Creek stomping in the river of justice and righteousness

A sermon for Bethel Lutheran Church, Parkersburg, IA

 Amos 5:18-24

The scripture readings for today are like a river in and of themselves—to follow that river I think it’s best to start at the confluence and to wind our way back upstream, which means I’m going to begin with the Gospel of Matthew and the reading from Thessalonians—both of which are about Jesus Christ coming along to reconcile and redeem a broken world. This is the central hope and belief of the Christian faith—that what Christ did on the cross, dying for all of us, will be work that is completed when the world has ended and when our lives here are over. “Keep awake!” says Jesus in the Gospel reading—for you do not know when Christ is coming.

            However, there is one thing about Jesus telling us to stay awake that can be misconstrued. The goal of life on earth is not to escape life on earth. It is to be awake; it is to see Christ when Christ appears before you. And Christ will come when all of this is over—for most of us, most likely, that will be when we die. And that day could be years from now or today. But Christ also comes to us in the form of others who enter our lives—others who do not know they are being Christ—and all of us can see Christ in those encounters if we are awake to it. Christ comes in a child who wants you to read a bedtime story. Christ comes as a beggar, or a prisoner, or a reject. The incarnation of Christ means that Christ has entered into all humanity, and as Victor Hugo said, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

The missing grace ( Or why wrestling with scripture we don't like is way more reverent than ignoring it)

Preached at Peace Lutheran, Clayton and St. Peter Lutheran, Garnavillo

Philippians 2:1-13

           I am going to preach on the Philippians hymn today, which I do with some measure of trepidation, because I feel I should be up-front about this from the start: I don’t particularly like this passage. Maybe this is very familiar scripture to you, it is for me (now), but once upon a time, I was sitting in a class at seminary and the professor told us that we would be meditating on this scripture to begin class… every period… all semester long. Our professor expected that we would already know this scripture pretty well, seeing as it was so commonly read in church, which was news to me (who had a degree in Religion at the time), but the professor also said we would see and hear new things when we meditated on this passage over and over… and over again.

            Perhaps you all have experienced the sensation of repeating a word ad nauseum until it loses its meaning—a phenomena that is called semantic satiation? Well, what I experienced with this passage is what I am going to call theological satiation. Rather than opening up new thoughts, ideas, and possibilities, the more I read, the less meaning I found. It began to feel like meaningless ideas that I was obligated to nod along with, because that was what it meant to treat the scripture with the reverence it deserved.

            “What word stuck out to you today?” the professor would ask.

            “Humbled,” I would think for the seventh time.

            “And what image do you see when you hear the text?”

            “Nothing. Meaninglessness. The void.”

            These were all things I wouldn’t say, so I mostly didn’t say anything at all, which—looking back—was a huge mistake, because I was so fearful of saying what I truly felt (which was nothing) that it kept me from being honest. And whenever we are lying, or faking it, or whatever, because we feel obligated to do something or be something or think something, it is precisely then that we are not giving the scripture the reverence it deserves. I forgot in that class that all scripture is meant to be wrestled with—that’s what faithfulness looks like—not ignoring it, but wrestling—confronting what I found to be, frankly, boring.

Not karma--not a great balancing act--just grace

A sermon for American Lutheran Church, Grundy Center, IA

Matthew 20:1-16

            This past week, I got some great news. Maybe I shouldn’t say this because my kids are here and I don’t want any of them to get a big head, but at the risk of bragging, I just want to say that my kindergartener, Elias, got his first FAST test results back and, let me tell you, he’s pretty smart. So, the tests say. I started looking at early admission to Harvard and I don’t think he’s quite eligible yet, but by his spring FAST test results, maybe he’ll be ready to skip 1^st-12^th grade. And, yeah, sure, he just turned five, but he’s on the fast-track to great things—the results say.

            But those test results—they’re a bit funny—because while they say he is doing quite well in reading and math, they don’t seem to mention some of his best qualities. I don’t see a single category for kindness or how well he cares for his friends. I don’t see any measurement of his capacity for empathy or the joy that comes from all the nonsense jokes that he concocts. I don’t see a single thing about his goofy grin, his love of the outdoors, or even his excitement about dinosaurs.

            To be fair, I don’t think any of these tests claim to say much about peoples’ best qualities—whether FAST, or the ACTs, or your credit score—but it’s worth noticing that how readily we are reduced to numbers when it comes to areas of our life that are deemed valuable to society. There is always somebody ready to assign us a value for how well we answer questions, or how we look, or how high we can jump. And this may work just fine and dandy to power an economic system that is built on merit, but according to Jesus in the parable we read today, it is simply not the way that the kingdom of God works. The kingdom of God is a kingdom of grace, which kind of stinks for me—what with such talented kids.

But then again, I have seen how they behave sometimes, too. I have seen how badly they need to be loved in and through their mistakes—how they need to be defined not by their worst moments but loved for who they are, even if it takes some time for them to become more who we would like—even if they are occasionally just awful to one another—even, in fact, if they never improve. It is for children like these that the parable of the vineyard is told. But, I suspect more than that, it is for we-parents who know how imperfect we are, who need to know that when everything goes to hell, God’s grace will catch us.

Ewalu Quilt Auction: Lost Sheep and God's Love of Material Things

Scripture: Luke 15:1-7

I’m going to begin this morning by reading another version of the Parable of the Lost Sheep—this one from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Now, if you don’t remember the Gospel of Thomas from your days in Sunday School, it will soon become obvious why. Thomas is a book of sayings discovered in 1945 in the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt. It is very old—perhaps as old as the Gospel of John—but it was obviously not included in the Biblical canon—again, for reasons you will soon understand.

Without further ado—the Parable of the Lost Sheep according to the Gospel of Thomas:

The Gospel of Thomas, verse 107:

Jesus said, "The kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them, the largest, went astray. He left the ninety-nine sheep and looked for that one until he found it. When he had gone to such trouble, he said to the sheep, 'I care for you more than the ninety-nine.'"

That is how you change the whole vibe of a passage with two words—one qualifier, “the largest”. Two words stir up a rather important question: Does God seek us out because we are lost creatures that he loves, or is God only going to pursue us if we are the best, the biggest, or the most beautiful? 

This brings up a whole other category of questions, like: Where does my worth come from? Am I valuable in and of myself, or only for what I produce, or only for what I consume? Then, a step further removed: What is God’s economy?

I believe Christians have done a terrible job of talking about worthiness, because too often we have slipped into this dialectic where faith is about spiritual things and life is about material things and never shall the two meet, presumably because God does not like material things. Now, I can say that almost without objection in the Christian church in spite of how ridiculous it is when we have a God was the one who made those material things and called them good.

God loves trees and rocks, but God also loves the works of our hands. I suspect God loves marvels of architecture just as God loves water and sun, livestock and companion animals, and every other thing that God created and called “good.” It is not sinful to marvel at created things—after all, you are one of them! If God cares for you, as a lost sheep, then I have to believe God also cares for quilts and bowls and all sorts of things we create.

As yourself: God's gracious love for YOU

Preached at Zion Lutheran, Jubilee, and American Lutheran, Jesup 

Scripture: Romans 13:8-14

Love your neighbor as yourself is one of those wonderful, golden rule bits of wisdom that is so universal that every major faith tradition in the world has some version of it. On the one hand, it’s very simple: Treat others the way you want to be treated. Only do things to people that you would want done to you. Seems straightforward. 

But there are a couple of challenges with this little morsel of a moral. The first is that we don’t do it very well. That’s no secret. We are certainly not guaranteed that our love will be returned with love. We often have to face the question of how to respond to disinterest or disdain, and showing love to folks who don’t care or don’t want it is rather hard. Paul writing Romans didn’t seem to have a problem with this, but then again, for the first half of his career, Paul sort of made his living killing people, so it’s pretty hard to put us in the moral absolutist shoes of St. Paul. Elsewhere in his writings, it is pretty obvious that Paul feels he really deserves to have his love met with hate. In some ways, it seems the self-hatred runs deep with him.

Which gets at the 2^nd, larger and more universal challenge with loving your neighbor as you love yourself. There is one enormous assumption in this phrase—perhaps you see it? To love our neighbor as ourselves assumes that we love ourselves. The honest truth: A lot of people do not love themselves. Many people are hardest on their own self. And this is particularly true of people who treat other people poorly—they do not love others so often because they first fail to love themselves.

I think we all recognize this on some level. We recognize the lack of love in others, and sometimes also in ourselves, but what to do about it? Some folks are able to escape from cycles of self-hatred, but for many it is a bridge too far. Worse, the self-hatred grows when they feel they have tried and tried but cannot love who they are. This is because transformation seems to have less to do with any willpower we possess than it does with something outside of ourselves. If I had to give it a name, I’d call it grace.

The broken pieces

Preached at St. Paul's Lutheran, Maynard, August 6, 2023

Matthew 14:13-21

            Abundance over scarcity.

            Scarcity is a real fear, especially in rural, agricultural communities. There are fewer things. Fewer opportunities in our towns, in our schools, in our churches. Fewer people. Less and less.

            When I was a pastor in NW Minnesota, I did a little research in our church history books. I looked at the year when church attendance peaked in our congregation. An average of 430 people every Sunday in 1965. At the time (in 2016), average attendance had fallen under 100. So, I went back into the church council minutes to see how the church felt about all of its growth in 1965. Surely, they were basking in the glow of all those baby boomers, thrilled at all the vibrant ministries possible with over four times as many people as would eventually be there?

            Not so much.

            The Luther League report read much like a youth report in 2023: There was not enough engagement with the young people, it said. Young people needed to be more involved in the church, they worried.

            Those Lutherans couldn’t see abundance when it was staring them in the face. The truth is: There would never be enough to satisfy.

            Our churches have drifted in the same thinking that drives capitalism—the premise that everything must grow in perpetuity in order for us to strive. And capitalism may well be the best of all the dismal economic systems we have developed as human beings, but God’s economy does not work like this. God’s economy is nonsense to all our sensibilities. God’s economy suggests something absolutely startling:

            The problem is not that we have too little; the problem is that we still have too much.

            God’s economy is Jesus, taking a look at the five thousand men (plus women and children) and saying, “Five loaves? Two fish? That’s plenty!” After all, we are dealing with a God who spoke the world into being with words. A few loaves and fish are more than enough.

            For us to participate in God’s economy, we have to give—our selves, our money, our time—until there is nothing left. This is why in another story we have a rich man who comes to Jesus looking to justify himself only to go away disappointed. He followed the laws. He obeyed the commandments. But he was lacking one crucial detail: He had things.

            Faith is only faith when all the other things that we are really trusting in are cast aside.

            As usual, I am mostly preaching to myself this morning, because I was born in 1986 and in the 37 years of my life, the ELCA has declined in numbers every single year.  Since the pandemic, many churches have fewer people around. At Ewalu, we have fewer campers around. The landscape has changed swiftly. When I was ordained in 2011, I waited five months for a first-call. Now, I had a lot going for me—I mean, I don’t know if I was a particularly good pastoral candidate, but I was single, male, white, straight. The grand slam that would offend nobody in any church. In 2011, there were exactly as many pastors graduating seminary (211) as there were calls open to first-call pastors (211). In 2023, seminary graduates are roughly half that and open calls have ballooned.

            It is entirely likely if you are under 65 years old, you have never experienced a church that is growing in worship attendance.

            All of this is to say that it is incredibly easy to be scarcity people. There is less and less and less every year. Or it feels that way.

            Clearly, we are not Jesus, who can do so much with so little. But I don’t believe we are the recipients of that feast either. Yes, we ought to remember that Jesus can do much with so little. Yes, our problem is still that we have too much. But man, that doesn’t sound like good news, does it? Like the rich man who came to Jesus, we would do well to give more away—more of our time, our talents, our gifts—but we can’t give it all away, can we? That is the harsh word of the law and what Jesus demands: Give everything. But shoot, that is kind of depressing, isn’t it? Not only do we feel we have less and less; we also feel we have less to give; and we feel even less capable of giving it away.

            This is where we stand, feeling the weight of scarcity UNTIL we consider a vitally important question: “Where are we in this story?” Where are we in the feeding of the 5000? We are not Jesus, clearly. But are we the people—hungry and with little to offer? Or are we the bread and the fish—provisions for a needy world? In some ways, we may be both hungry people and the food to feed them, but I believe that most of us are neither the hungry people nor the bread and fish. But we ARE in the story.

You and me? We are the broken pieces.

            We are the bits of bread and fish gathered together that are more than they started with.

            We are the broken pieces, because we see a world that appears to be spread thinner and thinner, but we cannot see the whole picture. In fact, we can see very little of what Jesus is doing. We are only ever feeding one person here, another there. On our own, we are not enough. And yet, by some mystery, our whole is greater than the sum of our parts. We are broken for the sake of those who need it, but that act of breaking does not destroy us. In fact, that breaking is the only hope we have.

            I see it at camp every single year, every single week. We are an ecosystem full of broken people. By this point of the summer, literally broken people—like a broken foot here, a broken thumb there. Exhausted, humbled, broken people. But the broken pieces are where you will find God’s handiwork. The broken pieces are evidence of the proclamation of God’s grace. You can’t follow after Christ without breaking apart. You can’t rise without dying. This is the paradox of the Christian faith. The less you have, the more capacity you have for God’s grace to fill you.

            The problem is not that we have too little; it’s that we are holding on to too much.

            So, we break apart, and that’s when God puts us to use. When we admit we are not enough, we discover that God is.

            So, what to do with all this—what nuggets of wisdom to take away—how then shall we live?

            I suspect it’s pretty simple: Be open to being broken open, because God will do just that. Be put to use. Do not be afraid to be broken pieces. Broken pieces are the surest evidence of good work, after all. But also, and this is probably an important point in a broken world, don’t let others break you. Instead, choose to break for the sake of those you care about—for the sake of those who need you.

            There is no need to pretend that we have it all together, because nobody in this story does. Jesus does everything with nothing. We, in turn, are called to remember that our problem is not that we have too little; it’s that there is too much in the way for us to see God at work.

My prayer is that we all let go. That we break—willingly and completely. Because I have found, whether at camp or at church or in the lives of my children, that the most meaningful moments happen when we just let go—when we break apart and let someone in. 

May you be broken and discover your worth—and may you be healed by Jesus Christ, who is broken for you. 

At camp, we go!

2023 Summer Staff Commissioning -- Preached June 3-4, 2023 @ First Lutheran, Decorah

 Matthew 28:16-20

Fittingly, the scripture readings for today are about both the great outdoors and great work. Psalm 8 tells us that God’s majesty is a reflection of the majesty of creation, which is something that I feel deep in my soul whenever I am climbing a hill and anticipating the view of the world below. Hopefully, you can slow down enough to experience the wonder of the earth and the heavens as a window into God’s playground. I could preach only on this today and have plenty to say. But even better, we mark the Holy Trinity this weekend with Matthew’s Great Commission, which takes all that business about the outdoors and the world and tells us, “Get to work!” Which is great, because right now, at camp, let me tell you, there is a lot of work to do!

And since there is a lot to do, I am in the mindset to focus on the verbs—the specific actions Jesus expects of us. There are five of them—five verbs of the Great Commission—five directives for Christians to accomplish while passing through this big, beautiful world. Those five verbs are: Make disciples, baptize, teach, and remember… I never claimed I was good at counting. Make disciples, baptize, teach, and remember… what did I forget?