The immortality of love

This week I'm posting the sermon I am preaching for the hospice memorial service, rather than the Sunday morning sermon, because A) I like it better, and B) I don't have a manuscript for Sunday morning and pulling it together after the fact is a lot of work I may or may not do. So, enjoy!

Revelation 21:1-4

Most of our lives are spent tiptoeing around death, sometimes pretending like it isn’t there, sometimes putting other things in its way, and sometimes intentionally minimizing it, as if any of those options put death to death. This is true of our own mortality but even more-so when it comes to those we love. Parents, brothers and sisters, friends, even our children. We tiptoe around it because we’re scared of it, because we absorb messages in our lives that tell us life is always good, death is always bad, so best to flee from it however much you can. When J.K. Rowling was crafting her primary villain for the Harry Potter series she could think of no better name to give him than “Vol-de-mort” which, in French, means “flees from death.”

            So, it is at first jarring, sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately a tremendous blessing to have people—nurses and social workers and retired people, as well as people who have vocations that don’t seem to have a thing to do with end of life care—who nonetheless give of themselves, their time and energy, to those whose life is ending, who do not flee from death out of fear but who stand alongside the dying, because that is what human beings are called to do. These people are the hands and feet of Jesus, it is most certainly true.

            Last month I was eating with a friend whose son had recently died unexpectedly—not a hospice situation, more of the tragic accident type—and during the course of the conversation we were talking about the ways that we face our mortality or flee from it. We talked about how Ironman triathlons are overrun with people in their 40s and 50s, trying desperately, it seems, to remain young forever. Perhaps if they do just a little more and just a little more they will never get old. We talked about regrets and living with grief, figuring out how to truly live when the imagined future is gone and we are confronted with a real-present that isn’t what we imagined. We talked purpose and what the good-life looks like. We talked about love, without using the word.

Despising ourselves-- On Job, Orlando, and suicide

Job 42:1-6

There are a million ways to say “I’m sorry!” Some of them are authentic, some are not so much, some are kind of even backhanded. My favorite “I’m sorry!” happens after we put Natalie in timeout and she screams usually tries to get off the chair a dozen times before finally pouting and crying for the whole two minutes she’s usually in timeout. Then, when her time runs out, she gets down runs over to Kate and I, gives us hugs and says, “Sorry daddy” and “Sorry mommy.” That’s my favorite, “I’m sorry.”

            But on the long list of apologies I’m not so sure where to put Job’s, because I’m not really sure how to read this, especially this last verse, “Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” Other translations read that Job repented of dust and ashes. Like a ton of phrases from ancient languages we just don’t know exactly what that means. Is it ironic? Is it defiant? Is Job hanging on to a little bit of self-righteousness against the God who he still believes took away everything he held dear? Or is this true repentance? Is Job the hero who could repent in a way the rest of us can only hope to emulate?

            Over the course of the book of Job this word for “despise,” the Hebrew ma’as, is used many times. Sometimes it is used by Job’s friends to tell him not to despise the Almighty (e.g. 5:17) or that God will not despise a righteous person (8:20), most often it’s used by Job to talk about how he loathes his life (7:16, 9:21), despises his work (10:3), and even how young children despise him (19:18 and 30:1). Finally, this word, ma’as, is used twice by Elihu, most importantly to tell Job that God does not despise anyone (36:5). In fact, you can trace the way that various characters use this word that’s sometimes translated “despise,” sometimes “loathe,” and sometimes “abhor,” to get an understanding of the frame of mind of each person. Job uses it out of a sense of pity. His friends use it to try to convict him of wrongdoing. Elihu, God’s spokesperson, uses it as a means of freeing Job from his vision of a judgmental God, and, maybe most interestingly of all, God never uses it. God never utters the word: “despise.”

            God despises nothing. Human beings? We despise all sorts of things. Even in repentance, which is one of our most positive traits, we despise ourselves. God just makes things good. We’re the ones who despise it all.

I know that my Redeemer lives!

Job 14:7-15, 19:23-27

One of the biggest worries I have in using the Narrative Lectionary is that there is an extended period of time between Easter and Advent—well over half the year—when I am not preaching from the Gospels. Now, I’m not one who believes you have to have a Gospel reading—obviously we don’t—and I do think there is a LOT for us to learn from the Old Testament, but there is a problem with reading from the Hebrew Bible and this is that the good news in the Old Testament gets kind of tempered by our own Jesus-expectations. Since we know we end up with Jesus the temptation is to find little value in the prelude to him. Who cares about the expectations that the Hebrew people had of the coming Messiah when we already know who he ended up being?

However, there are occasions where these Old Testament folks seem to get it—much better than ourselves, in fact. There are times when they are actually some of the best examples of faith without sight that we have. Again Job is one great example. Job has everything ripped away from him—his stuff, his work, his land, his family; all of it is taken from him. But, more than that, Job, like all the people in the Old Testament, also lacks a promise of eternal life. Now, I’m not saying that he’s not going to be saved ex post facto because of Jesus or anything like that; just that, even like some people in our world today, he has never heard of that promise, because, in this time in history, nobody knew of that promise.

I mean, the descendants of Abraham had promises of land and descendants and a great nation. Those were the covenants God made with them. And all of those are wonderful promises for a nation, but individually there are people like Job who experience few of the rewards of those promises. His land is gone; his family is dead; his nation might be the greatest in the world, but even if it were that great is that enough to comfort him? Doubtful.

            Job has nowhere to turn. So he turns to God, and in his desperate longing we hear echoes of a deeper promise that he could not have known but is one so familiar to our ears. Listen closely: 

As waters fail from a lake,
   and a river wastes away and dries up,
¹² so mortals lie down and do not rise again;
   until the heavens are no more, they will not awake
   or be roused out of their sleep.
¹³ O that you would hide me in Sheol,
   that you would conceal me until your wrath is past,
   that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me!
¹⁴ If mortals die, will they live again?

The last enemy is death: What Harry Potter taught me about being Christian

1 Corinthians 15:1-26,51-57

The year was 2001 and I was a high school sophomore with a pretty good idea that what I wanted to be in life was a pastor, which is not exactly the typical thing a sophomore in high school wants to be so I wasn’t one to talk much about it. I also had many ideas about what a good Christian pastor looked like— the kind of interests he had, the kind of music he listened to, the things he should be doing and not doing. I had all these things floating around my head, and one of the particular things I believed was this idea that a person can choose either to live in reality or escape from reality, and that Christians are supposed to live in the real world. I had just read The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway and The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald and found myself disturbed that people would choose parties and alcohol and casual relationships as an alternative to a purposeful life. As a Christian I felt not only that I should be doing the right things but also that I need not bother wasting any time reading fanciful stories or watching many movies or anything that might suggest an alternative to that good, Christian life. I believed, in short, that everything should be explicitly Christian for it to be good.

            So, here I was a sophomore in high school when my family decided to go to a movie on Thanksgiving following our family get-together, as was often our custom. And they decided we would see the newly released Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone. I knew a little about this movie. I had occasionally heard my mom and my brother reading from the Harry Potter series; it was the most popular series of books in the world at the time, but I had more or less completely ignored it to that point. My disinterest didn’t have so much to do with witchcraft, which I knew that some Christians were upset about, though maybe that was in the back of my mind too, I’m not sure. But I think I didn’t really care about it because I thought there was nothing here of redeeming Christian value. It wasn’t explicitly Christian; it wasn’t telling me about Jesus or about how to live as a person who follows Jesus, so it seemed like a distraction from reality.

            So I went to this movie expecting not very much. Well, about halfway through I found myself having an unexpected experience: I was becoming deeply affected by the characters and themes of this movie. Maybe some of you have had this experience with different things in your life. It might have been a book or a movie or a TV show or a play or a piece of music or something else—something that was like an onion, which, when peeled away, gave you a better and better understanding of life. In that theater, that day, I realized, even if I couldn’t have ever put it into words as a 15-year-old, that I was living the Christian life in the wrong way. I was trying to isolate myself from everything bad in the world in order that I might be a good Christian when a Christian is actually supposed to go toward what is rotten and point to Christ where you least expect him, because the true radicalness of the gospel is that death and life are turned upside down by Jesus.

‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’

-1 Corinthians 15:55

Doubt and the Cross

Mark 15:16-39

            Last night we encountered what true humanity looks like. It looks like Jesus praying to God to remove from his lips the cup of suffering; it looks like vulnerability, humility, and grace. It looks not like strength as we so often imagine it, but instead it looks like the power of giving up power—a power that does not seem at first like it is power at all.

            Now, today, we encounter what happens when a person is fully human: He gets crucified. On the cross Jesus shows that greatness looks like failure. It is shouting to the heavens, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s all the things that make us question God in similar words. “Is your God in Belgium?” an atheist asks mockingly on Facebook. Is our God with victims of genocide? Is our God in the streets of Chicago riddled with gun violence? Is our God with car crash victims whose only fault was an icy road or a drunk driver? Is our God with those who have cancer… a miscarriage… Alzheimer’s? Is our God anywhere at all?

            Today is the day that can either confirm those assumptions or challenge them, because this Good Friday is about the God who meets us first and foremost not in life’s victories but in life’s crushing defeats. This is the God of the cross. It’s not a very attractive God on the surface, but it’s the only one who really stands up to criticism because it’s the only one real enough to meet us in despair—where we truly need it. This is the God who points to death and says, “I’ve been there.” I’ve been there. This God is found in our failures far more surely than in our victories, because it is there that we discover our utter dependence. This is the God, who we know in Jesus Christ, who shouts from upon the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

To stand against the mob

Mark 11:1-11

This is a tough time of the year to preach for a couple of reasons. 1) The stories are so familiar. Who doesn’t know the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem with people waving their palm branches? Then, 2) This time of the year, more than any other, requires the whole story. This is why many churches have gone away from Palm Sunday and instead focused on the entirety of the passion on this Sunday before Easter. The church is reacting to people who don’t show up at Maundy Thursday or Good Friday services, as well as churches that do not have Easter Vigil services. The church is recognizing that people need the whole story. If you come to worship on Palm Sunday and then skip ahead to Easter you’ve missed the stuff with weight. You’ve missed some of the stuff that really matters. So you’ve likely missed the point.

            But, of course, we know it’s worse than that. There are a ton of people who not only miss Maundy Thursday and Good Friday; they also miss every other Sunday between Christmas and Easter. These folks not only miss the hard stuff of Holy Week; they also miss the reflection and penitence of Lent and the normal rhythm of Sunday worship. But, at least these folks are here on Easter Sunday. There’s a whole other group who don’t even make that much effort. For them, even the ritual of Easter is passé. So, not only have they missed the build-up—the part that convicts us and the part that causes us to reflect—but they’ve also chosen that the meat itself doesn’t matter either.

            So, here I am, reflecting on what to say to everybody in their various places across that spectrum over the course of the next week, and I’m realizing that it cannot be done apart from the whole picture, because you cannot understand Palm Sunday unless you understand that the very same people waving palm branches one Sunday are the ones shouting “Crucify!” five days later. You can’t get that if you are only in the Easter crowd, and there’s a tendency among we-human-beings to just be part of the Easter crowd, to disappear when things are challenging, to stick to Palm Sunday and then to reappear for Easter. That’s what most people do.

            Don’t be most people.

Take up your cross (but you probably won't)

Mark 8:27-9:8

The disciples in Mark are very stupid. Have you ever noticed this? It’s as if Jesus goes out of his way to collect average dunderheads and entrust them as his confidants and as the future of the faith post-crucifixion. Not only were these guys fishermen and tax collectors and various tradesmen, meaning they weren’t the best Bible students, they weren’t high-class, and they weren’t gifted in the way we generally talk about giftedness, but they also show it by continually misunderstanding who Jesus was and what he was up to.

Peter isn’t necessarily the worst about this but he is the most vocal so he tends to come out looking pretty bad. Jesus openly tells the disciples about his death and his resurrection—and let’s remember, this is the Jesus whom the disciples have been following and who they’ve seen not just heal the sick but raise the dead—but still they cannot make the leap of faith necessary to believe that somebody who could raise other dead people could himself be raised. Or, I guess, they just don’t want to see Jesus that way.

See, the disciples are good people, maybe simple people but good people, and they just don’t want Jesus to suffer and die. Their fault is their compassion, which is interesting, because Jesus calls them to a different kind of compassion. For most of us this is the hardest lesson, because it goes like this: It’s not enough to wish that somebody does not suffer, as Christians we are ordered to suffer with them. “Take up your cross and follow,” Jesus says. That is the true root of compassion—“passio”, Latin for suffer, and “com”, Latin for with—“suffer with.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer took this passage as his guiding principle while imprisoned in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. He wrote, “When Jesus Christ calls a disciple he bids him come and die.” That’s the end result of picking up your cross. We tend to minimize it—like our children are our cross to bear, or our work is our cross to bear, or our terrible football team is our cross to bear—but that’s not enough. It’s the things that kill you that are your true crosses, and sometimes that might be your children—we’re getting kind of close there—but it’s even darker than that. It’s the things that seem to have no redeeming value whatsoever. “Take up your cross and follow” is the hardest commandment, and yet the most central to the life of being a disciple; the life to which all of us are called.

Little resurrection versus big resurrection

Mark 5:21-43
 

Today’s reading is about little resurrection anticipating a big resurrection to come.

Today’s story from the Gospel of Mark is about Jesus on his way to heal a little girl, daughter of one of the synagogue leader. So, unlike most other times in the Gospel, Jesus is setting out here to help one of the people in power. Along the way he is confronted with a crowd that slows him down. Everybody, it seems, wants his power, even if they are in less dire need than this girl on death’s door. You can imagine the girl’s father’s desperation that these people get out of Jesus’ way.

Jesus ends up healing a woman who touches his cloak, unintentionally it seems. He stops to have a brief chat there about faith. Again, you can imagine the father’s consternation. Well, I can. If my daughter were dying I would be pushing all these lowly people out of the way. I mean, Jesus can heal them later! If the girl dies, she’s dead.

So, it is that the father finds out from an adviser that his daughter has died while Jesus is hung up with the crowds on the road. “Why bother the teacher any further?” asks the adviser. See, this is one of those great misconceptions that people have about Jesus up and down the stories we find in the Gospels. They imagine him a teacher—a rabbi. Then, when he heals, they imagine him a physician. What they don’t have is the imagination to believe that, perhaps, maybe, he is something greater. Perhaps, maybe, he is the Messiah. Perhaps, maybe, he is even the son of God.

None of that enters the grieving father’s mind, of course, because his daughter is now dead. Perhaps it was the crowds holding Jesus up or perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered. Either way, the scene is now set for Jesus to blow everyone’s expectations for him out of the water—again.

The strange (backwards) blessing of faith

Psalm 128

I want to talk with you today for, oh, about fifteen minutes, on what it means to be blessed, because, well, that’s what Psalm 128 is about.

“Happy is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways// You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall go well with you” (Ps 128:1-2). OK, good start. Fear the Lord and we will be happy.

“Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.” Even better, follow the laws and you’ll have a fruitful wife and children six feet tall at the least. And so it continues with the blessing of children and, in turn, security, because that’s what children were for life in that ancient world (and perhaps it isn’t so different today). Walk in the way of the Lord and you will have these things.

OK, that’s a good starting point. But scripture doesn’t end with the Psalms. In fact, the Bible actually offers us two competing visions of blessedness. One is this idea found throughout the Old Testament that good things come to those who are faithful—children, long life, a beautiful spouse, the star on the basketball team; those kinds of things. Bad things, therefore, come to those who are unfaithful—defeat, death, eternal damnation. Even the counterpoint to this in the Old Testament—the book of Job—which goes out of its way to show how ridiculous it is to blame sin for bad things happening, ends the story by restoring to Job all the things he lost, as if a new and better wife and kids makes up for the loss of his first. This is how the Old Testament deals with blessing and it is limited.

Not a transaction but a promise

Scripture: Matthew 27:1-61

“He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, ‘I am God’s Son’” (vs. 42-43).

            God doesn’t want to deliver his only son from death. Of all the crazy, counter-intuitive things that we believe as Christians this has to be near the top. We say “God is good all the time” and then we talk about a God who does not act to save his son from death when he has the ability and even the reason to do so. This is not Abraham on Mt. Moriah raising his knife over the bound Isaac; this time God does not intervene. This is an actual sacrifice; not a test; and our theological justifications for it overshadow the true terror of it. Did Christ have to die? Yes, sure, we can say that from the comfort of our place in history, but in the moment could any of us honestly believe it?

            But this idea of God, the Father, looking down upon his son, dying on the cross, is one we must forever rid from our conscience, because it’s nowhere near that simple. As Christians we believe something stranger; we believe that God himself came down in human form, 100% human and 100% divine, and it is God that was raised up on that cross as surely as it was Jesus Christ in the flesh. That’s strange, but it also frees us from asking absurd questions of this story. It means that this wasn’t divine child abuse, but instead it was God’s own self-sacrifice in his divinity and his humanity. And when Jesus cries out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he reminds us just how deeply human he has become.

            For the last couple millennia, people have debated passionately about why Jesus had to die. There are nearly as many atonement theories as there are Christians to think them up, many as plausible as the next. Many also raise some serious concerns. All of us need to step and back and understand that we’re not going to be able to wrap our heads around this one. We can’t make Jesus’s death into a transaction because it will always lose its absurdity, its imminence, and its importance when we do so. The act of the crucifixion is a singular moment for us to ponder, reminding us that some things are so sacred that we will only ever make them more banal by trying to get behind the curtain.

            Most importantly, we cheapen the act itself when we obsess with the mechanics of it. Suddenly, it’s not enough that God loved us so much that he died for us; now our salvation needs to be a mathematical equation with no remainder. It must be tidy and neat. It must be a transaction between God and the devil, or between God and us. But Good Friday isn’t tidy; it’s not neat. And it’s a humungous reminder that God works with the big picture. Yes, God can intervene; yes, miracles are real and wonderful and mysterious and we should be open to them, but, more than that, we have a God who is concerned with the cosmos, and if God is willing to enter into human form and die on a cross, then we had better understand that there is nothing so terrible that we go through where God hasn’t been, and, conversely, there are no guarantees that we won’t walk that path to Golgotha in our own way, at our own time.

            The authorities were looking for a reason, wanting a proof, and jeering Jesus when he fails to provide one for them to their expectations. Why wouldn’t he? Immediately we jump to atonement theories, about God needing to pay our debt, etc, etc. But all of that obscures the immanence of it: God died on the cross because God is a God of the big picture, and because suffering and sin and death came into the world with Adam and Eve we now are in need of a bigger resolution than mere healing, bigger even than bringing somebody back from the dead. Jesus raised Lazarus, but Lazarus died again eventually. We need something else; something that defeats death.

            Today is Good Friday, because today the last enemy is defeated; today death has lost its sting. That’s what the chief priests failed to see: the big picture. So do we. All the time. We’re short-term gain people. But we have a God who is wider, bigger, and more willing to suffer than we are. Thanks be to God for that, because it gives all of our suffering meaning. It doesn’t mean we won’t; it doesn’t mean things will work out in the end—at least not if by “in the end” we mean that our lives will be healthy, wealthy, and long. No, we will die. We might even die young. The small picture of our lives is variable, tenuous, and fragile. But God on the cross promises something else: Salvation, which is always wide, always seeking out the lost, encompassing more than we would expect, bigger and better than we can imagine.

Life-or-death faith (or why Christianity is against comfort)

Scripture: Matthew 21:1-17

“That’s interesting.”

You know what that means. To the unsuspecting outsider it sounds like we’re curious about something, like we might even be intrigued, but we know better. To the Scandinavian, interesting is concerning, flavorful is sinful, and different is wrong. So we furrow our brows and say, “That’s interesting.” It’s cultural, it’s our heritage; we’re salt of the earth Scandinavians—we’re an ethnic church, and we like it that way.

Many of these are really positive traits. I tend to like people who are humble, who don’t brag about their achievements and just go about their business whether the world notices or not. I think that’s good. But Jesus’ Palm Sunday example is challenging for us because it shows a brazen disregard for convention. It is most definitely different and interesting, which puts us in a tough spot. Jesus was the Son of God. He took liberties we may have trouble observing, but the life that he lived is one we must observe and consider. Are we brazen enough? Is this faith we have life-and-death enough? Because it sure was for Jesus.

            Life-or-death. That’s really the question of Holy Week: Is our faith a life-or-death thing? And, honestly, I think the answer we usually give is “no.” Not for most of us; not most of the time. It’s just a personal thing. It makes us feel better and maybe it gives our families a moral center. That’s American religion in a nutshell.

            Jesus hated this kind of religion. Hated it. He threw moneychangers out of the temple, because they had made religion a thing to be consumed. Religion had become a token for comfort, and comfort—they felt—must be appropriately priced. But just as bad as the moneychangers were the holy rollers who complained about the kind of crowd that followed him. They, too, had grown to love the comfort of a tidy religion, even though, as Jesus harshly reminds them: it is “out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies” that God has prepared praise. Jesus tells us straightaway that faith is less a commodity and much messier than we would like. Praise is not something we control. Worship is, by its very nature, out of control. It begs us to wonder what Jesus would say about our worship. Is it about praise, or is it about making us feel better about ourselves?

Every sermon I've ever given (at least this is what this one feels like)

The following is a not-so-perfect transcript of this sermon.
 
Scripture: Matthew 18:15-35

Forgiveness is an impossibly challenging thing to talk about, because, being the human beings that we are, we are always acting like human beings, and the forgiveness Jesus is talking about is God’s kind of forgiveness—a kind of forgiveness that we not only fail to understand; we also find it offensive and downright stupid.

This requires some context.

Today's reading starts out with advice about how to point out faults to another. It seems like practical advice at first glance: Give them three chances. One on your own, one with others, and lastly with the church as a whole. Churches have followed this model. It seems practical, but it's also a bit strange coming out of Jesus’ mouth. After all, this story comes immediately after the parable of the lost sheep. Jesus just went from seeking out of the one lost sheep to the possible detriment of the 99, and now he's talking about a kind of limited forgiveness. What's going on?

So Peter asks for clarification: How many times should human beings forgive? 7? 77? Or is it 70 x 7? 490? Infinite?

Apparently, it's not so clear. So, Jesus clarifies by means of a parable, which is typical Jesus, illuminating by means that seem to obscure, and this is the brunt of what I'm going to talk about today.

Blessed are the meek: Another reason God doesn't care who wins the Super Bowl

Matthew 5:1-20

Russell Wilson, the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks, created a minor stir this week—nothing as serious as deflated footballs, mind you, but a minor stir nonetheless—when he said that God prepared his team to win, that God wanted him to go back to the Super Bowl, and that this is “my season for Grace & Favor.” This is about as normal as sports clichés get, but, given our focus on the Beatitudes this week, I felt like maybe it’s the perfect intro into blessing.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted and the reviled. That’s a pretty long way from “Blessed are the Seahawks.”

For those of you who attended the event at Maria on Wednesday where Ben Hylden spoke about his experience I’m going to expand on some of the themes he talked about, but you should all know a little of the story. Ben was a high-schooler who was an athlete first, and a family member and Christian far after that, until a terrible accident and the repercussions of it pushed his life in an entirely different direction. One of the moments that hit me in his talk was when he decided he was done playing basketball, which was a decision he made not because he absolutely could not play anymore but because it just wasn’t worth the risk. He felt that God did not save him from his accident to play basketball, but for something much better.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with giving God credit for what we have or what we achieve, but there is a subtle line between doing that out of humility and doing it out of a different kind of arrogance—a Christian kind of arrogance that transforms the language of “I did this because I’m great” into “I did this because of my great faith”—and Russell Wilson’s comments probably strayed somewhere in that latter direction. So people rightly bristled. It’s a question of humility. To be humble requires more than giving God credit with your words, since that can be just as arrogant as claiming credit yourself. To imply that God blessed me because of my faith and because of my hard work is a humble brag par excellence.

Herod's death meet Jesus' new life

Matthew 2:12-23

This is really not appropriate Christmas scripture. I’m sorry. I don’t know what Matthew was thinking. I don’t know why he didn’t understand that Christmas is a time for happiness, a time to talk about the good things, to share memories, and, above all, to relax and be comfortable. Matthew shows that he is out of touch with the Christmas season by sharing this unsavory story of Herod killing the children of Judea, the children of his own kingdom. No. Matthew doesn’t get it. That’s not what Christmas is about.

It’s just unfortunate that Matthew needs to be so… so… real.

…

Then again, I suppose it is only a real world that needs to be saved. Matthew picks up the words of Jeremiah, referring even further back to Rachel in the book of Genesis, saying, “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” If Rachel is this model figure for the grief of incomprehensible loss, then it’s interesting to note that Rachel is not told to pick herself up by her bootstraps, to get over her loss, and to start living her best life now. She isn’t told it’s going to be alright, or is somebody does tell her that she certainly doesn’t believe it. She refused to be consoled. And Matthew seems to be suggesting, along with Jeremiah before him, that this is the appropriate reaction to senseless loss.

What kind of Christmas story is this?

Law, love, power, and death; the commandments pretty much have it all

Scripture: Exodus 20:1-17

A transcript of today's sermon
I’m going to do something crazy… I think I can do this out here… I don’t know [stepping outside the pulpit].

I’m going to do a recap of what we did on Confirmation on Wednesday. This is going to be a sermon, but it’s going to be a recap of a lot of what we talked about on Wednesday, so if I happen to drop dead in the middle of the sermon any of our ninth-graders here could finish it for me. So, I’m expecting really good sermon notes.

We talked about power on Wednesday—and we especially talked about power in terms of law and gospel—and today we’re reading about the Ten Commandments, which are fundamentally about the law. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about some of the same things we talked about with our ninth-graders. And they seemed to be able to wrap their heads around it a little bit, which was really kind of neat, so I hope that some of you can too.

When we talk about law and we talk about gospel we are really talking about two different kinds of power. The law is right-handed power. The gospel—Jesus dying on the cross—is left-handed power. 99% of our lives happen in the right-handed power world, so it’s actually really difficult for us to imagine any other kind of power. Right-handed power includes everything we do—studying for a test, playing sports, the work that we do. Anything that we do; anything that we are; anything that we work hard for—whether it’s a new job or a marriage, or whatever it is that you’re working at in your life—this is the right-handed kingdom. We live in that world 99—maybe 99.9—percent of our lives, and that’s what the Ten Commandments speak to.

The Ten Commandments are telling us how to live in that 99% of our lives. The insufficiency in the Ten Commandments is that they leave us there. They leave us in the right-handed kingdom, and they don’t themselves bring us across to the left-handed kingdom, which only happens when Jesus comes into the picture.

Downstream of the flood: Water, Death, and Resurrection

Scripture: Genesis 9:1-17

           This morning’s readings are bookends to the very familiar story of Noah’s ark and the great flood. They are a perfect new beginnings text for a September day when school has started, Sunday School and Confirmation are in short order, and we are all beginning to settle back into the familiar rhythm that the summer seems to take away. We all know the story: People were bad, God sent lots of rain (maybe this hits too close to home), the world floods, and then the water recedes. What’s left is just Noah and family, the creatures on the ark, and God’s promise to Noah, signified by the rainbow, that he would never again destroy the world—at least by means of a flood. This is a story about a promise, and it’s a more wide-reaching promise than we often consider. This is the only covenant God makes anywhere in the Bible that is with not only human beings but also with every living creature that lives and breathes and moves on this earth, above, and below it.

            Every time I read this story, especially with young people, there’s always that one kid who looks at you skeptically, because this is a story that elicits many, many questions. For goodness sake, when Noah gets off the ark the first thing he does is sacrifice a handful of birds. After 40 days on a boat, you can imagine what the birds were thinking, “Oh boy! We made it!” …

Then there’s the matter of the people who appear on the scene after the Noah story. Who are they and where did they come from?

            And then there’s the question that’s more on the subject I want to talk about today, which is the one you get from the smart kid who knows a bit about earth science, and asks: “Where did all the water come from?” This is about when I long for the glory days when pastors just told kids like these to shut up. The problem is that this is a great question, because if you understand nature a bit you know that water doesn’t just appear from space. We have evaporation and precipitation. Sometimes water is in the ground, or in the air, or in glaciers, but water doesn’t just appear. So, how do you flood the whole world?

Grace-filled insanity: Easter and the way of the cross

Scripture: John 20:1-18

             So, I have the thankless task of figuring out what to say on another Easter Sunday, and, like many who do this, it sometimes feels like the Holy Spirit just says, “Shut up and let the service speak for itself today.” And I probably should do just that, because I’m not sure I’ll really add much—sleep-deprived and hopelessly caffeinated as I am; like the kid who chases his ritalin with an energy drink. But, knowing the tradition as I do, I'm guessing there are some reading this who did not follow through Thursday and Friday of this week, and it strikes me that maybe my role is to tell you about where we’ve been, so you can fully appreciate where we are today.

            As such, I’m going to let you in on something crazy: Jesus died. On Friday. And not just operation table flat-lining but like bleeding out and embalmed and utterly stone-cold gone. So, that’s crazy.

And it was "good": A meditation for Good Friday

Scripture: John 19:31-42

            There is no more strangely paradoxical day in our Christian calendar than this Friday that we call “good.” Etymologists will tell you it’s good because it is a lasting vestige of the Old English; a word that once meant “holy.” So, this is “Holy Friday”—and I suppose that makes it more palatable. But I’m thankful that modern English (and the modern church) have held on to this antiquated name, because there is something decidedly good about it. While 99.9% of our lives are spent hiding from death, on this one day death is called “good.” On just this day we admit that maybe death isn’t the end of the world at all—maybe it’s precisely what this world needs.

            “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” says 1 Corinthians 15:26, which happens to have been picked up by J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series and is partly why I have it on the tip of my tongue all the time. Well, tonight is the celebration of the beginning of the end of death. It’s not done yet, but death is in its last phase; it’s just barely holding on. But there’s also a sour side to this Good Friday. If what came out of Jesus’ death was good, it was still us that put him to death; it was still human beings in our glorious imperfection. We can’t get away from that. And sure, the last enemy to be destroyed is death, but that also means that death is going to outlast other enemies: poverty, war, prejudice, disdain. It’s awfully nice to know that death is in its own death throes, but it’s less nice to know that it’s still going to outlast us.

The 31st Psalm and the cross

Scripture: Psalm 31

I’m going to break tack today and do something a bit unorthodox for holy week and preach not on the Gospel but on Psalm 31, and I’m going to do this for a couple of reasons. 1. Because the narrative lectionary is great and it gives us everything in order and helps the story make sense, but there is no Last Supper in the Gospel of John and I think Maundy Thursday works best when we stand on the precipice before the crucifixion rather than diving in straightaway, and 2. because I never get to preach on Psalms except at funerals and the Psalms deserve more attention than that.

            So here we are.

            As it turns out, this psalm does allow us to talk about the timely subject of the crucifixion, because some of Jesus’ last words come directly from Psalm 31, verse 5, “Into your hand I commit my spirit...” In fact, in ancient times quotations from a source were often meant to indicate that the entire source was read, so it is very possible that Jesus actually prayed not just one line but the entirety of Psalm 31 while hanging from the cross. Either way, we have this odd but beautiful contrast between a psalm written by one who has been rescued and Jesus, hanging on the cross, nearing death with no hope of rescue whatsoever.

Palm Sunday and the Way of Despair

Scripture: John 19:16-22

Disclaimer: This is a sermon for a particular situation, though I hope it speaks broader than this one case. Names have been removed.

          When we think of what the cross means to us I imagine there are many answers: it means salvation, it means hope, it means peace, it means love—all the things that we want so badly for our lives. What we don’t want to admit, but what is most true of all, is that the cross means despair. The way of the cross is the way of despair, because the way of the cross is death. And death is physical death but it is also emotional death and all the losses we experience in our lives: jobs, relationships, and dreams. Even in the church we tend to gloss over death in order to get to resurrection and it handicaps us when it smacks us in the face, leaving us unnerved, timid, and hoping to move on quickly to something more cheery. Meanwhile, those most affected by it are left to cope, knowing that death is not so easily satiated. The way of the cross is long and arduous, and it leads straight through despair.

            This has been a terrible week—a week that feels heavier than any physical death I’ve experienced here. It’s hard and painful, and it stirs up feelings of regret, remorse and despair. This week has been about death as much as any week full of funerals could be, and we simply don’t know what to do with death. Culturally, we treat death as a spectacle; we fear and revere it and it becomes the breeding ground of rumors and banal platitudes. Despair makes us so terribly uncomfortable, and so we create rumors, trying to craft a story we can control, often turning to conspiracies to create meaning that just isn’t there. We do this about international stories of missing planes, just as surely as we do it about local stories that we know little about. All of this is very human, but it is an affront to the cross. The way of the cross is despair because the way of the cross is brutally honest about loss; it looks the monster of death in the eyes and embraces its emptiness. It admits that death is terrible and senseless, resisting the urge to give meaning to tragedy. It’s easy to say “It will be OK,” but much harder to sit with someone, knowing it’s not.