"Turn Around" - Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany

Turn Around
Epiphany 3A
January 26, 2020
Grace, Waseca, MN
Matthew 4.12-23

“From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

You know those young people who leave the church after Confirmation? Well, I was one of them. I looked around our church, Hope Lutheran in South Minneapolis, and I only saw hypocrites. At the time, I wasn’t sure there was a God, but I was pretty sure I wanted no part of their God. I stayed away from the church through high school and college, even at Gustavus, a Lutheran school. The only time during my four years there that I entered the chapel was when giving campus tours to prospective students.

After college, I didn’t make it to grad school as planned. I needed a job, so I took a flyer on a management trainee position at Minnesota Fabrics, a fabric and decorating store. It was one of the best things that happened to me because I had started drinking more and when I drank, I smoked. It seemed I was destined to follow in my parents’ footsteps, who were highly functioning alcoholics.

That’s until I met LuAnn, a fellow Minnesota Fabrics employee, who invited me to the young adults group at her church, Trinity Lutheran of Minnehaha Falls. Long story short, that group loved me and prayed me back to the church where I could engage my deep faith questions. And so, it was that in May 1978 I rededicated my life to Christ. In other words, I turned around and started following Jesus. Not unimportantly, it was in that same young adults group that I met my wife Cindy and subsequently stopped drinking and smoking. Other than Communion wine, I haven’t had an alcoholic beverage or smoked a cigarette in 40 years.

I don’t tell this story to present me as some sort of hero in the faith. I’m not the hero in this story. If anyone is a hero, it’s LuAnn and the young adults group who loved me and gently helped me turn around.  “From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’” Jesus’ call to repentance may confuse some of us in the church because we view repentance in a strictly moralistic sense, as if we have done something wrong and needed admit it. Indeed, I had much to regret about my life as a young adult. But the word for repent is metanoia, which literally means to change one’s mind or a acquire a new mind. It can also mean to turn around and go in a different direction, to change your attitude. As I learned from that young adults group, Jesus didn’t come to shame us into a new way of being; Jesus invited us into a new way of thinking, a new way of going.

When Jesus calls his first disciples to follow him, he calls them to a life of radical transformation. In fact, Jesus invites them to become agents of transformation themselves by serving others. Jesus invites them to question the prevailing political, economic, and social systems of the day and think differently. Jesus invites them into a different reality, one where God’s overwhelming love for all people breaks into our hurting and broken world, where forgiveness, resurrection and new life are possible. In other words, what the disciples (and us) will come to know is a reality defined by the cross.

Today is our annual meeting, a time to look back on the year and celebrate where God has been at work in, with and through us in this place. Our annual report is full of stories of just a few times where we have been agents of transformation, of how we have been Christ to others, how we have made a difference in the lives of so many people. I hope you will read them if you haven’t already done so. Yet, if I may be so bold, I think it is also a time for repentance. By that I mean that we need to acknowledge those times when we’ve fallen short of God’s intentions for us, but we also need to listen to Jesus’ voice that invites us to turn around and follow him.

In Jesus, the kingdom of heaven has come near, breaking into our world with the gift of abundant life. With that gift comes a call on us to not only receive that gift but to share it with others in word and deed. You are worthy of that call, sisters and brothers, not because of who you are but whose you are. So, please, can we spend the time at our meeting and in the year ahead discerning together what that means? Can we spend less time on proper procedure and more time on how we proclaim the good news? I know we can do that because I see you striving mightily each and every day to do so. Bless you for that good work. I look forward to walking with you as we discover what it means to follow Jesus. Amen.

For an \audio version of this sermon please click here.

"The Obedience of Faith" - Sermon for Baptism of Our Lord Sunday Year A

The Obedience of Faith
Baptism of Our Lord A
January 12, 2020
Grace, Waseca, MN
Matthew 3.13-17

When hearing the story of Jesus’ baptism, I can’t help but think of some notable baptisms that I’ve done. For instance, like Cornelius’ household in Acts 10, there was the whole family I baptized as a result of the mom’s friendship with my wife, Cindy. Then there were the two teenage sisters, daughters of a Lutheran dad and Hindu mom, who decided to be baptized and then confirmed. There was a woman of Asian descent who grew up in a Catholic school system but was searching and wanted more in life. She started attending church, accepted the invitation to the Lord’s table and then wanted to be baptized.

It hasn’t been all rainbows and unicorns. In one of my less-than-finer moments, there was the dad that wanted to kill me after I dramatically declared that we were going to “kill” his infant daughter in baptism. It was my dramatic way of emphasizing that we have died to sin and rise to new life. He didn’t buy it. I no longer do this with parents, but I do tell the story to illustrate the same point.

Those who study baptism and the early church think that the baptism of John the Baptist may be loosely connected to ancient Jewish washing and purification rituals. Yet, they also believe those baptisms were an entity unto themselves. Likewise, the significance we place on baptisms now as a sacrament, a gift of God’s grace that provides a daily dying to sin and rising to new life, becoming part of God’s family, an assurance that we will always belong to God no matter what happens, were not a part of John’s baptisms either. But what I think does tie these memorable baptisms with Jesus’ baptism is an attitude of vulnerability.

Only in Matthew’s version of Jesus’ baptism do we have the curious exchange between Jesus and John the Baptist. John wonders why he should be baptizing Jesus, intuitively knowing a baptism of repentance for Jesus doesn’t make any sense. Jesus’ response, that it is necessary to fulfill all righteousness, is vague and provokes much speculation as to its meaning. I think that Jesus’ comment has something to do with Jesus agreeing to take on the mission for which God sent him. In every case, being baptized means agreeing to give up control of our lives and giving it to God. Even when we baptize babies, we do it without their permission, setting them on God’s path for them. And at some point they have to say to God in one way or another, “Let it be according to your word.”

The thrust of the season of Epiphany is to make manifest or reveal just who this Jesus is that has come into our world. It is bookended by two festival Sundays, the Baptism of Our Lord and the Transfiguration of Our Lord. In both cases, as we will see, a voice from heaven declares Jesus to be God’s beloved Son. So it is that in our baptisms, we are baptized into Christ Jesus, becoming God’s beloved children forever. In addition, we open ourselves to God’s direction in our lives, to share in Jesus’ mission to love and bless the world, an act of faithful obedience that continues daily until we move to the next life.

As we’ve seen all too clearly this past week, we live in a hurting and broken world. The shooting of Officer Arik Matson and the all-too-sudden death of Arlene Thieme have rocked us. In our own community of faith, we still feel the effects of numerous conflicts, traumas and tragedies. Yet, we persist because we are God’s beloved who are called to be a healing presence in this world. You see, all baptisms are notable baptisms. Today, we are humbly reminded that God has a vision for us, to make manifest God’s love to all who need to hear it, including ourselves. In the months ahead, we’ll discover together what that means for us as Grace Lutheran Church. But for now, let us “walk wet” in the obedience of faith, allowing the light of Christ to shine in, with, and through us. Amen.

For an audio version of this sermon, click here.

"One of Us, One with Us" - Sermon for the Second Sunday of Christmas

One of Us, One with Us
Christmas 2A
January 5, 2020
Grace, Waseca, MN
John 1.1-18

The pastor-in-training was visiting a patient in the hospital as part of his chaplaincy rotation. After a few minutes of intently listening to the agonies of the seriously ill man, the nascent pastor, with as much empathy and compassion as he could muster, said “I know how you feel.” Without warning, the patient’s hand shot out from under the covers and his fist caught the pastor square in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. The ailing man snarled, “You can’t begin to know how I feel.” It was a valuable, if painful, lesson the seminarian learned that day about walking with people and one I took to heart when it was related to me by him.

All the presents have been unwrapped and put away, the trees and lights are down, the Christmas programs are a memory, and Valentines displays are in the stores, but here in the church it’s still Christmas (at least for today). You might think it’s a cranky attempt by the church to be counter-cultural and revolt against society. There is some truth to that, but as Kathryn Shifferdecker points out, “The wonder of the Word-made-flesh cannot be contained or packed away with the decorations and trappings of Christmas.” Then she adds that, without all of the distractions, “…we may able to hear and speak of mystery” of Christ’s birth.

 “And the Word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, glory of a Father’s own Son,” John tells us in poetic, exalted language. The One who was there from the beginning, before there was a beginning, the One through whom and for whom all things were created took on and became one with that which he created. This claim has startling implications, not the least of which we claim that things that are finite are indeed capable of bearing that which is infinite and that which is limited can hold the limitless. In other words, human flesh, water, and bread and wine can contain God. As my friend and colleague Pastor Darby Lawrence notes when we take the very creator of the universe into our bodies, “It’s a wonder we don’t explode.”

Yet, perhaps the greatest implication of the mystery that God become one of us is the claim that God knows in an intimate way what it means to be human, to actually know what we feel. But is that true? Are we now protesting that claim with a mental fist aimed squarely at God’s chest? Sure, in Jesus Christ God knows hunger, pain, grief, suffering, death and joy, but does God really know what it means to be me. Does God know about cancer, Alzheimer’s, divorce, job loss, depression, PTSD, mental illness and other things? Yes! Jesus knows exactly what it is like to be us because in his cross Jesus took on all our pain and suffering and brokenness where it was ultimately crucified and redeemed.

That’s good news, but there is more because with God there is always more. The even better news is that the God who became One of us is also One with us. Perhaps the most enduring mystery is not that God entered creation at Christmas. The most enduring mystery is that God is still here. It would be easy for us to give up on ourselves and our world, to be cynical about our world full of political and cultural divisions, the wars and petty conflicts, if it weren’t for Christmas. Christmas reminds us that God has not given up on us nor will he. With that assurance and the New Year looming, I ask you to look back and see how God was with you this past year, to where the Word-made-flesh lived with you and invite you to resolve to look for God’s presence in the coming one. Thanks be to God! Happy New Year my sisters and brothers in Christ.

For an audio version of this sermon, click here. (It is dated January 8 and is in two parts.)