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.

The Death and Life of the Horseman Uncle

I was honored to be asked to speak about my uncle, Bobby Jones, at his funeral at. St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Sturgis, SD, on April 27, 2019.

My uncle Bobby was the consummate West River horseman and rancher, and for his first four decades a bachelor cowboy at that. The best photo I’ve ever seen of him is one that my cousin Anna took of him sitting up against a fence at the 2 Lazy J Ranch. Those long legs are all folded up like some cowboy origami, all elbows and knees. He has a straw cowboy hat on his head, a pair of black boots with scuffed toes on his feet, and a set of reins in his hands. With his long face and equally long beard, he’s nodding at the horse, and the horse nuzzling his hand seems to be nodding right back, as if there’s some unspoken language they both know – which wouldn’t be surprising when you’re dealing with a horse whisperer.

There’s a side of Bobby that’s well represented there: silent, stoic, thoughtful, still. This is the Bobby who would do his ranch chores with an eye to the horizon, watching for smoke to forestall the disaster of a prairie fire or the loss of a haystack that had been hit by lightning. Or keeping on top of the signs that his heifers were about to calve for the first time. Or silently stoking a stove-full of wood in the ranch living room to keep us warm at least until the wee hours before a winter dawn. No words. Just do the work. Git ‘er done. Do it all over again the next day. About the only time before he retired to town that I saw Uncle Bobby not actively taking care of the ranch was a 20-minute stint each day after lunch, when he and Grandpa Buster would take a quick nap on the floor in the living room and recharge for whatever haying or cattle feeding was in store during the afternoon.

I don’t expect that’s much different than it’s ever been for the men folk among the ranches of central Meade County, including Bobby’s best friend Floyd Cammack, or the Youngs further south, the Mikkudiks at the place north of ours, or the Bruchs and Vigs heading over to Fairpoint on the Old Stoneville Road. The ranch women had their extension club where they could connect. But the men would stand next to each other, leaning on their pickups after fetching the mail at the Stoneville Store, and say everything that needed to be said, but with as few words as possible. This is the ranching ethos, and Uncle Bobby served it faithfully.

Under that stoic demeanor there was a jokester and an imp. Bobby could get away with a quick-witted line under his soft voice. He’d say something about his beard covering up his turkey gobbler neck and then patiently wait for you to catch on. Healthy ribbing and leg-pulling were skills he’d mastered. The subtle joke was always better than out-and-out yuks. But when Uncle Bobby heard a good one he had a smile that stretched wider than a section of land, and he’d laugh with the best of ‘em.

Uncle Bobby was a steady presence in my life. He sat me behind the wheel of the old backward tractor and showed me the clutch and shifting lever, so I could help scoop up windrows and bring them to wherever he had the cage set up to stack hay. Later he taught me to drive the John Deere tractor with the hay fork on the front end. Still later it was that gold Chevy pickup with the plastic seat covers that left an imprint on your thighs. He trusted me to follow directions, be safe, and get my task done. It was from Uncle Bobby that I gained a love for peeing without walls. We’d be out with the cows, and he’d undo the four buttons on his Levis and let flow. This is an activity I believe we need more of in this world. He taught me to grab a cow’s teat just-so and showed me the rhythm of my fingers that brought milk squirting into a stainless steel bucket. He taught us kids to be careful in the granaries around the ranch and climbing stacks of bales behind the barn, so we’d be delivered back to our parents alive.

There are so many things in my life that continually remind me of Uncle Bobby. When I’ve let the lawn go too long between mowings and I think I could bale the grass, the smell of the new-mown grass takes me back to Bobby cutting alfalfa field across the road from the Stoneville School. When I catch a whiff of diesel fuel, I’m right back at the tank west of the garage with Bobby filling up the John Deere. Whenever I see the arc of something being welded on TV, I think of Bobby taking time to weld bolts, washers, and nuts together in the shape I wanted to make some goofball kid art project, which wasn’t far from how he created beauty from a strip of leather and a few tools. The feel of a rope in my hands takes me back to the contraption Bobby made to braid baling twine. And each semester he’s there when I tell my students about Christ the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world, I recount how Bobby and Grandpa would save an orphaned lamb from winding up on the ranch’s bone pile, by skinning a dead lamb and jacketing its skin on the bum lamb and presenting it to the dead lamb’s mother.

And of course there’s Aggie. I don’t know if my bachelor uncle ever had other shots at love and romance, and he sure waited long enough. But I’m grateful he was slow on the marriage front, because he and Aggie gave me a model in their long and faithful commitment to each other. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis, once said that your love can’t sustain a marriage, but a marriage can sustain your love. That’s what I saw happening between Bobby and Aggie over more than just shy of forty years as they depended on each other, filled in the gaps, and raised their three kids, Patrick, Anna, and Ted. Bobby brought me an aunt who understood me, who could talk literature and liturgy and love of family each time we met up.

These last years haven’t been easy. Bobby and Aggie had looked forward to traveling. That didn’t happen, although seeing pictures from Anna and Mark’s Jamaica wedding proved to me that an old rancher can learn new tricks. From the waist up Bobby was all cowboy, complete with hat and western-cut shirt with pearl snaps. But go south from there and find shorts, white legs, and flip-flops under Caribbean skies. Bobby in shorts? Who knew that my uncle was capable of it?

Whenever I asked my dad about the ranch or relatives or the history of the clans of honyockers who homesteaded this West River country, my dad always said, “We’ll have to ask Bobby.” Uncle Bobby was an amazing repository of lore. He was the only person I knew who could keep track of who the Shaeffers, the Cales, the Braziers, the Crows, the Dows, and the Mutchlers in our extended clan were. With my dad, Aunt Ida, and now Uncle Bobby gone, all those stories have disappeared. With the lore gone, we’re left with my beloved Stoneville Steadies history books and whatever paltry information Ancestry.com can offer.

When my siblings and I were growing up there used to be a billboard for Rapid City Clothiers along I-90 south of Piedmont. It was a giant pair of bow-legged blue jeans and cowboy boots. Nothing from the waist up. Just a 20-foot pair of Levis. Every time we drove past we kids would point to them and say, “There’s Uncle Bobby’s blue jeans,” because he was such a tall and lanky drink of water.

It seems impossible that what we have of him fits in this little container. But we’ll take it out to Red Owl this afternoon and place it in the ground just a ways from the church where Aggie brought him Sunday after Sunday, like the paralyzed young man’s friends brought him to Jesus in Mark’s gospel. It’s the cemetery where Grandma and Grandpa, Aunt Ida Mae, and countless friends and neighbors have been laid to rest. In a couple months that prairie graveyard will be surrounded by yellow clover and sit under wide open skies. In a way we’ll release Uncle Bobby to the elements, the land he loved, the countryside where he worked tirelessly. And we’ll give thanks for his twinkling eyes, his unassuming voice, his hands that could fix anything with some baling wire and a pair of pliers, and his gentle heart that loved with quiet strength. Blessed be his memory.

My Uncle Carl: the King of the Pasture

I was privileged to write a piece that was read at my Uncle Carl's funeral at First Prebyterian Church in Sturgis, SD, on March 4, 2019.

Dear Candy, Lisa, and Carl,

I’m grateful for the chance to write a few words about your dad, my uncle with the ready smile, the barrel chest, and such resilient faithfulness to his work, his community, and his family. Uncle Carl was a steady presence in my first couple decades, when we’d gather at the Atoll school for Christmas programs and at the ranch afterward to open gift, or when we Jones kids would spend a summer week each year playing or picking potato bugs down in the garden and dropping them in a jug of kerosene. Whatever we did Uncle Carl was there.

In the winter time he’d be dressed in coveralls and a Scotch cap heading out to feed cattle, in the summer it was a straw cowboy hat and work cowboy boots, and on trading days when he’d come to town he’d be decked out in that black leather vest, white shirt, black hat, and black cowboy boots. And along with it came the badge of a working cattleman: an untanned forehead. That was nothing, though, compared to seeing Uncle Carl when he took off his pants at bedtime. We’d be dazzled by the brilliant light show of his tighty-whities in combination with the brightest white legs that had never seen a ray of sunshine.

In my memory Uncle Carl took his work seriously. Successful cattle operations don’t appear magically, and he came by his hard-working way honestly. That’s what his folks, Jack and Ella, brought him up to do. And it was the legacy from his grandparents and your great-grandparents Carl and Liesel who came from Germany and homesteaded that Diamond-S Ranch in central Meade County. The spirit of the honyockers remained strong in him, that pioneer generation that plowed the gumbo and ran the Herefords, making do and often barely getting by. Uncle Carl was a man of the land, always more comfortable it seemed without a roof over his head, which might have been the reason behind his buying that red convertible. I remember him putting the top down and racing north to Jim and Vicky’s place, with gravel dust billowing behind us but blue skies above.

I never put much stock in the fact that Uncle Carl was on the school board. He was just my uncle. Besides, no kid understands how those things work, and I somehow had the idea that my Meade County ranching kin couldn’t have been as important as bankers and attorneys in the county seat. But I know now that they’re the salt-of-the-earth folks who actually make life work. And looking back now I can see the qualities that planted him on that board and rooted him there for all those decades: his honesty and trustworthiness, his diligence, and even the example of civic service he no doubt had from his own uncle, Jake Wahl, who himself served on the school board and in the South Dakota legislature. Uncle Carl had a commitment to making the world around him better, more productive, more efficient, more able to bear fruit into the future.

Of course, Uncle Carl had a side that truly delighted in those times when he let down. He knew how to have rigorous and righteous fun. I remember him at a rodeo in Union Center pulling a cold Schlitz out of a cattle tank filled with ice and beer cans on a hot summer day, with a lit Camel in his other hand. And I can still see him, rifle in hand, shooting rattlesnakes with the other menfolk, or watching us kids traipse around Goblin’s Gardens, or stomping the snow off his boots as he carried an armload of Christmas gifts into our house. Every memory includes his hat cocked a little to one side, a glint in his eye, and sideburns to spare. Put Uncle Carl on a dance floor, whether at the Red Owl Hall with my own grandpa playing banjo in the band, or at those early German Club Oktoberfests in Rapid with a polka band, and you’d see the picture of suave delight.

It’s been over forty years since I lived in Sturgis, and I’m sorry that I hardly knew Uncle Carl as an adult. That’s how our regrets work, don’t they? If I could, I would have asked him about the event that in a round-about way led to my existence. I’ve heard about the destruction of a car in the mid-50s and some resulting trouble with the law that involved your dad and mine, and how it led to both of them deciding that the better part of valor meant a hitch in the military. My dad’s service took him to Germany, where he met my mom and where I showed up on the scene. And it’s also the connection that got your mom to follow us with Vivien in tow back to South Dakota, and why you three also exist.

I’m thankful for your dad, my dear Uncle Carl. Over the years he came to resemble a big old red-and-white Hereford bull surveying the pasture he’d been given dominion over. But not even the greatest prize-winning bull ever had Uncle Carl’s straight line of white teeth that would stretch into a gleaming grin. When he directed it at me, it was his vote of approval and my own point of pride. I’m looking forward to seeing his smile restored, along with the rest of him. I hear the Pearly Gates are really less of a gate than a cattle guard that keeps the cloven-hoofed from crossing over and allows the rest of us to roll in. I suspect Uncle Carl is on the other side, refusing the haloes they’re handing out and demanding his black cowboy hat back. Thanks for sharing your Papa with Gine, Troy, and me, and with all of us who’ve been blessed to know him.

Love,

Kenny

Is God male or female?

Chapel at Grand View University this semester focuses on common questions students ask about the faith. This sermon was delivered September 25, 2018.

Our question we’re tackling today is this: “Is God male or female?” The easy answer is “No.” Thank you very much. Have a nice walk to your next class. And enjoy the extra ten minutes. Amen.

Of course, the answer is no because God is God and not a creature. Back in ancient Greece, Xenophanes, who lived a few hundred years before Christ, could have told you that. A couple weeks ago, my Ancient and Medieval Philosophy students learned that Xenophanes argued that it’s just wrong to think of the Greek gods as having human bodies. And thinking the sun is Apollo’s fiery chariot streaking across the sky isn’t much better. If our own God is going to be God, then we’d also be wise about assigning gender to a being who’s way more than a binary creature with either internal or external plumbing or X and Y chromosomes.

In Genesis we hear that God made human beings male and female and that they were made in God’s image. But that doesn’t mean that we’re male and female because God is multi-gendered. No, we have to look a few words later and see what God says about all that was created. When God’s divine identity was expressed out into the cosmos, God declared that it was all “tov me’od,” or “waaayy good.” God’s creation, including platypuses and pachyderms, spiny echidnas, and your high school cafeteria lady, is totes good. And so are you, no matter what body parts you have.

The hard thing about our question is that it assumes we can actually figure out something about God that God apparently isn’t interested in letting us in on. If only we knew whether God was male or female, then, depending on God’s gender, we could decide that women are manipulating she-devils or that men are full of toxically masculine demonic rage. And whichever one doesn’t match God can go back to hell where Satan’s spawn belong.

But our Bible passage this morning gives us some hope. In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul assumes we’re going to ask all kinds of questions that want to get at something about God’s essential nature. Stuff like, “Why did God let my cousin die so young?” and “If I prayed so hard for a homecoming date, why am I sitting at home with Ben and Jerry as my companions?” For Paul, no matter what our questions, when we try to get beyond the veil, all we’re going to find is ourselves. “For now, we see in a mirror dimly.” When we ask a question like ours, the only answer will be a reflection of ourselves. It’s all part of the limits of our thinking that God established in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We ask questions, and God will answer with silence.

But there’s hope in our verse. We look into that mirror and get a faint echo of God’s being. That means that we can learn something about God from human characteristics, even the most grievously stereotypical attributes we slap on the genders. We can learn about God from muscle-bound dudes and sentimental, weepy guys. We can learn about God from care-taking women and take-charge women. And those aren’t the only places we can learn about what God’s like. The opening litany we prayed today gives us a mighty list of things God has done that open up a vision of who God is. It’s admittedly a dim vision, but they’re clues nonetheless. It’s as if God were wearing many and various masks in this creation that show just as many and varied facets of who God is.

When we get no response to our question, maybe God is silent because God wants us to look elsewhere. It’s a dangerous thing to get behind the veil and see God’s full power and might (and maybe even God’s gender). When Moses asked to see God up on Mount Sinai, he only got to see God’s rear end and, because of it, was so changed that the Israelites forced Moses to wear a veil over his face. He was just too scary. So God sends you to encounter God where you can come to know God’s fullness in a way that God wants to be known: in the person of Jesus. There you have God made flesh and bone, with all the requisite and specific body parts real human beings have. Which isn’t to say that the almighty God is male, but only that God showed up in this one, Jesus. And because he was male in that patriarchal society, he suffered humiliation and degradation on the cross in a way that it wasn’t possible to experience for a woman.

But maybe I’ve misunderstood the question today. Maybe the question is really about whether we can use language other than male terms to address God. If so, we have Jesus’ example. Certainly, he taught us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” But Jesus also gave us the image of a hen bringing her chicks under her wings as a way to understand God’s great care for us. And we have the Old Testament witness of Proverbs that speaks about God as wisdom. In Hebrew, that word is “sophia.” Have you ever heard of a guy named Sophia? The point is that God doesn’t much care about our little pronouns and divisions of the creation according gender. God cares about whether you send your prayers God-ward at all.

Find a way to talk to God, all the while knowing that your words and images are a dim reflection of who God really is. If you don’t like calling God “Father” because your dad is a jerk, then know that God’s definition of father is so much greater than a fallible sperm donor. Know that a hen and her chicks is just one aspect of who God is. God is also a rooster crowing his delight at the sunrise and the rising of Jesus on Easter. The possibilities are endless. But the beginning comes only when you speak to God. And there you have an entire Bible to use as your source.

You can address God by pointing to what God has done. “Almighty God, who answered King David’s confession of adultery and murder with mercy, grant me forgiveness as well.” “Gracious Lord God who stayed faithful to the Israelites in exile, even when they thought you’d forgotten them, help me to trust that you remember me.” “Holy Spirit who drove Jesus to be tempted in the wilderness, I’m out of control and ask you to take the wheel and drive me, too.” “Divine One, who came to Moses in the burning bush, my life is pretty dark, and I need you to burn a little brighter for me, so I can hang on.” “Good Shepherd, I’m a stupid sheep who’s gotten lost. Please find me.”

See how it works?  You have resources for prayer and an utterly human brain with all its limitations. But God delights in hearing you. If neither heights nor depths, nor principalities, nor angels can separate you from God’s love in Christ Jesus, then your human language is a mighty small hurdle for God. However you speak, it’s enough. Give it a go. Just connect. Amen. And A-women.

The Office of Preaching and the Church Today

This is a link to the lecture I presented to the Augustana District of Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) at its annual convention on May 5, 2018, in Hutchinson, Minnesota. It follows up on LCMC's discussion of qualifications for ministry at its gathering last fall.

Click on this link