Why is it that you were seeking me? – Luke 2:40-52

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That is the question that Jesus, in his first words in the gospel, puts on Mary and Joseph. And it is rhetorical. It is posed not to get an answer, but to force us to answer it for ourselves. Why do we seek Jesus?

That is a sticky question theologically. This sermon posits that the deeper answer has nothing to do with us, but everything to do with Jesus. Why do we seek Jesus? Because we heard His voice. Because God calls us. Because Jesus is the only one who can forgive our sins. It looks like we are doing the seeking. It looks like we are the ones who “find Jesus” or “find our path”. Mary and Joseph look like the ones finding the “lost” Jesus. Perceptions are tricky. Jesus knew where he was and was at the correct place the entire time. Who exactly is the lost one and who is the seeking one?

Sermon – Christmas changes things…

Text: Luke 2: 22-40

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I don’t know what to say about this one. Just looking at the word picture above in comparison to almost any of the other sermons shows something is different. And that something different could be a very bad thing. The job from that pulpit is point at Christ as our salvation in as many verbal images as scripture allows. Jesus, Christ or God don’t appear in big words anywhere there. Probably the best thing that could be said is it is pietistic (and if you aren’t in the know on that word within Lutheranism it is one of those ill-defined put downs akin to calling someone a liberal in politics – it substitutes for argument). The pietist wears the heart on the sleeve and has a tendency to let the head go fuzzy. In the 17th – 19th centuries, to the hard headed Lutherans, the pietists were all law. They put the demands of piety upon you. This sermon does some of that – probably too much. Prayerfully the gospel was present.

Christmas – We know incarnations when we see them…

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Christmas. One of the two days of the year that you have to have a good message. (The other is mother’s day by the way. On Easter you are preaching to the congregation anymore. On Christmas and mother’s day you still get a chance to preach to the unconverted.) On top of being good, it has to be short. On top of being short it has to carry off a tone. Film makers do this by shooting specific places and then blurring or making crisp the picture. For example, if they want to paint a tragically romantic scene they might take a picture of a late autumn forest and blur it a bit. The same spot made crisp might convey instead of tragic romance a lurking dread. 10 seconds of such a picture sets the tone.

The audience is probably coming into the service either exhausted, angry, nervous, lonely, or annoyed. That is what we do to ourselves around Christmas. And the service in that frame of mind is one more thing to get through. The goal of the Christmas sermon (and the entire service) is to take people from that negative place, and to move them to a much different view of Christmas. To admit that this state I’m feeling right now is a result of how messed up the world actually is because of sin, and to rest in the fact that God has provided a savior. The tone should be one of a giant exhale.

This sermon didn’t pull punches. That is usually what the Christmas sermon does. It forgets the law. It goes along with the culture and the charade of a perfect Christmas. It talks of love and warm fuzzies, but without acknowledging the real state of people’s minds and why they are that way. That sermon fuzzes out the bad stuff and because of that can satisfy at the moment but is without merit. It is complicit is painting the Christ out of Christmas. This one didn’t pull those punches, but hopefully balanced it out with the gospel.

Sermon – A Lutheran Looks at Mary – Advent 4 (12/20/09)

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In defining ourselves, there are some things that we choose poorly on. The magnificat or Mary’s song is one of those things that gets overlooked by Protestants because we have a problem with Mary. Not specifically with Mary, but with where certain groups in the Roman church have taken her. Going back to Mary’s words in Luke hopefully helps us recover an important saint.

What did you come to see? – Luke 7:18-28 – Advent 3

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Text: Luke 7:18-28

The middle two weeks of advent are the weeks of John the Baptist. He’s a forgotten figure in modern Christianity. He doesn’t seem to have much meaning or purpose. We continue to read the stories of the patriarchs. We will talk about the OT prophets. We will give due to the apotles. The later church fathers will also be discusses. John the Baptist, who Jesus declares to be the greatest born of woman, gets left out.

One really good reason is that he more or less gets subsumed under Christ. The life and mission of Jesus overwhelm John who doesn’t leave any writings outside of the voice captured in the gospels. But that doesn’t account for it alone. I think it has more to do with the baptist’s message. It is a sparse and clear proclamation -repent, be baptized and bring forth the fruits of repentance. It is a message that Jesus picks up (Mark 1:14-15).

So much of life is spent finding the middle way. And that is usually the course of wisdom. Stay away from the extremes. Find the middle path through the mess. Just that in regards to truth, finding the middle way leaves you with nothing. God’s grace is not found by splitting the difference with the Baptist. I’ll admit I sin, but living the life or repentance seems extreme. Why this thing called baptism? Isn’t there something grander or more meaningful? The middle way would seem to ask for more than baptism as a sign and seal. In Luke even John seems to have questions. John has not followed the middle way, but things aren’t looking like he expected. He asks Jesus, “are you the one?”

And Jesus doesn’t apologize for the form of grace or the proclamation one bit. In fact he turns to the crowds and asks what did they come to see? They all came to see a prophet. They recognized a truth in John (and in Jesus) that was not just natural wisdom. And that recognition requires more than a middle way response. If you came to see a prophet, and the prophet says God’s grace is here, in water and word, in a crucified peasant, then we should align ourselves with that grace.

It is a great question to many people who come to churches. What did you come to see? If you came to see anything other than the presant grace of God, you’ve got the wrong purpose. Ask youself, what did you come to see? Does the answer require you to make changes?

Large Stones

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Mark 13:1-13

We are contingent creatures. That is a fancy way of saying we depend upon other people and things. Some of those people and things are big foundation stones that if a crack showed up in them, we’d just not know what to do. And that is the problem. When society seems to be falling down around you, when those big foundation stones are crumbling, is your whole life overturned…or are you able to stand in spite of the loss.

In the Holy Spirit we are made to stand. We aren’t promised that our stones won’t be toppled over. In fact if we’ve been listening to Jesus following him probably makes that more likely. What we are promised is one standing with us. Jesus Christ on the throne has poured out his Spirit.

Who gave all? – Mark 12:38-44

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Text: Mark 12:38-44

I got to deliver this sermon to two different audiences on the same day – the congregation here at St. Mark and the student mission at RIT. The full copy is the congregational delivery whic some things were modified for the RIT community, but it always amazes me that what preaching and the gospel best talk to is universal. The form of the questions and the searches might appear different, but the core concerns are the same – purpose, guilt, acceptance, love.

We like to ask questions that quantify those things. When we do that, we always end up in the red. We can never find enough of any of them. Instead we need to aks who. Who has has the power and love to accomplish those things we so desperately need. Who have already given all? That man on the cross. That is the Gospel – everything really needful has been supplied in full.

All Saints – Two Calendars telling a story

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Let me just say two things about this sermon: 1) I really hate it as a sermon. I think it misses the audience, doesn’t point to Christ enough, lacks a real solid textual foundation and doesn’t have the unity of message it should have. 2) I think some of the parts of it by themselves are bleeding raw and cut right to the heart of life. Modern life has lost the saints and the One who makes them and as a result is childish and soulless. We can’t see the problems even though they are right before our eyes. Being a Christian is a call to a life with a larger canvass, not a safe harbor.

Any sermon is a balance or weaving of separate threads. I have a comfort zone being very textual. In my own walk I can’t get over the fact that God speaks in this book, and I want to know as much about it as possible. That comfort zone moves through to application. Basically I have about five outlines: Very simple text-application, a little more complex 4 pages outline with the four pages being trouble in the text, gospel in the text, trouble in the world and gospel in the world (the individual pages can come in any order, when they are text, text, world, world it reduces to text-app), a three point outline (have something to say and say it well, or if you took debate/speech this tends to be a classic argument outline), a question and answer outline, and a refrain structure (multiple images or examples from life that end with the same biblical refrain). All of those outlines are about relating the text we are reading to our lives, or in reality relating our lives to the text. You could say I’m usually about trying to get people to let the biblical text read their lives. This sermon had a different basis in that the liturgical day (All Saints Day) was really the theme. Textual exposition was greatly reduced and the theology of being a Saint was brought forward. The general outline was compare and contrast – living life and interpreting reality from a secular veiwpoint alone (living with a calendar that only has Halloween) and living life with a church calendar (living with All Saints). Instead of being textual this sermon was theological and thematic.

It needed to be better.

Reformation Day Sermon – Law & Gospel: Living in the Tension

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One of the things ministers (at least Lutheran ministers) talk about all the time is what do you lead with. What I mean by that is this. The proclamation of the Lutheran is Law and Gospel. The law, in all its fierceness, says repent you poor miserable sinner. The Gospel announces the grace of God on all who do repent. The problem with that is followed to its human logical conclusion means being the human sandwhich-board walking down main street with ‘Repent-The Kingdom of God is Near’ painted on it. That may be the reductio ad absurdam of the the law proclamation, but it is rarely effective. It is my impression today, to get someone to hear the law rightly, that you almost have to sneak up on them. I think the culture assumes that the Gospel applies to them universally – we are all universalists when it comes to heaven. Jesus was anything but a universalist (Matt 7:13-14) and the entry gate on that narrow way is repentance. Stealing a line from a fellow circuit minister – “people know about Jesus, they don’t know Jesus.” Where is Martin Luther’s day the public perception about Jesus was a cruel tyrant (I think Luther actual used that term to descibe Him in Martin’s days in the cloister), and hence the society was ready to hear the gospel as it was already cowering under the law, today the public perception is one of the ever accepting Jesus – so accepting that he’s ok if you worship him under anygiven name, as long as you are true to yourself. Fostering a true encounter with Jesus means getting people to have a healthy fear of God first.

Sermon – “Who can be saved?” – Mark 10:23-31

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The gospel texts are sparse. What I mean by that is they relate just enough information to tell the story and expect you the reader to fill in the gaps from your knowledge and experience. We do this type of stuff everyday of our lives. The closer the person is to us, the sparser our communication can be. Husbands and wives often fall into this trap thinking that one fills in the gap correctly when they don’t. I’ll let you fill in the gap of the example. In the process of fleshing out the story, a peril for a preacher is preaching on the gaps. To preach or pull the main lesson for the text from what the reader has filled in is usually bad. At its best it is an orthodox sermon because the person in the pulpit has the Spirit and the gap filling in pious, but even then it usually has the effect of being distracting as the fill-in does not naturally fit the text. At its worst, the gaps are filled with stuff that contradicts the plain text and lessens or overrides its teaching. The sermon on the gaps becomes a sermon straight from probably the worst places of the preacher.

This sermon has one fill-in that in my studies for the week I could not find another who took it this way. That would usually mean that I would not use it to try and avoid preaching on a gap. I struggled with this because Peter’s reply to Jesus in the text – “look, we’ve left everything…” just did not make sense within the text as it is normally read. The typical reading is to see this as Peter comparing himself to the Rich Young Man and expecting that he will come out looking better. Jesus says is it hard to enter the Kingdom. We’ve already given up everything, so we must have merited entry. Here is why that makes no sense to me. First, if it was really Peter expressing a claim to merit, Jesus would have immediately struck it down. One does not merit the Kingdom. That is a doctrinal point, but one so basic that if you find your reading of a text going against it you’ve got a wrong reading. Second, Jesus has just said that with man it is impossible. Would Peter really respond to with man it is impossible with an assertion of his own work? Third, Jesus’ response is a blessing and a very confusing one as it gives a whole bunch in this time. Eternal life is an afterthought. Something else is going on here.

I leaned on Matthew to fill in the gap a little. The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) all follow a similar outline. (If you want more on that ask me.) Often you can look at the others to get a clearer view of what is happening. Matthew also records the encounter with the Rich Young Man and right after it records the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. My filling in the gaps to make sense of Peter’s response and Jesus’ response to that in this sermon was:
1) The disciples ask who can be saved
2) Jesus says everyone – because God is doing it, with man it is impossible
3) Peter’s response is that’s not fair (The NLT has a good translation from Matthew – We’ve given up everything to follow you. What will we get?)
4) Jesus promises stuff here in this life – the stuff he promises is a new community the church
5) In Matthew Jesus follows this teaching up with the parable of the workers in the vineyard which ends with the saying ‘the first are last and last first’ that Mark just tacks onto the end of Jesus’ response
I filled in the gaps I think in a way that makes more sense than the typical Peter trying to justify himself reading, but since I went out on a limb so to speak and it does play a role in the general outline of the sermon I add wanted to point out from where and why I filled in the gaps.