"Come and Be Fed ... With Affection" Sermon Pentecost 4B June 24, 2012

“Come and Be Fed … with Affection”

Pentecost 4B (Lect. 12)

Grace in the Park Worship

June 24, 2012

2 Corinthians 6.1-13

Take a moment and think about your family growing up. How was love and affection expressed?

Was your family one of those that did a lot of hugging and kissing and saying, “I love you?” Or was your family one of those who didn’t show affection much, but you knew you were loved? Take a couple of minutes to talk to someone near you, telling each other about what life was like in your family. After the break: I’ll bet there was a lot of variety in your conversations. Perhaps there were some cases where there wasn’t much love and affection expressed. I’m sure there were others where “I love you” was said a lot but not lived out. Love and affection are so important that we feel empty without them.

Many years ago, I heard a story about an orphanage. It was in Russia I think, but it could have been anywhere. There were so many babies in the orphanage that only a few of them could get any attention. Those babies who were handled and cuddled regularly did fine; those babies who weren’t didn’t do well at all. In fact, they were very sickly. Affection, even a little, is so important.

When I work with couples preparing for marriage, we read Jesus’ words in Mark 10 about divorce being caused by “hardness of heart.” We talk about the fact that hearts just don’t get hard overnight, and that the work of marriage is largely about paying attention to your hearts and keeping them soft. I think you could say it is also about making sure your heart is not closing, and that our work is about keeping it open.

 “Our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. … open wide your hearts also.” The Apostle Paul writes these difficult, yet affectionate words to the Corinthians. The Corinthian church was a church that Paul founded and to which he was strongly attached. However, somewhere along the way there was a break in the relationship causing the shedding of many tears, on both sides. Much of the responsibility was on the Corinthians’ part because of their misunderstanding about what it meant to be an apostle sent by God. To many of them, because of all the suffering that Paul endured and because he didn’t act like the other “super apostles,” they thought he was deficient.

In the ancient world, it wasn’t up to the injured party to make things right, but Paul knows how important it is to bring healing and reconciliation to bear on their relationship. We who have been reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, who have had our broken relationships fixed though we certainly didn’t deserve it, must work at repairing our relationships, even when it isn’t our fault. God opens God’s heart to us, has no restriction in affection for us, so we can do the same for others.

A number of years ago I became good friends with a member of my congregation I’ll call Bob. We regularly conversed by email and occasionally had lunch together. Bob is a good and faithful man who had not only supported the congregation generously, but supported my ministry, too. Somewhere along the way, something happened, I’m not sure exactly what, but Bob and I had a falling out that has permanently ruptured our relationship. I’ve tried everything I can think of to repair the relationship, but I have not been able to do so. I don’t tell you this to show what a great Christian I am and what a schmuck Bob is; it’s most likely the other way around. Rather, I tell you this because of the pain caused by closed hearts.

There are too many closed hearts in this world, and we in the church are not immune to them. That’s why it’s so important to come and be fed with the reconciling affection of God. God through Jesus Christ’s presence in, with, and under the bread and wine reconcile us to him. At the same time, God works in us to open our hearts to one another, risking being rejected. We cannot not be agents of affection and open hearts, no matter who or why. This is not because of who we are, but because of who God is, the One who has opened himself so that we may live. May you know God’s affectionate open heart, now and always. Amen.

"Come and Be Fed ... With Faith" Pentecost 3B Sermon

“Come and Be Fed … with Faith”

Pentecost 3B

June 17, 2012

2 Corinthians 5.6-17

 “We walk by faith, not by sight.”

There’s a scene in the movie, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” where Indiana (Harrison Ford) is forced to follow a path where others have died in order to reach the Holy Grail, the chalice Jesus was supposed to have used at the Last Supper. His father (Sean Connery) and the bad guys have both been searching for it. The bad guys shoot Indy’s father to convince him to go after the grail because only the healing powers of the grail can save him. After getting through the initial trials with the help of a coded guidebook, Indy encounters a chasm in which there appears no way across. The book indicates the one is to step out in faith. Driven by his father’s need, Indy closes his eyes and steps out, and finds there to be an invisible bridge that allows him to walk across, retrieve the chalice, and save his father.

“We walk by faith, not by sight.”

Paul is again helping the congregation at Corinth to see that appearances aren’t everything. Or, to say it another way, that we who follow Jesus Christ look at life and circumstances differently. Yet, we who are following Jesus 2,000 years later have an additional challenge: when we hear the word “faith,” we tend to think of it as something we possess. Faith is stuff that we believe. We believe in God the Father, we believe that Jesus is God’s Son, we believe in the Holy Spirit. But that’s only one part of faith and frankly, it’s not the most important part. There’s the heart part. The heart part of faith is relational. It means a relationship of trust, knowing that God is with us. It means being faithful and loyal, based on God’s faithfulness. It means seeing life differently.[1]

Several years ago, in my first call as a pastor, I took a group of high school students from a small rural town to a servant camp in NE Ohio. We did servant work in Youngstown and team building at the camp. One of the exercises involved having a person fall backward off an elevated platform into the arms of the rest of the crew, who were lined up in a double row with their arms outstretched and locked together underneath. When it came to my turn, with my eyes closed I was to count up to 10, during which time the students were to scatter into the woods. Then, I was to count slowly backwards and, when I hit zero, fall backwards, trusting that the students were reassembled and ready to catch me. I had to trust them, that they would be faithful to the promise they made to catch me. It was not just my head that helped me trust, but my heart as well.

Ultimately, any hope we have to walk by faith and not by sight depends not on us, how much we believe or how much trust we have, but in the faithfulness and trustworthiness of God. Because God has shown himself to be trustworthy in his relationship with us, we are able to trust God. When our oldest daughter, Angela, was very young she fell off a cushiony chair and hit her head on the sharp corner of the coffee table, opening up a large gash just above her eye. We rushed her down to the local clinic to be treated. They needed wrap her in a sheet in to keep her still so they could give her a shot into the wound and then stitch her up. It was my job to convince her that the doctor and nurse were there to help her, even though it looked otherwise. I told she needed to hold still and I held her, too. She trusted me, because I was her father. When we were finished, after telling her how well she did, I asked her to thank the doctor, which she did. The doctor melted into a puddle on the floor.

We walk by faith, not by sight.

In a few minutes, we will come forward and gather around the Communion rail to be fed. We come to the table by faith, for faith, trusting in the presence of Jesus’ body and blood. Because of God’s faithfulness we will be strengthened in our lives of faith, not only individually but also as God’s gathered community, a people called to see God working in our world. The cross is not only a sign of hope, as we discovered last week; it is our assurance of God’s presence and working in, with, and through even the most dire circumstances of our lives.

We walk by faith, not by sight.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[1] For a fuller discussion on the different facets of faith, see Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004) 25-41.

"Come and Be Fed ... With Hope" Sermon Pentecost 2B

“Come and Be Fed … with Hope”

June 10, 2012

Pentecost 2B

2 Corinthians 4.13-5.1           

 “So, we do not lose heart,” the apostle Paul writes to the congregation at Corinth. Corinth was the capital city of the Roman province of Achaia, which was the southernmost part on what we now call Greece. It was a large, prospering urban center with an ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse population. The congregation was largely gentile and mirrored that of the city. There were some people of prominence, but mostly were probably working class, both slave and free. The Corinthians had a special place in Paul’s heart because he founded the church, but had something of a love-exasperation relationship with them. Paul spoke to many issues in his letters, mostly correcting misconceptions about what it means to be a follower of Jesus, including what it means to be an apostle, one sent by God to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ.

The Corinthians looked at Paul’s apostleship and his experiences as such and started to distrust his message. Why? Because Paul wasn’t “successful” like some the other so-called super apostles of the day. He wasn’t tall, good-looking, and a great orator like the others, the Joel Osteens of the day. Paul refused to leach off of the Corinthians, insisting on paying his own way. Furthermore, Paul was regularly beaten, whipped, and thrown in jail. In their eyes, Paul wasn’t representing the faith very well. Fortunately, Paul is fluent in both Greek philosophy and Jewish thought and is able to translate the ideas surrounding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in ways that they can understand.

Prior to our reading today, Paul tells the Corinthians that the punishment he has endured was not only for their sake, to spread the grace and good news of God. It also showed the life of Jesus Christ. In other words, we as Christians look at life differently than those who don’t see through the eyes of faith. We value those things that we cannot see more than those things that we can see. Put another way, we who follow Christ focus on different values, which in turn affects how we live. “So we don’t lose heart,” Paul says, because God is working in way that we trust but cannot see.

Although he doesn’t use the word, Paul says that we have hope. It is a hope born from the assurance that the same God who resurrected Jesus is the same God who is working in, with, and through our lives and us. Henry David Thoreau said that the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Yet, we who are Christians see the world differently, not being overwhelmed by all the things that can go wrong. Why? Because we have hope. As Thomas Fuller says, “If it were not for hopes, hearts would break.” Samuel Johnson, testifying indirectly to hope’s power, observed that an acquaintance’s hasty remarriage after the death of his first wife, not a good one, was the “triumph of hope over experience.”

Not everyone is a fan of hope and many are rather cynical about it, but there are testimonies to hope and its power all over the place. As I told the children, every seed planted is a sign of hope. In James Michener’s novel, Poland, Eastern Poles rebuilt their homes and towns countless times through the centuries after assaults from the likes the Russian Tatars and Cossacks, the German Prussians, and the Austrians, to name a few. Closer to home, when the community of Rushford in southeastern Minnesota was ravaged by floods, they quickly started to rebuild around the slogan, “Never, ever give up.” Martin Luther himself, when asked what he would do if he knew the world was going to end tomorrow replied, “Plant a tree.” In a more personal way, those of us who have past “baggage” (which is all of us) are testaments of hope and the power of God to transform our pasts in a way to make new meanings and possibilities. You, my sisters and brothers, by your presence here each week, are signs of hope.

This summer, we’re inviting you to “Come and Be Fed” in worship. To that end, we have designed two sermon series with supporting worship experiences to help you grow in Christ. Today, we are inviting you to be fed with hope so that, no matter what you have gone through, no matter what you are going through, and no matter what you will go through, you will know God’s presence. There are many signs of hope around us, but none is more powerful than the cross, God’s sign that things aren’t always what they seem and that God continually works to make new life. As you come the table of Holy Communion to be fed, may God’s grace feed you with hope, for hope. Thanks be to God! Amen.

"Our Lips Are Seared" - Holy Trinity B Sermon

“Our Lips Are Seared”

Holy Trinity B

June 3, 2012

Isaiah 6.1-8

Today is Holy Trinity Sunday, a day that throws both preachers and pew-dwellers into a panic. Pew-dwellers, understandably, fear a mind-numbing dose of systematic theology, like a dollop of castor oil, delivered regularly whether needed or not. Preachers, for their part, are always looking for a way to make theological concepts palatable, but they fear simplistic and often heretical metaphors used to describe the Trinity. Add on top of this trinitarian angst is oft-repeated—and therefore it must be true—observation that Holy Trinity Sunday is the only church festival that doesn’t honor a person or a churchly event and you have a perfect storm brewing. However, what preachers and pew-dwellers often lose sight of is that the Trinity, as both doctrine and “person,” is an attempt to make sense out of our encounters with God, both in Scripture and in our daily lives.

All three of our lessons, in one way or another, are reflections on encountering God. I want to focus on Isaiah’s close encounter of stupendous kind, with a barely perceptible nod to Romans and John. Isaiah is in the temple and all of a sudden, it seems as if the temple walls expand and fade away. Imagine the walls of this sanctuary growing and God’s presence filling the space. God is at the same time fantastically huge and distant, but close enough to touch and talk to. God is so Holy Other that the earth shakes and smoke appears, but God so present that Isaiah lives to tell about his encounter.

I’ve just finished a book by James Rubart called Rooms, described by one reviewer as part CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters and part Wm. Paul Young’s The Shack; it could also be part Frank Peretti. The main character, Micah, has mystical encounters with God and other spiritual beings designed to help him choose the world that would give him life. Now, I find descriptions of these encounters fascinating: the overwhelming sense of the otherness of God, being bathed in intense light and God’s overpowering peace and love. Even so, I also find them puzzling because I cannot recall ever having that kind of encounter with God. Even when I had my own conversion experience as young adult returning to God, there wasn’t any kind of earth shaking experience. By the way, these kinds of experiences have been around at least as long as Moses, and they are well documented in mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen.

The point is that sometimes we mistake our experience with God for who God actually is. What Isaiah reminds us is that we don’t encounter God as much as God encounters us. In that encounter that God always initiates, God is both totally unknowable and intimately known; thoroughly invisible and yet as accessible as the waters of baptism and the bread and wine of Holy Communion; and enormously distant and yet intensely present to every moment of our lives. When asked about youth ministry during my call interview I responded that it is all about relationships, which means being present with young people, building trust, and respecting them. The reason this is true, not only for youth ministry but for all ministry, is that God is a God of relationships. God, within God’s very being, is relational.

The real bottom line is not how God encounters us, but rather what happens because of the encounter. Like Isaiah, when God meets us there is a question of how we respond, because God gets us moving. All of Scripture invites us into a relationship with God and invites us to see where God meets us. In that meeting, God transforms us, moves us, and invites us into a living faith. That’s what John’s Jesus means by being born anew and it’s what Paul in Romans means about being adopted as sons and daughters of God. When that happens, like Isaiah, our lips are seared, and we set aside to join God in life giving work. Look for those places where God is expanding your lives and be ready to say, “Here am I, send me.” Amen.

“Spiritual and Religious” - Day of Pentecost Sermon

“Spiritual and Religious”

Day of Pentecost B

May 27, 2012

Acts 2.1-21

An old Chinese proverb says, “May you be cursed to live in interesting times.” We don’t have to go too far to find the curse of the interesting. Our upcoming elections give us enough material. We are also dealing with increased polarization in our society and fragmentation. It’s not much different in the church. Mainline churches, the ELCA included, are struggling. Churches are also becoming polarized and more fragmented. The fast growing category of religious affiliation is the “nones,” not to be confused with Catholic religious. “Nothing in particular” is the choice of 12% of our populations, with another 4% being agnostic or atheist. If that isn’t cursing-ly interesting enough, a large segment considers themselves “spiritual, but not religious,” with dueling YouTube videos going viral back and forth.

Here’s a video called “It’s Pentecost,” that has a different take on our situation today.

Indeed, we have a story to tell, a story that takes us outside of ourselves into God’s world. In the curse of interesting times, we often find ourselves either giving up on the church altogether or feeling we have to defend it. I don’t find either option to be helpful or life-giving. I gave up on the church once, and that didn’t work. As for the other option, we don’t need to defend the church, not because it is perfect, but because it is God, through the Holy Spirit, that brings the community of faith together. God has a mission to love and bless the world, and for that mission God gathers you, me, and others to join in that mission, to tell the story of God’s love in Christ.

Even so, what is often missing from God’s gathered communities is a lively conversation about what God is up to in their communities and where it is that God is blowing us to join in that work. The Spirit may blow wherever and whenever it wills, but it does blow with intentionality and purpose. A community without the Spirit is dead. The Spirit without community is, well, not the Spirit at all. The Spirit of Pentecost is found wherever boundaries are broken down, just as they were at that first Pentecost when people from the known world are reunited into a singular group.

The Spirit of Pentecost is present wherever people as questions about meaning and purpose, no matter how perplexing and difficult. The Spirit is present where men and women, old and young, free or not, share dreams and visions of what God’s world could be. I believe that the Spirit of Pentecost is blowing through Grace as we seek to join God’s work to walk with families of all ages in our congregation and our community. Exciting and, yes, even interesting things are happening. We are making some major additions to our Wednesday night programming: a community meal, informal worship, and faith formation for all ages.

Like those early disciples, we may not always be clear about where we are going, and we’ll probably stumble along the way, but the Holy Spirit will be guiding us every step of the way. With God’s help, we are going to be spiritual and religious, a community of faith guided by the Spirit. That’s a blessing, not a curse. Amen.

"Whence Justus?" Easter 7B Sermon

“Whence Justus?”

Easter 7B

May 20, 2012

Acts 1.15-17, 21-26

Today’s text from chapter 1 holds a special place in my heart. While using it for a Bible Study/devotion during a call process, I had an epiphany of sorts. I discovered that, since both Justus and Matthias were equally well qualified, presumably either would have fulfilled the obligations of office. It would have been differently perhaps, but equally as well. That seems to take some pressure off from having to find “the right one.” More recently, this text was a the major biblical passage that framed my doctoral thesis, which was concerned with how to increase the synod’s ability to identify and recruit missional leaders.

However, as so often happens when you work with a familiar text, you see something else you haven’t seen before. That happened this week. Jesus’ eleven disciples find themselves “betwixt and between.” Jesus has ascended into heaven and they have been told to return to Jerusalem to wait for the promised Holy Spirit. So they gather, along with others who had been following Jesus, including his mother and other women as well. While devoting themselves to prayer and the word, Peter gets up and with support from Scripture, declares they must find a replacement for Judas. A list of requirements is agreed upon, two members of the group are proposed, lots are cast, and Matthias is chosen. By the way, the casting of lots was a perfectly acceptable way of seeking God’s will in the ancient world.

What I wondered as I thought about this text is, “Whence Justus?” Where did he go? Interestingly, we never hear from Matthias again either, but what happened to Justus? Was he so disappointed he didn’t get the job that he left the fledging church to start his own? A long time ago in a synod far away, I was present at a synod assembly where a new bishop was to be elected. As often happens there were three strong candidates for the position; of course, only one was elected. What I found interesting was that the two pastors who weren’t elected we very visibly devastated about the outcome. I wondered if those that want it that badly ought not to get it.

But, back to Justus. Did Justus go away mad, or did he just go away? I can’t prove it, but I don’t think so. I think that Justus was there when the Holy Spirit came upon the gathered brothers and sisters at Pentecost. I think that, even though he wasn’t named a deacon either, that Justus used his gifts for mission. Just as importantly, I think that, even though he didn’t have a formal position or title, Justus exercised leadership wherever he was and in whatever situation leadership was called for. But most important of all, I think that Justus served God’s mission to love and bless the world. By the way, those pastors that weren’t elected bishop did the same. They went back to being the pastors God called them to be.

In my doctoral work on mission and leadership, I encountered many models for leadership. Servant leadership, modeled on Jesus’ service to his Father and the disciples, was key. “I came not to be served but to serve,” Jesus says. But I also encountered the notion of distributive leadership, which says that leaders are distributed throughout an organization at many levels, essentially leading where they are. From those, I developed an understanding of leadership as communicative leadership, servant leadership that happens in an organization wherever it is needed, whenever it is needed.

Essentially, the leader is the one who in any given situation agrees to go first, to take the initiative. This is important for us on a number of levels, but I’ll mention one: it’s all about God’s mission. God has a mission for us to meet families, in all their diversity, in new and challenging ways. We need a lot of folk here to step up and help us as we figure out how to do that. As one writer says, “we are all, potentially, the ‘twelfth apostle,’ called to join God’s work. God has a mission, to love and bless the world; for that mission, God calls us, just as God called Justus. Amen.

"A Spirited Tale" Easter 6B Sermon

“A Spirited Tale”

Easter 6B

May 13, 2012

Acts 10.44-48 (Acts 10.1-11.18)

Our first reading from Acts is only a snippet—albeit a powerful snippet—of a much larger story.

The larger tale encompasses all of chapter 10 and a good chunk of chapter 11. It’s a tale that can be divided in seven scenes, each with integrity in its own right, but connected to the larger whole. I invite you to listen as I briefly describe each scene and then to reflect on some questions that each scene poses us.

Scene 1 takes place in Caesarea, a port city on the Mediterranean north of Jerusalem, where Cornelius, a Roman centurion receives a vision from an angel of God. Cornelius, a “god-fearer,” but not a convert, is told by an angel of the Lord that his prayers have been answered and that he is to send to Joppa for a man named Peter. Cornelius does so. One question our text asks: Where is God speaking to unexpected people in our world today?

Scene 2 shifts to the next day, as the envoy approaches Joppa. Peter goes up on the roof to pray and becomes hungry. He falls into a trance where he sees a vision of the heaven opened and a sheet let down containing all sort of “unclean” animals. God tells Peter to “get up, kill, and eat.” Peter resists because he has never eaten any unclean animal, but God tells him that what he has made is not profane. This happens three times. So, one question might be: How is God pushing our understanding of clean?

While Peter is still trying to sort this out, Cornelius’ envoy arrives in Joppa and makes its way to Peter’s house. As they are calling for him, the Holy Spirit tells Peter that there are people to see him and that he must go with them without hesitation. The envoy tells Peter about Cornelius’ vision and invites Peter to come right away to Caesarea. Peter invites them in to stay with him. A question: Whom is God asking us to walk with on their journey of faith?

The next day, Peter and some of the Jewish Christians start the 30-mile trip to Caesarea. After an awkward moment where Cornelius falls down to worship Peter, Peter finds that Cornelius has gathered his household to eagerly receive him and they compare notes about their mystical experiences. Cornelius then asks Peter to tell them what the Lord commands him to say to them.

Question: Where is God providing an opportunity for us to speak a word to a people eager to hear it?

Then Peter begins to preach the good news of Jesus Christ, the passage we heard on Easter Sunday. He begins with the revelation that he now knows that God shows no partiality, and that all who fear God and do what is right are acceptable in God’s sight. Peter starts with the baptism of Jesus and continues telling about his ministry, death, and resurrection. A question might be: What resurrection experience can we testify from our own lives that others might find helpful hearing?

The next scene is our reading for today. The Holy Spirit, thinking that Peter was going on too long, “fell on” all of those who heard the word. There was no mistake that the Spirit was acting because they all spoke in tongues, which astounded the Jewish Christians. Peter asks that great rhetorical question, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these who have received the Holy Spirit as we have? One possible question the text poses: Are withholding God’s sacramental grace, whether baptism or Holy Communion, from anyone who has received the Spirit?

Peter stays with Cornelius for several days, which allows the word of what Peter has done to spread to the church at Jerusalem. Peter is called to make a defense of his actions to the leadership there. He explains everything that happened, including a recounting of the visions he and Cornelius receive. Peter ends with “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” The question: The implications of the decision to welcome Gentiles were not fully worked out by the early church. Where might God be leading us in the same way?

Under the prodding of the Holy Spirit, the early community of faith is pushed into new territory. This is confusing and sometimes even chaotic for them, but it is also life giving and exciting as well. The question that ties all of the other questions together is, “Where is God through the Holy Spirit working in, with, and through us, pushing us into new places?” The good news is that God promises to guide us and show us the way. The Holy Spirit is bringing new life to Grace Lutheran Church. Can you see it moving? Amen.