Sermon for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost

Scripture text: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

One of the most insidious tricks that we play on ourselves is the idea that sin and evil is something external to us. It’s something on the outside that comes in. “The devil made me do it” we claim, as if we have no control, no agency, over our own behavior, thoughts, and opinions. No, it’s not our fault. It was them. It was that thing. It wasn’t really me.

I’ve been familiar with this mindset for a very long time. You guys know me. You know I’m this nerdy guy who’s into Dungeons and Dragons and sci-fi and fantasy and all that stuff. I’ve been into it a long time. Growing up, I was considered “at-risk” because the people in my church were convinced that anyone who had such hobbies was bound to grow up as a serial killer or a devil worshiper or something equally horrible. Surely, anyone who pretends to be a knight-in-shining-armor for a couple hours each week is doomed to a life of vilest evil. Well, surprise!

News flash: It is just a game. Nothing more.

Of course, Christian gamers like me are hardly the only example of this idea at work. All you need do anymore is turn on the news and you’ll see it in droves. There’s all this talk about dress codes in schools lately. About how girls wearing certain clothing are being singled out as a “distraction” for their male counterparts. But in pretty much every case, these young ladies are not wearing anything even remotely inappropriate. Modest shorts and tank tops, the sort of thing you might see worn even here at church. But regardless, these boys just can’t control themselves when they can view a girl’s kneecap or shoulder.

Gasp! How dare pastor show something so pornographic on his sermon blog. 

(And yes, this is the outfit that got this girl sent home for inappropriate clothing.)

There’s all this talk about “rape culture,” about how women ask for it by the clothes they wear. As if these rapists are just fine upstanding citizens until a woman walks by in a miniskirt. It’s not their fault. They couldn’t help it. What nonsense.

We’ve also been treated over the last few weeks to the latest chapter in the increasingly sordid tale of Josh Duggar. You know, when we were first exposed to the Duggar family with their reality TV show, it also brought to light the whole home schooling movement in conservative Christianity. How these families guaranteed that they were raising fine Christian men and women by making sure that they heard none of that talk about evolution and human sexuality and whatever else they find so objectionable in public school curricula. The more spiteful side of me would like to ask those parents how that worked out for them with their eldest son both a child molester and a confessed adulterer. But that wouldn’t be very nice of me.

But this is what we want to be true. We don’t want to face the fact that we, each one of us, is capable of horrific evil. Each one of us can commit the most vile of sins. And we can do it because we want to, because we choose to, and nobody or nothing outside influences that choice. It was us. We did it.

So to avoid facing that truth about ourselves, we’ve created this elaborate lie. It’s always something outside of us. The devil made me do it.

Of course, human behavior being what it is, this is not a new thing. The followers of the ancient Jewish religion were fastidious in avoiding the things outside that they felt would cause them to become sinful, much as many Christians are today. They cast out the people from their communities that were “unclean.” They would ritually wash the “sin” off their hands before eating their meals. Their behaviors seem odd, disturbing, or even laughable to us today, but they aren’t that different from what we do here and now. They serve the same purpose; giving us an excuse to believe our sin is caused by taint from outside sources. It’s not our fault. It’s them. It’s those things.

Jesus in not interested in playing their games. When they call him and his disciples out for the failure to abide by these silly rules, he turns the tables on them and reminds them of the truth. No, it’s not about what you wash off the outside of your person, it’s what’s inside that matters. If what’s inside is rotten, well...no amount of washing or any other fastidious behavior is going to change that.

And so it is with us too. If we really want to “come clean,” we have to be up front with ourselves. Sin is real. And our sin is our sin. We own it. We can’t pass it off onto other people or other things. No, the devil didn’t make you do it. You chose that course. I chose it. We did it. It was us.

Our insides are rotten. We are sinners through and through.

There’s no avoiding that. We can and have done the vilest and ugliest things in life. By all rights, we should face the consequences of those behaviors. We should be damned for what we’ve done.

But we’re not. We’re not damned. Instead, we are saved. And we’re not saved because we’ve avoided sin. No, we’re saved because God chose save us. His choice. His decision. His action is what saves us. He chose to send Jesus into this world. And Jesus chose to go to the cross willingly for our sake. He chose to die for our sake. He chose to save us.

Not because we deserved it. Quite the contrary. Not because we’re just the most perfect sinless most righteous people ever. Again, quite the contrary. No, we saved because God loves us. Loves us enough to provide an answer to our sin, a real answer, not one that dodges the truth about who we are and what we’re capable of. God’s fully aware of all that, but that’s not what matters to him in the end. What matters is that he loves us and he wants to be with us, so he provided a way.

It seems nonsense. We’re not very loveable when you really get down to it. We’re violent, hateful, perverse, and greedy. Everyone of us. There’s no denying any of that. Not if we’re honest. But God’s goodness is greater than all that. God’s love is greater than all that. God chooses us despite our sin. And that’s the truth. Amen.

Weekly Devotion for August 23, 2015

Scripture text: Nehemiah 9:16-31 (Appointed for Tuesday, August 25)

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Spanish philosopher George Santayana once famously wrote. It’s a popular quote that acknowledges the great dangers of forgetting our history. We can forget who we are. We can forget where we came from. We can forget what we’re capable of.

The latter statement is, of course, part of the reason it’s appealing to forget. Every people, ourselves included, has dark chapters in their past. Even a cursory glance over American history reveals very quickly the scourge of slavery, the genocide of the Native American population, the internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, My Lai, and a whole host of other events that put to question our self-perception as the “greatest nation” in the history of the world. As individuals also, we find numerous occasions in our own lives that we’ve come to regret: failed relationships, surrender to vices, and other times when we were not at our best. So the temptation to forget is always present. We don’t want to remember the ugly parts. We want to forget.

I’m sure for the people of ancient Israel that desire to forget was no less real. They too had their ugly chapters, times when they turned their back on who they truly were and what they were to do. Time and again, they became apostates, turned to other gods, rejected Yahweh, and often suffered dramatic consequences for it.

The story of Nehemiah occurs late in the Old Testament. Well after many of those consequences I just mentioned have come to pass. The people have been conquered by numerous empires. The kingdom of Israel no longer exists. It is occupied territory, a portion of the great Empire of Persia in the 5th century before Christ. The people of God are under the rule of Artaxerxes, king of Persia (and son of Xerxes, the “villain” of the Greek histories of the Battle of Thermopylae and Hollywood depictions thereof.)

Nehemiah was the Jewish cup-bearer of the king, a position of some importance. Upon learning of troubles back home in Jerusalem, Nehemiah convinces the king to send him back there to rebuild the city after decades of neglect. After accomplishing this feat, he returns to the side of his king, only to learn later that the people in Jerusalem have once again turned their back on God. So Nehemiah once again sets out to put things right. The lengthy confession we have as our text today is the result of his efforts.

It’s not necessarily a fun read. It’s a long laundry list of sins that the people have committed, not just recently, but over their long history. Time and again, they admit to having turned their back on God, turned their backs on one another, and “done what is evil in the sight of the Lord.”

And while it might be easy for us to point fingers and laugh at their constant and consistent failures, are we so different? Our society isn’t exactly reveling in its virtue right now, with ugly expressions of racism, sexism, and other social vices not only becoming acceptable again, but commonplace. Like the ancient Israelites, we’ve forgotten what we’re capable of and fallen into age-old traps of sin.

But there’s another piece to remembering our past and that’s the recognition of God’s presence in the midst of it all. Note the parallelisms in what the Israelites confess. We did this terrible thing, but God did this wondrous thing. Time and again, despite the sin and failure of God’s people, God himself comes through. God proves faithful. God proves merciful. God proves forgiving. If we humans are consistent in our sin and failure, then God proves all the more consistent in his love and grace.

Being human means dealing with sin. We screw up…all the time. Sometimes we even enjoy it, or at least we do until the consequences of it come calling. We, both collectively and individually, are more than capable of doing evil. Yet God responds to our mistakes with compassion and mercy. He sent Christ to die for our sins, to take upon himself the real punishment that we’ve deserved. He died because we screw up, but because he died, God looks upon us not with anger or disgust, but instead with mercy and forgiveness. Time and again, as we fail, God forgives.

And that’s worth remembering.



P.S. Just as I finished writing this, I saw news reports of a shooting where a news crew was murdered on air. Our evils continue. Lord, have mercy.

Sermon for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on August 23, 2015
Scripture text: John 6:56-69

In the Luther movie from a few years ago, there is a powerful scene where Martin Luther is making ready to face the Emperor and Cardinal Oleander at the Diet of Worms. Helping him groom himself is his old mentor, Fr. Staupitz, and the two of them have a conversation about what has happened since Luther was sent out from the monastery to become the new professor of theology at Wittenberg: the 95 Theses, the indulgence controversy, the papal reaction, everything. Staupitz laments that all that Luther has done is create chaos in the world, that he is “tearing the world apart.”

Luther rather dramatically grabs Staupitz’s hand and says “That day when you sent me out so boldly to change the world, did you really think there wouldn't be a cost?”

I’m always reminded of that scene when I read this passage from the Gospel of John. Jesus has just finished trolling the Pharisees with all this talk of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. He’s shocked them with these dramatic metaphors of vampirism and cannibalism that describe the new communion with God that he is ushering in by his incarnation. But the Pharisees and Jesus’ opponents aren’t the only ones who are hearing these teachings. It’s also his disciples and they too are shocked by what they hear. They too are taken aback by Jesus’ teaching and many are struggling to accept what he’s telling them.

What were they in this for? What did they expect? Those are questions these disciples are now confronting within themselves, because what they are encountering in their master is not what they expected. This isn’t what they signed on for. Like Staupitz, who sent Luther out to change the world without any realization what would happen if Luther succeeded, these disciples are just now starting to realize there’s a price to being a disciple. If they signed on, thinking nothing would really change, they’re now coming to realize just how wrong they were.

You’ve heard me say in my sermons, quoting Brennan Manning, that God loves us as we are. But he also doesn’t leave us there. His love, his grace, his mercy works on us. It softens our hardness, it gives us resolve and tenacity. It gives us the courage to love and the boldness to speak and stand up for the truth. But that’s a formula for a lot of trouble. That’s a formula for a hard road ahead and not everyone is willing or prepared to face that.

It’s harder to believe than not to.

Acclaimed author Flannery O’Conner was once confronted by a critic who wondered why someone as sophisticated as she was could profess to believe in all the silly superstitions of religion and Christianity. She wrote an essay in reply, explaining that the truth is it’s much harder to be a Christian than it is to be an agnostic. Christian singer Steve Taylor took the contents of that essay and turned them into the song “It’s Harder to Believe,” one of his most powerful and honest songs.


They’re right. All of them. It is harder to believe than not to. And in these times, we are starting to understand that truth.

I look out over the world and I see a nightmare unfolding. I see people rejecting long held truths about life. I see people turning on one another in an orgy of fear and anger. I see hate overcoming love. I hear echoes of the worst atrocities of history, threatening to come true once again: civil war, slavery, the concentration camp, fascism, Jim Crow. I see people suffering and others turning a blind eye to their pain. I see empty churches and full liquor stores as folks look for anything to numb the agony of their lives. And I see a loyal remnant of the Church, confused and terrified about how to respond to all this, afraid to speak the truth because they know there will be a backlash.

It’s harder to believe than not to.

It proves too much for many of those disciples. The cost is too high, the beliefs too strange. Many fall away the evangelist tells us. Many turn their back on Jesus because the road is getting hard.

The Twelve remain and Peter puts it all in perspective with those famous that we speak ourselves every week. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

That’s it, isn’t it? Peter understood, maybe not entirely, because he too has his moment when the road gets too hard even for him. But, in the end, that’s what it’s all about. God does love us as we are. God does accept us. God does go to Nth degree to save us, giving up his very son for our sake. God, the creator of all things, wants to be with us, with you, with me. He wants to spend eternity with us.

And when that truth sinks in, that love, that grace, that mercy begins to work on us. It softens our hardness, it gives us new perspective on life. We see others not as enemies or competition, not as those to be feared, but our brothers and sisters in need. People we can and will help. It gives us resolve and tenacity. When the world says, as it often will, that those we reach out to are not worth it, we ignore their hate. Christ died for these lost ones. Can we do any less?

And when their hate turns threatening, God’s love in us gives us courage. And have the boldness to speak and stand up for the truth. For what can our enemies do? Kill us? We have the promise of life eternal through Christ. What is their bluster and bullying to that?

Harder to believe than not to? Oh, yes, at times, in these times in fact. But here we are. The chosen few who have stood firm as the road has gotten hard. There has been a cost to our discipleship, a price that we are beginning to pay in world that fears the truths we represent. But what is their paranoia to what God is giving us? To what God wants to give them?

Strange as it may seem, the world needs us. We are the way back from the nightmare. I’ve said before and I’ll say again, the covenants have always been about showing the world a different way, a better way of life than all this hate and division.

The Peaceable Kingdom is still coming to pass. And it’s fallen to us to help make it happen. That’s not an easy task. But what have we to fear? We have God’s grace and acceptance. We have life eternal. We all these blessings and then some. Why do we hesitate? Why worry when the road gets hard? We already have our reward. Time to get busy. Amen.

Weekly Devotion for August 16, 2015

Scripture reading: Joshua 22:21-34 (Appointed for August 22)

I preached on Sunday about our obsession as human beings with being right, particularly on religious and faith matters, and how often times we can become so stubborn and stupid as to not see what it is that God is really trying to tell us. I’ve also spoken at some length in the past on how we are so quick as a species and a society to divide ourselves, one from another, to create antagonism between ourselves and our designated “other.”

Combining these two human tendencies is usually a formula for disaster.

The scripture text from Joshua is an example of that. In the early days of Israel, in the time when the people had just arrived in the Promised Land and were divvying up the territory among the Twelve Tribes, there were disputes and arguments about who got what. The tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh recognized immediately that they were in trouble. Between them and the other nine tribes was the river Jordan. There was a literal boundary between them, a literal separation and division, and they had the foresight to recognize that was going to be a problem in the future. It nearly proves a problem in the present, because the moment they set out to find a solution to this future problem, the other nine “call their banners” (old medieval phrase for going to war) and march on their territory. It didn’t take much for those divisions to get hostile.

The worst part about it was that it was all based on a misunderstanding. The tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh had built an altar, a monument, to show their reverence to God and to remind the other tribes that despite the physical separation between them, that they too were loyal children of Yahweh. The other tribes saw this monument as a blasphemy and set out for war, the very thing the altar was meant to prevent. But they were wrong and, thankfully, they were willing to admit their mistake before blood was shed. But what if they hadn’t? Would the history of God’s people be marred with the ugliness of a Civil War generations before Kings David and Solomon? Would that be their legacy as God’s own chosen people? It very nearly was.

And what does this have to do with us today?

Well, let me ask a question. How many of the divisions we’ve created in our society today are based on misunderstandings? How many are based on misreading the intentions of the other? How many are because we think we’re right about them and their motives when we’re not? Probably a lot more than people care to admit.

Take nearly anything controversial in the news today, from immigration to #BlackLivesMatter to the Iran nuclear deal, and you can quickly see that the scuttlebutt is based more on presumptions, half-truths, and prejudices than reality. It’s seems like we’re looking for an excuse to hate, because often times we are. And there’s the danger and the threat of disaster.

As Christians, we are called first and foremost to the truth. And when it comes to our encounter with the other, the way to find that truth is to do what the nine tribes did in our Joshua text: They listened in order to understand. We don’t do that very well, because again we want to be right and we’re stubborn about that. And that stubbornness could be the cause of tragedy. Lives could be destroyed, families ruined, war declared, and a whole host of other nightmarish possibilities all because we refused to listen to the truth. The blood of our siblings, fellow children of God, could be on our hands because we were too full of ourselves to admit we were wrong about something.

Is that really what we want? As a society? As individuals?

Maybe instead we need to step back and listen before we do something we’ll regret. And maybe, we as the Church need to show the rest of society how that’s done. After all, that was one of the points of the covenants both old and new. To show the world a better way of life. Perhaps, in these turbulent and tense times, we need to remember that and get back to what we’re to do and to be as the Church and show the world how it’s done. If we truly want a society of justice, peace, freedom, and equality, then we need to lead the way.

And it starts with opening our ears and our hearts. It starts with listening as the people of God did.

Sermon for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church and St. John's Lutheran, New Freedom on August 16, 2015
Preaching texts: Proverbs 9:1-6, Ephesians 5:15-20, John 6:51-58

If you ask a scientist, a biologist, an anthropologist, just about anybody really, what it is that differentiates human beings from other animals, you’ll get a variety of answers. It’s our adaptability. It’s our capacity for language. It’s our ability to craft and use tools. It’s a lot of things, but they all boil down to one simple idea. It’s our intelligence. We simply are smarter than the average bear.

Which to me is sometimes funny, because there are a lot of ways in which we humans, despite this lauded intelligence, are really really stupid. We’re stupid because we’re stubborn. We want the world to be the way we want it to be. We want to be right. And when evidence is presented, even overwhelming evidence, that the world is not the way we think it is and that we are wrong about something, we just dig in our heels and trumpet our ignorance all the louder.

Consider one of the recent controversies that’s been in the news. After the Charleston church shooting, there’s been a lot of debate over the Confederate flag. The African-American community and others are saying it’s a racist symbol. Others disagree; they say it's a symbol of Southern pride and heritage, that the Civil War was not about race, but about states’ rights and economic disparity and cultural differences.

Well, if we were to invite 100 historians to discuss this issue, they would come in and they’d sit down as historians are wont to do with the actual documents of the time when the Confederacy was formed. That nation was formed by politicians and, as we all know, politicians love to give speeches and have press releases. So there’s a lot of talk from that time about why they did what they did. And time and time and time again, we’ll read in those documents and the vast majority of those historians (say 90%) would confirm all this, that the reason the Confederacy existed was for the continuation of slavery and the subjugation of the black race.

If 90 out of 100 car mechanics said that the reason your car doesn’t run is because it needs a new alternator, you’d replace the alternator. If 90 out of 100 doctors said you have appendicitis and need to have surgery, you’d be having surgery. But if 90 out of 100 historians say the Confederacy was all about slavery and that its flag is absolutely the symbol of a racist nation, no, these people don’t know what they’re talking about.

Like it or not, it's about racism. Period.

Climate change is another hot button issue, another controversy. The world is growing warmer and climate and weather are going all wonky on us. Hotter summers! More extreme winters! Violent hurricanes! Record droughts! All of it, according to some 97% of all climate scientists, the result of human activity: agriculture, carbon fuels, etc. But our political class, all well bribed...I mean with their campaigns well funded...by the oil and gas industries, say it’s all a hoax. And a lot of people believe them.

If 97 out of 100 car mechanics said that the reason your car doesn’t run is because it needs a new alternator, you’d replace the alternator. If 97 out of 100 doctors said you have appendicitis and need to have surgery, you’d be having surgery. But if 97 out of 100 climatologists say that global warming is both real and we’re the cause of it, no, it’s just a conspiracy. It’s all a hoax. It’s all fake.

Say hello to the world we're leaving our children.

We can be so dumb.

We’ve got these anti-vaxxers out there that are putting people in danger of diseases that we’ve nearly eradicated. We’ve got people who still believe our President was born in Africa despite the mountain of evidence that he is, in fact, a citizen of these United States. We’ve got folks that think the moon landing was faked and that 9/11 was an inside job. We are so stupid at times.

The author of Proverbs calls us to feast upon wisdom, to set aside immaturity and folly. St. Paul calls us to live not as unwise, but as wise. Sometimes, I think they’re spitting into the wind. It’s tall order to ask stubborn and often willfully stupid people to give up their stubbornness and stupidity. We’re addicted to being right, even when we’re not.

And probably nowhere in the course of our lives are we more stubborn than when it comes to matters of faith. There’s something, if you’ll forgive my putting it this way, almost devilish in the way Jesus approaches his critics in our Gospel lesson today. If he were on the internet, we’d probably say he was trolling them with his talk of eating flesh and drinking blood. He’s going for shock value.

You see, Jesus’ critics, the Pharisees, the rabbis, the scribes, and all the religious leaders of the day were very set in their ways. They understood God. They knew what it was all about. But along comes the very Son of God, who knows the Father better than anyone, who offers a new perspective, a new relationship with the divine, a new communion, if you will. And to describe that new reality, he uses a violent image of cannibalism and vampirism, eating flesh and drinking blood.

It’s even harsher in the original language than it comes across in English. Those who “eat” of my flesh. In the old Greek, the word for “eat” used there is not one that conjures up a dainty little meal where everyone has good manners and proper use of posture and utensils. No, it translates best as “gnaw.” Those who gnaw on my flesh. Those who devour my flesh. It’s more the image of a starving man having food set before him for the first time in days.

So it’s not an easy image to digest (pun intended). But there’s truth within the image. But rather than listen to Jesus or to try to understand what he’s saying here, the Pharisee crowd will have none of it. They know what God’s all about. No one, not even God’s own Son, is going to change their minds.

Of course, it’s this very attitude that makes Jesus say what he says. This is the problem. The Pharisees want things their way. They want to cling to their old priorities, their old attitudes, their old opinions, their old theologies and doctrines.

But with Jesus, if you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. There’s no halfway point in this new reality. No compromise. You either accept the new way or you cling to the old. You’re either feasting upon Christ and in this new communion with God or you’re not in it at all.

We humans like our halfway point. We like our compromises. We like clinging to our follies, our preconceptions, our sins. We’re not so different from those Pharisees as we’d like to pretend to be. Love your neighbor! Bah! Not those people! Not the poor. Not the black. Not the gay. Not those sinners over there. They don’t deserve it. They haven’t earned it. Give of my resources to help people! Bah! It’s mine! You can’t make me. Surrender my hardened heart and my foolish ignorance about the world! No way! I’m right even when I’m not.

In for a penny, in for a pound. This new reality, this new kingdom, demands everything of us. We are to be new creations, ones who feast upon Christ and his goodness. Who devour his love. Who gnaw on his grace. And ones who surrender the old ways of hate and selfishness. But that asks too much of us. We’re too caught up in our own folly to let it go. Too stubborn to stop being stupid.

So what is Christ to do with us?

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. If that is the demand, then Christ will be the one who fulfills it. It will be he who gives all. It will be he who surrenders everything. It will be he who sacrifices the whole of himself for the sake of the world. To do what we cannot do.

In order to gnaw on Christ’s flesh, he must die. And die he does, upon a cross, for the sake of the world. For the sake of all the stubborn and willfully foolish human beings like ourselves. We cannot make ourselves a new creation even if we wanted to. No, God will do it for us and the price is the life of the Son. He will die so we can feast upon him. He will die to be with us. He will die so that we can have this new communion with God and be the creations he wishes us to be.

We cannot give up our stupidity. Even the wisest or most humble of us will succumb to sin and ego at some point. We cannot be the new creation on our own. We cannot have this new communion with God on our own. God must do it for us and do it he does. He gives of himself, his very life, for our sake. You want to talk about dumb? That seems dumb. We’re not worth it. We’ve proven that time and again. But to God, we are. Stupid we may be, but he loves us and he gives himself to save us. Amen.

Weekly Devotional for August 9, 2015

Scripture text: Ruth 2:1-23 (Appointed for August 11, 2015)

If you really want to push my buttons, get me to talk about the state of Christian music over the past twenty or so years. When I was a teenager, I listened to bands and singers like Petra and Michael W. Smith constantly. But as I grew older, two things happened. One, I matured in my faith and, to be blunt, the music got dumber.

Ok, maybe that’s a little harsh. Perhaps, it would be better to say that the messages and the theology of Christian music did not keep up with my own spiritual development. I largely outgrew it. It no longer related to my life as I was experiencing it. It no longer related to the faith that I held. It seemed so detached from real life.

One of the reasons I became such a fanatical fan of bands like The Choir and singers like Michael Card is because their music wasn’t detached from my experience of life and faith. Everything pieced together. Everything was integrated. Everything was interconnected and made sense.

The Choir could sing a song like “Between Bare Trees,” which is a romantic love song between a husband and his wife. It didn’t become less “Christian” because of that, because romance is a part of life. Michael Card could sing of the complexity of paradox and ambiguity in faith in a song like “God’s Own Fool,” because real faith isn’t always a simple thing nor is Jesus all that easy to grasp all the time. Life isn’t just one thing. It’s a little bit of everything: joy, sorrow, love, pain, confusion, certainty, complexity, simplicity, all jumbled up together.

Which is one of the reasons why I so appreciate that stories like today’s passage from the Old Testament book of Ruth exist. It seems there’s nothing terribly profound in this text; no great theological truths being revealed. It’s very ordinary. And THAT’S the point.

It’s real life.

Ruth is a love story. It’s a story of friendship between Ruth and Naomi, her mother-in-law. It’s a story of loyalty and fidelity. It’s a story of romance between Ruth and Boaz, a romance that would lead to both King David and Jesus Christ.

It doesn’t feel like a Bible story should. It’s not about God. It’s not about our salvation or God’s promises. And that’s okay. It’s about people like us. You can, in your mind’s imagination, see how Boaz becomes attracted to Ruth and how he pursues her in an effort to woo her. How many of us did the same with our own crushes when we were younger? How many of us have a story just like this in our lives?

It’s real life.

Faith is a part of life, not something separate from it. When we are living our day to day lives, as complicated and as ordinary as they are, our faith does not sit on a shelf, tucked away until we need it. It’s a part of us and a part of everything we do. It’s quite appropriate to think of love and romance and work and family and meals and friendship and all this other ordinary everyday things as a part of our faith journey, because they are. Everything is interconnected. Everything is integrated. It’s all part of a larger whole we call life.

Faith isn’t just something we just do on Sunday morning. It infuses every part of our lives. When we are romancing our spouse, faith is a part of that. When we are raising our children, faith is a part of that. When we are working our jobs, faith is a part of that. When we are enjoying our hobbies, faith is a part of that. Faith is a part of all those things, because faith is life and life is faith. They exist together, never apart.

Ruth’s story reminds us of that. Here, in the midst of God’s Holy Word, is the simple story of a woman and man who fall in love. It’s real life. It’s real faith. It’s all jumbled up together, as it’s meant to be.

Sermons for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost

Author's Note: Yes, the title is correct. Sermons. I preached both of these yesterday, one at Canadochly and one at St. John's. They're too similar in message and theme to post separately, so I figured I'd include them together.

Scripture text: John 6:35-51

----Sermon #1----

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on August 9, 2015

If someone were able to invent a time machine, or if Dr. Who’s TARDIS turned out to be real and we could borrow it for a time, I’m sure one of the first things we would do is go back to 1st Century Palestine and meet Jesus. To see him in the flesh, as he was when he was here on Earth. To experience him directly and not through the filter of the Gospel stories or even our own expectations. What would we find?

I’m sure there would be many surprises. First off, he would not be blonde and blue eyed, but would obviously resemble the people of that time and place. Dark skin, dark hair and eyes, full beard, probably a bit short and maybe a bit frumpy looking. Not the tall and regal figure we’ve come to expect, but a short little Jewish man.

Something like this.

And his personality? Again, I think we’ve come to expect a certain calm serenity, that he’s this unobtrusive and inoffensive character, perhaps because we’ve gotten so conditioned to seeing pictures of those faux blue eyes staring blankly into space.

Jesus been hitting the Ativan a little too much.

What a shock it might be for us to see him irritable or even sarcastic. “You’re not here because you saw signs, but because you want more bread.” He growls at the crowd at one point. There’s a certain snark in that line. A certain edge that we’re not used to.

This shouldn’t come as any real surprise to anyone, that the real Jesus often does not meet our expectations. Our expectations and impressions are formed without any real context of the flesh-and-blood human being that he was; we know only the stories and our own minds will fill in the spaces between the lines of those stories, creating a character that is somewhat like the real thing, but not quite there. It’s the best we can do. We’re thousands of miles and thousands of years removed from the real thing and there is no such thing as a time machine or a TARDIS that would allow us to remedy that.

However, truth be told, even those would could touch, see, and hear him with their own senses were often baffled by the “real Jesus.” He was not what they expected. He was often not what they wanted. Perhaps it is good that he had an edge to him, a bit of sarcasm and irascibility, because the more he defied those expectations the more disliked he was going to be. Calm serenity was not going to change any of that. Best to be honest and sincere.

“Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?”.The people in the crowd comment. Well, yes, he is. “How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Well, he’s that too. How can that be? Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it?

Expectation comes from experience. Experience comes from memory. And memory anchors us in the past. The people of the crowd are having a hard time recognizing that there might be more to Jesus than the little boy they used to see running down the streets of their village. A lot more.

But Jesus isn’t interested in the expectations of the past. His view is future oriented, what is yet to be. “I am the bread of life” is a statement of future reality. It is not the manna in the wilderness. It’s something new, something radical, something transformative. It’s life as it’s meant to be.

We may not realize it, but we are often stuck in the same rut as the people of that crowd. We think we know Jesus, but what we know is the Jesus of our expectation. It’s the Jesus of Sunday School classes we took as a kid. It’s the Jesus of the serene painting, with his blonde hair and blue eyes and catatonic look. It’s a Jesus stuck in the past, clouded by memory and nostalgia.

But that’s not who he is. He’s a lot more.

Expectation comes from experience. Experience comes from memory. And memory anchors us in the past. And the past is often times where we are stuck. “We want our country back” we bellow at politicians (as if it left us or something.) We pine for the days when church pews were full. We wish the radio still played the “good music” and TV the “good shows” instead of today’s garbage. No, if we had that time machine, we would likely not use it to satisfy some historical curiosity. We’d use to go back and relive our past life, dwelling in the places we wish we could be and trying to dodge those old regrets that still haunt us.

You know what the problem with all that is? Just how limiting it is. The more we look to the past, the more we admit how little faith we have in the future. We set our sights far too low. Our expectations of what is to come are diminished and small. How little hope we have.

And Jesus? Well, we’re drawn to the fake Jesus of our own minds more than the real one, because the real one seems too good to be true. Bread that takes away all hunger. Sins forgiven and forgotten. Life without limits. Being accepted and loved for who we are when we can’t even do that to ourselves. Come on! There’s nothing real about any of that.

Except, that it is real. And that’s who Jesus is. And that’s what he offers. And that’s the future that he brings, something far more grand and wondrous than anything out of history, memory, or nostalgia. If there was such a thing as a time machine, we would want to get in and go forward, not backward, in time and go into that wondrous kingdom that Jesus promises to bring. A place where tears are wiped away, death is no more, and the world is the way it is meant to be.

That is what this is all about. That’s God’s work, his plan, his scheme, his promise.

No, this is not what we expect. Nor is Jesus. It’s all so much bigger than our expectations. That’s the wonder of grace. Our future is far more grand than we can possibly imagine. Because that’s who our God is, always bigger than we expect, always more loving and giving than we can believe. He defies expectations, because if he didn’t what hope would there be? No, God is good. God is great and he offers a future that even our greatest hopes pale before. It’s his gift to his precious world and to you and I, his precious children. Amen.

----Sermon #2----

Preached at St. John's Lutheran Church on August 9, 2015 (Based loosely on the children's sermon preached at Canadochly that morning.)

You know what my favorite thing as a kid was? You’ll probably never guess, but I don’t think I knew for sure what it was until I grew up and became an adult. It’s not a toy or a game or a person. It was “tomorrow.” That’s right; my favorite thing as a kid was the future.

Think about it. Tomorrow is the day when your friend comes over to play. Tomorrow is the day when grandma picks you up to take you shopping for a new toy. Tomorrow is the day when you’re going to beat that boss level on that video game. Tomorrow is when you’re going to the movies or to the swimming pool or on vacation or off to camp or whatever. No matter how great today is, tomorrow is going to be even better.

There was always something to look forward to...tomorrow.

In fact, you could probably say that one of the biggest differences between children and adults concerns this perspective. Adults don’t like tomorrow. Tomorrow means going back to work. Tomorrow means sitting on hold with customer service for hours. Tomorrow means doctors’ appointments and sitting in traffic. It’s responsibilities and tedium and trying to navigate through this thing we’ve tricked ourselves into believing is life.

For the adult, yesterday is their favorite thing. Yesterday we were young. Yesterday we were careful. Yesterday didn’t hurt so much. Yesterday was before our friends grew up and moved away. Yesterday was when we still had a grandma. Yesterday was when the music was good and the TV programs were fun and wholesome. No matter what today is like, yesterday was far better.

You see this all over the place, this longing for yesterday. A good bit of our political discourse is about getting our country back to some “Golden Age” that people vaguely remember from the past. A good bit of our talk in the church is about getting our congregations back to a “golden age” when pews were full and we didn’t worry about the budget. People pine for what once was or, more accurately, what they believe once was. Nostalgia clouds our view of history and we so quickly and often deliberately forget the bad things in the past in an effort to dress it up as something better than whatever tomorrow might bring.

All that’s a problem, because you know what that really says about us as a people? It shows how little hope we truly have. How little faith we have in the future. How low our expectations about life really have become. There’s nothing to look forward to anymore. We can’t believe that the real Golden Age might be something yet to be, something in the future. No, it had to be something we lost in the past and only by pining for yesterday will we ever get something like it again.

We Christians however have pledged ourselves as disciples of Jesus Christ. We seek to living into his teachings. In order to do that however, we also have to understand his perspective when it comes to this sort of thing. And when we look to the stories of Jesus’ life and teaching, we do not find an echo of our cynicism about past and future. What we find is hope.

“I am the bread of life.” Jesus teaches. “Those who eat of this bread will live forever.” Those words are future oriented. It’s a vision of what will be in God’s kingdom. It’s a vision we find time and time again throughout the Scriptures. For such an old book, written thousands of years ago, it’s perspective is always to the future, always to what will be. It is a book of hope and it speaks time and time and time again about bread that takes away all hunger, sins forgiven and forgotten, life without limits, being accepted and loved for who we are when we can’t even do that to ourselves, days where there will be no more tears and no more death. All of it promised to us in God’s kingdom.

It’s a future that’s too good to be true. Too good to believe. But it is also the future we are promised. It’s who Jesus really is. You see, I think tomorrow is his favorite thing too, just it was for me when I was a child. Doesn’t matter how awesome today was, tomorrow is going to be even more awesomer. It’s God’s kingdom, God’s promises, come in their fullness.

And that’s our hope. In a lot of ways, that’s what our faith is about. It’s faith in those promises that bring us such hope. That’s God’s work, his plan, his scheme, his promise. That’s what it’s been about since day one, from the first time he spoke to the Patriarchs until now. A better tomorrow, a better world, life as it’s meant to be.

It’s all so much bigger than our paltry expectations. That’s the wonder of grace. Our future is far more grand than we can possibly imagine. Because that’s who our God is, always bigger than we expect, always more loving and giving than we can believe. But that’s who he is and this is what he’s about. God is good. God is great and offers a future that even our greatest hopes pale before. It’s his gift to his precious world and to you and I, his precious children. Amen.

Sermon for the funeral of Donald Tyson Sr.

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on August 4, 2015
Scripture readings: Isaiah 25:6-9, Revelation 21:1-6, John 14:1-6

Sometimes life just goes wrong.

Consider Donald for instance. I’ve known Donald Tyson now for three years. I’ve been his pastor, visited him at the hospital numerous times. The impression I always have of him is this giant.

I’m not a small guy, but it always seemed to me that Don just towered over me. That strong body served him well in life. He was a man who worked with those strong hands and strong legs. Yesterday at the viewing, I heard again sort of a quintessential Don story, of a time when there was an accident at work. A big heavy piece of steel came down and landed on a worker and Don, in a burst of adrenaline, pulled it off of him. Hundreds of pounds tossed aside. Don probably saved that man’s life.

But that’s who he was. He was a giant, but also embodied that old phrase of the “gentle giant.” He was a man of kindness and loyalty and love. He was loyal to his church; it seemed every Sunday there he was in the choir, ready to sing. Loved his family, especially his wife. Loved his country. Served for a number of years in 101st Airborne, one of the most storied and prestigious unit in our armed forces.

Don was a good man. But sometimes life just goes wrong.

Those strong hands stopped working. Those strong feet began to stumble. The giant of a man that he was was laid low by neuropathy and sickness. Suddenly, he couldn’t do anything anymore. A nightmare come to life for him. He couldn’t sing in the choir. Couldn’t work. Couldn’t drive. Couldn’t walk. Couldn’t even feed himself even. It was awful for him. He hated every minute of it.

Life just goes wrong sometimes.

I know the conversation over the past few days has been to the effect of “Donald is in a better place now. He’s not suffering.” I know that sentence has been said more than once and it is true. But if you want to talk about life going wrong, there’s the best example of them all. When death is best of all possible options, something truly has gone very wrong.

We have come here today to bid our farewells to Donald and to hear a word of hope. But to understand that word of hope, we must be honest about the nature of things. This world has gone wrong and our proof is in front of us. A beloved husband and father and friend and a good man lies before us, his life taken away by age and disease. And one day, likely under different circumstances, that’ll be each of us in that place. Death will come calling and life will go wrong that worst way it can.

But this is also what our faith is about. God giving answer to what we see before us today. This is not how it is supposed to be. Our God is a god of life and when he created us he created us to be creatures of life, ones who live with him and thrive in his goodness and grace. But that’s not the world we live in; things went wrong.
But God has refused to leave that as it is; he’s been working, from the dawn of humanity up until now and beyond, to fix what has gone wrong with the world. To set right what sin and death has done.

It was a long plan, put into place at the very beginning of civilization. It involved a promise to a man named Abraham that he would be the father of a great people, that from which would come a blessing that would set right all that was wrong in the world. Untold generations passed through time from Abraham to a little village of Nazareth, but from one of his descendents, a girl named Mary, came Jesus Christ. The Messiah, the Savior, the Son of the Living God, God incarnate in the world.

He came among us and shows how things are meant to be. Showed us how to be kind to one another, revealed a kingdom where the things wrong in this world are set right. And Jesus, as if that were not enough, made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the world, dying on a cross and then rising again on the third day.

All this he did for Donald and for you and for me. All this he did for the whole world. And Donald believed that, trusted in it. Even as his body broke down and things began to fall apart, he trusted in the one who had said to him, “One day, I will put it all right again.”

Donald died in that hope and it has not disappointed him. Those promises have been fulfilled in ways we left here behind can scarcely imagine.

Sometimes life goes wrong. Well, that’s the price we pay for living on this side of the veil, in a broken world marred by sin and death. But we have the same hope as Donald that there will be a day when it will all be set right. Scripture gives us vision of that day, with stories of feasts and tears being wiped away at last. Scripture also tells us of the promise that will make that all come to pass. “Where I am, you shall be also.” A promise beyond time, made in love and compassion for people God believes should something better than a world gone wrong. They should have life with him, as it was meant to be. Amen.

Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church and St. John's Lutheran Church on August 2, 2015
Scripture text: 2 Samuel 11:26 - 12:15

What is a hero? What makes a hero? I suppose the answers to these questions would be myriad, but certain qualities will emerge. Courage, strength, honor, nobility, success, and so forth.

Human beings have thrived on hero stories since before civilization even existed. They form the basis of mythology and folklore. Our ancestors thrilled to the tales of Hercules and Siegfried. We grew up with James Bond, Luke Skywalker,or Atticus Finch. Sometimes our heroes are real people: Martin Luther King or George Washington. They are role models. People, fictional or real, that we admire, people we want to emulate. In fact, anthropologists would likely argue that’s the purpose of the hero story: To illustrate in dramatic and entertaining form, the ideals of our society. What we aspire to be ourselves. The people we wish we could be.

In the midst of such worship, it is easy for us to forget that all our heroes, whether they be literary or historical, are still human beings. The stories themselves usually don’t shy away from that. Yes, Hercules completes his great labors, he slays monsters, he has his apotheosis and becomes a god himself, but he also loses his temper with his wife and children and murders them in a rage. John McClain defeats the terrorists over four (five?) Die Hard movies, but he’s still just a New York cop with a broken marriage and kids who want little to do with him.

Probably the best example of this is Jamie Lannister, because it turns the trope on its head. Who, you may ask. Well, Jamie is a character in George RR Martin’s infamous Song of Ice and Fire novels, better known to most through its HBO TV adaptation Game of Thrones. When we are first introduced to Jamie, we find him en flagrante with his twin sister and when they’re caught by a small child, Jamie promptly throws the child out a third story window to keep his secret.

The other characters tell us in the story that is not to be unexpected, that Jamie is a despicable honorless dog, a man of cruelty and viciousness. He was the king’s bodyguard and murdered him after all, broke all his knightly vows. But as we get to know Jamie over the course of several books, we find he’s a person very disgusted with being held in contempt for an act he considers to be an act of great good; he killed a tyrant who was about to order the murder of thousands of innocent people.

So Jamie decides to defy everyone’s expectations. He will become a paragon, the most noble, the most honorable, and the most chivalric of knights. And he does. His word is like iron. He’s kind, honest, noble, honorable, and no one knows what to do with him, including the readers of the book. This evil man becomes a hero and no one can quite get over it.

Our first lesson is part of the story of one of the greatest heroes in the Old Testament: King David. And the pieces of the hero story are here. He’s the Giant-Slayer who brought low mighty Goliath. He’s noble and honorable, refusing to slay even his worst enemy when he found him quite literally on the toilet. No noble death that, so David refused to kill. He’s the author of the Psalms, the one the Bible says is a “man after God’s own heart.” He’s pious and brave and everything you could want in a hero. When people want to honor Jesus generations later, they call him the “Son of David.”

But like so many others from page, screen, and history, we forget he’s human. And like Jamie Lannister, it is David’s lust that leads him to an act of unspeakable evil. One day the king is looking down from his balcony and spies a beautiful woman bathing below. He orders her to come to him and they begin this tawdry love affair. Bathsheba, the woman, gets pregnant and David decides to do something about her husband, one his most loyal and brave soldiers named Uriah. David orders Uriah to be placed at the vanguard of the next battle, the most dangerous place on the battlefield, and he is killed. Bathsheba comes into David’s household and all seems well. Except the prophet Nathan has heard of this murder and comes before the king.

The “man after God’s own heart” is a cold-blooded conspirator and murderer. The author of the Psalms is an adulterer. The man whose name is used to give honor to our savior is guilty of a vicious and cruel act. And much like Jamie Lannister in reverse, we really don’t know what to do with that. The hero has become the evil man. The paragon has become the villain.

To his credit, David repents of his evil, but the consequences of his actions never leave him be henceforth. His child dies. His kingdom is torn by rebellion and insurrection. To borrow words from another famous fantasy story, he bears the crown “upon a troubled brow.”

But what is the lesson for us in all this? Probably in how God responds to all of this. You see, God’s favor is with David from the very start. God loves him. God blesses him. God gives him his anointing, promises him the crown of the kingdom. God is with him on the battlefield against Goliath and all his other enemies. God stands by him through everything, including THIS.

David has done something horrible, and thanks to Nathan, he knows it and he knows God knows it. There is every reason for God to withdraw his favor. Every reason for those blessings to be cancelled, for another king to be anointed, for David to lose everything because of his sin. But that’s not what happens. There are consequences, as I said, but God forgives. God continues to love David. God continues to bless David. God’s promises are not voided by David’s sins. They stand firm.

And as it was for this king, so it is with us. I keep harping on this idea of how “God loves us as we are, not as we should be,” an idea from Scripture of course but lauded heavily by Brennan Manning in his preaching, a scholar and preacher I admire greatly. God loves us as we are, not as we should be. Well, David is proof of that. Here is man guilty of a heinous crime, a horrific abuse of his kingly power, and God STILL loves him through it all.

No one here is a murderer. We might have been tempted from time to time. No one here is an adulterer...that I know of (please don’t inform me otherwise.) But even if we are, those sins and any of the others that we have committed are not grounds for God to withdraw his love and favor. He just doesn’t do that. That’s not how God works.

Think about it. God sent his son into this world for you. Became incarnate from the virgin as Jesus for you. Taught all these things for you. Performed his miracles to show you his kingdom. Went to the cross and died for you. Rose again on the third day for you. God went through all that trouble to be with you. That’s how much he loves you, and you think a little sin is going to stop all that?

St. Paul spoke truly in Romans 8. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. David’s murder of Urriah did not drive God’s love from him. Your sins will not drive God away from you. My sins will not drive him from me. He is ours forever. Amen.

Weekly Devotional for August 2, 2015

Scripture text: Isaiah 55:1-9 (Appointed for August 5, 2015)

I first became really familiar with this passage from Isaiah at the Blackwater Falls Chapel Service in West Virginia. When I became pastor in Davis, the town in which the Blackwater Falls State Park resides, I inherited a number of things from my predecessors. One of which was a chapel liturgy that used the words of Isaiah 55 in much the same way we use the Psalm text each Sunday in our worship, a little vignette between the lessons that offers a song of praise for the Word of God.

Isaiah’s prophecy is full of visions of the world as it is meant to be. Here, we see how God envisions the peoples of the covenant to be a beacon to all the nations, showing them where they can come to receive the bounty of God’s goodness. But then, as now, this is a vision that is radically contrary to human nature. We are people of division and we like it that way. There’s our people and there are those people over there who are not our people. And those “others” are rarely folks we want knocking on our doorstep. They are, at worst, an enemy to be destroyed and, at best, simply not to be trusted.

This dynamic, it seems to me, has been much more pronounced over the past two decades or so. Americans have grown increasingly suspicious of just about anyone who practices the religion of Islam, due to its association with Al Qaida, ISIS, and other terrorist organizations. Many politicians and pundits are not even trying to hide their disdain of immigrants coming into our country, using language that is ugly in its naked racism. And each time there’s a police involved shooting in the media, there’s an immediate jump-to-conclusions that the victim (usually a black male) in some way deserved to die for crimes (or innocent behavior) that none of our legal codes prescribe the death penalty for.

The other scares us and if we had our druthers, we would find a way to get them out of our country and out of our lives.

But that’s not God’s way and he loves to remind us of that. As he says in the words of Isaiah, “his ways are not our ways.”

I had a rather dramatic reminder of this myself while visiting Detroit during the Youth Gathering. We arrived a day earlier than the main events, so we spent much of that first day exploring the city. Lunchtime found us at a mall in Dearborn, one of the suburbs of Detroit, along with probably at least one hundred other youth from various ELCA groups across the country. All of us were already wearing our brightly colored T-shirts, so it was obvious to any observers we were part of some “big thing” that was going on.

Now, Dearborn, MI is well-known as having one of the largest populations of Muslims in the United States. So many of the other folk at the mall, shoppers or workers, were of the Islamic faith. Many were Arab or Middle Eastern, others were black. The differences between us and our hosts during that hour or so were obvious.

At one point, I stopped at a Teavana shop to sample a bit of iced tea. The shop clerk immediately asked me about what was going on, curious about our shirts and who we were. I gave him a quick explanation that we were church youth groups from all over the country who had come to Detroit for a gathering and that part of our purpose there would be to help out the city in any way we could. Upon hearing that, the man gave a slight bow and made a gesture with his hands.

Now, I’m not as well versed in the Islamic faith as I’d like to be, but I recognized immediately that the man’s gestures were an act of blessing. My impression was confirmed when he said openly that he wanted to bless us for the work we were doing for his city.

God had come to me in the form of this Islamic shopkeeper. Talk about “not our ways.”

But that’s the point. God loves the other. He loves the immigrant. He loves those who practice religions other than our own. He loves people of different races. And he wants us to love and respect them as well. The peaceable kingdom he outlines in Isaiah’s prophecy is a world where the divisions we humans hold so vital matter for nothing. We are all God’s children. We are all people for whom Christ came, died, and rose again. God reminds us that they are not “the other” so much as they are our siblings, fellow children of God.

God is full of surprises. He truly does not think the way we do, but calls us time and again for us to begin thinking the way he does. When that happens, the world begins to look very different and we realize just how precious all of its people truly are. Amen.