Archive for December, 2009
December 31, 2009 at 6:16 am · Filed under Homilies
Introduction
This is the sermon I preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009, for the New Year’s Eve Eucharist.
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Readings
Jeremiah 24:1–7
Psalm 102:24–28
1 Peter 1:22–25
Luke 13:6–9
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Prayer
Father in heaven, grant us times of quiet thoughtfulness, that we may rest in your Spirit, listen to your voice, and ponder in our hearts the good news of your Son’s birth. Amen.
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Message
The gardener in Jesus’ parable of the fig tree
might be the unnamed patron saint of farmers and Cubs’ fans alike.
Both groups combine an attitude of resignation to adversity
with a childlike trust in an optimistic future…just around the corner.
And so they all say, “Wait until next year.”
Then they lay their plans.
Finally, after 102 years of frustration,
the Cubs will win the World Series…this year.
At long last, after years beset with drought or hail or infestation,
this year—finally—will bring the bumper crop and the up market.
And truth be told, none of us is much different
from the farmers of crops and the fans of the Cubs.
This new year, 2010, will be the year
that we make good on our resolutions,
that we stick to our new, good habits,
that we lose and keep off the weight,
get the spare room in good order,
complete the projects that have lingered undone for so many months.
At least, that’s what we tell ourselves
as we prepare to turn the page on 2009,
a year we likely won’t recall together as one entry in our top ten list.
It’s been a year of job losses and goodbyes to friends and loved ones,
a time of big businesses flailing and government stimulus spending,
another year with an endless procession of scandals and tragedies,
another dozen months with wars smoldering and flaring around the world.
But then, we shouldn’t be surprised by the bad news,
because most of it is the work of our own hands,
our soiled and sinful, so human hands.
We may have good intentions, hopeful plans, well-meaning thoughts,
but somewhere, somehow, we find ways
to sabotage our own efforts,
to bring down upon ourselves much of the adversity
we would prefer to avoid and evade.
This should not surprise us.
Because while we are all God’s children
and destined for eternal life in his kingdom,
we live each day in bondage to our sin,
unable to free ourselves.
It’s like we rise each morning
and greet the day with two faces;
we are children of God
and sons and daughters of sin—
both at the same time.
And maybe during this time of the year,
these days when we take stock of the past
and look ahead with hope,
we can dare to be a little more honest with ourselves
about our two-faced nature.
It’s almost as if the calendar is designed to help us to do this.
January gets its name from Roman mythology,
where Janus was the god of doors and gates,
the one to whom the Romans prayed when beginning a new task,
the one pictured as a man with two faces,
one looking forward to the future and one looking back to the past.
It might be tempting for us
to say, “Why bother trying to change.
After all, ‘We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.’
It’ll be the same next year.”
We know the truth about ourselves:
We come to the last day of December
and we still live with chaos and turmoil,
surrounded by unfinished tasks,
dragging a great chain of regret and remorse behind us.
And when we are tempted to think this way,
to be pessimistic or realistic of whatever we want to call it,
we can maybe see ourselves
in the parable as the owner of the fig tree
at the same time we are fig trees ourselves.
As the owner said to the gardener,
“See here!
For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree,
and still I find none.
Cut it down!
Why should it be wasting the soil?” (Luke 13:7, NRSV)
Again, we can find ourselves
being of two conflicting minds.
We each know that we have not borne the fruit
that fig trees and people—
all creatures of God—
will bear when they are pleasing to him.
And yet we are also the owners of our own fig trees.
And so we disappoint ourselves again and again.
Paul helps us to understand ourselves,
or maybe he helps us to understand
how beyond understanding we are to ourselves.
He writes to the Church at Rome:
“I do not understand my own actions.
For I do not do what I want,
but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15, NRSV)
But thank God our Father that he has sent his son, Jesus Christ,
to serve as the gardener in our lives.
So when we are ready to give up
on one another and on ourselves,
he steps up to us,
hoe in hand, and says,
“Sir, let it alone for one more year,
until I dig around it and put manure on it.
If it bears fruit next year,
well and good;
but if not, you can cut it down.” (Luke 13:8–9, NRSV)
So, that’s how we begin this New Year.
Jesus hoes around the roots of our sins with his Holy Word;
he waters us in remembrance of our Baptism,
he works in a good helping of the manure of his Holy Meal.
In all weather, in the face of pests,
he tends and cares for us
with a farmer’s springtime hope,
he roots for us with a fan’s eternal optimism,
knowing that this may be the year
when we inherit the crown of victory,
when he will reap the full and bountiful harvest of the Spirit
to the glory of God the Father. Amen.
December 31, 2009 at 6:12 am · Filed under Daily Words
“In baptism you were not only buried with him but also raised to life with him because you believed in the power of God who raised him from the dead.” (Colossians 2:12, LH)
December 30, 2009 at 7:10 am · Filed under Daily Words
“But now Christ has achieved reconciliation for you in his mortal body by dying, so as to present you to God holy, free of reproach and blame.” (Colossians 1:22, LH)
December 29, 2009 at 7:07 am · Filed under Daily Words
“By the might of his glory you will be endowed with the strength needed to stand fast, even to endure joyfully whatever may come, giving thanks to the Father for having made you worthy to share the lot of the saints in light.” (Colossians 1:12-13, LH)
December 27, 2009 at 2:38 pm · Filed under Daily Words
“Live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” (Ephesians 5:8b-9, LH)
December 26, 2009 at 6:35 am · Filed under Daily Words
“As Stephen was being stoned, he could be heard praying, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’” (Acts 7:59, LH)
December 25, 2009 at 7:30 am · Filed under Homilies
Introduction
This is the sermon I had planned to preach at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 26–27, 2009, for the First Sunday of Christmas. A blizzard forced cancellation of worship on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. So the congregation will celebrate its Christmas services this weekend, leaving this sermon a blog-only message.
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Readings
1 Samuel 2:18–20, 26
Psalm 148 (antiphon v. 13)
Colossians 3:12–17
Luke 2:41–52
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Prayer
Father in heaven, grant us times of quiet thoughtfulness, that we may rest in your Spirit, listen to your voice, and ponder in our hearts the good news of your Son’s birth. Amen.
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Message
It’s a great mystery
and more than a little frustrating
that we know so little about the years
between Jesus’ birth and his ministry.
Today’s Gospel shares the only details
about those thirty years
largely lost to human memory.
There’s just this one account
of a family journey to Jerusalem
to celebrate the Passover,
the great Jewish feast
marking God’s liberation of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt.
It seems Jesus and his parents
traveled in a kind of family caravan,
and when it came time to leave the city,
Mary and Joseph had walked a whole day
before they realized Jesus was nowhere
among all of the relatives in the group.
So they returned—frantic with worry—
and searched Jerusalem for three days.
Finally, they found him in the temple,
deep in conversation with the teachers,
“listening to them and asking them questions.” (Luke 1:46b, NRSV)
Mary poured out her anguish,
basically saying to her son,
“Your father and I have been worried sick,
thinking you were lost.”
Jesus, like any twelve-year-old,
had a ready reply:
they had searched backwards.
“Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 1:49b, NRSV)
And if that’s where he must be,
then they would have found him right away
if they had begun to search there.
It doesn’t seem to me that St. Luke tells this story
just to help us know that Jesus, in some ways,
was like every teenage child we know and love,
or like the teenagers we ourselves once were.
Instead, this account helps us to see
how Jesus commits his life to his Father,
meaning his Father in heaven.
Jesus is not in the temple sightseeing
or watching the varied tapestry of pilgrims
congregating from all over the known world.
Rather, he is focused and dedicated
to sitting among the teachers
and learning from the treasure
of the accumulated lifetimes of wisdom
they carry in their memories.
So he listens and asks questions,
because he “must be in [his] Father’s house.”
This is the task and the joy
for one who lives a life of faith and trust,
dwelling in the presence of the Father.
It’s really no different for us.
We have commitments and responsibilities
to our families and friends,
to our work and our school,
to all of the individuals and institutions
that share—and sometimes compete for—our dedication and attention.
And yet, because we are Christians,
because we are followers of Jesus Christ,
we live with the same task and joy
of dwelling in the presence of our heavenly Father.
We, too, must be in our Father’s house.
In part, this place, this sanctuary, is our Father’s house,
not because it is a particular building,
but simply because when we come here,
we trust that our Father has promised to meet us here
in worship and study and fellowship.
He’s committed to dwelling in our midst
when we assemble to hear his Word proclaimed,
to celebrate his Meal of sacrifice and sustenance,
to welcome new sisters and brothers through his Baptism,
to embrace new companions from other congregations,
to study his Scriptures and the Church’s traditions and teachings,
and to console and comfort one another with his divine peace.
And when we listen to our Father
and to the collective wisdom of our Church,
living in us who gather here
and flowing from our forebears throughout the Church’s history,
we find that God changes us,
that he guides us to live in his ways.
This is what we receive in St. Paul’s message
to the early Christians at Colossae.
God desires for us to dwell together
in ways that set us apart from others.
Because he is our God and we are his people,
we ought to be compassionate, humble, meek, and patient.
We must bear one another’s burdens,
forgive one another,
and above all, love one another.
We are called to be thankful,
to let our lives be shaped by the Word of God,
and to worship him with grateful hearts.
It can all sound overwhelming,
as if God demands perfection of us,
when we know the truth in our hearts
that we are far from perfect.
But that’s where the account of Jesus in the temple
comes to our aid and assistance.
Jesus, the Son of God,
sat and listened and learned from his elders.
He found reason to ask questions,
and when he went home with Mary and Joseph,
he “was obedient to them.” (Luke 1:51a, NRSV)
We can’t go too far wrong
when we listen to the teachings of our Tradition,
when we gather around our elders in the faith,
when we live in obedience to our parents,
whether they are the ones who raise us
or the ones who serve as our spiritual parents in the faith.
The ancient Rule of St. Benedict was written in the early 500s,
a time when the culture of the Roman Empire was in decline
and both civilization and the Church were under attack.
St. Benedict began his little book of guidance with some simple words:
Listen, O my son, to the teachings of your master,
and turn to them with the ear of your heart.
Willingly accept the advice of a devoted father
and put it into action. (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue 1)
It doesn’t matter whether we are monks
or people who aspire to embrace the wisdom of monasticism
or if we just find these words enlightening.
When we do what St. Benedict invites us to do,
when we listen and turn and accept wise and faithful advice,
we will live the way Jesus shows us,
the way he leads by example and invites us to follow.
And as we follow him,
turning the ear of our heart to his teachings,
we are doing what St. Paul admonishes us,
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly….” (Colossians 3:16a, NRSV)
And when that happens,
we will find ourselves “in our Father’s house,”
just as he finds a home in our hearts. Amen.
December 25, 2009 at 7:24 am · Filed under Homilies
Introduction
This is the sermon I had planned to preach at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Friday, Dec. 25, 2009, for Christmas Day. A blizzard forced cancellation of worship. So the congregation will celebrate its Christmas Day service on Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009.
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Readings
Isaiah 52:7–10
Psalm 98 (antiphon v. 3)
Hebrews 1:1–12
John 1:1–14
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Prayer
Father in heaven, grant us times of quiet thoughtfulness, that we may rest in your Spirit, listen to your voice, and ponder in our hearts the good news of your Son’s birth. Amen.
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Message
If we stop and listen …
we can almost hear the great sighs of relief
wafting up and away
from the homes here in Beatrice
and across the whole country.
We made it. It’s Christmas morning.
All the presents that could be bought
have been wrapped carefully and then quickly unwrapped.
The food we will eat fills our fridges and cupboards.
Most likely the planes and cars
have landed and parked
and loved ones have reached their destinations.
And so we sit and sigh,
we rest and sag gratefully into our chairs
as we watch the twinkle of lights
catch the eyes of our elders
and the dazzle of decorations
entrance the imaginations of our children.
And maybe the sighs turn to prayers,
“Thank you, Lord, for another year,
for bringing us this far,
for watching over us,
for keeping us safe.”
Or perhaps we exhale a prayer
in sighs too deep for words,
“Ah, Lord…Amen.”
But whether we speak or sigh our prayers,
we find ourselves turning naturally to God,
telling him what weighs us down,
what lifts our spirits.
This prayer is our conversation with God.
And we can do nothing more basic
as his children who gather around him,
just the way our children gather around us.
We come into his presence
and we speak the thoughts on our hearts,
we sigh out our weariness,
we breathe out our gratitude,
we pray our sorrows and our joys.
And the great mystery and blessing and gift of this day
is that we make our prayers to a God
who is more intimately grounded in our lives
than we find ourselves, than we are to one another.
The mystery of Christmas is this:
God himself deigns to dwell in our midst.
The One who made us and all things
is now himself one of us and one with us
in his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
St. John speaks of Christ as the Word of God,
announced and enfleshed in our midst.
And with an echo of affirmation,
the writer of Hebrews turns poetical,
“Long ago God spoke to our ancestors
in many and various ways by the prophets,
but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son….” (Hebrews 1:1-2a, NRSV)
Jesus Christ, that Son, is the Word,
spoken by the Father in the power of their Spirit,
spoken from all eternity and before all worlds,
but also uttered in our midst
as the baby, the boy, the man,
who is rabbi, healer, preacher, miracle worker,
who suffers, dies, and is raised again,
who will come on that last day to judge.
He is the Word of God
whom we hear each moment
with our ears of faith.
And in reply,
we raise our prayers,
our words spoken in faithful response.
This is our contribution, then,
our part and participation in the life of God,
in the conversation that goes on within God himself.
And the great mystery and blessing and gift of this day
is that this Triune God does not only talk to himself,
but he invites us into his divine conversation.
And like our elders who sit with us at the Christmas table,
and who ask about us and genuinely listen to our replies,
God invites us to his Table
and wants to know what we have to say.
This is one way for us to embrace his invitation
to come to our Lord’s Table.
Our Father welcomes us to feast upon his Son, his Word,
broken and poured out for us.
We listen with our ears of faith
as we eat the bread become the body of Christ
and drink the wine become the blood of Christ.
And as we do,
we find it doesn’t matter so much
whether this day is the first of many more days
or the last for us of many days gone by.
What matters is that we know and trust
that all our days and nights rest in the strong and gentle hands
of the God whose fatherly hands made us,
whose brotherly hands stretched out in sacrifice for us,
whose spiritual hands guide and comfort us.
When we settle into this promise,
we may rest securely in it,
warm and protected and loved
by our God and Father,
who by his Spirit,
speaks his Word for these last days,
for each day and for that Day,
the one that will never end. Amen.
December 25, 2009 at 7:11 am · Filed under Homilies
Introduction
This is the sermon I had planned to preach at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Thursday, Dec. 24, 2009, for Christmas Eve. A blizzard forced cancellation of worship. So the congregation will celebrate its Christmas Eve service on Saturday, Dec. 26, 2009.
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Readings
Isaiah 9:2–7
Psalm 96 (antiphon v. 11)
Titus 2:11–14
Luke 2:1–20
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Prayer
Father in heaven, grant us times of quiet thoughtfulness, that we may rest in your Spirit, listen to your voice, and ponder in our hearts the good news of your Son’s birth. Amen.
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Message
Memories are sometimes fluid and elusive.
We can come to believe
that we recall an event
in the kind of vivid detail
that only arises from personal experience.
But as we turn the memory over and over in our mind’s hands,
and look at it from different angles,
it gets hard to tell when our actual recollection ends
and our memories about the stories of those memories begin.
It’s what happens when we look at faded snapshots
taken when we were children.
Do we remember the lived event
or have we just built a memory
around the image in the photograph,
the stories our relatives have recounted over the years?
It’s hard to tell.
But in the end,
I don’t think it really matters,
because memory is not a transcript, a recording, a documentary.
It’s less than that, but infinitely more.
It’s our personal story,
and even if it’s not accurate in every detail,
it bears the truth of the meaning of the memory of the event.
That’s why our original memories
get overlaid and adorned and filigreed
with snapshots and anecdotes and stories and new memories
about those times when we have shared our old memories
with friends and family.
The picture we can envision
to help us understand ourselves
is of an attic, with boxes and chests
scattered in delightful disarray.
Some of these treasures are well marked,
but others are just a jumble,
waiting for us to come and to sort through them,
to make sense of them,
to put them in order.
This common and familiar experience
is what I imagine we share with Mary, the mother of our Lord.
Luke’s familiar telling of the birth of Jesus
reminds us how she and Joseph
found themselves swept up
in the Spirit’s whirlwind of action.
We know that God’s angel, Gabriel,
had announced to Mary
that the Spirit would come upon her
and she would conceive and bear a child,
the Son of God and savior of the world.
That’s why the Church calls her Theotokos, or God-bearer.
And Mary remembers all of this, vibrant with detail.
And then the political powers
do what they do,
and upend the lives of the common people
to achieve their own ends.
So Mary and Joseph journey to Bethlehem
in the midst of her pregnancy.
And Mary adds to her memories.
They end up finding shelter with the beasts.
Then Jesus—God in the flesh—is born among the animals
and rests his head in a feed trough.
Soon the shepherds come and testify to the angels’ message:
“Do not be afraid. A Savior, the Messiah, the Lord is born.”
And Mary remembers this as well.
As St. Luke tells us,
“But Mary treasured all these words
and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19, NRSV)
It’s the treasuring and pondering
that draws a picture for me
of the ministry of memory we share with Mary.
As the years go by and Jesus grows up,
Mary finds time to go to the attic of her memory,
she kneels beside a great big box,
and takes from it some straw,
a long strip of cloth,
a curl of lamb’s wool.
They are reminders to her—
in an age with no cameras
and in a time when she had no money
to pay scribes to write the memories on scrolls—
of the miracle of her son’s birth.
And “Mary treasured all these words
and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19, NRSV)
The Greek words Luke chooses are powerful.
What we read as “treasured” is the Greek word suntereo.
It means “to preserve (a thing from perishing or being lost),”
or “to keep within one’s self, keep in mind (a thing, lest it be forgotten).”
(http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/greek/nas/suntereo.html)
And where we read, “pondered,” the Greek is sumballo.
This means “to throw together, to bring together,
to converse,
to bring together in one’s mind, confer with one’s self,”
or “to encounter in a hostile sense.” (http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/greek/nas/sumballo.html)
It’s the work of a lifetime
to sift through memories such as these,
to keep them fresh in one’s mind,
to sort through the jumble,
to let the conflicts that arise work themselves out.
This was Mary’s work,
but it is ours as well.
We are like Mary in being swept up by the Spirit,
having our lives changed by the birth of God’s Son,
finding our journeys redirected,
walking to places we had not imagined,
meeting people we had not anticipated,
hearing messages we had not expected.
This is what happens when God our Father
gets to work in our lives,
when he breathes his Spirit into us,
when he comes among us in the flesh of his Son,
the Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ.
There is nothing else for us to do
but to follow Mary’s lead,
to “treasure[] all these words
and ponder[] them in our heart[s].”
And as we do,
we can kneel together
before the manger
and tell one another in gentle whispers
how this helpless infant,
so “tender and mild,”
how this Son of God,
has touched us, changed us,
given us life and freedom,
blessed us with love
that we might follow him,
no matter what and no matter where it leads,
even to the foot of that baby’s cross. Amen.
December 25, 2009 at 6:36 am · Filed under Daily Words
“On that day the root of Jesse,
set up as a signal for the nations,
the Gentiles shall seek out,
for his dwelling shall be glorious.” (Isaiah 11:10, LH)
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