Getting Caught Up – A Very Real Event

Sermon Text: Luke 2:21 and Church Calendar festival The Circumcision and Naming of Jesus
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There were a bunch of things that were not functioning fully this past week. This post is for completeness.

If there is one thing that I wish as a preacher I could ensure that people get is that the life of Jesus is not some pious and sentimental myth. Its not just a well told story. If that is what you think, you either haven’t read it or them, or you just don’t want to, or you are satisfied with something much less than what is on offer. The foundation that the apostles proclaimed was this was truth. The core of that being that Jesus is Lord.

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Preparing the Way

Sermon Text: Mark 11:1-10, Isa 64:1,8
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It was the start of advent. The start of the season of preparing the way. With the start of a new church year we also change the gospel that we are reading. We are now reading from Mark in worship. So this sermon in the text part takes a very broad brush view of the gospel to position the action of the actual text.

We all get caught up in the sweep of movements. And there is nothing actually bad about some of the sarcastic examples I use, as long as a person’s identity isn’t based on that object or movement. When you find yourself chasing glory through some object or institution or event, you’ve gone off the path. Jesus has his disciples fetch a donkey. Jesus constantly asks his disciples to do the little things.

That is where you find the beating heart of the Christian life. In the everyday living. In living close to God and your fellow man. That is preparing the way of the Lord. The only true glory is available only by grace and through a cross. Its a narrow way. It can’t be bought, only lived.

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Steve Jobs, iPod Touch, Wedding Clothes and St. Paul

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Text: Matt 22:1-13, Philippians 4:4-13

In the human economy there can only be one Steve Jobs. If everyone took Steve Jobs’ advice the world would be a pretty miserable place pretty quickly. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t inspiring. It also points to the problem with how we look at the world and the human economy. The entire creation is God’s. He claims every last inch of it. The parts that we find sexy and glorious and the parts less so, even crosses. He is renewing all of this now groaning creation. If you find something excellent or pure or noble think on these things…practice these things…is St. Paul’s admonition. And in God’s economy, one of abundance and not scarcity, we practice right in our backyard…with our neighbor. God finds that excellent. In God’s economy there is room for many Steve Jobs.

In a more personal note or reflection, this sermon uses a significantly different outline. It is really a story interrupted format. Where I would usually use stories as illustrations within a larger frame work, in this case the story is the format with a couple of places of commentary. This happened to us this week – a reflection on Steve Jobs – here is a way to interpret that shared story in the light of God’s Word. This may sound bad, but if the preacher isn’t effected, nobody else will be. The preacher’s first audience is him or herself. Steve Jobs effected me at multiple levels. I think that might come through. It is a shorter sermon than normal – just under 1100 words instead of usually around 1400. If you didn’t get a chance this Sunday, I’d invite you to listen. But we’d also love to see you in person.

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Hope and Holiness

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If I’m looking at this sermon critically – it is too much lecture and not enough preaching. Here is what I mean by that: a lecture conveys information while preaching reaches beyond that.

The core of the text (1 Pet 3:13-22) as I read it was a summary of Peter’s argument up to this point, and a reiteration of the purpose. The argument is be holy. The longer form of that is Be Holy because you are a child of God and that is what God’s children do. The purpose – to point the glory and all eyes toward Christ.

Peter’s words are “be prepared to give a defense for the hope that is in you.” For me the summary of the hope that is in me is creeds. The creeds themselves are intellectual things. The make statements of what I take to be facts. (Non-Christians would say that make claims that are probably not facts.) But it is not that intellectual content that is the basis of my or the church’s hope. The basis is the truth that the creeds speak about – the God, Father, Son and Spirit, reigns. Hope rests not in this suffering world, or hope rests not in this ill-at-ease contentment of safety and plenty and its continuation. Hope rests in the fact that God acts and has acted and continues to act. Hope rests in the fact that the God who has acted has revealed himself not to be a harsh judge, but one moved to compassion (I’m bringing back a greek work – splagnizomai), who has his guts torn out over his world.

Our proclamation of that Hope (the church’s proclamation of that hope) is displayed in our holiness. Being prepared is not just about knowing the creed, but also about living it. And living something is always messy.

Chains of Being

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Text: 1 Peter 2:18-3:7

That title is a reference to what you might have heard as a medieval way of thinking – The great chain of being. Really it goes back to the Greeks and Romans and the ancient world. You might also have heard it referred to as the order of creation which I take as the Christian attempt to baptize the chain of being. There is a truth buried within it. God is sovereign. But natural man can’t understand that correctly. We think chain of being or order of creation and immediate jump to hierarchical org charts. We think dominion. Roman philosopher Seneca held we couldn’t make progress until “we conceived the right idea of god.” The right idea of God put forward by Peter is Jesus – the suffering servant. The one who submitted himself to our bad justice.

I preach within a denomination that holds to what the larger Christian world calls complementarian sexual roles. They hold this view largely on the basis of an order of creation. Here is the page with the various studies that have been done by the LCMS. The most recent one being the Creator’s Tapestry in 2009. Bluntly, any order of creation argument is missing the point. To derive dominion for the husband out of 1 Peter requires completely misreading and selectively quoting. (The CTCR report doesn’t look at the entire passage, nor does it put it in historical frame, it just quotes the wife/husband part.) The entire passage is a household code. That form is not an OT form but a Greek form. In the sermon I’ve quoted what some of those greek codes said from names like Aristotle, Plato and Seneca. Peter uses the form, but completely subverts it. He starts with slaves. Slaves who didn’t have any moral ability in those greek codes. Slaves would never have been addressed by a greek writer. In Christ the slave comes first because he/she is the closest model to Christ. Only then does Peter move on wives and husbands. The teaching is live holy lives of mutual submission reflecting Christ. Find that the other has more value than yourself. Uphold the society you live in where possible, Christian freedom is not to tear down society, but know that your dignity comes from God having chosen you. You are not chained in being or orders of creation instead you willfully submit to Christ, who submitted himself to the cross. Any theology or politics of dominion must meet its end at the cross.

Is Hell endothermic or exothermic?

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If you are an engineering student you’ve heard the joke that goes with that question. I like that joke. I think that joke captures a whole bunch of folk wisdom beyond just being funny.

I probably should just post this and not say much. But I’m dumb that way.

To me, what the Rob Bell Hellgate speaks to is probably less about Hell and more about how we internalize faith, or make faith our own. It is one thing to say scripture alone, but as soon as you say that, you start to realize that the scriptures are not a logical systematic textbook. They are a narrative written over millenia in different cultures and languages. And that narrative is messy. Almost every group of Christians has developed a second book to help in that interpretation. The Book of Concord is the Lutheran one. Lutherans like to use Latin. We call scripture the norma normans which means the norming norm, and the Book of Concord the norma normata which means the normed norm. Irenaeus would talk of the regula fidei (more latin) which means rule of faith. The scriptures were read with the rule of faith which we today call the Nicene Creed. A Reformed Christian would read the bible with the Westminster Catechism. A Roman Catholic Christian reads the Bible with the Papal encyclicals and canon law. I like to think of those books as guideposts. They are watersheds of wisdom that capture what a large group of Christians at a given time heard in the Biblical story. It can be real dangerous to faith to go outside of them. In the case of the Creed I’d go farther. (But even there there are two splits – the Coptic/Syrian church doesn’t accept it, the Greek church doesn’t accept the procession of the Spirit from the Son, and then there is the western church in all its forms.) Ultimately these are normed norms. Occasionally you need to test them. Occasionally the church needs to remind itself that we follow the living Christ and not a new law in whatever its form. God is his own interpreter as the Hymnwriter Cowper would put it.

What Rob Bell is doing is questioning some of the planks of those secondary books. Many would, but I don’t think he’s gone outside of the Nicene Creed. But to be honest, I’m biased. What he’s prodded at in my mind is the Reformation consensus – in something minor to a Lutheran and in something core to a Reformed Christian. He’s said the story of a forever hell doesn’t make sense with the Biblical picture of God. When the culture is cohering, nobody questions the culture’s interpretation key. It is only when things get scary, when the culture is breaking apart, that the interpretation key get looked at. And that just makes things scarier. But we shouldn’t be scared. Because we are in the Father’s hands. Compared to the Reformation itself – these are very minor questions.

The Beatitudes – Vision and Challenge

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One of the things that I am constantly amazed at is how the Church or Christianity is usually placed in the narrow, weak, small-minded, etc category. To me the simple facts are usually just the opposite. It is the church that requires disciples of Jesus to a) look up and see with eschatological or eternal eyes, b) recognize your real pitiful condition and c) look for salvation from outside yourself and d) start living that eternal reality here and now even though the kingdom has not been completely revealed. Each of those elements takes more courage and greater vision than anything those who attack the church have ever tried.

Everything the world tries to do can be condensed to getting you to narrow you focus to something you think you can control. As long as you don’t ask the big questions or get outside of a comfort range, then you can fool yourself in a high self-esteem. Christ says blessed are the poor in spirit which is point a and b. If you look up with eyes that see beyond your immediate plot you should recognize just how poor and pitiful we are. You can recognize that and run back immediately to your little plot. The Christian recognizes it and confesses it – I am a poor miserable sinner. Which takes more vision and courage – retreat into the seemingly safe self, or confession? Which is more limiting – finding yourself in within a much larger plot, or going back to your small one? The world wants you to stay so small that you don’t even think you need anyone else let alone a savior. Christianity says its hopeless absent God’s action in Christ. Which takes more courage: trying to keep everything in your own hands, or turning your very life over to someone else? And then Christ says go be merciful, be pure in heart (read as seek God first), be peacemakers. You know what happens to those kind of people in this world. But Christ says his disciples do these things. These are what my blessed people will look like.

It is one of those truisms that the world will throw at the church that only weak people need religion, or that the church is for those who are small minded. That truism is demonstrably false. It is those attempting to follow Christ, to live out their religion, that are given much larger vision and challenges. It is much easier to run back to the deceptive safety of one small plot. But running back to that small existence casts away the blessings. Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Synagogue and House – Responses to the authority of Jesus

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The gospels present everyone as recognizing the authority of Jesus. They all knew he was different. What they didn’t all do is react the same way. Luke portrays a difference in the Synagogue resposne and the response of people gathered in the house.

Our society places a high worth on work and money. So high that we have been willing to destroy or at least seriously lame our communities and social stuctures. We work 12 hour days away from where we live. When we return we don’t have the energy to do anything. So we make up words like quality time. Leaders are divorced from those ruled. Children from parents, neighbors from neighbors, family from family. All of this in the name of making a living.

If we are being honest, unless the peak oil scenarios are right and we are all forced closer to home by just being energy poor, this isn’t going to change any time soon.

Being the church will mean operating within those constraints. It also means pointing out the consequences of certain decisions. The distinctions that Luke calls out in the responses of two groups to Jesus are paradigmatic. The synagogue sits in wonder and makes reports, but fundamentally does nothing. Way too many of our churches are really synagogues. The houses respond in service and bringing all the wounded to
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A world divorced and divorcing itself from community creates a lot of wounded. The house has the cure. It may look like many of the churches are dying, but that is how God works. Things die, so that he can take the glory in bringing them back. The real choice for churches is do they want to rise, do they want to act like the house, or are they content being the synagogue and burying the dead?

The Elephant in the room…Mark 10:1-16

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This sermons subject – sexuality and specifically divorce – is a hard word in our culture. Jesus doesn’t allow it – divorce that is. Divorce is not in God’s plan. And we can’t keep that – neither in what our society formally calls marriage, nor in our sexuality that assumes marriage rights without the committment. And it is a standing judgment against us – sexual sins are those we can’t fix, are those we commit against our own bodies. Wouldn’t it be easier if Jesus was just more laid back about divorce? Go that way if you want to lose the Gospel. Marriage is how God describes his relationship with His people – and he took reconciliation all the way to the cross – no divorce indeed. We are sinners, but our God’s grace and mercy are much larger than our ability to mess it up. Trust in that faithful relationship sealed on the cross made sure at the resurrection.

Sermon – Mark 9:38-50 – Low Walls, High Standards

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People have long looked at the second grouping of these verses (Mark 9:42-50) as simply an individual warning. That reading has always caused me trouble as I either needed to treat it as completely spiritual which I don’t like, or I needed to go lopp off a hand or pluck out an eye, which I liked even less. The context of the entire segment continues from the last couple of weeks lectionary readings (Mark 9:14-37), and that is more teaching through actions to the disciples how the church (the reign of God) will function. Speaking of the church in bodily terms is not exactly unbiblical either. The first grouping of verses is clearly about how we treat those of Christ who are not of our group. This is not directed at heretics, but those who are doing good stuff (i.e. miracles! in the text) in the name of Jesus. We treat them well – maybe not join them, but definitely don’t stop them. That is the low walls portion. The church welcomes all who come in the name of Christ. This gets balanced by that second group. If someone within your tribe is causing people to lose faith – it is not good for them or the group, cut them out. This is the high standards portion and it calls for judgement. Does the crank in every congregation or synod – you know the one that is always harping on [pick the subject they don’t agree with church teaching on] – does that guy or gal cause anyone to stumble? Probably not. Does an Elder of the congregation who denies infant baptism, or a preacher who ‘sleeps around’ or worse? Probably so. Its a tricky thing to pull off in a fallen world, but that seems to be the call of the church. Low walls – welcome everyone who claims the name of Jesus. High Standards – the church stands for something. If someone disagrees and it causes people to lose faith they must be called to account or cut off. The church in that way is about reconciliation and absolution. We admit where we are wrong, but we also receive that forgiveness.

Being a little meta about this sermon – it is a tough subject. I was really afraid that this was a non-stop bore fest. It interested me and I think it is important, but not really a ‘felt need’ type of thing. It is a real need – we need to be in a church as that is where we find salvation. But the jump from felt needs to real needs is not always obvious and this tended to be very intellectual which is a code word for boring.