Sermon for Christmas Eve 2013

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on December 24, 2013
Scripture text: Isaiah 9:2-7

Merry Christmas everyone.

In my previous call in WV, I gained a reputation for being the pastor who didn’t like to play by the Christmas rules. Rules? There are rules to Christmas? Well, of course, there are. We all know them well. “Smile, it’s Christmas!” “Nothing bad can happen at Christmas.” “It’s the most perfect time of year.” Everything’s great and wonderful and happy. TV turns into Hallmark-y feel-good sappy programs where everything has a happy ending because it’s Christmas. Radio turns into Christmas carols non-stop 24/7. These are the rules. I hate them.

Yeah, there. I admitted it. I love Christmas, but I hate the Christmas rules. It’s just not me. I’m not a sentimental guy. I don’t go for extravagant displays of emotion about most things, and this time of year is no exception. I’m not one to put on a smile just because of a rule or a tradition or an expectation by others. If there’s a smile on my face this night, it’s because it’s real. It’s because I mean it.

And I don’t like schmaltzy saccharine-sweet pop culture either. I’m the kind of guy who thinks “Die Hard” is the best of all Christmas movies. It is totally unpretentious. There’s no sentimentality in it. No nostalgia (although it is over 20 years old now). No pretending that evil has disappeared. Bad things still happen. Evil still exists, even on Christmas.

While it’s still a bit of Hollywood fiction, it feels more real to me than most things about this holiday. It doesn’t play by the rules either, and I guess that’s why I like it.

What is real to you this night and what is just “playing by the rules?” Do we know where that line is drawn anymore? We go insane in our desperate attempts to create a perfect Christmas. We pack into stores and fight tooth and nail for that perfect ham for Christmas dinner or that perfect toy. We sing all the right songs and wear all the right clothes. We go to church, maybe the only time of year we do so. All for the sake of the rules. So I ask again, in the midst of all the traditions and expectations, the sentimentality and the nostalgia, what is real to you on this night?

For many, maybe even some of you, what is real is not the presents that will often lie broken and forgotten in a week’s time. It’s not in the visiting family and friends that will be gone again in a few short days. It’s not in the time off from work that lasts maybe 24-hours in our over-worked and under-paid world. Nor is it in the spirit of kindness, good cheer, and charity that will sadly vanish from our society like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight on the 25th. None of that is real because it is gone almost as quickly as it comes.

What is real is the pain that doesn’t disappear just because it’s Christmas Eve. What is real is the loneliness, which remains despite the cheer of this night. What is real is the illness that doesn’t stop ravaging our body despite the date on the calendar. What is real is the fear. Is there a job for me? Can I make ends meet to support myself, my spouse, my children?

Is that what is real to you this night? If so, then I am here to tell you that this night, the promise of this night, what is REAL about this night is especially for you.

You see, YOU are the reason we are here. YOU and your pain and your fears and your brokenness, that is the reason for the season. Oh, but Pastor, we say “Jesus” is the reason for the season. Yes, but why Jesus? Why did he come? Why did God bother to incarnate as a human being and be born in a manger on this night?

Why indeed if not to give God’s answer to the messed up world that we live in? A world in which pain, hypocrisy, grief, and guilt are real 24/7/365 for people. They don’t go away on this night any more than they do on any other, no matter what the rules are. We may pretend for this one day they aren’t there. But they come back. They always come back.

And it is because they haunt us so that this little baby is born in a manger. Christmas comes BECAUSE our world is so screwed up, not in spite of it. So...

• To the young man sitting on the edge of his bed, gun in hand, ready to end it all, I say to you that Christ came for you and he came because of your pain and broken heart.
• To the teacher who just learned one of his students was killed in an accident on the morning of Christmas Eve, I say to you that Christ came for you and he came because of your grief and shock at this tragedy.
• To the family who lays to rest one of their own on Christmas Eve, I say to you that Christ came for you and he came because of your sorrow and loss.
• To the one who lies in the hospital on this night uncertain of what disease keeps him there, I say to you that Christ came for you and he came because of your fears and anxieties about the future.
• To all of you here present who hide secret wounds behind a holiday smile, I say to you that Christ came for you and he came because of all you bear inside, the things the world never sees. Pain, guilt, regrets, whatever they are. He came for you and to give God’s answer to those things you carry within.

THAT is what’s real tonight. A world of sin and death and pain and a God who comes within it to set right what has gone wrong. Darkness into which the light has come.

It’s amazing to me how many of these classic Christmas scriptures begin in darkness. That’s not coincidental. “Those who have walked in darkness have seen a great light.” “A light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” We live in a dark world, my friends, but now the light shines out.

The funny thing about all our pretending is how it drowns out that light. What is light in the midst of light? Do you even see an individual light in a well-lit room? But make that room pitch black and your eyes will be drawn instantly to the flash of a candle being lit. You will never miss it.

That is what Christ is in our world. The flame of a candle in darkened room.

That flame burns in the darkness for you. Its light comes forth for you. For you, not as you pretend to be in the midst of holiday traditions, unwritten rules, and self-imposed demands of perfection, but for the real you: flawed, imperfect, and wounded. The Christ child comes for that person, living in that dark place. He comes for you in your grief, in your sorrow, in your fear and he says to you “I love you. I came for you. I will set right what has gone wrong for you.”

That is what is real. A savior come into a broken world and into broken lives to put things right. Christ comes in flesh. Christ comes as a human being with all that goes with it. All the pain, all the limitations, all the struggles. He knows what it means to be you.

And to make right what is wrong, he takes on all the world’s pain, all the world’s sin, into himself and goes to a cross. He does this for you; he dies for you. He dies to set things right, to bring an end to sin and death, to pain and sorrow. Then on the third day he rises and proves to all that it is done.

Jesus didn’t come into the world to give us one day of pretend bliss a year; he came to give us real joy for an eternity. This he did for you and you and everyone. To the hurting and the happy. That’s God’s answer to the evils that plague us in life. That’s what real on this night and every night. Light in the darkness. Our true hope, our real hope, in a broken world. Amen.

Sermon for Fourth Advent

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on Sunday, December 22, 2013
Sermon text: Matthew 1:18-25

“What’s in a name?”

Behind every name is a story. A tale to be told...

My late grandfather was nicknamed “Bup” because a two-year old me couldn’t pronounce “Pop.” Sarah’s brother is called “Kik” for much the same reason. That’s a story.

My previous congregation and previous community was notorious for odd nicknames. There was a guy in town named “Bowhunk.” There’s was an elder in the congregation named “Hun” (as in Atilla.) His wife was called “Pan.” There are stories behind those names.

Emily is named for my wife’s two favorite singers. There’s a story there.

People have wondered about my email nickname “Avouz.” Is it French? No, it’s nerd, the name of a heroic elf I created for a Dungeons and Dragons game long ago. Another story.

I was to be called Michael, but around the time I was born the news in WV was full of stories about the murderer Michael Schwarz. So I ended up being Allen instead.

What stories do your names tell? Are you named for someone, an ancestor, a celebrity, a famous figure in history? Is your nickname an allusion to a funny story only a few close friends know (or are allowed to share)? Is there a reason for an unusual spelling or why you prefer to go by your middle name instead of your first name?

Names do have meaning. We may not approach the naming of a child in quite the same way as the great figures of the Bible do, but we have our stories too. We have our meaning and our understanding, our tales and our anecdotes. Our reasons why we call ourselves what we do. There is a purpose behind each of our names.

So when we come to a story like our Gospel lesson today, it should not seem so alien to us that God and his chosen people also have purpose behind why they name themselves and their children what they do. Abram becomes Abraham. Jacob becomes Israel. Hosea is told to name his children names that condemn the apostasy of the people in the time of his prophecy. Mary’s name is translated “rebellious one” (Told you she was a punk.)

And Jesus is to be named Jesus. (Or Yeshua, as I said to the children.) He is to be named this because “he will save his people from their sins.”

His story, his purpose, his reason for being is right there in his name.

He is not the first to bear this name in the Biblical narrative. There is, after all, a whole book of the Old Testament named for the other Yeshua. Joshua, the story of the leader of the people who brought them out of the wilderness into the Promised Land. That connection is not coincidental. This new Yeshua will bring out his people from the wilderness of sin and death into a good and bountiful place. Life abundant. Life eternal.

This new Yeshua will go among the people. He will teach them and remind them of the heart of God’s commandments and promises. Love your neighbor. Care for those who lack. Bind up the brokenhearted. Treat even the unclean with dignity worthy of any who are created imago dei, in the image of God. He will give to them samples of what that new life will be like by healing the sick, the blind, the lame, the leper. He will unburden the hearts of those bent low by the regret and guilt of sins unforgiven by giving them what they need most.

His whole life will demonstrate the truth of his name. He will save people from illness, from hatred, from guilt. But his name carries a universal ring to it. It is not “God will save some” or “God will save a few;” It is “God will save.”

So to spread this salvation as far and wide as God desires, Yeshua, Jesus must do the unthinkable. He must take on all the sin and all the death in the world. And these he must carry to the cross and have them nailed there in his body. He “became sin who knew no sin.” He embraced death: God incarnate dying for his created ones?

He had to. To fulfill the promise of his name, he had to. For God to save you and me and all, he had to. It was the course he plotted. The path he chose. The purpose for which he was named.

Jesus. Yeshua. God is our salvation. God will save you. God has saved you. Amen.

Funeral Sermon for Dennis Herbst

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Sermon text: John 8:31-36

This is wrong.

Everything about this is wrong. He was too young. Fifty-four is much too young to pass away. The circumstances of his death are wrong. A heart attack while driving on the road home. The timing of it is wrong. We're a week away from Christmas. Bad things aren't supposed to happen at Christmas time.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Of course, there's a lot that's wrong in our world. We see on the news each night of something else that's gone wrong. War, disaster, disease, poverty, hunger. All wrong. Even within ourselves there is much that is not as it should be. We treat strangers as enemies and those we love most we too often take for granted. Our lives are far too brief. Our loves too fragile. We are not honest with ourselves or with others. We cave into our fears instead of doing what is right and necessary. We do not appreciate what we have. We obsess over those things we desire most.

All of it has gone wrong.

We are trapped in many ways by the wrongness of this world. Imprisoned by it, and no proof of that is more powerful and more conclusive than what brings us here today. We are gathered to mourn the death of a beloved friend, brother, son, and husband. We are here to mark the death of Dennis Herbst, a death that is, like so much else in our world, wrong.

Why? That's always a difficult question, especially when there was so much that was right in Dennis' life. He was a good man, hard working. Loved his wife. Loved his family. A man of the earth, ever comfortable tending his garden or being out in the woods. A quiet but thoughtful man. It was a simple life, but a good one. There was nothing in it that merited it being cut short so early. Nothing in it that one can point to that says he had this coming.

But deserve has nothing to do with it when the world has gone wrong. And it has. It went wrong a long time ago. And the fact that it has is something that God has busied himself with ever since.

You see, God has been wanting to fix what has gone wrong. He's wanted to fix the ways in which we mistreat each other. He's wanted to fix the brokenness of the world around us. He's wanted to make it so that none ever need gather like this again, bound together in grief, bound together by death.

Death and sin are what have made things so wrong in our world. But God has a solution.

It may seem wrong for Dennis to have died so close to the Christmas holiday, but there is something fitting and right about our gathering together now, at this time. You see, that's the solution. No, not the day itself, nor all the human traditions that we've built up around it.

It's that baby that's the solution: Jesus, the Christ. God incarnate and come down to Earth. Here to fix what has gone wrong.

That's why he came. And all of Jesus' life he shows us how he's going to fix everything. He came among us and taught us that love is greater that hate. He showed us that even those society abandoned were people of immense value to God. Those broken by the world, those who infirm or diseased, he gave them healing. Those burdened by guilt, he forgave. He fixed what had gone wrong for them.

But those handful of examples were simply that: examples. What Jesus really came to do, he would do for everyone. And so to fix everything, he handed himself over to death. And we, the very people he came to help, nailed him to a cross and left him to die. And die he did. But it was a death with purpose; it seemed wrong, but it was not random or meaningless. No, he died for us. God died so that we could live.

It may be hard for us to wrap our brains around that. But it is that truth that sets us free. It is the truth that sets right what has gone wrong. You see the story doesn't end for Jesus on Good Friday. It doesn't end at the cross. There's more for him and for us.

What await Jesus after the cross is the empty tomb of Easter. He returns. He is resurrected. Life emerges where death once held fast. And what has happened to our Christ is what he now promises will happen to us.

St. Paul writes of this promise in that wonderful passage that I read from Romans at the beginning of our worship. “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like this.” That's how this works. That's how everything that is wrong becomes right. Dennis, you, me, all of us just as we will see death, we will also see resurrection thanks to Jesus Christ.

It's why he came. That promise is sure. It is sure for Dennis. He will live again. It is sure for you and for me. We will live again. Death has been defeated. What was wrong in the world is now made right in Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sermon for Third Advent

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on December 15, 2013
Scripture text: Luke 1:46-56

(The inspiration for this sermon comes from this commentary article by Roger Wolsey.)

In the mid 1970s, musicians tired of the glamour and fanfare of disco and other popular music of the day began an underground movement. They began to form bands and write songs based on simple melodies, stripped down instrumentation, and lyrics with a definite anti-establishment theme. These groups had a dark edge, filled with anger with little sentimentality or respect for tradition. Their names were the Ramones, the Clash, Joy Division, and (most infamously) the Sex Pistols. They were punks and their music, which remains popular today, is known as punk rock.

If you looked over the width and breadth of my music collection, you would find very few musicians who did not owe some debt to the punk rock scene of the late 70s. They were hugely influential, in large part because they recaptured what rock-n-roll music was supposed to be about: youthful rebellion, standing up for yourself, and refusing to take the world as it came.

Refusing to take the world as it came? Distaste or even hatred of the status quo? I’ve heard something like that somewhere else recently. Oh, yeah, right here in our lessons today. In fact, in the very psalmody we just read together. The Magnificat, the song of Mary, mother of Jesus.

“he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

My friends, that’s a song of revolution, of transformation, of defiance of the established order of things. That’s a punk rock song, written 2000 years before Malcolm MacLaren ever brought the Sex Pistols together. Mary was a punk.

In a lot of ways, that really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Think about it. She’s young, teenager. She’s pregnant, unmarried, and devoted to a God who seeks to change the system, to transform this world into something better. She is the epitome of what it means to be punk, again 2000 years before that movement sparked off.

I said last Sunday that hindsight is not always 20/20 after all and here is yet another example. We’ve always thought of the Pharisees as mustache-twirling villains when they were really like was just ordinary folk trying to do what they thought was right (and admittedly being wrong about it.) Here too, we’ve always seen Mary as this demure soft pretty little girl. Safe, kind, harmless but her song reveals that she is anything but. This is a person hungry for a new world, the one that God has promised to deliver. One where all the injustices of the past are made right. She is a revolutionary, a rebel, a devoted follower of a God who is likewise a revolutionary and a rebel.

We have all lived our lives seeing religion and the church as an intrinsic part of the establishment. Marx called religion the “opiate of the people” for precisely that reason; He saw it (as do we) as an institution dedicated to upholding the status quo. But the God Mary is speaking of, the one that is becoming incarnate in her very womb, is nothing like that.

No, this is a God who came to a herdsman of Ur named Abram and told him, “I am going to make of you a new nation, one that will change the world.” This is a God who, generations later, molded that man’s descendants into a chosen people by the leadership of Moses in the wilderness. This is a God who established with those people a just and good society, led by a kind named David. When those same people lost their way and gave in to injustice and oppression, this same God sent to them prophets to call them back to what they were meant to be. A new order, a new way of life, an example to the nations of what life could be. Of what life is supposed to be.

Life where none are left hungry. Life where no one is looked down upon or discriminated against for being different. Life where the sick are cared for. Life where everyone is valued and loved for who they are. That’s the world that God promised and that’s the world that Mary knows is coming through the birth of her son. A world that will be embodied in him, for those virtues, those hopes, those promises will be the core of his life.

And that we’ve seen. There is nothing about Jesus that fits in with the establishment, nothing about him that goes along with the status quo. He dares to heal the sick. He dares to welcome the outcast. He dares to love the unlovable. He too is a punk, a rebel with a cause, a revolutionary here bring about a new order.

Maybe we need to be punks ourselves. Maybe the Church needs to cease being part of the establishment and become an agent of change in our sick and twisted world. You see, I think that’s what Jesus is calling us to do. He’s calling us to join him in his revolution. Daring us to do as he does. To care for the sick, the hungry, the less fortunate. To love the unlovable. Challenging us to no longer be content with the world as it came, but to work to make something better of it.

Because that was what he did. That was Jesus’ whole life, even to the very end. In many ways, there are two dynamics to Jesus’ life and ministry, two elements to his revolution. One is the macro, where the whole world is changed, but there is also the micro where he comes into your life and mine to change us as individuals. You see, our establishment needs overthrown as well. We live in bondage to sin and death. We are prisoners of our own oppression. It is this twisted reality that we often foist onto others and that’s what makes the world what it is today. If Jesus’ revolution is to work, he can’t change one without the other.

And so to change us and to change the world, he allowed himself to be taken prisoner, tried as a rebel and insurrectionist, and then, as many of those guilty of those crimes often are, is put to death. But like everything else in his life, this death had purpose. It was the break the bondage we have found ourselves in and to bring about a new reality in each of us. Sin and death overthrown. The fulfillment of a promise God made long ago.

God’s punk revolution is at hand. A new world of justice, peace, and love awaits. And it is his Church, you and I, that he calls to be revolutionaries for the sake of others. A new world, a new order, life as it should be. The world that Mary sang of in the first punk rock song. The world that God has promised to all of us. Amen.

Postscript: Those who know a little about pop music and punk history might notice a few choice phrases ("new order," "not taking the world the way that it came"). That's completely intentional.

Sermon for Second Advent

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on December 8, 2013
Scripture text: Matthew 3:1-12

“Hindsight is 20/20” or so the old saying goes. But what if I told you that isn’t always true? Sometimes, looking back on the past gives us a more distorted view of life than if we had actually been there. I first encountered this truth when I was studying for my undergraduate degree in history. One of my professors was full of pithy little sayings, many of them full of great truths. One of them was that “history is not the study of what happened; it is the study of what is remembered.” Sometimes, you have to dig through a lot of distortion, perception, and just plain prejudice to get at the truth.

Take the Pharisees for instance. That “brood of vipers,” as John the Baptist calls them in our Gospel lesson today. The perennial villains of the Gospel story, the bad guys, the ones who are just chomping at the bit to do evil each day. You can almost imagine them having this Snidley Whiplash mustache that they can twirl as the scheme and plot. I mean, that’s how we’ve always seen them. They’re the enemy of Jesus, the enemy of God, and all that they stand for.

That’s how we remember them, in large part because that’s how the Gospel writers wrote them. But as I said, hindsight is not always 20/20 and I’m here to tell you that we’ve got them wrong. Oh, there’s no question they did some pretty bad things, but our image of them as rotten to the core is not even remotely accurate.

If you could go back in time and sit down with a typical Pharisee of the 1st century and if asked them what they believed and how they practiced their faith, you’d come up with a list that really isn’t all that different than what you and I might create if asked that same question. These were people who wanted to do what was right. People who wanted to be closer to God, wanted to do good. They wanted to be pure, they wanted to be righteous.  And they tried very hard at it, as many of us do.

Why then did they end up at odds with characters like John the Baptist or Jesus himself if that was their goal? If these were truly people who wanted to genuine followers of God’s way, why were not among Jesus’ most fervent allies? Admittedly, some were, but for the rest who came to oppose him, it’s probably very hard for us to imagine why.

Many of you who are here are retired or have been in your chosen professions for a great long time. Imagine for a moment some hotshot kid walks into your job and proceeds to tell you that everything you’ve been doing at that job for all those years has been wrong. He tells you that you don’t know what you’re doing. He tells you that even the fundamentals of your skills are incorrect. THAT is what it was like for the Pharisees to hear the preaching of John the Baptist for the first time.

They thought they had the answers. They believed they knew what God wanted. And along comes this upstart, this wild man of the wilderness, who dares to tell them they’ve got it wrong and they’ve had it wrong for the whole of their lives. Their teachers had it wrong, several generations of wrong. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! That’s all they heard out of John’s mouth and it’s hard for us to imagine how shocking that must have been to them.

They were the experts. They were the ones who had poured over the Scriptures. They were the ones who supposed to have it right. They did have it right, or so they thought. How dare this madman tell them otherwise!

The truth is, the madman was right. The Pharisees did have it wrong. They had it wrong because all their piety, all their morality, all their righteousness was turned inward. It was all about being pure. Not eating this. Not touching that. Not associating with “those people.” But God isn’t interested in purity. What he’s interested in is compassion. And that’s what John teaches. Give to those in need. Sacrifice for the sake of others. True righteousness is not about the good that you are, it’s about the good that you do for others.

When Jesus shows up not too much later, he puts that very idea at the heart of his ministry. The sick, he heals. The hungry, he feeds. The rejected and outcast, he welcomes. The sinner, he forgives. If God was so concerned about purity, as the Pharisees believed, Jesus would never have gone near any of them. But time and again, we see the Messiah in the midst of the impure and unworthy. Again, how shocking must that have been for those who thought they had it right all along.

How shocking is it for us when we think we’ve got it right and the words of the Baptizer and the actions of the Christ challenge us to our very core? How many of us have come to believe in our own righteousness, in our own rightness? We are good people! How dare some upstart tell us otherwise!

The esteemed Bishop of Rome, Pope Frances, recently released his first encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, in which he criticized the disparity between the rich and the poor in our world caused by unchecked capitalism. How dare he speak ill of our economic system! What is he, some sort of Marxist? A communist pope? No, a Christian one, one that sees that our economic system, like all human-created works, has its flaws and with those flaws come injustices that need to be addressed. It is we who have enshrined capitalism as an unquestioned good. We who may have gotten it wrong.

I hear Westboro Baptist Church is planning another protest surrounding the funeral of celebrity Paul Walker. Now most of us, I think, would not agree with that church’s extreme tactics, but many of us are convinced that homosexuality is a pretty egregious sin, one that the Bible concerns itself a great deal about. So much that it dedicates seven verses speaking to the issue. Seven...out of over 50,000. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that who a person sleeps with is not as big a deal to God as we make it out to be. Maybe we’ve got it wrong.

If you’ve read the newsletter, you’ve heard my thoughts on the so-called “War on Christmas” that comes into vogue this time every year and that nonsense about which greetings are appropriate and which are not. For one month a year, we turn Christmas into a bludgeon with which to hammer people whose beliefs and practices are different from our own.

The most Christian time in our society, a time of peace, goodwill, charity, and kindness and we are seeking to transform it into a time of anger, animosity, distrust, and outright hatred. It’s not them who are waging war on Christmas. It is us. We’ve got it wrong.

So how many of you are feeling a little uncomfortable in your seats? How many of you are angry with me for saying what I just did? If so, you’re beginning to understand what it was like for the Pharisees to hear the words of John the Baptist. Now you know why they sought to kill him and also the one who came after him.

Truth is, my friends, we are often the Pharisees of this day and age. It is not comfortable or pleasant to have our long-held beliefs challenged. But that is what the Baptizer does even now across the ages, reminding us that it’s not about purity. It’s not about how good we are, it’s about the good that we do for others.

When we remember that, the Pope’s criticisms make sense. We see the truth of them. The LGBT community becomes human again, just people like us. And maybe it’s not such a good idea to lambast some poor underpaid store clerk for not giving us the proper Christmas greeting. But even more important than these examples is how we start to understand the mind of Christ.

It’s not about purity. It’s about compassion. If it was about purity, Christ’s mission here on earth would have been pointless. None of us lives a sinless life. None of us are pure enough. None of us righteous enough. None of us good enough. If that was to be the heart of our salvation, then there would be no salvation.

Christ is pure. Christ is righteous. Christ is good. But that’s still not what matters. What matters is the good he can do for others, for us. And in that compassion, he did come down to earth. He was born of a virgin in a stable on Christmas night. He grew up and then went to the cross. He died a bloody impure death because that was what was necessary to save us. He did the ultimate good for our sake. He showed us what righteousness really is. What goodness really is. A life given for others. A life given for you and me. Amen.

Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on December 1, 2013
Scripture texts: Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44

"Those who see God as angry, do not see him rightly." - Martin Luther, Luther (2003)

When I was a teenager, my church youth group would take a trip each year from WV to the mountains of central PA to the Creation festival. Three days of Christian music, preaching, and camping out under the stars. Some of my best memories of those years of my life took place at that festival, not the least of which is that is where I met my first love.

One night, as my friend Doug and I were walking back from a concert, we were spontaneously invited by another group of youth. Among them was this girl, Jen. She was funny, cute, and for this oft-bullied nerd,  a girl that actually seemed to WANT to talk to me. I fell head over heels almost immediately.

Over the next several years or so, I pursued her like a man obsessed. She was the one I wanted more than anything else. But she was not quite as enthusiastic in her affections for me as I was for her. I remember very clearly one conversation we had many years ago now. She told me that she felt I was more in love with the person I thought she was than who she really was.

She walked out of my life not long after that conversation.

Truth is, she was right. I wanted so badly for Jen to be what mind and heart imagined her to be that I never really got to know the real person that she was. That didn’t really happen until just recently in my life. Through the wonders of Facebook, I’ve reconnected with her. Obviously circumstances are much changed now from those halcyon days of my youth. I am a happily married man; she has a wonderful boyfriend who loves her. But as we’ve gotten to know each other again, I’ve started to realize who she really is; I’m getting to know the real person and I’ve truly learned just how off-base everything I believed about her was.

I have woken up. The dream is over. Reality is now what I see.

I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t something like what I just described that motivated and inspired St. Paul to write what he did in Romans 13, our second lesson today. How many people in his audience thought they knew who this Jesus guy was really about by projecting on to him what they wanted to be true about him? How many of us think we know Jesus by projecting our wishes, our desires, and our delusions onto him?

Wake up! Time to stop dreaming! Snap out of it! Things are not as they seem. It is past time we stopped seeing things as we wish they were, and instead see them for what they truly are.

Nowhere in the Scriptures is a better test to help us see the real Jesus than in those apocalyptic texts that so popular in the lectionary around this time of year.

When I was last with you, I expressed my distaste for these texts, precisely because we project so much of our own anxieties and misunderstandings onto them, and by extension, onto Jesus himself. The end result is the person of Jesus in our minds becomes distorted into something utterly unlike who he really is.

I’ll prove it to you. Let me read again what Jesus says in our Gospel lesson today: “They knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

What emotion do you feel when hearing that? Are you frightened? Does this scare you? Do you wonder if you will be the one taken or the one left? A lot of Christians do. Maybe some of us are among them.

Jesus isn’t telling us this to frighten us, but that’s what we hear. We wonder

• “Have I done enough?”
• “Am I good enough?”
• “Maybe if I give a few extra dollars today in the plate, that’ll do it.”
• “Maybe if I go volunteer at a soup kitchen tomorrow, then Jesus will really love me.”
• “I should probably share that picture of Jesus on Facebook again. Prove to him that I really do believe.”

That’s what we do. We hear a text like this, or pretty much any about the end times, and we wonder what will happen to us. And we try to calm those anxieties by doing something, anything that we think will appease this monstrous judgmental God we know is coming to damn us.

Wake up! That nightmare is false. It is a lie. Our God is nothing like that. If this is what any of us believe Christ to be, I’m here to tell you we’ve got it wrong.

This story is not here to frighten us. It is here to remind us of the unexpectedness of Christ’s appearance. God became incarnate of a virgin and was born as Jesus and almost no one in the world knew it had happened. His mother and father, a few shepherds, and a handful of foreign magicians. That’s it. His return will be no different. Christ himself has told us no one will see it coming.

But why does that frighten us? Have I done enough? Am I good enough? No, we haven’t, but that also doesn’t matter. Because Christ has come to each of us, marked us with his seal in baptism. Told us that he loves us without condition.

That’s the Jesus I want to know, the real one. The one that loved you and me so much that he died for us and for our salvation. The one who is coming back to welcome us and embrace us, not to punish us or to judge us unworthy. That’s who our Lord really is. We keep wanting to turn him into some sort of boogeyman. Straighten up or Jesus is gonna get ya!

But when I look to the cross and the person I see there is not some monster lurking the shadows waiting to snatch me up and devour me. No, he is the one who sees me truly, warts and all, and loves me anyway. Loves me beyond words. One who died to save me and rose again to give me life. And he does for me, so too for all of you. That’s who Jesus really is. Wake up, my friends. Wake up and see him. Amen.

Sermon for the 26th Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on November 17, 2013
Scripture text: Luke 21:5-19

The weeks between All Saints Day and the first Sunday of Advent take on an apocalyptic air in the life of the church. The texts from Scripture that we read on each of those Sundays are often drawn from various End Time prophecies out of Revelation, Daniel, and the Gospels. It's the one time of year we in the more mainline and mainstream church traditions focus on what our evangelical brothers and sisters spend most of the year on.

I may get in a bit of trouble for saying this, but to me, it's two to three weeks too many. As a culture, American Christianity is obsessed over the end of the world, an obsession we don’t really need to feed any further. We talk about it. We calculate it. We interpret each and every event in the life of the world as having some manner of cosmic significance. It borders on the neurotic and just as unhealthy as that clinical diagnosis implies.

Amy Dietz joked on Wednesday at Bible Study that we had come through another milestone. Apparently this week, the survivalist movement had predicted the great Black-out that would destroy society and usher in a time of chaos before the "end of the world." Nothing of the sort happened, of course. I replied with a joke of my own, having now survived Y2K, the end of the Mayan calendar, the great Black-out, and 2 or 3 of the Rev. Harold Camping's predicted second comings of Jesus. I also managed to dodge WW3 during the Cold War, so I guess I've got a pretty good track record when it comes to evading Armageddon.

This is typically my approach to this topic: amusement, laughter, maybe even a bit of mockery. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I am a historian and a theologian. The truth is, we've been in the End Times since Jesus' moment of ascension. For 2000 years, we've been awaiting Jesus' return and for all we know, it could be another 2000 before he truly comes back. He's shown no inclination so far of accelerating his time table. And for those who think "Well, surely he'll do it now. After all things are so terrible," I offer a reminder of just a few brief points of history that did nothing to change God's mind.

The Fall of Rome and the near destruction of civilization. The dawn of the Dark Ages and no Jesus. The Black Death. Remember the old college joke about looking at the person on your right and left and being told that only one of you will pass? Change that to "only one of you will survive" and you've got what that time in history was like. No Jesus then. Nazi Germany nearly enslaved the whole world in tyranny and fascism. Nope, no Jesus didn't come back then either. Krakatoa erupted. Chernobyl exploded. San Francisco flattened by earthquake in 1906 and Tokyo in 1923. Natural disaster, war, disease, famine, and for 2000 years, Jesus has not returned.

However much we might want to believe otherwise, our time in history is not any worse than any other. In fact, there is significant evidence life is much better now than it has ever been. We have to take the world as it is, not as we believe it to be or wish it were. But therein lies my conundrum. You see, I wish everyone realized the folly of wasting all this energy on something we have no power over nor can we predict with any accuracy. But that's what I want, not what really is. As it is, our world is full of people increasingly paranoid about the End Times. Terrified. Frightened. Paralyzed.

And what are we to do about that? Perhaps the best place to start is to ask what is it that people fear about the End Times.

Is it the turmoil of society that is supposed to prelude Christ's return? The danger of being imprisoned, tortured, or even executed for one's political or religious beliefs is reality for many people throughout our world, one we have thankfully been largely free of here in America. But what if that were to change in the chaos that accompanies Jesus' return? What if being a Christian (or the wrong kind of Christian) became illegal here?

Well, to that possibility and for the many for whom that is already reality, Jesus himself offers the counsel of our Gospel lesson. "I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be hated, but not a hair of your head will perish." Christ himself offers us assurance that, whatever chaos envelopes the world around us, we will endure. There is nothing to fear.

Perhaps that's not it. Perhaps it is the fear of what will happen when we move from this world to the next. For what it's worth, regardless of when Jesus returns, this is a reality we all will face in the moment of our death. But here again, the Scriptures offer a word: the promise of Easter. That because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, death no longer has its sting. Death cannot separate us from God. Life eternal is ours. I would lose count of the number of passages where this promise is affirmed: Romans, the letters of John, the Gospels, Galatians, even Revelation itself speaks to this truth. There is nothing to fear.

If not that, then what else could we fear so? Could it perhaps be God himself? Sometimes I think that truly is it. We've come to be afraid of God. Afraid that he will punish us. Afraid that we're not good enough for him. Afraid that he'll cast us into the pit of fire along with the rest of the sinners.

Well, if that's God's intent than I suspect he will find heaven a very lonely place indeed, for none of us are good enough. Not you. Not me. But if we've come to believe that matters, I ask again that we turn to Scripture and even to the examples I've already given. If damnation is to be our fate, then why would God bother to defend the believer who stands before a tribunal fighting for his life? Why would God bother with the whole incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus bit? Why would Jesus even show up the first time if all he's going to do the second time is cast us all into hell? That, my friends, makes no sense.

No, more rational, more logical, and far more true is what we find, time and again, in God's holy word. A god of love, of compassion, of mercy. One who cared about you and me enough to bother. To bother with Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. To bother to stand beside you and I in our trials. He bothers because you and I are loved by him and it is a love the likes of which mere words cannot express.

I said a minute ago we need to take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Well, that's what God does. He's not interested in a perfect world, because that doesn't exist. He's not interested in a perfect you, because that doesn't exist either. What he is interested in is you as you are. Me, as I am. The world as it is. The person that he loves in you and I and throughout this world is not what we could be or should be, it's who we are now with all our flaws, imperfections, and mistakes.

It was that person that Christ came to save. It was that person that Jesus died for, and it is that person who will stand beside Christ at his return. You. Me. God is not our enemy. He is our greatest and most passionate lover, an ally in all things.

And if that is who stands with us in the midst of all the things this world and this life throws at us, there is nothing to fear. Let the world end. So what? Let the world endure for another ten thousand years. So what? God remains and he remains ever by our side, his eyes full of love for who we are, not who we wish we were. Amen.

Sermon for Youth Lock-Out

Preached at St. John's Lutheran, New Freedom, for the Youth "Lock-Out for the Homeless" on November 16, 2013
Scripture: Joshua 1:1-2, 5-9

Trivia question. What do all the following have in common?

• Abraham
• Moses
• Elijah
• Jesus
• Peter
• Paul

If you said “they’re all people in the Bible,” you’d be right, but that’s not the only thing they share in common. You know what else? Every single one of them was homeless at some point in their life.

• Abraham is told by God to pack up his things and leave for a land he’s never seen.
• Moses leads the people of God wandering through the wilderness for 40 years.
• Elijah is exiled from the king’s court and to avoid getting himself perished, he wanders about the countryside where no one can find him.
• Jesus leaves his home to begin his ministry and never really returns.
• Peter is called from his fishing boat by Jesus and spends the rest of his life on the road.
• Paul is famous for his great missionary journeys which take him from one corner of the Roman Empire to another.

In fact, this is only a short list of the homeless characters in the Scriptures. There are dozens, if not hundreds, more. Some of them walk away from hearth and home by choice; they are called to a new life by God. Others are forced from their homes by threat of war. Some are kidnapped and taken away. Some are exiled as punishment. Still others are carried off into slavery. The Prodigal Son is a story about a homeless young man. Lot is driven from Sodom before the cataclysm that destroys the town. Hundreds of examples.

We are very fortunate. Most every night we come home to a warm house with a warm bed. We come home to food on the table, to family that love and accept us.

Tonight, however, and every night there will be nearly one million people in our country who lack some or all of that list. There is no home for them to come back to. No warm bed. No food and no table. Their family may be with them in their plight or they may have long since abandoned them. Over the next 12 or so hours, we will share in some small fashion what it is like to be them.

Most of them, I am certain, did not choose this fate. It was thrust upon them by circumstances well beyond their control. Just as it could be for us. Life is full of uncertainties. One of us could be among them for real some day. Or may face other trials in our lives. What hope is there for us?

Joshua is among that long list of homeless wanderers in the Bible. He’s lived most, if not all, of his life wandering from place to place in the wilderness under the guidance of Moses. Now, Moses is gone and leadership of the people has fallen to him. The people of God are still without a home. They have not yet returned to the land promised to them, and it is on Joshua’s shoulders to get them there. But in the midst of this moment of uncertainty and anxiety, God comes to Joshua and gives him words that are comfort to him and to all of us.

“Be strong and courageous.” Three times, God tells him this. God knows that what Joshua is facing is difficult. It’s going to be hard, so he has to repeat himself. Drive home the point. But what is it that will make Joshua strong and courageous? God tells him that too. “I, the LORD your God, will be with you wherever you go.”

As it was with Joshua, so too with us and with those whose lives we experience tonight. God is with us no matter what happens. No matter where we end up. No matter what triumphs or trials we experience. He is by our side; there to offer his love, his strength, his support, and his courage to us. We could ascend the heights of success and find him still at our side. We could struggle as so many do with the basic needs of life and yet he is there with us.

“Be strong and courageous.” With God beside us, what then can the world really do to us? Amen.

Sermon for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on November 10, 2013
Scripture text: Job 19:23-27

Halloween is now over a week past, but I'm still enjoying a bit of the afterglow from the holiday. It's my favorite time of year and probably my favorite holiday. TV and film are particularly fun around this time, full of stories and shows about ghosts, goblins, vampires, mummies, and the like. I'm not a big horror movie fan, but I do like the classics: Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and their films from decades past. The scares of yesteryear, as it were.


Thursday night, after Emily had gone to bed, I sat down to watch one such classic horror movie: The 1972 Christopher Lee film The Wicker Man. I'd never seen the original film, although I'd heard it was vastly superior to the recent remake of a few years ago. As much as I'd heard about this film, it was not quite what I was expecting.

The story is basically this. A very devout Christian police officer is summoned to remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. No one on the island claims to know the girl, yet the officer keeps finding clues that prove she's real. In the meantime, our good church-going policeman is utterly baffled and disgusted by the religious practice of the islanders, who are all pagans. Eventually, (spoiler alert) he realizes he's been duped, that he was lured to the island in order to be a human sacrifice in the islanders' fertility rites. The officer is captured and then burned alive in the titular Wicker Man.


One of the things that stood out to me as I was watching this film (and the reason I've decided to make this my sermon illustration this morning) is the unwavering faith of Sgt Howie, the police officer. The islanders are constantly trying to tempt him with their pagan ways, their hedonistic sexuality in particular, and he always resists. Even when he realizes he's about to be murdered by these people, he holds fast to his faith, trusting that God will still be there for him no matter what.


It's funny, but some of the best portrayals of Christians and Christianity in popular culture can be found in horror films. Time and again, we find people of faith confronted with horrific villains and demonic monsters and time and again those same characters stand steadfast against the darkness. No matter what happens to them, they trust in God's saving grace.


I kept feeling that I had seen this sort of story somewhere else. Oh, yeah, it's in our lessons this morning, particularly in the Old Testament book of Job. Here again is such a person. Devout, steadfast, and he experiences horrific tragedy. His whole life is obliterated, his children killed, his fortunes lost. And yet despite all that and despite the counsel of so-called friends who tell him to “Curse God and die,” he remains steadfast in his trust that God will redeem him.


In fact, it is his statement of that very trust that stands as our first lesson this morning. I know that my redeemer lives! I know, even if the flesh rots from my bones, I will see God's deliverance.


He's not the only one in the Scriptures who makes such a bold claim. Our second lesson is a letter of St. Paul, who faced shipwreck, imprisonment, assault, attempted murder, and was eventually executed for his faith. Yet, he held steadfast in the face of those near-impossible odds.

Peter, James, Stephen, and many others faced similar fates. John, according to tradition the last and only apostle of the Twelve to not be martyred, faced his own trials: exile, loneliness, and perhaps a good dose of survivor guilt. Time and again, we see these great paragons of faith confronted with evil that should by all accounts drive them to renounce Christ, to run away, to live a normal life of relative peace and safety. But they never do. They rush headlong into danger because they know that God will be there for them.


They weren't wrong.


Job, at the end of his book, is granted an audience before God himself. And God proves faithful by restoring what had been lost. Peter, Paul, and the martyrs were not so fortunate as that, but they had witnessed with their own eyes something equally remarkable: They had seen Jesus. They saw his cross. They saw his tomb. And they saw him, scarred by the nails, yet alive again. They knew, all of them knew, that if Jesus could pull that stunt off, what couldn't he do? When they came to understand what that miracle meant, the question changed. Not just “what couldn't he do,” but now “what wouldn't he do?”


Those two questions are important for us today and it is the reason we tell these stories of unwavering steadfast faith. Let's be honest. We're not going to be burned alive in some pagan ritual like Sgt. Howie in the movie. We're not going to be eaten by lions in the arena like some of the martyrs. But we are going to face down trials. We are going to experience heartbreak, financial struggle, disease, injury, and death. These things are going to hurt and they are going to make us doubt and question. We are going to wonder if perhaps there isn't an easier way, to just give up and walk away.


When we are confronted by these villains, what then are we to do? The answer is here, in the faith that brings us each week to this place to worship, to learn, to pray, and to receive Christ in the sacrament. Those questions come to the forefront for us here.


What can't God do for us? He who made the universe so vast we humans can barely comprehend it. He who restored the fortunes of Job and who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus. What can't he do?


And what won't he do? The same God who showers you each day with all you need to live: air, food, shelter, loving friends and family. The same God who came to this world incarnate of a virgin to teach us and to show us how much he loves us. That love drove him to a horrific death on a cross to take away your sins and to grant you life eternal.


We talk a lot about our faith in God. But the truth is the martyrs were faithful, because they knew God was faithful. That he can and will do what he says he will. He has told us in his holy Word that he is with us, that he will not forsake us, that he will save us. We too can be faithful because God is faithful. All around each of us throughout all the days of our lives are signs of that. He is in his Word. He is in the Sacraments of table and font. He is in the kindness of friends and strangers. He is in the beauty of nature. And he is within you and I and all he has claimed as his children.



If he can do all that, what can't he do? If he was willing to bear the cross for us, what won't he do? In the face of all the trials of our lives, the answers to those two questions can keep us steadfast. Because he can and will do anything to keep us his. Amen.

(Pastor's Note: Some of you may perhaps have a bit of curiosity about the film I speak about in this sermon. If you haven't seen it and are curious, do be forewarned that it is not a film for the prudish. There is a great deal of nudity in the early scenes.)

Sermon for All Saints

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on November 3, 2013
Scripture texts: Ephesians 1:11-23, Luke 6:20-31

(I would be remiss if I did not give credit here to the writings of the late great Brennan Manning. His book The Ragamuffin Gospel is the current topic of our Bible Study at Canadochly and was a big inspiration for this sermon.)

---

Ok, show of hands. How many of you are currently holding...
...a sinner card?

...a saint card?

And how many of you have figured out that you have both, depending on how you're looking at it?

Alright, next question. How many of us believe we are a sinner? Ok, why then don't we act like it?

How many of us believe we are a saint? Again, why don't we act like it?

To all of us fake sinners, I have spoken a great deal in my sermons of late, because we don't act like it. Sin is always something other people do. This, in many ways, has become our holy symbol. 

The pointing finger. How dare you!

How dare you, poor lazy freeloaders! How dare you, rude obnoxious young people! How dare you, corrupt politicians! How dare you, workers of the sex trade! How dare you all!

• An angry woman came up to my internship supervisor after funeral one time. “How dare you, Pastor! You called my mother a sinner. She never sinned a day in her life.”
  

• A Tea Party activist went to rallies and protests, railing against the evils of the welfare state. Then he found himself unemployed. He immediately signed up for food stamps, unemployment insurance, and the like. When he was asked about this, his answer, “Well, unlike those other people, I deserve this help.”
  

• Many atheists argue that all the world's problems will be solved if we just dedicate ourselves to creating atheistic societies, atheistic governments. Get rid of religion and there'll be no more war. No more conflict. No more persecution. But when told about the two times in history we tried that, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, both nations whose body count and butchery of dissent rivals that of Hitler, they have nothing to say in response.
  

All three of these stories are true. They are about real people I or my friends have encountered. All have one thing in common. They are examples of either/or thinking in a both/and world. If those people are sinners, then I am not. Sin is something someone else does, but not me. Not my people.

If we say then that we believe we are sinners, who then are we to dare stand in judgment over others? And yet, that's precisely what we do. ALL THE TIME.

To all of us fake saints, I have words as well. I'm curious about something. If we are such wonderful followers of Jesus, if we live day in and day out living out his virtues of compassion and mercy, why then are these things still true?

• A million people will sleep on the streets tonight, between ¼ and 1/3 of them are veterans of our armed forces. We call our soldiers “heroes,” but why then do we treat them so?
  

• One in five children will go to bed hungry tonight. We say we are pro-life. Why then do we let this happen?
  

• Countless seniors each month struggle with a decision. Pay my rent or pay for my medicines. Why?
  

We like to call ourselves a “Christian nation.” Why then is it in our society that there is always money for guns and weapons and jails, but not enough for food and education? Not enough for medicine? There's plenty of money to kill people, but never enough to help people. Why is that? If we say that we are saints, why then do we let this go on?

If I am a saint, then they are not. They don't deserve help, only me and mine do. They only earn punishment. Either/or in a both/and world.

Doesn't matter how you flip the card, the ugly truth is we don't believe any of it. Not one bit. Our actions, our lifestyle, show the truth of it.

Why is it so hard for us to be honest about who we are and what we are? Why do we keep playing these games? Deep down inside, we all know the truth. We know what skeletons hide in our closets. We know what we've done to others. We know the blind eye we've turned to evil in our society. The apathy we've shown when injustice reigns. We know all of it and we hate ourselves for it.

As much as we mature and age over the years, in many ways, we are all still like schoolchildren. Desperately hoping that the more attention we throw upon others' faults, the less they will be able to see our own. Davey picks his nose. Let's all laugh at him, and then hope no one notices that I still suck my thumb and curl up with my blankie at night.

The funniest thing about all this is how we think we can fool God too. Look over there. Look at those people. Please don't look at me.

If the doors in the back of this sanctuary opened up at this very moment and Jesus walked it. If then he walked right up to you and looked you in the eye, what would he say?

I know what he'd say, because it's what he says time and time again in his holy Word. It's what he says time and time again through his sacraments of table and font. He says something so astonishing my jaw almost hits the floor every time I hear it. With him, standing there before me, with all my faults, flaws, sins, mistakes, idiocy, arrogance, and stupidity laid bare before his eyes, what he says is “I love you. I want you. I desire you. I adore you. Please be mine.”

We spend so much time and energy hiding and lying to ourselves, that we don't see what God is trying to do with each one of us. God pursues each of us like a desperate lover, like one who can't live without us. Us, you, me, the pathetic examples of humanity that we are. And he knows. He knows all of it, and yet still his desire, his hope, his passion for us never wavers.

That passion is so strong that he dared do things that gods never do. He came down from heaven and was incarnate as one of us. That's not all that unusual in the ancient myths; other gods did stuff like that too. But what happens next is utterly unique to Yahweh. He comes into our midst not to shower the worthy with his blessings, but the unworthy. He eats with sinners. He heals the broken and hurting. He calls to his side not the royal, the powerful, the wise, and the great, but the worthless, the nobodies, and the hated. Gods don't do that. They love the great and despise the sinner, or at least they're supposed to. That's how the old stories go, but not this one.

This god, our God, loves his broken and worthless creation so much that he does something else that gods never do. He submits to our idea of justice, where he is beaten, abused, tortured, and then executed on a cross. He lets us kill him. Gods don't die; that doesn't happen in the stories either, but it does in this one. He does this to say to each and every one of us, “I would rather die than live without you. So I will die so I can be with you.”

That death was no accident, no unanticipated twist of fate. It was the plan all along. Our god did something that's never been done before, not even in the fanciful stories of folklore and myth. He took on our faults, our brokenness, our sin, and received the punishment that we deserve for it. This death had purpose. It was to take away the consequences of our sin and to wash us in Jesus' blood so that we could be saints and live forever with him.

The death and resurrection of God incarnate as Jesus was, in many ways, a wedding ceremony, binding us together so that we never need live without one another again. The great lover that is God has won us for himself. He's won you, every last one of you, to be his forever.

A saint, according to Thomas Merton, is “not someone who is good, but rather one who experiences the goodness of God.” We are both sinner and saint, and that's okay. My friends, we don't need to play these games anymore. God showers his goodness upon us every day of our lives. He's seen the truth of who we are and what we've done, and he loves us anyway. He can't help it. That's who God is. That's what he does.

We don't have to pretend anymore. Yeah, I'm a sinner. Always have been. So are you. But because of Christ, because of how much he loves you and I and everyone else in this world, we are also saints. We are now a bride adorned with his goodness so that we never need be apart from him again. He's won us and made us his own, because when you love something as much as God loves us, you just can't help it. You'll do anything to have your heart's deepest desire. God died to have you and me. That's all we need to know. Amen.

Sermon for Reformation Sunday

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on October 27, 2013
Scripture text: Romans 3:19-28, John 8:31-36

It’s long been noted by historians that the Church appears to be on a 500-year cycle. Every 500 years something monumental happens in the life of the Church, a schism, a rift, a paradigm shift. Forgotten teachings rediscovered, a moment of reformation. Resistance to change. Turmoil and uncertainty.

Four years from now, we will mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenburg church. Five hundred years since the last great tumult of the Church. You can guess what that means. We are due for another.

Oh my, are we ever. The Church is sick. The signs of that are all around us. Membership is dropping across the board. The fastest growing religious group in our nation is the “nones,” that is they answer what religion they follow with the word “none.” The simple and ugly truth is that the Church has no place in many people’s lives. It has no place because religion does not do anything for them. Faith is meaningless to them. Why then should they participate in its institution?

And that is not a defect in them. We could stand here and deride those people for their foolishness, but that would only feed the problem not solve it. You see they find nothing here of value because so often there is nothing in our churches of value to people. That’s not their problem. That’s ours.

We’ve lost our way. That’s the simple truth of it.

It’s not hard to see when you open your eyes to the world around us. Look at what passes for Christianity in this day and age. In this corner, you have the Prosperity Gospel, those who teach that faith is a means to worldly success and riches. Just believe hard enough and just pray hard enough and God will shower you with all your hearts’ desires. Ok, God, I liked that picture on Facebook. Where’s my blessing? I prayed six times today. I want my Ferrari.

In the opposite corner you have the legalists. The Bible says...don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t dance, don’t have sex (or if you do, don’t enjoy it). Hate the gays, hate the liberals, love war, save the babies, but screw the freeloaders. Do all this or God’s going to come get you like a cosmic boogeyman. A great torrent of hatred and fear.

That’s what the church has become in this day and age. But here’s the funny thing. There ain’t done of that in the Bible. There ain’t none of that in the teachings of Jesus. And if it isn’t in the Scriptures, then where is it coming from?

The answer to that is simple. It’s coming from us. It’s coming from human beings. You want to know what the sickness of today’s church is? I’ll tell you. It’s quite simple. It’s all about us. Our desires. Our wants. Our opinions. Our hopes. Our prejudices. Our bigotry. Our anger. Our fears. Our behaviors. Our actions. Me. Me. Me. Me.

There ain’t no room for Jesus here anymore. Oh, except for one rather insidious way. We’ve turned him into a rubber stamp of sorts. The Prosperity Gospel is just greed. But we’ve stamped Jesus all over it and that makes it ok. Fundamentalism is just bigotry and hate, but we’ve stamped Jesus all over it and that makes it okay. This is fun. This is easy. Take anything wrong with the world today and do that. The sex abuse scandal of the Roman church. Well, we just stamped Jesus all over it and that makes it okay.

The funny thing is, none of this is new. It’s the same crap we’ve been doing for thousands of years. The Crusades were just murder, but we stamped Jesus all over them and that made them okay. The Inquisition was torture, but hey, we stamped Jesus all over it and that made it okay. Slavery was the brutal exploitation of human beings, but again, we stamped Jesus all over it and everything was okay.

We keep turning Jesus into an excuse, a rationale, a justification for things that he would have no part of. We think sin stops being sin just so long as we stamp Jesus all over it. It doesn’t. Sin remains sin no matter what pious justifications we invent to excuse it all away. You can’t lie to God, but boy do we love lying to ourselves.

And if that’s what we’re doing, lying to ourselves it’s not faith, my friends, because faith is based on truth. What it is instead is idolatry and the idol we worship is us.

In the 5th Century, during the first of those great turmoils, the church had become infected with the idolatry of me. It took the form of a heresy known as Pelagianism, which taught that salvation is all about what we can do for ourselves. My efforts, my works, my charity, that’s what saves me. St. Augustine turned to the Scriptures and found what it really says. Turns out, it’s all about what Jesus did.

When Martin Luther pounded those theses to the door of the church, the church had become infected again with the idolatry of me. The Pope cared only for temporal power. It was all about him and he got the whole world to go along with him by the wonderful power of that Jesus-rubber-stamp. Give me money for my mistresses, because Jesus said so. Feed my ambitions, because Jesus wants you to. Well, Martin Luther read what Jesus said in the Scriptures and he didn’t find any of that in there.

A lot of people are going to be real disappointed to find out what’s really in that book they claim to follow, but never read. Greed? Greed is condemned in the Bible. It’s teachings are clear that what we are given we are given to use for others. Hate? There is no hated in what Jesus teaches. Yes, sin is condemned, but not the sinner. Sinners are forgiven and even welcomed by Christ. There are countless examples of that. Salvation? It comes through the grace of God and by nothing else. It’s his call who is to be saved. It’s not up to you or me. Not our own. All the devotion, piety, and following the rules mean nothing when it comes to that.

And it’s not up to us concerning the salvation of others. For all we know, God could say “Hey, you know those people over there. They’re okay. Let’s let them into heaven too.” If “those people” are made up of people we think don’t deserve it, too bad. It’s not your call. It’s not my call. It’s God’s call. His choice and his alone.

If faith is about you, you’re doing it wrong. If it’s about Jesus, the real Jesus that you find in God’s holy word and not the rubber-stamp-Jesus that just tells you everything about you is okay, then you’re on the right track. That’s where the Church needs to be. We need to find the real Jesus again. The Jesus of the Bible. The Jesus who comes to us in Word, bread, wine, and water. The Jesus who loved the whole world (and everyone in it) enough to die on a cross for its sake and then rose again on the third day. The Jesus who calls his disciples, us, to proclaim his truth in word and deed to all the world. The Jesus who calls us to service and not to judgment. The Jesus who challenges all of us to be more than we are now.

We are the Church, my friends. This moment is ours and the new Reformation must begin with us and with all our fellow Christians. That title has to mean something again. It has to mean that people see who Jesus truly is through us. They see his love through us. They see his sacrifice through us. It’s got to stop being about us, because when it is that’s all the world sees. We can’t get in the way anymore. The world can’t afford that and neither can we. Amen.

Sermon for Halloween Youth Event

Preached at St. John Lutheran Church, New Freedom on October 20, 2013
Scripture text: John 1:1-5

There is something wondrous about what we are doing tonight. Something unexpected. Something out of the ordinary. Tonight, we are being honest.

One does not typically think of the church as a place to celebrate Halloween. Many would argue that this is not the place to discuss such grim topics. But a church that only talks about things as sweetness and light is also a church that runs the risk of being dangerously out of touch. We live in a world of darkness, a world full of monsters. Perhaps we should start acting like it.

Oh, when I say “monsters,” I don’t mean zombies or vampires or Freddie or any of those other creations of human imagination and folklore. I mean real monsters. Monsters like hunger and poverty. Monsters like tyranny and injustice. Monsters like cancer and disease, like war and heartbreak. Monsters like sin and death.

Those monsters are real and they’re all around us. They’re in our lives and in the lives of the people in our communities. Their threat is ever present, a constant shadow hanging over us.

So when I say that tonight we as a church are being honest, what I mean is that we are not hiding from these unpleasant truths. We’re openly admitting that these things are real and that they have an impact on our lives and the lives of others. We are talking about darkness because that’s the world we live in. A world of death.

So tonight is Ash Wednesday redux. “Dust you are and to dust you shall return...” Tonight is Good Friday. “And when he had said this, he breathed his last.” And also All-Saints Day, from which Halloween comes, we remember those who have died before us. Tonight is all about the monster of death, but not merely him alone. It is also about something else, another truth; the truth that there is something greater than death.

In many ways, the ghost and goblins of Halloween are fanciful metaphors of death. What makes them terrifying to us is their power to kill and to destroy. But while we acknowledge death’s power to destroy, we must also acknowledge that we are followers of a God who has overcome death and the grave. Christ Jesus who has died and risen again, who has made death his footstool.

There is an old literary saying. We tell fairy tales and ghost stories and the like not to tell us that monsters are real. We already know that. We tell those stories to remind us that monsters can be beaten. Tonight, we are telling the story of Christ for precisely that reason. The monster of death can be beaten. He has been beaten. The light of Christ shines out in the darkness and death did not overcome it.

This is our hope, my friends. This is the hope of the world around us. Light in the midst of darkness. Light in the midst of light is nothing. It’s washed out, unnoticeable. But a flame in the darkness can be seen by all. That is Jesus, shining out for the whole world to see and telling us that so long as he is with us, the monsters cannot harm us. Amen.

Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

It is our tradition at Canadochly that the Sunday closest to the Festival of St. Luke (Oct 18) is dedicated to healing. That tradition informs much of this sermon.

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on October 20, 2013
Scripture text: Psalm 121

I want to show you all something. Recently, there were a number of news articles about Voyager 1, the deep space probe NASA launched way back in 1977. Voyager had reached a milestone in human history as the first and so far only human-made object to leave the solar system and enter into deep space. It is now roughly 93 billion miles (with a b) away from Earth.

Twenty years ago, long before it ever reached the edge of our solar system, NASA sent a command to Voyager’s on-board computer. They ordered it to turn itself around and snap a picture of the planet Earth. This is that picture, one of the most famous photographs in astronomy. It is called the “Pale Blue Dot.”

Can you see planet Earth upon it from where you’re sitting? I’m going to guess no. It’s right here, a tiny speck on this piece of paper. That tiny speck contains the whole of human existence. The whole of your life and every life has taken place on that near-invisible dot.

Hard to imagine, isn’t it? But it’s true.

We human beings have a tendency to think of ourselves as the center of the universe. That we are the top of the heap, masters of our fate, lords over all that we survey. We are in control of our lives. Mighty, limitless, unstoppable. We can do anything.

But none of those self-perceptions can change the simple fact that in the grand scheme of the universe, we barely show up at all. We are tiny, finite, weak, and forgettable.

If only all the times in our lives where we are reminded of that truth were as painless as this bit of astronomical trivia...

Unfortunately, they are not. More often, we are reminded of our true limitations in ways that are deeply painful and damaging to us.

A corporation goes under, perhaps by mismanagement, perhaps by the whimsies of the marketplace. Jobs are lost. Our job, and there’s nothing we could have done to stop it. There was no controlling that fate.

Politicians misbehave. They are spiteful, angry, ready and willing to stick it to their opponents in the other party. As recent events have shown, some are even willing to bring our government to a screeching halt rather to talk to one another and work out their differences. How many were furloughed? How many others did that impact? And what were we to do about all that? Did we have any control at all, any say in what happened over these past two weeks?

And then, perhaps most germane to our purposes today, is the question of sickness. Who here seeks to fall ill? But who of us can stop it from coming? None of us want to be injured in an accident, but it’s called an accident because we couldn’t see it coming. There was no stopping it, no avoiding it. It just happened. It’s beyond our control.

This is what life is like for millions of people, struggling with circumstances bigger than they are, more powerful than they are, and (in some cases) deadlier than anything they’ve ever faced before. And who are we to face down the power of death in whatever form it may take? We who are less than a tiny speck in a vast universe. Where can we turn?

Our psalm for today has the answer to that question. I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence is my help to come? My help comes from the LORD, the maker of heaven and earth.

When we are faced with something far bigger than us, we can turn to one who is far bigger than it. The one who made a universe so vast that even our home planet is no more than a tiny dot on this photograph.

Now why on Earth would God bother? After all, he’s got a whole vast universe to run and compared to it we’re nothing. But that’s the funny thing. He does bother. In the vast scheme of the reality we live in we would seem to be nothing, except to God. Time and again, he has fixed his gaze upon our tiny little world and into our tiny little lives. We are precious to him. We matter to him.

Why else would he incarnate to live among us as Jesus? Why else would he deign to talk with us and teach us? Why else would he heal us of our infirmities? And why else would he die upon a cross and then rise again for us? The creator of all that is deeply invested in your life and mine.

So when our lives take an ill turn, when disease or some other misfortune strikes, God notices. It pains him to see us suffer. So he sends his spirit in our lives, to strengthen us against the trials we face and to remind us that he is the one that calls the shots in this universe. He is the one with power over life and death, and because of Jesus what he has chosen for you and for me is life.

There will always be things bigger than us. Disease, misfortune, heartache, calamity, the folly of the so-called powers-that-be. But there is one bigger than all of it, one who loves you more than words can say. My fate and yours is in his hands. Whatever we face in this moment or in the future may loom large before us, but they are nothing to the Creator of Heaven and Earth. Amen.