God with us

Matthew 1:18-25

Emmanuel—“God is with us.”

            It’s such a well-known name that we may miss how revolutionary this is. With Jesus coming into the world, God is with us. When things are rough, God is with us. When things are good, God is with us. When our life is full of despair, God is with us. This is the promise we have through Jesus with the coming of the Holy Spirit—that there is no place or time that God is not there.

            This son of Mary, through the Holy Spirit, is given two names: Emmanuel—“God is with us”—and Jesus—“He saves.” These are two promises we have—that God is with us and that God saves us. Yet, the history of the world proves that this kind of saving is not mere protection from forces of evil. Evil is alive and well, but because of this God with us, whose journey leads us to the cross, we know that there is no place full of suffering where God will not be.

            From a lowly beginning to a lowly ending, Jesus doesn’t set out on an expected course for the Messiah. He shatters expectations. First there is Mary and Joseph. The account of the Gospel of Matthew focuses more on Joseph, whose expectations are obliterated by an unexpected pregnancy. So are Mary’s, of course. This was not the engagement present they were looking for. From the beginning, God elects to enter humanity in the humblest of ways, against convention, partly to demonstrate the holy-ness of this birth but partly I imagine to demonstrate that God is with us no matter the discomfort where we might find ourselves. No matter the poverty of our circumstance.

God's left handed power

Isaiah 42:1-9

            Here, according to Isaiah, is what it means to be the chosen servant of God: He is one who will bring forth justice to the nations, not by crying out or lifting up his voice, not by force or beating down the opposition. Instead, this servant is coming with a different kind of power—the power that Robert Farrar Capon calls “left handed power.” In the Bible, there is much said about the strength of the right hand. It is the right hand that defeats nations. When you sit at the right hand you are in a place of power and prestige. In this metaphor for strength, the right hand is the good one, the strong one—sorry, left-handed folks. The right hand is the power of force.

If you Google this, you will find no less than 58 examples of God’s right hand at work in the Bible. Some say things like “Save with your right hand and answer us!” (Psalm 60:5), or “Your right hand, O Lord, is majestic in power, Your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy” (Exodus 15:6), or “He has bent His bow like an enemy; He has set His right hand like an adversary and slain all that were pleasant to the eye; In the tent of the daughter of Zion He has poured out His wrath like fire” (Lamentations 2:4). Lest you think this is only Old Testament, Psalm 110:1 is quoted no less than three times in the New Testament, saying, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Matthew 22:44, Mark 12:36, Hebrews 1:13).

Human beings have a great attachment to right handed power. Strength. Conviction. Decisiveness. All of these are traits of right handed power. We so badly want God to round up all the baddies and beat them up for us, teach them a lesson, and put them in their place. So much theology around heaven and hell in the church, if we’re being honest, is about other people getting what is due them. We love the right hand of God, because it means destruction for our enemies—something the Psalmist asks for again and again. In the pre-Christmas world, the power of force and coercion is the power that speaks loudest.

By contrast, scripture barely mentions the left hand of God. The only use of left hand in the entire New Testament is Jesus saying, “But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). There is nothing about left handed power, and I want to suggest this is very much by intention. You don’t need scripture to tell you about left handed power, because Jesus shows us by example exactly what it is. Our expectations were that Jesus would come wielding God’s right handed strength. He was supposed to be the Messiah who brought the chosen people back into the Holy Land. He was supposed to get back at those who had wronged his people. He was supposed to bring vengeance for all those killed—the powerless, the woman and children, and the warriors who gave their lives fighting for the faith. He was supposed to be the fulfillment of all the waiting for the people to get what they were due. He was supposed to be all these things, but instead he came wielding God’s left handed power, which is self-sacrifice. Left handed power is the least sexy power you can imagine. It is somebody slapping you on one cheek and turning the other and saying, “You forgot this one.” To the world, it looks like giving up. It is powerlessness and weakness and meekness and all those things that don’t look like power.

Prophet of death--prophet of hope

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:2-4, 3:17-19

Last week, we read from Jeremiah, who brought a message for those of us who have some power—to care for the immigrant, and the widow, and the orphan. Well, this week, we turn to Habakkuk, who is bringing a message of hope for those same folks who are oppressed. But… it might take some time.

I often think about what it would be like to live in the times of the prophets. Let’s say you hear this message from Habakkuk. You’re an Israelite living in the Promised Land six-hundred or so years before Jesus. The Babylonians are beginning their march toward the place where you live. Things moved slow in those days—it might be years until they got there—but you know when they arrive it’s going to be bad. So, you’re a Jew living in the land promised to you by God, knowing that within your lifetime outside invaders are coming to take it away, and everything you have—your property, your work, your place of worship—is going to be taken from you. And into this anxiety comes a prophet, in Habakkuk, preaching a message that says, “There is hope, but it may take a while.”

Now, imagine you can see the future and know that that hope is coming in six hundred years. Not only will you not see it—neither will any of your children, or grandchildren, or anybody else in living memory. By the time that hope arrives, you will be forgotten. This is the context of Habakkuk. It’s all going away, and it won’t be made right for a long, long time.

Frankly, this is why I get so agitated when people read from Jeremiah and pull out that one verse (Jeremiah 29:11) and talk about God knowing the plans he has for us and giving us a future with hope, because the prophets are talking about the same thing here! This is hope for a nation. It is hope for a telos—God’s ultimate purpose for creation. It is not a promise that life will be peachy in the meantime or that everything that is happening is according to God’s plan. This is, in fact, the opposite of what the prophets are preaching. They are telling us that things are most definitely NOT happening according to God’s plan, and that’s why the nation is being displaced, and anxiety is rampant, and this hope is far, far off. The prophets are saying that things are, in fact, really bad, and the hope we have is not one for this world, because most of us won’t see it.

At first this doesn’t feel like a better kind of hope. I can understand why we want God to tell us that it will all work out for us in ten years, because we want to experience that telos on this side of death. We want to see our children and grandchildren fulfill our hopes for them. It’s perfectly natural to give God our timetable. The problem is that it doesn’t always happen that way.

God keeps sending prophets for some reason

Jeremiah 7:1-11

Most of the time when I go back and read the sermon I preached on certain scripture four years earlier, there’s not much I want to reuse. Too much has changed—mostly, I read myself four years ago and think, “Man, that’s really not what I feel compelled to say today,” and sometimes I think, “Boy, was I an idiot.” However, today, I found some nice notes on Jeremiah 7 and a sermon with three themes from four years ago, which I am not going to re-use… not completely.

Theme 1: Generational warfare, Theme 2: Who is the alien? and Theme 3: A loss of monoculture is messy but also good.

            I can easily preach on those again today. #1: Generational Warfare. Not a week goes by that I don’t hear about millennials killing some industry. Yesterday, it was that millennials are killing the turkey industry by cooking smaller turkeys. Business Insider is keeping a running tally of things millennials are killing, including eating out at restaurants, starter homes, beer, and napkins. Personally, I think half the things millennials are killing deserve to be killed, but that’s maybe just because I am one. On the other hand, not a week goes by that I don’t hear fellow millennials complaining about boomers. Millennials are lazy; boomers are the worst—pretty much the usual stereotypes. Sometimes, I want to point out to people that generations create the next generation, ya know? So if one generation is terrible it’s maybe because they were raised to be that way, but whatever, that’s neither here nor there. Yep, generational warfare is alive and well, and Jeremiah is low-hanging fruit for a millennial who might want to point out that God calls the ones who are too young—or too old. So, I’ll let that be for now.

Not life, liberty, and happiness; but justice, kindness, and humble-walking

Micah 6:6-8

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God.

It starts with justice. Wow, justice. This is one we have a hard time wrapping our heads around. We live in the country with the most prisoners in the world—with over two million people locked away. What is justice for us? And as a country who celebrates Veterans Day but so often fails to provide adequate services for veterans upon their return to society, what does it mean to do justice? For that matter, when we talk about justice, are we talking about criminal justice? Is it God’s justice, or is it something else?

I think we need to jump to the end of this passage from Micah in order to get at this question.

Walk humbly with God—now there’s the pivot point for the entirety of the ethical Christian life. What does it mean to walk humbly with God?

In Philippians 2, it says that Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” I think that’s the best example we get of what it looks like—humble-walking means walking toward the cross. Be obedient not to the powers of this world that tell you it is this way or that—black or white—left or right—red or blue. Instead, humble yourself, trusting God far more than you trust your judgments.

We are told in a million ways every day of our lives that the world out there is black-and-white; it is me versus them; good versus evil; and—funny—I’m always the good one. Humble-walking with God requires us to see we are not just victims but perpetrators. It’s not relativism; it’s not saying everything is the same and the world is grey. Rather, it is saying that everything is far more colorful than I gave it credit, and I can’t possibly understand it all. I won’t understand every nuance of what it means to be human; I won’t be able to put myself in your shoes—never completely. So, I will choose to fear God, rather than other people; I will choose to fear my own capacity for evil, rather than things I don’t understand. Again, humble-walking is trusting God more than I trust my judgments.

This judging—that’s the problem. It’s hard to be humble and to do justice at the same time, but in order to live in this world we have to make judgments—both snap judgments and those carefully considered. How can we judge not, lest ye be judged, be humble, and still get by in this world? That’s the question.

In order to get at that, I want to talk a little about my family:

Politics, Cynicism, and the Foolishness of Grace

2 Kings 5:1-14

The books of Kings takes place in a time that’s a bit depressing to look back on, to be honest. It was a time when people assumed the worst of one another, when leaders led through threats of violence, when poor nations were ravaged by the rich and their people were turned into politic tools, when entire nations became refugees, and most of all, this was a time when everybody in leadership assumed the worst of one another. Good thing none of that happens today!

In the days when Naaman was a commander of the army under Aram, the world was predicated on violence. The law of the day was the law of the sword. It was very much a game of thrones world out there. This is dream world for the military leaders, who could freely judge one another with suspicion, and justify themselves based on conquests alone. Leadership in that age was defined more or less exclusively by how many battles you won and how many people you killed. It was a world of “us versus them.” In a world like this, what room is there for a prophet? Well, Naaman is going to have to find out, because Naaman is in need of healing, and no amount of war is going to solve that.

            The world in which Naaman lives is the worst of the world that we live in today. It’s a world that assumes violence is justified, politics means doing whatever it takes to make your side “win,” and that the only thing that matters is power. It’s a hard world to combat through persuasion, because it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Suspicion breeds suspicion, and pretty soon we assume that everybody is just like me—suspicious and cynical and out for themselves. Then, nothing else matters, because—if we assume everybody is the devil-incarnate—we can elect whatever leaders we want, even those who exemplify the very opposite traits of what it means to be a Christian in the world. Meekness and humility have no place in politics, we might believe, because we have made it so—because we have hardened our hearts and assume the worst of everyone.

I don’t have any advice on how to vote in such a world, but I do know this: The kingdom of God is not like this. Not at all.

Wisdom is knowing yourself--and that you're not that wise

1 Kings 3:4-28

Solomon is famous for his wisdom, so I figured on this Confirmation Sunday that I would talk a little bit about wisdom, since that’s something we could all use a bit more of.

            For Solomon, wisdom might have been a gift from on high, but for most of us, wisdom is something learned. It requires practice, discipline, and time, which is why many of our elders are so wise. They’ve had a lot of time to practice wisdom, and they’ve done a lot of listening in their lives. But age is also no guarantee of wisdom, because it doesn’t just come to us through osmosis—and it doesn’t come randomly either. Instead, the wise possess a few traits—actually, more or less the same traits that Jesus talks about on the Sermon on the Mount. He said: “Blessed are the poor… the mourners… the meek… those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers… the persecuted… the reviled… and those falsely accused.”

If you want to be wise, you have to practice being those things. Have you practiced being poor? Mourning? Being meek? Being merciful? Have you practiced any of that? Because if not, you will not learn wisdom. The opposite is also true, have you practiced richness? Haughtiness? Triumph? Have you been the persecutor? The one mocking others? Then, you can’t learn wisdom.

This might sound all well and good, but if it only lives off in the realm of theory it’s not of much use, so I am going to be explicit and specific.

The real king and queen of Israel

2 Samuel 11-12

            There was a king and queen of Israel during the time of David, but it was not at all as the nation of Israel thought.

I’ll get to them in a minute.

            You might recall, deep in the recesses of your memories, that God didn’t want to give the people of Israel a king. God was supposed to be their king, and anybody else was going to be a shallow imitation. But they asked and asked and asked, and God, being the parent that he was, unable to say “No” forever, eventually said, “Ask your mother,” which was also him, so that was confusing, but eventually he relented.

            “Fine!” God said, “You can have a king.”

            And much like that rare occasion when a child gets rewarded after hearing “No” from their parents a thousand times, the result of the children of Israel getting what they want is a disaster. The line of kings leads Israel through the Promised Land and out of it before you know it.

            David was supposed to be the greatest king. He’s the subject of our reading today, but by the time we pick up with the story, we should realize it may have been better if he would have been killed by Goliath long before, because when David falls, he falls hard. The hero-David becomes the villain-David, who uses his power to have an affair with a married woman named Bathsheba, and afterwards, unable to coerce Uriah, her husband, into covering his tracks, he goes and has him killed instead. It’s the kind of thing we would hardly be surprised to hear on the news today, as everybody expects their politicians to abuse their power.

Not everybody! You might say. Surely there are those in power who don’t abuse it, and there are—absolutely—but there are only two paths with power: You either use it and abuse it, or you give it away. Neutrality is not an option—not in this game. Any time a person in power gives away power they are starting down that road toward discipleship, following Jesus who told us that to be a disciple we are to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow. The problem is that giving that power away also means giving away your influence. History is littered with anonymous people who had power and gave it away, but we don’t know who they are.

Meanwhile, anybody with power who we consider “good”—our moral leadership, you might call them—has figured out how to work this world of transactions and keep enough power to keep doing “good.” This may well be pragmatic, but it isn’t righteousness. At best, it’s making do in a broken world. The paradox of Christian discipleship is that you can’t follow Jesus and retain any power for yourself whatsoever.

Why the Old Testament is so stinking repetitive (and baptism is not)

Joshua 24

What do you know about the Old Testament? If you’re like many Christians, the answer is not much. You probably know a few stories—there’s the creation of the world; there’s an ark; Moses, plagues and parting the Red Sea; there’s Jonah; and maybe, if you really stretch your memory back to Sunday School, you might remember a few other things. Perhaps you know quite a bit more than that, or maybe even those few events were testing the limits of your memory. Wherever you find yourself when it comes to the Old Testament, there is some good news: The Old Testament is really good at repeating itself.

            Many of our readings, including today’s from the book of Joshua, spend a large amount of time retelling a series of historical events. Often, God is the one sharing that history. God says, “Long ago your ancestors—Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor—lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac…” etc, etc, etc. Pretty soon, God is listing off the entire history of Genesis and Exodus. Then, God just keeps on going, telling us about kings and nations and history, lots of history. You might wonder: Why? Today’s reading could have been 90% shorter if God just skipped to the point. Many of you probably would have liked that.

            In order to understand why the Old Testament is so repetitive, you need to imagine the way these stories were passed down. People didn’t write them down. Few people were literate—why would they be? Even if you had the materials to write a book; you can imagine the effort—writing each individual copy! It would be centuries before there were scrolls, and even then most people—even devout Jews—would never see them, and only the priests could read them. This was an agrarian society; people didn’t need to know how to read, but they certainly did know how to tell stories. For centuries, these stories about God were passed on around campfires and dinner tables. People told them over and over, each story like a thread weaving the tapestry of the history of the nation, each character stacking their rock on the cairn that is the history of the Hebrew people. God became known through these historical characters. God’s name became “I am the Lord, your God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

The stinky church

Genesis 6:16-22; 9:8-15

I want to tell you today about the stinky church. Strangely, it’s the story of a boat.

Now, there are a lot of boats in the Bible. Jesus falls asleep in one; Peter jumps out of another; the baby Moses floats in his own kind of basket-boat in the Nile, but no boat is quite as famous as the ark. The big one. It is this boat that so captures our imaginations.

            It’s also a tough one to preach on Rally Sunday, to be honest, having seen the state of us, God decides he’s seen enough. Get rid of it all! Let’s start over! If you’re hoping God doesn’t come to a similar conclusion today, then you really have to hope that God doesn’t have Twitter. At the last second, stopping short of obliterating the human race, God gives us a boat. He gives it to Noah, but that boat just keeps floating, even to today.

            That boat is the church.

Now, when I say that, I want to point out that this isn’t some radical, millennial pastor off-the-wall thought. Boats have been a sign of the church for as long as there has been a church. In fact, many sanctuaries have been constructed to look like an upside-down ship. If you’ve ever been in a church with flying buttresses and a large curved ceiling, there’s a decent bet that the architects had a boat in mind in the construction.

Also, you know, “Jesus, Savior, pilot me… over life’s tempestuous seas.” That kind of thing.

Earning salvation isn't hard; it's impossible

Mark 10:17-31

            I preach on this story so often when it is not the reading of the day that I hardly know what to do with it when it is. I actually went back and looked and I’ve never officially preached on Mark 10, or the same story as it appears in Matthew or Luke, but I’ve probably mentioned the story of Jesus and the rich man a half dozen times or more in sermons through the years. So, it’s probably no surprise to you that I believe this is one of the most important passages in the entire Bible. Naturally, we’re reading it on Labor Day weekend when everybody is at the cabin, but hey, you can’t have it all.  

It goes like this: A man comes to Jesus with a fantastic question. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asks.  In fact, that really is the question isn’t it? If you knew for certain what it took have eternal life, then all the other questions would sort of be moot, wouldn’t they? If you had salvation assured, then all the secrets of how to live follow.

            Interestingly enough, Jesus does not answer the man with a parable. A parable would be more typical of Jesus. Somebody comes to him with a really big, difficult question, and his response is to say, “A man was going down the road…” or “A farmer went out to sow his seed…” Jesus does not go that route here. Instead, he asks how the man is doing with following the commandments. “Have you not murdered? Have you stayed faithful? Have you not stolen?”

            “I’ve done none of that,” says the man, “More than that, I have never used the Lord’s name in vain, I have never put another god before the true God, I have never coveted. You name it, I haven’t done it.” Sounds like a fun guy.

            More to the point, this is remarkable response. I mean, everybody violates the commandments! Some of us might be better at following the rules than others, but to keep them all—even the parts about coveting, which, honestly, most of us covet about twice a minute? That is astounding—impossible, really. What’s more astounding, however, is that Jesus doesn’t even question it. Jesus doesn’t go down the ‘Yeah, but…” rabbit hole, pointing out that this schmoe is obviously lying to himself. He doesn’t need to point out how wrong he is. Instead, he turns back to the man and says, “Alright, then go and give away all your possessions.”

            Hit him where it hurts, Jesus. Hit him where it hurts.

"Don't worry!" -- Why faith and optimism are not remotely the same

Matthew 6:19-34

Matthew 6 is just great, because it is the most appropriate time to use one of my favorite quotes, from Newt Scamander, in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the one that goes: “My philosophy is worrying means that you suffer twice.”

            I love this quote, as I love this scripture, because at first they both sound tremendously optimistic. Don’t worry, be happy; it will all work out. That feels so much like the messages our society sends around faith, which can be summed up by the ol’ Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” Our society eats that stuff up! Don’t worry; God has plans; you’re set. Wonderfully optimistic!

            Nothing about that is wrong, per se, but all of it is misleading, because Matthew 6 and Jeremiah 29 and Newt Scamander are not at all optimistic. Scamander’s quote doesn’t say, “Don’t worry because you won’t suffer;” rather, it assumes you will suffer, so why double the suffering by adding worry on top? That’s not optimistic. Now, we can excuse that, because that quote comes from a movie about wizards, so maybe it has little to do with our faith. But Jeremiah 29:11, which is quoted as much as any scripture, most certainly does come from the Bible, and it is most often quoted in an optimistic way. Nonetheless, this verse about God’s plans is said by Jeremiah to a nation in Israel in exile, currently suffering, and the plans do not involve individual people finding their best life now, or anything like that. In fact, many will suffer and many will die before Israel is ever restored from captivity in Babylon. Jeremiah 29:11 is about God’s plans for everything, but not you, specifically. It is not optimistic about individuals avoiding suffering.

            But surely Matthew 6 must be optimistic! Don’t worry, says Jesus. Consider those lilies of the field, how beautiful they are, and God takes care of them. Surely, God will take care of us, too! Absolutely, definitely! This scripture is about assurance in the face of adversity; it is about an ultimate promise that God watches over and protects. However, because it is ultimate protection, we have to be a bit careful. The first paragraph in Matthew 6 ends by saying, “That’s what the Gentiles worry about!” That’s what those pagan Romans worry about—food and drink—because they worship gods who provide for them in the here and now. They are, in fact, obsessed with the comforts of now—nice food, nice clothes, nice things; comfort. To be a Christian is something different; it is not to pray to God asking for food and drink and clothing, or even security and comfort; it is to say, “Jesus, I will follow you wherever you go, even through death, so what sense does it make to worry?” Matthew 6:33, at the very conclusion of this paragraph that begins “Do Not Worry!” concludes by saying, “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

            There are two ways to read that. One is to say: If I strive for the kingdom of God, God will reward me with nice things in this world. That is a possible reading, even if it doesn’t seem to match up with reality. After all, so many Christians through the ages have suffered, have died, have watched their loved ones get snatched from them, sometimes directly because of their faith. If anything, Christianity shows itself strongest in despair. So, I’m inclined toward the other reading of Matthew 6:33, which is that we are to strive for the kingdom of God with the assurance that when we suffer, when we struggle, and, eventually, when we die (which will happen for all of us, after all), that is when we will receive our reward; that is when all the pain of the world will be justified. The party is coming at the end of the story; all we have now are reflections.

God uses the least qualified. Are you still surprised?

Ruth 4

Why is the book of Ruth in the Bible?

I started three weeks ago by pointing out all the obstacles the book of Ruth faced in ever making it into the Bible: A story of a heroine in a world run by men; a moral about loving kindness for a mother-in-law to whom Ruth had no legal obligation; a story about a foreigner who was not part of the tribe. It’s one of those things that may well have happened and then dissolved into obscurity; the great-grandmother of King David who nobody talked about, as it might betray his royal blood.

And, yet, for exactly those reasons, it is so powerful that the book of Ruth persists. This is about a foreigner whose audacity to stay by Naomi’s side changed history. This is about a woman, who was property, and yet shows us a model for how to live in dark and dangerous times. This is a story that reads well today, in spite of the many and obvious differences between our society and theirs, precisely because of the unlikelihood of it all—because there are so many little, seemingly insignificant, people who do little things that make all the difference.

Ruth loved Naomi. Naomi advised Ruth. Boaz worked within the rules of the society, subtly influencing the unnamed next-of-kin to give up his inheritance, which included Ruth. All of these are little things that change the lives of all those involved, but they also suggest something about how God works through people. It’s rarely dramatic shifts, conversion experiences like Saul’s, or experiences more dramatic still, as it was with Jonah. More often, God moves just behind the scenes, subtly stirring hearts in a direction we will never see. Ruth has no idea of her part in all this, but she doesn’t have to see the big picture. Instead, because of her actions, not only does she save her mother-in-law from a life of poverty and death in obscurity, she also becomes great-grandmother to David, the great king of Israel. In that way, she becomes a central figure in the bloodline that eventually leads to Jesus.

Just a little person, doing little acts out of love.

Sex, love, power, and why the church is missing the point

Ruth 3

Well, this is an awkward part of the story of Ruth to preach, if I’m being completely honest. I guess, at least there isn’t a children’s sermon today?

I don’t mind talking about relationships, and marriage, and sex, but it’s nice when there’s something else besides it—you know, something Jesus-y, or gospel-y, or anything else, really. What is a person to do with this? What are the underlying lessons from Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor? Is it even something we should care about, or in the words of a seminary professor, who I asked one time to write an article for our student newspaper, and who said, “I’m happy to write, as long as the subject isn’t sex… again.”

            I suppose Ruth and Boaz could appear to be a story about sexual morality, as fun as that is to preach. From a quick sampling of sermons taken from, admittedly, largely evangelical sources on this scripture, I saw a lot of stuff about sexual boundaries. That’s thrilling and all (not really), but the other thing about that is simply: That has nothing to do with what is going on here. Ruth and Boaz do not exist in 21^st century America, and if you pretend that they do, then you’re not being faithful to the scripture.

Ruth is, quite literally, property. Now, that might rub you the wrong way, and it probably should, but it is simply how the world worked in those days, and that has to color the way we look at this relationship. It’s not like Ruth and Boaz can date. Their relationship is necessarily about contracts and assurances, which is not romantic (at all), but this was life in those days. Whatever you think about the way our society handles marriage, and the role of the church in it, it has to be said that we are miles away from what Ruth was dealing with. We have our issues, but they are completely different.

It’s really hard to culturally commute between 21^st century America and 11^th century AD Israel. To that point, using the Bible as a key to sexual morality is really fraught with difficulty, because morality in the Bible is a constantly moving target. At various times, scripture allows polygamy, levirate marriage (in which a brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his wife, which is sort of what’s going on here with Ruth), and many other versions of marriage which we would aspersions on today. The society of Ruth’s age began with the clan, which was the immediate family system. You could never marry outside of the clan. This is why Ruth goes to Boaz, because he’s a close-enough relative that he might take her in and protect her. Marriage, in that time, was about security for women and property for men.

Love? The only love here is between Ruth and Naomi, her mother-in-law. There is no romance; it’s just obligation. So, the first, and perhaps greatest, lesson here is that if you’re looking for a good message about morality in marriage today, you’re barking up the wrong tree. But if you’re curious about what it looks like to value commitment to meaningful things in a broken world, then yes, delve a little deeper into Boaz and Ruth. So much of our conversation on matters of marriage, sex, and sexuality, when it happens in the church, if it happens at all, is really a guise to talk about boundaries. We don’t actually talk about sex; we talk about boundaries around sex, and it’s awkward. I know, because I have to bring it up on occasion with a bunch of middle-schoolers. You think you’re squirming! The thing is: When the church talks about sex, it is usually to hold boundaries, to say, “This is appropriate and this is not”—whatever “this” is.

Commit!

Ruth 2

I believe that the book of Ruth has a very simple moral for us, which is this: Be committed. To something, to anything, preferably to someone. Just be committed.

Last week, I talked about how Ruth’s love for Naomi defies cynicism and is a reflection of God’s love for us. After all, who could be cynical about a daughter-in-law taking care of her mother-in-law. This week, the seeds are planted for something different—a different kind of love.

            But we need to hit the brakes here for just a minute. This is not a story of commitment in terms of romantic love, at least not how we think of love today. We shouldn’t romanticize the relationship between Ruth and Boaz. From the start, this is about protection and safety, and, in this case, you could make the case that there may be all sorts of ulterior motives brewing. Ruth and Naomi need a clan to belong to, and Ruth needs safety from these mongrel men, who apparently go around bothering all the women unattached to a man. Meanwhile, Boaz can lay claim to whatever woman he wants; he has all the power in the world over her—clearly, this is not a simple case of love winning the day.

            Yet, in the midst of a society that is obviously imperfect, still there are hints of something better. This starts with the reason Boaz finds Ruth attractive. Boaz finds Ruth attractive not first because of her looks (there’s not a word here about her appearance); rather, he is interested in her for two reasons: 1. Her commitment to her work, and 2. Her commitment to Naomi. There are many reasons Boaz could have sent Ruth away. She was a foreigner, not related to the clan or anybody in it. That alone would have been enough for most. To that end, he could have essentially made her a slave. He doesn’t do any of that, and the only reason we are given is because of her commitment.

Love that is unconditional, unbreakable, and unstoppable

Ruth 1

            In our reading today, I would hazard to guess that every farmer only heard “They came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest,” at which point every one of you started thinking about what you need to be getting ready in the next few weeks. This isn’t bad, actually. The book of Ruth is a story about fullness and emptiness; it’s about a great revolution—barrenness into new birth, bitterness into joy, death into new life.

            Given all that, it’s also not surprising that this is a story about a couple of women. As you all probably know, women are badly underrepresented in the Bible, so when they do appear it tends to be pretty important that we pay attention. I mean, if their story was important enough to make it through all the men making all these edits and decisions about what made it into the Bible, then it must really be important.

*          *          *

            For most of us, there are two verses in Ruth that are familiar, and they appear here in the first chapter.

‘Do not press me to leave you
   or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
   where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
   and your God my God.
¹⁷ Where you die, I will die—
   there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
   and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!’ 

The Eighth Commandment, In Practice.

My favorite line in Martin Luther’s Small Catechism is his explanation to the 8^th Commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Under the heading—What does this mean?—he writes, “We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them, or destroy their reputations.” Fair enough, good start, but here’s the kicker: he concludes, “Instead we are to come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light.”

            That last part is so brilliant and so hard: Interpret everything that others do in the best possible light. The church, by which I mean the people in the church (because what else is the church, really?), is terrible at this. We love our doctrine. We hold tight to the things we believe, and we, no doubt, have good reason for believing these things. Whether informed by scripture, or tradition, or reason, or experience, the things we believe are important. Theology helps us put together a better picture of God for the world to see. It helps us to say, “This is of God,” and “This is not.”

            Furthermore, our practices matter. Ritual matters. Every church has rituals—even the ones who think they don’t. Whether our ritual involves dressing up in funny robes on Sunday morning, candles and incense, potluck meals, long-form prayers, altar calls, communion, testimonials, standing up and sitting down, praise bands, organ, putting our hands in the air, or you name it, these rituals can connect us with God. In fact, anything done mindfully can connect us with God, and especially, those things done mindfully in a community. Pay attention, and you will see the ripples of the Holy Spirit moving in the midst of people gathered in God’s name. Our practices create space for this to happen.

            So, doctrine matters and ritual matters, but it’s obvious to anybody, whether outside or inside the church, that Christians don’t always agree on these things. Sometimes, we even disagree on things that some might consider essential for the faith. This can be difficult. But, let me remind you, we are not the ones saving anybody here. I hope we can agree on that: As Christians, we proclaim that Jesus is our Savior because of what he did on the cross. So, where we disagree on doctrine and practice, let us agree on one thing: Let us love as God loves us.

            Now, having said that, we probably do all agree with that, in principle. The problem comes when we start defining sin, and what is good, and what is bad, etc. We don’t agree on how to love. I’m not naïve to think that all of us agreeing to love means we’ll agree how that looks in practice.

So, rather than agreeing to love the same, can we at least agree to Luther’s explanation to the 8^th commandment? When we don’t agree with our neighbors, can we agree, especially then, to come to their defense? When we don’t understand our neighbors’ beliefs, can we attempt to put them in the best possible light? When we believe our neighbors are dead wrong, can we speak well of them, nonetheless?

            We aren’t the gatekeepers. In fact, I don’t believe there’s a gate for us to keep, but that’s just my belief. Take it as you may. I just hope you might try to see that belief in the best possible light, as I try to do the same with yours.

The Gathering: There's Grace for that, and hope for what comes next

1 John 1:5-10, 2:1-6

            “My little children,” writes John, “I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.”

            My honest first thought reading that verse? “Good luck with that, John!” The one constant in the universe is sin. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be better; we really should—and do. I just spent a week with a bunch of high-schoolers and, let me tell you, we do our darndest to provide the boundaries they need to not do anything particularly stupid while we are in charge of them. We do this because we care for them, because we believe that on their own they will sometimes make poor choices, and, also, because we like not being sued. But, at the end of the day, all we are really doing is forcing them within boundaries to keep them safe. They aren’t choosing of their own free will not to sin; we just try to keep it from them. Given true freedom we know what they might do, and we also know that they will eventually spread their wings and, like Icarus, they may very well crash and burn. I think that’s called college.

            On the 3^rd night of the Gathering we heard from Pr. Will Starkweather, who talked about his experience with cutting himself, starting in high school. This was one of many speakers who spoke on difficult, challenging subjects that directly impact the lives of our young people. Will talked about the first time he was honest with a spiritual leader about his problems, and the pastor told him four words: “You are going to hell.”

            That is the law, friends. That is where that first verse in 1 John 2 seems to be leading us. Don’t sin. Or else. I’ve heard this kind of self-righteous blathering from pastors before. I’ve heard pastors who get up at funerals and talk about how the person who died might have been saved if only he had done X, Y, or Z—if only he had been a better person, if only she had been a better follower of Jesus; if only they would have chosen to follow. I’ve heard this stuff before.

            Miraculously, Will came back to the church—a different church, obviously, because if you go to a pastor with a spiritual problem and he tells you you’re going to hell, then you find a new pastor—and Will eventually confided in a second pastor. You can imagine the anxiety this would induce in a person who was already suffering for something whose root cause ran parallel to anxiety. He went to his pastor, shared his story, and she responded with four different words, “There’s grace for that.” Four words that changed everything.

Coveting, boundaries, and why we can't do it without Jesus

Exodus 20:17

 

            Boundaries… when I read the commandments about coveting I think about boundaries. These commandments are so vital, because obviously none of us can come away from them feeling justified. All of us covet things—we all want things we can’t have. Often these are silly little desires, easily forgotten, but sometimes these things gnaw away at us, and other times they wreck us completely.

            There are a lot of tricks to deal with coveting, which runs hand-in-hand with addiction. Some of these methods are good: prayer, meditation, service, and accountability groups to name a few. But, at the end of the day, you have to figure out a way to erect healthy boundaries between you and the thing you are coveting or you will fail, every single time.

            I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard people tell me they just need to be strong, just need to get through this rough stretch, just need to work harder. Inevitably, they come back feeling like a failure. The heart is not so easily conquered by our willpower. You can’t combat your deepest, darkest desires on your own. You just can’t. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty of people try.

            Coveting is so insidious, because it makes us make all sorts of excuses about a thing. It’s that little devil on our shoulder telling us exactly what we want to hear. It’s not about the truth, because the truth is that road leads only to more pain and suffering down the road, but it feels like the truth. More than that, it feels good.

            However, the commandment doesn’t just tell us not to follow through on our coveting; it tells us not to covet in the first place. A person can take this two ways: 1. It can feel like an impossible burden, because how do you stop the coveting before it happens? Or 2. It can feel like an incredible relief, because it forces us to look for the thing that will actually save us from these feelings that are completely out of our control.

            It’s about boundaries.

The fulfillment of the law

Exodus 20:12-16

            There were a few things going on this week, so I suppose I (and you, too) could be excused if we weren’t paying much attention to the news. But I was paying enough attention to note, as many of you probably did, that our U.S. Attorney General made a foray into theology, which turned out about as well as these things typically do when people try to use the Bible as a weapon for their own ends.

            Most of the time, issues like these pass in the news cycle and it’s not worth a comment; not because it isn’t important, but because it’s hard to be nuanced enough to talk about politics without everybody slipping into their lanes. But today, as luck (or misfortune) would have it, the scripture for the day just so happens to be right in the same vein as the one in the news. Today, we talk about the law as it relates to our relationship with one another, which means I have to pick a bone with Mr. Sessions.

            First, I feel compelled to say that it’s tricky business talking about the law at all. For very good reason, we-Christians like to focus for the Gospel; after all, it is the uniquely amazing thing about being a follower of Jesus—it is the good news!

Nevertheless, if you remember picking up the Small Catechism in Confirmation you might recall a good portion of it has to do with the law and, specifically, the Ten Commandments. Luther, who was the champion of salvation by grace through faith, wrote in his introduction to the Large Catechism that, “He who knows the Ten Commandments knows all of scripture.” Luther understood what we so often fail to understand; that the good news of Jesus Christ requires the bad news of the law. You can’t have one without the other.

            We might find a clue why this is in Romans 13. Yes, that very same Romans 13 that the Attorney General used to try to justify the government having essentially whatever laws he wanted it to have: In Romans 13: 8-10, Paul writes: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Why Sabbath matters

Exodus 20:3-11

            If we were to take a poll, asking, “If you could remove one commandment from the Ten Commandments, which would it be?” and I absolutely forced you to remove one, I bet the answer would be the third: Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

            You see, when we break most of the commandments we feel genuinely bad about it. Maybe next time we’ll even try harder not to take the Lord’s name in vain; we may carry guilt about stealing or coveting. But the Sabbath? That one we might feel guilty about, but we’re not even sure it’s that bad.

            Some of this can be ascribed to poor definitions of what Sabbath is. So, what is this Sabbath that we’re supposed to remember and keep holy? One easy answer is: “Go to church.” A good start, but not the whole picture. Sabbath is about so much more than church. It’s about rest; it’s about admitting we cannot go and go and go forever; it’s about admitting we are not God. All of these things might just be a little convenient. It’s telling, actually, that when you ask people about Sabbath, the first thing out of their mouths is typically a thing they feel obligated to do—in this case, go to church—when Sabbath is about exactly the opposite; it’s about not doing a thing.

The sermon I don't want to preach

Exodus 20:1-3

I had an awfully hard time with this sermon this week—not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I only had one thing I felt like needed to be said and I didn’t want to say it. Preaching is hard, you know? If I were writing a blog on the subject, I just wouldn’t write it, but I’m sort of being paid to do this and it would be pretty awkward if I just stood up here for ten minutes of silence, though sometimes I think that’s probably about the best I can do. So, here I am preaching on something I don’t want to—come, Holy Spirit! It’s especially hard when the scripture of the week is the fullest expression of the law.

We begin a four week series on the Ten Commandments today with the commandment that matters above all others: “I am the Lord your God, You shall have no other gods before me.” This is the commandment of all commandments. And I know what needs to be said about it: You are sinners, and, more than that, you are completely dead in sin. No heart beat—dead, dead. You put all sorts of things before God.

I don’t want to say that. I want to say, “It really isn’t that bad. You’re all wonderful. You all have a spark of goodness in you; you can overcome this inclination toward sin.” I want to say that, but I can’t.

But the thing I really don’t want to talk about—the thing that I wrote an entire sermon around before changing it last night because of how much I really didn’t want to talk about this—is all the things that we place before God that are mostly good. I don’t want to tell you about how our children can become an idol, but I have to. I don’t want to tell you about how our country can become an idol, but I have to. And I really, really don’t want to talk about how the Bible can become an idol, because it will confuse the heck out of you, but I have to. Because we don’t worship our children, or our nation, or even the Bible; we worship the God we know in Jesus Christ. In fact, because those things are so very, very good, and because they represent so many things that are deeply meaningful to all of us, they are all the much easier to turn into idols. But I really don’t want to talk about how our children, our nation, and even the Bible lead us to breaking the first commandment.

I don’t want to talk about all this stuff because it’s a razor-thin distinction, and it would be so much easier to talk about how awesome it is to love those things that are next-most important to God. It is always much easier to preach healing than resurrection, because healing allows us to pretend that we aren’t dead people; that there’s something about us worthy of being healed; that we just need a little help. I don’t want to tell you that you are dead in sin, because I know you, like me, would rather not hear it.

Pentecost and the One Story

Acts 2:1-21 

            One of the things we watched in one of our early sessions preparing for the upcoming ELCA Youth Gathering in Houston was called “The Danger of a Single Story,” a TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi. In her talk, Ngozi spoke of growing up in Nigeria where she had only British books to read so that when she began to write fiction as a child she would write about the kinds of things British people talked about—tea, the weather, and the like. This story became her one story; never mind that that story wasn’t even compatible with her own story.

            We all do this when we learn things for the first time. We mimic. Whether you are writing, doing art, making music, or cooking the process is much the same; you watch and try to replicate those who know how to do it. We all start with that single story—the first example of what a thing is. This is true in every aspect of how we live our lives, and for those of you who have, or have had, children you know this. Their little brains just grab on to the one example—the first example—of a thing. But this is true of us well into adulthood as well. In fact, it’s more persistent with adults, because while we are just as susceptible to the single story as children our brains are also much more set in their ways, so we are less able to detach from that story, as children are.

            An example: On our way to daycare last week Natalie was upset with me because I was speaking Spanish to her. She was wearing her nice, new Spanish dress her aunt and uncle gave her so I took it as a cue to teach her a little Spanish, but she didn’t like that much. She told me, “I don’t like Spanish, because I don’t speak it.” I’ve heard adults use similar logic. So I told her, “Natalie, you can learn how to speak Spanish just like you know how to speak English!” To which she replied, “What is English?” There, in front of my eyes, her one story became many. By the time I picked her up for dance class later in the day she was asking me how to say all sorts of things in Spanish—things I had to Google because, frankly, I was pretty rusty. By next week I’ll be asking her how to say things.

If you only know one story about English, or about race, or about women, or about Jews or Palestinians, or about Liberals or Conservatives—if you only have one story, you only have a starting point—and it can be a terrible danger to live this way. It’s the easiest way to dehumanize one another; to consider others beneath us. You can only do this if you have a single story, because real people are much more complicated than all this.

This was a long intro to Pentecost, but I’m finally there.

It won't win you anything, but be humble anyway

Philippians 2:1-13

One of my favorite lines in the Philippians song, that we read today in Philippians 2, is verse 3, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” I also believe, after some experience in the world, that certain people will think that is an awfully wise sentiment, and others will think it utter foolishness, and I’m not sure we can do much to make people come across that divide.

I’m optimistic about many things, but I’m pretty sure some people will just always be selfish and others will always be humble. Is it really possible to make a selfish person anything but selfish? People are finicky by nature. What some people see as strength others see as weakness. So, what do we do when our worldview is opposed to others? Are we supposed to show the world that humility is preferable to a life of showboating, arrogance, and vanity? If so, how? It’s awfully hypocritical to be walking around bragging about how humble we are.

The honest answer is we can’t change people, and, more than that, there is no objective reason why humility is best. Far less can we say that we will receive any reward for viewing others in the most favorable light even when they don't deserve it. It's just foolishness. But just because it is foolish to a world that values seeking after power doesn’t mean we are wrong. It might be a lonely road to walk, this Christian humility, but know that you need not prove a thing to anybody. 

Busy-ness opposed to faith: Why the messy church is the Spirit-led church

Philippians 1:1-18

“I want you to know, beloved,” says Paul, “that what has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel.”

Well, what happened to him? What is Paul’s deal?

The story is this: Paul was in prison when he wrote Philippians—it’s right there in the next verse, where he says, “So that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone else that my imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brothers and sisters, having been made confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, dare to speak the word with greater boldness and without fear.”

These ancient prisons were essentially holes in the ground meant for short-term stays. The guards did not bring food or water, which meant the prisoners were completely at the mercy of the local people to bring them something to eat and drink to keep them alive. More than a few prisoners just dropped dead. Nonetheless, Paul says this is all for good; that his imprisonment was helping to spread the gospel. Paul is content because his mind is fixed on something different than his circumstances. The conditions of the prison could not touch the freedom of the gospel.

Paul’s life is a stark contrast to ours. Most of the time our top priority for the day is simply getting through our busy schedules. For many years, the church has lamented the lack of commitment to the faith, but nowadays the schools have the same problem, and so do sports teams, and so do clubs and organizations—not just for kids but for adults, too. Nowadays, we are busier with everything and we are less committed to all of it, and because we have so many things few of them can be commitments in the strict sense; we just don’t have time to have commitments anymore. So, we’re constantly sloughing responsibilities left and right, just trying to get by with our busy schedules. All the while we make plans lightly, constantly on the lookout for a better opportunity to come along. It’s completely normal to change plans on a whim—few things are set in stone.

It’s incredibly easy to become so busy that you just don’t have a faith life. I mean, who has time for that? And so it is that busy-ness has become our god. To be fair, the church deserves some of the blame for this. We who make up the church often assign menial tasks rather than offering eye-opening experiences; after all, somebody needs to read, somebody needs to clean, somebody needs to serve coffee hour. A few people take these ministries on with passion; still others treat them as tasks that they fulfill to feel good about themselves. The church can easily become just another potential commitment that few have time for. It’s a jarring contradiction to read Paul in a world like this; Paul, who quite literally had his eyes opened to a new way of seeing after being blinded on the road to Damascus.

The Biggest Question, and the Unknown God vs. Jesus Christ

Acts 17:16-31

Some weeks it’s tough to know what to say up here. I mean, I am pretty much saying the same thing week after week, and, as the author Bill Bryson once wrote about writing a weekly column, the thing about a weekly sermon is that it comes up weekly. Bryson writes, “Now this may seem a self-evident fact, but in two years there never came a week when it did not strike me as both profound and startling. Another column? Already? But I just did one.”

That’s pretty much how I feel about sermons. But, then I read about Paul, preaching the known God in a midst of a world in Athens that is worshiping the “unknown God” and I reminded of the necessity of sharing with the God we can know; the God who is specific, whose name Paul knows, whose name we know. Paul goes on to suggest that God created us this way—to search for him, to yearn for him, even, as Paul says, to grope for him, as if stumbling in the dark. There’s this God-shaped hole inside of us and we will spend our lives, one way or another, trying to fit various things inside of it, when only one fits. I don’t think we can talk enough about the one thing that fits.

            What matters to Paul is the specificity—it is this God, whom he knows in Jesus Christ, who is the one true God. Of all the questions I get as a pastor, one of the top few after “Can you get married?” (Yes, not Catholic), and “Why?” (Much more complicated) is “How do you know that your God is the one, true God?” I get this question on one level, because it comes from some kind of objective place where a person looks at the world and says, “I see thousands of gods worshipped by billions of people. How can any of them reconcile any of this business?” I get that. But where the people asking the question lose me is where they jump to the conclusion that, therefore, all these religions are bogus. Instead, I look at it like this: I can only preach the God I know. I can only share the faith that is in me. I can only tell you about the specific qualities of this God that I worship: That Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death and, through dying, he gives us eternal life. That’s all I can say, and I don’t say that having compared our God to a thousand other gods; I just share it because it is the faith that is in me.

            That also doesn’t mean I have to think other people are wrong—I don’t know their experience—and it doesn’t mean I have to spend my life doing the divine math on whether Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and whomever else is worshiping the same God or not. It’s not that I don’t care; I just don’t need to, because I can only testify to the God I know. Then, I can certainly listen to others talk about the God they know and ask myself in what ways they are filling in my blind spots and in what ways perhaps I disagree, but all of that is secondary. I can only testify to what I know.

            This last week was our final Big Q&A opportunity in Confirmation. This year I think the biggest question of all was raised—probably the most important, and, therefore, really, really difficult question to answer, and it was raised by an eighth-grader and I’m going to raise it myself now, because it ties in directly with Paul and the Athenians. This question was, simply: “What is faith?”

When you stop reading halfway through

Acts 16:16-34

About halfway through reading today’s scripture for the first time this week I stopped and opened up the lectionary document in the shared drive on the church’s computer and double-checked that I had the right scripture. Unfortunately, I did.

            Then I read the rest of the reading, and it wasn’t that bad. I had stopped after the part about the divining girl and the imprisonment; I hadn’t read far enough, and I didn’t remember what this story was about. I rejected the scripture on its premise without trying to understand where it was going.

            This got me thinking: This is a common challenge with how we read the Bible. Sometimes we start reading something in there, and it’s strange or shocking or we just don’t get what it has to do with anything, and so we are tempted to skip ahead and read something else, or else we read it quickly and say “I don’t know what that had to do with anything,” and then move on without a second thought. All the while we are missing our blind spots where scripture might be speaking to us; we pick and choose how we want to be affected and we don’t allow the Bible to challenge us. In this way, we domesticate this Bible that is naturally wild.

            After my reaction—and when I finally finished the reading—I was reminded of the men’s Bible study we did on the book of Romans last year for the few of us who gathered on Tuesday mornings. The book of Romans is a fantastic book—one of my favorites in the Bible, really. However, if you start reading in the beginning of Romans—which you should!—it’s easy to say, “Wow, Paul stop talking about the law. Give me some good news, man!” You see, in Romans, Paul sets the stage by talking about what it means to be justified according to your words and actions; he obsesses over righteousness; he tells us about the example of Abraham; the first half of the letter is mostly on sin and death and the law. If that’s not your cup of tea then in all likelihood you’re no longer reading when he gets to the point.

The first nine chapters of Romans leave us hanging on by a thread, wondering where Paul is going with all this. Then, there is this great turn where all that talk of sin and death and righteousness leads to a God who is the champion of grace, who embodies love, who saves us apart from all those things that Paul talked about so much in the lead-up. Starting with Romans 10, the next several headings in my Bible are: 1. Salvation is for All, 2. Israel’s Rejection is Not Final, 3. the Salvation of the Gentiles, 4. All Israel Will be Saved, and 5. the New Life in Christ. The book of Romans sets the stage for what life looks like under the law so that the rug can be pulled out from underneath us and show us why we so badly need the good news of Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, most people who started reading the book of Romans gave up before getting there.

Saul/Paul and the Scandal of the Particular

Acts 9:1-19

            I was going one way… and then one day I went another—it feels like the start to so many good stories. The villain turned hero—the nobody made extraordinary—it’s all so familiar, but would we accept it if it were part of our story? Would we accept Saul as Paul?

            Saul was breathing death against the early followers of Jesus. There’s this great choral piece by Z. Randall Stroope called The Conversion of Saul that begins with a minute-and-a-half of Latin cursing: Caedite, Vexate, Ligate Vinculis—Kill, Molest, Bind With Chains. When we talk about the story of Paul we have to begin with the story of Saul, and this story is a tougher one than we often give it credit, because would you accept Saul as Paul if he killed your son or daughter—if he was the one responsible for the death of somebody you love?

            This is one side of the “Scandal of the Particular” (a phrase of Walter Breuggemann). Most of us love the Saul-turned-Paul story in principle—in theory—but put yourself in the particular shoes and if it’s your loved one who met their demise at the hands of this man you might feel differently. Then, apply this to everything that happens in this life: If somebody you love is murdered it doesn’t matter that most people aren’t murdered; if somebody you love dies in war it doesn’t matter that most people don’t die in wars; or in a traffic accident; or in a natural disaster; or because of disease; or if you are born with a disability; or any of the multitude things that most people do not face.

            Statistics are not a comfort when bad things happen and neither are they an assurance that we are safe, and yet, on the other hand, the scandal of the particular is that we are met precisely in the midst of those moments where despair creeps in by a God who promises to be in the midst of suffering and death and loss and pain and grief because he went there first. The scandal of the particular elevates Saul to Paul in spite of our views of what is just, because the justice of God has a longer view of the universe than our own.

Holding one another fast

John 20:19-31

Hidden amidst the story of so-called “Doubting” Thomas is a verse that is of profound importance to what we do as the church. You might have missed it, focused as we are in Thomas in this story, but when Jesus first appears to the disciples (minus Thomas) he says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” This is what Martin Luther called “The Office of the Keys” and it is the special authority Jesus gives to his church—to forgive and, apparently, to refrain from forgiveness. And if forgiveness of sins is a significant part of our salvation then this is no small thing; in fact, it may be one of the most important things Jesus tells us to do.

            The first amazing thing here is that Jesus gives God’s people, the church, the power to forgive sins. For better or worse, Jesus allows forgiveness to come through sinners, such as us. This means that the capacity to forgive sins is not dependent on how holy you are or I am—and thank God for that!—because all of us need grace. So, already, Jesus, having died and been raised, has endeavored to pass on the faith to imperfect people such as us. This is both radical and, we might assume, potentially foolish.

If that isn’t enough, there comes a second part of the verse that is much trickier than the first. Jesus says, “If you retain the sins of any they are retained.” Now I don’t know about you, but to me this is cause for some concern. If sins can be retained—if forgiveness has to do with how proficient we are at offering it; then it feels like it will always be imperfect and limited. We need forgiveness that is perfect and can overcome all the dumb things we do. This second half of the verse scares the daylights out of me.

Easter Sunday: Resurrection and the Tree of Life

John 20:1-18

            This year I’ve focused on the three trees through the triduum—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess not all of you made it to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, so for a quick recap there is the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruit Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden. That tree invited sin into the world because we began to imagine that we are like God. So, we needed a second tree, the tree of the cross, which is the tree that stands tall on Good Friday—the tree on which Jesus died. It is the tree that bridges our pursuit of sin and death and sends Jesus through death on our behalf. The cross stands in-between this life and the next.

            Then there is today. No tree, you might think—not in the Easter story—except there is a garden and, in the end, this is taking us inexorably toward the third tree, which is the tree that has been there since the beginning. In the book of Revelation, the 22^nd chapter, it says, “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

            In the end, we have the tree of life. You don’t see the cross there because the cross has done its job. You don’t see the tree of knowledge there because knowledge is no longer necessary. In the presence of God we will know all we need. The tree of life is the end of the story because it encompasses all that is leading up to it. The trees are a progression and they offer a promise of returning to what was once created good and holy before sin entered this picture.