Think and Let Think: Recent Episodes
Taylor Mertins
The truth, of course, is that we all wish God was a little more obvious. We, like Elijah, are looking for big signs and clear signals. But God’s love is not like the over-bearing parent who wants to do every little thing for their child to the degree that the child never does anything on their own. No, instead God shows up and speaks up and gets super quiet in ways that we can scarcely imagine but make all the difference. God’s silence and God's speech both speak volumes into our lives because, as Elijah learned, God is always with us.Elijah’s talking got in the way of his listening. Trust me, if you talk long enough and loud enough you can convince yourself that your words are more important than the Word made flesh. He had to get quiet and hear the silence before he could truly respond to God’s question, a question that set him firmly on the foundation of God’s grace.And God’s grace is fundamentally strange. It is everything for nothing. It is life to the lifeless, hope to the hopeless, and joy to the joyless. It is quiet in a world that has grown too loud. It is stillness when the world moves too quickly. It is amazing precisely because it comes to us as a gift...
Listen, says the Lord, listen so that you may live. I am making a promise, an everlasting covenant; behold the one who comes from the line of David. Because of the one who makes a way where there is no way, people will come to you who you would otherwise never know, they will flock to you because I am doing a new thing, I am filling you with life and delight. Here, in the strange and wonderful place of grace called church, you can find what you’re looking for because I, says the Lord, I am looking for you.The mysterious and strange truth of the Gospel is this: There’s something deeper, longer-lasting, and more insatiable than our hunger, and it’s God’s hunger for us...
Paul says that Abraham is righteous not because of his goodness or virtue or morality, but because God reckons him righteous. God makes Abraham righteous by grace.This is why, to quote Paul again, the Law brings wrath but the Gospel sets free. Doing all of the right things and knowing all the right people and making all the right choices can’t make us right. We all fall short of the glory of God, we all waver, we all mess up, we all neglect to do the things we should and we tend to do a bunch of things we know we shouldn’t. We’re not a bunch of good people getting gooder all the time. We’re actually a bunch of humans (who by definition make mistakes) who just happen to have the good fortune of a community that says we are welcome simply because we are who we are.It never ceases to amaze me how weird and wonderful the church is. There is nowhere else you can find a more truthful community of people who are willing to see more than the world sees, who are willing to put our trust in the only One who can actually do anything about anything...
Now what? That’s what the disciples must be asking themselves when they gather with Jesus on the mountain in Galilee. Perhaps that’s the question you’re asking now that you’ve made it to the end of your confirmation adventure.Here’s the answer: no matter where life takes you, no matter what mountaintops or valleys you experience, no matter what you do or leave undone, whether you have blessed assurance or devastating doubts, so long as there is a church, there is a community of grace for you. And for all of us.
The theologian Willie Jennings says, “This is the beginning of a community broken open by the sheer act of God, and we are still yet to comprehend the extent to which God acts and is acting to break us open.”This is important. It’s important because, despite all of our best efforts, we tend to consider Pentecost only in the past tense, something that happened way back when never to happen again. It’s all just a little too perfect isn't it? I mean, a whole group of individuals living together in harmony, and no one has any need? Have you ever met people before? This doesn’t work.Or what about thousands getting added from just one sermon. It’s impossible. And that’s not even mentioning the miracle of speaking new languages!This is such a beguiling image: twelve disciples, with no exceptional credentials, no advanced degrees, no capital resources to draw upon, all standing in front of the crowds, standing in front of the world, with nothing more than a message, nothing more than a story. Who would believe such a remarkable word coming from such unremarkable witnesses?Well, if it were up to them alone it would be impossible. But that’s the power of the Pentecost story because it’s not all up to them, and it’s not all up to us. The Spirit makes the impossible possible, giving life to the dead and bringing into existence the things that do not exist.The truth, the staggering out of the upper room truth of Pentecost, is that the fire that landed in Jerusalem is still blazing through the church today.
Have you listened to the birds recently? Or considered the lilies? Jesus asks us to do so not just because it’s nice, and it is nice, but it also helps to give us perspective. It opens our eyes to something more than whatever is currently weighing us down.The Gospel is a promise. Jesus cares about you, desires your welfare and your gladness. You can give him your worries, by prayer, by exhaustion, by friendship, by worship, by any and all means necessary because he cares for you.Jesus is for you and with you no matter what.If you’ve ever been made to think you’re somehow not worthy of Jesus’ attention or affection, if the world has ever worked to diminish you or belittle you, just remember that the accusation lobbed against Jesus the most is that he spent too much time with the wrong people.People just like you and me. Jesus is the friend of sinners and the Savior of the world. There is no one outside the power of his grace, because Jesus is never done with anyone...
Forming the church, a community that is sustained by the wily Lord named Jesus, is as challenging as any endeavor we will encounter. It looks like a group of people who willfully gather with nearly nothing in common save for the fact that Jesus calls us his friends. It looks like people who are willing to pray for things they wouldn’t pray for on their own, like our enemies. It looks like people who believe that water is thicker than blood, that we are bound to one another in baptism in a way that is somehow more concrete than with the people who are part of our family trees. It looks like people who believe their allegiance is first and foremost to Jesus, not a country, not a flag, and not a holiday...
For God’s sake, what do you suppose we are going to be, you and I? When we grow up?That may fall a bit flat, of course. Some of us here are no longer children, though we may act like it online. Surely many of us have all of our growing up behind us. We’re responsible, committed, and decisive. We’ve already seen enough to know we’ve seen enough. Perhaps the question isn’t “What are we going to do?”, but “What are we now and how well are we doing it?” Maybe the time has come for a performance review? Whether we’re doctors, drivers, or designers; electricians, pediatricians, or morticians; teachers, preachers, or in-betweeners; recently hired, fired, or retired; we all like to think that, one way or another, we’ve already figured it all out and we just have to keep doing what we’re doing they way we’re doing it.And yet, this ancient apostle, the right hand man of the Son of Man, the paradoxical Peter pens an epistle to the likes of those who follow Jesus then, now, and forever. And he has the nerve to call us babies.Like little infants, long for the spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord. In other words, no one’s story is finished. It does not matter how old or young you are, what you’ve done or left undone, God isn’t done with you because God is never done with anyone, and we all have some growing up to do...
The apostle Peter pens an epistle to the early church in large part because they are trying to navigate what it means to be faithful and political in the world. They are contending against the Powers and Principalities and Politics of their day and they want to know which way to go. In chapter 2 Peter is in the middle of exhorting the faithful community to resist the empire by imitating the Lord who became Servant of all. He writes of how servants and slaves are free, right now, to imitate the cruciform way of Jesus. He describes the call to remember that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. Peter is preaching politics. A politics that was preached to him by Jesus.“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” What could be more political than that?And so, having received a particular political witness, Peter punctuates his epistle with the claim that the church will have to live as strangers in a strange land. In order to follow Jesus they/we will necessarily look very different from the world...
Paul and Silas travel to Thessalonica and they proclaim the Good News of the Gospel to any who will listen. But a band of ruffians, that’s the Greek for you, a band of ruffians form a mob and they send the city into an uproar. They try to find Paul and Silas in order to bring them before the authorities, and when they can’t find them they drag some other believers before the city rulers and they say, “The people who have been turning the world upside down have come to our city!”Before the church was called the church, and before Christians were called Christians, the first descriptor that the world used to describe those people was, “World-Turners.” Yes, they will know we are Christians by our love, as the old song goes. But they will also know we are Christians because we turn the world upside down.In other words, the church is a revolution...
Embarrassment is a unexplored virtue. The truth about the church is that we never really know what we’re walking into and we never really know who God is going to drag through the door. And sometimes the slides don’t work, or the microphone feeds back, or the sermon falls flat, but at least it’s real. Sometimes we sit next to someone who gets on our nerves, or the prayers hint at a reality we’re not entirely sure about, or we shake a sweaty hand during the passing of the peace, but at least we’re actually spending time with actual people. Sometimes we cry and we don’t know why, or we ache for something we can’t quite describe, or we feel weary about everything we’re carrying, but at least we have a God who refuses to be anything other than God with us.Be strange, Peter says, because God is strange. Only God would come up with an idea for something like the church, only God would give without ever expecting much of anything in return, only God would be willing to die so that we can live.Our faith gives us the courage to do embarrassing things because our faith isn’t in us, its in Jesus. When you know someone loves you no matter how bad your dancing turns out to be, or how much you cry at the weirdest things, or how much you laugh at jokes that aren’t really that funny, well then you know what it means to be free.That’s the love that God has for you, it’s more precious than gold and it’s imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. You are loved so much that you can go out there and make a fool of yourself. Feel that feeling of faithful embarrassment because everything that matters is on the other side of that.
Easter is a promise. It is a promise that you are worthy of love and that nothing can ever separate you from the love of God in Jesus, not even death.
Jesus is a revolutionary. It’s just a different revolution than anyone thought it would be. He’s not a lion who will supplant violence with more violence. He’s just the lamb, the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world...
The great Robert Farrar Capon believed that the greatest challenge facing the church wasn’t questions about the afterlife but rather our present dullness. In short, he believed we lost our astonishment. He said that the Good News preached in churches is no longer life-changing, only after-life changing. And yes, the promise is that one day God will breathe life into our old dry bones, but the promise is also that God is doing it right now.The reason the Gospel took hold after Easter is because the earliest Christians lived according to the future in the present, the promise that dry bones can live now and later. Those disciples refused to settle for anything dry. The Power and the Principalities, particularly those that perpetrate injustice, tried to stop the Gospel because in threatened to upend the status quo. But God breathed new life into the church.Then and now Christians are those whose hearts are on fire, who are continually astonished by what God did and does, and have witnessed their own bones be given new life. Christians are just people who have go down into and come out of the pit.
Jesus heals the blind man so that he can truly see. He sees the brokenness of the world but he also sees how beautiful the world can be because he sees Jesus. Whenever we look at the cross it’s like God is rubbing mud in our eyes. Grace is amazing but it’s also kind of grimy. The cross shows us the brokenness of the world and the beauty of the world to come. The cross is both a reminder of our sin, but also that Jesus is the Savior and friend of sinners.There’s something that shimmers in the sludge that Jesus places on the eyes of those who cannot see. Today the grimy grace of the cross is getting sloshed over all of our faces so that we can see and receive the truth, the truth that will set us free.Amazing grace how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see!
When we survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died, we see the lengths to which God will go to forgive sin. The cross is both ugly and beautiful. The cross is as ugly as sin and is as beautiful as love. But in the end, love wins.Which means the past isn’t prologue. The Gospel is the proclamation and the promise that God isn’t done with anyone. It doesn’t matter what you did ten years ago or yesterday or even right now. God rectifies the ungodly, God makes us righteous, God saves us.
God so loves you that God gives it all for you. God does not send Jesus into the world to condemn you, but to save you. Once you see it you can’t really see anything else. Or, to quote CS Lewis, once you see it, by it you begin to see everything else. It’s like being born. Again.
Some things never change. God has always used fools to shame the wise, has worked to lift up the lowly and knock down the mighty, and demonstrated strength through weakness.And, oddly enough, even though Jesus refuses the temptations of the tempter in the wilderness, by the end of the gospel he will, in fact, do the things the devil suggests.Instead of turning a boulder into a biscuit in the wilderness, Jesus will feed the 5,000 with little more than a bag of wonder bread and a handful of fish sticks.Instead of pulling off a Houdini-esque magic trick that would make even the crowds in Vegas jump to their feet, Jesus dies and then refuses to stay dead.Instead of getting caught up in all the internal machinations of Middle Eastern politics, Jesus reigns from the hard wood of the cross and then ascends to rule over the living and the dead at the right hand of the God the Father Almighty as King of kings and Lord of lords.Jesus doesn’t change from the beginning of the Gospel to the end, he merely makes the changes necessary for us to be set free from the chains of sin and death.
Lent is, as Stanley Hauerwas notes, a dangerous time for Christians. With talk of ashes and repentance, renewal and sin, we can soon turn the Good News of the Gospel into the bad news of God’s dangling us over the fire pit of damnation. And, despite the fact that there are, indeed, scriptures that describe God’s wrath (particularly toward those who are responsible for injustice), the strange new world of the Bible as a whole paints a rather different picture.From the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the New, we encounter and are encountered by the God who simply refuses to give up on us, who goes to lengths beyond our comprehension to remain with us, and who is willing to die on our account because it means our salvation. In other words, God has no damns to give because God is love.
'Seeing is believing,' we say. Implicit in this kind of affirmation is the presumption that if we were given enough information, enough data, enough instruction then our faith meters would be full to the brim. Except, when it comes to the disciples, they had already seen it all and it wasn’t enough. Which means that with Jesus, it’s the opposite: Believing is seeing. And, if should we worry that we don’t have enough belief to believe, Jesus says we only need faith the size of a mustard seed and, better yet, the disciples are proof positive that Jesus never stops showing the Gospel even to those who barely believe.Because faith, even faith as fractured as a glitched icon, faith as fearful as the disciples cowering on the ground, faith as fleeting as the breeze is all we need to have a whole new way of seeing...
I will confess that I did not know how to end this sermon. All week I worried about how to wrap it all up and I fear the art and text may leave us with more questions than answers. But then I remembered a line from the theologian Chris Green. Basically, he says to preachers, if you don’t what to say, then tell the church what the text makes you want to pray - for them, for yourself, for your family and friends, for the world, for the church. I pray that all shall be saved. Maybe that’s naive or beyond the scope of the Gospel, but it is my prayer. I pray for God to move among us so that we treat all people of having sacred worth, not matter what they’ve done or left undone. I pray that God won’t give up on us, even if we give up on God. I pray that God’s power really is such that every broken thing will be mended, every tear will be wiped away, and that heaven will be crowded.
Whenever we plant seeds and harvest the fruit, whenever we break bread and share stories with our friends, whenever we are surprised by the impossible possibility of God, we practice resurrection. Maybe the Mad Farmer of Wendell Berry’s poem is just that, a person committed to the earth who has grown bewildered by the wildness of it all. Or maybe the Mad Farmer is the divine gardener who insists on sowing seeds of grace all over the place.Go with your love to the fields.Lie in the shade. Rest you headIn their lap. Swear allegianceTo what is nighest your thoughts.As soon as the generals and politicosCan predict the motions of your mind,Lose it. Leave it as a signTo mark the false trail, the wayYou didn’t go. Be like the foxWho makes more tracks than necessary,Some in the wrong direction.Practice resurrection.
There’s a deep pleasure in the gospel that we don’t talk about very much, and it’s the pleasure of being surrounded by others in such a safe, fun, and inviting way that we can learn to laugh. Laugh at the world, laugh at ourselves. There’s such a relief in being able to say, like Abraham and Sarah, “Oh what a fool I’ve been! I was so sure I knew how this was all going to shake out. I shaped my whole life around a bunch of assumptions and look where I wound up!”When was the last time you laughed? Like belly laughed? Like laughed so hard it hurt? Maybe you were watching a show or a comedy special and it gave you the giggles, but some of the best laughter we ever share, we share with and because of other people.Karl Barth once noted that laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God. Because when we laugh, we are sitting at that table with the Trinity. When we laugh we laugh at the wild absurdity of it all. That we exist in this world, that we have friends to share it with, that we have light and love and laughter is worth laughing about.
For some reason the Holy Spirit is pleased to let these words stand as they are before us in the beginning of all things and the beginning of the Bible. Perhaps its because the Spirit, like any good artist, knows that color and shape and shadow and light and images reveal the truth. Importantly, the Word of God is both audible and visual. Artists, therefore, preach for the eye; for artists the medium is the message. Artists help us see the Word.
whenever we gather at this table, in this room, on a day like today, we’re certainly here in this time and place with these people, but we’re also in that room with Jesus long long ago. And we, no matter what we’ve done or left undone, no matter what happens when we leave from the table, the bread is broken and the cup is shared for us and with us. Art, as they say, imitates life.The church has been many things and will continue to be and do many things. But ultimately, the church is where the Gospel is made visible. By coming to the table, by receiving bread and up, we become the latest painting of The Last Supper.
Chances are you’ve felt interrupted a time or two this Christmas season; you had a plan and then you watched it fall apart. And chances are your life is not what you thought it would be. Various interruptions interrupted the path you prepared. And yet, God works through interruption. God shows up, usually when we least expect it, like a knock at the door, like the crying out of a little baby, like receiving good news when we’ve heard nothing but bad news. And tonight God interrupts your life and my life once again with the promise of the Gospel: A new day is breaking. Light shines in the darkness. Death is defeated. No matter what you do or leave undone, no matter how many plans come to fruition or fall apart, God refuses to being anything other than God with you.
Whenever we come to the table for communion, we share this short and ancient creed: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. We live in the in between, right smack dab in the middle of the already but not yet.The dawn from on high has come upon us, and it will come upon us.Whatever our personal darkness may be, whatever it is we are sifting through and trying to navigate, whatever keeps us awake at night and makes us nervous for tomorrow, it will be redeemed. The desert will bloom, light will shine in the darkness, the dead will be raised.It might not be today or even tomorrow, but one day God will make all things new.Hear God’s promise at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel: “By the tender mercy of the Lord, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to whose who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”Or, as Auburn Sandstrom said, “In the deepest, blackest, night of despair and anxiety, it only takes a pinhole of light and all of grace can come in.”
Lent and Advent are the most challenging seasons of the Christian calendar because during them we receive the most difficult, demanding, bad news ever to be called good - The Cross. Twice a year our worlds are rocked, our tables are turned, demons are put to wrought, and dead dreams are brought back to life. Jesus is the reason for this season, and frankly for every season. And lest we domesticate the Lord to mere flannel graphs and perfectly manicured manger scenes, we can’t forget Lent during Advent, the shadow of the cross lingers over the manger.For, the baby born king we worship here and now grows in spirit and wisdom enough to call the powers and principalities to task. J the B might hit us with some harsh words here in December, but they can’t hold a flame to what J the C says and does. Jesus will not relent to the world. In fact, Jesus overcomes the world.The promise of Advent is that no matter what stumps us in life, no matter how many dead ends we encounter, God is going to make a way where there is no way. Predator and prey will dwell together. Peace will reign. A child will lead us.
Let there be no mistake, we, all of us, stand on the threshold of God’s kingdom. We never really know from moment to moment when an opportunity will come our way. It’s a mystery, but that’s where the real power lays. The Lord is always out in front of us. God’s futures approaches us, God’s future in which we will all be made new. We wait with hope by lighting whatever little lights we can, for no light is too small in this ever darkening world.
“Jesus always comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. Jesus saves us in our disasters, not from them.” - Robert Farrar Capon
I’ve joked before, though its not really a joke, about how despite the beauty of the wedding liturgy, it would be far more appropriate if the couple made this public affirmation together: “We are both broken. We have been idiots and we will be idiots again. We are both difficult to live with. We sulk and get angry and hold grudges. We both blame other people for our own mistakes, we’re not very good at compromise, and we are definitely not as nice as we think we are. And yet, we are here together hoping against hope to fight against the loneliness our failings tend to create.”Marriage isn’t easy, but it might become easier if we realize that our partners are fallible creatures just like us. Jesus says “Marriage isn’t heaven nor will there be marriage in heaven.” Not because marriage isn’t a good thing, but simply because the goodness of heaven transcends the goodness of everything we can know in our earthly lives.
A saint is simply someone whose life manages to be a crack through which God’s grace peaks through.
God uses music to help us enter the mysteries of life, death, and life after death. We sing our faith. The words and melodies of our music transcend space and time; they tunes us in to God’s frequencies in the world. Music gives us the space to experience what we believe and how we pray when we don’t know how to put those things into words - music gives us the opportunity to feel whatever it is we are feeling without feeling like we’re not allowed to feel what we feel.When Robert Jenson said the End is music, he went on to add how that particular music does not end, and so is always our beginning.One day we, with all of creation, will be transfigured into God’s music. That’s the promise of the story of the Gospel.
Baptism is the gift of God’s living water that never runs dry. And it’s not just a sign of God’s love. It’s a sign of God’s love for the ungodly. Like the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus knows every little thing about us, the good and the not so good. Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves and Jesus still goes to the cross for us anyway. The living water seals us in the Spirit and nothing can ever take it away for, as Paul reminds us, there is nothing that can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Thanks be to God.
It’s by grace, and only by grace that Jacob makes it to the well and to the banks of the Jabbok river. It’s by grace, and only by grace, that the conniving, heel-grabbing, con-artist extraordinaire receives the name that names the nation: Israel. It’s by grace, and only by grace, that this flawed and fantastic figure fathers the twelve tribes of Israel and is the many-times great-grandfather of Jesus.The church is like a well - it is the nexus where everything happens. We gather, like Jacob, in order to come to grips with what we’ve done and left undone. We are given the promise, like Jacob, that there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any more, and there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any less.The church also gives us the space, imagination, and wonder to wrestle with the Word. One of the surest signs of the Spirit at work is contention. There’s a reason Jacob is given the name Israel.Lastly, as Stanley Hauerwas notes, whatever the church is, it is at least the discovery of friends we did not know we had. The church is where strangers become sisters, and others become brothers. God gathers us here together not just to hear a message, but to be God’s message to the world.
From his very first sermon Jesus identifies the work of the Lord with rescue, release, and relief. And the rest of the New Testament is ripe with such stories! Jesus delivers people from their captivity to demons, illness, loneliness, death, and isolation. The Holy Spirit delivers the disciples from captivity to preconceived notions and literal prisons. And, as we say in the liturgy, God delivers us from from slavery to sin and death and makes with us a new covenant by water and the Spirit. Yes, Jesus is a teacher and a healer and a preacher, but above all Jesus is a savior. Jesus saves...
One of the most compelling and evergreen reasons to follow Jesus is that discipleship is playful. There’s a dance to the life of faith and it’s fun, or at least, its supposed to be. I know a pastor’s whose church’s motto is: We take Jesus seriously, but not ourselves.Even Karl Barth noted that one of the truest tests of faith isn’t whether or not we can laugh, but whether or not we can laugh at ourselves. I also love that. But faith is often seen as a very serious endeavor. And for good reason. We’re talking about salvation here. But, if the only thing we ever heart about, or think about, or talk about is the law, all the things we should and shouldn’t be doing, then we will always find ourselves sitting under the shadow of failure, judgement, and seriousness.And yet Luther, Paul, and Jesus remind us that God always speaks two words: Law and Gospel. Dave Zahl writes, “The law tells us what we ought to do; the Gospel tells us what God has done. The law shows us we need to be forgiven; the gospel announces we have been forgiven.”There’s nothing more serious than Jesus mounting the hard wood of the cross on our behalf, but the result of that seriousness is the silliness of salvation...
Dave Zahl writes, “The very notion of a weekly Sabbath breaks the twenty-four-seven cycle of more and reminds us that we are God’s treasured children, not slaves to the ever-mounting demands of the pharaohs in our lives.” To anyone who feels like they can’t keep up, slowing down is a relief.Notably, according to Genesis, to be made in God’s image is to be a person who needs rest. And, according to Exodus, lest we forget the gift that is rest, we’re literally commanded to do it. In fact, the command to sabbath receives more detail and explanation than any other commandment except for idolatry.Rest is all over the Old Testament from psalms that describe the comfort of laying down at night, to prophets who find relief under the shade of trees, to further commandments about letting the land rest.And then Jesus takes it to a whole new level because he talks the talk and walks the walk. Have you ever noticed how tired Jesus gets in the gospels? He rests at the well, he rests from casting out demons, he rests after a long night of prayer, and, most notably, he rests the belly of a boat during a storm...
When Jesus commands the disciples to be like children, he’s telling us to recognize how much we’re like children no matter how old we actually are. Because the truth, the inconvenient truth, is that we don’t have it all together. Most of us are just barely scraping by and we need all the help we can get. If our standing in the world is based entirely on what we can do and achieve, then the status anxiety will always remain as an anxiety.But if our standing in the kingdom of God is based on what God can do, then we’ve been set free from the shackles that bind you and me...
We're all obsessed with control and we tend to mask it under the guise of efficiency. We adopt and adapt new behaviors and practices that promise order in a world out of control. But it is precisely from the burden of control that we need relief. We don’t need better ways to control because, as Dave Zahl notes, “the problem with control as the be-all and end-all of existence is that [all the things] we use to control our lives often end up controlling us.”And it is into the midst of all of this that Jesus embodies a life out of control. His time management is terrible, often letting interruptions interrupt the work of the kingdom. His evaluation of potential disciples is indefensible, calling fishermen and tax collectors to evangelism and community organization. If Jesus is trying to control people, he’s not doing a very good job. The movement he inaugurates dwindles the closer he get to Jerusalem, and by the end all the disciples abandon him. Jesus, to quote Zahl again, is clearly not a type-A personality. Jesus isn’t in the business of controlling people, if anything he’s in the business of relieving people, of freeing people, of giving them rest. In short, the way, the truth, and the life offers a different way...
Salvation has personal, domestic, social, economic, and theological dimensions. Salvation, in the New Testament, is the same word for health and well-being. There’s more than just heaven at stake here. Or, perhaps better but, heaven is at stake here and now. Jesus says salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ house because he, himself, is salvation in the flesh. He is wholeness and saving and everything else. He has a resurrecting effect on the bodies of those who just happen to be near by. Jesus raises Zacchaeus up from his dead life into a completely new existence. He moves him from reject to elect.And, again, Jesus loves to hang out with the rejects. Jesus loves dead ends, dead beats, and people we wouldn’t be caught dead with because Jesus is the one who makes a way where there is no way.Which is why Jesus can be so irritating at times. Shouldn’t he know better than to hang out with a dirty rotten tax collector? Who’s next? Lawyers? Politicians? Preachers?The story of Jesus and Zacchaeus is a reminder that, as John Wesley put it, “There are few matters more repugnant to reasonable people than the grace of God.”
All of us have some moment we would redo if given the chance, some past decision or action or utterance that we would take back if we could. Our pasts exert pressure on us in the present. Sure, we can become very good at moving on or pretending we’ve moved on, but the truth of us, what we’ve done or left undone, never really leaves us. Regret is real. Which is why forgiveness is so important. Forgiveness is the only thing that frees us and relieves us from the burden of not just who were were, but also who we are.
The prodigal perfectly proclaims the paradox of the gospel: Jesus dies and is resurrected for us whether we deserve it or not. Like the younger brother, we don’t even have to apologize before our heavenly Father is tackling us in the streets of life with love. And like the older brother, we don’t have to do anything to earn an invitation to the party, save for leaving our judgments and self-righteousness behind. Contrary to how we might imagine it, or even experience it, the whole ministry of Jesus isn’t dependent on our deservings, or our abilities, or our morality, or our faithfulness. Instead, it’s all about the God of the good time who is just dying, literally, to share it with us.
Hosea’s life becomes the parable of his preaching.Gomer, Hosea’s wife, mother of his three oddly named children, whom he loves and cherishes, is not faithful to him. Her adultery is not something hidden away, it’s a known element among the whole community. And so Hosea does as the law commands, he sends her away. The prophet Hosea thus meditates on what it’s like to lose a partner, to have a promise broken. He begins to enter into God’s own pain and suffering and anguish. Hosea is what we call a minor prophet, but his book is major among the minors. Its the longest, the most detailed, and the most vivid.He speaks of bitterness, anguish, and even wrath. Not just God’s, but his own!But then, wonder of wonders, the humiliated husband, the pathetic prophet, goes out in search of the lost love of his life. And he goes not to bring retribution, but instead he brings redemption. He finds Gomer among the last, least, lost, little, and dead, he saves her from destitution, brings her back to his own home (in violation of the law by the way), and recommits to the marriage. The one who names his children for the community to bear witness, now bears witness himself to the power of God’s grace. Hosea’s home becomes a place of grace.Like any good gossip it spreads fast, and the message is there for everyone to see: God’s love is invincible and unconquerable. God’s faithfulness to God’s people is stronger than unfaithfulness. God’s grace goes after and redeems the beloved.Hosea, on behalf of God, says, “I will woo her, I will find the her in the wilderness and bring her comfort.” The her in question is both Gomer and Israel. It's a parabolic prophetic proclamation.
It’s not too late to change your mindIt’s not too late for the truth this timeIt’s not too late to fall on your kneesIt’s not to late for apologiesIt’s not too late to come cleanTo face all the fallout that there might beAnd it’s not too late to understandGrace is more than a concept to believe inIt’s something more real than your beating heartAnd it runs to the depths of where you areIt follows you there retracing your stepsWhispering over and over againThat it’s not too late, it’s not too late, it’s not too late.- Andy Gullahorn
When healing comes, its usually quiet and unexpected and surprising. Sometimes it requires a crack in the sidewalk before the root of healing can take hold. But when it does, it is the difference that makes all the difference in the world.
Elijah climbs the mountain on a hope and a prayer, looking for a theophany. He comes looking for fire, wind, smoke, and earthquake, a decisive declaration of the divine. But he discovers the truth is a cave. Elijah is met by God in the silence.Elijah delivers more fireworks than all of the other prophets put together, but maybe God speaks in silence to Elijah because Elijah needs to know, needs to learn, that God’s always speaking and always with him.Even when God seems silent.Perhaps that’s the reminder for us today as well...
One day, in the city of David, shadows darken as a cross is raised. Upon which is nailed the last king to come from the line of David. What does God do with us sinners gathering at the foot of the cross? What does God do with us Davids who take and break and sin and suffer?My sin, oh the bliss, of this glorious thought, my sin not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more; praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!The cross is a sign of truth. It is a sign of our sin, our shortcomings, our situation. And the cross sets us free. But not before shaking us to the core, not before confronting us with the truth.
There’s only once church that matters, and it’s not a church that’s wealthy, or powerful, or prestigious, or bursting at the seems, or filled with acclaim.The only church that matters is a church that looks like Jesus.Jesus, the tiny vulnerable baby who is totally dependent on others. Jesus, the young child ready to challenge the status quo of those who have lingered too long in the temples of yesterday. Jesus, the faithful one who spurns the temptations of the devil in the desert days of life. Jesus, the story teller re-narrating the reality of existence.Jesus, the embracer of the last, least, lost, little, and dead.Jesus, the friend who stays with those who abandon him even to the very end.Jesus, the forgiver of those who do not know what they are doing.Jesus, the resurrected, who returns, reconciles, and receives everyone.The Spirit is poured out among us, working in and through us, giving us everything we need to look like Jesus.
Idolatry is real and it is more destructive than anything we can imagine. Idolatry is believing that social media is actually social when it fact is is constantly tearing us apart.Idolatry is believing the number at the bottom of our bank statements is indicative of our true worth and value in the world.Idolatry is believing that if our kids get on the right team, or the right score on a test, or into the right college everything will finally be forever perfect.Idolatry is believing that the names on our bumper stickers are more important and determinate than our relationship with people who happen to have a different name on their bumper sticker.Idolatry is believing we can know everything we ever need to know about another person by what type of music they listen to.And God says, “I am tearing down your idols, I’m busting them up into a million tiny little pieces. Nothing can ever get between us.”Faith in the Lord is a crazy thing. Keep at it long enough, keep singing these songs and praying these prayers, and all the sudden the idols don’t wield the power they once held over us.Faith is the antidote to idolatry.Faith, the faith gifted to us by and through the church, will keep us from putting all of our hope and effort in things that just aren’t up to the task.Faith teaches us to cherish and build and rejoice in small things.Faith, which is just another word for trust, tastes like raspberries and cream, it sounds like Bach’s cello suite No.1 in G major, it looks like the stars stretched across the night sky, it smells like freshly baked chocolate brownies, it feels like someone holding our hand when we don’t have anything else to hold onto.
Saint Augustine said, “You are the Body of Christ. In you and through you the work of incarnation must go forward. You are to be taken. You are to be blessed, broken, and distributed, that you may be the means of grace and vehicles of eternal love.”In other words, we come together to be blessed in order that we become blessings to others.
Hear the Good News: The mercy of God is going to catch you. It might happen in a backyard summer celebration. It could happen in church on a Sunday. Or it might happen when you spin a record with some friends. But the mercy of God is coming, and there’s nothing you can do about it...
The world rings with praise only because the whole of creation is in on it! Praise the Lord! The sun and moon, the sea, fire and snow, speckled frogs and spotted dogs, wrens and thrushes, old men with walkers and little babies who do little more than drool and sleep. The world joins up in the praise parade not with words, but with being. The snow whirls, the fires roar, the frogs croak, the cows moo, the birds sing, the old men sigh, and the little babies burp. In short, we learn to praise God not by paying compliments, but by paying attention. Have you ever watched a forest dance in the wind? Or listened to the symphony of a thunderstorm? Or sat in the silence and sound of a church service? Or experienced the fog lifting while you’re on the back of a motorcycle on your way to the zoo?We can praise when all is well and when all is hell because, as Frederick Buechner puts it, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”
God works in ways seen and unseen. The psalmist can only sing this song as one who has made it to the other side and is able to look back and see how God was in the business of deliverance. Maybe you’re able to look back and see the same. But if you’re in the pit right now, hear me when I say, it’s okay to not be okay, and this isn’t the end...
Good music, and I mean good in the true and beautiful sense, good music has a magic to it. It hits us, brings forth from us feelings we didn’t know we had. Music can travel us through time, backward and forward. Music moves.And its not always entirely clear how music does to us what it does. We can take a song that has shaped us, play it for someone else expecting similar magic, only to have them look back at us as if to say, “That’s it?”But that’s also the beauty behind the bands and artists that make the magic we call music. Even though the songs, melodies, and words stay the same, we all receive them differently.Just as music has a magic to it, so does scripture. It might not appear as such, hidden away under the dust covered Bibles of our sanctuary or living rooms. But, if you take out the Bible, and flip near the middle, it’s like finding an old mixed tape or CD. The psalter is a playlist of the prayers of God’s people.
Matthew tells of an angel who comes like lightning to roll back the stone. Mark recalls the women waking up early to go anoint Jesus’ body, John starts with Mary running back to tell the disciples about the empty tomb.But when Luke is finally ready to describe the power of Easter, he begins with the word “but.” The previous chapter ends with Joseph of Arimathea wrapping up Jesus dead and forsaken body and leaving it in a tomb. “But” Luke begins, “on the first day of the week, at dawn, the women came to the tomb and found it empty.” But, yet, however, nevertheless. These are the words that signal a sacred intrusion into reality. The gospel always turns on a great but...
If you don’t have one already, Holy Week will give you a low anthropology. It shows us at our worst. It’s not just the story of good vs. evil. It’s also the result of such human sentiments. Disagreements, jealousy, moral posturing, denial, betrayal.It’s not an easy thing to reckon with, that when God in the flesh comes to spend time among us, we nail God to the cross. Hence the great Lenten prayer of confession: Lord, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those thing which we ought not to have done; there is no health in us. Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Perhaps that’s why Martin Luther said, “If I were God, I’d kick the world to pieces.” But, thankfully, Luther wasn’t God. God is God, and God doesn’t kick the world to pieces. No, God so loves the world! God keeps entering into the world, marching into our little fickle Jerusalems. God keeps showing up, by grace, and keeps blessing our broken lives.Or, as the musician Kevin Morby puts it: “Everything we do is a mess, but, oh honey, may this mess be blessed.”
There are these threads in the scriptures that if you just start to pull on one of them you’ll begin to see how the whole thing is bound together. And the same happens in our relationships. How we spend our time, how we speak, think, and move, who we eat with, are very real examples of where we find our hope. And I know these might seem like really small things. What can a dinner party really accomplish? Can a card in the mail, or an handshake in the pews, or a unexpected phone call do much of anything? How does reading this scriptures, singing these songs, and praying these prayers bear fruit in our lives and in the world?Well, little things repeated over time can have a major and forming impact. It’s why so many people remember things like the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus Loves Me even when they cannot remember anything else. It’s why we lose track of time when we’re sitting at a table with friends. As the great theologian Saint Winnie the Pooh once said, “Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
Little things matter! Everything we do, whether we realize it or not, enfolds us and those near us into a vision of what we might call “the good life.” We are habituated by our habits and rituals toward the importance, or unimportance, of community, friendship, and faith.How we eat, how we speak, how we spend our time is a very real expression of where we find our hope.At some point or another we will find ourselves feeling like one of the sons in Jesus' parable. We will yearn for something that isn’t ours, or we will grow angry over perceived slights... But God, the author of salvation, is training us, habituating us, litugizing us, to see the Good News of the Gospel. Like the prodigal father who is filled with nothing but love, there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any more and there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any less.No matter what we do or leave undone, there’s always room for us at the party.
Our God is nothing if not incarnational. That is, despite what others may say, we have a very materialistic faith. God takes on flesh and moves into the neighborhood.Which means God meets us where we are, and not where we ought to be. We might imagine that to get close to God we have to do all sorts of things like sit idly by while the flood waters rise high. We might imagine that in our despair, pain, and brokenness that we’re got to cure ourselves, heal ourselves, and put ourselves back together before we can get together with God.That’s not the Gospel.God isn’t waiting for us to get it all figured out. God shows up in our lives right where we are to help re-figure us...
Amazon, Instagram, and Facebook (just to mention a few) are frighteningly good at captivating and capturing our imaginations as we spend our days exploring the digital architecture of the modern mall we call the smart phone.That why I really love that one line from the prayer of confession I shared earlier. “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” It’s amazing how prescient a line from 1662 can be today. For, the devices we carry in our pockets absolutely drive the desires of our hearts, and most of the time we don’t even realize it, we don’t notice the water we’re swimming in.Hence, the remarkable quote from Charles Baudelaire: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.These forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter are some of the most countercultural and subversive days in the entire church year. While we swim in the water of a culture driven by success, power, winning, God uses Lent to repent us, to turn us back around to the One who saves us through the waters of baptism, through the bread and cup of communion, through the cross and the empty tomb.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, explains the power of the heart over the mind like this: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”And "teaching the longing" is exactly right. For love is a habit. We, of course, may imagine that love strikes like lightning, without explanation or warning. But we are actually habituated toward our loves. We are shaped by habits that present those things that are worth our love.Love, in short, takes practice.Our hearts are calibrated through imitation and immersion into practices that, overtime, curate our hearts to particular ends. We learn to love not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love. Rituals train us to love rightly.In the church we have a different word for ritual: liturgy.
Will Willimon tells of having once served a church where there was a long standing tradition in which lay leader would rise at the conclusion of the sermon to offer a prayer. And, one Sunday after preaching a tough sermon on a difficult text, the lay leader stood up and prayed a simple, clear, and direct prayer. “Lord, today we’ve heard your word. And we don’t like it.”We don’t like this Word of the Lord because it cuts right to the heart of our faith.It’s impossible to live like this, we think. How could we ever really love our enemies? They’re our enemies for a reason! Shouldn’t we be doing the opposite of love toward them? Have you ever tried to pray for those who mistreat you? Better to run away and never think of them than to pray for them! It’s impossible, what Jesus wants us to do.Thankfully, though, nothing is impossible for God...
Robert Jenson once said, “It is a great achievement to know yourself a sinner.” It sounds paradoxical, but to know you’re a sinner puts you (and me) in a place to really listen to what Jesus is saying. Hence the parable of the publican and the pharisee. The dirty rotten scoundrel of a tax collector leaves worship justified, rather than the do-gooding religious adherent, because only he is able to confess that he is a sinner. It’s not easy to receive this sermon from Jesus (particularly the woes) but somebody has to say such things. One must really know the people to which these words are delivered lest we leave thinking the preacher is talking about other people. Bashing people with the law achieves nothing unless the one preaching is the One who comes to fulfill the Law. Martin Luther reminds us that “God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead. God does not give saintliness to any but sinners, nor wisdom to any but fools. In short: God has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.”
People always assume that the church’s primary business is to get people to behave themselves, to teach morality, and then keep them on the right track. Which is fine, except it often leads people to feeling more overwhelmed than they were before they walked through the door. Jesus doesn’t meet Peter by the lake and clobber him with calls to righteousness and goodness and the law. He doesn’t belittle him for his lack of fish or for his lack of faith. Instead he invites him to a new reality, an adventurous life, filled with unbelievable beauty and wonder and grace. So, open you ears and eyes and hearts to what Jesus says to Peter and what Jesus says to you. Jesus comes to your life, sits down, and says, “I am with you. I will never leave you. I believe in you. I see possibilities that you can’t even imagine. I have plans for you, I’m going to show you what makes the Good News so good, or I’ll die trying.”
There’s nowhere Jesus goes without outsiders becoming insiders. That’s part of the mission. But it’s nothing new! Over and over and over again in scripture God commands the people to care for the people no one else cares about. Open your eyes, God says, to the plight of your neighbors who have no bright hope for tomorrow. Open your ears, God says, to the anguish of your enemies. Open your hearts, God says, to the very people who drive you crazy.If the gospel isn’t good news for everybody, then it isn’t good news for anybody...
Whenever there is deliverance, liberation, recovery, and release, there is the preaching of the Gospel. In other words, preaching isn’t just for preachers, it’s also for all of you.Preaching doesn’t just happen in church. It happens in our words and actions in the classroom and at the grocery store. Preaching happens at the bank and in the backyard bbq. Preaching happens in the hospital and in the home. Preaching happens whenever there is deliverance and liberation, recovery and release.It’s as if Jesus is preaching to us through scripture today and he says, “Things are not as they ought to be. People are afraid. They don’t have hope. Well, I’m here to bring good news to the poor, to announce pardon to prisoners, to include the excluded, and to set the burdened free. Who’s coming with me?”
Robert Farrar Capon said, “Whatever the church is, it should enable us to realize we are at a party of outrageous proportions; and, at the same time, it should make us want nothing so much as to shout the invitation to that party at the top of our lungs.”Is that how we feel about the faith? Is that how we feel about church?Does all of this feel more like a funeral, or a wedding?What John points to in Cana, what we are being called to see, is the glory revealed in Jesus Christ. The party that is salvation is right here and right now. We have been invited to the marriage Supper of the Lamb and we didn’t have to do a thing except show up for the festivities. Just as Jesus commandeers the wedding and becomes its host, so too Jesus has conquered the world and now rules at the right hand of the Father. This is what glory looks like. The author of the cosmos condescends to our existence and opens up the doors and clears the dance floor and says, "The time has come to celebrate!"
With the magi and the manger we discover how the kingdom inaugurated in Jesus extends even to the Gentiles.And with the baptism in the Jordan we learn that we do not have the righteousness we require to acquire the kingdom, but that’s okay because Jesus fulfills all righteousness.In other words, the heavens open at the river not just for Him, but also for all of us.
The wild proclamation of the Gospel, made manifest in a baby in a manger surrounded by some certainly strange gifts, is that God knows everything about us, the resolutions we keep and break, and chooses to be with us anyway. You see, this odd God delights in getting down in the muck and mire of life to dwell among us. This odd God speaks and heals and teaches and preaches and reveals the truth that we all need but struggle to believe. This odd God even goes to the cross on our behalf, manifesting the paradoxology of the Gospel: There’s nothing you can do to make God love you any more, and there’s nothing you can do to make God love you any less...
Here’s the truth of Christmas, the great proclamation of the Gospel - God makes time for you and me. And not only that, but God has given us all the time in the world, redeemed our time and our foolish use of it because Christmas is the reminder of the lengths to which God was and is willing to go to give us the one thing we really need.The wonderful word of Christmas is "with." God takes on flesh in Jesus Christ and moves into the neighborhood "with" us.There is, of course, elements of “for” in Jesus’ life: Jesus is for us when he teaches and heals. Jesus is for us when he dies on the cross and rises on Easter. Jesus does for us what we can’t do for ourselves.But the power of what God does for us is made manifest because God is with us.
The strange and serious proclamation of Christmas is that though things change, we’re always in the moment of Christmas. Even when we snuff out the candles, and get in our cars, and go to bed, we’re still in Christmas.Because Christmas is the miracle of God making time for us...
Mary praises God through song for cracking open the heavens and pouring out justice on a world thirsty for it. She points to the power of the Spirit because her Son will relieve the proud and powerful from their self-righteousness, and He will fill the poor with more than money can buy.And she sings of it already having happened because time is different with God. The incarnation is not God’s last minute hail Mary to fix the world. It is, was, and always will be God’s decision to dwell with us. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. God was always going to dwell with us because God always dwells with us and God will always dwell with us...
Willie Jennings says that Joy is an act of resistance against despair and its forces. Again, it’s not living in denial, it’s not pretending things are better than they are. The joy we speak of in the church is the knowledge that, like the crowds who gather to hear J the B, we really are a brood of vipers. Seriously, according to the witness of the Word we’re all on the naughty list. But the axe is lying at the root of the tree because God is cutting down our sin and using it for the divine bonfire the banishes the darkness forever.
John the Baptist appears in the middle of nowhere and says to the gathered people, “Here comes the Lord! Get ready to change direction, be surprised, all shook up, and turned upside down. Hills are coming down and valleys are filling up!”In other words, when J the B shows up he says, “You can’t stay the same!”God is up to something! God is on the move! And God is going to get what God wants. We, of course, can certainly put up a fight and make a mess of the whole operation. But God’s cut-and-fill operation is already among us...
Jesus is reminding us that no matter how broken things seem, nothing is so broken that God can’t make something beautiful out of the brokenness. There is no soil so ruined that God isn’t willing to toss another seed on it. There is no sinner so sinful that God can’t make a saint out of them.Frederick Buechner said that the grace of God is the declaration that beautiful and terrible things will happen but we need not be afraid because God will be with us, always.Advent, as we’ve been saying, is the time when time gets confused. We look backward, forward, and everywhere in between. But one thing that endures through time is the hope we have in the Lord. It’s that hope that sustains us through what is coming upon the world. The time being really is the most trying time of all, but we can look straight into the darkness because we know the dawn will break from on high.
It’s interesting, I think, how almost no one in the New Testament self identifies as a Christian. In fact, the label of being a Christian is a public one. That is, it is applied to those in the church by the world because the world can’t make sense of what the church is doing.Today we take the practice of generosity as rather ubiquitous, particularly at this time of year, but in the first century it was inconceivable. And so, when people outside the church saw these individuals who were selling their possessions to help the poor, and people opening up their homes and tables to those who had no homes and had no food, they couldn’t wrap their heads around it. What kind of people would do such a thing? People who worship the King named Jesus.
By the power of Christ, through cross and resurrection, we are forgiven. More pertinently YOU are forgiven. That’s the heart of the gospel and it’s why people like me won’t shut up about it.But when I tell you you’re forgiven, whether from the pulpit or at the table, it’s not because you’ve somehow wiped your slate clean, or gotten all your ducks in a row. I am simply encouraging you to open your eyes to what you already have. To become what you already are: forgiven. The great gift of ministry is that I don’t have to stand day after day, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. Instead I get to share the Good News, “your sins are remembered no more,” and then I get a front row seat to the power of the Gospel at work.
Grief isn’t something to be fixed or gotten rid of. To deny our grief is to deny our humanity. The best we can ever do for others in their grief is just be there, to manifest the love that refuses to let them go. And the best we can ever do when we experience grief is exactly that - experience it. Weep and be angry and let it happen.Because that’s what Jesus does.Jesus, knowing full and well that he can make all well, still weeps at the grave of his friend. And it’s not just the tears, Jesus gets angry in his grief. There is nothing in this life that we experience that is beyond God’s knowledge. God knows our sorrow and our grief and our anger. When Jesus raises his clenched fist, when he lets the tears go, he does so with every person who has ever known loss.It's as the old hymn says: What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! Can we find a friend so faithful who will all our sorrows share.Jesus grieves, and Jesus grieves with us.
It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.At tea time, everybody agrees.I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror.It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.Who knew Taylor Swift was so Pauline?Even with all the accolades, all the money, all the power, all the influence, she sings of a life that is simul justus et peccator.In Paul’s letter, as he gets his Swiftie on, sees his own inner anti-hero, he crescendos to these words: “Wretched that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”And notice, Paul doesn’t ask “What will deliver me?” There’s no program of spiritual development or improvement that can overcome this inner turmoil. There is no what that can deliver. There is only a who.And the who has a name: Jesus.The proclamation of the Gospel is that Jesus jumps into the pit with us to show us the way out. Jesus climbs the hard wood of the cross on our behalf. Jesus rewrites our biographies so that they mirror his own. Jesus stands to be judged in our place. Jesus baptizes us into his death so that we rise into his life.To put it rather pointedly: Jesus becomes the sinner atop the cross so that we become saints in him. That’s why Paul can make such a bold declaration like there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Jesus sets us free from the law of sin and death. To use language from Taylor Swift, even when we’re left to our own devices with prices and vices that end up in crisis, they are no match for the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
Preaching is foolishness, Paul says, because lofty words of wisdom and grandeur do not bring us closer to God. Instead, God comes close to us. So close, in fact, that we have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. Which means who only really know who we are in relation to, and because of, who Jesus is. We can develop and put on all sorts of identities and qualities. But our primary identity, the outfit with which we've been clothed, is Jesus. We live in Christ and Christ lives in us...
God’s grace is unmerited, undeserved, and untakeawayable.The offering plate is too small for God’s gift to us. God doesn’t give us 10%. No, God gives us everything. The whole kit and caboodle. For God is the gift.This is the Gospel, the goodest part of the Good News: God gives and gives and gives. God seeks and seeks and seeks. God forgives and forgives and forgives.
The strange theological truth is that the world does revolve around us. I know that’s a dangerous thing to say, particularly in a time in which narcissism is on the rise and the evidence of our destructive tendencies toward Creation are all too apparent… But there’s an important distinction - the cosmos is ours not so that it might serve selfish ends, of course, but that, through creation God might delight in us.Perhaps that’s why God tells our first parents to have dominion over Creation and not domination. Domination would mean we get to do whatever we want whenever we want. Dominion is different. Dominion is a responsibility for this wondrous gift we’ve been given.
The church isn’t supposed to do or make anything. We’re not a factory or a company. We’re the church. We’re in the business of being. All the doing or making we’ve ever needed has been done and made by Jesus.
The witness of the church, straight from the lips of the Lord (and Paul), is that there is always a space for you in this place of grace because our differences make us the church. We have eyes and ears and fingers and toes. We have friends and family and strangers and foes.In other words, the church is an antidote to the loneliness of the world, and the loneliness that far too many of us experience. It’s here, among this body, that we learn of our shared story, that we are not alone, and that we are valued not because of what we can do, but because of who we are.The church opens us up to a future we cannot conceive on our own. It trains us in the habits of gratitude for one another. And it sets us free to delight in diversity.
Remembering your baptism, whether you actually remember it or not is just the same as taking time to consider who loved you into being. In baptism you enter into the oneness of the community of faith we call the church, in which you are surrounded by people who care about you and want the best for you. In baptism, your eyes and ears are opened to those whom God delights sending into your life just for you. We say that the Good News of the Gospel is for the world which is true - but it's also just for you. You. Regardless of who you are, whether or not you even understand it, whether or not you are a good and pious person. God loves you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Ephesians 4.1-6 & Deuteronomy 6.4-9Jesus offers us an alternative epistemology: Love God and love your neighbor. Paint those words on your doors, talk about them with your kids, get them printed on stickers and adhere them to your water bottles.Unlike what the world tells us over and over again: think for yourself, make your own way, don’t worry about anyone except yourself… Jesus frees us from having to bear the burden of everything. In the Kingdom of God ’tis better to receive than to achieve.You see, the Shema, even as a commandment is actually a gift, a gift just like the one that we will shortly receive at the table. It is a new way of knowing, and of being known, that helps us makes sense of this strange world. And we make sense of it together..."
God is not sitting idly by, far away, waiting for us to pray. Prayer isn’t putting pressure on God, or persuading God. It’s not about getting God’s attention, or changing God’s mood.God’s mood toward us never changes. God yearns for a world that looks more like the kingdom than all of this. That’s why God gives us these songs to sing and prayers to pray. That’s why God give us Jesus, to embody the new future so that we see what we’re actually praying for...
Psalm 51.1-12Confession is often nothing more than telling the truth about ourselves to ourselves, to one another, and to God. The community of faith that confesses is not a church without sin (for there is no such thing), instead the church that confesses is a church without secrets. And yet, it’s important to talk about what we talk about when we confess. For, confession has nothing to do with getting ourselves forgiven. It’s not a transaction, it’s not a negotiation in order to secure mercy, it’s not the first step on the road to perfection. Confession is the last step - it’s what happens when we are finally able to confront the truth: we are not as we ought to be, and yet we worship the Lord who looks beyond what we've done to what's been done for us by Jesus.
Exodus 3.1-6Prayer is what happens to us when we encounter the inconceivable surprise of living - it is a conversation born out of the realization, just as Moses discovered in the burning bush, that God is with us, always.
John 21.20-25John doesn’t earn his belovedness. He’s not the lovable disciple - he’s the beloved disciple. He doesn’t do anything better than the other twelve, he’s not striving after the gold medal of morality or the sanctity of spirituality. He is simply called to a life that he would not have had on his own, and he has fun along the way...
Luke 5.1-11Jesus knows full and well what a mess Peter is and still calls him anyway. Jesus should’ve absolutely left Peter on the shore that fateful morn, but instead calls him to a life of discipleship that conveys the freedom to be wrong.And it is a freedom. Consider how many of our relationships have faltered if not floundered because we can’t accept wrongness. Think about how many institutions are founded on the fundamental failure to see that we all mess up at some point. Imagine how different our church, or community, or even our world, would be if we took seriously the truth - we are all like Peter, and Jesus never gives up on us. In fact, the only thing Jesus gives Peter is the same thing that Jesus gives to all of us: grace.
Mark 4.35-41Music is perhaps the greatest technology of the heart, and singing in particular. To lift our voices together is to stand against the disorder of the world. Notice: singing is not a denial of reality. The Moravians on the boat with Wesley weren’t singing in order to pretend like the waves weren’t beating down upon them. No, they were singing because they knew how the story ends - they had seen the whole picture.So too, we stand and sing not out of naiveté, but because we know not all is as it ought to be. We sing in defiance of the wind and the waves because we know, deep down, that God is going to get us to the other side. It might not be pretty. And it certainly won’t go according to plan. But God will get us to the other side because God will always stay by our side...
Mark 4.26-34In the end the parables are stories that Jesus tells about himself. He is the Good Shepherd off in search of the lost, he is the fatted calf sacrificed for the party, on and on. And the branches of his kingdom are a place of grace for everyone.Grace, as Frederick Buechner was apt to say, is something you can never get but only be given. There’s no way to earn it, or deserve it, or bring it about, anymore than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream, or earn good looks, or bring about your own birth. And a crucial eccentricity to our faith is that we are saved by grace, by God’s action toward us in the person of Jesus Christ. There’s nothing you have to do, there’s nothing you have to do, there’s nothing you have to do. Which means grace might seem like a small thing, but Jesus does a lot with a little...
Mark 3.20-35The church is where God assembles us to imagine and day dream about how beautiful the world could be.It’s wild stuff really. It always has been. That people like me can stand up in a place like this and say “Welcome home.” Or: “I declare the entire forgiveness of all your sins.” Or: “You are loved beyond measure.” I sound like I’m out of my mind! But such is the power of God’s grace, it calls into existence things that do not exist, it creates a community where strangers become sisters and others become brothers, a family, where there is always a place for you no matter what.It sounds impossible - but God does God’s best work in the realm of impossible possibility.
Mark 2.23-3.6Jesus has a word for all of us. A word of gospel rather than a word of law. A word of relief rather than expectation. Jesus says, 'Stretch out your hand.'Whatever it is you’ve done, or left undone, it is no match for the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. Stretch out your hand. Come to the altar to receive the one thing needful, the body and the blood. You are more than your worst mistake or your last slip up. Stretch out your hand. Take hold of the Good News of salvation, this is the day that the Lord has made and we are here to rejoice and be glad in it. Stretch out your hand.
Psalm 29The church has a word of relief, and that word is the Gospel. It’s a very countercultural word, one that threatens to undo everything we think we know about what we think we know.The church can be safe and secure, unthreatening, unassuming, with our pews bolted to the ground, where we mutter and muster an 'Amen' only once in a blue moon.But God will not let us remain as such. The Spirit will start stirring things up through songs and scriptures and sermons to remind us that God is God and we are not. Jesus will speak right into our heart of hearts the story of salvation and we won’t be able to help ourselves from shouting “Glory!
Acts 2.1-12To be a Christian is not so much having a certain set of beliefs that give meaning to our lives. Instead, to be a Christian is to be initiated into a community with practices and habits that actually transform our lives.Which is just another way of saying, we only ever learn what it means to be Christians by watching other Christians and doing what they do. To be Christian means being together. Which, of course, isn’t easy. After Pentecost, the story of Acts tells of the great challenge of being the church. The church stand for, preaches, and speaks the language of the heart that runs completely counter to the language of the world. The world worships the first, the greatest, the found, the big, and the alive.God comes for the last, least, lost, little and dead.The world runs on deception and destruction.The Spirit conveys grace and mercy.The world is full to the brim with bad news.Jesus comes bringing Good News.On Pentecost, the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, the tall and the small, the sinners and the saints, the found and the forgotten. Not because we earned it or deserved it. But because we needed it.And we still do...
John 17.11-19Jesus' prayer in John 17 is rather unlike the compact prayer that he taught the disciples to pray, that prayer we will all pray later in worship. The theologian NT Wright says this very long prayer of Jesus is “so rich that we may choke on it unless we chew it slowly.”One of the people who has chewed slowly on this text is Brian Zahnd. Brian is a gifted writer and the pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. He’s got this knack for focusing the Gospel into bite size pieces.Like this:“God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus. We have not always known what God is like - but now we do.”
Psalm 22.25-31 & John 15.1-8The odd proclamation of the Gospel is that there is no hope in us. We are all withering branches in need of some pruning and care. We’re all sinners. We’re all incompatible with the Messiah because we tend to make such a mess of his message.But that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay because Jesus comes to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He says, Abide in me as I am in you. All of you.God meets us where we are, not where we ought to be. That’s the difference between the bad news of religion and the Good News of the Gospel...
Psalm 23 & John 10.1-18The first task of a Christian is not to forgive, but to learn to be forgiven.
Luke 24.36b-48I don’t know the last time you took a stroll through the strange new world of the Bible, but let me tell you, it is strange! It tells of cosmic creation, rainbowed repentance, kaleidoscopic covenants, profound prophets, geriatric geniuses, sacred psalms, liturgical litanies, paradoxical poems, and one heck of a messy Messiah.What begins on the day of Easter, and is continued through the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of the early church, is the stark claim that knowing the scriptures does little good unless we know it as part of a people constituted by the practices of a resurrected Lord. In other words: our faith is always faith seeking understanding...
Psalm 133 & John 20.10-31The story of Thomas seemingly ends with his triumphant and faithful declaration: "My Lord and My God!" But John isn’t quite finished. For he actually concludes with a strange note about how “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.” But, John continues, “These are written so that you may come to believe, to trust, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through faith you may have life.”Do you see? Faith is a gift given to people like us. And it makes people like us exactly what Thomas insisted he required to belief. This wondrous church, this body of Christ, wounded and weary, bold and beautiful, we are what the world beholds and knows that Jesus is the something more they’ve been looking for.
Matthew 26.17-30Music has this almost magic quality to it. It can bring forth emotions we did not know we had, or that we did not know we needed to feel. God uses the songs we sing to remind us who we are and whose we are.And the same happens here at the table. We do this in remembrance not only because we are commanded to, but also because, in so doing, we become Jesus’ memory for the world. The Eucharist is the feast that makes Christ’s time the time in which we live. A time meant for singing. And so, it is here in this ferocious fellowship of differents God says, “Behold what you are! And become what you receive.”
Matthew 21.1-10One of the craziest parts of what is already one of the craziest parts of the Bible, is the fact that, on Palm Sunday, Jesus doesn’t say anything.Have you ever noticed that before? It’s a bit odd coming from the one who has lots to say in his Sermon on the Mount, the one who parades out parables every chance he gets. Jesus doesn’t say anything while the crowds say everything.And when Jesus doesn’t meet their exceptions, when he doesn’t meet our expectations, the result is the cross...
Matthew 6.25-34It is to a people obsessed with themselves, with too much and too little, that Jesus speaks this powerful word: Why are you so worried about what you eat and drink? About what you wear and how you look? Look at the birds of the air. They are not terrified of these things. Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? Consider the lilies of the field! They neither toil nor spin and they are more gorgeous than anything you have in the closet. You need not worry about these things because your worry is eating you alive. Your heavenly Father knows what you need, and it is to you that the kingdom is given.The proclamation of the Gospel is that we need not worry, like the birds or the lilies, because God provides. But our desire to live lives without fear cannot but help create a world of fear because we are told, and often believe, there is never enough.Which is perhaps why, for millennia, the church has insisted on reminding people of these words from Jesus. The songs we sing and the sermons we receive and the sacraments we share all declare that we have worth and value. We say what we say in the church because the world is always trying to convince us of the contrary, both implicitly and explicitly. From our bosses, spouses, friends, and foes, from the advertisements, videos, movies, and shows.You’re too fat. You’re too skinny. You’re too stupid. You’re too slow. You’re too bold. You’re too shy. On and on we are bombarded with the words of the World.And then Jesus says, “You are enough. You are wonderfully made. You are beloved as you are.”
Matthew 26.14-16A rich man comes up to Jesus and he says, “Teacher, I follow all of the commands of God. What more must I do to inherit eternal life?”And Jesus, looking on the man with compassion, says, “Because I love you, how about you try selling everything you have, give the proceeds to the poor, and then you can follow me”The man walks away from Jesus, grieving, because he has many possessions.As far as I can tell, this is the only time in the strange new world of the Bible that Jesus invites someone into discipleship and they turn it down.The story doesn’t end there, of course. Jesus goes on to talk about how difficult it is for those who are wealthy to enter the kingdom of heaven. As difficult, in fact, as it would be for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.What a wondrous moment in the Gospel! It is quick to makes us squirm sufficiently in our seats. It is an uncomfortable word to hear because we, compared to the rest of the world, are rich beyond imagining, and then Jesus drops this word on us.And yet, there’s still more to the story! Peter, wondrous Peter, raises his hand after Jesus rebukes the wealthy, and says, “If that rich guy can’t be saved, even though he follow the entire law, then who can?”And Jesus says, “What is impossible for humans, is possible for God.”In the end, we worship the God who saves sinners, who can raise the dead, who can even diminish our greed, because nothing is impossible for God.
Matthew 26.36-46“Thy will be done” is the enemy of sloth. It’s the recognition that though we might not have eyes to see any new possibilities, we worship the God of impossible possibility, who makes all things new.“Thy will be done” sets us on an adventure in which we never quite know what the future holds, but we do know who holds the future. Perhaps that’s why Jesus is forever telling parables about those who fall asleep, and why he is forever commanding the disciples to wake up. When it comes to the Gospel, the only thing we have to do is wake up to God’s new possibilities, God’s new day, God’s new way. “Thy will be done.”
Matthew 21.12-17Contrary to the witness of John Mayer, we don’t have to wait on the world to change. We can pray for it. But we shouldn’t be surprised if, while praying for the world to change, God starts the work by changing us.
Matthew 20.1-16Grace, when it is so freely offered to any and all comers, without any regard to merit, seems downright irresponsible. Even when the truth of the matter is that grace being offered to me is no more or less miraculous that it is to someone who walks through the door at the last second.Grace is only grace because it is given to those who don’t deserve it. Which, in the end, includes each and every one of us.Envy, on the other hand, is all about keeping score, holding on to the ledger book in our minds, noticing who did what and for how long. Whereas Jesus’ story, and every other parable for that matter, is the proclamation that God has gotten out of the score-keeping business forever.
Mark 6.1-6The rest of the world, uninformed of the story that gives meaning to our stories, considers Pride to be an essential characteristic for living. We, on the other hand, are taught to be suspicious of pride.For pride often leads to us to believe that we are better than everyone else.Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them, Jesus warns. He continues by ripping apart the religious practices of those who pray in public for public praise, and those who show off their fasting for prideful gain. All that Jesus lists falls into the category of self-justification, self! It’s like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable who does all the right things so well that he’s wrong. “Well, at least I’m not like that degenerate over there” is merely a projection of our self-inflated righteousness and a denial of our sinful truthfulness.Lent, for better and worse, is a season of accusation. It is a time for us to hear who we really are. And it begins with ashes. Ashes, of course, are a sign of finitude and frailty and failure. But more important than the ashes themselves is the fact that we receive them in the shape of a cross...
Revelation 21.1-6Notice: it is not just a new heaven that John sees, but a whole new earth. Revelation, then, is the final declaration that matter matters.Remember, whenever Jesus waxes lyrical about the kingdom of heaven, he does so with earthy and earthly terms. The kingdom is like a mustard seed, it is like yeast mixed with flour, it is like a party with food and wine and dancing.Remember, when Jesus is resurrected on Easter, he returns to the displaces embodied, sharing food and drink, the incarnated Good News. Remember, when the church grows during the Acts of the Apostles, it’s not because they were pining after the pie in the sky after they die, but it grows because Christians took seriously the material world and how the sharing of goods could make life better for others.On earth as it is in heaven. Do you see? Revelation reminds us that the new heaven and the new earth isn’t just something that will happen, it is something that happens right now. We have access to how beautiful the world could be in water and bread and cup.
Acts 2.1-4 & Romans 16.25-27The Bible is, as Barth loved to say, the strange new world of God. With every page we discover more and more about the wild and wondrous God we worship. And in no place is this more evident than the Acts of the Apostles, and the various epistles. For, the eruption of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost sends reverberations through the church that we are still feeling today.God is on the loose!
Mark 1.1 & Mark 16.1-8“When the church stops talking about Jesus, it has nothing left to say.” - Sam Wells
Genesis 12.1-3 & Malachi 3.1-2The Good News of the Gospel for each and every single one of us, is that God meets us in the midst of our sins, not our successes. God meets us where we are, not where we ought to be.Israel’s story, both the person and the people, reminds us that God comes to us in our weariness and our woundedness. God delights in keeping up the covenant even when we fail to do our part. Ultimately we are as helpless as Israel, hobbling around with our hips out of joint. We can run away as far as we can for as long as we can, but one day God will catch up with us. God will grab hold of us. And God will tell us who we are...
Genesis 1.1-5Imagine, one day, you receive a strange delivery. A trunk. It’s heavy and you can feel and hear all manner of objects inside tossing about as you drag it inside. You open it and discover a great cacophony of items. Inventories. Diaries. Poems. Creative writing assignments. Blueprints. Photographs. Letters. Various genealogical records. Drawings. And on top of it all is a note from your great-great grandfather. All it says is, “This is who I am.”The Bible is like that treasure trove of a trunk, given to us by God, in order that we might know more about the One in whom we live and move and have our being.
Luke 2.1-14Christmas is not just about remembering an event in the distant past.Christmas is the celebration of a miracle in our midst. Christmas isn’t just where we come from, Christmas is who we are, here and now.Yes, it is finished, as Jesus says from the cross. Easter is the exclamation point on a sentence that begins long before the Incarnation of Christmas. But our knowledge of this power, our knowledge of salvation, our faith in the grace made flesh is Jesus in a miracle that has meaning for us in this very moment.As Martin Luther preacher in many of his own Christmas sermons, “The nativity of our Lord happens again and again everywhere the Gospel strikes at the heart of a person.”In other words, despite what the Grinch might realize by the end of his story, Christmas is actually about the presents, or at least the present of this present moment.
Luke 1.67-80The scriptures, the sermons, the songs, they are all about getting us to catch a hint of God’s more, a glimpse of the light that shines in the darkness. Dr. Seuss got it right - Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more.
Luke 1.46-55The incarnation is not God’s last minute hail Mary (pun intended) to fix the world. It is, was, and always will be God’s decision to dwell with us. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. God was always going to dwell with us because God always dwells with us and God will always dwell with us.And yet, Mary's song threatens those in the positions and places of power because it calls into question their power. Long before the cross stands on the horizon, Mary’s song reminds those with ears to hear that her Son’s kingdom is not of this world. Things are getting flipped upside down. Which sounds like Good News when you’re on the bottom, but bad news when you’re on the top...
Luke 1.26-38The One born to Mary comes to embody a peaceful way of being that transcends all of what we think or know because Jesus takes us from where we are to where we can be.Mary, in receiving the visit of Gabriel and the promise he holds, goes from nobody to somebody, blessed, fortunate, given a job to do in the story of salvation. Even in her ordinariness, her youth, her singleness, perhaps her embarrassment and consternation, she is called by God anyway, singled out to bear the savior of the world into the world.This is why Mary is often referred to as the first disciple. She is the first to be called by God to take part in the good news-ing of the world. And she is the first, when called by God in this way, to say, "Let thy will be done."Notably, she prays that prayer long before her Son does.Mary has faith.Perhaps therein lies the Good News for all of us today. We don’t need the perfect holy resume, we don’t have to come from the right family, or have the right job, or the right income. Lowly as we are, God chooses us anyway.How unexpected.
Luke 1.5-20The season of Advent gives us permission to rest in the silliness of salvation, in the wild and wondrous ways God chooses the strangest people and the strangest means to bring about the Good News for a world filled with bad news. God will arrive in the manger, and God will come again, whether we deserve it or not. In fact, God did and will do this because we don’t deserve it - We need it.God’s got the gift, the only thing we need is the hope.
Ephesians 1.15-23With the world moving on from the turkey to the trimming and the trappings of Christmas, today the church pauses the frenetic pace of the season and asks the question, “Who’s in charge here?”
Revelation 21.1-5We do what we do now in anticipation of what will come; we live according to God’s future - the new heaven and the new earth. Which means that whatever heaven is, whatever the resurrection of the body is, it will be like this life, only different...
Matthew 18.21-35The title for this sermon is "Preaching What We Practice." Which is, of course, a flipping of practicing what we preach. For, it seems as though we imagine that’s the purpose of the church - We exist to tell people like you how you’re supposed to be living. If that’s true, if that’s the point of the church, then I should end this sermon by telling you to go out into the world and forgive those who have wronged you.Which, is not a bad idea, but it’s just not the Gospel.The Gospel is not the story of what we’re supposed to do. The Gospel is the story of what God has already done...
Luke 14.15-23There is a strange and beautiful value in looking out at the beloved community we call church and seeing the ragtag reality behind it. In the same way, there is something downright wonderful about seeing a bunch of sinners, and observing the communion of saints within and behind them.We have a word for this. A strange word. A word not often said aloud but absolutely definitive when it comes to the church - Koinonia...
The Holy Spirit is always full of surprises, full of creativity, full of force. The Spirit goes wherever she wants, unsought, maybe even unwanted, intent on making all things new.You see, that’s what Pentecost is all about. A whole new creation. Just as the Spirit hovered over the waters in Genesis bringing forth order out of chaos, the Spirit blows through the upper room upending their orderliness for something exciting and something new.It has always been the nature of the Spirit to shake up the church, particularly when the church becomes too self-satisfied and content with the status quo...
Philippians 2.5-11Stanley Hauerwas is known for his anger. He is angry, like Jesus in the Temple, because he finds himself surrounded by Christians for whom Jesus no longer makes any difference, Christians who move and live in the world regardless of whether Jesus rose from the dead.He, that is Hauerwas, notes that his anger stems mostly from the great number of pastors who fail to challenge their churches to trust that without God, nothing is possible. In other words, if Jesus is not raised from the dead, if Jesus is not at the center of every single thing we do as a church, then we are wasting our time.
Genesis 1.1-5I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. There’s a reason we affirm the Creed week after week. It tells the story that gives meaning to all of our stories. For, we worship the Almighty God for whom nothing is impossible. The maker of all things, even us. And chaos, even the empty void, is no match for the One in whom we live and move and have our being. As the old hymn says: Summer and winter, and spring time and harvest, sun, moon and starts in their courses above, join with all nature in manifold witness to Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.
Exodus 17.1-7We are saved not by our excellent decision making, nor by our decisive dogmatics, nor by our presumptive power. We are saved not by our degrees, or our progeny, or our bank accounts. Only God can do what we cannot.The Good News of the Gospel is that when our abilities fail us, our knowledge, minds, patience, health, career, family, sanity, there is always a source of water in the dry and parched land of our lives. In other words, when we have the fortitude to admit that all sorts of goodness has come our way even though we’re not really that good, when we can admit that we’re sinners saved by the amazing grace of God, then things start to change...
The opposite of faith isn’t doubt, it’s control. The story of the manna is also the story of learning how to be out of control.Which might be why faith is such a challenge. For, from the time we are little children, we are fed a different story - that we have to be in control, that we have to be masters of our own destiny, that we have to make a way where there is no way. In short, we think we have to be God. But God is God, and we are not. God is the one who saves us, because we cannot save ourselves. Left to our own devices we can’t see beyond what we had in Egypt. We fall prey to the myth of empire and the foolishness of our own control.But here, in the wilderness, God says to the Israelites and to all of us, "You can let go. Open up your clenched fists of self-righteousness. Stretch out your hands and receive the gift. I have what you need, and what you need is far more important than what you want..."
Exodus 14.19-31The salvation made possible by the Good News means being saved from something, and for something. Just as the Israelites were saved from Egypt, they were also saved for a new kind of radical living witness to the power of God. Just like we have been saved from the powers of sin and death, we have also been saved for a new kind of living that calls into question the powers and principalities in this life...
The great and wondrous news from scripture is that death is not the end. Which means that whatever mess we make in this life, it is no match for the only One who can do anything about it. Just as God delivered God’s people out of their bondage to slavery in Egypt through the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb, so too God delivers us out of our bondage to death through the sacrifice of Jesus, our Passover Lamb.
Perhaps that’s why its important to remember what the word Exodus means. Exodus is not a journey or a vacation. Exodus literally means, “the way out.”
Therefore, whatever we can say about Passover, of it’s many strange and bewildering requirements and details, we can say this: on that night, God’s people were saved by the blood. They were given a way out.
And so are we...
God calls all of us like God calls Moses. God has plans and desires and hopes for all of us, all of you. Some big, some small, but vital all. And here’s the Good News - you don’t have to be carrying saints to be part of God’s mission in the world. You don’t have to have all the right scriptures memorized, or pray the perfect prayers, or read all the important theology. If you need anything, it’s just a little imagination, a delight in wonder, and the capacity to be surprised by what God is up to, and what God might be up to with you.So kick off your shoes. Open your eyes and open your ears. The burning bush is calling for you...
Romans 12.1-8
"Paul is addressing Roman Christians as people who have been released from the captivity to Sin by God’s action in Jesus Christ. Having been set free from this oppression, Paul empowers them to act, to respond, to do something. Present yourselves to God.
And it all hinges on the therefore.
Any time we encounter a therefore, whether in scripture or in life, we need to know what the therefore is there for. The word signals that what comes next depends on what came before.
Everything that has come before the therefore has been about God’s doing. God gets all the good verbs. Despite our culture’s constant emphasis on making our own destinies or picking ourselves up by our own bootstraps, Romans (and all of scripture for that matter) proclaims quite the opposite..."
Romans 11.1-2a, 29-32
Paul, as the church moves and grows, is rattling the cages of our prisons to disobedience with the Gospel. It’s as if he is saying that God makes sure we all experience what it means to be on the outside, so that God can be the one to open the door and welcome us back in.
God, like the prodigal father, comes to find us in the streets of life with mercy before we even have a chance to say we’re sorry. God, like the prodigal father, is willing to throw a party on our behalf because we are lost and we are found.
God has imprisoned all in disobedience, that God may be merciful to all.
I’m not sure why Jesus left it up to preachers to share this news. For preachers, one and all, are a bunch of nobodies, sinners with no hope of their own, scoundrels most of the time.
But then again, preaching isn’t something that preachers do, it’s what God does through us.
The word of faith that draws near to you even right now in this very moment is not because of anything you have done, and certainly not because of what I bring to the table, but, as Paul says, only because it pleases God through the foolishness of what we preach to save those who believe.
The church has always been a place for truth, but that doesn’t mean we’ve always liked it. When push comes to shove we’d rather consider and contemplate our successes than our sins. And yet, the knowledge and confession that each of us is a sinner in need of God’s mercy can be weirdly and wonderfully comforting. For, it gives us the freedom from pretending to be people we aren’t.
The writer Anne Lamott puts it this way, 'Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are.'
Baptism, like communion, is not something to be mastered, comprehended, or understood. We can’t wrap our heads around it any more than we can figure out why certain songs give us goosebumps, or why sometimes our laughter leads to tears.
Some things, in fact some of the very best things, are mysterious. Maybe that’s what makes them great. The challenge comes with resting in the mystery while the world values nothing but certainty.
Paul is begging us to see that the key to our salvation isn’t positive thinking or more morality or healthier habits. The key to our salvation is Jesus! Our salvation is God’s grace made manifest in the One who frees us from the delusion that we have to save ourselves.
The church isn’t in the religion business. Instead, the church is in the Gospel-proclaiming business. All of this, the scriptures, prayers, songs, preaching, it’s not about bringing the bad news that God will only look kindly upon us when we finally get our acts together.
Instead, everything we do here is about bringing the great Good News that while we were sinners, Christ died for the ungodly. In the midst of our faults and failures, Jesus rescues us.
Over the years, Paul’s writings and teachings have been often summarized as, “Become what you already are!” And for good reason. In baptism we are deadened with Christ that we might rise with Christ. In communion we put God inside of us that we might be more like Christ and less like ourselves. We are already defined by the grace of God, and nothing can ever take that away. Nothing.
Paul says the Law brings wrath, but the Gospel sets free. Doing all of the right things, and knowing the right people, and making the right choices, sounds wonderful in principal, but turns out to be impossible. We can’t make ourselves righteous, we can’t rectify ourselves, we can’t redeem ourselves.
Thankfully, God is completely caught up in the work of doing things we could never do ourselves by giving life to the dead and calling into existence the things that do no exist.
No matter what we do or leave undone God continues to hand over the Good News through letters, songs, preachers, and pulpits until our hearts are strangely warmed and we know, deep in the marrow of our souls, that Christ has taken away our sins, even ours, and has saved us from the law of sin and death.
Pentecost is the promise that we don't have to build a tower into the sky to get close to God; God has come to us.The arrival of the Holy Spirit means we are no longer defined by our mistakes, but only by God’s grace.
The movement that Jesus begins, the adventure of faith we call church, is constituted by people who know we have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatience, by cross and resurrection. The gift of the Ascension, of Christ’s ruling at the right hand of God, is the reminder that we can wait and pray. It’s a gift!
Paul writes to the church in Rome that faith comes from what is heard and what it heard comes through the preaching of Christ. The story has the power to change everything.It changed everything for Paul! The man who agreed to the stoning of Stephen now stands surrounded by stones that invoke his proclamation. He is compelled to preach in order to set the people free and bring about the end of religion.That’s an odd way to put it. But Christianity isn’t a religion. Or, at least, it’s not supposed to be. Religion, properly understood, is a set of habits, practices, or tradition that are done in order to achieve something, usually from the divine. Basically, if you do x then your god will do y.Christianity, however, is the Good News. It is something told to us about what is already finished. Christianity frees us from all the shoulds and musts that we might turn to the Lord who first turned toward us in Jesus Christ.
The story of the Gospel is a promise that no one is outside the realm of God’s mercy, that the worst thing is never the last thing, that grace is greater than our sin.
Living for other people is a completely radical and bonkers idea. Getting rid of possessions so that others can benefit is a wild and far cry from how things are supposed to work. Holding all things in common isn’t normal.It’s therefore not surprising that the disciples in Acts constantly find themselves in trouble - the kind of conflicts that John Lewis called good trouble.It’s good trouble because the church is, was, and always will be counter-cultural. All of these things described in Acts sound like the beginnings of a political revolution.We just have another word for it: Gospel.
The Gospel has a way of digging itself in, commingling with all of our thoughts about how things are supposed to be. The Good News declares that God has changed everything, we only need to act accordingly.In short - the people are moved to move upon hearing the story. That’s what the word “repent” means after all, it’s a turning or a returning to something.And that something has a name: Jesus.
It’s a confounding image to take in - these ragtag disciples tripping over themselves in the streets, drunk on the Spirit. It must’ve garnered quite the crowd. However, none of the twelve, Peter included, had much to show for themselves. No exceptional credentials, no fabulous degrees from Jerusalem University, no financial capital to invest.They have nothing, really.Nothing except a message.And, thankfully, the message is always greater than her messengers...
Notice: On Easter, Jesus’ response to the sins of his followers isn’t to berate them or judge them or even damn them. He doesn’t give them a list of things to do, or programs to start, or even prayers to pray.Instead, he just comes back to them, to us, with love.How odd of God.Easter invites us to do nothing more than trust that the Good News really is that good - that God in Christ refuses to abandon us regardless of how good or bad we may be.If Easter becomes anything less bizarre than that, then we can’t call it the Gospel.
Perhaps a night like tonight would be easier to handle had Jesus offered himself to the eleven but not to Judas. Maybe it would sit better with us if Jesus had drawn the line between those who are in and those who are out.But no, there’s our Lord caressing the feet of his betrayer, who will shortly use those feet to march out of the room and deliver Jesus to death. Maybe this is Jesus’ way of parabolically embodying another commandment - to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.If we assume that being Christian is somehow synonymous with do-goodery, victorious virtue, and modest morality, then this night is a rather robust rebuttal. If we think that, as Christians, we sit at Jesus’ table with clean hands and a spotless resume, if we think that our feet are washed because of our good behavior, well, then we’re wrong.John is begging us to see the scene, to take it all in, the feet, the hands, the hope, the loss, all of it. It’s a ringing reminder from the strange new world of the Bible that Jesus came to seek and to save sinners and only sinners. Or, as Robert Farrar Capon wonderfully put it, even the worst stinker in the world is someone for whom Christ died...
Karl Barth once said that “To clasp our hands in prayer is a beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” When Jesus enters the holy city the crowds sing their prayer, much like we sing and pray before we come to the Table: Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. Do you know what that word means? Hosanna? It means “Save us!”The crowds call for salvation, for Jesus to save them and, by the end of the week, that’s exactly what he does...
That Jesus teaches us how to pray is the wild declaration that God wants us to speak up, to voice our opinion, to ask for God’s intervention. And the claim of prayer is far more astonishing than we make it out to be as we mumble our way through the Lord's Prayer every week - the author of the cosmos listens and acts according to our prayers! Therefore, let us boldly pray prayers that are big enough that only God can bring them to fruition.
It’s one thing to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses,” and another thing entirely to add, “As we forgive those who trespass against us.”Forgiveness always comes at a cost - it’s not cheap and it isn’t easy. The hurt we experience is consequential. Therefore, when Jesus teaches us to pray this way, he’s not implying that we should shrug things off as if they don’t mean anything. It’s just that Jesus, through his life, death, and resurrection, refuses to let sin be the first and last word in our story.Instead, the first word and the last word is forgiveness.
We’ve said the Lord’s Prayer so many times in so many places with so many people that we often no longer think about what we say when we pray. And I think a similar sentiment is true of the Lord’s Supper. How many times have we come forward with our hands outstretched? How many times have we received the grace of God through food and drink? Enough that we know what we’re doing when we do so?The truth of the matter is that we do not know what we are doing. Not even the most theologically sophisticated among us knows what we’re doing. And that’s actually Good News. The disciples surely had no idea what they were getting into, and what was getting into them, when Jesus said, "This is my body and this is my blood."In the Eucharist we are confronted with a reality that confounds our speech. These things are more real than real. They cannot be contained by our words because they are the grace of God.Which is another way of saying: our most important business as a church happens at the table.
To pray “Your kingdom come” is to be willing to become part of a rather weird gathering of motley, mediocre, and messy people who were once considered outsiders but who have discovered their insiderness in Jesus.And yet, we pray for God’s kingdom to come because it is not yet here in its fullness. It’s the whole “already but not yet” thing. To be Christian is to be unsatisfied with the status quo, with how things are. We are unsatisfied because our faith is eschatological. That is, we are a people who insist on leaning into God’s future.
Jesus’ rebuke against practicing our piety publicly, particularly as we enter the season of Lent, it cuts straight to the heart. But sometimes that’s exactly what we need. Our hard-heartedness often renders us convinced that we have to earn our ticket to heaven whereas the crosses on our foreheads reminds us that heaven has already come to us. In the end, we are not called to be good, or virtuous, or even pious. We are called to be disciples. And discipleship is often nothing more than following Jesus toward the cross.The cross reminds us that we can’t fix ourselves. In any other place and any other institution that is unmitigated bad news. But here, in the church, it’s the Gospel. It’s good news because nobody, not the devil, not the world, not even ourselves can take us away from the love that refuses to let us go.
For some reason, we (that is preachers) like to take this miracle, and instead of focusing on it, we focus on Peter. We make our theology into anthropology. Focusing on Peter makes this extraordinary story ordinary, which undermines the miracle that is the Transfiguration!The Gospel isn’t found in Peter cowering on the mountain, and it’s certainly not in the idea of doing good works (which we all know we’re supposed to do whether or not we know the Christ on the mountaintop).The Gospel is Jesus Christ and him Transfigured.
The Law functions to drive us out of our propensity toward sinful self-sufficiency. That’s why Jesus preaches his offensive sermon. Otherwise, we are doomed to remain exactly as we are. And the Lord doesn’t arrive to keep things the same - the Lord arrives to make all things new. Including us. But there is no resurrection without crucifixion. Hence the expression: The Gospel can only make alive those whom the Law has killed.
The Gospel does not promise the possible - it deliver the impossible. The Gospel gives what the law demands.That’s why the love of God is strong enough to change things, even us.Or, as Luther put it: God accepts none except the abandoned, makes no one healthy but the sick, gives sight to none but the blind, brings life to none but the dead, and makes no one righteous except sinners.
Blessed are those whose anxieties overwhelm, who can barely muster the strength to make it through a day, for only those in need of help will be helped.Blessed are those who know not is as it should be and who yearn for things not yet seen, for that yearning is what we call hope, and hope does not disappoint.Blessed are those who don’t insist on getting what they deserve, otherwise they just might get it.Blessed are those who refuse to condemn others for what they do or leave undone, because they understand the parable of the publican and the Pharisee.Blessed are those who suffer for the sake of peace, for they already live according to the terms of the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who are mocked, hated, belittled, and beleaguered for the sake of their faith, for they rest in the shadow of the cross.
There’s a big difference, a huge difference, between trying to convince someone of the Gospel, and living according to the Gospel. For, living according to the Gospel, puts us in relationships with people we would otherwise ignore and, because God has a sense of humor, it usually results in someone seeing how we live and then asking, “Why are you the way you are?”And the answer, of course, is Jesus.
The Lamb of God brings a kingdom the world doesn’t want - the blood of the Lamb makes a difference and that difference means we are now different. God does not accept the current realities of the world. God is still contending against the powers and the principalities. God will get us to the Promised Land. It’s like God is saying to us today: “Come and see what I can do - come and see what we can do together! It’s going to be messy, but change always is.”
In the end, becoming and being a Christian is something done to us and for us before it is anything done by us.In other words: faith requires others. Just like baptism. Someone has to hold us, pray over the water, tell us about Jesus and the promise of what he has done, is doing, and will do. Someone has to model that faith, a whole life of faith. Otherwise, we would have no idea what we are baptized into.To know who Jesus is and what he means has got to come to us through others as a gift - a gift like grace.
There’s a story that passes around this time of year every year about a certain pageant and the child who played the innkeeper. For weeks and weeks all the children practiced their positions and their lines, they were ready. But when Christmas Eve arrived, and the little Mary, Joseph, and plastic Jesus arrived at the cardboard cut out entrance to the inn, they knocked on the door and the innkeeper froze. Little Mary kept repeating her line, “Please let us in. We’re cold and we really need a place to stay!” getting louder with each repetition. Until, finally, the innkeeper looked out into the congregation and said to the pageant coordinator, “I know I’m supposed to say, ‘No,’ but can I let them in anyway?”Kids get it.
The great joy of Christmas is that we do nothing to make it happen - Christmas happens to us. Even the biblical characters that we read and sing about, they are all so wildly passive in the story. They are recipients of God’s grace made manifest in the manger - just like us.
The world will tell us again and again and again that we are not worthy, that there is always more to do. Christmas tells us the opposite. God makes us worthy. There is nothing we have to do, except open our hands to the gift that is Jesus Christ. That is how the Good News works, it’s good news.
It’s rather extraordinary that we know the name of the Lord’s mother! And yet, even more extraordinary is the fact that God chose to come and make time for us, redeeming out time, and making possible the salvation that disrupts time forever. Our time is so redeemed because Mary’s son is Immanuel, God with us.No matter what.Whether we are on the naughty list or the nice list, God is with us.Whether we have gobs of presents under the tree, or if we haven’t had the time to get a tree at all, God is with us.Whether we have more Christmases ahead of us, or only a few left, God is with us.
Joy is what happens when we dare to trust the Lord to do for us that which we cannot do on our own.Joy is what happens when we are able to look at what we have, and had, and know that all of it, the good and the bad, came as a gift. Something rather than nothing.Joy is what happens whenever we encounter water in the midst of the deserts of our grief.
The promise of Advent is that new life always starts in the dark, whether in the womb or the tomb, whether underground or the lost being found; new life starts in the dark.
It was almost 100 years ago when Christians across the globe needed the first Christ the King Sunday. They needed a day set apart to reflect on how the Lordship of Christ outshines even the most devious dictators and the most devastating depressions.
Today, we need it just as much. We need Christ the King Sunday because it reminds us, beats upon us, that Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world. It forces us to confront the strange reality that our King rules from a cross. It compels us to hear the Good News, the very best news, the strangest news of all: Christ died for us while we were yet sinners; that proves God’s love toward us. In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!
Do you know what the mission of the church is? Our denomination says we exist to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. That’s fine. But it betrays the central claim of the Gospel: God has already transformed the world in the person of Jesus Christ!
The kingdom we live in is based upon what God has done and is doing for us, rather than upon what we do.
The church doesn’t have a mission - we are the mission. Our being is based on the presumption that we are witnesses first and foremost to Christ who is the difference that makes all the difference. We bear the marks of his life that gives life to us and others. Jesus has already made us different.
We, then, don’t exist to make changes, but living in the world made possible by the cross will, naturally, lead to transformation. It will lead to transformation because we embody the joy that comes from being part of Jesus’ body. It will lead to transformation because we can’t rest easy while the world is flushed down the toilet. It will lead to transformation because we know the truth (his name is Jesus) and that peace comes through weakness, not violence.
Blessed are those whose lives are an absolute mess, for God does God’s best with broken pieces.
Blessed are the humiliated, for they are on the journey to humility.
Blessed are the broken-hearted, for grace falls through the cracks.
Blessed are those who grieve, for what is grief if not love persevering?
Blessed are the last, least, lost, little, and dead, for to them the kingdom has been prepared.
Blessed are the forgivers, for, at the end of the day, what else is there?
But woe to you who think salvation is yours to earn through power, wealth, and pride, you will be disappointed.
Woe to the fat cats, there will come a time when you are empty.
Woe to those who think life goes on forever and ever, for you will die.
Therefore, live wild and reckless lives, for in so doing you will inherit the kingdom of God.
Love the unlovable.
Forgive the unforgivable.
If someone asks for food, invite them to your table.
If someone is in need of clothing, give them the jacket off your back. None of it was ever yours in the first place.
Love others the way you would like to be loved.
Whatever Christianity is, it is at least the discovery of friends we did not know we had. Friends who are possible only because Jesus has gathered us in for God’s great parable to the world we call the church. Friends who are willing to carry us to Jesus over and over again because Jesus is the difference that makes all the difference.
Flannery O’ Connor once said, “Most people come to the Church by means the church does not allow, else there would be no need their getting to her at all.”
Which is just another way of saying that Jesus meets us where we are, not where we ought to be. But then Jesus takes us somewhere else.
Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, not our money or lack of it, not our possessions or our minimalism, not our goodness or our badness, not our lives and not even our deaths. We might not see it, or even believe it, but there is greater wealth in the salvation of Christ than in every bank account in the world. And it’s ours for free. We can’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. It’s not cheap, nor is it expensive. It’s free. It’s free for you and me and every fool the world will ever see.
A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the claim that salvation does not come to us by natural inclination, by birthright, by earning, or deserving. Salvation is a gift from God. And because it is a gift it can only be received on God’s terms, not ours. The church is the witness to the gift of salvation, reminding us time and time again what we have been given even though we deserve absolutely nothing.
That’s a hard truth to swallow, the “we deserve nothing.” But it’s true. We all do things we shouldn’t, we all avoid doing things we should. We are imperfect people. We might not be the type of people who forget our children back in Jerusalem and wander around for a few days before we find them, but we do have a lot more in common with Mary and Joseph than we let on. What’s more, even though we fail to be an obedient church, even though we fail to love God and one another, God offers us grace anyway.
Faithful prayers are those that offer us up to possibility because prayer is the ultimate recognition that we are not in charge. Prayer deconstructs all of our preconceived notions about what is, and isn’t possible.
Prayer reminds us that God is God, and we are not.
The strange and bewildering proclamation of the Gospel is that you can put your whole bank account in the offering plate and God will not love you any more or any less. God loves you no matter what. The Good News really is that good. It's so good, in fact, that we can't help ourselves from changing because of it.
Jesus is the shepherd to risks it all on the one who is lost. Jesus is the Samaritan who lavishly helps those down in the ditch. Jesus is the Father who forgives before apologies are offered. And Jesus is the unjust steward, the dishonest manager, who fudges our accounts when we don’t deserve it.
It’s too easy, at times, to lose sight of how weird it is to be part of the church. For many years we have endeavored to appear as appealing as possible to those outside. Whereas the real test of whether or not the church is the church is if we are sufficiently unacceptable to the world.
We are not yet another club or social gathering that provides a needed distraction from all that is wrong in the world.
We are the body of Christ for the world - we model God’s future in the present.
We live, oddly enough, by grace. We practice trust and honesty and forgiveness in the midst of a time in which those things sound like fairytales.
The church is God’s parable for the world.
In the kingdom of God the new economy of grace is weird. It is everything for nothing. It is forgiveness, and mercy, and love. It is Good News for people drowning in bad news.
If Joseph was willing to forgive his brothers after all they had done, if Jesus was willing to return to his disciples who abandoned him and denied him, just imagine what we can do with the new economy of grace.
It could be amazing.
Jacob is a no good dirty rotten scoundrel. He runs from all his problems all while making more problems for himself and his family. He’s a liar, and a thief, and a cheat. There’s nothing holy about this heel grabbing son of a... Isaac.
Why then do we read of this man and his wandering heart? Why do we lift these verses from the strange new world of the Bible and say, “Thanks be to God”? Why does God promise to remain with Jacob even though he has nothing to show for his so-called life?
Because Jacob isn’t his real name...
We only learn what it means to be Christians by watching other Christians within the church and doing what they do. To be Christian means being together. Which, of course, isn’t easy. Particularly because we believe in telling the truth, even to those we love.
God beckons us to the altar so that we might be altered. We are invited not because we are good, or virtuous, or even right. We are brought before the throne of the Lord because we are not as we should be, and God has a habit of making something of our nothing.
The waters of baptism wash away any notion of our being defined by our faults and our failures. Every drop of baptismal water contains an ocean of grace and mercy and love deep and wide enough to engulf the entirety of everything that ever was or will be.
In baptism, the heavens are torn apart, the past, present, and future are confused in the best possible way, and the Lord declares, “you are my child.”
And we are who God’s says we are.
If grace really is as amazing as we sing it is, then we are going to be surprised by some of the people we discover in Heaven.
At its best, and I mean at its very best, worship reminds us, and begs us to realize, that we, even us, we are included in the myriads of the thousands in John’s vision. Worship tells us over and over again that there is nothing we can do for good or ill that can stop God from getting what God wants.
Worship gives us Jesus.
Oddly enough, even with its bizarre images and confounding cassations, Revelation is an odyssey of encouragement. It tells us who we are, who God is, and what is the world is going on in the world.
To put it simply, it tells us the truth.
The proclamation of Holy Week, the entry into the city, the meal on Thursday, the cross on Friday, the empty tomb on Sunday, they run counter to just about everything else in life - they don’t give us ways to be better human beings, they aren’t commandments about how to make the world more bearable. They are not about what we do, but are instead about what is done to us. And that what has a name: Jesus Christ.
Hosanna. I’ve always loved that word. It’s such a churchy word. And, every Palm Sunday, we reach into the vault of churchy words, we dust off this old familiar declaration, and we proudly put it on display. We shout it in our hymns, we put the word on the lips of our children, we hear it read in the scriptures. And then, at the conclusion of worship, we wrap it up and place it back into the church vault with our other special words only to come back one year from now.
We are familiar with this word. It conjures memories and songs. Churches everywhere will join us in our shouts of Hosanna today.
But do we know what it means?
Our world is built on the assumption that whatever ails us can be fixed by us. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is good and right for us to dig deep into our wallets and purses to help those in need. We do have an obligation to love our neighbors and our enemies as ourselves. We need to believe in a better world. We need hope.
But we aren’t the hope of the world. If we were then we would not longer need newspapers to tell us what’s wrong in the world because there wouldn’t be anything wrong in the world.
Transcendent hope, real hope for things not yet seen, can’t come from us, it has to be done to us. And that kind of hope has a name: Jesus.
Contrary to how we might often imagine it, the whole ministry of the Lord isn’t about the importance of our religious observances, or our spiritual proclivities, or even our bumbling moral claims. It’s about God having a good time and just dying, literally, to share it with us.
We are all fruitless fig trees standing alone in the middle of God’s vineyard.
We are doing nothing and we deserve nothing.
And yet (!) Jesus looks at our barren limbs, all of our fruitless works, and he says the three words we deserve not at all: “Lord, forgive them.”
Grace, what we talk about all the time, isn’t so amazing unless there’s a reason for it. Put another way - the law of God is given in order that grace might be sought, and the grace of God is given in order that the law might be fulfilled.
We need rejection and election.
We need law and gospel.
Because that’s what life is like.
Karl Barth put it this way: “There is no light which does not also know darkness, no joy which does not have within it sorrow; but the converse is also true; no fear, no rage, which does not have, far or near, peace at its side. No laughter without tears, no weeping without laughter!”
Even John Wesley once said that every law contains a hidden promise.
Grace abounds!
Notice: the things the devil offers to the Lord, they’re all objectively good things - bread, political power, miracles.
And yet, Jesus refused them. And he even used scripture to defend his refusals!
Perhaps if the devil offered Jesus an unending buffet at the golden corral, or the nuclear codes, or David Copperfield’s assortment of illusions, we could sympathize with Jesus’ dismissals. But the devil offered Jesus possibilities for transformation and Jesus said, “No, thank you.”
But here’s the real kicker, the truly wild part of this story: by the end of the Gospel Jesus will, in fact, do all of the things that the devil suggests...
We can’t fix ourselves. In any other place and in an other institution and around any other people that is unmitigated bad news. But here, in the church, it’s nothing but Good News. It’s good news because nobody, not the devil, not the world, not even ourselves can take us away from the Love that refuses to let us go.
The voice from the cloud commands us to listen to Jesus.
But, and it's a big but, if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t want to listen to Jesus. We’d rather listen to ourselves.
We’d rather listen to ourselves because we are downright addicted to control. Or, at least to thinking we’re in control.
And yet, do you know how God responds to those who think they’re in control?
Laughter.
It is humbling to be laughed at by anyone, but when God’s laughs at us it’s another thing entirely. But perhaps we need to hear that laughter, particularly when we wake and sleep believing that it’s up to us to make the world turn out right.
The world has already turned out right. We know the future in the present. The tomb is empty!
We don’t have to be the hope of the world because Jesus already is. The only thing we have to do is live accordingly.
Prayer is, and must be, more than bringing our wish lists to Jesus, asking him for occasional help when our bodies are no longer functioning the way they are supposed to.
Prayer, instead, is the risky attempt to let Jesus speak.
I can’t prove the resurrection. No one can.
"Believe this," "Believe that," we say in the church. And somehow the genuine character of one’s belief has become the litmus test for Christianity. Which is made all the more strange when we consider the amount of doubt right smack dab in the Bible!
My former professor Stanley Hauerwas puts it this way: “What a lost people we must be to think that God really cares whether we believe in Him or not.”
"The story of Jesus Christ, the one Paul proclaimed to the Corinthians, is that God comes to us not because we are good, but because we aren’t. And when we start to see that, not just in the strange new world of the Bible, but in our very lives, it is the difference that makes all the difference..."
Heaven is the party of the streaming sunlight of the world’s final afternoon. Heaven is when all the dead beats and all the success stories, all the losers who never got anything right and all the winners who finally give up on winning, simply waltz over to the judgment seat called the Kingdom of God, with nothing to show for their lives except an eternal invitation from the host of the party that goes on forever.
And the celebration is so good and so loud and so fun that it drowns out all the party poopers in the world.
Which is why we should take seriously the words we say week after week in the Lord’s Prayer - thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
What we believe shapes how we behave. And if we believe that God in Christ really reveals the fullness of love, then we need not look further than that love to see how we are to be.
Therefore, in the great and somewhat adapted words of John Wesley, though we may not think alike, though our differences of opinion and religious understanding may vary considerably, though we may not agree even on what it means to believe, may we not love alike?
Without all doubt we may.
When the incarnate God in Jesus Christ comes to us, we nail him to the cross. And then, three days later, God gives him back to us.
Which is just another way of saying: Hear the Good News, Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that prove’s God’s love toward us.
We are called to practice resurrection. That is, we Christians live according to the Good News of the Gospel which means we are different. We belong to a new age and a new time and a new kingdom in which death is not the end.
Our rejoicing, therefore, is not naïveté.
We don’t come here to pretend that everything out there isn’t actually out there.
We come here precisely because the darkness is so overwhelming, and we need something we can cling to in the midst of it all. That something has a name: Jesus Christ.
Contrary to how it’s been portrayed in the church or even in our wider culture, we never really pick Jesus. When all is said and done, when the King of kings and Lord of lords comes to dwell among us, we nail him to the cross. We, to put it bluntly, pick Barabbas instead. Which makes some of Jesus’ final words are the more powerful: “Forgive them Lord, for they do not know what they are doing.”
No matter how wild the world might become, and no matter how poor our priests might be, there is one thing that hasn’t changed, and it never will - the power of God’s unconditional love and the call on our lives from the One who is Love.
The church, at her best, is a storied enterprise - that is, she exists because of the story and lives by telling the story - the story of God.
The “all” in “All Saints” is important. Lest we fall prey to the temptation of believing that saints are only those perfect Christians - Saints are just sinners in the hands of a loving God. In fact, if there’s any real requirement for being a saint, it is merely the admission that we are not yet what we can be. It’s about coming to grips with the condition of our condition all while holding fast to the wonderful Good News that Jesus does his best work with people like us - Jesus deals in the realm of impossible possibility - Jesus is in the business of resurrection.
Jesus is in the business of transformation - of taking us from where we are, to where we can be. That’s what church is all about. We don’t do what we do just to sing a few songs, and think a few lofty thoughts, and feel a few warm fuzzies only to do it all again next week. We do what we do because it changes us!
At the end of the day it’s important to remember that the Gospel, the Good News, is a story. It’s not a self-help program, it’s not a textbook with steps to salvation, it’s not program for perfect morality. It’s a story, actually the story, that re-narrates all of our stories.
A one-sentence sermon - God meets us on the roads of life, proclaims the Good News through likely and unlikely places, is revealed when we eat at the table, and sends us to the share Good News to all who will hear it.
Grace is what happens when, no matter how hard we’ve tried to do more and be better, we see ourselves for who we really are AND we discover that God does not abandon us.
If you ain’t first, you’re last - so says the world. From the time we’re young adults until the day we die its always this break-neck competition for firstness, greatness, foundness. But in the Kingdom of God Jesus does his best work, his only work really, with the last, least, lost, little, and dead.
People like us.
God in Christ has this knack for making outsiders into insiders, for reaching beyond beyond the boundaries of propriety, for meeting people where they are and not where they ought to be.
God meets us in our mistakes, not in our triumphs. God meets us in our sins, not in our successes.
Contrary to how we often talk about it, and even how we live it out, Christianity isn’t a religion - if it is anything it is the declaration of the end of religion. Religion consists of all the things human beings have ever thought we have to do to get right with God. Christianity tells us that God in Christ does what we could never do in order to reconcile the world to himself.
Or, as Martin Luther memorably put it, “The law says, ‘do this.’ And it is never done. Grace says, ‘believe in this,’ and everything is already done.”
We, the church, don’t exist to wag our fingers at every little sin and indiscretion, we are not here to proclaim the Bad News that God will only think kindly upon us after we have fixed all of our mistakes.
Instead, the church exists to announce the Good News, the very best news, that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.”
The joy of the church is realizing how God delights in gathering people together who otherwise have nothing in common save for the fact that Jesus calls them his friends.
It’s outrageous stuff, forgiveness. It just also happens to be the way Jesus runs the kingdom.
In Christ, we encounter the incomparable new reality of God which both humbles us and exalts us, which knocks us down and builds us up, and that is our peace.
You see, peace, at least peace as defined by the Gospel, comes when we recognize our universal incompetence and our total need for someone to do for us that which we cannot do on our own.
God has claimed us. And, as Karl Barth put it, unity is the consequence of belonging to God.
However, there is a difference between the now and the not yet. Our sin-sick souls are stuck in this terrifying cycle of division and antipathy. But, as Christians, we are called to look beyond and, in so doing, reframe the now.
Being a Christian isn’t natural. It runs counter to the ways of the world. Turn the other cheek? Love your enemies? Pray for those who persecute you? We are different.
However, we have often tried to avoid the differences that make us different. We don’t want to appear strange, or evangelical, or like those other kinds of Christians (whoever they may be). We’ve been content to let our faith be something that happens on Sundays and only on Sundays. But because we have tried so hard to not seem different, it’s been unclear why anyone would want to be like us.
Jesus is the difference who makes us different.
Again and again in the strange new world of the Bible, God meets the people of God in the midst of their sins, down in the muck of life, and offers grace.
And grace, as Robert Farrar Capon so wonderfully puts it, isn’t cheap or even expensive, its free.
Jesus does not work according to the ways of the world. He does not say, “Bring to me your perfect lives and your perfect jobs and your perfect families.” Instead, he says, “Bring to me your burdens and I will give you rest.”
Jesus does not look at our choices and our actions in order to weigh out whether or not we’ve done enough to make it through the pearly gates. Instead, he says, “I have come to save sinners and only sinners!”
Jesus does not write us off for our faults and our failures. Instead, he says, “You are mine and I am thine!”
We might rejoice in viewing one another through our mistakes and our shortcomings, but in the kingdom of God we are viewed only through what Christ did and does for us. We might enjoy holding our judgments and prejudices against one another, but in the kingdom of God Jesus knows none of deserve anything, and yet we receive everything. We might love propping up all of our good works for everyone else to see, but in the kingdom of God there is a judgment that comes for each and every single one of us.
God, unlike us, delights in impossible possibilities. The insanity of the Gospel is that, over time, God actually changes us. We are not what we once were because God will not let us stay that way. God, through bread and wine, through water and Spirit, is making all things new.
Including us!
It’s one thing to sing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus” but it’s another thing entirely to think “what a friend Jesus has in us.”
Hear the Good News: God in Christ arrives in a world, in a vineyard, that cannot bear any fruit on it’s own. It has given itself over to disease, and abuse, and pestilence, and all sorts of other failures. But the (di)vinegrower tills the ground, enriches the soil, and plants the seeds that are the Word to bear fruit.
We truly are sheep without a hope in the world unless we have a shepherd who is willing to do for us that which we cannot do on our own.
Thankfully, that’s exactly what we get in Christ Jesus.
Resurrection, believe it or not, is forever inextricably tied up with our food and love of it. It is quite literally by the death of corn, cabbage, and collards that we have lived until today.
The world is going down the drain, but we’ve got a Savior who works at the bottom of the drain and he’s the only one who can do anything about it. And what is the anything our savior does? He forgives!
In just about every other part of our lives, there are expectations. And yet, Jesus is all about the unexpected. Jesus doesn’t wait on the cross until we right all of our wrongs. Jesus doesn’t hide behind the stone in the tomb until there’s enough do-goodery in the world. Instead, the proclamation of Easter is we don’t have to do anything, because the everything we’ve always needed is already done.
Consider the strange new world of the Bible - God looked upon us and our sin and what did God do? God did not remain above and far removed from our struggle. Instead, God chose to come right down into the muck and mire of our existence. God looked upon us and our sins and God entered into our very condition, birthed as a baby to a virgin in a manger. That baby grew to proclaim the Good News for a world drowning in bad news. He healed the sick. He fed the hungry. He befriended the lonely. And when he entered the Holy City we nailed him to a cross...
The foot washing has always been a little strange and a little weird to the people called church. For one, only John includes it and, for another, it reveals the heart of God in a way that feels uncomfortable. Not only does Jesus, God in the flesh, get down on his knees to wash the dirty feet of the disciples, one of whom will shortly betray him, another will deny him, and the rest will leave him hanging to die on a cross, but then Jesus has the gall to command us to do the same for one another. And yet, in a way, more than being told what we are supposed to do, the whole message of this final moment is, again, about what Jesus does for us.
The Good News of Jesus Christ is that we have already been forgiven, and we’ve been set free. What was done to us does not define us. What we’ve done, and failed to do, is no longer kept in a ledger of God’s design.
The great gift of the church is that God in Christ makes our lives far more interesting than they deserve to be. You see, Christianity is neither a religion nor a club nor a civic organization - Christianity is an adventure.
Jesus has taken the cleanup of the cosmos entirely into his own hands, hands with holes in them. He does not hang from the cross until we confess our sins, he doesn’t wait in the grave until we get our lives together. He does what he does without us having to do anything - which makes the Gospel the most radical thing in history.
Usually, when we picture Jesus, he’s this hippy-dippy character who throws up a peace sign every once in a while, he asks us to all get along, and above all he is nice.
But Jesus wasn’t nice.
You don’t crucify someone for being nice...
The devil wants Jesus to do what we want Jesus to do. Or, perhaps better put: The devil wants Jesus to do what we want to do. But here’s the Good News, the really Good News: Jesus is able to resist temptations that we would not, could not, and frankly do not.
A reminder for Lent: we are forgiven not after we confess our sins, but right smack dab in the middle of them.
(But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us - Rom. 5.8)
Jesus is not just some ethical teacher who wants us to behave ourselves. Jesus is not some political revolutionary whose words we can cherry pick to suit our needs. Jesus is not a new David come to elevate us to the places of power and prestige. Jesus is God! In himself he is the new creation.
Contrary to how the church so often functions, Jesus isn’t really trying to convince us, or the crowds, of anything. He simply stands to deliver story after story giving us glimpses behind the curtain of the cosmos and dares us to do nothing more than believe.
Stanley Hauerwas: “Beware when you hear a Methodist minister quote his/her twelve-year old in a sermon. When that happens you know you’re fixin’ to hear some baloney.”
Though, when he says it, he uses a much saltier expression than baloney...
Jesus’ parables are intentionally designed to pop every circuit breaker in the minds of those who receive them. And yet, they are all confounding and head-scratching Good News - They declare that God saves losers and only losers. God finds the lost and only the lost. God raises the dead and only the dead.
The hiddenness of God is revealed in the person of Christ. The incomprehensibility of God is made known through the life, the teaching, the parables, the miracles, the healings, the feedings, and ultimately the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Which, when you think about it, is rather confounding. Or, perhaps it would be better to call it offensive...
What wondrous good news it is that, when Jesus showed up proclaiming the beginning of God’s new kingdom, he did so not with sermons about the Trinity, or the atonement, or justification, or any other big and abstract theological mishmash. Instead, Jesus began by pointing right at our stomachs, to that gnawing, unsatisfied, emptiness within and then invited us to dinner.
Jesus has a temple tantrum, flipping over tables and calling out the powers and principalities all as a commentary against what the faith of God’s people had become.
Jesus was nothing if not zealous.
Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of all the worst Hallmark Christmas movies, he did not belong to the reasonable, or honest, or sincere world of decency that we all too often claim for ourselves today.
Jesus belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, scoundrels, adulterers, and liars.
Jesus belonged to people like us, and he came for people like us.
We often present Christmas as something spiritual or mystical. Or, on the other hand, we criticize others for making this time of year too materialistic. But Christmas really is a reminder that Christianity is inherently materialistic. God becomes material in Jesus. God becomes us. How Odd.
Over and over again in scripture, and in life, God chooses the unexpected to bring about the Kingdom. God plucks people out of complacency and says, in different ways, shapes, and forms, “I’ve got a job for you!” God stirs up our understandings of the world, flips them upside down, and calls it Good News.
The very best worship services are those from which we go forth not to more of the same, but to more of the name that is above all names: Jesus the Christ. For, in him, we begin to see that the Good News really is good.
Advent, for better or worse, is a time set apart in the church when we make a conscious effort to recover some of the strangeness from the strange new world of the Bible - and John embodies it all. Because, like J the B, Advent is rather peculiar. It’s out of sync with time.
The authentically hopeful Advent spirit is not looking away from the darkness, it is not filling our lives with fluff in order to deny the truth.
It is, instead, praying for Holy Spirit to give us the courage and the conviction to look straight into the muck and mire of this life.
For, in the end, that’s exactly where God chose, and still chooses, to show up for us.
Our King, counter to every other king in the history of all things, looks upon our miserable estate, takes all of our sins, and nails them to the cross upon which we hung him. And he leaves those sins there forever. No one can earn or deserve salvation. No one can even know that he or she is saved. We can only believe it. We can only trust it.
This is a parable of judgment. However, the only reason that judgment comes at all is the sad fact that there will always be fools who refuse to trust a good thing even when it is handed to them on a silver platter.
The shut door is an image that us well-meaning Christians don’t particularly enjoy, but it is God’s answer to the foolish wisdom of the world. For, in the death of Jesus, God closed forever the ways of winning and rightness.
But the wise bridesmaids, those who are foolish in the eyes of the world, who were willing to trust God more than themselves, were found in their lastness, leastness, lostness, and even deadness to rejoice and celebrate at the party.
And all of the do-gooders who were so sure they could save themselves when it really came down to it, they’re stuck out in the dark with an unusable invitation.
Perhaps we’d like to blame our politicians for our current tumultuous season. But the problem goes far deeper than those running, and selected, for office. The problem is us. Rather than seeing one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, we’ve viewed each other through the names on our bumper stickers. Rather than listening to and praying for those of different opinions, we’ve just shouted louder into the fray. Rather than confessing Jesus as Lord and living accordingly, we’ve fallen prey to believing that what happens on Tuesday is more important than what happens on Sunday.
Jesus is Lord and we are not. Lord, importantly, is not a democratic title. We confess Jesus as Lord because he is the One to whom we owe our fullest and truest allegiance. And this, the lordship of Christ, is a fundamental challenge to the status-quo. It means that our assumptions about power and prestige are all messed up. It forces us to reckon with a world of our own design rather than the Kingdom wrought on earth in the incarnation. It compels us to open our eyes and ears to the people we would otherwise ignore.
Love, at least according to the strange new world of the Bible, doesn’t look like what happens on Valentine’s Day, or even suggestions from a local civic organization.
Instead, love looks like the cross.
We Christians might believe that we’ve got everything all sorted out in our lives and in our culture but, as Christians, we know we have a problem when we do not have a problem.
In the end, there is no good in us. In spite of our attempts to be gentle, we mostly rest contented to do nothing or we take it too far and use our faith as a bludgeon against others. But the gentleness Paul writes of does not begin or come from us alone - It’s from Jesus.
No mistake, no sin, no disappointment, no failure, and no rebellion can hold a candle to the love of God in Jesus Christ that draws us home and refuses to let us go.
Grace works for losers and only losers, and no one wants to hang out with losers.
No one, that is, except for Jesus.
The world of winners, people like us, will invest in myriads of moral absolutes, and truck loads of self-improvement seminars, and heaping baskets of do-goodery.
But the world of winners, people like us, refuses to opt-in for free forgiveness because that threatens to bring in all of the disreputable types.
Thankfully, however, the Holy Spirit has a knack of reminding us, all of us, that we’re all unworthy, that we’re all up the creek without a paddle, that we’re all in need of some saving.
And we can’t save ourselves.
God in the flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, forgives those who haven’t a clue in the world and those who know exactly what they’re doing. God eats and drinks and cavorts with the very people we wouldn’t be caught dead with.
Which is kind of the whole point.
God chose to die, even death on a cross, out of love for the sinners we are.
“Look, I know the empire seems powerful and that there’s no way you can get away from it. But as disciples of Jesus, if there is a conflict between your politics and your faith, your loyalty is to Christ and your heavenly citizenship is what’s most important.” - Paul, paraphrased
The Lord dabbles in unexpected deliverances, in surprising turns of events, in providential happenstances. All of them are echoes of the great reversal that began that first Easter morning. They are foretaste of the world yet to come. They are the bread and the wine at the table, the undeserved invitation, the unmerited forgiveness.
They don’t always fit and fall when we want them to, but when God’s up to something, the best thing we can do is get out of the way and say “thanks.”
The world says, “do this and do that.” Grace says, “It’s already done.” The cross of Christ, hanging empty in the sky, is a stark declaration and reminder that God stands against sin, evil, and death. It is, problematic language not withstanding, God’s war on our behalf. Grace invades into existence not because we believed in God just enough, or because we said the right prayers, but simply because God is merciful. And grace never stops coming.
The world is forever telling us to do more to be better to earn and produce and reform and things largely stay the same. Jesus, on the other hand, is forever telling us that the most important thing has already been finished, the only thing we have to do is trust him. Peter, like us, wants so desperately to be the master of his own fate, he wants to be in control of what happens and to whom. His imagination of the Kingdom of God is limited by his imagination of earthly kingdoms. But Jesus didn’t come to bring us more of the same. He came to raise the dead. And the dead can’t raise themselves.
Jesus himself spent his whole ministry with sinners: drunks, prostitutes, thieves, murderers, traitors, and countless others who sinned against the Lord. You know, people like us. Jesus routinely chose to gather with the likes of the worst to break bread, to offer healing, and, perhaps most importantly, to offer them most precious gift of all: his time. And he said to all those sinners, “Follow me.” But Jesus never, not even once, said to any of them, “I love you, but I hate your sin.”
Paul might have something to say about women being silent in church, but many of us would simply not be Christians unless women were brave enough to stand and speak in churches. The Bible might have more than 200 verses in support of slavery, but we recognize that slavery is incompatible with God’s kingdom here on earth. We might read about doing our business outside the boundary of God’s holiness, but we don’t build churches without bathrooms.
Being a Christian is about more than saying things like, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”
It is my sincere hope and prayer that, in the midst of a moment of pain or fear or grief, no one has ever dismissively said to you, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.”
But chances are, someone has.
It is near the top of the list of Christian expressions used when we don’t know what else to say and, spoiler warning, it’s NOT in the Bible.
I don’t know what you've got going on in your life right now. But maybe, you feel like you’re down in a pit - life just won’t let up and you feel overwhelmed and suffocated by worry, fear, and anxiety. Or perhaps you’ve lost someone you love and every single day is a biting and ringing reminder that you will never get them back. Or maybe you’re struggling with an addiction that, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t kick it. We can claw at the walls all we want. We can fashion ladders of self-improvement. We can even make promises to ourselves that tomorrow we will finally become the best versions of ourselves. But sometimes, the only way out of the hole comes when someone else is willing to jump in and show us the way out. And that's exactly what Jesus does for us.
Life is hard and all sorts of things happen without explanation. I know that might not sound very pastoral, but it’s true. Can you imagine how you would feel if you came to the church one morning in your grief or suffering or pain, and you got down on your knees to pray to God when all of the sudden you heard a voice booming from the heavens declaring, “I”M DOING THIS TO YOU ON PURPOSE! THIS IS PART OF MY PLAN!” If that’s who God is, then God isn’t worthy of our worship. Thankfully, that’s not who God is. God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead having first raised Israel out of Egypt. God is the author of salvation and not the dictator of death. God is the one who would do everything, and already did, to make sure that nothing, truly nothing, could ever separate us from the his divine love.
Counter to many of our church ramblings throughout the centuries, and even today, we are not judged by the Lord in the light of our previous proclivities. If we were, none of us would go anywhere but hell. Instead we are judged by what Jesus does for us on the cross. He announces a forever and all encompassing forgiveness that transfigures us into his kingdom in ways that are hidden and right here among us. Let me put it this way: Everybody, even the worst of the worst, is someone for whom Christ died. Whenever the church goes around kicking people out for missed and poor choices, we fail to live into the netted-ness of Christ’s salvific work.
If the miracle of miracles occurs and people stumble into the church (or online during a streamed service) looking for something, what does the church offer in turn?
Hey, um, here’s the mystery of Jesus Christ all wrapped up nice and neat for you, the in-dwelling or his kingdom, but… if you want any part of it, you’re gonna need to shape up. So, uh, write this down, you need to work on your racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ethnocentrism, STOP USING STYROFOAM, go vegan, gluten free, eat locally, think globally, fight against gentrification, DON’T DRINK SO MUCH, practice civility, mindfulness, inclusiveness, take precautions on dates, keep sabbath, live simply, practice diversity, do a good deed daily, love your neighbors, give more, complain less, make the world a better place, YOU DRINK TOO MUCH.
If people have ever been evangelized by fear mongering or higher ethical stands, they might be converted from something, but not to the Gospel.
I mean, who the hell would sell everything to buy all of that?
In the end, the Kingdom will be populated entirely and only by forgiven sinners. That is, all of us. Hell, whatever it may be, exists only as a courtesy for those who don’t want any part of forgiveness. The fire of refining that comes at the end of the age will burn away all the stumbling blocks to the kingdom, it will burn away all iniquity, and the only thing left will be forgiven sinners. Nothing more, less, or else.
We want God to rule by just putting the right political leaders in office so that can pass laws that will make everything perfect, but it doesn’t happen (and it never will). We have this constant temptation to believe that we can make things right if we just work hard enough. We wrestle with a desire to bring the kingdom into being from the top down rather than from the bottom up. We think we’re responsible for, and in charge of, the kingdom. But we’re not.
We are hooked, downright addicted, to assuming that its all up to us. Give us just a small taste of the power that comes with making decisions about what is good and right and true and we’ll never be able to kick the habit. We delight in believing that we are the ones who get to settle scores here and now and yet, in the end, none of us could possibly make it in Jesus’ kingdom unless forgiveness reigns supreme.
Notice: in the kingdoms of earth, our favorite solutions to problems are knocking people down a peg or two, locking them up behind bars, and - if all else fails, getting them out of the game forever with the death penalty. We set up systems (powers and principalities) all in the name of law and order, but in the end they keep the poor poor and the rich rich. They lift the mighty even higher, and bring the low even lower. They, to put it simply, make the world a better place by making it better for certain people and far worse for everyone else. Remember: it was law and order that nailed Jesus to the cross - church and state working together for the common good to keep suppressed that which they disagreed with. Which isn’t too far of a stretch from how we’re still living...
Every week I stand in this place and I talk about how God gathers us together, how God proclaims God’s Word to us, and then we respond to it. The truth behind all that is our response, if it ever amounts to anything, pales in comparison to what God did, what God does, and what God will do. And that’s the best news of all. It’s Good News, really Good News, because nobody, not the devil, not the world, not the flesh, not even ourselves can take us away from the Lord that refuses to let us go.
So much of what Christianity, what the church, has become is focused on making people comfortable; how to tell people about Jesus without ever stepping on any toes. The fire of Pentecost, the one that sent the disciples tumbling into the streets can be found more in our national protests than in our sanctuaries on Sunday mornings. Parables are supposed to make us uncomfortable. Whether our soil is rocky, thorny, or barren. Hear the Good News: The Sower never stops sowing. The Sower doesn’t stop to take stock of the condition of our condition before offering the grace we so desperately need. The Sower just keeps throwing it all over the place until something comes of our nothing. Remember: When Mary encountered Jesus at the empty tomb she mistook him for the gardener. And what do good gardeners do? They till the soil, they weed out the thorns, they remove the rocks, they do whatever it takes to make the best soil possible. And that work is uncomfortable.
Faith, belief, trust... those are merely words for letting go of our presumption that fixing the world is up to us. Everything has already been done that needs doing. The end has already come to us in the person of Jesus through cross and resurrection. The powers and principalities have been vanquished forever.
We just don’t act like it.
I know it won’t seem like it right now, but this is nothing new. I am simply making manifest what I’ve been doing all along. No meddling, divine or human, spiritual or material, moral or immoral can save the world. Your salvation is already here, in me. The only thing you have to do is trust me. - Jesus
The eyes of our hearts have been enlightened by God, and we are called to bear witness. Through the hardship and the pain and the despair Jesus has been there through it all and He will get us through. Jesus has this, and Jesus has us.
A Christian is someone who calls a thing what it is. Which is just another way of saying that Christians tell the truth.
Here's the Gospel: It’s like we’ve been brought before the throne of God and every single one of our mistakes is paraded out in front of us. With every instance we cower closer and closer to the floor. And at the end, Christ looks at us, really looks at us, and says, “It’s okay. I forgive you.”
That is radical.
It's Awe-Full.
While many of you may be rightly dubious of whatever it is you receive from preacher types on Sunday mornings, there is something rather majestic here in Acts that points to a great and wonderful truth. St Paul puts it this way, “Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.”
In just about every part of our lives, from our jobs to our spouses to our children to even the ways we try to portray our perfect versions of ourselves on social media, it’s all transactional. If I do this, what can I get out of it? If I give you something, what will you give me in return? If I post this picture, what will people think about me? And here, in a sermon on the other side of Easter, Peter presents the Gospel without cost. This gift, the gift of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, is free. It’s not expensive, and it’s not even cheap. It’s free. And that is wildly irreligious and scandalous.
On Easter, Jesus’ response to the sins of his followers isn’t to berate them or judge them or even damn them. He doesn’t give them a list of things to do, or programs to start, or prayers to pray.
Instead, he just comes back to them, to us, with, of all things, love.
How odd of God.
Some of the best and the most important things in the world take place without us have to do much of anything. That is a very strange and troubling word for those of us who feel as if we’re never doing enough. But Easter, Easter is a reminder that the most defining moment in the history of the cosmos happens in spite of us. That’s why it’s Good News.
Jesus wasn’t killed for telling people to love one another. He was killed because we don’t have imaginations capable of understanding what love actually looks like.
Notice: God doesn’t tell Ezekiel to go out and give the bones a ten-step process on how to get their lives sorted out. God doesn’t tell the people to pray three times a day in order to earn their salvation. God doesn’t wait for the people to memorize their favorite book of the Bible before the bones starting coming back together. God raises the bones to life because that’s what God does! I hope you hear that as a hopeful word. Because even at our best, we’re not very good.
God is intense, passionate, unbalanced, unfair, and a little too honest. God is always pushing the envelope, testing the boundaries of what we might call “proper behavior.” God is the one who sees a vision of the world that even on our best days we could never properly imagine.
And we wonder, why can’t God just calm down about all this stuff? If God really wants to be the God of all people, wouldn’t it be better it God toed the line and stayed unbiased about the comings and goings of the world? When will God relax and start acting like the God we want?
But, again, the story of scripture is not a story about us. It’s about God.
The cross speaks the deepest and darkest truth about who we are. We are the sinners for whom Christ died.
I like to call that the inconvenient truth of Christianity. We’ve become very good these days, frankly we have lots of practice, at pointing out the sins in other people. To some degree I think that’s what social media is all about. We either log on to call out the imperfections of others, or we try to portray ourselves as if we are perfect into order to put other down.
The inconvenient truth of Christianity is that we are no better than anyone else.
God promises to do what is impossible for humankind, God calls into existence things that do not exist, God is the subject of the verb. If it were all on us, if it were all up to us, we would fail. We can’t bless the world because we are far too concerned with blessing ourselves. We can’t fix the world because we are so fixated on our own problems. We can’t redeem the world because we are the ones who need redemption. We can’t even keep our promises. But God does. Always. That’s a pretty crazy thing to think about when you hear it for the first time or the thousandth time, it just also happens to be true.
Whenever we hear about Adam and Eve in church, it is usually discussed in one of two ways: 1) We're told about how bad we are and how badly we need to feel about how bad we are. We leave church wallowing in self-pity and feeling even more exhausted than we did on the way in for all of our sins, past, present, and future. Or 2) We’re told all about how people outside the walls of the church are bad and how it is our job to go out there and fix them in all of their badness by bringing them in here so they too can start feeling bad about how bad they are.
But if that's all it is, then the Good News has become Bad News.
As Christians we cannot ignore the condition of our condition, we cannot fool ourselves into believing that we are better than anyone else - we are sinners resting in the hands of a loving God. That we can call God a loving God is what makes all the difference. For, it is in the same moment that we can truly acknowledge our brokenness that we also begin to see God as the One who offers mercy to us even though we don’t deserve it. While we were sinners, Christ died for us. Not before we were sinners, or after we were sinners, but in the midst of our sin.
None is righteous, no, not one. That’s the point of the Law - on our own we can’t even fulfill a fraction of it. All that stuff that Moses brought down from the mountain, it is good only insofar as it shows us that we, all of us, are bad. We’re all bad no matter how good we think we are and no matter how good we think other people are. Because behind closed doors, when we think we’re alone, or that no one will ever find out - in the secret thoughts of our hearts and minds - each and every one of us are more like Donald Trump and Pete Buttigieg and Rush Limbaugh and Jean Vanier than we are like Jesus Christ.
We tend to think that we have to save ourselves, and we’ve forgotten that the cross stands to show us how Christ is already in the business of putting us back together, in ways we’d rather not if it were up to us.
But thanks be to God that’s its not up to us, because if it were all we’d achieve is more of the same instead of the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God on earth. If it were up to us we’d only associate ourselves with the people who already think like us, and talk like us, and even look likes us instead of being surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses that only have one thing in common: Jesus Christ and him crucified.
The cross is where God meets us in our own lives. In all of our suffering, in all of our sins, in our shames and pains.
And that is downright scandalous because it rubs against so much of what we’ve been taught to think and speak. If we’ve left church feeling guilty for all the things we should have done, or for all the things we left undone, then we’ve missed the scandal of the cross. The scandal is that we don’t have to do anything. Because Christ does the everything we could not and would not do for ourselves.
For as much as the cross is a sign to the world about the forgiveness of sins, it is equally a reminder that we have plenty of sins for which we all need forgiveness. Or, to put it another way, we cannot look at the cross without confronting the inconvenient truth that we are the sinners for whom Christ died. We confess, however, that we would much prefer to hear a different kind of message about the cross. Perhaps something a little more uplifting, or at the very least something optimistic. Ultimately, whether we like to admit it or not, what we really want is to be told that we are right and they, whoever they are, are wrong. But, again, the cross tells us something different - the cross tell us we’re all wrong.
The letters of Paul and the stories of Jesus show us that there is more to grace than simply being accepted for who we are. And, no doubt, we are accepted - after all, grace abounds. But we are now in a kingdom bound by that grace which means we have been changed.
Can you imagine what Martin Luther King Jr.'s work would’ve have looked like without a call to change? What good is a dream of something new if only we stay committed to the past?
Here’s the kicker about tragic occurrences in the world - the best thing Christians can do (other than offering signs of help and support) is to just be quiet.
The unyielding desire to discern some greater meaning, or meaninglessness, behind it all, is cruel and presumptuous. Any time we, and by we I mean Christians, offer pious platitudes or trite words of comfort it only results in our soothing our own guilty consciences and making God into a terrible monster.
In Jesus’ kingdom trespasses are forgiven, grace is given, enemies are prayed for, peace is practiced, and all of our earthly differences are swallowed up because its more important for us to swallow the body and blood of Christ at this table together.
In the end, our personal politics might not line up with what Jesus had to say and what Jesus had to do, but Jesus was political, and the church always will be.
Our world is constantly telling us to do more, to be better, and to get it all together. And even in the church, we fall prey to this temptation all the time by telling people about all the stuff we need to do. But all of that is self-defeating because the more we’re told about what we’re supposed to do the more guilty we feel for all we’re not doing. On Christmas Eve its different. Its different because the strange new world of God’s desire has become our world. The whole story is about how we can’t do all that we need to do and that’s okay.
Part of what makes us/Christians different is that we know that we no longer belong to ourselves and we haven’t been left to our own devices. We belong to Jesus Christ who came into the world to take us and our burdens upon his shoulders. We belong to Jesus Christ who sees and knows our sins and nails them to the cross anyway. We belong to Jesus Christ whose birth we mark in the manger, and whose return we anticipate with joy and wonder.
We are at our strangest when we confess the dissonance of two Biblical truths: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God AND there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. In other words, all of us are sinners AND Jesus saves us anyway. That we confess “Jesus saves us anyway” is why we can call the Good News good. God does for us what we could not do for ourselves. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Ultimately one of the strangest things about who we are and what we’re doing is that we’re not really called to do much of anything at all. If anything, the only thing we have to do is celebrate that we don’t have to do anything. That’s the message of Jesus and his cross. God came to do what we could not and would not do. No amount of belief, or money, or morals can give salvation to us nor take it away. It is simply a gift for those who want it. No catch and no fine print involved whatsoever. If you want to know what the gathering looks like, save for a bunch of people hanging out in a basement, its like an outdoor wedding reception that refuses to stop on account of rain.
Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.
For many of us, that moment of becoming believers came with a catch - if we believe this, then God will do this. Or if we lay aside our sins, then God will give us eternal life as our everlasting reward. Or if we promise to love God with our whole hearts, souls, minds, and strengths, then God will love us back.
But there is no such thing as “if” in the kingdom of God.
I’ve noted a few times recently that it often doesn’t help the church to just spend time addressing what’s wrong in other churches. And I want to own that - I know that. But sometimes we have to know what’s wrong in order to know what is right. If the church tells us that we need to put America first, then it is not God’s church. If the church tells us that some people are in and some people are out, then it is not God’s church. If the church tells us that any politician or any leader or any celebrity is more important than the least of these, then it is not God’s church. We can only know what is good, right, and true because we know who Jesus is. Jesus, to use Paul’s language, makes the invisible God visible. Jesus is before all things and all things are held together in him, by him, and for him. Jesus is first. And that makes all the difference.
Sometimes it feels like the church is in the midst of a crisis. It should come as no surprise that less and less people come to church week after week, the world feels like is twirling down the drain faster than ever before, and that’s not even getting into the specifics of cultural and societal changes. But if the church really is in a crisis it is because we have foolishly convinced ourselves that we are a bunch of good people getting better.
The truth of the church is quite the opposite: we are a bunch of bad people who are coping with our failure to be good.
Jesus changes everything. That is what I want to tell people when I hear them talk about their better half, or their lesser half. No one becomes less of a person when they get married! Or at least they shouldn’t. We are unique and beautiful and wondrous because that's exactly who God created us to be. And yet, of course, we were made to be in community, but that doesn’t mean we lose part of who we are by being connected with other people. If anything, the point of connection is to give us the freedom and the strength to flourish as God made us.
Whether its Rome, or America, or our bosses, or our spouses, or whoever - we are forever being told who we are. We define ourselves by the definitions given to us by others, and more often than not from the others with power. When we look in the mirror we see not what we see but we see what we’ve been told.
But for Christians, none of us know who we really are until God tells us.
God cares not at all how much money we put in the offering plate or how much money we send to our favorite charity or how much money we make every two weeks or how much money we have saved away for a rainy day. God cares only that we see and know and taste and touch the wondrous gift already given to us in Jesus. What happens next is a matter of faith.
God sees potential in God’s creation in a frame of reference often beyond our ability to grasp. God believes in God’s people as a long term investment - it takes a lifetime of hearing about the goodness of grace before it really sticks.
But God keeps saving anyway. Even when things in the present scream the contrary, God keeps pouring out the Holy Spirit on a bunch of investments that no one in their right mind would put their money on. God saves because that’s who God is.
I’ve grown tired of the endless stories of the self-made individuals, of the people who earned their own fortune without the help from anyone else. No one is self-made. Period. We are all creatures created by God - we’ve all been purposed with gifts to participate in the kingdom in ways both big and small. In the eyes of God the richest person on earth is of the same value as the poorest person on the earth. God makes us what we are, not the other way around.
Wisdom, ultimately, is not something we arrive at on our own. Wisdom is a gift from God. Much like the gift of God’s Son - It comes to a people undeserving, in strange ways both seen and unseen. It can completely upend our lives in ways we care scarily imagine. But in the end, its the only thing that really makes a difference.
Wisdom, much like Jesus, is the only thing we really need.
In short, faith is being able to look out at a bunch of powerful and wealthy individuals knowing that their own interests have led to the imminent destruction in their midst and hoping against hope that they will hear what you are trying to say, that they will begin to shift their lives around, and that something new and beautiful can come out of their nothing.
We will always be sinners in need of God’s grace because that’s who we are. God, in ways that are confounding, chose to make us free. Free to act with God or against God. It is a beautiful and messy gift but one that make life all the more interesting and exciting. We are not puppets being pulled along by some puppeteer up in the sky (another messy metaphor). We are dirt. Dirt that has been given life by God.
We are the stories we tell. It’s true. Just think about what’s important to you or to your family. Whatever the thing is, there’s probably a story that helps bring the object to light. Narratives shape the world around us and give us the means by which we can understand who we are and, in the church, whose we are. And even though we know that we’re the stories we tell, more often than not we act like we are the things we possess. We value ourselves on the clothes we wear, the car we drive, the home we own. And all of those things are worthless. They can blow away like the wind.
The truth of the matter is that being Christian means being different. But unlike how we so often present this in worship or in the greater cultural ethos, it doesn’t mean being like the good religious man, it means admitting that we are all like the tax collector.
You see, following Jesus means admitting the condition of our condition. It's falling to the floor Sunday after Sunday with the same confession on our lips, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” And it’s knowing that before we can even bring those words to our lips God has forgiven every last one of our sins through the cross of his Son.
While we were still yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly. There are few sentences in scripture as unnerving and beautiful as that one. It’s beautiful because it's true. But it’s unnerving precisely because it we are the ungodly for whom Jesus died. We might like to imagine that God is waiting around hoping to dispense a little bit of perfection like manna from heaven if we just offer the right prayer or rack up the right amount of good works. But Jesus’ story about the unjust judge screams the contrary. It’s as if Jesus is saying, “Do you think it makes the least difference to God whether or not you are right, or if your case is just? Truly I tell you, God isn’t looking for the right, or the good, or the true, or the beautiful. God is looking for the lost, and you are all lost whether you think you are lost or not.”
"No matter how all of you feel about this stuff, there will be others who point at the craziness. They’ll say that mass shootings are my way of getting you back to prayer. They’ll say that locking up immigrants is a sign of holy justice. They’ll point and point and point and say my name. For God’s sake, literally, don’t go running after all that nonsense and don’t you dare follow their examples. Those people haven’t a clue in the world." - Jesus
The cross stands as an uncomfortable and unwavering reminder that you and I don’t need to do a thing for it. And yet so much of what we do as a culture, and heaven forbid as a church, tells people there is always more for them to do in order to get God to do anything. And that might be the greatest stumbling block of all.
No one, certainly not God, is keeping score and tallying up all of our good works against our bad. There is not a divine ledger with little tallies every time we misstep or we bring about something good in the world. And there is definitely not a test by which the accumulation of our wealth will determine whether or not salvation is in fact ours. The truth is a much harder pill to swallow precisely because everything else in the world tells us the contrary. Do all you can, earn all you can, achieve all you can, save all you can, invest all you can, those are all slogans of the world. But the truth is that the game is over. Jesus did for us what we could not, and would not, do for ourselves.
Jesus ends the story of the Prodigal without an end and it shows us that what’s most important has already happened. The fatted calf has been sacrificed so that the party can begin. Jesus has already mounted the hard wood of the cross so that we can let our hair down, and take off our shoes, and start dancing. We were lost and we’ve been found. That’s the only thing that matters.
In this particular parable none of the people who had a right to be at the party came, and all of the people who came had no right to be there. Nothing in the kingdom has anything to do with rights; God is going to deal with us in spite of our deservings, not according to them. And that just gets under our skin, or, worse, we completely ignore it. We’re so accustom to a way of being about earning and rewarding that free grace sounds irresponsible or too good to be true. But hear this, hear it in all of its craziness and bizarreness: Grace works by raising the dead - not by rewarding the living.
Jesus destroys the exceptions of the dinner party crowd and he does it throughout his ministry. He is a critical Lord, though we often forget that part of him. He’s critical because he wants to destroy all of our favorite and foolish expectations. Being first, found, big, important, and alive matter little in the kingdom of God. They matter little because Jesus didn’t come to make the first firster, or the found founder, or the important importanter, or the alive aliver. He came to raise the dead. And we can die, we can die to the desire to sit at the best places, we can die to the bookkeeping that keeps us awake at night. We really can die to all of that because Jesus already has.
At the very end, Jesus says the we who are knocking at the doors of perfect living and measured morality are nothing but workers of iniquity. Our good deeds are no more capable of getting us into the kingdom than our bad deeds are of keeping us out. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. Not while we were perfect, and not even while we were repentant, but while we were sinners. There is nothing on this earth that can make God love us any more OR any less. That’s the scandal of the Good News, but its also why we can call it good.
Jesus doesn’t give a flip whether we’ve got a fig on the tree or not. He only cares about forgiveness, a forgiveness we so desperately need because we have no idea what we are doing. For if we knew what we were doing, we would’ve solved all of the world’s problems by now. We wouldn’t have to worry about a young girl being ostracized in middle school for dressing like a boy. We wouldn’t have to worry about the safety of people dancing in a nightclub simply because of who they might be dancing with. We wouldn’t have to worry about a person contemplating ending their life because of what a preacher said in a sermon about who they are and their incompatibility. But we do have to worry about these things. Because this is the world we live in.
We are blessed by the risen Lord, for he knocks at the door, even in our deaths, and he comes bringing the party with him. And this party is not far off and distant in both place and time from us, the party is here with us, right now. It’s just that most of us are too stubborn to notice.
Our world runs on avarice - Extreme greed for wealth or material goods. It’s the lie we were fed as children, and it’s the lie that we feed to our children. It is reinforced on every magazine cover, in every instagram post, and with every commercial on TV. Happiness is yours if you acquire this thing. And it’s all a lie.
Jesus doesn’t come just to show the disciples, and us, a new way of life but is, himself, the new way. This can be rather frustrating for the many of us who want Jesus to just be clear about what we should and shouldn’t do. Contrary to what we often hear from the church, Jesus is not waiting around for us to be perfect, but simply says the time has come for us to recognize how last, lost, least, little, and dead we all are.
Jesus is free among the dead - He is the one who, again and again, is with the last, the least, the lost, the little, and the dead. If we want the parable to tell us to imitate the Good Samaritan, which it certainly does, then that’s fine. But if that’s all the Good Samaritan is good for, then it isn’t very good. Instead it leaves people like you and me feeling fine and guilty. We feel fine in terms of thinking about times we have been neighborly toward our neighbors, or it can leave us feeling guilty about the many times we haven’t. When, in fact, the whole story is about how Jesus is the one down in the ditch. That he, the Lord of lords, has condescended himself to our miserable existence and can be found in the place of our own ditch-ness and suffering.
We will never ever be able to enjoy the gift of the resurrection, a gift handed to us for nothing, if we cannot face the absurdity of our own forgiveness.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to be better - it’s just that in spite of our desires for approval and change and growth, the work of the Lord remains steadfast. Jesus saves losers and only losers. He raises the dead and only the dead. He finds the lost and only the lost.
The last, least, lost, little, and dead receive more of Jesus’ joy than all of the winners in the world. And we can’t stand it.
Religion, in the many ways it manifests itself, often only has one thing to say: people like you and me need to do something in order to get God to do something. We need only be good enough, or faithful enough, or merciful enough, until we tip the scales back in our favor. But this kind of religious observance, which is most religious observance, traps us in a game that we will always and forever lose. It’s bad news. But Jesus comes to bring Good News.
The resurrection of Jesus is completely contrary to our way of being. It is completely contrary because we have nothing to do with it. Jesus wasn’t waiting in the grave until there was the right amount of belief in the world before he broke free from the chains of Sin and Death. Jesus wasn’t biding his time waiting for his would-be followers to engage in systems of perfect morality before offering them the gift of salvation. The Good News is that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead. But the even better news is the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead whether we believe it or not.
The crucifixion of Jesus puts to an end the religious categories that separate people from one another and unites us under a common banner. We might want that banner to be a declaration of love, or grace, or mercy. But the thing under which we are all included is actually our guilt. We, all of us, are the ungodly. And yet Christ dies, for us.
We Christians are a people forever stuck in the past. And we can hardly be blamed; we only know what we know. But on Maundy Thursday we are compelled to get our sense of time confused. For tonight we do what we do both in remembrance and in anticipation.
There will always be more for us to do, but the one thing we could never do has already been done for us. The work of Christ, life-death-resurrection, provides all the enoughness we could ever really hope for. It is the sign that though we are unworthy, Christ makes us worthy, though we have sinned, Christ offers pardon, though we feel empty, Christ proclaims that we are enough.
The elder brother is so convinced, too convinced, that doing all of the right things will be enough to save him. His refrain is “I did everything I was supposed to. I stayed home. I took care of my responsibilities. I planned accordingly. I was perfect.” And yet his life is anything but perfect. And he cannot stand the idea of his father throwing a party for his brother who deserves nothing. But we all deserve nothing.
The cross is the manure of grace that is spread into and throughout our lives. It is a frightening thing that we’d rather ignore or dismiss, and yet without it we are nothing. And still, the manure that is grace is offered to our lives even when, and precisely because, we are not bearing fruit! We worship a God of impossible possibilities, a God who offers more chances than we ever deserve, a God who willingly drops manure on our lives over and over again. The cross is like manure; it is good and bad and ugly. But it is also our salvation.
There is a great leveling on the hill called Golgotha. Because until that moment, as Jesus says, the house was left to us. And when the house is left to us we, more often than not, like to chose who is able to join us in the house. We like to create our own rules about who is first and who is last, who is right and who is wrong, who is included and who is excluded. But so long as the house is left to us, it will not look like the kingdom of God. Instead it will be a place that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. It will be a place where longer tables and wider doors lead to more anger, more vitriol, and more violence. It will be a place of our own making, and therefore our own doom.
We are so much a people of the world, rather than the kingdom, that it is nearly impossible to see the temptation story from any point of view other than the devil’s - If you take away the fact that Jesus is the Son of God, take away the fact that we know the end of the story, the devil’s questions sound pretty good... That’s crazy. It’s a crazy thing to realize, here at the beginning of our own Lenten journeys, that the person with whom we have to most in common in this story isn’t Jesus, but the devil.
On Ash Wednesday we gather, we listen, and we faintly begin to grasp that there is quite literally nothing we can do to get God to love us more. We look deeply into our sins, the sins of the church, and the sins of the world and we inexplicably come into contact with the God who extends mercy to us even in the midst of our horrible condition. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. We can’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. And yet it is given to us.
We started the recent General Conference in prayer and we even had a cross up at the front of the room, but there was one person who was conspicuously absent from the proceedings: Jesus. Sure, I heard a lot about what it says in Leviticus. I heard a lot about Paul. I heard people quote precisely from John Wesley. But Jesus? I honestly don’t know where Jesus was while we were trying to figure out the future of his church. In fairness to our Lord, it felt like he had better things to do than witness the devolution of an institution whose motto is “Do No Harm.”
It is crazy that the United Methodist Church has the potential to go up (or down) in flames in the next ten days all over a debate about what does and what does not count as a sin when every one of our sins has already been taken up in the cross.
Christ died for our sins. He was buried in the ground. He was raised on the third day.
To Paul, this was of first importance. Not our behavior. Not even a list of beliefs. But a story. The story.
If God is love, then so is Jesus. Jesus is patient; Jesus is kind; Jesus is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Jesus does not insist on his own way; Jesus is not irritable or resentful; Jesus does not rejoice in wrong doing, but rejoices in the truth. Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Jesus never ends. So, we can go and love the people around us. We can even love the people we hate. The world could certainly use a little more love. But there is a big difference between “be love” and “be loved.” The former is the Law. And the latter is the Gospel.
In scripture and in life, God does not speak to us of why things happen. Instead, God speaks about how things can be. God speaks to us not in explanations, but in promises! Promises that we can scarcely imagine or even fathom. What Isaiah announced to the people called Israel, God has revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We who were once far off, removed by our own exile, have been brought near by the blood of the lamb who was slain for the world.
Here, on the day of Epiphany, as we celebrate the total scope of the gospel extending to the gentiles, we are challenged by Isaiah’s words to move out of the waiting of Advent darkness, and beyond the mystery of the Christmas incarnation, toward the brilliance of the brightness in Christ the Lord. But the brilliant brightness is only necessary because of the thick darkness that covers the people. During the time of Isaiah the darkness was nothing new to the people Israel; they truly knew what it means to dwell in thick darkness while exiled in Babylon. And today, we too dwell in our own version of exilic darkness...
Little baby Jesus, the one with teeny tiny toes and the one resting in the feeding trough, is the same person who walked through Galilee, who was transfigured magnificently, who feed the people abundantly, who walked on water miraculously, who suffered on the cross tragically, and rose from the grave majestically. The womb and the tomb could not and cannot contain the grace of God. Even in the darkest moments of our lives there is an everlasting light. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Jesus tonight.
Today we assume we know where Jesus is or, at the very least, where Jesus should be. We elevate particular politicians because we think they are on Jesus’ side, or we dismiss entire populations of people because we think Jesus is on our side. We relegate the incarnate Lord to our perfect manger scenes only to pack him away in a few days. But the story of Christmas is that God cannot, and will not, be stopped.
Hear the Good News! Jesus’ arrival both from the womb and from the tomb means that he will not let us remain as we are. He is the judged Judge who stands in our place. He is, in himself, the Good News.
John the Baptist’s words and ministry upset the status quo of our complacency. The kingdom earthquake is shaking all the old expectations of what we should say and what we should do. The fault lines of change are running through the middle of history and God is announcing a new order that carries with it a whole new way of seeing the world.
Advent is the season we celebrate new life - Jesus’, our own, and the new reality made possible by our God. We live in a time and among those who wish to see the world fizzle out in a tiny smoldering fire, but the Lord promises to return to us in a glorious way and is already bringing us signs of new life and peace.
Jesus would be a terrible president. Can you imagine? He’d always disappear in the middle of something important just so that he could pray with his heavenly father in private. He’d ditch the secret service to go hang out with the homeless around the Whitehouse. And he’d probably wear a dirty robe when he gave speeches from the Rose Garden. Jesus would be a terrible president. But he makes a pretty good King…
No matter who you are, and no matter what you going through in your life right now, hear these frighteningly and faithfully apocalyptic words and know that they are meant for you: “This is not the end.”
Many things about today feel terrible. There is political chaos as we wrestle with the “meaning” behind the midterms and wonder about what will happen to our country. The “national leadership” continues to bicker about everything on a two-week cycle such that we regularly forget what we’re talking about. And this week marked the 307th mass shooting in our country this year. For the sake of context: today is the 314th day. And it’s against that same kind of frightening and turbulent domestic scale, that we get the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz...
There are lots of liturgical moves that can be made on this day, but All Saints also raises a lot of questions, in fact some of our most profound questions: Who and what are we really? Is there anything permanent in the universe? Do our lives have any meaning? And those questions can be far more spooky and frightening than anything we might’ve encountered on Halloween.
Where is the hope in the middle of such terrible suffering? What does it mean for us to live in a world where the blind wait by the roadsides for help? Is this all life has to offer?
Jesus’ rebuke of the thunder brothers might sound harsh to our modern and prejudiced ears, but it’s actually a promise. Jesus promises that we need not live in fear, we need not wake up every morning worrying about our security, we need not scheme to accrue as much power as possible. But Jesus doesn’t promise our protection, or our safety, or even our power - Jesus promises us the cross!
The uncomfortable comfort and the impossible possibility of our salvation is that we worship a God who, in spite of our best and worst intentions, desires our salvation even when we cling to the things we know we should not.
In the US there is one divorce every 36 seconds. That’s nearly 2,400 per day, 16,800 per week, and 876,000 per year. Divorce is one of the most remarkably prevalent occurrences in our culture and society to the degree that most of us have become numb to it, and we almost never talk about it in church.
We don’t take it very seriously.
Food is important! And yet here, in America, our connection with and to our food is one that has altogether lost its sacredness. 20% of all American meals are eaten in car. And the overwhelming majority of those meals are consumed alone. 1 out of every 5 children will go hungry, multiple days without eating, at least once a year. And among Black and Latino children the rate is 1 in 3. And somehow (!) we throw away more than 40% of our food every year - a waste of $165 billion annually. We are what we eat (or don't, apparently).
Prayer is at the heart of the Christian life. It is something Jesus consistently did throughout the gospels, it is something we do here every single week, and I would venture to guess that most of us here, in a variety of ways, pray every day. But prayer, with all of its prevalence in the church, is something we don’t really talk about. Sure, we might do it, but what is the it we are doing?
For many of us The American Dream has become The American Nightmare when it comes to money and finances. So many of us are unwilling to delay gratification and we use tomorrow’s money to finance today’s lifestyle. Few us us save money appropriately because we keep thinking that tomorrow won’t come. But then it does. Over and over again.
In the United States there are more self-storage facilities than Starbucks and McDonalds combined! With the crazy and ridiculous ways that we are accumulating more items than we could ever possibility need, far too many us us are are focusing on earthly things instead of heavenly things.
Being a Christian isn’t popular, and it certainly isn’t easy. Paul calls for us to put on the armor of God because we’re going to need it!
When we, the church, are out of touch with our vocation it’s as if we’re stumbling around in the darkness like drunken fools. We might feel a welcome reprieve from the mundanity of life, we might get the hit we need to forget our frivolity, but without our call we cease to be the church.
We are an angry people, we Christians, and that's okay. We worship a Messiah who spent most of his earthly ministry being angry. But our anger, like Christ's, should not send us into despair or violence. Our anger, like Christ's, should send us to an even stranger place: truth.
There is a tremendous difference between loving one another (like Christ), and being nice. Being nice often means being quiet, and not calling out the behavior of others. Loving like Jesus however, often means speaking up and actually calling someone out.
Easier said than done.
Jesus’ peace is greater than any earthly vision we could possibly imagine. It is more powerful than any political policy, it is mightier than any magistrate’s order, it is more life giving than any piece of legislation. Jesus’ peace is revolutionary.
This country, and our love of it, flirts very closely with what Jesus called idolatry. When the country we live in becomes more important than the God who created us, when the lights in the sky on the 4th of July shine brighter than the bread and cup on this table, when we care more about what’s happening in Washington DC than what’s happening in our local community, then we have a problem. And part of the problem is that, like with David, we forget the tremendous cost of our victory.
We need Jesus to smack us across the head not with smooth stones from the wadi but with the hard wood of the cross. We need to be brought low to the ground before we can be raised high. We need to be defeated in order to be redeemed.
We complain about politics all the time. We hold our elected leaders to standards that we ourselves do not adhere to. And when they disappoint us we act as if no one could have predicted this. But we get the politicians we deserve.
Words are important. What we say often shapes what we believe and, perhaps even more importantly, it shapes how we behave.
Most of us have come of age in a world where the God of scripture has been conveyed to us through analogy after analogy, where professional Christians like me have endeavored to bring people like you closer to the divine, when the truth of the matter is that we cannot describe God, and God is the One who encounters us.
Easter boldly proclaims that at the end of our possibilities God creates a new beginning – Pentecost shows us how we take the first steps.
The whole truth of God’s testimony is that God gives us eternal life through Jesus Christ. It is that simple, yet truly profound witness that gives us the power and the courage to speak our whole truth regardless of the consequences.
Right now the contemporary church, from the realm of United Methodism to conservative evangelicalism, is struggling. The church struggles, in large part, because of our failure to recognize how we are bound to God and not to the world – such that many churches take their theological cues from the powers and principalities and assert them on scripture, rather than the other way around. It is precisely why our divisions are growing wider and our walls are growing taller.
It is in the loving of the other that we, and they, are made both human and holy. And this is at the heart of it all. We can talk about how much we love God because God loves us, but without loving our fellow human beings, we cannot know God! Let that sink in for just a moment – without love for one another, we cannot know God.
If you could saying anything to your/the church, without consequences, what would you say?
For some reason, as we mature into adulthood, our joyful play begins to fade and for some of us it completely stops. We just accept things the way they are, we make peace with the labels placed on us by society, we accept the love we think we deserve. And, more often than not, we'd rather relax than play. But not today...
All of us, particularly those of us with a self-righteous leaning, are sinners in need of God’s grace. From the racists to those who abandon their racist family members. One of the harshest realities this side of Easter is that most of us believe we are without sin, and we deceive ourselves.
Hear the Good News, the best news. Hear the three most important words you will ever hear: He is risen!
On Easter we have reason to celebrate; death has been defeated! But Easter is also a reminder that God has inaugurated a strange new world, in which all of our priorities have been flipped upside down.
Are we afraid?
If not, maybe we should be.
According to the strange and mysterious wisdom of God, it is in the crucified death of Jesus that all of the cosmos is altered (and altar-ed). This death makes our lives possible. This death is what makes the Christian experience intelligible. This death is at the heart of who God is.
The generosity of God means the crucifixion of the Son.
We don’t gather to contemplate how Jesus would respond to a certain situation, we don’t wonder about what Jesus would do, instead we ask ourselves What Did Jesus Do? Because that question, and the struggle to answer it, is at the heart of the mystery we call faith. This night, tomorrow night, Easter Sunday, every Sunday, they’re not about what we should do. It’s about what Christ did.
During the March For Our Lives, one of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School proclaimed, "Today the revolution begins!" But he was wrong. The revolution began a long time ago, when a poor Jewish rabbi entered Jerusalem on the back of a colt.
I’ve been in ministry for roughly 5 years and I’ve finally figured it out. After all the sermons and all the meetings, after all the prayers and preparation, I know how to fix all the church’s problems. It’s time to make the church weird again.
It’s incredibly ironic that many of the people who want the Ten Commandments up in public are the same who perpetuate a culture in which divorce is over 50% (you shall not commit adultery), where we have more guns than human beings (you shall not kill), where capitalism is more important than community (honor the Sabbath), and where we spend more time worshipping celebrities than Almighty God (you shall have no other gods before me).
Lent is the perfect time to read about Abram and Sarai in church; they were imperfect people through whom God made the covenant promise a possibility -- just like us.
If God was willing to refrain from violence upon the world, if God was willing to hang up the bow, why haven’t we done the same?
When we wrestle with our mortality we catch a glimpse of who we really are, and we wonder about what we could become, should we have just a little more time.
The work of the Lord, of going to the margins for the sake of people on the margins is no easy task. For many, it results in punishment, isolation, and even death. Yet staying the course results not only in our transfigured lives, but also in the transfiguration of all things.
Fair warning: “practicing what you preach” is no easy thing. There will come times when the last thing we want to do is gather with the people whom we call the church. Whether it’s because they stand for different political realities, or they speak the truth in love (and it hurts), or they simply remind us too much of whom we really are, it is not easy being a faithful community together. Even Jesus needed time alone.
This is what I do know: The saving of anyone is something is not within our own power, it is exclusively God’s. No one can be saved – by virtue of what he/she can do. But everyone can be saved – by virtue of what God can do.
“How old is the earth?” might sound like an innocuous question without too many ramifications, but how we answer the question comes with a lot of consequences.
Evangelism always begins in friendship, in the intimacy of two people sharing life together. Evangelism takes place in the trust when listening becomes more important than talking. Evangelism comes to fruition when saving and winning others is more about them than us.
I have brought infants, toddlers, teenagers, and adults to the waters of baptism again and again because what God does through the Spirit is the most wonderfully disruptive thing that can ever take place. In those moments, God speaks from the torn open heavens, just like on the day Jesus was baptized to say, “You are my child.” And we are who God says we are.
A real old-fashioned Christmas, which is to say a biblical Christmas, is different. The strange new world of scripture opens up for us a scene where kings rage and wickedness rules the day, where the threat of taxation forces young couples to retreat to the comfort of their parents’ homes, and countries who think of themselves as the very best have forgotten the very least. You know, completely unlike today...
Mary, in her remarkable song, reminds us that wealth and power have no ultimate influence in the realm of God’s kingdom. In fact, they are used to serve the lowly. That’s not a popular message to bear during Christmas, but it wasn’t popular during the time of Mary either. In fact, that’s the message that got Jesus killed. But, thanks be to God, we know that what started in the womb was also there in the empty tomb.
The people receiving Jesus’ first sermon were uncomfortable with his proclamation such that they wanted to end his life. They couldn’t imagine God would so subvert and change the priorities of existence. They were far away from encountering a God who would resurrect his Son from beyond the grave. They were, in some ways, a lot like us.
We live in a world where women are made to feel less than men. And God is doing something about it.
As Christians, we rest in the darkness of Advent. But we also know the end of the story: we know that greater things are still to come, we know that only God can shake the foundations of the earth, we know that hope in God is unlike anything else in existence. We know all of this, because the promise in Mary's womb comes to fruition in the empty tomb.
When we feel the struggle of making a joyful noise amidst all the other noise this time of year, we return to God's great gift of music. For music is the magnificent agent that lifts our hearts to commune with the heavenly angelic choir. Music transforms our hearts such that we can know the Lord is good. Music is at the heart of God's majesty and mystery.
I have a love/hate relationship with church signs and billboards. There are some that will always make me laugh like, "The Church Isn't Full Of Hypocrites... There's Always Room For More." But there are also plenty of signs that make me cringe like: "Accept Jesus Or Go To Hell."
Tell the story when you are up and when you are down, when all is well and when all is hell, tell the story when you are received and when you are nowhere believed. Tell the story until sinners are justified, until the devil is terrified, until Jesus is magnified, and until God is satisfied!
In America we emphasize individual freedom to such a degree that we surround ourselves with people who look likes us, think likes us, and vote like us. But saints are people who give their lives not to a donkey, and not to an elephant, but to The Lamb.
In a time when the word “love” is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the fundamental component of biblical love is not affection or hallmark cars, but service. To love is to serve.
We can put all of our trust in our money, we can use it to do all sorts of things in the world, but if we think that it all belongs to us, or has come to us simply because we deserve it, then we’ve failed to recognize the One from whom all blessings flow.
The church doesn’t exist to make a difference. Instead, the church exists to praise the living God who fills our lives with the kind of joy that sustains us through both the mountains and valleys we experience. Church isn’t about us. It’s about God.
Whenever we open the scriptures and study we are entering into the strange new world of the bible, one that shines a light on what our lives really look like even today.
Worship is practice. We do it over and over to tone our spiritual muscles in order to do the work of the Lord.
To those who love the church: make more room for it, bring to it your best and highest devotion. And to those who are not sure about the church: you will not find perfection here, but come anyway, and help us make the church better.
I’ve been in enough hospitals to hear doctors refer to their patients not by Mrs. Smith or Mr. Jones, but by a room number (or worse: by their disease). There are plenty of people who are judged simply because of the color of their skin, or their political persuasion, or their sexual orientation without their names ever being mentioned. Names are important.
In the realm of the church, in Christianity, to reject Jews, or any other marginalized group, is simply unchristian. For in God’s vision of the holy mountain, Christians are the gentiles who are gathered to join the Jews. We are the outcasts, the foreigners, the outsiders grafted into God’s great communion. To reject the outcast is to reject ourselves.
We can tell ourselves that what happened in Charlottesville will never happen in our town, but it does; it happens each and every day in some small way, shape, or form.
Today we live in a world where we are forever asking, "Who deserves to come into our country?" and "Who is worthy of receiving healthcare?" and even "Who should be admitted to college?" But in the kingdom of God, at the Lord's Table, all are welcome. Always.
Do we feel like the merchant from Jesus' parable? Are we willing to risk it all and throw ourselves completely in for the kingdom? Or, at the very least, have we found a pearl in the church?
If the church is no better than the culture that surrounds it, if it doesn’t embody a different way of being, then it simply isn’t the church.
We might not want to let God take care of our backyard gardens, wasting seeds left and right. But when it comes to the garden of the church, when it comes to people like you and me, there is no greater gardener than the Lord.
We are captivated more by the optimism of “what if” than the pessimism of “it’s too late.” We are held in bondage to the belief that we are more than the mistakes of the past, more that the pain of the present, and more than the unknown of the future. We are prisoners of hope.
The goal of preaching is the hope that people will not remember what you said. The goal should be that the next time someone turns to that part of the Bible it will say a little more to him or her. The purpose of the church, of doing worship week after week, is to give the bible a little more room to shine.
We become God’s people, a people of holy kisses, when the pews of the sanctuary are more like avenues of connection and less like walls of division.
Today, we throw the word “heaven” around like we throw around the word “love.” We use it as a filler or a descriptor to such a degree that it no longer means anything. And therefore when we say that Jesus ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, we no longer know what we are saying.
What has God done for me? God sent me to a church that listened to me, prayed with me, and loved me in spite of myself. What has God done for you?
Thomas wanted to know how to get where Jesus was going, he wanted an answer to his question, he wanted to know the way. And Jesus responded like this, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
For far too long we’ve limited our imagination of the church to being the mechanism by which we can develop strategies that, to put it in political terms, Make America Great Again. But that is not the task nor is it the mission of the church. The task of the church is to be a community of character that can survive as a witness to the truth.
We make so many assumptions about people without ever doing the good and difficult work of learning who they really are. We see a bumper sticker, or we hear an accent, or we observe a skin tone, or we read a Facebook post, and we let that dictate who they are to us. When truthfully, what we make of those limited observations says far more about us, than about the ones we see.
The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the epitome of God’s power and grace. Through it we see how God took something like a cross, a means of death, and turned it into the joy of life-everlasting. On Easter God transformed the tomb in the same way that He did on Christmas in a virgin’s womb. God made a way where there was no way. On Easter, Jesus opened up a strange new world for people like you and me.
While sitting at the table with his friends, it’s as if Jesus is telling them that when they see him hanging on the cross, they should see a door with blood. It’s as if Jesus is telling them that his sacrifice, his death, is their exodus.
Don’t be mistaken; Jesus is as political as they come. But he rules not at the head of an army, but from an old wooden cross. He rules not by filibustering particular Supreme Court nominees or demanding democratic political policies, but by laying it all down for the ungodly. He rules not by ordering his troops to use chemical weapons against innocent civilians or even sending tomahawk missiles to destroy a military base, but mounting the cross and saying, “Forgive them Father, for they do not know what they are doing.”
One of the things we struggle to remember, here in our comfortable Christianity, is that Jesus was a revolutionary. He was not killed for loving too much. He was killed for calling into question who was really in charge, for confronting the elite about not taking care of the poor and the marginalized, and for telling the truth. Jesus was a revolutionary and calls us to join the revolution.
Our lives have changed forever. We can’t just retreat to the ways of the past because grace abounds. God in Christ has made in us a new creation! The gift of God in Christ on the cross was, and is, such that we are forever freed from the tyranny of sin and death. Should we continue to sin in order that grace may abound? HELL NO!
Truly I tell you, we cannot know who we are to be, if we do not know our story. This inexhaustible, unexplainable, indescribable moment from the beginning (Genesis) is who we are. It is the story of how the life of order fell into disorder. But, thanks be to God, it is not the end of the story.
We don’t like admitting our shortcomings, our faults, and our helplessness. We reject that gospel and substitute our own. We’d rather believe the American gospel: God helps those who help themselves. Actually, Paul tells us quite the opposite: When we could not help ourselves, when we were stuck in the shadow of sin, Christ died for us.
We can have the perfect advertising campaign, with our slogan in big capital letters, but that does not redeem our sinful actions and behaviors. We might think we are righteous and that we are “color-blind” or “LGBTQ affirming” or “economically transparent” but we are nevertheless sinners in need of God’s grace and forgiveness. We can even leave the church doors unlocked all week long, but we will still be broken and in need of God’s redeeming love.
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
In an attempt to live into my fear, I stepped up to the pulpit without a pre-written sermon and offered this about the Transfiguration.
When we pray like the psalmist, when we utter words with true faith and humility, when we ask for God's will to be done and mean it, our prayers will always mean more than what we hear from the pulpit.
Is the Church supposed to make the world a better place? - Sermon on 1 Corinthians 3.1-9
Does Jesus really want us to love the sinner and hate the sin? Why is this such a popular thing for Christians to say?
A sermon on the current refugee crisis, church bathrooms, and women (not) speaking in church.
Why do eight out of every ten Americans think "God Helps Those Who Help Themselves" is in the Bible? - Part 2 of our series on Dumb Things Christians Say
Does everything happen for a reason? Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, recently said that he thinks God intervened to make Donald Trump president. Does God pull us along by strings like puppets? Do we have perfect freedom to act in this world?
What does joy look like? How can experience Isaiah's vision of a joyful community in this life? And what can a 2 year-old child receiving communion teach us about joy?
What does peace look like? How can we find peace in this broken world? And what in the world does peace have to do with kidnapping Santa Claus?!
A sermon on Psalm 98 in response to the myriad of events from the last week: How can we sing a new song to the Lord when people on both sides of the political aisle are filled with anger, fear, and resentment?
A lot of people think the world might end next week when either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is elected to become the next president of the United States. Are these political pangs the beginning of the end? When will the apocalypse come to fruition? Here is an old sermon about "the end."
Sermon on 2 Thessalonians 1.1-4, 11-12; In a world full of competing narratives, what is the mission of the church?
As the nation nears the conclusion of the presidential election, countless Christians will vacillate between the "left" and the "right." Perhaps now more than ever, politics have consumed our daily lives and our churches. But Christians believe that Jesus is Lord... Here is the Christ the King sermon from 2013; a challenging reminder of who we are and whose we are during this election cycle.
Conclusion of the Confronting Controversy Series with the topic of Homosexuality. Is the practice of homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching?
A sermon on the Good Samaritan based on an interaction in the church parking lot on the 5th of July.
Another chapter in the Confronting Controversy Series on the subject of War. Can/Should Christians serve in the military? Do Christians have a problem with War?
Out of all the sermons I've posted online, "The Power of Words" has been the most popular. Over the last three years thousands of people have gone to the blog for this one particular sermon on the connections between the prophet Jeremiah and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Should public schools require children to pray every morning? - Our fall intern is tackling the subject of Prayer in Public School from the pulpit this week, but I wanted to record some of my thoughts on the subject as well.
During my first year of ministry I attempted to tackle the question: "What happens to people of other faiths when they die?" I decided to break the sermon up into three mini-sermons on three different scriptures.
Part 4 in the series on Confronting Controversy. What does the bible say about Suicide? Why do we avoid talking about it in church? What happens to people who commit suicide?
Part 3 in the series on Confronting Controversy. Is the Death Penalty something Christians should support?
First sermon in a series on Confronting Controversy. The particular controversy was The Separation of Church and State.
Sermon offered at the beginning of Holy Week 2016. Rather than a general interpretation of a particular text, the sermon goes day by day through Jesus' final week.