Blessed are...

I had the pleasure of leading worship this morning for our synod's candidacy committee (the group of people who shepherd candidates for ordination through that long, involved process). I wanted to share with you the experience.

I knew going in that one member of the committee was due to have a baby any moment (she wasn't there for obvious reasons!); the bishop is having cancer surgery tomorrow; the committee had just had to make a difficult decision about one of the candidates; people had driven in from as far away as 4 or 5 hours... There was much going on. I chose to explore the Beatitudes, which is the text assigned for this Sunday, All Saints Sunday. I got inspired with an idea in a Bible study on the text earlier this week. Here is what I came up with:

(The video below was what I played as the prelude to worship, but the recording I used was from my own years in Gustavus Wind Orchestra, in 2002.)

I played oboe in my college band, and every year we went on tour. It had long been a tradition that each tour concert finished with an unscheduled performance of the old hymn, Nearer, My God, to Thee. Many years before, when the band had been in Slovakia on tour, the piece had been scheduled on the program. At the completion of the program, the host of that concert asked the band to play the hymn again. “It would mean so much to us,” he said. “Here in Slovakia, we sing this hymn at every funeral.” So the band played an unanticipated encore, and it soon became a tradition. At the completion of every tour concert thereafter, the band members close their folders and play this beautiful hymn from memory.

Fast forward now 20 years to the year I spent in Slovakia as a Young Adult in Global Mission. I had been settling in and feeling a strong sense of God’s purpose for me in that time and place, when I got the devastating news, Oct 22, that the mother of one of my dearest childhood friends had been brutally murdered by my friend’s father. My world and my faith were torn apart. I couldn’t imagine a world in which this was somehow a part of God’s purpose, and if it was, I wasn’t interested in that God. I struggled and searched and mourned and cried… and come All Saints Day a week and a half later, I was at least ready to remember and give thanks for my friend’s mom at the All Saints Day service. Following worship, we all processed to the cemetery, on a gorgeous fall day surrounded by bright, fall foliage. People around me scrubbed clean the gravestones of their loved ones, crying and praying. And we gathered all together and said some names and some prayers… and then all lifted our voices in singing, “Nearer My God to Thee.” Or rather, those around me sang, and I wept.  In that moment, memories good and bad flooded my mind, and God was nearer to me. I experienced God in a new way as my heart began to heal.

Each year as I read the texts appointed for All Saints Day, which is this coming Sunday, I remember how I felt in that cemetery, and try to imagine how others might be experiencing this day on which we remember the saints who have walked alongside us in our lives. In particular this year, I have found I struggle with Jesus’ famous words that we hear from Matthew: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” The comforted bit I can get on board with. But this blessing business – not only for those who mourn, but for those in all sorts of different situations in life that many of us would not call blessed – can be pretty hard for any heart to take, let alone a wounded one. Even as healing began for me in that Slovak cemetery that fall day, I would not say I felt particularly blessed, or lucky, or happy, or congratulated, or any number of ways you could translate that word. The blessing would not be revealed until much, much later – and even now there are days I am not entirely convinced of it.

And yet, this is Jesus’ promise to us in this opening to the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed.” Blessed are you – when you cannot see through your tears. Blessed are you – when you are being unfairly judged. Blessed are you – when you feel entirely empty. Blessed are you – when your marriage is falling apart. Blessed are you – when you hear the dreaded diagnosis. Blessed are you – when you life has taken an unexpected turn. Blessed are you.

Not all of Jesus’ beatitudes are bad, of course – seeking peace, pursuing righteousness, being merciful and pure of heart, these are good things, and things to strive for! But what they all have in common is that they are all exhausting, and require a sort of self-emptying, which is never easy or fun.

It says something about how we are to receive blessing, I suppose, because the thing about being empty is that it is required in order to then be filled. And so it is when we are emptied – by our own efforts or, more commonly, by a circumstance that is out of our control – it is in emptiness that we are ready to be filled up by God’s love. Hard as it may be to see at the time, in that indeed is blessing.

What if these beatitudes were written for you, based on your life? What has emptied you in life, or what currently makes you feel empty, such that you are ready to be filled by the blessing of God, and what might that blessing look like? Blessed are the cancer patients, for they will discover deeper wisdom. Blessed are the divorced, for they will be equipped to comfort others on their journey. Blessed are the confused, for they are ready to learn.

For our time of reflection and prayer today, I invite you to write some beatitudes of your own, either from your own experience or from those of people in your life, people you are praying for. It can be something in history, something from which you have already seen blessings come - or it can be something current, in which you are still seeking and hoping for blessing. During the prayers, I will invite you to read aloud your beatitudes, if you’re comfortable, or to pray about it silently in the midst of this community, trusting that all prayers, silent and spoken, are being held in this community. Let us take this time now to reflect on how God has or can fill up our emptiness with blessing.

I then played this song:

And we all wrote some Beatitudes. During the prayers, I started us and then invited people to read what they had written. I wasn't sure how it would play out, but I tell you: IT WAS BEAUTIFUL. I was so moved by what people offered, it was all I could do not to stand up there and cry. Each one offered so much hope, so much faith. I was inspired by these leaders of the church, and their ability to voice their hope in Christ in such a profound way. I closed us with this prayer, an adaptation of a scripted prayer for the Lutheran Morning Prayer liturgy:

Almighty and everlasting God, you have brought us in safety to this new day, blessing us in our emptiness, comforting us in our pain, promising us what we may not yet have seen, but for which we still hope. Preserve us with your mighty power, that we may not fall into sin nor be overcome in adversity. In all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

I love my job.

(I'm not preaching this week as I will be in Houston baptizing my niece! But I'm definitely going to store this idea away for a future sermon on the Beatitudes.)

Sermon: We are free indeed! (Reformation Sunday, 2014)

Reformation Sunday

October 26, 2014

John 8:31-36

            I am reading a book right now called Sensible Shoes. It’s about four very different women

who all find themselves together at a spiritual retreat center. One of the women, Charissa, is a young, beautiful grad student pursuing a PhD. She is driven, a perfectionist, and she has never had a teacher who didn’t love her. She is at the retreat center at a professor’s suggestion, to enhance one of her classes, but she is appalled to discover at the first day of the retreat that there is no syllabus, no objectives, no intended outcome to the retreat. How is she supposed to measure her success? How will the instructor know how well she is doing? From day one, she is frustrated by the experience.

            She brings her discouragement to her professor. She asks him what she is supposed to be learning from this unfocused “spiritual journey” thing he’d recommended. He tells her plainly that her desire to learn has become an idol for her. He says, “If your desire to learn is keeping you from encountering Christ, then the right place to begin is with confession and repentance. You begin by acknowledging the truth about yourself: you’re a sinner who needs grace.”

            Tough words for a perfectionist – and indeed it sends poor Charissa reeling. All she has ever tried to be in her life is Good. She is a model Christian, a good student, she is focused and responsible and always follows the rules. How dare her professor call her a sinner? She has done everything right! How could God not be pleased with that?

            I admit I think there is a little bit of Charissa in me – perhaps in all of us. It is that part of us that holds to the belief that if we just do things right, and are good enough, then God will love us, keep us safe, welome us to heaven. Although this makes logical sense, it will always lead to disappointment, to a sense of failure. For those who usually do achieve what they set out to achieve, the danger is that they really start to believe that their good deeds can save them, that the power lies in their own hands, that they can do this by themselves. On the other hand, for those who have seen in their lives too many failures and shortcomings, the danger becomes a belief that they are beyond saving, that they are so bad that nothing could ever make it better, indeed that they are unlovable, even by God. It’s a slippery slope, either way you slide.

            And either way, I think this belief that salvation is dependent on what we accomplish or not becomes for us a sort of captivity, or enslavement. Either you become enslaved to a need to always perform well and follow the rules and do the right thing, or you become enslaved to the despair of never doing anything right, to the hopelessness of not being enough.

            We talked a lot about enslavement in our Bible study this week on today’s gospel lesson. Jesus tells the Jewish leaders, “If you continue in my word… you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” The leaders quickly respond, “Free? But we have never been slaves to anyone!” Well, first of all, that is rubbish – the Jewish people had been slaves many times over: in Egypt, under the Assyrians, and the Persians, and at the time of this conversation, under the Romans. But regardless of their particular history, their kneejerk response opens up a conversation for us today. In our Bible study, we thought together about the various things by which people might be enslaved. The list was impressive: addiction, a job, perfectionism, broken relationships (both marriage and

otherwise), a need to stay busy, depression or other mental illness, financial constraints, ignorance, fear, disease or physical limitations, a general sense of apathy… I’m sure you could add your own things that keep you feeling trapped or enslaved. Even though we live in America, the “land of the free,” there is still so much that enslaves us.

            And then of course there is Jesus’ contribution to the list: anyone who sins is a slave to sin. That’s not unlike those words we say during our confession each week: “We are captive/in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.” We are! We can’t help it! No matter how hard we try, we always fall short of doing everything right, even if it is just because we have made “doing everything right” into an all-consuming idol.

            This week in confirmation class, we were learning about the liturgy, the form of the worship service, and about why we do each of the different parts. When we were talking about confession, someone asked, “What if we don’t remember everything we need to confess? Will it not get forgiven?” This, in fact, was the fear that young Martin Luther had. As the story goes, he would

spend as long as six hours in the confessional with the priest, confessing every little thing he had done wrong in his life, and was tormented by the possibility that he might have forgotten something; he would leave the confessional, only to turn right back around and go back in, having just remembered something else. It was so bad that the priest dreaded when young Martin came to confession, because he knew this would take a while! But then one day in his personal study, Brother Martin read these words from Romans that we heard a moment ago: “There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Suddenly he realized: he was never going to escape from sinning, but that was okay because first of all, that was simply a part of being human (all have sinned and fall short). But more importantly, his works would never save nor condemn him anyway - that was what grace was about. Upon discovering this, Luther wrote, “I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through the open doors into paradise!”

This was the realization that led to the Reformation, which we celebrate today, nearly 500 years later: that we are saved by grace and not by works, that nothing we do can be enough to save us,

but that the work of Jesus Christ is big enough and gracious enough to save us all – indeed enough to free us all from whatever enslaves us.

            That is also what we celebrate in baptism. The opening words of the baptismal liturgy say, “In baptism our gracious heavenly Father frees us from sin and death…” That doesn’t mean that suddenly after baptism we will no longer sin. What it does mean is that because of our baptism, we are no longer enslaved by the fear that we are not enough, the fear that we could do something to make God stop loving us, the fear that we could sin so much or so badly that we would endanger the fact that God has claimed us and named us “beloved children.” Our baptism frees us from the burden of believing that we somehow have the power to make God either love us or leave us. We don’t have that power – only One does, and that is the One who claims us in baptism, who feeds us with Himself, who forgives us our sins, known and unknown. And because that power is in God’s hands, not ours, we are left with freedom: to love, to live, to dare, to struggle, to dream, to risk, even to fail – and most of all, the freedom to hope in the one who gives himself for us, in whom we are free indeed.

            Let us pray… God of grace, left to our own devices, we will always fall short of the glory of God. And so all the more we give you thanks for your grace, for your unrelenting love, for your power to free us from all fear so that we might live lives not of despair, but which are full of hope in Christ. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon: Whose image is on you, and whose likeness? (Oct. 19, 2014)

Pentecost 19A/Lectionary 29

October 19, 2014

Matthew 22:15-22

            Last week I was in New York City at a banquet celebrating the 100^th anniversary of an organization called the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, or ALPB. Over the years, the ALPB has

The stewardship tract

done various work, but in their earliest years, one of their projects was to develop tracts and resources for Lutheran churches. One stewardship tract from circa the 1960s, had the eye-catching title, “I was an embezzler… and didn’t realize it!” It goes on to tell the story of how this man realized he had been stealing “company” money (God’s money) all his life by keeping it for himself, but how he then came to be generous, and hence a true partner in God’s work, no longer an embezzler.

            Well, it certainly has shock value! Not sure that is the particular language I would use now in talking about stewardship, but I suppose it gets the point across. And come to think of it, this approach isn’t unlike our Gospel lesson this morning, which causes us to reflect on what and whose money we keep, and what we give back, and why.

Jesus is approached by the Herodians and the disciples of the Pharisees. They have set up a trap for him, you see. Here’s a little background to help you understand the significance of this: First of all, these two groups, the Pharisees and the Herodians, are not friends. The Herodians were followers of Herod, collaborators with the oppressive Roman government. And the Pharisees were the very religious Jewish leaders, who were being oppressed by said government. The only thing they could agree on was that Jesus was trouble, and so they devise this trap for him, first flattering him and his teachings, and then asking him if it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. It’s a good trap: if he says no, they shouldn’t pay taxes, then the Herodians will brand him an embezzler, of sorts, and a revolutionary, and get him for breaking the law and rising up against the Roman government. On the other hand, if he says yes to paying taxes, he will be a traitor to the Jewish people who are being oppressed by this very tax. Either way, Jesus is toast.

            Except, Jesus is too clever for their trap. First he calls them out, tells them he knows what they are trying to do. Then he tells them to take out a coin – and in doing so, he spins the situation against the accusers. “Whose face is on it?” he asks. It is Caesar’s – and in admitting that, the Pharisees are caught red-handed. Merely by having the coin in their possession, they have broken the first commandment to have no other gods, and pledged allegiance to something and someone other

than God. In the context, this “gotcha” moment would have been clear to all involved.

            Still, Jesus goes on to explain. Caesar’s face is on there, he says, so it’s his. “Give back to the emperor what is the emperor’s,” he says. His response is so contemporary – though of course we no longer have an emperor, our minds substitute for that our own government and tax system, in which the law requires we give money to the government, to our own “Caesar.” We need not get into a conversation about tax policy here and now – I think it is clear enough that the mere reality of putting a significant portion of our income toward taxes, and our agreement or disagreement about how that money is used, strikes enough of a nerve to get the point across.

            In fact, the issue of paying taxes hits so close to home, that sometimes we miss the real climax of this passage, which comes in Jesus’ next words: “and [give back] to God what is God’s.” Though controversial, the concept of giving back to Caesar is fairly clear-cut, but this statement about God leaves room for question. What is God’s that we should give it back?

            The clue is actually back in the first part of Jesus’ statement, as he explains what should go back to Caesar and why. The currency used to pay the emperor his tax is a coin, specifically a coin with the emperor’s head engraved on it. So when Jesus has them pull out one of the coins and asks, “Whose image is on this coin, and whose likeness?” it is very obvious to whom that coin belongs, to whom it should be returned.

So, if a coin is the currency by which we give back to the emperor, what is the currency by which we give back to God? If we are to follow the same logic, it is that which bears the image and likeness of God. What could that be?

 “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness. … So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God, he created them.” It’s right there in the book of

Hand of God, Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo

Genesis: We are the currency, you see, by which we give back to God. We are – our hearts, our minds, our strength, our souls, all that is in us, all that God first gave to us – we are the means by which we give to God. From our very creation we have borne the image of God in our very being. In our baptism we were marked again with this image when a cross was traced on our foreheads with the words, “You have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” God is our being. Christ is engraved upon us. When we give to God, we give all of us – our selves, our time, and our possessions.

            Often when we think of stewardship we think only of money, but that is only one way that we give back to God. So this year for our stewardship focus, we hope to help you see how you might give your whole image-of-God self back to God as Jesus commands. By now you should have received a pledge sheet in the mail, which outlines five areas by which you can give back to God what is God’s through Bethlehem/St. Martin Lutheran Church: 1) Worship, which is the central activity that we as the church do, and our designated opportunity to offer thanks and praise to God for all that God has given us; 2) Growing in faith, which includes taking advantage of the various offerings of this church to help you think deeply about your faith and your relationship with God, so that it may grow; 3) Participating in mission, which is God’s charge to us, to love and serve our neighbors; 4) Showing gratefulness to God through financial giving, which is a concrete, physical way for us not only to support the mission and ministry of this church, but also a way to live out our total dependence on and gratitude to God for all things; and 5) Tell others about faith, which is but one important way to share the good news of Christ and the joy that it brings us.

On the pledge sheet you received, there are several ways listed that you can participate in each of these areas. These are all ways that we can “give back to God what is God’s” – in terms of our selves, our time, and our possessions. I hope that you will think about ways in each area that you can give, and thoughtfully and prayerfully fill out your sheet, and after you return it, to remember and hold yourself accountable to fulfill this promise you are making. (Maybe make a copy and put it on your fridge, or by your bed, so you see it every day and remember the promise you have made to God.)

As surely as Caesar’s image is stamped and engraved on a denarius, the image of God has been stamped upon you, upon your heart, upon your life. May we take seriously Jesus’ command to give to God what is God’s, understanding that it is with our whole selves that we respond in grateful thanks and praise for all that God has given to us.

Let us pray… Lord of all, you have created us in your image and marked us with the cross of Christ. Help us to live out this image in the church and in the world, guiding each of our decisions and actions toward your praise. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.