Lenten Midweek 5- Lord’s Prayer

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This is the final sermon in the Lenten Midweek series. We reviewed the first portion of the Catechism with emphasis on the creed (MW 2,3 & 4). The Law was MW1 and this MW5 is the Lord’s Prayer. We used the third petition as the text. The arrangement of Luther’s catechism in the Word section drops leaves you at prayer, which is part of Luther’s teaching. The Christian life is a life of prayer. This sermon reflects on what prayer accomplishes and how which are the two questions Luther asks in the catechism: What does this mean? and How is this done?

The East and the West

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Biblical Text: Luke 13:22-30

This is my first sermon at Mt. Zion. I think the text hovers around something quite important but rarely talked about. “Will many be saved?” is the question that kicks it off. That question plays on the fears of our loved ones and the doctrine of election. The all too easy answer is universalism. It also plays on our prejudice. Just our people, right? But Jesus’ answer is “the east and the west, the north and the south.” Anytime we become too concerned – taking responsibility for – the salvation of others Jesus and the apostles but the onus back on ourselves. “You strive to enter through the narrow door.” The election of God is God’s business. And the way he has chosen to work it out in time is our witness to our hope in how we live and faith in the work of Jesus Christ. Today is the day of grace for those who would here by those means.

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Acting on Faith

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Biblical Text: Luke 6:17-26

I’ve grown to love this series of texts for the Epiphany season from Luke with a late Easter. The early ones are about what and where we can expect to see God (i.e. have an Epiphany). The middle ones are about the proper reaction to that. And now we will have Luke’s version of the sermon on the mount which is about discipleship. What does the good Christian life look like? What does not just reacting but enduring in the Christian life necessitate? When you get into this territory you get into the wisdom tradition, or you have to start talking about virtues. In this case the virtue of faith, but of a very specific kind. To live the Christian life requires faith in the world to come and that you are already part of it. The Christian does not act simply on maximizing the good in this world alone. The Christian works under the assumption of eternity. And that will bring them into some temporal conflict. The blessings are for those who endure and persist. The woes are for those who take their share now, forgetting the age to come.

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Sent Stability

Biblical Text: Mark 6:1-13
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As I was preparing for this sermon this week I kept bouncing back and forth between two parts of the text. Jesus visiting his hometown is just a fascinating text, especially for someone like me who has lived a few different places in his life, but my kids have only really lived in one. But I was also pulled toward Jesus’ directions to the twelve apostles right after that hometown seen. He is sending them out two by two, but one of the restrictions he puts on them is if a place receives you, stay. The other restrictions, basically go out with nothing, would feed into that stability. After bouncing around it ended up a meditation on a paradox of the Christian life. The Christian life has a motion and a direction to it. We are sent. We are not at home here. The Christian life is one of stability. It can be lived anywhere it is received. How do we reconcile that paradox of sent stability? That is what this sermon ponders. How the spiritual life of the Christian moves out from the childhood home and can’t really stop until we reach the New Jerusalem, but it also it a spiritual life full of stability. I hope it might be a fruitful meditation on living the paradox for you.

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Great Expectations

Biblical Text: Luke 24:13-35
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The text is the Road to Emmaus. Luke likes road trips. Chapters 10 through 19 are known as the road narrative as all the action is suppose to take place while Jesus is walking from Galilee to Jerusalem. The Emmaus Road I think is Luke’s poetic description of the Christian life. I don’t comment on in in the sermon, but imagine Luke himself for a moment. He interviewed all these people: Peter, John, James, Mary, Paul. All these people who knew the physical Jesus and testified to the resurrected Jesus. Luke knew him through them, and through the breaking of bread.

Life is full of expectations. The road to Emmaus present in the sermon is how we have wise expectations instead of foolish ones. The main part of that is recognizing Jesus. And we are given to recognize him in the Sacrament and the Scriptures – Word and Sacrament. Our life here, after that recognition is a walk toward the New Jerusalem. Now the walk and the witness, next year in Jerusalem. And as on of the metaphors has it in the sermon, next year happens. I’m a Cubs fan. It does.

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Desiring Mercy and Ripping out the Mulberry Tree

Biblical Text: Luke 17:1-10
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Most of the commentators on these verses take them as a disconnected jumble of aphorisms. The equivalent of Luke saying, “hey, I’ve got these sayings I’ve got to include somewhere, might as well throw them together here”. Not that this might never happen, but I think that reflects the strengths and weakness of our age. As far as strengths I think due to the scholarship on the last century we know a lot more about how we got the bible we got (and its fundamental reliability) than probably any generation since the death of the apostles. The weaknesses are that to get that information we atomized our understanding and neutered what I’ll call our story imagination. We know a whole lot about trees, and we can’t see the forest.

In 10 verses, as Jesus gets toward the end of the walk to Jerusalem, he turns to the disciples and gives something of a summary of the Christian life. Jesus affirms that divine justice is sure. The stumbling blocks that must come will get their punishment. But that shouldn’t be the disciple’s focus or hope. The disciples watch themselves and live law and gospel or repentance and forgiveness. The disciple’s joy is found in repentance and forgiveness, not in justice.

And this is where I think it takes the story imagination to keep it all together. Disciples of every time and place eventually get to that point where they want justice. The world lives by the Chicago rules – “they put one of yours into the hospital, you put one of theirs into the ground”. Moses brought the law which said an eye for an eye. Jesus is telling the disciples in the Kingdom of God – if the sinner repents when warned – let it go, forgive. If they don’t repent – leave the justice to God. And they reply to Jesus – “increase our faith”. We can’t do that. And Jesus gives one of those mysterious replies about trees being uprooted and planted in the ocean. This is core message from the sermon…this is what I take Jesus answer as. How did that work for you? Following the world’s advice you end up in the kingdom of the dead. Following the law’s advice you end up in the kingdom of the blind. Follow me – and crazy things will happen. Small things loom large, like mustard seeds. Things that are rooted yards deep and immoveable – mulberry trees, bitter hatred, generational grudges…sin…these things will come up and fly away. Imagine if you can…its easy if you try.

The disciple’s heart, the heart that is being made right, desires mercy. Along the way, turning all justice over to God and desiring Mercy, we find those things so deeply rooted in us that we don’t know who we are without them, are pulled up and we are changed. This is the point of the kingdom. This is the basic nature of the kingdom in this world. And if we are disciples, servants of Jesus, we can’t dodge this.

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The Cost of Discipleship

Text: Luke 14:25-35
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Luke 12 to 14 is tough to preach on in the current context. Even the “easy” text of Luke 12:22-34 if you are preaching it in context is not so easy. I think most of us here those words and immediately think – “ok, this Jesus thing isn’t going to mess up my life, don’t worry, I can still have my stuff.” And that is almost exactly the opposite of the intention. A disciple is to be a fearless witness (Luke 12:4-12), and the assumed context of witness is persecution. Jesus is heading to Jerusalem and the cross. In the midst of that, don’t worry, your Father takes care of the sparrow, right? So keep walking. All these things that might be taken away here, will be added in abundance in the Kingdom. (Luke 12:31-34)

Then you careen through “not peace, but division (Luke 12:49ff)”, “the barren fig tree”, “the narrow door”, “Jerusalem’s hardness of heart”, “the great banquet – where the invitation are cast off for meaningless excuses”, and it culminates in this text.

Sometimes Jesus sees a crowd and his gut is churned because the are like sheep without a shepherd. But just as often Jesus gathers a crowd, he turns and says something that causes most to flee or go home. I’m importing that more full account from John 6:52-71, but you can take Luke and observe the lessons Jesus teaches when he turns toward the crowds. This would seem to be one of those second crowds. We are on the way to Jerusalem, to the cross, he thinks we should know.

Why it is tough, it because of the quote from Dr. Beck at the start of the sermon. The church today operates on a different model than the early church. The church today gathers crowds and tries to keep them no matter what. Oh it tries to encourage them to places and things where spiritual growth can occur, but what it never does intentionally is what Jesus does – spell out our spiritual state. That is left for you to intuit. The church at different times would force a counting of the cost first. Are your priorities Kingdom priorities? If you don’t hate the best things in your life (wife, husband, family, job) when they get in the way of your walk with Jesus, you can’t be a disciple.

In that counting is also the grace. Like Peter realized when others turned away – “Where shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.” This is Jesus at his most Protestant. You have a choice to make – the hard narrow path to life or the easy path to destruction. And once you choose, don’t turn back – because what good is salt that has lost its saltiness? Where can it be re-salted?

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Postmodern Ditches & The Narrow Way

Biblical Text: Luke 4:1-13
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The first Sunday in Lent brings the temptation of Jesus as the text. The text is usually turned into a moral lesson about knowing your bible. And there is some of that here. But as I worked through the text and the various inputs this week, that fit less and less easily. Especially given Luke’s text. The temptations come in a slightly different order here, and the Devil and Jesus flip-flop words. Jesus goes from “it is written” to “it is said” when the devil picks up quoting scripture. This is no sword drill bible quoting one-up-man-ship.

The postmodern world tells us that everything is interpretation. There are authoritative interpretations made so by power. There are deviant or subversive interpretations. But, there are no facts; there is no truth. In the first two temptations Jesus clearly refutes that as he both takes as true and binding the Word of God and refutes a power and authority’s ability to assert interpretation against fact. In the third temptation Jesus turns to the opposite problem. Instead of thinking that everything is interpretation, its opposite is often a too great a certainty. When the devil starts quoting scripture the temptation is to put a very precise interpretation on a poetic verse.

Applied to the modern church or would you have both the church that has abandoned the law because they hunger after the approval of the world, and you have the church that is uncomfortable with faith and hope and mystery. The narrow way lies between the two ditches. Letting the secret things be God’s, but claiming surely those things that have been revealed. Deuteronomy 29:29

This is an attempt to preach the text by connecting roots of post-modernism with how we see it playing out in events today. As such, as David Foster Wallace would once quip, I’m attempting to point out the water to the fish (what’s water?). It is preaching directly at a space that is probably never in questioned. As such it might have zoomed right past.

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Walking the Right Way

Text: Mark 3:20-35
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This past Sunday we sang one of the most haunting hymns in the Lutheran Tradition – I Walk in Danger All the Way. It is one of those songs where the melody is clear and rather light, but the words are deep. It has a history within the LCMS as it was sung on the floor of a Synodical convention after a particularly ugly fight. My guess is that those there took the wrong message from its words. If I was picking my 10 favorite, this on has a place on that list. But we rarely pick it for the congregation because I think the words are just too far removed from comfortable American middle class existence. We live a daily existence that is largely materialist. Rarely do we give a nod to spiritual things outside of maybe Sunday mornings or that odd deja vu/coincidence. The third stanza talks about death. That is breaking the rules in the United States. It takes those three stanzas to make a turn and the fourth starts to remind us of the gospel. Basically my gut tells me when I have the congregation sing it, in one sense I’m putting falsehoods on their lips. Not that the words are false, just that we don’t feel them.

So what does that have to do with the sermon. Well, that hymn is a hymn of spiritual maturity. The text is a call to belief, and not just to belief, but discipleship. It presents us with three groups of people and puts on Jesus lips the challenge to do the will of the Father. The text doesn’t use the metaphor, but the disciple Walks with the Lord. And that is not always easy. We walk through the valley of the shadow of death (stanza 3), but we fear no evil (stanza 5). The mature Christian will accept that walk.

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We don’t believe in one, and turn our eyes from the other

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It struck me yesterday, if he would have been open to hearing, how applicable Peter’s final words would have be to Rep. Wiener. Peter, more than any other apostle, uses the life of Christ as our example. And he ends his instructions for Christian living with three imperatives (verbs in the command tense, i.e. go, do): be humble, be sober-minded, resist Satan.

Be humble – yes you are a congressman and powerful, but do you really think people want pictures of your privates? Be humble…

Be sober-minded, be watchful – You wouldn’t think that such a thing would be necessary, but NY has had two congressmen flame out in the last couple of years for essentially the same thing. You have a beautiful wife – go home and get off the system.

Resist Satan – Is there any world where x-rated pictures are really appropriate? Only one where you think more of yourself than you do and you aren’t paying attention. Right where that roaring lion can devour you.

The core message of the apostles is relevant day in and day out. Not the least of which is the hope it rests on. The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore.