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.

God’s Promise in the Valley of Dry Bones

Audio recording of “God’s Promise in the Valley of Dry Bones” recorded during worship. (16:12)
Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Lent 5, Year A
Texts: Ezek 37.1-14; Rom 8.6-11; John 11.1-45

The valley of dry bones. When you think of the book of Ezekiel, this is probably the image that comes to mind, this or that crazy “wheel within the wheel” schtick. The book of Ezekiel is 48 chapters long, but these are the only two stories most people know from the whole book.

That’s because Ezekiel is dark. It’s macabre. It’s morose. Ezekiel was not a happy man. Most of the stories and images in Ezekiel are frightening or depressing. He is writing as a prophet in exile with Israel in Babylon. Ezekiel and his people had been dragged away from their homes and forced to live subjugated in a foreign land under an enemy king.
Babylon laid siege to the city of Jerusalem for two years before it fell. During those two years, thousands of people were trapped within the walls of the city. Food was scarce, space was limited, and sanitation was terrible. The people were safe from the invading army outside, but starvation and sickness skulked in the streets. Many people died before the army outside could kill them.

When Jerusalem did finally fall, the invaders destroyed houses, ransacked the city, and leveled the temple, the House of God. For the Jews, there was nothing left. “Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost—” they cried, “we are cut off completely.” Cut off from their home, from God, from their identity. Next they were lined up and marched out of their homeland to some strange place far away.

For these exiles, the ones who died in the siege and fell in battle, the ones with their bones scattered over the valley floor around Jerusalem, these were the lucky ones. This is the valley of dry bones Ezekiel calls to mind. God brings him to this place of desolation and asks a question: “Mortal, can these bones live?”

Each of our lives is like this valley. There are places that are beautiful and verdant, places were rivers flow and trees provide shade, happy places that give us joy and comfort. But there are also these places of desolation, places where the earth is scorched by pain and loss and the carcasses of dreams and relationships rot in the sun. God knows this about us. God knows that for all of the beauty and wonder life brings, it is also full of equal amounts of horror and sadness. It is in these grim landscapes of our lives that God meets us and asks us, “Mortal, can these bones live?”

When Jesus’ friend Lazarus died, Jesus arrives to mourn with his sisters Mary and Martha. Both women say to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Doesn’t this sound familiar? At one time or another, we have all come before God and cried, “If you had been here, if you had done something, this wouldn’t have happened!” As they struggle to make sense of their grief, Martha turns to her faith, “I know he will rise again on the last day.” Mary simply weeps. When we suffer, we have a deep need to know why. Maybe God has a plan. Maybe God is punishing us for something. We wonder why God allows evil to happen, wonder why God does nothing, even wonder if God is really good. We are left with questions. Questions, and bones.

Our lives are littered with these bones. Bones of personal tragedy. Bones of regret. Bones of sacrifice. Bones which are constant, painful reminders of death. Death is a part of our lives, woven into the fabric of our being. Death is part of what makes us who we are. We want desperately for these bones to have some meaning, to have some purpose. Mary and Martha asked Jesus why he didn’t come earlier. Israel asked why God had allowed another nation to come and ransack their homes and leave nothing but a valley of dried bones. We want there to be an reason for the bones, an answer, but all we get is God’s question, “Mortal, can these bones live?”

Death is inescapable. It is inevitable. It is as much a part of our life as our birth. The simple fact is that sometimes death just happens. It is random, chaotic, and meaningless. Sometimes, bones are just bones. This is why we fear it: we spend our lives striving after goals and laying plans, but death comes and makes everything pointless in the end. Life is structure, order, and progress; death is just death, just a pile of dried bones.

“Mortal, can these bones live?” God asks this like a professor asking a question he knows the class can’t answer. God is asking, “Mortal, does all this death have meaning? Is all this destruction worth anything? Or is it just a tragic accident of history?” As much as we want the bones strewn across the valleys of our lives to mean something, in the end, they are simply random misfortune. Bones are bones are bones, dead, dried and bleached: lifeless, meaningless.

We cannot deny that life is full of pain. But, it is in the valley of dry bones, the valley of senseless pain that God meets us, that God must meet us. How are we to greet God on the mountaintop of joy if God cannot be just as present in the valley of sorrow? In this valley, God performs God’s greatest miracle. It is here that God takes these lifeless bones and brings them together, bone to its bone, lays flesh and muscle on them, breathes life into them, and transforms a collection of scattered, bleached bones into living, breathing human beings again.

Tragedy is random. Death is inevitable. The power of God is not to stop death and tragedy, not to somehow lock us away safely from harm. Instead, God takes the chaos of destruction and gives it meaning. “Mortal, can these bones live? Can this senselessness make sense?” God transforms the chaotic mess of death that threatens to destroy us and transforms it into a force for structure, for growth, for order: for life. What begins as meaningless suffering God transforms into God’s own work in the world. God makes the worthless worth something, makes the unholy holy.

When tragedy strikes, and it will, in the midst of the pain, we rely on God’s promise. The promise is not that “things will get better” or that “this is for your own good” or even “God is in control.” The promise is that the tragedy of life, instead being the end, God claims and consecrates and transforms into a new beginning. In spite of the atrocity the Israelites suffered at the hands of the Babylonians, God transforms that violence and wretchedness into new life. God says, “I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel… I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act.” (Ezek 37. 12-14)

This is what Jesus means when he says to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Yes, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead that day, but he died again. Yes, God raised up the valley of dried bones, but that was a vision, an illustration to make a point. The point that God was making in that valley, that Jesus was making at the tomb, is that the chaos, death, sin, and evil we encounter in this life will continue to scar us, but it cannot and will not destroy us. On the contrary, God claims what is most evil and redeems it, making it a force for good. As St. Paul writes, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” (2 Cor 4.8-10)

Jesus is God’s promise of new life in the flesh. God took the crucifixion, our ultimate betrayal and rejection of God and God’s promise, and turned what should have been our last chance into our first hope. God transformed humanity’s rejection into God’s acceptance, humanity’s selfishness into God’s selflessness. God redeemed the worst evil and used it as God’s greatest good. God’s ultimate defeat became God’s most glorious victory. Jesus is God’s promise in action. No matter what happens to us, no matter what we do to ourselves and one another, nothing is so evil that God cannot redeem it and transform it into God’s own work.

In this life, we will still experience despair, sorrow, anguish, terror, and grief.  The promise of God, the promise of Lazarus and the valley of dry bones, is that these things will not end us, and that God dwells with us in them. When all is said and done, God will heal us. We will stand up like Lazarus and walk out of the tomb, rise like the slain in the valley and live again, both now in this life, and on the last day when the trumpet sounds. Through God’s power, we flourish in all things, even that which might otherwise destroy us. That power is love; the love of God for us, the love God gives us for one another. “In all these things,” Paul writes, “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (Rom 8.37)

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.