The early Jewish Rabbis had a method where a couple of verses or passages from seemingly disconnected placed would be brought together and examined. It would sometimes go in surprising directions. This weeks sermon felt a little like such a midrash. Being primarily a lectionary preacher, one of the goals each week is to smash together the text while being faithful to it with what is happening in life without being trite.

The lectionary is in Advent and the original herald, John the Baptist, gets his two weeks of the church year. If you sit down to read the Gospels as books and not snippets multiple times John is much more important that we think. In the Gospel of Mark, in this text (Mark 1:1-8) John announces the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And that beginning is portrayed in continuity with the past. Isaiah and the prophets tell about this beginning with a voice crying in the desert.

That gets smashed together with the contemplation of the calling of a new minister. The second part of this sermon tried to stay true to the text and to the local context. Both tied together with the call at the end for the outpouring of the spirit. A surprising blessing of a text coming from the lectionary.

Short week + tough reading + midweek preps = sermon that sounds like a lecture.

The idea still swirls in my head. I think it also still swirls in the culture. We are all faintly aware that things are not as they seem. Whether that is the sci-fi’ish stuff, or the game of shadows with terrorists or a market losing 40% in a month. If all was as it seemed, then why the corrections? Why would the next President who campaigned on immediate end to Iraq keep the Sec of Def of the despised outgoing administration?

One path is the fever swamps of paranoia and conspiracy theory – don’t go that way. The other path is to realize what the Bible says – we contend not against flesh and blood, but agaist the powers and dominions of the spiritual world. It may look like we are helping a homeless persons, but we are really giving aid to Christ. It may look like we are rich, but we are spiritually poor. It may look like we have everything figured out, and tonight our souls are demanded of us. That slight sense of things are not what they seems is a natural revelation. It should lead us to the written revelation in God’s Word – The Bible. In His Word we find everything we need to know for salvation. The last layer of that is that the only view that really matters is that of the Father which has been revealed to us in the Son, Jesus Christ.

Tough stuff to think about let along act on. Nobody else might be, but I’m glad we left the litany in as the prayer, that we spent more time in prayer. That prayer is incredibly centering. When the sermon was just not up to snuff, the liturgy can be given the load to carry. That prayer carries a huge load.

Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday. It usually meant that serious deadline harvest work was done – so Dad might actually be around. It also was just a simple holiday – a turkey, lots of food, some family, some cards and a football game. I guess it felt like a national day to exhale.

We’ve put some distance between that and us. The marketing machine has moved Christmas up – “Black Friday” nips right on the heals of Thanksgiving. Many families live long distances appart. The 100+ person family gatherings of my childhood are long gone. I can’t help but think that some of the distance we put between ourselves and our families is a reflection of the distance between us and God. Part of the mirror of the law.

But thanksgiving is still called for, becuase Jesus has bridged that distance. The thankful leper came running to Jesus’ feet after he was healed. The gap between us and God has been bridged. We can maintain that distance, like the other 9 lepers and run off to the priests – stay with the law, but we also can give thanks for the Gospel. That distance does not have to grow wider.

Stewardship sunday is always a tough one. One of the toughest things is that the minister is asking for support which in a small congregation often primarily goes to his salary. (Many people/minister might disagree with that statement, but practically they are fooling themselves. Stewardship is almost always heard as a gage of confidence in the current leadership.) The second thing is that the Word on money is actually pretty clear…and most households aren’t there. In fact most households, unlike say being good to your neighbor, might take issue with the Word on this. In a stewardship sermon there is a Scylla and Charybdis. On the one side you can just plain create guilt without pointing at the gospel. On the other side is a large amount of false hope – both the prosperity gospel kind and the no 3rd use of the law kind. The temptation to not be faithful, but to just steer toward a nice easy sermon is tremendous.

I’m glad to say I saw some grins and chuckles – a good sign for cheerful giving. In this sermon I gave the stewardship sermon I always wanted to hear. I hope it was honest and at the core cheerful.

I do owe a big debt in this serman to a Lutheran minister from Seattle. Here and especially here are a couple of sermons that helped me think through this sermon. I debated attributing them in the sermon itself, but I decided against it. Ultimately, while they helped me a great deal, the words interpreting the Word were mine. If this was a school paper footnotes would be required, but oral delivery is all or nothing. And he also went to many places I just didn’t. That is the great thing about the website. I can add a footnote where required.

There is a saying that I picked up from a couple of sources – the sermon is first preached at the preacher. If it is to be effective, it has to move preacher’s heart and mind. My study this week did that to me. I hope a little of that made it into the sermon. Unfortunately I have a feeling that this was written more for reading than speaking. I was treading on the subject of money and risk – something that I do have those 10,000 hours invested to understand at a deep level. (It was the parable of the talents.) It was also treading on the subject of living eschatologically. That is a two dollar seminary word for living in the knowledge of how it all works out. Moving from just a statement of belief in the resurrection (as we say in the creeds) and to a practical figuring it out the implications in this world is the core of living the Christian life. It was a great topic, but I’m not sure I found the right ways to express it. Providentially it is a major biblical topic, so I’ll have more chances to rack up those 10,000 hours to have a deep knowledge about what I’m talking about.

I have a feeling this sermon might have been like the hymns we sang in the service. I enjoyed them, but it was a guilty pleasure picking some of them. In the same way I liked this sermon. I felt really good about it before giving it. I still think there are some very good things about it, but it didn’t connect in the way I thought it might. The entire service was probably perfect for a congregation circa 1948, but it might have asked too much in its atmosphere and mood. Preparation and acknowledgment of our own day and hour are not topics that our culture does not want to talk about. We celebrate the natural – the person who doesn’t have to prepare. Preparation implies sacrifice and prioritization. We want it all. Our final day and hour also flies in face of the culture. It still amazes me that the generation that started with ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’ never really flipped that. The natural progress would have been for people to grow up and flip that emphasis – over becomes under. Instead one of the financial firms I can’t remember which one just upped the age. 60 years olds still want to be associated with 20 year olds. A fundamental denial of the day and the hour. A denial of a need for preparation. Yet if preachers don’t pay attention to the end of things we miss the great hope of the resurrection. Jesus becomes just another self-help alternative.

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.