Sanctified Freedom or how finance is a great school of the law


Biblical Text: John 17:11-19
Full Text – note, I deviated more from this text than I typically do.

Here is the question you need to ask yourself – are we bound creatures needing freedom, or largely free creatures needing strict guidelines?

How you answer that question will determine how you hear (or don’t hear) the gospel.

The stories come from the papers and the world of finance. The bottom line, the fact that everything can be reduced to a number and measured, and the relentless pressure to turn in a specific number drive home the lessons of the law and how we are all bound to unobtainable expectations. Only in Christ by the power of the Spirit are we free to produce real fruit.

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Christian Marriage


Biblical Text: John 15:9-17
Full Text of Sermon

Finding poignancy in pop songs is pretty tough. Lady GaGa flirts with it before retreating to camp and a great bass line. There are the ever so earnest indies. The ingenues like Adele whose combine the virtues of youth and a healthy supply of talent, but that usually doesn’t age well. Something close to of the moment (I’m a pastor with three young kids, so cut me a little slack) – “somebody that I use to know“. One of the pop lines that has stuck with me is from Matchbox 20’s Real World. The Chorus, after having the singer imagine that he’s rainmaker, sings about the real world – “Please don’t change, please don’t break. The only thing that seems to work at all is you.” I remember thinking when I first heard it that the song feels the fallen world. A bunch of people looking for something that works knowing that everything eventually breaks.

That is where the orthodox understanding of marriage comes in. Everything in this fallen world breaks: towers and titans, marriages and friendships, toys and trinkets. And when we move past bargaining- “Please don’t break” we move toward acceptance, at least if pop psychology is correct. Acceptance in the realm of marriage looks like what we have – a landscape full of people that we used to know, maybe even those living with us.

But acceptance is not the endpoint of the Christian story. We might accept that things break, but not for the purpose of excusing them or making the brokenness normal. If we say the brokenness is normal, we lose the gospel. Instead we teach repentance – I’m broke. And we teach restoration – Christ makes all things new.

In regard to marriage we could teach acceptance, but that is what Moses did, that is what the law does. And the law permits divorce. In this day and age it is permitting a whole bunch else as well. But Jesus didn’t teach that. If he did, we wouldn’t have the cross, because that is what Jesus did for his bride the church. And you don’t do the cross if there is another way out. We are broken. We live in a broken world. But Christ was not. Jesus fulfills the covenant that marriage is a glimpse of. The bridegroom shares 100% of himself with his bride. The crucified one is the only thing around here that works.

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Roses, vines and tools


Biblical Text: John 15:1-8
Full Text of Sermon

“I am the true vine…remain in me.” That is the core of the text. As I say in the sermon reflecting on the seven I am saying of Jesus in John, I am the true vine and my Father is the vine dresser to me is the more complex or deepest. Unlike say the good shepherd which makes immediate intuitive sense, or the bread of life which also has a real referent, we know vines and vine dressers, but applying it to humans and the Christian life quickly gets tough.

What I try to do here is trace out a matrix of Biblical meaning and I throw it against an episode of my personal life. Writing and delivering sermons is a process of reading and proclaiming three different things. The biblical text is of primary importance. It has something to say that is for all people. But the congregation and the preacher also need to be read. A perfectly fine sermon for Saint John the Divine parish might be horribly wrong for Saint John the mundane. Likewise there can be perfectly orthodox sermons given by Pastor Emo that given by Pastor Study would be false. That is why we hold the Sermon to be God’s Word for the people of that time and place. It is also why the sermon is a spoken form.

I can’t really describe this one beyond saying I think you’d have to listen to it.

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The Good Shepherd – Reflection on Vocation in Our Lives

Biblical Text: John 10:11-18
Full Sermon Text

The jumping off point for this sermon was Jesus’ statements on being the good shepherd. The way John writes about it, in modern terminology, Jesus is defining his job requirements. If you want to be the Good Shepherd this is what is required: intimate knowledge of the sheep and laying down your life for them. And Jesus truly is the Good, in all its philosophical meaning (closer to model), Shepherd. And Jesus fulfilled and continues to fulfill that vocation: Cross, Sending of the Spirit, Sacraments. He knows his people so intimately that his Spirit resides in them. He gave up his life for them and continues to supply his body and blood. All the eternally important stuff, the defeat of Satan, the world and even our sinful nature has been accomplished by the Goodness of Christ.

What does that mean for us? Well, we also have been called to a variety of vocations: Son, daughter, husband, wife, employer, employee, elder, trustee, councilman, maybe even banker and politician. Being in Christ we are called to be a good one. In the Lutheran tradition, vocation is a large concept. We all have our vocations. What is in front of us is our vocation. And it is rooted in how our Lord carried his vocation. Our life flows from the Christology, it flows from Christ himself.

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Bad Religion

Biblical Text: John 20:19-31
Full Text of Sermon

The 2nd commandment (3 commandment if you are Reformed) is about respecting the name of God. The 1st petition of the Lord’s prayer is that the name for God would be holy. The 1 article of the Augsburg Confession is “On God”. The first thing the church post the apostles wrestled with was the creeds which are verbal ways of nailing down just who this God is – Father, Son and Spirit. The church seems flooded with bad religion. And bad religion starts with a poor conception of God. Usually a conception warped by our reason. Either reason twisting revelation to its design, or reason using a great filter to only let in what it desires.

And that Bad Religion is tragic because we always filter out the gospel. The God we worship – Father, Son and Spirit – comes to us, reveals himself, abides with us, and won’t let go. The revealed God, revealed most fully in Jesus Christ, is the one who brings peace. Its those things we lose when we go looking for a God to take His place.

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Bird Girl, Grace and the Moral Calculus

Sermon Text: Mark 10:35-45
Full Text of Sermon

We do it all the time. We weigh all kinds of stuff searching for the fair or the just. Think of Bird Girl nearby as a pretty artistic expression of the human striving after the moral calculus. Grace scrambles that. There is no fair with grace. The equation never balances when grace is in the picture. I think that is the core of what Jesus is saying is today’s text. This is not so among you – you are to be servants. Servants always get the short end of the stick. Why would Jesus say that? Because the economy of the Kingdom is grace. Most importantly the grace of the Father. And grace is an all or nothing proposition. Either Father, into you hands I commit my spirit, or its all crap.

There were a bunch of reasons I cut it short this morning, but I had a short coda/conclusion which is primarily Psalm 49. I don’t know how this psalm never jumped out at me, but it captures the either/or, at its deepest and more forlorn, grace comes in, and it doesn’t take much to unbalance the equation. If you want a little more poetic a take, read the last page of the full text.

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Avoiding the Anonymous God

Biblical Text: JOhn 3:14-21
Full Text of Sermon

Defeated by John again. A little honesty, I’m pretty sure this was a muddled mess. Why oh why when Ephesians 2:1-10 was sitting right there, ripe for the preaching…but no, I have to pick John. Lured in by the same trap of an idea that looked ripe. There is always an idea with John. The problem is the there is always more than one idea from John. And Saturday afternoon, while 15 seeds are beating 2 seeds, you are trying to edit things down and put some structure on the mess. And Sunday morning you are just in prayer – “God this one is a stupendous mess, I know it is all you anyway, but this one is going to have to be ex nihilo – cause I’ve got nothing.”

Anyway, what I was attempting to make real and meaningful was two points:
1) You can’t take John 3:16 without John 3:14-15. The ground of John 3:16 is the cross. Otherwise you end up with an anonymous loving god who looks somewhat sad or pathetic. {Akin to saying, God loves you you mutts, now earn it. An amazingly bad evangelism method and very bad theology.}
2) When you ground John 3:16 in the context, you have a strong proclamation of the sovereignty of God and the doctrine of election. That should make John 3:16 all the more meaningful for believers as it has nothing to do with our reaction. God’s love is on the basis of God. And God will make it so. The believer’s works are good because they are in God (John 3:21). If no one believed, He would still have taken the cross. In John the cross is not an atonement act but THE SIGN, the revelation and act of God.

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And They Remembered

Biblical Text: John 2:13-22
Full Sermon Text

The text is the cleansing of the Temple. It is an episode that is in all four gospel. Words from it end up at the Sanhedrin trial of Jesus. In Matt/Mark it is the proximate cause or fig leaf for convicting Jesus. In John it is moved to the front – the first action by Jesus of his public ministry – for theological reasons. All that is to say that the Scriptures view this as important. The indictment of Jesus is that the people have turned His Father’s house into a marketplace. It was easier to make God a transaction.

I have to say that much of American church life can feel like that at times. That sometimes it is just easier to pay the temple tax than to carry the cross.

Where does renewal start? “The disciples remembered…and they believed the scriptures and the word that Jesus had spoken.” The disciples remember. The sheep hear his voice. The new temple is a temple of living stones. A temple cleansed in the blood of Jesus. A temple where the sacrifices are the broken and contrite heart. The renewal…the life starts by being deep in that word.

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Temptation…the terrible feeling of aloneness

Biblical Texts:Mark 1:8-15, Gen 22:1-18, James 1:12-18
Full Drafft of Sermon

The first Sunday in Lent. All the texts are about testing or temptation. And If you are listening it is hard to read the testing of Abraham and then read James right after it. There would seem to be a contradiction, and its about something as important as the nature of God. Does God test/tempt? James says don’t say that God does. Abraham is told by God to take Isaac. Jesus is thrown into the desert by the Spirit. Luther, he of calling James an epistle of straw, sides with James in the Catechism. “God tempts no one.”

I think that is something that gets held in tension. Its something we probably don’t see clearly right now. And the overwhelming feeling felt in the texts and often in out lives is of being alone or being abandoned. We might have to live in the tension in the difference between the words testing and temptation, or that awful dodge God allows but doesn’t cause, but the feeling of being alone can be resolved. God has been abundant in his mercy so that you are never alone. The specifics on that are in the sermon…

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The Christ must include the Cross – Mountain to Mountain

Biblical Text: Mark 9:1-10
Full Text of Sermon

We create fancy ways of talking about the reality of suffering – like the theology of the cross. If you think words are a bloodless way, there are less attractive ways. Like gated communities, or social darwinism or government programs that can make us feel like we are doing something but really just make us feel better and insulate us from suffering. But those fancy ways of talking at least confront reality.

But at the end of the day, the best teacher is an example. Christ is the ultimate example. He left the mountain of transfiguration for mount Calvary. You don’t get the Christ without the cross. Even more important to recognize those we know personally who have lived the theology of the cross. This sermon tries to point that out. We at St. Mark’s had an example in our midst. Our organist who we memorialized Saturday. This sermon attempts to make concrete what the theology of cross looks like.

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