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.

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.