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.