United Lutheran Church Sermons

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, February 5, 2012

2012-02-05T12:59:00.003-06:00

Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147:1-11, 20c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22-23
Mark 1:29-39

As soon as [Jesus and his disciples] left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

Last fall several youth and parents from United Lutheran went to Lake View neighborhood to do a Night Walk with an organization called the Night Ministry. Before we broke out into teams to actually walk on the street and simulate what it would be like to be homeless, a Night Ministry staff person talked with us about what it means to be without a home. As part of this discussion, we were asked to say all the benefits that come with having a home. About 15 minutes later, there was a list of at least 50 things on the white board…and I’m sure we could have come up with 50 more. Some of the benefits were bigger things, like safety, protection, a place to cook food, eat, and hang out with family and friends, like many of us will do to watch the Super Bowl this afternoon. Some of the benefits were more hidden things that we take for granted: a mailing address, an internet connection, light to see and do things at night, a place to grow plants and vegetables. Put together, these all combine to give the over-arching benefit of a place that gives us identity. It was an eye-opening moment for us to see with new eyes all these seen and unseen privileges that come with living in a home.

That over-arching home benefit of receiving identity—a sense of self-worth, a sense of groundedness—is something that we may have come to see with deeper appreciation in recent years. Since the economic collapse of 2008, thousands upon thousands of homes in the U.S. have been foreclosed on. Many have found themselves without a job, without steady income, and without the resources to pay their mortgage. Even more than the economic impact this has had on these homeowners who had to walk away from their homes was the devastation of no longer having that identity, self-worth and stability that comes from living in a home. Not only did these people have to leave the place that gave them identity...they had to leave the whole web of relationships that surrounded their home—neighbors, their children's classmates, friends, their church community and nearby family members. Being torn apart from their homes meant rebuilding the whole foundation of their social lives...and rebuilding their connection to a new community.

It’s that kind of loss of connection that Jesus sought out immediately after his first act of public ministry in the Capernaum temple. If you’ll remember last week’s reading from Mark’s Gospel, Jesus healed an unclean, demon-possessed man right there in the temple—the very place where this man's uncleanliness had forbid him to enter. Now Jesus continues his campaign of renewal, his campaign of bringing the kingdom of God near to us, by going to one of the most ordinary places in our daily lives: our home.

Jesus did not begin his ministry by bringing his message of the good news of God’s renewal of God’s kingdom come near to the places of power in Israel. Jesus did not go right away to a city, where the richest and most politically powerful people and institutions in Israel were. Jesus went directly into a common setting, where everyday people lived everyday lives doing everyday kinds of work, in everyday kinds of homes. Jesus shows up in a home, a place that gave people as much an identity and connection to community as it does today.

But even moreso than blessing the structure of the home itself with his presence, by coming into a home so early in his ministry, Jesus gave his blessing to the relationships, the self-worth, and the grounded connection to the family and community that a home gives us.

When Jesus enter the home of Jesus' disciple Simon Peter, however, the health of the relationships there are being torn apart. His mother-in-law’s fever threatened to isolate her from the relationships in her home and community that were the lifeblood of her existence. Without her health, she could not function in the role that gave her an identity of who she was. Without her health, she was unclean, unacceptable and isolated to the rest of her community—a community that she had already been distanced from after her husband's death widowed her.

Jesus comes into this place and extends the reaches of his kingdom to this relationally void setting. Not only does he come there and heal this woman, he restores her calling within her home life. Immediately after her healing she builds on the relationship that has healed her, and begins to serve and minister to Jesus and his companions.

Last week, we heard that Jesus’ healing in the temple turned sacred spaces like this church into spaces where God turns us from unclean into acceptable in God's sight. Today, Jesus turns the ordinary space of homes like ours into spaces where God connects us to one another and to Jesus’ kingdom of restored relationship. Last week’s Gospel blessed us to re-imagine this place as a place where we can find healing. This week's Gospel blesses us to re-imagine the home as a setting where Jesus also longs to set up his kingdom in our lives. His presence there does not necessarily promise to fix whatever may try and isolate us from relationship to our community...but his is a presence that puts us in touch with his power that casts out the power that sickness, disease and death try to wield to keep Jesus and his kingdom at bay. This week Jesus sets up his kingdom in the most ordinary of places, to show that his transformation can turn any place—even a place of sickness—into a place of healing, a home and a community.

What could Jesus’ kingdom look like in the homes we live in? How can we take Jesus’ power over what keeps us from others into our homes? In what ways can Jesus' healing presence turn our homes into places of community and wholeness, just like it was for this widowed relative of Jesus’ disciple? Maybe Jesus' kingdom coming to our homes looks like a place where relationships with each other are surrounded and bathed by daily prayer, a practice that bathes us in closer relationship with God and one another. Even Jesus himself needed prayer, like when he goes alone to pray after healing his disciples' relative. Maybe Jesus' kingdom coming into our homes looks like a place where family bonds run deeper than blood, where strangers are welcomed as family, just like the Bread Breakers ministry at ULC that mixes up different people into homes for meals and fellowship. Maybe Jesus' kingdom coming into our homes looks like a place where Jesus’ Lordship dismantles our attempts to live for ourselves, and empowers us to instead serve one another. Maybe it looks like a place where no sickness, disease, stigma or fear keeps the compassion of others from coming in. Maybe it looks like a place where eyes are kept open for Jesus' healing to break in and mend the cracks that are bound to come between anyone living under the same roof.

Homes may be something that we take for granted. But Jesus’ second miracle in Mark shows his power equipping us to share his healing even in such an intimate and private setting as a home. Even there, being present to one another in our weakness—which is the definition of healing—becomes not just something Jesus gives us, but something Jesus gives us the power to be for each other.

Christian memoirist Sara Miles writes that Jesus’ healing “shows us how to enter into a way of life in which the broken and sick pieces are held in love, and given meaning…in which strangers literally touch each other, and [in] doing so make a community spacious enough for everyone…in which the deepest desires of our hearts draw us to health…” (Jesus Freak, 105) May each and every one of us discover Jesus’ healing way of life not just in this sacred space, but also in the ordinary that Jesus makes sacred through his healing presence that creates his kingdom in our homes.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, January 29, 2012

2012-01-29T13:19:00.004-06:00

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
Deuteronomy 18:15-20 • Psalm 111 • 1 Corinthians 8:1-13 • Mark 1:21-28

[Jesus and his disciples] went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, "What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God." But Jesus rebuked him, saying, "Be silent, and come out of him!" And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, "What is this? A new teaching--with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him." At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.

Believe it or not, Valentine’s Day is coming up on February 14^th,so please count this as your reminder to get your valentine a card or gift. Those days have a way of sneaking up on us sometimes. As we look towards that day in a few weeks, it got me thinking about what makes for a healthy relationship in married life, or in a dating relationship, or even what makes for a healthy friendship, one where there’s just lots of mutual affection and respect—not in a lubby dubby way, but in the best possible sense. And one of the things that is an ingredient in a healthy relationship, believe it or not, is something that’s actually counter-intuitive to what we’d think would make for health…and it’s conflict.

I was taught in seminary to always be wary of a couple coming in for pre-marital counseling that had never had a conflict before….because health in any relationship is not that there’s an absence of conflict, but that when it happens there’s a willingness to talk about it, and remain faithful to each other, and to forgive, so that the disagreement does not become a burden on what’s most important, which is the relationship—and not whatever it is the disagreement is about.

Another way we could say this is: “Staying connected in our relationships is not about who is right. It's not about keeping score.” When our spouse hasn’t taken out the trash in three weeks and it’s their job, and we go to them and they point out that we haven’t cleaned the toilets in four weeks, the way forwards in the relationship is not about keeping score. When a friend at school invites you over to play video games with a big group of friends and then doesn’t let you play as much as anyone else, and you ask them about it and they complain that you’re not good enough to possibly have a chance at beating them, the way forwards in the relationship is not about keeping score. When a parent who has been increasingly spending 3 and 4 nights a week at work finally asks their child if they would like to watch a movie for a family night at home, and the child says “no”, going on listing each time in the last few months when the parent called to say they couldn’t give them a ride to a friend’s house or to a play date because they had to stay at work…the way forwards in the relationship is not about keeping score.

When Jesus begins his public ministry in today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel, he paints a picture for us of how “not keeping score” is a fundamental part of how Jesus reforms and renews our relationships with each other in his kingdom. A few weeks ago we heard Jesus declare, after his baptism and his journey through the wilderness, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15) Today’s Gospel is our first picture of what the kingdom that Jesus comes to usher in looks like….and the scene where he steps into his public ministry is a scene where there is a whole lot of score keeping going on.

It’s the Sabbath day, a holy, sacred day for the Jews, and as Jesus begins interrupting their worship with his teaching, a “unclean” man, a man possessed by a demon, a man who by the score kept in the temple regulations should not have been there. But nevertheless, he comes inside this holiest of holy places. This man coming in to this temple changes the score that was usually kept in this sacred space: where the so-called “clean”, acceptable, privileged and powerful ones came and were affirmed for their “ritual pureness.” This sacred space was not supposed to be a place where people who were “unclean” came in and God made them acceptable.

But that’s the kind of kingdom Jesus wants to build. Jesus comes in and sees that the way forwards for him in his relationship with God’s people is not about keeping score of how unclean this person or that person is. Jesus comes to reform an unhealthy Temple system where people cannot or are not able to admit: all our lives are “unclean”, blemished and scarred.

In Jesus’ kingdom, everyone is unclean…not just this possessed man, but everyone…those inside and outside of God’s sacred space. Everyone faces evil powers that try to abuse and enslave us,whether it's addiction, greed, affluenza, sickness, workaholism... Whatever it is…no one gets a perfect score in the game called life. For Jesus to find a way to inaugurate his rule among us, his way forwards in his relationship with us, he chooses not to keep score of all the ways we are unclean. His rule comes so that when we gather in his name, lives are changed, and we who are unclean can discover that his rule makes us whole.

When Jesus comes to the Temple, he rebukes the power that keeping score of each other’s faults and good works has on us. When he gives us his healing power, he comes to the center of Israel's religious life to show us...he is Lord over even the most powerful systems and communities. His Lordship comes and rules over that which tries to possess this man, and us. His Lordship comes and exposes the way worldly powers keep their power—by keeping score. He comes in with a different kind of Lordship that unbinds the powers that try to Lord themselves over us...so that his rule of acceptance and mercy can rule in our hearts.

Jesus begins his rule in his kingdom with this miracle of an exorcism….a miracle that turns sacred space like this space here this morning…into a portrait of his kingdom… a kingdom where as our Lord, he doesn’t display his greatness through might, force or power. Jesus’ rule gives up his divine greatness for the sake of loving us. His rule gives up bullying us into submission and instead wins us over with his mercy. Jesus’ rule gives up power, to show that we can all have the power to be equal partners in his kingdom. In his kingdom, it’s not the score of winners and losers that matters; it’s not the score of our wrong or right behavior. It’s the giving away of his healing, gracious love, as we’ve been given…love that gives itself away for the sake of both the clean and the un-clean...that is what his kingdom looks like.

Why is it, though, that so many people persist in thinking that this place, and the church in general, is anything but a place where everyone gets to be in the picture of Jesus' kingdom? Why does the image persist that scores are kept here, rather than Jesus' making clean of us all? We see some of the common reasons why in an internet video campaign made last year called “Back to Church Sunday”. All the reasons people gave for not coming to church had something to do with viewing themselves like the possessed man in today’s Gospel did: as “unclean”...as people who were possessed by powers, perceptions and guilt that made them think God would not accept them in church. I'm going to recreate a few of these reasons with Lucy's help right now, where I'll share the reason someone gave for why they are “unclean”, and then an actual church-goer responds with the values of Jesus’ kingdom:

“I can’t come to church until I get my life together.”
“Church is how I got my life together….it’s a place for a new beginning.”

“Church is filled with a bunch of hypocrites.”
“And there’s always room for one more…imperfect people are welcome.”

“All they care about is your money.”
“[A CEO replies] They care about me, not about my money…people are priceless.”

“Church just makes me nervous.”
“I was nervous at first, but then I felt right at home….right where God wants you.”

“I’m not sure I believe everything you believe [in church].”
“But you can still belong…doubters are welcome.”

“Church is for whimpy, girly men.”
“[Big rough dudes with goatees and muscle shirts:] You want to say that again?”

“If you knew me, and what I’ve done…you wouldn’t want me.”

“If you knew me and what I’ve done, you wouldn’t be worried [about being a part of this community.]”

These are so many ways we can invite others not just into church...but into Jesus' kingdom....where scores are not kept, but relationships with each other, God and the world matter the most. Jesus changes the rules in his kingdom so that we are no longer bound by the powers that keep us from conneting with him and one another.

What’s occupying us, or our community, or our world that we need to be unbound from? What do we need to lift up to God to loosen its grip on our lives? Whatever “uncleanliness” it is that possesses us, Jesus' kingdom of compassion breaks us from them and rules over them all: even our failures, our hypocrisy, our finances, our doubts, and our stereotypes. Jesus’ kingdom comes, on earth just as it is in heaven, to rule over even the conflicts of our closest relationships…conflicts that are inevitably part of even the healthiest of relationships…conflicts where we can find a way forwards not by keeping score, but by giving up being right for the sake of staying connected to the other person. That may be not be the most popular message on this year's Valentine’s Day cards…but it’s the message of Jesus' inaugural miracle...a message that sets us under his rule...and that frees us from a life of keeping score to a life that lives his rule of love for the other.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, January 22, 2012

2012-01-22T12:57:00.002-06:00

Third Sunday after the Epiphany
Jonah 3:1-5, 10 • Psalm 62:5-12 • 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 • Mark 1:14-20

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God,and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea--for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." And immediately they left their nets and followed him.As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

Is it the case in your home, as it is the case in many, that the younger the family member of friend there, the more likely they are to know how to operate your technology? Take for example, Peter, whose family had a twelve year old VCR—remember those? This VCR was malfunctioning so bad, it refused to rewind, fast forward, or even eject out the videotapes. Peter’s seventh grade son announced to his wife and him: “Mom and Dad, this is a really low-tech household.” So to remedy this situation, Peter went and bought a new DVD player that he said probably ushered them into the threshold of being at least a “medium-tech” household.

But a new problem arose as the result of this purchase. The family room table now had one more remote control device, bringing the total to three. Nobody could figure out how to operate this new one! It had more buttons than the cockpit of a Boeing 757 airplane. Even when they could figure out how to operate it, it wasn’t always easy to find it!

Several years ago the company Magnavox released a study indicating that more than half of all Americans lose their remote every week between one and five times. In 63% of these searches, it took at least five minutes to find the lost remote. Most people indicated they found their remote hiding in furniture or a nearby room. Six percent said they would usually find it in their refrigerator!

So who came up with this device that is so prone to being lost? Zenith engineer Gene Polley came up with the idea for the remote in 1955, hoping that we would be forever freed from the oppression of having to get up off our couch to change the channel.

But this simple little device is really about one thing…one thing that we want so desperately in our lives, but that slips through our fingers as quickly as we can lose this little rectangle of plastic in our home. What we really want with this device, and with our lives is control. Almost every marriage, or coupled relationship in the western world finds this device to be a bone of contention in the household. Perfectly loving, caring people can in an instant become set off with rage over whose fingers can control the channel, volume and when to hit the pause or mute buttons. As handy as this device is, it fuels a hunger we have to be the one in control of our life. (Marty, The Anatomy of Grace, 92-93)

Jesus’ call of his first disciples in Mark’s Gospel finds an extraordinary example of people who lose control over something much more precious than a remote control. When Jesus calls Simon, Andrew, Peter and John, they immediately, without hesitation, drop their fishing nets…and follow Jesus. In an instant, they let the “remote” out of their hands, and out of their lives: they drop the very thing that gives them life, their livelihood, their income, their food and their community. They even drop their nets to leave behind their families.

How could these disciples have possibly done this? What happened to the people who depended on their fish for food? What happened to their nets and boats? Did they just float away into the sea?

The disciples display an astonishing willingness to leave everything behind not for the sake of a secure, prosperous and easy future. Rather than being in control, they leave everything for the sake of following Jesus. They lose their life in the love and service of “fishing for people”, in order to save it.

Jesus’ invitation to follow him challenges us to ponder—what are we willing to give up control over to follow where he will lead us. As we enter deeper into this season of the church year, after we celebrate God’s coming into the world through Jesus, we get to enter deeper into the embodying our call from God to follow this incarnate Jesus. We heard last week about Samuel’s call to be one of God’s prophets. Samuel’s call came from God's voice that led him to a specific action: demanding accountability for the Temple priest’s sons who were stealing and abusing their power. There are times when we respond to God’s call for such a specific action. But there are also times for each of us where we are called by God to account for who is our Lord…to account for who we say we give our whole lives to, whom will we follow, who receives our utmost allegiance. No matter how much we stumble, no matter how much we drag our feet, no matter how much we may want to not let go of our control, Jesus asks us to let go...and follow.

Somehow, some way, the invitation that Jesus offers to these first disciples compels them, as it compels us, to answer that call to follow Jesus as their Lord. Somehow, some way…they trusted that what they left behind—all that was unfinished, all that was still to be done, all the people they loved and cared for—that those things were in God's hands. Somehow they trusted God would mend the nets of the parts of their lives that were now their former lives, the lives they had torn themselves apart from.

Perhaps in the end what compelled the disciples to leave everything and risk living a life they had no control over was that they really were not changing professions. Jesus told them instead of fishing for fish, they would be fishing for people. Instead of casting nets for fish, these fishermen would cast their nets to catch people and get them out of the waters that were drowning them with sickness, pain and suffering. These fishermen would confront those who wanted too many fish at the expense of others going hungry. These fishermen were asked to put Jesus as the captain of their fishing boat, even when doing so meant taking the risk that the powerful would stop at nothing to try and drown them.

The promise of Jesus’ call to us, to follow him as his disciples, is not a guarantee of a life where we are in control. It does not guarantee that life will be easier. But it does promise that our lives’ legacy will be lives of love, because the way of following Jesus always flows through the cross. The way of Jesus flows through responding to the world’s hurts with his compassion. The call to follow Jesus is the call to risk everything for the sake of letting Jesus' mercy loose on the world. His call is to follow him to the cross where he let go of his life, in order to give us life...and where his gnarled fingers opened just enough to find a couple of spikes being hammered through them. Living with our hands open means facing the threat of losing everything.

Rather than grasping for control over what gives us power—whether it's authority, status, or a remote control--we can answer his call to love as he loves us: by opening our hands. We can open our hands to something that’s much more low-tech than a remote control: we can open our hands to the flesh and blood hands of someone else. Living with open hands gets us in touch with Jesus' love that touches people's lives...and that has the power to cast out fears.

What do we need to let go of today, in order to follow Jesus’ call of open-handed compassion more closely? What do we need to get un-stuck from and hand over to our Lord, so we can partake of the rich life that finds power in letting go for the sake of love? That’s a question for us all to answer…but thankfully as people Jesus calls together to be the church…we don’t have to answer it alone. With Simon, Andrew, James, John and all who let go to follow Jesus, we get to answer his call together.

Today during the Lord’s Prayer I’d like to invite us to let go of whatever we are holding, and hold onto each other’s hands….and to together embody what living with our hands open looks like. Although it may be awkward…it’s no more awkward than it would be to give up bickering about who in our house gets to hold the remote control. Instead, it will be like anytime we let go of our desire for control: we'll find ourselves instead getting in touch the undeniably low-tech life of caring for the human family that following Jesus as our Lord is all about.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, December 25, 2011

2011-12-25T12:36:00.003-06:00

Nativity of Our Lord: Christmas Day
Isaiah 52:7-10 • Psalm 98 • Hebrews 1:1-4, (5-12) • John 1:1-14

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.

Some of you may know that I have become a runner. Many of you may not know that my preferred time to run is fairly early, 5:30 am or so, with a running group, which both gives good reason to get out of bed, and also provides for good company and encouragement. In a few weeks I will mark my first year of running this early in the morning.

Over the course of this year I have truly seen how different the light is that early in the morning. In the middle of summer, by 5:30am, the sun was up, and its rays were peeking over the tree tops as we got going. But now, in winter, it is dark, and it’s even still dark by the time I get back home. I’ve learned that in these winter months, this is all the more reason why it’s important to run with a group, because the rest of them seem to have something I don’t ever use...a light. Whether it's a head lamp, lit arm band, or brightly lit vest—they all have some way of being seen in the dark. Running around Oak Park and River Forest that early in the morning, believe it or not: there’s more than a few cars driving around. So in winter, without some kind of illumination, we would be in danger—we wouldn’t be seen until a car would come a few feet from us, which would be too late.

In the darkness, whether the darkness of running, or the darkness of navigating our way through our journey of life, it is a truth of our existance that we need light in order to see our way forwards. No matter whether our journey is smooth or full of obstacles, in order to not stumble, we all need lights that can help us spot danger, and enlighten the pathways that will lead us home. We especially need a light that can shine not just in the daytime, in our darkest hours--light that cannot be overcome by the dark.

The light that can illumine our way in life...the light that does shine its light on us as bright as the dawn of this morning’s sunrise...the light that comes to give us sight of God’s love for us...is nothing less than Jesus himself. John’s Gospel proclaims a profound connection between Jesus as our light, Jesus as the one who allows us to see God, Jesus as the one who makes our believing in God possible. In John’s Prologue, which is always the appointed reading for Christmas Day, Jesus, the Word, comes as God’s very life in human form, a life that gives “light to all people”, and a light that shines in our darkness and that darkness cannot not overcome. (1:4-5) Christ displays his light for us by showing us the character of God’s love for us.

Throughout John, the author of this Gospel shows Jesus exposing many who live in darkness and who believe they are bound to live without any light—people who do not see any way forwards, people denied access to the light of God’s acceptance. But time, and time again, those who trust that God is present in this Word made flesh called Jesus, they receive sight to see God. Light indeed has come to shine on them, and on the world. Nicodemus comes to Jesus questioning him under the darkness of night, but on the day of Jesus’ burial he steps out into the light of day to help keep watch over the burial the Son of God that had opened up God to him. A man born blind, a man whom everyone else had cast out of the Temple and into the darkness, steps out into God's light through the healing power of Jesus. Jesus goes to raise Lazarus from his dark tomb of death, to give him new life. Lazarus no longer has to stumble in the darkness of death, but can walk in plain sight alongside the one who came to give him life. Jesus comes to all of them, and to us, this Christmas and always, to give us the light of God’s saving love that shows God to us, and that illuminates our sight of the way forward.

But why did God have to send Jesus as our Light? Couldn’t God have just told us? Couldn’t God have guided, redeemed and brightened our lives without Jesus? Couldn’t God have given us that light through all the other ways God had spoken to us before Jesus, like making a new covenant, giving us an updated version of the law, appointing new judges and new kings, or calling new prophets?

God could have done those things. But Jesus comes to show us God’s light amidst our darkness because we wouldn’t love that light unless God wanted to win our trust...and the only way that we would freely be won over by God’s love, is through someone like us. Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once described the Incarnation as being like a royal king who fell in love with a lowly serving girl. He couldn’t earn her love by a show of power, or she would be intimidated. He couldn’t shower his wealth on her, or by his powers declare that she was his equal. Then she would not love him for who he really is, but for what he could give her. So the king decided to give up his kingship and become a humble servant like her in order to win her genuine love. So too, in Jesus, “the Word became flesh and lived among us”, not to intimidate or coerce us into trusting God, but for us to see in flesh and blood just who God really is and to be won over by his love. (Lose, Making Sense of the Christian Faith, 120-121)

But there’s another reason that the light of God’s love comes to guide and redeem our paths in Jesus. After all, we can understand God better through a human, but how can we trust that this Light of the world will lead us to safety? A story about a farmer’s husband can help us picture this. This farmer never went to church, but his wife went regularly. One cold and blustery Christmas Eve, after his wife had once again failed to convince him to come to church, he was reading comfortably by the fire when he heard a sudden thudding against the windows of their house. He saw that sparrows were crashing into the windows, trying to get out of the cold harsh wind and who had been attracted by the light and heat inside. Not wanting to be bothered, he covered the windows, but that didn’t work. So he went out to open his barn doors wide so the birds could find sanctuary there. But they wouldn’t come in. He tried spreading a trail of cracker crumbs, but they wouldn’t follow. He tried to shoo them in, but that only frightened them more. He thought, “If only I could become a sparrow for a little while, I could lead them into the barn to safety.” It was in that moment that he finally realized what Christmas was all about--the story of God being born a human was both the way for us to be brought into the Light, for us to recognize God. Jesus coming, the farmer realized, was also the way God could lead us to the Light that is our help and our safety, which is God’s saving grace in Jesus. (Lose, 121)

Jesus coming as our Light doesn’t just give us faith to step out from the darkness into his light by ourselves. His light gives us faith to see God as gracious towards all people. His coming gives us light to see that on our path, we are not alone, but we have companions on they way of life that follows God's light. God showers that light down on all, creating a circle of light, a circle of faith, a circle of trust that encompasses our sight of the world as a recipient of this Light. Our faith in Christ’s unfailing light means that we can join in circles of trust with others. In the midst of those circles of trust that gather in Christ’s name—whether they are ones like this circle here, gathered as the church, or a Bible study, small group, family, neighbors or friends—the Light of Christ shines with an embrace that allows our darker, shadow sides we may not be so proud of to come out into Christ’s light and be acknowledged without shame but with mercy. Christ’s light creates circles of trust with others that help us remember where it is we come from, and what relationships are most important to us. In the midst of trusted circles with others created by the light of God’s incarnation, healing can take place, so that we continue on our journey in the world more connected to God’s love than to our dehabilitating wounds. The light of Christ doesn’t just create faith, it creates sight to see the circles of trust that surround us, and remind us that we are never alone.

So we rejoice together this day. God’s light has come. We can step out of our darkness and behold the wonder of God made flesh. We join the Gospel of John’s hymn, to praise Christ who comes to give us sight of a gracious God who is always at work among us, nourishing us with Light to save us from the darkness of our journeys. We join in singing our own hymns this day. Together we join as a circle of trust created by God's faith in us to embody our own gracious response with hymns to God for the self-giving love we’ve been given. We join as people of the Light who have been given sight of the way of our future, the way of salvation, that shines brightly in Christ. We praise God's Light with praises like this stanza that we sang in “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,”:

“This flow’r,
whose fragrance tender fills the air,
dispels with glorious splendor
the darkness everywhere.
True man, and yet very God,
from sin and death he saves us,
and lightens every road.”

Rejoice, people of God! The Light that leads us home has dawned once again!

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Saturday, December 24, 2011

2011-12-24T20:48:00.003-06:00

Nativity of Our Lord: Christmas Eve
Isaiah 9:2-7 • Psalm 96 • Titus 2:11-14 • Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see--I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!" When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us." So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

What picture of Christmas do you hold most dear? What vision of what this night means do you longingly come to seek refuge in, this holy night? Is it something like the crech manger scene in your living room, or on that one neighbor’s front lawn? Or perhaps it’s that Renaissance stylized portrait that shows the whole scene in its perfection: a barn with a window at just the right angle to light the manger by the moonlight; a young family with rosy colored cheeks staring lovingly at a happy, cooing babe; the eyes of the sheep, donkey, cattle and the magi’s camels all focused intently on the baby Jesus, as if ready to have a conversation with him.

These visions all come from the story we hear again tonight--the very familiar story of Jesus’ birth, a story in Luke that captures our imaginations...with its elegance, beauty and grandeur. For many of us this story’s familiarity fills us with the comforting picture of Christmas that we long for--of an infant surrounded by loving parents, guests and animals...an infant who is even favored by the voices emanating with songs from the skies.

But how accurate is that picture we hold on to so dearly? Have we edited the story to give us comfort? Today, we now have the technological power to doctor, edit, crop, paste, touch up and cover up any image to make it look how we would like. It’s called it “photoshoping” after the computer program of the same name. Although it is a more recent phenomena, in films this was a popularly done in the 1960‘s with movie stars like Doris Day or Grace Kelly, who would have close-ups softened so their facial curves were smooth, and blemishes were erased. Now with the convenience of digital cameras and personal computers, almost anyone can take a picture and cover up a pimple, remove a double chin, or shed a few pounds with just a few clicks. Image, as the TV ad used to say, after all, is everything.

But have we “photoshopped” the real Jesus out of his birth story? Is the beloved image of the nativity--and even of the beloved rituals that are a part of our home and family life which we look forward to so much each year--are they a little too perfect to be true? Have we rushed so quickly to escape from our everyday struggles and challenges that we have domesticated the incarnation of God to a neat and tidy corner of our lives?

The trouble is that a “photoshoped” Jesus is not the picture that these events in Luke’s Gospel paint of Jesus’ birth. If anyone has worked on a farm, they would know of the stench that surrounded this new family. If anyone has been near a baby’s delivery room, they would know it is anything but a meek and mild experience. Luke’s Mary is a frightened, unwed teenage mother, engaged to Joseph who is way over his head, having to take his family back home and search relentlessly for a place to stay. The shepherds whom the angels greet stand at the very bottom of society’s ladder. They would have brought their own dirt, grime and smell, along with their filthy flocks, to the birth barn. This night of Jesus’ birth was not a picturesque night.

So all of us can perhaps admit that we easily soften the edges of Christmas. But the messy, smelly, fragile and vulnerable scene is not what we want on Christmas, is it?! We have enough hard realities already in our daily lives. We don’t need any more realism, do we? It’s hard enough to keep our tenuous lives in tact, and stem the tide of chaos that threatens to turn our work, our home and our world upside down. It’s hard enough to turn on the news, or open a newspaper and have to see how mucky and messy our world is. Can’t we just clean Jesus up, keep him nice and tidy, and enjoy this little respite from the world's madness?

But even though the beautiful, precious and wonderful lives we work so hard to carefully manage do an excellent job of removing the blemishes in our lives....can we confess this Christmas night...that that life is still not fully, deep down satisfying? Are we willing to confess that our beautiful and wonderful lives are at the same time fragile, vulnerable and ultimately insufficient...

For that is exactly where Jesus comes to save us. He comes to up-end the ordered life that Herod tries to enforce by registering, counting and taxing everyone. Jesus comes far away from the centers of power, far from our efforts to protect our lives through achievement, acquisition and ego. Jesus is born at our most vulnerable fringes. He comes at the fringes to overturn an authoritative empire. He comes at the fringes of surviving a childbirth that could have cost him his life, to die at the fringes for us so that we would be born into his new life. He comes to the fringes where outsiders like common laborer shepherds become his messengers of the best news the world has ever heard.

Jesus comes at the fringes to reveal God does not condemn us for our broken lives, nor does he come to offer us life that is “just a little better” or “just a little more bearable”. Jesus comes at the fringes to completely transform, redeem and resurrect our lives precisely from our fragile center. His coming paints a picture of us that shows us what we look like through God’s eyes. God's view sees the fragile fringes where we reside in for most of our lives, but God hasn't photoshopped them. The view that God comes to see in us through Jesus saves us, and convinces us of God’s belief that we are completely and totally loveable.

I’m guessing that all of us have moments of our lives that contain blemishes we would prefer not to have others to see. A few times now, unfortunately, I have had the unfortunate experience of being videotaped doing something I would not exactly be proud of. Several times I have opened the day’s mail to see an envelope from the City of Chicago, telling me that I had to pay a $100 fine for running a red light. There is nothing more humiliating than going onto the website the city provides to watch a video of yourself breaking the law. There’s no denying it, no getting around it.

God’s tape of us runs much longer and much deeper into our lives--and it’s all because in coming to us in Jesus, there is no place in our experience that God’s presence cannot be found. No matter how fragile our life's videotape is, God comes to offer redemption to us, one and all--even those who disobey a traffic signal.

Despite the tape of our lives carrying warts, muck and blemishes...the image we come to watch and embrace this night is the image of a promise that comes at the fringes...to give us not just more of our same lives...but an abundant life...a redeemed life...a life that is saved for us by Christ. God goes through all the red lights we put up to make a way into to our broken lives.

At the risk of ruining a perfect Christmas escape from our troubles, we can invest our faith this Christmas not in the perfect escape, but in the Savior who was perfectly human and perfectly God-ly for our sake. We can come and seek the One who feeds us in the place deep down inside that wants something more. We can embrace Christ's promise that he has at the fringes to offer us the abundant life we seek, abundant life that shows his light through our cracks, abundant life that will seek us out until all can join in singing, “Let heaven and earth rejoice!”

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, December 18, 2011

2011-12-21T09:36:00.002-06:00

Fourth Sunday in Advent
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 • Luke 1:46b-55 • Romans 16:25-27 • Luke 1:26-38

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

Today in the Prayer of the Day we prayed, “Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come.” When we responded “Amen”, did we really mean that? The four Sundays of this and every Advent season, we begin that prayer with the words “Stir up your power, O God.” Do we really want God’s power to be stirred up in us? Are we prepared for the impact that God dwelling among us mortals really would have on our lives?

Our response to this prayer taps into the creeping belief in us that God is not an active, present participant in our everyday lives. When we picture the story of our lives, do we imagine God as one of the characters in it? As much as that may be what God desires for us, our “default” God may be more likely to be pictured in the background of our lives, waiting, watching, maybe encouraging us...but not acting on, in, beside, underneath and around us.

The passive God looks similar to the god of the deists, the Enlightenment philosophers who believed in a “clockmaker” God who created the world, and set it in motion, but is not present in its ongoing innerworkings and the playing out of everyday life. In a recent study of the spiritual lives of American teens, surveys showed that this distant “deist” conception of God was the most common belief in God. In fact, far from an incarnate God, the belief system most cited by teens was something the authors called “moral therapeutic deism”, a belief that God is a generally disinterested divine power, who set up a world system where peace and prosperity are provided by God for people who are nice. For many teenagers, the study found they adhere to a religion that is helpful but not entirely necessary, or that demands much of anything from them. (Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Teenagers, 2005)

We are not alone in our skepticism of an incarnate God. Perhaps more than we give her credit for, Mary also wrestled with the impossible possibility that God could be with her...and take up residence...in her. (1:28) The only thing the angel Gabriel had said to Mary was “You are favored! God is with you” and already Luke says she is “perplexed” and that she “pondered”--debated, reasoned, wrestled--with what sort of greeting this might be.” (1:29) So often our picture of Mary depicts her as immediately pious, accepting, and obedient to God’s favor of her. But the three verses between Mary asking “How can this be?” and confessing “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” is the space where she has to work through and process what it means that God wants to accomplish great things through an unmarried teenage mother from the back country. Is that not also the space that we inhabit, too? Do we not keep God at bay, wondering if God is done interrupting people’s live to use them for the health and healing of the world?

The good news is that the angel’s announcement to Mary is God’s announcement to us. God still is at work in the world. Far from us fitting some kind of “checklist” for being “nice” that God must approve before God can come to us, God chooses to identify with us by coming as one of us. God plants the seed of Christ not just in Mary, but in the whole human race, regardless of how impossible it may seem. This is the promise of Christmas that we are watching and waiting for this Advent season: that God’s incarnation in Jesus means God favors us each, and wants to do marvelous things through us.

Where does God’s love want to take the story of your life? What shape does God setting up a dwelling place in us, and not in a place of bricks and mortar, look like? What does it look like in all the places and positions that we have in our lives to imagine God wanting to accomplish something for the health of the world through us? It may not be bearing God’s Son! But what else does God want to see enfleshed through you? Not in the sense of being a pawn in a grand chess game that God is playing with the world. That would cheapen our worth. But rather, God wants Mary’s song to become our song, a song that we, too, matter to God’s bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly; we have a part to play in “filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich away empty.” (1:52-53)

This past April, perhaps some of you got up at 5:00 am like I did to watch the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Catherine Middleton in England. There was so much fanfare and publicity, it was almost obscene how much media coverage there was over it. But in the midst of the service was a profound moment that many may have missed, but that was the true highlight of the whole event. The Anglican Church's Archbishop of London, Richard John Carew Chartres, was speaking to tens of millions of people around the world when he started his sermon by saying something that didn't just speak the heir to the throne sitting there in the church, but something that empowered everyone who heard him. He said, "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire." It was a quote from Catherine of Siena, an Italian theologian of the Middle Ages. He continued by saying, "Every wedding is a royal wedding, with the bride and groom as king and queen of creation, making a life together so that life can flow through them into the future. ...A generous God, who so loved the world, gave God's self to us in the person of Jesus Christ. In the Spirit of this generous God, [we] are to give [ourselves] to each other." On a day when everyone was watching to give royalty their due, everyone was themselves made into royalty...the same royalty that God declares to Mary, and that God declares to us. God wants to set the world on fire not just through the high and mighty, not just through the family who was made holy by that angel's visit, but through you, and through me.

So take a minute today, and because we all have such different situations and contexts we live our lives in, imagine one way God could use us to impact the health of the world between now and Christmas. This fourth week of Advent gets to be its longest this year, with Christmas not upon us until a week from today. But what one thing could we do that would reflect the favor God has on us, of wanting to set the world on fire through us, and make a difference towards God's ongoing healing work? Is it something as ordinary as providing a place for someone to stay? Is it as small as buying someone something to drink? Is it as simple as extending an invitation to someone to a seasonal party? It doesn't have to be big. But the important thing is to see it as connected to one of the many the marvelous things God wants to accomplish through us. What great thing will that be?

To make those connections, we will all need some practice. So we're going to pretend, just for a moment, that I'm Gabriel, and you all all Mary.

"Greetings, favored ones. The Lord is with you and intends to do great things through you.

Congregation: "How can this be? We are ordinary, everyday people."

"Yet you have found favor through God, and the Holy Spirit will come upon you, guide you, and work through you to care for this world and for all people God loves so much. For nothing is impossible with God.”

Congregation: "Here am I, a servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.

Amen."

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, December 11, 2011

2011-12-11T12:25:00.005-06:00

Third Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 • Psalm 126 •
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 • John 1:6-8, 19-28

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ... This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said. Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing. The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel."

Today is the Third Sunday of Advent which is traditionally understood as “Gaudate” Sunday, which in Latin means “Rejoice.” We distinguish this day by using a pink candle on the Advent wreath. It’s a day when we mark the halfway point of Advent...that we have made it this far and are only two weeks away from Christmas! It’s a little mini-celebration in the midst of a season of continued darkness, waiting and preparation.

As we mark this day with these small gestures of joy, we also admit that the real reason to celebrate is not here quite yet...we come together to admit our un-faithfulness and brokenness as we did in the opening confession. While one thing of joy is happening on the surface today--the coming together of God’s people to watch for the promised Light of Christ--another dynamic plays out beneath the surface. The dynamic of the honest, real and raw realities that are happening in our lives. We all come today wearing masks, and beneath them lie our true selves, our selves where all of us are cracked, and all of us are longing for something deeper to sustain us and make us whole. In many ways we could say today is two-faced Sunday...one of wearing joy...and one of raw honesty.

But then we have the John of today’s Gospel, and John offers us a way of taking off that mask and opening up our hearts with honesty, and turning that honesty into an authenticity that receives the coming Light of Christ as good news amidst our darkness. This disciple of Jesus is also traditionally associated with this third Sunday of Advent as well. This John is not the writer of John’s Gospel, it is just John...who in John's Gospel is John the Witness to Christ. He is not given the titles in the synoptic Gospels, like John the Baptist in Matthew, or John the Baptizer in Mark, or John the son of Zecharaiah in Luke. The first words John uses to describe himself are not even his own--he only will define himself by the one he has come to witness to: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’” (1:23)

John goes through an engaging dialogue with religious authorities who have flocked to come and see him. They want to know, “Who are you, John?” (1:19) It’s John’s opportunity to choose if he’ll wear a mask or not: will he wear the mask that boasts of the importance God has given him in the story of salvation...or will he reveal the light that he has come to prepare us for, and point us to...the light of God that shines in the darkness, and that the darkness cannot overcome?

John takes off any mantle or impression that he or anyone else may be putting on him, and quickly replies who he is not: he’s not the Messiah, he’s not Elijah, he’s not a Moses-like prophet. John quickly reveals a lack of any pretentiousness, which is exactly what had been foretold of him: “he came as a witness to testify to the light...he himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light...” (1:8-9)

John shows his leadership through the power of vulnerability, the power that comes in putting on no masks about who he is. He is not the big deal. It is Jesus, whom he has come to witness to, who is the big deal. John's identity is not self-made. He did not become the great prophet through his own efforts—but through his faith. He's made who he is by someone else—it's clear that Christ the light coming into the world, makes him who he is. Like John, our identity in Christ is as his witnesses, and followers. John shows the tremendous vulnerability it takes to confess we're not who others think we are—especially when they are elevating us to an elite status. John demonstrates that real power comes not in boasting of ourselves, but in boasting of the power the merciful light of Christ that comes to shine in us.

As we wait for the advent of Christ among us, the church is one of the few places where, with John, we can speak the truth about our lives. This can be the place where we don't claim to be the Light, but where we continually point to the one who is our Light. Here is the place we can be real, honest and unpretentious about who we are, where we can be vulnerable to our struggles as well as our triumphs. We speak the truth here, because the truth is what Christ comes to die for. He comes so that the truth no longer need be hidden from plain sight, but through the truth his Light of compassion, of wholeness and mercy can shine all that much more brightly in our lives. Here is the place where because we can speak the truth, God moves us from the isolation of triumphant individualism, to intimacy born by a community, like this one, that bears one another's burdens.

If we were to choose a musical background for this Advent time of taking off our masks to reveal to the truth of the darkness within us, and the places in our lives that need Christ's Light, I don't think it would be the station playing Christmas music twenty-four hours a day. I think it would be the music that matches the blue color of this season: the blues. Advent is a time for blues, and not just because we're in Chicago, although there's not a better town for blues music. The blues wastes no time in telling the truth...in fact it revels in it. Whether it's the truth of “I done lost my baby 'gain...” or “I'm so poor, ain't got no money,” the blues finds hope by confessing the very real troubles of life that human beings face. The blues were created by enslaved African-Americans in the deep south who found healing and wholeness in the truth-telling power of this musical form. Thomas Dorsey, who wrote the hymn “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” saw many connections between the blues and church with the cries that come out of both in response to the circumstances of life. In talking about how the blues tries to uncover our brokenness, he once said: “Now what we call low-down in blues doesn't mean that it's dirty or bad or something like that. It gets down into the individual to set him on fire, dig him up or dig her up way down there 'til they come out with an expression verbally. If they're in church, they say, 'Amen.' If they're in the blues, they say, 'Sing it now.'” (Scharen, Broken Halelujahs, p. 73)

The place that Dorsey says the blues can touch in us—the place beneath our masks, where we are broken—is the place that God touches us in Christ's coming. That is the place that Christ absorbs on the cross. That is the place that God turns from a “no” into a cosmic and definitive “yes.” Even though we sing the Advent blues, the “Amen” God shouts in return to us affirms all that John confessed to when he saw Jesus for the first time: “Here is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (1:29) (Scharen, p. 94)

So what posture do we take in these remaining days of preparing for Christ? What's our response as we wrestle with the everyday choice of whether we will put on a mask of pretentiousness or not. Our posture in these Advent days is one of hope. It's not a hope that everything will be better, or a hope for what we want individually or communally. It's time to hope for God's Spirit to arrive in us and sweep away all that shields and keeps the Light of God's mercy out of our lives. It's time to hope for God to come and renew us again with the promised peace and love of our Savior. It's time to sing the Advent blues...and hear more loudly still the song of joy that the advent of Christ sings into our lives.

Our posture of hope in these days will come from the model John sets for us today. Once a preacher pointed out that the witness of John is remembered in Advent which comes at the darkest time of year, with the winter solstace approaching. As the light around us decreases, John testifies that the coming Light in Christ will increase. In the same way, John is commemorated by the church on June 24, just a few days after the summer solstace. When the earthly Light is at its highest, we commemorate the lowliness of John, who saw himself as one who pointed to the brightness of Christ's Light.

May we embrace the dawning of the Light of Christ John points to—the Light that comes to set us free from our masks, who hears our “Advent blues” cries of “Amen! Save us, Lord!”, who renews God's covenant to hold us in God's love forever.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, December 4, 2011

2011-12-04T13:47:00.005-06:00

Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 40:1-11 • Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 • 2 Peter 3:8-15a • Mark 1:1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'" John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."

Happy New Year! We’re in the second week of the new church calendar year in this season of Advent. It’s an advent time in many ways in the church, a time of advent for new beginnings, especially at United Lutheran. A new vision for our future was adopted on November 27, the last Sunday before this new church year began. It’s a time for the new beginning of this vision to take hold in us, a time for embracing, living out and turning into reality what the advent of a church that’s “Centered in Christ, and at work in the world” would look like. It’s a time of new beginnings, of discerning how it is each one of us will participate in and give to United Lutheran’s 2012 ministry. It’s also an advent time for church leaders: of planning budgets, sending letters asking for pledges, recruiting volunteers, and re-organizing teams.

It is more than fitting then that in this New Year advent time of the church that we begin engaging a new Gospel for this next liturgical year. Today we hear the very beginning of that Gospel, which is Mark: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” (1:1) The grammar geeks, editors and English teachers among us will notice that there is no verb in that sentence. It is for that reason why many scholars believe Mark’s beginning serves as a kind of title for this book of the Bible. This is a book where it is OK to judge the book by its cover. It is itself what it says: a proclamation to us, today: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.”

Patricia Lull, the author of the Bible study that many of the Women’s Circle small groups started working through this past September, says the following about the way Mark’s Gospel starts: “Mark begins with a unique and powerful declaration that the very text of the book itself is a message of good news about the one called Jesus. While we call the first four books of the New Testament Gospels, only Mark claims that designation for itself.” Mark’s Gospel begins by describing this Gospel as “the beginning.” It is as if all of Jesus’ ministry described in this book--his life, death and resurrection--as if that is just the beginning of God’s story of good news. There is a sense in which this Gospel is unfinished and is just starting by the time it ends. The ending verses of Mark also come across as seemingly unfinished, with scene of women fleeing Jesus’ empty tomb, which is the last picture we see in Mark—these women who “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (16:8) There are no appearances of the risen Christ, no celebrating...just an open-ended question: “What now?”

In the ways Mark bookends his Gospel, his proclamation to us becomes a message that God’s gospel is just getting started. It's not old, antiquated or outdated. It’s just getting started...it’s just beginning...and will not end until Christ comes again. And not only that God’s gospel does not end with Jesus’ death...but it ends by Christ coming into our lives, and through us into the world. God’s gospel story is a story God includes us in, and longs for us to be a part of-a story of God’s saving mission to redeem and love the world--a story of good news that God wants to begin again in us today.

Good news--living through us. That’s what this time of year is supposed to be about, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be a time of good cheer, compassion and happiness? So why then does the story being told in our world and in our lives seem more like bad news? Why is our nostalgia for shopping, evergreen trees, decorations and peppermint sticks not feeding our souls and leaving us, yet again, feeling empty? Why in this season of “good news” are so of us many finding ourselves again facing one of the loneliest times of the year when many are so isolated from family and friends? How is it that despite our familiarity with the central story of this season--of Mary and Joseph, of a baby in a manger, of shepherds in the field--we still doubt whether this story of good news really has anything new left to say to us at all?

The good news of this season that the title of Mark’s Gospel speaks of, which we won’t find by looking inside ourselves, does not start with us. God's good news starts...God's good news begins...God's good news is born...with God who doesn’t gospel us with a cozy memory, with something we’ve heard before, something we know, something that we’ve become numb to. God gospels us with news that is new and good and worth sharing...that sets us free to begin again...and that puts us at the beginning of an untold story--God’s unfolding story of Jesus Christ, at work through you and I. God is just getting started telling that story of Jesus' love, redemption and healing for the whole world. We cannot proclaim the good news of this season to ourselves. As Isaiah says, the words that we speak will wither and fade like the grass. But the word that God speaks...the good news of Jesus Christ...stands forever. He is the one who gospels us into God’s heart, proclaiming that no matter what dead end we may be facing, it is never too late for God to renew restore and recreate us. We are never far from the beginning God speaks to us, and that beginning is the Christ whom John the Baptist foretells. God speaks Christ into our lives. God doesn’t speak a sentimental feeling, or a memory into our lives. God speaks the living Christ to us...centering our lives in his mercy...and that is always good news to celebrate.

The season of Advent reminds us that as we wait for the fulfillment of God’s kingdom, God is never finished proclaiming that good news to us, and God is never finished with us in being a part of fulfilling God’s dream for the world. What is God trying to begin in us this Advent season? What do we need the good news of God’s coming in Christ to set us free from...so that we can be a part of what God wants to begin in us? Is it bitterness towards a relationship that’s stuck in stagnancy? Is it shame for a past decision that we have never managed to get over? Is it fear that hard times will never be able to change? Whatever it is, we will not be able to free ourselves from it. But God in Christ can...and does. God announces a news flash to us that proclaims we are completely loveable and worthy and capable of being a part of the ongoing story of God’s people even though we do not deserve it. It’s that proclamation that makes all the difference in this season that can seem so familiar and almost routine.

There once was a couple who adopted a son from a Russian orphanage, and they wondered why it was that he had so much trouble being consoled, and why as he aged he had so many challenges socially and behaviorally in school. They loved him to pieces and did everything they could on their own to help, but nothing changed. So they tried to get him help. Medications, counselors, doctors...nothing changed. Eventually they discovered a study that was done on the orphanage where their son had been raised. It turned out that this orphanage had approached caring for babies by giving them far less physical touch than normal. Somehow they thought this holding and cuddling was harmful. But it turns out, and studies have been done to prove this, that especially in the earliest stages of life, we can’t console ourselves. We need someone else’s physical presence to hold us, surround and love us, so that we can develop into our truest selves and to fullest potential.

In the same way, our broken lives cannot grow or be sustained on our own. We need God to give us the good news that enfolds, fills and sustains us. We will not find God being born within us in this season of watching and waiting for Christ to come...but we can look to God—rather than putting it on the shelf, we can keep the Gospel storybook open. We can open up the story of our lives to God. We can be humble enough to become beginners again, and find Christ coming to break the bonds of our brokenness.

The Christian mystic and activist Thomas Merton once said, “Advent is the beginning of the end of all in us that is not yet [filled with] Christ.” (my addition)

Come once again this new Advent year, O God, and begin again the work of Christ's power and love in our lives.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, November 20, 2011

2011-11-20T12:44:00.004-06:00

Christ the King
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 • Psalm 95:1-7a • Ephesians 1:15-23 • Matthew 25:31-46

[Jesus said to the disciples:] "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.' Then he will say to those at his left hand, 'You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. Then they also will answer, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?' Then he will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

Several years ago, I was at Holden Village, the Lutheran retreat center out in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state that Stacey and I love so much, and we were a part of a farewell party for the three Directors who oversee the day-to-day operations of the Village. They were completing several years of amazing ministry, and at one point in the evening, several people spoke up to talk glowing about their gifts, from cooking skills, to managing crises, to giving up their lodges for guests to use when the village was at overflowing capacity, to renewing the village’s mission to be centered in the gospel. After all these accolades were laid upon them, it was their turn to speak. The first thing that one of them, Paul, said, has always stuck with me. He said, “I’m not sure what I can say for all the kind things you’ve said about us...except...you have been Christ to us...and the people of this Village have been Christ to us.”

Here were people who had just been described as having themselves been Christ to this Village... How could the first thing Paul say about this experience be that we had been Christ to them? It has always struck me since as a great moment of reversal--a great example of how serving others does not always mean that it is up to us to bring Christ to others...but in relating to and serving others—we can discover the vastness of where Christ is already at work. For Paul, Christ had shown up in the guests who brought their longings for rest and renewal, in the staff who gave their all for little or no pay, and in the gorgeous mountain wilderness that sang out with the beauty of Creation. What Paul was saying was that despite all the transformation that had happened in the Village during their service, it ended up also being the directors themselves who had been transformed by their service too. Mutual transformation...all because of Christ.

As we are called by Christ to serve others, that call to serve can often seem like a heavy, heavy burden. When I heard from United member John Halvorson about his Bible study on this passage from Matthew 25 this past summer, he noted how heavily people in the discussion felt the weight of God’s law--law that both convicts us and also commands us to serve Christ in the “least of these.” But what often is overlooked in the call to Christian service is the promise that goes with it: that we will discover Christ already at work in the world, and that we ourselves will be transformed by the presence of Christ who is already present—already reigning, we confess on this Christ the King Sunday. Christ is already at work fashioning a home in the presence of the world he comes to dwell in—at work through us, and at work in others to reveal himself to us.

This reminds me of a very common experience I have when I talk about the ministry that my wife Stacey does in her work as a hospital chaplain with children. So often, I mention what she does, and people say, “Wow, that must be incredibly difficult.” What I most often observe her saying when she hears that is that it is difficult to be with children who are in the hospital for days on end, or who go through incredibly challenging treatments. But she also says that she discovers amazing faith, hope and love in these children and their families. It is a blessing, she says, to be in the presence of children who end up giving the staff and all who care for them the incredible gift of their stories, testimonies and blessing of those around them. It ends up that the children she serves become Christ to others. They become the ones blessing her rather than only being the recipients of others' blessings. So it doesn’t turn out to be as hard work, as it is paying attention for the surprising ways God is at work through such broken circumstances with incredible compassion that runs both ways.

I have heard one such story, of when a high school student was on hospice care. Before he died he wanted Holy Communion brought to him, and to celebrate it with all his closest family and friends around him. During that service, while there were many tears shed, unbeknownst previously to everyone else, this young man started going around the room and blessing each and every person there. Whether it was a few words of thanks, or a hope for their future, or simply laying a hand on their hand, this young man who everyone else had come to surround with Christ’s presence...became Christ in those moments to everyone in that room. In his need, he discovered compassion big enough to bless those who had come to bless him.

The thing that these stories of Paul and this young man and that Jesus’ words about finding him in the “least of these” have in common, is that Christ is found in our mutual need—the need we all share, regardless of whether we serve or are being served, whether we love or we are being loved. In Matthew 25, all the people Jesus where says he will appear lack something, whether it is food, water, a home, clothing, care, or community. Even if our lack of those things does not define us, we all stand in need of all those essential things in our lives, and it is in our lack—in that space inside all of us that longs for God to sustain us with those things—that Jesus comes and sets up his reign of compassion...a reign that was intended since the world began and is a reign that will not end until the end of time.

But there's still the question...how can Christ come alive? How is it that Jesus, this 2,000 year old, Son of God, who was born, lived, died, rose again, and reigns with God until his return--how can he show up, be present to us, extend God’s blessing us, and make God known to us...through another human being? It’s kind of crazy when you look at it from that perspective, isn’t it?!

It’s funny, though, this sounds like a similar questions to what was asked in our Adult Education session last Sunday about communion: “How can Christ be truly present in communion?” We as Lutherans believe that it is still bread and wine, but that Christ’s presence is there “in, with and under”, as Luther says. His presence is there, just as his presence is there in our compassion for the least of these—and any who are lacking, because of his promise to be present...to reveal some piece of himself...to give us a glimpse that is visible through the eyes of faith. Christ’s promises that we will see his presence in our lack because his compassion goes all the way to the cross...his compassion affirms that in the heartbeat of reality, the world is not hostile, threatening or indifferent. Christ's presence is possible because he fills the world with grace--grace that has already been won for us, and that we can trust lies at the core of God's heart.

Thank the Lord that we do not have to be Christ. There has been and there will only be one Jesus. The way we get to see him is by receiving him...who fills in all the ways we lack in our lives...and in the lack that we find in those we serve. In that lacking we all become channels of his blessing, means of his grace, full of his promised compassion. While we are still human, still children of God--his compassion flows in, with and under us, in ways we cannot even imagine...turning we ourselves into servants who will be transformed again and again by this unending reign of love.

So we can today take these ordinary things we find in our midst—in bread, wine, and one another—and see them with the eyes of faith...see them as gifts that are themselves Christ resurrected, alive, here, now, today, present...all being Christ for us....being the same gift we already are and will be to all who lack, to all who hunger to live under Christ’s reign. We can look around at the ordinary people we find through our daily life--in our neighbors, community, strangers, and friends alike--to see the extroardinary love of Christ at work in them...and in one of the most incredible twists of the life of a Christian: seeing Christ in their love filling our lack, and them seeing Christ in our love filling theirs. It is for that power revealed in love that reigns forever that we give thanks on this Christ the King Sunday.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, November 13, 2011

2011-11-14T13:07:00.002-06:00

Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost
(Lectionary 33A)
Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18 • Psalm 90:1-8, (9-11), 12 • 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 • Matthew 25:14-30

"[Jesus said to the disciples:] For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.' His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.' His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, 'Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.' But his master replied, 'You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'"

A few weeks ago I saw in the news that a site where several of us went after the Cedar Rapids, IA service trip last year, the iconic Field of Dreams movie baseball field in Iowa, was recently purchased by a couple from Chicago. It made me think about one of the things that happens throughout this film is that the main character hears voices telling him things. Ray Kinsella walks along his Iowa corn fields and hears a voice saying, “If you build it, he will come.” He talks to other farmers, wondering if this is commonplace for people who spend lots of time out caring for their fields--to hear other people speaking to you when no one else is around.

With the birth of Liv two and a half weeks ago, these past several weeks I’ve been hearing a new voice in my head, often in the middle of the night, saying things like, “Is that a cry for a changed diaper I hear, or just a moaning yawn?”, and “Wow, she’s amazing...but what have I gotten myself into?!”, and “Treasure these precious moments now. She’s going to change so fast.”

Part of us says that these voices aren’t something to listen to. But even those of us with good mental health are going to hear a voice in our head of someone who isn’t there speaking to us. That voice can even sometimes be God’s way of speaking to us.

Once a woman who came back to the church after many years astray told me that she had started hearing voices. “Is that normal?” she asked me, as if she were unsure if this was something that was “supposed” to be happening to people of faith or not. She said, “God is saying things to me, trying to affirm me, or lead me to talk to or help other people. I’m hearing my dead grandparents saying wise things to me too, and this is all since I recently started to pay attention to God’s presence.” I reassured her she is not alone, but also shared that the challenge for us is to discern between what voices bring us closer to God’s fullness and consolation, and what leads us to places of desolation and God’s absence.

With today’s Gospel text, a voice may try and tell us that Jesus’ story about the master giving funds to slaves to invest can only be heard and interpreted in one particular way. But there are at least two very compelling and yet very different interpretations--both of which are valid, but both of which lead us to wonder how it is we reconcile God’s voice when we hear two different voices speaking to us.

One interpretation prompts the following voice to speak to us: “Work hard, invest your resources, don’t bury your treasure like the slave who did nothing with his master’s money.” This is the voice that the third slave did not hear. He chose instead to live in fear, to seek the safety of security, to never take risks and to care for his own self-protection. The other two slaves did follow that voice, of taking the risk, and they returned double to their master what they had received by buying and selling it, by investing it, and by allowing it to grow in the marketplace. The voice that God wants us to hear from this story would seem simple if this were all.

But another voice speaks loud and clear, one that needs a little help from the cultural context of that day. In the ancient near east, it turns out that they had a very different view of the rich and poor than we have today. The rich, it was always assumed, had come to their wealth unjustly or were heirs of unjust persons. This was because they did not believe such thing as an “honest” rich person was possible--it was widely held that being rich meant that somehow their wealth had been been taken away and come at the expense from the socially vulnerable. Also, in that day, burying one’s treasure in the ground was actually seen as a sound financial strategy in those days because it guaranteed a return. This has profound implications then for the other interpretation of this parable of the talents.

With this perspective, the master and the two slaves who accumulate the wealth now become the extortioners who illegally come into wealth by means of greed that takes away from others. The voice that then comes out of this story comes from the third slave, whose voice says, “I refuse to invest this master’s attempts to make wealth at my expense. I will name the abusive of power for what it is, regardless of the price I will have to pay when the master returns.” This interpretation completely turns the voice of the other two slaves on its head, as they become part of a practice of bowing to harsh demands for economic growth at any cost, even to the lowliest. Both interpretations can be valid, and both can be true, even when the voices emanating from them are different.

They can be true together because they both speak with the unified voice of Jesus. His voice is always one that speaks in the midst of brokenness, and it speaks in unison here--because both interpretations –both voices--show our profound estrangement from God and each other that’s at the core of us all. But Jesus has a voice that despite all the other voices that try and separate us from him, it cannot be declared dead or irrelevant. His voice still does matter, and it still does speak to us. His voice matters because his voice silences the powers that keep an abundant life from us. We, whether we are like the servant who is scared to risk, or like the one who is threatened by greed, are in need of a voice that will both heal what is broken at our core and stand up for those at the margins. Jesus’ voice is the one that connects us back to God and each other.

Jesus’ voice is one that will come into our heads...will hear his voice speaking...in the need to risk using what we've been given, and in our need to challenge greed. His voice will come to us, and invite us as a community into the promise of a fruit-bearing life, because while his voice invites us to risk loss, is a voice that leads us to a shared life. His voice will say to us that he loves us so much that he wants to share our hopes and dreams, our fears and our failures...his voice wants us to know of God’s love enough that he dies on the cross so that we might be joined across differences to have life and have it abundantly. Jesus‘ voice invites us to the abundant life of the two slaves who enter into the joy of their master because they didn’t sit on their hands--they get in the game. And Jesus’ voice is also that same voice that stands up for us in the way the third slave stands up to the master’s tyranny by not cowering but by boldly naming unjust greed, in order to take its power away.

In what ways is Jesus’ voice speaking through his story to your life, and to us as a community? To what greater abundance is Jesus inviting us? It’s waiting there for us to receive, but we have to get up and use our voices to sieze it.

As we stand in the midst of times when the gap between the rich and poor in our country now stands at an all time high...as protests continue to rage on Wall Street and around the world decrying the injustice of economic inequality...and millions of unemployed continue to bear the brunt of a recession that will not seem to quit lingering...what do we hear the voice of Jesus saying? Where are the places of deepest economic brokenness where we are no longer listening for him? Where have we tuned out and stopped demanding that the biblical value of care for the poor be of major concern to our congregation and to our elected officials?

We all will hear voices, but Jesus’ voice is the one that speaks clearly to us in our brokenness and in the world’s injustice. The question is what our response will be. Can we hear the vocie of Jesus speaking through these servants? As hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzsky once said, “We miss 100 percent of the shots we never take.” And as many celebrities are saying about the continuing famine in the horn of eastern Africa are saying, man-made “famine” is the real “f-word” obscenity we’re not willing to hear being spoken, because it calls us to accountability for the 30,000 children who have died there in the last three months.

We can trust that like Ray who heeded the voice in his head in Field of Dreams, that following Jesus’ voice of compassion and justice will lead not to desolation or to God’s absence--it will lead us to a communal life of abundance.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, October 23, 2011

2011-10-23T11:59:00.004-05:00

Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost
(Lectionary 25A)
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 • Psalm 1 • 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 • Matthew 22:34-46

When the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: "What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?" They said to him, "The son of David." He said to them, "How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, 'The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet"'? If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?" No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

When we’re looking for what more we can do to fill our plentiful free time, when we’re looking for what we can add on top of our already full to-do lists, when we’ve got nothing better to do...who do we turn to? Is it Jesus? When we’re looking for help with keeping God’s commandments, who do we turn to? Is it Jesus? When we’ve done a pretty good job at getting in trouble for not playing by the rules, whom do we turn to then? Is it Jesus?

Jesus isn’t someone we readily associate with what we call “the law”--the things we are expected to do, the commandments God has given us to keep, the obligations we are responsible to fulfill. Jesus' graceful, forgiving love for us can create the disillusion that we no longer need to-do’s, commandments and rules. The grace of Jesus, however, does not come to abolish the law. He comes to fulfill the law.

Jesus shows his affirmation of God’s laws when the Pharisees try and challenge Jesus one last time. They question him about the 613 religious laws in the first five books of the Bible, otherwise known as the Torah. One of them asks him, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus answers with the law of love: “Love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind...and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says every law revolves around these two commandments: that without our neighbor we cannot love God, and without God we cannot love our neighbor. Jesus’ law of love is not a replacement of the old--it builds on it, putting together two laws taken directly from the Torah.

How do we keep this law of love without reducing it to a legalistic, controlling, score-keeping commandment? How do we live out the law of love that is given to us not out of a sense of a burden that’s meant to weigh us down, but so that our relationships with each other are transformed into ones of care, love and mutual respect?

One arena where we ask these “law of love”questions most is in our home and family life. As an impending father—not yet! but any day now—I’ve been thinking about fatherhood and what I observed of my parents “keeping the law” as a way of looking out for my well-being. One example sticks out in particular.

Once when I was in about third or fourth grade, my mom started to buy vitamins from Shaklee for me. I absolutely hated those vitamins. Could not stand them. They tasted like chalk, and had to be chewed up in order to get them down. Rather than go through this dreadful process, I decided to hide them. Each morning in my robe pocket, I would put the vitamin there, and then drop it in my wastebasket--and because I was also the one in charge of taking out the trash, nobody knew I wasn’t taking my vitamins.

Until one day...when I got a call downstairs to the laundry room. My dad had found my robe in the washing machine...with a whole bunch of smushed vitamins in the pockets. I had forgotten to put them in the trash! My dad asked me, “What’s this Jon?” I couldn’t hide my secret any longer.

After that, my parents asked me to do two things. First was to admit that I had lied, or as the commandments put it, that I had born false witness. I had given the appearance I was doing something they had asked me, when I had not, and I admitted to it. The second was to turn off the television for one whole week. I couldn’t believe what they were asking of me, but I did it. This “law of love” seemed way too harsh at the time, but I was grateful for it by the end of the week.

That whole week, it turned out, was a time when one of those terrible Chicago snow storms had hit, and a crust of ice had formed on the top of the soft snow. Each day after school that week, when I had normally gone inside to watch cartoons, had become a fort-building time in the backyard with these icy snow blocks. The “law of love” had opened up a space for creativity and new interests to blossom and flourish. And, I did end up taking those vitamins, though usually with a huge gulp of orange juice, which my parents said was OK.

That is what Jesus’ law of love is all about: it’s about God’s desire for the flourishing of human life, and human relationships. As parents, it can be hard for the “law of love” to rule our home life, for example, when we want to give our children all the things they see their friends have but that we can’t always give them. It can be hard for the “law of love” to rule at home when parents’ expectations for grades are set so high that no room is left for flourishing of life beyond the classroom.

What it comes down to is that Jesus’ law of love goes beyond emotions. It is more than a feeling. In our culture, love has been so sentimentalized that it has become a feeling towards something that we really “like”. We believe love is a passive feeling in response to something outside of us, such as, “I love chocolate”, or “I love that movie”. Love in the biblical sense is love that is active. It’s love that is just as loving regardless of how emotionally close we are to someone else or not. It’s love that acts on another’s behalf for their well-being. Love in the biblical sense is something we do, regardless of how we feel for them. When Jesus gives the “law of love”, to love God and neighbor, he doesn’t command an emotion. He commands an action.

We have to look no further for a picture of what that looks love like than Jesus himself. God gives us the ultimate love action of all, of raising Jesus from the dead, so that we may live forgiven, all in the name of love. We will not always keep the law of love perfectly. We will fail God and God knows we will fail one another. But Jesus’ cross of mercy picks us up, dusts us off, and enables us to live in restored relationship. The kind of relationships God cares enough to ask of us, are not ones bound by keeping rules, or being right with God, or being on the right side, but that are bound by the active love of God in Jesus Christ that is at work in us for the good of all.

What are some concrete ways I can show that love to God and neighbor, you wonder? Here is one challenge for you for this week. In his book The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman talks about five ways we express love for each other: quality time, gifts, acts of service, words of affirmation and physical touch. What’s hard is that each of us tend to give love in only a few of these ways that we are most comfortable with. But fulfilling the law of love calls us beyond our comfort zones to love God’s world in ways that aren’t easy for us, but that make God and others know that God's love is in our hearts. Try stretching yourself this week, and perhaps each successive week, to grow in one of these five languages that do not come quite as naturally: spending quality time, giving gifts, performing acts of service, speaking words of affirmation and offering (appropriate) physical touch. We may not feel any different for doing it--but Jesus law of love will have been made real for the other person. And when we fail at living up to this law, we will find God’s love is enough to continue giving us back to each other and to God so we may live in the live we've been asked to share: to love God with heart, mind and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, October 16, 2011

2011-10-16T12:29:00.002-05:00

Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
(Lectionary 24A)
Isaiah 45:1-7 • Psalm 96:1-9, (10-13) • 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10 • Matthew 22:15-22

Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax." And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" They answered, "The emperor's." Then he said to them, "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Is there anything that does not belong to God? (repeat) It seems that is the question that Jesus’ words have for us.

It turns out also that his actions as much as his words here pose this question of whether anything does not belong to God. The coin that is given to Jesus by disciples of the Jewish authorities and the followers of King Herod does not just show a picture of the emperor. It would have had this inscription on it: “Tiberius Caesar, Son of the Divine Augustus, Augustus.” Here is Jesus, the Son of God, holding a coin that says Caesar is the Son of God! How much more ironic can Jesus get?! Jesus sets up a choice between who will be our God: the empire's god, or Jesus' God? He makes the distinction very clear for us: nothing can truly “belong” to Caesar...there is only one God of all, only one to whom all things belong, and that is above all earthly powers, and that is Jesus' God. The emperor, the president, the CEO, the boss...whomever the most powerful person is we can think of...this God is bigger...and Jesus asks us to live as if everything belongs to God.

The strategy that these opponents of Jesus try to use is to put him on the defensive. If they can just get him to admit he does not support that charged five letter word—taxes—they would have what they needed to execute him for treason to the empire. But Jesus refuses to fall for their paranoid, self-justifying bait. He calls out their malice, and recognizes it is these questioners who are themselves caught between the God they worshiped and the “god” the empire demanded they worship.

Why is it that we too find our sense of stewardship--our sense of what belongs to God--coming up short? Why does our practice of stewardship come out of this same defensive place as these questioners of Jesus? Perhaps our caring for and serving all the various aspects of our lives comes out of a belief that what we give to God can appease God. We think, “if I can just give x amount of time, or money or energy to this...then God will be satisfied.” “If I can just give x amount of time, or money or energy to this...then I can be done with it, and God won’t have to bother with these other parts of my life.” Or, we give of our selves out of obligation--because we’re supposed to. No matter what kind of defensive posture it is, it’s all the same underlying motivation: it’s giving out of an obligation that believes our stewardship is a transaction giving us permission to retreat from God.

Why do we get so defensive with God? We can become pretty good at it. It can become so hard for us believe...our whole lives, and our whole world...are all truly a gift. Maybe it is because there are some things we don’t want to belong to God. We don’t want God to have everything. We protect what is scary or shameful for us. We would rather have our own mess, our own stuff for ourselves rather than to let God have God’s way with us, our loved ones, our church and our world.

What can help us in this real struggle to be faithful to God who asks for our all--who wants not just to connect with one part of our lives, but every part of us? What guides us out of this barrier called defensiveness and into the life of generosity that God intends for us? This fence we put around parts of our lives looks different for each one of us, but we’re all trying to protect something that’s keeping us from giving to God what belongs to God.

What breaks that fence is the gospel of Jesus--the same gospel of Jesus--the gospel that he embodies in this encounter with these scheming questioners, and the gospel he embodies in his encounter with each one of us. He takes our defenses away. Jesus takes our resistance away and lets in God’s compassionate , forgiving and redeeming generosity into every part of us and our world. Jesus takes away any consequenses that could threaten fences being torn down between us and God. He shows us that behind the fences we put up is the heart of God...that does not beat with demands and manipulations...but with freely given love that’s better, and more powerful, that’s more inspiring than anything we’ve ever been given. Jesus doesn’t divide, carve and slice up our lives. Jesus makes our lives whole. His love gives every ounce of himself...to redeem every single aspect of our lives. Jesus shows we cannot divide the world into sacred and secular, Ceasar and not Caesar’s, public and private, ours and God’s. The reach of Jesus’ redemption runs through straight through these fences, through his cross, into the whole world.

We have been imprinted...not with an image of a leader on a coin...but the name that is above all names...of the one who is our God. We've been imprinted by Jesus, whose gospel comes to our whole selves and gives us

eyes...to see his vision of justice

hearts...to feel his love

ears...to hear ourselves called by our true names

hands...that we can open to receive and give his blessing and care

feet...that take us to places we didn’t believe God’s compassion could reign.

With our defenses down, we no longer have an obstacle blocking our eyes, hearts, ears, hands and feet from belonging to the generous life God wants us to have...the life of giving to God what belongs to God. With our defenses down, we’ve been given such good news that it is now our job to exercise that love by sharing it... With no reason to defend ourselves from God...we see that God is bigger than any power or superpower, bigger than any government...bigger than any one political party...and yet more gracious than all of them combined. Without our defenses, we can no longer contain God into a God of our own making...an idol who gives according to our ways...

Without defenses at our side, we are left weak, and open to attack, however. There is much malice, violence and greed that threatens a defenseless, generous life. But vulnerability and risk are where Jesus’ gospel meets us most...it’s in those places where Jesus met and redeemed us on the cross, and it’s there where he protects his children—and we as his church--to stand for what he stood for: generosity, charity, justice, speaking truth to power, and mercy. God comes in Jesus to stand with us rather than against us, to walk beside us as his brothers and sisters who belong to God.

What of God’s things have we been holding back from giving to God in our lives? What broken relationship, what time, talent or treasure, what commitment are we willing to break open and give over to the generous compassion of God working through us? Imprinted with Jesus’ compassion, what will we render unto God? It’s not easy to to. Our defenses will surely try to come up. But Jesus’ life, death and resurrection destroy those defense’s power over us. That’s why we will never stop witnessing to such generosity, and advocating for it with our every breath. It’s the only way our lives can give back to God the things that belong to God.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, October 9, 2011

2011-10-09T12:24:00.005-05:00

Seventeeth Sunday After Pentecost
(Lectionary 23A)
Isaiah 25:1-9 • Psalm 23 • Philippians 4:1-9 • Matthew 22:1-14

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, 'Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.' But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, 'The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.' Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests. "But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, 'Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?' And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, 'Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' For many are called, but few are chosen."

What a doozy of a Gospel text we have before us this morning. How are we to make sense of this? As we take the lectionary readings back up again into our weekly worship, we enter into a series of very divisive and heated parables in Matthew that Jesus tells the Pharisees the week before his death. What are we to make of the people too busy to accept a king’s invitation to his son’s wedding banquet? Does this represent people turning away from the invitation to return to God? What are we to make of the king burning the city of those who do not accept his invitation? Perhaps the hardest question of all about this parable comes in the ending, which is unique to Matthew’s Gospel: how can a king who goes to great lengths to have his servants invite everyone, the common people, to fill up his wedding banquet hall--“the good and the bad”--and then, throw one of the guests into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, all just for not wearing the right clothing?

Let’s focus on this last question, because it is one that I think most convicts us but also offers us an invitation into God’s promises. To start with, the king’s actions of inviting “everyone [that his servants] find” is nothing short of miraculous. Normally the guests who were invited for such royal festival occasions were the most honorable, elite and powerful in society, so that their status could match the social honor of the host king. But this parable's gracious king welcomes all who are out on the streets, “the good and the bad”, the people who would have brought shame upon the elite in society....but on this occasion, they brought the king honor, by not leaving his son alone at such a festive occasion.

Kings in that day and age would have provided everything for the guests at these events, including the appropriate attire of robes. When the king, then, notices a man not wearing one of the provided robes, he wonders why this man will not put on the clothing that marks the joyful nature of this occasion. Yes, we could say that the king lowered his standards when he opened the door to let everyone come to the banquet...but that did not mean that there were no more standards to be kept at this banquet. The king still had expectations of his guests.

Could Jesus’ parable somehow be holding a mirror up to ourselves? Does this story not connect with our own hypocrisy to claim to be members of the banquet feast of God’s grace...but yet our lives all too often reflect our resistance to living as a part of that feast, and our unwillingness to being changed by God? In baptism it has been customary throughout the church’s history for the baptized to wear a white garment—like what this story’s wedding guests wore. We have been clothed, therefore, in our baptism, with the right attire. We have been welcomed by God—but can we profess to have lived up to the honor of such grace as has been poured out upon us?

The jarring conclusion of Jesus’ story asks us to look at where we wish to stand in this story: do we want to be a part of the feast of love given to us by God, or do we wish not to join the celebration on God’s terms but on our own? Do we want to push God’s invitation to us aside, because leaving our old life of isolation, shame and aimlessness for a new life of purpose, community and grace involves letting go of too much? Or can we dare to bring all that God asks of us—our whole lives—to God’s banquet where God gives everyone the clothes to wear that take away the nakedness of our shame—the clothes that take away the power of brokenness, the clothes that transform lives with love stronger than death, the clothes that don’t just turn us from bad people into good people but that put Jesus on us and lead us from death into life, the clothes that make us his followers? Can we dare to be seen with the clothing of Christ on?

As much as God wants to clothe us with honor, and cover up our greed, our pride, and our cynicism with the robes of righteousness, God desires a response from us. God wants us to live with the robe of Christ on! God desires for us to come and join the feast we are all privileged to be invited to, to be drawn in and forever intertwined and interconnected with the justified saints and sinners of God’s people. The joy of God's banquet came at a great cost, the cost of Jesus whose self-sacrifice included his own robes and garments being stripped from him, before he went to the cross. With such a high cost, God’s grace does not come to us cheaply. But it does come...it comes to we who are not the hosts but the guests at God' banquet...and the invitation remains extended...to the good and the bad...to join in the celebration...the celebration that death is no more...that there is enough for all...that God’s love does get the final word.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the most well-known Lutheran theologian of the 20th century, a German who died in the underground resistance to Hitler, believed that our lives cannot be let off the hook by self-congratulating ourselves for just showing up at God's banquet. Bonhoeffer said, "Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. . . . Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.. . . . Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." Bonhoeffer contrasted “cheap grace” with “costly grace”, grace that changes us forever, that bears fruit in our lives...that invites others to see the goodness of the Lord that has been opened to us by Jesus. We are always the guests at God’s invitation—it's up to us what we will do with it.

Perhaps what we need, and what this guest who chose not to put on the robe of God’s gift needed, is the promise that although grace is costly, there is more than enough of it to go around. Maybe what kept the person in Jesus’ parable from joining the banquet was disbelief that a king could be as just as to truly invite the dishonored to be guests of honor. Perhaps they disbelieved that they were truly worthy of being there. Perhaps they believed they had to be a more “pure” person to deserve such a feast.

Thankfully we don’t deal with a God who sees any of these things as obstacles to dressing us for receiving and living in the gift of grace. All it takes to join in this feast, is just enough faith to realize we are naked but for the love God clothes us with. All it takes to participate in God's banquet is a heart that we are willing to throw over any barrier thrown in our path...trusting there is room enough in this world for God’s abundant mercy to catch us...and sustain us.

The robe of the righteousness of Christ is not the flashiest piece of clothing out there—it’s nothing that would ever even get considered for display on a fashion runway—but that's not what it is for. It’s not bestowed on us to make us popular. This robe of Christ has the power to to clothe our insides—our hearts—with joy and celebration, with passion for all who are dis-honored because God has set us free...free from justifying ourselves, free from wearing the tattered clothes of our fallen nature...free to set others free by inviting all to the party where the king has more than enough garments of grace to go around.

It's time to don our robes. Put on Christ. Come to the celebration of shame turned to honor. God has made us worthy. Extend this host's invitation. Come to the banquet, for all is now ready.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, October 2, 2011

2011-10-02T12:31:00.004-05:00

"Marked by Christ" Sunday
Joshua 1:1-9
Acts 2:37-47
Mark 7:31-37

As much as today is a day about community, it is really a day about what each one of us values most in community. Community is one of those things that we find both appealing and repelling. We love the benefits of being a part of a community. Yet when it doesn’t give us what we want...it can be easy to want to run away. One of the things that I hear so often about Oak Park and other towns and neighborhoods in Chicago is, “I like the sense of community here.” But at the same time, we could all probably come up with a “top 10 complaints” list about our communities off the top of our heads--too many laws, too many regulations, not enough local businesses, too much development, too little development, too high property taxes. We love the benefits community gives us: friends, neighbors, schools, nature. But that love can turn quickly to indifference and pulling away as the challenges of being in community bump up against us: responsibilities, resolving disagreements, and responding to changes. (Skinner)

The early church shared these same feelings towards being a community. The picture painted in Acts 2--a passage we studied in Koinonia Conversations this past summer--shows a church drawn together by the joy of the Spirit, unified in its heart and its soul (2:32)...excited to be the church of Jesus Christ. But it does not take long for this joyful bunch of believers to bump up against the reality of human brokenness at work in this community. No sooner than Acts describes the church community members as having everything they owned held in common and given to any who were in need, it soon describes a man named Ananias and his wife Sapphira withholding sharing their proceeds from land they sold--and then lying about it to the apostles. (5:1-11) But the arc of Acts shows that these tensions were not too much to break the early church. The arc of the story of Acts is a story of the early church moving from unity, to disagreements, to escalating tension, to working through the inclusion of different kinds of people, to ultimately saying it could define itself as a church of both Greeks and Gentiles.

It is natural for us to not want to deal with tension in community, let alone in church. 10 days ago, the CEO of online social network Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, spoke at a conference where he announced new ways that the online communal experience would become “frictionless”. He said social “applications” would create even more sharing of information about our lives online--more than even whatever we choose to share--like what books we are currently reading, what movies we are watching, and what songs we are listening to. This shift towards even more sharing of personal information without our awareness has many concerned that personal privacy could be breached illegally, and further expansion of these “applications” may continue to grow if it is not stopped. These concerns raise the importance of a myth that we give credence to all too often, whether to online or in-person communities: that with no privacy, with enough information about each other, we can create a frictionless utopia void of personal differences. But, as interconnected as such things can make our lives, the story of early church in Acts shows us that without borders, without the opportunity for self-reflfection and mutual conversation—without the capacity to self-differentiate—a “frictionless” group will be created, but it will no longer be a community.

This is the gift of this “Marked by Christ” Sunday. We take time today to each individually continue to re-set the borders of what matters most to us as we look to God’s future for our community, to discern our sense of what is our communal identity, and to continue to get a sense of what we believe is vital to the mission and ministry of United Lutheran Church as we look forwards. We are gifted with this opportunity as the church because we’ve all been marked--we’ve been marked by Christ. God marks each and every one of us uniquely with the hands of Jesus--hands that open up our ears to hear and our mouths to proclaim his good news of new life; hands that opened the blind and the mute, and drew them into relationship with him and his community.

God has marked us so that we can give the love and power of Jesus traction in the world. The only way to traction can happen is if there is friction. Not friction in the sense of being attacked, blamed or victimized. The mark of Christ on us creates friction by defining us...as blessed, redeemed and made whole...when there are forces at work that do everything they can to define us otherwise. Despite these forces, God marks us in Christ, even though there’s more than enough layers of friction between God and us to give God the right not to mark us...as “forgiven.”

We are marked by Christ to give the power of the Spirit traction in the world. Being marked may cause differences...but Jesus stands in the midst of those differences, still keeping us connected to one another as a diverse community—even connected with those whom we may have the farthest thing from a “frictionless” relationship with, whether in the community of our family, our neighborhood, our country...or even this church.

It takes courage to be in community. There’s no doubt about that. But like the Israelites who stood together as a community at the River Jordan, with the promised land on the other side, after a long journey in the wilderness, they heard God say “I will be with you wherever you go...I will not fail you or forsake you...be strong and courageous” We too are called to be the community God has marked us to be even when there are differences with each other, and with the world...that friction can make us grow because it is Christ who holds us together and binds us together as ones marked by his cross. His love is more powerful than anything that could divide us. For once we’ve been marked by Christ, his hold on us all is forever sure. He will never let us go.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, September 25, 2011

2011-09-25T15:07:00.006-05:00

Season of Creation:
River Sunday

Genesis 8:20-22, 9:12-17
Psalm 139:19-24
Revelation 22:1-5
Matthew 28:1-10

It is River Sunday, the final Sunday in this month's mini-season of the “Season of Creation.” It is a day that we live out in several ways today by connecting God's waters to the waters of baptism—in John's baptism, and in welcoming two new members of our congregation today to live out their baptismal covenant with this congregation.

I'd like to offer a few brief, but I hope meaningful, words that comment on all that is happening today through the lens of a very common experience we have with water.

One of the events that can produce a great many stories about anxious children and parents is that time of children learning how to swim. Today many more parents are taking their children as infants into the pool to become more comfortable in water. But even then, there is still that all-important moment in learning how to swim when a child has to let go of the safety of the arms of mom or dad or the lifeguard, and swim. An essential part of that leap, beyond the techniques of freestyle, backstroke, and treading water, is the basic step of mastering breathing underwater. I can remember a college roommate once telling me about one of his favorite parts of being a summer swimming instructor was teaching kids how to blow bubbles underwater. He said the children always hated trying it at first. It was completely counter-intuitive: breathing underwater? But after that new rhythm became natural—blowing underwater, learning to turn their heads to the side to breathe in, and to repeat: face down, blow; turn, inhale; down, blow; turn, inhale—their faces beamed with excitement. Once that moment came, the waters changed from being the most terrifying thing in the world, to one of the most incredible things in the world.

At each of our baptisms whether they happened today or years ago, we have undergone a similar transformation. These waters have transformed our fear of drowning to our sinfulness into God’s buoyant blessing that frees us to breathe in God’s gift of grace forever. Baptismal waters are waters that will not drown us. We will always be able to breathe in them. They are waters that themselves are full of life-giving Spirit, rescuing us from the power of death and evil, and pouring the promise of eternal life on us. God makes these waters of blessing waters that we can breathe in, even when we cannot seem to keep our heads above the waters we navigate in our lives. Whatever may try to drown us, and keep us from breathing in God’s gift of grace, the oxygen of the Holy Spirit always stands within us, even when it seems we are underwater. All we have to do is breathe.

On this River Sunday, we recall the sign of water that God uses to bless God’s world. We recall the many ways God has blessed God’s people with not just water to drink, and water to bathe, but also water that gives us the grace to breathe in God’s promises, no matter what waters surround us.

All of today's readings point to the gift of God in water, and to our response to that gift. Despite the waters of the flood, Noah was given the life-boat of the ark to continue breathing in grace. God promised Noah that the flood waters would never overcome the Earth again, and that humankind would always breathe in the promise of forgiveness from sin.

The apostle John was given a vision of the waters of the river of life, waters that flowed in a stunning image at the end of his book of Revelation. This vision proclaims that the waters of God—our baptismal waters—flow from the location where the Jerusalem Temple used to be located, the place always associated with the pinpoint of God’s presence in Jerusalem. But the temple is no longer needed for us to come into contact with God: rather it is the gift of the river of life, the waters of baptism, that flow from God to us, so the world may once again breathe with this gift of grace.

Our response to that gift is rejoicing. The story in Matthew of Jesus’ resurrection is a story that echoes Creation's rejoicing with us for the gift that baptismal waters give us. It is the story of an earthquake in response to Jesus rising from the dead. It is as though the whole creation cannot help but shake, move and dance with us in praising God that death is no more. It is the earth, let loose from the prison of brokenness, that now can breathe a sigh, and shout with rejoicing.

We today receive a swimming lesson once again, that here in this boat called the church, this “nave” that structurally represents an upside down ark, God promises us with new life in Christ, and so teaches us how to breathe in and breathe out grace out in the ocean of the world that surrounds this place. Together we blow bubbles in the face of whatever keeps the abundant life of Christ from us. Together God promises that baptismal waters put us in touch with waters that flow to God’s heart—waters that lead to Noah's rainbow vision of an eternal covenant, waters that lead to John's vision of the river of life, waters that rejoice with us as does all Creation at Jesus' defeat of death, waters that transform us to swim our lives surrounded by grace, full of the breath of God to sustain us.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, September 18, 2011

2011-09-18T12:30:00.003-05:00

Season of Creation:
Wilderness Sunday

Joel 1:8-10, 17-20
Psalm 139:13-19
Romans 8:18-27
Matthew 4:1-11

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

We do not have to be out in the middle of nowhere to find ourselves in the “wilderness.” Louis Zamperini experienced the wilderness in a place not full of sand or rock. Shot down on a rescue mission in the Pacific during World War II, Zamperini floated to the surface from beneath his downed plane, and found himself in a life raft in the middle of the blazing hot sun. He could have blamed anyone for winding up in this predicament. But as Lauren Hillebrand chronicles in her recent book Unbroken, despite being faced with “wilderness” challenges more life-threatening than what many of us ever have confronted, he never stopped continuing to see the bleakness around him as a way to grow in life and in faith.

Zamperini thankfully had two friends with him in his life raft that also survived the crash, Phil and Mack. In this wilderness experience, the men knew they would have to conserve only the food they needed to survive. But on their first night, while the other two men were sleeping, Mack gave into his fears and ate most of what was the only ration they had left--chocolate. Mack’s hoarding not only didn’t ease his fears, it left him with fewer resources to cope after becoming sick, and he died after 30 days.

Zamperini always took as active a role as he could in this situation. He refused to see himself as a victim. He waded through many dangers during his 47 days on this raft with his friend. The worst threat was sharks who at first would simply swim around the boat, and who then, when the men would go to sleep at night, would swim underneath the men and punch their noses up onto the bottom of the boat, as if to let them know the men they were there waiting. Finally as their boat began to deflate, the sharks would gain momentum and try to launch themselves into the raft. But the men kept doing whatever they could to keep the sharks away: from beating them with oars, to hitting their noses with their fists to keep them out of the boat.

As it turned out, that wasn’t the worst of their time of testing in the “wilderness.” Next they were picked up by a Japanese naval ship that took them to a POW camp. Over a series of months they were given hardly any medical care, little food, suffered physical and emotional abuse and lived in beyond primitive conditions. The man in charge of the last camp they were at was so madly set on torturing prisoners there that Japanese royalty tried unsuccessfully have him removed.

But even after surviving all this, even after coming within an inch of his life, even after coming back home to California and suffering terrible nightmare flashbacks, Louis Zamperini found a way to forgive his torturers. Now 94 years old, and without an ounce of bitterness in his body, he continues to live one of the happiest lives that his chronicler Ms. Hillebrand has ever heard of.

What is it that allowed this man to survive such suffering? How could he have made it through an experience that would have broken the spirit of most of us? Call it human will power, call it faith, call it God, but through a mysterious power that touched his life, Zamperini refused to see the desolation of the wilderness around him as a place that intended to break him down. In the midst of a broken situation, Zamperini saw this as his growth opportunity, and he found enough resources in himself and around him to survive--even though he was going through what we would call, “the wilderness.”

It is this testing in the wilderness that I would invite us to reflect on today. What “wilderness experiences” have we been through in our lives--or perahs are we currently in right now--and what resources does God give us to overcome them? The wilderness, for all its wildness and undomesticated qualities, for all the ways that human beings want to find ways to domesticate and overtake it, does serve an this important purpose in Creation. The wilderness is a physical space and a spiritual experience that clarifies, refines and tests our values and our dependence upon God to sustain us. Though it may not enter our consciousness in this urban part of Creation we live and dwell in, the wilderness, as part of God’s Creation, cannot be forgotten nor “thrown away.” Absent of the kind of resources we are more comfortable having around us, occasionally being in the wilderness can connect us to God by placing us in a position of reliance that can make God more real than ever, whether it is Zamperini’s Pacific Ocean, or an untamed area in the Minnesota Boundary Waters, or even one of the prarie grass lands beyond the outskirts of Chicago.

In the Bible the wilderness is a place that serves as means towards teaching and readying people for being a part of God’s mission. The Israelites entered a forty-year “wilderness school” after fleeing Egypt that humbled them a great deal, forcing them to rely for food only on the meat provided by God in the evening and manna that came in the morning. Looking back from the promised land, the Israelites discovered that they had found what was in their hearts during that “wilderness school.” What was there was God’s sustaining presence, physically and spiritually, in the midst of what seemed like an environment that was anything but present with means to sustain them.

Jesus’ testing in the wilderness, which we heard in today’s Gospel reading, proclaims an even bigger message from God to us about the wilderness: the wilderness is the arena where Jesus’ identity as God’s Son gets tested and affirmed so much that he cannot be anything but our Messiah after completing that forty-day journey. Jesus defeats the temptations of self-sufficiency, of grasping for political power and of trying to defy death on his own--temptations that he faced again, but that he overcame for us by doing what he did in the wilderness, relying upon God’s help. The wilderness experience is Jesus’ “Outward Bound” journey that prepares him to pass the many tests that will come in his public ministry--tests that will pale in comparison to what he faced in the wilderness. Jesus discovered that in the wild, God is present--as he was fed and ministered to there by God.

We need not fear the wilderness, whether it be a physical or emotional wilderness. For as God has shown through the Israelites and Jesus, God has a track record of showing us that while the wilderness may seem to be a place that is desolate, there is no such thing as a spiritual crisis where we are in the wilderness. As we affirm throughout our liturgy today, God’s abundant presence fills even the most desolate areas of the planet. The wilderness is a place that is alive, waiting for us to discover all that God provides there, and it is a place that calls upon us to proclaim to others that the wilderness is not a place of crisis. It is a place to be navigated through, an adventurous place--both geographic and spiritual--where God’s provisions are laid out for us, morning after morning after morning.

We do not have to be in the physical wilderness to appreciate and connect with the parts of creation that are--at least on the outside--desolate or wild. But we give thanks for what God purposes these parts of Creation for: to express the sustaining goodness of God through even the scarcest times and places. Now as we continue moving through this Season of Creation liturgy, we move to the table that will fill us with our manna in the wilderness, Christ’s table, so we may go and share Christ’s love with all who are desolate, and who yearn to hear that no wilderness is cause for a crisis of faith in God's abundant provisions.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, September 11, 2011

2011-09-11T12:37:00.005-05:00

Season of Creation:
Land Sunday
Genesis 3:14-19, 4:8-16
Psalm 139:7-12
Romans 5:12-17
Matthew 12:38-40

Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

It’s hard to find a family history that isn’t in some way messy. As they say, “Shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall.” If we look back into our family’s past we can often find a “black sheep,” sibling rivalry that never was reconciled, a stubborn parent or a cousin who is always drifting. After all, come on, no matter whose family we come from there’s no doubt our ancestors had “bad heir” days once and a while...or some lifeguard was not on duty at the “gene pool.”

We all carry baggage with us wherever we’ve come from, whether our family story descends from complicated European royalty, or a simple dream of a better life that came through Ellis Island.

It’s no surprise then that the story of the first human family is not without its warts and exposed rough patches. It’s a story of fallen, dishonored and broken relationships all around--between each other, between God, and even with the land. We look back at their story and say, how did God possibly work to bless the world through that family?--even as in the same breath we wonder the same question about our own family, “How could God possibly be at work...with what we've been through, and through what's happened in our past?”

The story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s first children, is the epitome of sabotage rearing its ugly head in a family system. Eve set up Cain for a fall from grace with the words she said as soon as he was born: “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” (4:1) Eve essentially calls him god-like, a “man as Yahweh”, the epitome of a strong, dominating first-born male. Abel’s birth doesn’t get any such praise. Genesis merely states the fact that he’s born. His own name gives him hardly anything to stand on--Abel means “vapor, nothingness, meaningless”. No fewer than seven times in the story does it say that Abel was Cain's brother--but never the other way around. Abel is never mentioned on his own merits. It’s clear who ranked ahead of the other brother.

Cain’s higher status even affected his offerings to God. He brought some fruit from the ground he was to tend to which were probably left-overs. But Abel brings the first animals of his flock of sheep for an offering--the best, the first creatures, given from God who made them and to whom they belonged. Is it then any wonder that God favors Abel's offering over Cains, the weak one, the “meaningless one”, who only has any meaning at all in his family because he is related to his brother? God began to show what is the hallmark of how God works in us--through recognition of the small and neglected ones.

Cain is so disconnected from Abel, so far “above” him, he does not even refer to him as his brother until after he has jealously murdered him. God asked, “Where is Abel, Cain?” and he replied, “What, am I my brother’s keeper?” God could have wreaked vengeance upon Cain, but instead chose to freely send him away from the land he had fed with his brother's blood, instead of seeds.

That’s usually where the story ends when it is told—even though it continues for the remainder of Genesis chapter four, a part which is omitted from today’s first reading. But the rest of the story shows that this is actually a family story that doesn’t end with this game of hunting a “forebear”. If we just look at that crisis--the relationship between Cain and Abel--we miss the larger story of God telling a story of redemption, grace and resurrection that begins with this first family, and reaches all the way to our own.

The seven generations that follow Cain--none of them were farmers. No one took care of the land that had been entrusted to Cain. By the time his ancestor Lamech came along, Lamech was saying things like “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” (4:23-24) The same story of Cain and Abel was continuing to become the family mantra. But during all this time, Eve was watching. She saw what happened as a result of this hierarchy that had been set up between her sons. She saw what became as a result of the male who had taken the same kind of fall that she had when she ate of the fruit of the forbidden tree. It couldn’t go on like this. It had to stop. And God found a way to interrupt the way of violence with the way of grace. Adam and Eve birthed new life.

They birthed a son named Seth. This time Eve did not just speak about Abel, that forgotten, humble, servant-son. She spoke on his behalf, saying, “God has appointed for me another child instead of Abel.” Seth’s birth was their redemption, resurrection and new life, all rolled into one. Seth, which means “survival of the unfit”, became grace for this family that had thus far seen hierarchy creating death. With this new birth, the relationship of humanity with God was restored as Genesis recalls that God then was worshiped as the one to whom all were subject to. The relationship between humanity and the Earth was restored: the soil that had been filled with Abel’s blood had now been redeemed with the seeds of one born in his stead. The relationship of this first family and our ancestors was also restored. Thanks be to God that Seth is our ancestor, rather than Cain, for as Seth’s name testifies, God’s providence works even through families with checkered pasts, who are unfit—even through us who thrive but only for the new life given to us by God.

How is such a story of a second chance, and redemption possible? How can God continue to make way for us to rekindle our connection with one another and creation? The answer, I believe, lies hidden in the question that Cain asks God when God comes to him after Abel's murder. Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Within this question is a deeper question: who are our brother and sister? Are we their keeper? We are, because we have been kept by the One who keeps us all--by God, whose keeping of us draws us closer in relationship, to God, to one another and to all Creation. Even going back to Adam, Eve and Seth, God “keeps” us as children. God does not have grandchildren. God only has children. For just because our parents were people of faith does not make it necessarily so for us. God adopts each of us, each successive generation, to keep us as children, no matter what birth order, or hierarchy, or earthly rank we want to impose on each other. We are our brother’s and sister’s keeper because God has made all of us brothers and sisters, every one--even with brother moon and sister stars, brother creatures and sister land. Here at United Lutheran we are one another's keeper—even across hierarchies of age, class and ethnicity—even between someone like Sam Richardson who can call a newborn baby like John Podolak a brother in this place!

On this day when we recall our brokenness that was exposed on 9/11, and the mix of emotions that still flood us ten years later, has the human family system siezed this opportunity to expand who we see as our brother and sister? Has it made us more interconnected with those brothers and sisters of our country and of our world who are different from us--or has it insulated us in reactive, fearful isolation?

With Adam and Eve who gave birth to Seth, we can be the answers to our prayers for peace, reconciliation and wholeness in the human family that we lift up this day. We too can dismantle the hierarchies in the world that keep our kinship anything other than as brother and sister. For that is how God manages to continue working God’s way of grace through a human family as messy and as quirky as us. We carry with us the promise this day that no matter how many strikes our family history puts against us, from the very beginning, God has left no family system beyond redemption, nor from claiming us as keepers of one another as the brothers and sisters God has made us.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, September 4, 2011

2011-09-04T11:47:00.001-05:00

Season of Creation: Forest Sunday
Genesis 2:4b-22
Psalm 139:1-7
Acts 17:22-28
John 3:1-16

It can truly be an exciting and fascinating thing to incorporate Earth into worship, as we are doing today. I am presume that there has been some moment, some experience we have all had of being amazed by God’s Earth--whether it be an experience of the weather, or a particularly beautiful place we visited, or maybe an animal that we grew to love. There’s an aspect of appreciation and thanks to God for these moments and experiences that I think all of us can appreciate honoring in worship.

However, there is also an aspect of this drawing together of creation and ceremony in our worship that seems odd, strange and out of place. It seems so far removed from this insulated, brick and wood edifice. In many ways our discomfort stems from ways in which Creation has been taken out of and even segregated, we dare say, from Christian thought and practice. The Christian message, after all, is for us, isn’t it--for humans? The Christian story is a human story, not an Earth habitat story, isn't it? Nature is beautiful after all—God created it—but what could God possibly have to do now with the non-human world: trees, plants, animals, skies, mountains and all the rest? Don’t those all exist to serve us?

We can hear the roots of a human-centered worldview of Christianity through a story told by Wangaari Maathai, environmental activist and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Growing up in the highlands of Kenya, Christian missionaries came to her people and saw theses Kenyan natives’ deep reverence for fig trees, which were considered a place of worship. The missionaries cut these trees down because, they said, God was worshiped in a house called church, not under a tree. This was devastating not just for Ms. Maathai’s people but also for the trees themselves. Because they were worshiped with such reverence, the fig trees had never been cut down, and therefore their roots went down extremely deep into the ground. They went so deep they broke rock that then released water up into the below ground water system, providing irrigation for their local crops. These deep tree roots also prevented the soil from eroding—soil that grew their food. What was presumed to be “correct” Christian belief that separated God apart from the natural world only served to undercut these very trees, causing landslides and extensive damage to these locals’ ecosystem and livelihood, and eroding also the relationships to those whom these missionaries wanted to serve. (Speaking of Faith, April 30, 2009)

In recent years the Christian church has been awakening to the dangers of segregating Creation from our imagination and thinking about God. In no small way have the vast and urgent crises of the Earth’s degradation contributed to our awakening: from global inequalities, to climate change; from the loss of species as well as safe water, to urban growth; from resource depletion, to the loss of biodiversity, and many more. We are now beginning to reach back into the vast trove of resources in the Christian tradition and discover that there is a God who affirms humans and the created world together in an interdependent rather than exclusionary relationship.

One such resource that is only beginning to be untapped is the second account of creation heard in Genesis. Most of us are more familiar with the first account of creation in Genesis 1 that starts “in the beginning”, where God takes 6 days to form the earth, and where at the end of each day God declares “it is good.” That story, for all its grandeur, has for so long distanced us from the Earth, namely because of God’s command in it for humans to “have dominion” over Creation. This has more often been interpreted as reason for humans to exploit the earth rather than to be stewards, care takers and custodians of the world--which is truer to the original Hebrew word that was translated “dominion.”

The second creation story in Genesis--yes, there are two of them!--is being resurrected for the deep, connected relationship it places us in with God’s creation. Here God forms us out of the very “stuff” that the Earth is made out of--dirt. Adam, in fact, gets his name from the Hebrew word for topsoil, adamah. God places adamah-made Adam into God’s first garden, Eden, “to till it and keep it” (3:16)--to care and tend to this very ground--this very stuff from which he came.

This second creation story shows a God who is fond of the Earth, who longs for us to live in close relationship with Earth. This stood in stark contrast to other creation myths at the time that Gensis 2 was written. In one myth of that time, the junior dieties have to dig irrigation channels, and get so tired of it, they go on strike and create slave laborers so they can rest forever. The God of Genesis, however, gets involved with the earth. The second creation story begins with an earth that has nothing in its fields, but God gets busy by rolling up God’s sleeves and getting God’s hands dirty. God plants trees, irrigating them with four major rivers, and then supplies those trees with a full time steward to care for them: Adam, born of adamah. Adam, caretaker of that which he is made of and where he came from. Like Adam, trees are not just for us to care for. Because they are made of the same stuff we are, they also give us life.

There is another tree besides that one in God’s first garden that Christians have begun to reclaim from an Earth-perspective. It is something that we may not even think of as a “tree” at all, even though it was made of wood. Our tree of life, the tree that does not just give us redemption, but the tree that also gives birth to us as creatures who are forever interwoven with this Creation God has given us, is the tree of the cross of Christ. The cross does not just redeem us, it offers God’s forgiveness to us that restores us into a relationship with all the earth--all the adamah--that is not dead, but that lives. On the cross God transforms a tree that was full of death into a living tree for us, a tree supported by living adamah—a tree that has roots deep enough to defeat the power of death, and strong enough to uphold our tree of life as our source of protection, sustenance and steadfast love.

Today as God sends us from this place, I invite you to look at the trees that surround us on our streets, in a local park, or even the one planted right outside this wall of the church--a tree that was planted in honor of a deceased child of this congregation whose life was cut tragically short. As we look at these trees we do not just see them as nice decorations, or beautiful ornaments. God intends for them to come alive to us by the story they tell of Jesus‘ presence offering us life. As we look upon them we are drawn to trees because they reveal to us that God’s Creation is not dead, it is alive. We are made of the same, alive, redeemed stuff as these trees. We both have a common partner, Jesus, who has come in our form--we as a mammal, and trees as adamah.

As partners with these trees who speak of the life given to us through God’s tree of life, we tend them. We tend to trees just as we would to anything that is precious, and vulnerable. When we care for them, we care for the one who died to give life to all the Created world, the cosmic Christ. We join together in Creation care just as Nicodemus cared for the broken Christ; Nicodemus, a nighttime inquirer of Jesus who questioned him about why one must be born again by Jesus being “lifted up” on a tree for many; Nicodemus, who cradled the crucified Christ in his arms after Jesus' decent from his throne on a tree; Nicodemus, who like us was made of adamah and who like us found redemption in God’s grace working its way through the stuff we find in God’s created world, even stuff as simple as dirt and trees.

Today we do not just thank God for nature. Today we reconcile that which has been separated from Creation for too long. Christ transforms our relationship with Creation--a relationship that goes beyond just recycling paper, stopping junk mail and printing double sided copies, though those are are a part of that relationship. The gift of this relationship is that through Creation we are all drawn deeper to Christ--Christ whose home is the whole world; Christ whose wounds in Creation cry out to us for care; Christ whose resurrected adamah has turned him into a tree of life for each one of us.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on August 28, 2011

2011-08-28T12:12:00.002-05:00

Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost
Jeremiah 15:15-21 • Psalm 26:1-8 • Romans 12:9-21 • Matthew 16:21-28

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." Then Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? "For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

Have you ever gone from feeling sky high to rock bottom in a matter of seconds? That is what Peter’s experience is with Jesus as Jesus begins orienting his ministry towards Jerusalem. As we heard in last week’s gospel reading, Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”, and he heralded Peter’s confession that Jesus is “the Messiah”. Jesus declared Peter's confession fully worthy of building the whole church on. No doubt, he was on cloud nine. Here is God’s own Son, giving a pop quiz, and Peter is the only disciple who dared answer--and he got it right! He’s standing 10 feet tall.

But as quickly as he ascends, he falls just as quickly. Jesus starts to talk about undergoing great suffering, about being killed and being raised on the third day. Peter thinks this does not sound like what a Messiah ought to be about. He thought the Messiah, of all people, would be making the proud, the greedy, the power-hungry to suffer and die...but choosing himself to undergo suffering and death? God would never let that happen to the Messiah! No sooner does Peter cry out in protest--“No! God forbid your dying! It must never happen”--than Jesus turns to Peter and cuts him down to size: “Get behind me Satan!” Jesus had just given Peter his name, which means Rock, when he gave his confession. Now, he is given another name by Jesus: “You are a stumbling block to me.” Scripture does not record Peter saying anything back to Jesus, but given how far he’d fallen in a matter of moments, I think Peter wouldn’t have anything to say...except...for stunned...cold...disbelieving...silence.

Silence, after all, is about the only thing we can usually muster when we’ve been put in our place. Peter’s own words had not saved him. He had said everything right. He’d thought he had Jesus figured out. Until his words confessed what he’d thought was his notion about how God operates--that not God, nor God’s Son could ever go through our agony of death. Peter’s words did not save him.

In our lives and in our life of faith, we believe that our words will save us. That if we can just put the right words on the resume, and say just what they want to hear in the interview...that job will be mine. That if we can just explain our side of the story of how we betrayed that friend or spouse or family member...they will finally understand what happened. If we can just say the right words to our children, we can finally get through to them. If I can just say the right words to this person...then just maybe...they’ll want to come church. Like Peter, we just want to get the words right to get ourselves out of the challenges we face.

But as Peter exposes in Jesus’ rebuke, even Peter, who spoke all the right words, cannot speak for Jesus. Jesus’ promises, Jesus’ identity as Messiah, Jesus’ way of self-giving sacrifice, cannot be spoken to us by anyone except Jesus himself.

As Peter is silenced, so are we. We are not just silenced at our inability to grasp the Son of God...we come to the end of words to describe the violence, the destruction and the death we see around us. We are silenced when we have no words to describe the catastrophies humanity is capable of carrying out. Still, almost 10 years later, the tragedy of 9/11 has the power to bring us...to silence.

Even as we try to break the silence of suffering, what can we say? In a world now filled with so much media, technology and commercialism, do we even have the space anymore to hear the words Jesus says to us? The average American subjected to 6,000 messages a day. Can we cultivate an openness to listening for a God who could still possibly be speaking to us?

The word Jesus speaks to Peter and to us is a word that chooses not to avoid being spoken in the midst of the unspeakable that brings us to silence. His word for us is a word that is more trustworthy than all the words that come at us to confuse and turn us in on ourselves. Jesus speaks his word from the path that leads through Jerusalem, through whatever suffering silences us...to his cross. His word meets us there at the intersection of where our deepest fears meet God’s great promise of hope. Jesus Word for us...is an embrace of the truth. The word spoken to us on the cross...is LIFE in his name. This is a Word spoken to us when we have no words left to say—when we become ambivalent to having faith in anyone or anything else. It turns out God chooses to bring speech out of silence through one who remained silent before his accusers....whose death was so irrelevant that it was not even recorded by the authorities. (Lischer)

It is in the places of silence where God’s Word of the suffering, saving Christ echo with the promise of presence. In his work about his time at the Auschwitz concentration camp in World War II, Elie Wiesel writes in his book Night about seeing the hanging of a child, and hearing someone ask, “Where is God? Where is he?” The boy was not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, so the boy died slowly and in agony. Wiesel filed past him, saw his tongue still pink and his eyes clear, and wept. “Behind me,” he writes, “I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”

So it is on such a cross that the Word of Life is spoken to us, which we cannot speak for ourselves: Jesus will have the final word. His word will not shy away from all who hunger for compassion that fills us beyond measure. We respond as does the prophet Jeremiah who received a promise of return home from exile: “Your words were found, [God], and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart: for I am called by your name, O Lord, God of hosts.” (Jer. 15:16)

The Jesus of the cross speaks his word that paves the way for us to follow him. Thankfully we do not have to blaze that trail on our own. It has been paved for us already by Jesus, the Word, who offers forgiveness, who clears a way for us straight into God’s heart for the world.

We as the church gathered today hear this word, and it is that word that we then go and proclaim to all the ends of the earth, speaking the name that is above all other names, that runs deeper than any pain, into the silence: Jesus... Emmanuel... God is with us.

As United Lutheran continues its visioning process, what are those places of silence in this community and in our world that we feel God calling us to speak Jesus’ word of life to? Is it to assist with refugee resettlement? Is it to those without affordable housing? Is it to those who don’t feel welcome anywhere? This word, Jesus, is a word that matters, and that can change lives. I believe this church has the faith and courage to speak the word Jesus with boldness, even when the world would rather cover its ears.

So in the crazed world of our lives filled with so many words, let us now take a minute of silence to actually listen to God, who speaks a single Word of Life into our lives today, the self-giving...Jesus...who comes even in the silence of our frailty...to still our fears and fill us with his resounding YES to us spoken from the cross. ...And at the end that minute or so of silence I will say... Word of God, word of life, to which all will respond, Thanks be to God.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, August 21, 2011

2011-08-21T18:21:00.004-05:00

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 51:1-6 • Psalm 138 • Romans 12:1-8 • Matthew 16:13-20

Preached at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Oak Park, IL as part of a “Pulpit Swap” Sunday with their Pastor, Rev. Kathy Nolte, who preached today at United Lutheran Church in Oak Park, IL.

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

Thank you so much for the honor of being with you in worship this morning. It is good to be with you as an ELCA partner congregation in this community. My wife Stacey, who is also here this morning, is expecting our child in October, and one of the many things we have been doing to get ready is cleaning out clutter, which means...lots of empty boxes. I've been thinking a lot about boxes the last few days. I've been thinking about those times in our life or someone else's life that feel like this... [put box over head]. Have you ever been put in a box? No, I’m not talking about when you were five and your older brother played with you by putting you in a box. I’m talking about being labeled something that did not truly identify by who you really are. Maybe it is assuming that just because you are at a White Sox or Cubs game doesn’t necessarily mean you are a fan of the home team. Maybe it is the bully at school who called you weak. Maybe it was the boss who called your work style uncooperative. Maybe it is the extended family member who assumes a political label of liberal or conservative for you on every possible social issue. Maybe it is the doctor who gave a diagnosis that now will labels you, or at least your medical chart, for the rest of your life: depressed, disabled, high-risk...

Boxes and labels, we have been taught, are unhelpful. But it seems in our culture these days that labeling others, putting them in boxes and drawing lines in the sand are becoming more a sign of courage than of weakness. The labels that are being thrown around so casually today are coming out of our preoccupation with economic indicators and political in- fighting and seem to be a way for us to try and hold on to something secure amidst all the change and conflict happening around us.

Once I was at a seminary--that shall remain nameless--and saw the student newspaper sitting outside of the bookstore, and the main headline article was something like “What About Thinking Inside of the Box for Once”. With all the forces trying to change the church this student was trying to advocate closing the church off from the world, in order to preserve the “purity” of the church—trying to keep it in a “box.”

The disciples of Jesus were confronted with this very challenge we face—of labeling, categorizing, and making idols--as Jesus began to turn his ministry towards Jerusalem, and towards the cross. As Jesus asked them “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” he asks them to give him the labels--the boxes--that others would give to him. And they name them: John the Baptist, Elijah, a prophet. But then Jesus asks them the tough question: “But who do you say that I am?” The disciples could pick one of the boxes they had just said and put Jesus in it. They could borrow someone else’s testimony about how Jesus had impacted their lives.

But Peter realizes quickly that Jesus does not fit into a box. He defies categorization. There is only one name that he could be given that comes close to describing who this healing, teaching, preaching, friend of sinners, anti- imperial man was: Messiah. Jesus transcended any human category, because in Jesus, Peter experienced and touched God’s very presence among us. “You are the Messiah, Jesus, the Son of the living God.”

When Jesus comes to us, God’s promise of mercy is made real in flesh and in blood. Jesus defies the category of any other relationship we have ever known or will have in our lives. In him, the living breathing flesh of God comes to us, and it’s personal, it’s real, it’s life-giving, it draws us into an all-encompassing relationship with every single aspect of our lives...that there is no other name we can give him, than Savior and Messiah. When Jesus comes to us, we find we can’t put that experience into a box...it cannot be contained...it cannot be bottled up...it cannot fit into a tidy compartment of our lives...but Jesus envelops and transforms every part of us into something we could not be, apart from Jesus. In him we are given a gift that is bigger than any box, label or name: the gift of being made a new creation, a whole human being, a beloved child of God.

We are posed this question today by Jesus: who do we say that he is? What is the gift that he is to us? Will we box this gift of Jesus into a corner of our lives--to a tidy hour on Sunday? Or can we open ourselves to him walking with us every single hour and day of our lives? Will we draw on another’s testimony, borrowing a box of someone else’s words about how Jesus changed their life, or use those “buzz” words we Lutherans so often like to say—grace, justification, gospel--but maybe don’t know how they actually touch our own lives? Or can we tell our truth, beyond the boxes, of how Jesus love has worked through our weakness to reveal God to us? Who do we say Jesus is?

ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson challenged the ELCA in his report at this week’s churchwide assembly in Orlando, to look to Jesus as our reconciling Lord who brings us into relationship with each other, not inside any boxes, but beyond them, across our differences. Our Messiah, our Lord, reigns from a cross, transforming our whole lives, and also transforming our relationships with those who differ from us. This Messiah chisels and chips away at us with divine love, love that shape us together into a people who care for each other and for God’s whole world. That love that unites us stands bigger and more powerful than any box, than any difference or than any ideology that may try to divide us.

Eboo Patel, one of my most inspiring seminary professors, is a Muslim. He started an interfaith youth organization in Chicago that equips youth from different religions to do joint service projects, and then reflect on what is it about their faith tradition that inspires them to take action for a better world. Eboo sees that the boxes of religious identity cannot separate us from working together on matters that concern us all. He used to say, look at an average daily newspaper, and cut out all the articles that have the perspective of two different religions or ideologies clashing, fighting or causing violence. See how little of that newspaper is left. The Messiah that Peter and that we testify to today transforms us to into people who work together out of a different story line, across the lines and boxes that the world would put us in, to discover that God is present there, in those relationships we had not even imagined possible.

And so the church is built on this Messiah, not on any strength or coercion or manipulation on our part, but on the box-transcending Jesus. Jesus unites us even beyond the twenty Oak Park blocks that separate United Lutheran Church and Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. The church, just like Christ, cannot be contained with the box of a building, and so it is for us to celebrate our unity, especially the unity of our two ELCA congregations in this community. Pastor Kathy and I are deeply committed to seeing our congregations work together, outside of our respective boxes, to collaborate as church partners--to whatever extent God may be calling us to do so, from sharing educational and youth ministries, to joint worship services...the possibilities are endless. We can together proclaim the Messiah who lifts the world out of the boxes of fear and isolation and bullying and poverty...and who places us into the arms of his own gracious, freeing and merciful embrace.

There are many whom we will encounter in our daily life who live with this as how they view the world--trapped in a box-- whether it’s the literal box of sleeping in one on the street, or what can feel like one when there seems like no place to belong. Jesus breaks these boxes down so we can proclaim to all that are trapped by them, that what traps us no longer has power. Jesus gives Peter and us that power and authority to loose those living bound to the boxes placed on them, and that is the power Jesus can make possible through we as the church. We have been given his power, as Theresa of Avila once said:

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which to look out Christ’s compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands through which he is to bless.”

Who do we say Jesus is? Go into the world, brothers and sisters, as proclaimers of our Messiah, as ones set free to share the transforming gift that does not come in a box: he has named us all as his beloved.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, August 7, 2011

2011-08-09T09:22:00.003-05:00

Eighth Sunday After Pentecost
1 Kings 19:9-18 • Psalm 85:8-13 • Romans 10:5-15 • Matthew 14:22-33

Immediately [Jesus] made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, "It is a ghost!" And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid." Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water." He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, "Lord, save me!" Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?" When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God."

I am sure many of us know of someone who is always the first person to raise their hands, or speak up when a question is asked. A “brown noser,” we often call them. I don’t think the disciple Peter was necessarily trying to earn a better grade or be at the top of the class called “Discipleship 101.” He was acting like that when he eagerly shouted out to Jesus to tell him to walk on water. But he did have a certain eager initiative and risk-taking streak that none of the other disciples had. In some ways Peter is the overachiever disciple. After all, it took more gumption for Peter to call out to a mysterious figure taking a stroll on top of a lake and say, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water,” than the courage it took for the coyote in the Looney Tunes cartoon to choose to run over an empty canyon yet again to catch the roadrunner.

For a few moments, Peter pulls it off. This ghost tells him to come, and he does it. He’s walking on water...for a moment. But then...holy mole...the wind starts to pick up. He wonders if he can do it. He realizes this is a scarier and harder task than he’d thought. He wonders, if he starts to sink, whether he’ll be able to save himself, and whether he’s really cut out for this or not. Soon, he’s sinking like a rock.

But it’s not Peter’s fault that he sinks. He’s not supposed to be walking on water. None of us is! None of us, no matter how eager, excited, enthused, or talented we are, could possibly do that! But somehow we think that that is our job—that that is what is expected of us...that we can achieve unbelievably high expectations that we set for ourselves—or others set for us—that we have no way of keeping them.

On top of that, when we try walk on water and struggle to do so, ourselves and others often see it as a lack of character or lack of faith. “If I could just have more faith in myself, then my job wouldn’t be so demanding.” “If I could just believe in myself, this marriage would stop from going down the tubes.” “If I just believed I could make it through, this sickness would go away.”

But no increase in faith will fix these nor any crisis we face. It is not our business to be in the business of walking on water, of being in control of outcomes that are beyond our power. That is Jesus’ business. As the Lord of life and death, it is Jesus’ job to be our lifeboat. It’s his job to save us. It’s his job to walk on water—to do the impossible, go to any length necessary—to come and rescue us, we who are in the boat being tossed about on the ups and downs of our lives. It is Jesus’ job to stand in the midst of our chaos, our struggles and and our fears and reach out a hand to us that pulls us all together into his boat that directs us all to his new life. That is the Jesus we meet who saves us from drowning, and that is the Jesus we meet on the cross.

Once I met a bishop whose ego challenged him to zealously believe that his job was to save the church. He shared that a very wise spiritual director told him to keep a cross in his pocket at all times. Anytime that he began to think that he was the one in control—the savior—he could reach in his pocket for that cross, and remember who he was, and whose he was. He wasn’t God. He wasn’t the Messiah. He was a sinner, rescued by the hands of Christ to proclaim the one who is Lord of life and death to the world.

Just as Peter’s failure to walk on water plunged him into the water, so too can our failures draw us deeper into the grace of God who rescues us in Jesus. For much of the first part of Quaker writer Parker Palmer’s adult life, the God he believed in was a God of abstract peace and justice ideals that he could never manage to live up to. Finally thrown into the darkness of a clinical depression, Parker struggled more than ever with the shadow side of himself that he had denied existed for years and years. In the midst of what was an excruciatingly lifeless time in his life, he came to see that God not just in abstract theology, principles or beliefs. In coming closer to his own inability to walk on water, Parker recounts that he grew to trust that God is also found in our experiences—of our suffering as well as our joy.

In one interview, Parker recounts a way that he experienced God’s presence even in the throes of some of his worst days of depression: “After asking permission to do so, every afternoon about four o'clock, [this friend] sat me down in a chair in the living room, took off my shoes and socks and massaged my feet. He hardly ever said anything. He was a Quaker elder. And yet out of his intuitive sense, from time to time would say a very brief word like, 'I can feel your struggle today,' or farther down the road, 'I feel that you're a little stronger at this moment, and I'm glad for that.' But beyond that, he would say hardly anything. He would give no advice. He would simply report from time to time what he was sort of intuiting about my condition. Somehow he found the one place in my body, namely the soles of my feet, where I could experience some sort of connection to another human being. And the act of massaging just, you know, in a way that I really don't have words for, kept me connected with the human race.” (“Speaking of Faith”, 11/16/2006)

Those massaging hands were the hands of Jesus, reaching out to rescue Parker from his depths. They were hands that could only come from one who chose not to dwell in the heavens but to come down and hold up arms to grab us, support us and set us up straight again—not having to walk on water, but to join with him and those he rescues on his boat.

Those hands are the hands of Christ that rescued Peter, and that rescue us—hands that cling to us and that will never let us go. Jesus’ hands are the ones that reach down and pull us up in our baptism, saving us from drowning in death, raising us to new life.

What storms, what chaos, are we seeking rescue from today? We don’t have to deny that they are there, but we also don’t have to deny that somehow, someway, Jesus comes to kneel at each one of our feet and touch our lives with his life this day. We can open our hands and together go and be a community that does not walk on water, but that stays connected to each other, and goes to share that connection in the world, both in our brokenness as well as our joy, all in the name of the one holds us up in his love. Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, July 31, 2011

2011-07-31T12:26:00.003-05:00

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
Isaiah 55:1-5 • Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21 • Romans 9:1-5 • Matthew 14:13-21

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves." Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat." They replied, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish. And he said, "Bring them here to me." Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Jesus was tired. He was grieving. He was ready to get away. Before we get to the beginning of this story of Jesus and the disciples feeding the multitudes, it is so easy to forget that he had no intention of wanting to heal, pray for or feed anyone. He had just heard that his mentor, his cousin, his friend, John the Baptist, had been beheaded, and his head had been served on a platter to King Herod. He was gone. Like anyone who has lost a love one knows, all one wants to do is get away. This was supposed to be Jesus’ time to recharge the batteries.

But that isn’t what he finds when he gets to the shore of the other side of the lake. Instead of a deserted place to retreat--to take a summer vacation--he finds thousands of people who are in great need of every kind. Some are sick; others are possessed by demons; some just are completely confused and lost, without direction.

Jesus could have said to them, “No, I’m sorry, people. I need to take a break folks. I can’t help you right now. I just lost my best friend.” Even though his tank is on empty, Jesus turns away from his desire to flee, and embraces them. What he has to offer is not much: laying a hand on a shoulder, offering a prayer, sitting with the outcast, talking with the people. But it is enough. It would have been the intelligent and logical choice for Jesus to get away and think for a while about what he would do next...to do a little “strategic planning” for the next phase of his ministry. But instead he does the illogical thing, and meets the hunger of the crowd with compassion.

When Jesus has come to the end of that day, all these people are still there, and although their spirits have been met with such compassion, their bodies cry out with pangs of hunger. The disciples demand Jesus to do something: send these people away, so they could at least go home and eat some leftovers, or make it to the shops where they could buy something to eat. It’s almost as if the disciples are in the same place that Jesus had been in on his way to the shore: they just want to get away. All they can see is scarcity. “There isn’t enough, Jesus.”

Which makes it all the more amazing what Jesus says to them, and to us: “You. You give them something to eat!” But the disciples are still in the place boat Jesus was in just as he arrived with all the people here: We don’t have enough. We’re empty. We’re spent. What can we possibly feed them with? They buy in to the belief that there is not enough to go around. “You give them something to eat,” Jesus says. They don’t believe they have anything to give. But Jesus insists they do, and wouldn’t you know, the little that they do have turns out to be more than enough.

The miracle of this story turns out to be not that Jesus turned five loaves and two fish into enough to feed a crowd the size of what would have been one of the largest cities of that day. The miracle is that Jesus believes we have been given enough to feed those who are hungry. We tend to think that Jesus does everything in this story: that he breaks the bread, that he multiplies the fish, that he feeds the crowd. But in Matthew, it’s the disciples who distribute the meal. They give them something to eat.

This is the good news for us this day, dear friends in Christ. As tired, empty and scarce as our emotional, spiritual, or physical reservoirs may ever get...Jesus can take even what little we have, and turn it into an abundance that freely feeds us and a starving world. Jesus has the audacity not just to keep from withdrawing amidst his grief, but also to transform the disciples from being receptors of his compassion, to agents of his compassion. He cannot feed the multitudes without us. Jesus declares us such agents too--that whatever we have to give, as long as we give it freely, it will be enough to share and feed all who hunger for his abundant love.

In the late 1980’s the film Babette’s Feast famously portrayed a meal that displays an agent of abundance—the kind that Jesus makes us into. Babette is a French refugee who has been taken as a cook by two Danish daughters of a pietist pastor. At the end of the film, when she wins the lottery, Babette decides to spend every bit of it--all that she has to her name--on a lavish meal for this family and their friends, complete with exquisite dishes like turtle soup, fine wine and rare morel mushrooms. Little do they know that she is actually one of the finest chefs in France.

After the film came out, many restaurants incredibly tried to cash in on the movie’s popularity by offering a high-priced meal similar to the menu of the one depicted in the movie. But unlike the film, and unlike the feeding of the 5,000, this meal did not come without a price. As one commentator notes, “It would truly be the feast [from the film] only if you couldn’t afford it, if someone paid all they had for [you to have it], and if it was given to you and to others.” (Lathrop) That is the freely given abundance of God that Jesus makes visible in the feeding of the 5,000. We are the distributors of this abundance, because as freely as Jesus has made us his agents, we can give away ourselves, our time, our possessions--signs of God’s gracious love...love that we offer as Jesus did, as Babette did: freely, “without a price”. (Is. 55:1)

Right now a place that is dying to receive that freely given abundance is the horn of Africa, where drought and famine threatens the lives of more than 11 million in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti. The worst drought in 60 years is getting little press coverage. Yet here is one place where Jesus challenges us that there enough supply to meet demand: “You, give them something to eat.” It is not that there is not enough food in the world to feed places like this; it is a question of how to change the unjust systems of distribution so that we can live out our calling as agents to feed the hungry. (You can respond by going to the ELCA Disaster Response Website at elca.org/disaster)

I have heard it said that this story of Jesus and the disciples feeding the multitudes as an allegory for small churches like United Lutheran. In America so often we think that the mega churches are the ones that are “successful”. But the overwhelming majority of churches, at least 75% or 80%, worship under 150 people a week. In small churches it can seem like that situation Jesus encountered on the hill: so many needs, and so few resources. But what makes life in a small church so meaningful and such a blessing, is that even though we may have so little to give, we give it and we let Jesus bless it. We feed each other and the world with our gifts, our time, our resources...whatever it is that we have to give. And Jesus has a funny way of blessing that little bit--those five loaves and two fish--into more than enough.

What do we come today wanting to run away from? What is making us run on empty? As we receive Jesus in our open hands again today at his table, we receive the little we need to feed us and fill us with God's abundance. Jesus is still saying to us, “You, go and give them something to eat.” God has given what we need. God’s work is still calling forth something from our hands. Now it is our turn to go and take part in God making it enough for all. Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, July 10, 2011

2011-07-10T13:55:00.004-05:00

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost
Isaiah 55:10-13 • Psalm 65:(1-8), 9-13 • Romans 8:1-11 • Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: "Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen! … Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty."

Jesus liked to tell stories. They actually were a specific kind of story: a parable. I don’t know about you but as a child I was fascinated by stories. No matter how old I was or what else I was doing, when the teacher called for story time, I would stop everything to go and get on the mat to hear a book read. During silent reading time I would sit at my desk and it was as if I entered into a whole other world—of Narnia, of a different part of the country, or of another galaxy. Now today, my passion for stories has gone to some extent into films. I have no doubt that one of the main reasons why movies continue to be so popular in our culture is that they are one of the primary vehicles for stories to continue to be told. Stories have a way of feeding us, and we will always hunger and thirst them.

For several years now there has been a resurgence in academia scholarship about the power that stories have in giving meaning to our lives. More than any principle, dogma or doctrine, stories have the power to shape our lives, give them purpose, and to construct reality for us more than anything else. Not only do stories have the power for us to make sense of our lives, but also to make sense of our faith. It’s no wonder then that Jesus liked to tell stories. In telling them he gives us glimpses of God’s story of gospel love—love that draws us in because God always has a place for us in God’s unfolding plot line.

Jesus doesn’t tell any old stories. He tells parables. We’ll be hearing many of his parables in the lectionary readings from Matthew’s Gospel for the next several weeks. Parables are very short—they don’t belong in the “short story” bookshelf at the library. They are allegorical. They cannot be understood unless we understand who is speaking them. Jesus’ parables have a subversive power because the meaning in them isn’t obvious—it’s concealed. They have a hidden purpose of de-legitimizing whatever tries to keep us out of the story of God’s gospel love.

Jesus’ parable story we hear today is one that to us human beings do not make any sense, and does not seem to have a place in it for us. A sower goes and sows seed, planting it on all different kinds of ground: a hard packed path, rocky ground, thorny ground, and good fertile ground. When we picture a farmer going out to plant crops today, we picture a farmer doing all he can to make the soil good before he goes out to plant and maximize his crop. But the sower in Jesus’ parable scatters seed down on the ground regardless of whether there are rocks there or not; regardless of whether the ground is tilled or not; regardless of whether the soil has any barriers that would keep growth from happening.

What kind of sower is this? Is this a fantasy? Is Jesus crazy? Does he not see that that’s not the way to grow an abundant crop? Or could this be a story not about our understanding of growth, but about God, and how and where God operates?

In Jesus’ story, the sower could represent many things. He or she could be God, Jesus, the disciples…it could even be us. Regardless, do we not share stories with the sower’s experience? Do we not scatter seeds of investing ourselves in ground that does not give the return we expect? What about an investment of time, talent or treasure we’ve made in someone else that didn’t pay off? Perhaps as a parent it’s compassionate guidance that falls on a teenage son or daughter’s deaf ears. Perhaps as someone who is lonely it’s an investment in a friendship that shows no signs of mutual affection. Or perhaps as an employer, it’s a complete commitment to offering workers a living wage and as quality a product as possible, only to see clients flee for what’s cheaper and more profitable. On one level we connect with Jesus’ parable because it speaks to the truth we know in our lives. As Paul Harvey in his radio voice would say, “But that’s not the rest of the story.”

The whole story is that at the end of the parable, there is growth. There is an abundance. There is a hundredfold yield! A seven-fold yield is considered a good amount—plenty to live on for a year. A hundredfold isn’t just abundant. It’s a miracle. The full story of the parable is that God doesn’t just scatter seeds of the saving good news of Jesus everywhere. God scatters those seeds everywhere trusting that an abundant yield is there. That yield may seem hidden now, but it is there, waiting to be revealed. The purpose of the sower—whether it is God, Jesus, the disciples, or us—is to continue to scatter seeds of investment in others—even in those where no results seem possible. Regardless of the outcome, we trust that God will make the abundance visible in surprising, unexpected ways.

The history of the Christian church is replete with examples of ways in which we have made it up to God to scatter seeds of God’s love, rather than us. The church been more comfortable believing those inside the church are good soil, and that it’s God’s job to scatter the seeds out in the world where all the rocky soil is, so they can be brought in to the church and grow. This is what happened in the year 325 C.E. when the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as his Empire’s state religion. The church became faced with the challenge of becoming an institution unto itself, and seeing only itself as the good soil—the arena of God’s saving activity. The problem is that there is just as much rocky, thorny, and hard-packed soil in the church as outside it. Jesus’ parable says nothing about whether we have a choice about whether we are good soil or not.

But we do have a choice about whether we will seek out the One who chooses to scatter seeds of God’s love and power on us no matter what kind of soil we are. We can go out into the arena of the world where God’s saving activity promises to take place in the least “strategic” of places and the least “worthy” of people. We can scatter the seeds of God’s love and power as freely and indiscriminately as God does.

In a book called Pathyway to Renewal that many leaders in our church have been reading, the authors drive home this kind of approach to evangelism. Even when churches struggle, the book says it is not true that the salvation of this or any church lies outside our walls. The truth is that we have salvation right here, right now—in the freely given seeds of God’s power and love that Jesus scatters on us. The church has already been saved. We have all we need to go out and scatter those seeds of the life-saving gospel of Jesus.

How do we do that? We tell stories. We tell stories of Jesus and his love. We can tell Jesus’ story and trust it has the power to produce a hundredfold of God's grace, love and justice. We can trust that the yield will be abundant. Jesus’ story, after all, is the one that makes us grow. It’s his parable that shows there’s all different kinds of people beyond these walls hungering to have seed scattered on them. When we tell his story, we find that it’s not just we who are telling about Jesus’ love; it’s Jesus who tells the story of his love through us. Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on July 3, 2011

2011-07-03T12:24:00.005-05:00

Third Sunday after Pentecost
(Lectionary 14A)

Zechariah 9:9-12
Psalm 145:8-14
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

[Jesus spoke to the crowd saying:] "But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.' For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds." At that time Jesus said, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

As we celebrate our nation’s values this Independence Day weekend, one of the ones that rises to the top is our value of “hard work.” We believe an “American Dream” that says we can accomplish anything we want, be anything we want, and do anything we set our minds to...if we can just work hard enough. If someone is in need, hard work is the solution. They’ve got to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”, we say. But what about when such lives have so few resources left they hardly have any straps left to pull on? Or, when someone asks for help, we often say “no” while adding, “we only help those who help themselves,” even crediting the Bible for that saying, even though that line never appears anywhere in Scripture. Yes, this country’s economic capacity, its ingenuity and its resiliency are grounded on the value of hard work. But this value can come at the high cost of leaving behind the poor and disabled. Hard work can lead to a “workaholism” that severely threatens the health of our families and our communities.

It’s no wonder then that we find such relief in one of Jesus’ most well-known sayings: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (11:28-30) Rest. An easy yoke. A light burden. What Jesus promises sounds so appealing to our overworked lives, but can it be true?

Lutherans have been taught that it’s not our own good works that save us, but rather God’s grace. Can it be true that we don’t have to work so hard--that Jesus’ promised rest can free us from that burden? We may believe that we are “justified by grace through faith apart from works” (Paul). But our lives reflect that we believe our justification before God actually depends on us. Something keeps telling us that to justify ourselves, we have to do more, be more, try harder and prove ourselves worthy to earn God’s love. The hard thing is that that hunger has a way of never, ever ending.

As we dance this tension between grace and works, Episcopal preacher Barbara Brown Taylor notes that we still “labor under the illusion that our yokes [need to be carried] alone, that the only way to please God is to load ourselves down with heavy requirements--good deeds, pure thoughts, blameless lives, pure obedience--all those rules we make and break and make and break, while all the time Jesus is standing right there in front of us.” (Seeds of Heaven) Jesus stands there right in front of us this day--as we ponder offering again our sacrifices to the American altar of “hard work.” Jesus offers us something else: that all God requires of us is to belong to God through him. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

When Jesus says this, he has just sent the disciples out on their mission to spread the gospel. One could look at him and say, he’s just sent them out to do hard work to earn their keep. But the disciples know, just as we know, that the work Jesus equips his disciples for comes with a promise. The disciples go to share the good news they've been given. They are not alone. He walks with them. No matter what the outcome, they will always belong to him. Jesus doesn’t leave his disciples without a yoke—without any purpose. They have a role to play in his ministry. Jesus’ yoke is a light one. It flows from his grace--grace that he does not come break our backs with the weight of heavy expectations. He comes with grace to sustain our lives with his life, so that we might have life in his name.

There may be some who are more familiar with farming equipment like yokes than I am. But I learned something new this week about yokes from Ms. Taylor. There are one person yokes, where a contraption is put over an oxen’s back, so that it can pull the yoke behind it and plow the rows in the soil for planting seeds. The person guides the yoke so as to keep the animal from veering too far one way or the other. But then there is also the two-person yoke, which looks very similar, but that also has room for two animals or two people to hold it and guide it. The thing about two-person yokes, however, is that one person does not have to do all the work. The weight of the yoke can be shared as the work is done.

When Jesus says “take my yoke upon you”, I believe he is talking about a two-person yoke. He’s telling us we don’t have to do it all. It’s not about who can carry the heaviest load, but who is willing to share their load with him. Are we willing this day to lay down what weighs on us, and to share it with Jesus? When Jesus asks us to take his yoke upon us, he’s not asking to add another piece of weight to squelch our already guilt-ridden souls. He’s saying, “There is a place on my yoke for you. Join me. Bear this yoke of grace with me. For this load is as light as a feather when it is shared. Join me in giving gospel life to the world. Though we will be tired, we will not be exhausted. For I will share it with you.”

Jesus invites us to walk the co-yoked daily walk of faith. This is a walk that opens up pathways of our lives like plowed rows of soil, ready to be sprinkled with the seeds of God’s manifold mercy. We do not have to do the heavy lifting. Jesus reminds us that he has already done the heavy lifting of the heaviest yoke of all for us on the yoke of the cross.

In Africa there is a proverb: “We can run much faster by ourselves, but we can walk much further together.” In walking the way of faith that runs the course of our lives, we could try to get much more accomplished on our own. But we can walk the way of faith with Jesus by doing it together with him, and with one another. We can stop to check in with another member of the church we don’t know (even when we don’t feel like it); we can avoid the temptation to do our spiritual practices like reading Scripture, praying and serving others all on our own; we can admit the weight on our lives because of a burden we carry is too heavy, and find new life by no longer carrying it all alone.

In walking the co-yoked walk of Jesus’ way, we will find that his is not a way of guilt, shame or fear. It is a walk that has nothing to do with earning anything by “hard work”, or “doing it on our own.” We will find his is a co-yoked walk that is full of all the love and power we need to sustain our lives, to sustain one another and to sustain the life of the world. It is that “light” purpose to which we as his disciples have been called and to which we are now sent, together. Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, June 26, 2011

2011-06-26T12:06:00.003-05:00

Second Sunday After Pentecost
Jeremiah 28:5-9 • Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18 • Romans 6:12-23 • Matthew 10:40-42

Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

“Winners” can seem to be the ones who get all the glory. Several summers ago there was a wonderful film called Little Miss Sunshine, in which a father, Richard, was trying to get a self-help book published that was called The Refuse-to-Lose Program. His career as a “success” coach drove him and his entire family with their old VW bus all the way across the American southwest in order for his daughter to compete and win in a “Little Miss Sunshine” dance competition. To Richard, this appears to be the only possible way that his daughter could feel good about herself by being a winner—by refusing to lose.

Richard is in a lot of ways a “template” character, whose values are exaggerated in order to get the story’s point across. But his “success at any cost” approach to life illustrates the false notion that being a slave to success will provide us with freedom.

If we can just win, and come out on top, we can be free set from rules and even not have to play by the rules--or at least that’s the way that those in power often try to define freedom. Obligations, commitments, responsibilities, even maintaining sexual boundaries—these have no bearing within the ideal American definition of freedom: “I can do what I want, when I want, how I want, and when I want it.”

Christian freedom, however, looks much different than that. Winning to gain free reign over our lives was challenged this past week by someone who would appear to have all the fame, notoriety and “success” that would warrant embracing such freedom. Stephen Colbert, host of the popular TV news satire show “The Colbert Report”, addressed the graduates of Northwestern University last week with a surprisingly different address than anyone could have expected:

“If you do get your dream, you are not a winner.

After I graduated from [Northwestern], I moved down to Chicago and did improv[ised comedy]. Now there are very few rules to improvisation, but one of the things I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. And if they are the most important people in the scene, you will naturally pay attention to them and serve them . . . . You cannot ‘win’ improv.

And life is an improvisation. You have no idea what's going to happen next, and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. And like improv, you cannot win your life.”

By the same token, we can’t “win” at the improvisation of being the church, or “win” at the improvised life of being a disciple. And we cannot “win” our freedom. Freedom is a gift. It is a gift of grace given to us by God, won already for us on the cross by Jesus. God’s promised Word of Life to us, Jesus Christ, comes to us to set us free. In him we are free from being enslaved to a life of separation from God and from one another. We are free to no longer have to strive to fill a self-serving hunger to come out on top.

The apostle Paul in his message to the Roman Christian community helps us to see that Christian freedom is defined quite differently from our wider culture—it is something for us to give back in obedience to God. “But thanks be to God that you,” he writes, “having once been slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.” (6:17-18) Paul is saying that life lived in the gospel is not a life of doing whatever we want regardless of the consequenses, of striving to win above all things, but rather a life lived in righteousness—in service—service to God, and service to others.

“Freed to serve.” This will be the theme of the 2011 ELCA Churchwide Assembly coming up in August in Orlando, Florida. Jesus frees us for service so that we can freely keep our promises, our responsibilities, our obligations and our callings. This is not a glamorous, popular or heroic path. It's not a path of instant gratification, or a path to “success.” But it is the path that follows in Jesus’ footsteps. It is a path that leads out into the world and into all of the relationships in our lives. Service, the life of righteousness, is the path that freely joins us to the pains of this world, as inexplicable as they are, to reveal that freedom finds its fulfillment in serving God and others.

Colbert concluded his address by making a connection between the servant life and a life of integrity. I think the apostle Paul would say that such life can reflect the steadfast love of God. “In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible. If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself. So no more winning. Instead, try to love others and serve others.”

So for a moment let’s think about an obligation or commitment that you have freely chosen to serve, because fulfilling these obligations is not easy. Perhaps it is a commitment that you may be struggling with, or need support to continue living into: it could be to a friend, a partner, your children, to you parents, to your work, to this congregation, a commitment to the poor, or someone or something else. Write one down or just think about one for a moment... Let’s pray for them: God, today we invite your Holy Spirit to help us embrace obedient service, a joyful obligation we get to be a part of. Come and help us embrace your freeing Word of life spoken to us this day, that we do not have to win yours or anyone else's favor. Give us faith to share the freedom you have already won for us in the holy obligations we have been entrusted with. Help us to serve others, rather than our fleeting desires. May we freely follow in Jesus' footsteps of making your love visible, both this day and all our days, that finding our fulfillment in service, that you may be given glory, honor and praise...in Jesus name we pray. Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, June 19, 2011

2011-06-19T20:38:00.007-05:00

The Holy Trinity
Genesis 1:1-2:4a • Psalm 8 • 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 • Matthew 28:16-20

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."

Can you remember the last time you tried to learn something new--a skill, a hobby, a household chore, a musical instrument, or a new language? As an adult it can and most often is one of the most completely humiliating things that’s ever happened to us. I can remember taking dancing classes with my wife before we got married a few years ago, and how scared I was to do the waltz as our first dance in front of a room full of our closest friends and family members. That night, as I counted “one, two, three...one, two, three” while we danced, I could probably be heard in the whole room, even all the way into the kitchen, maybe, and I know even I could barely hear the bluegrass band’s beat that was playing the music to that first dance. I was so scared of stepping on this beautiful bride’s shoes and embarrassing myself that I was willing to do anything to avoid looking incompetent.

Perhaps that fear is why learning a new life skill is so challenging for adults. We build up so much of our identity in the areas of our lives where we are competent--our work, our home life, our volunteer activities and hobbies. So when we find ourselves in situations where we do not feel competent, our anxiety level goes through the roof!

And perhaps this is why, for many of us today, I am guessing that Jesus’ the words of the Great Commission to “Go and make disciples” doesn’t exactly serve to inspire us a great deal with confidence. More of us than not, I am guessing, hear this command and are reminded of our guilt, as I am, for not having done more to make more disciples...guilt for for not knowing how to...guilt for feeling powerless to...and guilt for simply never having done it. It’s not that we don’t want to go and make disciples. It’s that we don’t feel any competency to make disciples whatsoever. Maybe we’ve never had a chance to learn about it, practice it, reflect on it, or integrate it into a regular part of our own lives of faith and discipleship, and so we’ve never developed confidence in ourselves to follow through on this great co-mission that Jesus has entrusted to us.

But maybe that is to some extent Jesus’ point. After all the task of discipling that Jesus gives his disciples and us sounds nothing less than completely impossible! To make a disciple—followers of the way of Jesus?! The eleven remaining disciples don’t even have a very good or lengthy track record of being competent at doing it! And not even that, but Jesus gives us the command to make disciples of all nations, bringing the good news of Jesus’ power and love to peoples and cultures completely different from our own! This task may be so unbelievably impossible, in fact, that there is no way for us to fulfill it...except, that is, to completely and utterly throw ourselves into God’s mercy and strength. Making disciples in fact may be one of the few things that does not rest on the authority of our own competence, but rather rests upon Jesus, our Lord, who prefaces the Great Commission by declaring that all authority rests with him--not with the church, with our resources, or our abilities, but with the crucified and risen Jesus, to whom “all authority on heaven and on earth has been given.” (Mt. 28:18) (Long)

Could it be possible, then, for us to move out of our comfort zone of what we are competent in, to fulfill our purpose to witness and proclaim the gospel? It is possible, because God has given us all the competency we need, when God got out of God’s own comfort zone to send Jesus to redeem us. God got out of God’s comfort zone with the wildest of investments in, of all people, us--an investment that even went as far as Jesus being willing to promise he would always be present to us through the Spirit. It’s possible for us to move out of our comfort zones for the sake of sharing Jesus’ love and power because grace never comes to meet us and simply leave us where we are at. As spiritual memoirist Anne Lamott defines it, grace always meets us exactly where we are at in our lives with the life-changing graciousness of God in Jesus...but it never leaves us there. Grace, as the reality that God has chosen to believe in us, challenges us to grow--not just to consume grace, but to be strengthened by it so we can go and feed the world with God that it is so hungry to receive.

As we go into the world to follow the Great Commission, we go marked with the cross of Christ given to us in baptism. We go to make disciples as people clear about what kind of difference being a disciple makes for us. How can we expect to invite others to be disciples, after all, when we do not know how our lives have been transformed by God’s grace in Jesus Christ? See if any of these statements describes the difference God leaving God’s comfort zone to love us has made in your life. These could be examples of how you could talk to someone else about the difference Christ makes in your life:

I used to strive for everything...now I’m grateful.
I used to live so confused...now I have direction and purpose.
I was angry...now I’m grateful.
I was striving to prove myself...now I’m accepting of my limits.
I used to be self-destructive...now I’m making healthy choices.
I used to struggle with the meaning of my life...now it all seems to make sense.
When I’m in despair...faith is what keeps me going.

Start small. Try practicing talking about what difference being a disciple makes for you with those you love, and care about. Gradually, you will find you will build confidence, and be able to step out and say those words to someone you don’t know as well--someone who may hunger to hear about a gracious God; someone who is searching, lost, disconnected, alone or afraid. And you will be ready to move out of your comfort zone to bring God’s comfort to someone else’s life. You will be ready to “make disciples.”

There’s also an element of “going and making disciples” that has to do with our style of sharing our faith. Typically Lutherans are most comfortable with evangelism in the serving style of self-giving service, and in the invitational style of inviting someone to worship, a service project or class. Both of these styles can be effective, but both of them can also easily happen without our telling of the story of God’s love in Jesus. We don’t have to be restricted to one or two styles of making disciples, however. We can get out of our Lutheran “comfort zones” to share the good news in a variety of ways. There’s the confrontational style that speaks the truth of the gospel with love; there’s an intellectual style for the analytical, inquisitive type; there’s a testimonial style for those who are clear communicators who can connect their own story of faith to the life experiences of others; and there’s the interpersonal style for those of us oriented towards friendships, and who can share the truth of our faith even when it may put those friendships at risk. (Hybels) Sharing in these ways may be uncomfortable at first; but the more we move beyond our comfort zones, the more we will see that God’s grace is more than competent enough to work through our hands, heads and hearts to fulfill the Great Commission.

When Jesus meets the disciples on the mountaintop and gives this commission, it says that some of the disciples “doubted.” (28:17) They hesitated. It’s not all too unlike the disciples who see Jesus walking on water hesitating to believe that it’s Jesus. Jesus’ response to the disciples in the boat echoes his promise made on that post-resurrection mountaintop in Galilee to be with us to the end of the age. “Take heart,” Jesus says, “It is I; do not be afraid.” (Mt. 14:27) In handing over the Great Commission to us, Jesus gives us all the skills we need to fulfill our purpose as evangelists. We have his promise that we have a message to share, a world to love, and a faith that can’t be kept hidden. Like the disciples, Jesus will perceive our fulfillment of his commission not only by whether we recognize it is Jesus who gets out of his cozy Godliness to come walk on water to find us...but also by whether we have the courage to get out of the comfort of our boat, share the good news, and to trust his promise that the Spirit will always, always, go with us. Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, July 12, 2011

2011-06-12T12:29:00.005-05:00

Day of Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
John 20:19-23

No one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit. Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

I know that some of you know of my fondness for the game of football--or “soccer”, as we Americans tend to call it, even though it has everything to do with feet. One of the things that I find so gorgeous about soccer is how much of a team sport it truly is. There can be no superstar on a team--while someone needs to put the ball in the net, a team has no chance without a goalie, defenders, midfielders, wingers, and strikers, all working together in concert. Soccer does not have the scoring that, say, basketball or American football does. But truly, when a team is playing in harmony--like, say, the Barcelona club that won the trophy for best European club team two weeks ago--and everyone is playing their role and complimenting one another, we can see why so many call it “the beautiful game”, and compare it to watching more art than sport.

But as fluid and impecable as soccer can be played, there are, of course, those who are beginners. Many of you may have had children who, at a young age or who even still play soccer. Some may have seen matches of children playing soccer as young as 5 or 6 years old. When one watches such games of extremely young players, it ends up looking more like an amoeba cell collecting more and more cells as a glob of even more and more kids huddle around together, all running after the ball. As soon as the ball goes to one corner, a mob of nearly everyone on the field runs as fast as they can over to crowd around the ball. There it gets bounced around between that group, until the ball pops out like a piece of popcorn down to the other end of the field, and the whole mob of players runs after it, and it all starts over again! The strange phenomenon at work in this kind of endless grou pursuit of the ball is that everyone thinks they have to pass, dribble, defend, attack, run, walk, yell, scream...and of course, don’t forget scoring! Everyone thinks they have to do everything.

In many ways I think this can describe our lives and even the church sometimes. This scene can illustrate how we order our lives by this approach, which is: hurling ourselves fully and completely towards this problem, and then reacting to then that one; surrendering our whole lives to doing everything possible to resolve this conflict, and then escaping into another one; or in the church, we can lurch from this volunteer ministry, to that activity...from doing this ministry for the poor, to being that volunteer for worship, Sunday School, altar guild, this committee and that one... As any doctor will tell us, our bodies can only handle so much activity until our defenses weaken, and before we know it our immunity system can no longer protect us. We can begin to wonder...is it all up to me? Can we do it all on our own?

For wearied soccer players, harried parents, overwhelmed high school graduates, and depleted church volunteers alike, the apostle Paul has good news for us. “There are varieties of gifts,” (1 Cor. 12:4) he tells the Corinthian church. No one has to do everything, be everything, or fix everything. Rather, everyone has a role to play, and gifts to share in the body of Christ. Paul was writing to a Christian community in Corinth that was beginning to believe that the only players on their “team”--in their church--who mattered, were those with the gift of speaking in tongues. But it is not just those with the most popularity or who can do the most who have gifts to share. “To each”, Paul says, “To each is given the manfestation of the Spirit for the common good.” The Holy Spirit will not let us say, “I am not gifted.” The Holy Spirit will not let us say, “I have to do everything.” The Holy Spirit puts on our lips the words “Jesus is Lord”. Jesus is Lord frees us from the role of trying to be Lords of our own lives—that job description has already been filled. Jesus being Lord frees us free us from being someone God did not create us to be, but to be who God created us to be. Jesus being Lord gives us freedom to join our gifts to the common purpose of God's mission, working in us to be an interdependent community, loving, blessing and reconciling the whole world.

But wait, “Jesus is Lord”--how can we say those words, “Jesus is Lord”, in a culture that does not make it comfortable or natural or easy for us to say we believe that? That must be crazy! How can it be possible for us to not deny but rather affirm that in Jesus’ name those who appear to be the poorest, least talented and spiritually un-gifted people among us surprise us with the gifts that only they can share? That must be crazy! How can the descending of the Holy Spirit to people of every nation and tribe nearly 2000 years ago possibly bear a promise for us that every single disciple participating in the life of this congregation has value? That must be crazy! How can it possibly be that God levels the playing field, energizing and activating all of our gifts together for the sake of giving glory to Jesus, who is Lord? That must be crazy!

Being filled with the Holy Spirit, as God promises us this Day of Pentecost, indeed does make us crazy. The Holy Spirit makes us look crazy to the world that is especially so resistant to those parts of the body of Christ which appear at first glance to be tiny, insignificant, and un-“successful.” But the Holy Spirit is a renewable resource, fellow crazy-people! In fact it is one of the things I love about this congregation—that despite how much responsibility people may have in their daily lives, people here are empowered by the Spirit to give in ways that the world may see as “crazy”--but that build us together to be the living, breathing body of Christ.

If you don't believe you have spiritual gifts, or if you need some help clarifying what your gifts are, I'd like to invite you, before you leave today, to take something with you that is given to everyone who becomes a member of this church, called a “Spiritual Gifts Inventory.” It’s a personal assessment, and helps you to see the gifts that God has given you can flow out as a natural expression of the Holy Spirit. Take one home, fill it out, and if you don’t want to score it, turn it in to me and I’ll score it fore you, and help you to discern the specific gifts that don’t just give life to the church, but that also give life to the world—and give life back to you. (Complete the “Spiritual Gifts Inventory” online by clicking here. The link will also be in the Midweek Moments weekly email this Wednesday.)

When the Spirit was poured out at the first Pentecost, people said, “They must be filled with new wine” (Acts 2:13) “They must be crazy!” But that’s what the Holy Spirit does to us. The Spirit makes us get crazy. Crazy with wisdom, crazy with healing, crazy with prophecy, crazy with giving, dilligence, compassion and cheerfulness. In what way is God calling you, today, to step out and be crazy with the Spirit? Being Spirit-crazy may not seem like the way to ward of sickness and illness for a healthy body of Christ. But in the end, getting crazy with the Spirit in the ways we have been particularly gifted may in fact be just about the sanest thing that we can do to become the Spirit-filled body of Christ that God has gifted us to be. So let's get crazy with the Spirit! And in so doing we will find ourselves formed into a team that looks less like a wandering ameoba, and more like God's beautiful work of art. Amen!

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, June 12, 2011

2011-06-05T12:37:00.002-05:00

Vision Sunday
Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21 + John 17:1-11

Today’s service is briefer than normal (in case you hadn’t already noticed!). This is to allow time for everyone to gather after worship to discuss the very important challenges and opportunities facing United Lutheran Church. Thank you for your flexibility!

What biblical story could be better for us on this Vision Sunday than a story that at its heart wrestles with the tensions of oppression and liberation, change and risk, fear and freedom? The story of the Exodus has inspired visions of hope for over three thousand years, and hopefully once again, today, this story can offer us guidance as we seek to uncover what the way forward is for us.

We heard this story told at the Vigil of Easter this year--it is one of the twelve possible readings that are appointed for that wonderful service. And this year I as I heard it again I was struck by the questioning fear of the Israelites as they approached the Red Sea. Here they are, finally free from the system of slavery that placed them at the bottom and that kept them powerless--and what do they do? They complain! They want to go back to slavery! They say, now we are in the wilderness—with no direction, with nothing in sight that looks like a new home. Back in Egypt, even though it was slavery, at least we knew to expect. At least we were safe. At least we could depend on nothing changing. “What have you done to us [Moses], bringing us out of Egypt?!” (Ex. 14:10-12)

In many ways this is the point at which ULC stands. We stand at a liminal place—a place where we know we cannot go back. We cannot go back to the glory days. We cannot go back to the days when the institutional church was at the center of American life and culture. We cannot worship nostalgia. I can’t imagine what it has been like for each of you over the past ten to twenty years to see this church go through the challenges it’s been through, especially with declines in membership, participation and now with severe financial hardship.

But I think God says something to Moses that offers us hope. God does hear our cries, and our yearnings, and our questions. God says to Moses, “Why do you cry out to me?” as if to say, “Do not doubt that I have called you here for a purpose. Do not cry out to me without also trusting that what I have said I will accomplish through you, I will do.” We can have doubts about the future of this church, dear people. But we need not doubt that God can do amazing things through us. Like the Israelites, we do not know what the path before us to freedom looks like exactly. But we do know this: the possibility of change, of being the church that God is calling us to be, here and now, and into the future, is possible. I do not doubt for a second that you all have the imagination, the gifts and the skills to dream God’s dream for United Lutheran’s future. In all my time with all of you I have never doubted that you have that desire to listen for and follow God's vision that is wiser than our own vision. God wants something both for this congregation and for the people we serve in this community and in the world...and God will communicate those desires...if we take the time to listen—listen to one another, and to the Holy Spirit. We will also need to wrestle with the questions of how we will live out what God desires for us. But I have no doubt that as we step out in faith into the wilderness, that God will not let our hearts turn to stone, but that God's promise of deliverance will keep our hearts open to God's future for us. God is ready once again to deliver God's people from fear to hope.

Jesus, in the night he was betrayed, prayed a prayer to God on our behalf that he prays for us when we cry out. It's a prayer from today's Gospel text: “Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” (John 17:11b) As we now enter a time of walking in the wilderness together as United Lutheran Church, discerning our future, Jesus will keep us one. We have many voices, but Jesus intercedes on our behalf to make us into one people—one people whom whom he will deliver, in the same way that God kept the Israelites as one when God delivered them through the Red Sea. As Jesus makes us one with God, Jesus promises: even as we take those risky steps into the wilderness, he will keep us one with himself, with God, and each other.

I, for one, am excited to see the future vision God has in store for us! I hope you are too. Amen.