Live Like the Mountain is Out

11th Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 21), Year C
Texts: Isa 58.9b-14; Heb 12.18-29; Lk 13.10-17

At the risk of stating the obvious, this story from Luke’s gospel is a healing story; but who is being healed? Certainly, the woman is healed. Having been bent over for 18 long years, she is finally able to stand up straight; but is she the only one?

I notice as I read this story that her infirmity is very peculiar. She’s not suffering from bleeding or feeling poorly or mental illness but being bent over. Luke says she has a “spirit of weakness.” That’s oddly specific, isn’t it? Maybe she’s got a spinal problem, but then we’d expect her to be paralyzed; maybe it’s anemia, but then how is she able to move about at all?

The Greek word that describes this woman’s posture can also mean to bow in a gesture of humility—or humiliation. I can see how a “spirit of weakness” would leave her that way. The word that Jesus uses to cure her ailment is not “heal” or “cure” or “rise” or even “save” (which is often used in healing stories) but rather “to set free.” Interestingly, the same word can be used to describe the official dissolution of a marriage. I doubt Jesus is granting her a divorce, but isn’t that interesting? The way Jesus helps this woman is by setting her free: but free from what—or whom?

The Death of Hope

2nd Sunday in Advent, Year C
Texts: Jer 33.14-16; 1 Thess 3.9-13; Lk 21.25-36

During Advent, we talk a lot about hope. That’s what the season is about, right—hope? Hope for the return of Christ, hope for the future of our species and our planet, hope for the return of light and the forgiveness of sin and the end of death. Hope for the healing of the nations and of the world. We remind ourselves that, just as we know Christmas is coming at the end of the month, the days are surely coming when Jesus will return and establish God’s reign of peace and justice over all the earth.  But what are we to do when that thing for which we are hoping seems to be so far off?

How to Lay Down a Life

Delivered at Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church in Benson, MN. Easter 4B – “Good Shepherd” Sunday
Texts: Ac 4.5-12; Ps 23; 1 Jn 3.16-24; Jn 10.11-18

I once heard a story of a father and his two children who were hiking in the mountains late one autumn. They were caught in a sudden storm and were forced to seek shelter in a small cave. With no way to make a fire and the temperature falling rapidly outside, the man knew they would all freeze to death if he could not find a way to keep his children warm.

The wind was howling and the mouth of the cave, though small, was letting out precious heat. So, the man curled himself up in the opening to block the wind and the rain. The two children slept through the night, and in the morning, the family was discovered by a search and rescue team, but during the night, the father had frozen to death protecting his children from the fury of the storm outside.

As Christians, we are accustomed to talk of sacrifice. We are very familiar with the idea of giving one’s life for the benefit of another out of love. This is the primary narrative that we use to understand Jesus’ action on the cross: Jesus took the punishment that should have been ours for our sinfulness and died so that we might live. Just like the story of the father and his children caught in the storm, this story stirs in us the image of a God who will stop at nothing to love us and save us, even to the point of dying for us.

What’s really interesting is that this is not in our reading today. Nowhere in John’s gospel does Jesus talk of being punished on our behalf or of dying so that we might live. What he does say is that “God so loved the world that God sent the Son so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3.16) and “The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

I think it is important that we ask ourselves just what it does mean to lay down one’s life. Jesus talks about laying down his life four times in this short section of John we read today, and our reading from the first letter of John mentions it again. We hear that Jesus lays down his life for us, and that this is why God loves him. Jesus says later that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15.13), and we hear that we, too, ought to follow his example and lay down our lives for one another.

Clearly, I cannot forgive anybody’s sins or grant everlasting life if I die for somebody else, and yet the authors of John’s gospel and letters writes that we ought to lay down our lives just out of love as he did. Our actions imitate Christ’s.

The community that wrote, collected and recorded John’s gospel and letters did not regard Jesus’ death as what saves us. Jesus himself refers to his crucifixion as his glorification, not our salvation. In John, it is Jesus’ life that saves us, not his death. Did you hear what Jesus just said? “I lay down my life in order to take it up again.” Jesus died so that he could come back from the grave, and in so doing, prove that even death is no match for God’s saving love and power. Easter morning is God’s definitive answer to our question, “Where is God?” God is right here next to us, breathing on us, eating with us, being mistaken for the gardener or the store clerk or the window washer. God is alive, and because God lives, so is our hope, and so are we.

This is the power of Easter. This is the extent of God’s love. The amazing thing is not that Jesus died for us, but that he lives for us. This is why we celebrate Easter! Instead of dying for our sins and leaving it at that, Jesus came back for us. He broke the lock and smashed the door of death, leaving it hanging askew on its hinges waiting for us to follow him through.

So, in light of Jesus’ resurrection, just what does it mean then for Jesus to lay down his life for us, and for us to lay down our lives to one another? Normally, we have taken these words to mean that our lives should be lives of sacrifice, lives lived for the good of others, even when it means suffering for ourselves. Certainly, this is true, at least to a point. Christ himself endured shame, suffering, and death on the cross to rise for us. But this idea has justified wars and violence as we strive to assert our will over others “for their own good,” has been used to condone abuse and shame as we believe that our suffering is how we “take up our cross and follow.”

There is so much more to the idea of laying down one’s life than simply dying. When we are encouraged to lay down our lives for one another, we are being asked not to die for one another, but to live for on another, just as Christ did. Sometimes, this means following in Christ’s path, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune for the sake of proclaiming the gospel, being willing to die for what is good and right.

But sometimes, it means recognizing when God is calling us to stand up  and refuse to be somebody else’s doormat. Sometimes love requires us to deny others instead of enabling them. Sometimes, we are called to care for ourselves because nobody else will.
You see, we all have moments when we need to put our own desires aside and help those in need, times when we need to empty ourselves to fill somebody else. In those moments, we embrace hardship to promote peace and fullness. But there are also moments when we are the empty ones, when others take away our power and our dignity either willingly or unconsciously for their own benefit. There are times when we are victims, when we are the lost sheep.

It is in these moments of powerlessness when the gospel of Christ and the joy of Easter are a message of empowerment. With Jesus, we proclaim that nobody else has the right to take our lives from us. When we suffer from a loved one’s addiction, when we bear the brunt of an abusive relationship, Christ bids us not to come and die, but to drink and live.

“I came that they might have life,” Jesus says, “and have it abundantly.” (John 10.10) The love Jesus commands us to have for one another—God’s love—always seeks this abundant life, and always strives to change us for the better. Sometimes that love calls us to endure pain and suffering in order to bear out that love to another, but sometimes that love calls us to rise up and take power for our lives back from those who have taken it from us. Jesus, our Good Shepherd, has done both of these. He has proven the extent of his love for us in his resurrection, not his death; he has laid down his life in service to us, not in suffering.

So how are we to know when “laying down our lives” means suffering and when it means refusing to suffer? Listen for the voice of the Good Shepherd, seek after Jesus’ example. When love brings abundant life and changes us and others for the better, that love is worth dying for; more than that, it is worth living for! But love that offers no abundant life but only pain and shame instead is no substitute for the love of God. To those who know this kind of destructive love, Jesus himself opens for us a way back to God’s love that is not blocked even by death itself.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. In calling us to lay down our lives for one another, he asks no more than he himself has done, which is to abide in the love of the Father. “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly,” Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. I lay it down—nobody takes it from me—and I take it up again.”

The Cross is Obedience, Not Suffering

Delivered at Trinity Lutheran Church, Pottsville, PA. Lent 2, Year B.
Texts: Gen 17.1-7, 15-16; Rom 4.13-25; Mk 8.31-38

Over the years, Christians have devised many various and imaginative ways to hurt themselves. There’s the cat-o’-nine-tails, of course, a whip with nine ends, usually with knots or barbs on the end, for whipping oneself while in prayer. Then there’s the cilice, a belt of metal barbs to be worn around the arm or thigh to induce pain. Some have even gone so far as to nail themselves to crosses for periods of time. I could go on, but you get the picture.

I mention this because it is the verse we hear today about taking up our cross and following Jesus that we use to justify and even encourage practices like these. We feel that there is some redemptive aspect to suffering, some purifying and cleansing way in which suffering makes us worthy of God’s grace or helps us to atone for our own sinfulness.

However, though some might find some purifying aspect of pain, this idea that our own suffering can be redemptive is not only false, it is blasphemy and heresy. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes, “It is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. (Heb 10.10)” Christ suffered and died on the cross for sins not his own so that we would not have to pay for those sins. To suggest that we, as ordinary people, can purify ourselves or make ourselves worthy by suffering when Christ, the Son of God, could not, is only blasphemy and idolatry of ourselves.

And yet, verses like this one are used to justify everything from spiritually punishing our bodies, to staying in an abusive relationship. For years priests and pastors have counseled battered spouses to stay with their abusers, and to “suffer with Christ,” that the abuse is their “cross to bear.” In order to see why this is wrong, let us examine what Jesus means by these words.

Immediately before telling his followers to take up their crosses and follow, Jesus tells them that they must first deny themselves. We think of denying ourselves in terms of giving up things or avoiding pleasure, but this is not what Jesus says. He says we are to deny our SELVES, and he says this in response to Peter’s reaction to Jesus’ prediction of his passion and death.

Jesus knew that he would suffer and die for bringing God’s message to humanity. He knew that there could be no other outcome because our broken, sinful world, this adulterous and sinful generation, is hostile to God and to the gospel, which is God’s message of love to us. To avoid death, Jesus would have had to either hide or recant the gospel, neither of which would have served God’s purpose in sending him. Even though Peter was speaking out of love for his teacher, out of fear for his safety and well-being, Peter’s mind was set on human things: preservation of life, saving Jesus’ honor, victory over their opponents. Jesus rebukes him because he does not have God’s bigger picture in mind.

When Jesus asks his followers to deny themselves, he asks us to put God’s will ahead of our own goals, our own ambitions, our own plans. Peter’s human way of thinking told him that in order to win, Jesus had to survive and continue to preach. God’s plan had Jesus being true to his message and bold to the end, being completely obedient to God and faithful to the gospel no matter what, in the end proving that human authorities, this world, even death have no power over God and God’s children.

To deny ourselves, then, we must put aside our own concepts of right and wrong, of victory and defeat, of good and bad and trust completely in God’s will and in God’s ways. We must throw these perceptions and attitudes away like the dung they are, for they are constructions of this adulterous and sinful generation, habits and practices and ideas that we have learned from living in a broken world. It is only then that we can truly follow Jesus.

When we deny ourselves, when we allow our actions and our attitudes to be governed not by our own wants and desires and appetites, but instead by God and the gospel of love, we will find that in order to follow God’s way, we are often forced take up a cross, just like Jesus did. The cross does not refer to any and all suffering, but the hardship and opposition and shame we face for not being complacent in this world, for not simply following the herd, for marching to the beat of a different drummer, one pounding out a heavenly cadence.

God does not want us to suffer, either at our own hand or at the hands of others; any such suffering grieves the heart of God. Nor did Jesus did die on the cross because God wanted him to die. Jesus died on the cross because the powers and the systems of this world, because humanity, demanded it; because we could not bear the message of Christ’s gospel: that God loves the world and everyone in it so much that God sent the only Son to be present with God’s people in this adulterous and sinful generation and to proclaim to those broken people that they are the Beloved of God.

You see, when Jesus warns us about being ashamed of him and his gospel, he is not warning us about the consequences of not “witnessing” to everyone we meet, he is warning us about not realizing that even at our dirtiest, wickedest, and evilest, we humans are the Beloved of God, that though we deny and nullify our worth to one another through our sins and our evil ways, God has deemed each of us worthy enough to send Jesus to take us by the hand and teach us the way of God, even when that meant that God would have to endure the death of God’s only begotten Son.

In verse 37, Jesus asks, “Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?” What is there that is worth our individual lives? What is each one of us worth? Even as the Son of God asks this question, God the Father answers, and that answer is Jesus himself. Jesus died on the cross by our hands for sins that were our own, and in that very act, God, instead of seeking retribution and justice upon us, forgave us our sins.

So, you see that taking up our cross is not about suffering in solidarity with Christ or even about gladly bearing any and all pain in this world. Denying ourselves, taking up our crosses and following Jesus is about living out our lives as a response to what our Creator has done for us in sending the Son to give us the gospel, God’s love letter to humanity, signed in the blood of the Lamb. As we live our lives in response to God’s love letter, we can do nothing but acknowledge our own worth and the worth of everyone around us in the eyes of God. By submitting to cruelty and injustice, by allowing others to abuse us and shame us or anyone else for no reason, we are dishonoring the Beloved of God, we are cursing the creation, and by extension, the Creator.

Because Jesus has shown us the extent of God’s love for us, we will stand up boldly and declare for all to hear the all-surpassing value that God has assigned to all people, and we will gladly suffer any shame or derision or pain which comes upon us for bringing that message to the world. God wants all humanity to know that we are loved, and that God wants our love in return, and not even death will keep that message from being told. Even if we must endure the shame, the suffering, and the humiliation of the cross, we will follow Jesus and proclaim this message to the world: God loves you this much <stretch out arms as on a cross>.