Today was again one of those moments when, in the process of trying to put together my weekly devotion, the Holy Spirit came and gave me a nice “whack upside the head.” A text too perfect and too appropriate for the moment to be ignored.
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.
The passage from Isaiah 25 is one of the appointed texts for our funeral service. Fitting given that there has been a death in the Canadochly family just this morning and also that the shadow of death is cast long over both congregations that I serve in these times. Both church families are dealing with people with difficult cancer diagnosis. Both church families have lost prominent members to death in recent weeks and months. Death and its terrible power seems a constant presence in our lives right now.
It is very easy for us humans, who deal so easily and so fully with what is tangible, to believe that death’s power is limitless and unstoppable. We speak of it in hushed tones, as if we can somehow superstitiously summon its attention if we speak of it too openly or loudly. It frightens us and we would do anything to avoid its gaze.
But we Christians worship a God of limitless power and limitless compassion. A God who has promised to his people that death does not have the last word; that death’s power does have its limits. It could not stop Jesus Christ, though he was dead and buried three days, he still rose again on that first Easter. And through his resurrection, Christ promises that the same will be true for us. That the grave will not hold us or those we love long, that as it did with him, it surrender us back to life once more.
Isaiah’s prophecy is a vision of that day when the grave will surrender at last all those it has claimed: You, me, those that we love, generations long past, and generations as yet unborn in our time. That great moment on the last day when life triumphs at last. It is hard to cling to that hope when death’s shadow seems so immediate, but that’s the nature of hope: believing in what is not easily seen.
But the promise is real. Time and again throughout the Scriptures, God repeats the promise and gives vision to what we cannot see: the Day of Triumph that awaits us all. It may not seem that way, but that feast that Isaiah envisions is more real than death. Cling to that. Hold on to it and draw strength and hope from its truth. Amen.
Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on July 26, 2015
Scripture text: John 6:1-21
“Blessing, honor, glory, and might be to God and the Lamb forever. Amen.”
That’s just a small sample of the lyrics from “This is the Feast...”, one of many liturgical songs we often sing here in worship. These lyrics are drawn from the many songs of praise from the book of Revelation, such as Rev 7:11-12.
And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing,
‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor
and power and might
be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.’
These words all point to a God of magnificence, a God of wonder, a God beyond comprehension. A God of great strength and power, which shouldn’t be any surprise to anyone. We hear tale in Scripture that this same God crafted this universe in which we live, a universe so vast we have barely begun to measure it, let alone explore it.
I was witness to the power of this God in Detroit last week. What else could take the hands of teenagers and use them to transform one of the most wounded cities in our nation? Our children in VBS this week learned about God’s mighty power, his ability and his willingness to provide, to comfort, to heal, and to forgive. And we read today in Scripture of how God can take even the feeble fare of the disciples to feed thousands of people and how he is master of storm and water, time and space. That’s power alright.
And it, quite frankly, scares the hell out of us.
In one sense, I suppose that’s reasonable. After all, a god who can do these amazing things is also a god who can squash us like bug without a second thought. But that’s not typically the origin of our fears. We don’t fear destruction at the hands of this powerful God. More often, I think we fear transformation at the hands of this God. We fear he will not leave us as we are. We fear he will show us how wrong we are about so many things and compel us to change.
There is however a solution to this problem, one we’ve often embraced enthusiastically and vigorously in our society. And that’s to make God as petty and small-minded as we often are. There’s an old saying “God made mankind in his image, and then mankind promptly returned the favor.” This god, a reflection of ourselves, only tells us how right we are about things. This god never challenges us. This god will not and, in fact, cannot change us. He cannot transform us. He cannot make of us a new creation. And that’s precisely how we like it.
This god is small, manageable, not powerful, and very very comfortable. He’s a god of self-affirmation, of “atta-boys” and “good jobs.” A god that tells us what we want to hear. A god that lies to us in the exact same ways we lie to ourselves.
Problem is, that’s not the God of Scripture. That’s not the God I, as your pastor, am called to serve and proclaim. That’s not the God who created the universe, who created you and me. But we who serve the real God have a very uphill battle. Because telling you what you want to hear about yourselves is precisely what our society does so very well. We are lied to constantly and we eat it up.
Buy this shampoo and it will make you sexy. We know it’s a lie and we do it anyway. Own this car and you’ll be a real man. Use this body spray and women will fall all over you. You know it’s funny. People are so often cynical about politics; they’re all liars they’ll grumble. And yet when one of them, a candidate or a pundit, gets up there and lies in such a way that you want to believe it, you never second guess them. You just eat it up. “Oh, here’s one that tells the real truth.” The cognitive dissonance is astounding. In one breath, they’re all liars. In the next, they’re God’s own prophet. Of course, they’re a prophet of your god, my god, that puny weak little god we’ve made for ourselves, that tells us precisely what we want to hear, that tells us how right we are about everything.
Why are you here every Sunday? That’s a question we probably don’t ask often enough. Why do we do this, spend this hour or so together? Is it so we can be lied to again, told what we want to hear? So we can worship a tiny puny God that has no power to change or transform? Or we here to find the truth? To seek the real? The answers should be straight-forward, but so often they are not.
I know you guys. I’ve been your pastor for three years. I follow a number of you on Facebook. I hear what you say. I see what you post. I’ve seen snobbery. I’ve seen racism. I’ve seen classism. I’ve seen economic and educational elitism. I’ve seen you defend the indefensible. I’ve seen you tear people down. I heard and seen all these things, and sometimes I’ve heard them and seen them from my own mouth. Yeah, I’m guilty too.
So why are we here? Are we here so we can remain those things? So we can be unchanged and untransformed? All our hypocrisies and sins to stay as they are. Or are we here to allow a God of power, might, compassion, and grace to renew our hearts and minds and to make of us a new creation?
Because let me tell you about that God. It’s a God that did create our universe so vast that we can barely measure it and will probably never be able to explore it. It’s a God that did fashion you in his image, each of us fearfully and wonderfully made. It’s a God that came to this world incarnate as the virgin’s son so that we could know him more fully and more intimately. It’s a God who made the ultimate sacrifice so that we could be with him in eternity. This is a God who loves us more powerfully that we can know. A God who wants to provide for us, to comfort us in our sorrows, who wants to heal us of every malady, and who seeks to forgive our every sin and flaw.
I said in my sermon two weeks ago that “God loves us as we are, but he doesn’t leave us there.” No, what he wants for us is to be more truly ourselves. To cast off these petty hatreds and fears, to be set free from our addiction to being right all the time (even when we’re not). To give us a heart of love, not of superiority. He wants to change us, but maybe not in the way we think. He doesn’t want to make us into something else. God doesn’t want us to stop being who we are; he wants us to become more fully who we are.
One of the best moments of the Youth Gathering was Natasha “T” Miller, a spoken word artist, a rapper, a poet, and truly one of the highlights of the whole event. She got up on Thursday night in front of our crowd of 30,000 and spoke of her love of her city. She spoke with passion and with power about how she (and many others too, most likely) don’t want to Detroit become something else. They don’t want it to be New York or Boston or Seattle. They want it to be Detroit only more so. Well, that’s what God wants. He wants you to be you, only more so. He wants me to be me, only more so. He wants this world to be itself, only more so.
That’s the change that God offers. That’s the transformation he brings upon us. To be ourselves, only more so. To be our true selves, to be the person we were created to be.
And the God who can feed thousands on the meager fare of a handful, a God who can command the wind and waves to cease, a God who can bring a group of frightened disciples “immediately” to their destination without moving, that’s a God has the power to transform us into who and what we’re meant to be. That’s his plan. That’s his power. Embrace it, don’t run from it. Amen.
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the LORD with gladness. Come into his presence with singing.
I know I say this too much, but Psalm 100 is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. Unlike many of the other texts I say that about, it has been so for a very long time; since I was a child. There is just something about the full experience of God that compels us to express ourselves in song. As the old hymn goes, "how can I keep from singing?"
I did not post a devotional last week because I was away for the ELCA National Youth Gathering in Detroit, MI. Over 30,000 people came together in the Motor City for fellowship, for service, for fun, and for worship. I can tell you it is an impressive sight to see tens of thousands of people act out the Psalmist's words, making such a massive melodic cacophony as to shake the very ground.
Detroit is, as many know, a city in severe decline. In the last 40 years, it has lost over half its population. Neighborhood after neighborhood is empty or nearly so of residents. I lost count of the number of abandoned factories, warehouses, and storefronts I saw just driving to and from the hotel to downtown. Not exactly a garden spot into which to bring 30,000 screaming teenagers.
And yet, it is an ideal place for mission for that very reason. God sent us there not because it was luxurious or pleasant, but because it was broken and difficult. That was the point. In many ways, reading the historical narrative of David's conquest of Jerusalem in 2 Samuel reminded me of what we set out to do in Detroit. Take a broken place and make it glorious again. That is God's goal for the whole Earth. We did our part for one tiny piece of it.
Jesus' parable of the Lost Sheep drives this point home. God's purposes in the world are not to rescue those already rescued, but to go after those in need of rescue. The broken and the lost who are out there, outside the four walls of our churches, are the ones he came to save. He calls us to join him in this crusade, to seek the lost and the broken and to restore them to life.
The combined youth of the ELCA, 30k strong, gave powerful witness to this in Detroit last week, a moment the city will not soon forget. But what about us? In each of our neighborhoods and cities, there is blight and brokenness. It's not always as obvious as a run-down city like Detroit, but it is there. There is pain. There is hurt. There are people who are lost. God calls us to find them and bring them to him, so he may bring them to life once more. This is the plan. This is God's hope for the world.
And when it comes to fullness, there will be such a song as the universe has never known. Joyful noise indeed. Amen.
Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on July 5, 2015
Scripture text: Mark 6:1-13
Having the political opinions that I do and hanging out in the circles that I frequent, I hear a lot of scuttlebutt from atheists and agnostics about religion and religious people. As a pastor, I’m trained to be a reasonably good listener, trying to discern what is mere griping and what is legitimate critique. I have to say that they’re spot on more often than not. They say that religion tears people down, Christianity in particular, and I have to admit that often times they’re very right about that.
There is a vocal group of Christians who go on and on, from podiums and pulpits, that will tell you that God will only love you if you’re perfect. And if something about you or your life is not perfect, then God hates you. God hates you if you’re poor. God hates you if you’re not pretty. God hates you if you vote for the wrong people. God hates you if you’re different. And the events of your life, they say, are reflective of that. If you get sick, then it must be because you’ve failed and God is angry with your failure. If you have a setback at work or school, God is punishing you for some sin. And on and on it goes.
Far too many of us have internalized this message. Far too many of us have come to believe this lie. And we use it to bludgeon ourselves constantly over faults both real and imagined. We beat ourselves up for mistakes and weaknesses. And then we turn that bludgeon on others, going after them for all their flaws. Tearing at each other, bringing each other down. We do this all the time. Dog-eat-dog world.
The atheists are right. We tear each other down and religion is the reason why.
It’s nothing new. Two thousand years ago, in the time of Jesus, there would be much we would be surprised by. How a different a world it would be culturally, but here is one thing that we would not find surprising. The Pharisees, those guardians of propriety that they were, told much the same message as that vocal group of Christians that so many of us have believed. God only loves you if you’re perfect and if you’re not perfect, if you’re poor, sick, flawed in any way, then God hates you.
That was their message. Follow the rules, our rules, rules that we’ve cribbed from Scripture but we’re the ones who decide which ones are important and which ones are not. The rules are arbitrary, capricious, yet by them you can determine whether God cares about you or not. Do as we say, be proper, pure, and perfect, or else.
And then along comes Jesus. This carpenter’s son who goes amidst the poor and the downtrodden and brings a radical message: God loves you as you are and not as some religious bigwig thinks you should be. And he’s in their midst and he’s paying attention to them and he’s teaching them and he’s caring about them. And when the sick are brought to him, the blind, the lame, the leper, he doesn’t chide for their sins, he says “God loves you” and to prove it he lays his hand upon them and their ailment is cured.
God loves you as you are and not as you should be. That’s what religion is supposed to be about. That’s what our faith teaches. And how far we have fallen from that wondrous message. Far too often we have not been disciples of Jesus as much we’ve been disciples of those long dead Pharisees and taken up the mantle of being this generation’s “guardians of propriety.”
That’s not our job and it was never our job. And perhaps it is fitting to see in today’s Gospel lesson what our job really is. Jesus, after his work is done in Nazareth, sends out the disciples to go ahead of him and deliver his message to the places he intends to go. He tells them to do as he’s done: proclaim good news and heal the sick and that they will do this with his authority and power.
It’s a prelude, in many ways, of what will happen on the mountain of ascension, when Jesus speaks those words of instruction to all his disciples, to go into all nations and make disciples by baptism and teaching and that he will be with them in spirit and in power wherever they go. His words echo across the generations, calling us anew to this work.
I can tell you first hand just how important this work is. I have felt very keenly my own flaws of late. I know how imperfect I am, because I know how broken my body is in the midst of this illness. And that temptation is always there to listen to the words of those guardians of propriety that tell me that I’m worthless and a failure because I’ve succumbed to these symptoms. But I know instead that God loves me with a love that cannot be measured or described adequately in human language. He loves me as I am and not as I should be because you have told me that. You have told me that in your support and in your prayer, in your kind words, your compassion, and your friendship. You have been the kind of Christians Christ has called us to be.
And what Jesus is asking of us is that we not just be that with the ones we know and we’re very good at that part. But be that instead with everyone we encounter, no matter how different they are or how flawed they are. We know what the world does to us. It does that to everybody. Do know what power we have in the truth we’ve been told? Imagine what we can do for people if we say and do what Jesus has taught us, that God loves us as we are and not as we should be.
This is evangelism, people. We treat that as such a scary word and yet this is all it is. Showing people how much they matter to the one who created them. That’s what Jesus did. That’s what his miracles are about. That’s what his table fellowship, who he chose to eat with, that’s what it’s about. Telling people they matter, that they’re loved, that God loves them as they are and not as they should be. And it’s what the cross is about. St. Paul says that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While we were still imperfect, flawed, mistake-making, prone to error, God loved us enough to endure the cross for our sake. He didn’t have to fix ourselves for him to do that. He did it anyway out of that love for us.
Christ tells us that. The Scriptures tell us that. We tell that to one another. Now we are asked to tell that to the world. God loves us, all of us, as we are and not as we should be. Simple message. Profound truth. Amen.
Author's Note: I owe a great debt, not just for this sermon, but for much of my preaching to the late great Brennan Manning. It was he who popularized the phrase "God loves you as you are, not as you should be." I'm including below a YouTube video of one of his sermons. It's well worth the time to watch and listen. He says this truth with great clarity.
I wasn’t planning to make this about me. I really wasn’t.
But sometimes, the Holy Spirit throws a text at you that not only speaks to you
in your present circumstances, but also turns those circumstances into a
testimony for God. Well, that’s precisely what this week’s lectionary texts
did.
Many of you know that over the past two months I’ve been
struggling with some pretty significant health issues. It’s a frightening thing
to go, almost overnight, from a reasonably healthy man in his early 40s to
someone unable to function without copious doses of medication. There are many
days when I hear my own lament echoed in the words of the Psalmist.
My eyes fail with watching for your promise;
I ask, ‘When will you comfort me?’
For I have become like a wineskin in the smoke.
There is a spiritual element to illness. It may be one of the most difficult experiences we mortals must contend with. It saps our strength. It frightens our hearts. It discourages our souls. At times, it separates us from those around us, something that was even often codified in earlier ages (leper colonies and the like). It takes us from being fully human to something less.
It’s the reason Jesus uses healing miracles as a sign of the kingdom, showing us that God’s promises include restoration of all that we are from what illness has done to us. We get back our strength. We are given peace to calm our fears. And we are given hope.
But the road between now and that moment of restoration can be long indeed. Thus James writes to his people a call for patience in the midst of suffering. He calls us to remember the prophets, to remember Job, and how God fulfilled his promises to them. I often find this call to remembrance important, not only in remembering the struggles of those who went long before us, but also in remembering those around us here and now. Easily my biggest aid in the midst of my struggles have been my fellow Christians, many of whom are themselves either currently dealing with health troubles or have recently done so.
Where are the signs of God’s promise? Does he even care? The answer to those questions, question close to the heart of the suffering Psalmist (and to many of us), is right before us. It’s in the people God has given to us and remembering their struggle and their perseverance. God got them through it and we see that before us. It’s no accident they are in our life. They are a gift. They too are a sign of the kingdom, calling us to remember what God has promised.
Author's Note: With my weekly devotional, I'm going to wander off the reservation a bit this week. I know I've only been doing these for a few weeks now, but I feel I can't ignore recent events and none of this week's Scriptures fit very well with the issues I feel compelled to discuss today. So we're doing something a little different today.
I'm sure by now most everyone, unless you've been in the wilderness for 40 days like Jesus in his temptation, has heard of the Supreme Court's ruling on Obergefell vs. Hodges, or as most everyone knows it the "gay marriage case." The court came down 5-4 in favor of allowing same-sex marriage to be legalized in all 50 states of our union.
For some, this has been cause for great celebration. For others, this is a disaster of epic proportions. Personally, I am delighted. I feel that the church has, for many generations, over-emphasized the "regulation of sexuality" instead of the proclamation of the Gospel as its mission, particularly in recent years regarding same-sex relationships. There are only 7 or so verses in the 10,000 verses of the Bible that have anything to do with same-sex sexuality, so it doesn't seem very logical to me that this is as big a deal to God as we often make it out to be.
But to those who don't agree with me, that's okay. We are a big diverse church and different opinions on matters of faith and doctrine are to be expected and (honestly) encouraged. What I would ask is that people not buy into the hype and exaggerations of the panicked and the fearful (or those who would exploit the same for their own ends.) This is hardly the end of the world, no matter what your position or beliefs.
What I would ask you to do is to keep in mind the words of our denomination's founder, Martin Luther. In his many writings, Luther articulated what has come to be known as the "Two Kingdoms" doctrine, the idea that God rules the universe through two distinct and separate entities: The government (aka "the sword" or the Kingdom of the Left) and the Church (the Kingdom of the Right.)
The purpose of the Kingdom of the Left, i.e. worldly government, is to create order. To this end, it produces laws and enforces them. Some laws echo commandments in Scripture, such as the various laws regarding homicide echo the commandment "Thou shalt not murder." Others have no parallel in our spiritual writings, such as the law to stop at an intersection where a stop sign is posted. These latter laws fit the purpose the Left-Kingdom by keeping order and allowing society run reasonably smoothly.
Of course, with government being a human institution, things don't always work out perfectly, but the intent is still there. What government is not allowed to do is to infringe on matters of the soul. According to Luther, a government cannot tell you what to believe about matters of faith and God, cannot compel you to worship in particular way, and cannot order you to attend a particular church (or no church at all.) This is the territory of the Right-hand kingdom, the Church.
In Luther's own words...
God has ordained the two governments: the spiritual, which by the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people; and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and wicked so that they are obliged to keep the peace outwardly… The laws of worldly government extend no farther than to life and property and what is external upon earth. For over the soul God can and will let no one rule but himself. Therefore, where temporal power presumes to prescribe laws for the soul, it encroaches upon God's government and only misleads and destroys souls. We desire to make this so clear that every one shall grasp it, and that the princes and bishops may see what fools they are when they seek to coerce the people with their laws and commandments into believing one thing or another.
So what does all this have to do with gay marriage?
Well, what has essentially happened in Obergefell vs. Hodges is that the Kingdom of the Left has decided, for the sake of order, that there is a benefit to society in allowing same-sex couples access to the privileges and benefits of marriage. Things such as tax credits, visitation rights, inheritance, etc. are now available to same-sex couples as they have been to heterosexual couples. That's really it.
Well, what does this mean for the Church or for the individual Christian? Well, that depends. This ruling of the government does not presume to dictate the practice of either. There is no new law that now compels a church or a pastor to preside at a gay wedding if they do not wish to. There is no new law that requires an individual Christian to attend a gay wedding. Nothing has really changed in regards to what we might believe or how we might practice our faith. There is a lot of fear-mongering and hype that this is what has happened. It is not true.
And if it were, you would find me among those opposing such laws. Why? Because they cross that line between the Two Kingdoms. The government cannot tell me or you how to practice our faith. That is something only the Church can do.
In the long run, I suspect this will be a lot of "sound and fury signifying nothing." Homosexual individuals will be getting married; some of them in the church, but only if that is the wish of the individual pastor. The Church will continue to have this debate about the importance or lack thereof concerning those seven verses and people will continue to agree or disagree as is their wont. In the end, things will look pretty much the same as they do now. The sky is not falling. The end of the world is not nigh (at least, not anymore than it has been for these past two millennia since Christ ascended.) The world is still turning and will continue to do so until God wishes otherwise.
My hope, as I somewhat eluded to earlier, is that we, as the Church, move beyond the distractions of being society's guardian of morality. There is one lesson in this for those of us who center our lives more predominantly in the Kingdom of the Right, that perhaps we've lost our focus somewhat. We are here to proclaim the Gospel and to serve the world in need, to build up the Kingdom of God, not to be the new Pharisees who regulate people's romantic lives. That's really not our job. It's good to have a reminder of that.
