November 26, 2017 Christ the King Sunday Matthew 25:31-46

            Some time ago a person who is not a member of our church asked me what my thoughts were on apocatastasis.  Now, maybe you use that word on a daily basis, and if you do, good for you… I guess.  But I replied that the first thing I have to do is to look up what apocatastasis means!

Now I could have pulled out my phone and looked it up, but I was hesitant.  In matters of theological terms I don’t trust Google.  I like to turn to stodgy old textbooks and dictionaries.  Google is too often wrong, and also other books are often wrong. 

This may seem like an aside, but it will be relevant in a couple minutes, with all our Reformation celebrations in the last few months I saw a posting in the Sunday School wing about the five solas in Lutheran thinking, and they were linked to the Luther’s Rose symbol.  Five solas?  No.  There are only three: sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura.  Grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone.  But online people will tell you there are five.  They add Christ alone, and sola deo gloria, which means, “To God alone be the glory.”  And not just online.  I’ve seen a children’s book that lists five also. 

You have to be able to go to the raw sources if you want to be right.  Even Wikipedia notes that the extra two solas are not supportable.

Anyhow, so I turn my Handbook of Theological Terms to apocatastasis and read this, “a Greek word referring to the final and complete salvation of all beings.  It suggests universal redemption or universalism.”  The idea developed in Christianity in the second century by church leaders who could not believe that if God was loving he wouldn’t condemn anyone to eternal punishment.  In other words, everyone goes to heaven regardless.  This is a key teaching in the Unitarian Universalist Church.

The idea of apocatastasis is both supported by scripture and rejected by scripture.  In support we have passages like Ephesians 1:9-10, “With all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

            But of course there are other passages like our gospel reading today.  Some go to heaven.  Some go to eternal punishment.  The Matthew scene is a frightening one.  But what is perhaps the most disconcerting about it is that it contradicts the idea of the three solas: grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone.  From the Matthew text it looks like not only is it all about doing the right works to earn God’s pleasure, things like grace and faith have no part!  If all we had was Jesus’ words in Matthew we’d have to teach that salvation come exclusively by helping the poor and needy.  That is a mess too!

            After doing a bit of research I got back to this person saying I don’t know.  (How’s that for a professional answer!?!)  And truthfully we don’t know.  It is God’s business, not our own.  In regards to salvation this is what we teach.  We know we are loved by God and we live in confidence in that love.  That confidence drives and shapes our lives.  As for those who from our perspective appear to be outside of God’s love, or who reject God’s love, we just can’t speak.  As St. Paul wrote, “It is God who justifies.  Who is to condemn?”

            So how should we understand Jesus’ teaching in our gospel?  Commentator Eugene Boring says that we should not force our gospel writer Matthew to be more consistent than he is.  We spent the first half of this year reading through Matthew’s gospel and you may remember that it is full of contradictions.  In fact, teaching in contradictions is a technique often used in ancient Hebrew thought.  That doesn’t do much for you if you want a concrete answer, but some things don’t have concrete answers.

            If someone asks you, do you believe in universal salvation; or do you believe God eternally punishes some people for their wrongdoing on earth? they’re actually asking an entrapping question.  They’ve gotten the whole idea of life and salvation wrong.

            My kids used to like playing Mario Kart with a neighbor boy.  And if you’re familiar with that game there are twelve competitors in each race.  The fastest six characters seem happy and cheer when the race is over.  The slowest six seem sad and moan and groan.  The neighbor boy used to call it the, “happy cut.”  If you at least made the top six you should be happy.

            Questions like heaven and hell and who goes where make an artificial distinction.  They’re asking who made the happy cut.  And being the humans we are, we’re going to try to leverage it.

            I remember guys in college asking, “What’s the least I can do yet still get a passing grade?”  That’s missing the point of the course!  The point of the course is not about passing.  The point of the course is to learn and to be effective.  Passing or failing just shows whether you understand the material or not.

            Life is not about doing the minimal amount necessary to get to heaven.  Life is about knowing you are loved by God, and then you live out that love.

            In the weakness of our faith I think we all ask ourselves the heaven or hell question.  But a deepening and maturing faith stops asking the question, because it isn’t a real distinction at all.  Simply trust God and live in that trust.  God will work out the rest.  Live in trust and all the judgment stuff that Jesus talked about in our gospel reading will automatically be taken care of.  The faithful ones even answer Jesus that they didn’t know that what they were doing was actually serving him.

            Thanksgiving was last Thursday and I asked myself what I am thankful for.  I can list a lot of things, but central to the things I am thankful for are things like my ability to work, my ability to learn, and my ability to grow.  I realize that the things I value the most in life are not things that have come cheap or been free.  They are things I have worked and worked hard to have.  Somehow in working for something you invest a part of yourself in it.  Because of that you appreciate it more.  If I were to win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes I don’t know what I’d do with the money.  Many people would be thrilled to be able to buy just about anything they wanted for the rest of their lives.  I don’t think I’d be so happy.  I’d have lost appreciation for all that I get.  It wouldn’t cost anything.

            I think our ability to work and to earn and to grow are actually examples of God’s grace.  God doesn’t make life easy for us.  That would deny us appreciation, and it would make our lives meaningless.

            If God miraculously solved all the world’s problems simply because we prayed about them then this would be a pretty pointless life.  Instead we have meaningful work to do.  It costs us.  It hurts us sometimes.  We do things right and we do things wrong.  We don’t see that work as getting us to heaven and keeping us from hell.  That work is shaping our identity and making us stronger and deeper.

            May you do for others not for the purpose of buying God’s favor so you make the happy cut after you die.  May you do for others because you realize God has empowered you to do for others, and like God, you do not overlook the broken parts of the world around you.

November 12, 2017 Joseph's Coat Genesis 37

It seems like everyone has seen the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  The only thing is, what does the Bible say about that amazing coat?  Was it actually colorful?  No, the distinguishing characteristic of it was long sleeves, not colors!

            The idea that the coat was colorful came about because of a mistranslation from Greek.  And that mistranslation happened 500 years ago and it can be traced to the source, one man – Martin Luther.  When Luther was translating the Old Testament into German he found it difficult to know how to translate what Joseph’s coat was like.  What was distinguishing about it was that it had long sleeves.  So what?!?  Luther’s writing to Germans.  Winters are cold.  Everyone’s coat has long sleeves!  But what people don’t have is colorful clothing.  Only rich and powerful people have colorful coats.  A colorful coat was a sign of leadership and power.  The long sleeved coat that Joseph was actually given was a sign of power in his day.  It was a sign of authority in the family and leadership.

            Do you remember the parable of the Prodigal Son?  What does the father do when the prodigal returns?  He commands the servants to bring out a robe, the best one, and put it on him, and put a ring on his finger.  The robe would have been a long sleeved robe and the ring was the signet ring used to seal official documents.  All of this conveyed authority in the family.  That is why the faithful brother is so jealous.

            It is this priority and leadership Luther wanted to convey in his translation.  And a father giving his son a long sleeved coat just wasn’t going to cut it in Germany.  Somehow though Joseph’s colorful coat has caught people’s imaginations for centuries.

We’ve stepped away from Genesis for several weeks so let’s remind ourselves of the family dynamics that have led to Joseph getting a special coat from Jacob, his father.  You’ll remember that Jacob is far from a perfect man, but in later life he starts to show some courage.  He was tricked into marrying his first wife, Leah.  His really loved his second wife, Rachel.  But Leah could have children and Rachel couldn’t; at least not at first.  In competition and jealousy Leah and Rachel throw their maids into the mix, and by the time we get to our story today Rachel has died giving birth to Benjamin, the youngest of all the children; and Jacob’s had a total of twelve sons and one daughter to four different women.  The true firstborn is Reuben.  He is the first son of Jacob’s first wife, Leah.  Joseph is the firstborn of Jacob’s favorite wife, Rachel.  You’ll note that both Joseph and Reuben had a part in today’s story.

The Bible’s story is far more complex than the musical it inspired.  But we should not be surprised that the ten brothers older than Joseph are jealous of his position.  Is he daddy’s favorite only because of his mother, or is he truly of superior moral character than the rest?  As the story goes on we’ll discover that he is truly better, but that all the other brothers aren’t the same.  Even in today’s story we learn that Reuben doesn’t want to kill Joseph, but he doesn’t want to stand up to his brothers either.  It is interesting because you’d expect Reuben to be the most jealous.  He is, after all, the true firstborn.  He should be getting the special coat.  In the end Reuben though comes off being spineless.  He participates in the deceit of destroying the coat and smearing it with goat blood.

The brother Judah also stands out for being scheming and seeing a way to make a profit for selling Joseph, rather than killing him.

No family is perfect.  I’d say this one is as messed up as it can get, except we meet the Herod family in the New Testament and they’re even worse!

Anyway, what to make of all this…

What stands out the most to me is something that I find still existing strong in human nature.  People can be very tolerant of an opposing viewpoint or something they disagree with, but only until it starts to hurt their bottom line.  The other brothers certainly did not like Joseph.  They could tell he was daddy’s favorite but they didn’t do anything about it.  However, when Joseph receives the coat which proves his superior status then it is time to take action.

Last week I brought this up to the confirmation class.  I used the example of Martin Luther and the 95 Theses.  Don’t for a minute think that one day Luther got mad at what he was seeing in the church and suddenly decided to post his complaints and immediately the church went wild.  No, Luther had been preaching against the sale of indulgences for years.  And in September of 1517 he released what he called Disputations Against Scholastic Theology.  These 97 theses were far more challenging to the church than the famous 95 Theses he posted on October 31^st of 1517.  But no one responded to Disputations Against Scholastic Theology, and it has largely been forgotten. 

Why did the 95 Theses stick, while a more shocking document earlier didn’t?  Because Disputations Against Scholastic Theology didn’t hurt anybody’s wallet!  The 95 Theses only got Luther into trouble because Albert of Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Mainz, was in desperate need of cash.  The 95 Theses ruined his fundraising campaign.  Otherwise the 95 Theses would have been ignored as yet another silly theological rant by an over-zealous monk stuck in his own righteousness.

I told the confirmation class that they should always stand up for what is right.  But that they will probably be ignored until standing up for what is right starts to impact someone’s wallet or their power or their public image.  Then watch out!

It happens every day.  We know what is right and what is wrong.  We like to think we’ll choose what is right, but that gets hard when it starts to cost us.  Sexual harassment has been in the news a lot lately.  I certainly hope you’re not guilty of it, but when you see it happening do you do anything about it?  Maybe, maybe not.  I have a feeling that for most people they will consider the cost to themselves or their careers when they decide whether to do anything about it.  If there’s no cost, then standing up against it isn’t hard.  But if you know it’ll cost you your job or an advancement then you think twice.

Racism is another big issue.  The entire membership of this congregation is categorized as either white or Asian/Pacific Islander.  We don’t experience racial discrimination as a group.  It’s an issue for us, but not one that really hurts us.  My colleague Imani O’Lear, the black pastor at Reformation Lutheran Church is only one of two black pastors in our conference.  She leads excellent presentations and workshops about racial issues.  I’ve thought about bringing her here to do one.  But how many people would actually come?  I’m sure you’d appreciate what she does and you’d be impressed if I had her do something during worship time.  But of course she’s a pastor and she has her own church on Sunday mornings.  If I scheduled something some other time would you feel a pressing need to make time for it in your schedule?  Maybe, maybe not.  The point is, you can afford to ignore it.  If violent racial riots erupted in Ontario County and several of your homes were vandalized and people were killed you’d have a different approach.

There is so much brokenness in the world.  We pray “thy kingdom come” but it is so easy to not do anything about it. 

Now there’s nothing wrong with living in a nice and safe community.  And there is wisdom to knowing when to fight and when not to fight.  But it is very easy to cross the line into doing nothing about an injustice because it doesn’t impact you, or if doing something will hurt you.

Remember, we are children of God.  That is our first and our last identity and it is our identity every day of our lives.  Let us not be selfish weaklings who go through life seeing only to ourselves and avoiding all conflicts except those that directly impact us.  Let us use being children of God with boldness and confidence, knowing that God is by our side.  Next week we’ll again look at Joseph, then we’ll see he’s become a powerful man who could seek revenge against his brothers.  We’ll see that his brothers have not changed.  Not surprisingly though, Joseph will stay true to what is godly and right, even though it brings him no benefit.

November 5, 2017 All Saints Sunday 1 Corinthians 15:35-44

                I love this line from Mark Twain, “I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it.”  Hmm, you can take that any number of ways. 

                On All Saints Sunday we remember those who have died and gone on before us, and we also consider our own mortality.  I recently saw a bumper sticker that read, “I plan to live forever.  So far so good.”  But of course that only works for a while. 

                The way we consider our mortality and death changes as we go through life.  Little children take a very simplistic view, like dying is just a long nap.  Adolescents tend to think they will live forever.  They act and drive like it too.  Young adults become a bit more introspective but they see it as something that is still too far off to worry about.  Middle age people consider their mortality more, but they still see death as being decades off.  In senior citizens I see a variety of responses.  Some deny it.  Some see death as looming ever closer.  Some, like Harry Braunlich, say they refuse to buy more than one or two bananas at a time lest they not live long enough to eat them.  I know senior citizens who would go to the post office and only buy enough stamps to mail what they had to mail that day, lest they die and the stamps go to waste.  I roll my eyes thinking that someone is sure to use the stamps.  And who really cares whether they get used or not!

                My colleague Mary Johnson used to be a hospice chaplain.  She says that typically as a person approaches death their priorities change.  Many day to day things that they used to think were important aren’t so important anymore.  The traffic, or getting to appointments on time, or how the Bills season is going, or the stock market, or how many likes their post received on Facebook doesn’t matter anymore.  They are focused on deeper and more significant issues.

                When I’m visiting someone in the hospital I sometimes look out the window and see all the people scurrying around in their day to day tasks, all of it seeming so important at that moment, but not really so in the grand scheme of things.

                And yet not everyone who is about to die has deep thoughts.  I remember working with one person who was endlessly concerned that her income taxes would be filed correctly and on time.  I imagined the IRS having a special operating room where they have auditors gathered and they endlessly revive people until they pay their taxes!

                William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania said, “He that lives to forever, never fears dying.”  It’s a noble thought, but one that is hard to live into.  Death is the great mystery.  It is something we all must face sooner or later; but what is it like?

                Our gospel reading was the Beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  They speak of a great reversal of fortune for many who are suffering now.  The text from Revelation shares a great vision.  A vast multitude from every nation is gathered around the throne and the Lamb crying out praises to God.  We are told they will never hunger any more or thirst any more.  The sun will not strike them nor any scorching heat, and God will away every tear from their eyes.  It is a wonderful vision and sounds great.  But if you think about it for a while you start to have questions.  Do I really want to stand around the throne of God and sing praises to God forever and ever?   That doesn’t sound like fun.  Plus, how narcissistic can God be?!?  And if you are like me, doesn’t everything get boring after a while?

                By the time my one grandfather died, well into his eighties, he developed the sense that he had seen what he wanted to see in life and done what he wanted to do in life, and he was ready to die.  He wasn’t depressed or anything and he didn’t become a recluse, just things of this life no longer attracted him. 

                Eternity is a long time.  Just about anything is sure to become boring.  I love a meal of prime rib, potatoes, grilled vegetables, a nice glass of wine, and hot apple pie with ice cream for dessert.  But to have that every meal forever and I’m going to get sick of it!

                What is eternal life, resurrection life like?  If we are to be as William Penn suggests, living to forever, what does that mean?  If we are to look forward to God’s promises and use them to help us get through the hard times of today, then it would be good if we had a clear and solid sense of that.  The more clearly I can imagine a good future the more able I am to get through a tough time now.

You can search the Bible all you want.  You won’t get definitive answers.  Eternal life is simply something beyond what we can comprehend.  I suppose we could call it unimaginably good.  That might be good news for you, but I still want more.  I want something more concrete to understand. 

I think St. Paul was trying to help the Corinthian Christians with just that when he wrote what we read as our second lesson today.  He doesn’t give an answer.  That would be impossible.  But he does try to describe what God is really up to.

He uses the image of a seed and the way the seed contains all that is needed to grow a plant, but the plant and the seed may not look at all alike.  While no image is perfect, Paul’s image here is powerful.  Throughout Christian history people have said that things in this life don’t really matter.  Not so.  If this world and this life really don’t matter at all then why the crucifixion?  Jesus could have just come a been a teacher that told everybody to be nice and good to each other and that would be that.  No, this life is vitally important.  Just like a seed is vitally important to grow the plant.  And so, we, the seed, will be transformed but still recognizable in a further stage of existence. 

Paul’s writing also teaches us something else.  Salvation is not just an individual act between God and ourselves.  Salvation is a cosmic undertaking on God’s behalf. 

St. Paul understood that everything had a body, and that nothing exists outside of a body.  He doesn’t mean just people but all creatures and all plants, and the air and the ground and the water and the whole planet and the moon and the stars; and if he had known about them, whole galaxies. 

All of those bodies are seeds.  All of them are part of God’s cosmic work of salvation.  We think ourselves pretty high and mighty if we think God is at work just saving us and the people we love; or saving our lifestyles.  We are kidding ourselves is we think that heaven is like living forever at Disney World with no lines and no waiting. 

God’s salvation isn’t about making you happy forever.  While God certainly considers you worthwhile, God is at work saving the entire universe.  Somehow, someway, every blade of grass your lawn mower has ever cut and every fly you’ve ever swatted is part of God’s redeeming work.

Now I have absolutely no idea how mosquitoes will have a place in heaven, but they are part of God’s work of salvation.

Perhaps the best way for us to live out the promise of eternity is to not think about ourselves.  I think people make a mistake if they think something like, “I have to suffer now so that God will reward me later.”  That is pure nonsense.  Better to think that the world is broken.  You are suffering and if you are suffering and there is a way out of it then take that way.  And in so doing you help to ease the brokenness of creation.

When you think about heaven and eternity think about God’s great work, and pray to find ways to engage in it.  That will bring about satisfaction this day and in every day to come.  God is not saving the universe alone.  God has equipped your body to help.

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.

September 24, 2017 God's Election, Romans 9:16-24

Examination time, a one question test.  How many Biblical people can you name who went on spiritual quests to find God?  Don’t think about too long or too hard, and don’t doubt yourself if you think you don’t have enough biblical knowledge.  The answer is easy – zero.

In our scriptures no one ever goes on a quest to find God.  It is always the other way around.  God seeks people and finds them.  Sometimes they run away, like Jonah.  But God hounds them until he gets them.

It is important for us to remember that it is God who seeks us, and it is God who chooses us, not the other way around.  It is God who creates faith in us, and it is God who maintains that faith within us.  You cannot come to God by the power of your intellect or your righteousness.

This all seems good until you think about it a bit.  What then about people who reject God?  What about people who are evil?  What about people who do not know God at all.  What about them?  And in all of this with God seeking us and creating faith in us and maintaining that faith within us, where does that leave free will?  Do we have a choice?  These are not new questions.  We know they’ve been around for as long as there has been Christianity because St. Paul writes about it.  We find one of the times he writes about it in our second reading.  There to the Romans he says, “So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy…  God has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses.  You will then say to me then, ‘Why then does he still find fault?  For who can resist his will?’  But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God?  Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’”  And Paul goes on.

This can leave us unsettled.  Again, we like to think we have free will.  And it leaves us wondering about the many people who do not know God and who do not seem to have faith.  We probably even care deeply about any number of people who do not live in faith.  Has God rejected them?  Has God made them as objects of his wrath, as Paul says?

I don’t have any answers to these questions.  I wish I did, but I think we just have to let God be God and realize that there are lots of things we simply cannot understand.  I do think it is good that we have questions like this.  It shows that we care.  We are concerned about the people around us and we do not want God to withhold grace and mercy from them.

But it is also important for us to move on.  Martin Luther understood that the way God does things with faith held great comfort for him.  In his essay, The Bondage of the Will, Luther writes:

(Copyright regulations do not allow for the text to be printed here.  See Luther's Works, Volume 33, Pg. 288-289)

Can you feel the comfort and certainty Luther writes about?  It is as if he has relaxed from the greatest worry and burden of his life, which indeed he has.  In early life he was constantly plagued by worry.  Was he good enough for God?  Did he do enough?  How could he be sure God liked him and would save him?  Realizing how securely God held him brought him real joy.  And it’s ironic that when he realized he didn’t have freedom in determining his salvation actually gave him freedom in life.

Instead of constantly asking himself if God approved or disapproved of something that whole way of thinking was thrown away.  He was God’s!  He was saved!  Now he wanted to share that reality and invite others to know it too.  That is the root of true evangelism – having something good you want to share.

I’m sure you’ve all had a task or a problem that worried you.  You may have even lost sleep over it.  And then when the task is over, assuming you succeeded, you feel light hearted and joyful.  You want to share your success with someone.

If you’ve helped with the garden project at Wymans you know there’s a little equipment shed at the top of the hill.  It’s a simple structure but creating it was tricky because zoning won’t allow for a building to be put there.  All of the equipment we use for the garden could be just left outside in the weather but I’m obsessive about keeping things inside.  I came up with the design for a structure to store the equipment but would be moveable, so it technically wouldn’t count as a building – at least as far as zoning regulations were concerned.  The question is, would it work?  Now that building isn’t complicated or expensive or heavy.  I shouldn’t have worried about it at all.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?  But I have to confess I lost more than one night’s sleep over the thing.  What if my design was flawed?  What if it couldn’t be moved once it was all put together?  What if it twisted and distorted into a pile of broken wood and bent metal?

Mark helped me when we loaded it onto the church’s wagon to move it to its final place.  My heart thudded every time the structure creaked and groaned while being loaded.  The wooden structure of the wagon bent under the load, but in short order it was loaded.  It moved, and moved well.  And when it came to tweaking it into the exact spot where we wanted it Mark and I discovered we could roll this 12ft. by 24ft. structure around by hand.  The idea had worked!  And when it was solidly on the ground I relaxed for the first time in days; the joy of seeing an idea succeed!

Perhaps this is too trite an example when compared to salvation, but the relief is the same.  You don’t want to have to figure out your own salvation.  You don’t want to have to build your value based on your own skill and brains and then just hope it will be good enough for God when you die.  That’s not salvation.  That’s torment.  No, you want to live in confidence.  You want to have the confidence that you can make mistakes and know that you’re still God’s.  You quit worrying about building and are able to just start enjoying.  Again, that is the root of real evangelism.

You’ve heard me say this before but it bears repeating.  God made you.  And God likes the work he did in your creation.  God delights to have you and is glad to save you.  Your relationship with God is not one where God just puts up with you the way you put up with annoying relatives at the Thanksgiving table.  No, God sees you as a guest he is excited to have.

Salvation is God’s work through and through, beginning to end.  How it works is beyond what our minds can comprehend.  But it is God’s mind that counts here, not ours.  And God will hold and keep us always.