God's Word, or why "real" preaching matters

Isaiah 40:1-11

There’s a Lake Wobegon-kind-of-story of a pastor who preached his Sunday morning sermon as he did every week, got down from the pulpit, led the rest of the service, shook hands with his parishioners, and then went home only to discover that over the course of the week, much to his surprise, the members from the congregation started doing the things he preached that they should do. He preached about evangelism, so one of the flock went out and started knocking doors in their town telling people about Jesus. The pastor personally thought this was a little pushy, but it did seem to be the gist of what he was talking about. He preached about helping the poor, so one of the flock bought a meal for a local family, and then charged it to the church. So at least he was in the spirit of what the pastor had said even if the practice was somewhat lacking. The pastor preached about how Jesus comes before family and friends, and several members of the church reported back that they took his advice and had kicked their adult children to the curb, who were really just playing video games in their basement, anyway, most of the time.

            At first the pastor rather liked this new congregation of people who listened to him, but as the week wore on and new report after new report reached his ears of congregation members doing outrageous things in pursuit of the ideal he was preaching, he gradually became overwhelmed. So, he got up in the pulpit the next Sunday and begged the people “Please, go back to not listening to me!” he said. Because everybody had taken his advice and things had gotten very complicated. And nobody was taking his advice in the way he imagined they should be doing it. He had expected things to go one way, and it had gone quite another. In the end, he concluded that it was much better when the pastor’s preaching didn’t change a thing.

A Perfectly Rational Story

1 Kings 18:20-39

“If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.”

            This sounds so simple. It should be that simple. Who is the real God? Follow him. Except… most of us don’t get to run this kind of test. We just don’t. Instead, we get hints and wonders and little things that make us yearn for something better and a quiet assurance that such a thing is there. Most of us don’t get to see God hurling down lightning bolts from the heavens. This is a wonderful story and a difficult story for that reason.

            I mean, I love this story. I expect some of you do, too, because it is a story that is thoroughly modern (even if it is three thousand years old). What I mean by calling it a “modern” story is that the grounds that are established for God’s existence are thoroughly rational. Elijah sets the premise: Worship a God who actually does something. And then he goes about constructing a challenge where only the real God could succeed.

            He gives Ba’al every advantage. The home field of Mount Carmel. The weapons of choice: Ba’al being the god of fertility, what better advantage than lightning? He plays in front of the home crowd—four hundred of Ba’al worshipers. Elijah makes it so lopsided that the only way Yahweh—his God, our God—could possibly win is if he is real and Ba’al is not.

            I wish we could do a similar demonstration for you today. Wet down the altar and have a little competition between the God who we know in the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and all the other gods we have. Wealth, fame, sports teams, deer season... But this is not how God normally works. This story with Elijah is the exception and not the rule. Deuteronomy 6:16, which predates Elijah by hundreds of years, says “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” which is exactly what Jesus quotes to Satan when he is tempted in the wilderness. The honest truth is that Elijah gets a free pass here that the rest of us do not. He gets to put God to the test in a way we cannot.

            This may be unfair, but it is also a reminder that, as much as we might think otherwise, we are not the heroes of the faith. God tends to work through nations, telling a big story, crafting a big plan. This is why that oft-quoted passage from Jeremiah, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to proper and a future with hope” (Jer 29:22) is misinterpreted again and again. It is not an individual promise to you and me but rather it is a national promise; a promise, we might say, for the whole body of Christ. Sometimes you won’t prosper. Sometimes you won’t be very hopeful. Sometimes—probably often—you’ll have a tough time crafting a rational test for God’s existence. This is not evidence against God; it is simply proof against your methodology.

John the Baptist makes Lutherans nervous

Matthew 3:1-17

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

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

Know yourself... or else you'll never know why Jesus had to come.

Scripture:Isaiah 42:1-9

I wonder how much we really know ourselves. On the surface that probably seems like a silly thought. Who could you possibly know better than yourself? But we played a little game with our Confirmation students—and I’m going to have you play it wherever you are in a minute. I want you to think about two things--to really think and pore over it--and, if you can, share them with somebody else. The two things are these: #1: What is something you are good at? And #2: What is something you need to work at or improve upon? Take as much time as you need to ponder.

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Was that easy? I think for most of us it’s a challenge, especially when we get to talking about what we need to improve. Most of us have stock answers to those questions: I really need to work on balancing my time better, or I really need to work on getting out more, or I really need to work on having a more positive attitude, but those answers are often only scratching the surface of what’s really going on with us. We have a hard time being introspective enough to know what we need to work on, because it’s scary to look at ourselves in the mirror so closely. In many ways our families and friends can answer those questions about us better than we can answer them ourselves.

Many of our societal problems are rooted in our unrealistic opinion of ourselves. As Bertrand Russell once said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” To use biblical language, there’s a lot of pointing out specks in other peoples’ eyes and not a lot of acknowledging the log in our own. And what ends up happening in a world where we don’t know ourselves very well is that we get awfully defensive. Arguments escalate. Since we are not comfortable in the situation—since we aren’t very sure of ourselves—we overcompensate, and we become louder and brasher. We talk over others. We never listen. Listening is weakness, letting others talk is weakness, admitting there are things we don’t know is weakness.

The general rule of thumb is that the person who is loudest knows him or herself the least.

It's harder to be thankful as the oppressor than the oppressed (thoughts on Thanksgiving, Habakkuk, Ferguson, and whether we should be affected))

Scripture: Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:2-4, 3:17-19

The following is a transcript

 

We’re reading from Habakkuk today, which is one of my favorite books in the Bible—also, coincidentally, impossible to pronounce. Habakkuk’s preaching has a good deal of weight because he is preaching from a place where he has absolutely nothing. It begs the question in this season of Thanksgiving: how can you be thankful when you have nothing? Thankfulness is something we associate with having things. That makes sense. I mean, it’s much easier when you have things, but Habakkuk tells us something different—that he is thankful precisely for having nothing.

He says, “Though the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on the vines… though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation” (Hab 3:17-18)

Though I have nothing… I will praise God for everything.

Habbakuk sounds so un-American. We tend to associate good things as things that we thank God for and bad things as things that we pray to God to remove from our lives. When we say we're "thankful in all things" usually it means that we find the positive in the negative--not that the bad things themselves are worthy of being thankful for. But on the other hand this attitude of Habakkuk is really refreshing, because he’s treating God as more than a good luck charm. We need more of that. At certain times in life this philosophy is very useful. This is why this scripture from Habakkuk has been used against regimes in Nazi Germany and apartheid in South Africa. It’s scripture for people who are being murdered and ruthlessly suppressed. People who have nothing but discover that being thankful even then gives them a kind of power.

Generational lines, "All Star" clergy, and reaching the aliens

Scripture: Jeremiah 1:4-10, 7:1-11
The following is a transcript

I'm going to start with a little poll. How many of you are subscribers or regular readers of The Lutheran magazine? Anybody here? Alright, we have some people who read The Lutheran. For those of you who do not (or for those that do but did not read this month's issue) they had a big issue on the clergy retirement wave, and the age demographics of clergy (and implicitly also congregations) in the ELCA. This became something of a controversial issue, because never did they say anything negative about the next generation--my generation--of clergy, but they did kind of imply things--like we're in the process retiring the "All Star team" of clergy. That's a message that many of us heard loud and clear, saying "Oh, so we're the minor league team, I guess." What ended up happening was a lot of good discussion already--and I expect more in the future. But what came up more than anything else is a sense of frustration at how easily we fracture along those lines of demographics and age.

So this call of Jeremiah that we read about today is a call to somebody who is extremely young. I think we fool ourselves if we think that God only calls people that are extremely young, but we also fool ourselves if we think that the only people who ever receive worthy calls from God are in their 50s and 60s and 70s. I think that God calls people of all sorts. There's no such thing in God's mind as too young or too old. In fact, in the Jeremiah reading God says that he set him apart before he was even born.

Bullying into prayer, swords into plowshares

Scripture: Isaiah 36:1-3, 13-20; 37:1-7, 2:1-4

            This is a story about bullying. Sure, it uses kings and nations as the characters, guys with long names that distract us. Who names their kid Sennacherib? All of that merely serves as a distraction from a story about a person with a loud voice, shouting “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” This is a story about bullying, about fear, and about all the terrible, awful, untrue things that people say to try to grab your attention. So this is a perfect story for our age.

            The Rabshakeh always gets a lot of attention. He’s the guy—or gal—who yells the loudest, who is the most threatening, and who seems the most sure of himself. I’m reminded of a time on The Simpsons when all the characters are bemoaning that nobody listens to them and Homer Simpson chimes in, saying, “I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are.” That’s what it feels like when there’s somebody yelling from a place of power. We feel like we need to engage with the person shouting on the TV or the radio because he or she is loud and given air time; even though that engagement only gives them more power.

            There are a lot of bullies out there. Some of them live in our schools—that much is still true. More and more of them live online these days. Plenty of them, like the Rabshakeh, are willing to stand up on a chair and scream to instill fear in the masses. Isn’t that what we expect from our legislators when they are passionate about an issue? Stand up and shout to show us how passionate you are. The loudest voice is the one that gets heard, after all.

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).

Not politics as usual: Election Day and the story of Naaman

Scripture: 2 Kings 5:1-14

           So it’s election season, and, as such, we know to drown out the incessant political ads, the editorials and letters to the editor that read as if the person writing in is standing on a chair screaming, and the substance-less promises of people in far off places looking for our vote. Closer to home we have friends and neighbors seeking elected offices of one sort or another, which is a whole other thing that, while not nearly as obnoxious as campaigns in St. Paul or Washington D.C., still contributes to a good deal of local stress—even if we’re all too polite to acknowledge it. It’s that political time of the year, and all I can think is, “Thank God it’s not a presidential election year.”

            It’s also a confusing time for churches because we aren’t allowed to endorse candidates but we can, apparently, take stands on issues; hence the churches who put up banners saying “Vote Yes on measure such and such” or “Vote no on something else.” These are the kind of razor-thin ethical distinctions that only politicians could create. The church lives in the world, so we are political in the sense that all people making decisions about how to live are political, but we are also apolitical—in that we do not put our trust in elected leaders or legislation to tell the world about Jesus.

            This is a good time to read from 2 Kings for that reason. Naaman, who is introduced as a commander in the army of the king of Aram, has a skin problem. He has some really bad acne. The translation we just read suggests it is leprosy, but since leprosy was more or less unknown during this period it could be as serious as that or, more likely, it was something like psoriasis. Either way, Naaman has a skin issue and he needs some help. Hearing that there is a prophet in Israel—that lowly country that he has been raiding again and again—who can heal his disease, he sends word to the king and asks for an audience with the prophet.

Becoming Goliath: Underdogs and the career arc of King David

Scripture: 2 Samuel 12:1-25

            On Friday I had planned on spending the day putting together thoughts for today’s sermon when I had an unexpected cat-sickness-related detour to Grand Forks that took most of the day. Stranded in the “big city” with no computer, Bible, or anything with which to actually “work” on a sermon, I made my way to Target to pick up a notebook, a pen, and also a Bible. When it came time to find the Bible I meandered into the book section of the Target store, which feels like it shrinks every time I’m there, slowly being eaten away, as it is, by the electronics. Today you can practically buy more different versions of Grand Theft Auto than you can books of any title from a given Target store—I’m only slightly exaggerating.

            So, when I found myself in the two aisles of books at Target I was at least thankful that they did have Bibles—two of them; both King James versions, of course—but next to these a couple of other books caught my eye. First was a book called Jesus>Heaven that I was vaguely familiar with but thought it might be mildly appropriate for Sunday sermon material, and then there was another book by Malcolm Gladwell that had very little to do with religion but, I can only assume because Target doesn’t actually care where they shelve books, it was placed right next to these other religious titles with its own title of David and Goliath. The subtitle reads: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. OK, I thought, I’ve got what I need. Which was a funny thought because I honestly didn’t even realize at first that this David of David-and-Goliath-fame is the same David from today’s reading. There is such a stark contrast between the David of youth and the adult David that you too can be largely excused if you don’t remember at first that this David who looked down on Bathsheba was the David who slew a giant. So when I left Target I did so with a notebook, a pen, a book that only vaguely had anything to do with religion, and no Bible, but I had this realization that the David story was maybe exactly what I needed.

            It was a reminder of who David was that I needed in order to get to the David we see in this reading today. I needed to remember that this King David who acts reprehensibly, without scruples or any kind of remorse, was once the underdog—was once the model of purity and devotion to God.

            I had to check myself and ask honestly, “What does this mean?” What do we do with this David. And that was a perfect launching pad for today’s sermon.

Who mourns in lowly exile here: Dry bones and resurrection

Scripture: Ezekiel 37:1-14

In the winter of 2006, our Augustana Choir did our Christmas Vespers on the theme of the O Antiphons. An antiphon is a musical response by a choir or congregation, and the “O Antiphons” are the responses attributed to the last seven days before Christmas—called “O” Antiphons because they all begin with the word/letter “O.” Anyway, I think you’ve probably heard of these before even if you’re thinking that you haven’t. In fact, I can almost guarantee you have.

            So, I realize this is a blog, and audience participation is limited, but here's what I want you to do: I want you to think about the Advent season (not Christmas, Advent)—and I want you to think of any piece of music that represents this season to you. Now, I want to be clear again: we’re looking for a piece that represents Advent, not Christmas, so if you’re thinking of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer you might want to think of another one—in fact, if you’re thinking of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer you might want to think of a better Christmas song, too, but that’s another matter.

Jeremiah 29:11 and the Challenge of Faith for the Twitter Generation

Scripture: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-14

            “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” I have to be careful whenever I say anything about this verse because my wife has it tattooed around her ankle, but she’s in Alexandria, so... here we go! She’s not alone in liking this either. Jeremiah 29:11 has been called the most popular biblical verse of my generation (I should probably explain at this point that I’m going to refer to my generation as the “millennial” generation because that’s become the cool thing to do; and I’m not sure yet if this is a compliment or a derogatory term, so for now I’ll go with it). Anyway, more than one stuffy commentator has noted with a kind of sweeping generalization that members of the millennial generation claim Jeremiah 29:11 as a personal motto because we are selfish and entitled, believing in a God who is out to serve us, and because, you know, we’re snotty kids who haven’t figured out what the real world is like. Basically, Jeremiah 29:11 has become the rallying point for theologians who want to paint a negative picture of America’s Christian youth.

            Like most stereotypes there’s a grain of truth in this. All of us pass the Bible through the lens of our own life experience. So, when a person’s life experience to this point covers only years in school, including perhaps bullying, struggling to find the right social group, discovering who you are against the backdrop of who others expect you to be, and never living up to the standards set by your parents, your friends, your church… in other words when life basically looks like forces outside of your control telling you what to do and be, it is awfully attractive to look for a promise that another force outside of your control has good plans for your life. If you want to understand why millennials love Jeremiah 29:11, you need to start by understanding what it means to be a teenager. Mostly, it’s rough.

So, you think you want justice to roll down like waters?

Scripture: Amos 1:1-2; 5:14-15, 21-24

            Justice is one of those tricky ideas that sounds really nice in principle—like, who could possibly be against justice? It’s like being against hope or brownies—but when justice actually comes somebody always has to pay. We default to a victim’s mindset, assuming that the comeuppance will be for somebody else when the reality is that it may just as well be you or me. I read an interview with Lance Armstrong this past week that just stuck with me: here’s a guy who was on the receiving end of justice—who did terrible things and is now getting what he almost certainly deserved—and, yet, he rails over and over against the unjustness of the witch hunt that brought him down. His hollow apologies betray a person who cannot see himself as anything but the victim, never as the perpetrator, in a world where justice always means getting his way. When asked if he thought justice was served, Armstrong said plainly, “No.”

            If justice is going to roll down like waters, as Amos famously says, perhaps that should make us uneasy. Perhaps we really don’t understand what justice is.

The politicians we elect (then hate), and the ones we reject and God elects

Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:1-13

            As I read through the call of David this past week I was struck by the kind of people that God elects compared with the kind of people we elect. According to polls[1] from this past week 10% of Americans approve of the job that Congress is doing, 8.5% don’t know or care (which is probably misleading because I’m pretty sure at this point 100% of us don’t care, in addition to our other feelings), and 82.5% disapprove. Given the nature of things in Washington these days I can’t really say I’m stunned, but taken on its own those numbers are staggering. Isn’t it at least a little insane that only 1 out of 10 of us approve of the people that we elected to represent us? We live in a representative democracy wherein the people decide who gets to serve, and yet we pretty much all dislike the very people we have elected into that service. And though there is a side of us that really would never be completely content with any representative, the fact remains that a majority of us decided that each and every one of these people is the best person to serve our country.

So, we can be comforted in knowing that God chooses people very differently from us!

We like to go the sexy route in our elections. We like to pick the people who are really smart and attractive, who have a fancy degree from a prestigious university, and who have done a good job of running a business or making speeches. We assume that those are the kinds of people that we need running the country because they have experience doing important stuff, which suggests they can faithfully represent the issues that are important to us.

            Notice, on the other hand, that God calls a boy shepherd to be king. David isn’t especially smart; he’s not really attractive in the authoritative way we expect of our leaders; he has no experience with anything resembling politics; he has no business acumen; and God doesn’t even ask where he stands on the issues. What a mockery of the political process! David doesn’t know a thing about leadership, he has no political convictions whatsoever, and he never went to Yale or was made captain of the football team. No human being would have ever elected David to be king.

We all find different things in life challenging: Moses' calling, our calling

Scripture: Exodus 4:10-17

            In Nadia Bolz-Weber’s new book, Pastrix, she tells a story of her time as a down-and-out alcoholic comic in Denver like this: “When I was working as a comic, normal noncomic people would often say, ‘Wow, I don’t know how you can get up in front of all those people with just a microphone.’ To which I would reply, ‘Wow, I don’t know how you can balance your checkbook and get up for work each day.’ We all find different things challenging in life. Speaking in front of hundreds of people was far less challenging for me than scheduling dental appointments.”

            We all find different things challenging in life. There’s a lot of wisdom in that short sentence. I can resonate with that quite a lot. It’s not that I don’t find this whole preaching thing a challenge some of the time, but compared to, I don’t know, tending a garden or changing oil or cooking dinner I’ll take preaching most any day. Some of you would prefer those things to preaching—I don’t know why. I’m clearly normal; all of you are clearly strange… or maybe we are all challenged by different things.

10 or 12 out of 1700: The false arithmetic of salvation

Luke 16:19-31

Well, today is my chance to go fire and brimstone on you… but I’m not going to do it. There’s a problem with trying to make the story of Lazarus and the rich man into a fire and brimstone Gospel: there’s nothing about repentance in this story—nothing. It doesn’t say repent or burn, as we can imagine any number of preachers and prophets saying. Furthermore, the fire and brimstone message seems inconsistent with the Gospel of Luke. In this very same Gospel, Jesus has said A) you are rich and you can never give enough away, and B) rich people are tormented for eternity in hell. Doesn’t it suddenly seem like a long time since we were singing “What a fellowship, what a joy divine?”

Simeon's Apocalypse: A Glimpse of the Baby Jesus

Text: Luke 2:21-38

            This sermon was not supposed to happen. I mean, it’s Sunday and all so I get how this works. Once every seven days I’m supposed to and say things from a pulpit, but this time it was in doubt. I don’t know how much each of you heard, but the world was supposed to end on December 21 like the Mayans predicted; it was as sure a thing as a Vikings season ending with disappointment. And never mind that the end of the Mayan calendar had much more to do with their understanding of the renewal of creation than with an apocalypse; that’s not nearly as good of a story. The world was supposed to end on December 21. I read it in Newsweek.

            Honestly, I was wondering why the malls were so busy in the lead-up to Christmas. Apparently, nobody told those people that Christmas was not coming; instead, we were going to have fire and brimstone and the four horsemen of the apocalypse and all of that jazz. Anyway, you can imagine my shock when the 21^st came and passed and here we still are and here is this sermon being preached. I claim false advertising.

Why do we want the end of the world?

So, I woke up this morning and the world was still spinning. Funny. I really thought the Mayans had this one, just like Harold Camping last May and every other would-be prophet of doom and destruction. It's the same refrain again and again: "Things are so messed up... we clearly must be nearing the end of the world!" they say. Funny, again, because reality suggests something else. If we're looking for the worst of all possible times, history is unlikely to side with the 21st century. Remember the Inquisition, the Black Death, the European wars of the middle ages, Civil Wars in America, France and other places, World War I, World War II and the Shoah. I mean, if we truly think things are worse now than under Hitler and Stalin then we need to gain some serious perspective.

Anyway, what is much more interesting than calculating how bad things have gotten and picking a date for God to end it all is why we would want the end of the world in the first place. Of course, most would-be prophets won't admit it, but that is really what's at work here: they want the end of the world. I suppose if you were to tease it out, these Christians (and people of other faiths as well, but let's be honest it's mostly Christians) are desperate for the apocalypse because it will usher in the reign of Christ. On the surface that makes sense. The world is a messy place. It would be much easier if we could just skip this business of living down here and fast-forward to the fully realized Kingdom of God. I get that.

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.”

The Spirit and the Messiness of Worship

Text: Joel 2:12-13, 28-29

            Last Wednesday the Nativity Scene at Grace blew over. It was so perfectly poetic I had to take a picture of it lying there flat on the ground. Jesus is not in the manger yet; we still have a few weeks of Advent. So I’m OK with subtle divine hints that maybe that nativity scene can wait. And besides, it was particularly appropriate that it was the wind that knocked it over, since the Hebrew word for “wind” (ruach) also means “spirit.” It was as if the Holy Spirit were saying, “No. Not yet. Slow down. Wait.”
             Lo and behold, now we have the prophet Joel this Sunday, again preaching on the Spirit. Joel is probably one of the least familiar books in the Bible, so I’ll forgive you if you aren’t Joel experts. Still, some of what we read today should be familiar. There’s that Lenten refrain: “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” Lent and Advent share some commonalities. They are both about reflection, they both involve turning or returning to God, and they are both times awaiting God’s in-breaking into the world. We understand that this is the season where we are anticipating Jesus, but God's in-breaking into our daily lives requires also the Holy Spirit. We don’t really talk about it much—because honestly we don’t talk about the Spirit much ever—but in this time of the year when we’re completely fine with angels and heavenly choruses it's astounding that we still manage to ignore the Holy Spirit.