God’s Audacious Love

Delivered at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church, Swift Falls, MN. Lent 5, Year B.
Texts: Jer 31:31-34; Ps 51:1-12; Heb 5:5-10; Jn 12:20-33

Have you been keeping up with the news lately? In Toulouse, France, a terrorist named Mohamed Merah killed three soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish school children in a series of shootings which he hoped would, in his own words, “bring France to its knees.” He himself was killed in a police standoff on Thursday. There is still violence in Syria where President Assad is waging war against his own citizens while the international community dithers about if and how and when to intervene. On March 11, a US soldier in Afghanistan killed 16 civilians, including women and children; and just this week, in our own country, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in Florida by an over-zealous neighbor just for being black and looking “suspicious.”

And the saddest part? This has been a fairly typical news week. Such atrocities are common place in our world; headlines like this fill our newspapers and search engines every day. I have to confess that each time I sit down to write a sermon about the love of God and the salvation that comes through the cross and the grace of Jesus Christ, I can’t help but think about the state of world around us and I begin to wonder, “So what?”

Where is God in all this nonsense? What good news does the Church have to offer a world in such dire need of deliverance from this meaningless violence? Sometimes I think that the Church offers no answer to this question. I think that is why people, especially young people, are leaving: because even while we claim that Christ is our savior, sent to rescue us from sin and death, the world continues to crumble around us. To the rest of the world, we look like a bunch of deluded idiots. The world isn’t looking for a savior who promises us residence in some kingdom in the clouds with streets of gold; the world is looking for a savior who can stop the madness that meets us on the streets and in the headlines day after day after day.

Throughout the season of Lent, we have been reminded that this madness is the result of Sin. Not our sins—the misdeeds and failings that we commit every day despite our best efforts—but Sin. Sin is the corruption of humanity that spoils our best intentions and twists all our actions towards evil. We call it many different things—human nature, evil, Murphy’s law—but whenever we say, “nobody’s perfect,” or “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” we’re talking about Sin, that pervasive force for evil we simply cannot overcome.

This is what the Psalmist meant when he cried out, “For I know my transgressions, and my Sin is ever before me… Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” Sin is the source of all our trouble, the origin of poverty, bigotry, hunger and hatred. He knew that Sin is what separates us from God and causes us to harm one another. He knew that from the moment you were a twinkle in your mother’s eye, Sin had its claws in you. Even the best among us, the most noble and valiant and kind, are as trapped by Sin as the Hitlers and the Bin Ladens of the world.

This Sin permeates us, down to the very core of our being. It infests us from the inside out, and there is only one cure: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.”  This is the good news: “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;” the Psalmist writes, “wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” Because of Sin, we are powerless to fix ourselves, but God is not. Only a total overhaul from the inside out can get rid of Sin at its root, and only the God who created us has the power to replace what is inside us. If God takes away our Sin, it will truly be gone. That is where Jesus comes in.

What if I told you that Jesus Christ was not sent here to die? One way we understand Christ’s death on the cross is that he was punished for our sins so we would not be. This is a helpful metaphor, certainly borne out in scripture, one that is rich and meaningful to many of us, but it is not how St. John explains Jesus’ death. According to John’s gospel, Jesus died not because he was taking our whipping, but because he loved us.

“For God loved the whole world so much that God sent God’s only child, so that everyone who trusts him and believes what he says will not die, but live forever.” God’s love is so radical, so extreme, that it has the power to change the world, to overcome this idiocy that threatens to swallow us up. God’s love has the power to cut out that old, rotten and stinking heart tainted by Sin and replace it with a new heart, a clean heart, a heart made only for love, inscribed with God’s law.

God doesn’t accomplish this through surgery. Unlike Adam, we will not fall asleep and wake up to find a hole closed up by flesh. Instead, God accomplishes this Sin-ectomy through the sheer, brute force of God’s love, the love that created the world, that brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, the love that saved David from Saul and rescued Israel from the exile in Babylon.

That love was written on our hearts when Jesus willingly gave up his honor, his ministry and his life in obedience to God and for the sake of God’s kingdom. Knowing that the cross lay ahead, he did not pray “Father, save me from this hour,” but instead trusted in God’s love to accomplish its goal, regardless of the cost to himself. This is why he says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

When we seek after our own benefit, when we run the show how we think it ought to be run, when we strive to get ahead, Sin causes us to fail. So, Jesus says, instead of looking out for number one, you should disregard, even despise, your own gain, your own reputation, your own well-being, even your own life for the sake of the gospel and God’s love, and in doing that, you will find death; but see, death is no longer in control—God’s love shown in Jesus’ death on the cross conforms even death itself to God’s will, transforms death into life. Just like a grain of wheat that must first die in order to sprout, our lives corrupted and consumed by Sin must first end before we can experience life in God’s love.

So what does this have to do with the headlines, with Merah and Martin and Assad and all those murdered Afghans? They are the result of Sin, the result of people and governments and organizations and factions all acting out of self-certainty, self-reliance, and self-interest. All these sins are committed by people doing what is right in their eyes, but their sight is infected by Sin, blind to true goodness.

God’s love cuts through the murk of Sin and greed and selfishness, allowing us to love with reckless abandon like God loves, even though it may cost us our livelihood, our respect, our friends and family, even our lives. When we survey the wondrous cross and see the amazing love of God poured out for us, mindless of the cost to both Father and Son, we see the truth—that love conquers all, even Sin and death.

Sin is the disease, and Love is the cure. God’s love promises that those victims of violence and oppression are not neglected by the creator of the universe, and that same love stirs us to respond, spurs us to audacious action in the name of Christ to protect and to comfort and to heal, mindless of the cost to ourselves. In the love of God poured out on the cross, we are transformed into God’s lovers of the world, a force to contend with Sin itself. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but when it dies, it bears much fruit. This is how the death of one man in the shame and misery of the cross can change the whole world, one heart at a time.

New Sermons Posted

Greetings! In the interval while I await call, I have continued to work on this site. Often, people wish to have access to the homily given at their wedding, which is why I have recently posted four wedding sermons that I have delivered, posted under a new corresponding category. The new posts are Where You Go, I Will Go, The Threefold Cord, The Sublime Melting Pot and Loyalty and Faithfulness. In the future, I will continue to post wedding and funeral homilies here where family and friends (as well as the general public) can access them.

Death and Christmas

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Christmas day, Year B.
Texts: Isa 52.7-10; Heb 1.1-12; Jn 1.1-14

One of my side jobs is working as a hospital chaplain. I’ve been doing this about once a month at Meriter Hospital this year, staying overnight to make visits and to be with people in need. I picked up an extra shift late last month, and the moment I came on duty I was working with a family in great need.

Here’s the long and the short of it: this fellow, we’ll call him “Bob,” got sick the evening of Thanksgiving, and was hospitalized that night. When my shift started at 5pm the following Monday, I was informed by the day chaplain that Bob had coded (which meant that his heart had stopped) and the doctors were working to resuscitate him. They were finally successful, but over the course of the night, it became obvious first to the doctors and then to his family that Bob was not going to make it. His heart had been stopped for too long and there was too much brain damage. Even if he survived, he would probably never wake up. By 4 am, the

family was asking for a priest to administer last rites before they turned off Bob’s ventilator.
I stayed with the family for the rest of the morning. I was there with them when Bob’s wife and two sons made the decision to cease life support, when they talked to the doctor about their decision, and when the nurse disconnected the machine. Bob’s extended family had been there the whole night as well, milling around, trying to comfort one another and take in everything that had happened so fast. Now they all gathered around his bed. From the moment the machine was off, everyone waited with him, silently watching the monitor and saying goodbye.

In our cultural mythology, we have many different stories about what happens when a person dies. Some people believe that angels appear to bring people into the hereafter, or that one sees a bright light, often with a voice or a presence that beckons them. Then there’s the image of the grim reaper, that morose personification of death as a tall being shrouded in black and carrying a scythe as it comes to collect souls. Whatever Bob’s family thought he might be experiencing, they wanted to make sure that they were there with Bob when his moment came.

We hate to think of people dying alone. We want to believe that when we die, there is somebody or something—an angel, a voice, even a creepy skeleton in a robe with a giant sickle—that comes to be with us, to accompany us to whatever comes next. Even though Bob was unconscious, even though it was unlikely that he was unaware of anybody’s presence in that room, once the decision had been made to remove the life support, everyone crowded into his room and waited there with him, unwilling to let him die alone.

For that matter, I could hardly bear to let his family be alone. Even though they had one another, they were faced with one of those moments in life when the darkness seems to engulf everything, and they were suddenly adrift in a life raft in the middle of a vast, dark and unknown ocean. So, even though they didn’t pay much attention to me, even though there was nothing I could really say to make anything better, I stuck around, just so they wouldn’t be alone. When nothing else helps, when nothing else matters, it sometimes becomes very important to us to have somebody is there.

By now you are probably asking what all this sad talk has to do with a celebration like Christmas. As Christians, we believe that the God who created the universe took on human form in Jesus Christ. God did this in order to be present with us in a way that God’s infinite nature did not otherwise allow for. In other words, God became human so that we wouldn’t be alone. It’s something that both Christians and non-Christians alike fail to fully appreciate, I think. When we think about God, we often focus on what we get from it, what God does for us, how faith in God makes our lives better. Mere presence just doesn’t seem enough. It doesn’t end our suffering, it doesn’t make us happy, it doesn’t enable us to do anything we can’t do by ourselves. And yet, when it comes down right to it, when we find ourselves completely helpless and powerless, the one thing we truly want more than anything is not to be alone.

The prophet Isaiah writes of a child named Immanuel (Isa 7.14), a name which literally means “God-(is)-with-us.” For Christians, we celebrate the holiday of Christmas as the day when the Creator of the universe put off heaven to put on skin and bone, suffering and heartache; to be Immanuel. In our evangelism, we too often forget this significant fact, or when we don’t, it’s received with ambivalence: “So God became human to ‘be’ with us, so what?”

Somewhere deep inside each of us is the need for companionship. It may not be essential to our survival, but it is essential to our well-being. We can’t bear to think of a loved one dying alone because somewhere inside ourselves that aloneness is what we fear most. With all the good and bad that life throws our way, we need to be loved. Having somebody with you doesn’t make any of that go away, but somehow it does make it more bearable.

God understands this about us, even if we don’t always get it ourselves. It’s a jungle out there, full of pain and sadness, but even our joys and celebrations seem somehow hollow if there’s nobody with whom we can share them. Even with the blessings of friends, family, community and spouse, sometimes our circumstances change. People come into and leave from our lives. Friends move away. Our lives are shaken by hardship, our relationships are torn by conflict. We are separated from loved ones by death. Though we almost always have the comfort of having people around us, there are times in everyone’s life where we feel undeniably and inescapably alone. It is for those times, the times when we are hardest pressed and backed into the tightest corners, the times when we are at our most vulnerable, that God has become Immanuel.

John’s gospel tells us that in Jesus, “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” In Greek, it literally says that he “pitched his tent among us.” John tells us that God has made camp with us, always ready to pull up stakes and follow us so that wherever we go and whatever we do, we will never be far from God’s presence. On this Christmas morning we celebrate the promise of God’s love and strength taking on flesh to be with us, to be one of us. God has come to be with us like a chaplain comes into a hospital room. God’s presence may not mean the end to life’s woes or the answer to its problems, but the good news of Christmas is that God is forever Immanuel: no one has to die alone, and no one has to live alone.

Immanuel

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Advent 4, Year B.
Texts: 2 Sam 7.1-11, 16; Rom 16.25-27; Lk 1.26-38

One question I continually come up against as I prepare sermons is “So what?” God is alive. God is with us. God loves us. So what? What difference does this information make in our lives or in the world around us? I know I’m not the only one who wrestles with this question. There is a growing number of people who view religion as irrelevant. To them, the church has nothing to offer the world except simplistic answers to complex questions and a reason to be arrogant and preachy.

Even churchgoers sometimes end up relegating God and God’s effect on us to the realm of the spiritual, of the immortal. We trust that God will collect our souls when we die, but until then, God seldom enters the picture except for “church time.” The time we spend dealing with clients at work, facing the loss of a job, preparing for tests at school, celebrating birthdays, and searching for our car keys seems either too distant or too insignificant for God to matter or take notice. Today, however, God answers our question of “so what?” with the announcement of a child.

Nothing changes one’s life like the arrival of a new baby. Anybody who has ever had children of their own can imagine what thoughts must have been running though Mary’s head as the angel told her what was about to happen. As the angel went on about David and his kingdom, Mary was probably thinking about how this little tiny life would develop inside her and would eventually grow from an infant to a child to a man, and that in spite of the hardships she would face, this pregnancy was a sign of God’s favor and the means by which God would bless the world.

The Son of God could have come to earth in a grand display of majesty and power, tearing open the sky like a moldy curtain and descending in glory surrounded by angels. Instead, God became human, and did it in a remarkably usual way. He could have been born to the emperor of Rome, had the entire known world bowing at his cradle. Instead, the Son of God was born to a nobody girl in a backwater town.

God chose this extraordinarily ordinary to break into our world because  God is not only the subject of religion or church. Our God has entered fully into this world of ours in all its imperfection and monotony precisely to be Immanuel.
You have heard me talk a lot about “Immanuel.” It is a Hebrew word that means “God-[is]-with-us.” God seeks us out and chooses us to be a part of God’s work of redeeming the world, just as he chose Mary. God looks for us and meets us in those mundane moments of our lives—as we walk across the parking lot, as we watch television, as we wait in line at the post office.

This in-breaking presence of God can sometimes pull us away from our own desires and comforts. We are predisposed to live our lives looking out for ourselves and our families and friends. However, God-with-us binds us all together. We no longer see strangers or enemies or even neighbors and friends, but fellow children of God. Immanuel shows us how we are interconnected with each other and the world.

This radical presence, like the child which the angel proclaimed to Mary, is a gift that comes unasked for and undeserved. Unlike her relative Elizabeth, Mary was not praying for a child—that was the last thing she was expecting. Yet, God chose her anyway. No matter how she responded to the angel’s words, she was going to become pregnant with that baby. Likewise, whether we respond to Immanuel with indifference and hostility or with joy and anticipation, the gift is ours. However, our response to this gift is still important.

When the angel finished talking, Mary could have responded with denial or resignation. As she was imagining all the joys of motherhood, she must also have been thinking about how she would be shamed and rejected by her own family and friends for being a “loose woman,” how her fiancé Joseph might easily abandon her at the news of this unwanted child and abandon her with a hungry mouth to feed. What she didn’t think of, but what we know, is how she would one day see that child’s face contorted in pain as he died on a cross.

She could have fought God tooth and nail and demanded to know why God was ruining her life. Instead, in spite of her fear and uncertainty, she answered God with words of trust, hope, and excitement: “Behold your servant! Do as you have said, and let’s see where this goes!” When Immanuel invites us to participate in God’s action in this world we, too, can respond out of cynicism and say, “it will never work! The world is the way it is, and nobody can change it,” or we can hold on tight and see where God leads us.

I have some experience with this myself. As my wife and I prepare to leave for Minnesota, I am preparing once again for unemployment and uncertainty about my future. As badly as I want to serve in a congregation, there is nothing available for me right now. This is not what I had hoped for, and God and I have exchanged words many times about this subject, sometimes very heated words. But, at the end of the day, like Mary, I trust that God is leading me, and even if it is not what I had wanted for myself, I trust that it will be good. Just like when I first came to Watertown, I was in much the same position, waiting with nothing to do, and the Spirit moved and brought me here, to you.

Mary’s willingness to trust the will of God in spite of all her misgivings and the hardship she faced is why she has been honored for thousands of years. When God told her that she would bear a child, instead of rejecting God or focusing only on her own fears, she accepted the Almighty’s invitation to change the world. Immanuel offers us that same invitation. Immanuel shows us the faces of poverty and oppression and violence around the world and in our backyard and invites us to change lives. Whether or not we accept, God claims us and will use us for the work of the kingdom, just as God has already been using us. In my time here I have seen God touch the world through the ministries of this congregation: through the Agape preschool, the food pantry, the clothes closet, our GIFT programs. If we can say with Mary, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your will,” then we will enjoy the ride a whole lot more, we need not fear threats to our wealth, our comfort, our safety or even our lives, because we know that God is good.

This is our final week of Advent. Next weekend, we will be singing “Silent Night” and thinking about a newborn baby laying asleep in a manger. This tiny child is nothing less than the radical, impossible, unstoppable love of God made flesh to walk and live among us. The world may think that we are irrelevant, that the Church is just another cult that imposes moral boundaries and requires blind obedience, but this child says otherwise.

This child says that we have each been called in all our ordinariness, like Mary, to bear the earth-shattering promise of God’s justice and mercy to the world. This child says that each of us has been offered the chance to make this world a better place with the power of Almighty God behind us. This child says that all of us—whether rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight, citizen or illegal alien, no matter where we are from or the color of our skin or what we do for a living—all of us are one, because God is with us.

This child is coming. In preparation for his arrival, the earth is groaning with anticipation. The angel comes now to us with good tidings of great joy, tidings of Immanuel, tidings that will shake our world to its foundations. Immanuel offers us the invitation to change the world. Let us join together with Mary in saying, “Behold, the servants of the Lord. Let it be with us according to your word.”

What Are We Waiting For?

Audio of “What Are We Waiting For?” recorded during worship. (13:02)
Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Advent 1, Year B.
Texts: Isa 64.1-9; 1 Cor 1.3-9; Mk 13.24-37

Advent is a season of waiting. We don’t like to talk or even think about about waiting very much; we like to skip the waiting and get straight to the good part. We don’t talk about going out this weekend to wait in line, we talk about going to a movie or eating at a restaurant. Yet, every year, for four weeks leading up to Christmas, we don’t just observe, but celebrate this season of waiting. Why bother? What are we waiting for?

The textbook answer, of course, is that we celebrate Advent as a reminder that we wait for the second coming of Jesus Christ, a time when he will return to earth to bring completion and fullness to creation. During that time, we read in Scripture, swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (Isa 2.4), the wolf and the lamb will live together, and the leopard will lie down with the kid (Isa 11.6), God will dwell among the people and wipe away every tear from their eyes (Rev 21.3-4). We’re waiting for a time when all the brokenness of this world will be healed and the violence and injustice and hatred the plagues us as a people will be abolished. In short, we’re waiting for salvation.

Now, ‘salvation’ is kind of a buzz-word. When Christians use it, most often we’re talking about being ‘saved from death’ and ‘inheriting eternal life.’ But salvation means more than that. When the prophets and poets write about salvation, they aren’t using some theological jargon that refers to something that happens when you die. They are writing about the very real, very present help in time of trouble, of rescue from one’s enemies, of deliverance from disaster, of companionship during isolation. ‘Salvation’ is a life raft in the midst of turbulent waters. In our reading from Isaiah, the prophet longs for salvation for a people whose homes and lives have been destroyed.

So, during Advent, we are looking forward to the salvation of the world, we are waiting to be rescued from the mess we’re in. Isaiah has it pegged, doesn’t he? We look at the brokenness and in the world around us and sometimes we feel just like a leaf in the wind, swept away by sin and powerless to do anything to change our course. Like Isaiah, we are waiting for God to tear open the heavens and come down in glory and power to make the mountains tremble. We expect that God will come because this world is not how God intended it to be. We wait for the salvation of the kingdom of God, a time and a place where all wrongs will be righted, all faults corrected, all sins forgiven.

The ‘kingdom of God’ conjures in us a vision of a far of place in a distant future, or perhaps that kingdom in the clouds where we awake when we die. However, this is not the vision Jesus came to bring. Jesus’ ministry in Judea begins with the words, “The kingdom of God has come near! Repent!” (Mk 1.15) We look at our world and we see it’s brokenness and how it is fallen, and because of that we wait for God to come fix it. Jesus, on the other hand, saw not a broken world, but a world in progress, a world on its way to being what God intends.

I’m going to test your Biblical knowledge here: does everybody remember Genesis 1:1? “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Well, in Hebrew, the phrasing is different, it’s ambiguous. It can be read that way, but it can also be read, “When God began creating the heavens and the earth…” If we understand it this way, creation is not yet complete: the six days of Genesis was only the beginning. We read that on the seventh day, God rested, but did not stop. What happened on the eighth day? God has been active ever since; everything since then—the flood, the exodus from Egypt, the exile in Babylon, Jesus’ ministry, the Roman Empire, Martin Luther, the Enlightenment, Charles Darwin, Richard Nixon, the Space Program—everything is part of the continuing work of creation. Not only that, but we have been invited to participate in that ongoing act of creating with God. In Eden, God created adam, which literally means ‘earthling’—that’s all of us—and invited adam to help create this world with God by naming the animals. That invitation still stands.

When Jesus says, “the kingdom of God is near,” this is not an announcement of some thing to come in the future, but the introduction of a new way of being part of God’s creating action here and now. Isaiah prays, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” and that is precisely what God did! At the baptism of Jesus, ‘he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.’ (Mk 1.10) Isaiah’s prayer has been answered in Christ Jesus.

We find ourselves waiting for salvation to come from God, but the truth is that the kingdom of God is here, God’s salvation is now. We find ourselves waiting for a God to come and overpower us, to take the world away from us and fix what we broke, but as we have already seen, that is not how God works. The Jews in Israel were waiting for God to send a Messiah, a mighty warrior king to come in glory and free them from the Romans, but what they got was the son of a carpenter, an itinerant rabbi who died in shame on a cross. If we are here waiting for a God who will come to overpower our sin, we are waiting for the wrong God. Our God comes not to overpower us, but to empower us, to give us strength and ability beyond our own to fix this world and live the kingdom of God here and now. Our God comes to be Immanuel, “God with us.”

Listen to these words of Paul, “for in every way you have been enriched in him…so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 1.5,7) This world is still becoming what God wants it to be—a world of peace, justice and mercy—and God has invited us and equipped us to help it grow, to usher in the kingdom. This world, fallen as it is, is still God’s, and God is still actively at work redeeming it and inviting us to be a part of that redemption. Today, this first Sunday in Advent, we remember that this is what we are waiting for: to take part in the salvation of this world here and now.

During Advent, we celebrate the waiting, we sit on the edge of our seats with baited breath because every day, every hour, every minute we could come face-to-face with the living Jesus in the face of a friend, neighbor, or even a stranger. During Advent we are reminded that every moment is a God moment, a chance to meet people where they are, to be their real salvation, to rescue them from hunger, heartache, violence or loneliness, and in so doing, to be rescued ourselves from complacency and inaction. Every moment is an opportunity to do the work our master has given us. We celebrate Advent because we are always waiting for the next opportunity to turn the corner and run headlong into Jesus Christ.

Of course, this work will not see it’s completion in our lifetime, either. When we leave this life to rest with the saints, there will be much, much more left to do. And so we also celebrate Advent to remember and to hope for Christ’s promised return, to bring with him the kingdom in its fullness and to complete both what was begun in Eden and what was started in Bethlehem.

Come Lord Jesus! Break into our lives, bring the kingdom now, in us! Help us be ever ready, ever vigilant, ever alert for the coming of your kingdom around every corner and at every crossroads. For now is the Advent of our God, now the coming of Christ is around every corner. Now Jesus is Immanuel. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. So what are we waiting for?

True Gratitude

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Thanksgiving Day.
Texts: Deut 8.7-18; 2 Cor 9.6-15; Lk 17.11-19

As I listen to our text from Deuteronomy today, I cannot help but think of a painting that hangs in my parents’ house. It is a portrait that my father painted of my great-grandmother Magdalena Egstad. Scenes from her life surround her portrait in little vignettes: Born in 1890 in Vardal, Norway, she left on a steamship bound for America in 1911. That same year, she married my great-grandfather, Hans, in Buxton, ND, and in 1916 they homesteaded north of Nashua, MT, where both my grandmother and my father grew up.

As I think of this painting, I am reminded that everything I have and everything I am is thanks to people like Magdalena who came before me and paved the way for me to be what I am and do what I do. All that I am is a gift of those before me; no matter how hard I have worked or how much I have earned, I owe it all to my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents. In the end I, and they, owe everything to God. It is God who brought Magdalena safely across the ocean, who led her to Hans who brought them to the farm. It is by God’s grace that my grandmother survived childhood, even though two older siblings died before the age of 2 before my she was born. It is God who gave me the family that brought me here today.

This is what God is reminding the Israelites. They had been slaves in Egypt, a people without hope for a future of anything but hard labor and oppression. Then, God called them out of Egypt, sustained them through forty years in the desert with miraculous manna for food and water from bare rock, sustained them with the leadership of Moses, and brought them through trial and hardship and failure to a land rich in food and drink, a land full of grain and vines, pomegranates and figs, a land welling up with springs and hills full of iron and copper.
Over the generations, as their silver and their gold multiplied, God’s people placed more and more value on their own power and their own ability. They deserved the money they earned, they earned the fruit of their labor. I made this wealth through my own hard work and merit, I worked hard for it, and it is mine! I have a right to spend it or save it however I choose. Sound familiar?

When we feel that we are entitled to what we have, it becomes harder and harder for us to appreciate it. A paycheck is always too small, a house is never big enough. We think about all the things we want or need and how we can’t afford them, and we grasp tightly onto those things we do earn. This is what we learn from the story of the lepers. While Jesus and his disciples are heading to Jerusalem, he heals ten lepers. Of the ten, nine follow his command to go show themselves to the priests. It is not that they weren’t thankful, but before they could rejoin society, before they could return to their families and their lives, they had to do this thing. They were thankful, certainly, but they were Jews who had asked a Jewish rabbi to heal them. He did, now they went and did as he commanded. It was only fair.

The tenth, on the other hand, was a Samaritan. He knew that he had no right to ask anything of Jesus, because Jews hated Samaritans. That Jesus paid him any mind at all was a gift he did not expect. It was precisely because he saw how unworthy he was of Jesus’ gift that his thankfulness compelled him to return to praise God. His Jewish companions did not return because they expected Jesus to act, and were not surprised when he did. This man expected nothing, and so he was able to see that he had been given everything.

We forget sometimes how unworthy we are. In our minds, we know that we are sinners, but we also know that we are faithful churchgoers, upstanding citizens, ready volunteers and trustworthy friends. The blessings of this life have made us quietly entitled, and that entitlement too often creates distance between us and those we perceive as not working as hard or being as decent as we are. Though we try not to, we look down our noses at immigrants, at welfare moms, at those “rough” people. I think that we are secretly afraid that they want to take what we have without earning it. We forget that all we have is a gift of God’s boundless generosity.

St. Paul compares generosity to a farmer sowing seed. “…the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully…He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.” His point is that God has given us these gifts freely, and will continue to do so. God is faithful—we need never fear that the flow of God’s generosity will dry up!

When we stop to remember how little we truly deserve and how richly we have been blessed, we cannot help but be thankful. Not just thankful enough to sing songs and hymns of praise, not just thankful enough to give up an hour every Sunday to come to worship, not even just thankful enough to put our check in the offering plate. No, God’s incomprehensible generosity is bigger than that. We have nothing of our own: all that we have and all that we are is a gift from God—the sheer magnitude of this blessing inspires in us true thankfulness, the kind of thankfulness that drives us to action, just like the Samaritan on the road to Jerusalem. Though all ten lepers were grateful, the one man returned to thank Jesus, and according to Jesus, only that one man was ‘made well.’ True thankfulness is not just gratitude; true thankfulness is grateful action.

Now, you must understand, it is not that we ‘owe’ God a ‘debt’ of thanks. Jesus did not heal the lepers on the road so that they would get him a nice bouquet of flowers and a card. Our grateful action is actually a part of God’s generous action. Consider Paul’s analogy of the harvest: when the farmer brings in the harvest, it is not only the farmer who benefits: the grain is made into bread which feeds the whole community. In the same manner, God sows blessings of wealth, prosperity, good health, love and mercy among us in order that the whole human community may benefit.

Our true thankfulness to God is as much a part of God’s gift to us as the harvest is a part of the sowing; the grain goes in, and the stalks come out. So it is with us: God sows among us generously and we respond generously to God and to God’s world.

This week, by proclamation of the sixteenth President of the United States and out of civic custom, we gather together to celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. Yet, even as we gather to share a meal with family and settle in for an afternoon of football, we cannot help but be painfully aware of how many millions of God’s beloved people around the world and in our own backyard go without adequate food, clean water, or ample health care, how many people are not afforded the dignity and freedom that we in this country call “rights.”

As we look at these millions upon millions every day wasting away in poverty and hardship, we sometimes ask ourselves, “Why doesn’t God do something? If God is loving, how can God allow this to happen?” Friends, God is doing something: right here, right now, among us. St. Paul writes, “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.” God has blessed us richly an intends for us be a rich blessing to others. God has heaped good gifts upon us so that we might trust God’s boundless generosity and never fear for our own security as we share those gifts with the world. All that we have, all that we are is a free gift of God bestowed with love upon us, upon our parents, upon their parents and their parents’ parents. God has sowed abundantly the seeds for love, peace, and plenty within this community, and the harvest is ripe for the picking. Let us give thanks to our God.

Fly, Ducks, Fly!

Audio of “Fly, Ducks, Fly!” recorded during worship. (12:46)
Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Reformation Day.
Texts: Jer 31.31-34; Rom 3.19-28; John 8.31-36

Every Sunday at the duck pond, the ducks all gather together at duck church. Every Sunday, the duck preacher ascends the pulpit and cries out, “Ducks! You have wings! You can fly, ducks! You can soar through the heavens and break the bonds of gravity. You have the ability to take wing and float through the air! Fly, ducks! Fly, for you have wings!” After the service, the ducks file past the duck preacher and tell him how inspired and uplifted they are by his words, and they all waddle home.

It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? To spend so much time hearing about their ability to fly and the great gift of their wings, and to then waddle slowly home. But we are very much like those ducks. We come here today, and much as we do every week, we hear Christ speak these words to us: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free!” and we respond, “Yes Lord! I know the truth, and I am free. Thank you, Lord, for freeing me!” and we go home and continue our lives in captivity.

We claim this wonderful freedom in Christ, but where is it? If we are free, how does this freedom affect our lives? What difference does it make to the world that we are free? How does that freedom affect how we treat the bank teller, the woman on the street begging for change, the man who stole your wallet? What does that freedom mean to you?

Luther writes in his Treatise on Christian Liberty that “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none,” and “A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” These two contradictory statements are both true, he claims, because our faith in God and God’s promise of life and salvation frees us from fear of punishment, from obligation to the law, from the need to earn God’s grace, and from guilt and shame for our failings. God has given us wings. Of course, those wings are no good to anyone unless we fly. God’s freedom allows us to fly, allows us to serve, it gives us the power to continue in Christ’s word and truly be his disciples, to know the Truth that God’s commandments are not given to lead us to righteousness, to make us better people, or to make up for the sins we commit, but instead are an open invitation from God to take part in God’s continuing work of creation and participate in God’s redeeming this broken world.

500 years ago, the Church obscured this Truth. It held God’s promise ransom, used it to bribe and blackmail God’s free and justified children into good works and worship attendance and giving money. We observe Reformation Day in celebration of God’s work to liberate the Church and God’s promise from that captivity through the work of servants like Martin Luther. But the reason we continue to celebrate Reformation Day now, the reason we have bothered to change our paraments from green to red, is to remind ourselves that the Church is always in need of reformation. Just as God’s love invited men and women like Martin Luther to work for reformation then, God’s love continues to invite us into God’s work of reforming God’s Church.

Too often, people come to churches looking for the very freedom we proclaim, but they see the preacher exhorting the ducks to fly, and the ducks waddling home. Church to us is worship on Saturday or Sunday, giving our offering in our envelopes, singing our hymns and doing our volunteer projects around the building. The problem is that our service stops there. Too often our Christian liberty and love does not extend beyond these walls. We are afraid to go out and get our hands dirty, afraid to fly. It is that fear, fear of failure, fear of going outside our comfort zone, fear of the world that holds us captive and keeps us waddling on the ground. It is that fear that stops us from freely serving and loving God’s people.

If we are ever to explain freedom in Christ to the world, if we are to have any hope of being able to show people the magnitude of God’s promise, then we must live it. If we are to convince the ducks that they too have wings, then we must fly. This is what it means to be a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Free from any obligation or duty, we voluntarily and joyfully go out to share this good news with the world that they too might experience God’s freeing promise. In Christ, we are free from holding grudges, free from cynicism, free from suspicion of people asking for help, free from “what will the neighbors think.” God’s promise frees us to screw up, to give generously to thieves, to hang out with outcasts, to visit the lonely and depressed, to break bread with hookers and swindlers. God frees us to love dangerously. It’s like this poem* I saw recently: “I slept, I and dreamt that life was joy; I woke and I saw that life was service; I served, and I found that service is joy!” No matter what we do or don’t do, we can’t lose. Having given us wings, God is inviting us to fly.

This is dangerous. It’s much safer on the ground. Jesus himself says that we will suffer for this. People will take advantage of us, they will harm us, they might even kill us. The world does not understand free grace; it understands, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” And so, we stand to lose everything: our dignity, our money, our time, our comfort, but in the words of the hymn†, “were they to take our house / goods, honor, child, or spouse, / though life be wrenched away, / they cannot win the day. The Kingdom’s ours forever!” Whatever we may lose, even our lives, cannot compare to what we have already gained in Christ. This is what it means to be a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

Martin Luther lost much to proclaim this good news. Though it meant excommunication from the Church, the loss of his friends, the loss of liberty, even a death sentence hanging over his head, his faith in God and his Christian liberty compelled him to preach on. Where he could have sat back, rested on his knowledge of God’s promise and kept silent, instead he spoke and wrote and preached, boldly proclaiming, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise!”

If we really trust that God is in control, then we know that God can even redeem hardship and suffering and bend it to God’s will. We know this because of how God took the shame and failure of the cross and turned it into a God’s greatest  victory. We seek joy and happiness in our own comfort and desires, but God can turn even our suffering into joy.

If we claim to believe that God has set us free, then let us exercise that freedom and rely on God’s goodness. If we claim to believe in God’s goodness, then let us exercise that goodness and rely on God’s promise. If we claim to believe that we have wings, then let us fly. I am here today to tell you, Ducks, that you have wings. You have wings, Ducks! Fly!

*Poem by Rabindranath Tagore
†Words to “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” text tr. hymnal version, Lutheran Book of Worship (1978)