Silence and Darkness

Luke 1:5-13, 57-80

I want to talk today about two of the things we fear about this season: Silence and darkness. Both of these things that seem at first like things to be avoided at all costs are also necessary to give this season the depth of meaning that it has.

            I’m not just talking about silent moments, either. I was editing this sermon last night after watching the kids all day, and I was desperate for silence, but Elias was still awake, Kate was watching TV, I was overwhelmed by noise and touch. Seriously, why do the kids have to always be touching me? I mean, I love snuggling on the couch for an hour, but why does one of them need to be sitting on my chest for the next five?

            Anyway, that reprieve of silence at the end of the day is obviously good, but there is something even more meaningful about silence that takes us from relief into uncertainty before encroaching even upon discomfort. Silence, like darkness, provides depth to the human experience, it forces us to confront things as they really are; it turns our autopilot off and forces us to think, to feel, and to live in the uncertainty.

            Yesterday was the shortest day of the year—the winter solstice. For six months, things have been getting darker and darker. With the encroaching darkness comes a weightiness to the season, a certain gravitas that we can feel whenever we wrest ourselves away from the shiny lights of commercialism and the busy-ness of responsibility. Perhaps this is why we fill our lives with so much this time of year. We fear the heaviness of the dark and the pregnant silence that comes with it. It is a season that bears the hopes and fears of all the years, as the hymn (O Little Town of Bethlehem) says.

            God doesn’t show up in a light, airy moment. The Gospel accounts of the lead up to Jesus’ birth, the birth itself, and its repercussions all bear witness to a world in the throes of a long night. A petulant king fights back against a dangerous child—it sounds like The Mandalorian… or America 2019; history just circles back in on itself. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

            Today we read about Zechariah, the father of the John, who would become known as John the Baptist, cousin to Jesus. Zechariah receives a promise from an angel that he and his wife will have a son in their old age. Sound familiar? History circles back around—Abraham and Sarah become Zechariah and Elizabeth. But she couldn’t have been that old; after all, her sister, Mary, must have only been a teenager. So, in Zechariah’s case, his lack of belief seems like it has less to do with biological impossibility and more to do with mistrust of the unknown. Who doesn’t, really? Whose first reaction to angels wouldn’t be that they were being punked? Who doesn’t doubt?

            Still, because of his response, Zechariah is rendered mute. He can’t speak from the time the angel proclaims the coming child to the moment of his naming. That silence is itself a theological statement on how we are to wait. Zechariah is not being punished. He is being forced, like so many before and after him, to experience the silence between words where God moves.

Real comfort

Isaiah 40:1-11

“Comfort, comfort my people!” says Isaiah. Then, also, “The people are grass.”

            Isaiah hasn’t had a lot of pastoral training. Few prophets have. That’s not really their job, to be completely honest. Prophets are free agents, who are really just God’s agents, subject to nobody. It’s actually a bit strange that Isaiah leads with comfort, because so often the prophets burst onto the stage and can’t seem to help themselves but proclaim judgment and justice and all those things. Comfort is a softer kind of word, more a pastoral word than a prophetic one.

            But Isaiah is also bringing a different kind of message. For the last several weeks now I’ve been preaching on the change in the prophetic imagination as we leave behind old covenants and discover the new covenant. This new covenant is whispered in first Isaiah—an earlier prophet known as Isaiah, who we read about even before Harvest Festival—then in the reforms of Josiah, then in Jeremiah, and today, finally in second Isaiah. These are, in fact, the first words of 2^nd Isaiah, and it is the first time we hear in the book of Isaiah that Jerusalem has been destroyed.

            Perhaps that gives some clue why Isaiah leads with comfort. You preach comfort to people who need it, not to people who need to know about the impending judgment looming over them. No, these people have experienced the trauma of losing their homeland, of the desecration of their religious capitol, and the loss of their history in that place. These are people that need comfort, and, yet, that comfort comes not in a promise that they will one day return home.

The new covenant you won't believe

Jeremiah 31:31-34, 33:14-18

Two readings from Jeremiah today, three chapters apart, and both begin with the words “The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will… 1) make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah, and 2) fulfill my gracious promise.

            This gracious promise—this new covenant—will not be like the covenants of old… which is kind of weird if we’re being completely honest, because God makes these covenants with a people forever. God said to Noah, “I will never again destroy the world by flood, and here’s a rainbow as a sign of my covenant.” And God said to Abraham, “You will have descendants and land. This is my covenant.” These are supposed to be eternal promises, but these eternal promises are dependent on the people responding correctly. And there’s the really obvious flaw that Noah and Abraham and Moses seem to be missing: People absolutely never respond correctly. So, what good are these covenants, really?

            God makes a promise, says you get this nice thing as long as you obey, and about five minutes later people are like, “You know what would be really fun to worship? A golden cow!” A covenant that requires human beings to be something other than sinners is a worthless covenant, because we won’t be, we never been, and we never will be. Give us any length of rope whatsoever and we will manage to hang ourselves. Just because we have Jesus does not mean we have left this kind of thinking behind. The predominant view of God, even in Christian circles, is as one who gives us nice things when we obey him. Perhaps you’ve seen the Joel Osteen clip going around where he says, “When you are poor, broke, and defeated all that proves is that you are poor, broke, and defeated. It doesn’t bring any honor to God.”

            This, of course, is fundamentally opposed to everything Jesus said—blessed are the meek, become like children, etc—but it doesn’t matter. Osteen can get 40,000 people in a stadium to give him a standing ovation for saying it, because it is a sexy lie. We want to believe that we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps and earn the covenant, like the Israelites were supposed to keep up with their end of the bargain. We want to believe we are different despite the fact that the entire history of the human race is marked by the failure to be even halfway decent followers of God the moment we provided with even a single alternative thing to worship. Osteen is low-hanging fruit, but he is a perfect example because the prosperity Gospel would be the best possible Gospel if it were possible.

            The problem is sin. The problem is us. God tried this prosperity business. That was essentially what happened with Noah and Abraham, with Moses and eventually with David. God tried to give us the possibility of living up to the expectations. Just be good, said God a hundred times, like the parent who feels obligated to parent in this way even when we know deep down that our children are going to not be the perfect little angels we expect them to be.

            So, when we come to Jeremiah, God has reached the stage of parenting where he throws up his hands and says, “Fine! Don’t be good then! See if I care!”

            But on the other side of this despairing over the behavior of God’s children—on the other side of exile and lots of death—comes this:

³¹ The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. ³² It won’t be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant with me even though I was their husband, declares the Lord. ³³ No, this is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. ³⁴ They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord; for I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins.

Losing Land, Finding Hope: A Harvest Festival sermon on exile and taking one step at a time

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

            The high priest, Hilkiah, comes to the secretary, Staphan, with a message: I have found the Instruction scroll in the Lord’s temple!” (2 Kings 22:8). This might seem like a very little thing, but it is one of the earliest accounts we have of people following written scripture. Apparently, the Bible—as it existed in those days—was hanging out somewhere in the temple for Hilkiah to find. What this scripture is we don’t know exactly, though best guesses suggest something like the 12^th-26th chapters of Deuteronomy, since the reforms that Josiah institutes are limited to that section of what became Deuteronomy.

            Josiah must have realized that he had only part of the law. He had to have known he was dealing with partial information, but he also had to start somewhere. He understood that it’s often better to do something with little information than to do nothing until you have a fuller picture. He took the next step. And today I want to talk about what that looks like for us on the day we celebrate and give thanks for the harvest of 2019.

            I was pleased to find that the commentary on Working Preacher for the scripture of the week was by Mark Throntveit.[1] Dr. Throntveit was the seminary professor who preached at my ordination, and at that ordination service (eight years ago this month), he talked about the lamps that burned in ancient times, citing Psalm 109:105, “Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” We have a pretty modern image of lamps, something with a halogen or LED bulb, i.e. something awfully bright. The headlamp that I wore while hiking for a month had something like 325 lumens, which was enough to light my way for thirty feet without much difficulty. But the lamps they were using in the ancient world were lit by candles. Their lamps weren’t anything like the lamps we use today, not even like the kerosene lamps used for generations before us.

            Dr. Throntveit was making the point that “Your word is a lamp unto my feet” only means that God’s word gives us enough light to get us to our next step. We can’t see even three steps ahead, just one. We have only a little light, which means we only ever see a very small part of the picture. We might imagine that what we see is all there is, but it’s really only a little view, hardly anything in the scheme of things. If we overanalyze and overexert ourselves, fixating on every detail about the little that we see right now, then it’s easy to forget what is anchoring us.

Welcome to Advent (because, let's be honest, December is Christmas)

Isaiah 5:1-7, 11:1-5

We have two readings today from first Isaiah that, like last week, move us from a God of retribution and judgment to a God of something more. I know this is hard to do in this season of holiday everything. Honestly, the radio station Kate uses at the coffee shop—a certain not-to-be-named one out of Grand Forks—switched to Christmas music on Friday… November 15—and we aren’t even remotely in advent yet! Nonetheless, you are already being bombarded by advertisers trying to tell you that Christmas is right around the corner, which makes it particularly hard to do the necessary work of putting ourselves in the sandals of people who didn’t have Jesus yet.

            In fact, this is the yearly ritual of Advent in a nutshell, but by the time we reach December it’s probably fruitless to pretend that Christmas isn’t coming, so what hope we have for a real Advent lies in November. Advent is about anticipation, but it is not a clear anticipation; it should be as if we are about to hear the Christmas story for the first time. Advent is the season in which we should all become children again, wondering and marveling in the mystery of what is coming.

            This is the mentality we need to bring to Isaiah’s passage about the stump of Jesse. The stump is dead, as stumps are. Jesse was David’s father, a nod to the lineage of the kings of Israel. That line of kings started with David, but now it’s dead. It’s a stump. Yet, Isaiah anticipates a shoot springing from the stump—a sign of life from a thing most assuredly dead. And what will this shoot do?

            Oh, just judge the poor with righteousness and work for the equity of the meek; he’ll merely kill the wicked, and embody righteousness and faithfulness. In short, Jesus is coming to turn the world upside-down—not reform it, not to tweak it. Jesus is coming to turn everything around. The funny thing is we think that sounds great. There is a reason that Isaiah and the other prophets talk as much about the coming judgment of God as they do about the grace and love of God. It’s both. It starts with judgment before it can ever move to grace. The advent of God coming into the world is the harshness of the law first, Gospel only thereafter.

God's expanding love

Hosea 11:1-9

Hosea 11 stands as a fulcrum on which the history of God’s love pivots. We who know Jesus may find ourselves less than keen to delve into the Old Testament because of the love of God we find there. After all, from the beginning, God’s love felt harsh. God loved us so much that he said “Don’t eat that one thing” not knowing, as parents do, that there is no better way to get our children to do something than to tell them it is the one thing they are not allowed to do.

From then on, God has a kind of quid pro quo relationship with the Chosen People. I am your God, I will give you land, and children, and a throne that endures IF you worship me. Through much of the Old Testament, God’s love is finite and dependent on a response. If Israel fails, then God’s love turns to rage, as in the Great Flood, as in Sodom and Gomorrah, as with many others. God’s love was a transaction with Israel as Chosen People.

However, with the prophets we begin to see hints of something more. God’s love doesn’t seem to be the same. Through scripture, we are presented with a God who changes. It’s the same God and, yet, the rules of the game evolve over time. Once Moabites were evil, but then there came the story of Ruth. Once Samaritans were impure, but then there came to the story of the Good Samaritan. God’s love, which once was bounded by human imperfection, begins to break through as we begin to see hints of the life we have in Jesus Christ.

Jesus changed everything. And, yet, it was a process that had already begun. Hosea gives voice to God’s love in this poem we read today, saying “My compassion grows warm and tender” even for a people who have failed and disobeyed. God’s love, which was once dependent on you getting it right, is now something different. In Hosea, we begin to see hints of grace—hints we cannot understand until Jesus.

Worshiping America (and other gods)

“So Ahab sent to all the Israelites, and assembled the prophets at Mount Carmel. Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, "How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him."”

It’s that simple, and it’s that hard. If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.

It’s hard because Ba’al might be a made-up god but Ba’al is certainly an attractive made-up god. In fact, you might say we have plenty of our own Ba’als to deal with in 2019. There is the Ba’al of wealth, the Ba’al of fame, and the ever-present Ba’al of power. There are plenty of gods out there.

If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Ba’al, then follow him.

It is tough to be a Christian in America today. I’ve heard people say that, and I agree with it, though perhaps not for the reason most say it. It’s tough to be a Christian in America because for the entire history of this nation the Christian faith has been tied to power. From the pilgrims establishing their New Jerusalem to Manifest Destiny and the accompanying Christian justification for slavery and genocide, it has always been a good thing to be a Christian in this country. That hasn’t really changed. It’s tough to be a Christian in this country not because Christianity is becoming oppressed or anything like that. Rather, it’s hard to be a Christian because a few hundred years of history has tied our faith to the concept we call “America” and Christianity is not a faith that weds itself to political power. The great idol of American Christianity is—and always has been—America, whose tenets of freedom have freed us toward allying our faith with power. The American ideal is our Ba’al.

A little bit of history

1 Kings 12:1-17, 25-29

There’s a saying that probably most of you have heard: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” (George Santayana).

That sounds nice, doesn’t it? But that doesn’t change the fact that most people find history painfully boring. It’s hard enough to convince people that things happening right now matter in their lives, let alone things that happened a long time ago. Obviously, some of you do care—some of you perhaps a lot—but you already know you are weird.

So, today is Reformation Sunday, and 502 years after Luther nailed some theses to the door at the church in Wittenberg I am fairly certain that this doesn’t matter much to most of you. Furthermore, the scripture reading for today is about the throne of Israel after Solomon—about these guys called Jeroboam and Rehoboam—a minor story about relatively minor characters in the Bible from hundreds of years before Jesus. I think most of us are content that somebody somewhere is studying these events, and their job is to hold the universe of history together, because we feel like this is probably important for some reason and we simply don’t know why. I believe we also probably feel this way about the entire history of the early church stretching from the beginning of time to oh, about whenever we were fifteen years old.

I’m creating a caricature here, but I believe our apathy toward history is generally truer than we want to admit. Here’s my argument why you should be at least generally aware of the long-standing history that stretches like a river far back to a headwaters you cannot remotely see. You should be aware of this history because everything about the practice of faith is built on the backs of those who have gone before. You are not an individual on an island of faith, building a personal relationship with Jesus. Everything from your baptism to your confirmation to your relationships, friendships, and the like has impacted and changed your faith, and it often had little to do with you. Confirmation is not about confirming a personal relationship with Jesus. It is about acknowledging an awareness that God knows you and has chosen you long before you could respond. God is not just your God but the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Moses, and David and Mary, and Martha, and Paul, and all the others. Confirmation is sitting down in line with all the historical figures of the faith. Confirmation is about getting off your faith islands and becoming part of a community full of sinners who recognize their need for a Savior.

On our first day of Confirmation class every year we talk about the Reformation. Lutheranism 101, we call it. I’m acutely aware that most people in the world do not care about the Reformation. A good many people out there who did not grow up in the Lutheran church think that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr are the same person. They don’t know—they don’t care. Our kids also don’t know anything—not until they step into that first class—and then we talk about this remarkable thing that happened a long time ago. And they still don’t care about most of it.

They don’t care about the argument between Luther and the papacy. And they don’t care about the Diet of Worms. And they mostly don’t even care about the peasants wars. But then something happens pretty much every year. They hear something they do care about, and what catches their attention are two things: Luther’s kidnapping and the translation of the Bible into German. Our youth are sitting there watching this clip from the Luther movie of the Diet of Worms. Luther is standing before Cardinal Cajetan and Prince Frederick and there’s this dramatic theological debate where Luther finishes by saying, “Here I stand. So help me God.” And the theology students and the peasants break into applause. And our confirmation students have the same reaction that the rest of the world has: Blank stares. They don’t care. Theological debates do not matter to them.

Then we start talking about what happens next, and in an instant they are engaged. We talk about how Luther was guaranteed free passage from the Diet but how the Catholic Church leaders were planning to break that promise, to capture and eventually to kill him, and how Prince Philip (Luther’s protector) kidnapped Luther himself and hid him away in a tower so that the students and the peasants believed the church had in fact kidnapped and killed him. Seriously, have you never heard this story? It’s some 16^th-century James Bond stuff. Our kids love this story.

Prince Philip locks Luther in the tower of Wittenberg to keep him safe, and Luther in turn uses his time locked away in the tower to translate the Bible into German for the very first time. Our kids enjoy this story because it’s dramatic but it’s more than that, because what happens next is the really cool part. Luther lived at the perfect moment in history because just down the road they were inventing the printing press at Gutenberg, and it lined up perfectly with Luther’s German translation of the Bible. The point that always gets our youth wide-eyed was when I tell them that nobody could read the Bible before Luther—just the priests.

Somebody always asks some variation of the question, “Well, how could they trust them, then?”

And that’s just it. The Catholic Church could tell the people whatever they wanted! It was why Johannes Tetzel was wandering around Germany selling people indulgences that he claimed would help free their dead relatives from purgatory. Creating the capacity for the common people to read the Bible was a revolutionary act. For the first time in modern history, it encouraged people to actually learn to read. This is how the Reformation kick-started the Renaissance. Before Luther was the Dark Ages; after Luther, the lights turned on.

Now, one of the things we talk about quite a bit in Confirmation is how we do not worship Luther. The guy was incredibly flawed. He was racist, an anti-Semite, and he was the most foul-mouthed church-leader in history. He was also one of the most fearless, the most revolutionary, and the most important. Our kids love that story, because most of what we hear about in church is rather mundane. Somehow, we have taken the greatest story ever told—the story of Jesus dying for you and me and rising for our salvation—and made it so boring that people leave the church every Sunday without once starting a revolution.

I suspect that the reason our confirmands resonate with that story of Luther’s kidnapping and the translation of the Bible into German is because that is where they are in the story. They don’t know a thing about the Bible, let alone any of this deep-dive stuff like Jeroboam and Rehoboam. What they can relate to is a world that tells them how it is, and the flicking on of that light of understanding that allows them to be part of this world. Our kids want to be part of things. They want God to be accessible—to feel God’s presence, to experience deep things and to be changed by them. They don’t want to answer questions about the Reformation; they want to live the Reformation and not have to explain it, because they haven’t had remotely enough time to reflect on it.

The Reformation is important not because it happened 502 years ago. The Reformation is important because it is always happening, and it is happening right now. You are the church that is always reforming, and I can tell you as we look at a daycare center coming down the line we are sometimes reforming in big, visible, life-changing ways.

For our confirmands, that is the church I hope for you. You are entering a body of believers that is willing to take the past and remake it for the sake of a better world, a clearer view of Jesus, and to help those in need. And we are more like Luther than we might want to believe. We are sinners in need of redemption. And we are saints, living as disciples of Christ.

That’s the history of the church, but it’s also the present. You are the church now. Reform it, like ever.

You are loved

Ruth 1:1-17 

            Today, I want to talk about a single word in Ruth, chapter 1, verse 14. The word is translated “clung” and it the verb used to describe how Ruth reacts when Naomi has ordered her away. I want to talk about this word because—if we’re being completely honest—we don’t have a very good barometer for love in the ancient world. Surprisingly, this word that is translated “to cling” or “to cleave” may show us something of what it looks like.

            But first let’s quickly recap today’s reading. There’s a woman, Naomi, whose husband, Elimelech, dies. Their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, take wives from among the people of Moab and then they, too, die. So, Naomi finds herself in a hopeless situation. She has lost her entire social security safety net. She is in a foreign land, outside of her homeland back in Bethlehem, and she has no means to provide for herself and nobody else to provide for her. In the ancient world women could not own property themselves, so what was she to do? Most widows without a clan resorted to begging. That was the option left to them.

            Ruth should have been nothing to Naomi. After her husband died Ruth had no legal obligation to Naomi. It was also not expected of her according to the rules of the clan. Daughters-in-law were not responsible for their mother-in-law’s well-being. Naomi was from another clan anyway. More than that, even if Ruth wanted to support Naomi how could she? The only way for Ruth to live was to find another husband, or else she would have to resort to the kind of life that awaited Naomi. Her way forward was clear, but Naomi had none.

            So it is that we have this remarkable scene in which Naomi orders Ruth to go and find a husband—Go back home, she says—and against the conventions of the day Ruth refuses to leave Naomi’s side. She clings to her. The Hebrew word in Ruth 1:14 is davaq, a word that appears fifty-four times in the Old Testament in a variety of contexts. It is the word that God uses to explain marriage in Genesis 2. “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife.”

            It is a word that appears three more times in the book of Ruth. Boaz tells Ruth (2:8), “Do not glean in another field, but <cling> to my young women.” In other words, stay with me. Stick with it. It is a word of connection—a word of relationship—a word of devotion—but ultimately it is a word of love.

            To davaq with someone is forge a bond and hold on. It means to stick to it even when forces are pulling you apart. This devotion is found in marriage, in friendship, with family, and more, which is why this word appears in so many contexts.

Taking away the air: Discipline, children, and the effects of the law

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

The source of the issue

When I became a parent I became an expert on the law. This happens to all of us who travel that path through life. You spend your youth looking for exceptions to the law. You spend your young adult years testing, bending, and maybe even breaking the law to see what happens. Then, there comes a point where perhaps you settle down and have a family, and your entire perspective on the law changes. Suddenly, the law exists to keep your children safe, and there is nothing more important.

            Now, I’m not talking specifically about the laws of our country, though perhaps those may play a role. I’m mostly talking about the rules we establish to help our children grow. But our kids don’t understand how wise we are, and so they don’t always listen. They bend the rules; they break the rules; and then we have to figure out what we’re going to do.

            Seriously, please tell me what to do.

            You follow through, right? There are consequences. You take something away that they want. We do this with Natalie, and it always has the same effect: she gets worse. The effect of the law pushes her further down the path to self-destruction. So, what next? Well, we’ve gone down that road, so now we need to commit to it or else she’ll sense weakness. So, we take away something else. She behaves worse. We are backed into a corner, so we start bargaining. “You can earn back that last thing if you just start behaving.” She doesn’t care, because she’s not reasonable. She rejects the premise of the law entirely. So, we have no choice but to take away one more thing. Pretty soon we’re out of things to take away, and it’s like, “Natalie, if you do that one more time we’re going to take away… the air!” Or “So help me God, you’re not going to eat ever again!”

The little things

Exodus 3:1-15

            I want to talk today about holy ground, about noticing the little things, and what we can do to find God in front of us.

            I’m guessing most of you remember something about Moses and the burning bush. It might literally be just that—that there was a guy named Moses and a burning bush—but at least that’s something! We remember it because of its simplicity. God speaking from a fiery bush that is not consumed. How cool is that?!

            The first thing that God says from the bush is “Remove your footwear!” because Moses is standing on holy ground. First of all, it’s worth considering why the ground is holy. It’s not because the ground possesses any kind of special resources or geological features; the ground is holy because God is there. Just like heaven is heaven because it is where God lives (for lack of a better term) so the ground before the bush is holy because that is where God meets Moses. That meeting requires not only God’s appearance but also Moses’ recognition. Moses recognizes that God has met him there, and, thus, the ground is hallowed.

            We all have our holy ground. Each year, I joke about the high holy days of deer hunting season, though, let’s be honest, a lot of what happens during those days is not exactly holy, but there is an element in hunting of returning to a holy space—a place where God might meet you in the silence, a refuge from the hustle and bustle of daily life. Another holy space might be this one—this sanctuary. We know that God doesn’t live in the church, but God may very well meet you here. Still, holy ground is not confined to the places you might expect. Holy ground can be at home, in nature, on the road, at work, or at the cemetery, or a garden, or it might not be on ground at all. How many times in scripture does God show up on the water, for instance?

            I suspect this is why we remember the burning bush story so well. It is a story grounded in a place that feels familiar to us. The bush is so tangible and not just because we all know what a bush is. It is a setting unencumbered by the specifics of historical time and place. You don’t need to know anything about Jewish history to grasp it. You are as qualified as me to understand it. It’s simple.

Wrestling with God on the trail and in life

Genesis 32:22-32

I thought I was under a lot of pressure to say something wise before going on sabbatical, but now I’m supposed to have found myself or something. Talk about pressure!

            It’s good to be back. Honestly, I can say that. It was also good to be gone. Those things are not mutually exclusive. One of the things I found to be very true over the course of a month walking the Superior Hiking Trail was the futility of grand declarations and defining experiences before you have them. There are lots of people hiking that trail for lots of different reasons. Some people are out there to make some definitive change in their lives. Something isn’t right back home and the trail offers a kind of proving ground to test a new way of living. But that wasn’t me.

            For others, they were out in the wilderness to find themselves. If you’ve ever read the book Wild or the seen the movie with Reese Witherspoon that’s the kind of mentality I’m talking about—people walking a trail because they don’t know who they are and something about it calls out to them. This is closer to an act of pilgrimage. You strip away the daily rigor of life and replace it with a different, simpler rigor and you may discover something about yourself you’ve never realized before, but again, that wasn’t why I was out there.

            I had the advantage of perspective. I wasn’t a 20-something trying to find myself, and neither was I in a mid-life crisis. But that’s not to say I knew what I was doing. There’s a tendency on the trail (as in life) to make wide, sweeping declarations about why we are doing what we are doing. Many of these declarations end up being impossible to maintain.

            How many of you know people who are constantly talking about making 180 degree changes in life? They’ve been going one way for so long, but now they’ve reached a point and decided, “Now’s the moment! I’m going to change.” I’m guessing many of you have been there. I’ve been there! Maybe you are there right now, thinking, “I just need to flip things completely around!”

            Some of you have grown past that stage, perhaps. There were plenty of those folks on the trail, too. People returning someplace meaningful… people just getting out to get out.

            That’s the thing about the trail: It’s a metaphor for life, because everyone has a different direction, pace, and purpose. Everybody is out there for different reasons. Everybody is starting and ending at different places. Everybody is looking for a different experience. Everybody suffers differently. Everybody enjoys it differently. It’s a huge mistake (whether on the trail or in life) to assume that everybody is in it for the same reason that you are. They’re not. Your goals are not other peoples’ goals. Your deepest desires are not their desires. Sometimes they line up, sure, but not always, not most of the time.

Do not go through life trying to make other people have the same purpose as you, especially not your spouse and especially (especially!) not your children. Even if you’re walking the same path, don’t assume it’s for the same reason.

My last sermon (if I get eaten by a bear)

This will be the last sermon posted until mid-September as I head off on sabbatical.

Hebrews 9:1-14

I was told this week that there’s a lot of pressure on me with today’s sermon, because it’s the last thing people will remember before I go off into the wilderness and get eaten by a bear. So, there’s that.

            Also, thanks to the lectionary, I’m stuck preaching on a story about church buildings when I’m getting increasingly excited about getting out of the building, so to speak. At first, I thought this was a bit jarring. Then, I thought, maybe I should actually read the scripture (which is a novel thought, I know), and once I got through Hebrews 9 I had a bit of an epiphany. This is about something that might actually play very well with where I’m going, because this is scripture about Jesus taking us through the walls of right practice and dogma and the sacredness of the buildings we’ve erected and opening the doors to something better further in.

            This is a story of how Jesus takes a church that is all about walls and whispers, very quietly, only for those who are listening, “There are no walls anymore.”

            First, a little bit of history about the temple in Jerusalem. When you imagine the temple, if you’re like me you probably first go to an image of a single, immense building like the National Cathedral or Notre Dame. But that’s not exactly right. Neither the original Temple of Solomon nor the second temple under Herod was a big, monolithic building. In Jesus’ day, that temple of Herod consisted of the temple precinct, which was basically the neighborhood. It may have been as much as a mile wide. Then there was the Court of Women. That’s where you who were born with two X chromosomes could go. Further in was the Court of the Israelites, which was where Jewish men could go. Then, the Court of the Priests, then the Temple Court, which was where the offerings were taken to the altar and at this point you were finally entering the temple building itself. Then, the temple vestibule or porch, the temple sanctuary, and finally the Holy of Holies.

            The temple was an onion that you peel back to find another layer, and each layer was separated by another wall. Walls upon walls upon walls. And in those walls were religious people doing religious things. What’s not to like? Well, according to Jesus, perhaps a lot.

You probably don't know Melchizedek

Hebrews 4:14-5:10

You know how you’re reading through your Bible and come to some reference you don’t understand, but you keep on reading because, honestly, if you stopped for every reference you didn’t understand you’d only ever be reading a Bible encyclopedia? Does this sound familiar to anyone? Have you ever stood up and read the Bible in front of people and felt like a bit of a fraud, because even though you are reading the words you don’t know what they mean?

            I’m guessing a lot of parents don’t read the Bible to their kids for exactly this reason. At least when this happens with Harry Potter we can be like, “It’s a wizard thing, kid. Don’t worry about it.” But the Bible? It feels too important to not understand everything, and yet we don’t, because there’s a lot going on. And we don’t get it. And that makes us feel shame.

            So it is with this guy named Melchizedek. Honest moment from me right now. I know I stand up here and have a week to prep on things, so I can say some smart-sounding stuff about people in the Bible, but I’m really glad nobody came up to me last week and asked, “So, what do you know about Melchizedek?” Because I had no clue. Zero. And if I spent a serious amount of time studying this stuff—undergrad plus four years of seminary plus seven-and-a-half in the parish—then how can you possibly be expected to know any of this?

            Answer: You aren’t.

The pioneer of salvation

Hebrews 2:10-18

            “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”

            One of the illustrations that the book of Hebrews uses for Jesus is the pioneer of salvation. If you stop to think about it, a pioneer is a pretty great description for Jesus. Pioneers leave behind their home and comfort, eschewing the ordinary in the hope of something extraordinary. Pioneers take big risks and make sacrifices so that we might be called brothers and sisters (as it says in the 2^nd chapter of Hebrews).

            Throughout history, many people have been called pioneers: Da Vinci. Galileo. Curie. Einstein. In America, we have built a mythos around Daniel Boone, though it must be said that Boone’s quote about having to move on whenever he saw smoke from another man’s chimney because the country was getting too crowded might be the whiniest comment in human history. All of those folks (and many more) were and are pioneers of their fields. Since Jesus’ field is the human race, he is the ultimate pioneer.

            But it’s not all good. Part of being a pioneer is being despised in life (and not just Daniel Boone, who kind of deserved it). To defy what people expect of you is the quickest way to lose friends. To chance a better world will instill fear amongst those whose world is built upon things of the past. Many pioneers die for their cause. Jesus is certainly a big ol’ example of this. Pioneers are hated because they are a threat to the status quo. One of the reasons Jesus was hated was because he had the capacity to save. This is a strange part of the human condition; we tend to hate the thing we need most desperately. Our pride gets in the way and we forget an essential part of our humanity—we need a Savior.

            Instead, we too often sell ourselves on a narrative: We say that so-and-so is the enemy, and so often that so-and-so who we portray as the enemy is precisely the one who can make our lives easier. Our hate of the other paralyzes us from the kind of life we could be leading. It is not others who are keeping you from being who you were created to be; it is your own stinking self. Pioneers are the rare breed who don’t blame their failings on others but pursue something better. Jesus did. He pioneered a way of life free from fear, making us no longer slaves to death. I think that particular point is underplayed in the Christian church: We have absolutely nothing to fear from death any longer. We are slaves to it no longer.

God's three words

Hebrews 1:1-4

How does God speak to us?

            That is the essential question that the book of Hebrews addresses in its opening verses. Once, by the prophets written down in the ancient scriptures, then by God’s Son—by an embodied word that we know in Jesus Christ.

            But how does God continue to speak to us today?

            There are three words of God alluded specifically mentioned in the Bible. The first is scripture itself—the Bible. God speaks to us as we read scripture and let it sit with us. It might be the words themselves that are speaking to you; it might be in, with, and under the words, between the words, or apart from the words altogether, but scripture is certainly one of God’s words for us.

Unfortunately, many people stop there. In fact, many Lutherans stop there. After all, wasn’t one of Luther’s big selling points the idea of sola scriptura—scripture alone? This is most certainly true, and, yet, the very scripture that stands alone also proclaims that God’s word is considerably more multi-faceted than words on a page. The Bible itself gives us two other examples of God’s word beyond scripture. If you think about it, it makes sense that scripture cannot be the one way that God speaks for a variety of reasons, not least because each of these books of the Bible existed in its own place in history. Think about it: When the author/s of Genesis wrote Genesis, how could s/he have any idea of how God might speak in the books that followed? Or that there would be any books that followed in the first place. Same with the prophets. Same, even, with the Gospels.

Jesus came and that feels like it should be the end of the story, but God hasn’t stopped speaking. In fact, in the book of Acts, God sends a further person of God’s own self into the world—the one we call the Holy Spirit—with a promise to continue speaking to us today.

            So, that leaves us with three distinct words of God: The Bible, Jesus himself who John called the word of God incarnate, and the Holy Spirit who continues to blow where it pleases amongst us today. Of course, it is awfully difficult to pin down what the Holy Spirit is doing. I imagine this is one reason why we like to focus on the Bible, because the Bible is simple, clear, and allows us to live without contradictions and debate, right? RIGHT?!

The Psalms and the real "me" underneath it all

Do you ever look back on work you did in the past? Maybe you still have that cardboard box full of old schoolwork from when you were eight or eighteen. Maybe your mom saved all of it in folders and delivered it to you at 30 years old—not that I can relate. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s schoolwork, or handiwork, or work-work—whatever—most people look back on occasion at their work and marvel at how they’ve improved or not.

When you’ve looked back, perhaps you’ve had this experience—where you’ve read something you wrote—or looked over something you made—and thought, “Huh, that was PRETTY TERRIBLE.”

            I suggest you do this every once in a while. I have this wonderful pleasure of preaching on the same scripture every four or so years, so I can always look back, and when I do what I mostly see is not very pretty. I mean, I used to use Garamond font. What. A. Child. I. Was. You’ll be happy to know I’ve progressed to Georgia sometime in the last four years. When I look back, I notice that there are some metaphors that are universal: the perpetual suffering of Vikings fandom, Lutherans’ particular allergy to change, and children pretty much universally being better at this Jesus-following thing than we are. But the particulars change.

            Looking back isn’t really about marveling at how much smarter you are now. We should get older wiser. Rather, we should be looking back to remain humble, to realize that because we were not so smart then, probably we are not so smart now, and so that we might gain some valuable clues about where we are going.

The Psalms are forever moving from the past to the present and the future. “I waited patiently for the Lord” begins Psalm 40, and “he drew me out of the desolate bog.” “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to God.”

The Psalm begins in the past tense for a moment before abruptly changing, saying, “Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.” And then from the past, to the future, it returns abruptly to the present, saying, “Happy are those who make the Lord their trust.”

And so it continues—past, present, future—all folding in on one another. You can’t know the present if you don’t understand the past, and you can’t see the future if you don’t know where you stand. How can you hear the promise of the Gospel—a promise that supersedes time and space, a promise of a future with hope, like it says in that oft-quoted verse from Jeremiah—when you have no clue where you are standing right now? If you don’t understand your own self, you will have no clue what a promise of future hope even means.

We have no idea who we are most of the time.

Lament is natural, good, and faithful--so says the Psalms

            I think there is this common misconception around lament—that lament is good and all, but the purpose of it is to move from lament to faith; that lament is contrary to faith; that lament is a sign of weak faith. The Psalms point out that this is simply wrong.

            It is not only OK to lament; it is natural, and faithful, and good. When your life is a mess, kick and scream to God. The Psalms do. Over and over again, they yell at God because he has not lived up to the bargain. Far from a lack of faith, lament shows where we are to turn when everything is wrong. We turn to God, because God can take it.

            The 69^th Psalm is a song of disorientation in which the Psalmist cries out about all the things that have gone wrong. We could spend all day parsing whether this is justified—we do this all the time with others! Should they really complain as much as they do? Do they really have it that bad? We wonder this about people all the time, but at the end of the day, what you feel is what you feel, and the feeling of God-forsakenness is real. For some, it is all-too-real and all-too-familiar.

This Psalm gets into the nitty-gritty awfully quickly. Everybody’s turned on them; their enemies, yes, but even their family. The Psalms don’t care much for motivations. Do you feel this way? OK, here’s an example of how to scream at God. It might feel like a strange kind of prayer, but prayer it is. Since the Psalms are prayers and not credos for living, they don’t restrain themselves to a compact, systematic theology. They simply feel what they feel and they don’t apologize for it.

The Psalms of lament are for you in moments of desperation. They don’t suggest that you need to pick yourself up, or feel better, or become a better Christian. Instead, they are honest about actual honest-to-goodness feelings. The Psalms call out the lie that the Christian faith is about blessings, and happiness, and unicorns, and purple silly putty. More often, the life of faith feels like being submerged in rising water. The Christian faith expects us to yell at God as often as it expects us to pray meekly. To that end, we aren’t assured that good things will follow faithfulness. Ask the apostles, martyred for their faith. If the Christian faith rewarded faithfulness, they would have all retired to Sicily. Instead, they were beheaded, or crucified, or died in prison.

The Psalms lament that this is the way of the world. They lament that the righteous are persecuted and the unrepentant sinners grow in wealth and prestige. They lament that politicians create systems that profit themselves, while oppressing the poor and the migrant, pitting outsiders one against another.

Praise the Lord! (For the stoic midwesterner)

Psalm 113

            As we enter into our summer lectionary readings we begin with a topic that might make some of you uncomfortable. It’s all about praise!

            I can hear you thinking: Oh now, pastor, can we have just a little more time with all that judgment stuff, please? Obviously, that makes us uncomfortable, too, but at least when you talk about judgment we aren’t worried that you’re going to force us to do something we don’t want to do!

            Praise is a scary word. It’s scary, because it brings to mind other scary things like dancing and singing. We don’t dance much in public anymore, you might have noticed. It wasn’t that long ago that school dances involved dancing. It also wasn’t that long ago that communal singing was a thing that happened all the time. Nowadays, it’s pretty much reserved for church and the occasional odd sporting event, which is really cool when it happens, by the way. I will always remember the late-September 2008 Twins series sweep of the White Sox when the Metrodome corridors were packed with fans shouting Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. We know how to praise. We mostly just don’t want to.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In many places in the world today, dancing, and singing, and communal praise are essential to worship. In 2006, I went on a trip to Tanzania with the Augustana Choir. One Sunday after worship in a village outside of Iringa, a half dozen local choirs joined us on the back lawn of the church to sing for one another. But it wasn’t just singing—it was dancing and jumping. It was praising. Every one of those groups came dressed for the occasion and ready to move it, clad in long-flowing robes or traditional Masai black-and-red laden with jewelry. They knew who they were, and they were there to do praise.

Our music was meaningful but different. This Lutheran tradition of stoicism is a heritage of ours that has some real strengths. We tend to be humble; we tend to value meekness; and we tend to do what we do well. But, man, do we struggle with praise! So, we say “Praise the Lord! Praise, O servants of the Lord; praise the name of the Lord” from Psalm 113, but we say it meekly. We say it uniformly. We don’t want to stick out. And if the pastor (or anybody else) tries to get us to do differently, watch out!

            So much of this comes from a good place—really, it does! We see the people who make a show of their praise—who raise up their hands not out of genuine worship but to demonstrate their faithfulness to others, or to fit in themselves. We see the auditoriums and the stadiums full of worshipers who are mimicking the actions of others, and we find that at best inauthentic and at worst showy or boastful. But just because we see the hypocrisy of others doesn’t mean we have our house in order.

Dying and Rising

Romans 6:1-11

I want to talk today about baptismal dying and rising—a subject we don’t talk about here that often—in part I’m guessing because it sounds like one of those church-y things that we leave to the seminary professors and church theologians. But like most church-y things, Paul’s letters are not really for ivory tower white-bearded dudes to form a systemic theology around. Rather, they are for you—good news! Not just that Jesus came but also why that matters. They bridge the history of our faith with the practices we share. This has the power to change the way you live.

            Dying and rising is not some theology. It’s the way we live our lives as Christians. Each day, we don’t look in the mirror and say, “Man, P. Frank, looking fine today. Better Christian than I was yesterday! Working my way up the spiritual ladder! Sure glad I’m not the dirty, rotten sinner I was before those college degrees. Glad those student loans bought me salvation!”

            No!

            Dying and rising means waking up in the mirror, looking at yourself, and saying ( in the words of a seminary professor of mine), “Male bovine fecal matter! I’m still the same dirty, rotten sinner I was before all those student loans. Dang." And yet… if Jesus died on my behalf—if my trust for meaning is not in these sorry black bags under my eyes, then I can stop playing these stupid games. If Jesus died for me, then I will die in him. And, strangely, I already have. I already died to sin. And I do every day. But Jesus promises something better: You don’t just die, you rise!

            And dying and rising is for all of us!

            Dying and rising is for the alcoholic who understands they cannot fix this problem by their own willpower, but who discovers on the other side of addiction that  grace isn’t for the righteous but for them. Sinners. And it’s not dependent on you fixing the situation, because—like with so many things in life—you can’t fix it. Instead, the only thing that might work is God fixing you, having realized you couldn’t do it yourself.

            And dying and rising is for the parent, whose children never listen, who feels overwhelmed by the burden of teaching them good behavior, and who too often feels like a failure when we can’t make our children into the people we want to be, because baptismal grace commands us to measure ourselves not by our successes but by our failures, and love is the only prerequisite of living a life with God. So, you can’t fail your children if you love them—even if they’re little devils; even if they seem to reject the God who you want them to know by love. Love your children and they will kill you minute by minute, not being able to mold them as you feel you should; not being able to keep them completely safe. Our children are vulnerable—our children make us vulnerable—which is why when we baptize we don’t shy away from it. Children don’t deserve to die, and yet, they do. In baptism, we name it, because we are people of the resurrection.

A Memorial Day Reflection on Enemies

Romans 5:1-11

I’ve read Romans 5 maybe a hundred times in my life. It’s on the short list of the most central passages to Christian theology. This will be the fifth time I’ve preached on it. But, like so many things, there’s more there the more I have read it. This was the first time I even noticed one word. It’s the first time I considered the word, “enemies.”

            “For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life,” says Paul in Romans 5:10.

            I doubt we think very often about our relationship with God as one of enmity. Even when we are perfectly fine describing ourselves as sinner, I don’t think we consider ourselves enemies to God. I suspect most of us feel like we are, at worst, neutral parties, not enemies! And, yet, if there is no neutrality, and none of us can choose God’s side, if we are only ever able to choose our own side, then I suppose we are enemies. So, I started to think about that a little bit.

            I suspect that one of the other reasons it stuck with me is because there is a lot of talk in the world about who are our enemies. It’s worth thinking about probably more than we do. The longer I thought about it, the tougher it became to tease out an answer. On first blush, there’s the answer I want to give—that I feel like I’m supposed to give: Nobody. We’re supposed to love everybody, and, yet, even Jesus says to pray for our enemies—not “Do not have enemies!” but rather pray for them, because apparently you will have them. As citizens of the United States of America, especially on this Memorial Day weekend, we have other allegiances settled for us. By virtue of our national identity, some people are supposed to be our friends and others our enemies. We didn’t choose this; it simply is.

Jesus for debtors

Romans 1:1-17

Debtors

“I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish,” says Paul.

            This is a really incredible thing to say, actually, but I’ll get to that in a minute. First, we need a one-minute reminder about Paul. This is the guy who was killing Christians in the name of the hard-and-fast temple law of the day, and this is the guy who was blinded on the road to Emmaus, became a follower of Jesus, and then wrote a good portion of the New Testament. All of this we need to know when Paul says he is indebted to Greeks and barbarians, the wise and the foolish, because it takes an awareness of his history to get there.

I suspect all of us are OK with saying we are indebted to teachers, to parents, to coaches, to people we like, who inspire us, and who make us look good. We like to tell that story. But how often do we stand up and say we are indebted to people we don’t like? Indebted to sinners? Indebted to non-believers, and criminals, and people who have wronged us? Those people? That’s a much tougher story.

            If we hear that story at all, it’s usually in the context of somebody saying, “I owe it to my haters, because they pushed me to be better.” But what Paul is saying in Romans 1 is more radical than that. He’s saying he owes the foolish; he owes those who are wrong; he owes everybody. Paul starts here in his letter to the church in Rome to make it abundantly clear what sin looks like—it is not just bad choices, which Paul certainly made in the past, but, more importantly, it is an indelible part of our character, and all of us are debtors because of it.

            In the alternative version of the Lord’s Prayer most often said in Presbyterian and Reformed churches, there is that line “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Lutherans tend to use trespasses, while others use “sins.” In some ways, all of these are trying to describe something we often fail to understand. Our debt, trespasses, and sin are not just things we do but a condition in which we live, which is precisely why we need forgiveness so desperately. We can’t simply refrain from doing bad—it is part and parcel of who we are.

            So, we are debtors—debtors to people we like and don’t like. This gets particularly messy when we talk about abuse, because surely we cannot owe people who have committed abuse against us. Practically speaking, victims don’t owe perpetrators anything, so let’s be clear about that, but underneath it all is a reality where each of us are bound to one another, and the fabric of the universe was once and forever broken by sin so that abusers exist and those abused face the Sauls of the world without any recourse. There should be no abusers; there should be no people abused, but there are: Paul was an abuser—an abuser of the early Christians. He knows what he owes; he knows he can’t repay the debt caused by murder. What could repayment possibly look like? No reparations are enough.

            The story of Saul’s conversion, becoming Paul, is not one of a bad dude becoming a hero. He’s still a guy who did bad things. The only difference is that after his conversion he knows it, and he’s trying to pick up the pieces of a broken life, seeking forgiveness, and finally understanding the place from which forgiveness and, with it, true power comes.

The Gospel

            The conversion does not make Paul righteous by his own effort. Instead, it made him a preacher. He became one of the first to write down things about this God we know in Jesus Christ. When Paul wrote Romans, none of the Gospels we know today yet existed. Mark was still a decade away, Matthew and Luke thereafter, and John long after that. That’s not immediately obvious reading your Bible, but when Paul wrote this letter, the words of Jesus were part of an oral tradition passed on around campfires or in house churches, or perhaps they were part of earlier texts now lost to us. This matters, because when we think of Saul prior to conversion, I think we tend to imagine a guy who had all the information and chose not to believe in Jesus. Yet, in many ways, this letter to Rome had no scriptural precedent. Paul didn’t have Jesus’ words; he wasn’t writing an accompaniment to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

What he had was an experience, and it was that experience that put everything in stark relief. This is a tough one for those of us in the Lutheran church, which was founded largely on this idea of sola scriptura—scripture alone—and in the day of Martin Luther this made sense, raging against the popes who made up their own laws apart from scripture. But nowadays, it feels as if Christians worship the Bible sometimes more than they do Jesus. Like so many things, the Bible—being one of the next most important things—is easy to mistake for the most important thing.