Sermon for the Baptism of Our Lord

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on January 11, 2015
Scripture text: Mark 1:1-11

I do this mental exercise with some regularity, asking you to imagine for a moment what it would be like to go back to the times of the Bible, to the Old Testament and New. To use our minds to envision what things were like for Moses or Jesus or whoever. One of the reasons why I do this is to really drive home the fact that our Scriptures, as precious as they are, were not really written with us in mind. They were written instead for an audience now thousands of years dead. An audience with a different understanding of the world, a different experience, a different culture and language, and by playing this little mental game, I try to put us in their shoes. What was it like for them to experience these things and how was it different than how we experience it?

Time and again, we find that we do not know these people or that world nearly as well as we think we do. Even those of us who have studied it extensively, those of us with a passion for or interest in history, can be surprised by the ancient world and its people. For instance, if I told you this morning to imagine yourself in a Greek temple, like the Parthenon in Athens, what images would come to your mind? A beautiful tall building, wondrous statues dedicated to pagan gods, everything in white: the stone, the clothing, the walls, the pillars, everything that shining polished look of marble.

And what if I told you that’s absolutely wrong?

Turns out, historians and archaeologists have since discovered that the Greeks didn’t really go for that white marble look that we so often attribute to them. They would paint their statues in vivid color: reds, blues, yellows, flesh tones, and so forth. The Parthenon would look less like a shrine dedicated to the color white and far more like the Big Top of a circus.

We’ve likely all seen specials and reports in magazines on the terra cotta warriors of ancient China, statues of soldiers buried with that land’s long dead emperors. And again, our image of them is of dark brown ceramic sculpture, beautiful but unadorned. And again, we have since learned that these statues were painted in vivid and bright colors. The ancient world was a vibrant place.

So what does all this have to do with the baptism of Jesus?

The Gospels are, in a sense, their own form of art, more that of sound and the written word than that of the visual. Often times they rely on the experience of the hearer or the reader to fill in the blanks. And often times, those “blanks” are that vivid colorful world that we barely understand. Symbol is hugely important in the Gospels. These authors are trying to convince their readers of the importance of Jesus and his mission and they don’t just do that with the words. They don’t just do that with what they say. They also do it by what they don’t say, by what is implied, by what is in those blanks.

Mark, possibly of all the Gospel authors, is the true master of this. That may be why his Gospel text is the shortest of the four. He wants us to add in the pieces he leaves out. And that’s harder for us to do now in the 21st century than it was in the 1st when his text was first written, because we do not fully understand that world. We don’t even picture it right.

On Christmas Eve, I introduced the idea of the Gospels bookending themselves symbolically. Luke’s Gospel, for instance, does this with the manger. The rough misshapen wood of the feeding trough into which the infant Jesus is laid prefigures the rough misshapen wood upon which he will die at Golgotha. Mark does this too, but it’s not as easy to see.

Mark, for one thing, begins his narrative of Jesus’ life with the baptismal story, not Christmas. We have all the familiar elements: John the Baptist, the River Jordan, Jesus coming to John for baptism, the sky tears open, God speaking, all that. One of these pieces is a “book end.” One of these pieces symbolically prefigures where Jesus’ life will take him. One of these pieces points to the cross. But which one?

And here’s where that knowledge of what the ancient world was truly like comes in. Jerusalem, like Greece or China, was a colorful place. The great temple was a massive structure, and it was not a building of dull brown stone. It is said to have been gilded in gold and precious metal, that it shone out in the sun. And upon its entrance was a great tapestry, this gigantic piece of cloth upon which was woven a magnificent image of the night sky. Again, symbolism being important. Those entering the temple would pass through this tapestry to go inside, going from (in a sense) Earth to the heavens.

It was colorful. Vivid. Alive. And that would have been the picture of Jerusalem in the minds of everyone who first read Mark’s gospel. So when they hear the heavens tear open and God declare himself come to Earth in Jesus at his baptism, those readers would immediately think of another heaven, the one they would see at the entrance to the temple.

The same heaven that would tear asunder as Jesus breathed his last.

This is no coincidence. Mark is telling us through symbol and inference precisely what Jesus has come to do. To break down the barrier between us and God, to tear asunder the boundary that separates us from him. No longer would sin separate us from God. He would come to us. He would be with us. He would save us. He would give heaven to us. All this can be seen in the blanks of the Baptismal story. It’s all here.

Jesus has come to save us.

People often wonder why does Jesus come to be baptized. After all, John is preaching for repentance and Jesus has nothing to repent over. But baptism always serves a double purpose. Not merely the reversal or change of what has come before, but a dedication to what will come after. In the Jordan, Jesus dedicates himself to his mission. He has come to save the world. He has come to tear apart all that separates us from God. And we see that purpose play out, not merely in the work of his life, but even in this very moment, as God tears opens the heavens to declare Jesus his beloved son. The heavens are open, my friends. They are ours, because of Jesus. Amen.

Funeral Sermon for Jim Dietz Sr,

Preached on January 12, 2015 at Etzwieler Funeral Home, York, PA


Death is part of life, we are often told. And while this is certainly true, it is also an unpredictable part. Capricious, chaotic. There is nothing convenient about death. It often comes when it is least expected and when it is least welcome. It throws our lives into disarray. It leaves us scrambling to figure out what will we do next. How will we adapt? What are we going to do now?

I know these questions are on many minds today as we say farewell to Jim Dietz Sr. I did not know him, but I know his one son and he and his brother came into my office this past Friday to share a small portion of the man they knew as their father. Told me a bit about his life. It is never an easy thing to sum up any one of us in just a few short words, but there were impressions that I got from the picture they painted.

And one of those words that comes into my mind is “dependable.” There is particular constancy in James’ life. You could rely on him. His work relied on him to fix the machines and printing presses at Motter, not merely here but just about everywhere. He was there for his country when he served in the USMC. He was there for his family, for his children and grandchildren. And in particular in these recent years, he was there for his wife, taking care of her, learning to do the things around the house that men of his generation weren’t accustomed to doing.

Another image that came to my mind, another word for Jim is “passionate.” He was passionate about his sports and his bluegrass music. He loved to fix things: TVs, cars, and (of course) that was his job. He loved his family, his wife (59 years of marriage!), his children, and grandchildren.

In many ways, his dependability was fueled by that passion. The two are interconnected and related. Passionate is about love. Dependability is about trust. Love drives us to be trustworthy. Passion leads to dependability. And in many ways, you cannot have one without the other.

There is another man in whom those virtues were paramount. And he is as important to our proceedings today, if not more so, than Jim Dietz Sr. The man I am speaking of is Jesus Christ. He too was passionate. He too was dependable, although we would more likely use a different word. We would call him faithful.

And again, in Jesus, these two characteristics are intertwined and interconnected. Jesus loves his people. He loves Jim. He loves all of us. He loves us so much that once, many many years past, he came to this Earth, born of a human mother and lived as we do. He taught his ways, healed the sick, embraced the outcast, and loved his people face-to-face as one of our own. He loved his own so much that he endured the most horrific death imaginable on a cross for our sakes and then rose again from the grave on the third day.

Now by his death and resurrection, Jesus did something for Jim and for all of us. He made a promise. He made a promise that we can count on. A promise we can rely on. A promise Jesus will one day fulfill for everyone of us. And we’ve heard that promise multiple times in our worship today already. “If we have been united with him...” from Romans. “Where I am, there you will be also.” from John. “I will wipe away every tear...” from Isaiah. Over and over again, the Scriptures proclaim this promise. The promise that death, for all its fearful disarray and unexpected coming, does not have the last word. God Almighty does and his word is life.

That promise is dependable. That promise is given in love, a love so great it endured the grave for us. Jim may not have been a church going man, but his life is an example of this very truth: love drives us to faithfulness. That’s a good life. Jesus takes it one step further for all of us. Love leads to faithfulness and that leads to salvation.

The promise is sure, my friends. This is not the end. Not really. Amen.

Sermon for the Festival of Epiphany

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on January 4, 2015
Sermon text: Matthew 2:1-12

The star of Bethlehem has been a mystery to scholars for generations. Some have dismissed it as mere legend; that the whole birth narratives that Luke and Matthew have written for Jesus are mere fabrication and myth. In other words, there is no star of Bethlehem. Others have argued that Matthew embellished his story; Jesus was certainly born, but the magi were little more than travelling merchants and not the royal astrologers the story makes them out to be.

I’m not adverse to believing Matthew did a little embellishing to his birth narrative, but I’m not so quick to dismiss the account of the magi and the star quite so easily. After all, I have been, at various points in my life, an astronomy buff. I love the stars, the planets, the various phenomena in the heavens, and in their myriad and wondrous variety I am convinced that there is something that God made use of to draw those ancient star-gazers to the cradle of Christ.

I am not alone in that desire. Other astronomers have engaged in this effort as well and there are numerous theories as to what exactly the star of Bethlehem was: a supernova, a comet, or perhaps the most intriguing theory: a planetary conjunction.

Now, if you’re on Facebook or other social media websites, you’ve probably heard of this particular astronomical occurrence. There is a rumor circulating that there is to be a conjunction today and that the planets will all line up in a straight line and their combined gravity will cause all of us to float in mid-air for around five minutes this afternoon.

People can be very clever with Photoshop.

To those looking forward to this oddity, I have to inform you that gravity does not work that way, nor is there a conjunction scheduled for today. But the planets do, at times, line up and to those looking up in the night sky they would see not two or three planets separate (which look like stars to the uninitiated), but one single point of light. Or perhaps a pattern, a line of “stars” pointing, let’s say, to the Western horizon.

Well, these conjunctions take place with some regularity as the planets orbit around our sun, making their occurrences quite predictable. And there are two such events that would have taken place around 6 to 7 BC when Jesus was likely born (Jesus was not born in year 1, by the way.)  Two planetary alignments that occurred in the constellation of Pisces (long associated with the Hebrew people) in those years that might have been what those magi of the East gazed up and interpreted as a sign of the birth of a king.

So what does all this mean?

Well, in one sense, not a whole lot. It is an intriguing bit of astronomical trivia. It is not proof or confirmation that the Bible is historically accurate or factually solid (it usually isn’t). I don’t engage in this exercise seeking that sort of certainty. What I find in this bit of trivia however is something I believe is a great deal more profound.

In an astronomical sense, a planetary conjunction is a very routine event, no more unusual or unique than a clock striking 12 each day at noon and midnight. They happen all the time. The two that astronomers have uncovered as the likely source of the Star of Bethlehem occur roughly every 800 or so years and the next one will be visible to us around the year 2300 or so. The Star of Bethlehem will return. It has returned and it will continue returning for as long as the solar system exists. Like clockwork. Utterly ordinary. In some ways, even boring.

God didn’t make the star of Bethlehem occur. Of course, he created the stars and the planets, but in this circumstance he didn’t have to do anything extra to create this herald star. Nature in his own time would do that on its own. What God did do was take this ordinary routine astronomical event and turn into something he could use to announce the birth of his son to those sorcerers and fortune-tellers of old. He took something ordinary and made something extraordinary out of it.

Behind me, surrounding the altar here at Canadochly, are the myriad symbols and items of our own gifts and talents. God has gifted each one of us with skills and talents, knowledge and ability. What is presented here is but a small sample of what we are capable of. There is so much more hidden within the bodies and minds of all of you.

But in our midst, I’m guessing there are not any secret Picassos or Mozarts, no Oliviers or Edisons. We’re good, but we’re not that good. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing sublime. In most every congregation or social setting in our society, you can likely find others who share our gifts who are our equals or perhaps even our betters. We’re quite ordinary.

Or, at least we are until God gets a hold of us. And then something wondrous happens.

Time and again, we see this happen in the Scriptures. Moses stuttered and yet God made of him a liberator for his people. David was the youngest of his brothers, so insignificant that his father didn’t even bother to summon him from the sheepfold when the great prophet Samuel came calling, yet he would become a king. The magi were pagan magicians and astrologers, yet God used them to announce the coming of his son. What will God do with you and I?

No, perhaps that’s the wrong question. Better to ask instead, what can’t he do with us? I don’t know, but as this new year dawns, I’m eager to find out. Amen.

Sermon for Christmas Eve 2015

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on December 24, 2014
Sermon text: Luke 2:1-20

Let us take a journey. Let us travel backward across the millennia and across thousands of miles to Bethlehem on the night of Christ’s birth. What shall we see? What shall we hear? Will it match our expectations, expectations formed from many ideas and traditions of what that singular moment in history looked like? Or will it be something else entirely.

I would imagine the first thing that would hit us is the smell. Jesus is born in a stable, laid in a feeding trough, surrounded by animals: horses, cattle, sheep, goats. Most of us have some experience with farm life. It is not a clean smell. It is the smell of dung and sweat and slobber. The smell of animals.

And Mary, what would she be like? All dainty and beautiful, Probably not. Her skin likely glistens from exertion. There is blood and other fluids here. Childbirth is messy as any mother can tell you. It is a beautiful thing, but it is not clean and dainty.

Jesus himself? He is an infant, brought forth into the world. The sudden shock of going from the warm womb out into the world likely triggered a cry of fear. Not surprising. Infants are really only capable of doing a handful of things: cry, eat, pee, and poop. That’s pretty much it. Would we walk in to see Mary or Joseph changing his diaper or cleaning him up after he’s spit up his milk? Would he be wailing his head off, making that famous hymn about the silence of this night a bit of a lie. That is what infants do after all. They’re messy. They’re noisy.

That’s all a far cry from the sanitized nativity scene as we so often picture it. There’s always this tendency in our minds to think of Jesus and Mary and Joseph and these events as somehow holy, clean, ethereal, and unreal. Jesus doesn’t poop. Mary isn’t covered in the mess of childbirth. The animals don’t stink. It’s all nice and pretty and clean because it’s Jesus and it’s supposed to be different from what it’s like for the rest of us.

But if that’s truly the claim we make about the events of this night, then in many ways we are missing the point. God did not incarnate as this tiny infant, born of Mary, to be different from us, to be above us, to be greater than us. He came to be one of us and all those goes with it: the mess, the stink, the dirt, and the grime. That’s all part of the deal. God didn’t avoid all that. He dove right into it.

That’s what the incarnation means. That’s what it’s about. God-with-us. Emmanuel. And if God is to be with us through Christ, then he’s got to live life as we do. And life is messy. It’s dirty. It’s hard. It has pain.But it also has joy and happiness, pleasure and laughter. It’s all those things. God didn’t come to stand above it all. He came to get into the thick of it, where we are, where we live.

He needed to do that. To be with us and one of us. How then can you or I, as his disciples, go to one struggling with disease and say “Jesus understands?” How can we go to one struggling with grief at the death of a loved one and say “Our Lord gets this. He’s been there?” That’s what the incarnation means. Jesus isn’t above or detached from those moments of mess in our lives. He’s right there in the midst of it, granting his strength and his tears in equal measure to us lowly humans. He is beside us, holding fast to us, in the moments of terror and grief. He knows what it means to be us, because he was us.

Neither is he above or detached from those moments of triumph in our lives. He’s right there in the midst of those too. The birth of a child, success in school or work, finding love with another person; he is beside us in those moments as well, granting laughter and joy in equal measure as he celebrates our lives. It’s all that jumbled up together, the glorious mess of life, the good and the bad, the hard and the easy, the joy and the sorrow. All of it together.

As a pastor I have often been critiqued for preaching “downer” sermons on Christmas Eve. But this is why I do that. God isn’t just about the happy moments. He’s there in the midst of the sad and difficult as well and Jesus is proof of that. After all, the moment when Jesus is most human is not really his birth, it’s at the other end of his life. And in that moment, even our best efforts to sentimentalize things cannot remove the blood and the gore and the pain of the cross. God is born in the glorious mess at Bethlehem and he dies even more messily on the cross at Golgatha. And that’s glorious too, because it is in that moment and that only in that moment, that our lives become holy.

It really is about the mess. The mess of life and the mess of death. That’s what Jesus is about. He’s in the middle of it all, experiencing it, sharing it with us. That sharing is of vital importance, because it goes both ways. God became human to experience life and death as we do, and because of that we will experience life as God does. Eternal, unending, unlimited. The road to our salvation is paved with the mess of Christ’s life and our lives. The parallels are intentional. They are deliberate.

I conducted a funeral yesterday for the husband of one of my wife’s friends. And in that funeral rite, there is a reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans that points to this truth. He writes that because “we have been united with Jesus in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like this.” That was the plan. For God to dive into the muck and the mire that is human existence, to be one of us, so he could lift us out of that and give us eternity. On this night, the most important step in that plan came to light, in the blood and the fluids, in the stink and the crying of the stable in Bethlehem. Christ is born. Amen. Alleluia.

Sermon for Fourth Advent

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on December 21, 2014
Sermon Text: Luke 1:46-56

We are a society of numbers. Numbers determine everything. Numbers determine the value of something. Numbers determine the worth of something. Numbers determine the success of something. It’s everywhere and unavoidable.

A person in our society is regarded as a great success if they have high numbers of dollars in the bank. A business is considered viable if they have large numbers of store or quantity of product on the shelves. A bank is considered stable if they have large numbers of assets in trust. A country is considered strong if it has large numbers of soldiers. Many women and more than a few men regard themselves as of value if the number of the scale each morning is sufficiently small. A church is considered healthy if it has large numbers of people sitting in its pews. Numbers everywhere. Numbers define us, for better and for worse.

Which is one of the things that makes the Bible such an anomaly in our society. We venerate the Scriptures. We hold the Bible in great esteem, but it really doesn’t jive with the way the rest of our society works. The characters in this story often do not have numbers. They are not rich. They are not successful. They are not powerful. And, for that reason, we often times don’t quite know what to do with them.

Mary, Jesus’ mother, is probably the quintessential example of this. We hold her in great esteem as the mother of our Lord, and yet never examine the whole of her reality, the whole of her story. She has no numbers. She does not have large numbers of money or servants or houses or any other mark of great wealth and power. She’s a noboby and the only number we know for her is an educated guess: 13 or perhaps 14, her age as of the time Gabriel chances to visit her.

Perhaps to better understand this, we should play a little game: a time warp. Bring Mary forward to our world, our time. What then? An unwed, impoverished, pregnant teenage girl. Now what we once venerated looks a whole lot more like a scandal.

What would we say to this? Would Bill O'Reilly demand she wear a T-shirt that says “I shouldn’t have gotten pregnant at 14?” Would we be astonished at Joseph for staying by her side, since men in the inner city never stick around? That’s what they do after all, just a bunch of worthless criminals. Just another ghetto tramp, or if you prefer, another piece of trailer park trash.

Is that language too harsh for you? Let’s be honest. It’s how we talk about people who do not have numbers. People of no value. People of no worth. They are often less than human to us; we treat our animals better. Mary, were she living today, would be one of millions that we would either ignore or disdain.

And that’s precisely the point as to why she was chosen.

It’s the same reason an anonymous sheep herder was called to be the father of a Chosen People. It’s the same reason a banished exile was called to be the liberator of an enslaved race. It’s the same reason a ruddy lowly shepherd boy was called to be king, and a fisherman was called to be apostle. The same reason slaves were the first to hear of the birth of Messiah.

It’s not about the numbers.

What matters to God are things like faithfulness, compassion, mercy, justice, love. The intangible things that cannot be measured. Cannot be numbered. These are the things God looks for and where he often finds them so often is in places we never dare look. He finds them among the poor, the criminal, the outcast, the disregarded, the people we’ve abandoned, the people we’ve taught ourselves to hate for their lack of numbers. People we think we are better than because we have numbers.

But are we truly?

Mary sings that famous song we know as the Magnificat in response to all that God has done for her. We consider it a beautiful piece of Biblical poetry, but the lyrics of it should honestly scare the hell out of us. For in it, she talks about the great upheaval when God comes to judge the earth in righteousness. She talks about the things we so often believe give us worth and value will, at best, count for nothing and, at worst, will count against us. The mighty will be cast down from their thrones. The rich sent away empty handed. That’s not good news for those of us who are rich in the things of this world and sit upon thrones of our own making.

What matters to God is not numbers, but the immeasurable qualities of faithfulness, compassion, mercy, and love. Qualities found not just in David or Moses or Abraham or Mary, but in Jesus himself and he had them all (unlike these others) without limit, boundary, or condition. For how else could he then go into the midst of a world that would reject him, mock him, and eventually kill him and not hate that world for it? No, instead he embraced that world, embraced all people, and called them to let go of numbers as being the benchmark of a person’s worth. He loved and loves everyone. He values everyone. All are precious to him, regardless of what we think of them.

So precious, in fact, that it is he who interposes and imposes his own life in our place when that moment of judgment comes. “Look not at their failure. Look not at their blind insistence that numbers mean something.” he pleads, “Look instead to me on the cross, calling for forgiveness and compassion for the very people who put me there. Look to me and forgive them. Look to me and welcome them. Look to me and embrace them.”

That was the plan all along. A child conceived in a nobody would save everybody. From nothing comes everything. Those numbers don’t add up, but they’re not supposed to. It’s not our way. It’s God’s way. It’s his call, his plan, his rules, his salvation. Amen.