Introduction

This is the sermon I preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 5-6, 2009, the weekend of the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

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Readings

Isaiah 35:4-7a
Psalm 146 (2)
James 2:1-10 [11-13] 14-17
Mark 7:24-37

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Prayer

“Let the words of my mouth
and the meditation[s] of [our] heart[s]
be acceptable to you,
O LORD, [our] rock and [our] redeemer.” Amen. (Psalm 19:14, NRSV)

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Message

The details may change over the years.
But for many of us,
the routine and the ritual remain a part
of our daily lives.

Maybe you venture outside
in the quiet gray before sunrise,
your dog darting about and sniffing
while you shuffle to the end of the driveway.
You stoop down to retrieve
the morning’s newspaper—
thinner than it once was
thanks to a diet lean in advertising—
but still filled with news.

Some good, but mostly bad.
Same as yesterday…and the day before…and the day before that.

Or maybe you background the TV
while you get cleaned up for work,
letting the talking heads
jabber their way through the headlines,
seasoning the morning’s serving with a few jokes
as the camera cuts from one head to another.

Mixed in with the incessant celebrity patter is the news.
Some good, but mostly bad.

Or perhaps radio is your drive-time companion.
Some snippets are actually useful.
Weather, traffic, school menus, and cancellations.
And there’s news too.
Some good, but mostly bad.

And then there’s the Web,
filling our monitors and smart phones
with news you can use,
customized to your personal preferences,
packaged and tweaked,
ranked and commented.
And in the end,
some is good, but mostly it’s bad.

And yet we browse, we listen, we watch, we read,
perhaps in hope that someday the news will be good.
But mostly, it is as it almost always is—bad.

Manufacturers lay off workers,
scaring families by the score and more.
Debts and deficits climb,
trailing triplets of zeros behind them.
Global hotspots burn brightly,
threatening both civilians and soldiers.

Trusted institutions go all wobbly,
cutting age-old ties with their roots.
Individuals fear for their health,
waiting for diagnoses of their bodies’ betrayals.
Families bear secret and silent pain,
aching from hidden wounds.

This is the news, the daily news
of our lives in this world.
In the end, despite our efforts
to read it with detachment,
to speak it with smiles on our faces,
the news all and always boils down to one word: death.

Sometimes the news is straightforward.
People we know and love and have treasured
as companions in our journeys together have died.
And other times, the little deaths wear disguises,
masquerading as changes and adjustments.
Our relationships bend and finally break in estrangement.
Our health sags and finally succumbs to illness.
Our dreams tatter and finally tear into little pieces.

It’s everywhere we turn.
It’s inescapable, inexorable, and inevitable.

But, in the end, the bad news is not the final report.
It is not the last word on our lives.
It is never the ultimate verdict spoken of us.

In the midst of the pain and the loss,
the grief and the turmoil,
the breaks and the death,
there is the calm and firm voice of God.

And he speaks a word to us
that finds its echo
in the words Winston Churchill
famously spoke to England
in the darkest moments of World War II:

“Never, never, never give up.”

The Word of God is a word—a clear word—
acknowledging that we are lost and we do sin and we shall die.
This is the law.

But God’s Word is also a word of hope overcoming despair,
a proclamation of grace forgiving our sin,
a message of life vanquishing our deaths.

Hear God speak through Isaiah, his prophet:

“Be strong, do not fear!” (Isaiah 35:4a, NRSV)

Listen to God sing with David, his psalmist:

“Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the LORD their God….” (Psalm 146:5, NRSV)

Find comfort in the question that James, God’s servant, asks:

“Has not God chosen the poor in the world
to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom
he has promised to those who love him?” (James 2:5b, NRSV)

Feel the fingers of the Father’s Son in your ears and on your tongue,
his breath sighing in your face, his voice saying,

“‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’” (Mark 7:34, NRSV)

These are God’s words of life spoken in the face of death.
They are his Gospel, his good news that silences all the bad news.
These are his words of blessing and mercy.

When our families ache from hidden wounds,
God speaks a quiet word of reconciliation.
When we worry about our health,
he touches us with his Spirit of healing.
When our institutions leave us wondering what to trust,
he tells us that his Son is the way and the truth and the life.

When violence turns the land into a battlefield,
the Prince of Peace reminds us he is also King of Kings.
When our economy digs holes so deep we cannot see out of them,
God reminds us the earth is his and everything in it.
When we lose our jobs,
God, who knows when a sparrow falls,
embraces us with strong arms and gentle hands.

This is the news for today.
And it is good, all good.

But strangely,
there are moments when we don’t want to hear this news.
There are times when we have grown
so accustomed to the pain and brokenness,
so acclimated to our adjustments to the bad news,
that we get some odd satisfaction
from wallowing about in our sad lot in life.

We say to ourselves,
this may be my own personal misfortune,
but it’s mine, and I have made it for myself.
We become, in our own way,
like the sad and twisted Gollum in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
We each hold onto personal sin and pain
and treasure it, echoing Gollum’s plaintive lament: “My Precious.”

And when God pours his grace upon us like baptismal waters,
when he rests his hands of blessing on our heads,
when he marks our brows with a cross of oil,
then we may find ourselves trying
to jerk away from his glistening finger,
to escape the press of his palms upon us,
and to dodge the splash of his holy water.

Why?
Why do we act this way?
Not because his gifts are not good.
But because for us to receive his gifts
is to face the truth
that he is God and no other.
Not you, not me, not anyone we know.
And certainly not any idol
we fashion for ourselves
from the bits and pieces of our lives,
the little scraps of habit we hoard,
the flotsam of our possessions,
the nagging pains that twist our spiritual posture.

But God is persistent.
He outlasts our struggling.
He withstands our rebellion.
And as he does, he bestows upon us his upsetting mercy.
He reminds us who is God.
As the Psalmist tells us:

“Do not put your trust in princes,
in mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
on that very day their plans perish….
The LORD will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise the LORD!” (Psalm 146:4, 10, NRSV) Amen.