bacteria. So Plato said ideas are real. Even if all dogs where to disappear, still the idea of dog would last. The idea of numbers lasts. Two plus two will always equal four. But Plato conveniently ignored the certain truth. The world around us does exist. And when we say “This is most certainly true,” we’re saying it actually exists.

 

This truth isn’t some mere idea. It is. It exists. It does things. The word of truth is a living word. It changes lives. It’s what linguists call “first-order discourse.” It is because it’s language that changes the person who hears it. It changes the relationship between the person speaking it and the one who hears. It’s like the words we speak from our hearts to each other, words like “I love you,” “I take you to be my husband,” and “Come over here, sweetie, and kiss me quick.” The trust exists, it is, because it comes into the world and changes everything by its presence. As the gospel writer John says, Jesus is the Word that came into the world. And, boy howdy, did he ever change things. Because of your Lord, the entire ground has shifted. The Law is over with. The new day has begun. We’ll leave the pie-in-the-sky hope for a future transformation into becoming our own gods to the Mormons. Give us the true God born of the Father from eternity and true human being born of the Virgin Mary, God in the flesh, Immanuel, who was, who is, and who will be. Give us the God who says his name is “I am who I am.” Give us the God who’s come to us and who is at work in the world right now.

And then there’s “this.” What is this “this” that we speak of that is, that is the most, that is certain, and that is true? Now we’re at the core of the Reformation and the very center of what this time and space are dedicated to week after week, year after year. Now we’re at the reason you have my beloved Ryan as your pastor. We’re at the certain thing that drives our proclamation. And it is the promise I just alluded to. God comes to you in a way that you might become his own.

 

The “this” is the very Word of God that was spoken to create the heavens and human creatures. The “this” is the promise that cleansed Naaman of his leprosy. It’s the power that went out of Jesus at the touch of his hem that cured the woman with the twelve-year flow of blood. It’s what raised both Lazarus and the son of the widow of Nain. It’s what calmed the storm and banished demons. It’s the “this” that forgives sins, delivers from sin, death, and the devil, and makes a new you out of sinful, dying flesh. It’s the “this” that swirls through the galaxies and through your veins. When the crowds hear Jesus teaching, they ask “What is this?” That “this” is a Word that has taken me out of my death. And you, too. It’s the Word that makes you such a new person that not even death can change you.

This “this” comes in all sorts of ways. Luther and the reformers knew it and spoke it. We set apart women and men who have this “this” on their lips, so there’s always a place to come when the world bears down, beats down, and betters you, so there’s always a place you can be most certain you can hear the truth. The “this” is what we come for, isn’t it? And to that end, the only way to have you be able to say “This is most certainly true” is to give you “this.” The only way for the truth to be able to set you free is to actually speak “this” and free you. So I challenge Pastor Cosgrove to start speaking it to you with me. When we speak the “this,” your response each time will be Luther’s words from the catechism: “This is most certainly true.” Let’s try it.

• Jesus has come to be your Lord.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• You have been baptized into Christ’s death and raised with him to new life.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• This is Jesus body and blood given and shed for you.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• I have called you by name.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• I will be your God, and you will be my people.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• Can a woman forget her nursing child or the child of her womb? Yet even if these should forget, I will never forget you, says the Lord, for I have you carved in the palm of my hand.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• He is risen. He is risen indeed.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• There will come a New Jerusalem where there will be no more mourning or crying. The past is over and a new day has begun.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• When your church building burned to the ground, you built a crypt in below the new church to hold the old church's charred remains. It ties you to the past but reminds you that our good God holds you even in the most difficult of situations.

               "This is most certainly true."

• Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• This is the feast of victory for our God. Alleluia.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• The Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• All things work together for God for those who love the Lord, who are called according to his purpose.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• Neither height nor depth, angels nor principalities, things present nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• Years ago you lost a pastor. He preached on Sunday morning but died suddenly that night. Yet God brought you through that loss to a new day.

               "This is most certainly true."

• Were they to take our house, goods, honor, child or spouse; though life be wrenched away, they cannot win the day. The kingdom’s ours forever.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• I once was lost by now am found, was blind but now I see.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• We know that we are justified not according to works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• Go therefore and baptize all nations, teaching them what I have commanded you. And, lo, I will be with you to the end of the age.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• The Lord is my shepherd. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• For freedom Christ has set us free.

               “This is most certainly true.”

• As a called and ordained minister of the church of Christ and by his authority, I declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins.

               “This is most certainly true.”
Do you see? You are people who have no cause to say “The truth? I don’t know even what is the truth anymore.” For you know the most certain truth. It has come into your midst, into your ears, into your hearts, to do its eternally merciful work. This place in these few moments with all this back-and-forthing is a place that carries on not just the legacy of the Reformation and Luther. You are the bearers of God’s Word in the world.

Budgets-schmudgets, buildings-schmildings, church councils-schmouncils. You are a place where this miraculous living word does its work. No congress or senator can do that certain true thing. No plan or program can do it. It’s that guy’s calling to do it. It’s your job to demand it of him. It’s your business to spread the word. And when you hear it both today and on your last day when the dead are raised, you know what to say. Say it with me. “This. Is. Most. Certainly. True.” Amen.

And now may the peace which far surpasses all our human understanding keep our hearts and minds in the one who himself is certainly true, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Smashed babies and scarred palms

Grand View chapel sermon
October 21, 2014
Psalm 137: "Happy is the one who pays you back for what you have done to us, who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks."

That’s about as awful a Bible passage as you could find. Yeah, there’s the story of the king who gets a sword through his belly and has his guts spill out. And there’s another one about the woman who puts a tent stake through the temple of an enemy general. But they don’t come close to this psalm when it comes to anger and violence. Most church hymnals include all the psalms along with church services and hymns, but some leave this one out, because it seems so inappropriate for worship. Although the psalm stands out like a thumb struck by a five-pound sledgehammer, the attention it draws to itself also reveals a God who’s not afraid of dealing with all that being human means.

The very human despair and anger on display here are well-founded. The Israelites had been blessed by God to be a blessing to the world, but their kingdom had fallen apart, in spite of the warnings from the Old Testament prophets (most of whom, by the way, had righteous beards). The Assyrians had captured the northern half of the land once led by King David. And now the Babylonian armies of the most powerful kingdom of this new day had advanced on Jerusalem, the Israelite capital city that sat on Mount Zion. The psalm says the Babylonians shouted, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations,” and they did just that. The worst part was that the destruction included the holy Temple where the chosen people could always count on God being found. Steeped in hopelessness, anyone left after the invasion was carted off into exile in Babylon, far from the security of home, and even farther from any access to God.

The psalm tells us what life in exile felt like. The Israelites remembered the joys that life in their homeland offered. They remembered having been chosen. They remembered what it was like to sing the great songs of faith. And of course they remembered everything that had happened. The psalmist says he’d rather have his right hand wither and have to eat with the left hand he wipes his backside with than forget what happened. The Israelites did indeed remember, and in the face of what had happened they couldn’t imagine any future except for the path of desolation that those events had set up for them.

It’s like a short story Deborah Eisenberg wrote about a character whose New York apartment overlooks the World Trade Center’s destruction. She says, “While the sirens screamed, Lucien had walked against the tide of dazed, smoke-smeared people, down to the fuming cauldron, and when he finally reached the police cordon, his feet aching, he wandered along it for hours…among all the other people who were searching for family, friends, lovers.” Then she describes what 9/11 felt like: “Oh, that day! One kept waiting—as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real—the intended—future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month, waiting for that day not to have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened.”

Now the Israelites were stuck in a foreign land, mocked by their captors who said, “Your God isn’t so powerful now, is he? Sing one of those songs about Mount Zion. Spin a melody about your God in his Temple on Jerusalem’s heights. It’s all been destroyed. It looks for all the world like you so-called chosen people were only chosen for slaughter. You’re nothing. And your God isn’t much either.” So the psalmist says the Israelites hung up their harps on the willows. Singing the Lord’s song was too painful. Sobbing will do that to you.

This psalm reminds us that the utter helplessness of loss and the bottomless pit of grief aren’t just some of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of dying to move through. Instead it’s living with a Jerusalem-sized hole in the middle of your life. It’s the emptiness where your loved one used to be. It’s the void that invades every breath, every thought, every waking moment. There’s no territory of life to walk around in that the hole doesn’t border, and you just keep falling into it. The grief comes over you in wave after wave after wave.

The psalmist remembers everything lost and his response is to move is toward vengeance. He calls on God to remember the destruction of the Israelites’ entire way of life. And he calls down God’s wrath to echo the destruction in the most vivid way imaginable: smashing babies against the rocks. The psalmist wants God to end the Babylonians’ seed, their future generations, just as they had done to the Israelites.

Yet with all the talk of remembering in the psalm, it’s a curious thing that the Israelites in exile began to think that God had forgotten them. God couldn’t be found in the Temple anymore. God had let the very people he had chosen be destroyed. But the Israelites’ God, the God of Jesus, and our own God, isn’t some divine Alzheimer’s patient who daily forgets the right words for things, who forgets who people are, who can’t remember what life is, to the point of even forgetting how to breathe or keep a heart beating. No, this God, your God, is a God who remembers.

The prophet Isaiah, who preached during the Treehouse of Horror that was the Exile, spoke of the Israelites’ fear of God forgetting them. And he brought them a sweet promise that told them again of what they’d forgotten. Their God is a God who remembers. When the Israelites say, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me,” God says, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have you carved in the palms of my hands.”

That’s a promise that stands true for you this day. Whatever loss you’ve undergone, whatever grief resides in the hollow of your heart, however much it seems like God has abandoned you, God sees that void as the place he wants to fill with new life and mercy. God’s own Son, Jesus, knows the hole of grief and destruction. His last words on the cross were, “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me.” But the desolation of his death and the tomb became the birthing pangs of resurrection.

Smashed babies and a Temple in ruins were not the last word on the Israelites in exile. Your loss, your grief, your own death are not the last word on you. Though you may not feel like singing a single glorious note about God on this dark day, God promises you something later in Isaiah. He says, “The ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

It happened for the Israelites. They were brought home to Jerusalem. The Temple was rebuilt. And the best thing yet, God came to them in a way that showed they would never be forgotten. He appeared in a manger in Bethlehem. He wandered Judea preaching about a kingdom of God that will last. He was crucified, died, and was risen. And no matter what else happens, he promised to remember you and be with you to the close of the age.

With a promise like that of a remembering God, we can use our opposable thumbs to grab our harps off the willows and sing our hearts out. We can tell the world about the New Jerusalem where there will be no more weeping or mourning. We can tell the story of a God and his people, of Jerusalem’s Temple erected, destroyed, and rebuilt, of God’s Son raised up on a cross and risen from the tomb. God remembers you. All that’s left is to see your bitter fists loosed from their grip on eye-for-an-eye revenge and be opened to grasp God’s mercy for you. After all, you’ve been carved in the palms of his hands. Crucifixion nails have a way of doing that. Amen.

Deus Absconditus: God Hidden and Revealed

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Luther Memorial Church
Des Moines, Iowa
July 27, 2014

Think about what the first game you ever learned was. It wasn't bridge or Scrabble, and it certainly wasn't boring and unending Monopoly or groovy Twister. Your first game wasn't even patty cake. No, the first game every one of us learned was peek-a-boo, the simplest version of hide-and-seek. When we cover our faces, babies believe we've gone away. When our face pops out again, the baby often giggles with delight at having found us again. My nephew Nate posted a video of his infant daughter to Facebook this week, and that's exactly what little Penny Kay did. She giggled to the point of hiccupping.

When we get older we advance to more elaborate games of hide-and-seek. Someone is it and everyone hides, and the person who's it has to find them all. Sometimes it gets more complicated as a game of Kick-the-Can. Or it gets turned inside out as a game of Sardines, where one person hides and everyone else is it. When the find the hider, they get to hide with them in the same tight quarters. Hide-and-seek is our first game because it's our basic mode in life. It's like our brains were built initially for seeking and finding. And all those eureka moments of finding and discovery tie together to form a web of mastery over hidden things that may be simple or difficult to find.

The hide-and-seek game is there in so much of what we do. It plays out all over the place. We strive after success and seek status. We wait for Godot. The movie "Urban Cowboy" told us we're looking for love in all the wrong places. And in the 80s the band Loverboy reminded us that we're working for the weekend. Whatever it is we're seeking, it all has its roots in a deeper longing: out quest for God. That's where Jesus is going in our gospel passage this morning. In all these little parables, he gives you a festival of hiddenness and a challenge to go seeking after God. But be careful! It may not be as easy as you think.

Sure we can imagine God present in the beauty we see all around us. Rainbows. Waterfalls. Fall colors. In the best sounds: The thwack of a perfectly hit golf ball. The sweet-spot smack of a ball hitting the bat for a home run. My infant niece giggling and hiccupping. Or in the smells of the coffee aisle at the grocery story, of fresh oranges and strawberries, and of whiff of vanilla. Or perhaps in the savory tastes of Cajun cooking, or bread from Ethiopia and India, or my wife's red beans and rice.

It's so easy to imagine God in these things. But as soon as we do, along come floods and drought, tornados, and famine. Not to mention hunger and homelessness, cancer and drug-resistant bacteria. And moldy popovers. And red beans and rice spilled on my nice white polo shirt. And potholes. And computer glitches. If we say we can find God in all the wonderful things, then we have to be able to say that God, being the one in charge of it all, has to be present in all the tragic, disastrous, and just plain yucky stuff we see, too. That might not be the most gratifying way to find God. It's sure not going to be the way to find a gracious God. Martin Luther, this congregation's namesake, said that if we go that route we're likely to find a God that doesn't look much different from the Devil with all that seemingly capricious malice.

So we sinners go another route. We like to ascribe God's hand as the thing behind our every success, rewarding us for our well-intentioned efforts. We think we deserve all the good things in our lives, and we can find God in them. That's what a preacher like Joel Osteen gives you in his so-called prosperity gospel. But the implication is that things like hunger and homelessness, cancer and poverty are somehow God's retribution for laziness or a lack of character. That's no God I'm interested in seeking after. And the prosperity gospel isn’t a true gospel. It’s just a way of manipulating the God you thought you’d found.

We ought not be surprised that God is so difficult to find. If we look at the Scriptures, an honest quest for God finds God going AWOL on a regular basis. It turns out God is a little harder to find than we might first suspect. In the Garden, Adam and Eve turned away from God when he wasn't at their beck and call. They saw imagined he was holding back something marvelously divine from them. In their failed search they chose to go it alone.

Yes, Moses did encounter God who called him into his Egyptian-slave-freeing scheme, but Moses didn't actually ever see God. Instead God appeared behind the mask of a burning bush. And later, when Moses begged to see God fully on Mt. Sinai, God said it would destroy him. God told Moses to hide in a cleft of the rock. He hollered, "When!" and Moses only got to see God's fanny...pack. Moses was so changed by the experience that he had to wear a veil over his face to keep from scaring the Israelites.

Worst of all, when those same chosen people were attacked by invading armies, their kingdom was razed and they were carted off into exile in Babylon. They looked for God in it all and came up empty-handed. It seemed for all the world as if God had forgotten them. All that was left was like sand running through their fingers and their echoing cry for God in the barrenness of their lives. “Where are you God…god…god…od…od?”

We might well ask why God hides behind a divine veil himself. But maybe the real question shouldn't be whether we can find God at all, but whether we're urban cowboys looking in all the wrong places. We want a God who can be found in mighty deeds of power, but he might have set up shop on the other side of town. We look for God to show up like he did in ancient Israel when Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to a God-calling match. When worshipers of Baal couldn't produce a result, Elijah prayed a simple prayer over the water-logged altar of stones and wood they'd built. God lifted a little finger and burned it all to a crisp. Nothing was left of the water, wood, and stone cairn they’d piled high.

The lesson in finding a God who shows his hand in such a powerful and obvious way lies in what happened afterward: The Israelites promptly chased their enemies, with Elijah leading the chase, and they slaughtered them down in the Kishon Valley. You see, we sinners start thinking we have the market cornered on truth and we believe it's right and meet for us to defend that truth and destroy all who challenge it. They’re a threat to our own power and glory, and they must be dealt with promptly and defiantly. It happens on a spectrum from bullying in a middle school to high finance, from social questions like same-sex marriage and abortion to terrorism, the downing of a Malaysian airliner, the festering conflicts in the Middle East, and our own domestic squabbling over borders, immigration, attack ads and power politics. If you had a God you could so easily spot, what would you do with him? Take control? Treat God like a glorified Saint Nick? Go after those who oppose you?

Look, though, at where Jesus tells you God's kingdom can be found. It's not in acorns that become oak trees. It's in tiny mustard seeds. It's not in the loaf of bread, but in the invisible yeast spores who cause the bread to rise. It's not in the glory of a high-rise high-finance Wall Street investment bank, but in an overgrown patch of land too-long neglected. It's not in the splendid Mormon ordered scheduling of a Franklin day planner, but in the messy flotsam and jetsam hauled in by a drag net.

If you want to find God, the places God wants to be found will surprise you, take you aback, and maybe even offend you. God chooses to be found in the midst of what an old translation of Isaiah calls the uncomely: God is present in the ugly, the unprepossessing, the sad and worn-out. God chooses to be found in the unexpected presence of a baby on a manger who quickly soils his swaddling clothes and grows to become a roving Judean preacher with dirty feet who is executed naked on a cross. "If you're looking for me," God says, "that's where I am."

It goes further. God won't be found in power or prestige. Instead God tells you to go looking in the ordinary water of baptism and in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper, even when it's a crisp circle of Styrofoam blandness masquerading as bread and a sip of Welche’s instead of a rich, full-bodied cabernet.  God says look to his ephemeral presence in the here-one-minute-gone-the-next preached promise of the gospel. Find him in the announcement of forgiveness. Find God in the witness of your neighboring pew sitters whose presence here today says that you, too, can find God afoot in this place.

It's doubtful that you'll ever find God in the moral games of the culture wars with all their one-upmanship. God is too clever to be found in such obvious potential political weaponry. Nor will God well-pleased to put himself on display in the glory of mega-churches, with their fancy technology, sharply-dressed TV evangelists, and programs for inch-deep discipling. Instead God chooses to be found on the smaller scale where people of faith know and love one another and rub up against one another like iron sharpening iron, upholding and strengthening each other's faith.

God is indeed a treasure and a pearl of great price. We can find God even by playing another game of hiddenness from out childhood: In this room I spy God with my own little eye. I spy God in the way so many of you have quietly supported a struggling in her imprisonment and loss of her children. I spy God in someone who makes wine for communion. I spy God in one spouse caring for the other in the face of infirmity and dementia. I spy God in a family moving together through the grief of a brother and son killed, in another family at the loss of a mother and wife, and still others who've lost a daughter and husbands. I spy with my own little eye the treasure of God working in people laboring in their daily lives to be of some earthly good. I spy God in the sound of clanking coins in a noisy offering to send their spare change to battle malaria. I spy God in aebelskiver and hanging ships and the faithful history of unnamed happy Danes making sure this would be a place God could be found. I spy God like some divine Tom Joad present in the lost, the least, the homeless, the wondering and wandering, in you my friends, my neighbors, my fellow pew-sitters week after week.

The irony is that what’s found in the back corner of the field is the stark, unexpected fact that God doesn’t need any search for; we're the ones who need to be found. God's been right here all along just as he's promised to be. But we've run out to kick the can in another childhood game, so we ourselves can remain in hiding to escape God's judgment on our meager myopic vision and paltry love of our neighbor. So God comes once more to you in Jesus the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to find a single lost lamb.

Do you not know that God considers you his treasure to cherish in eternity? Do you not spy the fact that you are such a pearl of great price that Christ has died for your sake and forgives all your sins? Do you not know that God's final Judgment Day call of "Ollie, Ollie, oxen free" is echoing already today to bring you in from hiding, never to be called out?
You who are lost are now found. You who have hidden yourselves for so long are now brought into the light of Jesus’ love and mercy. You are treasured. For you, God has paid the ultimate and eternal price. Amen

The Dysfunctional Family of God

Proper 9A 2014
Grace Lutheran Church
Adel, IA
July 9, 2014

Our first reading this evening is part of a grand family saga that makes up the book of Genesis and, really, the whole Old Testament. You could call the family “The Adam Family,” or, more properly, “The Adam and Eve Family.” The saga, of course, began in the Garden of Eden and told of God’s creation and our human parents’ disobedience and sin. The story told of their children Cain and Abel and how that original sin was passed on to successive generation.

Generation after generation it continues until God chose Abraham and Sarah to give his blessing. God bestowed promises on them. In spite of their being childless in their 90s, God promised to give them an heir, a land, and descendants as numerous as the stars in heaven. God had begun to make good on the promises. They’d moved to the land of Canaan, which God gives them. And at last they had a son – an heir to receive his father’s worldly goods, but more importantly one who would receive God’s blessing.

We only know a few details about that son, Isaac.  Abraham had had another son with his slave girl Hagar when he and Sarah let go of their trust in God to deliver on the promise. Isaac was born when they actually sat back and watched God operate on his own schedule. And when Isaac finally arrived, he was the apple of their eye. Whether that means he was spoiled rotten, I leave it to you to decide. But you might have a clue in an old joke. Question: Why did Abraham sacrifice Isaac when he was twelve years old? Answer: Because a year later it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice.

We can see that, although God wanted to be the center of their lives, Abraham and Sarah had made their son their be-all and end-all. In the story of God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his son, we see God taking away the gift that had become an idol and returning it in its proper place. Isaac couldn’t be the thing Abraham and Sarah bent all their energy toward. But when they demonstrated their trust, God delivered Isaac and provided a ram to be sacrificed instead.

At this point in the saga, Abraham was recently widowed, and Isaac had taken it hard and could find little comfort. Abraham knew he was so old that it was likely he’d be gone before long, too. He didn’t want Isaac marrying a local girl from among the Canaanites, because they worshiped a false god. So he sent his servant Eliezer of Damascus home to the kinfolk in Haran to find a wife for Isaac. The people who put together the lectionary leave out most of the fun details about the servant taking ten camels with him and that the woman who watered the camels would be the gal God intended.

When Rebekah’s brother Laban saw the gold nose ring and two gold bracelets the servant brought as a bride price, the conniving began. Laban saw the possibility of a nice haul for getting his dad to marry off his sister. And Rebekah proved to be something of a “B” from the tent next door, when she herself connived to get Isaac to bless her twin son Jacob whom she favored over her other first-born twin, Esau.

We begin to get an inkling of a major theme in the book of Genesis: people acting under their own power and assuming they have perfect knowledge to create their own future. Back in the Garden of Eden, God told Adam and Eve that they were forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The disobeyed God and refused to trust in what God had promised, so they were cast out east of Eden.

At the end of Genesis we find Isaac’s grandson Joseph who had become the second-in-command to the pharaoh in Egypt. His conniving brothers who had come to Egypt to beg for grain in a time of famine, now begged for Joseph’s mercy when they met the brother they’d sold into slavery. Joseph told them he couldn’t presume to know the difference between good and evil. They had done him dirt, but God actually used their evil for good and wound up saving the lives of thousands of people.

Genesis tells us that when you assume the high quality of your own judgment skills, things are bound to go bad. It’s because you place yourself in God’s position, a spot that God zealously guards as his own. When you act like your own god, even your best choices go bad. It’s why Jesus teaches in the Lord’s Prayer to pray against ourselves by saying “Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.”

And how does this sinful, self-centered, self-deifying bent turn out in the Old Testament family saga? It’s not much different from the families on Days of Our Lives or, worse, The Maury Povich Show. Bickering. Back-biting. Illicit affairs. Bloodshed. Baby daddies. It’s all there in the Old Testament story of The Adams-and-Eves Family. Isaac’s wife Rebekah helps her son Jacob cheat, and Jacob has to run for his life. The other son Esau winds up as an outsider. Jacob’s own sons throw their brother Joseph down a well. They tell their father he was killed by wild dogs, and they sell Joseph into slavery. Moses comes down off the mountain to see his brother Aaron has crafted an idol from the Israelites’ gold for them to worship. The great judge Samson loses his power because he’s in thrall to the enemy woman Delilah. King Saul sinks into out-and-out paranoia. King David forces himself on Bathsheba and has her husband killed when it appears there’ll be a baby on the horizon. And if none of that is bad enough, the Israelites, the people chosen by God, who are blessed to be a blessing to others, start chasing after what they think are gods who’ll give them what in their human wisdom they think they need. By the end of the Old Testament the Israelites’ kingdom has broken apart, their armies conquered, and the people who haven’t been killed in battle are carted off into exile.

Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, once said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There’s not a single family among us that’s completely happy. Neither yours nor mine. We all have our quirks and characters. We all have baggage and brokenness that we work to keep from showing to the rest of the world. Look honestly at your family and you’ll know which category you fall into, happy or unhappy. And our forebears in the Old Testament are no different.

Though Tolstoy says we’re all unhappy in different ways, what we all have in common is the unhappiness that Paul talks about in the reading from Romans. He argues that we consistently get it wrong. “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Sin dwells within me.” Paul means that we are so caught up in ourselves and in protecting our own interests that we constantly take control of life. We try to twist and change things to our own advantage. And ultimately we hold God accountable by our standards, which is something God wasn’t entirely pleased with when Job demanded an explanation for his woes. Even though we can talk a good line about being good Christians, our actions speak louder than our words. As Paul says, there is “another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin.”

For all his good intentions and good works, Paul knows that all of it has a single foregone conclusion: the wages of sin is death. From the first bite of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God has known the outcome of our fruitless efforts. In this life, we won’t get out alive. Although the culture around us declares us to be autonomous, independent actors, who are the very solution to our problems, exerting our free will and choosing to take control of our lives is not the solution. The Independence Day we celebrated less than a week ago is just a tiny bit of freedom from tyranny compared to the release we need from the tyranny of sin that runs roughshod through our days.

There’s just no escaping the power of your own will. How can you ever simply choose to not be you, to not act as you do, to not have the history you have, to not create the wake you spread out behind you for others to water-ski over? Paul looks deeply at himself. He does what AA calls, a “fearless and searching moral inventory.” He sees himself coming up short – no different from any of his Old Testament ancestors. He’s at the end of his rope and at the end of his illusions. “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” “Help me, God. I like to present myself as powerful, secure and in control, but I’m powerless, and I can’t escape. It kills me to say it. And it kills me to live with it. Rescue me.”

In our gospel reading, Jesus says something curious, but it connects with what we’ve been talking about. In his prayer, Jesus says, “I thank you, Father, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” What he’s saying is that our life-management initiatives and success strategies, and our self-continuity projects only get us in trouble. We look at the way our world is, and it doesn’t meet our standards. “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.” We want God to be at our beck and call. We demand that God suit our preferences like some Facebook friend we can message when it’s convenient or unfriend when they post something that challenges our politics or lofty good taste.

So Jesus is grateful that God’s power isn’t revealed to the powerful. They’d just abuse it. But Jesus revels in bestowing God’s almighty and eternal mercy on the mess-ups and failures, the middle school nerds, on the girls-gone-bad, on the bankrupt and the bereft, on the scatterbrained and the slipshod, on the broken, on the sinful, on those who know the frailty of this body of death, on those who hope against hope that someone will rescue them. These are the ones who have ears to hear. No, we are the ones he comes for. We are the infants, unable to stand on our own, dead meat but for a caring hand. We are the people who are ready to get what Jesus has to give.

And boy, does he ever have something for you. He says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” Do you hear that? All things. Including a judgment of mercy, forgiveness, deliverance from sin, death and the devil, salvation, and eternal life. It’s all in his hand to dole out. And it’s his good pleasure to deliver it to you, deserving or not. He makes the most gracious invitation to you: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Oh, how tired the Israelites must have gotten of their family saga over the thousands of years that are the Old Testament. Oh, how weary of himself Paul was, with all his striving toward excellence in his purpose-driven life. Oh, how close we are to the grave – closer every day – and how hard the slog is for us. Oh, how sweet it is to have a Lord who makes the criteria for your salvation not your actions, your intentions, or your careers of failed good works. Oh, how free it is that he makes his own death and resurrection your gate into a new life. You’ve been living your life with strings attached, maybe even cords, ropes, or cables. But Jesus cuts through it all. He slices through the Israelites’ long history of faithfulness, through Paul’s body of death, and through your own attempts to justify yourself before the rest of the world and before God. And he says, “Well, that’s all over now. The Old Testament that is your own history is done now. I have a New Testament to give you, a new and last will and testament. I’m giving you myself. I’m giving you everything God graciously has in store for you.”

In 1518 Martin Luther, whose name this congregation bears, said, “The law says, do this, and it is never done. But the gospel says, believe this, and it’s done already.” The world around you says, “Do this. Be this. Act this way. Accomplish this.” And it’s never done. Your history bears it out. But Jesus says, “Trust me. I’ve got it all in hand. And I’m bringing it all round right.” And it’s already done. Ain’t nothing to do, there’s just Christ to trust. Given how my own past has gone, it’s the only option I have left. And I don’t even have to choose it, because it’s already been given to me. And when the burden of Jesus’ freedom and faith is placed on me, all I can say is, “It’s like toting air. Give me more. Lay it on me.” Amen.

Good Friday sermon

"It Is Finished"
Good Friday 2014

Lent will be over in a couple days, so I’ll take my last real chance to confess. I confess that I like control. And I bet you do to. I especially like remote controls. I’ve got one for my television and one for my iPod dock. Another for my DirecTV satellite DVR. Another for the surround sound system. And I’ve got a controller for my Nintendo Wii gaming system. And that’s just the start of it.

I control my communications with my smart phone. And I really want one of those thermostats that I can control with my phone. I have an iPad with an app that I can use to control my DirecTV satellite DVR from this very pulpit. And then there’s my Facebook account that I use to control my image in the world through carefully-wrought posts and clever bon mots, pictures revealing my travel and dining experiences (none of them with my hair in disarray), and the obligatory selfie or two. I can use my various hand-held electronica to download an eBook or audio book, or even a batch of non-perishable groceries. Such a world do I live in that with a swipe of my finger I control the light passing through fiber optic cable and get what I want, when I want it. And when do I want it? Now.

 

One day in my sought-after bright future, I may also be able to advance to my deeper desire and use my device to control those around. “I’d like a little less attitude from you all, and a little more Stepford. Heed my demands. Feed my ego. Fulfill my every last desire.” And if I were to truly have my way, I’d be able to swipe a screen, or better yet think a thought, and control God: “Sure it was nice out today, but I’d prefer 78°. And while you’re at it, God, take care of the creeping Charlie and dog poop in the back yard.” I even want to control God in ultimate things. “Oh, Lord, let me determine who lives and dies. Mike and Cheryl in our congregation this last month or the deaths you've suffered in this congregation lately? Well, those were untimely deaths, way too young. Stop that stuff, God! That car accident my student Isaiah was in last December? Roll back the clock, make it right, and let him win his national wrestling championship. As for me, God, accept my good intentions, if not my good deeds, as evidence for why you ought to look upon my with beneficence and grant me eternal life.” Control? I’ve got it and want it to the full extent of my imagination.

All of which makes the Old Sinner in me shudder when I hear Jesus’ last words on the cross in John’s gospel. Just before he breathes his last breath, he says, “It is finished.” In the other three gospels, Jesus’ death is random and chaotic, an out-and-out disaster. Jesus tumbles head-long into ignominious defeat at the hands of all the religious folks in Jerusalem. But in John’s gospel, Jesus is in complete control. “It is finished.” If he could pull his hands off the cross to do it, he brush them off, saying, “Spick-spack. There. I’ve done it.” “It is finished” means it’s accomplished and complete, and none of it happened in a way Jesus didn’t intend.

Which shouldn’t surprise you one whit. He warned you this was the way it was going to go. Half-way through John’s gospel, Jesus tells his followers that he’s the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. That’s not passive. His life isn’t taken for his sheep. It’s an active thing. He lays it down, and he says, “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again” (John 10:17-18). Do you hear what he’s saying? He demands control. You don’t get to yank him around to serve your own purposes, no matter how noble, kind, or good. He has come to complete his task of sheep-saving, and he will have it. He’s going to git ‘er done, no matter what. And when he claims that authority, the religious people around him murmur that Jesus is possessed by a demon.

That’s just the tip of the control iceberg that God has been floating through the world’s history, though. Back in the days of Deuteronomy, God told the Israelites, “I kill that I might make alive.” And a little earlier in the story of those chosen people, Moses sees God in a burning bush. God tells him he’s sending him to free his people from slavery in Egypt. When Moses asks God for his name so he can tell Pharaoh who sent him, God says his name is Yahweh. That means, “I am what I am” or “I will be what I will be” or “What you talkin’ ‘bout, Willis? I’m in control!”

When God finally can’t wait a moment longer, at the right time, he takes on flesh in order to be what he will be: the Good Shepherd, the Vine, the Gate, the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, Emmanuel – God-with-us – and Savior, King, High Priest, and Lord. Jesus will be what he will be. And what he will be, whether you like it or not, is your Lord, and the Lord of all the hurting, sick and sorrowful, and even the Lord of his enemies.

And we human creatures? What do we do when God shows up in the person of Jesus? Oh yes, we’ll sing hosannas and wave palm branches as long as he rides in as our own chosen royalty. But as soon as he asserts his power and control, we’ll scream bloody murder about losing our control. In fact, we call him demon-possessed at best, and at worst nail him to a cross, hanging him to die there, mocked by the crowds, and breathing his last as a sinner executed between two thieves. Control? We give it our best shot on Calvary. We go postal on Golgotha. We seek his death at the Place of the Skull. Rather than give up our control, we’d rather kill off the God who kills and makes alive. That making alive business we don’t so much trust, and we’re scared spitless of God’s angel of death. We take control, or at least we think we do. We brush off our hands, saying, “Spick, spack. There now. We’ve done it. We don’t have to bother with that scoundrel anymore. He’s finished.”

He’s finished, that much is sure. But rather than our offing him and insuring our lifelong self-continuity project, Jesus declares that he’s been in control all along. “It is finished,” he says, and breathes his last. He knew what was coming. He knows how sin works. He’s got you nailed down to your last bit of corner-cutting, deception, and autonomy. It’s all done. Jesus will be who Jesus will be. He is the Word who was there at the beginning. He pitched camp among us. And his own rejected him. Jesus death looks like defeat and disaster, but Jesus sees what we can’t. The whole blamed sinful project of ours is over and done with.

No longer is God’s judgment on you determined by the Law, as if you could ever have fulfilled God’s demands in the way God desires. Your attachment to eye-for-an-eye justice is now thrown in the dustbin of history. Your constant judgment of others based on your untrained eye and chomping down on the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, has no place here. And when you get paid the wages of your sin, death will have no more power.

You think you may have dealt a death-blow to the threat of Jesus, but now Jesus has finished it all off. He goes down into the depths of death, into the place of your demons, into the grave of your good intentions, religious activity, and righteous deeds, into the whitewashed sepulcher you’ve constructed for yourself. And he asserts that he has control over things even here. “It is finished. Done. Complete. You kill me, but when you do it, that just gives me a chance to take control even there.” No one can take his life from him. He lays it down of his accord.

“It is finished” means that now he he’s got control in spades, a royal flush of them. And the one single thing that’s certain about you – your death – he makes into the gate to eternal life. To the old sinner in you, he remains the greatest threat you could face. But for the beat-up, the broken-down, and the bedeviled he’s complete good news. On the cross he becomes the Lord of sinners, the godless, and the unrighteous. Jesus heals the sick and lifts up the downtrodden. He goes to the hungry to feed them. He goes to the thirsty to give them drink. He visits the imprisoned and clothes the naked. He goes to your rough patches, and self-dug holes to bring his mercy to you. Even in death and the depths of hell he proclaims the acceptable year of the Lord.

When your last breath comes and the forces of time or illness or the physics of an object in motion staying in motion until acted upon by another object or force end you in an accident, you, too, will be finished off. Yet though the sin of all humanity, you included, sought Jesus’ end, he will not let that be the last word on you. For he’s done all that needs to be done. “It is finished.” He has performed every good deed required of you by God. Say it with me: “It is finished.” He fulfilled the Law and gives you his righteousness. “It is finished.” He provides you with the full measure of a life free from sin. “It is finished.” He’s taken it all: the entire messed-up, random disaster of your attempts at sustaining yourself, and wrapped himself up in it like grave clothes.

Before you have a chance to object or cobble together excuses or file a plea for leniency, he will come to give you what he’s accomplished: your salvation and eternal life. When he does, you might not even recognize that it’s happened. Life might look exactly like it did before. The guards in front of his tomb stand there guarding, never suspecting that behind their backs, behind the stone obscuring the tomb, literally everything has changed. And when Mary encounters the finished, resurrected Jesus there on Sunday morning, she doesn’t understand what’s happened to the point of not recognizing Jesus. Everything is different, because it's now finished.

And how about you? You will recognize him. He has laid down his life for you. You have not taken it from him. He’s done it of his own accord, you wandering sheep. And when he calls you out of your grave, like the rest of his sheep you’ll know his voice. And you’ll say, “Baa-baa, Jesus. Thank God you’ve taken control and finished it all. Thank you for finishing off the sin and death I’ve suffered under my whole life. Here I am. Have at me with your resurrecting power and judgment of mercy.” When he comes on the Last Day to speak your name, you will say, “I thought you’d never get here, but now I can breathe at last. It is finished.” Amen.

Easter follow-up to the random naked guy

On Thursday night, a guy who was with the disciples ran away naked when Jesus was arrested. Tomorrow morning, when Jesus rises, the living Lord will be naked. And he'll leave behind his grave clothes so we and that naked guy can all be wrapped up in Christ's death and resurrection. The only caveat as that a fella needs to be dead and naked in order to raised and wrapped.

In the Catechism's explanation of baptism's daily benefits, I think Luther used the word "drowned" rather than "washed" on purpose. "Washed" allows the self-continuity project of the old sinner to progress unabated. But "drowned" means the old you is done, kaput, finis. Only when that happens can the resurrection happen.

That's why any act of the will in regard to God can't get you saved, whether it's accepting Jesus, fighting abortion/gay marriage/name-your-own policitical issue, or getting a Hollister t-shirt to impress you middle school friends. When we rely on anything this side of death, then the sinner still gets to retain the ability of the self to do something, and that means our First-Commandment-breaking penchant still swims with its head above water. Frantically paddling, yes, but also desperate for shallower waters than God offers in baptism.

As Luther says in Thesis 18 of the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, "Only when we completely despair of ourselves do we merit the mercy of Christ" (or something like that). That means I ain't never gonna get clean, no amount of scrubbing can help, and no religious bar of Irish Spring can do the trick. It seems to me that the only people who can really mean it when they say they need what Christ has to offer are the dead and naked. And the new resurrected you will wear your grave-grime joyfully as the very reason Jesus made himself yours.


This means our Easter prayer needs to be, "Gracious God, make me dead and strip me clean. And then wind your eternal grace around me. Only then will I have your promised abundant life." That's what Luther meant when he told us to sin boldly and trust all the more boldly in Christ's mercy.

Random naked guy

Sermon preached at Luther Memorial Church, Lent 2013

Mark 14:43-52
“Immediately, while [Jesus] was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived; and with him there was a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders. Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, ‘The one I will kiss is the man; arrest him and lead him away under guard.’ So when he came, he went up to him at once and said, ‘Rabbi!’ and kissed him. Then they laid hands on him and arrested him. But one of those who stood near drew his sword and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled.’ All of them deserted him and fled. A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”

Any normal preacher would read you this passage from Mark and proceed to tell you about why Judas betrayed Jesus with that kiss or about what Jesus means that the scriptures would be fulfilled. But I’m not much of a normal preacher. I still have too much of a twelve-year-old boy in me, so my eye focuses on that random naked guy at the end of the story, because that’s just plain weird. Mark throws in this one little detail: When Jesus was arrested, there was this fella wearing some kind of toga, and the soldier who had come for Jesus grabbed him, too. But they only grabbed the cloth and he got away scot-free. Naked, but free nonetheless.

There’s been plenty of speculation about why Mark includes the random naked guy in his gospel. The most common answer is that Mark was telling his reader’s something of his own experience: Mark himself was the naked guy, and including this bit in the story was his own confession. He’s telling us that he didn’t cut it when it came time to defend Jesus, and he wants his readers to do better. But I don’t think that explanation cuts it any better, at least not in how Mark wants you to respond. If this random naked guy was the author of the gospel and he’s confessing, it’s not to give you a moral lesson. Instead, it’s to say how the disciples responded to Jesus arrest, crucifixion and death started with him and that it didn’t get better. The random naked guy ran away to save his hide, if not his toga. Then Peter following at a safe distance wound up in the courtyard of the high priest where Jesus was being tried, and when he was confronted about his connection to the criminal inside, he denied ever knowing our Lord. By the time Jesus hung dying on the cross, no one was left. Everyone had turned away, clothed or not. Anyone in the story that you might have expected to stick by Jesus, including the eleven remaining disciples, had closed up the discipleship shop, shuttered their windows and barred their doors. And when Jesus was in his bitterest agony, hoping for some comfort from God, all he got was silence. So his cry was, “Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Everyone ran and hid, but only the random guy at the arrest was naked. He has good company in the Bible. When King David had the Ark of the Covenant brought into Jerusalem, he stripped down to his birthday suit and danced the goofy out of excitement at the presence of the Lord. When Noah finally got to leave the ark with its 40 days of mammal manure and bird guano, he promptly got himself drunk. His sons Ham, Shem and Japheth found him passed out and naked, they did what all good sons in that situation should do: They grabbed a cloak, walked into the tent backwards to avoid seeing anything that would embarrass old dad, and they covered him up. The most important naked folks in the Bible, though, can actually help us understand something about our random naked guy in Mark. Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden. That always poses a problem for illustrators of children’s Bibles, but naked they were and apparently that wasn’t a problem for God. But when our father and mother in the Garden sinned, they came to see their nakedness as a shameful sign of their sin. They made loincloths out of fig leaves and covered themselves, and they hid from God. They couldn’t fess up to what they had done.

If the random naked guy in Mark’s gospel is the writer himself, then he’s doing exactly the opposite of what Adam and Eve did. He’s not afraid to admit what shames him. He’s no better than Judas the betrayer or Peter the denier. He’s the naked guy who runs away. And by telling the truth about his inability to stick with the Lord, he winds up exactly where Jesus wants him, exactly where Jesus has a chance to do something with him, exactly where he can become the recipient of what the Lord has to offer.

In 1518, Martin Luther wrote a little document called The Heidelberg Disputation. It’s one of my favorite things from his pen, so of course I make the students in my class on Luther read it. And every time I teach the course, my students land on one thesis as their favorite. In Thesis 18, Luther says, “It is certain that we must completely despair of ourselves in order to become fit to obtain the grace of Christ.” What he means is this: Christ comes for sinners, not for pious religious people who have their act together. In the gospels, the people who are on the receiving end of his mercy are the down-and-out, the hopeless, the outcast, the lost and the least. It’s the people who have nothing to present to God who actually get the full measure of Jesus’ power and grace. It’s the paralyzed man who had to be carried to Jesus. It’s the woman caught in adultery. It’s a tax collector like Zacchaeus. It’s the Gerasene demoniac. And it’s every last dead person he encounters, from the dead son of the widow of Nain to rotten, stinking Lazarus whose body had lain in a tomb for four days.

Mark seems to offer a first-century version of “What Not to Wear.” In our day, Stacy London and Clinton Kelly on TLC tell contestants how to dress. And Mark in our gospel reading seems to know that if you want what Jesus has to offer, you can’t come to him wearing the wrong thing. And the right thing for your appearance with the Lord is always simply nothing. As the great hymn, Rock of Ages, says, “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling. Naked, come to thee for dress; helpless, look to thee for grace.” If the random naked guy is Mark, then he’s showing his reader more than his physical nakedness. He’s also showing his spiritual state. When you get asked about what you’ve done for the Lord and actually say, “Well. I guess I’ve got nothing,” then you’re at the place where, as Luther said, you can obtain the grace of Christ.

The summer after I graduated from college, I worked on a day camp staff for the Lutheran church camps in South Dakota. One week the six of us had run a camp near the town of Mitchell. We had done the camp for elementary-age kids at a lakeside camp that had been rented from the local Baptist church. On the last day of the camp week after all the parents had picked up their progeny, and after we had spent our last energy cleaning and putting everything back in shape for those Baptists, we six Bible camp counselors decided to do some fat-free swimming, if you know what I mean. The camp was on a secluded bay, and it was supper time, so no one would be out water skiing. The other five thought it was fine to stand with males and females with their backs to each other and leave their suits on the beach. But I thought better of the situation and grabbed an empty plastic milk jug. I waded out to chest-high water and put my swim trunks through the handle of the floating milk jug and kept ‘em handy. Apart from getting ribbed for being such a prude, all was well and good. Well, it was until all the Baptists drove into camp, parked their cars and walked toward the beach for their church potluck picnic. Now my fellow counselors who were certain of their own power and freedom were faced with the real possibility of the summer’s early end. How were they going to get their swimsuits, except to turn to the one whom they mocked for not being cool enough? Now they knew they needed the guy with what came to be known as “The Lucky Jug.” I donned my trunks, walked to the beach, snatched up the swimwear, distributed it to the proper people and the six of us still had a full summer on camp staff.

And that, my friends, is exactly what this season of Lent is about: knowing your nakedness and then relying on the one you mocked and killed to give you the life you thought you’d created yourself. And if it’s essential that we come to Jesus with nothing, absolutely nothing of our own as proof that he should regard us well, no Bible reading, no church attendance, no giving level, and not even any Danish genes, then Jesus promises to give you more. In a few weeks when you hear about his resurrection on Easter Sunday, you will hear about a bundle of cloth left behind in the tomb. The risen Jesus walks out of the tomb with a naked resurrected body, and he leaves his grave clothes behind for you. In fact, the word for the linen cloth the random naked guy left behind is the same word as the one for grave clothes.

In Galatians, Paul says, “For all of you who have been baptized have clothed yourselves in Christ.” When you’re at your wits end, at the end of your rope, and at the end of your life and have no other hope, you have this promise: Christ clothes the naked with his righteousness. Jesus, God in the flesh, wraps himself around your shame. Christ takes on sinners like you and me, and spins such fine garments for them that in the book of Revelation the hosts of heaven look at them and say, “Wow. Who are these people arrayed in white?” The answer is that they’re the ones who were brought low in life, the ones made naked and who knew it, the ones who came to Jesus in their need. Every time we baptize a baby and dress her in a white baptismal gown, it’s announcement that the nakedness of sin has been covered in Christ’s mercy. Every time you see a pastor in a white alb, it’s a proclamation that sinners like Russ and Greg have also put on Christ. And every time you see a coffin draped in a white funeral pall, it’s a promise that even the naked truth of death is covered over in the Lord’s resurrection mercy.

You gotta love that random naked guy who ran from the danger of Jesus’ arrest and, like you and me and sinners everywhere, found himself running right into the Lord’s arms. How else could Mark the naked runner have ever had the courage to tell the story of a God who comes in the flesh, who is abandoned and killed by the very people he’d come to save, and who rose from the dead with a glorious eternal obsession to clothe, claim and forgive sinners? Mark knew what it meant to have his sin covered over, and now so do you. You clean up so nice. Amen.