American Idols

Acts 13:1-3, 14:8-18

Why would we worship this God whom we cannot see when we can worship this person, place, or thing that we can see right in front of us? This temptation is real. It’s lived out in today’s reading when the people in Antioch saw Paul and Barnabus doing miraculous things. Surely, they must be gods, they said. We don’t really know what they represent, but we do know them! We should worship them!

            We could laugh at this, but this temptation is not just real; it is universal. It’s really easy for us to trust in the thing we see in front of us—the person who is doing things we like, things that might even seem miraculous. We search out these folks as our own personal spiritual gurus. We look for that person who embodies what we hope for, and we follow.

            Of course, we do this with celebrities. And it’s easy to criticize other peoples’ celebrities, right? Man, look at all those dummies following Kim Kardashian, we might think. That’s a ridiculous person to idolize. OK, but you’re telling me you don’t follow after somebody different? You’re telling me you don’t trust somebody else in the same kind of way?

            This is all harmless, we may imagine, except there’s one giant problem with raising up human beings: They will fail you. Every one of them. They aren’t worthy of your worship. None of them. Last summer, this phenomena hit the mainstream with the announcement that Justin Bieber got engaged. If you don’t know who Justin Bieber is, good for you. For most of us I suspect this wasn’t news we cared about, but for teen-turned-20-something girls who grew up idolizing him, this was earth-shattering. Every generation has their idols and Bieber was the pinnacle for young millennials, and upon news of his engagement more than one of these teens-turned-young-adult women openly criticized his fiancée as unworthy because she didn’t worship Bieber the way they did.

            As a person who does some pre-marital counseling, this one was obvious: I hope she didn’t. I hope she hardly knew him growing up. I hope she didn’t invest herself in the idyllic image that is never reality. Can you imagine a worse bedrock for a relationship? Because it’s built on a lie. You should not worship your spouse, because your spouse is not God. You should not worship your children, because your children are not God. And you certainly should not worship Justin Bieber, because—I don’t know a lot of things, but I know this—God, he is not.

            And this might sound obvious and low-hanging fruit when talking about idolatry, but I think we all have our Justin Biebers. When we are deciding how to order our lives and what things matter more to us than others, we inevitably lift certain people onto the altar of things we worship. Think about it: Who is the person who shapes your beliefs most in the world? Someone you know, perhaps, but what about somebody you don’t know—not personally? Somebody whose books you’ve read. Somebody you’ve seen on TV.

Easter Sunday: Practice Resurrection!

Matthew 28:1-10 

           In my office, I have a US Forest Service sign and poster that reads, “Who passed this way?” showing an assortment of native and pioneer faces. Underneath, in a somewhat smaller font, it reads: “Please Don’t Erase The Traces of America’s Past.” I have that sign hidden back behind the desk in my study, because I’m half-expecting that the Forest Service will be knocking on my door and arresting me for having it tomorrow.

            How this sign came to me (legally, cough cough) is maybe interesting but not so important, but as I think about Easter, and especially the report of Easter from the women at the tomb, I am intrigued by the way we consider Easter both an historical event and a game-changer that turns our lives upside-down, even two-thousand years later. Today, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but we don’t celebrate it like we do Memorial Day or even Thanksgiving, whose significance is tied to memory. The resurrection is more than that Forest Service sign; it does more than beg us to remember the past. Easter does not live in a museum. It is not some fossilized reminder of a thing that happened once, which we must excavate each year. Easter colors everything.

I want to talk today about why.

            Like many of you, my eyes were drawn to Notre Dame last week as that famed cathedral caught fire. The majesty of that church and the history held within capture our imaginations in a multitude of ways, but the cathedral itself is only an incredibly impressive antiquity. People discover God there—no doubt!—but as I listened to the coverage, I heard the value of that building equated time and again with its age. I get it (I do!). Magnificent, old churches have character and a patina where the very air you breathe feels ancient, pregnant with the weight of the divine. And, yet, the worship of relics for relics’ sake is another way of treating Easter as just another historical event. God is more than a god of history; God is the God of right now.

            The resurrection of Jesus is the life-blood of the Christian faith; it is the thing that moves us, and we remember the resurrection not just by study and devotion but also by practicing resurrection daily. Practice resurrection! This is the concluding line of a poem by Wendell Berry (in his Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front) that might be the most important call to attention for Christians in this 21^st century, because it takes something that we assume to be passive—God will raise us; we are the object of the God’s action—and it transforms resurrection into something we participate in. Of course we can’t resurrect ourselves, but we can live out of the grace of God that this Easter morning instills in our souls.

Good Friday: The cross tells no lies

Matthew 27

The cross. Today, we venerate the cross. It’s a strange thing we wear around our necks, put on t-shirts, and feature in our worship spaces. The symbol of our faith does not lift up the glory of the resurrection or the divinity of the incarnation but the uncertainty of Jesus’ crucifixion. It’s the thing that causes death, bursts barriers, and brings both joy and sadness. It is both/and. The cross doesn’t avoid suffering; it lives at the intersection of all that we lose and all that we gain.

            Most of all, the cross tells it as it is.

It shows us we are our mortal. You will die, it assures us. It whispers that you cannot save yourself. The cross suffers no heroes; instead, it is where heroes suffer.

So many things in our lives don’t tell us how it is. Almost everything we experience is marketed to us in a sugar-coated form, cleaned up, and exaggerated. The cross doesn’t sugarcoat a thing. Nothing about the cross is Instagram-worthy; it’s the kind of thing we would much prefer to avoid. The cross doesn’t tell you how to be a better you, and it doesn’t promise you things it cannot fulfill. Instead, it tells you that you are not enough.

The wonder of the Christian faith is that being not enough is precisely what we proclaim. We are not enough, so Jesus had to be.

            The cross tells no lies. It is the place where we admit our mortality, our brokenness, and our inability to choose rightly. We come here not because it’s the place we want to be, but because it is the only honest place left for us when all else turns out to be a lie. This is the low point of human history, and it is the most relatable for all of us. Because the cross does not gloss over true suffering. It does not minimize genocide, or starvation, or AIDS, or cancer, or car accidents, or war, or you name it. The cross takes it all; it lives in those moments, and it does not say, “Cheer up. It will get better.” Instead, it is the place where our Savior dies with us.

The mystery of communion

Matthew 26:17-30

            I don’t remember the first time I took communion. I vaguely remember something about classes—maybe I even learned something, but if I did, it’s long flown away—but I suspect, when I first took communion, I couldn’t actually have explained a single thing about what it was that I was doing. I suspect this is the same with most who come forward to the rail. What is communion? A mystery, we might say.

            Whatever our theology, and Martin Luther wrote volumes on this subject, all we really have from scripture is Jesus saying, “Take, eat; this is my body… drink from it, all of you, this is my blood…” Paul adds directions to that in his letters, but, really, they aren’t much clearer. What we have is an open-ended sacrament.

            I’ve gone to seminary and led my share of first communion classes, so I can tell you now what Luther’s Small Catechism says about communion—namely, that is gives forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation—but those words telling us about what communion is pale in comparison to the experience of what it does. This is not something to be understood with your head; it’s something that should be felt deep inside of you. It’s meaning is not in its logic but in its mysteriousness.

            But practical matters get in the way and eventually we have logical questions, like “Who gets to commune?” Is it members of the church? Is it members of our denomination? Is it all Christians? Is it all people? “And what age?” Is it from the first moment a baby can eat solid food? Is it six? Eight? Ten? Twelve? Eighteen? If it’s only when you understand it, then I suspect the answer is never, because what hope do any of us have to put the experience into words? For that matter, “How often should we commune?” Every day? Every Sunday? Every other Sunday? Once or twice a year?

Jesus doesn’t answer these things. We can intuit some sense of right practice and feel it deeply, but the open-endedness of communion has made this extremely difficult to pin down, and I suspect that many churches who do it very differently nevertheless do it very faithfully. For me, the reason communion is hard to pin down is because it is a means of grace—and means of grace are free, and unmerited, and don’t stand up to any of the rules we construct around them. They defy our legalism.

Legal, Right, or True

Matthew 21:1-17

As we read today about Jesus entering Jerusalem on the precipice of a week full of world-changing history, it’s worth remembering the difference between what is legal, what is moral, and what is true, and I think this is something worth reflecting upon this Holy Week.

            When we teach children about right and wrong, at first it is clear. What is right is what is legal is what is true—that’s where we start. Don’t do drugs, because it’s wrong and because it’s against the law. Don’t steal, because it’s wrong and because it’s against the law. But if you live long enough and find yourself mulling enough tough life situations, you begin to see that these things occasionally diverge. For Christians, who worship this God we know in Jesus Christ, this is forever colored by Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, where he comes in as a king but is quickly arrested and put to death according to the law. According to that law, the chief priests and Pilate were righteous and Jesus was a criminal.

Jesus broke the law. He healed on the Sabbath, he claimed to be God’s Son—even God’s self!—and he claimed authority that pit him against the leaders of the day. Jesus was guilty of breaking the law, which is precisely why we need to remember that our laws are not always not always a mark of morality. Rather, the law is a human thing, created for order, which can be used or misused. Apartheid was the law in South Africa, the Holocaust was executed according to the law in Germany, and, even today, in places as distinct and different as South Sudan, and Israel, and Venezuela, and Russia, the law is used to silence and oppress, sometimes to the point of killing; sometimes more subtly. The passion of Jesus should remind us that the law may easily become morally bankrupt.

            If we look deep enough within ourselves, I suspect most of us take issue with some aspect of our laws, whether it’s about drugs, or abortion, or immigration, or criminal justice, or whatever. Most of us are not fully satisfied, and that’s OK! As followers of Jesus, we are called to struggle together to find a better way of doing things, knowing that the law will never be perfect. The law is a human creation that can always be done better, and it’s always at risk of becoming the thing that kills Jesus all over again.

Sheep and goats; knowing and not knowing

Matthew  25:31-46

            This was the first scripture I ever preached on here at Grace and Red River, and I’m happy to report, in spite of the rumors flying apparently making the rounds in the community, this will most definitely not be my last. No, we’re not going anywhere, so if you’ve heard that one, feel free to go back to the source and correct them. I’ve got far too many adventure race ideas to leave anytime soon.

            But back on the subject of this scripture, this is really a tough one. I mean, on the one hand, we should obviously be treating everybody who is hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison as if they are Jesus himself. This is good. Go do it. Still, I don’t know what Jesus is up to here, because the moral of the story seems to be: Do good and that’s how you’ll earn eternal life, which runs contrary to everything else we’ve been taught—that it’s not about works; it’s about faith. And if it’s about works, then how will we ever know if we are sheep or goats?

            This is where it gets kind of interesting. In this parable, the sheep don’t know they are sheep and the goats know they are goats. Everybody is confused. At first, that doesn’t fill me with confidence. Not only does Jesus suggest salvation is about something different than he’s been suggesting all along, but now it also comes to people who don’t know on which side of the fence they stand. This is not comforting.

            But, then, there is this matter of the sheep and the goats, and I wonder if Matthew’s Gospel hasn’t been preparing us for this all along. This is the last parable. And it’s our inclination to make the last parable the most important, but perhaps that’s not quite it. Perhaps this parable is simply the reminder that all that stuff about faith and grace, which matters so much, doesn’t change who we are or how we are to act. Most of all, perhaps this is a reminder that we haven’t got God figured out, not even a little.

Faith's return on investment

Matthew 25:14-30

            These parables toward the end of Matthew’s Gospel are the hardest parables, no question. They get harder and harder until we get to the point where it feels like Jesus is contradicting himself. I mean, we just spent weeks reading “the least shall be first and the first shall be last” and now Jesus turns it around and says, “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away?” What is going on here?

            Fear. That’s what these parables evoke—fear that we haven’t gotten it right—fear that even after seeking after God earnestly (and, let’s face it, we haven’t always done that so well), even when we have, we are afraid we haven’t done enough, because it’s not clear from Jesus’ parables what “enough” is. There are many folks who spend their lives afraid of being insufficient; afraid of letting everybody down, and nobody more than God; afraid that they are not enough and never will be enough.

            Yet, there is a thread woven through the Gospels of something different. Jesus is hard—harsh, even—but especially to those who believe they have it all figured out. These are the ones who find the swiftest rebuke, so that everybody ends up alongside Peter, asking the question he once uttered: “Lord, to whom shall I go?” You are it. If everything is as I hope, then you are the only one worth turning to, and if it’s not, then I have nothing else to fall back on, so what else is there but you?

            As I read the parable of the talents, it seems to me that that last slave, given the one talent, is absolutely paralyzed by fear. I recognize this, because I see it all the time. I see people who are so scared of doing anything that they quietly live and die never having really lived. I see people paralyzed by anxiety and a feeling of worthlessness—that they don’t deserve a thing and can’t believe anybody would fail to see through their façade and see them for the imposter they are. This slave would rather not have been given the talent at all! It would be much better if the master had just given talents to others!

I’m reminded of that marvelous scene in the Lord of the Rings (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then go read it, go see it, and then go see it again) where Frodo says to Gandalf: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” And Gandalf replies, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”