Spiritual Gifts: 1 Corinthians 12

The four Lutheran churches in the area take turns hosting midweek Lenten services, and the pastors and lay leaders also rotate preaching. This year our theme is “What St. Paul Says About Being a Christian”. Following is the homily I preached last evening, Wednesday, March 4, at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Highspire.

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

Tonight, we begin our series on what the Apostle Paul says to us about being a Christian. And I want to start by telling a story about a conversation I had with my father when I was home visiting my family in Florida after Christmas. My father, and this is not the first time I’ve heard him say this, claimed that the Apostle Paul acted “holier than thou” and did nothing but tell people what to do and not to do. My father said that he “wants to hear more about Jesus and less about Paul”. Now, my guess is that this probably has to do with the way that my father has heard Paul preached in the congregations that he’s been part of throughout his life, and maybe some of you have felt the same way. But it makes me sad because, while I admit that Paul’s ego does come through rather forcefully in his letters, those letters are still part of our Holy Scriptures, and, if we were to speak with Paul himself, I have a feeling that he would say that in all of his letters, he is, in fact speaking about Jesus. I think another factor that is playing into my father’s attitude about Paul is this: The fact that Paul was spreading the word about Jesus long before any of the Gospels were ever written down is not mentioned very often in our congregations. The earliest Gospel written down was most likely Mark, and that did not happen until somewhere between the years 66 and 70. Paul’s earliest letter, on the other hand, was 1 Thessalonians and was written somewhere around the year 51. So, Paul was spreading the word about Jesus long before the story of Jesus’ life was ever written down. In Paul’s words we hear about Jesus and how we are to live as followers of Jesus.

So, with that framework, let’s turn to some background information on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Corinth is a city in Greece, south of Athens, and is located on a narrow strip of land that connects parts of Greece together. At some point, someone figured out that it would be easier and safer to haul boats over this strip of land from the Adriatic Sea to the Aegean Sea and the reverse, rather than sail around the southernmost point of Greece, and so Corinth was built as a port city. And all those things you’ve heard about that sailors do when they’re in port? Well, it’s been going on at least as long as Corinth has been around. In fact, Corinth became a synonym for loose sexual morals among the Greco-Roman world; there was a temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, located there, and one way that people worshiped Aphrodite was to have relations with the temple prostitutes.

And somehow, in the midst of this culture, the Apostle Paul managed to form a small congregation of people who followed Jesus Christ. As was his habit, once Paul had established the congregation, he moved on to a new town to start up another congregation. But all was not well back in Corinth. People had divided up into factions. There were disputes going on about what kind of sexual relations were permissible, and whether or not one should get married. People within the congregation were suing one another. They were arguing over whether it was okay to eat food that had been sacrificed to idols. They did not know how to properly celebrate the Lord’s Supper. And, in today’s portion of Scripture, they were arguing over which spiritual gifts were the best. This is one reason why I love this letter: it makes me feel better, when we encounter problems in our congregations today, when I realize that this stuff has been going on since the first Christian congregations were founded!

So, let’s come back to spiritual gifts. And really, to understand what Paul is saying about this, we should be reading chapters 12, 13, and 14. But, we don’t have time for that tonight, so I will try to hit the important points. As I mentioned before, the Corinthians were arguing over which gift was best, and in chapter 14, from what Paul says, we can see that they thought speaking in tongues was the best thing ever. If you’ve ever experienced it, there is a certain glamor to it. Yes, sometimes people make it up to get attention. But I have experienced others genuinely speaking in tongues, and from what I have seen and heard, it is an ecstatic experience. The person is so overcome with love for God that words come out of the person’s mouth that are somehow intelligible to that person, but not to anyone else. And basically, Paul says, in chapter 14, that yeah, that’s pretty cool, but if you don’t have anyone to interpret what you’re saying to everyone else, then what good is it going to do the community? And so, to get to that point, he lists several spiritual gifts in chapter 12, emphasizing that they are all given by the Holy Spirit and no one is better than another, and that as a community, we need one another and the gifts that we each have to help the community function.

Each one of you here tonight has one or more spiritual gifts given to you by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps that is the gift of wisdom, or the gift of knowledge: and yes, there is a difference between those two! Perhaps one of you has the gift of faith that you can use to strengthen someone else who is faltering. Maybe there is someone among us who can work miracles: maybe not miraculous healing, but other kinds of things that seem impossible. Perhaps someone here is a prophet: and prophecy does not mean foretelling the future, but that’s a whole different sermon that we don’t have time for right now! And maybe there are some here who can speak in tongues and others who can interpret those tongues to the rest of us. And the spiritual gifts that Paul lists here are just a sampling; the Spirit gives what and where the Spirit will. The point is that these gifts of the Spirit, whatever they are, are to be used to build up the community of Christ. Christianity is not a you-and-me-God religion. It is a communal religion, one of being different but united in Christ.

If you are interested in finding out what your spiritual gifts might be, there are tons of inventories out there, and Pastor Mike and I can look into doing that study with you all at some point; maybe at a future SOHL meeting. But here’s the main point about spiritual gifts that Paul makes. 1 Corinthians 13 is the love chapter that gets read all the time at weddings. But he’s not talking about romantic love! He’s talking about love in the context of all of these spiritual gifts. Listen: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” He is using those spiritual gifts that he just named to make his point! I could be the best preacher in the world, but if I do not speak in love, it does not matter. Rose could go out and tell everyone about Jesus, but if she does not do it in love, then so what? And the love that Paul describes is that kind of love that motivated Jesus to live among us sinful human beings, to teach us how to live, and then to die on the cross for all of those times when we fail at living a Christ-like life.

This is what Paul says to us in tonight’s reading about being a Christian: Discover your spiritual gifts, and yes, all Christians have those gifts. Use them to build one another up as the body of Christ and to reach out to others with the love of Christ, both in word and in deed. Do everything in love. And remember that no one gift is more important than another. We are all members of one body, and we need one another and the gifts that we bring to the table. Amen.

 

Sermon for Lent 1 Narrative Lectionary

Mark 10:17-31

Last week, we heard Jesus speaking to us about denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following him, and we looked on with Peter, James, and John as they saw Jesus transfigured on the mountain and speaking with Elijah and Moses. This week, we are once again in the valley, walking with Jesus as he ministers to the people in the villages. But, as usual, I would like to fill in the story that we skipped over between last week and this, so here goes. As Jesus and Peter, James, and John walk down off the mountain, the disciples ask Jesus about the belief that Elijah comes before the Messiah. And Jesus says that Elijah has already come, and “they did to him whatever they pleased,” implying that John the Baptist was Elijah returned. When the four men rejoin the other disciples, they see a great crowd, and the scribes are arguing with them. The problem is that the disciples tried to cast a demon out of a boy, and they couldn’t. Jesus gets exasperated with them all and heals the boy, telling the disciples that this kind of demon can only come out with prayer. After this, they continue traveling through Galilee, and Jesus is teaching the disciples that he will be betrayed, killed, and on the third day rise again, but once more the disciples do not understand him. Then comes an argument among the disciples about which one of them is the greatest, and Jesus says that whoever wants to be first must be last, and that whoever welcomes a child welcomes him. Then Jesus teaches some more, telling them that whoever is not against them is for them; not to put a stumbling block in front of “little ones who believe” in him, and a very strict teaching about divorce. He then blesses the little children that people were bringing to him, in spite of the disciples trying to prevent it. And now, finally, we arrive at today’s story.

And I’m not going to lie; this is a difficult text for us comfortable, middle-class Americans to wrap our minds around. It usually comes out of the woodwork during stewardship season, when the church is trying to encourage us to give more money for the work of the church. And that’s not a bad thing to do; it’s only that most of us find ourselves on the side of the rich man, doing our best to live by what Scripture teaches and coming to Jesus wanting to make sure that we’re not missing out on anything that we should be doing. And then we hear Jesus tell the man, and us, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” And we, too, walk away from Jesus shocked and grieving, for we, too, have many possessions that we do not wish to part with. And so, we find ourselves asking, “Did you really mean this, Jesus? All of my possessions? Really? How am I then to live?”

So, what do we do if Jesus really meant what he said? What if part of entering the kingdom of God really means giving our possessions away and giving the money to help the poor? Right about now, your defenses should be going up; mine are too, especially the Lutheran ones that are screaming “grace alone! Faith alone!” But let’s tell our defenses to calm down for a moment and go with this thought, because remember, Jesus and his disciples were not Lutheran. If Jesus meant what he said about giving our possessions away and giving the money to the poor, then this would mean that those who are poor have just as much worth and dignity as human beings as those who are not poor do. This means that we who are not poor can no longer distance ourselves from those who are by looking down our noses and saying, “Well, they’re poor because they made bad choices. Who pays for a smart phone when you have to put food on the table?” Never mind that, in today’s society, if you’re looking for work, a smart phone is just as essential as food because you need it to communicate with people both over the internet and the phone, and look at job postings on the internet. We who have not struggled with poverty do not have any idea what kind of hurdles those beloved children of God who are poor deal with daily.

Several years ago, when I was serving my first call congregation in Wyoming, I participated in a poverty simulation. This is an event where participants are given a scenario in which they struggle to make ends meet. Volunteers who help out with this simulation play the parts of an employer, volunteers at a community help center, a church, and other places that you would need to get to in a community. Now, there is something artificial in all of this, I grant you, but in my case, I think the experience achieved what the goal was. I played the part of a mother with a young baby at home whose boyfriend had to go to work with the only car we had. I had to use the limited resources I had to get on the “bus” and try to get food and other supplies for our household. I’m not ashamed to say that I failed miserably. And what this simulation forcibly put in front of me, through my experience and the experiences of the others who participated in the simulation, was how difficult it really is in our society for those who are poor to get their needs met; basic needs that those of us who have some wealth take for granted.

So, let’s return to Jesus and the rich man and struggle with this text some more. And let’s notice the question the man asks of Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” When I say the phrase “eternal life” what do you think of? Well, if you’re like most Christians out there, you’re probably thinking of living forever with Jesus, floating on the clouds and playing harps with the angels. Or, you may be thinking of some version of the Garden of Eden, living in paradise forever. My personal idea of eternal life would be having all the time in the world to read all the books in the world with no computers or cell phones around and being able to play with all of my pets that have crossed the Rainbow Bridge. But for an observant Jewish person in the 1^st century, none of those ideas would have crossed their minds when they heard the phrase “eternal life”. A closer translation of the sense of the Greek phrase than “eternal life” would be “the aeon to come,” or “the Messianic kingdom” and it would be here on earth, not in some heaven far away. And in this coming kingdom, all of the earth’s woes would be set right, and everyone would have enough. No more billionaires, and no more people struggling to survive. Everyone in this kingdom is healthy and has enough.

The idea in Christianity is that God’s kingdom is coming, this kingdom where everyone has enough, and everyone is healthy, and no one wants for anything. This is how Mark’s Gospel begins, with both John the Baptist and Jesus calling on the people to repent, for the kingdom of God has come near. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that God’s kingdom may come. And while we are not the ones responsible for bringing in the kingdom—God does that—we are called to participate with God in bringing in God’s kingdom. So, what does that look like? In this case, it means that we are to take Jesus seriously when he says to sell our possessions and give the money to the poor. Not necessarily that we are to give everything away, but that we are called to regularly take stock of what we do have, what we can live without, and what we might be able to sell or give away so that someone else might be able to better meet their daily needs. And more than that, we are called to stand with those beloved children of God who are poor: we are called to advocate for them when the government threatens to do things like cut funding for food stamps or for public transportation or any other services which might threaten people’s ability to meet their daily needs. As participants in God’s work of bringing in the kingdom where everyone has enough, we are called to work toward that day when everyone has enough.

With the disciples, then, we may be asking ourselves, “Who then can be saved?” This is where we fall back on Jesus saying, “With mortals, this is impossible, but not for God; for God, all things are possible.” Jesus knows that the demand he makes of the rich man, to sell all of his possessions and give the money to the poor, and then come and follow him, is impossible not only for the rich man but for most of us as well. There are a few exceptions among the saints, like Saint Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa, but they are truly the exceptions among us Christians and not the norm. We may want to do more, but our fear and our sinfulness get in the way: all the time. And God knows that. And that is why God sent Jesus, God’s only Son, to die on the cross for our sins. This is where our Lutheran lens can come back in: we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone. God loves us and God’s got us; the works that we do are not how we earn our way into God’s kingdom, but rather, they are an outflowing of the love that God has given us, that love that is so much that it bubbles up in us and pours out to others. With mortals, with the things that we do, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who has wealth to enter the kingdom of God. But with God all things are possible, and so it is God who loves us and admits us into God’s kingdom.

During Lent, the dismissal that we hear at the end of the worship service is “Go in peace. Remember the poor.” Remembering the poor is one of the three spiritual disciplines that we focus on in Lent, besides fasting and praying. And so, I think it is fitting that on this first Sunday in Lent, we wrestle with the command that Jesus gives the rich man to sell his possessions and give to the poor. How will you remember the poor this week? Will you write a letter to your government representatives and advocate for them? Will you examine what you have and give of your overabundance so that someone else can have enough? Will you participate in a poverty simulation to better understand what those who are beloved children of God who wrestle with poverty daily go through? Christian Churches United is putting on a poverty simulation on March 21^st. Any and all of these, and even more that I haven’t named, are good options. Trust in God that God loves you, and pray, asking God how you might do more to help bring in God’s kingdom. Amen.

Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday

Mark 8:27-9:8

Last week, we talked about Jesus teaching the disciples and the crowd about what makes a person clean or unclean, and found that of greater concern to Jesus is the evil that comes out of our human hearts, and we learned about the concern we should have for these things. We skipped over the strange little story of Jesus healing the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman; that’s the one where he basically calls her a dog and she pushes back, and Jesus is so impressed with her that he grants her request and heals her daughter. After this, Jesus heals a deaf man who also had a speech impediment, and even though he orders the people to tell no one about it, they do so and his fame spreads. Next, Jesus feeds a crowd of four thousand people with seven loaves and a few small fish, and then immediately gets into a boat with his disciples and goes to a new place. When the Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign from heaven to test him, he refuses. He then tells the disciples, when they realize they had forgotten to bring enough bread with them in the boat, to watch out for the yeast of  the Pharisees and of Herod, and when they don’t get it, he points them back to his miraculous feedings with just a few loaves and is frustrated that they still don’t understand what he’s trying to teach them. And before today’s reading starts, Jesus heals a blind man in the village of Bethsaida.

I don’t know about you, but as I have been reading through these last several chapters of Mark, I get the feeling that Jesus is irritated that people aren’t getting what he’s trying to teach. He was irritated last week when he went on the attack against the perceived hypocrisy of the Pharisees; he is annoyed enough with the Syrophoenician woman to call her a dog, and he’s frustrated when the disciples don’t understand what he’s trying to tell them about the yeast of Herod and of the Pharisees. And that frustration also weaves itself into our reading today. Peter, in a flash of brilliance, names Jesus correctly as the Messiah, but then, when Jesus starts telling them what that’s going to mean, Peter has the nerve to take him aside and rebuke him. And then Jesus lays it all out on the table and tells everyone what it really, truly means to be one of his disciples. And I don’t think that we comfortable, middle-class Americans truly understand what it means to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Jesus. We know what it doesn’t mean: it does not mean staying in any kind of abusive relationship because somehow you think you’re suffering for Jesus. If any of you here today are in that kind of relationship and are looking for a way out, please come and visit with me. What does it mean, then, to deny ourselves? I’m not sure that I have the answer to that. If we look to the saints, we find many of them giving up all of their material possessions and becoming poor and following Jesus in that manner. And those that did that then form communities, monasteries and nunneries, to support one another in this way. But not all of us have that vocation as our calling. We also know that denying ourselves does not mean simply giving up chocolate for Lent; as I said last week, if you’re planning on doing that or something similar, make sure you give the money you would have spent on that indulgence to help those in need. So, as we struggle with what denying ourselves and following Jesus might mean, let’s keep that question in the back of our minds for a moment and continue to the part of the story where Jesus shines and speaks with Elijah and Moses.

The story of Jesus’ transfiguration has always puzzled me; I’m never quite sure how to preach this. It is a mystical experience and one that is recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so it was important to the first disciples of Jesus that this be written down and told to future generations of Christians. But what do we make of it? Jesus is truly revealed to be the Son of God in this experience; Elijah and Moses are often thought to symbolize the Law and the Prophets of the Jewish people, supporting Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah. But what meaning are we to take from this story today?

Well, after speaking with a colleague about this, here is one thing that I think we can grasp from it. Pay attention to Peter. Peter is so excited about this experience that he wants to build shelters for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah and stay up on that mountain forever. Think about it this way: today, rather than being present in a moment and having that experience live in our memories, many of us today grab our cell phones and start recording, so that we see whatever is happening only in the lens of a camera and are not fully present in the experience. That’s what Peter wants to do with building shelters: he wants to build a monument rather than fully live into the experience, because he somehow believes that having a shelter will make the moment last forever. If he had built those shelters, what would have happened next? Elijah and Moses would have disappeared, Jesus would have told them to come down the mountain with him, and all that would be left of the experience would be three crumbling shelters up on the mountain, of no use to anyone anymore. Because the ministry that Jesus will continue to do, as we keep reading in the Gospel of Mark, is not up on the mountain where people stream to see holy figures come out of their shelters, but rather, ministry happens down in the valley, amongst the people who are in need of Jesus and his healing and his teaching.

If you’ve been listening to me preach and teach for a while, you may be able to guess where I’m going with this. Our congregations are housed in monuments that were built in a moment in time where they were good and beautiful and useful, but now, with the changes in society, they no longer are. Yes, Jesus is present when we worship him here. But these buildings are no longer primarily where the ministry of Jesus takes place. Jesus is calling us to get out of these monuments which people are no longer coming to and go and bring what we experience of Jesus into the community around us. As Peter found out, Jesus cannot be kept in shelters of any kind. Jesus is everywhere, and, in fact, has already gone ahead of us into the places where he is calling us to be. He is simply waiting for us to catch up.

What does all of this mean for us here at Salem and St. John’s? Well, let’s go back to that struggle we were having with what Jesus means when he says, “If any wish to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.” Our fondest wish as a congregation is to keep our buildings. Those of you who have grown up coming to church here or at least attended for a very long time are emotionally attached to them. I’ve only been here a short time, and even I feel sadness at the possibility of giving up these beautiful spaces. But the reality is that the world is changing, our congregations are getting smaller, and we won’t be able to keep up with the demands of these beautiful buildings for much longer. So, in this case, denying ourselves and taking up the cross and following Jesus will probably mean leaving these buildings. It will probably mean combining with St. Peter’s and Trinity at some point. And that means that we will have to get over old rivalries and animosities and learn to work together and follow Jesus together. Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” If we are only focused on saving our congregation for the sake of saving the congregation, we will lose our life as a congregation. But, if we are focused on losing our life, so to speak, and joining with others for the sake of the gospel work that Jesus is calling us to, then our life will be saved.

I don’t know what exactly this is going to look like as we go forward. Because we are sinful human beings, the process is not going to go smoothly. These four churches have been talking about coming together in some fashion even before I arrived here as your pastor. We’ve had some steps forward, and some steps back. But following Jesus is like that. We only need to look to Peter’s part in today’s story to see that. He has that flash of brilliance in naming Jesus as the Messiah, and then when he doesn’t understand what Jesus being the Messiah means, Jesus calls him Satan. Peter wants to build shelters for the three great figures he sees on the mountain, only to be told by the voice from the cloud that he needs to listen to Jesus. And yet, Peter continues as one of Jesus’ disciples regardless of these, and future, mistakes that he makes.

And that’s the beautiful part for us: Jesus knows that we don’t get this following him thing right. We expect ease and glory when Jesus calls us to suffering and denying ourselves. We will stumble. And yet, Jesus loves us and continues to call us to follow him. Today marks the last day of the Epiphany season; on Wednesday we will gather to mark the beginning of Lent. All four churches will come together that evening to worship at 7:00 at Salem. I encourage all of you to come, and I encourage you to sit next to someone from Trinity or St. Peter’s who you don’t know very well. This will be a glimpse of what Jesus is calling us to as the 4 congregations come together. You might not have the chance to speak to the other person during the worship service, but just sitting next to one another is a sign that we are ready to walk together in the way to which Jesus is calling us. Let’s come together, and together explore what taking up the cross and following Jesus is all about. Amen.

Sermon for Epiphany 6 Narrative

Mark 7:1-23

Last week, Vicar Andy Wagner spoke to you about the healing of the woman with the flow of blood and the raising of Jairus’ daughter. Today, we’re skipping over Mark 6 to talk about chapter 7, so I would like to outline what happened in chapter 6 before we dive in to today’s text. After Jesus healed the woman and the little girl, he moved on from the town where Jairus lived and returned to his hometown of Nazareth. There, he teaches in the synagogue, and the people react badly to him, saying, “Wait a second. We know this guy. Where did he get all this?” And Mark tells us that because of the people’s unbelief, Jesus could do no deeds of power in Nazareth, except for healing a few sick people. After this, Jesus goes among the villages, continuing to teach, and he sends out the twelve disciples to help him proclaim that all should repent; the disciples also were able to cast out demons and heal the sick. Then Mark tells us the infamous story of how John the Baptist died. Herodias, the wife of Herod, wanted to have John killed because John had been saying that it was not lawful for Herod to marry Herodias, as Herodias had been previously married to Herod’s brother. But Herod did not want to have John killed because he regarded John as a holy man and was afraid of him. But then, on Herod’s birthday, Herodias sent her daughter in to dance before Herod and his guests, and Herod was so pleased that he vowed to give her anything she wanted. At her mother’s prompting, the girl asked for John’s head on a platter, and Herod felt he had no choice but to give it to her. And so, John died. This story is told as a flashback, and then Mark resumes the story of Jesus’ disciples returning from their mission and telling Jesus all they had done. But when Jesus urged them to come away to a quiet place, the crowds followed, and Jesus ended up feeding them with five loaves of bread and two fish. After this, Jesus made the disciples get into a boat while he dismissed the crowds and stayed on shore to pray. Jesus then comes out to them later that night by walking on the water. And chapter 6 ends with all of them on land once more, with Jesus continuing his ministry of teaching and healing the crowds that come to him.

After all that excitement in chapter 6, it seems odd that we land on today’s Scripture, where Jesus is teaching about what is clean and unclean. For us Gentile Christians, this dispute seems archaic and hard to understand, since we generally don’t have any religious laws prohibiting us from eating certain foods. And so, the first thing I think we need to do is to take a step back and remember when Mark was writing this account of Jesus’ life and deeds. So, even though Jesus was ministering to the people of Galilee and Judea around the year 30, Mark did not write his Gospel account until around the years 66-70, according to the best guesses of scholars. During that time Christianity had begun to separate out from 1^st century Judaism, and it was also during this time that the Jewish revolt against Rome took place, resulting in the destruction of the Temple in the year 70. During this time, the young faith that we now call Christianity was expanding from its Jewish roots and including Gentiles. We can tell from our reading that Mark has inserted editorial comments for a mostly Gentile audience, when he speaks of the customs of the Pharisees and the Jews, when he explains what the word Corban means, and when he says that Jesus declared all foods clean. And some of today’s reading is, with these editorial comments, Mark taking some potshots at the Jewish people who did not acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, because we know that Jesus was an observant Jewish man and as such, would not have eaten any unclean foods. So, we can tell that there were already some bad feelings between the traditional Jewish people and this new faith that followed Jesus.

So, let’s put aside the portions that are Mark’s rhetoric and focus on what Jesus was actually trying to say. Remember also that in Judaism, it is okay to discuss and debate the Law; trying to figure out how to interpret it and live it out in the best way is part of being in relationship with God. In today’s text, the Pharisees question Jesus as to why his disciples do not wash their hands before eating. This is not the hygienic style of washing hands that we do today; please do continue to wash your hands before you eat! Rather, this is a ceremonial ritual by which the Pharisees try to live out their faith and remain in a state of ritual purity before God. But, for whatever reason—maybe he was having a bad day, or maybe it was the tone of voice in which the question was asked—Jesus uses this question about ritually washing hands to attack the Pharisees for their perceived hypocrisy. He claims that they put their human-made traditions above the commandments of God, even going so far as to allow people to refuse care for their mothers and fathers by saying that their wealth is going to be an offering for God. Whether or not this was truly the case, or just an extreme point of rhetoric, Jesus’ larger point is what’s most important here: God’s commands to love God and love neighbor, including mother and father, come before any human-made tradition. Furthermore, what is more important than worrying about what kind of food is clean or unclean is worrying about what kind of evil comes out of the heart; those evil things are truly what make a person unclean before God.

So, what are the human-made traditions that we have in our church? And are we guilty of placing more importance on them than on following the commands of God? Let’s speak for a moment about decorating the church for Christmas. If Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Jesus, then why do we bring a pine tree, real or artificial, into the church and decorate it? Yes, there are many legends that have sprung up trying to explain this tradition and make it Christian, but there were no evergreen trees in Bethlehem when Jesus was born, and Mary and Joseph did not decorate the feeding area for animals in preparation for Jesus to be born. Yet, if I were to suggest that we not have a Christmas tree in the sanctuary this year, I would get horrified reactions from most of you. It’s tradition and it’s simply something that we do at Christmas. However, over the last couple of years, as our congregations have gotten smaller and older, we tend to find it more difficult to summon the energy necessary to haul out all of the decorations, put them up, and then after the Christmas season is over, put them all away again. Are we holding up this particular tradition at the expense of loving our sisters and brothers and telling them it would be okay not to decorate this year?

To pick on another one of our liturgical traditions that’s coming up in a couple of weeks: in Lent, we do not sing or say the word Hallelujah/Alleluia during worship for six long weeks. This is another one of our Christian traditions that has obscure origins, and it’s actually a tradition I like, because it gives even more meaning to me when I worship on Easter and I’m finally able to belt out those alleluias when I’m singing. But, if I completely fast from that word of praise for those six weeks during Lent and use that to show other people how religious I am, and yet do not attend to curbing those evil things that Jesus says come out of my heart, then I am honoring God with my lips and worshiping God in vain; I am teaching human precepts as doctrines. Or, another one of those Lenten traditions that we like to do: giving up something for Lent. If I give up chocolate, it might benefit me by helping me to lose some weight, but what good is it going to do anybody else? But if I give up chocolate and use the money I would have spent on it to help someone in need, then that is putting some meaning behind the religious tradition that I am observing.

Even though it might sound like it from our Gospel text today, Jesus is not giving us an either/or proposition here; it’s not either tradition or living out the commands of a true faith. It’s both: traditions are there to help give our life a rhythm and meaning. The point that Jesus is making is that we need to examine what we do and why; what our motivations are. And I think that this is part of the reason why people have stopped coming to church: they see that what we do doesn’t always match up with what the Christian faith is supposed to be about, and they wonder what the point of coming to worship is on Sunday mornings when they don’t always see us living out what Jesus taught in our daily lives. Once a person knows that I am a Christian, that means that my actions are always on display, and I will be judged by others by how I act. So if I say that God loves everyone, and then I do not act with love towards my neighbor simply because she is from Guatemala, then that means, first, I need to examine myself and repent, but second, I have shown that I may go to church on Sunday, but my heart is not really close to the heart of God.

This is a tall order for all of us, I know. We do our best, but we are still going to make mistakes. We are not going to keep the Law, whether the letter of it or the spirit of it, perfectly all of the time, because we are sinful human beings. And Jesus knows this. This is why he went to the cross to die for us, to show us what true love looks like; to love us as we are, and not as he would like us to be. He offers us forgiveness when we fail, and the Holy Spirit is there beside us to continue to urge us to repent, to ask for forgiveness from others, and to continue to walk the path of the Christian faith as best as we can. Let us continue to walk the road of faith together, keeping our traditions when we can, and when we can’t, learning to let them go in favor of living out our faith in love for one another. Amen.

Sermon for Epiphany 5A RCL

I was a guest preacher at a congregation in upstate NY on February 9th. This is the sermon I preached, on the Gospel from the Revised Common Lectionary.

Matthew 5:13-20

We Lutherans sometimes have issues with the Gospel of Matthew. After all, Matthew records Jesus saying a lot of things about righteousness and unrighteousness, and those who are righteous going off to a heavenly reward while those who are not righteous going off where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. And we have a problem with this because, in our theology, passed down to us by Martin Luther, we are taught that it is not our works that save us, but only faith alone by grace alone through the saving death of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so, when we are confronted with passages like the one we have today from the Sermon on the Mount, we start twitching and, as one of my colleagues on a Facebook page put it, “But Jesus, how is this not works righteousness?” So, this is what I like to remind my lovely colleagues who are rightly concerned about something like this and how we are to interpret it: Jesus and his disciples and all of those around him were not Lutherans. They were, in fact, Jewish, and what Jesus is doing here and throughout all of the Gospels, but most especially in Matthew, is to re-interpret the Law for the people around him in that historical context. And the people who were listening to Jesus were mostly Jewish, members of a group of people who, at that time, were being ruled over and oppressed by the Romans, who largely could not comprehend why this subject people worshiped only one God and refused to make images of that God. These are people who are hungry to hear how they are to live out their faith under Roman rule.

So, let’s take a look at this Gospel text and see how we can interpret it using our Lutheran lens, but remembering that Jesus, his disciples, and the crowds are not, in fact, Lutherans. One author that I have been greatly influenced by in recent years is Amy-Jill Levine. Levine is a professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt University, and she is Jewish, so she very often has a unique perspective on New Testament texts. One thing that she emphasizes is that, for Jewish people, the Law is never a burden. You can see that in Psalm 119, for example; that long acrostic psalm meditating on the Law as a delight. Following the Law of God is the way that you are in relationship with God. God knows that we’re not going to get it perfect all of the time. At one presentation where I heard Levine speak, she likened the Jewish person’s relationship with God to a marriage: yes, sometimes in a marriage we will get things right and sometimes we will get things wrong. But just as a wife does not stop loving a husband because he makes a mistake, God does not stop loving us because we don’t get something exactly right. God loves us regardless; the law is there to show us how we are to live with God. Another thing that Levine emphasizes is that, having different opinions on how the law is to be applied in a current situation is a good thing. So, the fact that the Pharisees often disputed with Jesus in the Gospels is not a bad thing in and of itself; it’s normal. And, coming back to our text today, in his Sermon on the Mount Jesus is expounding and interpreting the law of God as any good rabbi would do.

So, remembering that the Law is not a burden for Jesus and most of the people who are listening to him, and remembering that Jesus is expounding and interpreting that Law for those who follow him, what meaning should we who live in the 21^st century take from the metaphors that Jesus uses in today’s Gospel passage? Let’s start with salt. We all know what happens when we use too much salt or too little salt when we’re cooking food, but what is Jesus talking about when he says his followers are the salt of the world? Here is one idea: at the congregations where I am called to now, I have been encouraging people to not only show the love of Christ in the deeds that we do, such as community meals and free clothes banks, but also to build relationships with people in the neighborhood and actually speak to people about their faith. I believe that one reason our congregations struggle to attract people is that they are afraid to speak to others about their faith and invite them to see Jesus. In other words, they’re not salty enough; and as Jesus says in this passage, it’s very difficult to restore flavor to salt that has lost its taste.

On the other hand, sometimes we as Christians can be too salty. This is what that looks like: when we trade the humility which Jesus called for into a pride that we are Christians and we think we are the only ones who have this faith thing down right, and that anyone who does not fall in line with what our thinking and our beliefs are cannot truly call themselves Christian. I like to tell this story about my brother, who is a lawyer in Florida, and who says that he is agnostic. For those who are not sure what that means, people who characterize themselves as agnostic say, “Maybe there’s a God, maybe there isn’t, we have no way of knowing for sure.” Many people who characterize themselves as “spiritual, but not religious,” would fall into the agnostic category. My brother and I were raised the same way, as church-going Lutherans. But somewhere along the way, my brother became disillusioned with what he saw as the hypocrisy of the institutional church and the unwillingness of many Christians he met to think about what they believed and to question it. In other words, he experienced too much salt from the Christians that he knew. He decided he didn’t believe in any of this and he wasn’t going to go to church anymore. But, as he watched me as I progressed on my faith journey, he would occasionally ask me questions about things that he heard Christians say, and I would answer him to the best of my ability, being honest with him about what I believed and why, and treating him and his questions with respect. On the day that I was ordained as an ELCA pastor, he came to that worship service, and he was the one who took all of the pictures that I have from that day. No, he still has not come back to the church, and he still claims that he does not believe. But he also knows that not all Christians are afraid to question what they believe, and not all Christians are as intolerant as the media makes them appear, and he knows that there is at least one Christian out there who will treat him with respect. That is one way that we Christians are called to be the salt of the earth: to be different than people expect us to be by being humble, being respectful, and sharing the good news of Jesus in that humble and respectful manner.

Now, I’d like to turn from the salt metaphor to the light metaphor that Jesus uses: You are the light of the world. Light is just as important to the human body as food and water is. I learned this in a dramatic fashion when I lived in more northerly locations, most especially when I lived in Alaska. I spent a year in Wasilla, and we can talk about Wasilla’s most famous resident more at another time. Wasilla is located about 40 miles north of Anchorage, so it’s still in southern Alaska. During the wintertime, the sun did not come up until 10 in the morning, and it set between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. Now, if I knew that I had to be awake for something, say, I had to be at church by 8:30 for the worship service, I would set my alarm, pull myself out of bed in the pitch black, and walk into church, grumbling good-naturedly to my pastor about how this early time in the pitch black was cruel and unusual punishment. And he would laugh at me. But if there was nothing that I had to get up for in the morning, this is how it would go: I would set my alarm for 7:00, and I would give myself a talk the previous evening about how I would be disciplined and how I would get up in the morning just like every other Alaskan would, and how I would start my day in the pitch black and go about my business. And then 7:00 a.m. would roll around. I would switch off my alarm, see that it was pitch black, roll over, and go back to sleep: just for a little while, I would tell myself. And the next thing I would know, it would be 10:00 a.m. and I would be getting up with the sun and be angry with myself about not being more disciplined. Thankfully, people in Alaska were understanding and told me not to worry about it; everyone who was new to the state had these problems. But this is where I truly learned the lesson that we human beings are dependent on light for our health and well-being just as much as anything else.

We, the Christian community, are called to be light to the world, so that others may see our good works and give glory to our Father in heaven. This is where we can bring our Lutheran lens back in and connect it with what Amy-Jill Levine says. God loves us, no matter what. Whether or not we do ten good works in a day, fifty good works, or none at all, God loves us. It is our faith that saves us, not how many good works we do. But, the fruit of faith in God is good works. Luther himself said that God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does. So, we know that God loves us and that God has saved us, and if we truly believe that, then we will want to do good works to show others how much God loves both us and everyone that we come into contact with. We cannot make a stark division between faith and works; they are wrapped up together as one. The light of Christ shines through us when we help those in the community around us to live whole and full lives. And the light of Christ is just as necessary for everyone’s health and well-being as natural sunlight is.

Jesus has named those of us who follow him, as a community, the salt of the earth and the light of the world. The good news is: we already are this. We do not have to work at becoming salt and light, because we already are. Christ’s light shines through us whether we are 42 or 84 or 15. We are a community, and we are called to continue letting the light of Christ shine through us no matter what age we are or what circumstances we find ourselves in. And the people around us will see that light shine through us and taste the salt that we bring to society through our loving and humble witness and through the good works that Christ calls us to do for our neighbor. So, let us go and shine: do not be afraid, but let the light of Christ shine through you. Amen.

Sermon for Presentation of Our Lord

Luke 2:22-40

Merry Christmas! And no, I’m not going insane, although after the events that I went through this week (having my purse stolen out of my car while I was standing there) it might be understandable if I’m a little scattered. But no, February 2^nd, which used to be known as the Festival of Candlemas, is actually the old official last day of the Christmas season in the church. So, if you still have Christmas decorations up in your homes, now is the time to take them down.  It is 40 days after Christmas, and you will see in our Gospel text today that Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the Temple to dedicate him to the Lord 40 days after he was born, following the Law of Moses, as Luke tells us. In the ancient church, the day was called Candlemas because the candles that would be used in the church for the upcoming year were officially blessed on this day; people would also bring their candles from home for the priest to bless. We aren’t prepared to bless candles today, although if you would like to see that, I’m sure I can come up with something after the service.

So, let’s look at the Gospel text that we have before us and notice a few things about it. We don’t get this story in any of the other Gospels; only in Luke, and Luke is very interested in portraying Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as an observant Jewish family. In the book of Leviticus, chapter 12, there are laws for purification after childbirth. When a woman gives birth to a boy, she was considered unclean for a total of 40 days, and after that time, she was to go through a ritual cleansing. Two things that we need to notice about this: First, being unclean does not mean that you are sinful. Most Jewish people at this time were ritually unclean most days of the week and had to go through various purification rituals as outlined in Leviticus to be considered ritually clean. Second, it does not necessarily mean that Mary did not wash herself for forty days. I’m sure she kept herself clean in whatever ways she could. This has to do with ritual and being considered ready to rejoin the community. Leviticus 12 also prescribes the offering that women were to bring to the priest at the time of their ritual purification: either a lamb in its first year for a burnt offering and a pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering, or if she could not afford a lamb, two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for the burnt offering and one for the sin offering. Since Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph brought “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons,” we know that they are poor; unable to afford a lamb.

But then, while they are in the Temple, a random old man comes up to the new parents, takes the child from them, and begins singing. I don’t know about you, but if that were to happen today, we’d immediately be on our cell phone calling the police. There is no indication that Mary and Joseph knew who Simeon was. Perhaps he did ask them before he took Jesus in his arms, but Luke doesn’t tell it that way. God has promised Simeon that he will not die before he sees the Messiah, and when Simeon sees Mary and Joseph with the baby Jesus, the Holy Spirit reveals to him that this is it: here is the Messiah, as a 40-day-old baby. And, did you pay attention to the words that Simeon sings? At St. John’s, we sing a version of this song after we receive Holy Communion, because we know that when we receive the bread and the wine, we are receiving Jesus’ body and blood, and we have, in fact, seen Jesus, both in the bread and the wine and in the community that gathers around the table. Simeon sings this joyful song because God’s promise to him has been fulfilled, and he can now die at peace with his God, whenever that death may come.

But Simeon isn’t finished yet. He prophesies to Mary about what this child Jesus is going to grow up and become and do. Now, we know from Luke’s first chapter that Mary knew about what God was going to do through her child: bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly; filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty, and all of that. Mary knew how important her baby was going to be; she knew that God was working something special through her child, Jesus. The first part of what Simeon said, she could nod her head in agreement: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.” But this business about a sword piercing her own heart, too? Our thoughts automatically go to the eventual death of Jesus on the cross. But even before then, a sword was going to pierce Mary’s heart: like the time when she and her other children wanted to speak to Jesus but could not get through to him because of the crowd, and Jesus said that his true family was anyone who heard the word of God and did it. A sword probably pierced Mary’s heart then, and many other times as she watched her son do the ministry of saving the world.

The story of Jesus’ presentation of the temple is not over, though, with Simeon’s words. Next, an old woman named Anna comes forward and begins to praise God and to speak about Jesus to all who were looking for the redemption of Israel. I wish Luke had written down her words in detail as he had written down Simeon’s. I wonder if what she said was similar to what Simeon had said, or if it differed in some important respect. But I guess in the end it doesn’t matter, for Anna was another witness to the importance of who this special baby was. And when we consider how old she was: now here the Greek is a little vague, and there are a couple of different ways of rendering her age, but let’s assume that she was at least 84; here is this 84-year-old woman going around telling people about Jesus. She is a model for all of us as we are called to witness to others about Jesus.

So, what can we take from this story into our lives this week? Here is one thought: February 2^nd, in pre-Christian times, was a day for pagan festivals looking forward to the end of winter and the arrival of spring. This is where our secular Groundhog Day comes from; people in pre-Christian times would look to groundhogs, and other animals, to give them predictions about the weather. February 2^nd marked the changing of winter into spring. Likewise, having this feast day of the Presentation of Jesus 40 days after Christmas marks a changing of the liturgical seasons for us. It is the last day when we remember Jesus as a baby, and, as Simeon did, we turn our faces to the future: Lent is coming in just a few weeks, and we will remember that sword piercing the heart of a mother who will watch her son die on a cross. The time after Epiphany, when we remembered the Wise Men bringing their gifts to Jesus, will soon be coming to a close, so now is the time for celebration and for singing Alleluias while we can.

But there’s more than just the changing of the seasons to be gained from this story. Let’s return to Anna, that 84-year-old woman who sang Jesus’ praises to anyone in the Temple who would listen, and to Simeon, that older man who was finally at peace with his God because he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. One thing that Luke is showing us is the value of older people in our church. Many congregations today are focused on trying to reach out to the younger generations who have left the church. This is a good thing, because we do want to pass on our faith in Jesus to the people who will come after us. But let’s not forget our elders, which many of you here today are, in the process. When my parents retired, they remarked about being less involved with their congregation because “it’s time for other people to do this” or something along those lines. And I looked at them and I asked, “Did you stop being a Christian just because you retired?” Being a Christian is a lifelong call, and Simeon and Anna, although they were not Christian—Christianity had not become a faith yet; they were Jewish—testify that faith in the Lord is a lifelong thing. Yes, as our bodies get frailer and older, we may have to give up some of the harder tasks around the church. But we can still tell the story of Jesus to those around us, regardless of how old we are. We can share how important our faith in Jesus is to us when we talk with others. We can show the love of Jesus for others in the things that we are able still to do. This calling upon our lives does not die until Jesus calls us to his side.

Let us therefore be bold and joyful as Simeon and Anna were in telling others about the Messiah, born to this humble Jewish couple from Nazareth who found their way first, to Bethlehem, and then, to Jerusalem, where they gave the offerings required for their purification. If the elderly Simeon and Anna could do it, then that shows us that it doesn’t matter what age we are; we can show the love of Christ in both word and deed if we’re 8 or 84. And let’s do it joyfully, not somberly; let’s really share how much Jesus’ love means to us in our lives, and how confident we are that Jesus will be with us no matter what, always loving us, always offering forgiveness, and walking with us through anything we encounter. Jesus has come to be with us, always. Amen.

 

Sermon for Epiphany 3 Narrative Lectionary

Mark 5:1-20

Today’s story from the Gospel of Mark is strange, funny, and terrifying all at once. The funny part, of course, is that there is something slapstick about a herd of pigs racing down the steep bank into the sea, and we often take the funny part of a story and make jokes as a way of deflecting our attention from the strangeness of the story. When we were assigned this story to preach on in a seminary class, and we were discussing it, suddenly all of the pig jokes started coming out. For example, now we understand where the phrase “when pigs fly” might come from. Or, this was the original Bay of Pigs incident, for those of you who remember that failed attempt by Cuban exiles in 1961 to reverse the Cuban revolution which brought Fidel Castro to power. And, finally, now we understand the true meaning of deviled ham. But once we got all of the jokes out of our system, we seminarians were left with the strangeness and the terror of this story of Jesus casting a legion of demons out of a man and into the pigs, and just as it did then, this story still today raises more questions than it answers.

So, let’s start at the beginning, with Jesus and the disciples crossing over to the other side of the sea. If you’ll remember last week, we heard Jesus teaching the crowds, including his disciples, about the kingdom of God using parables about seeds: casting the seeds and how the seeds grow. After he finished teaching them, Jesus said that they should get in the boat and go to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, presumably to continue his teaching ministry there. While they were on the sea, a windstorm arose, and waves swamped the boat while Jesus slept in the stern. The disciples woke him up, and, very irritated, Jesus stilled the storm with a few words. So, when they all land on the other side of the sea, they already know that there is something strange about this rabbi whom they’ve chosen to follow.

But things are about to get stranger still. When Jesus steps out of the boat, he is immediately met by a man who is possessed by an unclean spirit. Mark describes this man as having superhuman strength because of the spirit; able to break shackles and chains. When we studied this story in our Bible class on Thursday, Jesse said that it reminded him of Samson in the Old Testament. Your pastor’s mind, on the other hand, went straight to Marvel Comics and the Incredible Hulk! But if you think about it, it could be said that Bruce Banner was possessed by a spirit every time that he got angry; one that turned him green and gave him superhuman strength. Anyway, Jesus’ encounter with this man possessed by demons—demons that made the man howl, bruise himself with stones, and live among the tombs, raises many questions for us today.

The first question that we need to wrestle with is the question of whether evil still exists today. We like to pride ourselves on being more sophisticated than our 1^st century ancestors. We look at the man in this story and maybe we think that what was going on was some kind of mental illness. Even today, many of us can point to people that we know, or maybe friends of friends, who suffer from illnesses like schizophrenia or any other illness that you can think of and say, “Oh, well, this man was suffering from one of those illnesses, and today he would have been treated with such-and-such medication, and he might be able to live a halfway normal life.” But you know something? That may explain away the man’s behavior, but it doesn’t explain away the pigs.

For all of our pride in our science and technology, we still suspect that there is something more out there. Our brothers in the Roman Catholic Church, for example, still train some of their priests to be exorcists. And we still tell stories to scare ourselves; if you ever want to be scared like this, watch the movie Fallen, with Denzel Washington. He plays a detective who is tracking a series of murders, and what he discovers is that there is a demon jumping from person to person, and it is the demon making the people commit these murders. And you find out which person the demon is in because they start singing, “Time is on my side, yes it is,” by the Rolling Stones. Instinctively we know that our scientific explanations of things can only go so far before we come up against the problem of both evil, and good, forces in this world.

Besides the problem of wrestling with the idea of evil forces in the world as opposed to our scientific, rational explanations for these ancient stories, the next thing that we need to wrestle with is the reaction of the people in the area to what Jesus has done for this man. You would think that after seeing this man healed from his affliction, the people would be thankful and would welcome Jesus to teach them more. But that’s not how they react. They are afraid and they beg Jesus to leave their country. Certainly, some of it has to do with the economic loss involved with the great herd of pigs drowning in the sea. But I think there’s more to it than that. Jesus has upset their societal order by what he has done. Because they couldn’t do anything to help this man with the demons, the people in the town had written him off; had told their children not to go out there; basically had accepted that the man was there and they didn’t have to deal with him. But now, here is the man, clothed and in his right mind, and they have no idea how to re-integrate him into their society. They are afraid that he will blame them for not doing more to help him. And perhaps they are afraid that Jesus will condemn them for not doing more to help.

And Jesus gets that. And that’s why he tells the man formerly possessed by the demons that he can’t come with him, but rather, he is to stay and tell everyone how much the Lord has done for him. Jesus knows that the only way his message is going to get through to the people in the country of the Gadarenes is if this one man witnesses to them about the great mercy that Jesus has shown to him. By the way, the Decapolis means “ten cities,” and consisted of areas of Roman settlement east of the Jordan River, with the exception of one on the west side of the Jordan. They were centers of Greek and Roman culture in an otherwise Jewish country, which explains why they were herding pigs. So, this one man had a mission: he traveled throughout these ten cities, who were Gentile, and told them about a Jewish rabbi who had had mercy on him and cast out the demons inside of him. And thus, word about Jesus spread not only among his own Jewish people, but among the peoples of the Greco-Roman culture surrounding them.

Here are some things that we can take away from this story today. First, we are very much like the people in the country of the Gadarenes who asked Jesus to leave. We know that there is evil in the world; all we have to do is turn on the news and see reports of shootings, of oil spills that decimate the environment, children locked in cages, people fleeing wars and being uncertain of welcome in other countries, people who live on the streets, children dying from the flu, and even something as mundane as an aging sewer system that spills waste into the Susquehanna River when the pipes can’t handle all the rainwater and the rest of it. It’s overwhelming. I am guilty of wanting to turn away from all of it myself because I just can’t handle more bad news. I want to just accept the way things are and try to get along with my ordinary life.

But here’s the thing: Jesus comes in and disrupts all of that. Jesus shines a light on the evil that’s going on and my blindness to it. And when I realize that I am complicit in these evil things, then Jesus brings healing and tells me to go and tell everyone how much he has done for me, and how much mercy he has shown me. And so, perhaps, in the end, that is the message that we can take away from this strange story. When we are like the man possessed by the Legion, when we feel that evil has overtaken us and there is nothing we can do about it, we can come to Jesus and ask for mercy, forgiveness, and the strength to tell others that evil will not win the day. Jesus’ love and mercy will, in the end, win out. And we are emissaries of that love and mercy to all of those around us. We participate in shining the light of Jesus in the darkness of the world and bringing that light to others who are shrouded in the darkness. So, shine where you are. Jesus is with you, and will strengthen you to stand against the forces of evil that threaten us. Amen.

Sermon for Epiphany 2 Narrative Lectionary

Mark 4:1-34

Last week in the Gospel of Mark, we heard about the ministry of John the Baptist, Jesus’ baptism, how he spent 40 days in the wilderness being tempted by Satan, and finally, after John was arrested, how Jesus came to Galilee and proclaimed that the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news. We have skipped over the end of chapter 1, as well as chapters 2 and 3 to get to chapter 4 today, so I would like to give you a summary of what has happened in those two chapters before we tackle all these parables that we heard today. After Jesus made his initial proclamation that the kingdom of God was near, he passed along the Sea of Galilee and called his first disciples from their fishing trade: Simon and his brother Andrew, as well as James and his brother John, who were the sons of Zebedee. Then they all went to Capernaum, where Jesus entered the synagogue and taught. While he was in the synagogue, he drove an unclean spirit out of a man, and everyone was amazed at this new teaching; with authority. Jesus’ fame begins to spread. Jesus and his disciples then go to Simon’s house, where Simon’s mother-in-law was sick, and Jesus heals her. Do take note that this means that Simon Peter was married, even though we don’t hear anything about his wife in the Scriptures. After this, Jesus and his disciples travel through Galilee, spreading the good news to many other towns. Jesus heals a leper and commands him not to tell anyone, but the former leper ignores that and tells everyone, so Jesus’ fame spreads more and it’s difficult for him to go into a town openly because of the crowds. Jesus returns to Capernaum and heals a paralytic who his friends let down through the roof because of the crowds, and Jesus begins by forgiving the man’s sins before he heals the paralysis. This is where the scribes begin to question him, asking by what authority Jesus forgives sins when only God alone can do that. Jesus then calls Levi the tax collector to be one of his disciples. He teaches about issues such as fasting and the Sabbath. He heals a man with a withered hand on the sabbath, thus getting the Pharisees upset with him and beginning to conspire how to destroy him. He continues teaching and healing, and then calls the twelve disciples: Simon Peter, James and John the sons of Zebedee, Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot. Jesus then continues teaching, and, when his mother and brothers come to call him out of the crowd, Jesus says that his true family is whoever does the will of God.

And now we come, finally, to the parables of Mark 4. Up until this point, the examples of Jesus’ teachings that Mark gives us are fairly straightforward: speaking about what is and is not lawful on the sabbath, for example, or why his disciples do not fast as John’s disciples do. But now he begins to speak to the crowds in riddles, in metaphors that we call parables, and if his disciples then did not understand them, then we 2000 years later, who don’t necessarily have the farming experience that our ancestors in the faith had, can be forgiven for butting our heads up against these parables and saying, “But Jesus, we don’t understand.” So, let’s see if there’s any way we can wrestle with these stories today and get some kind of meaning out of them.

So, let’s start with the parable of the sower. This is a well-known parable, probably because it also shows up in Matthew, and probably also because it is one of the few parables that comes with an explanation. In my first call in Wyoming, the congregation was located in a small town that hosted a community college and a hospital, which were the major employers in town, and it was surrounded on all sides by farms. The crops that were farmed there were mainly cash crops: sugar beets, beans of various kinds, alfalfa, and barley. One year I had in my confirmation class the granddaughter of a farmer, who lived with her family on her grandfather’s farm. And one night in class, when we learned the parable of the sower, I wanted to know what her reaction was to the sower who just flung seed around willy-nilly without regard to what kind of soil it landed in. And her response was this: “If my grandfather sowed the fields like that, there would be no way that he would get a good crop that he could sell and make money from.” So, the image we have of this sower in the parable is of someone who does not make good business sense for running a farm. No farmer would sow his seed like that; so why does the sower?

As you may have guessed, this is not your usual farmer. Jesus says that the sower is the sower of the word. It may be that the sower represents God, but it also may be that the sower represents the preacher, and it may also very well be that the sower represents you sitting in the pew. The sower of the word could be any one of us. When we talk to other people about the word of God, we become the sower of that word. And we don’t know where the seed is going to land or what the soil is like when we sow the word. It may be that the seed is snatched up out of the person’s heart right away; it may be that the person who hears wants to become a disciple of Jesus, but when trouble arises, they fall away. It may also be that the seed falls on rocky ground, where it tries to spring up, but the cares of the world suck the joy out of the Gospel message that was heard. Or it may be that the seed lands on good soil, and that person produces an abundance of the harvest. And it may also be that any one of us has been each kind of soil in our lifetimes, and we go back and forth as to how receptive we are to the word of God at any given time. But one of the points of this parable is that the sower keeps sowing, and trusts that God will bring about good fruits in the person who hears in God’s time, not ours.

For now, we’re going to skip over Jesus speaking about not hiding a lamp under a bushel basket, because I want us to stick with the seed parables that Jesus tells. The next image that Jesus uses for the kingdom of God is again a growing plant metaphor. He speaks of how someone scatters seed on the ground and goes about their daily lives, while the seed sprouts and grows, without the person knowing how it happens. If you’ve ever planted any seeds, then you know that it takes a lot of faith. You make sure the soil is right; you plant the seeds, you water them regularly and make sure they get enough sunlight, but you don’t know if the seeds are going to sprout and become beautiful flowers, or vegetables that you can eat, or if they will die despite your best efforts. This is what the kingdom of God is like: when we sow the seeds of the Word of God, we don’t know how it will grow. I’m reminded of how my pastor confirmed me when I was a teenager, and then my family moved away after I graduated high school. And then the next time I ran into him, I had just been assigned my deaconess internship. My pastor didn’t know when he confirmed me that he was part of the work God was working in my life to serve God; it was only years later that he was able to see the fruit of the work that he had taken part in. That’s one way that the kingdom of God works.

Finally, we come to the parable of the mustard seed. Here Jesus starts with a small seed and speaks of how it grows up into the largest of shrubs. Scholars have written many words about how, in the plant world, the mustard seed is not the smallest seed there is, and how when it grows, it does not become a tree, but rather, it is more like weeds. When I traveled to Turkey in 2018, we saw fields of mustard all over, and they did look like weeds with bright yellow flowers. But I think that the scholars are missing the point. Jesus is not trying to be a botanist when he speaks this parable. He is speaking of how the kingdom of God may start out small, but then suddenly, when we’re not looking, here it is, and it is so large that we cannot miss it. No small seed is insignificant in God’s kingdom; something may start out small, and we either dismiss it or overlook it, but then suddenly, there it is in front of us, and God’s kingdom is present in whatever that thing is.

It may seem strange to be talking about all of these metaphors of growing things in the middle of winter, when we’ve just been through a snowstorm and when the gardeners in our midst are not even thinking about planting seeds yet. But I think this is a good time in the life of our congregations to reflect on these growing metaphors. As Salem and St. John’s have been getting smaller, we may be wondering what God is doing among us. We are wondering where God is calling us to go into the future, and how we are to continue following Jesus. This is when we can look at these parables and be reassured. We continue casting the seed of the Word and praying that it lands on good soil both among us and among those whom we meet. We don’t understand how that seed grows, but we plant it in faith that God will give the growth and it will sprout and bloom in God’s time, not ours. And finally, we try not to neglect or overlook even the smallest seeds, because we trust that God is able to bring large growth of the kingdom even from the smallest beginnings.

And so, now we return to that section we skipped over, where Jesus says that we don’t put a lamp under a basket, but we put it on a lampstand so that it gives light everywhere. He urges us to pay attention, for anything hidden will one day come into the light and be made known. The kingdom of God is everywhere, if we know where to look and how to listen. So, let’s keep our ears and eyes open, and look for the signs of God’s kingdom everywhere in our daily lives. Amen.

 

Sermon for Baptism of Our Lord, Narrative Lectionary

Mark 1:1-15

Welcome to the portion of the year where we focus on the Gospel of Mark! If you read the article that I wrote for Salem’s newsletter this month, then you will know that the Gospel of Mark is the shortest of the four gospels. You will also know that scholars believe that Mark was the first Gospel that was written, and that Matthew and Luke used large portions of Mark, plus their own sources, to write their own Gospels. We don’t know who actually wrote the Gospel of Mark; one of the early church fathers, by the name of Papias, said that “Mark was an interpreter of Peter and that he wrote down what Peter said, accurately but not in order.” As to who this Mark was, tradition identifies him with the “John Mark” described in several passages of Acts. But we don’t know for sure, because none of the oldest manuscripts we have of this Gospel have any author’s name on them.

You may also notice that Mark is different from our other Gospels in a few ways. Mark does not start his Gospel with stories of Jesus’ birth, as Matthew and Luke do. Instead, Mark starts his story with the ministry of John the Baptist, Jesus’ baptism, and then goes into Jesus’ opening call, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” Mark is a very action-oriented person; he doesn’t stop to smell the roses. Instead, he keeps Jesus moving, and one of the ways he does this is by using the word “immediately”. You will have heard that word already as I told you our story this morning.

In the spirit of “immediately,” let’s dive into today’s story, as we are celebrating Jesus’ baptism and remembering our own baptisms today. And as I was learning this story and studying it, the word that kept coming to mind was “repentance”. John’s baptism was for repentance; the people confessed their sins and were baptized by him. When Jesus begins his ministry, he proclaims, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” So, I asked this question on my Facebook page, “What does the word ‘repentance’ mean to you?” Here is a sampling of some of the responses:

“To repent is to turn your life around.” “To repent is more than saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ Genuine repentance is permanent change.” “I think it means to be truly sorry. Turn away from your sin or not go to that place anymore.” “I think of the Hebrew word teshuvah. It basically means coming back. So, in brief I think of repentance as returning to be what God created me to be. Coming home to my own truest self, which includes realizing my own limits: I need Christ for my salvation. Repentance involves understanding yourself better than you did before. So even if it is about returning, it is still a step forward.” “Stop doing something that is wrong and promising to never do it again. Sometimes we break that promise, but then we stop, say and mean I am sorry, and promise to stop it again, until one day it is gone from your life.” “Greek means to turn around, change your mind. I think of repentance always in response to God’s initiation. I’m walking in one direction and turn around to walk the opposite direction. … It has nothing to do with feeling sorry, although we may feel sorry. It’s just changing our minds about God.”

All of these responses, I feel, are good ones that get at the idea of repentance. Repentance means more than saying, “I’m sorry.” It also means permanently walking away from whatever your sin was. So, to pick a more obvious violation of one of the Ten Commandments, if you regularly take stuff that does not belong to you, in other words, you steal, then repenting of that sin would mean changing your mind: you’re not going to steal any longer. But there could also be evidence of that repentance: you would restore whatever it was that you stole to the person or people whom you stole it from. One example of this would be the story of Zacchaeus, that tax collector who, after he encountered Jesus, vowed to give half of his possessions to the poor and pay back anyone whom he defrauded four times the amount.

But I also like this idea that one of my friends said about repentance being a return to your truest self, because I think that is what is going on in the story of Jesus’ baptism. When Jesus comes up out of the water, he sees the heavens torn apart, the Spirit of God descending on him as a dove, and a voice saying, “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.” This is the identity that God reminds Jesus of at his baptism. Jesus is God’s Son, and God is well-pleased with Jesus and what Jesus has done. It’s a moment where Jesus’ truest self is revealed, both to himself and to those who heard Mark’s Gospel for the first time. It’s incredible; amazing; a mountaintop experience. Imagine: to hear from God personally that you are God’s child and that God is pleased with you. Your truest self revealed.

Unfortunately, the Spirit doesn’t let Jesus rest too long on that mountaintop, but rather, drives him immediately into the wilderness for 40 days. It’s all well and good to know that you are God’s Son, but now Jesus must figure out what that means for himself and for the ministry that he is called to begin. That’s why he must stay in the wilderness for 40 days; that’s why he must let Satan tempt him, or rather, test him.  He has to figure out how he as God’s Son is to act in the world and how he is to use the gifts that God has given him to teach humankind what it means to follow him in the path of God’s love. Mark doesn’t give us the details that Matthew and Luke do about how exactly Jesus is tempted, though. What’s important to Mark is that Jesus does figure it out, and when he emerges from the wilderness, he begins to proclaim that God’s kingdom has come near, and that we all should repent and believe the good news.

So, how is Jesus then calling us to repent? That’s a really good question. Of course, we continue to confess our sins and repent of them daily, even when we fall back into them. That is a big part of repentance, and I think that we understand that, even when we’re not always good about doing it. But you know what? God says the same thing to us that God said to Jesus on the day when Jesus was baptized so long ago: “You are my beloved child; with you I am well pleased.” Sometimes it’s hard for us to remember that, especially when we are all too aware of how imperfect we are. So, let’s hear it again: “You are my beloved child; with you I am well pleased.” And let’s say it again, together: “We are God’s beloved children; with us, God is well pleased.” Isn’t that incredible? To think, that we are God’s beloved children, and that God is well pleased with us.

But, also like Jesus, we have to figure out what that means. I’m not suggesting that we all need to go out in the desert and fast for 40 days as Jesus did, although if that appeals to you, I won’t stop you. But in our prayer time and our devotional time, and in our time when we study the Scriptures, we need to listen for God’s voice showing us how we are to use the gifts that God has given us to proclaim God’s love to the world. And that can happen in many different ways. Perhaps God has given you the gift of evangelism and, like our good friend Rose Tonkin, you can just walk up to someone on the street and start talking to them about Jesus. But not everyone has that gift, and that’s okay. Perhaps you’ve been given the ability to teach others about Jesus, such as in Sunday school or adult Bible class. Perhaps you show Jesus’ love to others in other ways. God has not given us all the same gifts, and that is okay. The point is that, as God’s children, we listen to what God is telling us as to how we are to act and to proclaim God’s kingdom to the world around us.

Here are some final thoughts about repentance, whether it is confessing your sins or returning to who you are as God’s child: repentance requires humility. It requires an acknowledgment that who you are in the present moment is not who God meant you to be. It requires a realization that, no matter what lies you tell yourself on a daily basis, you are not perfect, and you need help. And this is where the Holy Spirit comes in. Martin Luther tells us that when we say we believe in the Holy Spirit, that means, “I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, made me holy, and kept me in the true faith …”. So, when we feel the desire to repent, we should have the humility to say that that desire does not come from ourselves, but that it is a gift from the Holy Spirit.

And that gift, that receiving of the Holy Spirit, did not just come on Jesus at his baptism, but rather, it also came upon each one of us when we were baptized. It leads us to repentance not just when we confess our sins in worship each week, but also on a daily basis. Through our baptism, the Holy Spirit continually reminds us that we are beloved children of God, gives us a desire to turn back to God, and the desire to act in the way that God’s children should act, using the gifts that God has given us and continually discerning how God wants us to use them. Let us then go forth from here this day, remembering that we are God’s children and that God loves us, and let us live our lives continually turning back to God. Amen.

 

Sermon for Christmas Eve 2019

Luke 2:1-20

I have a confession to make: I struggle a lot with Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, the good news of God coming in the flesh as a real, human baby is wonderful, and I rejoice over this wonderful, great, good news. It’s the rest of the stuff around Christmas that I struggle with: the sentimental songs: for example, the last thing that a mother with a newborn baby would want is a little boy banging on his drum right when she was trying to get the baby to sleep; and no, Mary does not need someone mansplaining to her what the birth of her son meant: she did, in fact, know what it meant because she said so in Luke chapter 1 when she sang that God had brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. Then there is the commercialism around Christmas and the pressure to make it just perfect, when buying stuff is the last thing that the Savior of the world wanted us to do when he was born. Finally, there are the inaccuracies of our storytelling around the actual birth of Christ itself which obscure the great and awesome mystery of this child born for us. For example, we know from Luke’s story itself, with the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks in the fields at night, that Jesus was not actually born on December 25^th. Winters in the Middle East can get cold, and for the shepherds to be out in the fields would have meant that it was springtime, probably sometime in March or April. And you may have noticed another discrepancy when I told the story of Jesus’ birth tonight: I replaced the word “inn” with “guest room”. And I want to explain more about that, because it helps us to enter this story, find out what really happened, and more fully understand what the birth of Jesus was about.

So, come back in time with me for a moment. Come back to a time when there were no phones, no emails, no text messaging, no social media, none of that. Come back to a time when Rome ruled most of the land around the Mediterranean Sea, to a time when Emperor Augustus had defeated his political rivals in a civil war and instituted an Empire that was at peace, but at peace by might of his military. Come to a place that is called Galilee in the north and Judea in the south, under the rule of the despised and feared family of King Herod, and a place where no Roman official wants to be assigned because its people are so “backwards” and “contrary,” refusing to follow the Greco-Roman gods and following their own God only, who prohibits any kind of images depicting God. Come to a little town called Nazareth in Galilee, where a young couple, forced by the dictates of this foreign Roman government to go to Bethlehem, starts out on the 90-mile journey when Mary is about nine months pregnant. By the way, we don’t know if this poor couple had a donkey or not; Scripture doesn’t tell us, and if they did, I’m not certain how comfortable that would have been for a nine-month pregnant woman to ride.

Mary and Joseph arrive in Bethlehem. Since Joseph was descended from the house and family of David, and since Bethlehem was his hometown, he would have had family there. The word “inn” is a mistranslation of the Greek; inns in this time would have been little more than a room or two connected to a bar where unsavory characters would go to drink; there is no way that Joseph would have looked for a place in a strange inn for Mary. Instead, the word should be translated as “guest room”. Joseph and Mary go to Joseph’s family and find the room in the home is occupied by other people, who are probably also in town for the census. Then, while they are greeting their family and catching up on the news, Mary goes into labor. She needs privacy to give birth, and so she goes, not into a separate stable, but into the area of the house where the animals are kept. Luke doesn’t tell us any details about how long it took to give birth to Jesus, but for those of you who have been through the process, I want you to imagine what it would be like to go through birth without any pain medication. Mary is not the serene, perfectly dressed woman kneeling at the manger in prayer. She is disheveled, sweaty, in pain, lying in the place where the animals are kept, clutching her newborn baby to her victoriously, thankful to God that both she and her newborn son have survived birth, just as the angel Gabriel had promised nine months ago.

But more importantly, Mary and Joseph are not alone during this time. They are surrounded by their family. Perhaps one of the older women there served as a midwife during the birth process. But after the birth, when Mary laid the baby Jesus in the manger, the family all crowded in to the area with the animals and cooed over this new baby, wondering what life would have in store for him; at this point, according to Luke, Mary is the only one who knows what the angel Gabriel has said about her baby—although she probably did tell Joseph at some point. Suddenly, though, strangers burst in on the scene: shepherds with a strange story about angels announcing the birth of this baby who is the Savior, the Messiah, the Lord. The birth of this baby in the backwaters of the Roman Empire is not just for their family, but for all people. And God has sent not the emperor, not the kings, not the politicians, not the powerful—but ordinary, everyday people, to come and see the baby in the manger, the feeding trough for animals, who would be the Savior of the world and who would feed the world through his life, death, and resurrection.

This is truly what we are called to celebrate on Christmas. Not the tree, not the sentimental Christmas songs that are untrue, not the gifts, and not the “idol” of the perfect Christmas celebration. We are called to celebrate, with the angels and the shepherds, the birth of a Savior who came for me, for you, for all of those the world deems “unimportant,” or “disposable”, and for all people—and all means all. The birth of Jesus the Messiah to an obscure Jewish couple in the hinterlands of the Roman Empire with only ordinary, everyday shepherds come to celebrate his birth, is a subversive signal of resistance to the powerful Empire: Caesar is not Lord, but Jesus is. A Lord who will bring peace, but not a false peace brought through the force of military might, but rather a true peace brought by serving us and teaching us to serve one another. A Lord who, from the start of his life as he lay in a manger (where he did cry, by the way), would give himself up as bread for us, so that we might be truly fed and satisfied. A Lord who was both, somehow, mysteriously, truly human and truly divine, and who loves us, each one of us, no matter who we are or what we’ve done.

This is the story that we celebrate each year in December. It is a story that, when all the legends and inaccuracies that we have built up around it are stripped away, is no less powerful for having lost all of that. It is a story that tells us who Jesus is and that he is our Lord. It is a story that is part of the greater story of all of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that is part of us and that informs how we are to live and to be in this world. It is a story that both affirms our biological families and encourages us to open our families wider and include people like the shepherds in them. And it is a story that tells us that God is not afraid to be born into the muck and dirt of our daily lives, because God’s love is so great that God is willing to do anything to show us how much God loves us, even be born as one of us among both humans and animals. Isn’t this an incredible story? And it is ours to share with the entire world.

So, let us glorify our great God with singing, as the angels did, and praising, as the shepherds did. Let us ponder the mystery of God becoming one of us as Mary did. But one thing we dare not do is be silent about it. Let us go from here this night, sharing the great good news with one and all that Jesus, our Messiah, is born and has become one of us, sharing his love not only with us who are gathered here, but with all people, everywhere. Amen.