Porch Light

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Easter Morning (Sunrise), Year A
Texts: Acts 10.34-43; Col 3.1-4; Matt 28.1-10

This week, we have walked with the disciples of Jesus as they went from Sunday’s joyful entry into Jerusalem, through the anxiety of Maundy Thursday and the fear and anguish of Good Friday into the despair of Saturday. Jesus, sent to be Immanuel, God-with-us, had been killed and sealed in a tomb. Even as the disciples have sunk into despair over the loss of God-with-us, we, too, grieve the absence of God and God’s promise in our lives.

Too often, our world is a dark and lonely place. Every day we face trials and difficulties: addiction, contention, disappointment, abuse, scandal, shame, death, and grief are part of our lives. The situation in the rest of the world is much worse. Life is poverty, oppression, genocide, exploitation, war, famine, and unrest. It is easy to wonder where God is in all of this. We cry out to God for an answer, and We long to see God’s promise of reconciliation and healing fulfilled. We begin to wonder if God can see what is going on.

I remember when I was a kid and we used to go visit my grandma. We’d be all packed and ready to go as soon as Mom got off work on Friday evening. The four of us would pile into the car and drive the five hours from our home in Great Falls to Grandma’s farm outside of Nashua, MT. Northeastern Montana is kind of like northern Wisconsin, only without the trees. If you are not in a town, it’s a pretty empty, desolate place. There are no people for miles at a stretch, nothing to remind you of civilization except the highway and the barbed-wire fences that run alongside it. Because we left so late and had to drive so far, it was always dark when we got there. Because there are no people around, if the stars and the moon were not out, it could be absolutely pitch black.
Grandma had this single, sunflower yellow light bulb on her porch. Most of the time, it wasn’t lit, but when company was coming, she would always leave it on. As we traveled, we’d drive through the darkness until we turned down the quarter-mile driveway to the farmhouse. Once we got close enough, we could see that porch light. In the midst of the emptiness of the Montana plains, amid the darkness all around us, when we saw that unmistakable yellow light, it was a sign. It was the promise of love and hospitality and cheerfulness inside that tiny little farmhouse alone on the giant prairie.

This is what the resurrection is for us: a porch light, a reminder of God’s presence with us and love for us. As we travel through the darkness of this world, this small light pokes a hole in the blackness and the emptiness to remind us that there is a real place and real love that lives there.

For most of our lives, this tiny light is far off and distant. We remember God’s promise only in terms of a distant future when we will be with God in heaven. But on Easter, this small, yellow light explodes into brilliance and warmth, fills our being and for a moment, all of Heaven stoops to kiss the earth and we find ourselves in the presence of the real, living, God.

When the disciples needed Jesus the most, when they were at their lowest and had no idea where to go or what to do next, he left the tomb and found them, gave them a message and a mission. He told them to go back to their home, to Galilee, and that he would be waiting there for them. And that’s exactly where he was.  Christ’s resurrection is living, breathing, walking, talking proof that our God is not a dead God sealed in a stone building, locked up in a musty book or even trapped in a distant paradise. On Easter, in the midst of the darkness around us, Christ breaks into our world and gives us the living promise that we can see and hold onto, that we can taste and eat.

On Easter morning, Jesus is once again Immanuel, God-with-us, both in death and in life. The empty tomb is proof that we do not have to wait until we die to see God, that God is with us here, waiting for us at our homes. In the resurrection, Jesus finds us, greets us, and sends us with a mission. In midst of the despair and suffering of life, Jesus invites us to be light for the world, invites us to be God’s porch lights to a people in need of hope and healing. Jesus is the living promise that God has heard the cries of the people, just as God heard the cries of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt. God has heard, and God is acting.

The resurrection is not a one-time event. Jesus’ walking out of the tomb was only the beginning of God’s continuing action of renewal in our broken world. Just as on that first Easter morning, God is still with us, beside us and within us. We celebrate today because Immanuel is here, because God has sent healing and rescue to this place, because Jesus Christ lives and breathes, and God is at work.

Peter says in Acts that “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power;” that “he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” (Acts 10:38) This is how we know that Jesus is Immanuel, and how we know that God is still with us. Jesus Christ still goes about doing good and healing all who are oppressed by the forces of evil in this world. In our baptism, we have been buried with Christ, and this is the morning in which we are resurrected with him. The living, moving God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob and of Jesus is living and moving in us, to do good, and to heal the oppressed.
Last weekend, we lifted our voices with the crowds of Jerusalem, with people all over the world as we cried out, “Hosanna!” which means, “Lord, save us!” Save us from danger, save us from hopelessness and despair, save us from complacency while others suffer, save us from oppression and war and famine, save us from genocide and poverty. As much as we need that blessed assurance of a future in God’s presence, God’s people need rescue from death in our world today even more.

Today, as the risen Christ meets our eyes, our cries of “Hosanna” become shouts of “Alleluia!” which means, “Let us praise the Lord!” We say this word in our worship nearly every week, and it has little meaning to us, another Greek word that is foreign to us. We speak it, and it is grey, it has no color. But today on Easter, of all days, we truly see the color of “Alleluia.” It is the color of the tears that rolled down the women’s cheeks when they saw their Lord on the road. It is the color of the sunrise on the morning of the third day. It is the sunflower yellow of that porch light. Let us not just speak, but shout and feel and dance with Alleluia today, for our God is alive, our God is with us, and our God has come to rescue us. Jesus Christ as emerged from the grave to be light for the world, a light in the darkness, a light which the darkness cannot over come. Christ is Risen! (He is risen indeed!) Alleluia!

This is the Night

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Easter Vigil, Year A
Texts: Gen 1.1-2.4a; Gen 7.1-5, 11-18, 8.6-18, 9.8-13; Ex 14.10-31; Ezek 36.24-28; Zeph 3.14-20; Rom 6.3-11; John 20.1-18

Tonight we gather in solemness as we reflect on the crucifixion of our Lord.  With Jesus in the grave, the evil and sin of the world seem to press down on us more than ever, tonight we feel the weight of death on our shoulders. And so we come together in the evening, huddling together as in a tomb, and we share stories with one another about how God has been with our ancestors and has saved our people throughout history.

We share these stories to remember that even as we gather in fear and sadness, God has proven God’s love and faithfulness for us. God has saved us time and time again from whatever threatens to destroy us. Through the waters of the flood, God blotted out evil in the world. When Israel was hard pressed by the armies of Egypt and about to be slaughtered, God led them through the waters to safety and swallowed up the might of Pharaoh behind them. As God’s people languished in exile, God once again promised through the prophet Ezekiel to purify the people with water so that they would be clean in God’s sight, free from idols and evil.

Tonight as we gather in fear to mourn the death and defeat of our Lord Jesus, we recall the promise made at our baptism, the promise that we have been baptized into his death. Tonight we gather in the tomb with Christ, and we recall God’s power to rescue us from every kind of evil and danger and hardship. Tonight we gather and we recall that God’s promise is to rescue us even from this grave. For, as Paul writes, if we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we shall surely be united with him in a life like his.

Yesterday, Jesus hung forsaken on the cross. But his promise remains that on the third day he will rise again. It is for this reason we come here tonight, even in the midst of sadness and grief, we have a glimmer of hope. As God has delivered us before, we trust in God to deliver us again through the resurrection of Christ.

Tonight, we recall God’s mighty deeds of power, of God’s saving love, of God’s all-transforming goodness: the goodness that can transform the waters of chaos and uncertainty at the beginning of time into all of creation, which God saw was very good indeed; the goodness that can transform a terrible and destructive flood into the purification and sanctification of the whole world; the goodness that can transform an sea into a path and a terrible army into a harmless puddle; the goodness that can take simple water and words and make them into the seal of Gods’ promised salvation in baptism.

Tonight, we hear these stories and we gather in anticipation of God’s saving action in the world. God has promised that in the morning, Christ will rise, opening the way for all of us to new life, abundant life in the Kingdom of Heaven. Tonight, we recall God’s glory in times past and we trust, we expect, we yearn for God’s glory to be shone on this world again in the promised resurrection. Tonight, we sit in the tomb with Christ, and in the morning we rise with him. This is the passover of God from death in to life. This is the night!

A Most Ridiculous Kind of Buffoonery

This is the final sermon in the Lenten series on the Lord’s Prayer. This week’s focus is on the doxology. All Luther quotations are from “A Simple Way to Pray, for Master Peter the Barber” in Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, tr. Timothy Lull. Fortress Press, Minneapolis: 2005

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI on the 6th Wednesday of Lent
Texts: Isa 6.1-7; Rev 5.11-14; Lk 19:29-40

In the Lord’s prayer we have prayed that God’s name be hallowed, that God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done, that we receive our daily bread and forgive as we have been forgiven, and that God keep us from temptation and rescue us from evil. This prayer that Jesus teaches us covers all the bases, catches all the points we ought to remember. Martin Luther writes about the Lord’s Prayer, “It is the very best prayer, even better than the Psalter, which is so very dear to me. It is surely evident that a real master composed and taught it.”

When we get to this last part of the prayer, the doxology, we’ve pretty much finished. In fact, if you’ve ever had the chance to pray this prayer with Catholics, you find they omit this part altogether. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been praying at a Catholic’s bedside in the hospital or at mass with a friend and been thrown off when they say “Amen” after “deliver us from evil.”

However, even though this section of the prayer is not in our Bible and is not a “petition” in the proper sense, it is nonetheless very important. Just as the introduction “Our Father in Heaven” reminds us to whom we are praying, the doxology is a reminder again about what this God in Heaven is like, and why we pray to that God.

Luther goes on to write about the Lord’s prayer, “It seems to me that if someone could see what arises as prayer from a cold and inattentive heart he would conclude that he had never seen a more ridiculous kind of buffoonery… How many pray the Lord’s Prayer several thousand times in the course of a year, and if they were to keep doing so for a thousand years they would not have tasted one iota, one dot, of it! In a word, the Lord’s Prayer is the greatest martyr on earth. Everybody tortures and abuses it; few take comfort and joy in it’s proper use.”

One problem we probably all have, especially me, with praying memorized prayers is that we know the words, but in the praying, the meaning, the implication and the focus escape us. We pray with our minds wandering to other thoughts, only realizing when we are nearly finished. We pray petitions like “forgive as we have been forgiven” and don’t see the irony as we hold grudges, or we pray “thy will be done” as we continue to order our lives contrary to God’s will. Luther recognized this, and even admitted to doing it himself; this is why he calls the Lord’s Prayer “the greatest martyr on earth.”

This is why the doxology is so important, and not because it breaks us out of our reverie on time to say “Amen.” In this part of the prayer, we remember that the kingdom does not belong to us, that we have no power on our own to affect it, and that we are not called to seek our own glory. We remember that the kingdom we pray for is God’s, the power we look for is God’s, and that the glory we work for is God’s.

Let’s think about this. How often to we find ourselves working towards our own kingdom, thinking only our our own glory and power? Even as we pray, we envision things the way we want to see them. We want to see ourselves prosper, our enemies get what’s coming to them. We want to live in comfortable and satisfied lives. Even as the Church of Christ, we too often think only of ourselves. We want to see our congregation grow, our budget increase, our influence spread. But what if that is not what God wants? As Lutherans, we also remember what Dr. Luther wrote in the small catechism about baptism, that it is the old sinful Adam dying daily and our daily rising to new life in Christ. This goes for the Lord’s Prayer; in order to see God’s kingdom, God’s power, and God’s glory, our own desires for authority, power, and prestige must first die before we can get out of God’s way and let God’s will be done in and through us.

This is a tall order. Sometimes, it is God’s will to close a church. Sometimes it is God’s will that we live meagerly. Sometimes it is God’s will that we fail so that God can succeed. Always it is God’s will that we never be satisfied with the way the world is, because God’s kingdom is not yet established, God’s will is not yet being done on heaven as on earth, because we do not yet forgive as we have been forgiven, not everyone receives their daily bread, and we are daily given over to evil and temptation.

While poverty, injustice, egotism and evil remain in this world, we as Christians can never rest because we pray in this prayer, “thy will be done, thy kingdom come,” we pray “give us this day our daily bread,” and “forgive us as we are forgiven” and “deliver us from evil.” This prayer is both a plea to God for help and a call to action for Christians everywhere. God works in the world through the Body of Christ, and if the Body is at rest, God’s work is hindered.

Of course, God’s will is done regardless of our prayer, all these petitions are met whether we ask or not, but, as Luther writes, “we pray in this prayer that it may come about in and through me.” Praying this prayer saddles us with a lot of responsibility, both as individuals and as the Church. To ask that we might be a part of God’s kingdom, be subjects of God’s power, and work together for God’s glory, do we really know what we are getting ourselves into? What if we fail, what if we miss the mark and stray from God’s call? What if we find that we can’t do anything?

Brother Martin writes, “Finally, mark this, that you must always speak the Amen firmly. Never doubt that God in his mercy will surely hear you and say ‘yes’ to your prayers. Never think that you are kneeling or standing alone, rather think that the whole of Christendom, all devout Christians, are standing there beside you and you are standing among them in a common, united petition which God cannot disdain. Do not leave your prayer without having said or thought, ‘Very well, God has heard my prayer; this I know as a certainty and a truth.’ That is what Amen means.”

God promises in love to forgive our failings, but not only to forgive them, but rather to help us so that even our failings serve God. Luther points out that we never pray this prayer, or any prayer, alone; God has blessed us with community in Christ to assure that our prayers are heard and acted out according to God’s will. This is a lot of responsibility for one person, but thankfully we are united by God for this very purpose: to establish God’s kingdom on earth. With God’s help, and with the help of our brothers and sisters, God’s will is done in, through, because of and even in spite of us. We pray this prayer boldly, knowing that God strengthens us as God’s claimed and called people to make it so.
Whenever I hear the word “amen,” I cannot help but think of the movie “The Ten Commandments” with Charlton Heston. They used to show it every year on TV around Easter when I was growing up. I noticed that the characters were always saying to one another, “So let it be written, so let it be done.” This is what ‘amen’ means to us; it means ‘so let the Word of God be written in us, so let it be done through us.’ Most Holy God, yours is the kingdom, yours is the power, and yours is the glory. So let it be written, so let it be done. Amen.

The Strange and Dangerous Kingdom

This sermon is part of a Lenten series on the Lord’s Prayer. This week’s focus is the 2nd and 3rd petitions.

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI on the 2nd Wednesday of Lent
Texts: Col 1.9-14; Rev 11.15-17; Mt 13.31-35, 44-53

Just what is the kingdom of God? We never really get a straight answer from Scripture. Even Jesus, who came to tell us about the kingdom of God, only told us what it was like, and only then in parables. When we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” it helps to understand what the kingdom of God is.

To understand this, first we have to figure out what the kingdom of God is not. It is not where we go when we die. Of all the things Jesus, the Gospels and St. Paul say about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of Heaven, they never once say that it is where we go when we die. Jesus is very adamant that the kingdom is coming to earth, and in fact is already here. The kingdom is also not a kingdom, at least not in the way we think of it. It is not a nation with a capital or a prime minister. The word that gets translated kingdom can refer to this type of kingdom, but it can also mean the state of being, in this case, the state of being ruled over by God. The kingdom of heaven is the reign or authority of God on earth.

To describe the kingdom of heaven, Jesus spoke in parables, because there is no way to describe the kingdom of God in human terms. We hear some of those parables today. Like the kingdom of heaven, parables do not have one “correct” interpretation, like a fable that has a moral. Instead, they are like art, paintings with words that show an aspect of their subject, but what each person takes from it as they look at it can be completely different. Jesus described the kingdom in parables like this because even though the kingdom of God is one thing, it is experienced differently by everyone who sees it.

Let’s unpack some of these parables. Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure in a field, that when somebody finds it, they sell all that they have in order to buy the field. Why not just take the treasure and leave the field? In Jesus’ time, before there were banks, people sometimes hid valuables in fields. Sometimes they forgot where those things had been buried and sold the field with them still buried there, and sometimes they stayed buried for generations. So, laws were developed that whoever owned the field, owned whatever was buried in it. If this man in the parable took the treasure from the field, the owner could still claim it and charge the man with stealing. But, by buying the field, the man could claim rightful ownership of the treasure. To anyone else, this man would seem crazy to sell everything that he owns to buy an empty, worthless field, but to the man himself, the return is worth the cost.

The kingdom of heaven is like a pearl so valuable that a pearl merchant sold all that he had to get it. If he were going to sell it again, it would be better for him just to keep the money from selling all his stuff, but he doesn’t want the money, he wants the pearl. Just like with the treasure in the field, the thing in question is so valuable that it is worth more than everything the person already has. He doesn’t want to sell this pearl, he wants to own it and enjoy it for himself.

The kingdom of God is like a net that catches all types of fish, and at the end, you have to keep the good and throw out the bad. This might mean that at the end of time, bad people go to hell and good people go to heaven with God. It might also mean that people themselves are full of both bad and good things, and that all of a person, both the bad and the good, is brought into the kingdom, but over time, the kingdom changes a person so that the bad parts get thrown out and destroyed, leaving only the good.

The kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman mixes with three measures flour to leaven the dough. This is strange for a number of reasons. First, three measure of flour is like a half a bushel; nearly 30 pounds of flour, enough to feed roughly 400 people. Second, leaven is nasty. We think of yeast in the nice, sterile jars or packets we get at the grocery store, but in Jesus’ time, a person leavened bread by taking old dough from the last batch and mixing it with the new dough. If you’ve ever made Friendship bread or sourdough bread, it’s like that. This old piece of dough contained the yeast, so it was fermented, it smelled bad, it was considered rotten and unclean. It might even have some mold on it. This is why during Passover, Jews eat bread that does not have any leaven in it, because unleavened bread is unclean.

Finally, my personal favorite, the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. Now, like the picture on the front of your bulletin, we think of the mustard “tree” like a giant oak that comes from a speck of a seed. Jesus is playing with some images here. When people talked about Jerusalem, one image they used was a cedar tree, like the ones that grew to the north in Lebanon. Cedars are tall, strong trees prized for the strength and beauty of their wood. Solomon’s temple, the one that was destroyed when Israel went into exile in Babylon, that temple was made of cedar wood. Jesus could have said that the kingdom is like a cedar of Lebanon, and people would have immediately understood that. He’s intentionally calling on that image with the picture of the tree. But, a mustard plant is not a tree. A mustard plant is a leafy, grassy shrub. It gets about 4-6 feet tall. It’s a weed.

Where I went to college in Idaho, in the next town over they had a community garden. This garden was run primarily by the church groups in town. One day, somebody decided that it would be fun to plant some mustard in this garden because of this parable. Then people could see what it was Jesus was talking about. They set aside a corner of the plot for the mustard and planted a few of these seeds, which really are incredibly tiny, and they got a good crop of giant, bushy mustard plants. But, these plants dropped all sorts of seeds and soon, the mustard was spreading beyond its area. The gardeners were constantly pulling up new mustard shoots, but even with all that, they were still loosing the battle.

That fall, when the vegetables had all run their course for the season, the garden was tilled under like it was every year. They figured that should take care of the mustard problem. However, the next spring, before they got a chance to plant anything, mustard started sprouting throughout the entire garden. It grew like wildfire—there was no way they could manage it. They did finally get rid of it, but it took three years and lots of hard work and herbicide.

Jesus might well have said that the kingdom of God is like a dandelion seed as a mustard seed—it would mean about the same. Like the mustard seed, the kingdom of God cannot be contained: though we might put aside our own little enclosure for it and try to tend it and care for it, it is not long before the kingdom escapes our carefully appointed area for it and takes over our lives and our world. Just as Luther writes, “the kingdom of God comes indeed without our prayer of itself!” We pray “thy kingdom come” so that we might be on the side of the mustard, spreading and thriving with God’s help, rather than on the side of the harried gardener, trying in vain to pull it up and reign it in.

This is the inherent danger in praying both “thy kingdom come,” and “thy will be done:” so often we assume that we know what God’s kingdom is or what God’s will is. We assume that we have the answers, and we work so hard to make everybody else see things our way. Aldous Huxley writes, “The third petition of the Lord’s prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.” We trust ourselves to interpret God’s will, but we end up doing only our own. We preach and rave and rail about the kingdom and God’s will and slam all sorts of condemnation on the people who don’t fit into our vision of that kingdom, but we would be wise to remember what Annie LaMott writes in her book Traveling Mercies, “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

In the end, only God knows what God’s will is, only God controls the kingdom. We pray the Lord’s prayer so that the kingdom and God’s will might come in and through us and that we might be included in God’s kingdom, not so that we might make it happen or so that God will make it happen according to our wishes. The kingdom of God is coming, with a wonderful and terrible fury. The humble will be exalted and the exalted will be humbled, the hungry will be fed and the full will be sent away empty, first will be last and the last will be first. God’s will is to break up and sweep away all the sin and poverty and arrogance and inequality and false piety and self-righteousness that plague this world and replace it with the coming kingdom of God. What is truly ironic is that in order to be a part of God’s kingdom and escape the turmoil which comes with it, we ourselves have to be broken up and swept away. Luther writes that the old Adam or Eve in each of us has to be drowned—killed—through baptism, and we must be raised as new creations in Christ. Anyone to sees themselves as God’s instruments for punishment or righteousness or cleansing in this world is in for a big surprise when that moment comes.

With these intense and sometimes frightening images of the kingdom of God, why do we pray these prayers at all? What makes us think that God’s kingdom and God’s will are even in our best interests? This reassurance comes from the opening words of Jesus’ prayer, the words that remind us to whom we are praying: “Our Father in Heaven.” As we pray for God’s unknowable will and God’s inconceivable kingdom, we take comfort in knowing that God truly is our Father, our Abba, our Daddy, and that God’s will and kingdom are gifts given in love.

Radical Grace

Audio recording of “Radical Grace” recorded during worship. (23:12 – Quality is somewhat poor.)
Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Lent 1, Year A
Texts: Gen 2.15-17; 3:1-7; Rom 5.12-19; Matt 4.1-11

We often think Lent is about giving something up. We give up a variety of things for a variety of reasons. Candy, coffee, meat, television, video games, you name it. My campus minister in college used to give up jelly beans for Lent. Of course, she told us right out that this was more because she was a purist and didn’t believe in celebrating Easter before it actually arrived. One year while I was in college, a friend of mine gave up swearing. That one lasted all the way until we all met up to go to Ash Wednesday services together that evening.

We feel like we should test ourselves to resist temptation because of Jesus’ tests we read about today. Or, we feel this is a time to punish ourselves for our sinfulness. But, Lent is neither a time to test ourselves nor punish ourselves. Lent is like a spiritual pit stop, a time to change the oil, rotate the tires, and fuel up.

In the Bible, the number forty is significant. It means “enough,” just like we use “a hundred” or “a thousand” to mean “a lot.” So, “forty days” or “forty years” means “long enough,” but for what? Forty days was “long enough” for God to cleanse the world of sin while Noah was on the Ark; it was “long enough” to give Moses the Ten Commandments and establish a covenant with Israel; it was “long enough” to prepare the Israelites to enter the Promised Land. “Long enough”—not too long, not to short, but just right, and just as long as it takes to get the job done. In each of these stories, God is trying to establish or fix a relationship between God and humanity.

When God leads Jesus into the wilderness for 40 days God is again setting out establish and repair relationships. At Jesus’ baptism, God has just announced to the world that he is God’s beloved Son. Now, immediately after this, Jesus is “cast out” (from Mark) into the wilderness so that he and God can work out what it means to be the Son of God. But, God is also trying to repair a relationship—with all of humanity.

In the beginning, back in the Garden of Eden, God created the world and saw that it was good. God created Adam and Eve to be God’s helpers in the garden. But, they wanted more. They wanted to be like God, they wanted to do things their way, have their wills be done. And so, they disobeyed God’s will.

In the wilderness, Jesus is faced with the same temptations they found in the garden. There is no question in his mind that he is the Son of God—God has said so. There is no question of whether he will be able to resist. Instead test in the sense of an evaluation, this is a test in the sense that it is an opportunity for Jesus to let go of himself and trust completely in God.

First, he refuses to care for his own bodily needs by turning the stones into bread. Instead he relies on God to care for him, just like God took care of the Israelites with manna. Next, he refuses to show his power, to prove that he really is like God. He refuses to accept glory or praise for being who he is, trusting that God’s glory alone is enough. Finally, he refuses the opportunity to fix the world himself, to let his will be done. He trusts that God’s will is better than his own. Where Adam and Eve disobeyed God, Jesus obeyed. These temptations are no tests at all, but instead are a chance for him to live into his identity as the Son of God.

Where Adam and Eve failed, Christ succeeded. Where they saw temptation, he saw only God’s glory. Where they fell, he was raised up. According to Paul, just as Adam’s one sin of disobedience brought death into the world, Christ’s one righteous act of obedience on the cross wiped it out.

But, this might be good time to mention that the story of Adam and Eve is not history. It is not a “just so” story about how sin came into the world at the beginning. It is a metaphor for what happens to each and every one of us every day of our lives. We constantly face decisions which we ought to handle with the knowledge of God’s commands and God’s love, but instead we trust our own judgements and our human systems. We reach out to take the fruit, to turn the stones into bread, to leap from the temple. Every day, we bow down to Satan so that our will might be done.

Even those of us who are good people—and I know many good people here—cannot escape sin. In this country, when we buy a pair of jeans, we support child labor in Indonesia. When we drive our cars to work, we contribute to pollution and climate change. When we eat strawberries, we pay for illegal immigrants to make the dangerous crossing over our border and work for a pittance at a job that American workers would never stand for. As the richest 20% of people in the world, our culture hoards 80% of the world’s resources, leaving 5 billion people to starve and struggle in poverty. Even though nobody in this room has committed any of these acts, we incur guilt simply by feeding our families, wearing our clothes, and sleeping in our beds. This pervasive and systemic evil is the result of the Adam and Eve within each of us insisting on providing for ourselves and living according to our own will. Death truly has dominion in all of us because we are all guilty.

But—even though the Adam or the Eve in us continually rejects God, through the grace of Christ, God continually accepts us. Even though our Adam sinned first, Christ not only covers the debt, but gives a free gift of grace over and above the penalty. As a result, Adam and Christ don’t just cancel each other out. In Christ, we are not returned to a state of Eden, from where we might fall again, but to a state of Heaven, where even when we fall, we receive only more grace. Sin and fall and fail though we will, we cannot fall far enough to bottom out of God’s grace. When God should sentence us to death, God instead sentences us to life—full, abundant  life—with God. God invites us to live into our newfound identity as God’s sons and daughters. To understand how to do that, we observe Lent.

During Lent, we reflect on our sin and brokenness—the things which keep us from God. We see how much power Death has over us and we see where the Adam and Eve in each of us has exerted our will over God’s. Only when we see how hopelessly we are enslaved to sin can we even begin to comprehend the length and breadth and depth of God’s amazing and reckless love for us. It is through this love and faithfulness on God’s part that God works with us to daily drown that old sinner, that old Adam and Eve, in each of us in the waters of our baptism and wash them away just like we wash off the accumulated muck and grim in our daily shower. Even though we tromp and splash through the mud of sin and evil every day, God takes us tenderly in God’s arms and washes us off, like a mother gently washing her babe in the kitchen sink, wiping off the mess of spaghetti sauce and crusty baby vomit that we have so gleefully smeared all over ourselves.

During this season of Lent, we remember that God has saved us from sin for a ministry. God has a mission for each of us: to tell the world about this amazing grace and to invite others into God’s kingdom. Lent reminds us that this invitation is on God’s terms, not our own. Like Jesus in the wilderness, we remember that we are dependent on every word from the mouth of God for our existence. The words which fall to us from God’s lips are words of kindness, equality, justice, acceptance, forgiveness, reconciliation and love. God has shown us that in the kingdom of heaven, even when we completely screw up, even when we continually and wantonly make crappy choices that hurt ourselves, our families, and our communities, and even pain the heart of God, through the free gift of grace which Christ has given us, there is always room for reconciliation. God’s grace means responding to hate, greed, apathy, scorn, hostility and even to violence with love. Sometimes it means tough love, but in the end, it always means LOVE.

To live out God’s radical grace to a broken world means to BE TOTALLY POSITIVE PEOPLE, just like the pledge we took in worship a few weeks ago: to act in love, to react in kindness, and to give ourselves and our brothers and sisters room to fail in love, trusting that in God, we all succeed.

Like Jesus’ time in the wilderness, Lent is about exploring what it means for us to be children of God and discerning how to live into that reality. For some, this spiritual tune-up might mean giving up coffee or sugar, but what it means for all of us is taking time to spend with our Father in Heaven so that God can help us respond to the voice of Christ crying out, “Repent, the kingdom of heaven has come near!”

The New Creation

Audio recording of “The New Creation” from TLC’s radio ministry “The Connecting Link.” (8:26)
Delivered at Trinity Lutheran Church, Pottsville, PA. Proper 2, Year B
Texts: Ezek 17.22-24; 2 Cor 5.6-10, 14-17; Mk 4.26-34

Two summers ago as I worked as a hospital chaplain in Maine, I had the occasion to visit a young man recovering from surgery. He was a little younger than me, about 22 or 23. I always made it a point never to ask the patients I saw why they were in the hospital; I figured that if they wanted me to know they would tell me, but I was so curious why this young, healthy-looking guy was in the hospital, that I couldn’t help but ask what brought him in.

He told me that he was a heavy smoker, both of cigarettes and marijuana. Though his lungs were still clean and healthy, he had developed a single symptom of advanced emphysema: a bubble had formed in his lung and popped, which deflated it and almost killed him. As he told me this, I could see the old fear in his face: he had almost died, and he knew it. He reflected to me that he felt incredibly lucky that this had happened to him because, even though he could have died, for whatever reason this occurred before his lungs were severely damaged. He told me that when he got out of the hospital, he planned to give up smoking entirely because this was a wake-up call of what lay in his future if he continued down this path.

In my conversation with this young man, it did not take me long to see that I was talking with a changed person, a new man. He had stared death in the face and it had deeply altered who he was. In a sense, this young man had died when his lung deflated, and he was sitting before me in that hospital room as a resurrected person, as a new creation.

Like this young man, the new creation that Paul talks about in his letter to the Corinthians has been deeply altered by the experience of death, and can never be the same. The new creation has died with Christ and been resurrected as something completely different than it once was.

We imagine ourselves as the new creation because we are Christians; we trust that Christ died for us and that because of that we are redeemed from our sinfulness and wrong doing, but are we really new? In order to really be the new creation, the old things must first pass away. Every beginning must first be accompanied by an ending, a death. As Christians, we believe like Paul that, “[Jesus] died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”

Martin Luther writes in the small catechism that this death with Christ is not a one-time occurrence. Daily we must drown the old sinner and daily we rise to new life with Christ. Christian faith is a constant cycle of death and rebirth. So what happens when the cycle is stopped?

When I was very young, the Women of the ELCA chapter at my church decided that they wanted to be more welcoming to new members. They wanted to have some fresh ideas and new leadership, somebody who would revitalize the group and help them grow. Because of this, they elected my mother as president. She had the new ideas and the fresh perspective they were looking for. However, Mom quickly found out that these women were not willing to let go of the old to make room for the new. Any time she came up with a new idea or a new way of doing things, her suggestions we rejected out of hand because it wasn’t the way things had always been done. The group was not willing to experience the death of the old things in order to become the new creation.

How many of our churches are like this? How many of our church members are like this? We seek after our own needs, our own desires, our own agendas, and we hold on so hard to the old things that we refuse to let them pass away. We claim to be unafraid of death because we know that it will bring us closer to God, but in practice we fight with all our heart, all our mind, and all our strength to preserve the old traditions, the old order, the old methods.

In refusing to die, in regarding everything from our human point of view, we walk by sight, trusting in what we know rather than walking by faith in God. We prefer to remain at home in the familiar body of our old traditions and trappings and be away from the Lord. We aim to please our selves and our human commitments to the church rather than aiming to please Christ.

It is in this worldly behavior that the Church becomes a Jesus Club. We throw socials and dinners, we practice our worship and put on our activities and meet with our committees, and all because we refuse to die. We get so caught up in what we are doing that we drown out the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit calling us to take part in what God is doing. It is true that we will be spared from eternal punishment thanks to the righteousness of Christ, but when we stand before the Almighty Creator or the Universe and are asked what we as individuals and as Trinity Lutheran Church have done for God’s world, what will we answer?

We too often live as if that young man in the hospital, after his brush with death, were not changed at all, if he continued on down his self-destructive path. Who can experience death and not be changed by it? Those who have not truly died. Christ came that we might have abundant life, but in order to claim that life, we are first called to die: to die to ourselves, to our selfish desires, to our human and worldly point of reference.

Every ending is a beginning. When we die to these things, God in Christ raises us up renewed, refreshed, and reinvigorated. Instead of being driven by our own needs and desires, we are urged on by the love of Christ, the all-encompassing love which is given freely to everyone, regardless of their character, their social class, their mistakes, or even whether they return that love or not. Why should we want this new creation? Why should we seek to give up what makes us who we are to be servants for God? What is so great about having to love everyone when they do not love us in return? Why would we rather be away from our old familiar body and community and at home with the Lord?

This is a question each of us must answer for ourselves. Do we live for God, or for ourselves? Are we Trinity Lutheran Jesus Club, or Trinity Lutheran Church? Are we the old which is passing away, or the new creation in Christ? If we would truly be this new creation, we must first let go of the old things as they pass away and die, for as St. Francis prayed, it is only in dying that we are born to eternal life.

We walk by faith, and not by sight. Our sight tells us that death is the end, and so we fear it. But our faith tells us that in God, every ending is a new beginning. As we outgrow our old ways and put them aside, we make room for exciting new ways of experiencing God, we welcome interesting new people with wonderful new gifts to share. But just as each ending is a new beginning, each beginning must accompany an ending. We cannot continue God’s work in Pottsville unless we are willing to let some things die. We cannot be God’s servants unless we are willing to stop regarding people and practices from a human point of view, and regard them instead based on how they will assist God’s work.

Zombies

Delivered at Trinity Lutheran Church, Pottsville, PA. Baptism of Our Lord, Year B
Texts: Gen 1.1-5; Acts 19.1-7; Mk 1.4-11

When I first read the lesson from Acts for today, I could hardly believe what I was reading. It is a story we don’t expect to hear in the Bible, a story about zombies. Okay, so they’re not exactly the George Romero type, but in a sense these men that Paul finds in Ephesus really are dead men walking. Allow me to explain.

These men were disciples of John, and they had been baptized by him. However, as Paul explains to them, John’s was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins; it was only an admission of guilt and sinfulness with the promise of forgiveness. To be baptized with John’s baptism was like going under the water, and not coming up again; it was a death to sin.

Jesus, too, was baptized with John’s baptism. Sinless Jesus, only son of the Living God, was baptized with John’s baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. However, as we have just heard, when Jesus was baptized, something special happened. He went down into the water, and as he came up, the heavens were torn apart like a curtain, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him. God took John’s baptism and transformed it, made it into something different by entering into it and then injecting the Holy Spirit.

Recall that this is the same Holy Spirit that hovered over the formless and chaotic void at the beginning of creation. The Hebrew word for Spirit also means breath or breeze: it is the breath that God blew into the nostrils of the first human. By breathing the Holy Spirit into John’s baptism, God made it alive, made it more than just a bath in the river just as it made Adam more than just a lump of clay. Sinless Jesus died to sin in John’s baptism and was made alive again with the Holy Spirit.

So what does this mean for us? Without the Holy Spirit, we are like John’s disciples in Ephesus; we are zombies–walking dead, doomed to roam the earth filled with an insatiable hunger, not for brains, but for forgiveness, fullness, reconciliation to God; in short, for life.

But, because God has taken baptism and transformed it through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and because it is into that baptism which we have been baptized, we are not the restless dead. Instead, we are the resurrected dead: we are whole, we are redeemed, we are claimed. Because we are baptized not into John’s baptism of death to sin but in Jesus baptism of resurrection, we are alive, more alive than we were before, because we have received the Holy Spirit, the breath of God which makes all the difference.

I also want to tell you about another transformation which God has enacted for us. At the end of Jesus’ life, he was beaten, humiliated, and executed like a criminal. At the moment of his death, Mark records, the curtain in the temple was torn in two, destroying the boundary between God and humankind, just like the heavens were at his baptism. Then, of course, three days later, Jesus rose from the dead. Just like John’s baptism, Jesus entered into death, and by doing so he changed it, transformed it into something else, something more. Like John’s baptism, death became no longer just death, but the transition between old life and new life.

Just like Jesus’ baptism changes us from the living dead into the resurrected dead through the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ death and resurrection changes us when we die from corpses into seeds awaiting new life, again through the Holy Spirit. This is why Baptism is so important for us as Christians, why it is so much more than just a public bath or a sprinkling of water. Thanks to God’s transformation of baptism from death into new life, our baptism promises us not only new life filled with the same Holy Spirit that hovered over the deep at the beginning of creation, but also resurrection with Christ at the Last Day. As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, we are baptized into Christ’s death, so that we may be raised to new life with him.

We are not just zombies, roaming the earth seeking forgiveness for the sins we continue to commit. Because we share this baptism with Jesus, we are new people, reborn of the Holy Spirit, with a new lease on life and a new mission: to walk as children of the light, to learn from Jesus and live in the Kingdom of Heaven while on Earth.

Now comes the dangerous part. Because we have been filled with the Holy Spirit, not only are we assured of God’s presence with us and God’s love for us, but we are set on fire by God to work for justice, peace, kindness, and equality in all things. Because God has broken into our world in Christ, we are no longer insulated from God, free to be complacent or quiet. The same Holy Spirit which fills us with new life burns within us to live!

The same Holy Spirit that stirred up the deep at the first moments of creation pushes us to participate in the ongoing work of creation. Like the wind, the Holy Spirit is restless and unpredictable; it rushes over us like a raging storm and blows us about in God’s world to bring about new life. This work is good, but it is not safe. It is dangerous. If we follow this holy wind where it blows us, we will certainly find ourselves, like Jesus, at the foot of a cross, for this world, though it is claimed by God, is not friendly to God. Jesus’ entire ministry was fueled by the Holy Spirit and aimed at bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, and because God’s power was a threat to the powers of the world, he was killed. Because the Spirit fills us with the same message Jesus brought, we can expect the same treatment as he received; maybe not death, but we will certainly suffer, be humiliated, and maybe even be seen as criminals if we devote ourselves to God and do work of the Holy Spirit. But, we began this life transformed by Jesus’ baptism into something new, something better; and we can rest assured that when we come to the end of this life, we will join in Jesus’ death, which has also been transformed, and a new life again awaits us.

That is the hope we have in baptism. Jesus entered freely into John’s baptism, even though he had no sin to repent from, for our sake, so that we could receive with him the Holy Spirit, so that we could be changed and become truly alive, and so that we could freely do God’s work without having to fear the cross.