Sermon: Trusting God in heart and pocketbook (Nov 19, 2017)

Pentecost 24A

November 19, 2017

Matthew 25:14-30

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

            Today’s parable, the Parable of the Talents, is in many ways a preacher’s dream. It is so rich, and there are so many angles to take. The biggest challenge, really, is not finding something to say, but rather, which thing to say! Pardon the pun, but it is an embarrassment of riches!

            Perhaps it is a parable about God’s providence. At the beginning, the Master gives the servants five, two, and one talent respectively. A talent is a currency equal to about 15-20 years of labor – no small amount! If we think of God as the Master, then we can read this to mean that our God is one who entrusts to us exorbitant riches, charging us to use what God provides for good and for gain. That seems a reasonable interpretation.

            Or, perhaps it is a parable about what we understand as “talents” – our particular gifts and skills – and being good stewards of these talents. This is a common reading of this text because it makes a lot of sense: God gives us many gifts, and good, faithful people use those gifts to serve the world. Those who are willing to share their gifts with the world, especially for the purpose of serving God and neighbor, will find great return for their efforts. On the other hand, those who “bury” their gifts and never share them will be diminished, perhaps in the form of losing that skill they once had. Moral of the story: use it or lose it, and if you use it, God will be praised and pleased.

            Or thinking more broadly, perhaps the talent currency in this parable is actually a metaphor for faith and love. If we exercise our faith by reading our Bibles, praying, going to church, and serving our neighbor, and if we spread God’s love throughout the world, telling others about God’s saving grace, then faith and love will increase. If we don’t tend to it, it will diminish, and eventually, we will lose it. It’s like that song my mom taught her kindergarteners: “Love is something if you give it away – you end up having more!” That’s a very nice interpretation. After all, who could argue with the idea that love and faith are something to be shared?

            All three of these, though, get a little close for comfort to works righteousness – the idea that in the final judgment we will be judged based on what we do or don’t do with what God has given us. And Lutherans don’t believe that our actions determine our salvation – we believe God’s actions determine our salvation. God is a God of grace, and while I do think God cares about whether I get out there and live out my faith, or sit on my bum and do nothing, I don’t think that this, finally, will be what determines whether I am sent to heaven or to the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

            So what if this isn’t a parable about retribution (do this, don’t do that, and you will receive your reward accordingly)? What if it is a parable about trust in God, and about expectations?

            What makes me go there is the third servant’s explanation to the Master about why he buried the talent. He says, “I knew you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” Traditionally Christians have read this parable allegorically, in which the Master is God… but this does not describe the God that I know! The God I know is gracious and merciful, full of compassion, and abounding in steadfast love – not harsh and greedy and overbearing. But you see, the third servant expected the Master to be harsh, greedy, and overbearing… and so that is what he was.

            Have you ever experienced that? Like, you expect someone to be one way (liberal, conservative, smart, not smart, etc.), and so everything they say and do you fit into that mold and it becomes proof for your expectation? Or even with a situation – you expect a conflict to be awful and painful, and that is exactly what it is… or, you see conflict as an opportunity to grow, and that is what it becomes. Our expectations about a person or a situation are very powerful, and can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

            The problem is, this allows expectations to become a barrier to growth, a barrier to connection, and a barrier to relationship. And they can definitely become a barrier to trust. That is the real issue with this third servant. He does not trust. He assumes the Master is a certain way, and so he does not trust. Instead, he fears. “I was afraid,” he says.

            Now, fear is a great motivator. It can even motivate us to do acts the on the surface seem faithful – like go to church, or pray, or tithe. But is this truly faith, if you are acting out of fear? In my experience, fear seldom (or never!) motivates us to act in true faith. Only trust can do that – trust in a God who will take care of us, and bring us into God’s abounding joy.

            It’s quite telling that Jesus chooses a tale about money to make this point. I think he does so because he knows that money has the power to negatively affect our trust in God. That’s why he talks about money more than anything else in the Bible, apart from the kingdom of God itself. Money has a strong grip on us. Its wiles so often disguise themselves as honest and admirable – how good we are at justifying spending our money on selfish needs – and yet if you’re anything like me, my justifications and explanations mostly serve to mask the fact that I’m not certain my management of my money is entirely faithful.

            In our November newsletter, I wrote an essay about my personal stewardship journey. I wrote about what a cheerful giver I was when I was first starting out. But then I got a mortgage, and my student loan deferment ended, and medical bills accumulated, and we had a couple babies and the daycare costs that go with them… and suddenly I was justifying hanging onto a little more of the money God had entrusted to me to offset those costs. And then the wily ways of money made their move – the more I hung onto, the more I felt I needed to hang onto, and the more apt I became at justifying my tight grip. And not coincidentally, the less joyful I felt about returning to God what has always been rightfully God’s.

            “I knew you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground,” said the servant to the Master… and just now I said, and I hope you agreed, “But that’s not the God I believe in!” And yet, how quickly we slip into exactly that – believing that if we loosen our grip on our material gains, our God will no longer take care of us. How quickly we slip into not trusting the God who gave us our very lives. How quickly we slip into expecting that God will work the way that the world works.

            The third servant did not trust. That is why he saw the Master as harsh, over-bearing, and greedy. A trusting servant sees the Master as gracious and merciful, full of compassion and abounding in steadfast love. A trusting servant knows that God will provide. A trusting servant is able, then, to joyfully give their talents – in both senses of the word – toward God’s work in the world, because that servant knows that a God who would give his only son so that we would not perish but have eternal life, would also provide for us our every need.

            Let us pray… Gracious God, we know you to be a loving and merciful God, a God we can trust with all our heart. Help us, then, to trust, and to give our whole selves to you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon: Blessed like the saints (Nov. 5, 2017)

All Saints Day A (and the Rite of Confirmation)

November 5, 2017

Matthew 5:1-13

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

            The Beatitudes, our Gospel lesson today, is one of those texts in the Bible that is so well known, that I usually approach it thinking, “Oh, I know just what to say about this one,” and yet every time, I find I am surprised by something new. It always speaks to me differently depending on what is going on in my world at the time.

            Maybe I am in the midst of a conflict with friends, and so that line, “blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” is what speaks to me. Maybe I am watching on the news as people protest and cry for justice for some group or another, and I think, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled!” Maybe I have just met with a parishioner who is in the hospital, yet demonstrating such deep faith in the midst of struggle, that my prayer becomes, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Or maybe, like several here today, I am mourning a loss of a loved one, and am comforted by those words, “Blessed are those who mourn.” Yes, there seems to be something in there for everyone!

            Yet even as one can find comforting words here for various situations, I’m not always sure how to read the text as a whole. Our first inclination might be to read it as sort of, instructions for a life of faith. Especially today, on All Saints Day, as we not only remember those who have died in the faith, and those who have served as models for us, but also recognize that all of us were promised sainthood in our baptism (yes, we are ALL saints!), it becomes tempting to see this text as something to aspire to. Like, this is what the life of a saint looks like: to hunger for righteousness, to speak boldly on Christ’s account even in the face of persecution, to be peace-seekers.

However, we can’t really say, “Be like these people Jesus is saying are blessed!” and call it a day. The cases I just mentioned make sense, but it doesn’t make much sense to say, “Hey, you should find more opportunity to mourn!” or, “Do something to get yourself persecuted now and then, would ya?” So seeing these as “rules for a life of faith” isn’t entirely helpful.

The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs
by Fra Angelico (accessed on WikiMedia Commons)

So if they aren’t instructions, then perhaps they are meant to be read more as words of comfort. That’s why they are assigned for this All Saints Day, a day when we remember the dead, when we may count ourselves among “those who mourn.” Though we don’t likely find ourselves in all of these categories at once, we likely find ourselves in some of them sometimes. Like I was saying at the beginning of this sermon: we all grieve at some point; we all pursue righteousness; we all desire peace. Some of us have probably felt at some point like living a life of faith made us feel, if not outright persecuted, at least like we were trying to live a way that is counter-cultural, a way others in the world might not understand. And in those times, it is gratifying to read these words from Jesus saying, “I know you are struggling right now. My promise to you is that this will not last forever. You will get what you need! You will be blessed!” This is a very helpful way to read the Beatitudes, especially in a world with so much pain and fear.

But I’d like to suggest a third way to read this beloved text. Because you see, Jesus doesn’t say to those struggling, “They will be blessed.” He says they already are. So, what if we read the Beatitudes not as words speaking to us wherever we are, assuring us that our circumstances will change sometime in the future but doesn’t imply any current or eventual change in us, but rather, as a way to shift the way we see the world right now and going forward?

Let me explain. If I were to ask you, “When do you feel blessed?” I doubt you would say, “When I’m lacking, or grieving, or experiencing injustice, or being persecuted,” right? We feel blessed when things go well, not when we are suffering! No one says, “You should have heard this guy today who was screaming all kinds of evil threats against me. Ah, I felt so blessed!” No! And yet, Jesus says that there, in those places, is blessing. How can that be?

You see, in saying this, Jesus is turning upside down everything we thought we knew about suffering. But that’s sort of Jesus’ M.O., isn’t it? Jesus is always turning everything on its head. We see it right away, when the King of Kings is born to peasants in a smelly stable. We see it when he is raised in Nowheresville Nazareth. We see it when he surrounds himself with lowlifes and sinners. And we see it most profoundly on the cross. Nothing about Jesus is how we would expect God to be.

And so maybe, just maybe, God is using these unlikely blessings to show us that God continually moves and acts where we least expect it. Not in the glorious places we’d think to look for God – in success and wealth and notoriety, in places we normally associate with blessing – but rather, in the broken, in the aching, in the grieving. It goes back to the theology of the cross we talked about a couple weeks ago – that God has shown us that God’s love is made most profoundly known to us on the cross, and so we can be sure that in our own suffering, God will be there with us, too, kneeling beside us in our despair. And because God is there, with those who suffer, those who suffer are indeed blessed.

It can be hard to believe, can’t it? I know when I have been in my lowest places, it can feel not like God is with me, but the opposite – that God has abandoned me. Well even then, we’re in good company – that’s how Jesus felt on the cross when he cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” And yet, we know that God was there on the cross, and we know that God then descended into hell to be present even there, and then that God broke the bonds of death and, bringing all of the saints with him, entered into new life, a life where we “will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike [us], nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be [our] shepherd, and he will guide [us] to the springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.”

So what does all this mean for a life of faith? It doesn’t mean that we should make ourselves suffer so that God will come to us. It does mean that if we want to see God, we must go to where we know God is: in suffering.

Today [at St. Martin] in a moment, we will witness a young woman affirm her baptismal faith in the rite of confirmation. One of the things I asked Lydia to do in preparation for this day, was fill out a little bio. One of the questions was, “What do you want to do someday?” I imagined this as a sort of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question, but I like Lydia’s answer better. She said that she’d like to go to a children’s hospital and hang out with the kids all day, adding that this would be great. You see, Lydia is already living into the saintly life she inherited in baptism – she knows, in her heart if not in her mind, that in these children, she would see God. Or perhaps, they would experience God’s love in her. Because God is with us, in many and various and sometimes unexpected forms, when we suffer.

            As we celebrate Lydia’s confirmation, we give thanks for the ways she has and will continue to live into her saintly nature, even as we give thanks for the ways God calls us to do the same – by hearing the good and comforting words of Christ when we are the ones who are suffering, and by witnessing God by being present in others’ suffering. You know, some Bible scholars believe that a better way to translate that word, “blessed,” is actually, “Congratulations!” Because being so close to God is a celebration. You have experienced God’s mercy – congratulations! You have seen God’s work among the poor – congratulations! You have fought for justice in Christ’s name – congratulations! You have experienced a true life of faith – not one in which God promises you will never face hardship, but rather, that when you do, God will be deeply and profoundly present with you in it. Blessed are you! To Lydia, and to all your saints out there – Congratulations!

            Let us pray… Blessed Jesus, we know that you know and understand the pain we feel, because you have felt it, too. Bless us with many opportunities to see your love at work in the world, by emboldening us to be with the suffering in their pain, just as you are with us in ours.  In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

We have another toddler!

November 4, 2017

Dear Sweet Isaac,

Well, it only took you 10 ½ months, kid… you are walking! And delighted to be doing so, I will add. True to your character, you went through all the prerequisite steps before taking the actual steps – roll over, sit up, army crawl, all-fours crawl, pull to standing, cruise on furniture, stand on own…. And then those first, wobbly, tentative steps, that result in a fall into the arms of someone joyfully receiving you. And with each success along the way, Isaac – you celebrate! You grin and laugh and move your arms about. And you stand up to try again, now feeling a little more secure.

Train ride and pumpkins.
Isaac wanted all the pumpkins.

Now that you have had a couple weeks to practice, you’re getting much more consistent, and much braver in your efforts. You take a few steps, wobble back and forth, focusing your attention on not falling, smiling when you realize you have succeeded at this, then take another step. When you fall, you look up at someone nearby, smile slightly, and work on standing back up.

Honestly, watching you learn to walk has been so dear. Like your learning to come down stairs, this has offered such a beautiful glimpse into your developing personality: your care and attention, your caution, your consideration of a situation, your wanting to do it the right way, your determination, and your joy in celebrating your success. I can’t wait to see how these wonderful traits serve you in your future endeavors.

Meanwhile, you are living it up as a biped. Sometimes you toddle into the kitchen like a drunken sailor, stand and watch me for a while, smile, and then turn around and go back in the living room, carefully stepping over the bottom of the baby gate. You are getting stronger at keeping up with Grace, which makes you very happy. The two of you like to wrestle and roll around on

Halloween!

the ground now. Grace likes to hug you, which you’ll put up with for a while and then push her away. You are more and more adept at climbing the stairs, and will dutifully follow me up, then turn right back around and follow me down as I run around the house doing chores. The up and down doesn’t seem to bother you; you’re just glad to be able to participate in it!

Even as your mobility improves, so does your language. Several times you have said things that sounds like the appropriate word for the situation: “More,” “ow,” “mama,” etc. You have discovered a grumbly part of your voice, which you enjoy, and you also like to shout various syllables, like you are making an important statement everyone needs to hear, then you smile, pleased with yourself. You have also gotten into music lately, trying to dance, or play instruments, or drum on things. Of course I’m pleased about this! You and Grace and I just had our first jam session a couple weeks ago – I played ukulele, Grace and I sang, you laughed, and you and Grace alternated playing drum and maraca. It was pretty great. I hope it is the first of many!

In two days you turn 11 months – amazing! My little boy is so big! What a joyful almost-year it has been with you, my incredible son. I’m grateful for every single day that I get to live with your smile and laughter.

                                                                                                Love you,

                                                                                                Mama

Sermon: Reformation500, Free Indeed! (Oct. 29, 2017)

Reformation Sunday (Ref. Series: Doctrine of Justification)

October 29, 2017

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 46; Galatians 2:16-21; John 8:31-36

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

            Five hundred years. I know this will reveal what a church nerd I have always been, but I’ve had this day on my radar since I was a kid. I remember thinking how old I would be when the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation came about! Turns out, fun fact, that Luther was exactly my current age when he posted his 95 theses on the church door.

Well now that it’s here… I don’t really know what to say. On the one hand, there is something to celebrate. Because 500 years ago, a young monk (and he was young!) said to the Church, “Hey listen, you’ve distorted the heart of Christian faith. You’ve got people believing they can buy their forgiveness, when really, that comes free from God!” What followed was a reformation of the Church as it was, resulting, hopefully, in a greater emphasis on God’s grace.

But that also brings up the dark underbelly of the Reformation, which is that this event spilt apart the Church. And that is nothing to celebrate. Division wasn’t Luther’s desire, nor was it Jesus’. Jesus prayed that we would all be one – and the Church now, 2000 years after Jesus’ death and 500 years after Luther’s bold act, looks nothing like one, united Church. Christians differ from each other even on the most basic tenets of faith, and that difference has led to bloodshed. In fact, Luther’s words did much to cause some of the pain the Church has experienced for the past half millennium. He also said awful things about Jews. Nazis used his words to justify their actions. He wasn’t always kind to other Christians, either. Lutherans today have worked hard to heal some of the very divisions and pains caused by our namesake.

And so, 500 years later, I find myself as prone to lament and even repent, as I am to celebrate. But I think that’s okay. After all, the first of those 95 theses states, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” I can lament and repent that my denominational heritage hurt people along the way. I can lament and repent that there is division in the church. I can lament and repent for what I have or haven’t done to heal that division. Lament and repentance are an important part of the life of faith.

Because of the complexity of this historical event in the Church’s life, the word we are supposed to be using is “commemorate.” A recognition, but not a celebration. That said, I do also want to recognize that there is something to celebrate today. And that is the realization and the articulation, by Luther and his colleagues, of the life-changing, spirit-filled, liberating theology known as the doctrine of justification: that we are saved by grace and not by works.

That’s a lot of fancy church words, so let’s break this down into more accessible words, drawing some inspiration from our Gospel reading today. Jesus is talking to a bunch of Jews, saying that the truth will set them free. “Free?” they respond. “But we don’t need to be freed. We’re not slaves. We were never slaves.” You might be inclined to feel the same about yourself. We’re American, after all, living in the land of the free. I don’t even have slavery in my family history. I know nothing of slavery. But if you know something about Jewish history, you’ll remember: they were very much slaves! Remember that whole bit in Egypt? How Moses had to ask the Pharaoh a bunch of times to let God’s people go? How Moses finally led the Israelites, God’s people, out of Egypt in dramatic fashion, through the Red Sea? Uh yeah, it’s sort of a big part of their history that they were slaves!

And while it may not be quite so obvious in our own histories, we were and are still very much slaves, too. We are enslaved to the love of money and all it can do for us, to building and maintaining our reputations, to our work, to our schedules – always trying to justify ourselves by saying our diligent attention to these things will increase the level of happiness for ourselves and our families… But in the end, it is just a never-ending race of trying to keep up, trying to succeed, trying to prove to ourselves, our neighbors, and to God, that we are enough.

And that’s really the driving motivation in all of our enslavements, isn’t it? We want to be enough: good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, faithful enough. And we try to prove to ourselves and the world that we have achieved “enough” by ensuring our kids have all the best opportunities, and we make a good salary, and contribute something worthwhile, and maybe that we have whatever the hot item is. We are slaves to the relentless desire to be enough.

But we are not doomed to spend our whole lives in this enslavement – we can be free. “The truth will set you free,” Jesus says. “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Did you hear that good news? It is the Son, Jesus, who makes us free. Not the right number on the bathroom scale, not the higher salary, not your kid earning straight As, not getting that award, not even doing good deeds. Those things aren’t bad in and of themselves – really, they are good! – but while they may make us feel good in the moment, they will not set us free from that core fear of not being enough. Only the Son can do that. Only Jesus’ work on our behalf can do that. Only the promise we receive in baptism – that we are beloved children of God, whose sins and failures are always forgiven by a merciful God – can free us.

I like how Lutheran pastor Emily Scott put it. She says, “I am only interested in a conversation about the Reformation insofar as it is centered on the liberation of God’s people. The life-giving theology Luther and his colleagues articulated has rescued me from a life depending only on myself.” To me, this really is life-giving

news! How much pressure we put on ourselves, believing that we can pull ourselves out of our own darkness! I am pretty smart and capable, and often I am able to fix my own problems, but the most pressing ones, and especially the rat race of trying to prove to myself and the world that I am enough, never seems to have an end, at least not as long as I’m in it alone. I always seem to resort to comparing my own success or failure with someone else’s, and it turns out, there is never any joy in comparison. It always results in my feeling like I could be more or better, like I’m not enough. But the good news of the Reformation is that there is an end to that race, and that end is Jesus Christ. Through Christ, God says, “You are already enough.” It doesn’t depend on you or your goodness. It depends on God and God’s goodness.

That is the end of the rat race – but it is the beginning of a life of faith. Pastor Scott goes on: “If we are to remember the Reformation, let it stir us to see the suffering of God’s people in our midst,” and reach out to them with love. This, you see, is also the heritage of the Reformation. Once we hear that good news that we are free from sin, free from the temptation to compare ourselves to others, free from the constant effort to prove ourselves to everyone, we also realize that we are freed for a purpose. We are freed for serving others. We are freed for speaking up on behalf of those held captive by oppressive power structures. We are freed for giving our time, talents, and treasures to those who lack what they need. We are, in short, freed for loving our neighbors and seeking their well-being as fervently as we love and seek our own.

For Luther, you see, and the theology he described, neighbor-love was an implied response to the good news that we are saved by grace and not by works. When we hear that good news, he says, when we really hear it with our whole being, we are compelled to love and serve our neighbor in whatever way is possible – not because it’s a nice thing to do, or to get a gold star in our crown, or so others will look to us and say, “Wow, they are great!” or even to get into heaven or to be saved. We serve others because it is what springs out of the good news that we are loved and forgiven and embraced by God, who loves us and says we are enough just the way we are. We don’t serve others to be loved and saved. We serve others because we already are loved and saved. This truth, sisters and brothers, will set you free.

On this 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, you may, like me, feel a mix of emotions. Sadness that the Church is still working toward unity, but gratitude for the work that has already been done. Lament for the ways people of faith have been nasty to one another, often using our own Martin Luther’s words as fuel, and hope in seeing that many are working hard to mend the brokenness. Despair that this world still has so much pain and fear, but immense joy that Christ continually promises to be with us in the pain, and bring us toward new life. There is room in our faith for all those feelings. As we commemorate the Reformation, may we let it be a reformation of our hearts, knowing that lament leads to repentance, and repentance leads to hope, and hope leads to joy in the promise of a new life of freedom.

Let us pray… Reforming God, by your Son you have freed us from the shackles of sin and doubt and promised us that we are beloved, and we are enough. Continue to reform our hearts, that we would see the needs of our neighbor, and reach out to them with your love and grace. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen