Texts: Rev. 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14:23-29

GOD’S ADDRESS

What’s God’s address?   Does anybody here know?   I can’t find it in my Outlook contacts.   And, God’s not listed on the web, either—at least there’s no reliable information you can find there on where it is that God lives.    I suppose it could be some cosmic address, like, “777 Heavenly Place, Beyond-the-Edge-of- the-Universe, Eternity.”   Of course, if God’s address is something like that, we probably couldn’t confirm it; I doubt it’ll show up on Map Quest. You’d think with someone who’s as sought-after as God, he’d be a lot easier to locate—a lot more accessible.   [hold right ear and look to side]  What’s that?  God’s address is listed, in our gospel today?   [to congregation]  Sorry…my producer is breaking in here…[hold ear and look to side again]  Okay, so God’s address is listed in our gospel reading.  Hang on…   [pull out lectern Bible and flip through and look at a page]  Uh…I’m not seeing it here.  [put Bible down, look at congregation, then to side holding ear again]  What is it?   You gotta be kidding me!   Are you sure?  Really?  Okay…[let go of ear, look at congregation]  Apparently, God’s address is 12000 Independence Parkway, Frisco Texas, 75035.  That’s…right here.  The address of Rejoice Lutheran Church.  It seems that, according to the Lord Jesus, this is where God chooses to reside.   [hold ear and look to side again] Say again?  Oh.  [let go of ear again, speak to congregation] I guess this is just one of many residences where God hangs out.   It appears that, being God and all, he can manage to be all kinds of different places at the same time… I guess they call it, “omnipresent.” 

Perhaps you’ve already noticed, but we are Christians.   That means we’re not Deists.  Deists are folks who believe that God is sort of like a clockmaker.  Deists believe that, God made the universe, wound it all up like a clock, and then simply stepped back to watch it all unwind.    The God we worship and embrace isn’t that kind of a God.  Our God is an imminent, even an intimate God.   God’s much more like our mothers.   Our mothers gave birth to us, and then they continued to hold onto us, and to care for us and nurture us, day in and day out, in all sorts of very hands-on ways.  And that’s how we might describe our experience of God.   Because, in our Lord Jesus Christ, we’ve found God getting up-close and personal with us, in a way the God of the Deists never could.   In Christ, we have the divine ‘Word made flesh’—that’s sort of a way of saying that Jesus is God’s mind and character wrapped in human skin.  In Jesus, we can see God come among us as one of us, in order to embody his incredible love for us, by living with us, and by teaching us and touching us and healing us, and by suffering and dying for us, on a cross.   And, this ‘Word of God made flesh’ that we know as our Lord Jesus has even gone beyond this.  Because, this living, breathing Word of God is also a dying and rising Word.   In Jesus Christ, we find that God’s passionate commitment to love us--as he did back in 1^st century Judea, is still ongoing…through him we find that not even death itself can stop the commitment that he has toward us.    

“Those who love me,” our Lord Jesus says, “will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them…The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and will remind you of all that I have said to you.”   It’s right here in John chapter 14 that we find the promise that our Triune God, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, will reside with us.   That he’s not going to keep his distance, but that, quite the opposite--he’s going to make his address here, among us.  Wherever there are those who love Jesus and who keep Jesus’ word, the Scripture says, that’s where God wants to live. 

God wants to live with those who love Jesus.  You know, the thing about Jesus is that, once you know him…once you’re aware of what he’s has done for us, well, it’s pretty hard not to love him.    I mean, what’s to not love?  Somebody who’s gone to mind-boggling lengths to assure us of how deeply God loves us?  Someone who’s suffered and died and risen from the grave, so that we can live in the confidence that, no matter who we are or what we’ve done, our sins are forgiven?  What’s to not love?  Somebody who, while he did bear a cross for us, doesn’t pull any punches, but tells it like it is when it comes to our spiritual condition…and who inspires us and empowers us to live on a higher spiritual plane than we’d otherwise be able live on?  I mean…how do you not love all that? 

“Those who love me will keep my word,” Jesus says.  Yes, we will keep his word.  We’ll keep it because, once we’ve experienced the light of his word of forgiveness…once we’ve encountered the word of his example of caring service, we realize how precious it all is.  And so we want to keep Jesus’ Word…we don’t want to let it go.  Oh, for sure, sometimes some of us get temporarily get distracted from Jesus’ word.  There are, after all, a lot of distractions to draw us away from it, right?  But with the help of the Holy Spirit Jesus promised us, we in the Church have managed to organize ourselves in such a way that, even if Jesus’ Word should become obscured to us, it’s still here, clearly visible for us.   Week after week after week, his Word is proclaimed and celebrated, and even served up for us to eat and drink.   Any time something arises that clouds our vision—and admittedly it can and does at times, in a multitude of different ways, Jesus’ word of loving service still lives on in our midst.  His word lives on in and through those of us who use our gifts, here in our worship life… or in youth ministry or education ministry.  His word lives on in our Stephen ministers.  It lives on in those who prepare food for fellowship events, in those who’ve planted and are tending a community garden. And it lives on in those who’ve  put together some recent outreach events here at Rejoice.  Jesus’ word lives on in those who lovingly accomplish all of the day-to-day tasks that go with keeping a growing faith community like this up and running.  Jesus’ Word lives on.  And, even if we should get distracted or blinded so that we’re temporarily unable to see it, Jesus’ Word remains tangible and visible for anyone who wants to see it or touch it.    

Right here among us, just as in other local churches throughout the world where folks love Jesus and keep his word, here among us, our Triune God chooses to live.     I wonder if what I’m talking about this morning makes anyone here at all uncomfortable?  I wonder if the thought of God being so very near to you kind of makes you feel a little bit squirmy inside?  If so, well, take a look all around you.  Because all around you are others who also feel that way at times. I know I do. Pretty much all of us at some point are so aware of our own shortcomings, so burdened with our own guilt or shame, or just overshadowed by a sense of our own unworthiness, that we find ourselves unsettled at the thought of being in close proximity to God.   There’s probably not a single one of us here today who hasn’t at some point hesitated to show up for worship because we felt or we imagined that God’s judgment toward us was looming.   And that’s something we’d just as soon postpone dealing with for as long as possible, thank you.   But the more time you spend with God and God’s people who love Jesus and who keep his Word, the more you find you’re able to break free from those kinds of oppressive thoughts or feelings.  The more time you spend with God and God’s people, the more you know in your heart that God isn’t any more likely to reject you for anything you’ve done than your mother was likely to reject you for repeatedly loading your diaper, or spitting up all over her nice clean shirts, or for breaking her favorite lamp.   Not only that, but the more time we spend with God and God’s people, the more we’ll find that, like any good parent, God is here to help us grow out of the things that burden our conscience…by helping us to grow into a life of caring service…the kind of life that that enables us to show our love for Jesus, and to keep his word. 

12000 Independence Parkway, Frisco Texas, 75035.   It’s just one of God’s many, many addresses.  In fact, our Lord has promised that, any time two or more of us are anywhere, doing stuff together in his name, that’s where you can find him.

Text:  John 21: 1-19

PLENTY OF FISH

”There’s plenty of other fish in the sea.”   I’ll never forget when, as a young adult, someone said those words to me, just after I’d broken up with a girl I’d been dating for months.   I know…they’re intended to be words of comfort, but if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this platitude, then you know:  instead of providing comfort, all it usually does is rub salt into an open wound.    But this morning, I want to lift up these words in a whole different context.  Instead of a cliché intended for someone who’s going through a breakup, “There’s plenty of other fish in the sea” is something we as God’s people can hear as a call—a call to engage God’s mission.  

Peter and some of Jesus’ other followers had been through a lot.  They’d witnessed Jesus’ arrest, his trial, his suffering and death, and they’d been among the first witnesses to his resurrection.   The risen Christ had commissioned and empowered them to continue the work he’d begun in the world—the work of embodying God’s grace and truth.  And they been given this task to the extent of even administering the forgiveness of sins on God’s behalf.  And so, what do these disciples do next?   “I’m going fishing,” says Peter.    “Great!  We’ll go with you!” the others respond.    Now, for Peter and at least two of the other disciples there that day, going fishing was a familiar activity from the past—that is, the past before were called to follow Jesus.   Going fishing was how they used to make their living.   It’s kind of human nature, isn’t it?  That whenever we’re faced with some great new venture, but we’re not really very sure about what it is we’re supposed to do, we return to old, familiar patterns.

For those three disciples, getting into a fishing boat and casting nets by night was a well-known habit.   And the others?  Well, they were likely just following Peter’s lead…again, probably a familiar pattern.  After following Jesus around for three years, they were used to following somebody.    In any event, for them it was a long, fruitless night out on the water.    It says that they caught nothing.  Nothing!   I don’t know, maybe they weren’t really very serious about fishing.   Maybe they got bored and somebody pulled out a bottle of wine, and then somebody else started to sing, and somebody else joined in, and they ended up scaring all the fish away.  Or maybe they were just plain unlucky that night.    Happens sometimes, to the best.  But after an entire night casting their net out in the boat, John’s gospel says, they’d caught nada.  Zilch.   The sun was coming up now, and they were probably thinking it was time to head in for coffee and donuts.   

And that’s when some guy over on the beach calls out to them, “Hey, kiddos…ya don’t have any fish, do ya?”  They answer, “nope.” And the guy onshore then presumes to give them a fishing tip:  “Try throwing out your nets on the right side of the boat.  If you do,” he says.  “you’ll get some fish.”   Okay, a little irritating…but probably figuring, “Well, what do we have to lose?” Peter and his buddies go ahead and they cast the net as directed.   And…whoa!  They come up with one big, honkin’ haul of fish!    Of course, that’s when they suddenly realize who this guy on the beach is!   It’s the same person who’d turned all that water into wine at a wedding in Cana…the one who’d fed thousands of people with just a few loaves and some fish.  It was obvious now… the only one who could come up with such a great catch of fish was Jesus.    After they’d struggled to drag ashore this net that was chock-full of shiny, flipping sea critters, apparently somebody took the trouble to count them all; because John’s gospel gives us a number…a hundred and fifty three.  A hundred and fifty three large fish.   So many fish, and yet, we’re told, the net was not torn.

I find it very interesting that this is the very last experience with the risen Jesus that this gospel records.   In the midst of this rather pointless, fruitless fishing outing, when the disciples are doing something that seems pretty far-removed from what their Lord had commissioned them to do, their Lord appears to them one more time, and he leads them to come up with all these fish…fish that, at this point, none of them would’ve thought were anywhere near their boat.    It’s almost as if Jesus is saying, “Yeah, go ahead; do your thing.  Do whatever comes natural to you.  But remember:  it’s not until you follow my lead that anything good is going to come of it.” 

The disciples all come ashore and Jesus shares with them what’s been called “the last breakfast.”  And it was after that breakfast that Jesus has this rather odd conversation with Peter.    Peter, who, when he’d recognized Jesus from the boat, jumped in and swam quickly ashore—but not before putting on his clothes!  Why, you have to ask, would Peter put his clothes on in order to jump into the water and swim ashore?  I mean, it says he was naked, but…o-o-h.   In the Bible, covering up ones nakedness and a sense of shame kind of go together, don’t they?  Certainly Peter had something to be ashamed of before Jesus.   It was Peter, you’ll recall, who had denied his Lord, not once, but three times.   In any case, we’re privy to this post-breakfast conversation that Jesus initiates with Peter.  Of course, after what Peter had done, Jesus would’ve been totally justified in sending Peter packing, wouldn’t he?  Or at very least, he could easily have just ignored Peter—just acted like he was invisible.    But Jesus doesn’t deal with Peter like that.  Instead, Jesus stays connected with Peter.  And, instead of rejecting him, he draws Peter in to a recommitment to Jesus’ mission.  He does this by asking him about his love for Jesus, not once, but three times—once for each time that Peter had denied his Lord.  And in the end, Jesus takes this faithless and guilty man, and he not only commits him to caring for his flock, but he also give Peter the vision of a deeply faithful future—a future where Peter will follow his crucified and risen Lord into places where he would “not wish to go.” 

Now, this whole account might well seem to have a very familiar ring to us.   Because as we hear his word and receive his sacrament here in his gathered community, we too have encountered the risen Christ.  We too have been commissioned and empowered by the risen Christ; just as the Father sent our Lord Jesus into the world, so he also has sent us.   We too have been entrusted with dispensing his divine Word of forgiveness to those who need it.    And yet, we too can get caught up in old familiar patterns, investing ourselves in activities that have little or nothing to do with what our Lord has sent and empowered us to do. 

Old familiar patterns can pop up in all kinds of different ways, can’t they?  The next time we find it necessary to speak in a way that denigrates somebody—whether it be a government official or a boss or coworker, or even a fellow church member, we might ask ourself, “What does this have to do with following Jesus?  How am I embodying God’s grace and truth when I say things like this?”  Or, if we’re compelled to expose ourself to salacious celebrity gossip, or to the toxic vitriol that’s being spewed these days on talk radio, we might ask ourself, “How does this equip me to better persuade someone that their sins are forgiven?”   Should we find ourself entangled to some degree in a conflict, in the workplace, or at our kids school, or in a neighborhood dispute, before we take sides in the conflict, do we even bother to think about what our role might be as God’s representative in that situation? 

I want to propose that, in any of these circumstances, or in any of a thousand other familiar ones, our risen Lord is always standing nearby.   We may or may not recognize him, but he’s there.  And I’d suggest that, in those times, he’s pretty much always got something to say to us--something that , if we heed him, will transform the situation.    In times like these, what I suspect our Lord has to say to us is this: “There’s plenty of other fish in the sea!”  

There are plenty of other people who have yet to be caught in the net of God’s saving love, aren’t there?   There are plenty of other people who long to be embraced by God’s warm, caring arms—who are even desperate to be embraced,…but who haven’t yet been caught up by the experience of God’s love.    You may’ve already experienced it…but, many others haven’t.   Some of them are people just like you and me, but they’re folks who, living in an increasingly harsh and demanding culture, have never really come to know the unconditional love, the pure, unearned favor that God has revealed to you and me through the cross of Jesus Christ.  

There are plenty of other fish in the sea.  Some of them are people from other cultures, people who’ve immigrated from lands where they’ve had very limited exposure, if any, to the good news of the generous and kind and merciful God who we’re blessed to know.  You know, some say that the 153 fish in today’s gospel represent the 153 different nations of people that, in the ancient world, were known to exist.  I don’t know about that, but I do know that, living all around us, right here in our own communities, we can find many different people, from many different nations.    People for whom the light of God’s forgiveness in Christ is just a distant glimmer.  There are plenty of other fish in the sea.

Not only that, but you and I…all of us, we make up a net that can catch a lot of those fish.  Just in this one congregation, there’s a large and growing net, a network that’s spread out from Plano to Melissa, from Princeton to Little Elm.  And if our gospel today says anything to us, it’s that it doesn’t matter how long or how often this net is cast, until it’s cast as our Lord leads us to cast it, it’s going to come up empty.    But, to the extent that we heed him…to the extent that we listen for and respond to our Lord’s direction, well, get ready!  Get ready to be stretched and strained, almost but not quite to the point of breaking.  Get ready for a future where we may be led into situations we wouldn’t necessarily wish to go.  But get ready also to receive the forgiving love and renewing power of the risen Christ.  Love and power that will strengthen us, so that we’ll be able to stand up to whatever load it is that we have to bear.

I know that some among us have labored for such a long time, first to get into this building, and then, for the past year, to get ourselves settled in our new home.  It’d be nice now, wouldn’t it, to just sit back and relax? To let someone else do what needs to be done?  And, as for those among us who are fairly new at Rejoice:  perhaps you come to us with the notion that not much is expected of you.   That just showing up and filling a chair for an hour on  
Sunday is all there is to this thing called ‘church’. But the net of Rejoice Lutheran Church consists of every single one of us.  And, to keep this net from tearing, the weight has to be spread out, among all of us.  This may or may not be where we wish to be led…but this is the reality of who we are and why we’re here.   We’re here because there’s plenty—and I mean plenty, of other fish in the sea!

Text:  John 20:19-31

SEEING ISN’T BELIEVING

Imagine going to the doctor with a bad sore throat.  The nurse swabs your throat and she takes the swab and goes and runs a test.  A few moments later, she comes back in and she says that you’ve tested positive for strep, and that the doctor will be in shortly to write you a prescription.   Upon which you demand that the doctor show you a microscope slide, with cells from your throat swab, so that you can verify that you do, in fact, have strep throat.

Or, let’s say you go to a restaurant and you order a hamburger.  But when they bring it to you, you inform the server that, before you’re gonna eat this thing, they provide documentation that the cow this burger came from did not have mad cow disease, or any other potentially harmful condition that might infect you. 

Are these absurd situations?   Of course they are!  If we insisted on proof for everything, we’d drive ourselves and everyone else totally nuts.   In a multitude of different ways, from situations like these, to our retirement investments, to getting behind the wheel of our car after somebody else has done a brake job… every day, over and over again, we demonstrate it for ourselves: seeing is not believing.  

Thomas wasn’t there when the risen Christ appeared to the other disciples as they were gathered in a locked room.   And so, when they later told Thomas what had happened, he wanted proof.   Now, if you consider it, you can’t really blame Thomas.  After all, he wasn’t asking for more than what the others’d already had—an up-front, close and personal encounter with the risen Jesus.  Okay, Thomas did say he wouldn’t believe unless he could actually touch Jesus’ wounds…so, perhaps he was asking for a bit more than the other disciples had gotten.   But, when push came to shove and the Lord appeared the next Sunday when they were all gathered together—Thomas included this time, Thomas didn’t actually insist on touching Jesus.   Apparently at that point, seeing Jesus was enough to bring Thomas to acknowledge the reality of what’d happened.  Jesus response to Thomas, though, implies that seeing isn’t always believing.  And not only that, but Jesus goes on to promise that believing without seeing has significant benefits. “Blessed are those who have not seen,” Jesus says, “and yet have come to believe.” 

Now, there are different ways we can talk about ‘believing’.  There’s intellectual assent that a teaching or proposition is so.  That kind of belief doesn’t require much from us, although we usually require some kind of proof or evidence before we’ll believe in that way.  Believing in the Christian sense means far more than just intellectual assent.  It means a way of living…it means living by faith in a crucified and risen Jesus.   It’s what the apostle Paul was talking about when he wrote in Galatians chapter 2 that, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)  The Biblical definition of faith, is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”(Hebrews 11:1)  “The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  So, from a Biblical point of view, you might say that, if it depends on proof, it isn’t really believing.   On the basis of assurance and conviction without seeing, people of faith throughout the Bible acted on their faith, and they did so in bold and striking ways.  Essentially, to have a Biblical, Christian faith is to learn to put one’s trust, not in what we can see or touch, but in something intangible--in God.  And it means to trust God to the point where it impacts the way we think and behave.   So, when the Lord Jesus gives his promise of blessing to those who “do not see and yet have come to believe,” that’s what I’d suggest he means by “believe.”  He means this kind of motivated trust.  When the writer of John’s gospel tells us that his gospel was written to give us what we need so that we too can believe, what I’d propose he means is this gospel is written so that we too can come to put our trust in God through Jesus Christ…and that through this trust, we can “have life in his name.” 

Believing…trusting…and having life.  For those of us who belong to Christ, these three go together.   Believing…trusting…having life.  Yes, we could get all caught up in looking for proof.   But that’s not what gets us where we need to be.  To have a truly blessed life, to experience the fullness of life as Jesus Christ came to give it to us, is to believe—in the sense of trusting the testimony that, in Jesus, God did come among us.  It’s to believe, in the sense of trusting that, in Jesus, God revealed himself to be a generous and a loving and a saving God.  It means to trust that Jesus suffered and died on a cross for us, and for the world.  And it means to trust that God’s power to save us is greater than death itself—as was revealed by Jesus’ resurrection. 

Seems simple, right?  I mean, all we have to do is trust all this wonderful good news about God’s amazing love for us in Jesus, and we have blessedness and we have life.   But it’s far from simple, isn’t it?  Because, this is right where the complexity of our human condition comes in.  There’s a part of us—the part that perhaps identifies with Thomas in today’s gospel, there’s a part of us that goes, “But I can’t believe it all...I can’t trust it—not without proof.”   And, at the very same time, there’s another part of us that doesn’t need that proof.   This is the part of us that wants to seek the blessed life that comes from trusting God in Christ--from living by faith and not by sight.  And on any given day, one part or the other of us may prevail.

When the “faith-ful” side of us is in the driver’s seat, the life that comes from trusting in the promises of the crucified and risen Christ is ours.   When we’re in trust mode, we find ourselves living under the promises of God’s forgiveness, of eternal life, of God’s abiding presence and power at work in our life.  When we’re trusting all that  Good News that comes through Christ, we’re aware of God’s Spirit guiding us in our life, leading us to use our gifts in caring service to those around us.   We experience the joy and fulfillment of being part of the body of Christ.   Troubles may come our way, but those troubles simply drive us deeper into fellowship with God and with God’s people.   Those days when we live by faith and not by sight are days when we are truly blessed…just as our Lord said we would be. 

But there are those times when even the most faithful of us find ourself living under the shadow of a giant question mark.   Days when doubt and skepticism fill our hearts.  On these days, we wonder how anyone—let alone we ourself, can possibly let go of all those worries and fears that’ve wormed their way into our psyche.   And on those days, all the worries and fears have power over us…they keep us from the caring and giving that, deep down inside, we know are what will lead us to true happiness.  When it comes to doing those things that give us joy and meaning, some days we can find ourself paralyzed.   And usually, it’s those says when the distrustful side of us is running the show.

There’s a poem that captures something of this “unfaith-ful” side of us.  The poem is called, “I Cling to the Wall”:

Sometimes I cling to the wall,
I can’t go into the room,
As if I were a speck of dust
Unswept by natural broom. 

What is this curs’d magnetic pow’r
That draws my hours away?
Who is the hag that waves the wand,
Submersing another day? 

The room awaits, full dancing floor,
Beckoning me to come.
But I am trap’d beneath a weight
That weighs a heavy ton.

I squint to see my nemesis,
To glimpse that hollow face.
And here begins my genesis:
I’m on my own shoelace!

I’m convinced that we were all created to live by faith and not by sight.   To live each day with a childlike trust.  That’s why, every day we tend to live a good part of our life not expecting proof for things.   When the doctor says we need some medicine, we take the doctor’s word for it.  We order a burger, and we just eat it when it comes, no questions asked.   Doubt and disbelief can creep into our hearts and minds—for some of us, more-so than for others, but it’s not inevitable that any of us will let our reservations control how we think and how we act.   Faith, I’m proposing, is a natural human condition—it’s just as natural as doubt. 

Here’s the thing:  we have some say in how things pan out for us.  We can either engage in those things that cultivate faith in us, or we can neglect and avoid faith nurturing activities and simply wallow in our doubts.   Thomas could’ve heard the testimony of the others who told him they’d seen their Lord risen for the grave, and he could’ve just said, “That’s it…you guys are a bunch of flakes…I’m outta here.”  But he didn’t do that.  Thomas was back the following Sunday.  Back among the community of gathered disciples.  And it was in that gathered community where Thomas’s doubt and skepticism were laid to rest.   It was in that gathered community where the risen Christ made himself known to Thomas. 

Here in this community of gathered disciples, the risen Christ awaits us.   Some among us have learned to live our lives mostly—not totally, but predominantly, by faith.    You can tell who they are because there’s a joy and peace in them that transcends the day-to-day worries and fears of life in this world…a joy and a peace that frees them to give of themselves with abandon.    Oh, they still get down and anxious at times, but they somehow manage to rise above whatever comes their way—even as their Lord rose from the dead.   They also tend to be those who pray daily, who study their Bible, who worship weekly, who build spiritual friendships—who engage in those things that keep their faith healthy and growing.   Others of us spend most of our time on the other end of things…consumed with the burdens of daily living, pulled this way or that by demands and worries and troubles.  But no matter who we are, no matter how much or how little we trust in him, the risen One is here among us.  The One whose great love for us neither the cross nor the grave could impede, is here to give us his peace; he’s here to breathe his empowering Spirit upon us.  He’s here, to give us his word of forgiveness--a Word that we can both claim for ourselves and that we can share with others.  

I don’t know about you, but I’m glad I’m here today…and I’m glad that you’re here too.  Because, the more we  keep showing up here, the more we can see—well, perhaps not the risen Christ himself, but the blessed life that comes when our faith in him is growing. 

Text:  Luke 24:1-12

AN IDLE TALE

Hey--have you heard?  There’s this bank that’s offering limitless loans at zero percent interest!   You don’t have to qualify, and you can apply it to anything you want to buy—even if it’s worthless.    Oh—and if you don’t get around to ever paying any of it back…that’s fine with the bank.  

One thing you might be interested in buying with the loan is some prime, secluded, beachfront real estate on the California coast—complete with a deluxe beachfront home!   The owner will let you appraise it yourself, and whatever you say it’s worth, that’s all you have to pay.   

Once you’ve purchased the property and moved into the home, you’ll probably want to spend a lot of time just hanging out on a chair in the sun.    And you don’t have to worry about the harmful effects of UV rays; a new study that was just released says that sunlight actually prevents skin cancer.  So, no more hassle with applying those messy sunscreens!   Just stay out there all day, if you want! 

Oh, and did you also hear that death no longer has to have the last word?  That there was this guy who was executed some two thousand years ago, who was actually entombed for a couple of days, who came back to life again?  And that he’s still alive today?  

Yeah.  Right.  

There’s some things we all know just don’t happen.  Not ever.  No bank is going to offer limitless, zero percent loans to unqualified people.    Not now, not ever.    No seller is going to let you set the price for beachfront property…even if there were some kind of toxic spill there, they’d still manage to find a buyer willing to pay a halfway decent price.    If any study actually came out claiming that the sun’s rays are completely healthy and not at all harmful, we’d never see that study, because nobody would be dumb enough to publish it.    And dead people…well, dead people stay dead.   Nobody comes back from the grave.  And nobody who died two thousand years ago is still breathing.   We all know that. 

And yet…we in the Church have this crazy Sunday--every year.   This day when we hear the witness of those who were there…the women who went to the tomb early in the morning, expecting to find a body…so they could do what you do to dead bodies…you respect them, right?  By giving them a decent burial.  That’s what the women were up to that morning.  Because, it was sunset on Friday, by the time Jesus had died and his body was put into the tomb; the Jewish Sabbath had come, and so it was forbidden to do any such work—even the work of preparing a body for burial.   So the women returned that Sunday morning, after the Jewish Sabbath was over, bringing spices to anoint the body.  That was customary way back then to show respect for the dead.  Only…the stone was rolled away from the tomb.  And there was no body.  Kind of a freaky situation if you think about it!  And it was made more bizarre by the sudden appearance of these two, mysterious, frightening men in dazzling clothes…men who jogged the women’s memory about some things that Jesus had told them—how he’d said that everything that’d happened to him would happen, that he’d suffer, and die, and that he would then rise again from the dead.  At least, that’s the story according to Luke’s gospel.

I dunno…it’s just so…implausible.   I mean, this kind of thing simply doesn’t happen.   Death is death.   Alongside of taxes, death is about the only certain thing we know, right?   We might think that someone could cheat death—that does happen, sometimes.  You know, the media reports on how somebody who should die, doesn’t die.  Their heart stops, and then, amazingly, somehow it starts beating again.  Somebody’s parachute doesn’t open, they hit the ground, and yet inexplicably, they manage to survive.  But we’re not talking about that kind of thing here.  We’re talking someone who’s been executed by the state…someone who’s been put to death before a whole throng of witnesses, both friend and foe alike.  People like that don’t cheat death.  

Jesus’ original followers knew that he was dead. That’s why, when the women who’d been at the empty tomb came and told them what they’d seen and heard…well, as Luke puts it, “It seemed to them an idle tale.”  You know, something somebody just made up because they were…bored, I guess?   That doesn’t really fit, though, does it?  Do grieving women get bored and then manufacture fantastic stories?  It doesn’t quite add up.  And in fact, something about the womens’ account must’ve stirred up some questions for Peter.  Because it says that Peter went running off to the tomb himself.  And he arrived to find things exactly as he’d been told—the tomb was empty.  Empty except for the linen cloths that the body had been wrapped in…kind of like a mummy.   Okay, so it was grave-robbers, right?   Only, why would grave-robbers take the trouble to unwrap the body?   It’d be much easier to carry if they’d left it wrapped.  And taking time to unwrap it would increase their chance of getting caught.  For Peter, so much had happened over the past few days.  There was Jesus’ last supper with Peter and his other disciples…Jesus’ earnest prayer in the garden…his betrayal and arrest, Peter’s denial that he even knew Jesus, the trial before the crowds, Jesus’ crucifixion, his suffering , his death, the reaction of the Roman centurion and the crowds, once they realized that an innocent man had been put to death.    Still, of all that’d happened these past few days, for Peter, this empty tomb with linen wrappings left behind must’ve been the most mind-blowing part of it all.  Luke’s gospel says that Peter simply “went home, amazed at what had happened.” 

That’s kind of obscure, isn’t it?  It doesn’t say that Peter believed that Jesus was risen.   Do you suppose he did believe at this point?    Would you have believed?   Do you believe-- now?   I mean, all we have to go on is less than Peter had at that moment when he went home.  All we have is the testimony, the word of somebody else to go on.   We weren’t even there to see the empty tomb and the linen wrappings, like Peter was. Why should we believe that this ‘Jesus is risen’ thing is anything more than an idle tale…the figment of someone’s imagination? 

Actually—maybe we do have a little more to go on than Peter had at that point.  We haven’t seen the empty tomb, but we’ve heard the testimony of those who did see it, along with the testimony of those who later saw and heard and even ate with the risen Jesus himself.    Yes, the accounts of what exactly happened from this stage on vary from one gospel to another.  But that’s pretty much what you’d expect when a number of different witnesses are recounting the same event.  The primary thing we have to go on from those witnesses is that something happened to Jesus body…something that could only be described by his original followers as resurrection from the dead.

Okay, so we have that to go on…and there’s our own experience.  Or at least the experience of some of us.  Over two millennia, multitudes of people have been part of the church.  Multitudes have heard, time and again, the Easter news that Jesus was raised, and probably most have struggled with the common understanding of what’s real—that death is death and people don’t come back to life after they die.  And among all of those, there have been some among us —perhaps even many, who’ve asked ourselves, “What if…?  What if it were true?”  

I’m not here to try to convince anyone to believe in Jesus’ resurrection.    If that were my job, well, after 17 years of trying, I think I’d probably be good and ready to move on to another field!    Overcoming peoples’ skepticism about such a thing as a man being raised from the dead?…Well, if you ask me, that’d be a lost battle, right from the outset.  That’s not what I’m here for.  What I am here to do today is to encourage those who do believe, or those who want to believe, but who struggle with the doubts and questions that any intelligent person is likely to have.   And I want to support those who have open minds, those who maybe have just a tiny, little wisp of faith.  Those who’ve been part of this faith community, or perhaps some other one, anyone who’s considered the news that Christ is risen, and who’s found themself going, “What if it were true?”  If these descriptions fit you, then here’s a few things I’d urge you to consider….

You might consider first off how, week after week in churches all over the world, the good news of God’s forgiveness, of his unconditional love for all of us, no matter who we are and what we’ve done, is still being proclaimed in Jesus’ name--after two thousand years!   You might consider how you’ve experienced that Word of forgiveness at one point or another, or how you’ve experienced that forgiveness on an ongoing basis.  Consider what a relief that forgiveness provides, or how much peace it gives to you.

Then take a look at how, here at Rejoice, as in many other churches, we proclaim and teach what the Scriptures say: that we are now the body of Christ—that Christ has called and gathered us to live out his love and his grace and truth together.  You might weigh how, in the gospels, he calls us to do this by using our gifts to serve God and our neighbors.  And you could reflect on how, through his Word, through his sacraments, and through his Holy Spirit, our Lord empowers us to do this. 

And then you could contemplate the many, many ways people at churches like Rejoice do use their gifts to serve.   Our adult youth leaders, for instance, who’ve been putting in long hours doing some extensive planning for the future of our youth ministry at Rejoice.  Adult leaders who offer regular youth events, so that young people, who often struggle to feel like they fit in anywhere, find they have a church youth group of their peers where they know that they belong. You might consider our Stephen Ministers, who walk alongside people who are going through times of crisis or transition, and who meet monthly to support and train and pray together.   You could look at our children’s ministries…Kids of the Kingdom, Kids Church, Vacation Bible School—where caring adults help kids to learn and grow, while making kids feel valued and cared for in a way they seldom do elsewhere.  Or, you can consider all the caring and sharing that goes on in the many small groups churches like ours offer, where spiritual friendships are built and where folks find that they can learn and pray and laugh and play together —and that this is a big part of what being the body of Christ is all about.   

You can ponder how, at churches like this one all over the place, grieving people find comfort and hope in times of loss—along with the practical support of things like meals to help them through their difficult time… or how many people—a number of them here among us, have experienced healing—inner healing of emotional wounds, and yes, even at times physical healing, through the prayers of those who bear the name of Christ. 

Think about all this that you have seen with your own eyes, that you yourself have witnessed.   And then tell me that you can honestly say that the account of Jesus’ resurrection is just “an idle tale,” a made-up story, produced by someone’s imagination.  If you can weigh all of this evidence, alongside the testimony of those first witnesses to the resurrection, and you still say “it’s all a bunch of blarney and I’m not gonna believe in it”…well…that’s okay.   Because Jesus is alive.  He’s here among us today…and while you may not believe in him, as he’s demonstrated once and for all through the cross, he still believes in you!

Text:  Luke 19

INTO THE FRAY

What is it that you expect?   Not from life in general, but from God…and from God’s people, who are called the church?   Some folks look for a God who aligns himself with their interests.   One who works things out so that they can get theirs.   Others seek a God who stands high above the fray of our human struggles over “who gets what?”     Their idea of divinity seems to be a God who remains completely detached, unsullied by human politics.   In today’s gospel readings, we can see both of these kinds of expectations at work.  

There’s the crowd…all those people who eagerly welcomed Jesus, and who celebrated his coming as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, the savior king sent by God to at long last deliver them from the power of their enemies.   The Romans, you see, had been in Judea for a long time, and they’d been squeezing the land dry with taxes and ruthlessly oppressing any effort to break free from their rule.  Many in the crowd that day who shouted their hosanna’s and waved their palm branches and laid down their cloaks for Jesus to ride over probably had high expectations.  They were fervently expecting Jesus, who’d demonstrated God’s power in so many ways, to use that power here in Jerusalem to unseat the Roman governor and allow them to reclaim their country as their own.  What Luke describes happening here as Jesus enters the city parallels a situation that’s described in the Old Testament book of Second Kings.   A situation involving a prince named Jehu.  Jehu, we find in Second Kings, also entered the city to the acclaim of his supporters, and his supporters also threw their cloaks on the ground before him and proclaimed him to be king.  But it’s what happens next in this Old Testament story that’s notable.  Straightaway after this triumphal entry, Jehu goes and hunts down and kills the existing king, a fellow named Joram, who was known for his wickedness.   So, when Jesus’ came riding into Jerusalem and was proclaimed “the king who comes in the name of the Lord,” it’s likely that many among the crowd expected Jesus to do something similar to Jehu—to go in the power of God and to dispose of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.   Once Pilate was out of the way, everyone could then rise up in revolt, and the land would be theirs.    

Of course, some who were present that day apparently saw this messianic scenario unfolding—and they didn’t like what they saw.  They objected to Jesus, saying, “Jesus, you’re just a rabbi, a teacher of God’s word…you’ve got to put a lid on this…so, order your disciples to stop proclaiming you king!”  These folks, we’re told, were some Pharisees, members of a religious group that stood for tradition, and who at the time, had a lot to do with shaping civic policy among the Jewish people.  What was their problem with what was going on?  Well, there will always be people—even religious people, whose interests are aligned with the status quo, and who insist to everyone else that “God doesn’t have anything to do with human politics.”   Often, this is the case for those who feel they have a lot to lose in the event there’s some significant change.   For folks like this, it’d be best if we all just assumed that God confines himself to “spiritual” matters. 

One group expects Jesus to initiate a political power play that would spark a revolution.  Another group looks for Jesus to steer completely clear of politics.  Both groups would be disappointed.  Because, the Lord Jesus fulfilled neither set of expectations.  He didn’t go and try to topple the Romans, as some hoped he would.  And he didn’t stick strictly to “spiritual” matters, as others wanted him to do.  Instead, he both prophecies and laments the coming destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans—something that actually happened some 30-40 years later.  And then, immediately after his triumphal entry into the city, Jesus heads right for the temple and proceeds to completely disrupt the vendors who were selling sacrificial animals there.  By doing this, he upset an accepted system where these merchants were allowed to exploit poor people, who needed to purchase sacrifices to offer at the temple.   It seems they were ripping off the poor, charging exorbitant prices that they couldn’t afford for sacrifices that were required by Jewish law.   Instead of using his power to try and overthrow the imperial power of Rome, Jesus confronted an injustice that he found taking place among his own people.  

So, back to where we started:  what do you expect?  What do you expect from God…and what do you expect from the community of faith where God has chosen to locate himself?   Are God and his church for you the means to an end?   Do you show up here and wave your palm branches and celebrate Jesus as “your hero” because you see in him a way to gain something, for yourself, or for your family?   Would you be disappointed to learn that, for Jesus himself, it’s not all about you and yours?  Would you be let down to find that, while Jesus came “for you,” and for others like you, he also came “for them”—for the poor, the powerless, and for many others who aren’t at all like you?   And would you be surprised to learn that Jesus calls people like you and me, who make up his church, to follow him in being the same way?

Or, have you convinced yourself that God is too great, too high and holy, to be concerned much with the likes of our affairs?   And does it bother you to see the church entering into the fray when it comes to human politics?  For instance, does it upset you when those who bear Christ’s name speak out for and take action on behalf of the poor and the powerless in our society?    Would you “run the other way as fast as you can” if your pastor were to start talking about things like social or economic justice?   Do you have a hard time seeing God’s hand at work in things that could undermine your sense of security?

I suspect that most of us here find ourself operating toward one end or the other of these two poles.   Either we tend to see God and his church as a way of advancing our own interests…or else we simply look for God—and his church, to stay out of the way so we can keep pursuing our own interests.    Many of us see ourselves as entitled, don’t we?…entitled, at the very least, to “get whatever we can, while the getting is good.”   After all, we work hard…we deserve it, right?  And our church is simply one more way to get what we have coming to us.   And so either we see God as our buddy, helping us to do that, or else we see God as being too far removed to interfere with us as we seek to get what we feel we deserve. 

This week in the church year has a way of exposing us for who we are—whoever we happen to be.   Holy week shows us, among other things, that our expectations often tend to be amiss.   As we’ll continue to read later this week in Luke’s gospel, the same crowds that were shouting “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord” one day, only a few days later were shouting “Away with this fellow!  Crucify!  Crucify him!”   This morning, we already read how some of the same pious people who, on one day, tried to stop Jesus from accepting political power, began to conspire politically themselves over the next few days to have Jesus executed.   But, as we’ll also read next Sunday, at the conclusion of Luke’s gospel, all of this was part of God’s plan.  And it was a plan that couldn’t be stopped by anyone’s expectations, or by their disappointment.   It’s a plan that couldn’t be stopped by anything—not even the grave!    

Not only that, but as we can read in the sequel to Luke’s gospel, the book of Acts, this unstoppable plan continues to unfold, in and through communities of Christian believers just like this one.  As the book of Acts shows us, our self-interest, our self-preservation, nothing we do can stop God from carrying out his own purposes, here among his people.  Here’s the beauty of it:  whatever we’re like, whatever we do, we simply become witnesses… witnesses to God’s passionate commitment to embracing and caring for all people with his gracious love in Jesus Christ!  

We may not be ready or willing to bear witness to God’s loving care by taking action on behalf of the poor and powerless, as our Lord did.   We may not desire to be part of a church that works for social or economic justice.  After all, look what happened to Jesus!  Look what happened to President Lincoln...and to Reverend King...and to some congressional representatives just this past week.   No, we may not be ready to get into the fray on anywhere near the level that our Lord Jesus did when he set his own interests aside, entered Jerusalem, and drove the merchants out of the temple.  No, we may be here simply for what we can get out of it for ourselves.  

But we are still witnesses.  Because, whatever it is that we come here looking for, we still get to see and experience--all the time, the unconditional love that God has demonstrated for us through the cross of Christ.    Through the cross, we get to see how far our Lord will go to get right in here with us so he can embrace us…just as we are.

Text:  John 12:1-8

EXTRAVAGANT LOVE, EXTRAVAGANT DEVOTION

To prepare them to publicly confirm their faith through the rite for Affirmation of Baptism, our second year confirmation students are asked to write a Personal Faith Statement.   Miranda Boraas is about to move out of state with her family, and so she’s going to affirm her baptism today, a couple months ahead of the rest of her classmates’ confirmation.  Miranda’s Faith Statement is on display in the lobby.   

In Miranda’s faith statement, among other things, she wrote a paragraph about her role in the church.  I’d like to highlight for you just one short sentence from that paragraph.  Miranda wrote that: “I should use all of the skills and gifts God has given me.”  “I should use all of the skills and gifts God has given me.”  Wow!  Just imagine what that’d be like, if Miranda were to actually use all of her God-given skills and gifts to serve in various ways in Christ’s Church.  Miranda, in your faith statement, among other things, you wrote a paragraph about your role in the church.  And if it’s okay, I’d like to highlight just one short sentence from that paragraph.  You wrote that, “I should use all of the skills and gifts God has given me.”  “I should use all of the skills and gifts God has given me.”

Wow!  Just imagine what that’d be like, if you were to actually use all of your God-given skills and gifts to serve in various ways in Christ’s Church.  Imagine what it’d be like if all of us at Rejoice were to use all of our skills and gifts, together!   What do you think?  I think if that were to happen, this congregation might become regionally--perhaps nationally or even internationally recognized, for the vast amount of ministry it would accomplish!  If that were to happen, if all of us were to use all of our skills and gifts together, I’d imagine that many hungry people would be fed; a lot of homeless people would be housed; jobless people, divorced people, grieving people—all kinds of hurting people, would find the support they need.   Great numbers of children and youth would develop a growing, vital faith, and they in turn would join the rest of us, finding even more ways to serve.  And as a result, there’d be this steady, spiraling increase in caring service, so that conceivably, some of our ministries could even make their impact felt in other countries.    If all of us at Rejoice were to use all of our skills and gifts to serve, together. 

But let’s get real.  Even for any one of us to use all of our skills and gifts…that’d be a bit much, wouldn’t it?  I mean, each of us only has so much that we can give to the church.    We’ve got to be able to use our skills and abilities elsewhere in life too, right? …at work, at school, at home, in our communities.  If we used all of our gifts to serve God through the Church, we wouldn’t have anything left for other parts of our life. 

Unless…what if all the other parts of our life were to be places and ways for us to serve God too?  What if the spheres of work and school and home and out in the community were to be realms where we can demonstrate our love and devotion to God—alongside of the ways we do it together as the church?  What if each of us were to look for ways to put everything we have and everything we are into fulfilling God’s purposes in the world?   Would people consider us fanatics?    Would we be crazy for doing that?   Do you suppose some folks might even resent us for being too extreme, too selfless, or too unconventional?   

In today’s gospel, we find that somehow, a woman named Mary had acquired some very expensive perfume.   And that’s an understatement.  We don’t know how she came by it—whether it’d been given to her as a gift, or if she’d purchased it herself.  But we do know that the amount and type of perfume Mary had—“a pound of pure nard,” was worth almost a year’s wages for a common laborer. A year’s wages!  For perfume! This is some stuff you probably wouldn’t even find at Nieman Marcus!    The bodies of ancient kings were said to have been anointed with this long-lasting perfume called nard, as a way of keeping the stench of death at bay for as long as possible.   So, this perfume amounted to a family treasure.  It was something to hang onto, perhaps as an investment; something to sell off for retirement, or to cash in in an emergency, or to trade for some other really valuable asset.  So when, just a couple of days before his final entry into Jerusalem,  Mary takes this perfume and she pours it all over Jesus’ feet during a dinner party in his honor, well, you can just imagine how stunned everyone present must’ve been. 

I mean, in that time and culture, you as the host might honor a guest by having a servant come in and wash their feet with a basin of water, to ease the guest’s discomfort and to wash the filth of the dusty roads away.    If you were feeling generous, you might even have the servant sprinkle a little perfume onto the honored guest’s feet, for good measure.  But to take a whole jar of absurdly expensive perfume, and to use it to anoint the guest’s feet…to do this yourself…and then to wipe this pungent substance off--with your own hair?    This was way more than “a little over the top”!  What Mary did was completely outrageous!   And this was definitely not something anybody there was going to be able to ignore or forget:  this was some powerful stuff.  The whole house, it says, was filled with the fragrance!    People didn’t remember what was served to eat at this feast in Jesus’ honor.   All anybody remembered was the perfume.  No doubt everyone there was taken aback by what Mary had just done.  So taken aback that they really didn’t know what to say.  Well, everyone but Judas.  Judas, we’re told, complained about the waste.  “Just think of what we could do to help the poor with all the money we could’ve raised by selling this perfume.”    But John’s gospel confides in us that Judas had a hidden agenda behind his response: he was the treasurer for Jesus and his disciples, and he was a thief.  He wished they could have sold it so that he could skim a little off the top for himself.   Everyone else there was speechless, but for somebody like Judas—well, the wheels are always turning. 

So, what, if anything, can we say about what Mary did?   Was she fanatical?   I don’t know.  If you consider what some football fan-atics will spend to get season tickets, or for a single seat at the Superbowl, I guess it does sort of compare.   Was Mary crazy?   Well, I guess that depends how you define crazy.   Is it crazy to spend ten or more hours a week--a whole tenth of one’s waking hours, tooling around on FaceBook, as some of us probably do?  Should somebody who was there—other than Judas, have told Mary that she was being too extreme, too selfless or too unconventional?   The Lord Jesus didn’t.   About a week later, Jesus knew, he would be a corpse, sealed in a tomb.  Whether she knew it or not, Mary it seems, acknowledged this with what she did.  Jesus also knew that Mary was acknowledging him for who he was—God’s only begotten Son.  And so the Lord simply accepted what Mary did as an appropriate use of this gift…a gift, as he put it, “for the day of my burial.” 

Of course, there was much more to the story than we see right here in John chapter 12.  Mary was the sister of Lazarus, the guy, we’re reminded, who Jesus had raised from the grave after he’d gotten sick and died. In this way, and in so many other ways, Jesus had demonstrated repeatedly that he was, as the introduction to John’s gospel puts it, “the Word made flesh”--God come among us, wrapped in human skin.   Jesus had spoken openly of being “lifted up” on the cross, so that all who believed in him would have life— life abundant and life eternal.    By this point, Jesus had revealed all of this about himself.  But in spite of this, Mary, it appears, was about the only follower of Jesus who had any real inkling of who her Lord was and what he had come to do, for her and for the world.  By the way, the very first person to encounter the risen Lord outside his empty tomb was a woman named Mary—Mary Magdelene; whether this is the same Mary that we encounter here in chapter 12 is disputed…but it would make sense.  After all, just days before it all came down, this Mary alone seems to’ve had a clue about the saving work Jesus was about to complete by giving his life on the cross.  She alone seemed to truly appreciate Jesus for what he was going to do.  

What about us?  Do we have a clue about what Jesus has done?  Does Jesus’ outrageous gift of his own body and blood, given and shed for us, mean anything to us?  Do we appreciate it?  Or do we see Jesus as some crazy, fanatical, extreme or unconventional guy who did something that simply doesn’t make sense? 

A love that deep, a love that embraces a cross, is a pretty hard thing to fathom.  It doesn’t really make sense—not in a rational way.   Love seldom does.  And to love someone so much that you’re willing to suffer that greatly, to the point of death…it’s so…extravagant!   What Mary seems to have seen—that nobody else at the time saw, was what a priceless gift her Lord was about to give.  To be real, it probably didn’t make rational sense to her either; but I guess we’d have to say that, on some level, Mary got it.   Because it’s really only in the face of such extravagance on the part of Jesus, that Mary’s gift becomes an acceptable one.   In the face of the excessively costly, overgenerous love that Jesus Christ demonstrated for us through his cross, any and all gifts that we might want to give to Jesus are fitting.  Even the ones that might, to those who just don’t get the cross, seem to be way over the top.   After all, such a conspicuously extravagant love, when we genuinely start to get it—when it truly penetrates our hearts, a love like that is bound to move us.   And who knows? A love like that could even move some of us to a pretty extravagant response.

Texts:  2 Cor. 5:16-21; Luke 13:1-3,,11b-32

A NEW YOU

Every night at bedtime, the father went upstairs to tuck in his son. Every night, the father sat on the edge of his son’s bed, and he looked at him and said, “You are my son; I love you so much…and I know you’ve got what it takes to be a great man.”    And every night, the son looked back at his father and said, “I want juice.” 

You’ve got to wonder if that’s not how God experiences us a lot of the time.   In baptism God has called and claimed us to be his very own children.  From the cross and from the pulpit and from his holy table our heavenly Father tells us over and over again how much he loves us and what a great life we can have as his people.  And if we bother to say anything at all to God, it’s likely to be, “I want this,” or “Give me that.”   Most of us know that being Christian means a whole lot more than just asking God for what we want or what we think we need, as if God were our own personal genie.  Most of us know, either intuitively or because we’ve learned it somewhere along the way, that being God’s people in Christ involves transformation of life.  And yet, if many of us are honest about our own lives, we sometimes have to ask ourselves, “Where’s the change?  What difference does it make that I’m a Christian?”   This morning I’d like to invite you to reflect with me on how we can be made new as God’s people.

"If anyone is in Christ,” the apostle Paul writes in second Corinthians, “there is a new creation: everything old has passed away: see, everything has become new!”   When Paul wrote these words, he was writing to a faith community of people who were in need of spiritual renewal.   Instead of being swept up together in engaging God’s mission, they were embroiled in all kinds of unhealthy conflicts, they were disrespecting each other in a multitude of ways, and some of them were even disrespecting Paul, who’d brought them the good news of Christ.  They needed spiritual renewal.   And essentially, Paul seems to be telling them here that renewal has already taken place…they simply needed to lay claim to it.  How?  “All this is from God,” Paul says, “who reconciled us to himself in Christ…..”    The key to claiming our spiritual renewal, according to Paul, is to simply trust the good news that we’re made right with God through Christ.  

But that can be easier said than done.    We are, after all, spiritually broken beings who live in a spiritually broken world.   That brokenness often leads us to embrace attitudes and values and choices that our conscience tells us are far from what God intends.    Maybe in an effort to maintain job security, we do and say things that are dishonest or unjust, things that bring about suffering, either to our co-workers or to the public that our industry serves.  Maybe we find ourselves unable to resist certain temptations, and so we indulge in unwholesome behaviors.   Maybe we’re simply poor stewards, of our time, or of our wealth, or our abilities…so that what we know should be offered or used to further God’s purposes is instead hoarded, or else used for selfish purposes.   In a multitude of ways, our human condition, known as ‘sin’, can distort our lives and lead us to feel that we are far, far away from God.  

A sense of guilt or alienation from God is perhaps one of the most common of all human experiences.  It’s why, since ancient times, people have tried to offer sacrifices to God or to the gods, in the hope of making atonement for their sins and bridging the gap that they feel between themselves and the divine.  We modern folk may not feel inclined to sacrifice a cow or a goat or a lamb, but it’s not unusual for us to seek other paths, trying to earn God’s favor.   Perhaps, in order to appease God, we’re determined “go to church” on a more regular basis than we have been.  Or we put a sizeable gift in the offering plate.  Or we vow good behavior in a certain area of our life for a specified period of time.  Or we try to pray the right prayers, or to say the right words, or to perform the right rituals.  And the hope is that, by doing such things, we can avert God’s judgment, or curry God’s blessings, or perhaps just relieve ourself of the burden of guilt or shame that we’ve been carrying around.

For a while, these kinds of efforts may even seem to do the job.  But they have a way of leaving us with at least a degree of uncertainty.  “Have I done enough?” we can find ourselves asking.  “Is this really going to cut it with God?  Isn’t there more I ought to be doing?”  Plus, sooner or later, we’re bound to stumble and do something else that undermines our attempt to redeem ourself, sending us right back to square one.   The reality is that, whatever we try to do to deserve some measure of God’s favor, it’s never enough.

It’s also completely unnecessary.  Because, in Jesus Christ, God has revealed something about himself—something that totally negates the need for us to sacrifice or to do anything else to win God’s favor.    The well-known parable of the prodigal son that we heard in our gospel today, presents this revelation about God in a pretty startling way.  

The younger son in the story has the gall to claim his inheritance before his father is even approaching death’s door.   And he then goes and recklessly squanders the whole fortune by adopting an immoral, depraved, self-indulgent lifestyle.  As Jesus tells the story, this young man then finds himself hitting rock bottom—and he winds up feeding pigs for a living.  Things are so bad for this young man at this point, Jesus says, that what the pigs were eating started to look pretty good to him.  And at that--no big surprise…he comes to himself, and he comes up with a plan.   A plan for getting back into his father’s good graces--at least enough to assure that he’d have his basic needs provided for.   “How many of my father’s hired hands have plenty to eat,” he says to himself.  “So, I’ll just go to my father and say the right words that might earn me at least enough forgiveness so I can get hired on as an employee in the family business.”  And so the young man heads for home to pursue this plan.  But, as the Lord Jesus describes it, “While he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; the father ran and put his arms around him and kissed him”—and, after hearing his son rattle off his lame attempt at getting hired, the father fully reinstates him to his former place in the family; he even throws him an extravagant “welcome home” party—complete with barbecued fatted calf!   M-m-m, m-m-m!  And, in case we fail to see just how outrageously generous and compassionate the father is in doing all of this, the older son now shows up onstage.  He’s heard about what’s transpired, and he’s really ticked off.  He expresses how unfair it is for the father to treat “this son of his,” like this; after all, “unlike me, who’s been here, working hard all along, that little jerk hasn’t done a thing to deserve it.”

So, what do you think?  What does Jesus parable tell us about the nature of God, our heavenly Father?    What it tells me is that God’s love for us is so amazingly extravagant that all we have to do is point ourself in God’s direction, and God’s going to be there, ready to embrace us with open arms, ready to restore us to our full status as his beloved children—along with all that comes with that status.  What it tells me is that we don’t have to do anything…we don’t even have to have the right motives, in order to find ourself back in God’s favor.  All we have to do is turn toward God.  What we might consider to be the “right words” to say to God, or the right penitent attitude…that’s all completely beside the point.  God is always eager to give us a place as his precious sons and daughters—for no other reason than that he loves us!  

Now, it’s a curious thing, but…we can hear the good news of the cross of Christ, and the promise of forgiveness that comes to us through his body and blood, and we can hear it over and over again.  In fact, if we worship regularly, we do hear it over and over again.  But somehow …if we’re burdened with enough guilt or shame, this good news can become blurry to us, and we can miss out on experiencing it as the good news that it is.  I don’t know, maybe there are just so many opportunities for us to make bad choices, to do the wrong thing, to embrace the wrong attitudes.  As a result, simply by trying to muddle our way through life in this broken world, we can lose the assurance that God means for us to have through the cross.  The real meaning of the cross gets out of focus for us.  That’s why it’s a good thing the cross isn’t the only way God has expressed the good news.  When you think of the cross, think of the father in Jesus’ parable.  Think of how the rebellious son only has to turn toward home, when the father, who obviously has been out looking for his wayward son, sees him coming, and immediately runs out to embrace his boy.  Think how, just like this son has done nothing to deserve being given a new robe and a ring for his finger, so we’ve done nothing to deserve God claiming us to be his children through our baptism.  Think how, just as this son has done nothing to warrant having the fatted calf killed for a “welcome home” feast, so Christ died for us “while we were yet sinners.”   In fact, think how the feast of Jesus’ body and blood that God offers us from this holy table, is there for us, not because we deserve it, but precisely because we don’t deserve it, it’s there to assure us and everyone else of God’s abiding love for us. 

Through the cross of Christ and through the teachings of Christ, God reveals to us how unfathomably extravagant and unconditional his love for us is.  It’s because of that love, and not because of anything we try to do, that we are reconciled, or made right, with God.  In fact, as our favorite theologian Martin Luther has put it, anything that we do in an effort to earn God’s favor is, in itself, pure wickedness.  That’s right; it’s not a good thing, it’s a bad thing for us to try to demonstrate to God that we’re worthy. Why?  Because it’s based on self-righteousness.   God alone can make us righteous—and in fact that’s exactly what he did when he came among us in Jesus Christ to suffer and to die.   Should we presume to act like what we can do even approaches what God has done for us?  No!  Pure wickedness! 

Last week I picked up a round of golf with this fellow who’d shown up on the course about the same time I did.  A few holes into the game, he looked at me and said, “You know, I can play way better golf than this; I just never have.”   Do you ever get the sense that you could do better spiritually than you have?  Do you ever perceive that you can and should live on a higher plane than you’ve been living?   Would you like to become more honest, more self-controlled, more faithful in managing what God has entrusted to you?  If you feel like you can do better, but you can just never seem to get there…if you want to be renewed so you can live a fulfilling life as God’s person in the world, here’s what I suggest:  quit trying.   Yep, you heard me right! Quit trying to be better or to do better.  Because, none of us can get there by our own efforts.   “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away, see, everything has become new!”  Did you catch that?  It’s all past and present tense. It’s a done deal…and it’s done by God, not by you or by me.  “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ.” 

The means to a new you has already been provided—by God.   When God reconciled us to himself through the cross of Christ, he gave us the one thing we need to be renewed spiritually:  he gave us a relationship with him. As we participate in that relationship, day by day, as we  trust God’s wonderful promises in Christ, as we bask in God’s wonderful forgiving love, God’s extravagance moves our hearts and our minds, and we can suddenly discover that we’re part of a new order that God is creating. Walking daily with our creator God, who is constantly working to make all things new, we can look expectantly for ways that God’s newness will make its appearance in our life.  And it will appear!   You can’t live daily with a holy, wholesome God without some measure of that holy, wholesomeness rubbing off on you.   

That isn’t likely to happen though, if we insist on trying to do it ourself.  In the end, trying to be good through our own efforts only erects a barrier between us and the new life that God wants to give us freely.  You may have noticed that the prodigal son story that Jesus told has an open ending.  As Jesus ends the parable, we’re left looking at a choice that the older son is faced with:  he can either stay in the miserable place where he’s at, alienated from his father and his brother by his own self-righteous efforts and attitudes, …or he can get over himself, and move to a different place by simply accepting that his father’s love is unconditional.    We too have a choice, each and every day.  We can hold onto a basic attitude where all our good works and efforts ultimately just move us farther away from God; or we can surrender to God’s freely given love—and we can let that love move us to a whole new life.

Text:   Luke 13:1-9

ANOTHER CHANCE

Along with all the other students riding the hay wagon one evening at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes event, the teenaged girl was having a great time.  As often happens with young folks, the fun got somewhat animated.  Kids started playfully pushing, and dodging each other on the hay wagon...and that’s when it happened.  This young woman jumped off, stumbled, and suddenly shrieked as she found herself pinned beneath the wheels of the hay wagon.  Somebody had a cell phone; the rescue squad was called in the hope that they might somehow extract her, but by the time they arrived, her life had ebbed away.   The next day, I was asked to come to this small rural high school, to be available in the cafeteria to provide grief counseling for the other students.   In a school of this size, everyone knows everyone else, so this heartbreaking misfortune had struck everyone.  Of course, some of the students who’d been on the hay wagon the night before were so traumatized that they didn’t even make it to school that day.   Most of the other students who did make it to school were simply not able or willing to talk about it.  They just went through their school day as they usually would’ve.  But there were a handful of students who did take some time to talk with me about it.  And among these, I noticed a pattern.  Each of them had lost someone dear to them within the past year.  The grief they were feeling over the loss of their classmate was all wrapped up with the feelings they still hadn’t quite worked through regarding the recent loss of a parent, or of a grandparent, or in one case, a brother.   The burden of their grief over those previous losses, it seemed, combined with or stirred up the grief of this loss, to the point where they found they had to confront what they were feeling about their classmate—even though those feelings were very painful.  A few of the kids who went through this horrible tragedy were internally driven to face the reality of what’d happened, in a way that most others weren’t.  

A lot of the time, we tend to go through life with the sense that everything’s going to be okay…that nothing bad will happen, to us, or to those we care about.   We hear about devastating events like the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, but somehow it doesn’t seem very real to us.  Our minds do this little trick, where we dismiss what’s happened to those other folks as something that doesn’t concern us…we imagine it as something that “couldn’t happen here.”  Or maybe we rationalize that, even if something bad does happen here, we in this country have the resources and the infra-structure to cope with it, so ultimately, everything will be okay.  After all, it’s not like we’re a third-world country, right?  It’s not like we have a government that’s so corrupt or ineffective that basic disaster services that aren’t even developed.  And so when calamity strikes, and the news is filled with all these horrible images and death and casualty figures, we just go through our day as usual.   Of course, not all of us can do this.   Some of us have had our own calamities; these fresh tragedies that happen to other people stir up our own terrible experiences that we’ve buried inside but that are still not too deep below the surface.  Those for whom this is true have to at least pause for a little bit, to process what’s happened to somebody else.  Some of us might even feel compelled to try to come to terms with it on some level--to try to explain what’s happened.  After all, if we can explain it the right way, maybe we won’t have to think much more about it.   

Perhaps looking for an explanation, in our gospel today, some people come to Jesus and they inquire about a terrible tragic event that was current news—how the Roman governor had slain some Galileans while they were worshipping at the temple.   Jesus response?  Does he give them an easy explanation?  “Yeah, for something like that to’ve happened to them, those people must’ve been really wicked folks.”  Or, does he comfort them by telling them, “Chill out!  It’s okay, you’re safe!  Don’t worry…this kind of stuff can’t happen to you.”  Nope.  The Lord confronts the conventional explanation for dealing with such things—and he does so in a rather surprising way.   There was a prevailing attitude in Jesus’ society that, if something bad happened to someone, they had brought God’s judgment down upon themselves, on account of some great sin.  Jesus flat out denies that this was the case—both in the situation with the Galileans, and in another recent event he brings up, where a tower had collapsed, killing 18 people.  “No,” Jesus states, “these people didn’t suffer because they were worse than anyone else.”    But he then goes on to essentially tell them, None of us you are safe…On account of your sin, you all face the judgment of an empty, meaningless death.  And Jesus seems not only to imply that the inquirers should meet this harsh reality head-on, but he directs them to how that reality should lead them to respond:  “Unless you repent,” he tells them, “you will all simply perish, as they did.”  

Jesus used this opportunity to speak a prophetic word of warning –a word that could well be addressed to us too.  For now, the Lord appears to be saying, we’ve all been granted the gift of time; how much time, we don’t know.   Jesus has a valid point.  We may live under the illusion that we have years or even decades to hang out here on the planet.  But the reality is that all of our lives hang by a thread.  We may not like to think about it, but we are fragile, and the world is a dangerous place.  At the very least, life as we know it is vulnerable.  Just ask someone who survived Hurricane Katrina, right?  Or someone who lived in New York City on September 11, 2001.  Or anyone who’s battled cancer, or suffered a heart attack, or lived through an assault or a serious car wreck.  Every day, people do manage to survive all kinds of awful things that can happen.    But, as many who have made it through things like this can tell you, life is seldom the same again.  

Wow.   This is a pretty depressing line of thought.   As a preacher, I got to live with it all week, and it’s not a reflection I would’ve chosen to pursue; it’s what the Lord Jesus’ words in our gospel for today have led to.  But there is a point to it.  “Unless you repent,” Jesus says, “you will all perish as they did.”   Now, Jesus isn’t making some kind of simplistic correlation between our moral choices and the bad things that happen to us, as some might suggest.  How do we know? Because to express the complexity of what he’s saying, he follows this discussion with a parable—a parable of a landowner who orders a tree chopped down, on account of it’s failed to bear fruit--for three years.  The parable also includes a gardener who intercedes for the tree, asking to give it another year so that it can be nurtured, in the hope that it will yet bear some fruit.    As I read it, the bottom line from this gospel reading seems to be this:  We really all need to face the harsh reality that we are mortal.  And facing our mortality should lead us to embrace a new approach to life.  Our remaining time here is a gift—a gift that has limits.  And it’s a gift that, while we have it, is intended to produce certain results.

The nature of those intended results—well that’s pretty much what the rest of the New Testament is all about.  For the people of the early Christian church, the new life they were called to in Christ was about turning from self-interest and self-righteousness to live together, as the start of a new thing God was doing in his creation.  It was about living out Christ’s call to forgive as they’d been forgiven, to love as they’d been loved, as a way of bearing  witness to God’s great love for all in Christ.  It was about caring for poor people and embracing marginalized people.  It was about doing away with the distinctions and barriers that society had established, and relating to one another as equals under God.  It was about serving those in need and a willingness to suffer for the sake of righteousness.  And for the early Christians, this new life came about as they lived together in Christ-centered community.   In the book of Acts, it describes how they broke bread together in homes, and they devoted themselves, it says, to the apostles teaching, to fellowship, to sharing the sacrament, and to prayer.  They willingly shared their resources so that no one among them would go without.   And, through this shared approach to life, an active, vibrant and fruitful faith grew, in and among them.

What about us? What might our lives look like if we were to turn from the emptiness of short fruitless lives, to embrace a whole new life in Christ?  What if we were to take to heart our Lord’s inference that the time we have remaining on this earth is a gift—and that it’s intended to give us a chance—a chance to produce good fruit?  I have an idea that certain things would come more clearly into focus for us…while some other things would probably become a lot less important.  

For one thing, we might avail ourselves to as much “fertilizer” as we can get.  The gardener in Jesus parable says of the fruitless tree, “Let it alone for another year, so I can put manure on it.”  In ancient agriculture, just as it is for modern organic farmers, manure was the main form of fertilizer.  If you wanted to produce a good yield, you dug around a plant to loosen the soil a bit, and then and you spread some manure at its base.   For us to get “fertilized,” we need to be exposed to those things that will help our faith to become more active and fruitful.   Most if not all of our small groups at Rejoice have a strong fertilizing component…as do all of our worship experiences, including both Sunday morning and seasonal mid-week services.  Yep, that’s right…just think of me as a manure shoveler.   And think of every worship opportunity at Rejoice as a chance to get another good dressing of manure.  

The Lord Jesus’ parable spoke of a fig tree…fig trees were known to produce fruit only every three years.  This particular tree in Jesus illustration though, hadn’t born any fruit for three years; that’s why the owner wants it chopped down…it’s obviously a bogus tree that’s taking up space in his garden.   But the gardener in the story is hopeful that, with just another year of cultivation combined with fertilization, the tree might yet bear some fruit.  Maybe you’ve sat for years in worship, and you haven’t seen any changes in your life.  Maybe at some point you’ve even taken part in a small group Bible study, but you haven’t noticed much in the way of results.   But the things that lead us to have a strong and vigorous faith tend to be cumulative.  We tend to “catch” a fruitful Christian faith from being around other fruitful believers; as we spend time with them, we see time and time again what faithful, Christ-like living looks like…and it has a way of rubbing off on us.   Oh, I suppose spending one hour a week in worship might do it for us, to some degree—especially if we do across many years.  Taking part in a Bible study might do it for us—again, especially if we’re consistent in participating over a long time. But the thing that I’ve seen produce the most dynamic effect, is when we serve—or do ministry, together.  Occasionally I might run into somebody who’s served in some ministry at their church for a long, long time, and who’s become burned out by it and who’s regretted it.  But I’ve seen far more people whose faith has been energized by serving with others.   Why is it that we have so many at Rejoice who invest so many hours a week doing youth ministry, walking alongside someone who’s struggling, or cleaning or maintaining our facility, or printing worship bulletins, or working on our computer network, or doing other tasks that have to do with administration or leadership?  There’s just something fulfilling and uplifting about using our gifts to respond to a need, or to make something happen that needs to happen so that we can be church together.  It’s not something we can find in a career, or in our family life, or in any of the countless ways we have for distracting ourselves from the harsh realities of our existence.   

The next time you see images of a disaster, or that you hear of someone with a life-threatening condition, you might heed what goes on in your mind.   Beware of the subtle voice that says, “This could never happen to me.”  Or the one that says, “Oh, they must’ve done something to bring this on themselves.”   Or the one that says, “Oooo…I really suddenly feel like going to the mall!”    Because while we can deny it or reason it away, or distract ourselves from it as much as we want, the fact remains:  life is completely unpredictable.  Without warning, at any moment, life can be gone, or forever changed.   So, when tragedy comes to your attention, or if the cold hand of death or disaster touches our life, instead of rushing to put it behind us or averting our eyes or pretending that it’s not our problem, perhaps it can serve as a reminder that, at any moment, whether we deserve it or not, bad things can happen to us.  But we can also bear in our heart and mind that, even though we don’t deserve it, something wonderfully good has already happened to us.   In Christ, God’s great love has been poured out, for us and for the world.   Here and now, the good news of that love is there, like fertilizer, to feed and strengthen us.  Here and now, as long as we still lie and breathe, we have another chance…the chance to live a new life of fruitful service together.

Text:  Luke 13:31-35

UNSTOPPABLE

Five months ago, 19 year old speedskater JR Celski lay on the ice bleeding profusely after a skate had gashed a six-inch wide, 2 inch deep slice in his leg.  The gash had just missed the major artery in his leg; when he yanked the skate out of himself, he didn’t know how close he was to death.   He did manage to lose so much blood though, and he required so many stitches, that he didn’t know if he’d ever skate again.    A little more than a week ago, Celski won the bronze medal in the 1500 meter short track race in the Olympics.  The Winter Olympics has been chock-full this year of stories of amazingly dedicated athletes. There’s skier Lindsey Vonn, who bruised her shin days before the Olympics started, but who endured agonizing pain to win the gold in the women’s downhill, and a bronze medal in another event.    And then there’s Bode Miller, whose embarrassing performance and distracted behavior at the last Olympics had left him with a humiliating reputation…one that he overcame by refocusing his life and claiming his place on the podium as an Olympic champion this year. 

We’ve all met people like this—some of us are them.  People whose commitment to something is so great that the most daunting circumstances can’t stop them.   People who’ve survived multiple bouts with cancer, or who’ve come back from a devastating tragedy.   People who, through their persistence or patience or high level of skill, have managed to succeed at something that few others have.   Some people just aren’t going to let any obstacle get in their way.   In our gospel today, some of Jesus’ enemies, some religious leaders called Pharisees try to intimidate Jesus as he’s bound for Jerusalem.   The Pharisees claim to know of a death threat from a powerful ruler.  “Get away from here, Jesus,” they say to him.  “Herod wants to kill you.”  Perhaps they believed this would thwart Jesus from accomplishing his mission.  A mission that, as he’d openly stated, was going to be fulfilled in Jerusalem.   But these Pharisees got more than they bargained for.  Because, instead of turning tail and fleeing, as they might’ve hoped he would, Jesus instead replied in a way that showed he was not going to let fear of Herod, or of anyone else, get in his way.  He tells them that he’s not going to stop until he’s completely triumphed.  Now, Jesus has no illusions about what he’s up against; he calls Herod what he is--a wily and crafty fox, a predatory animal.  But then Jesus declares that he’s going to keep on fighting the forces of darkness that oppress peoples’ lives until he’s finished.  And that, he says, won’t be until “the third day.”  The third day, you’ll recall, was the day Jesus was raised from the dead after being arrested, tried, whipped and crucified.   Nothing…not even death itself, is going to stop Jesus!   Talk about commitment!  Talk about overcoming obstacles!   And the Lord Jesus didn’t just talk about doing it—as we know, he went on to actually do what he said he was going to do.   He walked straight into Jerusalem—a city that he knew full well had a reputation for killing those who were sent by God, and he compassionately embraced its people.  In fact, he made God’s grace and mercy known to all people everywhere, by embracing the cross.  All kinds of obstacles developed that might’ve derailed Jesus, and nothing—not one of them, was able to stop him from accomplishing the will of his heavenly Father. 

What are the obstacles that appear in our paths?  What are the things that develop to thwart us from doing what it is that we know God has called us to do?  As baptized people of God, we’re not only recipients of amazing promises, of forgiveness and life and salvation, but we’re also set apart and called by our Lord to be instruments for him to continue his work of making divine grace and mercy known in the world.  We all have gifts…gifts that God has given us and that God calls us to use to engage his mission together.   Here at Rejoice, the way we’ve come to express this mission is in terms of Growing Faith Together.  And we’ve developed a pretty good number of specific ways for people to do that.   There are our ministries of care and concern—TLC, Stephen’s Ministry, our Prayer Team.  There are our many youth and children’s ministries—youth groups and Sunday morning Christian education and confirmation, and church camp retreats and mission trips.  There’s our worship life, where we can all help to share the load, so that the tasks involved with supporting our worship services don’t become a burden on anyone.  And there’re lots more ways to serve in the areas of leadership and fellowship and stewardship and outreach.  There’s our small groups, there’s care and maintenance of our property; there’s a whole multitude of paths we can take to pitch in and help with the fulfilling yet constantly demanding work of Growing Faith Together.   

And yet why is it that so often, it can be difficult to find folks to step up and do what needs to be done?   Why is it that so often, it’s a last minute scramble to find ushers on Sunday morning?  Why doesn’t somebody take on the job of cleaning up and putting away the coffee pot, after things are through on Sunday? Why have our outreach team and our fellowship team and our Kids of the Kingdom ministry teams so often struggled right down to the wire to pull things off?  There are probably lots of reasons for this; a need for more effective leadership or better communication, the sheer number of possibilities for service we have here at Rejoice, for such a relatively small church.  But we have to ask if there aren’t maybe some other reasons—some obstacles that are arising to disrupt us from faithfully engaging God’s mission.  

Obstacles like…fear.  Fear that we’re going to get ourselves into something that’s going to drain us or frustrate us, when our life is perhaps already draining and frustrating enough.   We do have some rules of thumb here at Rejoice that are designed to keep folks from getting in too deeply; our council leaders work to make sure, for instance, that no one has more than 2 major roles at Rejoice, and that there is a clear end to peoples commitments when they agree to do something.   But in spite of the best efforts of our leaders, some of us might still fear that we’re being sucked into something that’s going to make our barely manageable life feel overwhelming.   

This past week, a nasty virus took over two of our household pc’s.  Man!  You don’t know how much you’ve got invested in a computer working properly until suddenly it stops doing it!  The kids need one for their homework, we use one to pay our bills and manage our finances—I should say Linda uses it to do those things… I use it to stay connected to folks at church and work on sermons and other projects when I’m at home.  Heck, I don’t even know where the phone books are at our house—I always just look up stuff like that online.  And now all of a sudden, we can’t do any of this.  What a hassle it is to deal with this kind of thing—and we’re still dealing with it.   Time consuming?  You bet!  Stressful?  Very.  For a few days there, as we were scrambling to cope with this, I know I wasn’t much fun to be around.  It felt like the fine balance in my life got way out of kilter, and there was just way too much coming at me.

Do you ever feel not managing your life very well—that your life is managing you?   The sense that things are on the verge of being out of control can lead to fear--the fear of opening ourself to anything that might push us over edge, into chaos—or into more chaos than we’re already enduring.  Of course, fear can also arise if we lack confidence in ourself, can’t it?  “What will people think of me if I do that?” “What if I mess up?”  “I’m not really cut out to do anything beyond what I’m already doing.”  Fear that comes from a lack of confidence can be as paralyzing as any obstacle there is. 

Or maybe we’re not fearful; maybe we’re just distracted.  We live in a culture where distractions abound, don’t we?   Sports, entertainment, an excess of consumer items…the whole worldwide web to surf, way more information coming at us than we could ever possibly need or process.  If we have kids, then the distractions multiply; we get pulled into their activities…we find ourself taking responsibility for their entertainment, we get roped into shopping and buying stuff for them, and we’ve got to monitor their internet use.  Yep… living in this part of the world in the 21^st century, it’s not hard at all to get pulled off track with distractions. 

Or, could we simply be consumed?   Consumed with the demands of what we think we have to do to keep a job…or to do a good job…or to manage the household  properly…or to raise our kids the right way…or to deal with our health…or to deal with the health of a family member.    Sometimes, we can allow ourselves to be defined by our circumstances—defined by a bad economy, by external or internal compulsion to excel, defined by misfortunes that come upon us, or that come upon those we know.   And once we let something like that define us, it consumes us—it burns up so much time or energy that there’s not much left for anything or anyone else. 

Fear.  Distractions.  Being consumed.  These are just a few of the obstacles that can hinder us from staying engaged with God’s mission.  Our Lord Jesus faced and moved right through every obstacle in his path.  Nothing stopped him from sticking to the tasks he’d been called to accomplish.   And he’s called you and me to follow him.  Is there anything that can lead us through those things that stand in our paths, so that we can show something of the kind of commitment that our Lord demonstrated?   Or is this a hopeless cause—something we shouldn’t even bother thinking about? 

I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard that originally the word “Christian” was supposed to mean, “model of Christ.”   I think the idea is that we’re supposed to model for others what our Lord Jesus is like.  But one definition of “model” is “a cheap imitation of the real thing.”   We’re spiritually broken beings, you and I.  Labeling ourselves “Christians” doesn’t change that fact.   Because of our broken human condition, we’re never going to fully embrace the work God has for us in the world, on the level that the Lord Jesus did.   But we’re also beings who, through the cleansing waters of our baptism, have been forgiven.   And that forgiveness means that we can walk in a day-to-day relationship with God; it means we have a place here with God and God’s people, now and forever; we don’t have to spend any of our time or energy worrying about what’s going to happen after we die; we have the assurance that we’ll be in God’s care always.  Being baptized also means we have God’s Spirit dwelling in and among us…and it means we’ve been caught up in something that’s far greater than ourselves.   We’ve been swept up in the mighty flow of grace and love that Christ first poured out at the cross, and that continues to be poured out to this day in the faithful service and loving care of faithful people who bear the name of Christ.   I’m convinced that by going with that flow…by trusting in God’s promises, and by seeking God’s help to overcome the obstacles that stand in our way, we can become, not perfectly Christ-like, but more faithful, more Christ-like people.  Obstacles will always arise, obstacles that could easily stop us.  But the One who in baptism has claimed us to be his own, the One who even the grave itself couldn’t hinder, our unstoppable God, can empower us. Swept along by in the powerful flow of his love, whatever obstructions we encounter, we can keep on moving.   It’s his purpose, his mission that we’re a part of, and he can accomplish it, in and through us.

Text:   Luke 4:1-13

TESTED

At the end of the second week after Christmas break, Elsie’s parents got an email from one of her teachers.   “Elsie only scored a 55 on her social studies exam.   This is puzzling, since she’s been such an excellent student,” the teacher wrote. “Perhaps you could talk with her about it and find out what’s going on.”   So, the next chance they had, the parents got with Elsie, and they asked her what the problem was.  “Oh nothing,” Elsie said.  “You know how they always mark things down after the holidays.”  

To keep her students on their toes, a math teacher decided to give an oral exam right at the beginning of class.   “Jeremy,” she said, “What are 5, 8, and 304?”   

“Aw, that’s easy,” Jeremy answered.  “CBS, ABC and the Cartoon Network.” 

A father was talking to his college aged son on the phone.  “So,” said the dad, “how’d you do on your final exams?”    “Oh--I’ve got some great news, Dad!  You won’t have to pay for any new text books… I’m taking the same classes over again next semester!”

Tests.   It seems every time we turn around, our kids are taking tests these days.  There’s the SAT, the ACT and other college entrance exams.   There are the TAKS tests…despised by teachers and students alike.  There are the practice TAKS tests.  And there’s all those other tests kids have to take to get ready for the TAKS and the practice TAKS and the SATs and the ACTs.  In one way or another, for all of us, each day contains tests of one kind or another. I used to scare the bejeebers out of my confirmation students by telling them there’d be this huge comprehensive test at the end of their two years of confirmation.  But then, when the big day came, I’d simply explain to them, “There is no written exam today.  But you’re still going to be tested.  Every day for the rest of your life, you’re going to be tested on everything you’ve learned here in confirmation classes.  Sometimes you’ll pass the tests and sometimes you’ll fail.  But make no mistake about it…you will be tested.”   Of course, I couldn’t keep pulling off that stunt for long; word got out to the younger kids who were coming up into confirmation… “Hey…don’t bother studying for pastor’s comprehensive…there really is no test!”  It was fun while it lasted, though—see the mixed look of relief and distress on the kids’ faces as they learned that there was no test that day…but that many more real tests were coming. 

In our gospel today, the Lord Jesus is tested.  Tested by the devil…out in the wilderness.    Tested, from what we can see, mainly on one subject:  his faith in his own identity as Son of God.    Now, Jesus had just been baptized; at his baptism, the Holy Spirit had descended on him, and he’d heard the voice from heaven address him, telling him he was God’s Beloved Son.   Then, full of the Holy Spirit, it says here in Luke 4, he was led out “in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted--or, as the original Greek would be literally translated, “he was tested…by the devil.”

The wilderness.   Figuratively speaking, it’s a place we all wind up in, sooner or later.  Maybe we’re experiencing a time of great uncertainty about the future, a period when a job or a relationship or our health has left us high and dry.    Maybe it’s the wilderness of deep anxiety over the behavior and choices of one of our children.   Maybe we or a loved one have had to struggle deeply with some compulsive or addictive behavior.   In one way or another, at some point, most of us wind up out in the wilderness.  In a place of vulnerability, where the usual resources we have to sustain us simply aren’t there.   It’s a place of great hunger; we yearn in those times to get to a place where we can enjoy a sense of well-being again.   And, when we’re in the wilderness…we’re usually stuck there, for a while.   It says Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days.  Noah’s ark floated while the rains fell for forty days and forty nights.  For forty years, the ancient Israelites wandered with Moses in the wilderness.   Forty appears to be Bible talk for “a long, long time.”  When we’re enduring a wilderness period in our life, it seems to go on and on and on, doesn’t it?  It just keeps dragging along, day after day, for way too long.    And it saps us.  It wears us down. 

I think that’s part of what makes the wilderness sort of a magnet for the devil.   We don’t have our normal resources.  We get worn down over time.  And so we’re spiritually vulnerable.   A perfect chance for the evil one to test us, to see just how real our faith in God is.  That seems to be what the devil is really after—our faith, the basis of our relationship with God.  Because, if he can destroy our faith in God, then he can set his grappling hook of despair into our hearts and he can drag us along wherever he wants to.  Despairing people become people who just don’t care…they don’t care about others, and eventually they don’t even care about themselves.   Despairing people give up on there being any meaning or purpose in life.   On the other hand, faith in God, roots our lives in the One who is the source of all purpose and meaning for life.  The powers of darkness know that, if you remove a person’s faith connection to God, then you’ve essentially got an empty soul that just aimlessly drifts about, and that can be easily led almost anywhere.

The Lord Jesus’ faith was tested.  Specifically, his faith in the word of God that was spoken to him at his baptism, “You are my Son, the beloved…” The voice from heaven had told him.  Out in the wilderness, the devil comes to him and says, “If you are the Son of God….”  Can you hear the undermining implication in that statement?   “If you are the son of God, prove it!  Come on Jesus, you don’t really think that you warrant that title, ‘Son of God,’ do you?    If you were really a Son of God, you could do some incredible sign, like…turn these stones into bread!  C’mon, you know how hungry you are, so let’s see you do it, Jesus…if you are the son of God.”   

You and I have been named sons and daughters of God.  In our baptism, we’ve been adopted as God’s own beloved children.   And that identity, “child of God” is the basis for trusting all of the rest of the promises God gives to us through baptism.  If God is our heavenly father then of course he forgives us; of course he wants us to be with him forever.  Wilderness times though, can be times when we find ourselves questioning this identity.  “Am I really loved by God?  Does God really consider me one of his own?  If so, why am I suffering through this awful time?  Why don’t things get better...if I’m really a son or daughter of God?”   We might even try to do something to make things better, and then despair when it doesn’t work as we’d hoped.

There are other ways the devil can play this game.  “Okay Jesus…if you’re really son of God, then--you deserve the best!  So, just do whatever you have to do in order to get everything you really want; do whatever you must, and it will all be yours.”  When we’re in the wilderness, we’re vulnerable to making bad choices, vulnerable to pursuing things we wouldn’t normally pursue.  Things that, in the end, can become idols—objects of worship that take the place of the God who alone is worthy of our worship.    How easy it is when we’re longing for things to be better, to get caught up in just how good they could be if only we achieved the right things.  Never mind that the ‘right things’ so often lead to destruction, to other people and, in the end, to us ourselves; in certain circumstances, those things can have a very powerful appeal.   “After all, if God really loves me enough to call me his own child, don’t I deserve more?  Don’t I deserve all that I long to have?”  And before we know it, we’re bowing down at the altar of an all-consuming job…or we’re spending money we don’t have, or we’re burning through resources that we have but that we really ought to be saving.  

There are lots of different ways our minds can be led to think.  “Jesus, if you’re really a son of God, then, go ahead…take a risk!  Do something that will prove who you are…something that will demonstrate, once and for all, how deep your faith in God is.    If the devil can’t destroy our faith, he’ll try to twist it into something unwholesome— even into something downright toxic.    A twisted faith can be almost as good as no faith at all. When we’re worn down emotionally and mentally by circumstances, who knows—we might actually go for this.  Developing an inappropriate relationship…blowing off time with our family…gambling…abusing drugs…eating or drinking too much of the wrong thing.  Stuff that doesn’t sound good at all when we’re rested and relaxed can somehow seem a lot more appealing to us when we’re so tapped out that we’re not thinking clearly.  A lot of bad decisions are made when people are, for whatever reason, kind of a mess.  At times like this, many of us find ourselves being tested…and many of us fail the test.   

The Lord Jesus, however, passed his test. Even though he was vulnerable, even though he was very hungry, even though he was undoubtedly weak and tired and a mess, Jesus succeeded where many of us tend to fail.  And this wasn’t his only test.  It says that, when the devil had finished testing Jesus in the wilderness, “he departed from him until an opportune time.”   An opportune time.  The most opportune time appears to have been when Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane, facing imminent arrest and torture and death at the hands of his enemies.   There he knelt in prayer, and he asked that “this cup would pass from” him—he expressed to his heavenly Father his earnest desire for a way out of the appalling challenge he faced.  But ultimately, there in the garden, he submitted to his Father’s will.   He didn’t try to run away from the horrible trial he knew was about to begin; he stayed and he faced the challenge.   And so the Lord Jesus passed his final test.

Because Jesus passed his tests—especially that final one in order to fulfill God’s purpose, you and I are assured that, regardless of how well we do on our tests, we are still precious to God.   The price Jesus the firstborn Son of God paid for us on the cross shows us just how precious we are to God. Through baptism our Father in heaven assures each of us personally that we are his beloved children.  But, we shouldn’t be surprised when we too face challenges at opportune times.  In fact, we should expect that our identity as God’s sons and daughters will be called into question, or even used to twist our faith into something unwholesome.    As long as we hang onto the basic promises of our Baptism—the promise that we are God’s adopted children, the promise that our sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, and the promise that we have a place with God and God’s people forever…as long as we cling to those promises, then we can share in our Lord’s triumph over the power of sin and the devil.  

Tests will come our way…throughout our lives. Especially in those opportune wilderness periods, when circumstances drain us of our vitality.   But in the end, what’s most important isn’t whether we pass or whether we fail each individual test.   What’s most important is that we look to Jesus…that we look to his proven excellence. to the tests that he passed.  Because of his great love for us, demonstrated so proficiently on the cross, our failures are not the end of the story.  Heck, we’re forgiven by God, so we can always learn and grow from our failures, right?   And, holding onto our baptismal identity as God’s children, who knows? Some day, on some level, we too might even hope to excel—just like our big brother, Jesus.

Text:  Luke 9:28-36

BUILDING A FRAMEWORK

It’d been the most intense 18 months of my life.   I had served with 5 other Lutheran young adults on this full-time, cross-cultural mission team to Africa.   We had lived together, worked together, travelled together, eaten, slept, and breathed together for a year and a half.  We’d visited Lutheran churches across a pretty good part of this country.   And we’d gone all through Kenya and Tanzania in East Africa, serving Lutheran churches there, meeting local people in open market places and schools and hospitals, staying with them in their mud houses with dirt floors and grass roofs.  We’d seen and experienced things none of us would ever have imagined before we went.  We’d been deeply exposed to the daily struggles and suffering of African people…and to their great dignity and generosity.   We’d seen the political tensions that still existed there after a recent coup attempt in Kenyans; four of us had even spent a few days in Tanzanian jails, when a misunderstanding arose at the border between Tanzania and  Kenya.   The six of us had gone through a lot together--including the stress that takes place when that many very different personalities live and work closely together, day-in and day-out.   I mean, when you’re spending that much time together--doing so much together for such a long time, well, you develop an acute awareness of the shortcomings and rough edges of everyone—theirs and yours.   In fact, that part wore on me so much that I remember the predominant recurring thought I had during the last couple of months of my team commitment. It was: “Thank God, it’s almost over!”     And then, suddenly…it was over.   We had a homecoming program and reception up in St. Paul, we said our goodbyes to each other…and that was it.   Suddenly these 5 team members who I’d gone through so much with, these people who I’d come to know so much about and who knew so much about me, were gone.   My parents had driven up from Illinois to Minnesota for the team homecoming, and after the reception I’d climbed into the back seat of their car to return home with them…and that’s when it all began to sink in…the immensity of everything I’d just been through with my team members.  What we’d just lived through together was an incredible experience—one that had produced a profound impact on me.  It would take a while before I could wrap my mind around it--enough to start to figure out what to do with all that’d happened during that chapter of my life.   For a long time, I didn’t even try to talk about it, with anyone.   I didn’t know how to talk about it with anybody who hadn’t gone through it all.  I didn’t really understand what’d taken place.  All I knew for sure was that I was never going to be the same again.

I wonder if that’s something like the way Peter, James and John must’ve felt, after their intense encounter up on the mountaintop.    At the very end of our gospel today, after they’d witnessed this incredible and somewhat terrifying series of events involving the Lord Jesus, it says that “They kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.”    Of course, you could say that “the things they had seen” were somewhat akin to a modern-day alien sighting.   A part of what kept them mum may have been the thought that, if they said anything about it, nobody would believe them!    Or that people would think they were nuts!  But no…obviously, eventually, they did get around to telling people what they’d witnessed, as bizarre as it was.  After all, we have this record of their testimony, right here in Luke’s gospel.  So, I suspect what prevented these three followers of Jesus from talking about it “in those days”—in the days immediately after the strange mountaintop episode, was that they had to struggle for a while to make sense of it all. They had to first figure out what they were going to say to people before they could start to say anything meaningful.   In time, after their Lord had gone to Jerusalem to suffer and die and  rise from the grave, just as he’d said he would…and after the promised Holy Spirit came upon them, in time, Peter, James and John were among the most vocal of witnesses to all that they had seen when they were with Jesus.   In due course, they did manage to make enough sense of this, and of all the other astonishing things God accomplished in and through Jesus, so that they were able to share about their experiences, with many others.  The sequel to Luke’s gospel, the book of Acts, is the account of how Peter and Paul and others did just this, throughout the whole Roman Empire. 

What I’d like for you to consider this morning is this:  the God who manifested this awesome revelation to these three disciples in what’s now called Jesus’ “Transfiguration”— this God is always at work, revealing things to you and to me.  Now, the means he uses to reveal stuff to us, and even the things he reveals to us may not be as striking as what those three original followers of Jesus witnessed up on the mountain.  But our Lord is constantly illuminating us in one way or another, about things that are significant.    And eventually, you and I are going to be called upon to share with others our testimony about the things we have seen.  In fact, I’d propose that one of the signs of a growing and maturing Christian faith is when we are able to give a witness to the extraordinary ways we see God working in our lives and in our world.  

“Who, me?  Talk about God...or about my faith?   To somebody else?   You gotta be kidding!”    Nope.   If you are baptized, then you are called, along with the rest of us who are baptized, to live a life of love, right?  And not just the mushy Valentines Day card message kind of love.  We who are baptized as followers of the Lord Jesus are called to love as our Lord has loved us.  That’s a roll-up-your-sleeves, get-in-there-and-pick-up-your-cross kind of love.  It’s the kind of love that sets the self aside for the sake of the other.  Now, think in terms of somebody who doesn’t know much at all about the God’s love as it’s been revealed to you and me in Christ.  Or, think of someone who hasn’t yet learned to walk in a trust relationship with God…somebody who’s really struggling in the face of some pretty serious problems they’re having.  Think about how they might benefit from hearing from someone who has learned to trust God, or from somebody who, amidst their struggles, has had God’s grace and comfort, and strength and purpose revealed to them.

None of us gets there on our own, do we?  If you have begun to trust God in the face of life’s challenges, then I’d say that it’s because in all kinds of ways, throughout your life, the Lord has helped you to see and grasp the depths of his love for you.  Observing faithful family members calling upon God to help them through their struggles …attending worship and listening to sermons…taking part in a small group Bible study and hearing a group member share about what God has done for them.  In all kinds of ways, through all kinds of people, God has worked to reveal himself to you.  So, if you’re called to love as you’ve been loved, then isn’t it part of your calling to help others to grasp the benefits of a faith walk with God?

Of course, not all of us come with a built-in capacity to put into words the things we’ve seen God doing in our life.   Some of us have a bit of a knack for stuff like that.  I was an English major; that’s because putting things into words tends to come easier for me than it does for many.   Now, if you’re talking about doing math, or building something, I’m not the guy you want to turn to.  But I can put thoughts into words.   In fact, sometimes it can be kind of hard for me to stop putting things into words.  But that’s not how it is for most folks.   Most folks are more like I think Peter James and John probably were. Especially when it comes to the things of faith.  Undoubtedly, for a lot of you, it can take quite awhile to put it all together in a way that makes sense to you…let alone in a way that’s going to be comprehensible to somebody else.  

There are 20 adults among us right now who are taking part in a six-week Bible study now on Sunday mornings at Rejoice.  I want to commend you folks—along with anyone else who’s taking part in any other in-depth Bible study.   And not just because “Studying the Bible” is one of our Marks of Disciplelife at Rejoice.    Bible study is an important way to develop our framework of understanding as God’s people.  It’s an important way to develop our framework of understanding as God’s people.  We all go through life with some way that we’ve developed of making sense of the world and of our place in it.  Being a person of faith involves the need to integrate into our framework of understanding some very unusual things.  Things that a lot of the people around us aren’t exposed to very much.  Oh, you and I may not experience anything like those three disciples up on the mountaintop did, that day the Lord was transfigured, and he talked to Moses and Elijah, and when a voice addressed the disciples from a mysterious cloud, saying, “This is my Son, my chosen, listen to him!”   We don’t typically witness things like that.  But we can go through some pretty heavy-duty things, at times.  Things that, once we’ve experienced them, can leave us forever changed.   Maybe it’s a tour of combat duty.  Maybe it’s a spiritual awakening that comes with some significant life-passage, like having a baby, or getting married.  Maybe during a period of unemployment, or in a time of grief, or illness, we receive God’s gracious, saving help in a way we never knew before that we could.  Perhaps we just beheld the wonder of a prayer answered, or of a hope fulfilled, and that’s left us with a new sense of wonder and gratitude at how intimately responsive God is to our every need.   Studying the Scriptures is can help us to incorporate these experiences into our framework of understanding.   The Bible, you see, contains a story—the story of God and God’s people.  And because we are among God’s people, this story is our story.  The language of this story is our language, and like any language, it helps us to understand things.  So, the better-acquainted we are with this story, the better-equipped we’re going to be to develop our framework of understanding.

Ultimately, until we have some way of understanding our faith experiences ourself, we’re not going to be ready to share about them with anyone else.   But, when it comes to understanding our faith, we don’t have to start from scratch.  The Bible is filled with insight on what it means to be people of faith, and to live and struggle as people of faith.  We’re not on our own…we have the Scriptures to help us make sense of it all.  Not only that, but our Lord Jesus himself meets us right here every week, to assure us of his abiding presence and love for us as we try to make sense of it all.   As we abide in him by hearing his Word and by sharing his Sacrament, he’s promised that his Spirit will abide with us throughout the week, to give us all wisdom and insight and knowledge.   And, alongside of all of this, there are those among us who’ve already developed their faith understanding, to the point where they can show us how to articulate what it is we need to say.  A couple of weeks ago, I asked one of the fellas in the Men’s Bible Study group to come up with a description of what the group is about, along with some other basic information, so we can publish it.   What he came up with was this:  “In Men's Bible Study we learn more about how Christ works with us and in us to help build stronger family and personal relationships.  We share with each other the triumphs and disappointments of walking through life with Jesus.”  Now, I don’t think I could’ve put it into words like that, but as I consider it, that’s pretty much what happens at Men’s Bible Study.  Well, that and the usual guy stuff about trucks, transmissions, and jock itch….,

Now, this is a church made up of quite a few lifelong Lutherans.  So, something tells me that many among us may not have even tried to put our faith into words or think much about our faith, since we were in confirmation class.    And for some of us, that’s been a long, long time!    When it comes to matters of faith, we shouldn’t expect to always be able to make sense of them and talk about them right off the bat.  But neither can we expect that we’ll never be called upon to talk about our faith.   We are all called, you and I, to share the good news of God’s grace and love in Christ, with those around us who need that good news.   And in this part of the country, where many are oppressed by a distorted view of God as an angry judge, you know there are a lot of people out there who need our good news.  We have the Bible to provide us with a way to look at things and with some words we can use.  We have a living Lord who’s suffered and died for us, and who continues to be present for us, revealing his great love.  We have his Spirit, within and among us, to enlighten us.   And we have other growing, faithful disciples to help us as well.   Is there any good reason why we shouldn’t all finally come to the place where we’re ready and able to tell others of “the things we have seen”?

Text:  John 2:1-11

CAMOUFLAGE

Attending a wedding for the first time, a little girl whispered to her mother, “Why is the bride dressed in white?”  “Because,” the mother explained, “white is the color of happiness, and this is the happiest day of her life.”  The little girl looked thoughtful for amoment, and then she said, “So why is the groom wearing black?”  

Okay, so one antenna gets married to another antenna.  The wedding wasn’t that good, but the reception was great! 

I know.  That one was a bit painful, but don’t worry, that’s it…you’ve just heard my whole repertoire of jokes about weddings.  This morning we’re going to reflect for a bit on the wedding at Cana in our gospel today, and so I had a choice…either I could start with some jokes about wine or some jokes about weddings.  You got the better selection, believe me….

Weddings.  Traditional weddings today in North America and weddings in 1^st century Galilee are two very different birds.   Having officiated at my share of them, I can say without qualification that traditional weddings today are something of a production.   Of those that I’ve seen, the focus is largely on the couple—on the ceremony that they’ve planned, and on certain rituals that they engage in at the ceremony and the reception.  At the ceremony, there’s the bride’s dress, there’s the walk down the aisle, there’s the vows the couple chooses to speak to each other--some written by the couple themself, there’s the music they’ve selected to have played or sung during the service that reveals the couples’ taste…and there’s that kiss they give to each other–either a big, honkin’, passionate smooch or a warm, affectionate brush of the lips.   Then at the reception, there’s the clinking of glasses with spoons to get the bride and groom to kiss some more, there’s the couple’s first married dance, the cutting of the cake, the throwing of the bouquet, the removal and snapping of the garter…you know how it always goes.   Much of what goes on in traditional weddings today is focused on the bride and groom…weddings as we know them tend to be kind of a show, and the bride and groom are the main actors.  

In 1^st century Galilee, things were considerably different.  For those who attended a wedding like the one Jesus and his mother were at in our gospel reading, the focus was way more on the big party that accompanied the wedding ceremony.  The party could last literally for days.  Basically it went on for as long as the “party supplies” lasted.  People didn’t have TV sets or Wii’s or football stadiums or water parks to go to; they didn’t have any of the trappings of a modern, affluent society.  There wasn’t much for anyone to do but work and survive.   Except…when a wedding came along.  Then it was time to put the drudgery of work aside and to forget about the hardships of trying to eke out a subsistence living in a forgotten rural corner of the Roman empire.  A wedding was an excuse—a license, to party!   It was one of the few opportunities folks had to just kick back and chill and have fun and mellow out with your family and friends.   Everybody in the community would be invited to a wedding, and everybody in the community would attend.  Even folks from nearby communities would show up.  After all, like I said, there really wasn’t much else to do in that time and place!  

But at this particular 1^st century Galilean wedding party, we’re told, the wine gave out.   Why was this an issue? Well, because, they didn’t have Shiner!  They didn’t have anything else, either, that would help folks unwind, and that would lend the occasion a “celebrative atmosphere.”  And, there were no stores in the area where you could just send somebody out for a case or three of Chianti.  For most of the guests, the wine was the focus.  And either somebody had planned poorly and not ordered enough wine, or the groom was too poor to afford much wine.  In any case, the wine was now… all gone.  And basically, what that meant was… “The party’s over…”   Once word leaked out that the wine had dried up, all the guests would start to disappear.  

Apparently, that would’ve been a real bummer for someone.  I don’t know; perhaps it would have been humiliating for the groom, who was responsible for providing the open wine-bar.  Or maybe it’s just that everyone would’ve just been very disappointed that they’d now have to return to the daily grind of their difficult lives.    For whatever reason, Jesus’ mother was concerned about the wine problem…concerned enough to tell her son about it.  Like any good mom, she knew her son…she knew that Jesus was the one person there who could do something about the situation.   There’s this little exchange that then takes place between Jesus and his mother. She tells him about the problem.  There’s some resistance on his part to doing what she was implying he ought to do.  “What is this to you and me?” Jesus responds, “My hour has not yet come,” he says.  This, we learn later in the gospel, is a reference to the hour of his suffering, death and resurrection, the hour when he would give his life to redeem the world.  Jesus knows that it’s not time for that yet.  But Jesus’ mom knows her son.  She knows not only what he’s capable of doing, but she knows his character.  She knows his inclination to show grace and care for peoples’ needs whenever he could.   And so she instructs the servants there to do whatever Jesus tells them to do.  Sure enough, Jesus tells them to fill up these big, approximately 20-gallon purification containers with water, and to then take a cup of it to the chief steward--the one hired by the groom to manage the party.  The servants do as Jesus tells them—they fill the six huge containers, bring the steward a cup of it without telling him where it came from, and the rest is, well history!   The wedding celebration that was about to fade into oblivion gets a big kick start, the groom comes off looking great for reserving the best wine for last, and everybody there is readayyyy to par-tayyy!   And the significance of this, we’re told, was that this was the first of Jesus signs, through which he “revealed his glory.”  

Pretty curious, isn’t it?  Jesus is the divine Word made flesh; he’s God come among us as a human being to shine the light of divine love into the darkness, to redeem the world.  And this is the way he begins his saving work?   By making it possible for a large group of people to shuck their responsibilities and maintain their buzz?  Actually, it’s even worse than it sounds.  Because among good, decent Jews, Galilee was known as a disreputable territory.  Galilee was a region filled with gentiles-- and with all kinds of other bad and scandalous characters.    Heck, it wasn’t even really a part of Judea.  Respectable Jews just didn’t even hang out in Galilee.  So Jesus not only chooses reveal his glory by juicing up a wedding party, but he does it among those considered by many to be faithless scoundrels.   It’d be like me or some other pastor putting a collar on and going to buy rounds for everyone at the seediest bar in North Texas.   You know, a place along the freeway called something like, “Scuzzy Jake’s Private Club.” 

Such is the time and place where Jesus chose to do his first sign—his first revelation of God’s saving power and love.  What could possibly come of a sign like that, in a place like that?  And yet, it seems, the result was actually a very good one.  Because, while Jesus kept a low profile—he didn’t go around advertising to everyone present that he was the one who saved the wedding party, there were a handful of folks there who saw the whole thing:  Jesus’ first disciples, who’d come to the wedding with him.  And the outcome of what they’d seen here, we’re told, was that these disciples believed in Jesus.  As crazy as it seems, Jesus’ miraculous provision of adult beverages in this scandalous place accomplished a significant objective; Jesus now not only had followers; he had followers who were ready to put their trust in him as a vehicle of God’s grace and power in the world.  

I don’t know.  I guess, God has this way about him.  This way of doing things, not in big, flashy, widely respectable gestures…but through commonplace, at times even somewhat offensive methods.   Like, by appearing among us as a baby born in a smelly stable…or like by calling some grubby, uneducated fishermen to be his first disciples. Like, by revealing his divine power and concern by turning some 120 gallons of water into a mass quantity of alcoholic beverage.   Or like pouring out the blessings of divine love to the world by suffering and dying like a criminal, nailed to a cross.

Our favorite theologian, Martin Luther once said that, “God hides his pearls in a pile of dung, so the devil can't find them."   Don’t you just love that quote?  “God hides his pearls in a pile of dung, so the devil can't find them."    Would it change how you feel about it if I told you that Luther was actually talking about you and me?  And that we’re not the pearls in the equation?  What does he mean “God hides his peals in piles of dung”?  By claiming us to be his own through baptism…by placing his Holy Spirit within us and among us…by calling us to live lives of Christ-like love, rooted in a relationship with him, our Lord hasn’t selected the most upright, pure, wholesome crowd of folks there are.  No, he’s chosen just some everyday, profane folks.  He’s chosen some people with plenty of flaws and lots of hang-ups. I mean , let’s be straight.  If we get down to it, most of us have done things in our lives that we wouldn’t want even to talk about, especially in polite company.  And yet, we’re the ones God has chosen to carry out the work he began at Cana in Galilee...the work of revealing his glory and love to the world.  

And the situations where he chooses to do that work are often as low-key and maybe even as disreputable as the water-to-wine Galilean party-saving stunt.   It can happen when, for instance, we elect to associate with somebody who everyone else at work or at school despises—and for good reason.  It can happen when we lean into somebody’s pain or grief, asking an open-ended question and then simply listening quietly and sympathetically as they pour out their heart and their tears.  It can happen as we step up to do some task that nobody else is willing to do, giving whatever it is we’re able to pull something off that, even if it’s only for the moment, means something to an individual or to a group of people. 

Maybe that’s what suddenly occurred to Jesus after he initially resisted his mom’s request to do something…that people often come to experience and trust in the reality of God’s love in the most mundane, the most peculiar, sometimes the most unseemly of ways.  What may seem to us like the wrong time or the wrong place, could turn out to be exactly the right time and place for God to use us most effectively.  After all, God’s work in the world, the work of making his wonderful love known, in order to call people into a saving relationship with him…God’s work is being relentlessly opposed by those forces that are enemies to God and to God’s ways.   If you’ve been on the planet for a while, then you know…behind the scenes of our human story, there’s a spiritual war going on, a war where the forces of God and the forces that spawn brokenness and despair are constantly battling for peoples’ souls.   It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that God frequently prefers to camouflage his work, by revealing his gracious hand in rather unexpected people and circumstances. 

So, the next time you have an opportunity to do something…maybe because you have a skill set or a position or a personality that makes someone turn to you…instead of flat dismissing it, instead of going with your inclination to discount the idea, because at first glance it doesn’t seem like it’s right for you, or dignified enough, or it doesn’t appear to be likely to accomplish much or win you much admiration …next time, consider the Lord Jesus and his behind-the-scenes wine-making work at a Galilean wedding.   Open yourself to the possibility—the probability?-- that the good news of God’s grace in Christ is often best revealed in the exactly this type of situation.  Consider how you might be camouflaged as God’s instrument, in the break room at work, or at a neighborhood social occasion, or at those sporting events you attend to watch your kids.  Consider how, while you’re out working in the yard or shopping at Wal Mart, as you’re taking a walk through the neighborhood, or when the guy comes to fix your refrigerator…consider how, as strange as it may seem to us, any moment could be God’s moment—a moment when God can use you to bring to light his power and love.

We live in a culture of overkill.  It’s like, everything we do, we have to way overdo it.   And while many other holidays reflect this, at no time is it more obvious than at this time of year.   Christmas isn’t until December 25^th, but retail store shelves were already selling Christmas right after Halloween.  Even KLTY, the region’s main Christian radio station, promotes itself as “waiting to play Christmas music until the time it should be played…the day AFTER Thanksgiving!”   As if that was some huge accomplishment, to wait until then.   By this point in December, you can drive through any housing development and see an unbelievable array of holiday decorations.   Homes colorfully and gaudily lit up from ground to roof.   Yards jam-packed with lighted reindeer and Santas, and with blow-up, caroling snowmen and penguins on choo-choo trains, and candy canes and manger scenes galore.  I was cruising down Preston Road in Frisco last week, and there it was, right alongside the road in front of a carwash:  a 30 foot-tall Santa Claus!   Now, you expect businesses to go overboard this time of year.  But now, even residential neighborhoods are getting to where, if you don’t overdo the decorations, it’s like you’re some kind of Scrooge—dissing the holiday!   And then there’s those endless holiday obligations.    I overheard somebody recently mention that they’d just sent out 130 Christmas cards—each of them with a personal, hand-written note.  And yet it’s not hard to imagine that some of us might be going, “Only 130?  That’s nothing!”   And what about shopping?  Have you got your Christmas shopping done yet?  If your answer is yes, are you sure you’ve got it done?   After all, there’s always another sale…and even if there’s nothing else you need to get, sometimes another sale means you could return something you got at onestore in order to take advantage of a better deal on that item at another store.  And, what if somebody you haven’t gotten anything for suddenly decides this year to give you a gift?  Doesn’t that mean you should reciprocate?  And oh, yeah—there’s that holiday party, where everyone is expected to bring something for the gift exchange.   And—oh my gosh, the relatives are coming to your place this year, and that means you’ve still got a ton of groceries to buy!  In a society that thrives on over-consumption, at this time of year, it’s like the volume gets turned way up.  We over-decorate, over- shop, overspend, overeat, and over-function, to the point of overkill.   It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?

But then there’s our gospel today.  In the midst of all this excess, we hear John’s response to the crowds who asked him, “What then should we do?”  As you may recall from last week’s reading from Luke’s gospel, the word of God came to John, the son of a small town priest, who then went around the region of the Jordan “proclaiming a baptism of repentance, for the forgiveness of sins.”   As Luke portrays it, John did this in fulfillment of the prophet Isaiah’s vision—a vision of leveling out this world’s injustices and inequities…by lifting up those who are poor and oppressed and humbling the rich and the mighty.   Now, there’s no evidence that the world changed much as a result of John’s call for repentance—at least not directly as a result of it.  John did succeeded in getting people to ask how, specifically, they were called to turn their lives around to be in line with God’s work in the world.  He succeeded in getting some to ask what the shape of repentance should be for them.   John’s answer, found in today’sgospel, was that those who had plenty were to share with those who lacked what they needed…and that those who had power over others were to stop abusing their power, and live contentedly with what they have.   The implication, of course, was that just the opposite was taking place…the have’s were hoarding, while the have-nots were going without, and those who had power were using that power togain advantage and greedily take whatever they could from those they had power over.   Specifically addressed by John in these respects were tax collectors and soldiers—individuals whose positions were aligned with the absolute power of Rome, and who were known for taking advantage of their positions. 

Many people—probably especially the have-nots and powerless among the crowds, liked what they heard from John.   And it says they were “filled with expectation,” wondering if John might be the promised Messiah—the savior king, sent by God, to rescue the people from the Romans and from those who derived their power from Rome.  “Is this John the One?” people were asking.  But John denied it, and he clearly directed them to “One who was yet to come,” to One who, John said, would be “more powerful than” him.   Ultimately, John’s call for repentance—even specifically spelled out as it was, wasn’t going to save anyone.  Ultimately, it would be another who would bring salvation. 

I wonder…what if John were to appear here today?  What if, moved by the word of God, a John-the-Baptist-like figure were to show up among us, preaching repentance? …calling for us to change the direction of our lives and to get ourselves in line with God’s purposes in the world?  And what if we were to respond by saying, “Okay then, what should we do?”  What would the shape of repentance look likefor us?  

I don’t know, you might see it differently, but somehow I think it’d have something to do with all of this overkill we engage in.   Somehow I have to believe, we’d be called upon to start reining in some of ourextreme excesses.  It seems to me, one thing we might be told to do, is to moderate our approach to the holidays…you know, to scale it all back, considerably.   We might be called, for example, to invest less in buying and exchanging gifts with those we know…and to restrain ourselves a bit on all the seasonal decorations; believe it or not, Garden Ridge and Wal Mart would likely still have plenty of businesswithout us—and Christmas will still come even if we don’t put all that strain on the power grid with all those lights.  We might even be directed to give ourself a break from the obligation to send all those cardsto everyone, or to attend or host those parties.   And finally, set free from this seasonal insanity, we might then be gently re-directed to look to and respond to the needs of some whose experience is far-removed from that of a suburban North American household.   Like, perhaps, some people living in rural African communities.  Some people whose daily life-and death struggle would be transformed with the simple addition, say, of a fresh water well.  $3500.  That’s all it takes for an organization called “Water to Thrive” to build one well, for a community either in Sierra Leone in West Africa, or in Ethiopia inEast Africa. 

$3500.  That’s 35 of us, each giving a gift of $100, or 100 of us giving gifts of $35 each.   We have the means and the power, you and I, to change the lives of 300-500 impoverished people!  If only we could somehow contain some of those excesses, and instead respond to some folks who, due to their desperate circumstances, are very close to God’s heart.   

The origin of “Water to Thrive” as an organization is a fascinating story.  Water to Thrive emerged from an adult Bible study—a bible study that was conducted during the summer of 2007 at Triumphant Love Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas. Over the course of six weeks, an average of 40 adults gathered at Triumphant Lutheran to focus on the topics of world hunger and poverty.  During one session the group learned about the water crisis in rural Africa.  They heard about a development organization dedicated to bringing fresh, safe water to the impoverished, rural areas of Ethiopia--and about what it takesto do that.  A few of the study group attendees came together to create a matching challenge fund of $6,000, to encourage others to make a commitment, over and above their normal gifts to the church, to provide clean water for those in need.   By the end of the six week study, Triumphant Love had over $20,000 in commitments.  By the time a check was presented, enough money had been raised for providing 12 fresh water wells.   The gifts of this one church forever changed the lives of over 6,000 Ethiopians!   And out of this experience, the “Water to Thrive” organization was begun, as a way of enabling others to take part in the godly, fulfilling work of providing “living water” for many more Africans. 

There’s a difference, isn’t there, between knowing what we can or should do to align our lives more with God’s work in the world, and actually doing it.  And, as John the Baptist pointed out, we really need to look beyond him—beyond his call for repentance, to one who came after him…to one who was more powerful than him.  We need to look to the One who ‘baptizes with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  He is the One who, as John described him, has the means to sift through our lives and to sort out the wheat from the chaff.   If the direction of our lives is going to actually change…if we’re going to turn from the ways of wasteful, meaningless overkill to the way of compassion for the poor and powerless who are dear to God, then we need to look to the Lord Jesus Christ.  

Because, through our baptismal connection to him, we have some powerful, life-transforming promises.   Like the promise that God’s Holy Spirit will be at work in our hearts and our minds—and in thecommunity of the Spirit that we’re made part of through our baptism.   And there’s that wonderful promise of the forgiveness of sin.  As we live in the light of God’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ, we can remain close to God.  And remaining close to God over time, we can’t help but open ourselves to seeking God’s will for our lives.  That, I suspect, is what those adults at Triumphant Love Lutheran were doing when they took part in that six-week bible study that led them to engage in a life-changing well project.   And, it wasn’t just the lives of some Africans that were changed, right?   It was the lives of all those church members in Austin—and the lives of many more since them, who through the organization they formed, have found at least some of their attention and resources redirected from excessive pursuits to somemuch holier ones. 

The shape of repentance is, first and foremost, the shape of a cross—the cross of our savior Jesus Christ.   Some might say that, for God’s Son to come among us and willingly suffer and die on a crosswas overkill.  It was excessive!  But that’s what it takes…it’s what it takes to get us to trust that God loves us, in spite of our sins.  It’s what it takes to move us to a life empowered by the Spirit of God.  Thecross is what it takes to get us to that place where we will let our Lord sift out and burn away our senseless excesses.  The shape of repentance is a cross—because the cross is what leads us to the joyful fulfillment that comes with being part of God’s merciful work in the world. 

Text:  Mark 13:1-8

BRAIN SHIFTING

Have you noticed?  The entertainment industry seems fascinated with apocalyptic, or near-apocalyptic themes.  In last summer’s movie, called “Knowing,” a document turns up that, once it’s decoded, predicts the end of all human life.  It’s a prediction that’s believable to the main character, who’s played by Nicolas Cage, because all the other disaster predictions in the document come true.  Another upcoming movie, called “2012,” is premised on an ancient Mayan calendar prediction of global cataclysms that will supposedly bring an end to the world on a specific date in December of--you guessed it, the not-too-distant year of 2012.   Two current hit TV shows are based on weird, disturbing ideas.  One is the sudden appearance of an alien race with sinister plans; the other is a worldwide, two-minute blackout where everyone on earth gets a preview of what will supposedly happen to them at a certain time on a certain date, just a few months in the future.    We’re being inundated in a popular culture of fascination with the end of life as we know it.  And now today we read this gospel where the Lord Jesus is talking about things that have to do with the end.   Man!   As if there’s not enough to stir up our anxieties already, right?  I mean, talk about turning up the volume on our fears!   But, if you listen closely to Jesus, and if you read his words in context, they can and should have just the opposite effect.  As I read it, Jesus seems to be saying, “Yeah, a lot of really nasty stuff is coming.   There is an end to history as you know it, but it’s God’s end.  And God has it all under control.  So relax!” Jesus is saying.  “Don’t panic!   Any big, earth-moving stuff that you’re headed into is part of what’s got to happen in order for God’s final goal to be reached.”  It’s like when a woman gives birth, Jesus tells us.  It’s painful to go through, but that pain is a necessary part of the process.  So our Lord urges us to keep our head in the midst of all the disturbing stuff that happens…to trust in God…to focus on what’s on the other side of it all…and to have faith that, even if it looks like the end, there is something new and wonderful on the way!

In other words, “The end of life as we know it” isn’t a bad thing!   Whether we wind up facing some doomsday scenario, either from or supernatural causes, or from natural causes like human neglect or carelessness...or whether things just get even crazier and more messed up than they already are for the human race, we can count on God to ultimately triumph.  We can count on God to accomplish what’s good, for us and for all of God’s creation.   The bottom line for us Christians then, is that we face whatever causes us anxiety with faith…faith in God’s power and goodness, no matter what might befall us. 

What might such faith look like?   Well, I’d suppose it depends on what’s going on—with us or around us.   Not everybody’s reality is going to be the same, right?   It’s difficult for any of us to imagine what it must’ve been like for those at that processing center at Fort Hood when that gunman appeared and started to shoot people down.   Nobody knew what was happening!  Was it a single gunman run amuck, or a team of terrorists carrying out a carefully planned attack?  Either way, it would’ve made sense for anyone who was there to simply hit the deck and stay down, or else to run away and hide, as fast as possible.  Apparently, though, that’s not what everyone there did.  Some remained as the shooting continued, to administer first aid to the wounded and to comfort the dying. Do you suppose their anxiety was any less than those who just dove for cover, or who ran and hid?   I doubt it.   But obviously, some were able to master their anxiety and to look past their fear, to the needs of their fallen neighbors. 

Hopefully, you and I will never have to face such a horrible, real-life apocalypse.   Hopefully, we can live, safe and secure from random acts of violence, and from attacks by enemies of our nation.   There are, of course, no guarantees of that.  What’s more common though, is the non-violent but just-as-impersonal distress brought on by economic hard-times.   Hardship has hit many of us—perhaps even most of us, in a variety of different ways.   The terrible anguish of job loss and trying to find employment during a recession…the subtle-but-heavy, ongoing burden of those who still have jobs but who wonder if theirs might be the next to go…the dismay of watching retirement or college investments wane or disappear…the hard choices some must make--letting go of dreams and assets accumulated over a lifetime, swallowing pride to accept help we never imagined ourselves needing.  Some of us simply feel pressure to cut back, to hold onto what we’ve got for that rainy day that our gut tells us is pretty likely to come.   Whatever form our adversity takes, few of us are immune from the very human experience of anxious reactivity.  

Anxious reactivity.  It’s sometimes referred to as a “fight-or-flight” response.  And it’s really part of the way God wired us.  At the base of the human brain is the same structure that most members of the animal kingdom have…it’s often called the “reptilian brain.”   It’s the part of our mind that, when a big tree is about to fall on our head, or a charging moose or a truck or motorcycle is about to plow us over, is what moves us to get quickly out of the way.  If a bear has hold of us and is about to tear us to pieces, or if somebody is threatening the safety of our child, this part of our brain gets us to take a stand and fight back.  The thing about this part of our brain is that it tends not to distinguish between imminent threats and, well, less imminent ones.   Fortunately, we humans have something that separates us from other animals…it’s called a cerebral cortex.  It’s the part of our brain that enables creativity and rational thought.  And if we let it, our cerebral cortex can overrule our lower-brain reactivity, whenever the situation warrants it.   So, unlike snakes or birds or other animals, we don’t have to operate on that fight-or-flight basis.   We don’t have to anxiously react to every fear-inducing thing that happens.  At Fort Hood, there were some who demonstrated this ability, very well.  

The Lord Jesus doesn’t pull any punches; he doesn’t try to shelter us from the fact that we are in for some fear-inducing, even hair-raising events—including some pretty big ones, like wars and earthquakes.   Events that some will even use, he says, to make wild and self-serving claims, claims that will lead many astray.  But to us, his followers, the Lord Jesus says, “Do not be led astray,”…“Do not be alarmed”…“Trust in God.” 

O-o-okayyy…but sometimes that’s a lot easier said than done!  When fearful things are happening—around us and to us, it sets off those reptilian alarm bells in our lower brains.   And when those bells start to ring, how are we supposed to “not be alarmed?”  How do we go about trusting in God’s power and goodness, when our insides are screaming “Take cover!” or “Fight back!”?  How do we silence the alarm bells and keep our head?  How can we focus on Jesus’ promise that these are just birth pangs…that somehow, through it all, something wonderful is going to be born?  

If only we could all become teenagers.  Most teenagers I know have somehow managed to turn off that part of their brain that sounds the alarm.  It’s like, they go screeching around corners up on two wheels and they don’t even flinch.  The big test is tomorrow and you haven’t studied at all?  No biggy…it’s just a test.  Cliff diving?  Bungy jumping off a bridge? Hanging out with those people who my parents would freak out about?   Sounds like fun!  Too bad we can’t all become teenagers.  Teenagers are always so cool, about everything.  Nothing can make them even break a sweat.  Okay, maybe there is one thing; the one thing I’ve seen that can make a teenager scream is if you tell them you’re blocking texting on their cell phone.  “A-a-a-ah!!!”

On second thought, perhaps just becoming teenagers won‘t make us as calm as we need to be.  So, I’d like to suggest that those Marks of Disciplelife we recite every Sunday at the end of our worship service can come in real handy for silencing those inner alarm bells, once they start clanging away.  Praying daily, worshipping weekly, and studying the Bible…these are acts that can keep us rooted in our relationship with the gracious God who reveals himself to us in Christ—a relationship that’s been granted to us in our baptism.  These faith-nurturing activities of prayer, worship and Bible study are essential for engaging our hearts and minds with the One who, with a cross and an empty tomb, has proved himself to be worthy of our trust.  These Marks of Disciplelife can really help us out!  “Serving others,” as so many have found, is an excellent way to quiet an anxious spirit.  It’s hard to focus on the needs of another and, at the same time be all caught up in our own inner noise.  Serving others takes us outside of our selves. “Building spiritual friendships”?  Spiritual friendship can keep us accountable.  Hopefully, a spiritual friend is somebody who can be honest with you.  It’s someone who you can run things by, and if needed, they can say, “Hey, you need to chill—you’re getting carried away here!”  “Giving to God and our neighbors in need”… well, that pretty much requires that we put that anxious part of ourself on hold; faithful and generous giving comes out of a grateful and trusting heart.  You can’t do it if you’re operating out of fear.    And, what better way is there to look toward God‘s promised future than to welcome and help usher it in by consciously “Engaging God’s mission”?  

Beyond these Marks of Disciplelife, though, there are probably some other things we can do, that lend themselves to functioning on a spiritually higher plane than that reptilian, fight-or-flight response allows.   One such thing might be to avoid those voices that’ve become so prevalent in the media.  I’d bet we’re all very familiar with these vocies.  We can tune off or turn off those personalities who are determined to stir up all kinds of fear, and anxiety, and reactivity.   In this respect, we do have plenty of choices these days, don’t we?  We can watch or listen to or read the writings of people who make us feel fearful and angry…or, we can stimulate our imagination with a good book or a wholesome, thoughtful show, or by doing a word puzzle.  We can listen to those who want to interpret for us what’s going on in the world around us, or we can study the facts from a variety of sources and think things through for ourselves.  

As the Lord Jesus spelled out for us, we’re going to hear about and even experience all kinds of upsetting events.  But he also assured us that it’s all part of what it’s gonna take to get us to that place where God is taking us.  The challenge for us is to not be led astray.  If we find ourselves getting worked up about things, that’s probably a sign—a sign that it’s time to step back and do whatever’s needed to shift our thinking to a different part of our brain…to that part that lets us trust that, no matter how things might look or feel, God has it all well in hand.  

Text:  Mark 12:38-44

THE MATH PROBLEM

Anybody here good at math?  Here’s a word problem for you.   It’s on page __ of the Trumpet notes, if it helps to see it.  Tim makes $70,000 a year and he works 50 hours a week.  Audrey is retired and lives on a fixed income of $33,000 a year.   Audrey serves at her church an average of 2 hours a week, and she gives $3,300 to support her church’s mission.  Tim serves at his church an average of 1.5 hours a week, and he gives $4000 in support of his church’s mission.   Who gives more to their church, Tim or Audrey?

The answer is…both of them!   Audrey gives more of her money, while Tim gives more of his time.    Okay, I know what some of you are thinking:  “Yeah, Pastor John, I can see why you got a seminary degree and not an MBA.”   Fact is, I really did stink at math in school.  My kids know not to even bother asking me for help with their math homework.  Come to think of it, one of my kid’s teachers said that, the way they teach math today is so different from the way we adults learned it that we shouldn’t even try to help them.   But the math we’re using to solve this word problem this morning isn’t the math I stunk at in school.  It’s not even the “new” kind of math our kids these days learn.  This math is God’s math.  God, you see, has a whole different standard when it comes to adding up what we give.   By the world’s standard, it’s a simple matter of quantity.  By the world’s standard, Tim gives a higher dollar figure than Audrey, and so Tim gives more.   But, according to the math lesson Jesus gives us in today’s gospel, God doesn’t figure things that way.   For God, it’s not a matter of mere quantity…it’s a matter of proportion.  In God’s economy, you measure what’s given in proportion to what one has to give.  Audrey has way more time on her hands to serve at her church than Tim does; but since Tim serves almost as many minutes as Audrey, by God’s math, Tim actually serves more.  It’s what Tim gives in proportion to what he has to give that adds up, when you’re using the divine math model.    I want to invite you today to reflect with me on some of the implications of using God’s standard instead of our own.  

Let’s start by voicing some questions that could arise in our minds as we’re about to offer our giving intents and make ourselves available to serve at Rejoice for the coming year.  “What good,” we might ask, “can whatever money I can manage to give to my church do, in the face of all the need out there in our world?     What good can a few hours of service to my church do, in the face of all the need out there?”

There are a number of ways to answer these questions.  One way would be to use Jesus’ approach to math cynically and say, “It’s not gonna do much good at all.  After all, if you compare the proportion of what we give to the proportion of need, any amount we give looks totally insubstantial.”  That’s the smart-aleck answer.  Another way to answer, though, can be summed up by a cartoon I once saw.  In this cartoon, there’s this vast sea of human faces; over each one of these faces is a thought balloon.  And inside each of those thought balloons is the exact same thought:   “What can one man do?”  a sea of people, all thinking the same thing—“what can one man do?”  The answer is clear…together, we could do a whole lot, if only we weren’t limiting ourselves by that question.  Just imagine what we could do if only we were all doing whatever we can.

Still another way to answer such questions is to frame them in terms of what good our giving and service for God does once God makes use of them.  “What good can a few loaves and fish do to feed so many people?,” Jesus’ disciples once asked.  What do you suppose they did with those twelve basketsful left over they collected after Jesus was through using those few loaves and fish to feed five thousand people?  “What good can one man’s death do, in the face of all the need in our world?”  I don’t know, why don’t you ask the innumerable believers who’ve enjoyed a saving relationship with God through the cross of Christ—a relationship that’s sustained them in the face of life’s hardships and burdens and even in the face of death?  A relationship that’s resulted in Christians working together to create immense movements and an abundance of  organizations and institutions that provide food and medical care and social services and development and education--and that make life bearable and even rich and meaningful for countless people?

“I am the vine, you are the branches,” our Lord Jesus said, “If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.  Apart from me, you can do nothing.”  I’d propose that what good anything we do is, ultimately, is up to God.  What good anything we do is, ultimately, is up to God.  I’d also propose that, in our giving, you and I are simply called to trust—to trust that our gifts, whatever they may be, in conjunction with God’s blessing and partnership, can and will achieve great things.   In fact, faith, or trust in God, that accompanies our giving, seems to be a major factor--for God.  I mean, the poor widow in today’s gospel, Jesus said, “put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”  Think about it!  That took a whole lot of trust on the part of that poor widow, didn’t it?  Way more trust than those were wealthy and who “put in large sums.”  Apparently, it’s not just the gift that’s offered that’s important to God…it’s the heart of the giver.  The heart of the giver.

The dollar figure you put down to give to Rejoice in 2010 is between you, God and our financial secretary.  But the real value of that amount is between you and God alone.   The Opportunities to Serve at Rejoice that you’re making yourself available for in 2010 will be known by you and whatever of our leaders need help in those areas.   But you and God alone know the real value of the ways you’ve said you’ll be available to serve.  God’s not looking just at the amount of money or the number of hours we’ve said we’re willing to give; God’s looking at our heart. 

God’s math as Jesus teaches it to us is different than the math we’re used to.  But it’s not really that difficult to understand…if I can get it, anyone can.  But it could be that our real problem isn’t that we don’t get God’s math.  The Lord Jesus also teaches us that the greatest commandment is that we should “love the Lord our God”, first “with all our heart” and then “with all of our mind and all of our strength.”  Our real problem might just be that none of us keep this commandment; we fail to love God with all of our heart… and so we don’t love him with all our mind and our strength…the end result being that we don’t give God all that we have to give.  But then, isn’t that why Jesus gave his body and shed his for us?--to assure us of God’s abiding love even when we fail…and to call us into a new relationship with God, one based not on obeying commandments, but based on gratitude and trust?  To me, what that adds up to is this simple question: in view of what Christ has given us, are we ready now to give God our heart?

Text:  Romans 3:19-28

WHO KNEW?

Who knew that split ends could be so useful?  Researchers recently discovered that Gecko lizards are able to rapidly run up walls and even ceilings because they have these very tiny hairs on their toes.  Each tiny hair, it turns out, has a lot of split ends on it.  And the split ends are so small, they actually get into the spaces between molecules.  It’s in this way—with the split ends on the tiny hairs on its toes that, in a split second, a Gecko lizard can run all the way up a wall and right onto the ceiling!  Who knew that spilt ends could be so useful? 

Who knew that a cross could be so useful?    For centuries after giving his laws to his chosen people of Israel, God watched, heartbroken, as time and time again, they turned away from him and strayed into destructive paths of injustice and evil.   It seems God’s commandments, as numerous as they were, and as great as they seemed to be for pointing out what the people ought to do and needed to do, could not inspire in people the means or the ability to do those things.   Then, after many generations, when his peoples’ whole society had totally collapsed, God finally made known his real plan for bringing people into a right relationship with him and with one another.  God’s real plan all along, it turns out, was based on something completely different from those laws; it was based on his promise of grace, mercy and forgiveness…grace, mercy and forgiveness that would come through, of all things, a cross.   Who knew?

On Reformation Sunday, we celebrate and proclaim the centrality and importance—not of what we have done, but of what God has done for us, through the cross of Christ.  We don’t sing hymns with words like, “We’re so good, we’re going to heaven.”   No, we sing songs about what “A Mighty Fortress is our God.”   It’s not, “Amazing us, ain’t it just great, that we’re so obedient and righteous...”   No, the whole point of the Lutheran Reformation was that, what we are unable to do for ourselves, God has done for us in Jesus Christ, when he suffered and died for us…on a cross.  Our Lutheran identity is founded on the teaching that what makes us right with God and with one another is the unearned favor that God freely gives us, by declaring us to be righteous, not because of anything we do, but for Christ’s sake.  And yet, how many Christians—even Lutheran Christians, get caught up focusing on the laws or commands of God in the Bible…using them as a standard, either for themselves to live up to, or for others to live up to…acting as if adhering to certain do’s and don’t in the Bible are somehow necessary for a person to be considered good and faithful and worthy? 

Let’s go back to where we got all those laws and commandments in the Bible.  The people of Israel have had God’s commandments for thousands of years…long before there was a Bible.  And yet, they couldn’t manage to keep those laws and commandments. Instead, as we read about it--in the Bible, they repeatedly broke God’s laws.

The problem?   It wasn’t God’s laws.  No, the problem was something fundamentally broken in the people who were supposed keep those laws.  The Israelite, or Jew who we now call the apostle Paul, was originally a member of a Jewish sect called the Pharisees.  As a Pharisee, Paul devoted himself to keeping and upholding God’s law; he even persecuted those who worshipped Jesus as the son of God as law-breakers.  Then one day, Paul himself encountered the risen Jesus.   And so Paul became a Christian believer and the premier teacher, theologian and missionary of the early Christian church.  In his New Testament letter to the Romans, Paul wrote these words:

^…I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh.  I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

Does that sound familiar to anyone here?   It should…it’s a great description of the experience we all have.  It describes this species-wide condition we all have, called sin.    And that’s what Paul called it; “sin within me,” were his precise words for this situation he describes in Romans.  

Sin within us is exactly where the problem lies.  Because of this human condition called sin, keeping God’s law is simply impossible.  Boy, that sure explains the history of the people of Israel, doesn’t it?  Being human, just like us, they couldn’t keep God’s laws.  If anyone here has any doubts about that…if you believe that you can manage to present yourself as righteous before God on the basis of keeping the commandments… well, good luck!  

We’re welcome to try and fail at obeying God’s commands all that we’d like.  But the thing is, it’s simply not necessary.  Because, us trying to keep God’s laws isn’t God’s plan.   The Bible clearly spells out that God has established another way for us to gain a right standing with him.  This way was lifted up first long ago by the prophet Jeremiah:

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant... It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt — a covenant that they broke…. this is the covenant that I will make…I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people…for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

A new covenant, based not on our keeping God’s law, but one based on God forgiving our sin.   A covenant that will enable God to reshape our hearts and our lives, so that we can truly come to live as God’s people in the world.   How does this happen?  Again, in Romans, the apostle Paul spells it out for us:

But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed…through faith in Jesus Christ, for all who believe.

As we have faith in, or as we put our trust in Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross, Paul tells us, God’s righteousness becomes our righteousness.   God knows the bind we’re in—how sin has such a hold on us that we can’t keep his laws.   And so, through the cross, God has mercifully done for us, what none of us are able to do for ourselves.  “For there is no distinction,” Paul writes, “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus…”

Justified, declared righteous, by God’s grace, as a gift…through Jesus Christ.   We can’t keep God’s laws to become righteous, but we don’t have to, since, on the cross, God has done what’s needed to make us righteous.   Pretty great news, eh?  So… how come so many Christians still get hung up on God’s laws, on those do’s and don’ts we find throughout the Bible? Do God’s laws still have a role to play?

For our favorite theologian, Martin Luther, the answer was…yes.   Surprised?  It’s true!  Luther said that, while we can in no way become righteous by trying to keep the law of God, the law still functions for us like a mirror; we stand before God’s laws, and we find reflected back to us our brokenness--our need for Christ and his cross.   The law is still useful…for driving us to faith in the cross of Christ.  Beyond that, Luther said, the law can also help us determine what it takes to have a good life together here on earth.   Of course, sometimes Luther found it necessary to reinterpret God’s laws—as we do, too. 

The law of God, you see, isn’t just in the bible.  It’s built into the fabric of the universe.   It’s woven all through our lives and our experience.   It’s like the law of gravity...it’s simply there, affecting us--all the time.  And just like the law of gravity, changes in human understanding and experience can change how we express or relate with God’s law.  Science and technology changed the way gravity operates on us and limits us.  Humans used to be convinced that human flight was impossible… “If God meant us to fly,” people used to say, “he’d have given us wings.”   Now, having traveled to the moon, we don’t find gravity limiting us in the same ways.  In a similar way, other changes can affect the way we’re limited by the laws of God that operate in our lives.

Let’s take the 10 commandments.   We can see that some of the ten clearly still apply, just as they were written, long ago.   I think most of us would agree, for instance, that bearing false witness against our neighbors violates the trust we need to live together.   “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy”?  Yeah, we need, more than ever, to take regular time to rest, and to hear God’s Word.  Of course, the way we live with that commandment has changed a lot over the last 40-50 years.   People didn’t used to do business on Sundays; now we buy and sell without thinking much about it. Very few will say that adultery is a good thing; most understand that marriage is a major building block of a good society; for most people I know, anything that threatens or undermines a marriage relationship—as adultery surely does, is seen as bad.   “Honor your father and your mother”?   We all need to learn to live with authority.  And I’m sure we’d all agree that the main way kids learn that is by learning to live with the authority of their parents.   But what about that commandment that goes “Do not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his ox, or his servants…”?  Ancient peoples viewed and treated women as the property of men. Slavery and indentured service were widely accepted and practiced in the ancient world.  Today, well, at least in our part of the world, it’s not considered acceptable to treat women as property, or legal to own people.   So, perhaps we need to express anew how God’s law is operating on us.   Maybe something like, “Don’t plot to steal another company’s employees”?  Or, maybe, “Don’t scheme in ways that put other peoples assets at risk”?  Even if we know we and others are going to make the wrong choices at times, we still need to figure out what our limits are, don’t we? If we don’t, there’s a very earthly price to be paid! 

We live in anxious times, when so much is changing in the world.  In the face of all that change, some want black and white answers to what are often today some pretty complex issues.  “My Bible says such and such, and that’s how it is!”, you’ll hear some folks say. I always want to ask such folks why that one thing their Bible says is so important, while so many other things in there, they can just ignore.  I mean, my Bible says, in Leviticus 20:9--and again in Exodus 21:17, that, “All who curse father or mother shall be put to death.”  Would you really feel bound, if your child who was so disrespectful as to curse you, to put them to death?  Or would you perhaps take away their car keys, or ground them from screens for a week or a month, or make them start doing their own laundry?   (To my kids, that’d be, like, a fate worse than death!)  My Bible says, in Leviticus 19, “The alien who resides among you shall be to you as the citizen among you….” So, is everyone ready to grant undocumented immigrants all the same rights and privileges that all American citizens have?   After all, my Bible is your Bible, and it says you should.

Or…as baptized Christians, are we not bound to the law as it’s expressed in various parts of the Bible?   Well, let’s check out what the Bible itself says.  This very question came up, you see, for the early church in Jerusalem.   Some in the church wanted to make Gentile converts get circumcised (ouch!)--as a sign of their devotion to keeping the laws of Moses.  But, as the apostle Peter put it, “Why are you… placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will."  The apostle Paul had to address this same issue in church after church that he’d founded, where these false teachers kept turning up after he’d left.  These teachers were persuading people to focus on trying to keep God’s law instead of trusting in Christ and his cross.  To the church in Galatia, Paul wrote,

“Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified! The only thing I want to learn from you is this: Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard?”

It’s a rhetorical question; the answer is obvious. The Galatians received a place among God’s people because they believed Paul’s message of Christ crucified.

Trusting God’s grace through the cross of Christ isn’t just what makes us right with God; it’s our way of life.   When we trust in the cleansing promise of forgiveness that comes to us through the cross, we receive another gift from God: a share of God’s Spirit—the Spirit of Christ.  As we live by faith in the cross, this Spirit of Christ works, within us and among us, leading us and empowering us, so that we can live a much more wholesome life together than we’d otherwise have.  And so the world can experience through us some ongoing measure of God’s love and mercy.    It’s in this way that God fulfills what he promised so long ago:  to write his law in our hearts.  

As people who stand on the cross of Christ, we’re not bound to the law as it’s expressed in the Scriptures.  Oh, we can turn to the Bible as a starting place, whenever we need to figure out how best to live in our time and place.  But we do so with this understanding:  the law of God, the do’s and don’ts we find in the Bible is not our way of life.  The cross—and following the One who bore the cross, is our way of life. 

Who would have thought that a cross could be so useful?

Text:  Mark 10:35-45

TAKE MY LIFE AND…

If you’re not a person who has a genuine Christian faith, you can just tune out today’s sermon.  Go ahead…put in your earplugs and turn on your i-pod, right now.  Because it’s Stewardship season in the church…it’s that time when we consider how we’re called to manage the gifts that God has entrusted to us.   It’s that time when we all ask, “What, on a practical level, does good stewardship mean for me?” That question really isn’t for people who don’t believe.  It’s for authentic Christian believers with grateful hearts.  Good stewardship, you see, is the response of somebody who truly believes that, in Christ, God has done some amazingly great things for us—things that call for us to do some pretty great things for God.

Of course, if you don’t believe that, then we might well ask, “What are you doing here?   Why are you hanging around the church?”  Is it just because you think it’s got something to offer your kids, or your spouse, and so you just come along for the ride?  If Jesus didn’t suffer and die on the cross for you, it seems like there’s a lot of other things you could be doing with your time on Sunday mornings.   After all, the puppet shows and other children’s messages are usually kinda fun, and the coffee and the company are good, but they’re not that compelling, are they?  I mean, wouldn’t you rather be home reading the funnies, or the sports section?

On the other hand, if you do believe that, to prove the depths of his love for us, God became one of us and offered his body and blood for us on the cross, for the forgiveness of our sins, well, then, it’s Stewardship time!   Listen up! 

Stewardship time rolls around this time every year because, well, first of all, good stewardship doesn’t happen in general.  We show our gratitude to God through good stewardship by managing specific resources that’ve been entrusted to us—by our willingness to give a certain amount of our time, our talent and our treasure, in ways that serve God.  

“Take my life and let it be, consecrated, Lord to thee.”   If you’ve grown up in the church, you’ve likely heard or sung that hymn pretty much every single year, at least once or twice a year.  And yet, if you look at how some of us behave, we might well be singing, “Take my life and leave me be.”  With the pace of life these days being what it is, I’m sure there’s times we’d all like to say that.  I know there’s times I would.  “Okay, Lord, I believe in you.  You’ve granted me life, forgiveness and eternal salvation; I believe that, when I die, I’m goin’ to heaven...Thanks a lot, Lord!  Now, how about we just leave it at that?” “Take my life and leave me be.”

Last week on behalf of the Stewardship Team, Don Hays asked us all to start to prayerfully consider how God is calling us to financially support Rejoice in carrying out its mission and ministry for 2010.   This week we’ll all be asked to start to prayerfully consider how we’ll be available to serve at Rejoice in the coming year.   It’s necessary for us to do this…because, as I’ve already said, good stewardship isn’t in general—it’s specific.  And it’s also necessary because, well, I’ll lay out this next reason in the form of a story.

Olive and her husband Jack were driving home from a dinner party one evening, when, out of the blue, Olive said in a thoughtful tone, “You know, Jack, if it weren’t for my money, we wouldn’t be driving this nice car.”   Jack looked at her, but he said nothing.  They pulled up to their house, and Olive said, “You know Jack, if it weren’t for my money, we wouldn’t be living in this nice home.”  Jack said nothing in response.  They went inside and, on their way to the stairs, they passed by the living room, filled with elegant furniture that they’d accumulated over the past few years.  Olive paused and said, “Jack, if it weren’t for my money, we wouldn’t have this nice living room set.”  Jack silently headed for the stairs.  They got into their nightclothes, pulled back the covers and climbed into bed together.  Before reaching for the lamp, Olive said, “And you know, Jack, if it weren’t for my money, we wouldn’t have this nice bed.”  That’s when Jack looked at his wife and said, “Yes…and you know Olive, if it weren’t for your money, I wouldn’t be here either!”

So what’s the point?   It’s simple!  If it weren’t for your money, I wouldn’t be here.   If it weren’t for the faithful, committed service of many of you, I wouldn’t be here. Neither, I suspect, would any of the staff at Rejoice—not on the level we are now.   Without your partnership in ministry, we’d have to work elsewhere so we can help pay our household bills.  Even if that weren’t the case, without the vast amount of service so many of you give, your staff would be quickly overwhelmed, and we’d burn right out.  Without the faithful, good stewardship of a lot of households at Rejoice, stewardship of both wealth and of time and talents, we wouldn’t have Rejoice Lutheran Church!  

We do a stewardship emphasis once a year because the continued mission and ministry of Rejoice depends on you.  We at Rejoice share a vision for going where we’re convinced God is calling us to go in the coming years.   That vision includes far more than just maintaining a building and keeping up our property.   At the heart of our vision is that we continue to strengthen and expand our youth and children’s ministries.   We’ve had Brandon on board as our part-time youth minister for about 7 months now; his focus has been on building relationships and connections with and among our Junior and Senior High youth—and he’s been learning how to work with our team of adult youth leaders in planning and making youth events happen.  But even before we brought Brandon on staff, we saw our youth ministry grow in leaps and bounds…from just a couple of high school youth three years ago, to 14 of them who went to the National Youth Gathering this summer.  We’ve seen our confirmation ministry grow from 7 last year to 15 students this year. I can tell you straight out that this growth has taken place, not because of me or Brandon or any paid staff; it’s happened because for the past few years now we’ve had a number of “triple A adults” who care and who’ve been willing to do what it takes to make it happen.   One result of all this growth in our youth ministry is that we’re now seeing some pretty stretched and stressed adult youth leaders.  They’ve been asking for more logistical and organizational support from staff and so we plan, in the coming year, to add a part-time youth, children’s and educational ministries director.  In the not-too distant future, we want to grow both this new position and Brandon’s position toward full time; for now though, we’re definitely seeing the need to keep Brandon and to add this second part-time, administrative youth staff position.  And this is in addition to adding more funds to subsidize our young people as they go to church camp, retreats, synod events and a Mission trip, so they won’t have to do endless fundraising in order to attend.

Between our fixed expenses and what it’ll cost to resource this vision of expanding and strengthening our youth and children’s ministries, we’re looking at a significant increase in our budget next year.  The momentum of our vision is really rolling now…we have three youth groups, a thriving confirmation ministry, and we’re also looking to add an after-school care program for middle school students.  But I can tell you this… if we’re going to keep the ball rolling, we’re going to need more than a nice new facility, some part-time youth staff and some money to help pay for youth events.  We’re going to need plenty more adults to step up and offer to support these ministries, with their time and their abilities—and the same is true for all of our ministries.

Our church council has a chart of all the major roles and responsibilities at Rejoice.  Every month they check this chart to see who it’s time to approach and ask, “Are you ready to commit to doing more of this, or is it time for you to step down now and find some other way to serve?”  It’s a sensible way we have at Rejoice to prevent burnout.  Even if they want to continue to serve, people seem to appreciate being asked whether they want to….and not just have it taken for granted that they will.   As you might imagine, our list of major roles and responsibilities is a long one.  What might not occur to you is that many of the commitments to serve folks have made are about to end, and we’re seeing some who’ve been serving in these roles for quite some time tell us that they’re ready now to step down.  That means the council is going to be looking for somebody to step up…in fact, lots of somebodies!

It also means this:  if not for your commitments to offer your time and talents in the coming year, we won’t continue to offer some of our ministries…and other ministries will struggle.   I’m glad we seem to have a number of folks who are willing to mow and to clean; that’s part of our life now; we’ll always need folks to do these things.  What we really need right now, though, is for lots of folks to serve in other ways…we need people to coordinate, people to plan, people to take responsibility for making events happen.  And we need a whole slough of other folks to help and serve with those who do coordinate, plan and take responsibility for making things happen. 

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but you never hear me talk about needing “volunteers” at Rejoice.  Volunteers, as I see it, are people who, if they have some leftover time and energy to give to some cause they consider worthy, they’ll do it.   And if they don’t have leftover time an energy, they won’t.  I’m convinced that, as baptized people, you and I are not volunteers.   We are God’s people--people redeemed by Christ, and connected, through baptism, to Christ…so that we can do great things together.  We are the body of Christ, and each of us has been given gifts to use in the service of Christ our head.  Many of us who’ve grown up in the church were taught that one of the basics of good and faithful stewardship is giving God our “first-fruits.”   Usually we talk about “first-fruits giving” in terms of first dedicating a portion of our wealth to God through his church, and then planning how we’ll use the remaining portion of our wealth for our own needs. The idea is that we acknowledge, trust and appreciate God by giving our best to him first.   I want to suggest that first-fruit giving should apply to our time and talents as well.  That is, it’s not that we commit our time elsewhere and then, with what time and energy we have left over, we give it to the church.  I mean, think about it!  Any church…any organization, that operates that way, on the basis of peoples’ leftovers, is doomed!  Especially today, when there are endless ways we can use our time.  No, we are people for whom God has done great things through his beloved Son Jesus.  We are also then, people who are called to gratefully respond to what God has done for us in Christ, by dedicating our lives to following Jesus, by doing great things together.  And, as our Lord Jesus puts it in our gospel today: greatness among us, his followers, is defined in a certain way.  “Whoever wants to be great among you,” Jesus says, “must be what...a volunteer?”  No!  “…Your servant.” Your servant. Our Lord Jesus defined greatness as service in and among the Christian community.

I’m proposing today that the kind of greatness through service our Lord calls us to isn’t the result of “volunteers” who give whatever leftover time and energy they have to “help out around the church.”  As you consider your commitments for the coming year, I’m urging you to consider two things.  First, consider what abilities and time and energy you can set aside and offer that will really help to move Rejoice forward in engaging God’s mission.   And second, consider this: that bread and wine we receive during holy communion isn’t just bread and wine, right?  It’s body and blood…given and shed for us. “For the son of man came, not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  Our Lord Jesus Christ offered his best…he gave his all, for us.   How will you show him your thanks?  By giving him your leftovers?  By doing the minimum you can get by with and still show your face around here?   Or will you offer your gifts and abilities to serve, as baptized members of the body of Christ?

Text:  Mark 10:17-31

YEARNING FOR MORE?  GOD’S ANSWER

"Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor…then come, follow me."    “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."   With these two statements in our gospel today, the Lord Jesus shocked a wealthy religious man and his own followers.   Perhaps we should be shocked as well.  After all, even the less prosperous of us are among the top 25% wealthiest people in the world.   We live in a society that’s largely built on the premise that accumulating more wealth is a good thing, and that the truly blessed people in this world are those who are very rich.   Much of our way of life is founded on an economic system that depends on the willingness and ability of more and more people to be wealthy, so they can consume more and more goods and services.  Through credit and through advertising, we’re led to spend money we don’t have, on stuff we often don’t need and would be better off without.  Over the past year, we’ve seen how the relentless pursuit of wealth can carry us to disaster--of a proportion that we and our children are all likely to be paying for for a long, long time.   We all know people whose jobs have been eliminated as a result of the downturn that’s accompanied this disaster.  Some of them are among us.  And yet many of us continue down the same paths, our deeply ingrained habits of spending and borrowing maybe curtailed a little bit… but overall, we still pretty much just keep on buying, buying , buying.  The idea of divesting ourselves of our wealth and redistributing it to the poor--so that we can be free to follow Jesus?  No…I suspect most of us would walk away from that one.  Even to acknowledge that our patterns of consumption greatly interfere with our ability to truly serve God and our neighbors…again, good luck with that.   Such is the hold that our standard of living has on us. 

Gulf Coast Synod Bishop Mike Rinehart tells the story of going on a mission trip to Peru.  He was sitting on the plane, he said, en route to the first stop in Mexico City, and he was squeezed in next to this huge “biker-looking fellow.”  They were seated so close that he knew he’d have to strike up some kind of conversation.  But he couldn’t imagine what he might have to talk about with a fellow like this. So, he decided to just start with most obvious question.  “So,” Bishop Mike asked, “where are you going?”  “Oh, my buddy and I just made a pile o’ money drivin’ trucks,” the bug guy answered, “so we’re goin’ down to the beach to git drunk and pick us up some women.  How ‘bout you?  Where you goin’?”  Bishop Mike responded, “Oh, me and 10 other folks are going to do a vacation bible school for these children down in Peru. Peru,” he explained, “is one of the poorest countries in the world; most people don’t make hardly any money at all, so we’re going to put on this Bible School for these kids in Lima, and we know they’ll really appreciate it, a lot.” The biker-looking fellow was looking at him like he was from Mars.   “We actually pay to do this,” the bishop continued, “but we get so much more out of it than any of the kids we’re going to serve.”   The conversation kind of died after that.  A while later, when the plane had landed in Mexico, the bishop got up to leave.  But his seat-mate reached out and caught him by the arm.  He dug into his pocket, pulled out a wad of cash and started to peel off twenties, one after another.  He took a pile of twenties, put them in the bishop’s hand, and said, “You take this, and use it to help those poor kids now, won’t you?”

Bishop Mike says he learned two things from this experience…one is that you never know when or where you’re going to make disciples…it can happen at any place or any time, and it may not be anywhere around a church.  The other thing he learned is that, “When God touches your heart, he also touches your wallet.”

In the Lord Jesus Christ, God has come to touch our hearts—and to claim our hearts…along with all that we are and all that we have.   The wealthy man in our gospel asserted that he’d kept all the commandments…and yet, he still sensed that something was missing.  “Good teacher, “ he said to Jesus, “What should I do?” Maybe we see ourselves as upstanding moral people, people who do our share to earn what we have…and yet we still find an emptiness inside of us.   Perhaps our spirits cry out to be saved. No matter how many trips we might make to Wal Mart, or to the Mall, or to the movie theater or the Carribean or Las Vegas—perhaps we’re still left asking what we must do to be delivered from the shallowness of our existence.

Now, let’s be clear.  The question for us isn’t, “What must we do to inherit eternal life, or to assure ourself of being right with God?” There is nothing we can do to earn our way into heaven, or into a right relationship with God.  But what’s impossible for us, is possible for God. In fact,  God has already done for us in the suffering and death of our Lord Jesus!  We can’t do anything to inherit eternal life.  And, we don’t need to do anything.  Eternal life is ours…it’s a free gift from our heavenly father through his beloved son Jesus.  The issue for us now is, what can we do to be saved from living a pointless life on this side of the grave?”  Through Christ we have the assurance of a place in heaven after we die; what we ned is to be saved from an empty existence here on earth.  And, here in his church, our Lord Jesus Christ has given us an answer to that question.    The bumper-sticker phrase for that answer as we in the church have come to talk about it, is “Good Stewardship.” 

Good Stewardship.  As we understand it, God created us, and Christ redeemed us, to be good stewards--good caretakers, or managers, of all the gifts that God has entrusted to us.   The biblical stories of creation portray God making human beings to “have dominion”—to rule over on his behalf, all of earth’s living things, and to “till and keep” God’s garden.  Our purpose in this world is to be good stewards of all the gifts of his creation, and that includes not just the plants and animals and birds and other people, along with the water and air and soil necessary to sustain life, but also our own bodies and minds, and their well-being.  God calls us to be good stewards of all of our various abilities.  As part of this, God in Christ specifically calls us tomanage our money and possessions in ways that serve God and that benefit others-- that our money and possessions don’t end up managing us.   

The Good news is that, as with our eternal salvation, we’re not left to do ourselves.  Our Lord doesn’t just give us this task of stewardship and then cut us loose, saying, “Okay, you’re on your own…you’d better get it right!”  No…as a matter of fact, in calling us to be good stewards, God also calls us to seek his help.   Because, God knows that, left on our own, we’re bound to be influenced primarily by the powerful appeal of our spiritually warped world.   And so, especially when it comes to managing our wealth, the Lord expects us to seek his wisdom and guidance.   Annually here at Rejoice, as in many Christian communities, we provide an opportunity for everyone to be intentional about this.   At this time of year, we’re all urged to get into that place where we can listen for God’s voice, prayerfully seeking how we will give in the coming year, to God and to our neighbors in need.    In this way, at least once a year, we all have the chance to shake loose from the ways our wealth has come to mange us, by letting God touch both our hearts and our wallets.

Some find the ancient and traditional practice of tithing, or giving ten percent of our income to God, to be a helpful guide to determining how much God is calling us to give.  That’s a pretty straightforward, mathematical approach.  Others, though, in prayerfully seeking how they’re called to be good stewards, find fulfillment in adding gifts to their tithe; some even give significantly more than ten percent.  There are, of course, others who don’t feel able to give anywhere near as much as ten percent, usually due to a fixed or limited income.   Still others may not feel called or able to give anything at all, and so they look for other ways to be good stewards.  What I want to suggest this morning, though, is that all of us are called to come to God and, in the light of his generous and abundant grace that’s been given to us in Christ, to prayerfully seek the answer to the question, “What does good stewardship entail for me?”  

Our yearning for more in life can and should lead us to ask that question.  But ultimately, I’m convinced that a truly faithful answer to the question of how we are called to be good stewards doesn’t come from that yearning…or from anything else inside of us.  Ultimately, the answer to what we can and should give to God comes when, through Christ, God touches our hearts.   In the end, fulfilling, faithful, good stewardship arises from a deep and abiding awareness of what, in the cross of Christ,  God has given to us. 

Text:  Mark 10:2-6

MARRIAGE AND FAMILY: BUILDING BLOCKS

Having officiated at quite a few weddings, I can’t help but observe that there’s always something amusing that takes place at a wedding.  There was the time the bride made it all the way through the lakeside ceremony at a state park…and as soon as the service ended, she promptly grabbed hold of the top of her dress and started bouncing up and down, shaking the whole dress.  It seems that, somewhere early on in the service, a bug had started crawling around in there, and she’d been dying the whole time to shake it out.   Then there was the time at another lakeside wedding when a whole flock of birds came to rest in a hedge right behind me, and those blessed little critters just sang their hearts out for about half the service, so that the bride and groom and I had to shout to hear each other. Indoor weddings don’t fare any better.  I’ve seen a bridesmaid step on the bride’s dress…a groomsman who keeled over because of too much alcohol the night before…a ring-bearer with his finger up his nose…a pair of mothers who got into a tussle about what they were supposed to do--even though they’d rehearsed it together repeatedly.  At the rehearsals, I always tell everybody to expect something silly to happen, since something silly inevitably does happen.   Usually, the bride and groom seem to appreciate hearing that--maybe because it takes the edge off what’s otherwise a very momentous occasion.  But when you get down to it, no matter what I say, and no matter what funny things transpire at them, weddings always get down to that one very weighty, serious moment.  The moment when, before God and in the presence of the community, two people commit themselves to a lifetime together. 

Of course, as we all know, not everyone who makes that commitment follows through on it.  Marriages do fail.  Divorce happens.   People who had every intention of keeping their marriage vows, for various reasons, don’t.   In our gospel today, Jesus is tested with the very tricky question of divorce.  “Is it lawful,” the Pharisees ask Jesus, “for a man to divorce his wife?”  And Jesus answer contains these words that we’ve incorporated into the wedding rite, “What God has joined together,” Jesus says, “let no one separate.” 

Now for some of us, there’s comfort in such a black-and-white, straightforward answer.   But not everyone finds this comforting.  Especially those who’ve been divorced, or who are close to someone who has.  Why, some of us might ask, is Jesus such a hard-core when it comes to divorce?  Is it because he wasn’t married himself?  Didn’t Jesus understand how impossible it can be sometimes for two people to stay together?   Jesus comes across as such a liberal in so many other ways…how come all of a sudden, on this issue, he’s a social conservative?  

Well, the Lord Jesus doesn’t fit neatly into our categories.   We like to label people liberal or conservative, but especially with Jesus, our labels are quite beside the point.   The issue here isn’t about the kind of “culture wars” we’re so familiar with.  Jesus was asked the question, “Is divorce lawful?”  And he begins his answer by directing attention to the law of God as it was laid out by Moses, who, as it happened, permitted divorce.  As self-appointed keepers of Moses’ laws, that’s probably what the Pharisees were focused on.  But there is a deeper law, a law that’s built into the fabric of creation, and Jesus goes on to express this deeper reality.  The spiritual reality that God created the marriage bond to be a lifelong institution.  The practical reality that, as God established things in the created order, the relationship between two married people is such that you don’t just walk away from it.   As a woman who’d recently been divorced told me, “Going through a divorce is like attending your own funeral.”   Others have likened divorce to losing a limb.  Even if you leave aside the chaos created when two people who’ve shared property go their separate ways, the emotional fallout is devastating.  And when children are involved, the pain is multiplied.  I have to say that too often I’ve witnessed the agony of young people whose families are being ripped apart.  

Not only that, but as those among us who teach school can verify, the price that’s paid when divorce is widespread impacts far more than just the family that’s going through it.   Teachers these days have to spend a lot of their time and effort on managing kids’ behavior.  Students suffering from depression and anxiety because their families are broken take a toll on the rest of the classroom.  And it’s not just schools that suffer.  Businesses whose employees are trying to survive divorce and its aftermath often deal with decreased productivity--and with the distraction of people trying to seek support from their co-workers.  What Jesus expressed is true on so many levels.  Once two lives have been woven together, legally, emotionally, socially, spiritually and sexually, it truly is as if they are one.  And the consequences of separating what has thus been joined together are immense.  It disrupts the whole larger community. 

Another way to look at all of this is from the positive side.  As our favorite theologian Martin Luther saw it, marriage and family are basic building blocks of an orderly and wholesome society.  The state, Luther taught, has a vested interest in supporting and maintaining marriage, since when people marry and stay married, they help maintain a stability that a wholesome society needs.   This view has been widely adopted and is reflected in our court system today.  It’s from this point of view of “building blocks of society” that Luther came to see marriage and its related institution, parenthood, as vocations, or callings from God.  

Now, as with any calling from God, for Luther, marriage and family life were ways for us to live out our response to God’s grace in Christ.   They can also lead us to stay rooted in God’s grace in Christ.  The work of marriage, Luther said, including the “feelings of resentment” that can arise, are circumstances that “drive us to faith in God and love toward the neighbor, by virtue of manifold trouble…crosses and adversities of all kinds.”  Those are Luther’s actual words…resentment, manifold trouble, crosses and adversities.  Yep, that’s right, Luther himself was a married man…he knew what he was talking about!   The Lord Jesus said, “Those who want to be my followers must pick up their cross and follow me.”  And, as Luther saw it, if we want an ideal training ground to learn how to respond to God’s grace in Christ by heeding Christ’s call to cross-bearing service, marriage is it.      

Our recently-approved ELCA social statement on Human Sexuality spells out the implications of this Lutheran view.   “Marriage” the statement says, “requires constant care and cultivation…,” not only for the sake of the married couple, but because of its impact on many others.  “Marriage is intended not only to protect the people who are married,” the statement goes on…  

“but to signal to the community their intention to live a peaceful and mutually fulfilling life, even as they endeavor to strengthen the community in which they live. The public promises of marriage…therefore, also protect the community by holding people accountable to their vows..” 

When people are held accountable to their marriage vows, and when they stay faithful to them, everyone who depends on that faithfulness is blessed.  The quality of a marriage relationship effects other peoples’ marriages.  And not only that, but as this social statement describes it, it can have a tremendous impact on the next generation.  “Children,” it says, “learn either trust or distrust from their earliest relationships of dependence upon parents and others in the household…. 

Patterns of loyalty and confidence established in the family can reach into all future relationships. Those who do not learn to trust face significant obstacles to becoming trustworthy individuals in the more complicated relationships of modern life.”    

When trust is shattered in a marriage, it has lasting consequences.  Like Jesus’ teachings on divorce, this social statement, simply helps us to come to terms with the way things are. 

The way things are, according to both Jesus and our Lutheran tradition, there are plenty of very good reasons not to divorce.  We Lutherans do recognize that, as spiritually broken beings, there are times when we all violate the way God intends for us to live and to be.  There was a cartoon someone gave me that had a couple sitting up in bed together, each reading their own book.  And the wife says, “Would you mind stopping breathing?” 

Like a lot of humor, there’s a measure of truth in that cartoon.  People can feel so trapped in a bad marriage that they start looking to whatever might release them from it. All marriages fall short of intentions, and difficulties in a marriage are bound to arise. This is to be expected in every human relationship, right?  And in the light of God’s gift of forgiveness, difficulties in a relationship are not a reason to part ways.  But, when spouses grossly violate their promises of faithfulness, when there is no mutual love and respect, when patterns of abuse or infidelity have deeply violated trust, there are times when we must acknowledge the need for a marriage to be legally ended.   

Now, in Mark’s gospel, Jesus seems to be at odds with that conclusion.   But as it’s recorded in another Gospel, the gospel of Matthew, he doesn’t come across as quite so black-and-white.  In Matthew 19, Jesus does make allowance for divorce, in the event of sexual infidelity.   Some scholars point out that Jesus’ teaching in both of these gospels must be taken in its cultural context.  They observe that Jesus was living in a patriarchal setting, where men could easily divorce woman but a woman could not divorce a man…and that women in Jesus’ day had no real choice other than to depend on men to provide for them.  Viewed from this perspective, by prohibiting divorce with either no exception or with very limited exception, some say Jesus appears to be protecting the welfare of married women in his society.  

I think it makes sense to hear Jesus’ words in our gospel today, not as harsh words condemning divorced people, but as words of loving concern, spoken by one who cares deeply for all of us—especially the most vulnerable, and for the social order that we all must live in.   Ultimately, Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross was for all of us—for those who remain married and for those who divorce…for those who uphold trust and respect for their children and their communities by remaining faithful to their marriage vows, and for those who in any way fail to uphold trust and respect.  At some point, whether we stay married or whether we leave a marriage, we all need the grace and forgiveness that God offers us through the cross. 

Maybe we find ourself among the large percentage of people in our society whose marriages have ended in divorce.  Maybe we’re struggling to stay in a marriage where love has grown cold, or where we’re stuck in a toxic, vicious circle of unhealthy patterns or hurtful behavior.   Maybe we’re at a place where we’ve learned to bear the inevitable burdens of family life; maybe we even enjoy prolonged periods of blessedness and wholesomeness—blessedness and wholesomeness that emanates out, through our children, through others who witness and are encouraged by our family life, and through those who are served by us and by our family.  Maybe we’ve never been married, and we’re looking at marriage from the outside with a lot of anxious uncertainty …wondering if this is a step we’ll ever take, or if it’s a step we ever should take. 

Text: Mark 9:38-50

THE PROBLEM WITH SIN

"If I don’t get these jeans, I’m going to die!”…“I’ll be back in one second.”…“You took forever this morning in the shower.”…“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times!” 

Hyperbole.  It’s a commonly-used way of drastically exaggerating in order to make a point.   Our gospel today contains a multitude of examples of hyperbole.  Okay, it only contains four or five.  But you know what I mean—there’s quite a few of them!   All that stuff about getting weighted down and thrown into the sea, and chopping off important body parts and being cast into hell, “where the worm never dies and the flame is never quenched,” is so harsh-sounding that we can’t help but pay it some serious attention and feel downright uncomfortable.  Even if it is all metaphorical. But that’s what’s supposed to happen.  Jesus is using the figure of speech known as hyperbole to teach his disciples about the destructiveness of sin, and about their need to put a stop to sin in their lives when they become aware of it.

As Christians who follow in the tradition of our favorite theologian, Martin Luther, we revel in saying--over and over again, that we’re not saved by anything we do or don’t do.  We insist that whether we sin or don’t sin has no bearing on where we go after we die.  Jesus’ sayings here in Mark’s gospel, we say, have to be read in the light of the many other sayings and teachings of Jesus, along with the rest of the New Testament.  Elsewhere, the Scriptures make it quite clear that it’s God’s grace that saves us, totally apart from what we do….that when it comes to having a right standing with God and eternal life, the only thing that matters is our faith in Christ.    The Bible says, for instance, that “God proves his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”   It tells us that, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  And we also claim the biblical assurance that “nothing can separate us from the love of God that’s our in Christ Jesus.” 

So, when it comes to our having a right standing with God, our sin doesn’t matter.  For the purpose of getting into heaven, God’s unconditional love for us in Christ is all that matters.  Unless we’re totally clueless, though, we also have to acknowledge, that it still matters greatly what we do or don’t do.  Whether we sin or don’t sin still matters.  Although the Bible and the cross of Christ assure us that our sin can’t separate us from God, sin still presents us with many serious problems. Enough-so that, in today’s gospel our Lord hyperbolically warns us to deal with our sin in whatever way we have to—in whatever way we can.  

The first big, obvious problem with sin is that it hurts us--and it hurts others.  Some say that the essence of sin is an attitude...an attitude that puts us in the place of God. It makes sense, doesn’t it?  If we’re the object of our own worship, then it’s easy for us to put ourselves first.  To put our needs and desires above those of others.   And that, in turn leads us to hurt others—either through what we do or through our neglect.  Since having this sinful attitude is a condition shared by every person on the planet, we’ve found ways to mitigate this somewhat…through laws and other social consequences that restrain us somewhat from acting out in totally self-serving ways.  But in spite of this, there’s enough selfish behavior going around that we can see the effects of sin almost everywhere we look.  Self-centered choices and behaviors tend to especially impact the most vulnerable among us…the young and impressionable, immigrants and those who are born into poverty, excluded and persecuted minorities, the chronically ill.   When we think and act in sinful ways, we help contribute to worsening conditions for such folks. 

Of course, sin also impacts us negatively, in a number of ways.  Sin robs us of our peace—both individually and corporately.  When we hurt others, we stir up enmity against us; that’s so inevitable, it’s pretty much a no-brainer that sin leads us to be at a state of war with each other, either literally or figuratively.  But how does our sin rob us of our own, individual peace?  If we have any semblance of the humanity God created us to have, then we have a conscience, and so our sin produces guilt in us—a sense of self-condemnation when we do things that hurt others.  And that guilt is like a heavy burden, draining joy and peace from our spirits.  Guilt also gives us a sense of alienation from God.  It’s not that our sin or our guilt actually do separate us from God. The cross of Christ shows us that God loves and accepts us in spite of our sin.  And yet we can mistake the condemnation of our own conscience for God’s condemnation.  And that, in turn, can cause a vicious cycle, where more and more we stray from the wholesome benefits of a relationship with God, into things that are even more unwholesome, and that are yet more guilt-inducing. 

One of the more unwholesome things guilt can lead us into is arrogance.  To compensate for or cover up our own guilt, we can look down on others, in an attempt to exalt ourselves into something that we’re not.  This self-appointed righteousness often shows itself in the ugly form of taking the things of God and using them for self-serving purposes—such as a means for discounting or excluding or judging others.   We see this all too often among religious folk...those who seem to relish taking verses or passages of Scripture and using them to condemn the behavior of certain people.  If that were what the Bible is for, well, there’d be plenty of condemnation to go around for each and every one of us, wouldn’t there?  The Lord Jesus himself ran smack into this sin of self-righteousness.  He even exposed it, repeatedly.  You could say it’s what led to his being crucified.   Those who practice self-righteous condemnation may sound very spiritual and moral, but in reality, they stand directly against what God in Christ is all about:  unconditional love and mercy. 

However we understand it, however we experience it, one key consequence of sin is a lack of fulfillment.  Sin tends to leave with a sense that something is missing.  We may try to fill the void we feel with all kinds of things—attempting to sate our various appetites…throwing ourself into a career…trying to establish a sense of security for ourselves or our family.   But these things never work, because what’s lacking isn’t any of these things.  What’s lacking is a substantive sense of purpose in our lives.  As Christians, we’re all called and destined by God to be part of God’s mission team in the world; God has set us apart as his people so that, in a world filled with evil and suffering, we might stand as living signs together of God’s presence and God’s grace and God’s mercy.  Sin and guilt—especially in the form of self-righteousness, can cause us to lose sight of this vocation, to get focused on the wrong things, or to be simply confused.   It may be that some of us are thinking right now, “Yeah, that can happen—look at so-and-so, for instance.  That’s just what they’re like”   But lest we be quick to look at others, let’s be clear that all of us are subject to sin, and so all of us can easily stray into false paths, that cause us to miss the point of what it’s really all about.  

Take Jesus’ original disciples, for example.  In today’s gospel, they come to the Lord, telling him how they tried to exclude someone they’d encountered, because he was “not following them.” They obviously think they’ve gotten it right; you can almost hear the pat on the back they’re giving themselves in telling Jesus this.  But they’ve gotten it dead wrong.  And so Jesus has to straighten them out, calling them to turn from their narrow vision of being his followers to embrace God’s vision for mission and ministry—which is a very inclusive one:  “Whoever is not against us is for us,” Jesus teaches them.  And it’s interesting to note how it’s at this very point that Jesus launches into his statements about being drowned or to mutilating themselves, in order to avoid sin and its consequences.

I think we all know that Jesus isn’t expecting anyone to take him literally.  After all, if we did take him literally, then we’d all either be dead or hobbling around blindly without appendages.  I do think that Jesus is telling us to deal with the problem of sin.  And I think he may even be hinting at what Martin Luther eventually came to see as God’s remedy for the problem we all have with sin.  I think Jesus may be directing us to a daily remembrance of our baptism.

Baptism is more than just a one-time event.  It’s not just a cute naming ceremony, nor is it a mere “get out of hell free card.”  Through baptism, God provides us with many gifts—gifts for daily living.   And, as Luther taught, we are to lay claim to these gifts we receive through baptism, every day. The way we do this, he said, is by drowning our sinful self.  Luther didn’t talk about having a millstone tied around our neck and being thrown into the sea, like Jesus did.  But he did say that we can put our sinful self to death—as in a drowning, through daily repentance--so that God can raise us up to live a new life.  Essentially, recalling our baptism daily can mean that the part of our self that leads us to guilt-induced, self-righteous arrogance can be figuratively thrown into the sea and drowned, today, tomorrow, and every tomorrow after that. It can mean that, as baptized people, we can turn to God each new day, asking that those parts of our inner selves that cause us to sin would be cut off…so that we and those around us can be spared the grief and suffering that a life completely dominated by sin causes. 

Now, does this mean that any of us are going to literally be without sin?  Of course not.   Remembrance of our baptism through daily repentance doesn’t mean we’re going to live perfect and godly lives in every way.  But we can come to a place where sin doesn’t rule over us—and where more and more, Christ and his love come to take root and grow in our lives.   Just like a pine tree that’s still remains green for a long, long time after it’s been cut down, sin will continue to show its color in our lives, even if we do drown the sinful self through repentance every single day.   Our Lord Jesus has promised us though, that as we abide in him, our lives will bear fruit. 

We abide in Jesus by “living wet”—by claiming our baptismal connection to his death and resurrection every day.  This is more likely to happen when we’re part of a community of folks who are all seeking to live wet—who are all trying to make daily use of their baptism.  As Christians, we can help and encourage each other to do this.  In fact, outside of the Christian community, there really isn’t any other place where we can expect to get this kind of support and encouragement. That’s why we talk about “building spiritual friendships.”  Look around you—if you want support to effectively confront sin through your baptism…well, we’re it!

Hypocrisy:  putting up a front of being one way but doing just the opposite.  It has all kinds of different guises.  In Jesus’ day, it showed itself in those who passionately followed and tried to enforce on others religious traditions that had to do with ritual purity—the washing of hands and cooking utensils and eating foods that were prepared a certain way.  This ritual purity code was supposed to be a way of showing one’s commitment to God and to being righteous, godly people.  All too often though it Was simply an empty religious exercise that masked all kinds of nastiness. The proponents of this form of hypocrisy, some folks known as the Pharisees, got into it with Jesus because Jesus and his disciples were ignoring these rules.   Today we can look to certain well-known religious traditions that have established their own codes about certain things…you know, things like no dancing or drinking or smoking or cussing.   But those traditions are far from the only attempts today to externally present a certain image of righteousness or holiness.   In our society, there’s a health culture that seems to inspire the same kind of pride and self-righteousness that Jesus confronted in the Pharisees.  People who call themselves Vegans, for instance, who eat only plant-based foods and who condemn those who meat as evil.   Fitness enthusiasts, who look down on those who have an ample supply of body fat.  Former addicts, who harshly judge those who continue to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, or who abuse other substances.  

Of course, it’s not that what we do to our bodies or put into our bodies doesn’t matter.   It can matter, a great deal.   But, as the Lord Jesus put it, when it comes to being holy, when it comes to establishing ourselves as being righteous in the eyes of God, “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile,” Jesus said…the things that come out are what defile.”  It’s within ourselves, Jesus taught, that we all can find the real, unholy substance of evil:  destructive sexual attitudes…hostility toward certain neighbors that can result in our causing them harm…neglect when it comes to our neighbors’ physical needs…greed…deceitfulness…a willingness to speak ill of others… the tendency to make ourselves and those we consider to be like us to be somehow better than others. And of course, there’s the poor judgment that can arise from any of these.    These are the things, Jesus points out, that matter when it comes to our standing before God.   And if we’re really being honest, I think we’d agree that these things are so much a part of who we all are that we really can’t do anything to relieve ourselves of them.  Cruel, selfish attitudes like these are simply part of our human condition.   It’s not a simple matter of saying, “Okay, I’m giving up my sinful attitudes”--like we might give up eating meat or quit smoking.   We can’t just commit ourselves to a program of developing righteous thoughts and behavior, as if we were taking on a plan to eat right and exercise.  No matter what we do or don’t do, our underling tendencies are going to be in opposition to the way God would have us be.  It’s what we mean when we say in the order for confession and forgiveness, “We are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.”  In our heart of hearts, in our secret thoughts, evil will remain embedded and somewhat active—regardlessof our best intentions.   Our favorite theologian, Martin Luther, on his deathbed, looked back on his life and faced God’s judgment by writing these final words on a scrap of paper, “We are beggars.”  Luther’s final written words point us to what he spent a good part of his life proclaiming and teaching:   that we are lost and condemned people who have no hope of doing anything to establish our own salvation…but that God in Christ “came to seek and to save the lost”…and that only by putting our trust in Christ’s righteousness and not our own can we find the assurance and blessedness of a right standing before God.

So then, does that leave us completely hopeless when it comes to the reality of evil within us?  Should we despair of ever changing into more wholesome people who develop better attitudes and better patterns of behavior?  No!  Because, with that assurance and blessedness that comes to us through faith in Christ, we find that we’ve been given the free gift of a relationship—a relationship with a wholesome, holy Lord, who is the source of all goodness.  And through that relationship, we can begin to find our way to a better life.   Our spiritual brokenness, our fundamental evil inclinations, are going to remain a part of us until the day we die.  But with the help of our Lord Jesus Christ, who promises to abide with us and to dwell in us as we put our trust in him, we can start to find some measure of redemption, we can experience some relief from that part of us that the New Testament calls “the sinful self.”

As a young man, I found that I was hooked on smoking cigarettes.  It was an unfortunate addiction I picked up as a teenager.  But after I had a sort of spiritual awakening, and as I began to exercise my Christian faith, I found that it was natural to cut down on this habit considerably.  But I was hooked pretty badly, and I still continued to smoke, often maybe 2 or 3 cigarettes a week.   I remember there was a fellow at my home church named Dewey Lyons.  I’ll never forget Dewey; every Sunday morning after worship, Dewey would connect with me, and at some point in the conversation, he’d pat my shirt pocket to see if I had any cigarettes, and if he found some there, he’d just take them and throw them away.  I never resented it, just as I didn’t resent anyone who expressed concern for my health until I was finally able to quit smoking completely. 

With the help of Christ, who’s at work, within us and without—at work in our own minds and at work in the Christian community, we can learn to exercise some self-control and some wisdom when it comes to what we put into our bodies, and when it comes to what we do with our bodies.  Not because it somehow makes us holy or pure or better people, but because as people who’ve been redeemed by God in Christ, we are not our own any more.  We belong to God now.  And we belong to each other.  God has set us apart through baptism to live out God’s purpose in the world together.  So, what I do or don’t do affects my ability to work together with the rest of you, to do what it is that God calls us to do.  And what we’re called to do, is to live out what we at Rejoice call the “marks of DiscipleLife”…somespecific ways that we can follow in the footsteps of our Lord Jesus to engage God’s mission. 

Now, if we’re failing to do what’s wholesome and good, if we’re engaging in some attitudes and behaviors or habits that we know in our hearts aren’t good or right, if we’re doing some stuff that makes us feel guilty, what I’d hope we’d all know is that this in no way makes us worse than anyone else.  There is no distinction, the Bible tells us, all have fallen short of the glory of God….and God’s love for us is the same, whatever the character of our moral choices. Christ didn’t suffer and die on a cross to show good people how worthy they are; Christ suffered and died to show us the depths of God’s love for even the most sinful, warped and depraved parts of ourselves.   It’s “While we were yet sinners,” the Bible says, that “Christ died for us,” and the cross of Christ is how “God has proved his love for us.” But, the Biblealso teaches us that, as we put our trust in Christ, we can look for God to work in our hearts and minds, to lead us away from our evil inclinations, and to lead us toward more Christ-like ways of being in the world.  

God didn’t come to us in Christ to suffer and die for the righteous…he came to suffer and die for the unrighteous.  And God didn’t give us our bodies as a way of establishing ourselves as holy and righteous in the sight of others and God; only Christ’s body, and Christ’s blood can establish us as holy and righteous.    But, our bodies are the primary means we have for living out Christ-like loving serviceto God and our neighbors.   And so, it makes sense, doesn’t it, that we would spend a certain amount time and energy in taking care of our bodies?   I’ve noticed that, on days when I go to the gym and work out, I’m much better equipped to do my job as a pastor.  If our bodies are our primary means for living out Christ-like loving service, it makes sense, doesn’t it, that we’d look for ways to shake unhealthy habits or addictions that might cripple our capacity to serve our neighbors in need?  I love to drink coffee; I hate think of what I’d be like on Sunday mornings without my morning cup of coffee.  But I’ve noticed that if I limit my caffeine intake, I’m energetic for longer than if I keep pouring myself cup after cup. Most folks I know who’ve wound up in one have found that it’s pretty hard from a hospital bed to worship weekly, or to build spiritual friendships, or to give to God and our neighbors in need.  So, it adds up that we’d do well to not neglect our health, right?   Getting enough rest, eating right and exercising, limiting our intake of potentially harmful substances, getting medical attention when we need it, these things are all consistent with doing what it takes to engage God’s mission.

Flu season is coming.  And this year, we’re being told, is likely to be a pretty bad year, what with the HN1 virus, or “Swine Flu,” still active on top of the usual flu strains.   Washing our hands and coughing into our sleeve and staying home if we’re sick and other common sense measures are not going to make us “better people.”  But they may allow us to be better vessels of God’s love and mercy than if we behave carelessly about these things.  

The thing is, we’re all infected--infected with an incurable, species-wide, terminal condition.  A condition that makes us prone to all kinds of evil thoughts, that can lead to all kinds of destructive choices and actions.  This condition is what leads us on Sunday to come to worship God and sing God’s praises…and then the rest of the week to serve and to worship primarily ourselves.  Now, in our baptism, God in Christ has given us the means to mitigate that condition.  Each day, we can claim the promise of God’s love and forgiveness.  Each day we can ask God to drown that diseased, sinful self that we find within us in the waters of our baptism, and to fill us with faith in Christ, so that the Spirit of the living Christ might be raised up in us.   And each day as we do this, we can look for new patterns of wholesomeness to emerge in our lives…we can look for more Christ-like inclinations, that can result in a healthier approach to living.    But, these more wholesome patterns should give us no reason for pride.  No matter how healthy or wholesome we may be, we have no cause to look down our nose at others.  Because, any goodness we have and show in our lives doesn’t come from us.  It’s simply what happens when we look to Christ.  We’re just the vessels—and broken ones, at that. The more we look to Christ, the more we’ll find his love and his mercy are being poured into us. 

A VERY LUCKY HAND

The story of the Lewis and Clark expedition is the stuff legends are made of—only this story isn’t a legend, it really happened.  It was around 1800, a time when the American frontier reached only just a little past St. Louis, Missouri.  Under the command of a gifted friend of Thomas Jefferson named Merriweather Lewis, the “Corps of Discovery,” as it was called--a group of mostly rugged Kentucky woodsmen, had slowly plodded through uncharted western wilderness.  They survived off the land, carrying their gear in small boats, often hauling those boats upstream in rivers by hand with ropes. They were seeking a passage to the little-known west coast of the continent, trying to find a way through to a place where only a few sea-going ships had ever come.  After many months, the expedition came to the vast geographic wall that we now call the Rocky mountains.  At this point, they’d either have to try to move forward blindly, without knowing if there was a way through or not, or else they’d have had to turn around and try to make it back toward St. Louis for the winter.   The risk of moving forward was that they’d simply get lost and perish somewhere up in the mountains.  But just as Captain Lewis and his advance party approached the mountains, a handful of Native Americans suddenly appeared.   This tribe had never had any contact with white men before, so there was a language barrier.  This barrier would’ve been as insurmountable as the Rockies—except.  Except for the stroke of good fortune that was embodied in the expedition’s only female member…a young Native American woman named Sacagawea.

At 12 years old, Sacagawea had been kidnapped by enemy tribesmen; she was carried far away and sold into slavery.  A French trader had taken her as one of his wives and with her had a child.  The Corps of Discovery had on their way established their winter camp near where the French trader was living in what we today know as North Dakota.  And it was there and then that Captain Lewis learned that this young woman had come from a tribe located far to the west—a tribe that was in the general path that he hoped to take.  So, in the event they might need a translator, and that she might be able to translate for them Lewis arranged for the trader, his young wife, and their infant son to accompany the Corps on their expedition.  And incredibly, as it turned out, the leader of the handful of Native Americans that Captain Lewis encountered as he approached the mountain was none other than Sacagawea’s own brother!   The two had a tearful reunion, and then, through Sacagawea, Captain Lewis was able to talk to her brother, to arrange for some guides and some horses to carry the corps through a snowy mountain pass that enabled them to complete their long trek to the Pacific Ocean. 

What were the odds of that happening?  If you leave it completely to chance, I’d say pretty long odds.  But if you see God at work in the whole thing, dealing the group of explorers just the right hand of cards, then the chances look much, much better.  In our gospel today, Simon Peter appears to have truly appreciated the hand he’d been dealt—and the hand that dealt it to him.  Now, the bulk of Jesus followers had come to what they considered an impass in their ability to accept his teachings…and they’d chosen to turn back from following him.  It was at this point that Jesus turned to his twelve closest followers, and he asked them, “Do you also wish to go away?”  And Simon Peter answer shows that he knows and values what God has dealt him in Jesus.   “Lord, to whom can we go?” says Peter. “Youhave the words of eternal life!  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” 

Being Christians means we’ve been dealt a particular hand of cards.  For one thing, it means we’re baptized.   And among other things, being baptized means that we’re called to follow Jesus.   But ourability to follow Jesus—and our ability to keep on following him when things start to get a bit challenging, well, that depends on whether or not we have another card—or maybe I should say whether we realize that we have it.  That card is faith in Jesus.  Faith in Jesus…a substantive trust in the precious gift that God has given us in Jesus. If we don’t have faith in Jesus, or if we don’t realize that we have that card to play, or if we simply discard it, we can easily start looking for other cards to draw—especially if things start to get tough.  I mean, following Jesus often isn’t an easy thing for us to do…and there are all kinds of other things besides Jesus that we can set our hearts on following after, right?   Things that appeal to our senses.  Things that don’t challenge us so much.  Things that, at least for the short run, would seemto be nice to do or to have or to be.  What are those things for you?  What are the things that call to you, that compel you to head in their direction?  What are the things that for you, can have a lot more appeal than following Jesus?  

For many of us these days, it’s our job.  Maybe we really like what we do, and so it’s easier for us to put time in at the workplace than it is to engage in things that have to do with say, serving people, or studying the Bible, or engaging God’s mission.   Or, maybe in a crumbling economy, we’re simply struggling to keep our job secure…and we figure one way to avoid getting the ax is to put in a lot of long hours.   Long hours that don’t leave us with much time or energy left over to follow Christ. 

For others of us it’s stuff that appeals to us.  We get bombarded with a constant deluge of advertizing…glittery, sexy, appetite-stirring, image-conscious marketing.  There’s a reason companies will spend millions and even billions of dollars on advertising…it’s because advertising works.  We may not have the slightest inclination to buy a new car, but one well-done commercial that portrays the merits and the sleek beauty and power of a particular automobile, and it’s “Man!  Do I ever want one of those!” If the ad is really well-done we might even go, “Man!  I need one of those!”  What else would lead so many to spend in excess of $30,000 for transportation, when you can get a reliable vehicle for well under $20,000?   What would that extra $10-plus thousand do if it was given instead to God, or to our neighbors in need?

In this society, it’s really not hard at all to get pulled off track from following Jesus.  Stuff comes in so many forms and it’s dangled before us in so many attractive ways, it’s difficult not to get swept up chasing after it.   We can even develop sort of a Pavlovian response :  we see advertising, we’re led to go buy something, that thing satisfies our desire or gives us a lift for a little while…and then, we see more ads and so we go drooling after more stuff.  I don’t know if you’ve seen that that one Veggie Tale video for kids, the one where Larry just keeps on buying more and more things at a place called “Stuff Mart”…and Bob asks him , “Larry, how much stuff do you really need?”  And Larry goes, “I don’t know, how much stuff is there?”  How many of us, when the Sunday paper comes, or the mail arrives, we gofirst thing, straight to the ads?  How many of us have come to see going to the mall as a good, wholesome family activity?  How many of us spend far more time and energy shopping—online or in the stores, than we do building spiritual friendships, or praying, or serving in one or more of our church’s many ministries? 

The vast majority of Jesus’ followers turned away from following him at one point, because following Jesus started to stretch them considerably.  And so they found other things to pursue in their lives.  Apparently, it wasn’t hard to do, even way back then.  But Simon Peter and the other eleven Jesus had originally called to follow him stayed on as his disciples…at least at this point.  Peter even expressed his reason for valuing Jesus over any other options that were out there:  his faith in Jesus as “the Holy One of God” who had “the words of eternal life.”   Eventually, when the Lord went to Jerusalem and embraced suffering and death at the hands of his enemies, even the twelve—Peter included, abandoned him.  But ultimately though, their faith drew them back again. Ultimately, they came to believe and to know that, in the crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ, they’d been given the One thing that’s worth putting their trust in—the one thing that’s worth following…that living, eternal Word of love and light and life, that was dealt and given to all of us by God, on the cross.

Captain Merriweather Lewis was dealt a certain hand.  And he chose to hang on to the one card that, as it wound up, made all the difference:  a teenaged girl named Sacagawea.   We too have been dealt a certain hand—a very lucky hand. A hand that includes both the call to follow Jesus and many, many good reasons to put our trust in Jesus.  Will we throw those cards away and go looking for something else?  Or will we see what good cards they are—and hang onto them?

I guess that was one hungry kid!   In last week’s gospel, we read how the Lord Jesus had fed a whole multitude of hungry people, with just a few loaves and some fish.   The crowd he’d fed had seemed to respond in faith, at least a little…they’d remarked that surely Jesus must be a prophet sent by God.  But then they promptly dropped the faith response for something, well, less faithful. They wanted to crown Jesus their king, since he’d shown his ability to fill their bellies.   Jesus’ response to this was to withdraw from them for a bit.   But the crowd was so impressed with Jesus’ ability to feed them that they hunted him down.   In today’s gospel, we read the conversation that took place when they’d found him.  And it shows that the people still weren’t looking at Jesus from a faith perspective. Nevertheless, Jesusengages them.  He patiently works to lead them to the place where they would come to have a life-giving, saving faith in what God was doing for them, in and through him. 

A vital, sustaining, active faith in Jesus Christ…a faith that’ll carry us through all the challenges and struggles of life.  A faith that gives us such a sense of peace and contentment that we don’t waste our time chasing after meaningless prizes, trying to satisfy insatiable appetites.  A faith that leads to loving service to God and to our neighbors.   This kind of faith—an authentic Christian faith, doesn’t just happen on its own.  A faith like this is passed on, from those who have it, to those who don’t.  It’s intentionally nurtured and cultivated and transmitted, into receptive hearts and minds.   Today, I want to invite you to reflect with me on the call of the Christian community to be those through whom God works to bring about a vibrant, living faith.  

“This is the work of God,” the Lord Jesus said, “that you believe in him who he has sent.”  A faith relationship with God in Christ doesn’t come because we choose to have it.  It comes because God works to bring it about in us.    All of us who’ve wound up here in the church, and who’ve come to have a saving faith in Christ, have done so because God has worked in our lives, to call this saving faith into being in us.  Likely from an early age, God has patiently engaged us through our families, through Sunday school teachers and other church members, through pastors and camp counselors, through all kinds of folks, doing what it takes to bring us to the point where we can trust in God’s gracious caring presence, in our lives and in the world.  As the small catechism, puts it, “We cannot by our own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ”…But God the Holy Spirit works…to call us to and to keep us in a true faith. 

And one of God’s primary means for doing this, I’m convinced, is parents.  If faith is actively sown, nurtured and grown during those times when we’re most receptive, in our early developmental years, we’re much more likely to wind up with a substantive faith.   From time to time, you run across those parents who decide to just let their kids “make up their own minds” about what to believe “when they get old enough.”   It’s virtually always a sad thing to watch…key stages of development are simply wasted--crucial points when the language and images and stories of the Christian faith, and experiences with God and God’s people, could all be working together to help kids develop and start to make use of Christian faith.  You know, a lot of research has shown that when kids are exposed to a foreign languageby the time they’re three years old, they’ll have a much easier time picking up that language when they get older.  I’d be willing to put money on that being the case with Christian faith as well.  When young children are exposed to the sights and sounds of Christian worship; when kids hear stories of Jesus and learn about God’s promises, when they’re surrounded by people of faith living out their faith in Christ in many different ways, it’s going to be a lot easier for them to engage in those things that will help them to make that faith their own, later on in life. 

Now, that in itself is enough reason for parents to make a point of getting themselves and their kids up and here every week for worship, and when it’s offered, for Sunday morning Christian Education. It’s a strong argument for getting our kids to attend youth group events, or Vacation Bible School, or whatever opportunities there are that have a faith nurturing component.    Faith, it’s been said, is not so muchtaught as it is caught.   And the more the young among us are exposed to other people of faith, who engage in faith-related activities, the more likely they are to “catch” faith themselves. 

“But life is already too busy,” some of us might say.  “Kids today have so much to bear…way too much homework, extracurricular activities with heavy schedules and lots of practices.  Church activities are just one more thing—and since they’re optional, doesn’t it make sense to let them off the hook when it comes to church stuff?…you know, let ‘em sleep in, let ‘em just rest or chill, let them use that time forsports or other activities they enjoy?”    Kids today do have an awful lot to bear.  A lot more than most of us adults did when we were kids.   We parents today have a lot to bear too.  It takes a lot of time and effort to support our kids—to make sure they’ve got the means to do all their school work, to stay on top of their busy schedules and cart them around to activities, to show we care by turning out for their events.   Life for families with kids these days can range from hectic to exhausting.  

I know, because I’ve been one of those exhausted parents myself.  Let me share a couple of thoughts on this matter, from somebody else who was a parent…someone who had cause to address many others who were parents…a fellow named Martin Luther.   As a parish priest, our favorite theologian preached whole sermons on parenting.  One of those sermons was on the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.”  Luther preached that, “God communicates honor to father and mother; for which reason there is no greater authority on earth than the dominion of father and mother.”   If you consider it, even though he preached some 500 years ago, what Luther said still holds true today!  The way society still orders itself, we parents do have authority over our kids!  More authority than anybodyhas over anyone else--unless you’re in the military, or in prison.   Parents have the legal right—and in some cases, the legal obligation, to set and enforce parameters and limits for our kids. Society grants us all this authority because, well, if we don’t steer them straight, chances are nobody else will.  And, according to Luther, there’s a very good reason for this: God, he said, “has given you children and the means of their support, not that you might simply have pleasure in them and bring them up for worldly display.  You are earnestly commanded to bring them up for the service of God, or otherwise you will perish with your children, as the first commandment says, ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children…”  Luther stressed that we parents must learn that our children are not so entirely our own that we can withhold them from God…they are more his than ours, Luther taught.

I don’t know about you, but I hear in these words a stern warning...a warning that, if I fail to use my parental authority for the reason God gave it to me, if I fail to do things that lead my kids to develop a wholesome, vibrant faith, eventually there’s a price to be paid.  Not only for my kids themselves, but I’m not going to escape the consequences, either!   It’s not that God is going to actively punish them or me for my failure in this regard…it’s simply the way things work.  As Luther understood it, the commandments, like “honor your father and mother” are there to help us to see certain demands and limits that God has built into the order of creation.   And the commandments can help us to see that, if we want to have a good life here on this earth, we’ve got to heed those demands and limits.  In this case, it meansmaking sure our kids know who they are and whose they are as God’s people.  That’s one reason that in, the rite for Holy Baptism, we ask parents to publicly commit to raising their children in the Christian faith—and to do that in some very specific ways. 

Another way of looking at this, for us Lutherans, is in terms of being called—called to raise our children as people of faith.   “Most certainly,” Luther wrote, “father and mother are apostles, bishops and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel.”  Apostles, bishops and priests.  Okay parents, it’s time for us all to put on our clergy collars and miters (a miter is one of those pointy hats that bishops wear)…and it’s time to pick up our shepherd’s staffs.   Because, God is calling all of us good Lutheran moms and dads to be missionaries, to share the good news, not with people over in Africa someplace, but with our own kids.  

I can almost hear some parents saying right about now, “Um, yeah, but, I don’t know how to do that…I’ve never really done that, and I can’t really see myself doing it either.  I’m no theologian or church professor like Martin Luther.  I’m no preacher…I’m just an average church member.  Just talking about my faith doesn’t come easy to me.”  The average Lutheran hasn’t typically been one to talk much about faith.   When it comes to being outward with our faith, praying out loud at the dinner table is about the extent many of us go. But today that’s changing.  In congregations all over the place, partnerships are growing, partnerships where parents and others are finding ways to work together to raise up faith in the hearts and minds of their young.   At Rejoice, we’ve developed a number of significant ways to do this. 

First, there’s our Kids of the Kingdom ministry.   Kids of the Kingdom is a non-traditional approach to Sunday morning Christian education for younger kids.   In the traditional approach, Sunday school teachers struggled and quickly burned out, trying to produce weekly lessons throughout a school year and to teach those lessons for an hour to kids who mostly didn’t want to be there—and who too oftenweren’t there. In Kids of the Kingdom, teams of adults and older kids, walk alongside children, working to build an experience that kids can look forward to.    Ministry teams cultivate the kind of ‘good soil’ where seeds of faith can be planted and nurtured.   Just like farmers have to spend a lot of time and effort cultivating and tending the soil, a good portion of the Kids of the Kingdom hour is spent on creating a bond of trust and respect and enthusiasm among the kids, and between the kids and the ministry team members.  Then, within that context, there are large and small group activities that have to do withDiscovering the Bible, or Experiencing God, or Being the Church.   Since we’ve started to use this approach, some parents have said, “But the kids aren’t; getting taught stuff they need to know…they’re not learning the Bible stories we learned when we grew up going to Sunday School.”   To anyone who has that concern, I want to say that I’m really glad that you care, and I’m thrilled you can hear God’s call to share the gospel with your kids.  And I want to urge you to sign up to be part of the Kids of the Kingdom ministry team for one or more of our 10-week blocks this coming school year!   That’s one sure way you can get your concern addressed! Just be aware that our approach to Sunday morning Christian education is based on the reality that before you can put something worthwhile into a kid’s heart and mind, you have to open up the kid.  And that requires a bit of time and effort! 

Kids of the Kingdom sort of mirrors what happens in our Confirmation Ministry at Rejoice, also known as “Faith Incubators.”  When kids reach 7^th grade, we ask their parents to serve as part of a ministry team, to help provide different kinds of weekly “faith incubating” events every Wednesday.  “Faith Incubators” recognizes that, while it is important to teach faith content, you don’t produce faith in someone just by sticking a funnel in their head and dumping in a bunch of knowledge.  So, instead of just sitting there, listening to a pastor talk at them about the catechism for a hour or so every week, like so many of us suffered through when we were in confirmation, Faith Incubators youth sometimes come together to learn…and sometimes they do service projects…and sometimes they just enjoy fellowship--have somefun and get to know each other better.  Whenever they get together though, they get into these small groups with, what we call Group Guides—some adults and older youth, and they build relationships and they process questions of faith and they discuss what it means to be and to do church together.  Many of our Group Guides, by the way, are parents…although anyone--older youth, other adults who care, are invited to do so and often do. To be a Guide, you don’t have to be an expert or a teacher.  The only requirement is a willingness to spend some time learning with and growing with and laughing with and playing with and praying with some really neat young people.  We also invite parents and others to serve on our Faith Incubators team in other ways:  to help plan logistics and coordinate details, to season my learning event presentations with “creative interruptions,” and—at the very least, to take turns providing, serving and cleaning up after a light meal for the kids to share during their small group time.  You know, the main way we humans learn is by observation.  So, when kids observe parents and others living out their faith by serving them as part of a ministry team together, I’m convinced they’re learning as much or even more than a Bible story or catechism lesson is going to teach them.   They learn by observing a living, active faith.

Alongside our Kids of the Kingdom and Faith Incubators confirmation ministry teams, we also have a constant need for parents and other adults to help with planning youth group events, to host youth events, to lead youth Bible studies, and to go along as caring adults when our kids go away on Mission trips and to synod and churchwide youth gatherings and to church camp retreats.  And parents, what’s great about doing any of this is you’re not only helping to grow your own kid’s faith, you’re helping grow faith in other parents’ kids too.  As one parent put it just this past week, “It works out really great, because when it comes to God and the church, my own kids won’t listen to me, but they’ll listen to another adult!”

You know, if you want a sign that God is moving in some big ways at Rejoice in this regard, you only need to look at our Vacation Bible School … we’re offering four days of faith nurturing activities for kids this week — with a whole lot of parents helping to bring it off!    What’s really impressive is that we’re going to do this, and your pastor hasn’t even lifted a finger to make it happen!  Of course, with VBS and with pretty much every youth and children’s ministry we have at Rejoice, it’s not just parents—it’s older youth, it’s older adults, its many others who care enough to pass on their faith. 

God is at work here at Rejoice.  You can tell, because we’re not leaving it up to our kids to somehow find faith on their own.  And, as a result, we’re seeing among us a growing number of young people witha faith that makes a real difference….with a faith that’s about more than “What can I get out of it?”   I’m convinced that as we keep on building these faith-nurturing partnership, we’re gonna see a lot moreyoung people developing an authentic Christian faith—a faith that feeds, not on satisfying their appetites, a faith that feeds on Jesus, the true bread of life.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

When I was a kid growing up, my family would go on these long camping trips every summer in our Starcraft pop-top tent camper.  These summer camping trips, we found, were a great getaway from the grind and routines of the rest of the year.  After a day of driving, we’d pull into a camp ground, choose a campsite, crank up the tent on our pop-top camper, and then just relax doing whatever we wanted to do.  I could never understand why my mom always just wanted to cook dinner.  Actually, there’s always plenty for everyone to do when you’re camping.  There’s firewood to scrounge for, water to haul, the campfire to build and tend.   There’s unpacking and repacking the car so everything you might need is accessible.  It’s a strange thing, though; when you’re camping, none of these tasks seems to be achore! I guess it’s because you’re operating outside of your everyday routines and pressures.  Camping trips are a great getaway—every family should try it at some point.   Linda and I and the kids are looking forward to our camping trip together in a few weeks. When you’re camping, you’re pretty much cut off from it all—no internet, no TV, often you even find yourself out of cell-phone range, so there’s no calls or texting to distract anyone.  Most families I know of are work-and-activity-saturated, and even though they live in the same house, they’re dispersed by technology.  I’d say there’re few better ways to reconnect with each other than to go camping.

The Lord Jesus had sent his closest followers out in ministry teams to serve people in his name throughout the region.  Now they’d returned to debrief with him.  And apparently, as they came back to Jesus from all these different places they’d been, the disciples had inadvertently led all kinds of folks right to their home base.  In fact, it was getting crazy…so many people were coming and going, it says, that Jesus and his disciples couldn’t even find time to eat!    So, the Lord decided it was time for them to take a break together—to reconnect as a family of disciples.  He said to them, “Come on, let’s get away from all this; let’s go off someplace by ourselves, so we can just relax together.”   They packed their camping supplies into their pop-top tent camper—actually it was a sailboat, and they took off for afamily vacation.  

You can imagine how much they were looking forward to it…after the constant demands of doing all that ministry, the pressure of trying to work together to deal with what seems to have been asnowballing number of people seeking what it was that Jesus and his disciples had to offer….  To just break away from it all, to chill together…to play some Mexican Train, or Hearts or Rummy, or whatever it was they liked to do.  They were heading for this little lakefront town called Genessaret, on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee.  It was about 20 miles north of Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth.  Who knows? Perhaps Jesus knew of a nice campground there; maybe he even knew of some fun activities or places they go see together there--like the world’s biggest wad of gum or something.   Genessaret—vacation destination for the tired master and his exhausted disciples!

But that’s not how things turned out. No, it appears they must’ve stuck pretty close to the shoreline, sailing past all these places where they’d been doing all that ministry.  And they must’ve taken their time getting there, too, because it says that “many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them,” so that by the time Jesus and his family of faithful followers went ashore, they found a great crowd awaiting them there.  Now I don’t know about you, but if I were one of those disciples, I might’ve been, well, disappointed to say the least.  Probably more like exasperated.  I mean, this was supposed to be a getaway!  They really needed this.  The one thing they didn’t need was to be sacked with the burden of more people requiring more ministry.  Things had gotten so bad that they hadn’t even had time to eat; their inner resources must’ve been stretched pretty thin.  They were trying to get away to recharge themselves.  This trip was about self-care,not about more mercy for the multitudes.  The multitudes had gotten everything Jesus and his followers had to give.  What a total bummer to find that, now, when their wells were completely dry, the thirsty hoard was there at Genessaret, demanding more!   It must’ve seemed an impossible situation.  

But that’s pretty much the nature of engaging God’s mission in the world.  The level of need in our human race is so great that, well, it’s impossible to ever meet it all.  [Play “Mission Impossible” Theme from 2 seconds to 28 seconds, fading from 24-28]  As I was about to say…it’d be easy to think of God’s mission in the world as “Mission Impossible.”   For anyone who may not know, “Mission Impossible” was originally a TV show from the 1960’s, where a team of government agents specialized in carrying out impossible tasks.  We just heard the music form that TV show.  In any case, a key feature of the show was that, at the start of each episode, the leader of the Mission Impossible Team, Jim Phelps, would open a manila envelope with photos in it, and he’d listen to a tape recording that would lay out the details of the mission.  The voice on the tape would always culminate with the summary, “Your mission, Jim, if you decide to accept it, is to…blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.”  The voice on the tape would then say, “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”  Of course, the tape would always be enveloped in a cloud of smoke, and then Jim and his team of specially-gifted people would go and take on the impossible mission, whatever it was…each of them playing some part, big or little, to get the job done—in less than an hour, if you count commercial breaks.   

In Baptism, we find that in Christ, God has made redeeming us the object of his mission.  In baptism we find that, through Christ God has forgiven our sins, and claimed us to be his own now and forever--no matter what we do or don’t do.  And in baptism, we also find that God has called us to follow Christ, by engaging God’s continued mission to the rest of the world.   It’d be easy for us to see that mission asMission Impossible.  After all, as those first disciples found, the need is bottomless.  It never ends.  At any time, in any place, whether or not it lines up with what we might need, we can encounter grieving people, people in need of help or healing, people who seem lost or confused or ignorant, people who are hungry or homeless or lonely or addicted or bored or tired or…the list goes on and on and on, doesn’t it?   Once you’re tuned in to the need, as sooner or later those who follow Jesus tend to get tuned in, you can’t look anywhere without seeing it.   It’s overwhelming!  And it can be very, very draining.   Some of the folks who’ve been part of Rejoice for quite a while now know just how draining it can be!  There’s always more that needs to be done around here, right?  And it seems like there’s never enough of us to do it all!   No, it just seems impossible!  And yet, it amazes me to see that somehow…somehow, what needs to get done, gets done. 

[11:00]  Quite a few of our young people are heading out of town this week for a trip to New Orleans for the National Youth Gathering.  I hope this will be a great time for you…a fun time…a time for you to get some R&R and to make some new friends and to strengthen some existing friendships.  Just the fact that you’ll be away from home, staying in a nice hotel, in a place associated with good times and good music should give you a chance for some rest and renewal.  After all, this week, mom or dad can’t say, “Clean your room, or would you take out the trash?”  Nobody can ask you clear the table after dinner, or to take the clean dishes from the dishwasher and to lift them up, all the way into the kitchen cupboards.   You’ll be in a place where, with 37,000 other Lutheran Youth from across the country, with adult sponsors to care for you, and where everything has been set up to give you a rich and entertaining and meaningful experience together.  So, I hope you’ll relax and enjoy this trip together.  I hope you’ll also remember that you are part of Jesus’ mission team…that the Spirit of Jesus lives in you, and that throughout this week, you’re bound to encounter folks who need something of what the Jesus in you has to offer.   In fact, to help you remember this, each day this week, you’ll receive a manila envelope with some little mission that you can do…if you decide to accept it.  As is always the case with members of God’s mission team, it will be your choice as to whether or not to live out your calling by doing that mission task.  God will still love you and claim you as his own, whatever you decide. 

It’d be easy for us to get overwhelmed by the vast amount of need we’re faced with…to just throw up our hands and say, “What’s the use?  It’s impossible!”  But I want to suggest that being on God’s Mission Team doesn’t make us part of a Mission Impossible team.   Because it’s God’s Mission team we’re on.  And with God, all things are possible.   We may or may not feel up to the task of whatever it is that needs to be done.  But whether or not we feel up to it, God is up to the task.  In fact, God has this way of taking our weakness, and making his power and presence known through it.  As we face what might seem to us to be the impossible, we do so with God’s promise that his grace is sufficient for us.  That it’s not what we have to offer that matters, but rather what God has to offer through us.  And we can trust that, even if we’re completely tapped out, as Jesus’ original disciples were when they arrived at Genassaret, somehow, God in Christ will step into the breach and take care of things, in his own way,without depending on us. 

So, with God, we’re not part of a Mission Impossible team. We’re part of a Mission Possible team.   Each of us are members of that team; each of us has our own gifts and abilities that we can share as part of that team.  We may not feel we have much to offer; we may not feel we have anything to offer, but as part of God’s Mission Possible team, whatever we can offer, God takes it and uses it for good.   That’s part of what it means to be baptized…to be God’s people, in the world. 

Even little Emily, who will be/was baptized today, has gifts to offer as part of the team.  She’s not able to offer them just yet; it may be years before we even know what they are.  But those gifts are there, Iguarantee you.  In first Corinthians 12, it says that “in the one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body”—and that each member of the body has been given gifts by that same one Spirit.  So, as Emily grows, it will be our task as a faith community to help her to discover and unwrap those gifts…and then to help her learn how to use her gifts…as part of God’s mission team.  Even as it’s the task of each of us whoare grown to develop and use whatever gifts we’ve been given to serve as part of the mission team.  The more of us who do that, the more effective God’s mission team becomes.  You know, if you consider that God’s mission team now encompasses vast numbers of people all over the world, you begin to see that, while whatever gifts we have to offer may just seem like a drop in the ocean, the ocean of the global community of God’s people is made up of countless drops—maybe even enough to generate some very big, very powerful waves.  

But let’s not minimize it.  The need in our world for compassion is huge.  As members of God’s mission team, we can expect to have our resources stretched and depleted, to the point of exasperation…to the point of exhaustion, at times.  The need is just so great.  But being part of God’s mission team also means we are those among whom and through whom the Lord Jesus Christ is present and at work in the world.  His love and compassion are inexhaustible.  He has the capacity to give and to give and to keep on giving—even when we’re all tapped out.  His giving goes as far as the cross and the grave…and beyond.  What is impossible for us, for him is possible.  And, as members of his team, even the littlest thing we can give is something he can use to do great things!

Text:  Mark 6:1-13

THE MINISTRY MANUAL

The mid-level manager was leaving the office late one evening, when he came upon the company’s CEO, who was standing with a piece of paper in his hand, at the reception desk just outside of his office.  “Oh good, you can probably help me,” said the CEO.  “This is a very sensitive document.  My secretary’s gone for the day, and I can’t figure out how to get this thing to work.”  He pointed to a document shredder next to the secretary’s desk.  The manager eagerly responded “You bet!”  He turned on the machine, took the CEO’s paper, inserted it, and fed it into the machine.  “Excellent!  Thank you,” said the CEO as the paper disappeared into the machine.  “I just need one copy….” 

Ouch!  I guess that’s one instance where it might’ve been good if that CEO had simply found the manual attached to the outside of that machine.    Of course, not everyone takes the time to read the manual, even when it’s provided for them.   In today’s reading from Mark, the gospel writer appears to be giving us a sort of ‘manual on Christian ministry’.   At least I suspect that’s how the Christians whooriginally read this gospel may have viewed it.  Early Christian communities didn’t see themselves the way many churches today seem to see themselves—as “kind of retail outlets for Christianity.”   I heard just this past week about a church that’s got a drive thru—folks can just pull up, grab some religious material, and head on down the road.  Early Christian churches saw themselves as being set apart by Godbe a markedly different kind of community, distinct from the world around them.  And the one main distinguishing feature they had, was that they engaged in acts of Christ-like, loving service…they engaged in what’s known as ministry.  We too can see ourselves as a community set apart—as a community of people specially-ordained by God to do works of ministry, or to serve people, in the name of Christ.  So today, I’m going to invite you to read this text with me through that lense…as a sort manual that spells out for us some of the key dynamics involved with doing Christian ministry. 

Mark chapter 6 starts out with Jesus showing up in his hometown on the sabbath, to minister to people in the synagogue there as he had in communities all along the sea of Galilee.  But Jesus finds that the reaction of the folks in his hometown is, well, not exactly receptive. Reading between the lines, what it appears they were saying was, “Where does Jesus get off acting this way?  He’s no different from any of us.  We’ve known him since he was a kid! Heck—his family still lives here!  And check it out…do ya remember?  He was just a carpenter!”   It says that those hometown folks took offense at Jesus for his attempts to minister among them. I guess you could call this “Ministry Dynamics, chapter one:  Familiarity Breeds Contempt.”  When people feel like they know us too well, they may not be prone to take us very seriously.  And so, it can be hard to do effective ministry with those who know us well. I get to experience this all the time with my family.  They see me at my worst…they’ve seen me when I’mimpatient, when I’m tired, when I’m angry, when I’m walking around the house in a pair of shorts with my big gut hanging out.   If I really think about it, it’s kind of amazing that my family can stand to sit here Sunday after Sunday, listening to me!  If we’re looking at ministering to the people who know how badly we can stink, we’re looking at a real challenge.  And the point seems to be that we probably shouldn’t expect a whole lot.    Even the Lord Jesus, we’re told, could only heal a few sick people when he tried to minister to his home crowd.  He did try though.  And no doubt those few who he healed were prettyglad that he did.  So, go ahead, minister to your family, to your friends, to those who know you well.  They may or may not appreciate your efforts, but it’s still worth the effort; you probably shouldn’t set the bar too high for yourself though. 

Now, you’d think Jesus might get discouraged by this experience, but he doesn’t.  He simply moves on elsewhere, to other towns.  And, it says, he started at this point to send his closest followers out, in pairs, to minister in his name.  And here, it seems to me, is chapter 2 of our Ministry Manual:  a chapter on “Team Ministry.”  The norm for Christian ministry is to serve together in teams.  None of this “Lone Ranger” stuff for us Christians.  Come to think of it, even the Lone Ranger had Tonto!   If you aren’t old enough to remember the Lone Ranger, he was like this 1950’s, black-and-white TV, masked version of Walker, Texas Ranger, who went around in the old west stopping bad guys, just like Chuck Norris’ character Walker, only without the martial arts. Anyway, the Lone Ranger had this Indian sidekick named Tonto, and if I recall correctly, there were those episodes where, if Tonto hadn’t come to the rescue, the Lone Ranger would’ve been finished off by some bad guys who got the upper hand on him.   When we’re engaged in the work of ministry, we’re not necessarily going to be up against bad guys—although that certainly can happen.   But we can find ourselves facing some pretty draining, even overwhelming situations.   After all, there are a lot of people all around us, with some pretty serious hurts and problems.  People fighting life-and-death battles with devastating illness.  People trying to cope with financial disaster.   People seeking shelter from abusive relationships.  All kinds of people who are struggling with a world of grief.   If we’re serious about caring for such people, we really don’t want to be trying to do it all by ourself.  We need each other’s support.  And, since we’re human, we also need accountability.   That’s why our Stephen ministers meet together on a regular basis, for supervision.  Stephen Ministry is a proven, effective ministry that many have benefitted from.  The Stephen ministry model recognizes that, if you’re going to be in this ministry thing for the long haul—either with a single care receiver, or with several of them, you need the wisdom and emotional support of others who care.    Stephen ministers are folks who have special gifts for ministry; they receive 50 hours of initial training, along with ongoing continuing ed., to equip them so they can walk in caring and supportive ways with people who are going through crisis or transition.  As members of the body of Christ, we don’t all have to be Stephen Ministers; we don’t all have to be formally trained to be equipped to minister, on some level, to people in need of caring help.  We don’t all need formal training, but it’s not a bad idea, though, for us to pay some attention to the manual for Christian ministry. And the manual seems to clearly lay it out for us here:  effective ministry is something we Christians do, not on our own, but together.  

Another word for ministry is service.  Here at Rejoice there’s a growing variety of kinds of service we can engage in.  That’s why we have all of these ministry teams.  Some of them aren’t called ‘ministry teams’. They may be called committees, or something else, but that’s what they are…ministry teams.  Any time we Christians come together to serve, we’re doing ministry.  Some of us do Educationalministry, some do Youth ministry.  Some of us work together to do Worship and Music Ministry.  Others do outreach ministry; some do a ministry of Fellowship.  Still others do ministry by working together tocare for and maintain our church property.  I don’t know about you, but I’m thankful for all of these forms of ministry.   All of them play a vital role in making this church what it is—a faith community that’s been set apart by God to do all kinds of acts of Christ-like, loving service.  The folks among us who help keep the lawn mowed, or who clean the building, are just as necessary as those who serve together to support our worship life…or those who minister to our youth.   What’s crucial is that we all see ourselves as having some ministry role…and that we discover and use our gifts to serve together however we can.   People don’t usually stick around Rejoice very long without finding some way to serve.  If you haven’t found yours yet, just hang on a bit…it could well be that we simply haven’t started developing yet the ministry role that you’re most qualified for.   For instance, we’ve just started looking for folks to serve in the area of cultivating Rejoice’s visibility in the community.   We’re also in the process of developing a Middle School After School Care program a day or two a week.  If we pull that off, hopefully starting this fall, there’ll be a number of new ways to serve.  I have a vision of someone ministering by helping us find ways to become a greener church—to manage our property and resources in ways that’re consistent with caring for God’s creation. .  And then there’s always a need for those who want to start new, specialized ministries—a ministry to people recovering from divorce, for instance.  Or support and networking groups for unemployed people…or grief support groups, or…well, you name it.  If you want to start up a new ministry here at Rejoice, I’d say the door is pretty wide open.  What I’ll usually say is that, if you can find 2-4 others who share a vision for that ministry with you, go for it!   The Lord Jesus started out with ministry teams of two, but experience has shown me that, in our time and culture, at least 3 people are usually required to get something going and keep it going.  We’ve all got so much going on these days, and so at least three are needed--four or five is even better.  That way, if one or two get sick or too busy with other stuff for while, or if somebody has to drop out, there’s still enough people-resources to keep things moving forward.  Ministry teams, in our context, probably should be bigger than two. 

And that leads to the next chapter of the Ministry Manual we find in our gospel today:  “Cultural context.”  Effective Christian ministers take seriously the context that they’re working in.   They pay attention to what’s been going on and to what is going on.  Jesus sent out his ministry teams, and he gave them some pretty specific instructions.  He told them to take nothing for their journey except a staff…no food,no luggage, no money, just one set of clothes.   At the time that this gospel was written, there were a lot of these itinerant teachers travelling throughout the Greco-Roman world, teachers who were perceivedas having a calling from God to do what they were doing.  As a sign of their divine calling, they carried a staff—kind of like wearing a clergy collar today, I guess.  Another sign of their calling from God was their willingness to forsake worldly possessions and to trust in God’s providence.   So, in that cultural context, for Jesus’ followers to go about with what might be seen as an excess of clothing, with wallets full of money, relying on their own planning instead of trusting in God to provide, that would’ve almost certainly repelled many of the folks they encountered.  Also, in that time, the household was the primary unit of the social order; communities were organized into hierarchical households, with the heads of households in charge of everybody associated with their household.  By depending on the hospitality of local households, Jesus’ disciples would be strategically placed, right where they’d need to be if they were going to get a foothold in the community.  Jesus’ instructions took seriously the cultural setting where his disciples would be going to minister. 

We do well when we take seriously the perceptions and experiences of the folks we hope to serve.  For instance, it’d probably be a bad idea in our context to try to start a TV ministry where the preacher constantly solicits money in return for prayers. Or, it’d be a bad idea to start getting overtly political along partisan lines.   Or to go on a moral crusade that condemns certain behaviors with a level of certaintythat not many of the folks around us these days share.  These are the kinds of things Christians in our culture have been doing for some time—things that have soured more and more people to the church.  No, in our culture, where so many pay excessive attention to image and spin, if we want to effectively reach and touch the lives of many people, we’d do much better to simply focus on being authentic…authentic in our caring, and true to what’s at the heart of our belief and our experience with God.    We’d do well to be authentic to the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we’re sent to minister.

And that leads us right to the final chapter in our ministry manual today…to Jesus Christ himself, who not only sends us forth to minister, but who gives us the authority we need to minister.   Another way to understand authority is “power.”  It says the Lord gave his original ministry teams he sent out “authority over unclean spirits.”  It seems the Lord knew that his followers would inevitably encounter challenges to what they were trying to do.  There are unclean, destructive spiritual forces at work in our world.  They’re even at work in our own lives sometimes.  Forces that can impede us, in any number of ways.  Forces that can discourage us, that can stir up our anxieties…forces that can even paralyze us with fear, or with hatred, or self-pity.  So, we need power—spiritual power, power to stand up to those challenges,whatever they may look like, so that we can keep moving forward together in ministry.  And our Lord Jesus Christ has given us the power we need to stand strong and to keep on moving.

Another response to desperation is kind of the opposite of doing nothing.  It’s trying to grab control of whatever we think we might be able to control.  We may or may not be able to do anything to change our circumstances.  But the anxiety over the situation can be so consuming that we can feel driven to get a handle on whatever we can.  You know: “If I just throw enough money at the problem, or if I can only force that person to change, it’ll all go away.”  Or, “This must’ve happened because I haven’t taken charge enough in my life.  So I’m going to take charge now, and things will get better.”  Reacting in these anxious ways, though, can wreak havoc, not only on our own life, but on the people around us.  In desperate situations, it often doesn’t take much to make things even worse if we’re not careful.  And we may see ourself as well-meaning, as taking responsibility.  But others may experience us as something of a control freak.  That, in turn, can lead us to alienate ourself from the very folks we need to support us as we try to negotiate a very difficult leg of life’s journey.

What about distraction?   That’s one of my favorite ways to cope.  I mean, isn’t it good to find ways to distract ourself when things become too overwhelming?   Studies on managing stress have shown that distraction is a helpful way to cope with distressing circumstances.  It’s even been suggested that, before the dawn of medicine, that’s the role that witch doctors served.  Back in the days before there were medications to relieve pain, if somebody got seriously injured or ill, or even if they were delivering a baby, the witch doctor, or shaman, would show up in the person’s hut or tent, and they’d begin tochant and wave feathers and rattle rattles and dance up a storm.   Watching somebody dressed up in a coyote skin, or with a painted body wearing bones in their nose dance around and make noise like that for awhile, they think, may have actually provided enough distraction to help the patient make it through the worst of their situation.  Today we don’t need witch doctors.  We have endless ways to distract ourselves.   There’s hundreds of channels of TV…there’s movies, video games, the internet--complete with sites like MySpace and Facebook, and a whole multitude of very distracting things to see or do oneach of these.  Now, I don’t Facebook, or Myspace, or twitter, or anything else like that..  It’s not that I’m opposed to it. I just don’t have time as it is to deal with all the emails I get…so I’m not about to open myself up to the social networking can of worms too.    But I’m fascinated to hear about the kinds of things people are doing who are social networking online.   I learned the other day that there’s actually aFacebook farming community—that you can develop your own virtual farm online, complete with vast virtual acreages, virtual crops and virtual livestock.   Makes me wonder what’s next—virtual housekeeping?  “Did you clean your room yet, Suzie?”  “Yes mom—I sure did! (on my Facebook account).”  “Jimmie, did you take a shower?”  “Yes mom.”  “Did you brush your teeth?”  “Yes mom.”  Nothing like being able to Facebook your way through life!  

Distractions do have a place in helping us deal with the difficult passages we sometimes have to make in life.  But in a culture like ours that’s teeming with distractions, we can easily become addicted to them, burning up time--way more of the precious time we have on this earth than we ever intended.   I mean, somehow I doubt any of us are going to be on our deathbed, looking back over our life, saying, “Well, at least I had a really great Facebook homepage!”  

Hopefully, at some point, we come to see that there’s way more to life than what social networking, virtual reality games, dramatic tv series or even the best action or fantasy movies in 3-D with dolby surround sound can offer us.   As people who’ve been claimed and called by God to live and walk in a relationship with him for all eternity, hopefully, we can begin to not only live in anticipation of that eternal relationship—but hopefully we can experience its benefits.  

In our gospel today, two pretty desperate people found that, in One named Jesus, they were able to do just that.  One of them, a synagogue leader known as Jairus, had somehow come to hear of—perhaps even witnessed for himself, the amazing signs of God’s power and presence being demonstrated by Jesus. And so when he found himself in desperate straights, that’s where Jairus turned—to Jesus.  Jairus’ 12 year-old daughter fell critically ill, you see…so ill she was thought to be at death’s door.  This is every parent’s nightmare!   Those of us who are parents, or who have been parents, can maybe imagine something of the distress level this father must have been bearing.   To raise a daughter, and to have raised this girl just to the point of reaching womanhood--with all the promise that that entails, how crushing it would’ve been.  Add that to the fact that Jairus was a community leader, a leader of the synagogue—someone who maybe hadn’t taken the time to know and appreciate his daughteras he otherwise might have, and you can maybe see why he came so pathetically, as it says, falling at Jesus’ feet, repeatedly begging him to please use his healing power from God that he’d demonstrated so often on behalf of others. 

The other desperate person in our gospel, a woman who, we’re told, had been through a lot of grief for a long, long time, also found herself turning to Jesus.  She had some unknown condition that causedchronic bleeding And she’d lived with this condition for twelve years.   Twelve years is a long time to be losing blood—think of how weak she must have been much of the time.  Plus, in that time and culture, a woman who was known to be bleeding had to stay separated, to keep away from everyone, so as to avoid ritually contaminating others in the community.  So, she either would’ve had to stay home, cooped up a lot of the time, or else she’d have to conceal her condition, and just hope nobody would find out.  But it says she’d spent everything she had in the care of many doctors—kind of the take control response, right?  And it’d just made things worse it said.  Not only that, but that it likely meant that too many people knew of her situation.   It’s probable that this woman simply stayed home and lived a very lonely existence.  At this point a pretty miserable existence too, as she was now completely broke from paying all those doctors.   Somehow though, we’re told, she’d heard of Jesus.   And it appears she decided to take advantage of the crowd that was mobbing all around him so she could come and seek what she believed Jesus had to offer her.   She knew she needed what Jesus had to offer, but she alsoknew she was risking the outrage of her community—maybe even her place in her community, by coming out in public like this while blood was flowing from her body.   And so furtively, from the midst of the crowd, she reached out her hand, trusting that a mere touch to Jesus’ cloak would do what she needed to be done.    

Now, check it out.  In both of these instances, the desperate people took action.   They didn’t respond to their situation by doing nothing.  But they also didn’t respond by trying to take control of everything and everyone around them.  Neither did they respond by simply distracting themselves.    Distractions, after all, only go so far. They don’t change anything, except maybe the way we feel, and that only for a little while.  No, both of these desperate individuals responded to their circumstances with faith—faith in the One we’ve come to know as Jesus Christ the Son of God.  As we undoubtedly have, they’d bothheard things about Jesus—perhaps, as some of us have, one of them had even witnessed some things about Jesus for himself.  Things that inspired them to believe that the eternal God whose power and grace are great beyond our comprehension, was present and at work in Jesus. And they both acted in faith that this Jesus not only could help them, but that he would help them.  And that belief, that faith they both had in the power and mercy of God at work in Jesus changed everything for them!

Now I can’t guarantee you that having faith in Christ will protect you and your loved ones from all harm.   As a pastor, I’ve seen many instances where, inexplicably, people with serious illnesses have beenhealed, and even where those at death’s door have been brought back to the land of the living.   But I’ve also seen too many instances of those whose illnesses have continued, and I’ve buried and done memorial services for plenty of others.  If we’re looking for some kind of all-inclusive “by” from life’s misfortunes, if we’re grasping for some type of magical, mystical deliverance from all the really bad stuffthat can come down on us, I don’t know of any place to steer you—including faith in Christ.   If God did work that way, we probably wouldn’t call it “faith.”  If every single time we called on Christ’s name, whatever nastiness we’re facing just melted away, well, for one thing, the scientists would do lots of studies, and they’d all be going—yep, go ahead and call on Christ…that’s the way to deal with it wheneverbad stuff happens to you.   But God doesn’t operate like that.   I don’t know why—I’m just human, so I can’t come close to figuring out a lot of things about God.  But from what God has revealed about himself to us in Jesus Christ, it does appear that God wants us to have a faith relationship with him.  That is, God wants us to turn to him and to put our trust in him—to trust in God above all else.  And to help us to do that, in Jesus God has made it clear that he’s worthy of our trust.   After all, who else or what else do you know of that has demonstrated the level of commitment to us god in Christ has by willingly suffering and dying on a cross for us? 

Faith in Christ isn’t a magic charm. God is too great and too wise to jump through the hoops that we humans want him to jump through.   But if you’re asking, “Well, then why have faith?  What’s the point?”… let’s put it this way:  operating out of a belief in goodness and power and presence of God that’s been demonstrated for us in Jesus Christ can lift us out of desperation.  Turning to God for help may or may not remove our desperate circumstances…it may, but it may not.  But, for instance, many of us have found time and again that turning to Christ by seeking the prayers and comfort and support of the Christian community can make all the difference in how we weather those particularly bad storms that can and do blow in and dump on us.   Many of us have found that we can find peace and strength and, yes—even healing and life, by cultivating a daily walk with God, by