Rejoice! The Lord Has Made His Home With You

Biblical Text: 1 Chronicles 16:1-36

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This was the first Midweek Advent service of the season. The Theme of all of them is Rejoice! This specific one looks at a text a guarantee you have not spent time with. It is David moving the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem from Chronicles. There are lots of interesting things about this story. The sermon mentions a few of them, but it leaves those for you contemplation. Because the main addition of Chronicles in this regard is the re-worked Psalm of David. It gives us a couple of reasons to Rejoice: the works of God and the name of God. The works of God point us to who God himself is. That Ark that is moving is the summary of the works. It is the proof that God has made a home among his people. What the Tabernacle or Temple hides in the Old Testament is revealed in the New Testament when God makes his home among his people in the flesh. The incarnation of Jesus Christ.

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The King’s Peace

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Biblical Text: Luke 19:28-40

This is the first Sunday of Advent and the Gospel text is always Palm Sunday – the Triumphal Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. The theme or motif of the day is the Advent or Coming of the King. What this sermon takes up is our distance from even the idea of a King. What does it mean to have a King? What are successful Kings? And how is the Kingdom of Heaven different from all those?

The core of being a king is to reign. But there are many ways that reign is established, justified and judged. The Reign of Jesus is specific in two ways called out by the crowds. It brings peace and it brings glory to the highest. This sermon develops how we live in that peace and how we can recognize and join in the glorification.

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Thanksgiving 2024

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I keep trying to do Thanksgiving justice. I don’t think I ever really do. The sermons where I give in to just quoting old American Presidential Thanksgiving proclamations I think are better. They at least remind us of who we used to be. This sermon isn’t terrible. I think if I ever crack the sermon I want to give it is going to be something like this. It is on the difference between the glory story and the grace story. If you are telling the glory story, you can’t be in Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving only comes to those who received the grace. Part of the problem is that starting with this week the job has 4 hard deliverables a week. And you just don’t have the contemplation time. Part of the problem is that I try and limit occasional sermons (i.e. non-Sunday mornings) to 8-10 mins. Which means you can’t really develop anything. And the normal texts for the day – the 10 lepers with 1 returning to give thanks – have a whole lot else going on. This one is working more with Cain and Able and Psalm 50. That psalm is the key. I return to this theme about every 7 years to fight it out once more. This is better than the last one. Anyway. I hope you all had wonderful Holidays.

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Keep Awake

Biblical Text: Mark 13:24-37

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The last Sunday of the Church Year. The gospel reading was the second half of Jesus’ Apocalypse. It is in this part that I think Jesus is doing two things. First he is more fully answering the disciples two questions. After shocking them with the revelation that the temple would be destroyed, the disciples asked two questions. 1) When and 2) What are the signs? There is a base sense that everything Jesus says can be taken as answers to those questions. The second thing that Jesus is doing is letting that destruction of the Temple – the End of A World – stand in for the End of The World. And the reality that Jesus is revealing is that we all meet the End of A world. This sermon expands on that. Those experiences he calls the tribulation. “But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened… (Mk. 13:24 ESV).” After the tribulation comes the end. We ask for the signs in the hope of skipping or mitigating the tribulation. But that isn’t what it is for. The tribulation is there so we might learn to trust God and his faithfulness. The sermon also expands on that. Instead, how do we live in such times? Jesus ends his apocalypse with the parable. “A man is going on a journey, and he leaves his servants in charge of the house, each to his own work…”. How do we live? We do the work of the house. When Jesus says stay awake, that is what he means. The sermon also expands on this, that we might stay awake.

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Delivered

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Biblical Text: Mark 13:1-13

We are in the last two Sundays of the Church Year. The Gospel readings for those Sundays are usually given over to Jesus on the Last Days or The Apocalypse. And compared to how folk American Christianity treats the Apocalypse, a Lutheran approach is quite different. Apocalypse originally just meant a revealing, a lift in the veil. And that is what the apocalypse of Jesus does. It reveals the way of the world.

Jesus’ apocalypse always starts with the disciples pointing at the temple and the great stones. The 2nd Jewish temple was one of the wonders of the world. Their point it out is pointing out something like the tower of babel. Look at this thing that “we” did. Of course in the preceding stories that take place in the temple courts, Jesus reveals everything that those beautiful stones cover over. And the revelation to the disciples is that not one thing will be left. All of the glamour of the world, every spell it casts to distract from its sin caused rot, will be exposed and destroyed.

The sermon I said it very Lutheran. There is a law reason and the gospel reason for the revelation. And that is what this sermon explores. How the apocalypse delivers us. Delivers us from the glamour. Delivers us to the authorities. Delivers us to our callings to witness. And ultimately delivers us.

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Authority: Temporal and Eternal

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Biblical Text: Matthew 5:1-12

The day on the Church calendar was All Saints (Observed). The day on the secular calendar is election week. It is a good time to talk about the Kingdoms of the Law and the Kingdom of the Gospel. And that is what this sermon does. It first talks a bit of doctrine. What does the church teach about authority? And the basic teaching is that all authority is God given. The real question is how it is used and how it is ordered. Rightly ordered authority places the temporal under the eternal. Rightly used temporal authority is used for the love of God and the good of our neighbor. But the role of temporal authority is primarily a curb (first use of the law). The role of gospel authority is to justify and sanctify sinners.

The sermon, reflecting on the beatitudes (the gospel text for the day), then tries to draw some applications for how Christians live in the overlap of both legitimate Kingdoms. And how our hope – realized by the church at rest, those All Saints we remember – is the perfectly sanctified sitting on the throne and the joining of the Kingdoms. Not yet, but soon.

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Young and Old Meditation on Re-formation

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Biblical Text: Matthew 11:12-19

Reformation Day has been a lot of things through the years. This sermon is a bit of a clip show (a new show that relies on past clips to carry some of the action). In this case I think there are certain sermons that can be preached from the various assigned texts for the day. And they slot into how the preacher or the age wants to think about Luther and the Reformation. Young and Old is a reference to young Luther – skinny, single, revolutionary, and old Luther – heavy, husband and father, re-former. Most of the potential texts, and the choice of Oct 31st itself, prefer young Luther – the great Romantic Hero. You can pick the firebrand of the angel with an eternal gospel from Revelation. You can go with the doctrinal sermon from Romans, the text Luther claimed as his evangelical breakthrough. Or you can be the liberation theologian and take John’s gospel and the “son setting you free.” Me, I like the Matthew 11 gospel reading. It doesn’t let you just choose Romantic Young Luther. You have to contemplate actually re-forming the thing you tear down. It is the experiential text of law and gospel. Not just the doctrine, but what it means to live it. And Luther lived it. He didn’t get lucky and die the great Romantic Hero. He had to be a re-former. This sermon walks through those “clips” and tries to claim something of the Reformation for us.

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The Eye of the Needle

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Biblical Text: Mark 10:23-31

These was our “stewardship Sunday.” If you are not familiar with those, they are the Sunday that we set aside to talk money. It is budget season. We ask our members to fill out pledge cards in this season. And typically the lectionary serves up a gospel lesson that is Jesus speaking about money or mammon or the like. This year the lesson in the aftermath of the “Rich Young Ruler” which was last Sunday’s lesson. Sometimes you might choose that week, but for me Jesus teaching his disciples after that encounter is more stewardship. And it opens with his blunt statement, “how difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the Kingdom of God.” And it mostly concerns the disciples reactions.

This sermon is built around those reactions, and how they are the ditches on either side of the narrow road concerning money. It imports what I think is the first strategy around Jesus’ clear saying which is just denial that we are wealthy. There are two ways we can understand our wealth. The first is simply we are Americans, which is a relative argument. But the deeper is an understanding of providence. And that understanding sets the table for the disciple’s more subtle ways of fogging up Jesus statement.

Those ways are our natural mistaken framing of what wealth is. We take it as reward, but it really is faith challenge. The second way accepts the framing of Jesus on wealth that we are entrusted with it for Kingdom purposes, but pridefully attempts to claim heavenly credit for doing what we are called to do. The sermon develops those ditches so that we might recognize them.

It then ends with the narrow road. How the cross of Jesus is the eye of the needle.

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Foxes and Hedgehogs

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Biblical Text: Mark 10:17-22

I think this text is a hard one for us to hear because we are so far at an extreme. The key verse that jumps out is that “Jesus loved the Rich Young Rule.” The key question to ask is how did Jesus love him? What I mean by that is how did the love of Jesus manifest itself. And the answers is rather straight forward. Jesus was a good teacher. And in this man’s case that meant holding up the mirror of the law. First he hold’s up the 2nd table, what we might call the basis of ethics. But the man’s problem, the man’s idol, is not ethics. The man’s problem is God. He does not love God above all things, and he is still looking for what he must do. Man has two typical solutions to this. We either create a false law that we can keep, or we excuse ourselves from the law because we are so special and God loves us. But the love of God, what Jesus shows this man, is to hold the clear mirror of the law up. And then we can learn that we cannot free ourselves from our sinful condition. That we cannot do anything. But that Christ has done it.

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Soften Your Heart

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Biblical Text: Mark 10:2-16 (Parallel Matthew 19:1-15)

Of all the ethical teaching of Jesus, this is probably the most consistently rejected throughout all time and space. And not because it is false, but exactly for the reason Moses felt moved to regulate it – “the hardness of our hearts.” The text in Mark and the Matthew parallel are first about divorce, but in Jesus’ teaching about divorce you have his entire sexual ethic. And he doesn’t ground it in any petty legalistic scheme or regulation. Jesus is not getting pulled into our Overton Window fights. His response is so far outside of acceptable opinion that even Jesus adds the note of despair, “Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

What this sermon attempts to do is build the case for receiving it, even if it convicts us. Grounded as it is in natural law it is part of the deep magic of this world. And the law is good and wise. If we conform ourselves to this, things go better. But that is still the law. Why we should receive it, even if we cannot keep it, is because the gospel itself is unthinkable without it. Marriage is the image, the icon, that is given of Christ and the Church, of God and his people. And Christ loves the church with his steadfast love, his covenant faithfulness. We don’t want a world where God can divorce his love. And we do not have one. Receiving this teaching is receiving the invitation to the eschatological wedding feast. We may never live up to it, we might be cracked icons, but the icon is always imperfect. The perfect itself will come.

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