The four horsemen: Been there, done that

Text: Revelation 6:1-8

           I’m going to start this sermon-blog with a little survey. Now, I know what happens when I ask you a question involving raising your hands in worship—three of you will raise your hands about as high as your mouths and the rest of you look will around like I’m not talking to you. But since this is online hopefully you can at least answer in your head. Don't raise your hand. That might make your family or the other people at the coffee shop think there's something wrong. So, here’s the deal. This is a multiple choice question. There are no correct answers. However, there is one way to get the question wrong and that is if you don’t answer. So here’s the question: Which of the four horsemen do you find the scariest?

            Listen to your four choices and think about it. There’s the white horse, which represents conquest, especially by a foreign power; there’s the red horse, which represents internal conflict and violence; there’s the black horse, which represents economic insecurity and famine; and finally, the pale green horse that represents death. White horse, conquest; red horse, violence; black horse, famine; green horse, death. Those are your choices. Which do you find the scariest?

Boredom, prayer, and why reading Revelation stresses us out

Revelation 5:1-14

            Do you know that feeling when you’ve had something absolutely amazing happen—when your whole world has been rocked and nothing will ever again be the same? Have you ever had an experience so incredible and otherworldly that you have to share it? I hope you have. And I bet most of us at least have some idea what that is like. Every once in awhile the stars align and we have that perfect, often unexpected, moment. But if you have had such a moment you probably also know the feeling of trying to share it with somebody else.

            It’s hard for us to relate to subjective experiences. After our youth’s mission trip to Colorado last year we tried to share with you what it was like to experience some of the relationships we built and the emotions that we felt. Again this year when we return from our mission trip to Idaho we are planning to take a Sunday to share the same things. Of course, mission trips are far from the only time we experience these seminal moments in our lives. It happens when babies are born; it happens in moments of intense spirituality or the euphoria of your sports team winning a championship. Each of those moments is beautiful and equally challenging to share with others who are not a part of them from the beginning.

One big, stinking church

Text: Revelation 3:14-22

This is adapted from a sermon preached at midweek services at Zion Lutheran in Lake Bronson, MN.

            This summer at Grace and Red River we’re taking a narrative lectionary tour through Revelation so I’m going to share a little bit of that with you today. Together with the Acts reading we have a pretty clear central theme for the service which is: churches in need of repentance. And I know there’s nothing like a guest preacher coming into a place that is not his own and preaching on churches in need of repentance, so here we go!

             The truth is, whether I’m here at Zion or home at Grace or Red River or basically at any church in the world, we have the same basic need for repentance because we mostly have the same problems. I know some churches are big and others small; some are financially secure and others barely holding on, so it might seem on the surface like these churches have very different problems, but I want to suggest that it actually comes down to much the same thing. The book of Revelation was written to seven churches in seven different situations, but I can guarantee that your church fits into more than one of these categories; in fact, if your church is like mine then it fits into all seven. Every church has a problem sometimes with complacency, sometimes with assimilation, and sometimes with fear of the outsider. And I know this because, in spite of the fact that some churches are big and others are small, some are secure and others are struggling, we are nonetheless part of the same big, stinking church.

The surprising theology of happiness

Text: Revelation 3:14-22

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

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

The problem is that it doesn’t last.

An intro to Revelation

Text: Revelation 1

            I’m going to start today with a bit of a warning and a promise: the warning is that this sermon will be more academic than most—and if you’re my wife who thinks that all my sermons are way academic, then this one may be a little too academic. Hence, the promise: I promise that the rest of the summer will not be just like this week. I think that when introducing something as strange to us, as the book of Revelation is, that I should take some time to explain what it is first. So, I hope you bear with me.

            I’m going to guess that some of you are a little uneasy about a summer full of Revelation. This is, after all, one of the books Martin Luther wanted to cut off the end of the Bible (you know, shake your Bible hard enough and hope those pages at the end just fall off). It’s the stuff we’ve given over to those Left Behind authors and doomsday prophets. That’s their area of interest; not ours. I remember a camp counselor friend of mine leading a devotion from Revelation in which he talked about Satan and the forces of darkness and the battle for sinners’ souls and these kinds of things with 8-12 year olds. I wanted to run and hide. These are the typical things you hear about this book, so I can’t blame you if you’re a little worried that you’ve signed up for a summer full of crazy things here at Grace-Red River

A sermon for the high school graduates of 2013

Text: Galatians 4:1-7

This is a message for graduates… and also for the rest of us who really haven’t ever grown up.

There’s nothing quite like starting out a service celebrating the high school graduates of 2013 with scripture telling us that minors are no better than slaves. Yay! Congrats! You are no longer slaves! Not exactly graduation speech material. Now, I know none of our youth can relate to the feeling of being trapped under the repressive regime of parentage. Our young people are never rebellious against authority; they wouldn’t dream of doing anything they wouldn’t want their parents to know about, and since we all have such brilliant, angelic young men and women from such perfectly well-adjusted families, this scripture really doesn’t speak much to us today.

Right…

Sin that unites us: On race, diversity and oneness in Christ

Text: Galatians 3:1-9, 23-29

            After reading through the Galatians reading for this week I felt the need to take Harvard’s Implicit Assessment Test again. The IAT is something I first learned about in Malcolm Gladwell’s book entitled Blink. The test is a measurement of our implicit, often subconscious preferences for certain things over other things. This week I took the race IAT, which compares preferences for skin tones, and I did this because I’ve found it to be the toughest to “pass.” The test is on Harvard’s webpage and it takes about five minutes to do. It is basically a sorting test where you put words and faces into categories as fast as possible. There will be light-skinned faces and dark-skinned faces, positive words and negative words. You start by sorting based on faces only; if it’s a light-skinned face you click one letter; if it’s a dark-skinned face you click a different letter, then you sort terms; “joy” would be a good word, “awful” a bad word; “happy” a good word, “evil” a bad word; and so on. Then (and this is where it gets interesting) the light-skinned face and good words go on one side and the dark-skinned face and bad words on the other, and again you sort them as fast as you can. Then, it flips it around so the dark-skinned face is on the side with the positive words and the light-skinned face with the negative words.

            I have taken this test probably fifty times in the last couple years and I have never once come out anything other than favoring lighter skin tones. I say this as a confession but it is one that I share with everybody else I know who has ever taken the test. In Blink, Gladwell wrote that he, too, had a preference for light-skinned faces even though he is half-black. There are certain things—like racial preference—that are just interwoven parts of who we are. You might be wondering why I go through taking this test at all if all it ever does is convict me, but I think the main reason I do it is to remind me that I am not as fair and unbiased as I sometimes think I am. If you happen to think you are a person without biases I challenge you to try it as well; I think it will be an eye-opening experience.