The mountain-top and the plain

A sermon for First Lutheran Church, Maquoketa on the occasion of their 100th anniversary and celebration of partnership with Ewalu.

Scripture: Luke 6:17-26

One thing I like to mention as a guest preacher—whenever I come into a congregation and the assigned readings are like today with some serious “woe to you” energy—that these are, in fact, the assigned readings for today and not my selection. So, now that we are off on a better foot, let’s get at it.

Today’s Gospel reading begins by saying, “Jesus came down [from the mountain-top] with the disciples and stood on a level place,” which is why Jesus’ message is sometimes called “The Sermon the Plain” in contrast to the Gospel of Matthew, which has a much longer (and more well-known) version called the Sermon on the Mount. At the risk of missing the point here, I want to spend a moment on the location before I jump into anything else, because I believe there is something important happening here—something that many of us may overlook who are able-bodied, adventurer-types who love the idea of climbing mountains.

            Perhaps you see the challenge of the sermon on the mountain already—maybe it was obvious to some of you, who are perhaps not as mobile as you once were. Jesus could preach about great reversals to the small crowd of disciples who ascended the mountain, but—in the words of an old Rich Mullins song—it would be about as useful as a screen-door on a submarine. Many of those who desperately need to hear about God’s great reversal could not make it up the mountain—those too old or unable to physically climb, those who have children in their care, those too weak from malnutrition, too sick, too tired. These folks are all back on the plain, hearing rumors of this Messiah. Jesus—like the church that follows him—goes to the people, because Jesus is always seeking out the least, the lowly, and the lost sheep. In the words of the great theologian Robert Farrar Capon, Jesus is interested in the least, the last, the lost, the lowly, the little, and the dead. Those are the ones Jesus will call blessed.

            I want to keep that dynamic of the great reversal and the sermon on the plain in mind as I turn for a moment to the mountain that is camp.

            At Ewalu, kids have the mountain-top experience of camping. They come to camp and some part of their self opens up under the open skies. The Holy Spirit—whose voice is often hard to pick up in our “normal” lives back home—speaks to us in the silence on the mountain-top of camp where we are quiet enough to listen. And it happens around the campfire—and it happens on the climbing wall, and in the river, and on a hike—in Bible study and in conversation, in making new friends and pushing our boundaries—in discovering new things about ourselves. Camp is fertile ground for the Holy Spirit to change lives. So, there is little surprise that camping ministry has the highest positive impact on developing future pastors in the Lutheran church—and has held that position as these trends have been studied. At camp, kids discover Christ, grow in faith, and become disciples. In many ways, it is the mountain-top of our church.

            But if Ewalu is only the mountain-top, then we have a problem, because Jesus does not stay there. Most of life is spent in the normal, day-to-day happenings of the plains and also in the valley of the shadow of death that we sing about in the 23^rd Psalm. We need a fabric of camp and congregation that bridges the experiences campers have out-there and makes them disciples for life back here, and then we need to develop a welcoming atmosphere where folks like you—who may have long since grown out of a stage where you would ever consider yourself a “camper”—nonetheless have a positive experience with a sacred space like Ewalu or another space you have found sacred, so that together we can follow where Jesus is leading us. Together, we get the privilege to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to Maquoketa and together we get to preach to folks in your congregation, in your community, and in your own house, and say: Blessed are you, who are poor. Blessed are you, who are hungry. Blessed are you, who weep.

Breaking the surface

A sermon for St. John Lutheran Church, Cedar Falls

 Luke 5:1-11

             I have a not-so-serious rule for preaching that every sermon needs Jesus and every sermon needs trout, so I should be good to go with this one. Fitting fish into the Good Samaritan story takes some gymnastics, I tell you, or last time I was here, I seem to remember the text was on divorce. No fish to be seen, though I could preach on that one again, if you’d like.

            No, today we have fish, so we’ll stick with this one. Not trout, mind you, but close enough.

            I love watching fish in the water. There is something holy about looking through that barrier between the airy world where we live and the watery kingdom where they are lords. We live in two realities, yet, as every fly fisherman knows, we see one another through the surface—where air and water meet. What we understand as normal—living in the world of breath-air-spirit—that Hebrew word, ruach, that means all those things—is only a partial world. It reminds me of the commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005 called “This is water,” which begins with Wallace telling a story that goes like this:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

 

The danger of half a story

 A sermon for St. Paul Lutheran Church, Postville

Luke 4:14-21

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus preaches a one sentence sermon. He reads Isaiah and then preaches, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Nice, brief sermon. The problem with this break in the Gospel is that this is only half a story—and the other half of the story comes in next week’s readings when I won’t be with you. So, I could preach half a sermon or pretend that this scripture is only about Jesus as the fulfillment of Isaiah, but it does sort of lack a conclusion, doesn’t it? More to the point, it’s misleading: The way the reading is cut makes it almost seem like the people of Nazareth cheered and lifted Jesus up on to their shoulders and carried him out of the gym, like a basketball player hitting that game-winning three-pointer. It feels like that is where this is going.

The whole story—however—is something altogether different. At first, the people of Nazareth did love what Jesus was saying—they were eager to cheer on the local kid. After all, who doesn’t love a little pride in the hometown? Nazareth was small and easily overlooked, but the Messiah born in their midst? How about that! Jesus’ friends and neighbors had reason to believe he was going to lift them up and take Nazareth from nowhere to somewhere, and they feel this way right up until verse 24.

Then, Jesus says, “Truly, I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” You can almost picture the peoples’ faces changing, can’t you? The trouble with getting people all riled up and excited is that you now have a mob ready to destroy you if you let them down. The cheers turn to rage, and the people of Nazareth—Jesus’ people—drove him out of town and ultimately attempted to murder him, the child that grew up in their midst, who was the Messiah, but not the messiah they wanted.

Now, I suspect Pastor Lynn might have some things to say on that part of the story next week, so I am not going to touch on the implications of Jesus preaching to the hometown crowd today. Rather, my sermon today is about the danger of half a story—and how camp helps bridge the gulf between two of the most challenging stories we face in life today.

The first story:

            This is the story of getting by in the United States of America in the year 2025. It is certainly not the worst time or place in history, but life here is not without its challenges. People are divided, especially around political beliefs, which drives division in churches and between friends and neighbors. Our young people are more aware of these divisions than ever, because they are more connected to the world around them than ever. With their phones in their hands, they are told who is wrong—they are told who to hate—they are told they are wrong—and they are also told they need to be skinnier, smarter, and funnier—they are told they must achieve more, must be more—they are told they are the problem, and they are told others are the problem. They are told in a thousand different ways every single day that they are not enough—and the problem is themselves or the problem is other people—and then they are hammered further by other Christians who use the Bible as a weapon to beat the life out of those who already feel beaten by the world around them.

            So, while in many ways life these days is nowhere near as hard as it has been at most other times in history, it doesn’t feel that way, especially to young people, as the expectations they are fed meet a reality that feels impossible. That is story #1.

The second story:

            This is the story of a God who came in Jesus Christ to save those who could not save themselves. This is a story of grace. It is also a story that runs so counter to the first story that it is increasingly easy to believe that all the principles of the first story apply to the second—that God helps those who help themselves; that we have to earn grace; that we have to accept it as true or believe it in the right way. The second story is a story that has become harder and harder to believe as we convince ourselves we are our own saviors—that God favors the powerful and looks down on the poor.

            In short, America in 2025 looks surprisingly like Nazareth two thousand years ago. We nod along; we cheer; then we crucify.

            Our young people may not have the words to express the cognitive dissonance between the story of the self-sufficient American ideal and the story of Jesus Christ, but they feel it. Boy, do they feel it. I think we all do. We face a very challenging question: How can we reconcile the world of achievement where we beat each other back in order to climb the ladder of success faster with the world of grace that proclaims that the first shall be last and the last shall be first?

            I tell you what most people have done—they have turned away from the church, but not for the reasons we so often cite. The prevailing sentiment is that church attendance has declined for some combination of factors involving sports or clubs replacing churches as the center of the community and people backsliding away from being good Christians. I want to suggest that our busy-ness is a symptom not of a lack of faith but a lack of connection, and I believe that people have turned away from the church because the church in the developed world has always been allied to the powers that be and those powers-that-be realized little by little, then increasingly rapidly, that they didn’t need the church anymore, and they gave permission to folks who never wanted to be part of the church anyway to no longer be.

            And our young people, who need grace as desperately as any of us, don’t see it in the church, because the church is just another extension of the first story. If you don’t feel this, that’s probably because you and your forebears helped cultivate the church into what it is today, and that has served you and your community well. For other folks—adults and youth and children alike, faith feels like just another obligation—just another thing to graduate from on their ascent up the treacherous mountain of success. And it doesn’t matter if we tell them otherwise, it still feels that way.

            So, we have two stories and one is winning, because we mostly don’t see how to bridge the chasm between achievement and grace.

            Enter camp.

            Now, this is all very convenient for the camp director to come in and say, so I want to be clear: I don’t want to pretend that camp is the lone solution to this problem or that camp is one-size-fits-all or perfect—it is far from it—and I also don’t want to suggest that we have some magical formula for creating good little Christians—we don’t. But I have to say: Ewalu is a place where people who are looking to challenge themselves encounter a world drenched in grace, and that combination of striving to leave our comfort zones and discovering the love of God does something to people. We proclaim grace, but not cheap grace—not the kind of grace that says, “just try your best and God will take care of the rest.” No, here we preach the kind of grace that does not shy away from death—that does not pretend we can fix everything. And kids discover it to be true not because we tell them it is, but because they already know it is. They encounter death and resurrection in the world around them. They get their hands dirty in the mud and their feet wet in the water and when they do, something cracks open, some part of them dies, and then they rise.