God Passes By

Biblical Text: Mark 6:45-56

The text is the Markan account of calming the storm and walking on the water. There are multiple accounts like this, but Mark’s is unique. It isn’t about Peter getting out of the boat. It is really about Jesus getting into the boat. In this sermon there are two words from the key phrase that I think need sharpened up. The first is how the disciples are described. “making way painfully” misses both the origin of the word which is in testing the purity of precious metal and misses how the word is normally used as torture. The disciples rowing int the 4th watch against the wind is a test or torture. And Jesus means to pass the by. Means is just too squishy. He desired, a much deeper word. The combination is a tough saying. But it is in the toughest saying that we often find the sweetest gospel. This sermon meditates on that.

Liminal Time

There is a word I love – liminal. Yes, nobody knows what it means. Or, you all do, just not as that word, but as a gut feeling. It means a sensory threshold. A liminal sound would be one that you can barely hear.  A liminal vision is that one just on the horizon.  But my favorite use, and probably its most common use, is in regards to things of the Spirit. A liminal space is that sense of walking on holy ground, or the other way might be “walking past the graveyard.” A liminal time is usually only noticed in hindsight. My middle child is in something of one right now in college applications.  As an old guy I can recognize it.  For him, it just expresses itself as procrastination. That’s a common way to know you are in a liminal state, you procrastinate.  You are trying to stay in the known, not willing to give way to the unknown just yet.  Liminal states are necessarily scary, because what is on the other side is unknown or at least unexperienced.

Advent for me has always been a liminal time.  The old year is passing away; the new thing is coming.  You have things like congregational meetings.  You prepare budgets. Officers are renewed.  In the church year sense the old has already passed away, but Advent is a strange season even on the church calendar.  It was added as a season of preparation for the staggering mystery of the incarnation.  Sometimes that preparation was penitential.  John the Baptist appears twice in Advent with his calls to repent and warnings about what is to come. I often try to imagine what a John the Baptist would look like today and usually fail to come up with anything convincing.  The Baptist is a liminal figure proclaiming things are about to change dramatically, repent in preparation. That penitential sense is usually captured in the purples of the season.  But the liminal nature of Advent to me is not so much about those purples, which are constant in this life, as about the blues. They are the blues of right before dawn.  It is still night, but the sun is just below the horizon.  As we sang at the end of last Sunday, “The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns.”

And that is what the historic text for the first Sunday of Advent shows us, Jesus on Palm Sunday entering Jerusalem.  Anytime the King arrives it is a liminal space because the King has absolute authority. His word is law.  But approaching the King is always scary because you don’t know the ruling.  But that is part of why Jesus presents himself twice.  The first time humbly, riding a donkey.  The first time toward the cross, which addresses all our sins, so that we know the judgement.  The second time to set us free.  To set us free from those sins that still encumber us.  To set us free from our fears of this liminal space.

Advent is the season we ponder living in a liminal space. Knowing and seeing what is on the horizon – the judgement and the New Jerusalem, the King arriving in power not grace. Yet, that dawn is not yet.  Today is still the day of grace. Today the King still comes humbly, as a little child, as that knocking at your heart.  It is a liminal space that says “repent and believe, for you salvation comes quickly.” A liminal space that reminds us “all idols than shall perish and Satan’s lying cease, and Christ shall raise his scepter, decreeing endless peace.” A Great and Mighty wonder lies just beyond this liminal time.   

From Heaven Above (A Shepherds and Angels Children’s Pageant)

Today was our Children’s Pageant. The pageant this year was built around the hymn “From Heaven Above to Earth I Come”. That is LSB 358 is you would like to see all 15 verse by Luther. The recording here is my homily introducing the kids followed by the children’s songs and sayings. The photos are parson’s wife’s as I didn’t get a chance this year (thank you!). They did an outstanding job. Lend and ear and a voice if you would like to sing along.

Truly, Truly, I Say to You

Biblical Text: John 10:1-10
Full Sermon Draft

The text is the fascinating precursor to the “good shepherd” passages. In the context, precursor is the wrong word because the first 6 verses of John 10 are the basis. Verses 7 through 10 are an expansion or a change of emphasis. The good shepherd verses are elaborations on these initial “truly, truly” sayings. What this sermon attempts to do is meditate on those sayings. It asks the confirmation question “what does this mean” about the structure. After answering is examines three things: a) how God acts in this world as explained by the parable, b) our duty after “hearing the voice” and c) what Jesus means by abundant life. I think this is a rather thick sermon, but worth a listen

A Great and Mighty Wonder

Biblical Text: John 1:1-14
Key Hymn: A Great and Mighty Wonder, LSB 383
Full Sermon Text

Maybe it is just getting older, but two things I experience daily that a younger man wouldn’t think could happen together. It could just be becoming set in my ways, but that isn’t how I experience it. Daily I am more convinced both of basic Christian doctrine and also with specific Lutheran doctrine. I’m a contrarian by nature. It is the last thing I would have expected. At the same time as becoming more sure of that doctrine, I’m becoming less militant. What I mean by that is while I can’t imagine something that forces a rethink on Augsburg Confession doctrine, I’m also much more willing to say with Paul “and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. (Phil 3:15-16)” We are all straining toward a goal we have not attained. I save my militancy for those situations where I see people deliberatively leaving the narrow way, and those tempting them off it.

A Great and Mighty Wonder is my favorite Christmas hymn. It helps that it is set to Es IST Ein Ros (Lo, How a Rose is Blooming), but that isn’t everything. When you understand a little of the life of the writer it becomes all the more powerful. This sermon hopefully proclaims the savior’s birth, reflected through St. Germanus, while living in the eschatological hope. Germanus’ life is a life that is incomprehensible outside of doctrine. It is also one that understands how that doctrine itself can deny the hope that is only Christ. His hymn is a moving meditation moving to the great hope when all idols – seen and unseen – shall perish and satan’s lying cease. And Christ shall raise his scepter, decreeing endless peace.

Gold Bricks, Rotting Corpses and Dead Phone Lines…

Text: Mark 9:30-37
Full Sermon Draft

That title or the graphics might be a little macabre, but just give a listen (or a read). Every now and then you come across a story that has meaning beyond the simple facts. That’s what happened here.

Stories of Flesh and Blood

Text: Ephesians: 2:11-22
Full Draft of Sermon

Had one of the best comments possible I think – a 4 year old at McDonald’s after service commented on the sermon.

The stories in the world today – especially in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting – are stories of alienation and loss. They are stories of searching. Sometimes finding. Sometimes not and remaining lost. Those stories play with a deep truth. Sin alienates. It is the cause and the manifestation of our lostness. The artists and the church actually agree on the diagnosis, but they disagree on the prescription. The church actually has an answer. It is found in the incarnation…in the flesh and blood of Christ.

Christmas – We know incarnations when we see them…

wordle
Full Text

Christmas. One of the two days of the year that you have to have a good message. (The other is mother’s day by the way. On Easter you are preaching to the congregation anymore. On Christmas and mother’s day you still get a chance to preach to the unconverted.) On top of being good, it has to be short. On top of being short it has to carry off a tone. Film makers do this by shooting specific places and then blurring or making crisp the picture. For example, if they want to paint a tragically romantic scene they might take a picture of a late autumn forest and blur it a bit. The same spot made crisp might convey instead of tragic romance a lurking dread. 10 seconds of such a picture sets the tone.

The audience is probably coming into the service either exhausted, angry, nervous, lonely, or annoyed. That is what we do to ourselves around Christmas. And the service in that frame of mind is one more thing to get through. The goal of the Christmas sermon (and the entire service) is to take people from that negative place, and to move them to a much different view of Christmas. To admit that this state I’m feeling right now is a result of how messed up the world actually is because of sin, and to rest in the fact that God has provided a savior. The tone should be one of a giant exhale.

This sermon didn’t pull punches. That is usually what the Christmas sermon does. It forgets the law. It goes along with the culture and the charade of a perfect Christmas. It talks of love and warm fuzzies, but without acknowledging the real state of people’s minds and why they are that way. That sermon fuzzes out the bad stuff and because of that can satisfy at the moment but is without merit. It is complicit is painting the Christ out of Christmas. This one didn’t pull those punches, but hopefully balanced it out with the gospel.