Sermon July 5, 2009 – Proper 9B

‘Familiarity breeds contempt’ – so the saying goes. To become a United States citizen, that is, if you are not born a citizen – you must pass a test on U.S. history and civics which would scare most of us. For many people who become citizens of this nation, the proudest moment of their lives is when they walk into a voting booth and cast a ballot –for president, for congressperson, for local official, doesn’t matter. Just that they are counted among those who are free to choose who will represent them in government. Now if, like me, you have grown up as an American citizen, if you have never known another way to live, it may not be as meaningful for you to walk into the voting booth. You may be more focused upon complaining about the candidates or the lack of choice rather than thinking about the positive. Perhaps you need another experience – to impress upon you the miracle that is democracy – to make the familiar and everyday strange and new again.

I find the same thing with Lutherans. It is usually those who are new to the Lutheran church – or even who are new Christians – who ask the most questions – who want to know what it means to be a Christian or a Lutheran rather than some other kind of Christian – what sets us apart? Those of us who have attended a Lutheran church our whole lives, we may think we know exactly what it means to be Lutheran, and we’re not necessarily very interested in our past, or our teachings. We know, you see. We’ve been to confirmation. Familiarity breeds contempt. Or at least disinterest.

When Jesus went around Galilee, he would usually teach in the synagogues, and what we often call a “miracle” would follow. Perhaps demonic exorcism, perhaps healing of disease. This happened across the lake also – in Gentile territory. As we heard last week Jesus heals a woman with a long-standing hemmorhage, and raises the little daughter of a synagogue official. Then he comes home, to his hometown, the place where he grew up, and he can do nothing.

Now what is going on here? It is not that Jesus is in a slump, that he suddenly has lost the healing touch, that he is off his game somehow and needs a rest. Rather, it is the same old story. ‘Familiarity breeds contempt.’ It is one of the wiliest tricks the Evil One ever played upon humanity, the one where he convinces us that we know this and what we know about can’t possibly be worth knowing about – that we have seen everything that there is to see and that there is nothing more to be said. And moreover, that those things which we see every day we despise, we criticize, we hold in contempt.

Jesus had grown up in Nazareth, his familiy was still part of Nazareth life. The people know what kind of people come from Nazareth, and perhaps they wondered just who the hell Jesus thought he was coming back and putting on airs. Maybe you’ve experienced it. A kid goes away to university, gets a degree in something or other, and all of a sudden he or she comes back and you’d think they dropped from the sky with their knowledge and wisdom. Isn’t this the kid whose snot you wiped, whose diapers you’ve changed, the neighbor kid who was always tagging around after your daughter or feeding quarters to the pinball machine?

But, you know, maybe you’ve experienced it the other way too. Maybe you’re the kid who has come back home, having seen the world – and you are distressed because there is the same old same old around here, people are so provincial, so unenlightened, if they only knew what I knew, it would be a lot different. Nothing to see here, nothing but the humdrum rhythms of life in the valley, the same neighborhood, the same family, the same friends, the same job, the same church – and you take offense. Just like the good folks of Nazareth did with Jesus, you take offense. And you cannot receive what is abundantly available to be shared.

It is one of the wiliest tricks of the Evil One to tempt us to pride – the pride that says, “I have seen all there is to see, I have learned all there is to learn.” “I went through confirmation, I know all that stuff.” “I know that person, she’s the one who did this and said this once…” And we close ourselves off to what God might be doing, what deeds of power God might have in store.

The Son of God became a human being, to come close to us, and perhaps this is why we have such a strong reaction. He is like us, and yet unlike us. He not only shows us who he is, but who we are, and who we might be. And that is profoundly exciting and threatening at the same time. A man from Nazareth, like them, and yet unlike them,
the wisdom of God flowing from his lips, the power of God emanating from him, it’s like an indictment, an offensive statement about who they were. If Jesus was a man like them, they had no excuse to be the men and women they were. And so it goes. Much easier to deny that anything new is going on here than open oneself to the possibility of transformation.

There are only two choices available to each of us – deny Jesus, or deny ourselves. Acknowledge ourselves in need, or stubbornly insist that we are full of light, even in our darkness; rich, even in our poverty, strong, even when we are weak. St. Paul knew the irony – first a super-Pharisee, then a super-Christian, and it was important for him to let the wandering Corinthian church know that he had the power and wisdom given by the Holy Spirit, and that they should listen to his words and teachings. But as soon as he acknowledged the power and wisdom as his, as soon as he said it was his, God’s power and wisdom had departed from him, would slip from his grasp. And so he gloried in his weakness and his poverty, so that Christ could be everything – so that what was important was not that Paul was something, but that God was something. So that Paul and the Corinthians together could receive what God had to give.

My sisters and brothers, in opposition to pride, humility is the key to receiving what God has to offer. Neither to blindly accept everything that is new, or to focus upon the exciting, nor to hold fast to things because it’s not been done that way before. Neither to affirm all about the hometown, nor the home country, nor to despise it. Neither to affirm everything about every person nor to write them off. But in deep humility and poverty of spirit to assume that hidden inside each holy Word of God and each human being that he has created there is a treasure, there is a gift, that remains undiscovered, and to pray and watch and listen until God by his Spirit reveals Christ in the Word, reveals Christ in us.

Sermon June 28: Mark 5:21-43

In Steven King’s novel The Green Mile,and the subsequent movie of the same name, the green mile is the stretch of hallway which leads to the electric chair and the prison cells of death row which line that hallway. John Coffey is an inmate of Cold Mountain Penitentiary, a tall, strong black man, on the green mile for the brutal murder of two young white girls.

But, as the story progresses, Paul Edgecombe, his prison guard, sees things that leads him to doubt John’s guilt. How could such a gentle, even childlike man have committed such a terrible crime? Moreover, how can someone who has the power to heal as John does be evil?

For at John’s touch, Paul’s stubborn urinary tract infection is healed; a mouse crushed by a sadistic guard is restored; and in a haunting scene, John heals a dying woman of cancer. In each case, it is as if John breathes the disease into himself and then expels it.  It is an irony not lost on his guard that though John brings life to the dying, he is known as a murderer and condemned to die, destined to walk the green mile.

How can this be? It is like this verse of a hymn we sometimes sing on Passion Sunday: “Why, what hath my Lord done? What makes this rage and spite? He healed the deaf and dumb, he gave the blind their sight. Sweet injuries! Yet they at these, themselves displease, and gainst him rise, themselves displease, and gainst him rise.” “My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love to me, love to the loveless shown, that I might lovely be.” Jesus, the giver of life and healing, himself was condemned as a blasphemer – someone who brings death by cursing God’s name – and walked his own green mile which we know as the Via Dolorosa, the way of sorrows.

This fifth chapter of Mark begins to open us to the mystery. In the opening of the fifth chapter, St. Mark relates the story of the Gerasene demoniac. Jesus frees a man from the possession of demons, and expels them into pigs who immediately stampede and hurl themselves like lemming over the cliff. (Incidentally I should mention that the mass suicide of lemmings is another one of those things which was once taught as absolutely true in science class but has since been proven to be false.)

Then, in the stories which we have just heard proclaimed, Jesus heals the flow of blood of an old woman, and raises a young girl from the dead. In all three cases, we see the healing power of Jesus. But perhaps it is what we do not see which might awe us more.  We do not see that in each of these two cases, Jesus is exchanging his holiness for our sinfulness, his life for our death.

I always think the Gospel of Mark is unintentionally funny right here. The woman with the unending flow of menstrual blood had spent “all that she had on many physicians.”  Don’t we do the same thing? Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying anything about the state of or cost of medical care. Nor am I making a theological judgment about the healing arts. We are rightly grateful for the gifts of medicine and for doctors and nurses.  But at the same time we recognize medicine’s limitations. It serves to preserve life for a longer time, not to abolish the possibility of death. The sign of healing can be a sign of God’s grace in the midst of life. But we run from death, the look of death, the feel of death, we spend our money not only on physicians, but on treatments to make us look younger, so that we may accepted in a society that idolizes youth, on treatments that make us feel younger, so that we may continue to act young. And there is something about us still, even in this “enlightened” age, that does not want to spend time around the dying. Perhaps it is too much a reminder of our own mortality, that someday the keys will unlock our cell and we too will walk the green mile.

These days, many people read the story about the woman and say simply this, “Jesus was breaking down barriers of prejudice.” After all, a woman with an unending menstrual flow was unclean in the Jewish religion of the day, and could not participate with the worshiping community. In this reading of the story, Jesus is saying, “She’s OK after all. It’s you who exclude her who have the problem.” There is always something to be learned about prejudice. In Stephen King’s novel, American racism certainly plays a role in John Coffey being on the Green Mile. But the Gospel of Mark says that power came forth from Jesus. Jesus didn’t hold a discussion group, but simply by touching Jesus’ cloak, the woman was physically healed. Jesus did not say about the little girl, “it’s OK that she is dead,” but taking her hand Jesus raised her from the dead.

These two stories bracketed together tell us that the same thing is happening in both cases. And the earlier story in Mark 5 helps us understand it too – Jesus comes to his people to set them free from all that would keep them in bondage – the powers of sin which plague us, the disease which is living death, and the death which would cast us back into chaos.

But don’t think there is not a cost. There is always a cost. The cost is this: Jesus, in taking our uncleanness and sin from us, takes it upon himself. In taking death from us, he receives it himself. Think about it this way. Those of Jesus’ time practiced a religion strictly divided between clean and unclean. You could not touch a person with a flow of blood, for that was an extension of the power of death. If you did do so, you needed to be ritually cleansed. You could not touch a dead person, and if you did, you needed to be ritually cleansed. Jesus does these things, and giving his life to those in bondage,he takes on the uncleanness associated with death, in fact, he takes on death itself. It is on the cross that he bears our uncleanness, sin and death to the end, so that our sin and death may no longer separate us from God. Though we are still plagued by sin, and are subject to its consequences in this world, even our sin cannot separate us from God, for Jesus has taken on that separation in his own flesh. Though we die, death cannot separate us utterly from God, for Jesus has taken our death into himself.

So, then, what do the healing of this woman afflicted for twelve years and the raising from the dead of a twelve-year-old girl mean for us? It would be a terrible thing if the lesson we got from this story was that chronic disease and death in childhood is a sign of God’s disfavor, that if the Father really loved us he would always heal in this way. There will be chronic disease and untimely death as long as this world rolls. God sees it and God mourns with us and in Jesus makes a way through it.

We always want to remember that the healing that we see in the Gospels points us to the living Jesus in our lives. The new life which the two women experience through Jesus is both perfect and yet to be completed. Perfect because it is new life given by Jesus, yet to be completed because they are not yet free from the cares of the world or the threat of death. It is the same way with us. We may live confidently, knowing in Christ, God comes to us still, speaking words of healing, grace and forgiveness, offering us his holiness and life in exchange for our sin and death. We may experience the joy of being healed of physical and spiritual disease in this life, while knowing that one day we too will walk that green mile, trusting that on the other side of death we will hear those words, “I say to you, arise.”

Sunday Worship – It’s Not About Us!

Sunday Worship – It’s Not About Us!

Not that the “good old days” were always perfect, but there was once a time when American culture supported more regular Sunday worship attendance.  There were few other choices – grocery stores and shopping malls were closed, there was nothing on TV or the Internet, and it was not as easy to travel out of town for a weekend.   It was far less common for both parents to work – so the weekends were not the only time that families had to spend together.  Sports and other activities did not compete so ruthlessly for our time.  But churches were also filled in those days because more people were familiar with the concept of “duty,” simply doing something because it was the right thing to do.  Nowadays we are likely to do something if and when we feel we want to – and if we don’t feel like doing something, we often assume we are being hypocritical if we do it anyway.

Of course, it can be hypocritical to do something that we are not being honest about.  But at the same time it is true that if we only did the things we felt like doing,  there’s a lot necessary that wouldn’t get done.  I had to change my toddler’s diaper in the middle of writing this article.  I didn’t feel like doing it right then (and I probably could have put up with the odor a little longer).  But it was the right thing to do for him to take care of it right away.

We often fall into the trap of thinking that we go to worship to get something out of it for us: an inspiring message, beautiful or energizing music, or an answer to prayer.  But we can hear music on the radio, a sermon on TV, and we can pray when we have time.  Besides, sometimes the sermon is a clunker, the music is out of tune, and the other people there are imperfect.  When we go to church simply to get something out of it, often there’s not enough there to keep us going back, especially when we could get some work done or finally have an opportunity to relax.

So if not to get something out of it, why worship?  In his excellent little book Loving Jesus, Mark Allan Powell makes the radical suggestion that Christians should regularly worship simply because God deserves to be worshiped. In other words, it’s not about us!  It’s about God, and for all he’s given us, God deserves our gift of time and our hearts and voices to worship and praise him in the community.  We always get something out of worship in the process, but those “fringe benefits” can never become the primary reason for worship, or else we will readily turn to some other activity that always fulfills our needs and wants.

If Jesus of Nazareth knocked on our door and wanted to come into our house, wouldn’t we drop everything to spend an hour with him?  If we believe that he is invisibly but really present “whenever two or three are gathered,” won’t we be much more ready to seek him out there regularly?  So when you are deciding “Should I go to church this Sunday?” don’t think about what you might get out of it.  Think about God and all his gifts, the gifts of creation and sustenance and forgiveness and love, and decide whether he deserves your worship and praise, the token of your time and your voice and your presence with him.

Sermon Easter 5B

How did we get to this point in the life of the Church
where the people who are supposed to be teaching people how to pray
are being encouraged to take the drastic step of taking time for prayer?
I think it is because we have absorbed so uncritically the message of our culture
that we are justified by what we do and how much we do
that we have to be reminded to pray.
And I think it is because we have forgotten that in all things
we are dependent upon God and our neighbor
that so many Christians, not just pastors, but Christians, burn out.

Sermon 4 Lent – March 22, 2009

Why would you turn away from the light?
Why would you walk again into the darkness?
There is only one reason.
To walk into the light means to become visible.
It means to reveal yourself to the gathering, in the light of the bonfire.
It means to give up your anonymity and become part of the community
that works and plays together and keeps the fire going.

Sermon Lent 1 – Mar 1, 2009

Often people who joke about a lightning bolt striking them
for doing something bad
really do think that that’s what God does to bad sinners.
When a lightning bolt doesn’t strike them,
they think that either what they’ve done isn’t so bad,
or that there isn’t a God up there to zap them.
But what if that’s not God’s sign at all?

Sermon Ash Wednesday 2009

There are two ways to misunderstand the Gospel.
One way is to say that we have to work and work hard for our salvation.
The other way is to say that since Jesus paid it all, we needn’t lift a finger.
It’s so easy to get caught up in one or the other way of thinking.

Sermon Feb 22, 2009 – The Transfiguration of our Lord

If Jesus of Nazareth were to walk down that red carpet tonight,
if he were to take his place among the famous people;
or if he were to be present at Tuesday’s State of the Union address,
with President Obama and the powerful people of the government;
or if he had been the halftime show at the Super Bowl,
with millions and millions of people watching all over the world,
what would we see?

Bishop Driesen’s Pastoral Letter to the Synod – Proposed Social Statement on Sexuality

Pastoral Letter from Bishop Robert Driesen

The First Week in Lent, February 26, 2009

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

This is a difficult letter to write, because I realize that it touches the lives of so many, all of whom are seeking to be faithful to our Lord Jesus Christ. Despite our differences, however, all of us should be able to agree that questions related to human sexuality, while going to the core of what it means to be a human creature, are transformed, like every aspect of our lives, by our baptism into Christ. The sciences and other human disciplines, while informative, are not determinative, as we wrestle with what God’s intention is for us, having created us as sexual beings.

Sermon February 15, 2009

Mark 1:40-45

What does God hate?
I asked the Youth Group this question a few years ago.
We were starting a curriculum called The Justice Mission.
The purpose of the curriculum was to awaken Christian teenagers in America,
only a little removed from their childhood years,
to the injustices perpetrated upon children in many parts of the world,
from girls as young as nine or ten being sold as sex workers
to very young children who are given the mind-and-body numbing task
of hand-rolling cigarettes ten to twelve hours per day.
But when I asked, What does God hate?
the response I got was, “God doesn’t hate.”
The question didn’t make any sense to them.
We have done a good job catechizing our young people
and drumming into their brains that God is a God of love –
perhaps too good a job.
For love that does not want what is best for the beloved is no love at all,
and a love that does not hate what keeps the beloved in bondage is meaningless.

Why do I bring this up?
Well, biblical scholars make their translations of the Bible
from old hand-copied parchments which scribes made long, long ago.
Many copies of the Gospel according to St. Mark exist.
And many of the manuscripts read just as I read today, that Jesus, “moved with pity,”
reached out to the man with leprosy and healed him.
But some of the manuscripts have something different.
Some of them say that Jesus was not moved with “pity,”
but that he was moved with “anger.”
Scholars, of course, have no idea which is original.
Some think that because more manuscripts have “pity,”
that this is the original intent of Mark.
But others say that “anger” is more probably authentic,
because it is a harder reading.
It’s more likely, they say, that someone who was painstakingly copying
the Gospel according to Mark
would have the same reaction to the word “anger” as the emotion of Jesus
that our Youth Group had to the word “hate” as the emotion of God.
It didn’t make any sense to them.
And so they changed it to something that did make sense to them.

We have absolutely no way of knowing for certain which word should be there.
So I’m not going to stand up here and tell you that I know for certain
that “Jesus was moved with pity”
or “Jesus was moved with anger.”
But I do know this.
Jesus was moved.
By pity, by anger, or by both.
It might have been better had the curriculum asked the youth,
“What moves God’s heart?”
As surely as the God of Israel looked upon the children of Israel
as slaves in Egypt and was moved by their plight –
to take pity on them, or to become angry at their oppressors –
so was Jesus moved by the plight of this leprous man,
wearing the chains of his own bondage.
For leprosy made one ritually unclean
so that one could not be part of the worshipping community of God’s people.
To be a leper was to be an outcast in every way,
for to infect others with leprosy was not simply to threaten their physical health
but also their relationship to God.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness” used to be a phrase in common usage,
but in Jesus’ day, cleanliness literally was godliness.
And so lepers were isolated in their own ghettos
or driven to the outskirts of the cities,
to live alone, away from those who were clean,
without friends, without family, without God.

Being alone.
It’s one of the scariest things we can imagine.
Children, in the darkness, awake in the middle of the night, the minutes creeping by;
Teenagers, hunched over phones with tiny screens and pressing impossibly small buttons
to be-in-touch every second of every day;
Adults, searching for true love the second or third time around
or turning to drugs or alcohol to mask the pain;
the aged, mourning the empty house and waiting for the visit at the nursing home;
the imprisoned, kept locked away in environments of power
devoid of family or community relationships;
the secretive, ashamed of a dark part of their lives
or frightened lest they be rejected by God or others;
those who are used at the convenience of others,
like the children who suffer injustice all around the world:
Jesus, the Son of God, is moved.
With pity for us?
or with anger at what keeps us from him?
He is moved, and he moves –
reaching out to us, he cleanses us from our fear and shame
and makes us able to stand in his presence.

“If you are willing,” says the man, “you can make me clean.”
We often wonder what God’s will is –
for us, for others, for the world.
In his Small Catechism Martin Luther, whose commemoration we celebrate
this Wednesday, writes this about God’s will:
(God’s will comes about) when God breaks and hinders every evil scheme
and will of the devil, the world, and our flesh
that would not allow us to hallow God’s name
and would prevent the coming of his kingdom.
And God’s will comes about
whenever God strengthens us and keeps us steadfast in his Word
and in faith until the end of our lives.
This is God’s gracious and good will.
God is moved by the plight of human beings in bondage to whatever –
disease, sin, ignorance, poverty, oppression, death:
and he moves in response to it –
to free us from our bondage
by promising us a future in community –
not alone, but together with him and with all his people.

Jesus reaches out his hand,
and restores the man to physical health,
and not only to physical health,
but to restored relationship with God and the community.
He stretches out his hands upon the cross,
and in dying without sin,
he breaks the power of both sin and death for us.
By the hands of the church he washes us in baptism and feeds us with the Word of life
and the bread and wine of his presence.
God’s heart is open to us.
As our hearts become open to God,
we too become part of his willing action for the world,
reaching out our hands to others,
moved by their plight,
bringing them into community with us and with God.
In the end, when your heart is moved and you are stirred to action
on behalf of one who is suffering or oppressed or alone,
then it is the God who was moved by your plight
continuing his work in the world,
willing still that all might be healed.

Amen.