A failure of creativity

Luke 2:1-20

Human beings tend to have a failure of creativity. It is not remotely the same thing as being too conservative or too liberal, or too young or too old; in fact, part of the issue itself is our tendency to create simple categories for things and for people. No, a failure of creativity is much more significant than that. It’s maybe best illustrated with a few examples.

            The priests and the lawyers who one day met the grown Jesus had a failure of creativity. Hamstrung to their narrow interpretations of the law they were not open to the possibilities that emerged when God came down to earth. Herod also lacked creativity. It was he who ordered the execution of the children of Bethlehem, imagining only one way to be a king, which was to overthrow the kingdoms already established. For the first time with Herod we see what the opposite of creativity is, and that is fear. Fear that manifests itself in prejudice, anger, and hate.

            Creativity is always pitted against fear. This is why, in that most creative of nights when the Son of God entered the world, the angels appear to the shepherds with a word, “Fear not!” Do not be afraid because it is the natural tendency in such times, but rather be open to the presence of God, which will seem scary—very scary, indeed—until you come to understand the depths to which you need this. For Jesus, anything was possible—he was creativity-incarnate; the only time when creator and creation became utterly and indistinguishably one—which is why grace is so utterly astounding. Jesus could have done anything, become anything, achieved anything, and the life he chose above all others was a life directed toward the cross. God chose creativity through death, not apart from it.

God of the dawn break

A varying assortment of thoughts for today's sermon. When I preach without a manuscript this is sometimes the format in which I blog the sermon. While the thoughts are not all connected it hopefully gives some sense of where the Holy Spirit might be speaking through today's scripture.

Luke 1: 5-13, 57-80

*The light shines in the darkness… and the darkness has not overcome it.

*I’m actually going to start by parsing a Greek word that’s not even in our reading today. (Nothing like talking Greek to make everybody sit up straight and listen to the sermon). It’s that word we know as “overcome” which is the Greek word “katalambano,” which is most often translated “catch” but might also be translated “comprehend.” The light shines in the darkness… and the darkness does not comprehend it. I like all these translations, actually, side by side. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it, will not catch it, and cannot comprehend it in all its mystery.

*Even though this scripture is from John 1:5 it has the same themes as our reading from Luke 1. Light and darkness interplay with one another. These are the darkest days of the year. Long days… lots of seasonal affective disorder, depression, anxiety. Lots of drinking. Lots of generally sad things. This is a season of the highest highs and lowest lows.

*Naturally, Jesus comes into the world in the darkest of days. Of course some history-theology geeks—I bet you didn’t know there were such people; they’re the ones in the library with the plaid coats with a clerical underneath—anyway, they’ll tell you that Jesus probably wasn’t actually born in the winter because of the shepherds tending their flocks in that particular way or some nonsense. Whatever. It doesn’t matter what time of the year Jesus was actually born; the point of celebrating Christmas this time of year is to accentuate the darkest darkness (and also to remind ourselves how northern hemisphere-centric we are). In Australia they should probably celebrate Christmas in place of the 4^th of July, which—come to think of it—they don’t celebrate anyway.

*“The night is always darkest just before the dawn.” There’s so much wisdom in that proverb that it’s been quoted in The Alchemist, The Dark Knight, and by theologians for ages. Darkness seems its most complete right about now. Darkness and sin go hand in hand. When we think about sin we tend to think again about darkness… about things done in secret, about parts of ourselves that are hidden away. These are parts of us that we fear coming to light.

*John is coming to prophesy to something world-changing. “To give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of sins.” Sins are actually how we come to know about God, or rather the forgiveness of those sins testifies to something we know in our hearts: that we are not the perfect people we could be, and the only way to be perfect is to not die, and the only way to not die is to have some kind of salvation, and the only salvation that lasts is eternal, and the only one offering such a promise is one who takes on sin in death for us. There is no other way. There are no shortcuts.

*The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not comprehend it, because we believe that this little baby boy was born to die. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is too busy obsessing over our inward thoughts and all our hang-ups. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is concerned with judging us for what we have done wrong. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness measures us by how we stack up to being “good” people. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is too busy with the law. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is blind to the Christ-child. And the darkness is blind to a baby because it is too small, too insignificant, and too out-of-the-way to matter.

*Jesus was born insignificant, just like the rest of us. We dress him up, surround him with prophesies and wise men bringing gifts, even as we talk about the manger and no room for Mary and Joseph at the inn, but the real story is darker. The wise men were supposed to report back to King Herod. The gifts were burial spices; seen another way this looks sinister. King Herod meant to kill the baby before any of this got underway. The night is darkest just before the dawn. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot even see it.

*Zechariah’s song, sung for John, his son, who came to testify to Jesus, concludes with this line:

“By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” Peace, I bring you. Peace and light. Jesus came and, like the angels with the shepherds, he might as well begin his life with the words, “Fear not.” Do not be afraid. Yes, you have been living in darkness, but it is that darkness that will testify to me, because now you know why you need me, now you comprehend the light that shines in the darkness.

*Our problem is a lack of awareness that that is where we stand. Our problem is that too many people live in darkness and pretend it is the light. But Zechariah’s song lays the framework for what it means to be people of the dawn-break. It means forgiveness; that we acknowledge the darkness is real, but something more powerful is coming. Not power of our hands, not strength or might, but a baby who receives gifts from wise men of burial spices, anointed for death even from birth.

*The darkness does not comprehend the light because the darkness assumes that death wins. Jesus, becoming love incarnate for the world, comes to bring us a promise that darkness is just fleeting. Dawn breaks. Amen.

God chose Cyrus; God chooses anybody

Ezra 1:1-4

If you read the Hebrew Bible, which is what we most often refer to as the Old Testament, you might wonder where it’s all going. I mean, isn’t that question we ask of any good story? What’s the point, in the end? So, it strikes me as odd that I can’t remember anyone ever teaching me about the end of the Old Testament. We know about the New Testament—Revelation and this apocalyptic vision that, though strange, is nonetheless something of a logical progression.

But how does the Old Testament end?

Well, it depends on which Bible you’re reading. I’m not talking about translations, either; I’m talking about how you order the books. The Christian Bible concludes the Old Testament with Malachi, which leaves us with a call for Elijah’s return, but the Hebrew Bible (which came first, by the way) actually ends with 2 Chronicles. I’ll read that scripture for you (and it should probably sound a bit familiar): “In the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, in fulfilment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia so that he sent a herald throughout all his kingdom and also declared in a written edict: ‘Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him! Let him go up’” (2 Chronicles 36:22-23).

God's Word, or why "real" preaching matters

Isaiah 40:1-11

There’s a Lake Wobegon-kind-of-story of a pastor who preached his Sunday morning sermon as he did every week, got down from the pulpit, led the rest of the service, shook hands with his parishioners, and then went home only to discover that over the course of the week, much to his surprise, the members from the congregation started doing the things he preached that they should do. He preached about evangelism, so one of the flock went out and started knocking doors in their town telling people about Jesus. The pastor personally thought this was a little pushy, but it did seem to be the gist of what he was talking about. He preached about helping the poor, so one of the flock bought a meal for a local family, and then charged it to the church. So at least he was in the spirit of what the pastor had said even if the practice was somewhat lacking. The pastor preached about how Jesus comes before family and friends, and several members of the church reported back that they took his advice and had kicked their adult children to the curb, who were really just playing video games in their basement, anyway, most of the time.

            At first the pastor rather liked this new congregation of people who listened to him, but as the week wore on and new report after new report reached his ears of congregation members doing outrageous things in pursuit of the ideal he was preaching, he gradually became overwhelmed. So, he got up in the pulpit the next Sunday and begged the people “Please, go back to not listening to me!” he said. Because everybody had taken his advice and things had gotten very complicated. And nobody was taking his advice in the way he imagined they should be doing it. He had expected things to go one way, and it had gone quite another. In the end, he concluded that it was much better when the pastor’s preaching didn’t change a thing.

Treasure hunts: Re-teaching ourselves what is important

2 Kings 22:1-10, 14-20; 23:1-3

There’s this whole genre of TV shows these days about hidden gems from the past lurking in somebody’s basement. You know, American Pickers and Pawn Stars and the like. You go back a little further and there’s Antiques Roadshow on PBS (and it probably says something about my social life that I remember that from my grade school days). There are plenty of other TV shows (many of which happen to be on the History Channel) that are about missing treasure being sought in various places. These are all quasi-non-fiction (though some of them are more than a little conspiracy-laden), but there are also many, many fictional accounts like these as well. Once upon a time it was Indiana Jones, then National Treasure, now The Librarians and the like.

            All of these shows tap into some yearning we have to discover something exceptional that has been forgotten. There is something important about finding buried treasure that goes beyond even wealth. After all, in all these stories (at least the fictional ones) the greedy ones end up succumbing to their greed and those who find the treasure happen to be the ones doing it for the right reason. If you don’t know what Pawn Stars is, however; it’s basically what I just described but backwards. The wealthy greedy ones get the historical artifacts and the ones who bring them go off and waste all their money gambling in Vegas. But that’s another story.

            Anyway, in today’s reading we have an unexpected treasure hunt. Most of the best treasure hunts go down this way. Hilkiah, having been sent by King Josiah to find workers to repair the temple, stumbles upon scrolls from the Torah (specifically a part of the book of Deuteronomy) forgotten in the temple. This has all the making of an Indiana Jones plot minus the melting Nazi faces, except Shaphan doesn’t seem to understand the importance of what he is bringing to Josiah.

            We have to remember that books of the Bible were not just lying around in Josiah’s day. You couldn’t go down to the corner Hebrew book store and find yourself a scroll of the Torah. In all likelihood, this was one of few that existed and it was all-but-forgotten in the dilapidated temple that was supposed to be the center of the faith of the Hebrew people. It’s kind of amazing to consider the temple being in such disrepair, and it is a testimony to how little the faith of the people mattered any longer in those days. If our church gets dust in the corners I get phone calls on Tuesday morning. And we are just a little church in the far edges of creation. The temple is the very heart of the Jewish faith, standing in Jerusalem at the very heart of the world. The fact that the Torah was left behind in the temple is almost unfathomable. The fact that Shaphan, a priest, could bring the book to Josiah with barely a comment, as if he doesn’t seem to care about what it is, is equally astounding.

            The people of Judah had completely forgotten about God’s law.

            How could this happen?

Work. Rest. Two commandments of equal importance.

“Work is the reward of work, just as rest is the reward of rest.” –Aviya Kushner in The Grammar of God.

            As I’ve been reading through this wonderful book on Hebrew grammar and the way it informs how a person reads the Bible I’ve been struck by the ideas of language and how it changes our attitudes, our beliefs, and even how we act. This is evident enough in the politically-charged world we see in the media. Words matter. And half the war is in how they are arranged to paint a certain picture.

            But, ultimately, the way things are portrayed on TV, the radio, and the internet is not the only story. As we enter into Advent and eventually Christmas, now is the perfect time to reflect on all the ways we can paint a different picture of the world around us. Now is a great opportunity to think differently. For me, it starts with the quote at the beginning of this article. Work is the reward of work; rest is the reward of rest. To me, this means that even though there are many things outside of my control—wars and refugees and terrorism and the economy and the political issues du jour—none of that out there offers me any reward. That sounds selfish, but what I mean by this is simply: Doing things is what will leave me fulfilled. This can be work done for me and for my family, and it can also be work done for somebody else who I don’t know as well or at all. It’s the work itself that is the reward, because that’s what we were created to do.

            But there’s also a second part of this that some of us forget: rest is the reward of rest. It’s easy to think that work is where all positive contributions happen, but I think this is not at all the case. I believe there is a very good reason that God commanded rest (Sabbath)—right alongside not killing and not stealing and all of that business. Rest is reward to you and also where we are primed to work again; it’s where we are reset and reminded that work is actually a reward; not tedium, not pointless, but it all serves the good of our fellow friends and neighbors.

A litany of thanks

Today we give thanks for the many things that have blessed us. We do so understanding that not all have received all of these gifts; that each of us has reasons to be thankful as well as needs as yet unrealized. In this world of haves and have-nots we give thanks not by way of comparing ourselves, boasting, or demonstrating our superiority; instead we do so to remind ourselves of God from whom all blessings flow. That one who appears to have little to be thankful for, like the widow with her small offering, may be comparably rich in all that God values. That everything we have is a gift from God, so with praise in our hearts and thanks on our lips, we give thanks to you, O God...

For the life we have been given, for air to breathe and water to drink, for food and family, shelter, a place to sleep at night, and loved ones to share it with. For those who have died--for the memories we cherish--for the temporary and the everlasting. For safety and freedoms. For the sacrifices of those who have gone before and those who still live in our midst. For our military, for our veterans, for our peace-seekers, for our judges and prosecutors and lawyers. For all those who earnestly seek the good of all people.
We give thanks to you, O God...

For the harvest. For soil and fertilizer. For humus. For earthworms and nitrogen. For the wind and the rain, the sun and the snow. For hired hands. For mechanics. For family businesses. For combines and tractors and sprayers and the people who drive them. For the food we eat and the food we share. For organic food; for GMOs. For small-scale farming. For large-scale farming. For livestock and poultry and the gift of animal husbandry. For gardens and lawn mowers. For those who tend to all things living. We give thanks to you, O God...

For the gift of Christ-incarnate. For seeing the face of God in one another. For those who look the same as us and remind us of God's presence in us. For those who look different from us and remind us that God’s face is diverse. For those with whom we agree. For those with whom we disagree. For the freedom to have an opinion. For the freedom to withhold an opinion. For quiet reflection; for loud cheering. For sports teams. For meaning. For perspective. For wins and for losses. For pushing ourselves to become better people. For the assurance that we are enough. We give thanks to you O God...

For the gift of salvation. For grace and for mercy. For forgiveness when we err. For communion. For friends who value honesty and who tell us as it is. For family who does the same. For unconditional love. For a God who became human and ultimately died for us on a cross. For the love of a spouse, a boyfriend or girlfriend; for the love of all friends. For brothers and sisters—blood relatives and those who are adopted and claimed. For those we see often, and those we seldom see any longer. For children and grandchildren. For times when we feel weak and times when we feel strong. We give thanks to you, O God...

For Christ in other people, for strangers who demonstrate love, for random acts of kindness. For technology that makes life easier. For remembering the way work was once done. For medicine, doctors and nurses. For our hospital and nursing home. For teachers and social workers. For our school, for co-ops. For accountants and bankers, highway workers, electricians, farmers and ranchers. For plumbers and cashiers, for homemakers, day care providers, and all parents. For garbage haulers. For police officers, highway patrol, sheriffs and deputies. For border patrol. For firemen and government workers. For mayors, senators, council members, representatives, governors, and presidents. For all those who do good work, who value their occupation and their vocation. We give thanks to you, O God...

For the gift of music. For the gift of worship. For the gift of youth. For the gift of the elderly. For the gift of parents and baptismal sponsors. For the gift of pastors. For the gift of lay staff. For the gift of Sam and Heather and Karen and Frank. For church council members. For Renee and Brian. For Karen. For all choir members and soloists. For sound board and video workers. For altar guild. For women's groups. For M.O.P.S. For quilters. For A.A. For Cornerstone Food Pantry. For Wednesday School teachers. For Confirmation students, facilitators, and parents. For property committee. For personnel. For all those active in the church in their own way. We give thanks to you, O God. We give thanks to you, O God…

The Christian moral obligation to refugees (or why I'm sick every time I open Facebook these days)

"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:26)

This passage has always been a stumbling block for me. It fits alongside several other examples from Jesus' teaching of leaving family behind for the sake of becoming a disciple (cf. Mark 10:29, Luke 14:20, etc). I've always assumed Jesus talks like this to emphasize the importance of the kind of life that God offers over the life we can find in the world; that even love of family cannot hold a candle to the love of God. Contrasting these verses with Jesus on the cross in John's Gospel telling the beloved disciple that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is now to serve as his mother, and vice versa, has always struck me as a difficult tension. A person can't seriously argue that Jesus doesn't value family, but a person can't really argue that family is the most important thing either.

I think about this quite often, but it hit a sweet spot for me in the last couple days as the political world has erupted on the subject of refugees in light of terrorism in Paris, ISIS, Syrian ties and all that. The reason this strikes me is because I see many Christians opposed to refugees coming to America (or Europe, or wherever they might be), and I must confess I have a hard time understanding the logic. I understand if my atheist friends don't want Syrians in their towns; after all, that feels pragmatic and they have no political-moral obligation to them. But Christians do have a moral-ethical obligation to refugees. It's about as clear as any ethical obligation in the Bible, and I am struggling to understand how Christians can come to the understanding that it is OK to close their doors to those in need on the off chance they might do them harm.

God of wrath, God of grace

Hosea 11:1-9

One of the challenges of doing theology is that, if you’re honest with yourself when you read the Bible, there are so many peculiar tensions between things. I guess I might even go so far as to call them contradictions. In one place the Bible says one thing; in another place something else. Most of the time we don’t talk much about those contradictions because, frankly, it’s easier not to. Our modern, rational minds don’t deal well with contradictions and ambiguities and the like; they make us afraid—that the Bible isn’t what we think it is, even that God isn’t real. Contradictions can cause us to question our faith.

            But they also serve several purposes: For one, they make us humble. A person can’t figure out the Bible; it’s un-figure-out-able. And the Bible is just one way of God manifesting God’s self in the world, so if this most-tangible of God’s manifestations is sometimes ambiguous and confusing and self-contradictory, then God is bound to be awfully opaque. Again, rational minds rebel against this. So, we have fundamentalists claiming, “The Bible says. I believe it. That settles it.” We have relativists, suggesting that certain things are just fairy tales. Both miss a splendid opportunity to wrestle with the word of God. But the word of God is to be wrestled with. We live in a world where we are never completely safe, where terrorism is both extremists with assault rifles and even other kids at schools. The fact that we have a God capable of holding two opposing views at the same time in a way that we are not challenges us to look deeper—past politicizing opinions and into the depths of what it means to be human. This is an interesting thing to consider as we turn to Hosea.

            The reason this concern arose for me with this reading from Hosea is because of how God reacts to Israel’s disobedience. In the book of Genesis, God utterly decimated Sodom and Gomorrah alongside the two lesser-known cities of Admah and Zeboiim (mentioned in the reading today). God did this (so the story goes) because they were bad people who disobeyed God’s commands. This is the relatively karmic God of the Old Testament we expect. Israel’s history can be summed up by being good and then bad, receiving God’s blessing and curse, on repeat over and over again. Yet, here in Hosea we find something different. When we get to the point of judgment—the time when God has done the same destructive thing over and over and over again—for some reason God’s heart warms strangely. The God of judgment becomes a God of mercy and compassion.

The Punctuation of Life

Today I was reading Aviya Kushner's book, The Grammar of God, when I was hit by a rather small thing that I think makes a rather big difference. She was talking about periods. Full stops. Ends of sentences. This paragraph is full of them.

Specifically, she was talking about the way English Bible translations tend to render Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 as separate entities. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void." Period. Full stop. While Jewish translations, echoing longstanding midrash on the Hebrew, sometimes connect the two verses: "When God began to create heaven and earth--the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water--God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light" (Jewish Publication Society translation).

This is fascinating for purposes of understanding how grammatical constructs influence our ideas about God, and I commend Kushner's book to everybody's attention for that reason, but there is another reason I am intrigued by this, namely: How we imagine rests and breaks is part and parcel of how we live.

Some people live lives that are run-on sentences, continually moving on to the next thing, never spending more than a comma here or there. Others live from one period to the next; in short, purposeful bursts. I imagine what we consider busy lives to be like this. Every idea must be succinct and, above all, certain. There is no time for waste. So I think it's no surprise that some of the most American of biblical translations start, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Period.

Creation? Done. Orderly. Simple.

I see a lot of fruitless arguments between those who live run-on sentence lives and those who live period lives. For all their effort, they might as well be speaking Hebrew and English back and forth. And it's not as straightforward as suggesting that some people want to keep things simple and others want to dig deeper, because this is not so much about the depth of understanding as it is the culture in which that understanding is lived. A person can know a great deal and prefer to use that depth to come to a full stop conclusion; another is very happy combining ideas into a nexus that seems, to the full-stop person, unnecessarily vague.

The trick doesn't seem to be so much choosing between the two as it is acknowledging that the two exist and figuring out how to meet one another in translation.

I have more thoughts on this, but I have to get back to reading. Maybe another day.

Keeping Christ in Christmas

            It’s almost that time of year again when we descend into the madness of shopping centers and malls and Walmart and Amazon to find the next big present that will satisfy us for the next year (or at least a few weeks). And, in so doing, we’ll encounter folks who wish us all sorts of things, “Happy Holidays” and “Happy Kwanzaa” and “Happy Chanukah” and, of course, even “Merry Christmas.”

Of course there is endless frustration among Christians regarding all of those greetings that don’t contain the Christmas tag. Some will even go out of their way to frequent those businesses that are explicit in their Christmas-celebrating, because that is the reason for the season (after all). We all make choices about where we shop for various reasons, so I suppose there are worse reasons for choosing one business over another than their holiday greetings. I’m just skeptical that the best way of keeping Christ in Christmas is words said at a cash register by an underpaid, overworked person who represents the customer service side of some large, faceless corporation.

So, rather than focus on things that probably don’t matter much (i.e., your religion is not being oppressed if somebody wishes you happy holidays or, for that matter, a blessed Kwanzaa), I’m going to offer five ways that we can keep Christ in Christmas in a meaningful way. Now, whether you gift these ways forward or throw them away with the wrappings is completely up to you.

A Perfectly Rational Story

1 Kings 18:20-39

“If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.”

            This sounds so simple. It should be that simple. Who is the real God? Follow him. Except… most of us don’t get to run this kind of test. We just don’t. Instead, we get hints and wonders and little things that make us yearn for something better and a quiet assurance that such a thing is there. Most of us don’t get to see God hurling down lightning bolts from the heavens. This is a wonderful story and a difficult story for that reason.

            I mean, I love this story. I expect some of you do, too, because it is a story that is thoroughly modern (even if it is three thousand years old). What I mean by calling it a “modern” story is that the grounds that are established for God’s existence are thoroughly rational. Elijah sets the premise: Worship a God who actually does something. And then he goes about constructing a challenge where only the real God could succeed.

            He gives Ba’al every advantage. The home field of Mount Carmel. The weapons of choice: Ba’al being the god of fertility, what better advantage than lightning? He plays in front of the home crowd—four hundred of Ba’al worshipers. Elijah makes it so lopsided that the only way Yahweh—his God, our God—could possibly win is if he is real and Ba’al is not.

            I wish we could do a similar demonstration for you today. Wet down the altar and have a little competition between the God who we know in the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and all the other gods we have. Wealth, fame, sports teams, deer season... But this is not how God normally works. This story with Elijah is the exception and not the rule. Deuteronomy 6:16, which predates Elijah by hundreds of years, says “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” which is exactly what Jesus quotes to Satan when he is tempted in the wilderness. The honest truth is that Elijah gets a free pass here that the rest of us do not. He gets to put God to the test in a way we cannot.

            This may be unfair, but it is also a reminder that, as much as we might think otherwise, we are not the heroes of the faith. God tends to work through nations, telling a big story, crafting a big plan. This is why that oft-quoted passage from Jeremiah, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to proper and a future with hope” (Jer 29:22) is misinterpreted again and again. It is not an individual promise to you and me but rather it is a national promise; a promise, we might say, for the whole body of Christ. Sometimes you won’t prosper. Sometimes you won’t be very hopeful. Sometimes—probably often—you’ll have a tough time crafting a rational test for God’s existence. This is not evidence against God; it is simply proof against your methodology.

Age, Divisions, and All the Saints

1 Kings 12:1-17, 25-29

Today we enter an interesting period in our yearly Bible reading, because today we leave King David behind, and with David we conclude what most of us know about the Old Testament. I don’t want to assume—because some of you are very biblically literate—but for many, probably most here, our knowledge of the Old Testament goes something like: Adam and Eve into Noah’s ark into something about Joseph and a technicolor dreamcoat into Moses and the Exodus with Pharaoh, then some business about wandering in the desert, then the Promised Land, fast forward to David, a little bit about Solomon and his wisdom, then a good deal of blank space that we fill with prophets and look forward to Jesus.

            How many people actually know the name of Solomon’s son who takes over for him as king?

            It’s Rehoboam. He’s right there in today’s reading. But, honestly, until I read the scripture this week I didn’t remember that, and I’m guessing if I didn’t know that most of you didn’t either. The biggest thing I knew about Solomon’s predecessors is that it all went to pot and the two tribes—Israel and Judah—would end up decimated; first Israel destroyed by the Assyrians and then Judah in exile to Babylon. So, today is mostly setting the stage for why that happened.

            …And it’s also All Saints Day—a little strange combination.

            There’s at least one thing in this scripture that I want to focus on today that sort of, but not quite, bridges All Saints Day and this story, and that is the advisers who come to Rehoboam—the old men and the young men—and the kind of advice they give.

A life of service

2 Samuel 6:1-5

This scripture about king David dancing in the streets seems like kind of a strange story for Confirmation Sunday except for one thing: David was king because that is the role God called him to. He lived to serve God. Serving God is basically what Confirmation day is all about. Now, you’re probably not chosen to be a king (honestly, we don’t have much use for any more of those). The truth is that most of you are going to end up doing work that the outside world undervalues. Most people in our church have fairly normal lives, by which I mean nobody is going to write a book about you. Having a family? Normal. Working a job for somebody else? Normal. Sitting down for coffee with friends? Normal.

            None of us are Iron Man. That would be exciting. Probably you are just going to shop at the Farmer’s Store, or another similar place somewhere else in the world, and you’ll go home to supper and your favorite TV shows. If you compare yourselves to king David we’re going to come up looking seriously under-productive.

            But, here’s the thing: God doesn’t really care about that. God calls us to serve in different ways, but he calls all of us. More than that, the person serving in a perfectly normal role—who is actually living this life that looks so un-exceptional to the outside world—often finds exceptional joy and fulfillment in it. As much as we remember David, most of the good things we recall happen before he was king—when he was a normal shepherd boy. That’s when he defeated Goliath with a sling and a lion with a staff. When David does well it is because he is a servant, and when he does poorly it’s because he fails to be a servant. This is all God is ever calling us to be—to enter into servitude for the sake of a world that needs it.

            So your perfectly normal life to somebody on the outside might be exactly the kind of life that God would look at and say, “Well done. Well done.”

Becoming servants (and other surprisingly good things)

Mark 10:35-45

This sermon was offered as guest preacher at Pembina Lutheran Church for their Confirmation service.
 

Last year it was a privilege to have several of your youth in our Confirmation classes, including the three who will be confirmed today. And though Confirmation classes can sometimes feel like herding cats I can assure you that none of them were quite as brazen as James and John. None of them came out and said, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” I mean, that’s pretty presumptuous, and not just Midwestern-Scandinavian-Lutheran presumptuous either. It takes a whole other level of gumption to order Jesus around like that. We all pretty much know that if somebody comes up to us and says, “I want you to promise to do something” before explaining what that something is, then that something is probably not something we’re going to want to do.

            Jesus, being the pretty smart guy (not to mention Son of God) that he is, realizes this and redirects them to what they actually want, and what they actually want is a promise that they will one day sit on his right and left hand in the kingdom of God. In other words, if Jesus is king, then they will be the next in line, the highest among the rest.

            OK, let’s pause there, because even though we might bristle at the way James and John go about asking, we nevertheless tend to think about Confirmation as something like the process of earning our seats at the right and left hand of Jesus. Maybe that’s not exactly the image we have of it, but in one way or another we understand Confirmation to be the moment where we bask in the reflected glory of Jesus, having done our homework, checked a few boxes, and earned the right to become members of the church. So we parade you up here before the congregation (all robed in white, no less!) as if we are graduating you from the church (which for too many of you is exactly what you think it is), and we give the impression that this is what the life of faith is all about. We give the impression that the important things are A) that you’ve done your homework, and B) that from now on you’ll be able to say that you are members of Pembina Lutheran Church, no matter how often, or how rarely, you come back.

What toddlers tell us about the law

Deuteronomy 5:1-21, 6:1-9

So, I have a daughter who is nineteen months old. She’s off with mom today at her grandpa’s installation as a pastor in North Dakota, which means, like any good pastor, I’m going to use the opportunity with family not here to talk about my family. I miss Natalie, of course. I miss all sorts of things about her. Her giggles and her cute little grumpy voice and the way that she runs with her arms out and has at least a 30% chance of flopping on her face every time she gets up to speed. I even sort of miss meal times and bed times and waking up times; at least when she’s got that happy little dopey I-slept-the-whole-night-long face.

            Now, I’m no expert on raising this toddler. Mostly, Kate and I figure things out as we go along, but one thing I’ve noticed—that I probably always knew looking back on my old childhood—is that the surest way to make sure our daughter does something is to make sure she knows she is not supposed to do it. Perhaps you have noticed this about children: the more dangerous something is the more obsessed she is with doing it, and if we make a rule against it we are assuring it will become her life’s purpose to… climb on the table, or run into the road, or give the cat a bath…. That was a bad day.

            I shouldn’t be surprised by this, because it’s the oldest story in the history of humankind. Adam and Eve had this problem. Do anything, God told them, except eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Do anything! Just not this one thing. Oldest story in the world.

So when we tell Natalie not to touch that hot mug; she’s going to touch it and she’s going to give that little look of shock and use all three syllables to say “Oww—wow—wie.” And then she’s going to look at mom and dad like we betrayed her, as if it is our fault that this hot mug exists. She is more than happy to make decisions—to choose to watch Scooby Doo rather than go to bed, to choose bath time over going to bed, to choose milk over going to bed. OK, well she’s at least good at making one choice, but she’s pretty terrible at avoiding things that will hurt her.

            We know this about toddlers, but we’re less likely to admit how little this changes as we age. Now, we have boundaries, mind you. We only take a dip into doing things we know we shouldn’t do. It’s like a former president saying he took a whiff but he didn’t inhale, or a different former president trying to argue that sex isn’t sex because it’s not really sex. This is so human nature.

Loving strangers: even when it's every tent for one's self

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7

This is the perfect Biblical story for a day in which we are imagining what intergenerational relationships look like because you don’t get much more inter-generational than one-hundred-year-old-ish first-time parents.

I mean, if you get past the miracle of giving birth at 90 years old, which admittedly is a huge stumbling block, it’s natural to wonder what it would be like for a couple of people in their 100s to raise a child. I’m pushing 30 and some days it feels difficult.

More than that, this is a story of radical hospitality. Welcoming three strangers—three foreigners—lays the groundwork for Abraham to receive the promise of an heir. These men who stand as God before him, and whom Abraham serves without any indication of reward, become agents of grace who offer Abraham an impossible gift. Does Abraham receive the promise of Isaac because of he treated the Lord in the right way? We don’t know. But we do know that he quite literally lives out the reality of Hebrews 13:2, which )warns not to “neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

The morals for us are many. Obviously we are called to be hospitable to strangers and to take care of the needy, and this is ever starker given the context. Abraham and Sarah are on their own. There is no nation. Israel, you might remember, is the name given to the grandson of Abraham and Sarah. There are no Hebrews; no ethnic brothers and sisters. This is the beginning of all that. Before Abraham and Sarah it was every tent to themselves.

And yet, here they are practicing a radical kind of hospitality.

How to read the Bible (courtesy of Genesis 1 and 2)

Genesis 2:4b-24

There are so many different ways to go here with the creation story that it’s hard to pick just one direction. So I’m going to fall back on what I do with this story when teaching Confirmation because I’m sure a few of you could use a refresher back to those days. Creation always comes up when we’re in our Old Testament year, obviously, since it’s the only sensible place a person can start when it comes to the Bible, but it also comes up in our 9^th grade capstone year a couple times when we talk about Heaven, Hell, and New Creation, when we talk about God, the Land, and the Environment, and maybe most importantly when we talk about the Word of God.

            These shouldn’t really be heated verses. Clearly the world was created, surely there was some kind of order to it, and human beings today are this wonderfully complex latest movement in the creation process. But because of how these chapters are read scientists get set against Christians and creationists against just about everybody. We use this chapter in Confirmation to talk about how we read the Bible and why that matters. So, on this Rally Sunday, with new programs starting up and the school year underway, I imagine few better times to talk about how Lutherans read the Bible than today.

            Of course, in saying this I should point out that individual Lutherans read the Bible in all sorts of ways. Moreover, I can’t even say that all Lutheran churches read the Bible in the same way. The Missouri Synod reads it differently than the ELCA, which reads it differently than the LCMC and NALC and all those other initialed churches. If you read the creation stories differently than how I’m talking about today I’m not saying you’re wrong; I’m just saying that you might be unorthodox (which some of you would see as a compliment anyway). Today I simply want to illustrate that what many Christians believe to be orthodox (or traditional) is not necessarily what has been orthodox in the Christian church for far longer than they’d imagine.

            Here’s what I mean: When we discuss Genesis 1 and 2 in Confirmation I open up by asking the students how many stories there are of the creation of the world in the Bible. This is universally met by blank stares just like yours right now. For most people it never occurs to them that there could be more than one creation story, because our overriding understanding of Genesis is that it is to be read like a history book. A history book would distill creation to a single unified story by way of retelling, to the best of historian’s knowledge, the way that things happened. No historian worth his or her salt is going to put two accounts side by side with completely different details. But that’s exactly what Genesis does! In fact, it’s the first thing that Genesis does! Immediately after giving us our traditional six day creation with God resting on the seventh day, the book turns to a second account of the creation with things occurring in a completely different order and less emphasis on the chronology but more on the importance of humanity.

Israelites, Immigrants, and the Imprecatory Psalms

Psalm 83

One of the things we have lifted up this summer again and again is the breadth of emotions that can be found in the Psalms. No matter what you are feeling you can find some word in the Psalms that speaks to that experience: joy, sadness, fury, pain, regret, nihilism, hate, love… you can find it all. Today, that is on full display with a couple of the “hardest” Psalms, since these are Psalms written largely against groups of people. One of the things we have to be careful about doing thus far this summer is putting ourselves in the place of another group of people. Just because you feel upset and Jesus once felt upset does not mean that your anger is like Jesus’, and just because you feel particularly happy today does not mean your joy is like Mary’s Magnificat. It seems kind of obvious but it bears remembering when we read scripture that we are not the Israelites, we are not David, we are not Jesus, we are not Mary.

Just because you feel persecuted about something does not mean that you are persecuted like Israel. When we come across the experience of others it is perfectly normal to try to square their experience with our own. It’s why our first reaction to whatever a person is going through is to say, “I know how you feel” even when we obviously don’t. This tendency toward empathy is fine, but sometimes it goes awry, which happens most often when we put ourselves in the victim’s role, imagining that we are the ones persecuted even when we are not.

Psalm 83 lays down a foundation for what will come with Mary’s Magnificat song about turning the world around, but it comes in a very peculiar form. These are the hardest Psalms because they are imprecatory Psalms, and imprecatory Psalms are songs that call on God to defeat, conquer, even destroy the enemy. This is great for morale for those who are oppressed, but tough for us to deal with today because something inside of us knows that the Israelites are less a world power and more a subjugated minority. It causes us to wonder, “Are we the enemy?” From the first few verses of the Psalm:

Young Life Triathlon Recap

Alright, this is the post I finally got around to writing about my first Olympic Triathlon. The week before I had just completed a fun, pretty darn successful race in Nevis called the Northwoods Triathlon (you can read the recap here).

That race had a lot of things going for it. It was a sprint distance, the temperature was perfect, there wasn't too much wind, I hadn't had vacation for a week in front of it. All those are good things. Now, take every one of those things and cross it out and you had this race.

In-between the sprint tri and this tri Kate, Natalie and I headed to vacation with my parents at a lake near Grand Rapids. This was great for relaxation purposes but maybe not ideal for training purposes. I got in two workouts during the week. I swam out to a sunken island for a 1/2 mile or so workout in some pretty rough winds, and I ran 3 miles on a stinking hot day. Both of those were good training for what was coming, though I'd be lying to you if I said that felt like enough.

Olympic triathlons have a standard 1.5k/40k/10k distance, or about 0.93 miles of swimming, 24.8 miles biking, and 6.2 miles running. I'm at a point now where all of that sounds pretty manageable, but what sounded less manageable was 90 degree heat and winds for open water swimming and running in the sun. That sounded just terrible.

The strange (backwards) blessing of faith

Psalm 128

I want to talk with you today for, oh, about fifteen minutes, on what it means to be blessed, because, well, that’s what Psalm 128 is about.

“Happy is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways// You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall go well with you” (Ps 128:1-2). OK, good start. Fear the Lord and we will be happy.

“Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.” Even better, follow the laws and you’ll have a fruitful wife and children six feet tall at the least. And so it continues with the blessing of children and, in turn, security, because that’s what children were for life in that ancient world (and perhaps it isn’t so different today). Walk in the way of the Lord and you will have these things.

OK, that’s a good starting point. But scripture doesn’t end with the Psalms. In fact, the Bible actually offers us two competing visions of blessedness. One is this idea found throughout the Old Testament that good things come to those who are faithful—children, long life, a beautiful spouse, the star on the basketball team; those kinds of things. Bad things, therefore, come to those who are unfaithful—defeat, death, eternal damnation. Even the counterpoint to this in the Old Testament—the book of Job—which goes out of its way to show how ridiculous it is to blame sin for bad things happening, ends the story by restoring to Job all the things he lost, as if a new and better wife and kids makes up for the loss of his first. This is how the Old Testament deals with blessing and it is limited.

Stop. Listen for God.

           Earlier this month we took our Junior High Confirmation students to the Minnesota Institute of Contemplatiion and Healing (MICAH) retreat center near Crookston for an overnight to center ourselves for a year of faith development, learning, and service. One of the primary foci of contemplative prayer, as described by MICAH’s director, Trey Everett, is to move us out of our heads and into our hearts. That sounds kind of vague and new-age-y so allow me to explain. In our heads we are concerned with products and efficiency, with “doing it right”, and with doing “enough” versus doing “not enough.” Our hearts, on the other hand, focus us not on the product but the process, not on efficiency but love, not on doing it the “right way” but exploring how we might do something differently, and, lastly, our hearts allow us freedom from the anxiety of worrying about doing enough and, most importantly, about being enough.

            God tends to speak to us on the heart-level, because it is there that we free ourselves from all the things that cause us anxiety and fear; it is there that we are free to be led beyond our expectations and imaginations.

            We live in an anxious world. In fact, the more efficient we get the more anxious we become. There’s this worry in the back of our minds that we can always be working more efficiently; that we can always be doing more; and the frightening reality is that it’s true. We can always be doing more. The New York Times just published an eye-opening exposé of the working environment at Amazon where workers are encouraged to spy on one another, report one another’s inefficiencies, and managers are expected to cull their workers ranks on a regular basis in the name of being as efficient and productive as possible. This might be an exceptional example, but it’s also kind of the norm for how the marketplace works in the year 2015. Farmers feel it. So do business owners and restauranteurs and teachers (maybe especially teachers). Even pastors feel it. How often are our churches judged by money in the bank and people in the seats on Sunday morning?

Northwoods Triathlon Recap

What's this? A race recap?! I haven't done one of these in a while, and now I'm going to be doing two in a week. That's because I had the awesomely amazing, maybe not quite so sane, idea of doing two triathlons as the bread around the meat of a week-long vacation to the lake.

We'll start in Nevis.

The Northwoods Triathlon isn't particularly big (some 200-some people), but it is popular, which sounds kind of confusing, but trust me, I'll explain. Registration opens each year for the race in the first week of January at 8 a.m. on some random morning. Race registration fills up by 9 a.m. of said morning every year. So, I had to actually put registering for a race on my calendar. It's a minor miracle I remembered.

Challenge #1:

I may have registered for the race months and months ahead of time, but that didn't stop me from completely forgetting about such unimportant things as, you know, lodging. So, a week before we were heading out Kate had the bright idea to check on hotel rooms. Nothing. Not expensive, not inexpensive. Nothing. The idea of tent camping before a race sounded less than ideal (especially with a toddler), but we didn't know what else to do. Then I had the brilliant idea to check with Steve Peterson, now Executive Director at Pathways to see if we could stay at Camp Emmaus, 25 miles from Nevis. We could. Thank God. Steve saved the day.

Repentant songs, sinful kings, and why good people aren't just rare but impossible

Psalm 51

David was in trouble. He’d done something terrible. It was bad enough having an affair with Bathsheba; worse still was sending Uriah off to die in the war. He’s broken no less than seven of the Ten Commandments in a single go, which is a pretty starling accomplishment if you stop and think about it. David, the king of Israel, is chief among sinners.

            If one of us did what David did we would find it difficult to ever be accepted in town again. We know how people would react; the kind of gossip spoken behind our backs. We wouldn’t feel welcome anywhere anymore—not in the church; let alone at the school or anywhere else in public.

            David is creepier, sleazier, and more of an abuser of power and people than we would tolerate in anybody in our neighborhood, let alone our public officials. And that could be the end of the story, except for this:

God chose David. This is critical. It means that David was more than an adulterer and murderer. We like to define people by their worst actions; they become: rapist, thief, adulterer, bad guy. God calls them something different; God calls them “sons” and “daughters.” We give scarlet letters; God gives names. God gives humanity. David is not excused; it’s not that there aren’t consequences; it’s just that there is nothing so terrible that it can separate us from the love of God. God uses us in our brokenness and what comes from this God-given humanity that we discover when we understand how broken we are is often something unexpectedly beautiful. Today it is this song: Psalm 51.

One way the Youth Gathering showed me we have a long way to go

This is part 2 of at least 3 (OK, probably just three) posts about the ELCA National Youth Gathering. The first post can be found here.

Many good things happened in Detroit. I'm glad we went and especially glad for the experience so many of our kids had. The event itself is not perfect, of course, and that's not what I'm going to write on today. There's plenty to be said for making some philosophical changes to what we do when we come together as a church, but again I'm not going to talk about that here. The truth is I'm not experienced enough, or wise enough, to come up with an ideal solution.

Instead, I'm going to talk about something that I witnessed leaving Ford Field each evening that left me concerned. No, it wasn't the youth who inevitably don't pay attention to directions and walk down the wrong side of the street, though they left me pulling out my hair all week. Instead, it's something harder to comprehend, deeper, and more problematic.

Refuge and Satisfaction (or why we sing "On Eagles Wings" at funerals)

Psalm 91

“And he will raise you up on Eagle’s wings… and hold you in the palm of his hand.”

            So many of the familiar passages of scripture are familiar because of our communal songs. We’re going to sing “On Eagles Wing” today following the sermon. It’s part of our collective worship hymnody, and we sing it especially at funerals. In fact, I think we’ve sang it more often at funerals since I’ve started here than at any other time. But, as with much scripture made into song, I wonder if we use it in the way we should. Just like the more famous 23^rd Psalm, these songs seem out of place at funerals. They offer words of courage and refuge from trouble filled with promises for life. That seems odd when faced with death.

            So, let’s take a closer look at Psalm 91.

 “You who live in the shelter of the Most High,
   who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
 will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress;
   my God, in whom I trust.’
 For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler
   and from the deadly pestilence;
 he will cover you with his pinions,
   and under his wings you will find refuge.

            I guess the obvious question is “Refuge from what?”

Why the Youth Gathering matters

OK, I admit it, I was not in favor of doing the 2015 ELCA Youth Gathering in Detroit.

Gasp! I know, I know.

The main reason we did the Gathering is because Sam was about ready to beat me if we didn't and because we wanted to keep our commitment to doing things with the rest of the county (and they were pretty set on the Youth Gathering). Still, I had my reservations: Can we really justify spending more money for a glorified party than we do for boots-on-the-ground mission trips? Will the youth really get more out of this than they do from service?

Well, I'm happy to say that I was 100% completely wrong. And here's why:

Our group with Bishop Larry

#1- The energy is catchy
 By the end of most mission trips we're all so exhausted that we go home and have to completely decompress for several days. Well, that might happen with this trip, too, but I feel different after this one and I think others do, too. There's a kind of emotional high that carries beyond the music and the speakers and the 30,000 people in one place. It's electric but, more importantly, catchy. It's hard to come away from this feeling anything but inspired to figure out what we can do back home to rise up together again.

Which brings me to...
#2- It leaves things open-ended
As it turns out, my wife's mission trip next week needed a spot filled when I got back home, so I sent word to all our youth on the off-chance that any of them would want that spot. This was mere hours after getting off the bus from Detroit. No way, I thought, that any would take us up on the offer. An hour later I had heard from three of them. All wanted it. All wanted to go and serve in South Dakota with barely a chance to catch their collective breaths from this week. The Gathering primed them for service. It didn't discourage it and it didn't leave us so taxed that it would feel like a burden. It inspired us to greater service.

And lastly...
#3- It's about Jesus
I should probably learn to never doubt something that has God at its very core. When Pr. Steve Jerbi,  in his Friday evening talk about racism and the loss of a young black boy in his congregation, crescendoed a rousing refrain of "We claim Jesus," it became obvious that this Youth Gathering offered a narrative that is too often absent from our public discourse. Speaker after speaker inspired, yes, but offered a word deeply rooted in the good news of Jesus Christ. This was more than experiential; more than visceral; more than Skillet concerts, inspiring speakers, and Agape rapping; more even than 30,000 people and an experience of togetherness too often absent from our lives as Christians. This was incarnational, Christ-centered; this was Jesus-heavy, Gospel-heavy, promise-heavy. And Jesus-centered time will always be fruitful.

So, I confess I was wrong. This was worth it. Very worth it. It left me a better person. And I hope it did the same for you.

Let's find passion in the things that matter

Psalm 146

“Praise the Lord!” says the Psalm.

That’s not exactly a divisive, controversial statement.

But maybe it should be. Maybe we are failing to get into heated, passionate debates about the things that are really central to our faith, and maybe that gives the impression that when we get into debates over other issues that those things matter more to us.

I want to ask: “Why are we not nearly as loud about the things that are most important to us?”

“I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
   I will sing praises to my God all my life long.”

            Well, I hate to be a snot-nosed kid preacher and ask this, but why? Why does it matter so much that we praise God? I think I have an answer, though I’m not sure how well people can hear it nowadays. My answer is that the good news of Jesus Christ is a life-or-death message. When the Psalm says, “The Lord sets the prisoners free // the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. // The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down // the Lord loves the righteous. // The Lord watches over the strangers // he upholds the orphan and the widow // but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin” this is not hyperbole. People are imprisoned—sure, we can talk about people literally in prison, but there are others imprisoned by addiction, by regret, by grief, by feelings they can’t control. People are blind—we don’t see people who make us uncomfortable; we don’t see people we can help, often times because we don’t want to see it. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down—and how many of those are there around? The Lord loves the righteous—and how many of us are confident that we are righteous apart from the grace of God? I could go on and on.

            The reason we praise God is because we aren’t sufficient, but in 21^st century America we do a smacking good job of forgetting that. So we argue about health care, and marriage, and guns, and the size of our government, and we put more energy into these things than we do the things that are central to our humanity. I’m guilty of it—nine times out of ten and twice most Sundays.

Why this pastor is FOR same-sex marriage

I've seen too many words in recent days and most of them are the same tired old points. By saying that I don't mean that they are necessarily wrong, just that I've heard them before; I've listened (I really have) and I've been open to being wrong about all of this, but here I stand anyway.

To my mind, this issue of being "pro-gay" or "anti-gay" has everything to do with power. I hope you allow me a minute to explain, because if you stop at this point of saying "Scripture says it; end of story" you're missing the forest for the trees. Scripture has some things to say on the subject. Probably most famously, Leviticus calls relations between two men an "abomination" and, probably most importantly, Romans 1 talks about "exchanging natural intercourse for unnatural" (v. 26-27). Other scripture, like Adam and Eve and Sodom and Gomorrah, could be interpreted in a similar light, but it is most definitely just that--an interpretation (and in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah at least, in my view an irresponsible one).

A bit of context helps: Leviticus is part of the holiness code that differentiates the early Israelites from the other landed people who were a threat to them. For the Israelites it was incredibly important to keep themselves distinct from the dominant cultures; so no shellfish, no mixed fabric clothes, etc., but it was even more important that they procreate and keep the line going. It was so important, in fact, that men were allowed to enter into marital relationships that are not the traditional man-woman model that has been our primary example in the world today. You know, something about "Be fruitful and multiply" trumped everything else, and it's not very fruitful to have same-sex relations--not in that way. In Romans, the context is different. Paul is part of a persecuted Christian sect. All Christians in his time lived that way. They were under the Roman empire and may have been (or, more than likely, would be) jailed or even killed for their beliefs. This Roman culture included many examples of sin run amok: idolatry chief among them, also murder, slander, jealousy, etc., and among those is this business of "exchanging" normal sexual relations for same-sex relations.

OK, so here's where I believe too many American Christians are creating a false equivocation. I think too many of us put ourselves in Paul's shoes as a persecuted minority speaking out against the debased majority when the truth is almost exactly the opposite. I am the majority. I am white, male, and straight. Most of those speaking out most vocally against same-sex marriage also have power by virtue of their race, gender, and/or sexuality. Few of us can faithfully put ourselves in Paul's shoes. Of course, that doesn't mean that Paul is wrong, and it doesn't mean that the holiness code of Leviticus doesn't apply, but it does bring into question whether it applies now in the same way.

Postgame Interview Christianity

Psalm 40

 If you continue reading Psalm 40 to its conclusion, which I recommend you actually do if you’re looking for something Bible-y to read in the coming week, one thing you’ll discover is that the Psalm finishes with this declaration, “As for me I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought of me. You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.” This got me thinking… on this business of being poor and needy versus rich and blessed, how often do we prefer to label ourselves as the ones in need rather than the ones with power, and what does that say about us?

            There is one place where this shows up again and again, and that is when athletes are interviewed after a game. Some of you have undoubtedly had the pleasure of being that person with a microphone shoved in your face thirty seconds after an emotional high, dripping in sweat, and with muscles drenched in lactic acid, so you know it is exactly in that moment that you want to explain how you are feeling. We all know there is nothing more pointless than athletes being interviewed after a sporting event.
            In that moment, has any anybody ever said anything the least bit enlightening? It’s always “I’m just glad the team won” and “I just want to thank God for this opportunity” or “We left it all on the field/court/diamond/pitch today” or “We’ll get them next time.” Real enlightening stuff. But the funny thing about this is that if an athlete answers in any non-approved way; in essence, if they say anything that doesn’t stick to this boring, repetitive, pointless script that tells us absolutely nothing original; we bring out the pitchforks and insist that they get hanged from the nearest pole. This is all very stupid, but it’s also very interesting because we insist that our heroes stick to what is often an outright lie in their faux humility. We want them to downplay their success and to lift up how good the other teams are; we want them to play the underdog card, the “nobody believed in us” card, even sometimes when the vast majority of people believed in them. We don’t want the truth; we want a narrative that makes us feel good.

Faith is the absence of control

Psalm 27

Faith is the absence of control.

            That was the sermon.

Now spend fifteen minutes thinking about that.

            Or I guess I can talk about it some more; I’m just worried that the more I say the more I will distract from the message: Faith is the absence of control.

            I had those words written down after text study on Tuesday, feeling pretty confident that that was where I was going after reading Psalm 27: wait on the Lord, the Lord is the stronghold of my life—whom shall I fear? What I didn’t know is what would follow; how that idea would reverberate in my head as I reflected on what happened in Charleston, S.C. this past week and what I could faithfully say about it.

            Most of the time I don’t preach on the news. I tend to find it contrived and pretty easily transparent when pastors do that, like you can see what my agenda pretty clearly is. So, I hope that reluctance to preach on the issue du jour buys me a little bit of credibility when I say that I feel compelled to talk about Charleston today. That this isn’t just an issue for people across the country; it’s an issue here, and we need to be reminded of the specter of racism in this country all the more because we live in a place that is so homogenous.

Lament (or approaching pain and suffering honestly)

Psalm 69:1-16

            If there’s a single thing that strikes us most about the Psalms it has to be the brutally honest emotions that the Psalm writers use. We don’t read much that is so raw in our culture today. The closest corollary we have to modern Psalms are hymns or praise music, but, while hymns might be a little more far-reaching, almost all of our Christian music lives with a fairly narrow set of emotions—joy, thankfulness, relief, maybe even a kind of submission that is not as much emotion as outlook on life. You can listen to any Christian radio station or praise band, or sing along at most worship services, even at traditional churches, and hear largely these sentiments. The Psalms, however, go well beyond the bounds of what we normally feel as part of our standard religious practices.

            I’m not sure if this is more of an issue for the church or for our country. We tend to use language that disassociates us from our pain and we offer assurances that things will get better, even when reality points to the contrary. Ours is a culture of platitudes—things that sound nice but are only about as deep a kiddy pool in the ocean’s depth of what we feel. I can’t tell you how many times I hear from people who are in pain that “some people have it much worse.” That’s undoubtedly true but also not really the point. You aren’t some people; you are you, and what you feel is real, no matter what others are feeling.

There’s a part of us that always feels like it’s somehow inappropriate to say, “God, I just hurt right now,” as if we are just being too ungrateful. We say it in private and we say it to trusted friends and confidants, but we don’t say it loudly enough for anyone else to hear. Rarely do we pray, saying, “God, I don’t understand, and, frankly, I’m pretty upset. I hate this. But still all praise to you.” We’ve grown up with an implicit understanding that the reason we praise God is because God blesses us. On the cross, sure, but also in our lives. The Psalms, then, are one of the few places we can turn that approach pain and suffering with honesty.

            It actually sounds kind of funny to our ears when we follow lament with praise, but the Psalms do this over and over again. They cry out, they say they don’t understand, they lay out their frustrations and angst… and then they end with a word of praise or even thanks. There is some serious wisdom there. In fact, I think it’s the only way to effectively do lament, because when lament lacks that final word of thanks or praise it become self-centered, less honest, and it lays an expectation on God that God has never promised to deliver. I don’t mean that people who are sad or have experienced loss need to pick themselves up and feel better—actually, exactly the opposite—I mean they need to understand that even in lament—perhaps especially when we do not understand—God promises to be present and to hurt with you. We are not promised we will feel better, or that those with strong faith will not be in pain; only that God is with us when we are.

Reclaiming the "p" word: Praise as humility put into action

Psalm 113

As many of you know, words sometimes mean something a little different in some places than they do in the rest of the world. For example, today’s Psalm is about praise. In most places in the world—with most people—praise is a word that evokes images of joy and worshiping with abandon, but in this part of the world I’m come to find that praise is looked upon with something else—something more like suspicion. So, today, I’ve invited my cultural translator, Samantha, to translate Psalm 113. I’ll read. She’ll translate.

Ready?

Frank: ¹ Praise the Lord!
Sam: Sit still and think good thoughts.

Frank: Praise, O servants of the Lord;
   praise the name of the Lord.

Sam: Sit very reverently. Don’t make eye contact. God doesn’t like eccentricity. Just chill.

Frank: ² Blessed be the name of the Lord
   from this time on and for evermore.

Sam: <whisper> God is good all the time… just as long as I don’t have to talk about it.

Frank: ³ From the rising of the sun to its setting
   the name of the Lord is to be praised.

Sam: At least ten times a day I will consider saying something about God, then reconsider because I don’t really know what to say, because it’s better to be silent than to say the wrong thing.

Frank: ⁴ The Lord is high above all nations,
   and his glory above the heavens.

Sam: God is way up there somewhere, so dancing and clapping and whatnot are kind of pointless, because God hears me whether I whisper or carry on like a lunatic, amirite?

Frank: ⁵ Who is like the Lord our God,
   who is seated on high,

who looks far down
   on the heavens and the earth?

Sam: Rhetorical question! Like all the ones the pastor asks!

Frank: ⁷ He raises the poor from the dust,
   and lifts the needy from the ash heap,
⁸ to make them sit with princes,
   with the princes of his people.

Sam: Good, good, raising up the poor. But I’m not sure about this prince thing. That sounds like something for those people on the coasts. I mean, what would the neighbors think?

Frank: ⁹ He gives the barren woman a home,
   making her the joyous mother of children.

Praise the Lord!

Sam: <monotone> Amen. Hallelujah.

           

Thank you to Sam, my cultural translator.