What is God doing?

Biblical Text: 1 Kings 19:9-21

Our lectionary tends to skip texts with a bent to violence or martial images, like Elijah and the Prophets of Baal. It feeds us the sad sack Elijah in the aftermath. Now, there is a defendable reason for this, but you can’t really get to it by skipping. Because we all want the fire from heaven. And when the fire from heaven doesn’t come, or when Jesus rebukes you for asking for it as he did in the associated Gospel lesson for the day, we lament, we ask “why?”

The why’s largely remain God’s. He doesn’t really answer why. He redirects us to what. He will listen to the lament. He asks Elijah twice for his litany of lament. Why does it always work this way? And then God turns him to the What. Elijah, the question is not why God does something, the question is What is God doing. And in ask What we also get our invite to see it and participate. The Kingdom of God certainly comes without our prayers, but we pray that it comes to us also.

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Defeated Legion

062225 Sermon Download

Biblical Text: Luke 8:26-39

In the church year it is the start of the long green season. What I mean by that is the altar colors are green for the non-festival half of the year. And the lessons go back to some semblance of a continuous read through the Gospel (Luke this year.) And where we get dropped in the story is at the end of the Galilean ministry. (The sermon expands on that a bit.) Specifically, Jesus has started to make the moves that Luke often emphasized, which are those of Gentile inclusion. He tells the disciples to set sail across the Sea of Galilee for the other side where they are met by a demon possessed man. A man who represents the Spiritual state of the gentile world. The sermon develops how this man in many ways also represents the Spiritual state of Our World: shameless and death seeking. Which are the hallmarks of demons. Yet Christ has crossed the divide. And Christ has come to save. And the demons have no power over him. In fact he commands them. And He has set us free from our bondage to sin and death to live. The question the text leaves is with is represented in the characters: How shall we live? And that is the last movement of the sermon.

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Knowing God

061525 Sermon Download

Biblical Text: Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

The Sunday is Trinity Sunday, so we recite the Athanasian Creed and the theme of the Sunday is possibly the hardest one in the church year. If you want to know someone what a wise person would do is say look at what they do. And most Sundays follow that advice. We preach about God by what he has done for us or through his saints. But Trinity Sunday tends to be more philosophical, addressing the desire to know God in himself, or in the interior life. That is the normally the realm of the mystic. The rest of us are given solid words in the creeds. But this sermon – thinks about a few places where God has revealed his own inner life. First, God does wish to be known. Folly beckons you into the dark and secret places, but wisdom cries out from the hills, the crossroads, the gates. Wisdom can be found wherever you are. And wisdom is a reliable narrator. The relationship between Father and Son – between God and Wisdom in Proverbs – is this cycle like breathing of delight and rejoicing. And it is that interior life – of delight and rejoicing – through Christ that we are invited to take part in. Our humanity in Christ has been taken into God. Christ delights in the Children of Men, and we return in rejoicing.

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New Wine

060825 sermon Download

Biblical Text: : Acts 2:1-21

The day on the church calendar is Pentecost, which is the 3rd most important church festival after Christmas and Easter. Although Pentecost is kinda the Rodney Dangerfield of Church festivals. It gets no respect. Although it does get the great and rare liturgical color of Red.

Wine, even the phrase “new wine” is an important image in the Bible. That phrase “new wine” is used by some in the crowd on the first Pentecost to describe what is happening right in front of their eyes. The scoffers say the disciples are “full of New Wine.” Now that claim in absolutely false in the what that they mean it, that the disciples are drunk. But they are “full of New Wine” in a divine way. The Spirit of Christ has descended upon them. The promised power from on high. This sermon meditates on what that means. It spends some time thinking about ways that claims about new wine might be abused – in line with how the Old Testament prophets could talk. It also seeks to define – in line with Peter’s Pentecost sermon quoting one of those prophets – what the actions of the Spirit, the New Wine in proper use, does.

How do you recognize the “New Wine?” It is for everyone. It allows all to understand the Word of God. And it testifies the apocalyptic reality that God is making you new, and will bring that to completion. When you see these things, you are seeing the New Wine in action.

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Times of Transition (Liminal Times)

060125 Sermon Download

Biblical Text: Acts 1:12-26

The original idea for this sermon came from the strange day on the liturgical calendar – Easter 7. It is past Ascension Day, so Jesus is no longer with the disciples in the flesh. But it is not yet Pentecost where the Spirit comes and empowers the work. What do you do when one chapter has closed, but another has not yet opened? That is what this sermon is about reflecting on the passage in Acts in this time of transition.

Following the Apostles there are three things. The first is to close one chapter and prepare for the next. There are a bunch of things that travel under closing a chapter and the sermon meditates on those a bit. By preparing for the next it is largely the work of keeping the eyes open for things that will need to be done and people entering life. The second thing is to be constant in the Word. This is how we seek the face of God who will open that next chapter. The final thing might be the toughest, but the most necessary. Walk out in faith. You don’t get to live in the transition time, although we often try. You have to move in faith into what God has prepared.

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Ask

052525 Sermon Download

Biblical Text: John 16:23-33

On our current calendar it was the 6th Sunday in Easter. The old calendar used to call is Rogate, which is Latin for ask or even beg. The gospel lesson for the day, centering around Jesus saying “ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be complete,” has been the text since at least the 8th century. This sermon opens with a bit of memory about older forms of congregational collective asking. Both practical asking and spiritual asking. And then it transitions into a meditation on prayer – the way we ask. It is cribbing from Luther’s postil sermon for this day where he holds there are five necessities to prayer: promise, faith, specificity, soul need, and the name of Christ. You find 4 of those easily in the text. It is that soul need that is an interesting add by Luther. It is not that I disagree with the great man. (I better not, I just preached it.) But soul need as I hope the sermon makes clear, is the difference between my wishing and my praying. I wish a lot of things, but are they the deep needs of my soul? If they are not, they are not prayer. And it is prayer that Jesus promises is heard. Ask. Ask and you will receive. And you joy will be made full.

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The One About a Three Legged Pig

051825 Sermon Download

Biblical Text: Acts 11:1-18; (Revelation 21:1-7)

The text of the sermon is largely Peter’s vision of the heavenly tablecloth descending which ended up at Gentile Pentecost. It’s a story about ceremonial laws – clean and unclean – and how they play no role in the Kingod of God. Now most of us probably don’t think we have ceremonial laws which is crazy. Because we are constantly making clean and unclean distinctions. And constantly making new ones. They are much easier to render judgement upon. What this sermon does is two things. It attempts to teach some distinctions in the law: moral, civil and ceremonial. And then it proclaims like Jesus to Peter, “what God has made clean, do not call common.” For God made all things good. And Christ is remaking all things. Our clean and unclean distinctions, our ceremonial laws, better not get in the way of the Work of God.

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153 Large Fish

050425 sermon Download

Biblical Text: John 21:1-19

I think this is about calling. And for me I’d take it as calling in the broad sense. We all know there are things that we should be doing. And the very bedrock it is answering the question who am I? and whose am I? If we answer those calling then is being true to ourselves. The text is the contradiction of what happens when we ignore the calling (nothing) and what happens when we follow it (the grace of God.) It is also about things that stand in the way. Sometimes those are small things, like being hungry. Sometime those are huge things, like betrayal. This sermon is a meditation the weaves back and forth between Peter and the disciples and ourselves and how we deal with calling and the things that get in the way. And how Christ helps in all these things.

Recording note: the first 15 secs of the actual sermon sound bad. My microphone was muted at the board. So I amplified the ambient recording. After 15 secs the mute was taken off and it sounds much better.

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Mission and Witness

042725 Sermon Download

Biblical Text: John 20:19-31, Acts 5:12-32

The second Sunday of Easter, the end of the octave of Easter, is always the appearance to Thomas. And for most of my life this has been the Sunday to talk about doubt – doubting Thomas. Which I happen to think is a terrible reading of the text. Sure, Thomas doubts, but Jesus’ words to him are a gentle rebuke. Something like, “Thomas, stop being a fool, and believe. Do you really know these 10 so little that you think they’d lie to you about something like this?” If you want to talk Dark Nights of the Soul go read Job or Ecclesiastes or maybe even Paul on his fellow Jews. But Thomas is about mission. “As the Father sent me, I am sending you. Receive the Holy Spirit. Forgive Sins.” This is about the mission of the church in all times and places carried out through Word and Sacrament. And the first lesson of the day from Acts is a perfect example.

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Perplexed and Running

042025 Sermon Download

Biblical Text: Luke 24:1-12

Happy Easter. Luke loves to juxtapose two groups, often male and female. And it is no different here at the Resurrection. Often it is for two ends of a spectrum. Sometimes it is to show different reactions to the same proclamation of the Word. Today the women and Peter are juxtaposed (with the apostles being an indeterminate group). The Word is the Resurrection. Both believe, but their starting place is much different. Their starting places just might be the extremes of the people showing up for Easter Services.

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