Sermon for Easter Sunday 2016

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on March 27, 2016

About 130 years ago, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his seminal work, Also sprach Zarathustra, a novel condemning the nihilism of his day. The book is most famous for the phrase “God is dead” and its claim that religion and other systems of morals and ethics had driven the world to the brink of ruin.

It’s easy to see how he might have come to such a conclusion. The world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was hardly a utopia. Capitalism, largely unchecked, had become corrupted by humanity’s greed and was grinding people into the dirt. The era of the so-called Robber Barons, the Gilded Age, when wages were low, hours long, and safety precautions non-existent. People were expendable. “Hey, boss, we had six people mangled by the #9 machine.” “So what? Hire six more. There’s money to be made and that’s all that matters.”

We had developed weapons of such immense destructive power that we could scarcely understand what death they could deliver: the tank, the machine gun, poison gas, massed artillery. One hundred years ago we found out when the world entered its first world war and viciousness of it all is still staggering. We mourn the 70,000 or so who died in the whole of the Vietnam War, but such casualty numbers would be a single battle back in WWI.

God is dead. It’s not hard to see why people thought so. We had killed him with our own brutality.

We would like to think we’ve evolved past all that, but have we truly? Greed continues to corrupt our society, buying off politicians and community leaders and compelling them to turn a blind eye when workers are again ground into dust in the unrelenting pursuit of profit for a tiny few. Our weapons of destruction are so potent now that we can annihilate all life on this planet in the blind of an eye with a single nuclear strike. Climate change now threatens our planet with a similar extinction as sea levels rise and droughts turn fertile farmland into desert. All because we can’t say no to our own selfishness and cruelty.

But you don’t need me to tell you that. You turn on the news. You see it. Terrorist bombings. School shootings. There is very little in our world to inspire hope. Nihilism and despair are, in many ways, logical responses to a world gone mad.

God is dead. Well, a lot of people still think so. They see little evidence of his influence on the world today. It’s all us and our breakneck race to self-destruction.

But we are here today to proclaim that not only is God not dead, but that he is risen. God’s not merely alive, He is risen!

That may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it makes all the difference in the world. A god that is merely alive while the evils of this world run rampant is a god of apathy, a god who doesn’t care one whit about the state of his creation.

Sorry, Newsboys, that's not good enough.

But that is not our god.

Our God put into motion a plan ages upon ages ago to set right what has gone wrong in the world. It began with a man named Abraham and God’s promise to make of him a chosen people from which would come “a blessing for all the families of the Earth.”

God nurtured these people with leaders and prophets, teachings and the law. And then when the time was right, he brought forth from them another man: Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus took those teachings and promises to a new level, showing us the true heart of God. A god who does care for this world. A god who loves this world. And he could do that with honesty and sincerity because “he and the Father were one.” He was God incarnate, and yet one of us here on Earth.

But the evils of this world were not content. They were threatened by Jesus and they sought to destroy him. We sought to destroy him. After all, he taught that people have value, that they are precious to God. But we don’t want that to be true. We want God to hate the same people we do and because Jesus refused to play along, we killed him.

That should have been the end, but it wasn’t. That should have been evil’s triumph, but it wasn’t. No, for after three days, Christ arose from the grave. Demonstrating once and for all that evil and death and sin do not have the last word. GOD DOES and his word is life.

That’s why Jesus is risen matters. Because if he is risen, then evil is defeated. Death is defeated. Sin is defeated. And all that is wrong in this world will one day be put right.

That is our faith. That is our hope. It is what we believe. It is why we are here. This day and every Sunday. It’s our message and our mission.

Which brings us back to a world that believes God is dead. Why? Why do they think that?

Could it be because we’ve given them no reason not to?

When we give into fear and despair and the nihilism of this world, why would anyone believe us when we claim Christ is risen? And yet, that is what we do so often. When you see Christians on the news, what do you see?

You see people cowering in fear over refugee children. Oh, no, they might be terrorists. But they are children of God and precious to him. And our God is greater than any terrorist, so why are we afraid?

You see people damning others for who they share their bed with. But the Bible says...Yeah, but it also says to love your neighbor and it hammers that lesson home hundreds of times more frequently than the paltry handful of verses that even allude to homosexuality. God is greater than any sin, real or invented, so why are we afraid?

When we cave into our fear and despair, we declare to the world that we are liars when we walk into this place, because we don’t believe what is proclaimed here. Not really. There is nothing to fear when you have a God who is risen and struck down the powers of death. No force on Earth trumps our God. No sin. No evil. No violence. No wrong teaching. No lifestyle. No nothing is greater than he. And he went to the cross and rose again for you and I and everyone.

That is the truth. Christ is risen. Now live like it. Amen.

Sermon for Good Friday

Preached at Emmanuel United Church of Christ, Freysville, PA on March 25, 2016
Scripture text: Luke 15:11-32

One of the ever persistent beliefs we have about ourselves as Americans is that our nation is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles, and driven by Christian morals. I’ve always found this curious since the evidence of this belief is a bit sketchy. I don’t think we’re quite as Christian as we claim to be.

Imagine with me a rally for a presidential candidate. Pick one. It doesn’t really matter which: Cruz, Trump, Hillary, just pick one. And they announce at this rally that before they take the stage that there will be a guest speaker to start things off. Jesus of Nazareth will be the opening act. Wow. Think about that. What an endorsement that has to be.

This, with more Jesus. 

(pic from Robert Mann's blog)

Everyone’s excited and this short frumpy little Jewish man walks onto the stage. Ok, he’s not quite what we thought he’d look like, but alright. Jesus goes to the mic and the room goes quiet as we listen to what the king of kings has to say.

“A man has two sons.” He begins. “The younger comes to his father one day and says, ‘Dad, drop dead, and give me my inheritance. Give me what I deserve.’ Instead of punching him in the mouth, the father complies. He calls up his accountant and divides up his assets. He cuts a check for the son, who then takes it to the bank, buys a plane ticket to Vegas, and off he goes.

“He gets to Vegas and he smokes a ton of weed. He visits a bunch of brothels. He goes to the casinos, but Lady Luck is not on his side. He loses. And he loses again. And before you know it, all his money is gone.”

At this point, the crowd cheers. Ah, he’s gotten what he deserves. Serves him right. What goes around comes around. This is justice for how he treated his father.

Jesus holds up his hand. “I’m not finished. The son finds work at a local pig farm. As is often the case with migrant laborers, he’s paid a pittance and soon he finds himself starving.”

“Ah, ha!” Goes the crowd. “Salt in the wound.” This is just getting better. Tell us more of how this little creep gets to suffer for his sins. Tell us more of how he gets what he deserves.

Jesus keeps going. “The son comes to his senses. Realizes what a terrible mistake he’s made. So he makes a plan to return home and beg his father for a job. Let me be as the lowest of your servants. So he packs up what little he has left and hitchhikes his way back home.”

“So what’s Dad going to do when he shows up?” The people in the crowd wonder to themselves. Is he going to slam the door in his face? He should. The final blow. The ultimate punishment for this fool’s arrogance and cruelty.

Jesus pauses to let the tension build a little, then he continues again. “When the son arrives, his father looks out the window and sees him on the sidewalk. Without hesitation, he tears open the door, and he runs down the pourch and across the yard. He reaches his son and scoops him up into this massive bear hug. He kisses him, and holds him, and hugs him, and showers him with tears of joy. ‘My son, you’ve come home.’ He blubbers over and over again.

“He calls inside to his hired help. ‘His boots are still covered in pig poop. Get some decent shoes for him. Start the hot water so he can get a shower. Put out some good clothes, my best suit. And call a caterer and tell them to prepare a feast. My son has come home.’”

At this point, you can hear a pin drop in that convention center. Wait a minute, this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. This guy is scum. He doesn’t deserve this. Slowly an angry murmur begins to rise in the crowd.

Jesus keeps going. “The elder son comes home from a long day at work. He sees the caterer’s van parked out front. He hears the sound of music and laughter inside. And he wonders what’s going on. So he grabs one of the hired help and asks him. ‘Your brother’s home.’ Says the servant. And the older son is furious. You can see the veins popping out on his forehead. Dad comes outside to invite him to join the party. The older son goes off. ‘How dare you! I work 60 hours a week to help support this family, to help make up for what that creep took from us. And when he comes home, you throw him a party!’

“‘He’s my son. He’s your brother. And he’s come home. That’s all that matters.’”

The crowd’s murmur turns into a roar. “No way. That’s not how it is. People don’t get away with this sort of thing. People work hard and get their reward. People who are lazy or evil get nothing. We get what we deserve. We get what we earn. We get what we merit.”

“No,” Jesus says. “Life is about grace. Not deserving.”

“Well, we’ll show him.” Says the crowd. Someone throws a piece of fruit and it hits Jesus smack in the face. Someone jumps up on the stage and sucker punches him. Someone else spits on him. A group grabs him and drags him outside. “A tree! String him up.” And they put the rope around his neck and they yank him high.

“People get what they deserve,” we chant. “That’s the American way.”

As Jesus gasps through the lynching rope, you can hear him say “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Tell me again about what we deserve.

That’s what we’ve made our nation into. It’s what we’ve made our religion into. It’s all about deserving. Who deserves our help. Who deserves salvation.

Refugees fleeing a nightmarish war. They don’t deserve our help. Us? Hey, we came to church on a Friday night. I get a reward, don’t I? Joel Osteen says I do. I work hard. What’s mine is mine. It doesn’t belong to ‘those people.’

As Jesus gasps from the tree, tell me again about what you deserve.

People starving on the streets. They’re just lazy. They don’t deserve anything. Me? I’m a good person. I deserve understanding when I screw things up. I go to church. That makes me better than everyone else.

As Jesus gasps from the tree, tell me again about what you deserve.

Here’s the ugly truth. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are ALL the younger son. We have all spit in the face of our Father. We have all squandered the gifts we’ve been given. We have all acted like spoiled children. What do we deserve for that?

But we don’t get that. What do we get instead? Forgiveness, love, salvation, joy, hope. We get grace because the Son of God took what we deserved upon himself. He doesn’t belong up there. We do. Yet up there he is, drowning in his own blood, gasping for air, dying...for our sake.

It’s not about deserving. It’s about grace. And if we want to call ourselves Christian and claim our nation for Christ, then we must never forget that. It’s always about grace. What we deserve is not what we receive. Grace is what we receive and grace is what we should give. Amen.

Weekly Devotional for Holy Week & Easter

Scripture reading: John 19:17-24, 28-30

I had two jokes cross my Facebook wall in the last week or so. The first, showing up on St. Patrick’s Day, was a picture of a group of people in a bar, drinking away. The caption read “If Americans have a drink called the ‘Irish Car Bomb,’ do the Irish have a drink called the ‘American School Shooting?’” The second was a New Yorker-style cartoon showing a man and a pastor together on the front step of a church on Easter Sunday. The caption read “I hate to say it, Pastor, but I think you’re getting stale. Every time I come here, you preach on the Resurrection.”

The first is, of course, a bit of black humor which may be all the more fitting this week with what we see on the news. The terrorist attack in Brussels dominates the national news, alongside the local news here in Pennsylvania of a retired police officer who murdered two Turnpike workers. The common perception is that we live in ugly times and they are getting worse. That’s probably not entirely inaccurate. With Donald Trump doing his best “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” imitation and his more rabid followers doing their best to obey by sucker-punching protesters, it seems we’ve reached a very dark place in our election cycle. Add to that the seemingly constant screech of warnings from scientists about climate change and we’re all starting to ask why we’re all in this handbasket and where are we going?

In a lot of ways, there should be nothing surprising by all this. We live in a broken world, marred by sin and death. All the nightmarish images we see on the news each night are merely a reflection of that reality. To put it metaphorically, we all live on Good Friday, seemingly stuck in the shadow of the cross. Our only perception is that of death and suffering. The temptation to despair is strong in these times.

But a dose of perspective is in order. As ugly as things seem to be becoming, we have been here before. That is perhaps why the first joke, however grim, gave me a chuckle. There was a time, not so long ago, when terrorist violence in Northern Ireland was a seemingly everyday occurrence (much as mass shootings have become here). And while there is still much tension there even today, they have largely moved beyond the ugliness of random violence. The cycle of history has moved. That’s the way of things. Today’s crisis is tomorrow’s memory. Tomorrow’s crisis…well, we’ll deal with it when it gets here.

But perspective isn’t just this sort of recognition that the world has always been screwed up, it’s also knowing that the cross we witness is a precursor to something grand and glorious. The story of Christ does not end on Good Friday any more than our fates are bound to this present reality. There is something more that awaits us. To quote the old saying, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s a coming!”

Which brings me to the second joke. Yeah, it’s funny that a guy who probably only shows up once a year on Easter gets to hear the same sort of sermon over and over again. But that’s what we should all be hearing not just on Easter, but every week. It’s all about the Resurrection. Christ is risen! Death does not have the last word. The Kingdom of God comes. Easter is real. It’s Friday, but Sunday’s a coming!

That is our hope and our destiny. The cycles of history will turn as they will. Today’s crisis will fade and tomorrow’s will emerge. But one day, perhaps soon, the promise of the cross and empty tomb will come to fulfillment. Christ’s words from the cross will echo across the ages. “It is finished!” And the world will be set right at last. Life will triumph over death. This is God’s promise to the whole of creation. It is not here yet. That is abundantly clear. But it is coming. It is on the horizon. And therein lies our hope.

Christ is risen. And one day, so too shall we.

Sermon for Palm Sunday

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran and at St. John Lutheran, New Freedom on March 20, 2016
Scripture readings: Acts 15:4-14, Mark 7:1-8

We’ve come to the end of our Lenten series on the book of Acts. As Jesus makes his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, we conclude our look at the church of the 1st century. We’ve seen how the first apostles did it, turned this movement led by a small handful into the juggernaut it’s become in the 21st century.

Having read all these stories over the past six weeks, we might be inclined to believe that the apostles always kept their focus on what matters most. They were given a job by Christ at his Ascension, to go and be witnesses to the kingdom of God, to make other disciples and to spread the good word of what God has done. And they did that, all without letting petty things like culture, race, and personal opinion get in the way of their mission.

Except that’s not quite how it happened.

The Church is made up of human beings and there’s no escaping that we humans make mistakes. We are creatures of both impulse and thoughtfulness, of both virtue and vice, of both ego and selflessness. We get it right sometimes and sometimes we get it wrong.

The early church was no different and so I think it helpful for us to not merely look at what they did right, but also some of the traps they fell into. We’ve already seen hints of some of this in our previous discussions. Peter went to Cornelius only after a vision from God convinced him that a Roman could be a true disciple, and even after that he had at least a few occasions of treating Gentile Christians as second-class. His failings however hint at the biggest controversy, the biggest distraction, of the early Church, which is going to be our focus today.

The Church began on Pentecost and while that famous story highlights how far and wide the first Christians came from around the world with its often-hard-to-pronounce list of nations (I've lost count of the number of times I've heard about the people of the nation of "Cappuccino.") But it also makes clear that those first recipients were all Diaspora Jews. Gentile Christians would only come later with the missionary work of Philip, Peter, and, most prolifically, Paul. But all of that raised a question in the minds of early Christians. Must one become Jewish before becoming Christian?

This debate is at the heart of the Acts text for today. Paul and Barnabas are standing up for the Gentiles, arguing that there is no need for such extra burdens, but it’s Peter who makes the most powerful argument for them. His words are some that we should heed today. “why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”

Saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus. Peter drives home the point that there is only one thing that truly matters. Jesus lived, died, and rose again for the sake of the whole world and all of its people. We cannot lose sight of that for the sake of distractions that we humans keep throwing up as of first importance.

That is, of course, what Jesus is complaining about in our Gospel lesson. The tendency of the Pharisees to embrace "human tradition" over what got wants. They love their distractions. As do we. All over the place and all the time. We love distraction. It is easily the greatest idolatry of the Church today.

We really like our institutional distractions. These are rapidly moving to the forefront as we face the present crisis in the American church. My denomination is struggling with money. My congregation doesn’t have enough members to sustain itself. My church might close. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s not “your” church. It’s not “mine.” It’s God’s church and there was never a guarantee that these things would last forever. The church in which Peter, Paul, James, and the others are having their debate in Acts; do you think it still exists? Is that building still standing? No to both questions. It’s long gone, but the True Church remains and always will.

The church is not a building. It is not an institution. It is the Bride of Christ, the collected whole of all believers together. That will last forever. Its local manifestations will change with the tides of history. We cannot let sentimentality blind us to this reality.

I’ve spoken at some length already in this preaching series about our moral distractions, so I’m not going to beat this dead horse much more. But our insistence that others match our often arbitrary and random moral standards is a huge barrier for many of those we might otherwise reach for Christ. We cannot let our self-righteousness blind us to the truth that God loves everyone for who they are and not who they are supposed to be.

Our third distraction is a theological one, or to put it more simply, it’s our addiction to being right. I’ve spoken about this somewhat too, believing that our manifestation of the church is just somehow better than any other (and certainly better than whatever those lousy heathens and atheists believe.) But none of us really know for certain the whole of this God stuff. Just as God comes to us where we are, we come to God as we are, each of us in a different place, with different experiences, and different understandings. How can we say our personal experience is more real or more legit than someone else’s?

And yet we do it. We do it because we want to feel better about what we believe. And yet rightness is not what saves us. Listen again to the words of Peter. It is grace that saves us. We cannot let our own fragile egos blind us to this truth.

Our human proclivities can lead us and the church into so many traps. And the course of history over the last 2000 years shows us how often we failed to avoid them. Thousands, if not millions, have died for these failures and so many more are alienated from us, making our mission all the harder. But therein lies the rub. It’s why we like our distractions. They’re easy. To stand in judgment or arrogance or to cling to nostalgia and memory is easy. To go forth in honesty and humility to change the world one person at a time, to give of ourselves, to sacrifice our safety and resources to serve our God and his people, that’s hard.

Christianity is not for the weak or the timid. We are here to change the world and that is no small task. But I’ve said it before and it is no exaggeration, the world needs us. We look around and we see a broken reality. People hurting, dying, starving, betrayed, exploited. Who will go to them and who go for them? God calls each of us to do as his son did, to give all for the sake of those he loves. As God’s son did for us, we are to do for others. And let not your fears, your ego, or anything else distract you from that mission. Amen.

Devotional for Fifth Lent

Scripture text: John 12:1-11

This week, we have the evangelist John's take on a familiar story; the anointing of Jesus by Mary. The synoptic Gospels frame this story differently, showing in their version the woman as a stranger and one of ill repute at that. But John tells the story differently, with his anointer being Mary, the sister of Lazarus whom Jesus has just recently raised from the dead.

In fact, the only thing the two versions of the story have in common is that a woman washes Jesus' feet. That makes it difficult to reconcile the two versions as being two interpretations of a single event, as folks are wont to do with stories like this. The synoptic story is about hospitality and forgiveness, contrasting the woman's lavish behavior to Simon's stinginess as well as the woman's gratitude for grace to Simon's self-righteousness. John's story is about so much more.

John implies at the start that the anointing is an act of gratitude; Jesus has resurrected Mary's brother, Lazarus, and now she responds with this over-the-top anointing. Judas objects, doing his best impression of a modern day "concern troll." Jesus refutes his point in one of the most misunderstood retorts about the poor in the Scriptures. The story then concludes with the ominous warning that Lazarus is in the cross-hairs of the religious officials along with Jesus.

There's too much to unpack here in one short devotional. So I want to focus on two contrasting elements of the story, Mary and Judas.

Judas' words are largely ignored because of what we know of who he is. He's a thief and a betrayer, so the logic of his statements here is dismissed out of hand. Yet what he says is imminently practical, even if his motives are flawed. This act of anointing is wasteful. It is over the top. It is nonsensical. He may be a "concern troll," as I say above, but his concern is a valid one.

In the church today, whether we realize it or not, we often play the part of Judas here. Trying to be pragmatic, reasonable, and logical, we disdain and avoid the sort of extravagance or risk-taking that Mary embraces. But much like Judas, our concern masks an uglier motive; in our case, it's fear. Fear that we will fail. Fear that we will run out. Fear of what others may think or say.

But neither Mary nor Jesus cares for these things. All that matters is this lavish outpouring of affection, love, and thanksgiving. Jesus is the one who brings life from death. He's done it with Lazarus. He will do it again with all of us via the empty tomb of Easter.

What Mary has done here is a model for us to follow. Jesus himself echoes this event when he kneels down before the disciples on Maundy Thursday to wash their feet, another act of inappropriate extravagance, there highlighted as a model of service to the people God loves.

In many ways, what Jesus says about the poor here reveals an opportunity. If it is life-from-death that Jesus brings and if we are to reveal that truth by what we do and who we are, then the ever-present poor provide us infinite chances to show the world who Christ is. And we do that not with stinginess or reasonableness, but with over-the-top extravagance. These are people that God loves, people for whom Christ died and rose again, people for whom grace upon grace has been given. How can we not shower them (and all others Christ loves) with the same extravagant love that Mary shows Jesus? It's our calling. It's who we are. It's who Jesus wants us to be. Go and do likewise.

Sermon for Fifth Lent

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran and St. John Lutheran on March 14, 2016
Scripture texts: Acts 17:22-34, Matthew 15:11-20

I’ve said before there seems to be a cycle to Church history. Every 500 years or so, the Church undergoes a transformative moment. A large part of the reason I’m doing this preaching series is because I believe that we are in just such a moment now. The world’s largest Christian nation is undergoing massive change and transition. The American church isn’t quite certain what to do with itself.

But this isn’t the first time the Church has gone through this sort of transition and transformation. That’s the benefit of studying history. It’s the benefit of looking at the book of Acts and the stories of the church in circumstances very much like today. But there are also lessons to be learned from the first of these great transformative moments; from the era of Augustine and Patricius in the 5th century.

Patricius, or Patrick as he’s more widely known, has a holiday that we will celebrate in just a few short days. We know his name. We know he has something to do with Irish history. But for most of us, that’s the extent of our knowledge. The rest of it is lost in shamrocks, leprechauns, and green beer.

From the National Catholic Reporter

But Patrick stands out as a great paragon of our faith. In a time when evangelism was often accompanied with violence, either because the Church used the power of the Roman Empire to enforce its will or because the intended recipients of the faith had a fondness for murdering missionaries, Patrick managed a feat unheard of in those times: the bloodless conversion of an entire nation. Those people were the Irish and that made it even more amazing. The Irish of that era were made up of vicious warmongers and slavers. A modern equivalent would be for one Christian missionary to go to ISIS and then convert the whole lot of them without a single drop of blood being spilled.

How’d he pull it off?

He took a lesson from St. Paul, most likely the very text we have as our Acts lesson today. Paul has come to Athens, then as now the capital of the Greek world. As was his wont, he seeks out a place of prayer in the city, which is the Aeropagus.

Now the Greeks of this era had a very pragmatic approach to religion. They are a polytheistic people, believing in many gods. Those of us who have studied mythology (or watched Disney’s Hercules) know their names: Zeus, Athena, Ares, and the like.

But this is also several hundred years after Alexander the Great had nearly conquered the world in the name of Greece, so they’ve now become a very cosmopolitan culture. They’ve encountered many other peoples with many other religious understandings. As such, they have begun to incorporate or at least acknowledge the gods of other peoples. In the Aeropagus were not merely the shrines dedicated to their own gods, but also to the gods of Egypt and Persia and other lands the Greeks had encountered. And, to make sure they didn’t miss any, they put up an altar to “the unknown god.”
Paul sees his chance and begins to talk to the crowd about the god they claim is unknown, but is known to him. He speaks to them of Jesus Christ.

What is remarkable about this encounter to me is how respectful of the Greeks Paul proves to be. He introduces them to Jesus on their terms. And that, I believe, is the lesson Patrick takes with him to Ireland 400 years later. When he introduces the Irish to Jesus, he does so on their terms.
It works and it has created for us one of the most wondrous expressions of our faith that we have. Orthodox, devout, and yet beautifully unique, Irish Christianity still inspires people today with their symbols and stories. The Celtic cross, the legend of the shamrock as a symbol of the Trinity, the Breastplate prayer, and Irish hymnody like “Be Thou My Vision” continue to inspire and encourage people’s faith today.

But none of that would have happened if Patrick had made the mistake of which we Christians are so often guilty. When we refuse to accept that Christianity and belief in Christ can appear in very different ways than our own and be just as right, proper, and orthodox.

You see, I spoke last week about how different has become dangerous for many of us. And that’s not all that new to the human experience. For far too often, we have seen being Christian as “being like us.” Again, as I said before, diversity is not our strength and large part of the reason for that is that we demand conformity in nearly everything. Not simply belief.

We’ve come up with all sorts of excuses and rationales in our minds for why those seeking God need to abandon nearly their entire identity in order to meet him. Gays must become straight. People who read Harry Potter must burn their books. People who love rock-n-roll must give it up. Foreigners must speak English. Give up all that you are that is of the devil. These might seem extreme examples, but I’ve seen them all in the church and they are more common than we’d like to admit.

Paul makes no such demands of the Greeks, nor Patrick of the Irish. Perhaps because they both understood Jesus’ lesson in our Gospel that what matters is not what goes into a person, but what comes forth from the heart.

I remember when I was a teenager being shocked one Sunday that one of our Vietnamese refugees that I spoke of a few weeks ago came to worship in a Megadeth T-shirt. I was beside myself with indignity. Doesn’t he know how inappropriate that is, to walk into the house of God with this grotesque character leering off of his chest? I would certainly never wear a t-shirt to worship and even if I had, it would have been of a nice wholesome Christian group like Petra.

Such a pleasant image.

I didn’t get it. This man had already given up so much and here I was, immature in my own faith, demanding that he surrender more to make me feel better about myself. And yet, nothing that he was wearing or listening to had changed the fact that he was there, in worship, singing praise to God.
Of all people, I should have known better, having listened to people tell me my hobbies were of the devil for so long. What went in did not matter. What came out was praise to God and that was all that mattered.

And all this was before I knew that most of the members of Megadeth are devout Christians themselves. One is (presumably) an ordained LCMS pastor. Wrap your brain around that for a minute. The members of one of the most successful heavy metal bands in the world are Christian. Talk about how different we can be one another.

People are who they are and God comes to each one of us where we are. Respecting that truth goes a long way to winning people for God. Yes, God loves you as you are and not as you should be (as Brennan Manning so eloquently puts it) Perhaps more accurate for our purposes today is to say that God loves you as you are and not as I think you should be.

Paul won over the Greeks by respecting who they were. Patrick won the Irish by respecting who they were. Neither man worried about what they thought of these “others,” but cared only for God thought of them. And what did God think? Well, he sent Jesus to die and rise again for them. It was enough for them. Perhaps it should be enough for us. Amen.

Sermon for Fourth Lent (Lataere Sunday)

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran and St. John Lutheran, New Freedom on March 7, 2016
Scripture texts: Acts 10:23-36, 44-48, Matthew 9:9-13

I’ve mentioned a few times in my sermons that among my various geek and nerd activities are attending conventions. Most folks I suspect are not all that familiar with this not-so-little corner of fandom, where thousands of people will gather at a convention center for a weekend. Star Trek kinda started it all back in the 70s with their fan conventions, but since then there are fan conventions for comic books, Star Wars, Doctor Who, My Little Pony, and lord knows what else.

Image from the Columbus Dispatch

About 8 or 9 years ago, before we were married, Sarah and I decided to take a vacation together to Origins, which is one of the larger tabletop gaming conventions. It’s held in Columbus, OH each year around July 4 weekend. Emily tagged along and we had a really good time together, playing games, seeing the people in costumes, buying some new games in the dealer's room, and so forth. There’s no lack of things to do at one of these events. And then on Sunday morning, we went to church together, not at a local congregation, but at the chapel service held at the convention itself.

Wait, what? There was Sunday morning worship scheduled as a part of a giant gaming convention? As a matter of fact, yes. And there were probably about 50 to 60 people there, not all that different from a typical Sunday morning at most congregations around the country. And that’s what it felt like too. Just another Sunday morning, worshiping our Lord, albeit in the most unlikely of settings.

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about geekdom is how diverse it is. People of all stripes become fans: men, women, young, old, black, white, gay, straight, Christian, and all other religions as well. Despite the stereotypes, it’s often really hard to pin down precisely what a “typical” geek is.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the church. If you ask any one of us what a “typical Christian” is like, and odds are good you’ll end up describing someone almost exactly like you. Diversity has not been a strong suit in the church. You have white churches and black churches. Straight churches and gay churches. Often times, churches for older people and churches for younger people. And rarely do they intersect or even interact with one another.

Sociologists have noted that human beings often unconsciously gather in homogeneous groups. In other words, like attracts like. But I fear we’ve taken that a bit too far. There’s a reason people say that Sunday morning is the most segregated time in American society. It does not reflect the wider world. And there are a lot of dangers in that.

Last Sunday, in my children’s sermon, I told the old story about the pastor who disguises himself as a homeless person on the front step of his church. Ask yourself why no one in that church invited him inside? You might come up with a lot of different answers, but they pretty much all boil down to one thing. He was different. And especially in recent years, in our country, different has become dangerous.

But is it really?

Jesus doesn’t seem to think so. In fact, you can pretty quickly lose count of the times in the Gospel stories when Jesus encounters people who are not mainstream Jewish folk and yet he still shows them some manner of grace and compassion. Countless lepers and those dealing with disabilities, who were considered taboo by the good law-abiding Pharisees and other community leaders. Roman centurions, Gentiles and Samaritans, and, of course, Matthew the tax collector in our Gospel lesson today; to Jesus, they’re all just people in need of his message, in need of his salvation.

Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten the memo.

We’re in good company there, however. For all of the wonderful things Peter accomplishes in the first years of the church, this proves to be one of his blind spots. The book of Acts dedicates an entire chapter (chapter 10) to Peter’s somewhat forceful education in this regard. And again, it involves a Roman, here a centurion named Cornelius. Here is one hungry to learn of Jesus and yet Peter would likely have rejected this dirty Roman out of hand had God not sent a powerful vision to Peter in a dream.

Peter, to his credit, learns his lesson (at least for a time. Paul calls him out later when he reverts to his old ways. Can’t say Peter isn’t human.) But about us? Are we going to limit our outreach and evangelism to those simply like us in race, economic status, political opinion, and the like? Or is the Church going to see the world as it is, a great mix of different individuals all hungry for what we have to offer?

The truth is, while we may not realize it, we need one another. We need people who are different. A big part of the reason different has become dangerous in these times is that we are having a very hard time seeing the humanity of those others. We base our opinions on biased news reports, prejudices, and often extremely limited contact. We blame whole groups for the actions of a few individuals. And yet, when they try to tell us the truth, try to show us their humanity, we do not listen. We lecture, we frown, we look down on them, and tell them that their life experiences aren’t real because we know better.

It’s astounding how often this happens, even among the most well-intentioned. On Facebook, there is an ELCA clergy support group where Pastors like myself can go and ask questions, request prayer, and mingle among the like minded in cyberspace. But there’s a problem, the same problem I’ve been talking about for most of this sermon: the group is almost entirely white. And when a person of color chimes in about their life experience, about the racism they receive in both society and in the church, there’s invariably retaliation by the majority telling said person they don’t know what they’re talking about. That their experiences aren’t real, that they’re being too sensitive. Yeah, like we white folk know precisely what it means to be black or Latino or whatever.

You’d think we pastors would know better, but nope. Even there, we refuse to listen. Christ shakes his head and weeps. We are all his children and we refuse to see it.

Not all black people are criminals. Not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all immigrants are rapists. Not all young people are lazy and privileged. And if some of them were here now, in our midst, telling their stories, we might realize that. They’d stand up and tell us what it means to be them. How life really is for them, not as we presume it to be. Were we to listen, were we to open our ears, our minds, and our hearts to them, we might start to truly see them as human. Made in the image of God and beloved of him. We might finally take off our blinders and see the world and its people as Jesus does.

This is what Christ has called us to do. This is who we are supposed to be as the Church. The ball is in our court. What are we going to do with it? Amen.

Weekly Devotional for Fourth Lent

Scripture text: Luke 15:11-32

There is that old story about a pastor who preaches the same sermon several weeks in a row. When he’s confronted about his apparent lack of creativity by his congregation, he replies “Given your behavior, it seems obvious that you haven’t gotten the message yet.”

A mite judgmental there, but that old story does highlight a simple truth about rhetoric. Repetition drives home a point. Keep repeating and people will start to listen.

So, I once again find myself ranting against the word “deserve,” since I think the parable of the Prodigal Son is precisely the text Jesus uses to damn that moralistic approach to life. And given that I’m preaching this text on Good Friday, you’ll likely hear some of these points again when I post that sermon in the weeks to come.

We all know the story. Younger son comes up to dad. “Drop dead, Dad, and give me what I deserve as your heir.” Dad, despite his better judgment, does just that. Son goes off to a faraway land and “all manner of pleasures and diversions were indulged.” Things go south pretty quickly after that and the son soon finds himself starving while tending to the pigs on some farm, a long way from the party scene he’d once enjoyed.

Here’s the thing. If this was a story about what people deserve, this is where the story would end. What goes around has come around. The son’s mistreatment of his father has come back to bite him and he’s received justice for his cruelty to his family. Jesus would stop talking and the moral lesson would be painfully clear. Your sin will be your undoing, so don’t sin. Don’t be like this son.

But that’s not the story Jesus tells. It keeps going. The son conjures up a plan to return to his father and beg to be a slave in the household where he grew up. To his credit, the son recognizes the enormity of his error and knows he deserves nothing, but yet hopes for a small pittance of grace from dear old Dad.

But a small pittance is not what he receives. When his father spots him, Dad runs out and scoops him up in a massive bear hug and showers him with tears and kisses. You can almost hear Dad blubbering about how overjoyed he is that his son has come home. Immediately, a great celebration is thrown together. The son is restored to his usual place in the household. All is forgiven.

The son receives far more than he could ever hope or dream. He deserves nothing, yet receives everything.

And that is grace. That is God’s approach to humanity. That’s how he sees us. Yes, we are fallen. Yes, we are sinful. Yes, we are broken. All those things are true and make us deserving of nothing. And yet, we receive everything. God’s love trumps all else; what we’ve done and what we are do not matter. Just all that the son has done wrong in the story does not matter to the father who loves him.

And yet, all too often we are the older brother in the story, who rejects his younger sibling out of hand. To him, all that his kid brother has done DOES matter. He doesn't deserve forgiveness. And he's right, the younger brother does not. But deserve has nothing to do with it. Grace does. His father pleads with him to see things has he does. Don’t you get it? Nothing else matters except our love for one another. NOTHING matters except love and the grace and forgiveness that follow from that love.

How often does God plead with us to see our brothers and sisters the way he sees them? How often does he call us to love our neighbor, to forgive our enemies, and to discard this blasphemy of deserving? Are we listening?

Grace is all that matters. Period.

Devotional for Third Lent

Scripture reading: Luke 13:1-9

One of the persistent failures of the human condition is our presumption that we are the center of the universe. Believing that "things have never been as bad as this" or that "those sins that I abhor in others are the worst of all sins" reveal a certain arrogance in us. We are not seeing things rightly or truthfully when we think this way.

In many ways, this is the mindset that Jesus is calling out in the Gospel text from this past Sunday. He's given two tragic examples of the current events of his day, a tower collapse and an attack by Herod's thugs on some Galilean worshipers in the temple. The human impulse is to claim that victims of these tragedies are somehow deserving of their fate. (If you've been keeping up with my Sunday sermon series this Lent, you know how much I just "love" that word.)

Jesus not only refutes this but he does so in a way that should make us all a bit uncomfortable. No, their sins weren't any worse than yours, so if they deserved to die for what they've done, SO DO YOU.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that I'm talking about this Luke text the day after I received Michael Card's latest email newsletter. In it, he included a reflection that tells a similar truth, speaking about these current times.

There are two major misunderstandings, it seems to me, that might tempt us to lose hope right now. The first is the failure to realize that world has already been lost. It is no less "lost" at the moment than it has ever been, and no less crazy. Even a casual flipping thru any history book will confirm this.

Again, the presumption of our own self-importance blinds us to this truth. We are lost and we are rightly deserving of damnation. But Michael doesn't end there.

The second misunderstand that leads us to lose hope is that there is no one who has the power to make things right. To a lost world Jesus says "I am the way." To a world that has departed from the truth, Jesus says, "I am the Truth." And to a world that is on a collision course with death, Jesus says, "I am the Life."

Immediately after telling the crowds the uncomfortable truth about our sin, Jesus tells a wonderful parable about a patient gardener. "Give it another chance. Give it another year. Give it time." Give it grace.

Grace is the infinite number of second chances that God gives to us out of his love for us. And that is our hope. All may seem lost, but God is in control here. Not us. And we are not lost because it is he who finds us. We are not lost because he loves us. We are not lost because our patient gardener is giving us another chance and will always give us another chance. That's grace, and in grace we find hope, for ourselves and for our lost world.