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.

The End of Alone?

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2009/02/08/the_end_of_alone/?page=full

Two interesting articles

The truth hurts – too much?
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/02/how-much-truth.html?loc=interstitialskip

And, indulgences make a comeback in the Roman Catholic Church.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/nyregion/10indulgence.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

For Inauguration Day – Churchill on the American Presidency

The rigid Constitution of the United States, the gigantic scale and strength of its party machinery, the fixed terms for which public officers and representatives are chosen, invest the President with a greater measure of autocratic power than was possessed before the war by the Head of any great State. The vast size of the population, the safety-valve functions of the legislatures of fifty Sovereign States, make the focussing of national public opinion difficult, and confer upon the Federal Government exceptional independence of it except at fixed election times. Few modern Governments need to concern themselves so little with the opinion of the party they have beaten at the polls’ none secures to its supreme executive offer, at once the Sovereign and the Party Leader, such direct personal authority.

The accident of hereditary succession which brings a King or Emperor to the throne occurs on the average at intervals of a quarter of a century. During this long period, as well as in his whole life before accesion, the qualities and dispoisition of the monarch can be studied by his subjects, and during this period parties and classes are often able to devise and create checks and counterchecks upon personal action. In limited monarchies where the responsibilities of power are borne by the Prime Minister, the choice of the nation usually falls upon Statesmen who have lived their lives in the public eye, who are moreover members of the Legislature and continuously accountable to it for their tenure. But the magnitude and the character of the electoral processes of the United States make it increasingly difficult, if not indeed already impossible, for any life-long politician to become a sucessful candidate for the Presidency. The choice of the party managers tends more and more to fall upon eminent citizens of high personal character and civic virtue who have not mingled profoundly in politics or administration, and who in consequence are free from the animosities and the errors which such com bative and anxious experiences involve. More often that not the campion selected for the enthusiasms and ideals of tens of millions is unversed in State affairs, and raised suddenly to dazzling pre-eminence on the spur of the moment. The war-stained veterans of the party battle select, after many fierce internal convulsions, a blameless and honorable figure to bear aloft the party standard. They manufacture his programme and his policy, and if successful in the battle install him for four years at the summit of the State, clothed thenceforward with direct executive functions which in practical importance are not surpassed on the globe…

Sermon: The Baptism of our Lord

Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan is the confirmation of his identity; the voice of the Father and the dove of the Spirit do not “make” him who he is, but they witness to who he has been from eternity. When we are baptized into Jesus, however, something different happens. We are given a new identity, one which we did not have before we were brought to the water. We are put into the place of the Lord Jesus, into the water, and the dove of the Spirit descends upon us, the voice of the Father is heard speaking about us, calling us by name, “You are my child, you are my servant.”