The wrong side of town

For St. John Lutheran Church, Cedar Falls

John 1:43-51

Jesus is always hanging out in the wrong side of town, but we shouldn’t be surprised—that’s where he’s from. Always the wrong side of town—hanging out with the wrong people—sinners, mostly.

The story starts with Jesus out recruiting disciples one day. He finds Philip and says, “Follow me.” And we know right away that Philip is a good catch, because the first thing Philip does is go about recruiting more friends for the party. He really takes that fisher-of-men thing to heart. So, he finds his friend, Nathanael, and straightaway tells him that the Messiah has come and he is Jesus of Nazareth. However, Nathanael, you might recall, is not listed amongst the original twelve disciples, and the reason for this may soon become obvious, because Nathanael has his concerns about the origins of this Messiah. Nazareth? “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he asks.

You can substitute every wrong side of town you can imagine here, if you like. Even for those of us who try to see the best in all dark places, we can certainly list a few—places with a negative connotation in our minds—places we wouldn’t want to go—places we mistrust.

Then again, of course Jesus came from Nazareth! Of course, Jesus came from a backwater nowhere. I sat at home over Christmas and caught a bit of the Lutheran worship service from Bethlehem broadcast on Facebook, which they called “Christ in the rubble.” Today, Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, is a majority Muslim town in the West Bank. In those days, it was a quiet place—a nowhere place. Of course, Christ was born there! Not Jerusalem—not even Nazareth—not New York City—not London or Tokyo. Nowhere.

“Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Could anyone good be born in Bethlehem?

Well, here’s the backward, amazing thing about the Christian faith: Jesus Christ only ever dwells in those dark places. Jesus Christ only ever shows up on the wrong side of town. Jesus appears in A.A. meetings and under the rubble of natural disasters and war; Jesus shows up in dementia wards and children’s oncology units; Jesus is found in underpasses and in redlight districts and wherever the poor and neglected and hurting gather. Jesus Christ came into a world of darkness to meet us when it appears all hope has turned to dust.

The problem for those of us in the church is a practical one: That backwards, wrong-side-of-town mentality is not marketable, which is a problem because it means that Jesus is not marketable. After all, Jesus tells us that in order to be his disciples we must pick up our crosses and follow—and those crosses are not the kinds of minor inconveniences that we so often talk about to tone down the enormity of this calling. Our crosses are not our children or our relatives. Our crosses are our very lives—that is what Jesus ultimately calls us to give up. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When Jesus Christ calls a disciple, he bids them come and die.” You won’t see that on many billboards: Come, die.

You also won’t see that on any Ewalu brochures. And, yet… Ewalu is a place where faith is sticky—where kids depart at the end of the week singing songs—where adults look back on their time at camp as their deepest experience of faith formation—and I believe this happens so often at Ewalu because camp is a place where Christ does bid us to come and die. We die to the self we construct in our life apart from camp. We forget about the Instagram posts, and whether that one person read our text or not, and who won that game, and what you scored on that test. All that stuff dies at the boundaries of camp. At Ewalu, campers encounter this Jesus Christ who comes from a lowly, unexpected, wrong-side-of-town place kind of like many of the places they come from. For the first time, many of them experience this backward faith that seeks after lost sheep and celebrates the wrong sort of people—Samaritans and women and the poor and the sick—and campers latch onto that with all their might because so many of them are desperate for it to be true.

Why?

Because they already know that they are the lost sheep—they’ve just never had anybody spell it out for them! Because they know that they were born in the wrong place. They know that they have the wrong cheek bones and they carry weight in the wrong areas. They know that they can never be skinny enough or muscly enough. They know that they are fundamentally imperfect people, and their whole lives have been spent with adults (who hopefully love them and care for them, telling them that they are beautiful children of God), but they also know that those adults lie—that those adults, who we call parents, also aren’t very smart. They know we are faking it, and most of us are just doing exactly what our parents did (or exactly the opposite of what our parents did) and our parents didn’t know what they were doing either.

Our kids know this. Now, don’t get me wrong, you should be telling your kids you love them; you should be telling your grandkids you love them. I know many of you come from stoic, Nordic-heritage families like my own where all feelings are to be treated like a game of charades—where you act them out but it’s against the rules to actually say anything about them. Yeah, don’t do that. Do tell your kids you love them, but don’t be surprised when they run away from that love—and when they don’t believe you.

The reason the camp experience sticks with campers is because they discover that Jesus Christ loves them not because they are good, but because God is good. Better still, Jesus Christ comes to us from places like Nazareth—places from which reasonable people like Nathanael can wonder: Can anything good come from there? The Christian faith is not a reasonable faith. It is a faith that only makes sense in a broken world—it is a faith that can only be practiced by broken people. Cross-bearers.

Camp and church are after the same thing, but camp has an easier time marketing ourselves because it is temporary. One week of discomfort—full of fun, sure—but discomfort nonetheless. Nobody is arguing that Foresters village is more comfortable than your bed at home. Instead, we are saying that there is very good reason to get out there—to encounter Christ in creation—if only for a week. I don’t envy your congregation. I was a parish pastor for nine years, and I struggled with this myself quite often. As Christians we are called to go into all the backwards wrong-side-of-town places where Jesus is, but in a world that often feels so mixed up, we often come to church just needing a refuge. It’s hard to see that the refuge we need is to go deeper into discomfort. Churches have it hard because this is your calling every single week.

All of this is why I am glad we are in this work together. Help us help you (and your kids) to encounter Christ on the wrong side of town. Let us work together to discover how God shows up through discomfort. Together, we can meet a world of Nathanaels, who say, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” with an emphatic, “Yes! Come and see.”

In fact, the best things only ever come out of the wrong kinds of places. After all, that’s where God has promised to dwell. In our pain. In our hurt. In our grief. In our discomfort. This faith will drive you crazy, but it will also save you.

On curiosity and the moth

A sermon for St. John's Lutheran Church, Arlington and St. Sebald Lutheran Church, Strawberry Point

Scripture: Mark 1:1-8

        In the Mark year in the lectionary, Advent is contained exclusively in these 8 verses. The next verse after this passage reads: “In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” We fast-forward straight to adult Jesus baptized by John. In Mark’s Gospel, there is no baby in a manger, no shepherds in the fields, no kings bringing gifts; and before that, no Mary wondering what these things mean, no Elizabeth, no Joseph, no angels. There is no Christmas at all, and the entire season of Advent is distilled into this single passage about John, the baptizer in the wilderness.

Now you know why the Christmas pageant is never read from the Gospel of Mark.

So, while we have none of the Christmas story to contend with, we do have themes—whispers you might call them. We have John the Baptist, and we have this opening salvo from the book of Isaiah, 

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

   who will prepare your way;

the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

   “Prepare the way of the Lord,

   make his paths straight” 

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.