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 Hardest Kind of Freedom

This sermon is part of a Lenten series on the Lord’s Prayer. This week’s focus is on the 5th petition. Note: “Pat” and “Jerry” are characters from the weekly skit performed during worship.

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI on the 4th Wednesday in Lent.
Texts: Jer 31.31-34; Rev 21.1-7; Matt 18.21-34

“Forgive us our sins as we have been forgiven.” Seems simple enough, doesn’t it? Pretty straightforward. God has forgiven us so much that all the offenses we make and take on a daily basis are small change. What’s a couple hundred denarii? Almost all the arguments, conflicts and sins we experience in our day to day lives are pretty inconsequential. The jerk who cut me off in traffic this morning, the dork who punched me at school, the brown-nosing coworker who got my promotion… In the grand scheme of things, nearly all these little things are as silly as Pat and Jerry fighting over a line on the ground. In cases like these, forgiveness makes sense.

I learned about true forgiveness from a friend of mine named Margaret. Some of you have heard the story about how I met my wife while we were working as hospital chaplains in Maine. We were completing what is called Clinical Pastoral Education; it’s a requirement for all Lutheran pastors and for many other denominations, as well. There were 6 other people in our group, one of whom was Margaret. As part of this unit, we not only see hospital patients, but we dig around in our own baggage and learn more about what makes us tick. At the beginning, we each tell our life story. Margaret told us about how she and her husband Bruce had had a hard marriage, how they had even separated, but they were able to forgive one another and get back together. The two of them run a home for disabled vets called Camelot. When their three daughters were growing up at Camelot, one of them was abused by a patient there. Margaret could have, and maybe even should have walked away. Doing so would have left nobody to run Camelot, though, and all those men would have no place to turn. Somehow, Margaret was able to find healing enough to keep working with those men, and even to love them.

Margaret has remained a close friend to both Stephanie and me. We asked her to make our wedding rings. It was while we were talking with her back and forth about the rings that we found out that Margaret’s oldest daughter Molly had been murdered.

They still don’t know all the details. A man staying with relatives, friends of Molly and her husband, shot her. Nobody knows why. Margaret told me shortly after the incident that she just didn’t have it in her to forgive him. Does that make her a bad person? I for one can’t blame her.

We are at risk to suffer untold hurts in this world. For every wound, every bruise, every shock that we take, God feels the pain. When we speak of grace, too often we forget how heavy grace is. When I was in college, I was explaining to some friends of mine what a Lutheran was, and I talked about grace. “Wait,” they said, “so you can sin as much as you want and God still forgives you?” What do you say to that? Paul addresses the question in Romans: “Should we continue to sin so that grace may abound?” His reply: “By no means!” (Rom 6.1) God’s forgiveness is free, but it isn’t cheap. When we hear that God has forgiven us, we must always remember what that means: God has forgiven not only us, but all of humanity, for every wrong we have ever committed: mountains upon mountains upon mountains of untold terrors: genocides, holocausts, wars, murders, slaveries… the list goes on. With all that we have ever done to one another and to God, how could God simply let that go?

A man owed a king 10,000 talents. In terms for today, think of it like 10 trillion dollars, with a ‘T’. It is an amount he could never hope to pay back in 100 lifetimes. It is an amount that really only makes sense when talking about rich nations, not single persons. And yet, the king forgives him. Why? Pity. Compassion. Love.

God forgives us because God wants to live with us and love with us. As John of Patmos puts it, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God;    they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” (Rev 21.3) God forgives us so that nothing will stand between God coming to live in and among us and love us. In order to do that, God had to set aside all that pain and terror we have caused God.

God commands us to forgive because God’s wish of one family in Christ cannot be realized unless we are united with one another as well as with God. As long as we hold offenses against each other, we cannot fully love one another. Before we can come together, we have to remove what stands between us. Peter asks Jesus about “another member of the Church,” but the word he uses is not “church member,” but “brother.” In Christ, all of us, not just Lutherans, not just Christians, but all of us are brothers and sisters. We cannot live into that relationship if our debts get in the way.

In the Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes is falsely imprisoned for 14 years. He escapes, finds a treasure, and spends years more planning and exacting revenge on the people who sent him to prison. Imagine: being in prison for 14 years, then to be free! But Dantes was not free. He was still imprisoned, not behind bars of steel, but bars of malice and revenge. After his escape, his life was not lived for himself, but for the purpose of destroying those who imprisoned him.

This is what God does not want: God does not want to be a slave to a debt, even a debt so massive as what we owe. God also does not want us to be slaves to  debts owed to us, either. God sent Jesus that we might have life, and have it abundantly (John 10.10), that we may be free indeed (John 8.36). Christ’s mission, God’s desire, is for reconciliation, not just forgiveness. Forgiveness is dissolving of a debt, but reconciliation is the repairing of a relationship. God longs so deeply to be with us that God is willing to set aside our great debt so that God can be reconciled to us. In turn, God has given to us that ministry of reconciliation, that mission of repairing the relationships of the whole world so that we might be free indeed.

When we pray this petition of the Lord’s prayer, we are praying that God’s work of reconciliation might be done through us, but also that when we do not have the capacity to forgive someone for what they have done to us, that God might give us the strength to let the offense go, let it fade away to nothing so that we might be free.

Even though Margaret is not able yet to forgive the man who killed her daughter, she does not want to be a slave to that crime. She wants Molly to rest in peace, and she wants peace for herself and her family. That is why she has gone to petition the State of New Hampshire to abolish the death penalty; so that she doesn’t have to face the pain again of losing a life.

Talking to Margaret humbles me. She teaches me about God. Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian author and theologian, writes, “If you want to find out who you are apart from who you think you are, watch where your feet take you.” We are able to believe things about ourselves that we want or hope to be true, but which are not who we are. I want to believe that in Margaret’s place, I would be able to forgive, but I will never know unless I find myself in her place. What humbles me about Margaret is that even in the midst of such pain, even after her whole world has been shattered, her feet are still carrying her along the path of God. How many of us can say that our experience of God in Christ has changed us so fundamentally that even when we don’t know what we are doing, our feet still take us to God?

This is what God desires for us: for the Holy Spirit to enter into us so completely that our hearts and God’s are one. God describes this through the prophet Jeremiah this way: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” (Jer 31.33-34). Father, forgive us our debts, help us to forgive the debts we are owed, so that we all may be one.

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.