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.