Sermon for Second Lent

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on March 1, 2015
Sermon text: Mark 8:27-38

A week or so ago, there was an article published in the magazine Atlantic about ISIS. It was arguing a number of points, not the least of which is how we Western-thinking Americans truly do not understand what makes these people tick. I think there’s a lot in the article that’s up for debate, but our lack of understanding of what motivates these people is rather disconcerting. There is a certain illogic to them. The author of the article summed up this illogic by comparing them to the Nazis of 1930s Germany and quoting from George Orwell.

“Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”

Utterly alien to us, isn’t it? The idea that people would seek out torment and suffering for its own sake. And yet, as the Nazis and ISIS and countless other groups have proven, there is an appeal here. We continue to hear stories of people from all over the world who are seeking out these ISIS barbarians to join up. The notorious killer in their beheading videos is a British national. Three men in Brooklyn, NY were arrested for trying to sign up and three young women from London hit the news this week after disappearing while trying to smuggle themselves into ISIS territory.

This make no sense to us. Why would people like us want this?

We don’t understand it because our culture has evolved (not always in a good way) to being all about our own self-fulfillment. Orwell was right. The economic systems of the Western world, capitalism and socialism both, offer different variations on a life of ease and pleasure. It’s all about us. They promise to look out for #1 and #1 is, of course, ourselves.

But there is another worldview and it is the worldview that says there are things in life that are bigger and more important than ourselves. Things worth fighting for. Things worth dying for. And while ISIS may have perverted this hunger to serve a greater cause into something monstrous, it is the heart of their appeal. Serve us and your life will have meaning and true value.

They are not alone in making this appeal. It is also at the heart of what Jesus offers to his disciples, to us, in our Gospel lesson.

“If any wish to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.” You do realize what he’s asking here right? Remember what the cross is to people of his day. It’s a device of execution, an instrument designed to inflict upon those nailed to it a most painful and horrible death. “If you follow me,” he essentially says, “I will promise you pain, suffering, and death.”

Scary to see the parallels, isn’t it? He’s calling us to give up our very lives for something greater than ourselves. He’s calling us to die for the sake of his kingdom. Not exactly something that would make most folks jump up and down to sign on to this Christianity thing.

So we’ve done our best to try to mute Jesus’ call here. We’ve tried to “Westernize” his appeal, to make our faith and our religion about something far more important than God, love, and compassion for others. We’ve made it about us.

First off, we’ve made the cross a whole lot less scary. In some ways, that happened naturally as history passed from one generation to the next. It stopped being used as an instrument of torture and execution. We no longer see the brutality of it except when someone decides to recreate it on film. Most crosses we see today are decoration, a piece of jewelry. Ours here behind me is nice and pretty, not scary at all.

Secondly, we’ve had to play up the worldly benefits of a life of faith and downplay all that pain and self-sacrifice. During the middle ages, the monastery and the convent became marketing tools. Sign up with the church and escape the horrors of the world. Get away from tyrannical nobles, plagues, constant war, and hide away on a mountaintop.

Of course, as history again evolved, that appeal had to change too. Nowadays, it’s all be a Christian, and you’ll gain riches, and popularity, and a beautiful spouse, and a great family, and you’ll have no problems in life. God will just love you so much because your devotion and loyalty that he’s just waiting to shower you with everything you want.

We make it all about us.

And yet, deep down, we soon come to realize just how empty that is. Life is more than escapism. Life is more than wealth. Life is more than success. Life is more than putting on appearances for the sake of others. All these things are fine and good for their own sake, but they don’t give life meaning. They don’t give life purpose. When we make of ourselves an idol, we quickly find that our god is much too small.

Deep down inside of us, I believe there is a hunger to be a part of something greater, something with more meaning and value than ourselves. Charlatans of all sorts have tapped into that desire. It’s the reason you have murderous cults like ISIS and diabolically evil political movements like the Nazis. For better or worse, they offer people meaning to their lives and people in droves respond to that.

Jesus does the same, but in a far better way. He says to us to “take up our cross, and follow him.” He asks us to leave behind our distractions and our isolation. To leave behind our comforts and delights. Leave them and go forth into the world, to do as he did, to confront the ugliness, the pain, and the suffering of the world. Not for our sake, but for the sake of others.

He is asking us to be agents of healing, as he was. He is asking us to be agents of justice, as he was. He is asking us to be speakers of the truth, as he was. And when you do these things, when you spend time with someone dying of AIDS, when you stand against the evils of bigotry, when you speak the truth when it is not popular or fashionable, you will feel the weight of the beam. You will feel the nails pierce you wrists and you will know the cross.

Why would we do this? Why would we put ourselves through such painful experiences, through such hardship? You already know the answer, because each one of us has something in our lives that we have already regarded as greater than ourselves. Something we already see as worth dying for: A child, a spouse, a country, a cause. Why is that important to us? Love.

Love. We loved those people. We love those things. Had we the power, we would spare those we love from all their troubles. We don’t often have that power, but we do what we can. We do all we can to make them better.

This is what it means to love. And because we love so deeply and so dearly, we endure every heartache, every tear. We would go into the very depths of hell for them, that’s how great our love is.

And that is what Jesus is asking of us, not merely for that one person or thing, but for everyone in the world. The way of the cross of which he speaks is nothing more than the way of love. He asks us to love his people as he does. He asks us to stand up for them. He asks us to embrace them. He asks us to be with them in their hours of need. No matter how painful. No matter how hard. He asks us to love.

And what Jesus asks is no more than what he himself has done. He heals the sick. He eats with the outcast. He challenges the powerful and unjust. And at the last, he took upon his shoulders the beam of the cross. He took into his wrists and feet the nails. He took on the anguish and the mockery. He embraced his own death, for by doing so, he saved the world and everyone in it. And all this he did out of love for us.

That, my friends, is the way of the cross. Amen.

(Pastor's notes: I owe something of a debt for this sermon to one I preached way back in 2006. I also have some additional reading that helped inform my ideas in addition to the two articles linked in the above text. The first is The 12 worst ideas religion unleashed on the world, paying particular attention to the nonsense there about the evils of "Glorified suffering" and notice how our "new morality" of self-fulfillment is at work in the critique. The second is this more political article about American conservatism and the Tea Party. Note in particular the quote from the anti-vaxxer in the third paragraph and his lack of concern his actions have on others. Self-fulfillment at work again.)

Sermon for Contemporary Worship (First Lent)

Not preached due to weather (Was to be preached at St. John's on Feb 22, 2015)
Scripture text: Matthew 18:15-35

We enter into the season of Lent with an extended passage from the Gospel of Matthew on the value of reconciliation. That this is the theme of these texts is not always obvious to us at first, especially given that we begin this extended discourse with a Scripture passage that is often used by the Church as a mechanism for discipline and addressing misbehavior.

Jesus outlines a four stage process for dealing with a transgressor in the church. First, address the transgression with the one who committed it privately. Secondly, do so with appropriate witnesses. Third, do so before the whole community. Fourth, if none of these work, treat this one as a “Gentile and a tax collector.”

If we’ve reached step four, it’s easy to see this as failure. We have not fixed the problem. We have not reconciled this sinner, and now the only option is removal from the community. Banishment, exile, rejection. But that’s not actually what’s supposed to happen at this stage. To fully understand what Jesus is asking here, you have to step outside its boundaries somewhat and remember first off who it is that is reporting this teaching to us: Matthew. And what was he before he became a disciple and an evangelist? Oh, yeah, a tax collector. So he presumably has first hand knowledge of how Jesus treats tax collectors. And how does Jesus treat people like him? “Follow me.”

Reconciliation is the goal. If the first three steps fail, you start over at the beginning. You go back to the basics. What does it mean to be a disciple. What does it mean to be a Christian. All that. It’s less rejection than it is retooling. It’s starting over and trying again to bring this transgressor into the community.

Peter’s question and the parable that follows are logical progressions of this chain of through. Peter seems to understand what Jesus is saying here. To reconcile requires forgiveness, but how often? He offers up the comparatively generous number of “seven times,” thinking that’s surely hyperbole enough (The Jewish Talmud of his day suggests only 3 times by comparison.) Jesus goes even further with by saying “seventy-seven” times. Occasionally we’ll hear this translated “seventy times seven.” But the point Jesus is making is not the exact number, but the pure extravagance of forgiveness that is required for reconciliation.

And the parable drives home this point, leaving no doubt as to Jesus’ intention. Ten thousand talents is an outrageous sum, an amount no person could ever repay. (If you want to talk math, at the usual daily wage of ancient Israel, that sum would take 200,000 years to repay.) And yet, the king does the unthinkable; he shows mercy and forgives the debt. The servant however sadly refuses the same mercy over his colleague who owes a paltry (in comparison) 100 denari, for which he is then held to account for his cruelty.

Reconciliation requires extravagance. Time and again, Jesus teaches us this lesson. We hear it in other parables as well, perhaps most famously in the Prodigal Son. The younger son has done the unthinkable, demanded his inheritance while his father is still alive (essentially telling dad to “drop dead”) and then squandered it. When he returns in remorse, the father likewise does the unthinkable and forgives him. An interesting side bit of trivia. Some scholars have argued that this famous parable should be called the Prodigal Father, since the word “prodigal” (a word not common in modern English) means “extravagant.” Reconciliation requires extravagance.

Forgive, forgive, forgive. Reconcile, work it out. Try again and again. Never stop. Never give up. Never allow a lost one to remain lost. Treat the lost as Jesus treated Matthew and Zacchaeus and the woman of Syro-phoenicia and the Roman centurion and countless other “Gentiles and tax collectors.” Follow and forgive.

This is Jesus’ lesson to us in these stories. But it isn’t just a demand he makes of us. He is the merciful king in the parable. He himself goes out of his way to forgive extravagantly. He is the embodiment of the Biblical concept of hesed, a Hebrew word we often translate as “mercy” or “loving-kindness.” More than one Biblical scholar finds these translations inadequate, because the word really means something to the effect of “expecting nothing from someone and yet receiving from them everything.” We should expect nothing of God, sinners as we are, and yet he grants us everything.

Jesus is at the center of that. How far will God go to forgive us? How far will God go to be with us? How far will God go to reconcile with his people? How extravagant will he be? You have only to look to the cross to see the answer. That’s God’s extravagant reconciliation. He wants us so badly, he’ll die for us. He, like so many in these parables, does the unthinkable. God dies for his people. God dies for us.

Unthinkable extravagance. That is God’s way. Whatever it takes to bring us together. He and us. We and him. “No greater love,” Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospels, “has anyone than to lay down his life for his friends.” That’s what God does for us. He gives everything to be reconciled to us. This generosity, this mercy, this hesed is unthinkable, and yet it is true. God is the prodigal father, God is the merciful king, God is the unthinkably extravagant reconciler, and we are those who benefit from his grace. Amen.

Sermon for First Lent

Preached on February 22, 2015 at Canadochly Lutheran Church
Sermon text: Genesis 9:8-17

There are certain stories in Scripture that it seems everyone, regardless of how diligently or not they read the Bible, seem to have some passing knowledge of. We all know in this secular age that many people, inside the church and out, have little understanding of what the Bible actually says. But regardless, there are some tales that seem to be unavoidable. Even if your only encounter with Christianity or the Bible is to walk past the windows of a Lifeway bookstore, you still might have learned a tiny bit about some of these tales.

The story of Noah and the flood is one of these. Maybe because it seems so marketable to children. Hey, it’s got cute animals. The fact that the story is really about the genocide of nearly the entire human race seems to get overlooked to those who build Noah’s Ark playsets and pop-up books. Truth is, it’s really not a very nice story.

But with its popularity comes a certain scholarly scrutiny. Biblical scholars of all stripes have picked over this tale and are, not surprisingly, divided about what it’s all about. There are those, of course, who take this story literally. That at some point in our distant past history, God flooded the entire planet to destroy the wickedness of the human race, with one small exception. Others say this cannot be so, that it is scientifically impossible to flood the Earth. There is neither enough water nor enough time to accomplish such a feat as the story is presented to us. But these are likewise divided as to whether the story should then be read as entirely metaphorical or whether it is a theological treatise on some flood event that did, in fact, take place but is somewhat smaller in scale than what the Bible presents to us.

For my part, I lean towards the latter of these options. There is some geological evidence of multiple flood disasters in the ancient middle east, any one of which (or perhaps all of them fused together) formed the basis of a memory that lead ancient priests and mystics to wonder about God’s role in it all. (Not all that different from the musings we do in the face of natural disaster.) In the end, it is their wisdom that I believe is the most important piece of this story. They came to understand a vitally important piece about God and his way of interacting with the world. They came to realize that if God is love and that if God (because of love) wishes to rid the world of evil and suffering, it cannot happen through destruction.

That is why God makes the promise he does at the end of the flood story, which is what we have as our first lesson this morning. “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God will never again destroy the Earth to rid it of evil.

Ah, some might argue, it only says the world will not be destroyed by a flood, not that it will never be destroyed. But that’s the sort of hair-splitting argument that I’d expect of some ambulance-chaser in an American courtroom, not the sort of thing a God of compassion and mercy would do. Throughout the Scriptures, God makes even clearer his intention NOT to destroy evil, but instead to save it.

The first example is what happens a few chapters after the Noah story in Genesis. God makes another covenant, this time with Abraham, where he promises a coming blessing that will be for “all the families of the Earth.” Note the word “all.” It shows up a lot in these passages.

Later still, we have Jesus teaching Nicodemus in the 3rd chapter of John, a text we heard read and preached on this past Wednesday. In that, Jesus says openly that God loves all the world, that he sent his son to save it, NOT to condemn it.

And still further on in the Scriptures, we have the vision of John of Patmos in Revelation. John witnesses a great multitude of those saved by God, greater than anyone can count, from every tribe, race, and language. All of the world standing before God, lauding him for his salvation.

Time and again, we see the Scriptures map out God’s intention. Destruction does not work. God seems to conclude at the end of the flood story this simple truth. He cannot rid the world of evil without destroying everything. Yet God wants fellowship with humanity. He wants to be with us. That’s his greatest desire. He tries, the flood story tells us, to have it both ways: death to evil and salvation for the “good.” But Noah is only good in a relative sense; he may be better than the rest of the sorry lot of humanity, but he’s still a long way from perfect. And once the dry land is back and Noah and his family sets foot upon it, sin begins again almost immediately.

The flood did not accomplish what it was supposed to. It failed to rid the world of evil. So God had to figure out another way.

And his new way is redemption. Instead of destroying evil utterly, he will transform it into good. He will change the world. He will show mercy and compassion and patience and love. And it is with this in mind that he speaks his covenant to Abraham, that all families will be blessed by God through him. It is with this in mind that he becomes incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, the promised blessing made manifest. It is with this in mind that he goes to the cross and declares from it forgiveness as he breathes his last. Life instead of death. Mercy instead of punishment. Redemption instead of destruction.

This is what it’s all about. For many people, there is hunger for God to come down and smite all the unworthy sinners: the unbelievers, the poor, the rich, the lazy, the sexually different, the people of other nations or political beliefs. They want the fire-and-brimstone. They want the lake of fire for pretty much everyone else who isn’t like them. I get the feeling they’re going to be very disappointed when we’re all standing before God’s throne at the end of time and we’re all rubbing shoulders with gays, liberals, foreigners, and the soldiers of ISIS.

Now I’ll admit I don’t know if that’s precisely how it’s going to play out, but I do know that’s how God wants it to be. We’re all sinners in our own way. We all have our vices and mistakes, all have our ways of looking the other way in the face of evil. But despite that, God wants to save us all. God wants to redeem us all, regardless of what kind of sins we commit.

That’s why Jesus came, the blessing for all the people of the world, the one who came because God so loved the whole world, the one who came so God didn’t have to condemn the world. He’s came to save us all. He came to die for us all. He came to give us life, not death. He came to forgive, not to punish. He came to save the world, not to destroy it. Amen.

Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on February 15, 2015
Scripture text: Mark 9:2-10

When we talk about God’s laws as recorded in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, we see a curious mix of pragmatic rules for living and seemingly arbitrary rite and ritual that presumably helped to bring the ancient Hebrews closer in some way to their God. I would argue this perspective, which is somewhat commonplace among Christians, is a little misguided. There is actually a lot pragmatic about the rites and ritual laws too.

For instance, the ancient Hebrews and their modern descendants in the Jews are told to avoid eating certain foods. We call these rules the Kosher laws. It is, however, not coincidental that many of these foods (particularly in ancient times when sanitary practices were unknown) are notorious for carrying food-borne diseases. Those seemingly arbitrary rules were actually quite helpful.

The truth is, there is a pragmatism to all of God’s law, including those that are not obviously so. The commandment “Thou shalt not make a graven image” may not seem to be very practical or pragmatic. But there is a reason behind it. God is, of course, transcendent. In many ways, unknownable. No one truly knows what he looks like or even if he has an appearance as we understand it at all. But for us humans, we don’t deal well with that. We connect best to the tangible and the concrete. Things we can see and touch and understand with our own senses and minds. Hence, we are often forced by our own needs to break this commandment, to create images of God, shrines to the divine, and other tangible things that allow us to relate to that which is, in many ways, unrelateable.

The danger however and the practical reason behind the commandment is that we can forget that the image, the icon, the idol (as it were) represents but a mere fraction of the true deity behind it. God is always bigger than we imagine him to be.

And that brings us to the mountain of the Transfiguration. Peter and the other apostles are given a first-hand experience of the transcendent unknownable God. They hear his voice. They stand in his presence. And, as humans are wont to do when they have such experiences, they want to find a way to make sense of it. Thus Peter suggests that they memorialize this wondrous moment in time by the creation of a shrine. The full deity of God made manifest in Christ Jesus happened here. Probably a lot more impressive than all those places George Washington supposedly slept.

But it’s the wrong answer to this moment. It’s the wrong answer because what Jesus must do from this moment forward requires his humanity, not his divinity. He goes from this mountaintop to Jerusalem. He goes to the cross. He goes to die. And to focus so much on his divine nature because of this moment of transfiguration, Peter and the others have forgotten the whole of who Jesus is.

Forgetting is always the danger of idolatry. We forget the God behind the image and become enraptured with the image itself. We forget the truths behind the symbol. We forget that God is bigger than we imagine him to be. This is the mistake Peter makes when he suggests they enshrine this wondrous transcendent moment. They would come to focus on the symbol, not on God.

How often do we today fall prey to this error? Given how often Christians become obsessed with institution and tradition, quite a bit. Arguments over church buildings. Debates over who can receive sacraments or serve in the office of ministry. Fights over things because of what some dead former member or long-departed pastor would have wanted. All these happen in the church with some frequency and they are all a form of idolatry. Anytime the words “We’ve never done it that way before” or “So-and-so would have wanted...” are spoken, there is idolatry at work. We lost sight of the truth in the shadow of a symbol.

We are called to remember that God is not a tradition or a building or an institution or a memory. God is always bigger than we imagine him to be. And that’s a good thing. We called into the worship of a divinity that crafted the very substance of the universe, from the smallest atom to most vast galaxy. We called into the worship of a God who loved his creation so much that he became a part of it, incarnating as a human being named Jesus of Nazareth. In the wonder of unknownable mystery, Jesus was both fully divine and fully human and out of love that has no bounds, he went to the cross to do the one thing gods are not supposed to be able to do. He died and he died for us. And then, on the third day, Jesus rose again to life, become the first human, the first of us, to be granted that gift. The first, but far from the last.

In a logical scientific universe of the tangible and the material, there is much about this that makes no sense. But that’s part of the point. God is more than our tangible universe. God is more than we can understand. And he knows that. God has given us things to help us know him. He has given us a church and symbols and rituals that we can comprehend (even if we must remember that truth is greater still than these things). He given us sacraments and his story in the form of the Holy Scriptures. And he’s given us himself, found in the form of a humble carpenter’s son born in the ancient middle east.

In our ingenuity, we may unlock many of the secrets of our tangible universe. How it was made. How it works. But we will never figure out the whole of who God is. But God has told us what we need to know. He loves us, he made us, he died for us, he rose again for us, and he will bring us to him. That is no mystery. Amen.

Sermon for Contemporary Worship (5th Epiphany)

Preached at St. John's Lutheran Church, New Freedom, PA on February 8, 2015
Scripture text: Matthew 14:13-33

I make a pretty open secret about how much of a nerd I am. I was the kid sitting in the lunch room at school surrounded by charts and graphs that somehow, in the complexity of Dungeons and Dragons, represented an elf or a wizard or a knight in shining armor. I was the kid who could name the ten brightest stars in the night sky in order (not anymore). I was the kid who know the fictitious corporations that manufactured the X-wing and the TIE fighter in the Star Wars universe. No wonder I never had dates in high school.

Well, some things have changed, but much hasn’t. I’m still a nerd at heart. I’m still the guy that will still occasionally quote some icon of nerd-dom in my sermons. There’s a reason for that and that’s because truth can sometimes be found in the most unlikely of places. Life is full of surprises, full of the unexpected, and often times the great literature of my youth reflects that.

The Lord of the Rings has been one of my go-to texts for this sort of thing and there’s also a good reason for that. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author, was a very devoted Roman Catholic and his faith seeps into the story just about everywhere. The heroes of the tale are the diminutive hobbits, fantasy people who stand barely waist high on a normal human. They are small, often overlooked, and not taken to great deeds of strength and glory. Which is the point. Tolkien understood that it is often from the least that great things come. That was a lesson he learned from his faith.

And one of the texts that teaches that lesson is our Gospel lesson tonight. The crowds have gathered in vast numbers and Jesus, as is his wont, has taken to teaching them his wisdom. The lesson is not a short one and the hour grows late. This triggers a crisis. Matthew fastidiously reports that this crowd numbers over 5000 people (Only the men are “counted,” as was typical of ancient patriarchy. The crowd is likely much larger.) Regardless, the disciples have only their own meager fare, barely enough to feed themselves, let alone the immense number of people who have come to see Jesus.

Jesus, for his part, is not worried. When the disciples come to him to demand that he dismiss the crowds to the surrounding villages to find food, Jesus turns the tables on them by telling them to host the crowd themselves. That triggers a panic. “We don’t have enough.” You can just imagine Jesus shaking his head, taking hold of the five loaves and two fish, and grumbling something about “Oh, ye, of little faith.”

And then the miracle happens.

Christian author Michael Card calls Matthew’s depiction of this famous story as an “unmiraculous miracle” and there’s a lot of truth to that. There is no magic here. No spectacle. No fanfare. There’s no “watch this” gotcha moment. Jesus simply takes the meager food the disciples have and by divine mystery makes it enough to feed the immense crowd. From the least comes something great.

This dynamic continues in the second part of our lesson tonight. The crowd is satisfied with their meal, Jesus dismisses them, and then sends the disciples on ahead of him in a boat while he seeks a private moment to pray and recharge. Partway through the night, Jesus rejoins the disciples who are halfway across the Sea of Galilee struggling against the wind.

As before, reality as we typically understand it is little hindrance to Jesus. He walks across the water to the disciples boat, who being semi-rational human beings are unable to comprehend what they are seeing. They panic for the second time in these two stories, believing Jesus some manner of phantasm (I did say “semi-rational”).

However, once Jesus reassures them, something else remarkable happens. Peter, perhaps because he has learned at least in part the lesson of the loaves, ask to come out to Jesus on the water. Now consider this for a moment. This is Peter, a fisherman. He’s a disciple of Jesus, but as his boisterous and often misguided commentary towards Jesus’ statements indicate, he’s still got a lot to learn. No straight A student this guy.

But that’s also part of the point.

Jesus commands Peter to come and out onto the water he goes. Peter, the loud-mouthed knuckle-headed disciple, walks on water himself. From the least comes something great.

Jesus teaches time and again that just because something seems insignificant to our eyes does not mean it is so to God. He is the one who declares that it is the “meek” who will inherit the earth. He is the one who claims that faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. He is the one who welcomes children and claims the kingdom belongs to ones like them. And here in back-to-back episodes, he makes a tiny meal feed thousands and grants a bumbling but enthusiastic disciple to do the impossible.

Elsewhere in the Scriptures, it is claimed that “nothing will be impossible with God.” Here, in these two miracles we see how true that is.

Never underestimate what God can do. Faith is, at its core, trust that God can do what he says and will do what he says. When Jesus says to the disciples, “give me your food” the assumption is that it will somehow be enough and sure enough, it is. When Jesus says to Peter “come” the assumption is that he will not let Peter sink and even when Peter does just that, Jesus is there to take hold of him and to keep him slipping below the waves.

So, when Jesus says from the cross that he forgives us, what does it mean? When Jesus says that he will give us life and give it abundantly, what does it mean? From the world’s perspective, we’re not much. Just a small number of ordinary folk gathered together in worship on a Sunday night. But to God, we are a miracle waiting to happen. From the least comes something great. Amen.

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on February 8, 2015
Scripture text: Isaiah 40:21-31

When I am reading the Scriptures, either for study or for prayer, I am often on the lookout for what I somewhat jokingly call “summary passages.” These are texts that summarize the whole message of the Bible down to a handful of verses. There are a number of these throughout the Bible, many of them you know: John 3:16, Romans 6, Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 13, etc. Most of them are from the New Testament however, which often leads us to a frequent mistake. We can forget that Gospel, that good news, can be found in the Old Testament.

In some ways, it’s easy to see why we make that mistake. After all, the OT contains significant portions of historical material and history which, as a general rule, is often bloody and violent. God’s law as articulated in the books of Moses seems harsh and cruel to modern ears (although, in comparison to more contemporary legal codes, it’s quite lenient.) And the vast majority of the prophets are called forth to address some manner of misbehavior, some way in which the Chosen people have again strayed from their appointed tasks and need to be brought back into line with often vivid descriptions of the consequences of their actions. There’s a lot of negativity in the OT. There is.

That’s not always a bad thing. After all, life can be a bit bloody and ugly. Life can be negative. Life can be unpleasant and harsh. And I like the fact that our Holy Scriptures do not shy away from the ugliness. The people of our book live in the real world, just like we do.

But life also has joy and it has peace. It has happiness and laughter. It has triumph. And the Old Testament has these things too. And we often find them in those handful of “summary passages” found not just in the words of Jesus or Paul or some other disciple, but in the words of someone who only lived in the hope of a Messiah yet unborn.

(Consider this an unapologetic endorsement of DeviantArt)

And that brings us to the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah’s something of an outlier. First off, I should make a point of clarification. There is not one prophet Isaiah. There are three and not all three of them may be named Isaiah. But their time of prophecy spanned a roughly 150 years from before the Babylonian invasions of Judah to the fall of that empire and beyond. Way too much history for a single human lifespan.

But what binds this prophetic book together is not an individual, but rather a theme. Here in Isaiah, we find the hopeful prophet. Only occasionally does Isaiah slip into the usual fire-and-brimstone routine of his peers. What we find instead is a timeless message of hope and trust in God, a commentary in many ways on the Old Covenant itself.

It’s as if these three men over the course of these decades are telling the people, “Yeah, the world is chaos right now, but remember what God said to Abraham? Remember the promises he made? Let me tell you what that will look like.” The whole book is exposition on God’s vision for the world. And if you want OT summary passages, texts that tell the whole Gospel in just a handful of verses, Isaiah has them in abundance.

Isaiah 40 is a classic example. This is the beginning of the prophecy of our second Isaiah and what a wondrous stuff this is. The chapter begins with a text we often hear in Advent. “Comfort, O comfort my people, so says our God.” And it moves from that beautiful prophecy of the Christ into the passage we have today.

Isaiah pleads with his audience to remember what they already know. You’ve heard this stuff before, he reminds them. Remember what God said to you in ancient days. Remember the promises. God is an everlasting god. He will give you strength. He will lift you up. He will empower you and you will rise up as on the wings of eagles.

This is one of those texts where I sometimes wonder why I even bother with a sermon. It preaches itself. I’ve told you many of the things in this sermon so far for your own education. Your inspiration comes far better from the words of Isaiah unfiltered than does from anything I could say from this pulpit.

I guess I’m admitting this isn’t much of a sermon. But maybe it doesn’t have to be. Maybe what I need to do is what Isaiah does here. Remember! Remember the things God has told you. Remember the hope that it gives. Remember the salvation that has been promised to you.

Life is what it is, and it is often that chaotic turmoil from light to dark, happy to sad, easy to difficult. As we get tossed about, it can be easy to forget that our lives are in God’s hands. We see the menace of threats, both real and exaggerated, and we forget that God is greater than these. We feel small and insignificant in the grand scheme of the world and we forget that it is the meek and the powerless that God lifts up. We forget so much.

The prophet calls us to remember. Remember who we are and whose we are. To remember that God calls us by name. That God will not let one be missing. That God gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. That God will lift us up as on wings of eagles. This is a promise that he made to a sheep-herder in ancient Chaldea, a covenant that said that from that one simple man would come a blessing that would shared among all the peoples of the world. That blessing is Christ and we are his. Remember that. Amen.

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on February 1, 2015
Sermon text: Mark 1:21-28

There was a recent study concerning substance abuse that made some rather remarkable and unexpected findings. It was a two-step process. The first step involved animals, rats I believe. They first put a rat in a tiny cage, with little light, no activity. Attached to a cage were two dispensers, one for food and one distributing some manner of stimulating drug. Unsurprisingly the rat hitting the dope and got high.

They put another rat in another cage, only this time there was one of these wheels that they could play and exercise on. They gave it good lighting and better food and again the two dispensers, one that good food and the other with the drug. This time, the rat played on his wheel, basked in the light, ate the food, and hardly ever touched the drugs. Again, perhaps not surprising.

But the shock came when they took the rat from the first cage and put it in the second’s cage. The scientists figured it would hit the drugs like mad, now that the poor animal was addicted. But what happened was the first rat played on the wheel, basked in the light, ate the good food, and hardly ever touched the drugs. The addicted rat chose the alternatives when those alternatives became available.

The scientists asked themselves, “Does this apply to humans?” Well, they looked at several social studies of human behavior and substance abuse and saw a lot of parallels. They found happy well-adjusted human beings typical do not have issues with substance abuse, even when such substances are readily and easily available. They also found that people having difficulty with jobs, relationships, mental illness, depression, poverty, and other social ills were far more prone to abuse drugs, alcohol, pornography, etc. Again, no real surprises here.

But then they decided to do with people what they did with the rats. They took a group of folks that were struggling with addiction and gave them better opportunities: improved jobs, better health care, more income, marital counseling, etc. They expected these addicts to maintain their drug habits, but like the first rat in the second cage, they stopped doping up almost completely, even enduring the pains of withdrawal to do so.

It wasn’t the drugs that caused addiction, the study concluded. It’s not the people involved and their moral fortitude or lack thereof. It’s “their cage,” the circumstances of life in which they live.

We often use the phrase “demonic” to describe the devastation addiction causes in addicts and the people who care for them. It’s fitting. There is something viciously evil about it. But what if we’ve misidentified the source of the evil? What if we’ve gotten it wrong all this time?

Jesus has his own encounter with the demonic in our Gospel lesson today, one of many throughout the Gospel accounts. He goes to the synagogue as is his custom on the day of worship and there he encounters a “man with an unclean spirit.” Mark is his usual hurried self in telling the tale. Jesus commands the spirit to leave, it goes, the crowd is astonished, the end.

Time and time again throughout the Gospels we see this sort of story. Jesus encounters a demon-possessed person and he (and we use this phrase somewhat flippantly) sets them free. He commands the demonic to go and it goes. He destroys the cage that has imprisoned these poor people. He sets them free.

We live, in this day and age, in a demonic society. We are imprisoned by greed, poverty, lust, hatred, disease, sorrow, and a whole host of other evils. And those prisons, those cages, demand and define our addictions.

• The stockbroker convinced his happiness is tied to his bank account with continue to accumulate more and more money until he has more than he could ever spend in a lifetime and yet he still craves more.
• A homeless man who has nothing will seek out anything that gives him a moment’s respite from his misery. The oblivion found at the bottom of a bottle is sweet release.
• A lonely boy convinced no one will love him and a young woman damaged by sexual abuse will do whatever they can to feel loved, even if it means obsessive viewing of the lurid images of magazines or the Internet or throwing themselves into the arms of whoever’s willing.
• A person convinced the difficulties of their life is the fault of some other will relentlessly pursue a personal agenda of hate and anger against any and all who remind them of their imagined enemy.

I could go on, but we see this all around us. We see people addicted to drugs, to sex, to obsession, to rage, to food, to money, and they will do anything they can to feed their addictions: lie, cheat, steal, even in some extreme cases kill. And sometimes, we are those people and they are us. We too can be the rat in his tiny cage, doing anything we can to escape the nightmares, real or imagined, of our lives.

All too often, we think of sin as a moral failing. It is that, but it is also more than that. It is also the circumstances of our lives that drive us to make those choices. It is also our cage. Sins are the things that life does to us as much as the choices we make. That’s the reason we use the language of captivity quite often here in church when speaking of sin. We are “in bondage” to sin, for instance, in our confessional prayer.

Every morning, we wake up to discover life is finding new and innovative ways to kick the crap out of us. And each night, we return to our beds with new scars from the battles we’ve fought. Sometimes, those scars impact our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. It twists us into becoming the things we resent. Sin begats sin and find ourselves deeper and deeper in that dungeon.

Jesus offers an alternative: freedom. His kingdom, his reign, is the ultimate expression of the deepest desires of the human soul. A place of acceptance, compassion, peace, and liberation. Time and again, he reveals this kingdom to us in his ministry, saying in so many variations to people caged by demonic forces “Let them go.”

“Let my people go.” The clarion call of Moses is echoed in the work of Jesus. Perhaps that is what the people sense in their astonishment at his teaching. A new liberator has come, one here to set us free from all that enslaves and imprisons us. One that will break the bondage of sin, death, and evil. One that has the power and authority to do what we cannot do: Make us free.

This freedom comes with a price, but it is not one that we are called upon to pay. Christ himself goes to the cross for our liberation. Christ offers up himself to break the bonds of sin and death, to loosen our chains. This is why he came. The cross is not merely a crude instrument of torture and death, but the avenue that shatters all that holds us captive. Only he could do it. Only Jesus could endure its cost for our sakes. But endure it he did. He gave all so that we could have our heart’s greatest desire: freedom. Amen.