Forget the big solutions, try little acts of love

It’s election season… yay? The time when we disenfranchise one another with our Facebook posts. The time when everybody knows what is right and what our country needs. The time when I see more self-centered, all-knowing, blathering than at any other time. The time when everybody is looking for a big solution.

            I don’t care if the big solution you are convinced will solve the world’s problems is one associated with conservativism or liberalism—e.g. whether your big solution is immigration reform, universal healthcare, ending legalized abortion, or ending the war on drugs—all of these solutions are given more importance this time of year than they should, because this is the time of our lives when we are fed a constant stream of negativity about how this or that is going to end our lives or save them. Policies don’t save us; Jesus does.

            In fact, no big solution has yet to make us more righteous. I suppose it would be one thing if there really was a war going on between good people and evil people, but that’s just not the case. There are well-meaning, devoted, faithful people who take a variety of stances on the “big solutions” for a variety of good reasons. This means that no matter what happens in November we will sit down at coffee tables, chat on bar stools, and share a bleacher at sporting events with people who think the world is going to hell alongside those who think the world has finally gotten its act together. Either way we are divided.

            Our identity as Christians is in Christ; not in party allegiance. That should be so obvious it shouldn’t need to be said and, yet, here we are, because I think too many people get that completely backwards. When we buy into party politics we allow the big solutions to frame our lives, urging us to spend more time and energy explaining to others how wrong they are, suggesting that the only way to make a difference in the world is to advocate one particular ideology, when the Gospel is calling us to something different: Little acts of kindness and love. You should vote, absolutely, and you should do so based on your faith and values, but your vote shouldn’t be the primary way of identifying yourself as Christian. That should be evident from all the little ways you care for others in your day-to-day life. Then, you will be reminded that your vote will not make you righteous and votes contrary to yours should not make you angry, because we are all in this together, struggling as Christians to find the best way to love one another.

            The only way we can prove that is in those little acts of love; those surprising moments of joy and those little lights we spark in the darkness. The only big solution that matters is God’s plan for creation—God’s telos, to use a beautiful Greek word that you should all become familiar with—God’s ultimate objective. God does big solutions; we aren’t qualified. The best we can do is make our little actions count.

The youth are not the future. Jesus is.

Luke 11:2-4

             I’m going to begin today by apologizing to your Midwestern sensibilities, because this week I’ve listened to sermons from couple African-American preachers, including the black Lutheran tradition, and so if I have a little more fire in my belly than normal, well, you know where it came from, and this is—I think—a good thing. Feel free to “Amen” as needed.

Today we bring together a few different things. A youth mission trip to Idaho; the Lord’s Prayer, especially that first line: Thy kingdom come; and lastly, though not insignificantly, the work of our wider church in New Orleans this past week.

            When I started to think about all three of these things at once, first of all, I got a headache, because there’s just a lot to be said; then, I realized that the three events create a bridge from past to present to future. And so I’m going to start there.

            Sharing about mission trips is always a bit funny. Probably most of you have had this experience. You go and do something awesome—a concert, a big vacation, a convention of some kind, or a mission trip, or something else—and then you come back and you try to share it with people who weren’t there. You tell stories, share pictures, they nod politely, and then you start to think, “Man, they just don’t get it!” I guess, you had to be there, you say.

            The trouble with sharing the past if our goal is to bring people into the experiences is that if we just can't manage it. You can’t re-live it, can’t re-create it. That was in the past. So, it’s good and right to share it with you—many of you supported this particular trip with your time and money and prayers, but the truth is it’s done. Finished.

            We’re never going to have that experience again. Some will try. I remember going back to work at camp for the second time in 2008 and the summer program coordinator, in my interview, warned me, saying, “You know, it won’t be the same.” And I said I knew, but I didn’t. I didn’t know all the ways—big ways, small ways—that that second experience would differ from the first. Trying to re-create the past always disappoints.

            The church too often tries. But the church that takes the past and uses it to forge ahead into this moment… that is the church that is Spirit-led. It’s the church that can pray “Thy kingdom come” because it is looking forward to Jesus; the only future we have.

Last Monday, our presiding bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, preached a sermon in which she asked the body at Churchwide Assembly a not-so rhetorical question, so I’m going to ask it to you. The question is: “What are young people to the church?”

Its future?

No, that’s the wrong answer. Tempting answer but wrong. The youth are not the future of the church: Jesus is.

The youth are not the future of the church; Jesus is.

That’s what we mean when we pray “Thy kingdom come.” Not “thy young people come.” Not “thy children learn to fill the pews so our church has a future.” No! “Thy kingdom come.”

The future of the church is Jesus’ kingdom.

So, if the youth are not its future, then we must come to struggle with the fact that they are its present.

The mission trip is over. The kingdom of God is coming. But what about right now? What are we doing as people of God to make a difference in the world right now?

One of the joys of being in a different place in the world, surrounded by different people from a whole variety of backgrounds is listening to their stories. I talked with a lady on the bus to the airport in New Orleans who had just spent the week at the Baptist National Conference; she made sure to tell me it was the “Progressive Baptists,” which I kind of gathered when she mentioned hearing speeches from both Tim Kaine and Jesse Jackson, Jr. at the conference. (Hence, not the Southern Baptists). This lady was from New Jersey, in her mid-80s, African-American, and was filled with lament for the state of the country, but not in the way that I so often hear around here. It wasn’t “Gee, the world is getting worse out there, isn’t it? Glad we live where we live!” It wasn’t “Did you just see this on the news?” Instead, it was “Let me tell you about my experience. Our people are hurting.” It wasn’t out there; it was personal.

            And I was convicted, because I knew I’m part of the problem. I didn’t create it; I didn’t do anything, and that’s exactly the point—I haven’t done anything. This is about right now—what are we doing right now?

            Thy kingdom come, yes, but what about right now? What are we doing right now?

            Whether it’s changing our view toward those differently-abled than us, as we saw in Idaho, or healing racial injustice, or just simply finding and naming the persons in need in our community, the question is about right now. A little Greek lesson is appropriate here—I know how much you all like Greek lessons. This phrase, “Thy kingdom come!” is in imperative tense. Now you’re all scanning the deep, dark recesses of your middle school English classes or high school Spanish or French classes to remember what that means. Imperative. It’s a command. “Thy kingdom come!” When I first learned this it opened my eyes to the Lord's Prayer in a completely different way. The prayer is filled with imperatives. It’s not praying, “God, your kingdom is coming and I know this,” as if it were a confession of faith. It’s not praying, “God, I really hope maybe your kingdom will come soon,” as if it is a request. Instead, it’s an order. It’s you, ordering God, every time you pray to bring God’s kingdom now, because that’s God’s job.

Ours is to do our part in the meantime.

            And that starts with relationship. This week I befriended an African-American octogenarian from Jersey, a mother from Wisconsin—my age—with two children who had never taken the train before and had a load of questions, and I chatted with and visited a chess hustler in New Orleans, the head bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, as well as too many Lutherans to count. I had meaningful conversations with a person in every decade of life; I learned a ton about people who were very different from me and also people not so different from at all. I had meaningful conversations with a person in every decade of life. In Idaho our youth and adults walked alongside children and adults with special needs, and they experienced the same kind of enlightenment. None of this is radical. None of what happened this week in New Orleans or last month in Idaho is that out of the box. All we were doing was entering into relationships, and, probably not surprisingly, that’s all that really mattered.

But here’s where it really matters. The last part of this story comes yesterday as I attended a funeral for my friend, Zach, who died two weeks ago following a car accident at the age of 24. If ever there was occasion to remember that young people are the present and not the future it is moments like these where we are smacked in the face with the reality that nothing is guaranteed. All week I had Martin Luther's death bed quote reverberating in my head, where he says, "We are beggars. This is true." The promise of the future is Jesus; not anything else--not a long life, not a life without grief--which is why relationships are of the utmost importance, because relationship is the only thing that can begin to chip away at despair in the face of death. Friends, “thy kingdom come!” is something every person in this world is praying in one way or another. We are all crying out, all hurting, all pained, all missing something. So, when I sat on the stage of the social hall at that church following that service with Alex, Zach's dad, a very good friend and mentor of mine, I felt the depths to which that relationship mattered, and it was proved in grief and loss. I couldn’t fix a thing but I could sit there with him because we had tested that relationship through experiences and built the trust needed to stare death in the face when nobody wanted to be there. We could say "I love you" and mean it because the groundwork was laid.

That’s our challenge as the church. Pray “thy kingdom come!” Then get to work. Because we aren’t bringing about the kingdom on our own—that’s God’s job—but we are invested in one another. The youth aren’t our future. Jesus is. The youth, and the young adults, and the older adults, and the children, and everybody in-between is our right now. Which means right now we have work to do.

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.

Alien righteousness (it's even stranger and more awesome than it sounds)

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

            Last week, in talking about the way we are called to live as Christians, I said that “being a true Christ-follower is a different kind of foolishness.” I’d like to say that I planned that for this week’s reading, but if you believe that then you obviously have a higher view of my sermon preparation right now than I do. I didn’t read 1 Corinthians 1 until, oh, this past Friday, and only then I came across those words that we all have probably heard, but were already on my mind from the actions of Paul and Silas last week: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

            The secret of that line, which is really no secret at all, is that we are all perishing and we are all saved. We are all sinners; we are all saints. We are all redeemed; we are all not yet. But I think when I say that your eyes gloss over. I think it doesn’t resonate, because the both/and language of Lutheranism sounds beautiful but it’s sometimes difficult to translate that into our life experience. Just because our theology is good doesn’t mean that it’s inspiring, and if our beliefs do not spur us on to something better then I don’t think they’re very helpful.

            Now I know this was a busy week around these parts, but how many of you saw Bob Upgren talk either at Lancaster or at Maria on Wednesday? Awesome speaker. Great artist. The kind of thing that moves you and that gets you thinking. Hopefully the kind of thing that gets people to look at their own lives and re-orient them toward something better. But I have to confess one of my first thoughts, which isn’t necessarily very good. Upgren was coming at God from a perspective I hear a lot, and probably you do too. In fact, probably a good majority of you are right on board with what he was saying, which is that God gives us a gift of salvation and all we have to do is accept it. This, alongside the idea that we need to accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior, is one of the most widely held beliefs about what makes a person a Christian today; so much so, in fact, that many people just take it for granted that all Christians would agree with that. Well, I don’t. And, actually, a long history of Christian theologians stretching back further than you imagine also has a problem with that. There are very few new beliefs, just repacked old beliefs, and the idea that we have to accept the gift of salvation, or that we have to accept Jesus, is a form of semipelagianism, which was condemned as heresy in the Second Council of Orange in the year 529.

So here I was thinking some of these things on Wednesday night and for a moment I was despairing about it, because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard fantastic speakers with great messages cheapen grace by suggesting that it is dependent on our response to it. And here was another one.

            But then I realized something. This is not a problem with what only people are saying about God. This is a problem with Lutherans ourselves, because we have done a terrible job of articulating what salvation means to us. In our stead, every other faith tradition has told us what salvation is and so our people have no language to talk about salvation apart from what others are saying. This is our fault and it is our problem. Our way of talking about our faith has become saying that we are not like them. They tell you that you need to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. Well, we’re not like that! They tell you that you need to be a good person in order to be saved. But we’re not like that!

Loving strangers: even when it's every tent for one's self

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7

This is the perfect Biblical story for a day in which we are imagining what intergenerational relationships look like because you don’t get much more inter-generational than one-hundred-year-old-ish first-time parents.

I mean, if you get past the miracle of giving birth at 90 years old, which admittedly is a huge stumbling block, it’s natural to wonder what it would be like for a couple of people in their 100s to raise a child. I’m pushing 30 and some days it feels difficult.

More than that, this is a story of radical hospitality. Welcoming three strangers—three foreigners—lays the groundwork for Abraham to receive the promise of an heir. These men who stand as God before him, and whom Abraham serves without any indication of reward, become agents of grace who offer Abraham an impossible gift. Does Abraham receive the promise of Isaac because of he treated the Lord in the right way? We don’t know. But we do know that he quite literally lives out the reality of Hebrews 13:2, which )warns not to “neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

The morals for us are many. Obviously we are called to be hospitable to strangers and to take care of the needy, and this is ever starker given the context. Abraham and Sarah are on their own. There is no nation. Israel, you might remember, is the name given to the grandson of Abraham and Sarah. There are no Hebrews; no ethnic brothers and sisters. This is the beginning of all that. Before Abraham and Sarah it was every tent to themselves.

And yet, here they are practicing a radical kind of hospitality.

Sheep are silly

Scripture: Matthew 25:31-46

This morning I’m going to serenade you with two classic ballads of the Christian faith. Each is as deeply serious as it is theologically rich. The first is entitled “Sheep Are Silly” and it goes something like this:

Sheep are silly! (Silly?) Silly, my friend.

Sheep are silly! (Silly?) Silly, my friend.

They need a shepherd. (A shepherd?) To keep them alive.

They need a shepherd (A shepherd?) To help them survive.

Sheep are silly! Silly, my friend.

And the verse ends with an invitation that all of you associate with deep religious motivation: “Get silly!”

            The second song is perhaps even more familiar, and potentially life-changing (I hope I’m not overselling this). And it goes something like this:

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

            And I pray the Lord my soul to keep

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

Now there’s once verse in particular of this classic that applies to today and it goes like this:

            I don’t want to be a goat. Nope.

            I don’t want to be a goat. Nope.

            Because goats ain’t got no hope.

            I don’t want to be a goat. Nope.

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

Etc, etc, etc.

I’m tempted to preach no further, instead allowing you to reflect on the depth of the lyrics of Sheep are Silly! and I just Wanna Be a Sheep, but you’re not paying me only to make a mockery of myself up here, so let me expound on the sheepy song silliness for a second,

            There are two things I actually like quite a lot about these songs anyway when it comes to their interplay with the parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew’s Gospel. This is a hard, hard, hard parable, and these songs are immeasurably silly. That’s a point in their favor, because to the question, “Is everything a joke to you?” the only correct answer is ever, in the immortal words of Stephen Fry, “Only the things that matter.”

Does fear of the Lord still matter? (And other leading questions)

Scripture: Micah 5:2-4; 6:6-8

The book of Proverbs reminds us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Now, that doesn’t get much play these days. I suspect most people would say that the beginning of wisdom is found in college, or the beginning of wisdom is discovered in the process of aging, or the beginning of wisdom is starting a career, or having a family. Fear of the Lord may be biblical but we rarely consider fear of a thing to be good—not today—and certainly wisdom must start somewhere else. “Why should we be afraid of God?” we might ask in our best modern voices. We love God, or we have faith in God, but fearing God? No, no. That’s something for less civilized folk.

We’ve done our best to make God into the flavorless communion wafers that we serve as his body. He can be loving, and powerful, and good, but fearful? Nope, no good. We have become afraid to ascribe to God any attribute that we do not consider proper in our fellow human beings, and the end result has been a kind of arrogance in our understanding of who God is and what God does. We first decide what it is that a good God will look like, then we decide which parts of our God fit that description, and finally we only believe those things we have already decided befit the God of our choice. In this way we make God in our image. God has all the traits we like and likes the people we like.

Because this Old Testament God doesn’t act like the God we have created in our image we make this God out to be a different God that, because of Jesus, we can ignore. We do this even though Jesus seemed perfectly happy to pray to this God whom he called “Father” and even though our creeds confess this God to be one and the same with the Son and the Holy Spirit.

This is important when it comes to reading the prophets, like Micah, because our weakened images of God mean that we are tempted to take shortcuts and find in the prophets what we want to find. When Micah says, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” we read that as if it is a moral-ethical imperative. Do these things and you’ll be right in the sight of God. Perfect. After all, that’s exactly what Jesus says when he’s asked what a person has to do to inherit eternal life: “Be perfect like your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Wisdom vs knowledge, or why Confirmation doesn't work

Scripture: 1 Kings 3:4-28

The last two years on Confirmation Sunday we’ve read about Solomon’s Temple, which is a nice bit of scripture for Confirmation because it provides an opportunity to talk about the difference between church buildings and being the church. But today we have something even better: this early story of Solomon as ruler over Israel is the perfect opportunity to talk about something that is sincerely lacking in our confirmation curriculum: the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

The truth is: we have a Confirmation problem. We have a system that does a wonderful job of keeping youth in the building for these few years and a terrible job of cultivating lifelong faith formation. If you look at the data, ELCA Lutherans have a higher percentage of Junior High kids in a church learning environment than any other major church body in the United States. 70% of our youth in grades 7-9 are involved in Christian Education; that’s more than any other denomination, period. Locally, we’re even higher than that. Right now, at Grace-Red River we have 100% involvement in Christian Education amongst our Junior High kids. We can pat ourselves on the back for that.

Oh, but there’s one little problem. As a church body on the whole, we’re first amongst Junior High participation, but last in High School participation. And we’re nearly last (ahead of only the UCC) in adult participation. This is astounding if you think about it. There’s a cliff at the end of Confirmation where we seem to say, “So long! Good luck! That’s all the education you’re getting until you die and go to heaven. Hope you’ve got your books of the Bible memorized for when you get there!” We’ve done such a good job of teaching our confirmands that they don’t have to do a thing to earn their salvation that they have said, “OK, thanks. Bye now.” And that’s it.

 Our practice has been to teach you things during your Junior High years when studies have shown that this is when you will absorb the absolute least amount of information of any point in your life; the time where your hormones are raging, your bodies are changing, and your brains are quite literally checked out. We’ve chosen that time to load you up with knowledge about the faith. Sure, we have good reasons for it. It seems like an appropriate time to respond to your baptism. You can finally begin to think for yourselves (as we know all 8^th and 9^th graders are models of individuality </sarcasm>). And what’s happened over time is that we have young people who not only do not know anything about the faith (because we’ve tried to pack knowledge into heads that can’t hold it), but they also have no wisdom because in our hurry to pack in that knowledge we’ve had no time to actually practice faith. Instead of faith we teach doctrine, but even the doctrine we teach is generally shallow, so information-based, and so little lived that we might as well have been teaching them how to cook communion bread.

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.

We love because he first loved us

Scripture: 1 John 4:7-21

            Sometimes we need to step back for a moment and admire how stunning some bits of scripture are. “We love because he first loved us,” writes John, which is a nice little Christian Hallmark card waiting to be made, but he goes on: “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” I am utterly floored by that scripture not because I don’t believe it, but because it’s the kind of thing that I honestly don’t expect to find in the Bible. Usually, the Bible focuses on elements of faith and then treats acts of love as a response to that faith—and so it is in that little diddy in verse 19: “We love because he first loved us.” But to take it one step further and say that our love of God is proven in our love of our brothers and sisters—not in the strength of our faith—is so dang practical; it makes my job easy because I don’t even need to make that small leap. It means that a Christian who does not demonstrate love for her neighbor is an oxymoron.

            And what does that love look like? Well, according to John “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.” Love can’t be compelled—this is not a case of God saying “love your neighbor or else.” If you feel that this is a command of the law then you’ve already missed the point, because the kind of love that God loves is love that has no ounce of self in it. You don’t love because you’re going to get something out of it, and you don’t love because it’s the right thing to do; you love because God loves us, and the only way to experience God is to pass it on.

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.

Almost like falling in love: On service and comfort

Scripture: 1 John 1:1-4

            I’m going to say something radical that you might not believe, but it’s my goal by the end of this sermon that you may not only say “OK, that’s kind of true.” I want more than that. I want this to change you, because it is that important.
            What I want to say is this: “Comfort is the enemy of the meaningful life.”

            OK, that might not be completely radical. You can probably see that there’s at least some truth in that. If you grew up playing sports (or if you play sports still) you know that your success in athletics has a lot to do with how well you the push the boundaries of your comfort in training. If you’ve ever been self-employed or started a business you know how vulnerable, and yet immensely purposeful and gratifying, that can be. If you’ve ever fallen in love you know how scary and uncomfortable that is.

            So, if comfort is our goal, it makes sense to avoid sports, challenging work, and relationships. 

            But for reasons of our own we choose the pain of training, the risk of investment, the possibility of unrequited love, and the messiness of failed relationships. The things that we value the most—the things we talk about around the dinner table—are the very things that are most difficult. Every great story we read—every heartwarming example we have—testifies that life is better when we are impassioned for what is good and true in the world. That is why we serve—it’s a reflection of God’s coming into the world—to serve, not to be served. “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us.” We spend a good deal of energy telling you about the good news that is the incarnation, but we are often confusing when it comes to what that good news actually looks like today. We are freed not to comfort but to servitude. Nothing shows this better than falling in love, and nothing  shows it better in the church than serving in uncomfortable places. The two actually go hand in hand. When we serve, we love.

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.

John 3:16 and the virtue of humility

Scripture: John 3:1-21

            I’ve pondered at some point of my life going to a pro or college football game, standing in the end zone, and holding a sign that says, “John 3:14” or “John 3:17” or something along those lines, but since this would require going to a football game that’s probably not going to happen.

            If you stop and think about it, John 3:16 is probably only one of a handful of verses that can be considered widely known in the general public. I can think of only the 23^rd Psalm and maybe the first verse of Genesis as other examples of this. “For God so loved the word that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” That’s great and true and very worthy of sharing, but it is kind of arbitrary that this is the verse held so highly in public esteem. Why not John 3:14 and 15? “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” It’s very, very similar. Or then there’s John 3:17, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Again, very similar.

            Or, going a step further, why don’t we make a big deal of the light and darkness imagery, or the condemnation and salvation language that is everywhere in John? What is it that John 3:16 does that really works for us?

            This week when I read John 3 again for the first time in awhile I wrote down the first thing that came to my mind: “Oy, John’s Gospel… oy, oy, oy.” This is not a good sign for a pastor when that is the right at the top of your notes. Seriously, if you think preaching is hard when the scripture doesn’t seem to say anything important try preaching when the scripture says so much that I am going to need you to free up your schedules for the rest of the week to get to it all.

The only thing you really need to know

This has been a rough week in our little corner of NW Minnesota.

And, frankly, the more words I use to say this the more it risks getting lost, so I just want to put it our there: You are loved. Whoever you are. It does not matter. And it's not only my love, because my love really isn't all that special. But let's start there: I love you. Now, you're freaked out. OK, freaked out is better than not knowing you're loved, so I'll take that hit. Now, let's go a step further: There are others much closer to you who love you too; they should probably say it, but some won't. It's just who they are. But it's not even their love that truly matters. I mean, we're all human: we love you, but we also love french fries. The love that matters is much deeper than mine or yours. It's this kind of love:

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39).

I realize those are just words (and pretty simple ones at that), but on a day when I'm emotionally exhausted (and you very well might be too), it's hopefully enough.

The Small Things: Newtown, The Hobbit, and the Manger

Text: Isaiah 61:1-11

            “I’ve found it is the small things that keep the darkness at bay.” That’s Gandalf speaking to Galadriel in the Hobbit movie that just came out this weekend, and I haven’t been able to shake the words from my mind. In fact, the full quote is even better, so if you’ll indulge me for a moment, Gandalf says, “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why [did I choose] Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.”

             I saw The Hobbit on Friday about an hour after I first heard the news about the school shooting in Connecticut. And I don’t even really know what to say about it since it’s all so horrible and familiar. This shooting may have affected us more because of the innocence of the victims and the number of dead, but the narrative is something we’ve heard before. We live in a small world. We know about things that happen across the country and the world in the blink of an eye, and this is most certainly good and bad. There are seven billion people in the world, and with so many people in so small a place there’s plenty of shocking events to go around. When something happens the media eats it up. We are told in subtle ways how to feel, what should shock us, and who or what is the enemy. Quickly, every tragedy becomes an issue of debate about what could or can be done to avoid it: power against power. “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check,” says Gandalf, “but that is not what I have found. It’s the small things that keep the darkness at bay.”

You can't choose Jesus! A manifesto on how to love.

Text: John 15:9-17

This may very well color everything that I write, but I can never talk about love without thinking about the wedding scene in The Princess Bride. Wuv, twue wuvwill fowwow you fowever… I remember having a professor show that in seminary as a warning against… well, I’m not exactly sure what. It may have been a cautionary tale against having a really funny lisp and holding an office involving public speaking. While The Princess Bride may not teach us much about love, we are bombarded with messages about what love is that are just as wacky as Peter Cook preaching on mawaige.

Where do we hear about love?

Books… stuff like Twilight (God help us!) and Nicholas Sparks.

The movies… but the classical romance stories of Casablanca now look more like cheap date night flicks that these days even require “crossover” appeal to men, which usually involves tanks, a bank robbery and the obligatory car chase.

The internet… surveys say that more than 20% of all relationships start online these days. Do we learn about love from personality inventories and catchy personal profiles?

Music… Do we learn about love from Justin Bieber or Mariah Carey? (Oy!)

Television… TV may be where most young people encounter something portrayed as “love.” Big Brother, Jersey Shore, Real Housewives of… fill in the blank—wholesome, family programs that teach us all about love. It’s enough to make a person want to give up.

Reality TV tries to tell us what love is. As far as television producers are concerned love is the Bachelor bringing in a cadre of attractive ladies and testing them out one-by-one until finally deciding that one is his “true love.” Reality TV tells us that love is really, really liking somebody; it is one-dimensional devotion with expected physical and emotional benefits. You don’t love somebody because you are willing to sacrifice for them—even if you might throw in a catchy phrase like “I’ll give them the world”—really you are looking for somebody who is your “dream girl” or “dream guy”—that perfect person that will fulfill your every want. Reality TV tells us that love is choosing that which always makes you happy.

I can just imagine Jesus giving this is a big facepalm.

Simply, reality TV is a fairy tale wrapped up in a horror story. Watch it for thirty seconds and you realize immediately that there is something fake in it; there is something that does not match up with actual reality. But dang it if the story isn’t compelling! We still want love to win, even when it’s a horribly fake, commercially-enhanced charade that only resembles love about as much as Cheez-Whiz resembles cheese.

There is a nugget of truth in these commercialized caricatures of love, just like there is something cheesy about Cheez-whiz, but it is woefully misrepresented as the actual thing. Jesus is about the real stuff. And at the risk of sounding... well... cheesy, he offers a version of love that doesn’t sell us short. “Love one another as I have loved you,” he says.

How did he love us? Did he choose us on a reality game show? Did he find us to be fascinating, fun and exciting people? I think now. I mean, look around you. If Jesus loves Scandinavian Lutherans it’s certainly not because we’re fun and exciting.

Luckily, Jesus doesn’t need you to be; he doesn’t need you to dance in the pews. He wouldn’t mind it if you did, but in this part of the country that would be a legitimate miracle. Thankfully, this is not the test of Jesus’ love nor the reason for it. Jesus loved us by taking up his cross and dying for our sake. You know this. You can probably even testify to what that means to you, but let’s not forget that this is a two-part responsibility. Jesus gave himself up to death in order to show us his love, and we are to love as Jesus did. That means dying, folks; straight-up death.

If you’ve ever wondered what it meant when Jesus said to take up your crosses and follow the answer is right here. To love as Christ loved is to die, but not just to pass away at the end of this life (that’s a really easy test that we are well on our way to passing). To love as Christ loved is to die to yourself, to give up your own wants and needs for the sake of others. Simple enough, right? Don't ever want anything for yourself. Don't ever put yourself before somebody else. Forsake your joy for the joy of others.

Easy... right?

Thankfully, Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves. So when we feel high and mighty about our ability to love, Jesus shows up to give us a reality check. “You did not choose me,” Jesus said, “I chose you.”

Love is being chosen. We can’t love Jesus in return; not as we ought. That is why we come back every week to confess our sins and receive forgiveness. If we were capable of choosing Jesus we would be capable of real love, as it is we try our best and sometimes get it right, though often we can't and won't get there, which is why we come back to receive a word of forgiveness.

But doesn't “love requires a choice?" I have heard it said. This is a frequent refrain for those who believe that our salvation depends on us choosing God, giving our hearts over to Jesus, or entering into a relationship with God--whatever the language. Love, they say, requires a response. They believe that in order for us to show our love—whether to God or fellow human beings—we need to be able to choose them.

I think there is an important distinction to make here. Love does require a choice, but it can only come from one who stands on equal terms. We cannot choose God, because we don’t stand as equals with God. If we did, then no problem, we could declare our love for God and God would love us back. By the way, these are similar reasons why a person who has been abused cannot love an abuser. They might think they love him or her, they might be very devoted and feel a deep connection, but it is not love. Love requires an equal playing field. There can be no power dynamics in love.

So as I said, love does require a choice, but it is the kind of choice only Jesus is capable of making on our behalf. Jesus wants us to know, very clearly, that love is not about us. Love is all about self-sacrifice, dying to ourselves for the sake of someone else and needing nothing in return. The expected return on investment for love is zero, zilch, and anything that is reciprocated is grace—a bonus. That’s why it’s hard to love; it’s hard to expect nothing for something that matters so deeply.

But this is also why it means so much more than the junk that’s on TV. I have no illusions that I am going to put the networks into financial ruin by proclaiming that Jesus’ love is better than the Bachelorette, but I do have some hope that dying to the self is still possible in this world. I hope that we can be God’s chosen people, which is to let go of our need to be the choosers. I hope, finally, that we can laugh at the mainstream caricatures of love. Wuv, twue wuv is so much better than that.