Letting the Spirit loose

Text: Romans 8:22-27

So today is Pentecost—or as we in the Lutheran Church call it: Holy Spirit Appreciation Day. This is the day that we give the Spirit a little stage and show it off, just this once, so that it stays happy and doesn’t start to do any crazy things with the church. We might understand that it is God's church and not ours, but still, the last thing we need is tongues of flame and an unruly Holy Spirit on the loose causing people to do unusual things. If the Spirit wants that we can give it the address of the Assemblies of God Church down the street. It can do all sorts of stuff down there!

God forbid we would let the Spirit loose.

Now, I know Midwestern, Scandinavian Lutherans—being one myself—and so I understand the fear we have of letting ourselves go even a little. So, I don’t expect that I’m going to start being interrupted with “Hallelujah” and “Praise Jesus”… but it kind of would be nice. I mean, the Spirit’s big task in life is to put us to death, which sounds kind of like a morbid thing, but in truth dying to yourself is the most “gospelly” you can do. There is profound freedom in simply not caring about what those around you think. In this part of the world—in our culture—shouting out “Hallelujah” or just plain talking about what the Spirit is doing in your life would require some serious disregard for normal conventions; it would require some serious dying to what other people expect of you. There are people in this community who are very comfortable talking about their faith to anybody, anywhere. I thoroughly enjoy them--no matter what it is that they believe--because at least they have the conviction to admit it.

It’s hard to not care what people think of you, but it's also critical to the well-being of the church.

I’m kind of a hopeless optimist (to use a particularly oxymoronic phrase), so rather than focusing on the Acts reading, which is the story of Pentecost, I want to talk about Romans and make this conversation at the same time bigger and yet more specific to our lives. Given that the Spirit is about putting our little wants and desires to death, it’s important that we also know what it is then that gives us life. “In hope we were saved,” says Romans 8:24. We don’t experience new life because we have God all figured out. So to go out and tell people about your faith isn’t to claim that you have all the answers. In fact that is precisely the opposite of the kind of hope that Romans 8 is talking about. Hope requires knowing that you do not know. Hope requires giving up your own importance. Hope requires not seeing.

But not seeing is difficult, right? It's one thing if you hope for a pay raise, which you know is in the realm of possibility, but quite another to hope in Jesus Christ. This is where the Spirit comes in. This is where we need to let the Spirit loose; where we need to stop trying to chain it down to one Sunday a year. Romans 8:26 says, “The Spirit helps in our weakness.” When you’ve lost hope, when you don’t feel it, when life gets really complicated, when (again as Romans says) creation groans, when any bad thing happens, you will lose hope; it’s not something you will hold on to strongly in every moment in your life. It just doesn’t work that way. We are not only incredibly optimistic creatures we are also incredibly volatile. One moment we’re ready to tell the world about how great God is because we found an unopened Twinkie in the recesses of our cupboard, and the next moment we are cursing God because the Twinkie just made us sick.

We don’t know how to pray as we ought. We don’t know how to worship as we ought. We really don’t know how to praise God in any way approaching what God deserves. Creation is groaning and so are we.

That’s where hope comes in. It doesn’t make sense if you look at the world. How many times do you turn on the television to watch the news and immediately lose hope for the world? And yet, removed from those messages of despair, people are innate and strangely hopeful. Psychology could undoubtedly give numerous reasons why we remain optimistic, but I have another explanation; one that is at the heart of Pentecost. It is this: hope is something that can only come from outside of ourselves; not from within. You can’t make yourself more hopeful by working hard at it. On our own we are all Eeyore, but the Spirit does something to us. Even Lutherans who don’t like to talk about the Spirit are filled with it every time we have hope for the future, because hope requires dying to our self, and in the place of our little desires there is room for the Holy Spirit to flex its muscles. Even Lutherans are filled with the Holy Spirit; even if the idea of shouting “Hallelujah” in worship makes us want to hide under the pew, even if the idea of being spiritual makes us just a little nervous, we can be (and often are) filled with the Spirit.

Think about moments in your life when you desperately hoped for something. Now if you thought about little hopes go and throw those out the window and start over. Don’t think about hoping to catch that walleye or hoping to get that video game for Christmas. Throw out all the hopes that have to do with you wanting something for yourself. Now, think of the hopes that have really, really mattered in your life. Think of those things that broke through your Midwestern sensibilities and maybe even physically brought you to your knees in prayer. Sometimes those hopes have been realized; sometimes they haven’t. I don’t want you to focus on whether your hopes came to pass or not. Instead, I want you to focus on what you felt in the moment of desperation when all you had left was to turn to God.

That is where you find the Spirit. That is where the Spirit is destroying your ego. For those of you who are parents, think of that moment when your child was born. When they entered the world all that mattered was the hope that you could bundle up in your arms. That is a spiritual moment. Think of when you first learned that a loved one had died; think of what you felt. That is a spiritual moment. In those moments, your desires became distinct from your sense of self-preservation and in that way the Spirit was interceding for you, as Romans 8 says, “with sighs too deep for words.”

My worry when I look at Lutheranism in America is that we are losing that sense of the Spirit in our daily lives. We still experience it in times of new life and death, but on normal days we mostly go about ho-humming our way through life without any care about what the Holy Spirit is doing. This is not the same thing as being emotional; I don’t want you to think that. I don’t think God really cares if you are emotional or not, but God does care that you stop bearing the weight of self-importance on your shoulders.

I’m not that important, and I think that’s the only reason the Spirit has time for me, because in my best moments I’m capable of admitting that I’m not worth much on my own. Each and every one of you reading this are not that important. You’re just not. You’re important to God, but not because you’re important to the history of the world. You might do great things. You might be the next Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gandhi or Mother Theresa, but even the great things you do will happen only because you will have died to yourself along the way and let the Spirit do its thing. You don’t deserve the credit. And that is a wonderful, wonderfully freeing thing.

This is where Christians are both similar and very different from Eastern Religions. Buddhists believe in emptying yourself to achieve some spiritual nirvana. Nirvana literally means “where there is no wind.” For Christians, the wind is the exact same word as "spirit" in Hebrew; the wind is essential to the very process of letting go.

I want to see a Lutheran Church that gives itself up to the Spirit; that is so humble about itself that the Spirit blows like crazy. I want to see a church that trusts the Spirit to guide it. We’re not there. Frankly, we’re not even close. But I have hope, because it’s not up to us. Our only job is to stop acting so important. Then—and only then—will we be free to really let the Spirit mess this place up. It’s a scary thing.

So was Pentecost.

Why Being a Midwestern Lutheran is Hard

Midwestern Lutherans have ourselves a BIG problem this time of year; an insidious date that creeps up on our calendars after the High Holy Days of Easter and Mother's Day; a day so frightening that we do our best to cover it up on Memorial Day weekend in the hope that nobody will actually show up for worship and discover what it is all about. Pentecost--hereafter referred to as The-Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.

This Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named is near-universally celebrated by the Christian Church as the time when the Holy Spirit entered into the world and christened the church, but as the good Midwestern-Lutheran knows any good thing must come with strings attached, and in this case the Spirit's "good works" only cover the depth of the sinister plot that leads to good Lutheran boys and girls speaking in tongues and/or saying "Amen!" in church. Midwestern Lutherans know that this must be stopped at all costs.

But at this point I should admit that I have a little problem: I really like The-Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, I like talking about the Holy Spirit, and perhaps I should enter an AA program for saying so up here, but I like getting excited about things generally in church. This is a most counter-cultural stance in Midwestern-Lutherandom

I know. I am one of us. For our people, showing excitement over anything, least of all the workings of some foreign "Spirit," is a sin of great magnitude. We're lefse people: a little sugar hidden in the cavity of our mixed-marriage of potato-bread is about all the excitement we can handle. Too much enthusiasm may lead to sin, or worse yet, it may cause people in town to look at us strangely. Better to never do anything unusual or exciting in life than be shamed by one's neighbor. This is why being a Midwestern Lutheran is hard. It's an exercise in internal self-righteousness via external self-restraint.

The funny thing is that people here mostly don't see it that way. There is a kind of salt-of-the-earth humility that allows Midwestern Lutherans to experience a multitude of wonderful blessings and manage to remain stoic in all encounters public and private. On the Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named we remember that some people have the gift of speaking in tongues while we have the gift of Eeyore-ism.

But on days like The-Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named we are also left in a bit of a quandary. We can't break out of our shells, which is undoubtedly what the Holy Spirit will do to us if we let it loose, but we also want to remain good and faithful Christians. So what do we do? We make a big fuss about the color of the day and we make certain that all of our banners have stitching with flames! Happy Red Vestment Day! Then, we treat the Holy Spirit like it's our honored guest. We allow one day (that's actually the language we use... "allow" ... as if God needs our permission) to keep the Spirit happy lest it start to do crazy things with us.

Being a Midwestern Lutheran is oh so hard.

This is all cultural and engrained. It's not that we choose to sit quietly in our pews and smirk silently every time something amusing happens in worship. It's not that we choose to glance around and make certain that nobody is looking at us whenever we get up for any reason. It's not even that we choose to avert our eyes when somebody in worship doesn't know the proper decorum and we're embarrassed for them. It's just who we are. And it's hard. Really hard.

You see, it would be much easier to celebrate The-Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named with praise and dance and loud, out-of-tune singing. It would be much easier to show emotion, but we just can't do it. It's who we are. Most churches have realized that this kind of movement of the Spirit is really quite freeing. They understand that it allows people to be less self-conscious, which happens to be near to the heart of the Spirit's activity in seemingly every place and time. Most churches understand this. But we can't. We're too stoic, too weary, too fearful of what will happen if we say "Amen!" a little too loudly.

Being a Midwestern Lutheran is hard.

It is my prayer that this Sunday the Spirit is going to burst through the chains we have strapped to it and cause the very walls of the church to thunder with its movement. Many Midwestern Lutherans would be very careful with such words. I can imagine them saying, with slow, Fargoan accent and all, "Hey now, pastor, be careful what you pray for! It might just happen then!" To which I say, finally and absolutely: good. I hope it does. I hope we are shocked and appalled by what the Spirit does, because this Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named holds the key to our church's future, the key to breaking through the cultural bonds that hinder our proclamation of the gospel, and the key to dying to ourselves.

Only then will we be able to say, "Being a Midwestern Lutheran isn't so hard, after all."

Investing in our youth

The following is an article from Grace-Red River's June newsletter concerning the recommendation of the councils to hire a full-time staff position for ministries in the first third of life, aka a "children, youth, and family" position.

Church budgets are a funny thing. On the one hand, we are not a business. Not only are we non-profit by law, but there is also a kind of moral obligation to treat the offerings of the church with expediency. Nobody wants to think that their money is hanging around in the accounts of the church for a rainy day. On the other hand, there is a natural tendency toward preservation in light of the “what ifs” of the future. There are plenty of worst-case scenarios out there. It’s natural to want a safety net.

There are many different kinds of investments we can make. Recently, Grace decided to put a significant sum away to accrue interest. Those funds are still liquid (we can access and use them as we will), but nonetheless it is money set aside to make more money. That is one, very straightforward means of investment.

Other investments are harder to see in part because they are not investments that are familiar to those in the for-profit business world. This month we are faced with one significant investment, which is a full-time staff position to address the younger members of our church body. This is an altogether different investment than putting money away in the bank. It’s an investment in giving our young people (children, youth and young families) a reason to belong.

I am very aware when I craft a newsletter article like this of who my primary readership is. There may be a few of you who are youth or young adults in your 20s and 30s; there may be a couple young families; but my primary audience is folks who are parents or grandparents or great-grandparents of our youth. For those of you in that category, I want you to put yourselves in the shoes of a ninth-grade Confirmation student. We have sixteen of them being confirmed in the fall. Sixteen new members. Full members in the church body. How huge a blessing is it to consider sixteen new members!

Of course, if we're being honest and realistic about this most of those Confirmation students will show up less or hardly at all after their Confirmation date. It's really a stunning loss to have year after year, so it behooves us to reflect on why this is happening. It requires you, as I said before, to put yourselves in their shoes. To this point, they have come out of obligation. Most of them have to go through Confirmation, because that’s what’s expected out of them by their families and the community of the church. Come Confirmation day that will be over, and what compelling reason do they have to stay active? In truth, not much; at least not nearly as much as they had up to that point. Confirmation should be the exact opposite of graduation, but unfortunately the two are nearly synonymous. Confirmation should not be the moment you head off into the world but the moment of confirming your membership in our midst.

So what do we do?

It's a big world after all: Jesus' riff on the graduation theme

Text: John 17:6-19

A Sunday celebration of High School graduates

            Lost in all the cryptic language of Jesus' prayer on the disciples' behalf is that this week's Gospel may very well be Jesus' riff on of a graduation theme. It is a somewhat twisted graduation by our standards, but then again Jesus never seems to live up to our standards. Instead of telling the disciples (graduates) that they are going to go out and change the world Jesus focuses on why the world they are heading into a messed-up place. It is a place where they will be tempted; a place that they do not belong; a place that does not know God.

            I’d assume this is why Jesus was not voted to give a senior speech by his class at Nazareth High School.

            Of course, lest I confuse you, Jesus is not exactly giving a graduation speech, but—as with high-school graduation—he is praying on behalf of disciples who are about to go off into the world without him, and he’s is telling them, in his best Dr. Seuss impersonation, “Oh, the places you will go.”

            The world is a funny place if you think about it. I don’t mean the physical earth, though that is often a funny place as well, but what I mean by the world is what we perceive of the place we inhabit. What is your world? As children our worlds are pretty small. We have family, maybe a small geographical area with which we are familiar. Our worlds pretty much consist of that. Then they get bigger and bigger. Pretty soon our worlds encompass a city, then a county, then we travel and experience other places and other people. We discover people who think differently than us; people who look different from us; people who have beliefs that are very different from our own. When we learn the world grows.

            Sometimes a big world can be scary. For parents of children heading off into some of those unknown places it will sometimes be scary. For youth who are graduating off into the world beyond their parents’ homes sometimes it will be scary--even if they never admit it to mom and dad. For grandparents who do not know the particulars of where there grandchildren are moving it can be a very frightening place. The world is big and the world scary.

            But the world isn’t just that. Jesus, after all, goes through all this work of talking about the challenges of the world only after giving us the most famous verse of scripture that tells us something vividly important. You know it… “For God so loved… the world… that he gave us only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” God so loved the world. See, the world is crazy; it’s big and unknown. It’s a place that so often does not know God, and yet God knows it. God knows the whole thing and more than that he loves it.

It’s easy for us to stay in comfortable places that keep our world small. The easy way through this life is to never experience anything that challenges your worldview, but as Christians we also have a calling to witness; a calling that pushes against the boundaries of our small worlds. The Great Commission is at the heart of our Christian witness. Jesus says, “Go… and make disciples of all nations.” Go out into the world, because that’s the only way the world that does not know God is ever going to hear the good news. Without you, the world will remain an awfully scary place. The world needs to hear from you.

At the Northwestern Minnesota Synod Assembly last week the CEO of Lutheran World Relief, John Nunes, talked about one way that we--Lutherans who rarely take on anything more adventurous than camping the next county over--go out into the world. He talked about a time when he was visiting the West African country of Burkina Faso and he entered what was essentially a mud hut to find a Lutheran-made quilt lying on the dirt floor. The quilt was that family’s carpet. Nunes went on to talk about others who used quilts when they had to move possessions. They might not have a bag but they could wrap up their things in a quilt and throw it over their shoulders. Quilts were being used in Burkina Faso for hundreds of other uses. Those people in West Africa were connected to Lutherans in North America through quilting, and they were using quilts made over here in ways that probably never occurred to those who stitched them together.

Today, the world is connected in ways that were unimaginable a century ago, let alone on the day of Jesus’ graduation speech. This world is both a small world and a big one. We can connect with people across the globe in an instant and at the same time understand the vastness that separates us. The world is a place of “us” and “them,” and it’s also one world connected by universal things. Those people of Burkina Faso were connected to Lutherans in North America, even if they didn’t know it; even if the quilters didn’t know it. The blessings we share cross boundaries that we will never physically cross. That’s the thing about the world: it’s a big, scary place, but we’re all in it together.

In worship today we had one of those rare instances when we got to experience the spectrum of life in the church—I guess all we’d need is a funeral to cap it off but I hope nobody gets on that! At both Grace and Red River we had a baptism; then we celebrated our graduating seniors. And perhaps most importantly, in the middle of those two events, we gathered around the table for communion, remembering that no matter where we are, no matter where we are going, we are members of Christ’s body, living representations of the good news.

Our worlds are always in flux. Our worlds never stay the same. It’s natural to fear those outside of our experience, but in Christ our worlds overlap. There is no “us” and “them”; there is simply the body of Christ of which the people of Burkina Faso or any seemingly foreign place are members in equal standing. That is why we gather around the table; to commune with our newly baptized and our graduating seniors, to commune with our brothers and sisters in Burkina Faso or wherever our quilts may go, wherever our mission support and our money may go, wherever our footsteps take us, to commune with our elderly, our youth, and everybody in-between. We gather together to celebrate communion because this is not about the places you will go; it is about the unity in Christ you share wherever you find yourself. There is no “us” and “them.” It may be how we see it, but God sees the picture with much wider eyes. As Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, “We have point of view, but God has view.”

May your view be God’s view, may your world be big, may you go out into the world, and may you always come back to the table.

You can't choose Jesus! A manifesto on how to love.

Text: John 15:9-17

This may very well color everything that I write, but I can never talk about love without thinking about the wedding scene in The Princess Bride. Wuv, twue wuvwill fowwow you fowever… I remember having a professor show that in seminary as a warning against… well, I’m not exactly sure what. It may have been a cautionary tale against having a really funny lisp and holding an office involving public speaking. While The Princess Bride may not teach us much about love, we are bombarded with messages about what love is that are just as wacky as Peter Cook preaching on mawaige.

Where do we hear about love?

Books… stuff like Twilight (God help us!) and Nicholas Sparks.

The movies… but the classical romance stories of Casablanca now look more like cheap date night flicks that these days even require “crossover” appeal to men, which usually involves tanks, a bank robbery and the obligatory car chase.

The internet… surveys say that more than 20% of all relationships start online these days. Do we learn about love from personality inventories and catchy personal profiles?

Music… Do we learn about love from Justin Bieber or Mariah Carey? (Oy!)

Television… TV may be where most young people encounter something portrayed as “love.” Big Brother, Jersey Shore, Real Housewives of… fill in the blank—wholesome, family programs that teach us all about love. It’s enough to make a person want to give up.

Reality TV tries to tell us what love is. As far as television producers are concerned love is the Bachelor bringing in a cadre of attractive ladies and testing them out one-by-one until finally deciding that one is his “true love.” Reality TV tells us that love is really, really liking somebody; it is one-dimensional devotion with expected physical and emotional benefits. You don’t love somebody because you are willing to sacrifice for them—even if you might throw in a catchy phrase like “I’ll give them the world”—really you are looking for somebody who is your “dream girl” or “dream guy”—that perfect person that will fulfill your every want. Reality TV tells us that love is choosing that which always makes you happy.

I can just imagine Jesus giving this is a big facepalm.

Simply, reality TV is a fairy tale wrapped up in a horror story. Watch it for thirty seconds and you realize immediately that there is something fake in it; there is something that does not match up with actual reality. But dang it if the story isn’t compelling! We still want love to win, even when it’s a horribly fake, commercially-enhanced charade that only resembles love about as much as Cheez-Whiz resembles cheese.

There is a nugget of truth in these commercialized caricatures of love, just like there is something cheesy about Cheez-whiz, but it is woefully misrepresented as the actual thing. Jesus is about the real stuff. And at the risk of sounding... well... cheesy, he offers a version of love that doesn’t sell us short. “Love one another as I have loved you,” he says.

How did he love us? Did he choose us on a reality game show? Did he find us to be fascinating, fun and exciting people? I think now. I mean, look around you. If Jesus loves Scandinavian Lutherans it’s certainly not because we’re fun and exciting.

Luckily, Jesus doesn’t need you to be; he doesn’t need you to dance in the pews. He wouldn’t mind it if you did, but in this part of the country that would be a legitimate miracle. Thankfully, this is not the test of Jesus’ love nor the reason for it. Jesus loved us by taking up his cross and dying for our sake. You know this. You can probably even testify to what that means to you, but let’s not forget that this is a two-part responsibility. Jesus gave himself up to death in order to show us his love, and we are to love as Jesus did. That means dying, folks; straight-up death.

If you’ve ever wondered what it meant when Jesus said to take up your crosses and follow the answer is right here. To love as Christ loved is to die, but not just to pass away at the end of this life (that’s a really easy test that we are well on our way to passing). To love as Christ loved is to die to yourself, to give up your own wants and needs for the sake of others. Simple enough, right? Don't ever want anything for yourself. Don't ever put yourself before somebody else. Forsake your joy for the joy of others.

Easy... right?

Thankfully, Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves. So when we feel high and mighty about our ability to love, Jesus shows up to give us a reality check. “You did not choose me,” Jesus said, “I chose you.”

Love is being chosen. We can’t love Jesus in return; not as we ought. That is why we come back every week to confess our sins and receive forgiveness. If we were capable of choosing Jesus we would be capable of real love, as it is we try our best and sometimes get it right, though often we can't and won't get there, which is why we come back to receive a word of forgiveness.

But doesn't “love requires a choice?" I have heard it said. This is a frequent refrain for those who believe that our salvation depends on us choosing God, giving our hearts over to Jesus, or entering into a relationship with God--whatever the language. Love, they say, requires a response. They believe that in order for us to show our love—whether to God or fellow human beings—we need to be able to choose them.

I think there is an important distinction to make here. Love does require a choice, but it can only come from one who stands on equal terms. We cannot choose God, because we don’t stand as equals with God. If we did, then no problem, we could declare our love for God and God would love us back. By the way, these are similar reasons why a person who has been abused cannot love an abuser. They might think they love him or her, they might be very devoted and feel a deep connection, but it is not love. Love requires an equal playing field. There can be no power dynamics in love.

So as I said, love does require a choice, but it is the kind of choice only Jesus is capable of making on our behalf. Jesus wants us to know, very clearly, that love is not about us. Love is all about self-sacrifice, dying to ourselves for the sake of someone else and needing nothing in return. The expected return on investment for love is zero, zilch, and anything that is reciprocated is grace—a bonus. That’s why it’s hard to love; it’s hard to expect nothing for something that matters so deeply.

But this is also why it means so much more than the junk that’s on TV. I have no illusions that I am going to put the networks into financial ruin by proclaiming that Jesus’ love is better than the Bachelorette, but I do have some hope that dying to the self is still possible in this world. I hope that we can be God’s chosen people, which is to let go of our need to be the choosers. I hope, finally, that we can laugh at the mainstream caricatures of love. Wuv, twue wuv is so much better than that.

The church and marriage, part II

A couple of weeks ago I posted on Roger Williams and the origins of the separation of church and state in America, and in the weeks since this subject has come up more and more as various state amendments have entered the news cycle. Apparently gay marriage is a pretty big deal to a lot of people (who knew?), so it's time to do this all over again from a different perspective. Last time I was concerned about statements the church was making in regards to civil law--both for and against such amendments. This time I want to speak more specifically about the difficulties the church faces when it enters the realm of legalizing morality.

I can imagine one of the disciples--let's say Thomas--hopping in a time machine and speeding almost two thousand years into the future and discovering the world as we see it today. After admiring the remarkable advancements in technology, medicine, the arts and the incredible societal stability we have achieved I'm sure Thomas would be interested in our churches. What, dear friends, are our churches talking about?

Firstly, we talk about Jesus. Well, that's good!

And what are we telling people that Jesus is concerned about? Sex.

Wait, what?

Didn't you know, Thomas? Jesus was really concerned about sex, especially gay sex, and very especially the sanctity of marriage.

Uh... I really don't think...

Shut up, Thomas. I'm telling you about Jesus.
...
If we were to judge by the amount of news coverage and Google hits Leviticus 20:13 gets we may very well conclude that this is very near to the heart of Christianity. According to Rachel Evans, in her blog post "How to win a culture war and lose a generation", 91 percent of non-Christian 16-29 year old young adults' first reaction when asked to describe the church is "anti-homosexual."

Uh oh.

Seriously, if that doesn't make your head spin then you should really go and read that ol' Great Commission one more time (which I assure you is much closer to the heart of the Gospel than Leviticus 20:13). Seriously, people of God, do you not see the problem with what you are doing?

I'm going to spend exactly one paragraph talking about theology here, so if you're not interested continue on. But for the rest of you.... There is this belief among some Christians, largely in America, that the world must be improved gradually through whatever means in order to usher in the reign of Christ. It's called postmillenialism. The idea of a one thousand year waiting period for the coming of the Messiah seems to have everything to do with Revelation 20, but in fact it has more to do with people who care entirely too much about the end of the world and not very much about their neighbors staring them in the face. This allows them to climb their ethical high hills and look down upon all the meager sinners below and condemn them one after another, usually with a single verse of scripture, and usually ignoring the large log-like structure embedded in their own eye.

I can imagine Jesus muttering under his breath, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see', your sin remains" (John 9:41) over and over again.

So here's where we stand, fellow members of the body of Christ. We have essentially gone back in time to find ourselves with the Puritans of 16th and 17th century America in our attempt to institute a theocracy wherein the government enacts the will of God for the sake of the ethical betterment of us all. Sounds great! Well, except for the fact that the people deciding the will of God look decidedly human, and governments that have functioned in the name of God have committed some of history's worst atrocities with seemingly meager rewards.

This is why the church should take its hands off of civil legislation. These bills that make same-sex marriage illegal are abhorrent not because of their theology but because theology is a justification for their existence in the first place. Should our morals govern how we legislate? Absolutely. But Roger Williams understood--and we should remember today--that these morals should never extend over the liberties and freedoms of others.

A final word of appeal to anybody who reads the above and thinks I am some liberal, rainbow-wearing, gay rights activist who is relativizing scripture to my own ends. I claim none of those things. Instead, I am a person who has seen enough people of integrity whose only crime is loving a person in such a way that is deemed "unnatural" by a few passages of scripture. I have spent enough time with them to realize that they are not faking it; they are not somehow denying their true identities and forsaking God's will for their sexuality (as if such a thing exists). The guilt they sometimes feel seems to come from without and not from within--a product of a society that holds to some sexual ideal. Instead, their love seems to me to be the most natural kind. It is simply who they are. And if that very basic premise is true then I can have no ethical qualm against them. And if it's not true then we still have no legal claim against them.

All of this is to say that Thomas would take a good look around and probably shed a tear. When you see Jesus and proclaim "my Lord and my God" certain things just don't matter anymore.

Out on a limb

Text: John 15:1-8

Two years ago I found myself accompanying a group of young people from Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Salem, Oregon as they embarked on a mission trip to Idaho Servant Adventures based out of Shoshone Base Camp in the Idaho panhandle. One of the main premises of ISA is that the youth provide the leadership for themselves—the adult chaperones and ISA counselors are there to provide a measure of supervision but not to lead. I can remember walking into a home we were supposed to help renovate when the eight or ten youth immediately looked at me for direction. So, in one of my rare moments of wisdom, I took one of my high school girls to help me get a cooler from the van and while walking back to the house I said, “When we get back you’re in charge. You give the orders and tell people which jobs they should be doing. I’m going to shut up and look at you whenever anybody asks me what to do.” For half a second she seemed concerned and then the worry faded. She could do this. The thing about ISA is that every young person comes away knowing that they can do it.

            One more story that will bring us back around to the Gospel.

On that same trip, later in the week, we were helping to clear a swath of land overrun by brush, vines, and all manner of vegetation—you know, the kind with thorns and brambles and little pokey things that will get you in the eye no matter how careful you are. Again, I was working alongside eight high schoolers wielding power tools and clippers. We were pruning back the forest so that it could be useful; so that it could bear fruit; not the kind of fruit you can eat, but instead the fruit of usefulness; we were turning the land into something that would benefit those who came after us.

            At the same time, the youth were learning (even if they didn’t realize it) that they could bear fruit as well. Today’s Gospel is concerned primarily with this fruit-bearing, and the reason I address fruitfulness from the perspective of mission is because it hits all the right buttons. The most significant reason why we have mission trips—or service opportunities of any kind in the church—is that it is one of those rare moments that combines everything that the church is doing right. First, it is God-driven; its purpose is unashamedly about serving God, and honestly, we don’t get enough of that in our daily lives. It’s not everyday that we go somewhere or do something primarily because our faith compels us. Mission trips are the exception. Secondly, service projects provide unique moments of community. You know what it’s like to live side-by-side with your neighbors, and you also know that often those relationships are really just surface-level encounters with nothing on the line. It’s only when something wonderful or horrible happens that everybody comes together to support one another. The intentionality of mission is again the exception to the rule. And thirdly, mission is about serving somebody else before it is ever about us. Something amazing happens when we put service to others before our wants and desires; suddenly, our wants and desires aren’t gone, instead they are already fulfilled. All the while we thought that the secret to happiness was getting everything that we want when in truth it is giving away what we have for the happiness of others.

            So, here’s where the rubber meets the road for the Gospel.  Jesus is the vine; we are the branches; God is the vinegrower. Sounds good, but it’s challenging for us to tease what it means to abide in the vine. Yes, have faith in Jesus, but the metaphor is so much deeper than that. In order to abide in Jesus, as the Gospel says, you need to be connected intimately with the vine. Everything that we do has to have a clear identity in Christ. The reason I began with two stories about youth is because our young people get it much better than the rest of us. They can sniff out phony from a mile away. So, they understand exactly what Jesus is saying about being the vine and the branches. When they feel plugged into Jesus, everything about being a member of the church makes sense, but when they don’t then no extreme hospitality or outreach will matter. There has to be something on the line.

            What we do has to matter. We are branches—each and every one of us—but we are so often ignorant of the vine. Instead of allowing God to prune our dead weight we get it all backwards. We try to trim the branches ourselves. We see all the things that we do wrong—all the mistakes that we make—and we try harder and harder to fix ourselves. Never mind that the Gospel is about as clear as it can be: you can’t fix yourself. Self-help is a misnomer, because the only way to help yourself is to die to yourself, to give up your little desires for the sake the other. The more time you spend contemplating your own belly button, the less and less fruit you will bear.

On a grander level, this is what the church does when it is at its worst. Instead of bearing fruit by being the church in the best way we can be, which is preaching salvation to the prisoners of sin, justice to the oppressed, care to the needy; instead of imagining who is in need—spiritually, emotionally, and physically—beyond our walls, we have turned inward and examined minute points of doctrine and practice. We’ve concerned ourselves with how it’s always been and how we never have enough: time, money, volunteers—you name it. And all the while we’ve been doing it all backwards. The branches don’t trim themselves. Rather, the branch is dependent on the vine and the vinegrower. It is God’s job to trim the dead weight, not ours.

I keep coming back to that area of wild growth in northern Idaho and those youth clearing the land. They weren’t hacking away at the problems in their own lives, not directly; instead, they were fixing problems that didn’t have a thing to do with them. They were living out the Gospel for the sake of those who were in need, and in doing so their branches were being trimmed without even them ever realizing it.

Our youth have an advantage over the rest of us, and not just because they are still being asked to do intentional service on mission trips. Rather, their primary advantage over the rest of us is that they haven’t yet decided how the world looks. They haven’t found themselves a nice comfy branch on which to rest. They are willing to go out on a limb, to test their strength and flexibility. They have an advantage over the rest of us because they understand their need for support outside of themselves and not merely within. They realize they can’t be both the branch and the vinegrower. Their support has to come from others, and the only difference between our youth and our adults on this matter is that they realize this is true while we continue to put on the charade of autonomy.

Jesus is the vine. All of us are the branches. So rather than making our youth, who understand this better than we can hope, more like our adults, we have to seriously consider how we—the adults—will be more like our youth. How will we put down our machetes and start whacking away at problems other than our own? How will we turn outside of ourselves for the sake of others? And probably most important of all, what do we do that bears fruit? Where is the place in our lives that we turn to remember that we are God’s children ourselves, where we serve others and in-so-doing find ourselves?

These are the questions before us. The answers are up to you.