God of the dawn break

A varying assortment of thoughts for today's sermon. When I preach without a manuscript this is sometimes the format in which I blog the sermon. While the thoughts are not all connected it hopefully gives some sense of where the Holy Spirit might be speaking through today's scripture.

Luke 1: 5-13, 57-80

*The light shines in the darkness… and the darkness has not overcome it.

*I’m actually going to start by parsing a Greek word that’s not even in our reading today. (Nothing like talking Greek to make everybody sit up straight and listen to the sermon). It’s that word we know as “overcome” which is the Greek word “katalambano,” which is most often translated “catch” but might also be translated “comprehend.” The light shines in the darkness… and the darkness does not comprehend it. I like all these translations, actually, side by side. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it, will not catch it, and cannot comprehend it in all its mystery.

*Even though this scripture is from John 1:5 it has the same themes as our reading from Luke 1. Light and darkness interplay with one another. These are the darkest days of the year. Long days… lots of seasonal affective disorder, depression, anxiety. Lots of drinking. Lots of generally sad things. This is a season of the highest highs and lowest lows.

*Naturally, Jesus comes into the world in the darkest of days. Of course some history-theology geeks—I bet you didn’t know there were such people; they’re the ones in the library with the plaid coats with a clerical underneath—anyway, they’ll tell you that Jesus probably wasn’t actually born in the winter because of the shepherds tending their flocks in that particular way or some nonsense. Whatever. It doesn’t matter what time of the year Jesus was actually born; the point of celebrating Christmas this time of year is to accentuate the darkest darkness (and also to remind ourselves how northern hemisphere-centric we are). In Australia they should probably celebrate Christmas in place of the 4^th of July, which—come to think of it—they don’t celebrate anyway.

*“The night is always darkest just before the dawn.” There’s so much wisdom in that proverb that it’s been quoted in The Alchemist, The Dark Knight, and by theologians for ages. Darkness seems its most complete right about now. Darkness and sin go hand in hand. When we think about sin we tend to think again about darkness… about things done in secret, about parts of ourselves that are hidden away. These are parts of us that we fear coming to light.

*John is coming to prophesy to something world-changing. “To give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of sins.” Sins are actually how we come to know about God, or rather the forgiveness of those sins testifies to something we know in our hearts: that we are not the perfect people we could be, and the only way to be perfect is to not die, and the only way to not die is to have some kind of salvation, and the only salvation that lasts is eternal, and the only one offering such a promise is one who takes on sin in death for us. There is no other way. There are no shortcuts.

*The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not comprehend it, because we believe that this little baby boy was born to die. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is too busy obsessing over our inward thoughts and all our hang-ups. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is concerned with judging us for what we have done wrong. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness measures us by how we stack up to being “good” people. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is too busy with the law. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is blind to the Christ-child. And the darkness is blind to a baby because it is too small, too insignificant, and too out-of-the-way to matter.

*Jesus was born insignificant, just like the rest of us. We dress him up, surround him with prophesies and wise men bringing gifts, even as we talk about the manger and no room for Mary and Joseph at the inn, but the real story is darker. The wise men were supposed to report back to King Herod. The gifts were burial spices; seen another way this looks sinister. King Herod meant to kill the baby before any of this got underway. The night is darkest just before the dawn. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot even see it.

*Zechariah’s song, sung for John, his son, who came to testify to Jesus, concludes with this line:

“By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” Peace, I bring you. Peace and light. Jesus came and, like the angels with the shepherds, he might as well begin his life with the words, “Fear not.” Do not be afraid. Yes, you have been living in darkness, but it is that darkness that will testify to me, because now you know why you need me, now you comprehend the light that shines in the darkness.

*Our problem is a lack of awareness that that is where we stand. Our problem is that too many people live in darkness and pretend it is the light. But Zechariah’s song lays the framework for what it means to be people of the dawn-break. It means forgiveness; that we acknowledge the darkness is real, but something more powerful is coming. Not power of our hands, not strength or might, but a baby who receives gifts from wise men of burial spices, anointed for death even from birth.

*The darkness does not comprehend the light because the darkness assumes that death wins. Jesus, becoming love incarnate for the world, comes to bring us a promise that darkness is just fleeting. Dawn breaks. Amen.

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.

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.

On dust and bodily living

Scripture: Matthew 18:1-9

We are people who live in bodies, who move in bodies and experience life through senses that are embodied, and Ash Wednesday is a day to talk about embodied-ness in all its inadequacy. It’s a day to say “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” and to mean it—not only as a potentially depressing reminder of our mortality but also as the foretaste to a promise. You are dust, but dust chosen by God.

            When we talk about bodies in the church it tends to make people uncomfortable, because we all have bodily hang-ups. We can all pretend we have the perfect personality (which we don’t) or the perfect sense of humor (which we don’t), and we can try to fake having the perfect family (which is fooling nobody), but our bodies? We can’t even fool ourselves into thinking those are all that great. Even those among us who might feel they look pretty good, or who train their body to be an athlete, even they need only wait a year or two, a decade or two, and it will start to fall apart. Time makes all of our bodies out for what they really are. You are dust, and to dust you will return. It’s a promise; even if it’s not a very good one.

            So, on the one hand we’re uncomfortable with our bodies because they aren’t as great as we could imagine them being, whether you want to be more attractive or whether you’re just unhealthy and only want to be healthy again. And, on the other hand, we are also uncomfortable with our bodies because we have a tremendous capacity toward bodily guilt. When the typical person thinks about sin they don’t think about it as an orientation away from God. Most people think of sin as a bodily thing; that they have bodily urges that they should act on or not act on, that they have feelings that they can’t control. Even if most of the language of sin that we use in church is about sin in its universal sense, the way we feel sinful is usually in the core of our bodies—again, one might say, in our “embodied-ness.”

John the Baptist makes Lutherans nervous

Matthew 3:1-17

Whenever John the Baptist and Jesus share the stage in the Gospels it demands our attention because nobody is as brash and straightforward as John, and nobody matters as much as John when it comes to setting the record straight about who Jesus is. But John is also—how shall I put this?—not very nice, and, being the Minnesota-nice people that we are, we aren’t very sure what to do with a person like that.

For one thing, John didn’t understand hospitality. If you’re likely to lash out and call people a “brood of vipers” then perhaps you shouldn’t be a church greeter; instead you might fit in better volunteering at Confirmation. And it’s worth noting that this is what John says to the ones who actually showed up. You can imagine what he thought of those who didn’t even bother. Then he hits the Pharisees and the Sadducees where it really hurts, questioning the importance of their lineage. This is the kind of thing that really doesn’t play well in small towns, which is why I’m not so naïve as to tell you that your history doesn’t give you any special standing; I’m just going to reread verse 9, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, "We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham,” and I’m just going to leave that there to do with what you might.

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.

Father, forgive us

In this life we all make the choices that seem prudent to us in our daily lives. Each of us is the product of innumerable decisions and influences, some forced upon us and others discovered for ourselves over the long and wavering course of our lives. We are all travelers in a long, trail-less wilderness, carving for ourselves a path based on instincts and hunches and following the ways laid before us by others. That is our life, and few, if any of us, know where we are heading or have any idea what we are doing.

            That is the truth wrapped up in Jesus’ words as they raised him on the cross at Golgotha. “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” If those were only words for a people long ago and completely unaware of the Savior of the world living in their midst it would be one thing, but a part of us knows better than that. They are timeless words whose edge cuts through the annals of history to this day. Father, forgive us, because we don’t know what we are doing. In the midst of a world debating complex issues of life and death, love and hate, freedom and temperance: Father, forgive us for we don’t know what we are doing. When faced with criticism; when we are no longer open to debate; when our faith is tired and waning, Father, forgive us.

The Prodigal Son and God's Economics

Text: Luke 15:1-32

            Inside of us we all have an idea of what is fair. Now, we may not always listen to that inner referee, and we all may have somewhat different conceptions of fairness, but most of us know what fair looks and smells like. And this time of the year it seems like every story from the Gospels sets off our unfair detectors. Jesus does not seem to have the same innate sense of fairness that we do, which is strange when you think about it. What can we say when the Savior of the world doesn’t think like we do? We like to craft gods into our own image, but in Jesus we have a Savior who does not think or act like us at all. It’s a little strange.

            Part of our problem is that we live life as if it is one big budget sheet. Those of you who handle money are going to know exactly what I’m talking about, but even if you can’t make or follow a budget if your life depended on it you actually live like this too most of the time. When it comes down to it we make most choices in life by assessing cost versus benefit. Why do we choose to exercise rather than sit on the couch? Because the immediate discomfort of exercise will make us fitter and feel better in the long-term. Why do we choose to go bowling on a weekend? Because the cost of taking the family bowling is worth the enjoyment. Why do we choose not to steal somebody’s wallet or drive off with one of those vehicles that are running outside the Farmer’s Store? Because the benefit of the wallet or the car is not worth the potential cost of getting caught and harming our neighbors. Why do we go to church in the morning? Well, maybe we won’t get into that.

Jonah: Why Bad Preaching is Sometimes Good Preaching

Text: Jonah, chapters 3 and 4

            The good news for me today is that Jonah preached the worst sermon in the Bible and he just so happened to have more success than all the Old Testament prophets put together, so if today’s sermon is really lousy it may not matter.

            I still remember the worst sermon I ever heard. It was so bad that I could not shake it from my mind a day later or a week later or even today—years later. This wasn’t just your typical, unremarkable sermon or a sermon that said things with which I disagree. I’ve heard plenty of those sermons, and even though I find myself cringing and sometimes resisting the urge to bang my head with a Bible I can at least chock those up to differences in theology; not just bad preaching. However, this particular bad sermon was a problem because the pastor, who was a guest preacher at the church where Kate and I were worshiping, made the sermon into a performance—not about God, but about—well, there’s no other way to put this—it was all about him. He played some songs he wrote, while singing along with the piano. He talked a lot about his life. The only mentions of God were segues between his experiences. He made the sermon all about himself. It was horrible to sit through.

            The funny thing about that sermon, however, is that it stuck. In fact, after that Sunday morning an idea started to germinate in the back of my mind, and it was this: maybe some of the best preaching is actually, strangely, really bad preaching. Maybe even when the pastor tries to make it about him and her self God will work through that person to say something that gets the cogs turning. Then, I realized, we have the perfect model for this in scripture: Jonah! Who better to remind us that neither a person’s motives nor their preaching acumen matters? God is going to work through the sad, sorry preacher no matter how much they refuse to listen.

            This is good news, because there is plenty of bad preaching out there. There is plenty of preaching about the news or about the pastor him or her self. There is preaching completely out of touch with your lives, completely out of touch with the lives of young people, or old people, completely out of touch with the poor… or the rich; preaching unwilling to focus on the Gospel and unable to convey the message of salvation by grace through faith; preaching that forgets about Jesus, preaching that turns political; preaching that tries to use God’s word for its own ends.

            And yet, God works through that. That is the fascinating thing. There are those who have beliefs I find simply wrong that nonetheless experience the fullness of God’s word and who, through that word, come to know the God who created them, died for them and will raise them when time comes to an end. There are plenty of Christians who believe all sorts of things in large part because of their pastors who tell them all sorts of things—things that find their justification in some odd verse here or there in scripture but seem completely out of touch with the God we experience in communion and the forgiveness of sins—but you know what? In spite of that, these people are hearing and learning about the God behind it all—behind all the nonsense and the pastors’ egos.

            Jonah was a horrible pastor.

            He wanted nothing to do with those Assyrians who, he believed, deserved to die because of their heathen ways and warring against God’s chosen people. To Jonah, Nineveh represented everything that was wrong in the world—all the undesirable peoples that were acting contrary to God’s word; people, who God tells us, “did not know their right hand from their left.”

            Into this mix walks Jonah, still dripping in whale vomit, and he preaches a momentous five word sermon that is long on judgment and without any promise: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” he preaches. It might be the worst sermon in history. He completely misses the important part; the part where he tells them on whose authority this message comes—the prophetic introduction that always begins these kinds of sermons where the prophet says, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel” or something along those lines. Jonah makes it sound as if the message is just his idea. You have forty days to get your affairs in order then you will be smitten. Sorry, chaps.

            The funny thing—well, there are so many funny things about Jonah, but one of the things that is funny about this story—is that the people of Nineveh listen to this horrible sermon and they believe it immediately. The king even goes to the extravagantly unnecessary step of putting not just his people in sackclothes of repentance but doing the same thing to their animals as well. I can imagine walking around the giant city of Nineveh with its one hundred and twenty thousand people wearing potato bags with goats and sheep and chickens looking just the same. Now, that would be a sight. Oddly, they do this even without a promise that this will appease God. Jonah didn’t even tell them to repent. Instead, the king seems to wonder aloud, “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind.” It’s like he figures it can’t hurt, so they might as well try.

            So, to recap: Jonah preaches a horrible sermon, the people repent—and how!—and God changes his mind; the city of Nineveh is saved, which is where we find Jonah by the final chapter of the story. It is here we discover that Jonah is not just a bad preacher but that he is also a vindictive person. He doesn’t care that the people repented. He wants bloodshed, he wants vengeance, he wants those outsiders—those enemies of Israel—shown the true force of God’s wrath. He wants fire to fall from heaven, like with Sodom and Gomorrah. He does not understand that salvation requires forgiveness for our misdeeds because he cannot see past the other-ness of the Ninevites. They are bad; he is good. A just God should punish them. Jonah, unlike Nineveh, cannot change his mind.

            A comic strip appeared on my Facebook feed two weeks ago from a group called Radio Free Babylon. They put out these daily comics called “Coffee With Jesus”—I don’t often do advertisement but check them out if you’re on Facebook and you won’t be disappointed. Anyway, this comic strip always has somebody talking with Jesus over coffee, and on the 29^th of October the strip looked like this: 

Check out RFB on Facebook here.

            Isn’t that just it? We make it complicated. We make it about the evil of others. We sit, like Jonah on the hill, waiting for our enemies to be destroyed. Our inner sense of justice yearns for that kind of vengeance, because—honestly—they deserve it. They deserve death. I can hardly say this without thinking of that scene from Lord of the Rings where Frodo tells Gandalf that Bilbo should have killed Gollum—OK, I just completely lost all of you who don’t know Lord of the Rings so feel free to plan your grocery lists in the next 20 seconds of the sermon. But anyway, Gandalf responds to Frodo with one of those epic J.R.R Tolkien philosophical segues, saying, “Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo?”

            Can you give it to them, Jonah? Can we?

We need to get off our ethical high hills. We need to stop preaching bad sermons, because even when we preach the opposite God will work through our inadequacy. We need to applaud Nineveh because repentance takes admitting that there is something wrong with us in the first place. That is the harder path. It’s the path Kevin has to take to ask Jesus for forgiveness. It’s the path Bilbo took in sparing Gollum’s life. It’s the path before us every day of our lives, because all of us are both in need of forgiveness and forgiving. All of us are preaching bad sermons. Not just Jonah. Not just that pastor playing piano and singing his songs. Not just me. You too. Each of you occasionally preach—to your friends and families, to people you know and people you do not, on the internet and in your living rooms—and sometimes you preach poorly. It doesn’t matter. God will work through you. God will upend the natural order of the world in spite of you. That is the promise Jonah never knew. God is at work, changing things, doing things, forgiving things, and our words—though necessary—only work through the one who gives them meaning.
Thanks be to God for that.

Stepping on God's Toes and Why We Are in Need of Forgiveness

Text: Genesis 50:15-21

            We all have our plans. Our lives can be broken down into little strategic endeavor after little strategic endeavor. We set goals—sometimes realistic, sometimes unrealistic. We try to see what the future holds. Uncertainty makes us nervous. The unknown is our greatest fear.

            When Israel dies Joseph’s brothers are afraid because the rules of the game have changed. Joseph now holds all the power and without their father in the picture he could easily turn on his brothers. They don’t know what the future holds, and just as Joseph’s plans concerning his sons—Ephraim and Manasseh—are turned upside down by Israel’s blessing, so the brothers’ plans are rocked by Israel’s death.

            The future is murky.

            This is the beginning of the first school year since I came to Hallock to serve as pastor and I’m sure when I came there were some hopes about what the church would look like by this time of the year. Probably some of those were realistic hopes—maybe I’ve even lived up to some expectations—but all too often we have huge hopes for a future that doesn’t end up resembling anything like what we would have thought. If you expected this pastor to bring in hundreds on non-church goers and fix every little issue this congregation has ever had you are probably feeling a bit disappointed. This is in no small part because it’s not my job to grow the church. If the church grows it is because God is doing it; not me, not you. And we simply don’t know what God is doing with us. All we know is that the present looks different from the past.

We could spend our time wishing that were not the case; we could wish that we would return to some glory days in the past when everybody attended church on every Sunday and all the women were strong, the men handsome and the children good-looking, but that’s a past that probably never existed; or we can come to the conclusion that our plans are mostly going to come to nothing. I’ve said this before: the only way to grow is to die. The only way to be a growing church is to be a church willing to accept that its plans are pretty much wrong, and the only one who can map our future out is God. I’m not saying if we do that hundreds of people will start pouring in. I’m not sure what God will do with us, but I am sure that we stand like Joseph’s brothers before an Almighty God, tricking, pleading and finally falling on our faces for our misdoings.

            Forgiveness. That is where it starts. You are forgiven for everything that has happened to you—both as a church and as individuals. There’s a reason we start our service every Sunday with confession and forgiveness; it’s not because we are little Lutheran Eeyores who have to dwell on our mistakes. It’s not because we are such awful people that I’ve decided we REALLY need forgiveness. Rather, it’s because when we measure ourselves against God we end up looking pretty pathetic. But there’s also another reason we begin with forgiveness and this is much closer to the place Joseph finds himself with his brothers. We forgive because it is the only way to stay in right relationship with one another.

            Now, I don’t feel like I need forgiveness from many of you for anything significant, but in small ways and often unintentionally I have not loved you as I love myself, I have ignored you when you wanted attention or pestered you when you didn’t want to be bothered. I have done all these things and I’m sure I’ll do it all again. So when we meet in worship, what better way to begin than with forgiveness for all of those things—known and unknown—that separate me from you and you from the other person in your pew. What better way to start a school year—with the busy season of the church ramping up again—than with forgiveness.

(Service of corporate confession and forgiveness here)

            Now, here’s where confession and forgiveness gets tricky. It’s easy—maybe too easy—to read confession from the hymnal; it’s easy also to say “I’m sorry” and only half mean it. What’s hard is standing where Joseph stood in a place of power over those coming to beg your forgiveness and to honestly say, “Am I in the place of God? Of course I forgive you.”

We should have big expectations for ourselves and greater expectations for this church, but the only thing that’s certain about the future is that we are going to try to follow our vision rather than the one God has laid out for us. We are going to try to get our way, effect our strategies, and make our changes. Since I have been called as pastor nobody has done a better job of messing up God’s plan than me. That’s the entitled, sorry position I have been called to. I’m constantly stepping on God’s toes. That’s how we work. That’s why we are in need of forgiveness.

But God’s working in exciting ways in spite of us. We have energy, we have a new school year and renewed pride in who we are, we have new staff, new Sunday Schoolers, new Confirmation students, perhaps soon a new staff member; new, new, new. And it’s all a testament to what God is doing. On our own we are just like Joseph’s brothers. And just as they cast Joseph into the pit, we have cast our own Josephs out. But never mind, “even though we intended to do harm, God intended it for good.” If that isn’t the moral of our lives I don’t know what is.

Amen.

Joseph, the Pit, and Inception

Text: Genesis 37:12-28

           Do you have a younger sibling? Or are you the youngest child in a family? 

Those of you who are older siblings know what I know, which is that this Joseph story was most definitely written by a younger sibling. See, I have a younger brother, so I can imagine what I would feel if he came up to my parents and I one day and said, “Oh, by the way, I had a dream last night, and you were all bowing to me, because—well—I’m going to rule over you.” That would not have gone over well. I can imagine how much worse it would be for eleven brothers—ten of them older—who actually have quite a bit to gain from their father’s favoritism. We older siblings know that if this story was written by one of us Joseph would not have amounted to much.

            What to do with Joseph…

            This is a hard topic for me—perhaps it is for all older siblings—because Joseph earned none of this, and as an older brother I am tempted to play the “That’s not fair!” card on this one. Joseph was the epitome of the spoiled brat, feasting on the riches of his father through no merit of his own. Unlike other Biblical heroes—David, for example—he had no Goliath moment of character. All we know about Joseph is a couple of dreams and, worse still, his exuberance in sharing those dreams with his family. Not only is he brash and arrogant, he is completely unaware of the effect his brashness is likely to have. He is walking on thin ice.

            These dreams are the thing that sets Joseph apart. Analysis and interpretation of dreams has been around since at least the time of Joseph and probably for as long as human beings have dreamt. We have a fascination with this aspect of our subconscious. Are we telling ourselves something? Is something outside of us giving us wisdom? What do dreams mean?

            I can imagine that if I were preaching this sermon sixty years ago I would have talked about Sigmund Freud and his interpretation of dreams, or if I was preaching this forty years ago I would have talked about Carl Jung and his revisions of Freud’s psychology of dreaming, but since this is 2012 I will ditch the psychology and instead interpret Joseph’s dreaming through the only lens that a 26-year-old guy knows—the 2010 Christopher Nolan film, Inception.

For those of you unfamiliar, Inception is a film about invading a person's dream and planting an idea that will ultimately change the course of their lives. One of the questions that the movie raises is: What emotion is so powerful to plant an idea deep enough for it to take hold? Is it personal gain or fear perhaps? No, none of those things emotions will do. The person dreaming rejects these as unrealistic bases for a new idea. Instead, the only emotion that sticks is catharsis. Catharsis combines both reconciliation and forgiveness, which are the only emotions powerful enough to make a person change his course.

            So what does any of this have to do with Joseph?

In these early dreams, Joseph interprets from a point of self-interest. We don’t know if it is God or Joseph’s self-conscious desires that are causing him to dream these dreams, but regardless of their source Joseph sees them as visions of his own future glory. Nobody can mistake his reasons for sharing the dreams with his family. He is setting himself above his clan, but in so doing he is misreading the situation. The vision at the heart of those dreams is one of leadership, but in his excitement to share what he has seen Joseph shows he is not yet fit to be a leader. First, he must fall. Then, there will be the possibility of catharsis before he rises to the place he will one day stand.

            There’s that old saying that pride comes before a fall. That saying may very well originate here, as Joseph quite literally falls into the pit, albeit with a forceful nudge from his brothers. It’s not that his brothers are justified in their actions, though in their situation I probably would have been right there shoving little Joey (I can’t tell you how often I would have sold my brother to some passing Ishmaelites if the opportunity arose). Joseph doesn’t have a voice in this part of the story. We don’t know exactly what is going through his head, but I can imagine this is not what he expected. The dreams of greatness he had were portents of a future beyond his grasp. This was going to be much harder than he could have imagined. It was going to be much harder for the entire family. God had a trajectory in mind for Israel, but it took them much farther astray than anybody could have predicted.

            We have this problem with God’s will. For one, most of us don’t have dreams that depict what the future will hold, or if we do they are muddled visions of a reality we cannot yet discern. There is a real debate among Christians as to whether God has everything planned and whether we have any control over the future. Well, Joseph teaches us quite a lot about what God’s plan looks like. It is never fully crafted, or at the very least it appears to us only dimly. It is never without our input—both positive and negative. God’s plan is not intended for our ill, though ill may come of our response to it. Finally, God’s plan is God’s and not ours.

            I cannot imagine that God, being God and not subject to constraints like time and space, looks at the world like we do. When Joseph dreams these dreams they are visions of a future—yes—but not one that can come to be without the active participation of Joseph, his brothers and his father. Man plans and God laughs—not because God knows every little action that’s going to follow but because God’s view is much wider; ours is one-dimensional. Like Joseph, we interpret things in terms of personal gain. Joseph knew nothing of how to be a leader to his brothers until he was rejected and cast into the pit.

I hope it doesn’t take that kind of betrayal for you to understand your purpose in this life, but some of you have already been down into that pit. You have already had awful things happen to you—some, like Joseph, at the hands of family. You have to fall in order to rise.

            The Joseph story is a story lived out again and again in our lives. First we are prideful and exuberant, then we get shot down; then—slowly and after much backsliding—we discover our purpose in this world. Almost universally, that place in life looks nothing like we imagined it. When his family finally does bow to Joseph it is not in the place or manner he would have supposed. He becomes a leader in Egypt but finally wants nothing more than catharsis for those years gone by.

            We don’t know what we want. That is our fundamental flaw. We think we know—we think we want simple things: money, time, a person or a thing. We think if we have those things then we will be happy, but when we have it all we discover we want more. Soon, we are numb to life, unable to care for the good or the bad. The worst life is the life that no longer values catharsis; the life that learns no lessons from loss; the life that does not care. Catharsis requires loss, then a turning, and finally redemption. It requires falling into the pit. It requires looking deep within ourselves to find the essence of our humanity and turning around. It requires forgiveness.

            May you forgive as you are forgiven; may you find catharsis for all your hurt; and may God lead you in paths you would not have imagined.

The Simplest Idea: Inception and the Church

A pastor at our weekly text study came in with an idea yesterday to read a book together and discuss. The book was titled, I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church, by Paul Nixon. This pastor was in need of finding some wisdom to deal with the travails of leading a struggling congregation in the midst of a declining mainline Protestant denomination. In short, he was in a place where a lot of clergy find themselves--pastoring to decline.

I found myself thinking, "Are we still there?" Are we still focusing on leadership techniques and programs for pastors to churches in decline? Are we still moping about the challenges of churches with fewer members? Are we still talking about the death of the church?

Some of us have moved on. I mean, we have thought about this. For many church leaders in my generation the decline of the church is not something new but in fact the only reality we have ever known. When pastors and professors have tried to shock us by saying things like, "The church as you knew it is over" we have looked at them blankly and thought, "Actually, this is the only church I've known. The church you've known is over."

But most of all, we think about how the church is going to look different. I was struck yesterday by the methodology of having a book study in the midst of declining congregations. It felt so wrong. For one, it is not the pastors who need to think about this; it is the congregation members who have no formal training. But more importantly, they need to come to this idea in such a way that it actually sticks--that it actually penetrates their psyche and makes the light bulb go on. For most people, that's not so easy.

That's when it hit me. This is really a matter of inception. The 2010 Christopher Nolan motion picture, Inception, is based on the premise of changing a subject's mind by planting an idea in that person's brain. In order to make inception work you first need a goal--what you want the subject to believe. Second, you need an idea powerful enough to accomplish that change. In the movie, the goal was to get the subject to break up his father's company; the idea was that the subject's father loved him and wanted him to choose his own path.

Crucial to the success of inception is implanting the right idea. I find that churches recognize a problem--there are less people in mainline denominations, less vitality, less energy, etc. But then they come up with all sorts of massive philosophical changes without synthesizing the singular idea behind the matter. So, pastors throw out frightening words like change, missional imagination, rooted confessionalism and the like, which members of our congregation are neither ready nor able to hear. What the mainline denominations have seemingly failed to do is find that one idea that needs to be planted deep in the psyche of our people. So, what is it?

Let's start with what it's not. It's not "we must change;" or "we need to grow." In Inception we learn that neither fear nor material gain are powerful enough motivators to plant an idea. The only emotion powerful enough to make an idea stick is catharsis. Our churches--our congregation members, our people--are desperately in need of catharsis. We need to face our past and hear, like Robert Fischer Jr. on his father's death bed, that the monumental figures of our past want us to go our own way. Semper reformandum, said the leaders of the Reformation, "Always reforming."

But the way most of our people see the church is like that lowest dream level where the buildings and structures of the world are collapsing before their eyes. Moreover, since the structures of the church are tied inextricably to the outside world, this is also how they view their lives. Things are changing: the world is becoming more complicated and chaotic. There are horrible people doing horrible things. There is so much out of our control. The world that we recognize from our past is disintegrating before our eyes.

So, we come to the goal we want to accomplish. In a world whose edifices seem to be crumbling the only catharsis, the only good news, is that this world is not the ultimate reality. Like the spinning top totem that Cobb (Leonardo diCaprio) uses to determine whether he is in the real world, we are in need of something to ground us. The goal of the mainline church's inception, therefore, is not to acclimate our people to change or to get them to see the necessity of being the church in new and different ways. No, none of that will work, and it is precisely the kind of things we have been trying all along. Instead, the goal of our inception is to show people that this world is a mere dream of the ultimate reality. We live in the shadow-lands where things don't quite make sense.

But this realization is not easily achieved. I can preach death and resurrection week after week and it will often seem to be falling on deaf ears. Sure, the Holy Spirit will do its best to open the ears of the people, but I know well enough that the very premise that I'm preaching is far too big. I'm in need of a simpler idea; a synthesis of this new creation. I'm in need of catharsis.

That's when it hit me like a bolt from the blue. We have been making this way, way too complicated. We have been telling people about systems, about programs, about theology and eschatology. We have been telling them about Christology and pneumatology. We have been telling them about historical criticism and other modern methods of reading the Bible. We have been teaching them bits of Greek, Hebrew and Latin. We have been preaching meta-theories when the simplest idea of all has never sunk in, because we never went deep enough. We tried "God loves you" but it just feels so shallow. We tried "You are saved" but it does not connect. These, too, were too complicated. They involved static realities that we could not see. Neither involved catharsis.

You see, we've only taken it down a single level. We've never touched that second dream state, let alone the third, so the idea never stuck. We have to press harder into the subconsciousness of the people we meet and tell them the most fundamental truth that can shape their realities. The truth is this:

You are forgiven.

This is the very essence of catharsis. They are the words that break down the walls around our supposed realities and show us a creation more real than anything our dream-like waking could ever promise. Forgiveness--true forgiveness, not the "I'm sorry" hokum that passes for such in our world--opens doors to a new future with hope.

Church leaders, I cannot impress this enough, the key is going deep enough. This is not just a matter of reciting some words in the liturgy. It is instead meeting those in the most desperate need in their most desperate moments, when their tops are spinning wildly out of whack, and pointing them back to the ultimate, Christ-drenched reality and saying, "You are forgiven in spite of your faults, in spite of the past, in spite of everything historical that binds you to this moment and this place. You are set free--by a Savior who came to re-write history, to make the dead rise and bring about a creation so much more real than anything you experience here and now."

But more important than the words is that single moment of catharsis. In the movie it was the pinwheel that Robert Fischer made for his father, hidden in the safe, that represented the pride his father felt. For us it may be a hug, it may be a cup of tea; it may be something much simpler still. But remember, it is never complicated. Forgiveness never is. But true forgiveness will set the church on fire. It will shake the foundations of our world. It will make us rise again.

So, get planting.