Sermon for Refugee Sunday 2014

Canadochly Lutheran Church marked "Refugee Sunday" on June 22, 2014. This is the sermon preached that day.

Scripture texts: Genesis 18:1-8, Leviticus 19:33-34, Mark 7:24-30


Imagine for a moment you are at the Galleria. You’ve been shopping for a few hours and you’re starting to get a little peckish. You’ve got a 5-spot in your pocket, so you decide to hit up Taco Bell for a burrito. Quick snack on an ordinary day. But while you’re standing in line BOOM!!! A suicide bomber has just exploded over at Subway. There’s smoke, fire, bodies everywhere. Your ears ring, but somehow, by some miracle, you’ve escaped injury. You run. You flee. Out to the parking lot. You rush to your car as the emergency responders come in. Then BOOM again. A drone strike, a missile from an invisible plane miles away, just hit the car across the lot from yours. Fire, smoke, bodies everywhere. It’s the third time this month. How long before one of these near-misses doesn’t miss?

Your boss calls you into his office. We’ve made a decision. The companies we work with overseas have demanded we cut our costs, so from now on, you’re going to be making $0.10 an hour. Ten cents? You can’t feed your family on ten cents. Too bad, say your bosses. Decide which one of your kids you let starve. You look around, only to discover the other factories in town are now only paying $0.10/hour as well. No help. Oh, well, there was the one guy who said you could send your wife or daughter into prostitution and maybe make some money that way. You start to wonder. How long before the hunger pains begin?

The word has come down. The preachers have spoken. The radio personalities are all talking about it. Blue eyed people are an abomination, sub-human mongrels unworthy of life. It’s your holy duty, they say, to hunt them down like animals, to rid the world of their scourge. Your husband has blue-eyes. How long until they come knocking on the door for him? How long before they come for you for daring to betray the brown-eyes by marrying him? How long?

These three stories are fictional, but not all that far removed from the reality that is faced by millions of people across this world everyday. You may think them an exaggeration, but they really aren’t. I would not be surprised I’ve understated the nightmares many of these people endure day in and day out.

Today is Refugee Sunday, a day the ELCA has set aside to remember the stories of the suffering across the world. I could quote statistics and figures, facts and data, but one simple and very unpleasant truth lies behind all the numbers: These people exist because of the unmitigated malice, greed, and cruelty of human beings. You want to see the dark side of humanity? These people can tell you. They’ve faced it. They’ve lived with it. And every minute of every day, they’re trying to escape it.

Every refugee faces a choice, but it’s not a real choice. I can stay and be murdered. I can stay and become a slave. I can stay and be raped. I can stay and starve. Or I can take my chances out there, out in the wider world. There’s no guarantees. No certainty that what I’m going to run into out there is any better. But to remain is death. Millions of people have chosen not to stay and for the vast majority of them, they have found no better fate where they’ve gone than where they came from.

I first encountered this when I was a young teen. St. Paul, Charleston had become involved in a Refugee relocation program through the then-ALC, one of the predecessor synods of the ELCA. And we brought over to the United States the Tran family. They were refugees from Vietnam. He was Vietnamese. She was Chinese. To his people, that made him a traitor. He dared to fall in love with one of them. And if they’d stayed, they would probably have been murdered, the two of them and their five children.

I haven’t seen any of them in at least 25 years. They eventually settled in Los Angeles, opened a chain of Chinese restaurants, and became an American success story. They were one of that tiny percentage that escaped the nightmare. So many others don’t.

And we don’t make it easier on them. Here’s another ugly truth. For a nation that prides itself on its “Christian” bona-fides, we do very little as a nation to help these most-desperate of peoples. If anything, 21st century America is as hostile to the immigrant and the refugee as it has ever been, proving sadly our own hypocrisy about what it means to be a Christian nation. It’s not about what kind of monuments you can build or what you can demand of schoolchildren. It’s about how you help people who are in true and genuine need.

Abraham was a desert nomad. He understood the necessity to show hospitality to all who crossed his path. When three strangers came to him, he welcomed them, brought them in, gave them water and food on a hot desert day. When God Almighty set down his law from Sinai, he told his people in no uncertain terms how they were to treat the alien and stranger in their midst. Jesus, in his encounter with the Syro-phoenician woman, revealed the idiocy of bigotry by showing to his disciples the sheer magnitude of faith that can be found in the least likely of peoples. God knows the stranger has worth. God knows the alien is precious. Do we?

Not if the rhetoric spewed by our political class is any indication. Here’s the third unpleasant truth of the morning. These people are lying to us. They’re trying to exploit a simple reality of human nature: that we all want simple answers to complicated questions. No, they tell us, our economic troubles in these times is not the result of complicated and arcane economic and financial realities. It’s not about our greed or our voracious need to win by having the most toys. No, it’s because there are too many of “those people” around. They tell us that, knowing it’s a lie. But we believe it and we vote for these liars and we listen to their programs on the radio and TV and they get what they want. But the people who need our help the most, what they get is hate. This is not the Christian way.

The Christian way is to see people the way God does. To remember that he is love and that love has no limits and boundaries. It loves “those people” as much as he loves us and he calls us, as his followers and disciples, to show that love to them. Christ came to this earth to live, die, and rise again for them as much as us. I’ve said more times than I can count from this and other pulpits because it’s true. God’s love is universal and we as his children are called to express the same.

We talk a lot in America about our blessings and indeed we have so much. More than enough to go around. More than enough to share with the millions of displaced and desperate people around the world. But to do that, we have to take seriously what it means to live in response to the overwhelming love of God for us and for everyone. We have to say no to hate. We have to say no to greed. We have to tell those who lie to us that we will no longer heed their words. We will instead listen to God, who tells us time and again to welcome, to embrace, to take care of, and to love. Amen.

Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday 2014

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on Sunday, June 15, 2014
Scripture text: Genesis 1

There are some questions that simply do not have answers. For instance, there are no good answers to that question wives sometimes ask their husbands: Do I look fat in this outfit? Six years of marriage and numerous girlfriends before that have taught me that there is no answer I could give to that question that will not get me in some sort of trouble.

But jokes aside, there are truly are questions that do not have answers. Why was my home destroyed by a hurricane? That question doesn’t really have an answer. Sure, you could look at it as cause-and-effect. “Your home was in Florida.” But that’s not really what’s being asked, so it fails as an answer.

Part of our problem to some degree is that English is sometimes a painfully imprecise language. To answer a question like that one (Why did this happen?) with a cause-and-effect answer is to answer a “why” question with a “how” answer. You’re not answering why something happened, you’re telling how it happened. How questions are science questions. The answer is meteorology in the case of hurricanes, plate tectonics in the case of earthquakes, human biology and physiology in the case of disease, and so forth.

Why however is a metaphysical question, a philosophical question. It is a question that seeks meaning not mechanics. Understanding rather than causation.

We are very bad about mixing up those two words in our language. We blur the lines between meaning and function, truth and fact, to the point where sometimes we’re not sure of the distinction between one and the other. And as a result, we end up giving answers to questions that have no answers.

Now why am I bringing up all this? Quite simply because today is Trinity Sunday and we confronted once again with the doctrine of the Trinity. In many ways this is the ultimate question to which there is no answer: How does the Trinity work?

Well, I can tell you right now that if you actually have an answer to that question, you’re probably a heretic. There is no answer. I am steeped in the Scriptures, trained at one of the finest seminaries in the ELCA, have almost 13 years of parish experience as a pastor and I don’t have the first clue as to how this works. No one does. Not really.

But it’s also the wrong question. Two Sundays ago I took the disciples to task for asking Jesus the wrong question on the mountain of the ascension. Now I’m taking to task myself and the rest of the church for asking the wrong question about the Trinity. It’s not about the “how.” It’s all about the “why.” It’s about what this means, not how it functions.

And what does it mean? Now that’s a question we can answer. It is about life and it is about love.

The Creation story bears this out. I have to confess that I was tempted to diverge here for a bit, because here is a story where, probably more than anywhere else in Scripture, we confuse the why and the how. But I’ll resist that temptation and focus on that why, because this story is abundant with it.

This story is included on Trinity Sunday because here we see the Trinity doing what it does: bringing life. The Father creates, the Word (the Son) speaks, and the Spirit breathes. And all together create life that is good and wondrous and beloved.

“It is good.” “It is very good.” God says of the universe. It is precious to him. He loves it. That’s why he made it. That’s why he’s always tinkering with it. That’s why he seeks to save it. That’s why he’s infinitely patient with it, even when it disobeys and it disappoints. He loves it beyond words. He loves us and wants us to have life in abundance.

It’s all about life and love. And you can take the macro and go to the micro, the general to the specific, and it still works. You, me. The Father created us. The Son died on a cross and rose again for us. And the reason we know all that is because the Spirit is rattling around inside our heads and hearts reminding us of it constantly. Taking the words of Scripture, the beauty of creation, the sacraments of altar and font, the companionship of friends, and whatever else it can to tell us time and again that God loves us and wants us to live. To live abundantly. To live eternally.

It’s all about life and love. That is why there is a Trinity, why God chooses to interact with us in this way. It brings life and it brings love. There is no life without the Father’s creation. There is no life without the Spirit’s breathing. There is no life without the Son’s cross and resurrection.

And it is love that spurs the Father to create. It is love that sends the Spirit in, with, and among us. It is love that brought the Son to this world to live, die, and rise again for our sake and for the sake of all creation.

That is what the Trinity means. That’s the why of this doctrine, this teaching, this reality. I still don’t know how it works. I’m not sure I’ll ever know. But I do know why it was done. It is done for me and it is done for you. It is done for everyone in this creation, those long dead and forgotten (to us anyway) and to those yet unborn. God loves them all. God created or will create them all, giving them life. Jesus died and rose again for them all. And the Spirit blows in their midst, telling and reminding them each of who God is and what he’s done. That’s the Trinity and that’s why we celebrate it today. It’s about love and life for all of us. Amen.

Sermon for Pentecost 2014

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on June 8, 2014
Sermon text: Acts 2:1-21

A few years ago, my lovely wife Sarah bought me a present. She got me a Sirrius satellite radio system. This gift was a godsend, for two reasons. One, as you might imagine, living in WV means that radio reception is rather spotty because of the mountains. Two is because those few radio stations you can get have only both kinds of music: Country and Western. For this child of 1980s punk rock and new wave music, getting to listen to the music I love was wonderful.

Now I also took advantage of the opportunity this little bit of technology offered. Literally any kind of music or radio is available over their network. You want Conservative talk radio? They have a channel for that. Liberal talk? That too. Jazz? What kind? Classical? Again, what kind? Baroque? Romantic? Of course, every kind of rock-n-roll you can imagine. Many of which I sampled. I’ve got a new list of favorite bands and favorite songs that five years ago I didn’t even know existed.

One of those songs is by the band Against Me! It’s called “I was a Teenage Anarchist.” Now on the surface, from that title, you might think this is a typical punk rock song; full of anger and rebellion. But it’s actually the story of an older and wiser punk looking back on his younger years with a sense of nostalgia and disillusionment, talking about all the things he once believed in have proven disappointing. He talks about how the revolution was a lie and that the politics of his youth were simply convenient. But despite his disenchantment, he still pines for those times long past. The chorus asks a question that highlights this desire: “Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?”




Well, in response to the singer’s question, yes, I do remember. Perhaps you do too. I grew up, as i implied, in the 1980s. Tail end of the Cold War. I saw the villainy of the Soviet Union. I watched with disillusionment as own government often sacrificed its ideals in order to best those villains. It was easy to think that the best thing to do was to just tear down the whole thing and start over.

That was then. Twenty five years ago. I'm older now, wiser, more mature. I've learned a thing or two. Gotten wise to the world. Come to realize that people are people. There aren't really any white hats or even black hats in the world, just various shades of grey. Many of those evil Soviets were just ordinary folks who wanted what we all want, just to get through life and find a measure of happiness. And the heroes of my youth who so disappointed me, well they were human, prone to mistakes and vices, everyone of them doing the best they could, but were still far from perfect.

Recognizing that reality made me realize something. You see, revolution, change, transformation, setting the world on fire won't work, won't really work so long as it is human beings driving it, because such change will be imperfect, flawed, and probably corrupt. It will fail and eventually turn into something not all that unlike what it replaced. That's one of the more painful lessons of history.

But there is one that won't. It's a different kind of revolution, but it will set the world on fire. It is a revolution based not on human desires, but on God's desire. It is based not on hate, anger, and frustration, but on compassion, justice, and love. It is the revolution that began 2000 years ago in an upper room in Jerusalem with the rush of a mighty wind and tongues of fire alighting on 12 men (and perhaps others present with them.)

Fire's a good metaphor, because it has more than one meaning. We can think of it destructively, burning and destroying, perhaps to restart anew. But there's another kind of fire, the fire of passionate caring love, the kind of love that God has for our world. You want to talk about songs and music? How many songs do you know talk about love as something burning, something hot and fiery? That's how God feels for our world and for all of its people. The songwriter wanted to set the world on fire. I wanted to set the world on fire. Well, we’re in good company. So does God and on Pentecost, it began.

It's no coincidence the crowd that is summoned by the noise of that upper room is diverse in its origins. That crazy list of nations and lands represent the width and breadth of the known world of those days. God's fire isn't limited to one person or one race or one nation or any of that. It burns for all and he calls us to likewise burn for others as he does.

You want to start a revolution? Start treating people the way God would. Start loving them the way he does. They won't know what to do with themselves. Most people have never had that in life. This world tears us down. It beats us up and leaves us wondering if we've of any value at all.

I was passing through the living room the other day and my mother-in-law was watching one of those documentary specials Oprah puts out on her network. It was talking about a church camp and they were showing one of the rituals they did at this camp. The counselor would hold up a mirror and have each camper come forward. He would have the camper look at their reflection and he would repeat the same thing over and over again. Look at yourself. You are a precious child of God. You are loved. You are beautiful. You are worth more than words can say. The creator of all that is cares about you so much that he paid the ultimate price to have you beside him.

We don't hear that enough. We don't say that enough. But it's true. Every word of it is true. And if you want to see this world catch fire, that's how it's done. Tell people that. Live into that. Believe it in your bone of bones. Because every word of it is true. God loves you beyond words. God loves everyone you meet beyond description. God wants you and everyone to be a part of his family. He gave Jesus over to death for that to happen. He brought him again from the dead so that he would never have to live without us. And he sent his Spirit on Pentecost to see that the world knows it.

“Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?” Yeah, I do remember.  But not only that, I still want it. I want the world to know because the same love with which God embraced me and made me his own he holds for all people. And if and when we live that truth out, we will see this world burn with the fire of God's love and we will see lives transformed. I want the fire of the Spirit to come upon all humankind and set the world aright at last. I pray you do as well. Amen.

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on June 1, 2014
Preaching texts: Acts 1:6-14, John 17:1-11

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

All these quotes, both well known or not, point to one simple reality: human beings are painfully short-sighted. We do not often think through the full consequences of our actions and even in those times when we do we often don’t care. We demand a simplified reality and when life offers only complexity instead, we stuff our head in the sand and pretend otherwise. We all live as though we are going to die tomorrow and at the rate we’re going, we just might.

But what we do has its impacts on everything around us. We smoke today, more interested in the nicotine buzz than in the damage we do to our lungs. We like paying low taxes, heedless of bridges falling down and roads falling apart because there is no money to fix them. We like our energy cheap, blissfully and often deliberately ignorant of the damage we’re doing through pollution from fossil fuels. I like paying $5 for a t-shirt, but please don’t tell me it was made by children working in a sweatshop in virtual slavery.

But we are facing a moment of reckoning in our world today. The time to pay the piper has come and we see it on the news. Economic and political turmoil around the world. Environmental catastrophe. Our health plagued by the consequences of excess. And the only people we have to blame for this is ourselves. We did this. We did it, because we chose what was easy and convenient over what was hard and right.

So what does all this have to do with our lessons today?

“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” The disciples ask Jesus. A question sincerely asked, but also a good example of humans being painfully short-sighted and selfish. The disciples on the mountain of the ascension want what’s easy. They want what’s convenient. They want the glory days again. They want things to be as they once were, with them in charge.

Look at what they’re asking. “Are you going to restore the kingdom?” A fundamentally political question that ignores the fact that Jesus has been a completely apolitical figure. His failure, I’ve argued, to be political is a big part of what got him killed on the cross; he refused to “restore the kingdom” on Palm Sunday and the crowd turned on him. The disciples haven’t learned. This isn’t about them. It isn’t about what they want.

Because what they want won’t help the world. What they want won’t bring people to faith. What they want won’t save anybody, not even themselves. The kingdom restored? That’s not happening.

It’s the wrong question. It’s the wrong question because it’s too narrow. Too small. The disciples are begging for the return of King David and his kingdom. But that period in history was only part of a much larger and much grander scheme.

You see, when God came to Abraham, he made him a promise, a covenant. Abraham’s descendants were to be a chosen people, chosen for a purpose, for from them would come a blessing that would be for all the peoples of the Earth. That’s the Old Covenant at its core, a covenant in which King David played but a small part. But what matters is the promise: a blessing for all, not just for a few.

The disciples seemed to have missed that somewhere. But Jesus didn’t come to resurrect David. He didn’t come to bring back a relic of history. He didn’t come back to establish someone else’s kingdom. He came to establish his own, the one promised through the ancient covenants..  It’s the kingdom of God that’s coming. And the time for that is not yet.

The time is not yet in part because we’re not ready for it. The disciples prove that with their question. We here today are only somewhat better and, in some ways, we’re probably worse. Human progress has never been a smooth process. It lurches. It stumbles. It sometimes backtracks. We’re not ready for the kingdom either. Not yet.

But what will it look like when we are? For that, we can look to Jesus’ own words in his High Priestly Prayer in John’s Gospel. “May they be one, as we are one.” But what does that mean? It’s a call for unity, but do not misunderstand it. It is not a call for a unity of conformity, where we all think, look, and believe alike. It’s a call for a unity of compassion. It’s a call for us to think and feel about other people the way God does. Where we stop worrying about ourselves and devote our energies to the care of others.

Now imagine for a moment what that would look like. And don’t think small, think big. Imagine not driving your car or not powering your house because it creates pollution that hurts our world. How about giving up our bad health habits so that those who love us can have us around longer? How about paying more for products and services from business and government so other people can have a decent quality of life, instead of starvation wages and deteriorating infrastructure?

Too big? Well, probably. I don’t think I could buy into all that, but I did also say we’re not ready yet. But this plague of selfish blindness has to end. Our world is on the brink because we’ve turned inward and cared only for ourselves and what we can get right here, right now. But Jesus’ prayer for us is not “let them grab all they can. The one who dies with the most wins.” No, it’s “may they be one.”

Patriots are often fond of reminding us that “freedom isn’t free” and they’re right. Many of the benefits of our society have a steep price, the sacrifice of those many brave men and women who won them for us. But Christian freedom isn’t free either. Our liberation from sin and death came at a steep cost to our God; it came at the death of his son. To live our lives in selfish ignorance and apathy, with no care for what our actions have upon others, cheapens greatly what Christ did for us. It’s not about us, our wishes, our selfish desires. It’s long past time we stopped pretending it was.

No, it’s about them. It’s about the person next to you. The person on the street. The person half a world away. It’s about them. That’s where our energies are meant to go, our focus meant to be.

But if no one’s looking out for me, what then? I can hear that objection in each of your minds. But that’s small thinking. If you’re looking out for others, and if everyone else is looking out for others, what we discover is that it’s not “no one’s looking out for me,” it’s that everyone is. The person next to you. The person on the street. The person half a world away. You’re in their hands.

May that be one, as we are one. My friends, that’s what it looks like. And I’ll admit it sounds utopian. It sounds idealistic. It sounds impossible. But it’s the world our savior came to give to us. It’s the world his father promised to Abraham and the chosen. It’s the world that we could get maybe just a bit closer to, by choosing to do what is right for others instead of what is right for us alone. Amen.

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on May 25, 2014
Preaching text: Acts 17:22-31

On The Voice recently, they had a little montage of all the times when coach Adam Levine claimed that a song or musical artist was his “favorite ever.” In just this season alone, they came up with a good two dozen or so examples for their little joke, let alone all the other times in the past five or six seasons. As I was watching this little bit, I realized that you could probably do the same to me only with passages of Scripture. Even I’ve lost count of the number times I’ve claimed a given text is one of “my favorites.”

Well, I’m not going to break the trend today, because yet again, we have one of Pastor Allen’s favorite texts as our first lesson today: Paul’s visit to the Areopagus in Athens. I will however give you the benefit of telling you why I like this story so much.

To do that, I have to bring up that other thing that I never tire of mentioning to people: the fact that I am a nerd. Specifically, I was a nerd that grew up in the mountains of West Virginia. And while many of the stereotypes about Appalachian people are utterly false, there is one that’s true. Only a handful of people who grow up in those mountains ever leave them, even for brief trips. They hardly see any of the wider world, even if the wider world is Pittsburgh or Virginia Beach or York county, PA.

Many of them simply have no experience, no knowledge, of anything that goes on beyond those mountains. And what is unknown is feared. I grew up hearing about how every single hobby I was into, whether it be Japanese anime, D&D, rock-n-roll music, or science fiction, was going to send me on the path to devil worship. This is a place where even Christian rock concerts drew protests from people desperate to save our souls from damnation.

Of course, I’m obviously not a devil worshipper. None of the things that I was supposedly in danger of ever happened. Those largely well-meaning Christian people didn’t understand that my hobbies really were nothing more than harmless fun. Conversely, many of the gamers and nerds I associated with were threatened by the church and its people and not without reason.

But imagine put a typical nerd and a typical Appalachian Christian in the same room together and have them talk to one another. Even though both would be speaking English, I can guarantee neither would understand the other. There’s no obvious common ground. There’s a gap between them and someone somehow would have to bridge it.

Which is precisely what the story of the Areopagus is about. Paul is devout Jew-turned-Christian. He is steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures. He knows, by heart, the stories of Abraham, Moses, and King David. He knows the words of the prophets and the psalms. But now he finds himself in Athens. Athens, home of democracy, home of philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, home of the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to pagan gods like Zeus and Athena. There’s not a soul in this place who understands anything about the Patriarchs and the Torah. There’s a gap and Paul’s got to figure out how to bridge it.

He finds his answer in the Areopagus. Here, he finds shrines to all the deities of the polytheistic religion of the Greeks. Now the Greeks were exceedingly pragmatic in their religious thinking. They had traveled the world, conquered much of it under Alexander the Great, and in doing so had encountered other religions. Perhaps the Gods of Olympus weren’t the only ones out there. Perhaps it would be good to have shrines to Isis or Marduk, gods of other peoples. And on the off chance, we’ve still missed one, we’ll dedicate a shrine to the god or gods who are still unknown to us.

Paul sees his chance. “Hey, you say you don’t know this god. Let me tell you about him. His name is Jesus Christ.” Paul finds his bridge, he finds a way across from his experience, his knowledge, to reach those he might otherwise not be able to talk to. It takes cleverness, bravery, and effort for him to do that, but when you consider the salvation that he’s offering, the peace and hope that comes from faith in Jesus, it’s worth it.

Two thousand years ago, Paul figured this trick out, but in a lot of ways, it is today when we most need to hear what this text is saying to us. We have technological wonders in the realm of communication: the internet, cell phones, email, Facebook. And the world has shrunk as a result. I can go to my computer right now and strike up a conversation with my friend Rich in Thailand. But for all that wonder, we’ve also found new ways to isolate from one another.

For now, we need only consume that media which agrees with what we believe. All of us can cloister ourselves away and surround ourselves with only those things that tell us how right we are. We don’t need to talk to people who disagree with us on issues of politics or religion or pretty much anything. I can live in my little bubble and never be challenged, never be made uncomfortable, never have to rethink my views about anything. And a lot of people have done just that.

So the gaps between ourselves and others are wider than ever. That’s a problem, when our mission as a church is to go out there and make disciples of people who are different from us.

If they were the same as us, they’d already be here. We’re not called to evangelize the already-baptized, which is what the church seems to be doing right now. No, we are called to go out there to them and that means we have to find ways to bridge those gaps. Find ways to talk to one another even when it seems like we’re speaking different languages. Old to young. Young to old. Boomer to Millennial. Conservative to Liberal. Liberal to conservative. Christian to atheist. Christian to Muslim.  Bridge the gaps, so that God’s word can be spread.

We have to learn how to talk to one another again. We have to stop being afraid of being embarrassed. We have to stop being afraid of being challenged on positions long held that might be wrong (or might not be.) Someone has to take the first step to cross that gap and it ain’t gonna be them. It has to be us.

Because we’re the ones who have the gift to be shared. We’re the ones who have been brought to the font and the table. We’re the ones who have heard and read God’s holy word. We’re the ones that know what this unknown god is about. And unless we tell them about how this God came to earth and died for them, they will never know. Amen.

Sermon for Fifth Sunday of Easter

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran on May 18, 2014
Preaching text: Acts 7:1-60 (The actual text for the day is only Acts 7:55-60, but it's helpful to see the full chapter to better understand the sermon below.)

I remember my very first sermon like it was yesterday. I was at St. Paul, Charleston, my home congregation. I was probably a freshman or sophomore in college and it was the day after Christmas: St. Stephen’s Day. I had no training, no experience, no seminary. No idea really what I was doing. Only a word of advice from my pastor that was less than helpful: “He was young, eager, and dedicated.”

My sermon was less than 2 minutes long and a total disaster. (Anyone thinking I’m going to only preach two minutes today is going to be disappointed.)

I have quite a bit more to work with now. Which is good because today our first lesson is about St. Stephen and his moment of martyrdom. I’ve learned a great deal about who he was and what brought him to this moment, this paradoxically awful and yet triumphant episode in the life of the early church.

To fully understand it, we have to go back into history to recognize a few truths. Context is everything when it comes to this story.

The Bible is a book of many things, not the least of which is the chronicle of a religious conflict between two types of religious people.

Now I’ve talked about this at some length before. I’ve talked about the differences between settlers/pioneers, purity/compassion, moral/ethical. These conflicts are as ancient as humankind; they were happening before the Bible was compiled together, they were happening during the events of the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, and they continue today throughout the world.

On one side is the establishment, the church, the temple, the synagogue. They are concerned with morality, with ritual purity, with maintaining themselves as the sole purveyor of religious goods. They want to ensure that you come to them and to them alone as the source of all things spiritual and theological. As pastor, as preacher, I am officially on this side of the dividing line and, at times, I hate it.

It’s a little dangerous for me to admit that. You see, my obligations as pastor require me to support the establishment. The church pays my salary, gives me what I need to maintain my family and lifestyle. But where I am as a Christian believer is much more with the other side of the coin.

They are the originalists. Now I use that term very intentionally. When we talk about “originalism” as a legal concept, we’re talking about trying to be faithful to what the people who created something intended (A constitutional originalist wants to be faithful to what the Founding Fathers intended in writing the US Constitution, for example.)

Originalists always want religion to be what it’s supposed to be. What was God’s intention for his people in the Old Covenant? In the New? What is it that we’re really supposed to be about? Spreading the good news. Caring for the less fortunate. Welcoming the stranger. Being a light to the nations. These are fundamental original concepts behind God’s promises and his call to his people, both Chosen and Christian.

The conflict arises because the establishment is always threatened by the originalists. ALWAYS. They’re renegades, rebels, heretics, rabble-rousers, trouble-makers, and so forth. Originalists usually peel back the veil and reveal all the ways the establishment benefits those who are a part of it. They expose where the church or the synagogue or the temple has become about you or me, instead of about God. The establishment usually doesn’t take that very well.

Temple cult in ancient Israel, they’ve got themselves a cushy deal. They’ve brought in a few other Gods, usually those that give them a license for political ambition, greed, or lust. And along comes this pesky prophet. “Thus says the LORD...” What a nuisance, reminding people about what God told them in the law of Moses. Before long, they’re not going to put up with the lies we’ve been telling them. We’d better kill that prophet before that happens.

The Pharisees of the synagogue in Jesus’ day. They got a cushy deal too. The power and authority to include or exclude people from the community, based upon a exceedingly strict interpretation of OT purity. And then along comes Jesus, who eats with tax collectors and prostitutes, who heals lepers, and forgives sins. What a nuisance, reminding people that God loves everybody, not just the people who meet our approval. Before long, everyone’s going to be in this place. We’re not going to be able to keep “those people” out of here and then we’re not going to have any power anymore. We’d better kill him before that happens.

The Pope and the Curia of Rome in the 15th & 16th centuries. They got a cushy deal. We tell people to jump at our command, to pay for indulgences for their forgiveness, and they make us rich and powerful. And then along comes this monk Martin Luther. He keeps talking about what the Bible really says, that God forgives freely through Christ. What a nuisance! Before long, no one’s going to pay for our extravagant lifestyles. We’d better kill him before that happens.

As I said, this conflict has been around for all of human history. Stephen is one of many who challenged the system, stood up to the establishment, peeled back the veil, and died for it. We only get the tail end of his story, but the verses that precede our First Lesson are a long debate between Stephen and the establishment of his day. And sure enough, he reminds them of how poorly they’ve stayed true to God’s intention. He tells the truth, the most dangerous act of all.

Human beings are incredible self-deceivers. Nothing angers us more than to have our delusions stripped away. Originalists do that, by their very existence, they do that. The establishment wants to believe they’re doing the right thing. They want to believe it so badly that they blind themselves to every and all examples that contradict that belief. They self-deceive. They lie to themselves. We, because we often are the establishment, lie to ourselves.

Then along come these trouble-makers, these originalists. They remind us that we do not hold to our own values as well as we should or even want to Boy, do we ever hate being called out for that. So they’ve got a tough job. They’ve got to do something that no one wants them to do...

Except for God himself.

You see, the establishment is easier. You show up, you do the ritual, you tithe your 10% (or whatever), and you go home. You don’t rock the boat. You don’t cause trouble. And you don’t  have to have anything you already believe challenged. It’s easy. It’s simple. But it’s not what God calls us to be.

God calls us to be Stephen and those like him. He calls us to be Martin Luther. He calls us to be prophets. He calls us to be like Christ himself, willing to challenge the status quo for the sake of those it leaves out: the poor, the different, the less worthy, those we don’t like. That’s a tall order, to stand up to the church or to the government or to the whole of society and tell it what God really wants it to do. To tell the truth, the most dangerous act of all.

But here’s the thing. It’s dangerous and yet it’s not. Stephen himself puts proof to that. As the stones start flying, he looks up and has a vision of Christ himself. You see, God is with us every step of our journey in life. When we do the wrong things, but also when we do the right things, when we do the hard things, the things that make us enemies. The things that make people want to kill us because we dared to speak the truth.

Truth is a rare commodity in human society. But God has called us to be a people of truth, fully aware of what it might cost us. He’s been there. He remembers the nails, the mockery, the thorns in his crown. And because he remembers, he stands with us when we stand against all the powers of this world. And with him by our side, what’s the worst they can do? Kill us? Hah. Amen.

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran on May 11, 2014
Preaching text: John 10:1-10

There is a quote I see with some frequency on the Internet. It says that “the problem with today is that we were created to value people and use things, and yet now what we do instead is value things and use people.” And that is our society in a nutshell. We have become very cold-blooded towards other people in our madcap quest to get ahead in life. We are very mercenary towards others. Are you an asset or a liability? How much will it cost me in time, resources, and/or energy to help you?

But that mentality has its consequences.

Bishop Dunlop was here with us on Thursday evening at a synod-sponsored event. He began the workshop with a Bible Study on Moses and the Burning Bush. After taking us through the story (which most all of us know very well), he observed how God was listening to the cries of his people in slavery in Egypt and he wondered what sort of cries is God hearing from his people today?

We gathered together that night answered with what you might see as the typical lot of answers to that question: calls against poverty, injustice, inequality, etc. But Pr. Ed Robbins raised one that we did not expect; he said that one of the things we lack most today is a sense of connection and community with one another. The Bishop said in response that he receives that answer to this question probably more than any other.

We have myriad ways of making connections with one another: phone, texting, Skype, Internet message boards, Facebook, and so forth, and yet human beings have never been more isolated from one another. Talk about irony.

There was something else that jumped out at me in the Bishop’s Bible Study, something that I knew and had simply forgotten: Moses, at least at that point in his life, was a shepherd.

Now those two observations may not seem to have anything to do with one another, but bear with me for a moment...

If you looked at the width and breadth of the Scriptures, you find that shepherds are the most popular of professions. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the patriarchs were all shepherds at one point or another. Moses, as the Burning Bush story points out, was a shepherd. Before he was king, David was a shepherd. Shepherds were the first the hear the news of Messiah’s birth in the Christmas story. Jesus, in our Gospel lesson today, self-identifies as a shepherd. Even outside the Bible, this pattern continues to some degree. St. Patrick, for instance, has his beginnings as a shepherd.

It’s almost as if that’s the thing to be. The prestige job to have in the ancient world. Except that it isn’t.

Shepherds are slaves, or nearly so. It’s that no pay, no prestige job you give to the lowest of the low in the social order. Slaves or children (remember, this is ancient times when kids weren’t worth much). You might make your son a shepherd in much the same way you might tell your son or daughter today to do the dishes or fold a basket of laundry: menial labor that’s not worth paying a wage for.

Shepherds were nobodies. They had nothing. They were worth nothing. And maybe that’s the point.

Because shepherds, it seems, get more than any other profession or lifestyle the value of life over the value of things.

It’s astounding in many ways the stories you hear of what shepherds would do for their flocks. For instance, Jesus talks in our Gospel lesson about being the gate of the sheep. That was typical practice, not something unique to Jesus.

You see, most sheepfolds were caves. The shepherd, when the flock bedded down for the night, would lie across the mouth of the cave, becoming the “gate” of the sheep. None of the sheep could get out without walking over the shepherd, although conversely no predator could get in without likewise getting past the shepherd.

That sort of encounter likely didn’t end well for a sleeping shepherd.

But that was a given for the job, putting yourself into harm’s way for the sake of the sheep. Why? What makes these animals so valuable that each night you’d put your own life on the line for them? It’s not like these are the smartest or the greatest of animals. Sheep are pretty dumb, pretty helpless.

Understanding all this as a metaphor for God’s relationship to humankind only makes it worse in some ways. After all, we’re the sheep in that equation. But we’re not dumb. We’ve unlocked the secrets of the universe. We’ve made incredible advances in science and technology and social development.

·         We’ve discovered that burning fossil fuels poisons our atmosphere, but we keep filling our cars up anyway.

·         We’ve learned that smoking causes cancer, junk food obesity, and we keep gobbling those things down more and more as time goes on.

·         We’ve harnessed the power of the atom and then proceeded to build an arsenal of weapons based thereon that can destroy this planet 100 times over.

·         Many of us own a device that we carry with us everywhere that gives us access to the totality of human knowledge and we use it to laugh at cat pictures and get into pointless arguments with strangers.

Yes, we have the power of the universe at our fingertips and what we do with it is “I can haz cheezburger.” (If you don’t get that reference, count yourself lucky. Not knowing the inane world of internet memes is no handicap.)

In all the ways that matter, we’re no smarter than sheep. In fact, we might even be dumber.

It’s hard sometimes not to be cynical when it comes to human nature. We really do some of the stupidest things. But God doesn’t see us that way. Just as the shepherd sees the sheep as an animal in desperate need of his help, so too does God look at us. For God, what has value is life, not things. Life is what he seeks to give us, even at the cost of his own.

Because Jesus does put himself into harm’s way for our sake. He is attacked, beaten, and then killed for the sake of the sheep. All this he does so that we may have life. He never loses sight of that, never forgets that’s what really matters. Even if the granting of life to us costs him his own. Amen.

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on May 4, 2014
Preaching text: Luke 24:13-35

When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.

Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.

While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

These four verses that I just read illustrate a common theme in Jesus’ post- resurrection appearances. Despite the disciples’ intimate knowledge of their master, despite all the months and years they’ve spent together, when he appears to them, they almost invariably fail to recognize him.

It’s almost as if Jesus shows up where you never expect him.

Many years ago, I knew this guy named Richard. He and I had met when we were staffing Japanese anime fan conventions together in the 90s. He lived in the Washington DC area and the only place I ever saw him were those one or two times a year when we’d work the cons together.

I took a trip to NYC, and as was fitting for a fine nerdy anime fan like myself, I stopped by a Japanese bookstore to see what anime they might have. I turn the corner of one of the stacks and there’s this guy standing there. Something familiar about him, but...wait a minute. It was Richard. In NYC. In one of the largest cities in the world. In the exact same bookstore. Both of us hundreds of miles from our homes.

Talk about showing up where you never expect. The likelihood of that coincidence boggles the mind. I haven’t seen Richard in well over 15 years, but I’ll always remember that story.

God likes to do that to us too. He pops up where you least expect him to be. The Old Testament is full of stories where God surprises the daylights out of people. Abraham hosts three travellers, bringing them from out of the hot noontime sun, never suspecting that God had come to visit. Elijah is told that God will pass by his cave, but when the thunder roars and the whirlwind blows by, God isn’t there. It’s only when the silence comes that God arrives. King Nebuchadnezzar looks into the fiery furnace and sees not the three men he just condemned to death, but also a fourth in their midst.

God showing up where he’s least expected.

Today’s lesson is no different. Two disciples on the Emmaus road on the afternoon of the first Easter. They are joined by a stranger, but he’s not a stranger. He’s simply Jesus in the last place they expected him.

Another tale in the great list of God’s Holy Surprises.

In one sense, we make it too easy for God to surprise us. There’s a big reason for that. In our arrogance, we keep thinking that we know what God will do. If he showed up today, we’d know what he’d look like. We’ve got him all figured out.

If God came into our midst right now, right here, he’d appear as a column of blinding light or as an angelic figure so powerful none of us could bear to look at him. His voice would deafen in its power and we’d be paralyzed with fear. Now God has shown up in the Scriptures that way before, when it suits his purpose, but those stories are in the minority. More often, when God appears, we don’t even realize it.

In many ways, the fact that we make these assumptions says more about us than it does about God. We Americans idolize strength and abhor weakness, so our image of God is almost always one of strength and power. Our civil religion speaks of God invariably alongside either our money (meaning our economic power) or our military (meaning our physical power.) A certain public figure recently claimed that God baptizes terrorists through waterboarding, a statement that puts proof to the idea that God is only present when there is strength and power being exercised, usually violently.

But that’s not the story we see in his Holy Word. We know God best through Jesus Christ, a humble ordinary Middle Eastern man. A man who was taken prisoner, beaten half to death, and nailed to a cross to finish him off. What strength is there in that image? What power? What might? God beaten. God broken. God hanging on a cross. God dying in the last place anyone expects.

We blind ourselves to God’s presence because we want to him to play by our rules and be the sort of deity we claim him to be. But that’s not how it works. Our salvation does not come through strength. It comes through weakness. It does not come through violence. It comes through sacrifice. We want to see a God of power, but what God wants us to see instead is a God of love, one willing to go to any length, even death, for our sake.

No wonder he keeps surprising us.

I’ll let you in on a little secret though. It’s not really that much of a surprise. You see, God tells us openly where we can see him. And while it’s not in the places we might expect, if we take him at his word (and we should), he gives us all kinds of places to find him.

His Holy Spirit comes into us through baptism. God is in each one of us, so if you want to see him, look around you at the faces of your brothers and sisters in these pews.

Jesus taught us that whenever we do acts of kindness and love towards the least of our brethren, we find we’ve done it to him. So we find God in the needy, the poor, the hungry, the sick, and naked of our world, the people who need what we are called to offer.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention that we also find him in the same place that those disciples did in Emmaus, in the breaking of bread and the pouring of wine. This is my body. This is my blood, given and shed for you and for all. He comes to us in the sacrament.

God is present in all these places because he said he’d be there. Not quite what we expect, but the Christian life is full of paradoxes. Strength comes out of weakness. Life eternal comes from death. Victory comes from defeat. And the extraordinary is found in the most ordinary of places: bread, wine, water, and the people who share them. Amen.

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter 2014

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on April 27, 2014
Based on a sermon preached April 26, 2003 and April 11, 1999.
Preaching text: John 20:19-31

It’s a familiar story. In fact, this is one of those few Sundays where I have to do only a small amount of sermon prep, because this Gospel lesson never changes. Every year, the Sunday after Easter is “Doubting Thomas.”

Suffice to say, I preached this a lot and we’ve all heard this a lot. It starts in a dark, dirty, upper room. We have the eleven remaining disciples huddled together. It’s cramped, hot, the tension is thick enough to cut. One of them, maybe Andrew, maybe James, peeks out the window every now and then, expecting a howling mob at their door any minute.

Thomas gets up. “I’m leaving.” He says. Maybe he’s fed up, got cabin fever, whatever. But what timing. Sometime after he leaves, Jesus comes before those who remained, passing through the locked door. He speaks to them, shows them his hands and his side and they rejoice at seeing him alive. After spending some time with the disciples, Jesus then leaves.

And then Thomas walks into the room. His fellow disciples, rush over to him. “Guess what? Jesus was here. We have seen him.” To Thomas, it must have been almost like a cruel joke. Or perhaps worse. Maybe they’ve all gone mad from the paranoia and the cramped space. Either way, he refuses to believe his fellows. “I will not believe unless I see him myself and can touch his wounds with my own hands.” And so Thomas forever gains his infamous nickname.

I cannot read this story without feeling sorry for Thomas. This is not the only time he shows up in John’s recording of Jesus’ story. In fact, he’s number three after Peter and John himself in number of appearances, so he’s an important character. A solid and devoted disciple, questioning and asking, always seeking the truths that Jesus offers. But no one remembers that part of his story. Imagine for a second that the legacy you leave behind for generations to come is to be known not for your strengths but rather for one moment of weakness? A hero fallen from grace because your most famous escapade isn’t some great deed, but a single bad one. Poor fellow. Does he really deserve all that?

Of course not, but there’s more than just Thomas’ virtues that make that argument too. It’s a common theme in the Gospels about how those around Jesus did not understand what was going on when it came to the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection. (That’s the core element, in fact, of Mark’s Gospel.) They just didn’t get it. Jesus’ passion predictions went in one ear and out the other, and despite having had everything Jesus say would happen happen, it still came as a shock and a surprise.

Now, all of them, without exception, were confused, scared, and dumbfounded. For them, it must have been like living a nightmare to watch their friend, their teacher, arrested and killed. Therefore, consider this. Is Thomas’ doubt any worse than the flight of the disciples when Jesus was arrested? Was it worse than Peter’s thrice denial of Jesus? Was it worse than Mary Magdelene at the empty tomb not even recognizing Jesus when he was standing right in front of her?

Was Thomas’ doubt in any way different than those things? They all reveal a simple truth. None of them understood. It was only when they saw with their own eyes did they realize what was really going on. Jesus had indeed risen from the dead.

So, the truth is, Thomas is just one of the guys. They doubted just as much as he did. So why pick on him? It’s rather unfair to forever label him as the “doubter,” since in one form or another all the disciples earned that nickname.

But the evangelist John told us this story not to pick on his buddy Thomas. I think he had another aim in mind. I think he wanted to give the later disciples of Jesus someone to relate to. I think John told us about Thomas because he wanted us, years removed from Jesus’ time on earth, to understand we are not alone.

After all, who here can claim that they never have doubts about what they believe? Who here has gone through some traumatic period in our life, lost a job, lost a loved one, and not wondered “Where is God?” or “Why did God let this happen?”

We’ve all been there. We’ve all had our times when this Jesus stuff just didn’t make any sense to us. We’ve all been Thomas at some point or another.

We don’t like those times. We don’t like doubt. We like being certain of things. In truth, we fear doubt. We fear that if we doubt, then we lack faith. And, of course, if we lack faith, we might find the kingdom of heaven denied to us.

But let me remind you of what Jesus says to Thomas, or more accurately, what Jesus does not say. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Notice what’s missing? There is no condemnation in Jesus’ words. Nowhere does he say “cursed are you for not believing without seeing.”

It would have been foolish for him to do so. Like I’ve been saying, none of the first disciples were without their doubts. Not Peter, not Mary, not Thomas, none of them. In fact, Jesus knew they would doubt.

Why else would he, when he walks into the room for the first time, immediately show his disciples his hands and side? When he comes to Thomas, he does the same. He answers their doubts.

Jesus’ expectations of us are no different. No, we probably aren’t fortunate enough to have Jesus walk up to us and show us his hands and side in the same fashion as he did for his first disciples. But he does understand that we doubt, and he does not look down upon us for doing so.

In truth, it is in our struggles with doubt that we grow in faith. One who is not challenged does not grow, and doubt challenges us. It challenges our preconceptions, our long held, but perhaps incorrect or incomplete, beliefs. Jesus provides us with the insight to move beyond our doubts and then we find ourselves in a different place than we were before. And then we get more doubts and process continues. We grow in faith, and we gain in understanding of the wonder and mystery that is God’s love for us.

Thomas again shows us that this happens. For when he understands the truth of the resurrection, he utters the confession “My Lord, and my God.” He has gone from confusion to clarity, from doubt to certainty. Jesus does the same for us, as we struggle with our own questions and our own doubts. And when that struggle has ended, we will find ourselves in a new place with new insight and new understanding. We will have grown, just like Thomas did. Amen.

Sermon for Easter Sunday 2014

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on April 20,2014

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Easter is my favorite day of the year. My favorite festival of the Church. Here is where it all comes together. Here is where we see God’s plan for us and all of creation most clearly. We see it’s, to borrow geek terminology, “final form.”

But I’m somewhat alone in my opinion. Easter is often a pale shadow to the juggernaut of Christmas. And I’m starting to think I know why. It’s because of Jesus.

At Christmas, Jesus is a baby. Helpless, powerless, functionally mindless. A tabula rasa. A blank slate. There is little indication of the man he will become in the infant that he is, which makes it easier for us project our desires, our will, our intentions upon him.

The adult Jesus of Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter, not so much. The real Jesus is so unlike the Jesus we really want.

This ties in to a large degree with what I spoke of last week. God giving us what we need, rather than what we want or desire. Our image of Jesus, the picture we create in our own minds of who he is, is often a reflection of ourselves. He likes the same things we like; he’s passionate about the same things we’re passionate about; he cares about the same things we care about, and he hates the same things we do.

Atheists often mock us by saying that we “create God in our own image,” and they’re not far off the mark. This is something we’ve first been doing since we were first introduced to him all those centuries ago. The Pharisees, the Rabbis, and the people of his day were hoping he would be someone different than what he was. They wanted the Messiah to be...

·         ...concerned about moral purity and personal righteousness. He wasn’t.

·         ...angry about the Roman occupation. He didn’t care.

·         ...someone who would perform magic tricks on command. He didn’t.

·         ...someone who would tell them they were right and those other folks over there were wrong. Nope.

They wanted a God in their own image, one who would affirm them and condemn their enemies. And we have changed so very little in this day and age. We still want that. We want Jesus to justify our sin, our vices, our greed, our exploitation of others, our idolatry of “being right” and being hateful towards others. Justify, but not forgive, because in our minds there is nothing to forgive. We’ve done nothing wrong. That’s one hand. The other hand is we want him to condemn the sin of others, their vices, their failings, their mistakes. Condemn, but not forgive, because in our minds those people don’t deserve a single thing from God.

Jesus adamantly refuses to play this game with us. And for that, we killed him.

Yes, we killed him. Not those people over there. Us. The good people. The religious people. The righteous people. We’re the ones who drove in the nails. Scholars have said that “if Jesus came back today, the very first thing we’d do with him is crucify him again.” He’d again eat with the modern equivalent of tax collectors and sinners (strippers and gay people, perhaps?) He’d heal the sick when the political language of our times is “The sick and poor are unworthy of life because they cost too much.” He’d tell stories about the virtues of Muslims, atheists, and criminals, and he’d be very harsh on how wrong we Christians have been about him, his Father, and our neighbors. No, the really real Jesus is not much to our liking at all. We’d kill him all over again.

And he’d let us do it too. He’d let us do it because he loves us.

When God looks out over us, he sees a bunch of squabbling fussing children. We’re fighting with each other. We’re whining over things that don’t really matter. We’re ignoring everything he says to us. But we’re his children. We’re his children and he loves us. No matter how messy, how noisy, and how ugly we are.

My mother used to tell me in my teenage years that “I will always love you, but I may not like you very much right now.” We’ve all been there. We parents have all cleaned up more than our fair share of our children’s poop, vomit, snot, and other disgusting bodily fluids. We’ve all dealt with smart-alec attitudes, disrespect, and outright rebellion. We’ve seen our kids do the stupidest things, put themselves in danger, get in trouble for no good reason, and so forth. And yet, through it all, we have never once stopped loving them. No matter how much they frustrate us, disgust us, or hurt us, we cannot do it. They’re ours and they’re our whole world.

And God does with us as we do with our own and then some. It is no linguistic trick of Jesus when he refers to God as Father. God is our parent and he loves us with the same unbelievable power and passion that we bear for our children. And nowhere do we see that more clearly than on Easter.

For we have done the unthinkable. Our rebellion against our loving parent had reached the point where we murdered him, hung him on a cross, and let him rot. The ultimate statement of our crude defiance: We killed God. Deicide. But God’s love will not be stopped even by that brutality. On the third day, he rose again. Not even death could contain his love.

If we’d just be honest with ourselves for a moment, we’d pretty quickly admit that we and our “siblings” are pretty much the same as we are. And who are our siblings? Well, “those people,” however you want to define them. Their evil is really no worse than our own and our good is no better than theirs. This isn’t about how right and good we are and how wrong and horrible they are. We’re all in the same boat. We’re all part of this same family of flawed and sinful humanity. None of us is good enough to save ourselves, but also none of us is bad enough for God to not care.

Easter is about love. A love that transcends human categories and limitations. A love that transcends even human understanding. It’s a love that brought Jesus to this world to be murdered by the very people he came to save and it was that same love that brought him forth from that tomb alive a few days later. It’s a love that began at the beginning of time and it’s a love that will continue without failing into the future. And it is that love that will bring all of us from death to life just as it did Jesus. Amen.

Sermon for Palm Sunday 2014

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on April 13, 2014

Preaching text: Matthew 21:1-11

You know you’ve stumbled onto something powerful when it refuses to leave you alone. I preached last week on the differences between settler and pioneer Christianity and I’ve not been able to get that metaphor, that image, out of my head since. I’m preaching a sermon tonight for St. John's monthly contemporary worship that uses that illustration and it’s partly informed what I’m about to tell you today.

But that’s not all. I also read another article this week, written from a Greek Orthodox perspective, about the rapid decline of membership in that ancient church. Some 90% of ethnic Greeks in our nation are no longer members of that church. The author of the article says the reason for that is quite simple and it’s the reason we are seeing this decline across all denominational lines: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, you name it. The reason the church is dying in America is because it has stopped preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ and has replaced it with what the author calls “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

Last week, I criticized the church, the people, the leadership, everyone from top to bottom, for settling down and transforming the grand evangelistic mission into a life of dull monotonous security. But the truth is, most of us probably don’t know any better.We were never told, we were never taught, that there was another option.

Today, on this Palm Sunday 2014, all across our nation people are going to be taught (as they have been for the past uncounted decades) that the only thing that matters is that you believe hard enough, that you’re just “good at heart,” and that you’re not like “those people” over there.

We, and by we I mean the leadership of the church (the clergy, the bishops, and everyone who should know better), have watered down the message to the point where it is meaningless. People do not hear about sin because it’s unpleasant and guilt-inducing. People will not hear about death because please don’t remind me of my mortality. People will not hear about the cross, because it is blood, ugly, and defeatist. People will not hear about the empty tomb because without the cross what’s the point? People will not hear about the unbelievable unflinching love of God for them because it will confront them two truths. One, that they are loved not because of who they are, but because of who God is and two, that God loves the people they hate just as much as he loves them. And lastly, people will not hear about grace because, like everything else in life it seems, salvation must be earned and cannot be given.

Turn on the TV preachers and you will hear the lies of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Walk into most any church and you will hear them. Just believe hard enough, be good, and don’t be like those people. We no longer speak the truth from our pulpits. We have traded in that truth for what people want to hear and we have silenced the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

For uncounted years, in our quest to be popular, successful, and (in some cases) rich, we clergy have done a terrible disservice to you, the lay people of the Church. We have done what you wanted and not given you what you needed.

It is probably not coincidental that I am having this epiphany here and now at the dawn of Holy Week. At the end of his version of the temptation story, the evangelist Luke adds a little editorial flourish to the story. He says that the devil left Jesus until “an opportune time.” That opportune time arrives as Jesus approaches Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, and over the course of the next several days, our Lord is again offered three temptations.

The first is today, as he enters the city to the fanfare of the crowd. Hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna to the Son of David. That last title is the clue of what is being offered. Son of David, son of the king, heir to his worldly kingdom.

The other clue is buried in the geography of Jerusalem itself. Jesus enters the city from the eastern gate, a path which will take him past Antonia Fortress, the Roman garrison in the city. The one thing standing in the way of re-creating David’s kingdom is the Roman legions. If only Jesus marched on the fortress and used his powers to end their occupation...

That’s what the crowd wants. That’s what the people are demanding of Jesus. But it’s not what they need, so he rides on.

The other two temptations that Jesus faces this Holy Week are similar in character. The second is in the Garden. “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” Jesus prays. It’s what he wants, to avoid the nightmarish death of the cross. But it’s not what the people need, so he accepts the will of his Father and goes to his fate.

The third is on the cross itself. “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” taunt the priests, scribes, and other leaders. “Let him come down...and we will believe in him.” And Jesus could have. He could have done what they wanted, but he knew it wasn’t what they needed. So he gave up his spirit and died.

Three times Jesus is tempted to give in to what is wanted. Three times he chooses the harder path of what is needed for the sake of those he came for. Jesus chooses to die and he chooses this not because we’ve believed hard enough in him. He chooses this not because gosh-darn it we’re such good people. He chooses this not because we’re so much better than everyone else. He chooses this because that’s WHO HE IS. He chooses this because that’s WHAT HE CAME TO DO. He chooses to die because that is what is NEEDED to save the whole world, you, me, and everyone else.

The problem with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is that it takes Jesus out of the equation entirely. It’s all about us, what we do, what we think, what we believe. That’s not the Gospel. That’s not Christianity. Christianity is believing that Jesus came to save us by living, dying, and rising again because that was the only way it was going to happen. It’s not about us. It’s about him and what he did for us. It’s about him and the love for all of creation that brought him to this earth and drove him to the horrific death of the cross. It’s about him and the gift, the unearned undeserved GIFT, he gives to us through the empty tomb of Easter. It’s about JESUS. It’s always about Jesus.

I have a good friend, a Missouri Synod pastor out in Montana named Charles. Charles and I are utter opposites on almost every issue. He’s conservative, I’m liberal, theologically, politically. But he’s in the midst of the same epiphany I am. He talks on Facebook about all the people he’s encountering who have been in the church all their lives and have yet to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ. How sad that there are so many. These encounters have renewed his commitment to preach, teach, and live Christ crucified. And I will do the same. After all, it’s what you need. More than anything else I can offer you, it’s what you need most. Jesus Christ, the cross, the empty tomb, and the gift of his grace. Amen.