This was a very hard sermon to write and deliver. Bluntly, looking at the Beatitudes from a law perspective just comes so much easier to me. Speaking about things you have a intellectual understanding of but your gut consistently takes you somewhere else, makes either for a confusing sermon or just a bunch of babbling as one tries to sort it out.

That said I found it interesting that the idea I opened with also found expression on the New York Times Op-Ed page of all places. In the words of another blogger, Everyday Litergy, Halloween without All Saint is equivalent to Christmas Eve without Christmas.

At the end it was just too big a subject for my understanding level. I could not simplify enough for the given time. Maybe All Saints is just too big a subject for our culture in general. It is not our natural patern of thought, and we do not have the patience for something longer than 15 minutes. Maybe a better preacher could cover it. I was not up to the task.

Although my editor-in-chief, my Mom, didn’t fully appreciate the “Visit with Dr. Luther” part, I really enjoyed thinking about, writing and delivering this sermon. I bucked my editor this time and said I was happy with it and that altering the “visit” scene would gut the central conceit of the entire sermon. She eventually agreed, but still didn’t like it. I’ll chalk it up to generational difference. It might be a little too playful. Maybe this will be one of those sermons that a short time from now I’ll look at and say how did I even go into the pulpit with that!?! But right now. I still like it. It felt blessed by the gospel from the start.

This sermon had one core idea. We are made in the image of God, hence rendering unto God the things that are his includes all that we are. Very simple and very radical idea. We have an easier time getting lost in politics or sports or just the stuff of life. God isn’t there emailing you directly every day. What he send are preachers and books and friends and blessings, and they are easy enought to dodge or leave on the shelf or mistake for our work.

In that sense the sermon was like an image. You can look at it from different angles. You can ponder the image, but everything you need to know is captured very quickly. Any effect is in personal examination.

This particular sermon had very strong roots in a couple of discussions with the church community. Rita F., celebrating her 80th birthday, and in Bible study brought up a very deep question. What exactly is God? What we have been revealed as God is Jesus. Jesus said if you have seen me you have seen the Father. Trying to get go outside of that revelation gets us into the position like Job being questioned or like Paul’s pot of clay asking the potter. What we have been revealed is the image of God, the icon, Jesus. And as Christians, his is the imgage to which we are being conformed.

Caesar deserves his due as a type and shadow of that ultimate reality. Caesar points us the ultimate rule of all by God.

I’m a little late in posting this sermon. My parents came into town and the days were just too nice to waste. I was also a little conflicted about this sermon.

The primary Lutheran dynamic is Law and Gospel. What that means is short is that the law convicts the person of their sin, and the Gospel proclaims what God has done about that problem through Jesus. It is held that the good news of the gospel must predominate, but that it should always come after the conviction of the law. The central topic of the sermon was the judgement. That topic seems to me to be simultaneously law and gospel. If you are ready, the judgment is the longed for revelation and pure gospel. If you are not, the very thought of judgment strikes fear or denial. I could practice the sermon and think – this is all law – not good. I could then practice it again and say – no, correct message from the text. Ultimately, the preacher does not control how the Word is heard. Things we intend as law, may be gospel. Things that we take as pure gospel, may put the fear of God into people. Some people are just hard ground and nothing is heard as far as we can tell. How the Word is heard, how it is used/applied is the Holy Spirit.

The second reason I was hesitant is that the interpretation of the three parables together was probably complicated and maybe too cute for comfort. As I spent the last three week immursed in the three parables, the more convinced I became that the order and presentation had meaning as a unit. As much as I like stages of the christian life presented, I’m not sure that my abilities or time were enough to really address in an authentic and meaningful way.

Many are called, but few are chosen. I’m not sure that there is a more frightening phrase in the entire Bible. The Judgment is so central to Matthew’s gospel, but also just so beyond the mental props that we normally use. As the collect of the day expressed, Lord, judge us not by our fruits, but out of your mercy.

This sermon was a joy to give. One of the saying around the seminary was that the preacher has to read three books: The Bible, The Book of the Congregation and the Book of the Self. A preacher new to a congregation starts out with The Bible and hopefully the self, but never the congregation. The book of the congregation is the length of War and Peace without the cliffs notes. What complicates that as well is that with each new location the book of the self might change. In getting to see this congregation putting on the Beef on Weck, I think I got to read an important chapter in that Book of the Congregation. This was the 14th sermon given at St. Mark’s, and probably the first one that was able to weave in other themes more fairly. I’m always going to be very Biblical, that is part of who this preacher is, but the databank of congregation and the congregation and self interaction is starting to get large enough to actually not return null set.

I really like this text. I got more out of the textual study this week than most of the prior weeks. I’m wondering if that was helpful though. There were just so many linkages and promises. You could link old and new testament around the presesnce of God in the Temple and the presence of God in our lives. (Some of which made it in.) You could line Gosple to epistles with the temple made of bricks superceded by the Temple made of flesh and blood. (Some of that got in.) You could go with the Son of David motif. (Some of which got in.) You could be systematic about it and talk in three points about the different types of authority we live under and that Jesus is the authority. (This gave me the intro and the closing.) And I haven’t even got to my favorite insight from the week in connection with Acts, how in Acts 3 – 4 the same type of authority question with the same players happens, but so much is flipped, and the comparison makes so clear that Jesus is now on the throne instead of in the state of humiliation. (None of that made it in.) Usually a single line of thought jumps out at me early and I just don’t have to think about others. This week all those individual sermons were jumping around and I had to prune it down. I have a sinking feeling I didn’t do that enough.

A couple of comments thought it was good. A couple of comments noted reading other material. I have a feeling it was tougher to follow. As much as I edited and edited and tried to choose and make one coherent theme, I think the others kept intruding – which means that I was probably talking to myself as I was the only one who had the background.

Grace is strange. On a day when your head seems to be elsewhere (like forgetting to take the offering and moving it later in the service) you get a sermon that you still like. Pure grace.

Grace is just on the border of our experience. That we can recognize it seems to me a strong argument for God. Kinda like that old Police song, there has to be an invisible sun, gives its heat to every one. When the world is nasty, brutish and short, we catch a ray of grace. A glimpse of the divine economy. When the market is down and fear overwhelms and attendance is not where you’d like it, some small piece of grace seems to balance all the scales – no drives them completely out of balance. Like only underserved and unlimited grace can do.

The word cloud for this week is stark. I didn’t change anything in how it came back. Usally I’ll change the color scheme or try and get it to give me a word in a different location. This week the Black and White with Debt at so starkly contrasted to Jesus seemed correct. Out debt is rediculously large and stark, but the answer is Jesus.

In writing the presenting I had two concerns. 1) I did not address 9/11. In the past few years that would have be gross negligence in reading the context of the congregation’s life. When I learned that the twin spotlights were allowed to fade with the morning light on 9/12 this year, I thought that the commemorations had there proper ending. 2) I started in the introduction with monetary debt and relatively quickly transition to moral debt. I feared that I might have brought up uncertainty or fear without addressing it. In that I decided I paralleled the parable. It starts out as just a king settling accounts. It quickly gets to the point where we are not talking about just money or talents. After it makes that transition it doesn’t go back. The temporal points to the eternal. The eternal overshaddows the temporal. If we have eternal peace with God because He has removed those 10,000 talents of sin, then the troubles of today may not disappear, but they are put in the proper context.

Blessings on your week.

This Sunday was our Rally Day, the start of sunday school. We have a small sunday school that is just getting restarted. Some would probably say it isn’t worthwhile, but in general I think based partly on Matt 18 and a lot on other places, that is not an option of a church. The congregation that refuses to instruct its kids is building up some serious debts I’d rather not consider.

In any case, since the order of service was full, this sermon is a good page shorter than normal. The Word Cloud is interesting in that there are a whole bunch of words that end up roughly the same size. It was also interesting to me that Jesus was still on of the largest. While writing and delivering, I felt this sermon was a large amount of law and little gospel. I was concerned about that. If my training had been Reformed instead of Lutheran it would not have been as big a problem. The text for the day provided the outline. Big chunks of it were law (i.e. do this, don’t do that) from Jesus. It is very textual, but almost becuase of that I felt skewed to the law. The word cloud makes me feel better. As long as Jesus is big in the cloud, the gospel should come through louder.

Overall I got the impression that there are some real strong moments, if you tracked with the sermon, but if you didn’t it was probably rather dry. If you didn’t get the law proclamation and feel convicted, then the gospel and how we live together probably didn’t make much sense. I saw some faces that were clearly with me, and some very bored.

This was a fifth Sunday of the month and a holiday weekend, so I knew attendance would be lite. So the sermon was set within a very stripped down service. I had intended to use matins on Sunday Morning, but when I saw the attendance, I switched to the prayer service that was used on Saturday night. There would not have been the voices to sustain the liturgical songs. Lesson learned.

In regards to the sermon. I made one big mistake, I think. I always try to come up with modern and thought provoking examples. Part of the theme of the sermon was the spiritual need to take risks – that we like staying in past success or fading glory. Those risks might lead us through the cross, but they are necessary when following Jesus. As one of 4 examples of people refusing to take risks to their detriment I used a current political example. Sen. Obama gave a great speach in 2004 that even filled this cynical man with hope. And his whole campaign has been an attempt to live in a recreate the Hope of that speach. I still think it is a valid example of our tendency not to take risks to our detriment, but I get the impression that two things happened: 1) many just tuned me out after that and 2) the political reference will be the only thing remembered. I put it in there becuase: 1) I thought it was a compelling current example and 2) it was a risk in line with the theme – a series of risks that included a direct call for the congregation to find the final needed Sunday School teacher for next week. I will try my best to avoid such references in the future. It was an unnecessary risk. Lesson learned.

Given that I still feel good about the sermon, but I know I could write a better one. It might be the cumulative effect of the two lessons above, but this is the first lesson that I’ll look forward too in three years. I’ve got more ideas and thoughts and a clearer understanding of the message. Too bad there are no mulligans in preaching.