Reflect. Be humble. Find meaning. Be Lutheran.

Today’s reading is from 1 Kings. I wonder how much that means to you.

I don’t say that to be a crass jerk, either. I legitimately wonder, because today is Confirmation Sunday; it’s Reformation Sunday. Today we celebrate the 499-year tradition of our church, started by Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany. Five hundred years ago Christianity entered the Reformation and emerged as a faith much more accessible to all people, claiming that all of us are priests; every one of you. But that doesn’t mean that we know that much about the religious narratives we confess. Do you really know more about 1 Kings than football? Do you really care more about 1 Kings than the presidential election? Would you rather read the Bible or hunt for deer? Do you know more about your Bible or quilting?

Again, I don’t want to be crass, because being acquainted with the Bible is only a part what it means to be Christian, but if we don’t practice our faith how are we to confess it? I see a lot of diatribes on the internet on TV and in the paper about Christian commitments, but I don’t see an equal amount of investment of time and energy into prayer, study, and discernment of what it means to be a Christian. Most of the time I feel like people go on the internet looking for Bible verses to quote to make their point without ever having spent any time struggling, wrestling, or praying over the question first.

You don’t have time. I get it. But what do you have time for in your life? What is the story you are going to chase in this life? What is going to be your north star, guiding you into your future?

I ask this today because it’s Confirmation Sunday and I always wonder on Confirmation Sunday how we prioritize our faith or not. It’s a question not just for our confirmands; it’s for all of us: Where are you going to invest your time and energy? What, ultimately, matters? If you don’t ask the question, the world is going to decide for you. It’s going to tell you that what matters is how much you contribute to the economy, or what matters is how you vote, or what matters is your carbon footprint, or what matters is your vertical or your SAT score. Maybe those things matter, but what matters the most?

This is a much harder question today than it was for your parents, because they didn’t have this thing called the internet. So they weren’t told as persistently and aggressively about all the things they were lacking. They weren’t as easily distracted by all the narratives. Instead, they had time for this thing called self-reflection that we mostly can’t do anymore. Sadly, the lack of time to contemplate is an absolute disaster for faith communities, because this is a place that requires time spent listening for God’s voice.

Is it over yet?

            Is it over yet? Can we move on with our lives? I just can’t wait for it to be done. I just can’t wait for …

            Life is full of events like these. Exciting things we anticipate and can’t wait to experience, other things that produce fear and disgust, and still other things we are anxious to put behind us. I see a lot of looking forward to things and looking forward to getting past things, and then when we’re in the midst of something I see plenty of anxiety about how that thing is going. I just want to say: Stop. Stop letting future worries dictate your present.

            We’re wasting away our lives trying to get to and/or past the next thing, trying to escape the dreaded thing that’s coming, and then we are captive to nerves during the things that we have been anticipating. We worry, “What if it doesn’t turn out well in the end?”

            We need a break. And not just from the things that cause us stress. We need an outlook that allows us to move through stressful times without being overwhelmed, without letting the temperature of those around us affect us so much. We need some perspective.

            This is what spirituality has to offer. In order to be spiritual you have to be present in the here and now. You have to attentively listen for God in this moment right now. We spend so very much time not being present. We look forward, we try to escape; we don’t sit attentively much. We don’t navigate the stress; we let it dictate the course and then we respond. Stop responding. Start stopping and looking for God in the midst of all the stuff.

            I look at the way our kids play sports as a metaphor for how the rest of us live our lives. Actually, scratch that, it isn’t a metaphor, it IS how we live our lives, because our kids ARE living their lives and they are stressed out as can be. So, when they’re in a big game—define that however you will—you see in their nerves what that means to them. Those who cope better with stress are in the moment—they navigate—but others just react. In every aspect of your life you can be in the moment or you can be anxious and looking for resolution. It will define every interaction you have.

            The spiritual life is also about being self-aware. This has tremendous implications for how we see ourselves, because we hear competing messages in our faith life and our business/personal/family life. Are we trying to justify our lives based on our accomplishments, or are we trusting in God to justify what I cannot?

            So, here’s the thing about Election Day (because I’m guessing a lot of you are worried, anxious, fill-in-the-blank about the election right about now). It matters, but it doesn’t mean nearly as much as we build it up. The foundation of our lives is not our government but our God. The election matters… just not as much as you think. What matters more are the thousands of little things within your control. What matters is smiling, laughing, dancing, singing… what matters is playing, having fun, sharing stories… what matters is falling in love, making friends…  what matters is all the minutia of life that we miss when we wish things away.

            I hope you don’t wish anything away. We only have so much time and we just don’t know what tomorrow will bring. But, even more than that, I hope you don’t wish anything away because God so often meets us exactly in the place we are most dreading. This is the kind of God we’re dealing with and this God ain’t scared of anything, so trust in this God—not your feelings of anxiety or fear of what may come.

            Then, the question won’t be “Is it over yet?” but “It’s over already?”

Make me a house? I'll show you a house!

2 Samuel 7:1-7

            Make me a house? God scoffs. A house? What kind of house will hold the Almighty? What house, pray tell, can contain me?! You want to make me a house but you know what? I’ll make you a house. A house not of brick and mortar, a house that matters; a line—a legacy—that will last forever. A house!? Pfft.

            There’s something wonderful in God’s response to David. It’s interesting, because God makes a covenant with David even though it doesn’t seem at first to add anything to the covenants made with Abraham and Moses. They still have the promise of land and a future and descendants, but now God hints at something better, something eternal, and it all has to do with this misstep David has in wanting to build God a house.

            Quick history lesson. Actually, this requires me to flash-forward a little bit. If this were a movie we’d have a dramatic underscore that shows what’s coming. Solomon, David’s son, builds the temple and maintains the line of kings. It seems, for a moment, that God’s promise really is about a physical building. But then the kingdom divides. There’s Israel and Judah, the line of kings breaks apart; eventually, it fails completely. The Jewish people are conquered by Babylon and the reign of kings over Israel and Judah comes to an end. We know, looking back at history, that the eternal throne of David cannot be the promise here; not if it’s an eternal one. There has been no king of Israel since the Babylonian captivity.

            So, what happened? Why did God make an eternal promise with people who can’t keep their heads on straight for a week? This is just about the one way human beings are consistent: We are brilliantly reliable messers-up. No good thing in history ever lasts very long, and certain things are just fated never to work out. Vikings fans know what that’s all about. Cubs fans are testing that hypothesis at the moment. Among the many hilarious tweets from the Cubs pennant winning victory last night was one that read, “Cubs fans: This feeling you’re experiencing is called elation. Don’t worry, it will go away.”

The immortality of love

This week I'm posting the sermon I am preaching for the hospice memorial service, rather than the Sunday morning sermon, because A) I like it better, and B) I don't have a manuscript for Sunday morning and pulling it together after the fact is a lot of work I may or may not do. So, enjoy!

Revelation 21:1-4

Most of our lives are spent tiptoeing around death, sometimes pretending like it isn’t there, sometimes putting other things in its way, and sometimes intentionally minimizing it, as if any of those options put death to death. This is true of our own mortality but even more-so when it comes to those we love. Parents, brothers and sisters, friends, even our children. We tiptoe around it because we’re scared of it, because we absorb messages in our lives that tell us life is always good, death is always bad, so best to flee from it however much you can. When J.K. Rowling was crafting her primary villain for the Harry Potter series she could think of no better name to give him than “Vol-de-mort” which, in French, means “flees from death.”

            So, it is at first jarring, sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately a tremendous blessing to have people—nurses and social workers and retired people, as well as people who have vocations that don’t seem to have a thing to do with end of life care—who nonetheless give of themselves, their time and energy, to those whose life is ending, who do not flee from death out of fear but who stand alongside the dying, because that is what human beings are called to do. These people are the hands and feet of Jesus, it is most certainly true.

            Last month I was eating with a friend whose son had recently died unexpectedly—not a hospice situation, more of the tragic accident type—and during the course of the conversation we were talking about the ways that we face our mortality or flee from it. We talked about how Ironman triathlons are overrun with people in their 40s and 50s, trying desperately, it seems, to remain young forever. Perhaps if they do just a little more and just a little more they will never get old. We talked about regrets and living with grief, figuring out how to truly live when the imagined future is gone and we are confronted with a real-present that isn’t what we imagined. We talked purpose and what the good-life looks like. We talked about love, without using the word.

Just have faith

Exodus 32:1-14

            Moses was gone for like two hours—that’s my bias, we have no idea how long he was gone, but it feels to me like two hours before the people start thinking God has abandoned them. God, the God who parted the Red Sea for them to walk across; God, the God who sent plagues on Egypt, the God who gave Abraham and Sarah a child in their old age, who saved Joseph to have him rise to power in Egypt. This God who can do all things: They lost faith in this God in about two hours. OK, maybe it was days, a week even. How long would it take to lose faith in this God?

            Because I think that’s the big question before us today: What does it take to lose faith in God?

            In order to get at that question I want to talk about a different question that is part of the inventory I do with couples who are getting married. It goes like this: “Agree or Disagree: Nothing could make me question my love for my partner.” Couples who have never been married previously, and especially those who are young inevitably agree with this statement. It’s not 100%. Of course it’s never 100%. But most do agree. This falls into the category of romantic answers that people want to believe in. We want to believe that the person we are marrying—the person to whom I am giving my heart—will never let me down and that there is nothing that will happen between us that could lead me to be any less in love. This is romantic. It’s less romantic to start to name some realities of things that happen in the world: adultery, domestic abuse, change in personality, or addiction. In our most romantic moments we believe that love trumps all those things, and truly, it does. Just not always our love. Just not the kind of love we are capable of most days of the week. Our love is more fleeting than we tend to imagine.

            But you might be wondering what that has to do with faith, less still with the golden calf.

Well, I think we are frequently that person who runs headlong into faith, just as we do love, and we believe that nothing could possibly make us question our love of God. So, we practice faith like we enter into love, which is to say we do so naively. This is because faith is romantic, too. Faith takes us to a place of idealism and hope and peace and all sorts of things that are good and true but maybe not as easily earned as we imagine. Faith, like marriage, is tested and refined not in the mountaintops but in the valley-bottoms. Faith is not strengthened by virtue of results but of resolve, and this is often the same with love, though in a different way. We fall in love with an ideal but slowly, over time, we begin to love a person; a person who is not perfect. Faith is like this too, except the process works backwards. We begin our relationship with God by trying to make ourselves perfect, by taking on the biblical command to conform ourselves to God’s image, then our faith is strengthened over time as we begin to let go of our need to save ourselves and settle into trusting God to do what we cannot.

            But this process will show our faith for what is truly is: Is it something that exists to make us feel better about ourselves—a surface-level kind of assurance that things will be OK in the end that is always looking for validation? Or is our faith that deep reminder that we are not God and though the world quakes and our lives appear just as broken as before there is that great soul-peace of trusting in something much bigger than myself so it is not incumbent on me to fix it?

Passover people with a Pharaoh complex, or why we need ritual

Exodus 12:1-13, 13:1-8

The plagues of Egypt. What a story! Moses goes to Pharaoh, saying, “Let my people go!” Pharaoh turns his nose at him. Then the water turns to blood, frogs come up from the water, gnats and flies overwhelm the air, livestock die, people become covered by festering boils—that’s just the worst—that is until the thunder and hail and fire rains down from the sky and then the locusts, finishing off the rest of the crops, and lastly (or almost lastly… pen-lastly?) the darkness. Nine plagues: In some ways each more terrible than the last but nothing compared to the tenth.

It’s hard to imagine exactly how devastating the death of every firstborn in the land would be because losing one child is something like losing the world. For everyone in the country to lose a child at the same time is beyond imagining. This was a terrible time in history. The Egyptians put the Israelites into slavery out of fear that they would rise up. There were too many of them in the land. The Israelites had the numbers but the Egyptians held the power. So, in addition to holding them captive as slaves Pharaoh had ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill Hebrew boys and this is how Moses famously ends up in the reed basket in the Nile. It’s also how Moses ended up in Pharaoh’s house, saved by one of his daughters.

In one sense these plagues culminate in the eye for an eye kind of justice that pervades the earliest stories from the Bible. Pharaoh enslaved the Hebrew people and ordered that their boys be killed so God frees them from slavery by way of killing the first-born of the Egyptians. This is fair. It’s horrible, but it’s fair. More than that, the plagues set Israel apart from other people. These are children of Abraham. Nobody messes with children of Abraham.

So it is that the Israelites are commanded by God to sacrifice a lamb and put its blood over their doorpost to mark their homes so that when the tenth plague hits the Lord may “pass over” their house. This all happens just as promised and the Israelite children are spared; it was a terrible kind of miracle. The Passover is so important it must be remembered and celebrated. Thus, the festival of the unleavened bread was born.