Archive for February, 2010
February 28, 2010 at 6:10 am · Filed under Homilies
This is the sermon I preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 27–28, 2010, for the Second Sunday in Lent.
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Readings
Genesis 15:1–12, 17–18
Psalm 27 (antiphon v. 5)
Philippians 3:17–4:1
Luke 13:31–35
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Prayer
You call us to return to you, Lord God, and to leave behind all things that keep us from giving ourselves fully to serve you. Reach out to us with your Word, so that we may turn to face you and to give you glory; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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Message
Otto von Bismark,
the German Prussian politician from the 1800s,
is known for an aphorism:
“Politics is the art of the possible.”
He means that it takes skill and craft
to navigate the tangle of personalities and priorities
that entwine themselves in the workings of a society.
But frequently and unfortunately,
politics becomes a game of force— sometimes deadly—
played by the ruthless practitioners
of threat and intimidation.
And it doesn’t matter whether the arena
is the civic one or the religious one.
Factions and alliances form and grow,
then square off in conflict,
sometimes just with words,
but other times with weapons.
And eventually, inevitably,
their members turn on one another and the groups disintegrate,
the victims of their own verbal and physical violence.
This makes the study of history
and the watching of the news
an often dreary exercise in repetition.
It doesn’t take long before we feel this nagging thought
in the back of our minds,
“This sounds familiar. I’ve heard this somewhere else before.”
How many times has the United States
supplied arms to some country somewhere?
We say we want to help that country with its security,
but really we desire to prop up that country
as a countervailing force
to some other country we perceive as a greater threat.
And then, oddly enough,
the country we armed
turns on us and becomes our newest threat
and most perilous enemy,
poised with the arms we supplied turned against us.
How many times has our Lutheran Church,
no matter what the acronym for its name might be at the moment,
gotten itself mired in conflicts
over what will be our authority,
over who is qualified to serve as ministers,
over what shape our witness will take,
even over times on the schedule,
paint on the walls and carpet on the floors?
We confess that we believe the Spirit gives us a Church
that is one and holy and catholic and apostolic.
But so quickly in our hands it becomes
many and profane and sectarian and adrift.
And what about the politics of our families?
How well do we fare at balancing conflicting needs and desires,
differing priorities for managing time and money,
varying views on boundaries and limits for teens?
What begins in a springtime glow of love
can wither in the harsh heat of summer’s work
and the shortened days of autumn,
and then grow dormant in the cold winter of life’s passing years.
And if all of this and more
makes up our experiences,
our personal lives,
the story of our communities of faith,
and the history of our nation,
is it any surprise that human nature plays itself out in today’s Gospel
with the same numbing familiarity
of the politics of force and threat,
of the push of one faction upon another?
Jesus receives friendly advice from the Pharisees
to watch out for Herod Antipas,
the ruler of Galilee and Perea.
Herod does not like the growing threat
he sees in this itinerant rabbi,
an exorcist and healer,
preacher and teacher,
friend of the meek and poor,
and thorn in the ample side of the rich and proud.
But Jesus does not fear political theatre or threats.
He does not shut down his ministry
and wait for the safe and noncontroversial time,
for the conflict to abate.
Instead, he labels Herod with his true nature,
a fox, a predator who thrives on surprise and speed.
And what’s most amazing,
Jesus turns the politics of power absolutely upside down.
In response to the threats of a fox,
he depicts himself as a mother hen,
pinned down on her nest by duty,
protecting a brood of defenseless chicks.
It’s the last way that we would think to respond to power.
Jesus does not meet fist with fist,
harsh word with harsh word,
threat with threat.
Instead, he defuses the tension and defangs the fox,
living by the Word he would later share with St. Paul:
“My grace is sufficient for you,
for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9, NRSV)
And sadly, poignantly,
Jesus leaves us with this loving and tender picture of himself,
feathered and warm, maternal and tender,
with protective wings ready to stretch over his people,
to shield them from the tooth and claw of the world’s foxes,
to protect them from the bite and scratch of power politics.
“But alas,” he mourns,
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
the city of the people of God,
the community of God’s chosen,
Israel and the Church,
then and now, there and here.”
How often has Jesus desired to gather us together
as a hen gathers her brood—her scattered flock—under her wings
and give us peace and security,
but we are not willing.
And we leave the nest and abandon Jesus’ protection,
because we trust in ourselves and our power and our ability
more than we are willing to rely on our Lord
in his perfect weakness, his feathered wings.
And so, in the end,
our Lord stretches out those wings, those arms,
and submits to the power of politics
and the hammer and the nail,
the crown and the spear.
He goes from the nest to the cross,
and there he roosts,
perfect in his weakness.
The wisdom of God outsmarts the foxes;
the endurance of our Lord outlast all enemies;
the power of the Father defeats the forces of sin and death and the devil;
the victory of our Lord Jesus Christ puts an end to the games we play.
This is how our Lord loves us.
He loves us in the face of death.
He dies that we may live.
He gives us life that we may love him and others.
And in that love, we may trust him—
our Lord and our mother hen—
to gather each of us into his nest on the last day. Amen.
February 28, 2010 at 4:45 am · Filed under Daily Words
“The LORD preceded them in the daytime by means of a column of cloud to show them the way, and at night by means of a column of fire to give them light.” (Exodus 13:21, NAB)
February 27, 2010 at 4:32 am · Filed under Daily Words
“Let this, then, be as a sign on your hand and as a pendant on your forehead: with a strong hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt.” (Exodus 13:16, NAB)
February 26, 2010 at 5:21 am · Filed under Daily Words
“…you were ransomed from your futile conduct, handed on by your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ as of a spotless unblemished lamb.” (1 Peter 1:18–19, NAB)
February 25, 2010 at 5:38 am · Filed under Daily Words
“This is how you are to eat [the lamb]: with your loins girt, sandals on your feet and your staff in hand, you shall eat like those who are in flight. It is the Passover of the LORD.” (Exodus 12:11, NAB)
February 24, 2010 at 6:05 am · Filed under Homilies
This is the sermon I preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010. Midweek services from Ash Wednesday through Maundy Thursday will explore the theme, “Living as Christians.”
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Readings
Micah 6:6–8
Psalm 82
Romans 7:15–19
Matthew 22:34–40
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Prayer
You call us to return to you, Lord God, and to leave behind all things that keep us from giving ourselves fully to serve you. Reach out to us with your Word, so that we may turn to face you and to give you glory; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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Message
Tonight is our second gathering
on our journey through Lent,
our second time to ask together,
“What does it look like for us to live as Christians in today’s world?”
Last week, on Ash Wednesday,
we faced the reality of the evil
that runs loose in our world
and that lurks in the depths of our being.
This is the truth that we live
“in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”
We heard the call from Joel, the prophet,
to “return to the LORD our God.”
We received a word from Jesus Christ,
to prepare ourselves
to resist those forces of evil
through our prayer, our fasting, and our almsgiving.
We learned that evil is more than randomly bad things
happening to good people;
it’s a willful force opposed to God.
Well, tonight we turn our attention
to God’s response to the evil in His world.
In the same way that evil is not just bad stuff happening at random,
but is a willful rebellion against God,
justice is much more than getting fair treatment,
or benefitting from randomly good things.
Justice is the nature of the work of God’s love in our lives.
In Matthew’s Gospel,
we just heard the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees.
Jesus told how all of God’s Word—
the law and the prophets—
hangs on a pair of commandments:
love God with all that He has given you
and love others as you love yourself.
And with apologies to Tina Turner,
we might ask, “What’s love got to do with it?”,
when the “it” is justice?
The key is to see that God is the source and the standard
both for justice and for love.
When His justice is at work in the world,
then others regard each of us as worthy of respect
simply because He has loved us enough
to create us in His image,
making us for a purpose,
to love Him in return.
That’s why the first commandment
calls us to love God with all that He gives us,
because this is why he made us.
And because He made us,
we are made to love ourselves,
because that means we love what God has made.
Then we love others because we see
that they too are made by God.
His justice is at work in our lives
when we view all of our relationships
through the lens of love of God,
a love that cherishes Him and all that He has made.
When we show our love to Him,
we are living as He made us, as we ought to live,
and so that is just and right.
The same is true of our love for others.
He made each of us in his image,
and so when we love one another,
not necessarily because we find one another enjoyable,
but simply because we see God’s handiwork
in the lives of those around us,
then we are living and acting justly.
It’s easy, then, to see the damage we inflict on others through hate,
the ways that hate takes shape in our lives as injustice.
Recently I’ve been reading a book by Raymond Arsenault entitled,
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.
In its beginning chapters,
it reaches back to the 1940s to fill in the background.
One incident happened with Isaac Woodard,
a twenty-seven year old veteran of “fifteen months
[spent] fighting the Japanese in the south Pacific,
tried to ride a Greyhound bus home to North Carolina
from a military base in Georgia.”
Woodard, who was black,
“was arrested in Batesburg, South Carolina,
after he and the bus driver
‘exchanged words over some minor point of racial etiquette.’
Dragged from the bus and beaten by Batesburg police chief Linwood Shull and a deputy,
the …solider suffered massive injuries, including the blinding of both eyes,
[because] he ran afoul of two white men
who saw fit to gouge out his eyes with the blunt end of a billy club.” (p. 34)
That was decades in a different place.
And while the details may change,
the root reality remains the same.
When we do not treat others
as lovingly fashioned creations of God,
but rather as objects or animals
or beings inferior simply because of difference,
then we practice injustice, not justice.
We can beat people with words and expressions and attitudes,
even if we never raise a fist or wield a weapon.
We are a force for evil, not good,
when we live by hate, not by love.
In fact, it has always been God’s measure of justice
to look at how His people—both Israel and the Church—
treat those who have no say, no power, no sway.
That’s why the psalmist says,
“Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” (Psalm 82:3–4, NRSV)
This helps us to know what justice looks like,
especially when we are faced with difficult choices.
First, we remember that God has made each of us in His image.
Second, we recognize that we are called to love one another.
Third, we recall that He charges us to care for people on the margins.
Fourth, we repent of the ways we turn away from God’s justice.
And finally, we return to God when we err and ask Him to guide us.
This is how we live as Christians who carry out God’s calling
to practice justice through love in all of our actions,
with everything we have been given by God,
our heart and soul and mind and strength. Amen.
February 24, 2010 at 5:36 am · Filed under Daily Words
“Humble people you save;
haughty eyes you bring low.” (Psalm 18:28, NAB)
February 23, 2010 at 5:35 am · Filed under Daily Words
“Remain faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.” (Revelation 2:10c, NAB)
February 22, 2010 at 5:34 am · Filed under Daily Words
“God has then granted life-giving repentance to the Gentiles too.” (Acts 11:18b, NAB)
February 21, 2010 at 5:32 am · Filed under Daily Words
“Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Let my people go, that they may celebrate a feast to me in the desert.” (Exodus 5:1b, NAB)
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