Sermon #1
Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on October 30, 2016
Normally, on this Sunday, you get me all dressed up in some costume, pretending to be some major figure from Reformation times, like Luther or Pope Leo (I haven’t tried Katie yet. Anyone know a good cross-dresser that can make me look good in that role?) I’m not doing that this time, obviously.
You see, I’m in the process of raising a 13 year old daughter, who has reached the point in her academic life where she is asking the question “Why do we have to learn all this stuff? What good is it going to do me?” In truth, that’s a good question. Why is the Reformation important? What do the events of 499 years ago matter to folks living in 2016 America?
So, that’s my focus today. To answer that very question.
I stumbled upon an article on the internet about two or three weeks ago titled “Why Conservative Evangelical Christianity Is The Worst Evil Ever Manifested Upon The Earth.” The title is a bit extreme, a lot of hyperbole there, but it got my attention. Turns out, I simply could have read that article as my sermon today, because it articulated precisely why the Reformation matters here and now.
You see, many of us have come to believe, thanks to certain already-named segments of the Church, that God’s love is conditional and that everything is dependent upon what you DO. Christ died on a cross and rose again, BUT have you accepted him in your heart? God wants to bless you, BUT have you prayed enough? God loves you, BUT do you deserve it? Have you been good enough? Jesus saves, BUT you’ve got to do your part.
All too often, we make “God’s love, power, blessings, and desires...only as effectual as our human capacity to respond correctly.” We make God powerless to anything without our action or consent, leaving us in the driver’s seat and nothing could be more terrifying.
I spoke last week about how not-perfect we all are. None of us measures up even to our own standards of ethical or moral behavior all the time, let alone the standard set by God. We fail. We fall short. It’s what we do. We’re human. We make mistakes. We have vices. We stumble and fall.
But the false teachings of parts of the Church hold all that against us. If you fail, you die. If you screw up, damnation calls. There will be consequences. Penalties assessed. And as a result, we often twist our lives into desperate effort to avoid all sin or to make amends for sins already committed, hoping that (again) by our efforts, we might convince God to let us in on all that love, blessing, and salvation. We make it all about us.
Part of the reason I think the title of the article is a bit extreme is because this is not a new problem. It’s been going on for thousands of years and the errors of modern churches are simply the current manifestation of ancient heresies.
Fifteen hundred years ago, when the Church was still basically a toddler, a man named Pelagius began teaching that one had to earn salvation by doing good works. He was condemned as a heretic and his teaching regarded as erroneous and dangerous. One of the people key in that condemnation was a Bishop named Augustine.
Fast-forward a thousand years and you have a member of the monastic order dedicated to Augustine who discovers that the Church has fallen into the Pelagian trap again. Now you have to kiss relics, buy indulgences, pay the Hail Mary 500 times a day, obey the Pope, and do all this other stuff in order for God to love you. Same crap, different day. So this plucky little German monk decided to do something about it. His name was Martin Luther and the Reformation began.
Fast forward again five hundred years and here we are again. We’re still doing it. Still falling into the same trap of believing God’s love is conditional upon our response and action. No no no no!!!! If you believe that, stop it! Stop putting yourself through a hell of your own making. Stop believing that God feels and thinks about you the way you do.
God loves you. Period. End of story. Done. And because he loves you, he send Jesus to live, die on a cross, and rise again on the third day FOR YOU. Because Jesus has done this, you are saved. Period. End of story. Done deal. And God’s promise to save you is unbreakable. There is nothing you can do or fail to do that will change it. YOU ARE HIS and always will be.
That is what the Reformation was about. The rediscovery of that simple truth. God’s love is NOT conditional. It doesn’t matter how many Sinner’s prayers you pray, or don’t. It doesn’t matter how many altar calls you accept or don’t. It doesn’t matter what your personal theology is, if you even have one. It doesn’t matter how many good works you do. It doesn’t matter who you vote for in the upcoming election. It doesn’t matter your understanding or lack thereof of the Bible. None of what you do or think or say matters in regards to God’s love and offer of salvation. He loves you and he always will. He’s saved you and that will not be taken from you.
Charlatans in the church HATE this truth, because it means they can’t control you. They can’t make do what they want with the threat of hellfire and brimstone. God ain’t gonna cooperate with their agendas, so they lie. My friends, we’ve been lied to for a very long time. We’ve been told God is capricious, not steadfast. God is hateful, not loving. God is punitive, not embracing. And soul after soul throughout the years has been brutalized by these lies, perhaps yours.
Don’t believe it anymore. Believe instead the truth. God loves you and always will. He loves you when you’re bad and good. He loves you when you obey and when you disobey. He loves you when you’re perfect (those rare moments) and when you sin. He loves you so much that he’d rather die than be without you. That’s what the cross means. It’s a sign of how much God truly loves you, how far he’d go to just be with you.
That’s what Luther found again when he opened up the Scriptures and discovered God was not who he’d been taught. He discovered he’d been lied to. I ask you to rediscover what he did: the truth of a loving God who will not ever stop loving you no matter what. God that died for you and rose again to give you eternity. You’re his and always will be. Period. End of story. Amen.
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Sermon #2
Preached at the South York Conference Meeting on November 1, 2016
Normally, on Reformation Sunday, you’ll get me all dressed up in some costume, pretending to be some major figure from Reformation times, like Luther or Pope Leo, much to the amusement and delight of the folks here at Canadochly. I haven’t tried Katie yet, I’ll admit, and my friend Chao (who’s a champion cross-dresser) might be able to help me with that.
I did something different this year however. You see, I’m in the process of raising a 13 year old daughter, who has reached the point in her academic life where she is asking the question “Why do we have to learn all this stuff? What good is it going to do me?” In truth, that’s a good question. Why is the Reformation important? What do the events of 499 years ago matter to folks living in 2016 America?
So, that was my focus on Sunday. To answer that very question. And it seems fitting to revisit it yet again today for this august crowd.
I stumbled upon an article on the internet about two or three weeks ago titled “Why Conservative Evangelical Christianity Is The Worst Evil Ever Manifested Upon The Earth.” I don’t like that title, but it got my attention. Turns out, I simply could have read that article as my sermon, because it articulated precisely why the Reformation matters here and now.
You see, many have come to believe, thanks to certain already-named segments of the Church, that God’s love is conditional and that everything is dependent upon what you DO. There’s always a “but.” Christ died on a cross and rose again, BUT have you accepted him in your heart? God wants to bless you, BUT have you prayed enough? God loves you, BUT do you deserve it? Have you been good enough? Jesus saves, BUT you’ve got to do your part.
All too often, we make “God’s love, power, blessings, and desires...only as effectual as our human capacity to respond correctly.” We make God powerless to anything without our action or consent, leaving us in the driver’s seat and nothing could be more terrifying.
In my sermon on the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, I spoke about how none of us measures up even to our own standards of ethical or moral behavior, let alone the standard set by God. We fail. We fall short. It’s what we do. We’re human. We make mistakes. We have vices. We stumble and fall.
But the false teachings of parts of the Church hold all that against us. If you fail, you die. If you screw up, damnation calls. There will be consequences. Penalties assessed. And as a result, we often twist our lives into desperate effort to avoid all sin or to make amends for sins already committed, hoping that (again) by our efforts, we might convince God to let us in on all that love, blessing, and salvation. We make it all about us. The very core definition of sin to begin with. We make salvation sinful.
I don’t like the title of the article from which I got many of these thoughts. Not only is it ignorant of human history and vast numbers of atrocities we’ve committed against one another over the generations, but it’s also ignorant of Church history. This is, as we clergy know, not a new problem. It spans from Pelagius and his heresies in the 5th century to the relics, indulgences, and pieties of the Roman church in Luther’s day and on to today. Now, it’s the Sinner’s Prayer, altar calls, the Christian Entertainment complex, the 700 Club, the Prosperity Gospel, hating on abortion and gay marriage, and treating a certain political entity of our country as if “GOP” really does stand for “God’s own party.” Same crap, different day.
So what are we, as the clergy of Christ’s Holy Church, going to do about it?
About ten years ago, I remember when Jim Martin, the Methodist pastor who preached my installation here at Canadochly, was just starting in Davis, WV. Like me, serving on a mountaintop in WV where the only true church, regardless of what denominational name was on the sign outside, was a Pelagian one. He was very frustrated with this, and I remember consoling him over this by telling him, “Just preach the Gospel. Many of them have never heard it before.”
That counsel echoes across the years to today and to here. Words I need to take to heart myself, a reminder perhaps that we all need from time to time. Preach the Gospel.
Preach that...
- God loves us. Period. End of story. Done.
- Because he loves us, he send Jesus to live, die on a cross, and rise again on the third day FOR US. FOR YOU. Because Jesus has done this, we are saved. Period. End of story. Done deal.
- And God’s promise to save us is unbreakable. There is nothing we can do or fail to do that will change it. WE ARE HIS and always will be.
You see, that is what the Reformation was about. The rediscovery of that simple truth. God’s love is NOT conditional. What we do or don’t do doesn’t matter in the end. It’s what God did that counts.
The very first thing any of us learns walking into one of these buildings as a small child is that God loves us. Jesus loves me, this I know...Even now, how ever many decades later, we can still sing that children’s song. But as we grow older, we think it’s TOO simple, and we (clergy and laity alike) have to gum up the works.
And we gum it up with lies about how our response or action or behavior or our piety matters. But God does love us and he always will. He’s saved us and that will not be taken from us. Sin is forgiven. Our failures forgotten. All that matters is God’s love and the demonstration thereof on the cross.
It’s a sign of how much God truly loves you, how far he’d go to just be with you. As the late Brennan Manning was fond of saying in his writings and preaching, God would rather die than be without us.
That’s what Luther found again when he opened up the Scriptures and discovered God was not who he’d been taught. He discovered he’d been lied to. As inheritors of Luther’s discovery and clergy of God’s church, it falls to us to remind everyone of this. In every generation, we face a tidal wave of lies about God and his love. The only answer is the truth. One that will set us and everyone free. Amen.
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