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.

Why this youth trip meant more to me

For all I write I'm usually not very personal. This is mostly by design. I mean, I never much cared for pastors who preached all about their own lives, and I'm not much into self-promotion on the blog. There is a danger in not talking about myself--at a certain point I lose my humanity and become a thinking-head, a writing-automaton. It's posts like this that will hopefully keep me from becoming that. This is going to be more personal than most, and for that I do not apologize in the slightest.

This year marked my third mission trip/service trip/cultural immersion/whatever you want to call what we do with our high school youth each summer (personally I prefer service trip, generally, though this year was more of a cultural immersion). And this year was different than every other year--as it tends to be. Some parts were rough; some parts were great. We persevered and had what I would consider a great trip.

But the reason this trip meant more to me than years' past had little to do with what we actually did. It had far more to do with the relationships built over the course of three years, and (maybe more importantly) it had everything to do with the roller coaster ride I've been on professionally since Natalie was born. Things have been fine at home, but my time and energy has been sapped, and we have had a string of rather serious events in the life of our parish since I returned to the job in April. A change of secretary was tough, especially given the circumstances, then a spate of deaths, including a suicide of a man with a young family and a murder involving family of our congregation were tougher. Finally, in the last month we've lost a couple members who lived good long lives, but, frankly, they always made me happy to visit and, selfishly, I was very sad to see them go.

Bondage or freedom: What really makes us happy?

Scripture: Exodus 20:12-16

            So, today I knew I wanted to start this sermon talking about what is the good life, and so I did what any self-respecting pastor does these days and Googled it. “What is the good life?” I asked the Google, and it responded with a 2012 article from Forbes. Goodie, I thought. This was exactly what I was looking for. According to this Forbes article the good news—the secret of happiness--is based on ten golden rules (sound familiar?). If I’m to sum up these rules briefly (which may be difficult because they are decidedly more wordy than the original Ten Commandments) they are essentially this: Have new experiences, be responsible, don’t do evil to others, and be kind. As it turns out, with some minor tweaking this Forbes article essentially took the Ten Commandments and modernized them by making them positive (be and do this rather than “do not” do that) and by contextualizing them in such a way that each piece of advice drips with this magic elixir of our modern lives that we call freedom.

This is extremely typical of our postmodern world, which considers the good life to be the one where we are most free to choose whatever life we would like and whatever things we would like to fill that life. Freedom has become the symbol of the highest advancement in our society, more important to us than wealth, or even companionship. Our troops fight wars for our freedom; our politicians attack one another for limiting freedoms; we spout the line “It’s a free country” as if it’s a truism. The implication behind all the freedom talk is that the best life for you and for me is one where we are unencumbered by rules and free to do anything and everything we want.

            This may get politicians elected, but it is also a big fat lie. The good life is not being free to be all things. Rather, freedom only means anything when we choose to become bound to things that matter. A really good example of this is when we go shopping—or, better said, when you go shopping, because I hate shopping. But whether you like to shop or not, shopping is the ultimate example of the perils of freedom, because shopping presents a set of choices that promise a reality that is endlessly unfulfilling. Whenever you buy something, you convince yourself that the thing you have is more valuable than it actually is because you own it until, gradually over time, reality sinks in and you realize that your freedom to purchase a thing only results in your bondage to the things that you buy—either that or you just keep buying new things that make you proportionally less and less happy.

Diet Doom and Gloom: The first commandment with a side of hope.

Scripture: Exodus 19:1-6, 20:1-3

            As the week was winding down, and I still hadn’t gotten to thinking about a sermon on the 1^st commandment, I had this realization: I really don’t need to preach because Martin Luther already explained the 1^st commandment in his small catechism. Maybe some of you even remember this: “You shall have no other Gods. What does this mean? We are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.” Boom, end of sermon. Sure, it’s short but what more is there to add? Better still, this was a moderately cheery message for what can often seem like the doom and gloom of the law that we feel while reading the commandments. But then I figured, “Well, maybe a one line isn’t quite enough." So I went big (literally) and turned to the Large Catechism--that bastion of all things Lutheran that even pastors rarely crack open.

            And I started reading… and reading… and reading… and about four thousand words later I thought, “You know, maybe an hour long sermon isn’t a great idea either.” So, we’re going to have a sermon today that lasts somewhere between five seconds and an hour, which is kind of the trouble with the first commandment. On the one hand, it’s so clear that it hardly needs an explanation; on the other hand, it impacts basically everything we believe because it is the basis for our relationship with God. Have no other Gods before me. That’s pretty central to our faith.

Fun things make Lutherans anxious: Miracles, enjoyment, and the purpose that holds it all together

 Scripture: John 2:1-11

            The wedding at Cana is something that Lutherans don’t much care for, because it is something that sounds potentially fun, and we are nothing if not deeply suspicious about anything that might be fun.

            I figured that was a nice, stereotypical half-truth to get your attention, so I’ll get back to that in a minute, but first I’m going to take a detour to confirmation class last Wednesday. Our discussion topic with the 9^th graders was miracles.
            I asked, "What is a miracle?" But I didn’t anticipate at all what they were going to say. Their answers were very interesting. They said a miracle is something “meaningful”; something with a “purpose” behind it; something “good.” I was expecting a definition of miracles that had something to do with impossibility—that they would say that miracles are things that cannot be explained or things that violate the laws of nature. But, whether they knew it or not, they actually saw through the question to the part that really matters. It’s not the possibility or impossibility of miracles that makes them significant but the meaning behind them. This gives me a good deal of hope, because when Jesus does something miraculous in John’s Gospel it is not called a miracle. Every healing and raising of the dead, every feeding or walking on water are just called “signs”—semeion is the word in Greek. They are events that point to something greater.

            A miracle is a thing with a purpose behind it, something meaningful, and good. It’s unlikelihood (or impossibility) is really only something that magnifies the meaning of it. What matters is the purpose.

The surprising theology of happiness

Text: Revelation 3:14-22

            There is a famous 1978 study on the relativity of happiness in which a trio of psychologists set out to discover whether people become happier after they win the lottery. They tested their hypothesis by assessing the happiness of people who win the lottery over time and comparing it with a control group as well as a group of people who lost a limb as the result of an accident. That’s right, the main contrast in this study was between lottery winners and amputees. This research has been repeated a couple of times since with near identical results.

            On the surface this seems like an awfully strange experiment. Not all of us may buy into the idea that money brings happiness but I bet most of us would think: “It can’t hurt!” Either way, given the choice between winning the lottery or losing a limb I’m going to guess we would all make the same choice. And at first the study agreed with our gut instincts. Immediately after winning the lottery people are happier! Surprise, surprise.

The problem is that it doesn’t last.