Advent Experiences

Biblical Text: Isaiah 64:1-9

It is the first Sunday of Advent. I typically use the traditional text for the Gospel lesson of the day, the Triumphal Entry or Palm Sunday. All the best Advent hymns for the day are keyed to that text. The story being told is the welcoming of the King. But I chose the Old Testament text to preach from today. This text is from the “third Isaiah” which I simple think of as the portion the prophet addresses to the those who have returned from exile yet find the experience not what was hoped for.

Isaiah’s plea feels like the plea of all those who believe they have the answers but are ignored. “Would that you would rend the heavens and come down.” It is not the lament of unbelief, nor is it the prayer of those persecuted. It is the cry of the dismissed. It is the ask of those more zealous for the Lord than maybe the Lord himself. Think Joshua running to Moses about Eldad and Medad. Or James and John seeking fire from heaven on a volunteer disciple. The plea is not in itself sinful, but we should examine our motivations. Do we desire God’s presence that we might be proved right over our enemies? Or do we desire it for the sake of His promises? This sermon meditates on faith, the promises of God and our desire to seem them in power.

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I, I Myself Will Rescue

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Biblical Text: Ezekiel 34: 11-16, 20-24 (Matthew 25:31-46)

This was the Last Sunday of the church year. In the wordle picture over the last few weeks I’ve been making the green (the color of the season) darker and starting to bleed in the blues and purples of Advent. The Last Sunday is given over to the contemplation of Christ the King and more specifically the judgement. That is the Gospel lesson. But in this sermon I wanted to jump off of the Old Testament text from Ezekiel. The gospel message is clearer. God himself sets out to save. The picture in Ezekiel is the sheep of God – the people of Israel – who have been abused in every way possible by their leadership of every stripe such that they have been scattered. God himself promises to be the Shepherd and retrieve them from everywhere they have been driven. The sermon meditates on how this has been fulfilled and what remains by faith.

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Thanksgiving 2023

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Thanksgiving is an interesting holiday. It is very close to the bone of the religious impulse, yet it is not on the church calendar, but declared by the civil magistrate. The US has a long history of those declarations. This sermon listens to parts of a couple of them and their wisdom in line with Moses to the Israelites (Deuteronomy 8:1-10) about to cross the Jordan and Jesus to the 10 lepers he had just healed (Luke 17:11-19).

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Starting from Nothing?

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Biblical Text: Mathew 25:14-30

I’m endlessly fascinated with the parable of the talents. It puts forward some obvious truths, that our society rejects, in passing. It’s main comparison – the one the entire judgement is based upon – is something that we miss because we take it as obvious, but then don’t observe how we act. A couple of those obvious truths: 1) God is not about fairness. “He gave to the servants according to their ability.” 2) With what it given to us we have absolute discretion. God is much freer in how he entrusts than we ever are. 3) What God entrusts is never a small amount. Even the least servant got a full talent, a stupendous sum. I think those three truths might form our typically brief against God. He’s not fair; He’s not present to help; He hasn’t given us enough to work with.

And that brief against God, when you get people being honest, is what leads to the parable’s real comparison. The first two have faith in their master’s judgement. The last servant views his master as a hard man and stingy. It isn’t really the performance of the first two measured in money that gets praised. The master doesn’t take any of it back and in fact says “you’ve been faithful in little, I will set you over much.” In the sermon I take this roughly as “you’ve been faithful in this short sinful life, I will give you eternal life.” It’s the faith in the judgement displayed in their actions, not the absolute return. The last servant thinks what has been given – this life – is a complete set up. That the master is out to get him no matter what. The picture of God is of an ogre. When of course the revelation of God is Christ, on the cross, for us.

Real pagans I think tended to be much more honest. They did their sacrifices more to keep the gods far away from them. Running into a pagan god never went well for the human. They were ogres. (And well according to Paul they were demons, so…). I think our society has that view, but you have to scratch off the veneer. The veneer we have is that “of course God is good.” Of course we define good as nice. The first time we think God is unfair or doesn’t show up, the brief against God comes out. In some ways the modern church in what it teaches forms people into the servant with 1 talent. When what Jesus wants us to see is the stupendous nature of the grace that has been given. You have life. You have this life right now. You have the promise of eternal life. “The joy of your master.” God is the lover of mankind. He has set you up to succeed. Yes, not is the way we often define success, but in the way God does – the following of Christ, his son.

Anyway, this is getting as long as the sermon which is a meditation on these themes of life given to us, and our response.

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Lamplighters

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Biblical Text: Matthew 25:1-13

This parable – the 10 Virgins “all trimming their wicks” – is one that most modern Lutherans preachers hate I bet. At least if they are being honest about where their theology is at. I make a split at modern, because Luther himself had no trouble preaching its clear message. Its clear message, the clear message of all the end times sermons, is that sanctification is something that we are part of. The wedding feast? We don’t have anything to do with that. Jesus has paid the bride price and has prepared a place. Our justification is by grace alone in Christ alone. But Jesus consistently says “watch” or “prepare”. And the reason is that we can lose our salvation. In this sermon we can get so lost in the things temporal that we lose the things eternal. We become overcome with worldliness and forget to bring the oil. Because the one thing we know is that we don’t know when the Bridegroom comes. Making a quick trip to Wal-Mart won’t be an option. Have you lived the Christian life, or not? To many modern Lutheran ears that sounds like a betrayal of gospel. It isn’t. The betrayal is in not living it. In not preparing.

Recording note: the recording is an after the fact re-recording. Something happened with our recording system and the live version couldn’t be used.

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The Alpha and the Omega

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Biblical Text: Revelation 7:2-17

In the Church Year the Day was All Saints (Observed). What is a saint is a little bit different from one tradition to the next. The Roman Catholic tradition a saint is only someone that the Papacy has recognized as “experiencing the beatific vision” (i.e. we know they are with God and not in Purgatory or Hell because reasons.) So All Saints becomes a catch-all feast of the recognized saints whose own day has not been celebrated. No other tradition has a formal recognition process. The Orthodox, Saints are first the martyrs, and then those recognized by public acclimation and what used to be called “the cult of the saints.” Protestants, including Lutherans here, use the term closer to how it is used in the bible meaning all the faithful. One of Luther’s slogans is simul justus et peccator, at the same time saint and sinner. That really describes us – the Church in Warfare. Or following the text of the day, the church in the midst of the great tribulation. The church at rest no longer has that problem with sin. What All Saints becomes in the Lutheran tradition is a celebration or remembrance first of those who have recently died in the faith but also of the great cloud of witnesses in general.

This sermon and the text from Revelation is a look at that great cloud from two directions: the beginning and the end – the alpha and the omega. John’s vision is a vision of All Israel, all believers in all times and all places. The first part is the sealing by God of his own before time. The last part is the outcome of that sealing at the end of the age. The time in between is the tribulation, the time under the cross. What Revelation does so well is comfort. Yes, we are in the tribulation. But you have been sealed by God in the blood of Christ, and he will bring you through it.

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Always Reforming

This was originally a sermon given to a gathering of Circuit Visitors – the middle layer of ecclesial oversight. I tended not to post occasional services (funerals, weddings, etc.) or sermons given for occasions outside the congregation when my website was the congregation’s explicitly. But the slogan Always Reforming comes up almost every Reformation Day. And I think I did a decent job in this sermon thinking through that. So I’m posting it today. Two warnings: 1) The audience it was prepared for was a bunch of CVs, so there are things that I might explain more fully on a normal Sunday that I just assume here. 2) I’m also much more free in this sermon than I might be otherwise because the audience is a trusted one doctrinally. What do I mean by that? I’m trying to push beyond cliches.

The Biblical Texts were: Mark 9:49-50, Numbers 18:8-20, Rev 2:1-7

The introduction (the full text is in the file).

When I first saw the theme of the conference – “Forever Reforming” – I was intrigued. I was intrigued because I immediately thought of semper reformanda, the Reformed slogan, or maybe I should say the neo-Reformed slogan. My time at Grove City – Calvinist Hot Bed – would tell me that it goes back to the late 1600. More recently is comes from Karl Barth, and through Barth it even found its way into the Second Vatican Council document Lumen Gentium. Depending upon your church politics, I’ve probably either just hit every bogeyman, or every hero of the past 400 years.

The phrase at the level of common sense is obviously true. Even God moved from Hebrew to Greek. Part of that word given to us says that the Spirit will guide you into all truth. Being creatures that reflect the image of a creator God, we are constantly creating. And in creating also destroying. And in all that change, the church itself changes.

The real question, the church political heat, is how and what changes. Call me crazy, join the line that I’m sure is forming to come get me, I don’t think you can read Luther deeply and not realize he was more comfortable with more change – at least in theory – than we probably are. A good place to start in that if you are interested is to read Dr. Robinson on Luther’s essay On the Councils of the Church. But at the same time that Luther is more open to Forever Reforming, I think it is fair to say that Luther is much more intransigent about a subset of things. This is the guy who banged on the table about the word “est”…

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Reformation Conundrums

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Biblical Text: Romans 3:19-28

Reformation Sunday in a Lutheran congregation can have three flavors. Vanilla is a simple celebration. We assume that everyone knows the greatness and key points of the Reformation. We just celebrate it. Chocolate is to complicate that celebration. You do that by asserting that we don’t know it or we’ve lost the Reformation script or something about it is no longer relevant. This sermon has at least a scoop of Chocolate. Strawberry is the last and a little rarer flavor. It is an attempt to make us feel Luther’s anfechtung, his problem with sin and righteousness. If you can do that, you don’t have to worry about he Chocolate, because it is immediately relevant. This sermon is an attempt at a lot of strawberry. It is an attempt to rip away the veils of the age that hide the same problems Luther wrestled with. They are there. Our veils just worked for a while. So do the veils of the Papacy for a while before Luther.

The primary veil that we depend upon can be summarized in the word acceptance. We treat acceptance as the gospel, when it is no gospel at all. Acceptance doesn’t desire or achieve righteousness. It just overlooks sin. The Gospel is absolution. The sin is no more because we have been given the righteousness of Christ. This sermon attempts to take off the veil and encourage the reception of righteousness from outside ourselves.

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LWML Zone Rally Sermon

Text: Psalm 33

Introduction

When I was originally told that the LWML zone rally was here, I was asked for a verse and a theme for an opening devotion.

No problem I say to myself. I’ll do the evangelical thing. Open the bible to the concordance, look for one word that feels good and can support a portals of prayer length opening, and shamelessly rip that verse out of context.

Then Deb tells me about 2 weeks ago, “oh, no Pastor, its an opening worship service.”

Ok, look at the fuller context of Psalm 33. Oh, I might have chosen differently…

Gospel in the Text

How many of you have a “junk drawer” in your house? Is it the first place you look or the last? I guess that falls under the “there are two types of households…”. Ours is a last place house. You run around opening every other drawer and when you don’t find what you a looking for, cursing under your breath that it’s not where it should be, you open the junk drawer. Saying a quick prayer that it is like Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement. And mystically, out of the last place, what you need is found.

The Psalmist opens up telling us to “shout for joy to the LORD!” Why?

Because the earth is full of his steadfast love.
Because by the word of the LORD the heaven were made and the deeps put in their place
Because the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.

Surely God has placed everything in its correct drawer. And we know exactly where those correct drawers are. Right?

“The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples.” Oh.

Ok. So that steadfast love isn’t found in nations and peoples. But maybe it is found in the pride of place draw. The corner one with a glass front that shows off the impressive things.

“The King is not saved by his great army, a warrior is not delivered by his strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation.”

Oh, that steadfast love isn’t there in that drawer either. So where is it?

“Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love.”

God places that steadfast love where we least expect it. In those who fear Him. In those whose soul waits. In those who hope. In the junk drawer of the world.

You get a picture of an early junk drawer in the Acts reading. That early church was going to where they thought they’d find ears. “They were scattered after the martyrdom of Stephen, but spoke the word to no one except Jews.” Surely the steadfast love of God is in this drawer, his chosen people.

“But some of them spoke to the Hellenists, preaching Jesus. And the LORD was with them.”

And who does Barnabas get? He goes to Tarsus to look for Saul. The guy who had been part of the persecution. The guy who had shown up with a crazy story of meeting Jesus on the road. But everyone was afraid of him. So they threw him in the junk drawer. And Barnabas goes into the junk drawer to match the former Pharisee of the Pharisees with the former goyim who somehow had heard about Jesus. And it was in Antioch, in that Junk drawer of a city, that the disciples were first called Christians. In this junk drawer that they found the Steadfast Love of God in Christ for all peoples. It’s not the drawer that we look for, but it is exactly the drawer God has chosen.

When Barnabas came and saw the grace of God, he was glad….For our heart is glad in him, because we trust in His holy name. When we see the grace of God in action, when we realize “oh, here it was all along,” we can’t help but be glad.

Gospel in the World

The church used to have lots of drawers. And you can talk about that church as the larger institution or as the congregation.

There were lots of drawers that you’d open up. Surely what we are looking for is in this one. The seminaries, the pastoral office, the board of elders, the Praesidium, the mission execs. Surely these draws have the answers that we are seeking. Surely the steadfast love of God is found here.

And I don’t want to run those things down too much, but we’ve all opened those drawers enough and found them wanting. Or in latter days, just empty. “By their great might they cannot rescue.”

But then you see the church’s junk drawer. Funded by mite boxes. Sometimes asked, sometimes just expected to “do what needs to be done.” It is probably a little different in each of your congregations, but whether it is giving a cup of cold water to the thirsty person or knowing that God is going to show up and planning for it – when nobody else will. It is the LWML that again and again is where we find the steadfast love of God. Where we see the grace of God. Exactly where God desires it.

“He fashions the hearts of them all, and observes their deeds.”

It is the LWML that again and again demonstrated a heart after God.

It is the LWML that has always understood and continues to understand what it means to fear God.

Let your hearts be glad, because the Lord has seen you. And his steadfast love rests on you.

Conclusion

And may your trust in the name of Jesus, and hope in his word, that gladdens your hearts in service, be seen not just by God, but by our congregations. Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us. May we hope in you as those gathered here today hope. Amen.

Render to Caesar

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Biblical Text: Matthew 22:15-22

“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s” is one of the most quoted saying of Jesus. But I’m convinced that 99.9% of the time it is quoted, we quote it terribly wrong. We use it to let ourselves off the hook on our duty. That is the essence of the trap they were laying for Jesus. Which side of this divide are you on Jesus? And whichever side he is “on” he’d lose the crowd from the other side. They marveled at his answer. Not because it was simply a rhetorical masterpiece of weaving between two poles. We hear politicians daily attempt that, maybe monthly do it successfully. But those are always like the apocryphal saying of Barack Obama – “my superpower is that people hear what they want to in my words.” When Jesus said this what they marveled at was how it convicted everyone. Jesus isn’t on any of their sides. He’s the King of the Reign of Heaven. This sermon attempts to restore some of the marvel of that saying.

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