On curiosity and the moth

A sermon for St. John's Lutheran Church, Arlington and St. Sebald Lutheran Church, Strawberry Point

Scripture: Mark 1:1-8

        In the Mark year in the lectionary, Advent is contained exclusively in these 8 verses. The next verse after this passage reads: “In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” We fast-forward straight to adult Jesus baptized by John. In Mark’s Gospel, there is no baby in a manger, no shepherds in the fields, no kings bringing gifts; and before that, no Mary wondering what these things mean, no Elizabeth, no Joseph, no angels. There is no Christmas at all, and the entire season of Advent is distilled into this single passage about John, the baptizer in the wilderness.

Now you know why the Christmas pageant is never read from the Gospel of Mark.

So, while we have none of the Christmas story to contend with, we do have themes—whispers you might call them. We have John the Baptist, and we have this opening salvo from the book of Isaiah, 

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

   who will prepare your way;

the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

   “Prepare the way of the Lord,

   make his paths straight” 

Creek stomping in the river of justice and righteousness

A sermon for Bethel Lutheran Church, Parkersburg, IA

 Amos 5:18-24

The scripture readings for today are like a river in and of themselves—to follow that river I think it’s best to start at the confluence and to wind our way back upstream, which means I’m going to begin with the Gospel of Matthew and the reading from Thessalonians—both of which are about Jesus Christ coming along to reconcile and redeem a broken world. This is the central hope and belief of the Christian faith—that what Christ did on the cross, dying for all of us, will be work that is completed when the world has ended and when our lives here are over. “Keep awake!” says Jesus in the Gospel reading—for you do not know when Christ is coming.

            However, there is one thing about Jesus telling us to stay awake that can be misconstrued. The goal of life on earth is not to escape life on earth. It is to be awake; it is to see Christ when Christ appears before you. And Christ will come when all of this is over—for most of us, most likely, that will be when we die. And that day could be years from now or today. But Christ also comes to us in the form of others who enter our lives—others who do not know they are being Christ—and all of us can see Christ in those encounters if we are awake to it. Christ comes in a child who wants you to read a bedtime story. Christ comes as a beggar, or a prisoner, or a reject. The incarnation of Christ means that Christ has entered into all humanity, and as Victor Hugo said, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

The missing grace ( Or why wrestling with scripture we don't like is way more reverent than ignoring it)

Preached at Peace Lutheran, Clayton and St. Peter Lutheran, Garnavillo

Philippians 2:1-13

           I am going to preach on the Philippians hymn today, which I do with some measure of trepidation, because I feel I should be up-front about this from the start: I don’t particularly like this passage. Maybe this is very familiar scripture to you, it is for me (now), but once upon a time, I was sitting in a class at seminary and the professor told us that we would be meditating on this scripture to begin class… every period… all semester long. Our professor expected that we would already know this scripture pretty well, seeing as it was so commonly read in church, which was news to me (who had a degree in Religion at the time), but the professor also said we would see and hear new things when we meditated on this passage over and over… and over again.

            Perhaps you all have experienced the sensation of repeating a word ad nauseum until it loses its meaning—a phenomena that is called semantic satiation? Well, what I experienced with this passage is what I am going to call theological satiation. Rather than opening up new thoughts, ideas, and possibilities, the more I read, the less meaning I found. It began to feel like meaningless ideas that I was obligated to nod along with, because that was what it meant to treat the scripture with the reverence it deserved.

            “What word stuck out to you today?” the professor would ask.

            “Humbled,” I would think for the seventh time.

            “And what image do you see when you hear the text?”

            “Nothing. Meaninglessness. The void.”

            These were all things I wouldn’t say, so I mostly didn’t say anything at all, which—looking back—was a huge mistake, because I was so fearful of saying what I truly felt (which was nothing) that it kept me from being honest. And whenever we are lying, or faking it, or whatever, because we feel obligated to do something or be something or think something, it is precisely then that we are not giving the scripture the reverence it deserves. I forgot in that class that all scripture is meant to be wrestled with—that’s what faithfulness looks like—not ignoring it, but wrestling—confronting what I found to be, frankly, boring.

Not karma--not a great balancing act--just grace

A sermon for American Lutheran Church, Grundy Center, IA

Matthew 20:1-16

            This past week, I got some great news. Maybe I shouldn’t say this because my kids are here and I don’t want any of them to get a big head, but at the risk of bragging, I just want to say that my kindergartener, Elias, got his first FAST test results back and, let me tell you, he’s pretty smart. So, the tests say. I started looking at early admission to Harvard and I don’t think he’s quite eligible yet, but by his spring FAST test results, maybe he’ll be ready to skip 1^st-12^th grade. And, yeah, sure, he just turned five, but he’s on the fast-track to great things—the results say.

            But those test results—they’re a bit funny—because while they say he is doing quite well in reading and math, they don’t seem to mention some of his best qualities. I don’t see a single category for kindness or how well he cares for his friends. I don’t see any measurement of his capacity for empathy or the joy that comes from all the nonsense jokes that he concocts. I don’t see a single thing about his goofy grin, his love of the outdoors, or even his excitement about dinosaurs.

            To be fair, I don’t think any of these tests claim to say much about peoples’ best qualities—whether FAST, or the ACTs, or your credit score—but it’s worth noticing that how readily we are reduced to numbers when it comes to areas of our life that are deemed valuable to society. There is always somebody ready to assign us a value for how well we answer questions, or how we look, or how high we can jump. And this may work just fine and dandy to power an economic system that is built on merit, but according to Jesus in the parable we read today, it is simply not the way that the kingdom of God works. The kingdom of God is a kingdom of grace, which kind of stinks for me—what with such talented kids.

But then again, I have seen how they behave sometimes, too. I have seen how badly they need to be loved in and through their mistakes—how they need to be defined not by their worst moments but loved for who they are, even if it takes some time for them to become more who we would like—even if they are occasionally just awful to one another—even, in fact, if they never improve. It is for children like these that the parable of the vineyard is told. But, I suspect more than that, it is for we-parents who know how imperfect we are, who need to know that when everything goes to hell, God’s grace will catch us.

Ewalu Quilt Auction: Lost Sheep and God's Love of Material Things

Scripture: Luke 15:1-7

I’m going to begin this morning by reading another version of the Parable of the Lost Sheep—this one from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Now, if you don’t remember the Gospel of Thomas from your days in Sunday School, it will soon become obvious why. Thomas is a book of sayings discovered in 1945 in the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt. It is very old—perhaps as old as the Gospel of John—but it was obviously not included in the Biblical canon—again, for reasons you will soon understand.

Without further ado—the Parable of the Lost Sheep according to the Gospel of Thomas:

The Gospel of Thomas, verse 107:

Jesus said, "The kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them, the largest, went astray. He left the ninety-nine sheep and looked for that one until he found it. When he had gone to such trouble, he said to the sheep, 'I care for you more than the ninety-nine.'"

That is how you change the whole vibe of a passage with two words—one qualifier, “the largest”. Two words stir up a rather important question: Does God seek us out because we are lost creatures that he loves, or is God only going to pursue us if we are the best, the biggest, or the most beautiful? 

This brings up a whole other category of questions, like: Where does my worth come from? Am I valuable in and of myself, or only for what I produce, or only for what I consume? Then, a step further removed: What is God’s economy?

I believe Christians have done a terrible job of talking about worthiness, because too often we have slipped into this dialectic where faith is about spiritual things and life is about material things and never shall the two meet, presumably because God does not like material things. Now, I can say that almost without objection in the Christian church in spite of how ridiculous it is when we have a God was the one who made those material things and called them good.

God loves trees and rocks, but God also loves the works of our hands. I suspect God loves marvels of architecture just as God loves water and sun, livestock and companion animals, and every other thing that God created and called “good.” It is not sinful to marvel at created things—after all, you are one of them! If God cares for you, as a lost sheep, then I have to believe God also cares for quilts and bowls and all sorts of things we create.

As yourself: God's gracious love for YOU

Preached at Zion Lutheran, Jubilee, and American Lutheran, Jesup 

Scripture: Romans 13:8-14

Love your neighbor as yourself is one of those wonderful, golden rule bits of wisdom that is so universal that every major faith tradition in the world has some version of it. On the one hand, it’s very simple: Treat others the way you want to be treated. Only do things to people that you would want done to you. Seems straightforward. 

But there are a couple of challenges with this little morsel of a moral. The first is that we don’t do it very well. That’s no secret. We are certainly not guaranteed that our love will be returned with love. We often have to face the question of how to respond to disinterest or disdain, and showing love to folks who don’t care or don’t want it is rather hard. Paul writing Romans didn’t seem to have a problem with this, but then again, for the first half of his career, Paul sort of made his living killing people, so it’s pretty hard to put us in the moral absolutist shoes of St. Paul. Elsewhere in his writings, it is pretty obvious that Paul feels he really deserves to have his love met with hate. In some ways, it seems the self-hatred runs deep with him.

Which gets at the 2^nd, larger and more universal challenge with loving your neighbor as you love yourself. There is one enormous assumption in this phrase—perhaps you see it? To love our neighbor as ourselves assumes that we love ourselves. The honest truth: A lot of people do not love themselves. Many people are hardest on their own self. And this is particularly true of people who treat other people poorly—they do not love others so often because they first fail to love themselves.

I think we all recognize this on some level. We recognize the lack of love in others, and sometimes also in ourselves, but what to do about it? Some folks are able to escape from cycles of self-hatred, but for many it is a bridge too far. Worse, the self-hatred grows when they feel they have tried and tried but cannot love who they are. This is because transformation seems to have less to do with any willpower we possess than it does with something outside of ourselves. If I had to give it a name, I’d call it grace.

The broken pieces

Preached at St. Paul's Lutheran, Maynard, August 6, 2023

Matthew 14:13-21

            Abundance over scarcity.

            Scarcity is a real fear, especially in rural, agricultural communities. There are fewer things. Fewer opportunities in our towns, in our schools, in our churches. Fewer people. Less and less.

            When I was a pastor in NW Minnesota, I did a little research in our church history books. I looked at the year when church attendance peaked in our congregation. An average of 430 people every Sunday in 1965. At the time (in 2016), average attendance had fallen under 100. So, I went back into the church council minutes to see how the church felt about all of its growth in 1965. Surely, they were basking in the glow of all those baby boomers, thrilled at all the vibrant ministries possible with over four times as many people as would eventually be there?

            Not so much.

            The Luther League report read much like a youth report in 2023: There was not enough engagement with the young people, it said. Young people needed to be more involved in the church, they worried.

            Those Lutherans couldn’t see abundance when it was staring them in the face. The truth is: There would never be enough to satisfy.

            Our churches have drifted in the same thinking that drives capitalism—the premise that everything must grow in perpetuity in order for us to strive. And capitalism may well be the best of all the dismal economic systems we have developed as human beings, but God’s economy does not work like this. God’s economy is nonsense to all our sensibilities. God’s economy suggests something absolutely startling:

            The problem is not that we have too little; the problem is that we still have too much.

            God’s economy is Jesus, taking a look at the five thousand men (plus women and children) and saying, “Five loaves? Two fish? That’s plenty!” After all, we are dealing with a God who spoke the world into being with words. A few loaves and fish are more than enough.

            For us to participate in God’s economy, we have to give—our selves, our money, our time—until there is nothing left. This is why in another story we have a rich man who comes to Jesus looking to justify himself only to go away disappointed. He followed the laws. He obeyed the commandments. But he was lacking one crucial detail: He had things.

            Faith is only faith when all the other things that we are really trusting in are cast aside.

            As usual, I am mostly preaching to myself this morning, because I was born in 1986 and in the 37 years of my life, the ELCA has declined in numbers every single year.  Since the pandemic, many churches have fewer people around. At Ewalu, we have fewer campers around. The landscape has changed swiftly. When I was ordained in 2011, I waited five months for a first-call. Now, I had a lot going for me—I mean, I don’t know if I was a particularly good pastoral candidate, but I was single, male, white, straight. The grand slam that would offend nobody in any church. In 2011, there were exactly as many pastors graduating seminary (211) as there were calls open to first-call pastors (211). In 2023, seminary graduates are roughly half that and open calls have ballooned.

            It is entirely likely if you are under 65 years old, you have never experienced a church that is growing in worship attendance.

            All of this is to say that it is incredibly easy to be scarcity people. There is less and less and less every year. Or it feels that way.

            Clearly, we are not Jesus, who can do so much with so little. But I don’t believe we are the recipients of that feast either. Yes, we ought to remember that Jesus can do much with so little. Yes, our problem is still that we have too much. But man, that doesn’t sound like good news, does it? Like the rich man who came to Jesus, we would do well to give more away—more of our time, our talents, our gifts—but we can’t give it all away, can we? That is the harsh word of the law and what Jesus demands: Give everything. But shoot, that is kind of depressing, isn’t it? Not only do we feel we have less and less; we also feel we have less to give; and we feel even less capable of giving it away.

            This is where we stand, feeling the weight of scarcity UNTIL we consider a vitally important question: “Where are we in this story?” Where are we in the feeding of the 5000? We are not Jesus, clearly. But are we the people—hungry and with little to offer? Or are we the bread and the fish—provisions for a needy world? In some ways, we may be both hungry people and the food to feed them, but I believe that most of us are neither the hungry people nor the bread and fish. But we ARE in the story.

You and me? We are the broken pieces.

            We are the bits of bread and fish gathered together that are more than they started with.

            We are the broken pieces, because we see a world that appears to be spread thinner and thinner, but we cannot see the whole picture. In fact, we can see very little of what Jesus is doing. We are only ever feeding one person here, another there. On our own, we are not enough. And yet, by some mystery, our whole is greater than the sum of our parts. We are broken for the sake of those who need it, but that act of breaking does not destroy us. In fact, that breaking is the only hope we have.

            I see it at camp every single year, every single week. We are an ecosystem full of broken people. By this point of the summer, literally broken people—like a broken foot here, a broken thumb there. Exhausted, humbled, broken people. But the broken pieces are where you will find God’s handiwork. The broken pieces are evidence of the proclamation of God’s grace. You can’t follow after Christ without breaking apart. You can’t rise without dying. This is the paradox of the Christian faith. The less you have, the more capacity you have for God’s grace to fill you.

            The problem is not that we have too little; it’s that we are holding on to too much.

            So, we break apart, and that’s when God puts us to use. When we admit we are not enough, we discover that God is.

            So, what to do with all this—what nuggets of wisdom to take away—how then shall we live?

            I suspect it’s pretty simple: Be open to being broken open, because God will do just that. Be put to use. Do not be afraid to be broken pieces. Broken pieces are the surest evidence of good work, after all. But also, and this is probably an important point in a broken world, don’t let others break you. Instead, choose to break for the sake of those you care about—for the sake of those who need you.

            There is no need to pretend that we have it all together, because nobody in this story does. Jesus does everything with nothing. We, in turn, are called to remember that our problem is not that we have too little; it’s that there is too much in the way for us to see God at work.

My prayer is that we all let go. That we break—willingly and completely. Because I have found, whether at camp or at church or in the lives of my children, that the most meaningful moments happen when we just let go—when we break apart and let someone in. 

May you be broken and discover your worth—and may you be healed by Jesus Christ, who is broken for you. 

At camp, we go!

2023 Summer Staff Commissioning -- Preached June 3-4, 2023 @ First Lutheran, Decorah

 Matthew 28:16-20

Fittingly, the scripture readings for today are about both the great outdoors and great work. Psalm 8 tells us that God’s majesty is a reflection of the majesty of creation, which is something that I feel deep in my soul whenever I am climbing a hill and anticipating the view of the world below. Hopefully, you can slow down enough to experience the wonder of the earth and the heavens as a window into God’s playground. I could preach only on this today and have plenty to say. But even better, we mark the Holy Trinity this weekend with Matthew’s Great Commission, which takes all that business about the outdoors and the world and tells us, “Get to work!” Which is great, because right now, at camp, let me tell you, there is a lot of work to do!

And since there is a lot to do, I am in the mindset to focus on the verbs—the specific actions Jesus expects of us. There are five of them—five verbs of the Great Commission—five directives for Christians to accomplish while passing through this big, beautiful world. Those five verbs are: Make disciples, baptize, teach, and remember… I never claimed I was good at counting. Make disciples, baptize, teach, and remember… what did I forget?

Courageous Thomas

 John 20:19-31

A sermon for Decorah Lutheran Church

I want to talk with you this morning about Thomas and courage. I realize courageous is not the usual adjective given to Thomas. He is the “doubter,” they say, because he asked for proof—the same proof the other disciples received a week before. But just because he is no more a doubter than the rest of them certainly does not make him courageous, so what I am I talking about?

            Let’s step back for a moment. “The doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews,” the scripture says. I remember in church growing up how our pastor was very careful to remind us that everybody is a Jew here—the chief priests and the Pharisees who wanted Jesus killed, the disciples; the women who discovered the tomb empty; and Jesus himself. All Jews. Everybody of import in the story except Pilate is a Jew. My pastor made this point so that we were careful not to drift into some form of anti-Semitism, claiming that the Jews killed Jesus, as many Christians throughout the centuries have done. Nonetheless, this week it struck me that the reason the disciples are hiding is because of fear of their own people. They had every reason to be afraid, because their own people had done this to Jesus and now Jesus was gone. They had every reason to believe they were next

There is nothing to fear

Sermon for Immanuel Lutheran Church, Independence

Matthew 16:24-17:8

“When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome with fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid.’”

            My first religion course as a freshman at Augustana College was Murray Haar’s Religion 110 course, and the primary textbook for that class was a 666-page (I kid you not) tome called The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis by Leon Katz. If that phrase—The Beginning of Wisdom—means something to you, it is probably because you have heard it in scripture before, not in Genesis but in Proverbs—Proverbs 9:10, which reads: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The fear of the Lord is then picked up and repeated several times in Proverbs, and then in the book of Job and in Isaiah and in the Psalms.

            So, my ears perk up every time Jesus speaks of fear, because not once—not a single time in all the accounts of Jesus’ ministry—does he tell us to be afraid. Not once does Jesus say we are to fear him; not once does he say we are to fear God. Instead, he repeats the words, “Fear not.” Get up and do not be afraid. You have nothing to fear any longer.

            Too much of our lives are spent in fear. You all may have seen that business about spy balloons that the military shot down this week. Some say they are from China, some say they are from aliens. Choose your fear, really. We tend to imagine the worst possible outcome to fear. Reality, meanwhile, will remain unchanged—what will be will still be. We are reminded that we do not have everything under control. We are fragile. We are little. We need something to save us.

            To some extent, this is the state in which every single one of God’s campers arrives at camp, whether that camp is Ewalu or the camp of your congregation on a Sunday morning. God’s campers come afraid and in need of the reminder that we have a Savior in Jesus Christ who beckons us not to run but to stand, because our fears are not to be realized. The disciples never get this, by the way. They are always freaking out, whether it is in a boat on the water as it was in the Children’s message or atop a mountain. The disciples continue to live in fear, even most poignantly after the crucifixion when they are locked in a room. Meanwhile, Jesus repeats, “There is nothing to fear.”

Not hard but impossible

Sermon for St. John Lutheran Church, Cedar Falls

 

Matthew 5:21-37

Thank you so much the invitation to be with you this morning, and especially for the invitation to preach on… let me get this right, Matthew 5, but not the beatitudes part… or the turn-the-other-cheek part… or the love your enemies part… but the middle part. The heavy part. Well, at least I feel like you must trust me or something.

            We need some context. So, I’m going to go back a few verses and get Jesus’ introduction to all this business. In verse 17, Jesus says, “Do not think I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” Now, that doesn’t sound like great news to start, and it just gets worse and worse as we read through today’s Gospel reading. Not only shall you not murder, but whoever is angry has committed murder in their hearts. Not only shall you not commit adultery, but you should start tearing out eyes and things to stop yourself from doing so if that will help. Jesus takes all the laws and levels them up. After all, he says he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.

            This trend continues throughout the Gospel of Matthew—again and again, seemingly righteous folks come to Jesus and he says, “Yeah, but what about this?” and they leave him upset, angry, and eventually it gets him murdered. I suspect one of the reasons the crowd turned so quickly against Jesus before Pilate is that they felt what Jesus was asking was too hard. Certainly, the rich man who came to him much later did. Jesus told him to give away everything, which precipitates that famous exchange between the disciples where they ask (finally!) the question we should all be wondering right about now, “Then, who can be saved????” And Jesus replies, “For mortals it is impossible but for God all things are possible.”

            This is the heart of a very serious question in the Gospel of Matthew: Is salvation under the law really hard… or is it impossible? This is maybe the very most important question for you in your faith life, because how you answer it changes EVERYTHING. How you answer that question will color everything you ever read in the Gospel; it will change your faith life; it has divided the Christian church for as long as there has been a church, and we don’t talk about it enough. Instead, we read passages like Matthew 5 in Bible studies and then we go around the circle and say things like, “Well, that was a downer” and we quickly move on, because we know something… we feel something when we read this scripture. If we are honest, we are deeply convicted by this scripture, and we would likely prefer to scratch this right out of the Bible, because we have been taught from an early age that being faithful is about being a good person and this passage seems to suggest that we need to be REALLY, REALLY good people, and it sounds REALLY, REALLY hard.

Just ask the fish

Sermon for Wartburg College

 Leviticus 25:23-24

“‘The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. ²⁴ Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must redeem the land.

Job 12:7-10

⁷ “But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
    the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
⁸ ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you,
    and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
⁹ Who among all these does not know
    that the hand of the Lord has done this?
¹⁰ In his hand is the life of every living thing
    and the breath of every human being.

Two words from God to you and me this morning: 1. The land is not yours, and 2. If you want to look for God at play, you better get out and let the animals and the plants teach you.

Camp Counselor God gives a two sermon series on outdoor ministry first to the campers at Mount Sinai. This is not your land; you are foreigners on the land; care for, nay redeem the land. Then, camp counselor God uses Job to for the second half, which is simply: Look outside. The world out there will teach you.

Ours is a faith “open to the skies.” It is only because we live in Iowa and some of you insist on wearing basketball shorts in February that I am not demanding we do this outdoors. Outside, our senses activate in ways they cannot within these walls. We hear chirps and creaking trees, and we feel the razor edge of a blade of grass and seeds rubbing between our fingers; we spot hawks rising on the thermals and we may wonder, Are they singing the beauty of the morning, as well? And, then inevitably, we wonder, What is behind all this? For many of us, for the first time in a long time, we slow down. We disconnect.

To linger outdoors is an affront to a busy world. Some of you are itching right now to get back on your phones. And I’m not going to judge either; you are captive to those things, so go ahead, check that snapchat right now. I won’t judge, but you might—I suspect many of you are the very best at judging yourselves in this indoor world full of pressure. Pressure to check in… pressure to be better… pressure to do enough… pressure to impress… pressure to not fall behind.

You see, when I decided to preach on Leviticus this morning, I did so very aware that if you know anything about Leviticus it is probably about all those holiness code rules, and even the hint of me—the outsider—coming to your place of refuge and preaching on more rules may well have put your guard up, not because you don’t need rules (some of you could do with following a few more rules if we are being honest). No, you don’t need the Bible to beat you up because you are already the best at it. The indoor world of pressure has turned us in on ourselves and so we live in our own little caves with the walls pressing in—pressure to conform, pressure to be our own self. Isn’t it amazing that you can feel both those pressures at once?

⁷ “But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
    the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
⁸ ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you,
    and the fish of the sea will declare to you… 

The great thing about fish is that they don’t give a damn about cultivating a brand. Not once have I seen a bass carefully posing for Instagram.

The great thing about plants is that they have no sense of who is prettiest. Of course, they are pretty—they just don’t care.

Birds do not care about job opportunities.

Squirrels don’t dress to impress.

But you—you feel that pressure. So, there are two ways to hear those words from Leviticus—you do not own the land, it is not yours. You can hear it is as a limitation, as a thing to overcome, as a reminder of what you still need to achieve. You can march right out of the chapel and think to yourself, “I better go get that land.” Or you can take it as God meant it—the context of Leviticus 25 is jubilee. And jubilee is this awesome biblical concept of debt forgiveness which foreshadows what we come to know as grace. That the land is not yours? That is grace. Because the only thing ownership has ever brought you is pressure. Ownership has only ever taught you that you are not enough.

So, I have just one piece of wisdom for you today: In a world that tells you to own things, be an outsider instead. Stop owning things—owning your image, owning your work. Instead of owning those things, be stewards. Plant seeds whose growth does not depend on your righteousness and whose fruits will appear long after you are gone. Then, go take a walk and learn from the world around you—a world full of grace for imperfect people you like and me. God’s grace certainly is about salvation at the end of our lives, but it is also about what it means to live as if it is true right now. Free from the indoor world of pressure. Just ask the fish…

Amen.

On baptism and seeing with the eyes of children

A sermon for St. Paul Lutheran Church, Monona; January 15, 2023

Scripture: Matthew 3:13-17

Thank you again for having me this morning and giving me the opportunity to share a little about Ewalu and also in line with the Gospel text this morning to share a little about baptism. It is a refreshing scripture for me preach on, because so often I am invited by pastors to preach when the text is Jesus cursing a fig tree, or separating sheep and goats, or the binding of Isaac—you know, everybody’s favorite Bible stories. It is an AMAZING coincidence how often pastors take off those Sundays and call me to cover for them.

            So, it is with joy that I will preach today on baptism, a subject that has been on my mind quite a bit ever since my own son was baptized in November in the Maquoketa River at Camp Ewalu. My son, Wilder, who is here this morning does not know what happened that morning, or if he does, he is doing a great job hiding it behind all the dirty diapers and spit up. He does not remember that day when we loaded up the cars and drove the gravel road through camp to the pole bridge—Kate and myself and the kids along with my parents and his new godparents. He does not remember when we parked by the river, crossed the bridge, clambered down the bristly bank, and stood on a rocky inlet near the bubbling water while big, fluffy snowflakes fell, and he does not remember how we dipped our hands in the river and took turns doing the three parts—his parents in the name of the father; his siblings in the name of the son; and godparents in the name of the Holy Spirit. He remembered that cold, spring-fed, November river water for a moment, but only just a moment. He does not remember any of that and will not when he is older. But I do. We do. And, more importantly, God does.