Sermon for All Hallows Eve

Preached at St. John's Lutheran Church, New Freedom, PA on October 26, 2014
Scripture texts: Ezekiel 37:1-19, John 19:16-30, Revelation 21:1-6

Fear. Terror. Horror. Death. Decay. Destruction. These are the themes of Halloween as we have come to understand them. It is a day of monsters and fright. A day of the spooky and macabre, the grim and the sorrowful.

It is good that we are here.

It is good because our society as it has evolved is of many minds about these festivities. Many Christians reject this holiday and its ghoulish traditions as signs of the demonic and the devilish. They believe the devil stalks the Earth on this night more than any other and to name him is to give him power. But that’s not how it works. If you fear a thing, THAT is when you give it power. To name it and claim it, you instead gain power over it.

As much as the Church struggles with how to understand Halloween, so too does our larger society. Halloween is, in many ways, society’s nervous laugh at the darker truths of reality. Nervous because, like much of the church, it fears those darker truths. It refuses to name death and decay, disease and misery, fearing that naming them will draw their attention towards us. But that is not how it works. In fearing them, we give them power. Power they neither merit nor deserve.

Tonight, we are gathered here to name those darker truths, to lay hold of them, and to gain mastery over them. We are here tonight to turn that nervous laughter to confident mirth. We are here to celebrate the core truth of this day that is often forgotten and ignored.

We are here to remember that death has no power over us. That death has been defeated.

That is what all this is about. What it is really about. All our modern Halloween traditions had their origins in the ancient church’s understanding of truth. They would gather on the night of the ancient pagan festivals of autumn and declare to death itself “You have no power here.”

The costumes we wear? The ancients wore likewise, saying to death “You think you’re scary. Let me show you what scary really is.” The grim imagery and frightening themes? Hah, the ancients used these to laugh at death, to make mockery of it, as do we.

We do not fear you, death. We can do scary better than you.

I remember another ancient truth. One I was told once and it has stuck with me throughout my life. The opposite of death is not life; the opposite of death is birth. Our lives hold to a pattern. Birth to death and then, in our faith, we trust and believe in a third step: rebirth or, as we Christians call it, resurrection.

Birth to death to resurrection. Our worship tonight follows that pattern. The Scriptures themselves follow that pattern. Our lives follow that pattern.

We begin with birth. We are born into a broken and fallen world, a world of pain and sorrow, sin and despair. A world that beats us down and does its best to drive out hope and joy from our lives. Oh, Lord, let these dry bones dance! Ezekiel’s vision becomes our prayer. Restore us. Give us back, O Lord, what the world has taken from us.

That prayer has not gone unheard. God has given his answer. God has given himself as answer, born of a virgin, incarnate as Jesus. He came into this world of brokenness and despair and he lived as we live. Learned and saw first hand the troubles and torments of life here on Earth. And, at the end, he gave God’s answer to this fallen world by dying upon a cross and rising again on the third day. “It is finished!” Christ declared from that cross and with those words, death saw its power vanish.

It’s all over but the crying.

John’s vision in Revelation reveals that to us. Because of Christ and his cross, because of Christ and his empty tomb, there will come a day when death will be no more. The powers of evil that we mock this day will see their final defeat. The dragon and the beast, all the monsters of this world both real and metaphorical, will see their end come at last: disease, sorrow, pain, hunger, poverty, war, bigotry, hate, and death all swept away in the glorious rebirth of the world.

Birth to death to resurrection. The cycle will come to its fulfillment through Christ.

Birth to death to resurrection. Death and evil cannot stop it. It is already won. It is finished.

We know this. We trust this. We believe this.

And thus, tonight we gather. We gather pretending to be werewolves and zombies. We gather pretending to be Pokemon and Ninja Turtles. We gather pretending to be fantastical creatures or popular icons of culture and we gather in the midst of darkness and blood because we know these things have no power. We name them and declare the truth about them. They are impotent. Powerless. They bear no threat. They are nothing compared to what Christ has done on his cross.

So let us laugh and have fun on this and every Halloween. Death is powerless. Evil has been defeated. Let us make mockery of their futile attempts to frighten us and drive us to despair. God has answered our deepest prayer. Our dry bones dance. Life is ours through the cross and empty tomb. Amen.

Sermon for Reformation Sunday 2014

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on October 26, 2014
Scripture Text: None

(The following is a play-acted paraphrase of the life and times of Martin Luther)

In nomine Patris, et Filli, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

Those words, spoken at the beginning of every Mass, would come to define my life. My name is Martin Luther. I was born in what is now Germany in the year 1483. I was the son of a coal miner who sought a better life for his son than he had. So, when I came of age, I began schooling to become a lawyer.

God, it seems, had other plans.

One day, when out walking, a sudden thunderstorm came upon me. I was caught out in the open as lightning and thunder roared around me. I was nearly struck several times and in my fright and terror, I called out to St. Anne to deliver me from the storm. I bargained with her and told her that if I survived this, I would pledge my life to the church.

Well, obviously I survived, and made good my word. I entered the Augustinian Order, a monastic order dedicated to the ideals and teachings of St. Augustine. I took my vows and was later ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic church. All this much to the chagrin of my father.

In nomine Patris, et Filli, et Spiritus Sancti. Those words had become my life. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It was an interesting time to be alive and to be a part of the church. The whole world was in the midst of radical and profound change. Muslim Turks had stormed into Europe with their conquest of the last vestiges of the old Byzantine Empire. The efforts of Christian kings and Princes like Vlad Tepes notwithstanding, they were now at the very borders of Germany, threatening us all. But with the Turks came not just the threat of invasion, but also the opening of trade with parts of the world Christian Europe had long forgotten; China, India, and Persia were now open to us again. Christopher Columbus sought a trade passage to these lands that did not require the Muslim middle-man and had inadvertently stumbled a whole new continent.

The world had become far bigger than we had ever realized. But Guttenburg’s invention of the printing press had also made it a lot smaller. Now the secrets of far-away places and knowledge long forgotten was suddenly available to any who could read. Art, science, and learning were flourishing in what your historians would later call the Renaissance.

And in the midst of all of it was the church that I served. It too was undergoing its own growing pains, its transformation, its changes, its Renaissance. It was time. It was overdue. For far too long, the Holy See had been occupied by the basest of men, corrupt scions of powerful Italian families: Borgia, Della Rovere, Medici, and the like. They were the most powerful men in the world and with that power came a loss of vision. They ruled as worldly kings, not as the Vicar of Christ. They served themselves, not God, and not his people.

But, at the time, I was ignorant of all this. That was largely by design. In the Church of those days, the Scriptures were held aloft, held in such high esteem that were considered beyond the grasp of all but the most learned of the Church. A lowly monk such as I had never read the Bible and, like so many others, I remained largely oblivious to what went on behind the walls of the Vatican.

I was a nobody in Germany, doing his best to save his soul. My superiors believed me fit for further schooling, so they recommended me to the university in Saxony. There I was to learn and to teach the Scriptures to new generations of priests and servants of the Church.

And it was there that I began to learn what God was really about. Now I was being called to join that learned elite, those tiny handful who had actually delved into the Scriptures. That did not quite work out the way my betters had hoped. You see, once I began to read God’s Holy Word, I quickly discovered that I had been taught in the Church all my life was very different than what God had revealed in the Bible.

It is easy to swindle and con those who do not know better. And that is what the Church was in those days, one big con game with the people as the marks and the rubes. The latest scam was the Papal Indulgence. Pay money for the building of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome and God will forgive your sins. Forgiveness as a fund-raising strategy.

That is not what I read in the Scriptures. I read that God’s forgiveness comes through grace and mercy, through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. There was no need for these pious works that Rome taught were necessary. No need for indulgences, no need for relics, no need for penance, and dozens of other practices that were commonplace in my day. I was convinced at the time that this was all the result of simple error, that the leaders and scholars of the Church had simply forgotten what the Scriptures had taught.

So, like any good scholar, I called the Church to debate and discussion. I wrote out 95 points of contention, 95 Theses, if you will. And on All-Hallows Eve 1517, I posted these to the door of the University Church in Wittenberg.

I set off a firestorm. With the printing press, those Theses and many of my other writings began to spread across the whole of Christendom. And corrupt Cardinals, Bishops, and the Pope himself suddenly realize their little scam was up. I made myself quite a threat without even realizing it.

Thus, I was faced with a choice. I could recant my writings, recant my teachings, and live out my days in peace and quiet, leaving the Church to do as it had done for generations, lying to the people and bilking them of their money and energy on pointless piety and blasphemous practices. Or I could hold fast to the truths that I saw in God’s Holy Word. “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.”

I held fast. At Worms, I stood before Cardinals and inquisitors who demanded my compliance with the corrupted practice of the Church and I refused. “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason - I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other - my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. God help me. Amen.”

I had condemned myself in the eyes of the Church. But I was not without allies, I had the support of Dukes and Electors in Germany, who had no great fondness for an Italian Pope nor to a petulant Emperor who supported him. As I left Worms, I was kidnapped by my allies and hidden away.

With the Pope and his minions unable to kill me, unable to silence me, the fire that I began erupted all the more across Europe. Oh, they tried. They knew the stakes. But this was still Medieval Europe, this was still feudalism. With the threat of the Turk at our very doorstep, the Emperor could not afford to offend my ducal allies, whose knights and armies would support his war effort. Eventually, he backed down, defied the Pope himself (admittedly reluctantly), and I found my freedom again.

The rest is, as they say, history. There would be no going back after that. Slowly and admittedly not universally, the corrupt and deceptive practices of the Church began to be rolled back. No more indulgences. Relics lost their importance. Priests became Pastors and began to marry and have families. Monasteries and convents were emptied. The Scriptures were translated into the common languages and people began to read for themselves what God had taught his people. Others emerged in other lands to demand change and reformation to the Church: Cramner in England, Calvin in France, Zwingli in Switzerland.

The split was irrevocable and inevitable. Time and again, these Protestants as we came to be called sundered our relationship to Rome and became independent churches. And to its credit, Rome too began to eliminate its own corruption. Wiser popes ascended the throne of St. Peter as the years went on. The corruption of the old ways began to fade into history.

But human beings are what they are. And as I look across five centuries to you who live out the legacy of what I’ve done, I bring with me a warning. The errors and corruption of the Church are never as far away as we’d like them to be. We can all so easily fall into the same traps that twisted God’s Holy Church into what it was in my day. Reformation is not a one time thing, but is something we must all strive toward. We must be ever vigilant, steeped in God’s Holy Word, to prevent evil from rising again while cloaked in churchly garb. That task is yours and I commend it to you.

In nomine...

In the name of...

Amen.

Sermon for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on October 19, 2014
Scripture text: Matthew 22:15-22

I will confess much fear and trepidation as I was preparing my sermon for this week. I wasn’t looking forward to this and with good reason. Our gospel text today makes it almost unavoidable. I guess I have no choice. I going to have to dive into that minefield known as politics.

I think most of you by now have figured my political allegiance out and if you hadn’t, I told you all outright last week that I’m a liberal. I also know that I’m not alone in that, that there are some of you here who share in that inclination. Others of you do not and lie more on the conservative side of things. This is, of course, the fundamental problem of politics. The reason it is considered so impolite a topic in conversation. It’s divisive. Ideally, it’s supposed to be a battle of ideas, but far too often it becomes a battle of personalities. One person against another.

And I think it is for that reason that Jesus generally doesn’t get involved in political discussions. Despite modern perceptions by certain individuals and groups that Christianity is the sole possession of (and banner bearer for) one particular political philosophy in this country, Jesus says very little about the matter of politics. He’s a uniter, not a divider, in general. He’s come to save the world, all of it.

But even back then, as now, people are often wanting to draw him into the debates of the age. The Pharisees approach Jesus with a question, a somewhat pragmatic question rather than a theological one. “Is it lawful to pay taxes or not?”

The question itself seems somewhat straight-forward, but there’s a lot of context here to unpack. First off, these are Jewish scholars asking a Jewish rabbi his opinion about taxes. Now let us remember that this conversation is taking place in Jerusalem, in ancient Palestine. In 50 or so BC, Julius Caesar’s on-again off-again rival Pompey marched the Roman legions into Jerusalem and declared Palestine a province of the Roman Empire. Conquered territory.

Now, some 80 or so years later, as a province of the Empire, the people are expected to pay their fair share to support the infrastructure of the Empire: the roads, the salaries of public employees, the aqueducts, the public housing, all these existed in that era in the Roman Empire and all were paid for by tax revenue. Oh, I missed one. The army, they were paid for by taxes as well. The same army who kept the Jews and all the other residents of Palestine on their best behavior. The same army who lined the roads of Palestine with the crucified bodies of those who weren’t all that well behaved.

The coins that Jews paid into those tax coffers were then used to support the occupation and oppression of their own people. “Is is lawful to pay taxes?” Suddenly, it’s not so simple a question anymore. To not pay is to invite retribution for what was obviously a seditious act. But to pay is to directly support the brutality and tyranny that people were being subjected to each and every day by the Romans. No easy answer to that question, is there?

That, of course, is the point. These Pharisees are not asking this in good faith. They’re trying to trap Jesus. If he answers the question “yes,” they can accuse him of being a traitor to his people. If he answers “no,” the Herodians (who are also hanging around in this conversation) will go running to the Romans and accuse Jesus of sedition and inciting rebellion.

As clever as they think they are, the Pharisees have not fooled Jesus one bit. He turns their question on its head. He asks for a coin and, when he holds it aloft, he asks them whose image is on the coin used in the tax. Imago is the word in Latin, Icon in Greek, and Tzelem in Hebrew. His word choice is deliberate, casting the minds of these good Jewish religious scholars back to a passage in Genesis: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Whose image is on the coin, whose imago? Caesar, the Emperor. Well then, whose imago is on Caesar? Imago Dei, the image of God.

Jesus’s answer to the question about taxes, taxes paid to a hated empire made up of hated people, is to remind his questioners that those people they hate are crafted in the image of the same God they were.

This is what Jesus does, time and time again. We love to draw lines. We love to divide ourselves from others. We love to stand over and against other people. We want to believe ourselves their betters, that we’re superior. We’re superior in morals or money or character or virtue or race or politics or whatever. We draw a line and declare ourselves good, and put those people that we do not like on the other side of it. And we may be justified in our dislike, the Jews of ancient Palestine had many good reasons to dislike and distrust the Romans. Sometimes our hate is not so easily justified. It may be based on prejudice and presumption, on misinformation and ignorance. But three things are always true.

The first is that we always declare ourselves good. We’re the righteous ones. We’re the virtuous ones. The second is that the other is always declared bad. They’re the sinners, whether those sins are real or imagined is largely irrelevant.

And then the third thing happens. We’ve drawn our line, declared each side good and evil respectively, and then Jesus comes along. We always expect that he’ll stand with us, but every time without exception he steps across the line and stands with those we despise.

It’s what he’s doing in this story. The Pharisees hate the Romans, they hate what the Romans do with their tax moneys. But Jesus reminds them the Romans are God’s children too and that he stands with them. When Jesus does that, he does two things. One, he pleads with us on our side of the line to cross over to him. Come, come and see these despised people as I do, as God does. Precious and loved as children of God, fashioned in his image.

The second thing he does is he shows us our hate for what it really is. We think ourselves righteous. We think ourselves superior, but, by standing on the opposite side from us, Jesus reveals that our hate and self-righteousness makes us just as lost as those we are so quick to damn for their sins. Whatever sins we believe them guilty are quickly overshadowed by our hate and disdain and we become as guilty as they.

Good and evil, virtue and sin, righteous and unclean, these distinctions are we often define them are irrelevant to God. There isn’t one of us that isn’t guilty of something. We’re all sinners. We’re all lost. Which is why Jesus came to begin with. He’s not here just to save us or people like us. He’s not here to save the good people, because there are none. He’s here to save the sinner, the lost, the wounded, the desperate, and the depraved. He’s here to save everybody.

The Pharisees don’t see that and far too often neither do we. Hate blinds us to truth. We draw our lines and grow contented in our own self-justification. But then there’s Jesus, calling to us, pleading with us: Cross over. See the world as it truly is. See it as I see it. Cross over and replace hate with love and death with life. Amen.

Sermon for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on Oct 12, 2014
Scripture text: Matthew 22:1-14

I’m going to be honest. I have some fairly deep reservations about our nation’s response to the terror group ISIS. I fear us getting bogged down in a quagmire we just now (in the last few years) have managed to escape. I’m not convinced ISIS is anything more than a regional threat, and I’m particularly concerned about us rushing in to stop a group of terrorists that is so deliberately and provocatively vicious. I feel we are being played. We’re doing precisely what they want us to do.

But I will also concede that I am not a policy wonk. I am no expert in foreign policy nor military strategy. I do not have access to all the intelligence that the people in our government do. I am, for better or worse, a theologian and in that capacity there is something about this that I can address. Something far more troubling that the official decision of our government. And that is the way the people, ordinary folk like you and I, are often responding to this issue.

There’s something almost cartoonish about ISIS. They are evil for evil’s own sake, something we really don’t see outside of fiction and pop culture. Oh, propaganda would have us think otherwise; it would have us believe all our enemies are nothing more more than monsters. But real life is never that simple. But ISIS is a propagandist’s dream. They are doing everything they can to shock and infuriate us, being as mindlessly cruel and vicious as possible, and we are buying up what they are selling wholesale.

On a recent episode of his show, Bill Maher had noted atheist Sam Harris and actor Ben Affleck on to discuss the various goings-on in politics of late. The discussion turned to ISIS and Harris and Maher both were very quick to say that ISIS is not an anomaly, that all Muslims are like that. Affleck rightly called them out over it, saying that they were doing the same thing that racists do when justifying their bigotry. “Some black men are criminals, therefore they all are.”

This debate has been discussed and written about rather extensively on the liberal websites that I frequent. And in astounds me how many people are agreeing with Maher and Harris. All Muslims are evil. We have a Muslim problem and we need to do something about it. These are my fellow liberals (hippies, in one sense) that are saying this. You know, hey, let’s all hold hands as one big human family and sing Kumbaya together. Those sort of people.

But as troubling as that is, even they haven’t gone as far as we Christians. No, a Christian author wrote this week also in a popular Christian magazine that the answer to the problem of ISIS and the problem of Islam is genocide. Kill. Them. All. The article was yanked in less than 24 hours, but that’s irrelevant. Someone said it. One of us Christians proposed it. Hitler killed 12 million people in his camps between the Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, and his political enemies. There are about 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and a Christian author proposed we commit the Holocaust 100 times over to answer the problem of ISIS.

I wish I could say he’s an anomaly, just one crazy author whose opinion doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But he’s not alone. We’ve been hearing stuff like this from all sorts of supposedly good-Christian folks for weeks now.

(Anyone else having trouble telling these two apart anymore?)

It’s scary. Nietzsche once famously wrote that we should be cautious when we seek to hunt down monsters, for when we stare too long into the Abyss it starts to stare back at us. ISIS beheads a few dozen people and our answer to that is to propose the slaughter of 1/7 the world’s population. Who are the monsters now?

We are Christians. We should know better.

It is perhaps not coincidental that we have this Gospel text today. This is one of the more complicated parables Jesus tells for us to understand because it requires us to look into cultural realities that are alien to us. But its message, once we understand those realities, is powerfully appropriate for what is happening to us in these frightening times.

A king gives a banquet in celebration of his son’s wedding. He, as royalty is wont to do, invites the high and mighty, the nobles, the landed gentry, the wealthy merchants, the Bill Gates, the Pope, and the Queen of England of his day. They all make excuses. They cannot come. The king, annoyed, moves to plan B. Invite the masses, the plain and ordinary folk. Let them come.

Now, in the ancient world, if you attended such a wedding banquet, it was considered very poor taste to upstage the bride and groom. So your host would provide you with a wedding gown, a robe that somewhat plain so that you would not appear to be dressed more ornately or more fabulously than the happy couple. As the masses come in, they receive their gowns, put them on, and go into the feast. All except this one, who when the king sees him so flagrantly disrespect his son and his new bride, has him cast out of the feast into the darkness.

Jesus is telling this parable (along with the two we’ve had over the past two weeks) during his final week of life. He’s in Jerusalem and the cross casts a big shadow over his dealings during this time. He’s drawing a line in the sand with the Pharisees and his other opponents. They are the ones who should be most receptive to his message. They are the ones who claim and boast of their closeness to God. Yet like the nobles and rich in the parable, they reject the king and his invitation. But when the doors are opened to the common folk, to us, there are those among us who treat this gift with the same scorn and contempt as the guest who refused to wear his banquet gown.

How many of us Christians, in our fear and in our anger and in our hatred, have taken the gown given us in our baptism, washed white in the blood of Jesus Christ himself, and have sought to soil it anew with the blood of innocent people who happen to pray differently than we do? Christ died for everyone. He seeks to save everyone. He loves everyone. Whether they know it or not is beside the point. We DO know it. The king’s invitation to his feast is a gift beyond price. Why do we cheapen it so?

This parable is a warning...to us. When the king invites us to his banquet, it is a gift that we have not earned nor deserved. We are brought to this font, washed clean in the waters of baptism, and we called by those waters and those words to be something different than what we were before. We are called to be disciples of Jesus Christ and to live by his command and example. To care for those in trouble. To welcome the stranger. To embrace the outcast. To love even our enemies.

We cannot allow ourselves to forget that when the fears of this world encroach upon us. We are called to struggle against the barbarian within us, not embrace him. To reject hate, not celebrate it. To hold to faith and not give in to fear.

Christ died and rose again for the sake of all people, you, me, all the Muslims of the world, including the monsters in ISIS. While the realities of this fallen world may force us to use violence to answer the threat of terrorists like ISIS, we cannot allow that violence and our fear to turn us into monsters as well. We are Christians. We are the baptized. We are those called to be something different. Called to trust. Called to believe. Called to love. To not be darkness like all the rest, but to be light in the midst of darkness. To wear our wedding gown proudly at the Lamb’s high feast and to show the world there is a better way than hate and anger. That is who we are meant to be. That is who we are called to be. That is what it means to be Christian. Amen.

Sermon for the 17th Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on Oct 5, 2014
Scripture text: Exodus 20:1-21

The Ten Commandments. Probably one of the most discussed and argued portions of Scripture in the whole of the Bible. The Law, or at least the most elementary portion of it, upon which the morality and legality of Judeo-Christian society has been built, or so we’ve come to believe. Of course, therein lies our problem. For all the countless times this passage has been addressed, upheld, discussed, argued over, and picked apart by scholars, there is a massive amount of misinformation about it. What the commandments mean and what purpose they serve.

One of the more common ways conversations about the Commandments occur in these times (and for about the last 50 years or so) are debates about their place in the public sphere. Oh, if only we just had the Ten Commandments posted in our schools and in our courthouses and in our government buildings, then society would be so much better. People would be more polite, there would be less crime. It would be wonderful. Besides, they’re the basis of our legal code and should be honored as such.

I’m going to break down each of those arguments in turn. First off, the unending barrage of advertisement-based 24-hour news media has created the perception that life in these United States is as bad as it’s ever been. The facts, the statistics, do NOT bear that out. Crime is lower. Health care is better. Lifespans are longer. Poverty is lower. Things are far better now than when those Commandments were posted in all those places people are demanding they be returned to. Back then, crime was worse (but people didn’t talk about it), people died of diseases that no longer even exist, poverty was rampant (and like crime, kept invisible), and let’s not forget that discrimination and bigotry against those who were different was not only commonplace, it was sanctioned by the government and its laws. We are NOT going back to that.

And then there’s the idea that the Ten Commandments are the sole source of our legal code. Let’s just dispense with this nonsense right from the start. The religious commandments that deal with our relationship with God are utterly and rightly ignored in a nation that has built itself upon the separation of church and state. The rest, the ethical code of how we deal with other people, is common sense and found duplicated in nearly every legal code of every society ever. If you look at the carvings upon our Supreme Court building in Washington, you don’t see Moses up there alone. You see him joined by great lawgivers from all across the span of history.

I spoke last Sunday about how people are avoiding the church because they know we lie. Here’s another example. We lie about the commandments. Christians who want the Ten Commandments plastered up every 10 feet in the public realm are not truly interested in the historical basis of our legal system. Nor are they really interested in making society better. They want them displayed and read and followed because they believe the commandments are a means to an end.

And what end? For those Christians who see God as Santa Claus, the Commandments are how you prove your devotion. How you get God to notice you so he’ll shower you with that winning lottery ticket, that beautiful spouse, those genius children, and that yacht at the pier. And for those who constantly hammer the world about getting saved, the Commandments are how that happens. Obey and you will see heaven. Oh, they might say otherwise. They might say it’s about Jesus, but why then do they talk so little about him? Why is always talk of rules and regulations? Of personal purity and piety instead of faith?

They lie and they lie to themselves as much as anyone. They don’t know any better and, often times, neither do we. We’ve been bombarded with misinformation about the law of God practically from the day we were born. We’ve never realized that this isn’t how it all works. We’ve never been taught what the commandments are truly about. And so we fall into error. I may point the finger at other Christians and other churches, but we are often just as guilty as they of these same misunderstandings.

God gave the commandments to the people not as a practical way of life, but as an ideal to be striven towards. And as an ideal, they are impossible to truly obey. And none of us have. Sure, I haven’t killed anyone, but boy after getting cut off three times while driving on Thursday, I sure was ready to do so. Thou shalt not bear false witness. I’d lose track of the number of white lies I say each week and I’m a terrible liar. I try not to do it because I get caught so easily. Thou shalt not bear adultery. That woman at the swimming pool in the string bikini is seriously hot...and also not my wife. And that’s not even getting into the sheer number of times I put other things ahead of God and I’m a preacher.

That’s a short general example of the ways I don’t live up to these commandments. I’m sure each of you could give a similar list, and that’s not even getting into the real scary skeletons-in-the-closet stuff.  If the law is how we’re getting to heaven, then we’re just plain screwed. If the law is how our success in life is determined, no wonder none of us are sipping tea with Bill Gates this afternoon.

But that’s not how it works. That’s not what these commandments are for. They are here to reveal our failure, to remind us that we are not God, and that we cannot be like him. We cannot achieve his standard. And therefore, we must then rely not on his law, but on his mercy.

St. Paul considered this to be one of the greatest of his personal revelations about God when he became a Christian. As he says in our second lesson, he was as good as people get when it comes to obedience to the commandments. He was well on his way to earning that Golden Ticket into heaven when he realized that’s not how it truly works. God has a better way and that way is Christ.

Jesus came. Jesus died. Jesus rose again. It is finished. I used that cadence last Sunday to describe the process of salvation and I’m using it again today. I’ll probably use again in the future, because that IS how it works. It’s about Jesus. Period. It’s not about the rules. It’s not about our piety or our purity or our desperate need to remake the world into what we think it should be. It’s about Jesus Christ, his cross, his sacrifice, and his mercy.

That’s what the Church needs to be about. That’s what we need to be about. Trusting it, absorbing it, teaching it, believing it, proclaiming it, living it. Mercy, love, kindness, forgiveness, sacrifice. It’s all about Christ.

All God wants of us is to trust in that reality. He’s taken care of it, all of it, through Jesus. Obedience to the law is nice. It’ll help you get along with people better, but it’s not going to make you rich and it’s not going to save your soul. Jesus does that. Jesus did that. For everyone of us. It’s done. It is finished. Amen.

Sermon for the 16th Sunday After Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on September 28, 2014 (God's Work, Our Hands Sunday)
Scripture text: Matthew 21:23-32

As I’m sure many of you are aware, there is a great crisis in the Church. More and more young people, what is referred to as the Millennial Generation, are having less and less to do with the life of the Church. So everyone’s panicking, recognizing that if we don’t do something about this, there won’t be a church in a generation (or more specifically, there won’t be “my church” in a generation.)

I read one of many many articles on this topic this week, although this one was a bit different. This one was actually written by a young person, by a Millennial. Wow, you’d think that’d be the first thing these church scholars would do, talk to actual people, but then panic and logic don’t often go hand-in-hand.

One of the things that I came away with from this article is that one of the biggest problems in the Church today is that we are not honest, with ourselves and with the world around us. We say we are about God. We say we are about Jesus. We say we are about the things that truly matter. But we’re not. We’re not.

God has given us an immense gift in the form of his story, his Scriptures. The tale of his relationship with this world as revealed to the ancient Hebrews and through Christ himself. We call it the Bible and most every Christian claims that they believe the Bible. Except when we don’t. Except when the Bible tells us something we don’t want to hear. When the Bible tells us something that contradicts our long held opinions about life, people, politics, economics, or pretty much anything. And then we quietly discard the teachings of our faith and go on and do whatever the heck we were going to do anyway. We quietly ignore what Jesus said and go on believing whatever we want instead.

This is not a new thing. Our Gospel lesson from Matthew deals with the very same sort of dynamic. God comes to the people in the form of Jesus and tells them all about the truth of who God is and the Pharisees keep on doing the same things they’ve always done while the tax collectors and prostitutes listen. If we read this story and don’t realize it’s about us and we’re the Pharisees of today, then we’re not reading it right. Like them, we make the faith to be about what WE WANT, not what GOD WANTS.

And what is it that we want? Well, the modern American church generally manifests one of two ways. The first way is that we spend all of our energy on heaven. It’s all about getting to heaven. Everything and I do mean everything the church does is focused on making sure that every single person has that Golden Ticket to get past the pearly gates. So much so that they try to convert everybody all the time.

Side note: Please don't ever do this to your restaurant servers.

When I was a teenager, I dabbled in this sort of Christianity. I got real tired of hearing at every worship service how I needed to be saved. I went up for the altar call three weeks ago and you’re still telling me I need to accept Jesus into my heart. Did it not take last time? Was my baptism not good enough and it needs to be done again?

I already am a Christian. When are you going to stop telling me I need to become one? When are you going to do something to nurture me in that faith instead of demanding that I convert just one more time.

This sort of church doesn’t take God at his word. Jesus came. Jesus died. Jesus rose again. It’s done. He said from the cross “It is finished!” and it's like no one believed him. He took care of it all, our sins forgiven, our lives redeemed, our salvation secured, and no one seems to realize it. We got to do it all over again and again and again. Substituting our fear instead of faith in God’s promise.

That’s one kind of church. There’s another and it’s the exact opposite on the spectrum. Instead of worrying about the hereafter, they worry about the here and now. Trust in God and he will shower you with blessings. Just believe hard enough and you’ll be happy and rich and beautiful and popular.

This sort of church turns God into a means to an end. It’s about not him, it’s about what I can get him to give me. I want a Ferrari. If I’m a good little Christian and go to church every Sunday and tithe my 10% and obey all the rules, God’ll give me one. God as cosmic Santa Claus, doling out gifts to all the good little Christian boys and girls.

These two versions of Christianity, which are both exceedingly popular in these days, do have one thing in common. It’s all about us. It’s all about me. It’s all about you. It’s what WE WANT instead of what GOD WANTS.

That hypocrisy does not go unnoticed by the people who are outside the four walls of our churches. We wonder why they run for the hills? They know we lie. We lie to them and we lie to ourselves. We say we believe the Bible and we don’t.

We waste our time on things that God really doesn’t care about. Homosexuality, marriage, abortion, procreation, abstinence. Dear God, why is so much of it about sex? The Scriptures don’t even talk that much about sex. A verse here and there, scattered amidst stories and teachings that are often far more important.

Or in some cases not. Try this on for size. There are seven verses that talk about the gays, scattered across three books of the Bible. The rules on how to build the Ark of the Covenant took 12 verses, over 50% more, and I don’t see hundreds of Christian organizations and thousands of churches worried about ark building. We make it all about us and we want to be important. Not what God does. Our opinions, our desires, trump his and that should not be.

Do you want to know what God thinks is important? Page after page. Verse after verse. He tells his people “Go and take care of others.” Jesus himself, in his first sermon, declared his mission to be thus.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Over the whole of the Bible there are over 2,000 such verses. Take care of others. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Give voice to the voiceless. Visit the imprisoned. Care for the sick. Give shelter to the homeless. Protect the weak. Over two thousand times God tells us this is what he wants.

The prostitutes and the tax collectors realized that and the Pharisees didn’t. When are we?

Do we want to see the church grow again? Do we want to see Christianity thrive in these times? The solution is easy. Excise the phrase “Not my problem” from our vocabulary. People homeless in our streets. Not my problem. The Bible says it is. The elderly go without medicine because they can’t afford it. Not my problem. The Bible says it is. People being abused and discriminated against? People without enough food to eat? People being wrongfully imprisoned? Not my problem? Oh, yes it is. We are called to do something about it.

In Genesis, in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain murders his brother in a fit of jealousy and rage. God comes calling, says to Cain “Where is your brother?” Cain responds with a question. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God doesn’t answer his question in that story. Instead, he spends the rest of the Bible, page after page, verse after verse, telling us the answer is a resounding “Yes.” We ARE our brothers’ keepers.

And we are free to be that because of Jesus. As I said, he came. He died. He rose again. It is finished. He took care of the whole sin thing. He took care of the whole salvation thing. That’s covered. It’s done. You’ve got your Golden TIcket into heaven and if you don’t have it on you, it’s waiting at the gate for you. We don’t need to worry about that. We’re free. Jesus took care of us.

And he took care of us so that we can turn around and start taking care of others. It’s what the Church is supposed to be. It’s what we’ve forgotten or refused to learn. If we want others to join us in these pews, young, old, or whatever, then we need to stop lying, start believing, and start serving. Amen.