October 29, Salvation by Grace Through Faith

“Salvation by grace through faith,” was the rally cry for the Protestant Reformation.  The problem is, what does it mean?  I doubt that you use it often, or even any of the words.  How often do words like grace, faith, and salvation come up in conversations outside church?  Pretty rarely I’m guessing.  If the idea really has become obsolete then we might just as well let it gather dust in the pages of history books from 500 years ago. 

But the idea has not become obsolete.  And in fact it remains every bit as relevant today as it did then.  If we turn back the clock 500 years we’ll find dynamics very similar to what we experience today, only today they are a lot more subtle.

            500 years ago in Europe most every person was a Christian, they considered themselves to be sinful and that they would fall under God’s wrath.  They knew that when they died they were going to get it for every sin and misdeed they committed while they were alive.  Many people saw God as a harsh and demanding taskmaster.  They worked hard hoping that their good deeds would outweigh their bad deeds.

Through a series of practices the church helped people to ease their consciences.  Priests would hear confessions and offer suggestions to make up for the misdeeds.  Sometimes a misdeed could easily be made up for.  If you stole a loaf of bread from a baker’s cart and you confessed it to the priest, the priest would tell you that to make up for the sin you had to go back to the baker, apologize and pay for the bread.   But some sins weren’t so easy to make up for.  Let’s say you neglected the steps to your house and they became rotten.  Then your neighbor visited, the steps collapsed and he broke his leg.  How are you going to make up for that?  You can’t really go out and break your leg to be in solidarity with your neighbor!  So the priest would suggest a substitute action.  That substitute action was called an indulgence.  It all started out innocently enough, but by the late Middle Ages indulgences had become a commodity that were bought and sold.  Hard working poor people, afraid for the safety of their souls, worked even harder to make up for their sins.  Some sacrificed food, medicine and other necessities in order to have money to buy indulgencies; telling themselves they were making a sacrifice in this limited lifetime in order to buy an eternity of happiness.

            In all fairness I must say that this practice was not abused in most places, but in some, especially Germany, greedy church and political leaders discovered that selling indulgences for money was a cash cow.  It is this excess that inspired people like Martin Luther to risk their lives to stop it.  Their central cry became, “Salvation by grace through faith.”

            So how does any of that relate to today?  Indeed people no longer sacrifice their health and wellbeing to buy tickets to reduce the punishment for their sins from churches.  But I like the phrase from John Calvin, another of the great reformers, “The human heart is a factory for idols.”  Let me paraphrase Calvin here:  The human mind is stuffed with presumption that it understands the world around it.  It then imagines a god to suit what it sees.  The mind labors in dullness, sinks in its own ignorance, and vainly creates an empty phantom in the place of God.  To this another evil is added.  The god whom the person created inwardly is embodied outwardly.  The mind, in this way, conceives the idol, and the hand gives it birth.

            Or maybe to use more modern language: We think we understand the world, and thus we think we understand God.  We then try to live up to what we think we understand.  Calvin said the heart was a factory for idols.  Everyone has a god.  I don’t care if you’re the staunchest atheist in the world, you still have a god.  Every person looks around at the world, does the best he or she can to make sense of it, and then tries to live within the sense that he or she has made.  The thing or the place you look to for contentment, for safety, for approval, and for wholeness is your god.

            All too often people think of God as some ethereal force subtly at work at the edges of the universe.  Or perhaps they think of God as a mere concept leftover from the ignorant past that should be done away with if humanity is to ever get ahead.  But that is the wrong conception of God.  Again, where you look for approval, safety and contentment is your god.

            The dynamics of American life today have a lot of parallels to what Luther found in the 16^th Century.  Today most people do not fear God, but they do have one.  I call it the god of being a good person.  And people will drive themselves to exhaustion in service to it.

            What does being a good person look like?  Well, you have to work hard.  You want to be as educated as you can be to contribute at your highest potential.  Very little laziness is allowed in good people.  A good person is: a responsible employee, and a good spouse, and a good parent, and a good neighbor, and if you have elderly parents, a good son or daughter.  A good person pays bills on time, has a good credit score, and lives on a balanced budget.  A good person has a well-maintained and reasonably clean and tidy home.  A good person gets to his or her kids sporting events and other school activities.  A good person eats healthily, and is environmentally conscious.  A good person donates to charities and does service projects.  After all, don’t we force our kids to do service projects so they can grow up to be good people?  The list can go on and on.  To sum it up: in order to be a good person you have to do it, do it all, do it all well, make it look effortless, and look good while doing it.

            The god of being a good person will consume everything you are.  It’ll leave you run down and exhausted.  The god of being a good person does not forgive, for you feel guilty at every failure.  You feel responsible for every mistake your child makes.  You feel that other people around you who also worship the god of being a good person shame you if you run into financial difficulties or have a nervous breakdown, or your child gets into trouble with the law or any number of things.  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others put it in front of your face every day the things that other good people are doing.  Why aren’t you just as good?

            As a pastor I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, “I know it’s important but I just don’t have time to do things for the church.”  But I know the feeling, for I am no better.  I try to be a good spouse and a good father and a good son to my mother and a good neighbor, and environmentally conscious, and help out with the Boy Scouts, and on and on it goes.  As for finding time to give to the church… well I can be thankful I’m on the payroll of the church; otherwise I too would have no time to spare for it!

            500 years have passed but nothing has changed.  People still worship an all-demanding, unforgiving god.  Perhaps the church isn’t involved this time and wracked with corruption to boot, but the religion of being a good person is brutal.  And in the religion of being a good person what is the path to salvation?  I hear it all the time when I do the funeral of a person who wasn’t active in a church:  “She didn’t belong to a church but she was a good person.  I’m sure God loves her.”  Ha!  That sounds to me like the religion of being a good person has a salvation plan – works righteousness.  You earn your way to heaven by being a… no surprise, good person.  If you weren’t a good person?  Well, we just don’t talk about that.

            We are in just as desperate need for the message of salvation by grace through faith today as people were 500 years ago!

            Salvation by grace through faith first acknowledges there is a God, the real God; not some god imagined up by our own limited knowledge.  God is God.  We talked about this a bit last week.  God’s ways are beyond our ways.  God’s knowledge is beyond our knowledge.  We do well to remember that.

            Secondly, salvation by grace through faith acknowledges the ultimate nature of God.  God is not a demanding taskmaster making us take on the impossible task of earning our way to salvation.  God is gracious.

            What does grace really mean?  It’s not a prayer you say before a meal or a woman’s name.  It isn’t even the 15 days your insurance company gives you after your bill is due.  Grace means unmerited favor.  It means you get something you don’t deserve.

            God’s grace to us does many things; too many to list here lest we be here all day and our German lunch will get cold.  I want to conclude with just one thing God’s grace does: it saves us from destroying ourselves.

            God loves you.  God holds you safe and secure even when you don’t feel it, even when your faith feels weak; and even when you don’t believe in God, God still holds you.  God favors you even if you don’t deserve it.  And God does the work to save you.  You aren’t strong enough to do it no matter how hard you try.  So may the reformation message of salvation by grace through faith resonate solidly in your heart, and let you live in true freedom so that you can enjoy being a human (imagine that!), and find delight in what God has done.

October 15, 2-17 Forgiveness

I often wonder what goes through people’s minds during the silent pause we have during the confession of sins at the beginning of the service.  Do people look back over the week and start making a mental list of everything they’ve done wrong; and then feel bad about it?  Maybe people look back over the week and think, “I’ve been a pretty good person overall.  I haven’t really sinned.”  Or do people’s minds go blank?  Do they think, “Make this pause short and let’s get on with this.”  Maybe they think, “I hope that pot roast I left in the oven is doing okay.”  Whatever happens in your mind, when we think about God forgiving sins I fear that we come up short on what that fully entails.

            People often think of sin as if there were a list of dos and don’ts.  Do the right things and you haven’t sinned.  Fail to do, or not do, the right things and you’ve sinned.  Then you need to be forgiven; either by God or by someone else.  While there are indeed things you should and shouldn’t do, sin is not confined to such a mechanical understanding of things, and neither is forgiveness.

            In order to get a fuller understanding of sin let’s go all the way back to the first sinners, Adam and Eve.  If you were here the Sunday several months ago when we talked about Adam and Eve you may remember that their story is actually one of two creation stories in the Old Testament.  The first creation account is in Genesis 1.  This is the famous one.  What often gets left out is Genesis 2, which is a completely different account that contradicts Genesis 1 in any number of ways.  It’s the creation account in Genesis 2 and following that involved Adam and Eve.  You may remember me saying that while the accounts contradict each other they are deliberately placed there side by side.  The creator of Genesis knew we needed both.  Neither is exactly scientific, but both speak of reality.

            In the Genesis 1 account God speaks and things immediately happen.  God is enormously big and powerful.  You almost get the idea that God is far away - at the edges of the universe - and his voice bellows things into reality.  But the Adam and Eve account is entirely different.  There God does not speak reality into existence.  God forms it.  Listen to Genesis 2:7, “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”  Do you hear how close and intimate God is here?  God is not far away.  God is close.  The text goes on to say that God planted the Garden of Eden.  Then just like Adam God forms the animals.  And God makes Eve.  Adam and Eve are carefully created and crafted by God.  God gives them the garden and all three of them: Adam, Eve, and God are in the garden together.  That part that often gets left out when we imagine this story.  We think of God making the garden and then leaving Adam and Eve to be on their own.  No, all three are together.

            While Adam and Eve’s sin, their transgression, is technically disobeying God and eating the forbidden fruit, it is rooted in something deeper.  Adam and Eve decide they are not content with the way God made them.  They are not content with their community with God.  They want something more.  They believe that God somehow left them incomplete, or that God left them lacking in some way.  The temptation from the serpent is then to seek their own fulfillment apart from God, a self-improvement project.  They decide to go it alone.  Said differently, they seek to define themselves apart from God.

            They succeed at it.  Their close community with God is broken.  They sin and only God can make it right again.  They can never come back to the innocence of knowing only God.

            The same thing is the root of our sin.  Here we are living a very finite and rather short lifespan.  We have been promised eternity, but we act like this life is ultimate and God’s promises of heaven is an afterthought.

            Is your life driven by the realization that you are a child of God, that God created you good and whole and complete, and that God wants to be in a relationship with you?  I’ll answer that for you.  No, it’s not.  Your life is driven by anxieties, and uncertainties.  It’s driven by getting approval from others; and giving and withholding your approval to others.  Maybe we aren’t nasty, greedy sinful people, but our focus is here on this life and its pleasures and problems.  We seek to live this life by getting fulfillment from the world around us rather than God.  Our lives are identical to those of Adam and Eve.

            All too many prayers are prayed by people wanting God to fulfill them on their terms rather than being fulfilled on God’s terms.  That’s a sure fire way to not have a prayer answered!

            To put it bluntly, it’s as if we’ve turned to God and said, “Thanks for making me, but I’m good on my own now.  I don’t need you anymore.  I’ve got a good handle on this life thing.”  Yes indeed we are foolish enough to think that we can make ourselves, we can enhance ourselves, we can improve ourselves better than God can.

            How often have you failed as a child of God because of peer pressure?  In college there were people we called “Jesus freaks.”  You certainly didn’t want to be one of them!  They were oddballs, social weirdos.  Most of us are terrified by evangelism because we don’t want people to dislike us.  What?!?  God, who makes us, dies to save us, and promises us eternal life is too embarrassing to share?  Are we too ashamed to admit to others we need God for salvation?  Yes, we are.  Before others we are all too often ashamed of our only hope.

            Maybe there’s a person at work or at school or a neighbor who is always talking about Jesus.  They annoy you and you cringe every time they talk about faith.  You don’t want to be associated with them too closely.  No, you aren’t ashamed of your faith.  You aren’t afraid someone will find out that you belong to a church, but you consider yourself a well-balanced person.  Faith has its place – at home or in church.  And work has its place.  While you may use your faith principles at work you don’t say things like, “My faith in God is driving me to do this.”  Or, “I can’t stand before God on judgment day and defend myself if I agree to this.”

            Do you see our sin?  It is nothing to do with virtuous or naughty behavior.  Do you see much we are like Adam and Eve, not content with our God and thinking we need some enhancement on our own terms?

            Here’s the ultimate truth.  We all need God.  And the God whose work we aren’t content with in this lifetime is also the God we will be spending eternity with!

            What should God do?  Justice would say to stamp out the entire lot of us because we are such sinful failures right to our core!  But God is forgiving.  Even as we continually step away from God, God’s forgiveness keeps bringing us back.  It is as if in forgiveness God says to us, “I know you don’t trust me.  You didn’t trust me yesterday.  You don’t trust me today.  And I know you won’t trust me tomorrow.  But you are my creation.  And even though you aren’t content with my workmanship in you, and think you can do better on your own, I still choose you and the miserable mess you’ve made of yourself.  We’re going to be together for eternity, and I’ll take you messed up and broken rather than not at all.”

            This is the root of forgiveness from God.  It is this constant turning away from God that God forgives in us.  This is the root of forgiveness that Jesus gets at when he says you should forgive someone else not seven times but seventy times seven. 

            I love these words from Martin Luther in his devotional writing An Exposition on the Lord’s Prayer.  I’m picking up in the middle of a paragraph here:

“See how wretched this life is, being devoid of food and comfort and nourishment for the soul, as the preceding petition demonstrates.  Furthermore, it is a sinful estate in which we would deservedly be damned if this petition [‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’] did not uphold us by God’s pure mercy and compassion.  Thus the Lord’s Prayer makes us see this life as being so full of sin and shame that we become weary and tired of it.  And now, you yelping cur, judge yourself, speak about yourself, see what you are, search your own heart, and you will soon forget the faults of your neighbor.  You will have both hands full with your own faults, yes, more than full! (LW 42:71)

            And I’ll let Luther also get the final word with these famous words from a letter that he wrote to his colleague Philip Melanchthon. 

“If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin.  God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners.  Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death and the world.  As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin.  This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness, but as Peter says, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.  It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.  No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day.  Do you think the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small?  Pray boldly – you too are a mighty sinner.  (LW 48:281-282)

October 1, 2017 The Church & Christian Life 1 Cor. 12:12-27

You’ve probably heard the old quip that the church is a lot like Noah’s Ark, it stinks but it’s still the best thing afloat.  That’s actually a very healthy way to look at the church.  If you expect a church to be perfect you’ll be sorely disappointed.  If you expect church people to somehow behave better than other people you’ll again be disappointed.

In the Augsburg Confession, the theological constitution of the Lutheran movement, Article 7 describes the church as, “The assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel.”  Then Article 8 immediately follows saying that in this life the church also includes many false Christians, hypocrites and open sinners.  I won’t speak for other church denominations, but Lutherans have always noted that the church is not a perfect place.

The church has always been a place where people have agreed and disagreed.  It is composed of people who like each other and who do not like each other.  The church is united by one common bond – people who know they need God’s grace; and remember, grace means unmerited favor.

Over the door to this sanctuary is a sign that reads, “Sinners only.  This is a Space of Grace.”  It’s a playful saying on one hand.  I’ve heard members of Weight Watchers joke about it when they come in for their weekly meetings.  On the other hand it is deadly serious.  If you recognize that you are a sinful being who is broken and needs to receive unmerited favor from God, then you are welcome here.  Hopefully you will find God’s grace here.  Witnessing to that is certainly my job.  However, if a person comes in here thinking, “I’m a basically good person.  Okay, maybe I’m not perfect, who is after all?  But I do good things and I know that God loves me because of that.” well, there isn’t much here for such a person.  I certainly don’t have anything to offer.  A person who believes that he or she does good things and therefore is certain that God loves him or her because of that is not a Christian at all.  That person is a secular humanist, for that is the core belief of secular humanism.  In my opinion that is also the core belief of our society today.

It is the recognition of the common need of unmerited favor from God that unites us.  That is the strong bond of the church.

In 2009 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, of which we are a part, adopted a statement on human sexuality.  The statement was immensely controversial and caused some churches to leave the ELCA.  There was press coverage about the whole thing telling the stance the church had adopted and the changes it was making.  But that coverage completely missed the point.  The truth doesn’t make for a compelling news story so the truth was left out.  What the document really said is that there are a number of issues about human sexuality about which we cannot reach an agreement.  We are all reading the same scriptures.  We are all worshipping the same God.  But we are coming to very different conclusions.  Yet we have decided that even though there is no hope of us ever agreeing on these things, we are not going to let these differences divide us.  Our common bond of needing God’s grace is greater than any other human issue that can ever arise.  Therefore we will respect each other and the faith-filled conclusions others have reached.   Again, that truth does not make for great headlines, but that is the truth of how the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America operates.  It’s a messy place.  It’s a broken and imperfect church, but I think that is a truly faithful understanding of what it means to be the church.

Church is also not a place we go on Sunday mornings or a tradition that you do every week when you come here and daydream while I preach.  Church is everywhere and at all times.

Martin Luther had an idea he called the priesthood of all believers.  It is not that he saw that every person should become a priest and lead worship and preach sermons.  (Although I’d gladly let you preach and then I could sit back and daydream for a while.)  The priesthood of all believers is that God calls all people to meaningful work in his kingdom in everything they do in daily life.  Martin Luther is often quoted as saying that if you make shoes, then make shoes to the Lord.  But it is more than just what you do for a living.  It is everything from being a neighbor to rearing children to being a contributing part of the community.

The idea of the protestant work ethic is rooted in this sort of thinking.  The idea is that if you can work and contribute to society then you should.  It doesn’t matter if you just received a multi-million dollar inheritance and never have to work another day in your life.  If you can work and contribute then you need to work and contribute.  All people are called to make a meaningful contribution to God’s kingdom.

The priesthood of all believers means that when you are at work you make sure the things you do are in keeping with the principles of faith in Christ.  If you are the stereotypical sleazy used car salesman then you need to stop being sleazy and start making honest deals.

The priesthood of all believers does not mean that you overtly evangelize everywhere you go, but that you do show the life of Christ in your life.

My mind goes back several months to Judy Sax’s funeral.  As I put thoughts together for a sermon for her funeral I was struck by the way elementary school teachers have a big impact on the lives of their students.  They teach their students far more than reading and history and math.  The real teaching is something much deeper, and hard to quantify.  In any number of households these days the elementary school teacher spends more time with a child during that school year than that child spends with his or her parents.  (Assuming you don’t count the time that the kid is asleep!)  The deep lessons the teacher is teaching are things like: how to be a human, how to be an adult, how to handle adversity, how to discipline and maintain order, and how to handle success.  Kids learn and absorb lessons every moment of every day.

Judy Sax would never have been allowed to preach the gospel from the front of her classroom.  But I think she did strongly witness to what it meant to be a Christian.  She was embodying the priesthood of all believers.

Whether you are a pastor or a teacher or a factory worker or a secretary or a janitor or retired or a student or whatever, you are a priest in God’s church.  You have important work to do.

Church council is planning to redo the time and talent sheets, which are long overdue for updating.  I’m sure we’ll ask all the usual things, but this is one thing I want to add.  I want to add a question of what do you do for a living, or if you are retired, what did you do for a living.  We will collect all those things – all those ways in which we contribute to God’s kingdom.  Then during the Prayer of the Church, where we have different petitions about different things, each week we’ll have a petition about a particular job or occupation.  We need to pray about what we do, for God is there too.  And we need to pray for each other’s careers and vocations.  We are all joined by our need for God’s grace, whether we agree with one another or not and whether we even like each other or not.  And with that common joining we all have a part in God’s kingdom.