The intersection of ourselves and our world

Acts 17:1-9

            Sometimes the most discouraging part of reading the Bible is how little we can relate. It becomes difficult to see ourselves in these amazing situations and characters and we find ourselves distanced by the language. There are “thees” and “thous” and “shalts,” not to mention all those names. It’s sort of like explaining how to say “Wayzata” to anybody from outside of Minnesota—it doesn’t seem to make any sense. Then, there are modern translations of the Bible that sound a little more colloquial but it still sometimes feels like a code—like nobody talks like this, really. Of course, there are also all the completely unrelatable moments. You know, it’s just hard to put yourself in the place of the centurion watching Jesus die or one of the people on the hill watching the bread and fish multiply or one of the disciples in the boat when Jesus comes walking across the sea. These moments are so exceptional we just can’t relate.

            And yet, sometimes we can relate exactly. In Acts 17 when Paul and Silas visited a couple of villages in the Greek region of Thessalonica they went there to tell people about Jesus. They were in all likelihood the first to share this good news that Jesus had died and was risen to this part of the world. Their results in sharing this good news are, I think, pretty much what we would expect. Some of them were persuaded and some were not. People who were oppressed, generally, had their coming-to-Jesus moment. The rulers, the leaders of the synagogue and others, were not as enthused. They saw this as a political movement that needed to be stomped out.

            And you know what? They were right. It was a political movement. A very strange political movement. A political movement that has been used and abused by flawed human beings ever since Jesus rose from the dead. The synagogue leaders got it. They knew that whoever claimed to be a Jesus-follower was claiming a dangerous kind of politics based on self-sacrificial love and grief and suffering; they also understood that such beliefs could be misused and championed to claim authority over them. Two thousand years of history has given us many examples of Christians killing in the name of God, lording their beliefs over the Jews, even blaming them for Jesus’ death.

            This is foolishness. But being a true Christ-follower is a different kind of foolishness. The reason I can relate to Paul and Silas is because some people followed and some people resisted, and I experience this every day. It gets even messier still because some of those that follow are in it for themselves, while some of them are in it because they actually believe in Jesus with all the challenges and struggles that entails. And even that’s probably too simple because many of those who do not follow remain pondering in their hearts what all of this means; they just aren’t in a place to take a leap of faith. I truly believe that we are all created with a yearning for God inside of us; that God doesn’t give some the gift of faith and others the gift of skepticism or anything like that. Instead, we all are born to be Jesus-followers and on some level we all want God to fill that hole inside of us, but we are complicated people faced with immense challenges to our faith. To assume that I get it and you don’t, or you get it and somebody else doesn’t, is the wrong way to look at faith. I don’t blame the person who is not persuaded by Paul or Silas or you or me, and I don’t blame the one doing the persuading, as if perhaps they could have done a better job of it somehow. Rather, I pray for each to come to faith in their own time.

Outside In: Why the Holy Spirit uses the voices of the voiceless

Acts 3:1-10

            A lot has happened between last week and this one in the book of Acts. Last week, in Acts 1, the disciples were watching Jesus ascend into heaven and acting dumbfounded that he didn’t give them the military victory they were after. This is a far cry from this week, in Acts 3, as we find Peter and John doing their absolute best Jesus impersonation, healing in the same way that Jesus healed, speaking in the same way Jesus spoke; simply, being pretty good followers of Jesus. Somehow, in the span of two chapters the disciples figured it out. Something clicked. And that something is the Holy Spirit.

            I’m going to briefly touch on Acts chapter 2, which we did not read today or last week because it is a traditional reading on the day of Pentecost at the end of the Easter season and we will read it then, but it is critical to understanding what made the disciples change so here’s a little context. In Acts 2 the Holy Spirit descends, people start speaking in tongues, they hear one another each in their own language, and the disciples emerge as different creatures. The Holy Spirit wrecks their old lives and makes them into the Jesus-followers they always should have been when he was alive. This is very good news for all of us, because, frankly, we don’t get to see Jesus face-to-face today, but we have the very same Holy Spirit messing with us that they did on that first Pentecost. And it can change us like it did them.

            So when Peter and John come across a man crippled by the gate, begging for a handout, they do the Jesus-thing: They heal him. They don’t give him food or money; they give him health—something he didn’t even ask for. Health is always a first sign of salvation. Every time. But they also give him more than that. This man, who was the least of those on the outside of the temple, becomes the one who witnesses to God inside the temple. The outside has come in. This is what Jesus was always doing.

            The man who was on the outside because of some imagined unworthiness becomes worthy because of what the Holy Spirit does through ordinary people. This is a story of how God makes the outside in. So, who are our outsiders? Who are we keeping at arm’s length? Because those are not just the people we are called to be nice to, or to feed, or to clothe; we’re not even called just to welcome them—yes, all that, but much more. Those are the people who will preach to us. They will tell us about God far more surely and more persuasively than the people on the inside. They are the ones whom the Holy Spirit will use, because they know what it feels like to be treated as unworthy.

So, who feels unworthy here?

Who's the greatest?

Luke 9:30-37

Today’s reading from Luke marks a slight improvement in the disciples’ attitude from last Sunday. This time, on hearing Jesus talk about his death and resurrection, they still don’t understand him but rather than rebuking him openly they switch to the silent treatment. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure if that’s an improvement or not. And, just to be sure that we get that the disciples aren’t very good at this whole disciple-ing thing, and to make matters much worse, they start to act like children arguing about who is the greatest as they walk toward Capernaum.

            I think this is a man thing. I can say this, I think, because I am one. I’ve known a lot of one-uppers, most of them men, and when I was younger I used to be one a lot more than I am now. There’s something about the transition to adulthood, finding our place in the world, that makes men (not only men, but mostly men) enter into these squabbles over and over again about truly stupid things.

            I knew a one-upper who was so bad in college that we used to make up outrageous, impossible things about ourselves or about people we knew or whatever and throw them out to see how he could possibly one-up that. It became a running gag that I’m not sure he was ever aware of. That was exceptional but not really that extraordinary. I’ve worked with enough high school youth to know that claiming superiority over one another is just the way they interact. 

            But I think we’d expect better of the disciples, which is probably unfair, because in spite of how they are portrayed in film and art these guys were actually 18, 19, 20, maybe 23, 24 years old. I’m not old enough to call people that age “kids” (ask me in twenty, thirty years) but they were young men. They were, in short, at precisely that age where competition forms the basis for their relationships. They didn’t bond over coffee at the corner store; they bonded over wrestling with each other or kicking each other’s butts at ping pong—that kind of thing.

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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.

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.

The five verbs of the Great Commission

Matthew 28:16-20

            After the resurrection of Jesus, Matthew’s Gospel is wonderful in its simplicity. You may be familiar with different post-resurrection stories: John has a bit about Jesus meeting the disciples by the lakeshore, Luke has the walk to Emmaus, Mark ends things dramatically with a cliffhanger, but Matthew’s ending is not as dramatic as Mark’s or with as much narrative as Luke or John. In Matthew, there is only a single scene after the resurrection—just a few verses—where the disciples meet Jesus on a mountain top and he gives them a simple command. “Go, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”

            Sometimes we make our life of faith way too complicated. The Great Commission is simple, elegant, challenging, and engaging for people of every generation. We are called to go out. This means we are not to be a church in one place and hope people stumble upon us. And we are called to go out to all nations, not some people who look like us, and not just the kind of people we approve of. Then we are called to make disciples of them. Then we baptize, teach, and remember God’s promise to us. That’s it. That’s all we do. God does the rest.

            Matthew offers no special programs, no evangelism tricks, and nothing in particular about how we are to be church apart from these commands, let alone the specifics of how divine things work. We are simply called to tell others about Jesus, to make them into disciples, to baptize, and to help them understand what all of that means: to help all of us to become followers of Christ.

            Nowadays we have flipped the Great Commission upside down and we do it more or less backwards. We don’t go, make disciples, baptize, teach, and remember. Instead, we remember first. We look back on what was, putting a premium on understanding where we come from and often reaching back into that past for an imagined golden age when everything was perfect. Then we teach. We share our history. We study the Bible. We read the catechism. Then we baptize. Sure, we often do baptism before these things but we tend to believe that baptism is a step on the road to discipleship and not the other way around. Only after those things do we focus on making disciples; once we have figured out what it means to be faithful; once we’ve checked the boxes required for membership. Then, finally, we go… if we have time. But most of our energy is spent on the other tasks at hand. We only go if we have the energy to do so. Most of the time we expect others to come to us.

True humility vs Minnesota nice

Scripture: Philippians 2:1-13

             Sometimes I long for the good old Puritan days when I could read scripture like this, do my fire and brimstone sermon about your selfish ambition and conceit, and then return to my seat and sing “Amazing Grace.” That would be so easy. Lift up Paul saying “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” and let that sit in your stomach and see how well you do with it. The only problem with the straightforward, law-heavy approach to this scripture is that Paul ends this rambling exhortation to good behavior by saying “it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure,” which is kind of frustrating, because it means that, in spite of all the advice Paul is giving you, the only good you will ever do is not because you’ll be able to observe the law, but because God sees fit to actually do good with you. So, you’re all sinners that will never measure up without the grace of God—yay! (I love my job)

But this is what humility is. In a world of self-sufficiency it's so backwards that we don’t quite know what to do with it. True humility—the kind that takes no credit and honestly expects nothing in return—is beyond us most of the time, even if it’s the kind of thing we hope for our children. It goes beyond the don’ts: Don’t brag. Don’t talk only about yourself. Don’t rub it in when you win. Don’t blame others when you lose. The problem for Scandinavian Lutherans is that we tend to think that since we follow the don’ts we have this one covered. We don’t brag or rub it in; we don’t often talk ourselves up or others down. Sure, we might occasional forget all this at sporting events, but for the most part we’ve got Minnesota nice covered… and Minnesota nice must pretty much be close to humble, right?

            Actually, I’m thinking no.

The Thomas in all of us: Searching for faith in a proof-driven world

Scripture: John 20:19-31

           There may be no character in scripture who elicits such polar reactions as Thomas. Maligned as the doubter by many and defended as the truest disciple by others, he is a walking paradox. While most of the disciples are fairly anonymous—seriously, tell me a story about Bartholomew—Thomas is known for his stunning acts of faith but, more often, for this critical moment in John’s Gospel where his belief is dependent on proof.

            The conflicting opinions on Thomas are summed up nicely in an exchange from the 2006 movie, The Da Vinci Code. If you’ve never seen The Da Vinci Code, well, first of all, just don’t; it’s a conspiracy theory laden story that takes about ten steps too far into fiction while pretending to be actually plausible. But putting that aside, the typical exchange between characters in The Da Vinci Code goes something like this: Character A brings up a biblical character, a piece of art or artifact, or an historical event, then Character B spouts some stereotype about that character/artifact/event, allowing Character A to chastise Character B and assert that their simple understanding is really an elaborate hoax perpetuated by groups C, D, and E for purpose F in order to accomplish G, given criteria H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, and P. At which time, Character B blindly accepts Character A’s analysis as flawless and the story moves forward.

            The fact that The Da Vinci Code topped the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks says some sad things about humanity, but that’s maybe another issue (and, if you’re looking for a little hope for humanity, the one book that outsold it in 2003 was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix).

            More on point, in one of these exchanges in The Da Vinci Code the two characters are talking about Thomas. Naturally, Character B wastes no time jumping to the stereotype, saying, “Oh, you mean the doubter,” and, predictably, Character A becomes agitated that Character B does not know Thomas’ whole story, at which point I have a brief moment of hope that perhaps we will learn something useful from The Da Vinci Code. But—alas—it is not to be, because instead of talking about the interesting Thomas who shows signs of faith earlier in John’s Gospel, suggesting that there is more going on in this story than simple doubt, Character A instead goes off on a typical wild tangent about the church’s cover up of the Gospel of Thomas, which in his estimation was Thomas’ true legacy. I don’t remember what happens next, because I think every time I have watched this scene I have turned the channel in disgust.

Walking on water: Thoughts on Peter and discipleship

           This year at Grace we’re reading though the Gospel of John, and the story of Peter's denial, which we read the Sunday before last, jumped out at me on the topic of discipleship, because Peter is pretty much our classic example of a disciple and yet he is probably most famous for two episodes: 1. trying to walk on water and sinking, and 2. denying Jesus three times. Neither of those things sounds all that disciple-y, but I kind of like that. I mean, if Peter were some character completely above reproach none of us could really relate to him. The temptation would be to hero-worship this guy, but instead the Peter we get is relatable and far from perfect—a really interesting case study in what it means to be a disciple.

            So, this morning I’m going to talk about the two Peter episodes and what that can teach us about being disciples ourselves. The first is Jesus walking on water. Probably you have some notion of how this story goes. Jesus walks on water out to the boat where the disciples are fishing, Peter sees him coming, leaps out of the boat—well, first he puts clothes on because he was naked, which seems backwards, but whatever—and then he attempts to walk out to Jesus. The crazy thing is that he’s doing fine at first. This is a better result than I would have expected, especially for a guy whose name means “Rock.” That rock was walking on water—at least for a couple steps.

We are flawed. So what? Jesus will use us anyway

Scripture: John 18:12-27

            There’s this great moment in today’s lesson where Jesus, in response to the high priest, says “I have spoken openly to the world [...] Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard what I said to them; they know what I said.” And the scene cuts to Simon Peter, warming himself by the fire, approached by a slave who asks about his relation to Jesus, and Peter, for the third time, denies it. Jesus tells the high priest to ask those who knew him, and at the very same moment Peter, the star pupil, is basked just that and he denies the whole thing.

            Nobody would have expected this from Peter. This is the guy who tried to emulate everything about Jesus—walking on water, washing his feet—and the very same guy who promised never to deny Jesus—even in the face of death. This is the man on whom Jesus has promised to build his church. It’s astonishing that St. Peter, the namesake of the basilica in Rome, backed down not to a high priest, or a temple leader, or a Roman authority, but to a common slave.

            The fact is that Peter was scared. It’s not an excuse; it just is. The disciples, for all their proximity to Jesus, never really grasped this idea that he was going toward his death. Ironically, this is precisely the reason Jesus needed to die. If Peter could have told the slave girl all he knew to be true; if Judas could have accepted Jesus’ strange use of the common purse; if the temple leaders could have seen Jesus as the Messiah; if you and I could just manage perfection, then the cross need not have happened. Of course, like your NCAA bracket, there are always could-a-should-a’s, but you can’t change the past. If you could, you’d all be billionaires.