July 15, 2012 sermon--"Death, Thou Shalt Die."

Resurrection—“Death, Thou Shalt Die.”

July 14-15, 2012

1 Corinthians 15:42-58

Today, in our continuing series on faith questions you were afraid to ask but your kids weren’t, we come to the question of resurrection. Two of the questions that our confirmation students asked in the spring were: “Why did Jesus rise when he died for us?” and “Why was the symbol of God a cross?”  These questions inevitably lead us to deeper questions like, “What exactly are we talking about when we speak of resurrection?” or “Is resurrection the same as coming back to life?”

The last question is the easiest to answer, and gives us a good starting point to work from as well. No. Resurrection is not the same as coming back to life. Turn with me to the Gospel According to John, Chapter 11. It’s the story of the raising of Lazarus. You know the story—Lazarus has been dead for four days, Jesus comes to the tomb and tells him to come out, and he does. What Lazarus experiences is a coming back to life, but it is not a resurrection. His body is still the same, temporal body created from the same stuff as the dust of the earth, and to dust it will once again return. Lazarus is going to die again eventually. The life he receives is not new life, but a continuation of his old life. It is a wonderful gift that he and his loved ones were given, but this is not resurrection as we understand it, or as Jesus experienced it.

So then, if we know what resurrection is not, then what exactly is it?  This is where we turn to our Scripture reading from 1 Corinthians. In a sense, the hope of resurrection is at the center of this entire letter that Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, but it’s here in Chapter 15 where the rubber really hits the road. It sounds as though there were some folks who were denying that there would be any future resurrection, and what Paul does is he both reaches back to the very beginning, to the first 3 chapters of Genesis, while at the same time looking ahead to the end of time, and pulls it all together in his answer to them. Turn to page 935 in the pew Bible, to the very beginning of Chapter 15. This is where Paul begins to lay out his argument. Verses 3 -5 remind the church of what they’ve already been taught, those things that Paul had received from others and had passed on to them: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas (Peter), then to the twelve.” 

For Paul, it’s of utmost importance that the church understand that Jesus himself was resurrected, and then what that means for us.  Skip to verses 12-19. Paul writes, “¹²Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? ¹³If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; ¹⁴and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. ¹⁵We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. ¹⁶For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. ¹⁷If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. ¹⁸Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. ¹⁹If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Those are strong words, and they’re strong for a reason. And this is why Easter is more important than Good Friday. If all the cross was about was Jesus being sacrificed to pay off a sin-debt to God, then Easter is just an afterthought, a way to make sure that God doesn’t stay dead. But if the cross is about more than that, if it’s about God in Jesus taking on the very power of sin, the very power of death, of taking incarnation so far, of taking the idea that God IS with us to the very extreme of even dying the same death we die, and THEN to conquer that death by being raised, then celebrating Easter becomes a celebration of new life, of eternal life. It takes the promise of that final day when all is made new and brings a foretaste of that day to the here and now. And so it’s important that Jesus was not just resuscitated, he didn’t just wake up, because that would make him like Lazarus. As fully God but still fully human, his fully human body would have died again eventually. But that’s not what Paul’s talking about here—this is resurrection. This is a new creation, a new physical reality—in a very real sense, a new body.

On this point there’s been a lot of confusion over time, and the NRSV does us no favors by the way it chooses to translate the Greek. Skipping ahead in 1 Corinthians 15 to where our reading begins in verse 42 on page 936. Paul has begun talking about our own resurrection—what that will mean at the end of time for us. Contrasting our bodies now with what we will experience when all are raised on the last day, Paul writes, “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.⁴³It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. ⁴⁴It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.” At the beginning, it all makes sense—our earthly bodies are finite. They’re perishable. They’re prone to weakness, to illness, to pain, to injury. In this life, we deal with things like cancer, or with Alzheimer’s disease, or a myriad of factors that remind us that we are, indeed mortal. We were created, and God saw us and called it good, but as we remind each other each Ash Wednesday, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The trouble we run into is when our translations have Paul contrasting a physical body and a spiritual body. We think of physical as flesh and bone, and spiritual as…well, spirit. Soul. Whatever it is that we cannot see that is the essence of who we are. The problem with that idea is that it isn’t Biblical. It comes out of Greek philosophy. Plato talks a lot about that sort of idea, but it’s not what Paul is speaking of here.  NT Wright’s incredible book Surprised by Hope is helps make sense of all of this, and it’s important, because so much of what we think we know about faith actually is a product not of our faith at all, but of how our culture has grasped this idea of body vs. spirit, of physical vs. spiritual. Biblically, this stuff is much more earthy, much more tangible, stuff that you can touch and feel and be. The Bible doesn’t separate body from soul, or physical from spiritual. In fact, NT Wright tells us that the Greek word psychikos, which the NRSV translated as “physical,” means nothing close to how we think of “physical” today. The root, psyche, from where we get our word “psychology,” ironically, was the word Greek philosophers used to describe the soul. More important than that though is that “adjectives of this tupe, Greek adjectives ending in –ikos, describe not the material out of which things are made but the power or energy that animates them. It is the difference between asking, on the one hand, ‘Is this a wooden ship or an iron ship?’ (the material from which it is made) and asking, on the other, ‘Is this a steamship or a sailing ship?’ (the energy that powers it). [1]  Paul is contrasting the power by which our body lives. In this present life, we are powerless against those forces that make us mortal—illness, injury, decay, and ultimately death. In the resurrection, we are given new life—the word Paul uses is pneuma, God’s spirit, breath, wind. We don’t become spirit—we are given life through the Spirit.

So in verse 50, when Paul says that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” he doesn’t mean that there will be an end to physical being. The term “flesh and blood” was a common symbolic term. Just as in the Gospel according to John, whenever the writer speaks of “the world,” he doesn’t actually mean the whole world, or the actual soil of the planet, but rather those forces in the world which oppose God, the same kind of thing is at work here. “Flesh and blood” means “that which is corruptible, that which is finite, that which dies, that which is walking toward death.” His contrast isn’t between the physical and the non-physical, but between the physical which dies and the physical which lives forever.

And so resurrection isn’t, as we so often think of it, life after death. It’s really life AFTER life after death. Paul calls Jesus the firstfruits, sort of a downpayment if you will of what we all look forward to at the end. When we die, that is not resurrection. It is a time of rest, a waiting place on the way to the end of time. Jesus said that in his Father’s house there are many dwelling places—the word he uses, monai, doesn’t refer to a final resting place “but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run.”[2] The hymn For All The Saints captures this idea so well. Turn to hymn 174 in the LBW. Look at verse 6—it speaks of the rest of the faithful servants, the calm of paradise. Then in verse 7, there breaks a more glorious day—it is the end of time, and the saints triumphant rise. The final verse describes the eternal city, the New Jerusalem, as from all corners of the earth come God’s people to inhabit the new creation. The imagery is so amazingly powerful.

And it speaks to what we confess in the Apostles Creed. The ending of the creed goes, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” We profess our faith in the promise that God’s creation matters. That, as Pastor Tobi said on Easter, matter matters. We look ahead to the New Jerusalem, when Revelation tells us that we don’t all get whisked away to some spiritual plane away from Earth, but God comes to us. Heaven comes here. God makes God’s home among God’s people in a new creation that is physical, that is real, that you can touch and taste and see and experience, but that is at the same time eternal. What will that look like? We are given pictures and metaphors of streets paved with gold, of the river of the water of life, of the tree of life with leaves for the healing of the nations, and all of those pictures point to the future, but they at the same time point to right now, they point to the bread and the wine, very physical signs of Jesus’ presence with us and for us, and they point back to the very beginning when God’s spirit brooded over the waters and God created the heavens and the earth. We’re part of this amazing story of creation and life and new life and eternal life.

One of my favorite poems is a sonnet by John Donne. The official title is Holy Sonnet 10, though most people know it by the title, Death Be Not Proud. It takes what we’ve heard in 1 Corinthians 15 and reminds us of our ultimate hope in the resurrection and our ultimate victory in Jesus.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Amen.

Matt Schur

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church

Lincoln, NE

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[1] NT Wright, Surprised by Hope, New York: Harper One, 2008, p. 155.

[2] Wright, 150.

Sermon for 7-1-12: "And When You Pray..."

“And When You Pray…”

June 30-July 1, 2012

Romans 8:26-27, Luke 11:1-13

A note: this summer at our church, we're preaching a series we're calling "Faith questions you were afraid to ask...but your kids weren't." Back in May during a Confirmation class, we had our 6th-8th graders write down any question they wanted about God, faith, the Bible...whatever. What emerged was a set of questions that was so foundational, that got to so much of the important, big stuff--we needed to do something with it, something more than just addressing what we could in a class with just those young people. And so a sermon series was born. We've dealt with how we read Scripture, why bad things happen to good people, angels and demons and the devil, and now we're looking at what prayer is all about.

I’m going to be honest with you. There’s a lot that I don’t know about prayer. There’s a lot that I don’t understand about how it works, about what happens exactly when we pray, about how God answers our prayers. But there’s some things that I have come to believe about prayer through what I’ve read in Scripture and through how I’ve experienced it myself. There’s also some things that I’ve heard about prayer, some fairly common perceptions, that I think are ultimately unhelpful. I’d like to take a look at some of those, and in examining them, maybe together we’ll stumble on some truths in the process.

First, I fully believe that God is not a vending machine. Prayer is not the money we put into the divine pop machine so that we can press the button we want and wait for God to spit out the answer we’ve asked for. Sometimes what we read in Luke gets interpreted that way—that whatever it is we ask for, as long as we do it in the right way or with the right formula of words or with the right heart, God will give us exactly what we ask for. If we were to look at prayer that way, though, who is the one in control? Who is the one pulling the strings? God may be the one doing the answering, but we become the ones in power, as though we had discovered a magic lamp and because we freed the genie, he is bound to do our will. In a very real way, we end up putting ourselves in God’s place.  That’s not to say that God doesn’t want us to ask. The Greek word in our Gospel lesson that is for some reason translated as “persistent,” really means “shameless.” God wants us to ask, God wants us to be shameless in our asking, God wants to hear the cries and desires of our hearts…and why? I think it’s because God wants us to remember that we are completely and utterly dependent not on ourselves, but on God.

This isn’t some sort of power trip—God doesn’t have a Napoleon complex. But when we are offering our petitions to God, when we are shameless in our asking, we are being drawn into a relationship—the relationship of loving grace that God wants for and with each of us. We are assured that God hears our prayers. Sometimes, the answer is yes. Sometimes, the answer is no. Often, the answer is “not now.” Is there a specific, divine reason behind every response to prayer? This sort of goes into some of the issues that Pastor Tobi has been preaching about. I do not believe that God causes evil and suffering—I do not believe that there is necessarily a divine purpose behind when bad things happen to good people—but I do believe in a God of transformation. I do believe in a God of presence. I do believe that God hears our prayers, that God listens to our prayers, and that God is present beside us in the midst of whatever it is we’re praying for. And when we’re shameless in our asking, we are more fully drawn into the loving arms of God’s embrace.

Second, prayer is not about having all the right, fancy, churchy words. In fact, as we hear in our passage from Romans, sometimes we don’t even have the words at all. Think of a time in your life when words failed you. Sometimes, it’s a time of joy, or beauty, or wonder. I think of when my children were born as a time like that. Sometimes, it’s our time of deepest sorrow, or fear. I still remember the numbing grief that gripped me when I got the phone call years ago telling me that my mentor Larry Meyer had died. At times like this, whenever it is that our brains and our words fail us, Romans 8 tells us that we still have the God of presence with us, the Holy Spirit interceding on our behalf when we don’t have the will or the words or the strength or even the faith to pray on our own. I’ve told our middle and high school youth that sometimes, the most authentic prayer we can pray is simply three words: “Oh my God.” When they are said as a prayer, when they become our address to God and not just simply a throwaway phrase, they have the power to say in three words what we wouldn’t be able to encompass in an entire book.

In Matthew’s account of when Jesus teaches the disciples what we now call the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus also reminds us that prayer isn’t about needing to say the right things in the right way. He says not to pray like the hypocrites do—at the time, a hypocrite was an actor who wore a mask, quite literally someone who was “two-faced.” So Jesus didn’t have anything against big words or prepared prayers—in fact, he gave his disciples the model of the Lord’s Prayer to help them. Prayer can be spontaneous, or it can be prepared. Neither is more or less real than the other.  There are ancient, beautiful prayers that the church has prayed for thousands of years—sharing the same words with those who have gone before us, knowing that there are those who will come after us who will also share those words—what an amazing picture of the kingdom of God through time. What a way for us to ground ourselves in this thread of faith that runs across the centuries. At the same time, spontaneous prayer speaks to where and when we find ourselves—as the Spirit moves, sometimes the words just flow and we are for that time intimately connected with God and those around us. What Jesus is warning against is praying one thing while your heart is in another place entirely. Using fancy words isn’t bad praying if what you’re trying to do is to be drawn more deeply into communion with God—it is bad praying if what you’re trying to do is impress the person next to you. What we see again is that prayers become about relationship—our relationship with God.

That relationship between us and God form the centerpoint around which the Biblical psalms revolve. That’s what the vast majority of the psalms are, after all—prayers addressed directly to God. Prayers of praise, of thanksgiving, of petition, of fear, of anger, of sorrow. The psalmists sometimes get angry with God. They sometimes tell God exactly what they think of God. They sometimes doubt and wonder. They sometimes are in awe of God’s goodness, and sometimes question that same goodness. You want a guide to authentic prayer that covers the wide range of human emotion and experience? Use the psalms as a prayer devotional and guide.  It’ll knock your socks off.

Our prayers are also about our relationship with our neighbor and with all of creation. When we pray, WE are transformed. Did you notice that Jesus doesn’t begin with the phrase “my Father,” but rather “Our Father.” Prayer isn’t merely individual exercise. It is inherently communal. It forms community. It is meant to be something that is done together. And it draws us together in the very act of doing it. When we pray for our neighbor, we become invested in their well-being. When we pray for our enemy, we can no longer dehumanize them. When we pray for the world, we are empowered to become better stewards. When we pray for peace, when we pray for an end to hunger or a cure for a disease or that our children will be well or that God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, God draws us into that which we are praying for. We become part of the story, part of God’s mission.

There’s a man named Gordon Atkinson who lives in San Antonio. For years, he was a preacher in a small church—now he does independent web design. He is an incredible writer—I discovered him online where he wrote a blog called “Real Live Preacher.” He had a book published by the same name, a book of vignettes about the intersections of life and faith that he encountered. Gordon’s a dreamer, a wonderer, a faithful doubter, and a firm believer that when it comes to the really big stuff, the stuff of life or death or God or love or...prayer...sometimes the deepest truths are revealed through story rather than through rote explanation. That’s why the Bible isn’t mostly a book of theological exposition—it’s mostly a book of stories. Stories and prayers. This is one of his stories, one that speaks to what I think are some of the deepest truths about prayer. It speaks to our relationship with God, our relationship with each other, and how God uses our prayers to open our own hearts. 

These are Gordon's words:

What's the weirdest thing I ever prayed for in church?

A hermit crab.

A little girl raised her hand and asked if the whole congregation would pray for her sick hermit crab. I don't remember exactly what was wrong with this crab. I don't know how you determine that a hermit crab is sick in the first place. She seemed pretty sure he was sick, so we took her at her word.
Among those who bowed their heads that day was Roy, whose father died when he was nine. This was back in the Great Depression. His mother was left alone to scratch out an existence for herself and her two small boys there in the flatlands of the Texas Panhandle.

Chris was there that morning, too. Her father abused her for years and years, and no one in her family ever came to her rescue. As I recall, she used to sit in church when she was a little girl and pray that he would stop. I sneaked a glance at Chris and saw her head go down.

There were others with similar stories. The room was full of people who had seen plenty of hard times in their lives and done plenty of praying.

It's funny how a preacher's mind can wander, right in the middle of a sermon or even just before a prayer. I couldn't help but think of Julie, the little girl I prayed for years ago. She was five years old and had vaginal cancer. I prayed first that she would be healed and later that she would die in peace. The silence was deafening. After she died in great pain, I said to God, “I guess that's a ‘no', huh?”
All the heads bowed except mine. I was left standing at the front, wondering how you pray for a hermit crab in the presence of a man who prayed that his daddy would live. How do you pray for a hermit crab while looking at the bowed head of a woman who prayed that her daddy would stop?
And what about Julie, God? Exactly what was going on with that situation? Maybe it's like what I read about the butterfly causing a hurricane on the other side of the planet. Maybe you have complex reasons for letting things develop freely, but what grand scheme would have been derailed if you had let her die with no pain? She was five, God. Five!

If letting Julie die in peace was outside your self-imposed limits, what will you do for a hermit crab that we hear is a little under the weather?

Like I said, it's funny how a preacher's mind can wander. The people in my church have gotten used to the occasional pause before I begin to pray. This was one of the longer ones.

You know what got me started praying? The bowed heads. Roy's head and Chris' head. All of them. Rows and rows of bowed heads, waiting expectantly. Toward the back I saw the head of the little girl who asked for this prayer. Her hands were clasped in front of her so seriously. It was a precious sight, and my heart was filled with love for these people. I was like the Grinch looking down on the little town of Whoville and having a stunning revelation of his own.

“Maybe prayer,” I thought, “Means a little bit more.”

Here were people who would pray for a crab in church.  They loved this little girl, and she felt comfortable enough to share the concerns of her heart. Even in the midst of their own unanswered prayers, they were big enough and small enough to pray with their little friend for her hermit crab.
Suddenly, I wanted to be like these people. I wanted to be praying with them, and I didn't care if it made sense or not. I said to myself, “The heck with it. I'm praying for the darn crab.”

And I did. And it felt good.

When the prayer was over, all the heads came up and no one knew what had happened to me. As far as they knew, a kid had asked for prayer and we had prayed. Business as usual.

But it wasn't business as usual for me. Whatever I was praying for, I got what I needed. And I did not miss the irony either. The one leading the prayer knew less about praying than almost anyone in the room, including the little girl who loved her hermit crab.

That little girl was my daughter, by the way. The second of three sisters. The crab was named “Pinchy,” and he lived in our house all the days of his life. And I am a man who has become a child again.

I tell you, I will pray for just about anything.[1]

Amen.

Matt Schur

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church

Lincoln, NE

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[1] Adapted from “Something About Prayer ,” by Gordon Atkinson, from RealLivePreacher.com ©2004 Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids.  pp.19-21.

Sermon for 4-29-2012: Living Love in Truth and Action

Living Love in Truth and Action

1 John 3:16-24

Easter 4B: April 29, 2012

For a number of years now, I’ve been a member of an online community made up of Nebraska football fans from all around the country. There’s a part of the website where people can go to discuss stuff not related to sports—a lot of it ends up being politics or religion, but there’s also conversations about music or family matters…quite often people will post prayer requests if there’s something going on, and will be assured of having folks from all over and from all sorts of religious or non-religious backgrounds praying for them or sending them good thoughts.

There’s a guy who posts fairly regularly who goes by the name of Pops. Pops is a Vietnam veteran, a recovering heroin addict, and a biker who lives in Texas. He’s also one of the kindest souls you’ll ever know. He has devoted his life to two causes—working with heroin addicts, and helping abused kids, and the man wears his love for those causes on his sleeve like nothing else. He’s a founding member of his city’s chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse and has told countless stories of the lives that he’s come into contact with. One of his mottoes is, “You never stand so tall as when you stoop to help a child.”

A few days ago, Pops posted a picture showing a quotation by Cory Booker, who is the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Here’s what it said: “Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people; before you tell me how much you love your God, show me in how much you love all His children; before you preach to me of your passion for your faith, teach me about it through your compassion for your neighbors. In the end, I'm not as interested in what you have to tell or sell as in how you choose to live and give.”

Oh, I almost forgot to mention. Pops is also an atheist.

When I first got to know him 6 or so years ago, he was an angry atheist. He had been hurt by the church, and he had seen the church hurt others, and so not only did he not believe in God, but he would’ve been just fine if those who followed God just up and disappeared. And he wasn’t afraid to let Christians know exactly how he felt, either. Pops isn’t one to mince words.

Six years ago, Pops never would have in his wildest dreams considered posting a quotation about God and ministry and faith. But over those six years, he and I have had a number of conversations. He’s heard about the FEAST ministry. He’s heard about the Table. He’s heard about this congregation’s ministry in Tanzania, in Louisiana, in Pine Ridge.

Pops still doesn’t believe in God. But where his heart was hard, it has been softened. Where once there was animosity, there is now openness and respect. Why? Because he’s had the chance to see faith in action. He’s had the chance to know that there really are faith communities out there who serve with no ulterior motive, who love God’s children simply because they are God’s children and not because they expect anything in return or because they’re trying to live up to some sort of standard or to score brownie points with God. I like to tweak him a little bit and call him a minister, tell him that he’s doing God’s work, call what he does with addicts and with kids ministry. I do it in fun, but I also do it because it’s the truth.

Pops knows a thing or two about the kind of living out the words of the quotation he posted from Cory Booker, and I think he knows a thing or two about living out the words we hear today from the writer of 1 John.

He writes, “We know love by this, that he(Jesus) laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? 18Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

Jesus laid down his life for us. Today in the church is known as Good Shepherd Sunday—we heard Jesus tell us, “I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” What we get in this picture of Jesus as shepherd is not this storybook picture of a freshly scrubbed Jesus surrounded by cute, fluffy sheep. Rather, it’s the picture of a person who is so committed to the care and the wellbeing of these sheep that he is willing to throw himself in the face of danger, sacrifice even his very life to save those sheep from destruction. God didn’t just stop at telling the world, “I love you.” It wasn’t just word or speech, but God became LIVING Word, embodied word, word made flesh, in the person of Jesus. In truth and in action Jesus lived, he healed, he raised the dead, he forgave, he befriended those who were on the edges or on the outside of society—people like lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes—people who were supposed to be untouchable. But he didn’t stop there—he proclaimed God’s love for us in every step toward the cross, in every hammering of the nails into his hands and his feet, in the emptying of himself to take on the powers of sin and death. And he didn’t stop at martyrdom—he rose, and because he now lives we know that we too have been given newness of life and freedom to live not for ourselves, but for others. This was true love, not just word or speech, but love that was lived in truth, spoken through action.

As those who claim to follow Christ, we are called to follow that same path of self-giving for the sake of the other. Christ was given much—he was, after all, God made flesh, but he emptied himself in loving service. And that’s what the author of 1 John is proclaiming for our lives, too. Laying down our lives for one another. Realizing that we have been given much—the NRSV translates verse 17 as asking how someone can have the world’s goods and refuse to help, but if you were to look at the actual Greek, the literal translation is not “the world’s goods” but “the life of the world.” So we’re not just talking about material goods, but anything that we have been given that can be of service to anyone in any kind of need. Have you been given the gift of education? Of listening? Of organization? Of being great with kids? Of compassion? Of being a leader? Of being good at following directions and working behind the scenes? Or of wealth? Of power? Of being put in positions of possible influence?

True love, the love that Jesus shows for us and that the author of 1 John wishes for us to show the world, is love in action. It is making the conscious decision that what I have been given is a gift that doesn’t end with me. Instead, it is a gift that flows through me, goes out beyond me, speaks the truth of the gospel loudly not through words that are spoken but through deeds that bring life and healing, that break down walls and build up those who have been broken down by the world. We don’t just say love. We don’t just proclaim love. We do love. Love is an action. Love is a verb. Love is what gets us out of our heads, gets us out of the trap of thinking that the church should only be about the business of purely spiritual matters, and stay away from the messiness of social issues. Love is when our social issues, the things we see in the world around us, BECOME spiritual issues that we are called to confront and act on. It is our witness to the world that Easter makes a difference not only after we die but also right now, that the cross and Jesus’ resurrection have transformed us into a people who live to bring life out of death, to bring light out of the dark places in the world, to follow Jesus into the pain and the brokenness around us in God’s work of transformation and reconciliation, as God works to make all things new.

Love is following the example of my friend Pops, the atheist who does ministry, who does God’s work, living love for “the least of these” in society. Love is following the example of Jesus the Good Shepherd, who laid down his life to give us new life. Love does not stop at word and speech, but is truth that is embodied in action. Through this kind of love, we most clearly speak the hope of the resurrection, the truth of God’s power, the abundant life that is the Kingdom of God for all creation.

Matt Schur
Our Saviour's Lutheran Church
Lincoln, NE

Sermon for Easter Sunday, April 8 2012--"He Is Not Here!"

To begin the sermon time today, I showed a video called "Easter Is Coming!"  Highly recommended.  I've attached it below...under that, you'll find the actual sermon text:

He Is Not Here!

Mark 16:1-8

Easter Sunday

April 8, 2012

“You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.”

He is not here!

Yes, this is where his body was laid, this is the tomb, this is where he was so carefully and lovingly placed three days ago after his horrible crucifixion, after the arrest and the kangaroo court trial and the beating and the spitting and the mocking and the crown of thorns and the long trip outside of town to be executed as a common criminal, surrounded by common criminals. I know those visions are still fresh in your minds, the pain is still fresh in your heart, and all you wanted to do was come and give his battered, decaying body some of the respect that it was denied in the awful way Jesus died. You are here to cleanse his body, to anoint him…and maybe in the process, to find some closure for yourselves.

But there is no closure needed, because he is not here!

Listen to me, and listen closely. You may think of this as a physical place where you’re looking for him, and it is, but it’s so much more than that. Your heart is expecting to find death. Your mind is expecting to find someone whose ideas, whose cause, whose being, was defeated once and for all by the power of the world—the military power of the Roman Empire and the religious power of the chief priests and the Sanhedrin.  You are expecting death to have the last word, because you yourselves experienced three days ago that might makes right. The world’s power, the power to kill that which is a threat, was proven in your eyes to be stronger than compassion. Your despair is so much stronger than any hope you might have had that this Jesus really was the Messiah, that he was the one anointed by God to bring healing and deliverance for his people.

So listen to me—he is not here!

He is not here in this place, in the expectation of death, in the limitations you have placed on him. Yes, Jesus encounters your death, Jesus encounters your fears, your despair, your hopelessness, but that’s not where he stays. That’s not where he keeps you.  There are some who would make Christian faith seem like an avoidance of the bad stuff—as though being a faithful follower of Christ means that things suddenly get easy, that it’s all sunshine and rainbows and that if you just believe hard enough and have enough faith, things will be just fine.

You know better than that though, don’t you?  You’ve seen stuff. You know the way the world works.  You’ve seen pain and suffering and injustice, and sometimes the temptation is to let the pendulum swing the other direction, isn’t it? To wonder if God’s really there, or if God’s really listening, or if God really cares about what’s going on.  The echoes of Jesus’ quoting of Psalm 22 on the cross still ring in your heart—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” You’ve asked that question too, sometimes, haven’t you? Why did this happen? Why did my loved one die? Why is there so much suffering? Why? Why have you forsaken me, God?

You yourselves saw Jesus encounter death. You saw him enter into that same pain and suffering and forsakenness, you heard him ask that same question that you may have asked in those dark nights of the soul. But that’s not where he stayed.  And so that’s not where he is! He encounters the world’s brokenness, but he transforms it! From death into life, from pain into healing, from suffering into comfort, from forsakenness to relationship, from sin to forgiveness, from bondage to freedom, Jesus is alive and at work and is NOT ready to just leave you where you are, here at the tomb, looking for death, thinking that you’ve come to the end when what this is, is really the beginning.

He is not here!

He’s gone ahead of you, ahead into Galilee. I know this sounds strange, I know this is not at all what you expected, but God’s mission isn’t about your expectations. God’s life isn’t about dwelling in the deaths of the past. It’s about encountering the present, encountering the world, about being out and about where things are happening, where people are living and loving and hurting and dying and questioning and suffering, and he can’t stay here in this tomb because there’s already so many others who are walking around just like you are now, trapped in their own tombs of finitude and their expectations and what the world has told them about power and the way things are, and Jesus is already at work transforming those stories too.  And when he’s done there, he’s not going to stay there either!  He’s going to continue his work of transforming, of turning the Good Fridays of the world into Easter Sundays, until all the world knows and believes and experiences that Easter resurrection hope, the transformation of the cross into an empty tomb, the transformation of the world’s brokenness into wholeness, the transformation of all creation into that amazing feast of the victory of new life over sin and death and the devil.

He has taken your own sin—everything that you know about yourself, maybe even things that nobody else may know, and he took on the power that holds you captive to them. You are a child of God, and like a parent who sees their child in danger Jesus confronted that power head on. You’ve heard of the wrath of God—that wrath was not against you, but rather against that power that causes you, God’s children who God loves more than life itself, to suffer and die. Through the cross, God said, “ENOUGH! Sin, you have no more power here! Death, you will die! I will enter all of this, I will be a part of it, but I won’t leave it here!  I am a God of creation, a God of life and hope." The sin that has gripped the world may sweep Jesus to the cross, but that won’t be the end of the story. The story won’t be death, but a new creation!

And so, he is not here!

So, go! Go tell the others, and go to Galilee, where Jesus already is! And from there, go follow where he continues—go to the sick, and the poor, and the outcast, and the prisoners. Go to those enslaved by their possessions, in bondage to their expectations, held captive by the fear and hatred and shallowness that surrounds them, and tell them, he is not here! Be sent, so that through what you say and what you do, others are empowered to also be sent to go themselves, to find where Jesus already is, to enter with him into the world’s pain, and to be his hands and his feet in God’s amazing work of transformation and new life.

You are being invited into the story of the cross. The temptation will be strong to give into your fear, to not say anything, to allow all of the messages that the world tries to tell you about reality guide how you react to what I’m telling you.  But look around this place. He is not here! He is out there! He has taken the world’s messages and has turned them upside down, he has taken the world’s ideas about power and turned them inside out, he has taken those who are outcast and brought them in, he has taken the broken and made them whole, and Jesus is calling you to go out! Go out beyond these walls, go out and be a part of what he’s already doing!

How will you respond? What difference will this make for you, not just in eternity, but today? Right now?

He is not here!

Matt Schur

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church

Lincoln, NE

Lenten midweek sermon from 3-28-12: "The Times, They Are A'Changin'"

The Times They Are A’Changin’: God’s Call to Reformation

Isaiah 43:18-21

Song lyrics: The Times They Are A'Changin'

About 13 years ago, my wife and I drove up to Duluth, MN for a concert. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, together, outside, in a park right on the shore of Lake Superior. Beautiful venue, great concert. Bob Dylan was the closing act of the two. Duluth is his hometown, so when he came on stage, he pointed and said, “I grew up on that hill over there. It’s good to be home.” Then he launched into his first song, and that was the last time he spoke to the audience until almost near the end of his set. He said, “I’ve got a feeling that this next song is just as relevant now as when I wrote it.” And then he started the intro to the song we just heard, The Times They Are A’Changin.’

Oh the times, they are a changin’. No kidding, Bob. The world around us, the thoughts, ideas, perceptions, the ways in which people relate to each other, the way information is distributed…we are living in a time that is vastly different from even just 20 years ago.

Yes, there is no doubt that the world is changing. In her book The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle’s theory is that every 500 years, there comes a gigantic shift in the way the world, and particularly religion, experiences reality. 500 years ago was the Protestant Reformation. 500 years before that was the great schism between the eastern and western Christian churches. 500 years before that was the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe. And 500 years before that was the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. She senses that right now, we are in an age of transition, a time of shifting, a period of changing priorities and perspectives. It’s a time that she is calling “The Great Emergence.”

During our Wednesday Lenten services, we’re exploring the theme, “Listen, God is Calling!” Each week we’re exploring a different aspect of that call, through the lens of Scripture and in conversation with a pop song from the last 40 years. Last week we looked at God’s call to justice through the lens of the Bruce Hornsby and the Range song The Way It Is. Today, we listen for God’s call to reformation.

What are we emerging from? How are we being reformed, literally re-formed, formed again? How are we being transformed? Where is this emergence taking us as a society, as a church, as the people of God?

We’re Lutherans. Reformation is something we ought to get. It’s part of our DNA, part of our religious heritage, part of our tradition. When Martin Luther translated the Bible from Latin into German, he did so because he believed in the importance of the people being able to hear and read the gospel in their own language. We remember his contribution to theology, his insistence that we are saved by grace through faith, but just as important in many ways was his idea that you and I, the everyday common folks, should be able to experience the Word of God in our own context. That we ALL are part of the body of Christ, that we ALL serve as “little Christs” to one another, that we ALL make up a priesthood of all believers, not just the folks who wear the funny collars and go to seminary.

We now live in a world that is suspicious of the church, and of institutions in general. We live in a world that is divided, that is divisive. We live in a world where technology has both made communication more accessible and has made relationships more distant. We live in a world where people no longer just belong to the church that their parents did, or practice the same faith. It’s no longer enough to build a church and wait for people to come in. We live in a world where truth is questioned, where everything is relative, where folks claim to be spiritual but not religious, where the church is increasingly seen as an irrelevant dinosaur that is hopelessly behind the times and out of touch with the world’s needs.

It doesn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way. The world may have changed, but the fundamental needs of people have not. And we, as people of faith, as those who follow Christ, we have what the world so desperately needs. The good news of the gospel has not changed. Our need for that good news has not changed. The brokenness of humanity, our broken relationships, our struggles with the powers of sin and pain and death, those things have not changed. Our need for grounding, our need for roots, our need for connection, our need for self-actualization, our need to be provided for physically…none of that has changed.

What has changed is what it looks like. What has changed is how those needs manifest themselves.

And so as the church, we also must change.

And that shouldn’t be scary for us, especially for those of us whose religious heritage is defined by reformation, by change. It’s not the gospel that’s changing, it’s not God’s Word or God’s message for us or God’s presence with us that changes, but rather it’s how we are taking that message to the world, it’s how we are following Christ to where Christ is at work, it’s how we respond to the new and different ways in which God is calling us to perceive God’s work in the world around us.

“I am about to do a new thing,” God says in our reading from Isaiah. “Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

What are the new things we are being called to be a part of? What is it that’s springing forth in the lives we see around us? How are we being called not just to “go to church,” but to do church, to be church, to climb out of that fishbowl and actively engage the world? This call to reformation isn’t a call to change just for the sake of change. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s automatically better or right, but by the same token, just because something is older doesn’t mean it’s automatically better or right, either. Theologian Jaraslov Pelikan once wrote that traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, but tradition is the living faith of the dead. Tradition helps keep us grounded, but when it ceases to be a tool for God’s mission and becomes a god unto itself simply for the sake of tradition, then it has lost its purpose. On the flip side of the coin, change helps us experience God in new ways and engage the world with fresh ideas, but change for the sake of change can also become its own god and lose its moorings, lose its foundation. We use words like “traditional” and “contemporary” as though they are at odds with one another, as though in order to be one way you cannot possibly be another way. It’s really our vocabulary and our orientation that needs to change. We can’t afford to spend time and energy arguing over styles or terminology, wanting things either the way we knew them when we were younger or changing just so that we can be more comfortable and fresh. Our focus must be outward. How does doing what we do serve the needs of the world around us? Are there things that we do that need to change in order to better meet those needs? Are there things that need to remain the same to best meet those needs? Are there things that have changed over time that need to change back to the way they once were to best meet those needs? How can we best proclaim the gospel through our words and our actions in a language people will hear and understand and respond to?

When I was in New Orleans in 2009 with our church youth for the National Youth Gathering, a street musician who I had befriended during our time there played a special thank you song for our group. It was actually another Bob Dylan song called Forever Young, a beautiful blessing. Before he sang it to us, he told us thanks for our time there, and for the work we had done both in service projects but also in bridge-building and healing post-Katrina through our loving attitudes. He said, “too often, church folk come to this city just to tell us we’re all going to hell. You guys came to help, you came to be with us and not against us—I’ve learned more about Jesus by watching you 37,000 Lutheran kids this week than from any fire and brimstone preacher I ever heard.”

And then he played his song for us, and for that moment we WERE the church, we were at worship, and God’s blessing was on that song as it became a hymn there on that street corner in the French Quarter.

This kind of stuff doesn’t just happen, it doesn’t occur in a vacuum. I’m not a fan of when people try to box things into nice neat steps or progressions, because very seldom does real life happen in that way. Life is generally messier than that. However, in our Lenten series this year, I sensed a sort of progression as I was putting things together. First was our call to repentance. We look in the mirror, we are honest with ourselves when it comes to our own brokenness. Then we examined God’s call to reconciliation, a re-joining of human relationships and our relationship with God that can only truly happen if we’ve been honest about the hurt and brokenness that we’ve been a part of and caused. Our next call from God that we looked at, the call to unity, is a recognition that we are all different, but united in a common call and mission from the God we love and serve. True unity cannot happen without repentance and reconciliation. Last week was God’s call to justice, which we as a church cannot follow without Christian unity and without recognizing our unity as humankind. And it is that call to justice, that call to help meet the deepest needs of a changing world, that brings us to God’s call to reformation. Our call to be re-formed, to be formed again as the church, to take the shape in which God is molding us to be God’s hands and feet in a world whose needs are the same, but for whom the way we engage those needs must be different.

We are living in exciting times! God is doing a new thing, re-shaping us for mission. Some things may look exactly the same, some things may look radically different, but when we step back and take a look at the overall shape of the church, something will become very apparent.

If we’re the ones who have done the shaping, the church will look just like us. It will be in our image, the way we want it, to serve our own needs.

If God’s the one who’s done the shaping, the church will look like the cross. It will be in the image of Jesus giving of himself in sacrificial love for the sake of the other.

Matt Schur
Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church
Lincoln, NE

Lenten Midweek Sermon from 3-21-12: God's Call to Justice

God’s Call to Justice

Isaiah 58:1-12

March 21, 2012

Bruce Hornsby and the Range--The Way It Is

During our Wednesday Lenten services, we’re exploring the theme, “Listen, God is Calling!” Each week we’re exploring a different aspect of that call, through the lens of Scripture and in conversation with a pop song from the last 40 years. Last week we looked at God’s call to unity through the lens of U2’s song One. Today, we listen for God’s call to justice in conversation with Bruce Hornsby and the Range's "The Way It Is."

What does God’s call to justice look like? How does it affect us? Where does it hit us?

Our reading from Isaiah is one of my favorite passages of Scripture, yet at the same time it is an absolutely blistering indictment of a people whose main focus had become how religious they were. They kept the feasts and the fasts, made sure to observe all the high holy days and said the right things and sang the right songs and followed all of the religious rules and regulations and thought that therefore everything was just fine between them and God. Instead, God tells Isaiah to “announce to the people their rebellion.” Their rebellion, their sin, was not about neglecting to go to church, or following other religions, or questioning their faith, what we’d normally think of as “moral issues,” or any of the other reasons that might jump to our mind as to what God would consider rebellion. God’s problem with the people was that while on the one hand they were claiming to worship, on the other hand they were oppressing their workers, they weren't taking care of the poor and needy, and in fact were trampling on them to serve their own interests. For God, justice is the ultimate moral issue.

So then, what is justice in God’s eyes? When we hear the word “justice,” we often think of fairness—making things fair, equal. The Biblical idea of justice goes beyond that, though. Justice isn’t about making things fair as much as it’s about setting things right. God’s justice is rooted in love, and love isn’t fair. Love throws a party for the prodigal son who’s squandered the inheritance when he comes home, love leaves the 99 sheep to search for the one who is lost. Love speaks out, acts, pursues, in order to repair what is broken, restore what is lost, make right what has gone wrong.

God’s justice, a justice that is rooted in love, leads to the cross. It leads to the death of our old sin, and to the resurrection through baptism into the new life of the empty tomb.

The problem we often run into is that we set up this false divide between theology, worship, Scripture, “churchy stuff” on the one side, and “social justice” on the other side. The argument goes that you can be a faithful, Bible believing Christian who worships God, OR you can focus on matters of social justice and turn that into your gospel, losing sight of the cross. Isaiah 58 and many other passages of Scripture argue otherwise. Our faith is important to God. How we approach God, our relationship with God, how we read Scripture, how we worship, how we trust in God’s love and forgiveness and grace—all of that is important. But all of that serves to inform how we understand our relationships with each other, and forces us to ask the hard questions of whose voices aren’t being heard, where are we seeing oppression or discrimination or treatment that is less than what a fellow child of God deserves? When Jesus was asked about the most important commandment, his response in a nutshell was that there was not one, but two: love God and love people. And so we have Bible believing Christians, and we have Social Justice Christians, and where those two groups intersect…that’s where we find Jesus, doing God’s work through their hands and their feet and their hearts.

Our song today speaks of racial injustice, then in the chorus quotes an imaginary person just throwing in the towel on it all. “That’s just the way it is, some things will never change. That’s just the way it is.” But then the singer tells us, “Oh, but don’t you believe it.”

It is true that some things will never change. Human beings will always be sinners. We will always naturally be curved in on ourselves. We will always be in need of forgiveness and grace. We will always need the cross. But these sinful systems, these sinful structures, these ways of dealing with those who are different or less powerful than us, these things that we have constructed, these can change. And our call from God is to keep our eyes open, to keep our ears open, to keep our hearts open so that we can see where people are being oppressed, where people are being denied their rights, where the fact that we were all created in God’s image is not being honored and valued and celebrated.

And that doesn’t just happen on the other side of the world. It doesn't just happen in other parts of the country. It happens right here, in Nebraska, in Lincoln, in our own backyard. Our brothers and sisters who are gay or lesbian. Our brothers and sisters who are illegal or undocumented immigrants. Our brothers and sisters whose skin is a different color than us. Our brothers and sisters who are of a different religion than us, or of no religion at all. Our brothers and sisters who are unemployed or homeless. Our brothers and sisters who are sex offenders or convicted criminals. Our brothers and sisters who are addicted to alcohol or other drugs.

Yes, some of these things people were born with and they can’t do anything about it, and other things are the result of choices, but in God’s eyes is there really a difference? Does it really matter? In Isaiah, are we told to bring justice only for those who deserve it in our eyes? No. God’s call to us, flat out, is “for goodness sakes people, just take care of each other.”

These are some pretty hot-button issues I brought up, and I recognize that. It’s not my place to tell you what conclusions are the right ones—goodness knows that faithful Christians come down on different sides of all sorts of issues. What IS important to hear, however, is that God cares about HOW we’re coming to those conclusions. Do we approach these kinds of questions in faithfulness, or in fear? Do we look at each other with openness or with prejudice? Do we use our religious systems and structures, its rules and norms, as an excuse for justifying our own injustices, or are they spiritual practices and tools to draw us closer to God and to one another?

These big systems, these big institutions, these ways that society has constructed itself to marginalize and oppress certain groups CAN change. It begins with us, with our own attitudes, with our own small day to day decisions. It continues when those of us who were dealt the random card of privilege choose to use our voices to speak out for those whose voice is not heard, and continues further when we begin to work to allow those voices to be heard. It’s not about being embarrassed or ashamed for what we have, but rather about making a conscious choice to use those resources—whether they be money, power, voice, time, energy, skills, or anything else—for the sake of those who do not have them.

God’s justice, rooted in love, active in our lives.

Matt Schur
Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church
Lincoln, NE

The Hope That Is In You: sermon from 5-29-11

The Hope That Is In You

1 Peter 3:13-22

May 28-29, 2011

When I was a high school senior, I took Advanced Placement English from Mrs. Wolford at Bellevue West High School. Mrs. Wolford was one of the best teachers I ever had in school—she had a way of opening up literature that helped us better understand the world around us, and pushed and prodded us to become the best writers we could be. Throughout the year, we learned about all the various literary devices, major literary themes, symbolism—you name it, we covered it in detail. By the end of the year, when we had this box of tools at our disposal, an assignment would consist of reading a poem or short passage of prose, with the instructions, “explicate and analyze.” That was it. We were then responsible for closely reading and analyzing whatever the assigned passage had been, and discerning both its meaning and relevance.

Today, I want to do something similar with one sentence from our second reading. 1 Peter 3:15-16 says, “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” This single, simple sentence from 1 Peter really gets to the heart of our calling to be bearers of the good news of God in Christ to the world, and deserves our attention, especially in a world that increasingly is convinced that the church has very little to say to it anymore. So, in honor of Mrs. Wolford, let’s explicate and analyze.

First, it begins with “always be ready.” Think for a moment—if someone were to walk up to you and say, “I noticed you went to church. What do you believe, why do you believe it, and what difference does it make in the world?” what would your answer be? What DO we believe? Well, we have these creeds that we say most weeks in church—a creed is a statement of belief. I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and so forth. That’s a good start…but what do we mean exactly when we say these things, when we recite these words. Are they just words, or have we spent time studying them, wrestling with them, thinking about what they say and what we mean when we recite them? That was a concern Martin Luther shared, and is why he wrote the Small Catechism, which has short, clear explanations of the 10 commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, and the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion. His idea behind writing it was to provide parents a way to help their children learn about their faith at home. What would happen if families looked at the small Catechism together, and asked themselves together, “what does this mean?” One exercise I’ve seen suggested, and I’ve seen done sometimes in Confirmation programs, is to write your own creed. What’s important to you about your faith? How would you articulate that?

The second part of always being ready is to consider the question “why do I believe what I believe?” Is this something the Bible tells me? Is it something society tells me? Have I learned this through experience? Was it some combination of factors? How did I come to these conclusions? As Lutherans, while we value personal experience and traditions, ultimately it is the Word of God that is our basis. We also believe, though, that the Word of God first and foremost is the Living Word—Jesus Christ. You remember the beginning of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was WITH God, and the Word WAS God.” Jesus himself is the living Word who speaks to us in our situation today, and so when we approach the written word, the Bible, we do so through Jesus-colored and cross-shaped glasses. We filter, we interpret, through the lens of Christ crucified and risen. And so it is in our confrontation with the Living Word through the written word that we wrestle with why we believe what we believe.

“Hold on a second. This sounds like work!” You’d better believe it is…but if we’re going to address the third part of always being ready, our faith making a difference in the world, then we need to personally spend time wrestling in the messiness of those first two questions. Only when we have an idea of what we believe and why we believe it can it make any difference in the world—either in our lives or in anyone else’s. Wrestling with our faith in this way is a messy process, but then again, isn’t life messy? Isn’t the world messy? How can our faith even begin to speak to our lives outside of the four walls of the church building if we haven’t engaged it? So this third part is the “so what.” So you believe certain things about God, and so you have an idea of why you believe those things, but now what? What difference does it make? Is it a matter of factual knowledge that you can file away in your “church compartment” and go on living real life somewhere else? Or does it matter? How does it matter that God created the world and all in it? How does that color how we see creation? How we see others, even those who we disagree with or who hate us? How does it matter that Jesus was fully divine and fully human—that he died on the cross and rose? How does it matter that the Holy Spirit is active and at work in the world today? All of Jesus’ teachings, all of what Paul and others wrote in the New Testament on our Christian life and relationships with God and each other—how do all of those things relate with each other and make a difference in how I see and act in the world?

So we know we’ve got to always be ready to make a defense to someone who demands an accounting for the…what? Hope. All of this study and introspection that we’ve done sort of leads to a forming of our personal theology. Theology comes from two greek words: theos and logos: theos is God and logos is word. So all theology is, is “God-words.” We’ve come up with some words about God, but those words are not there simply for their own sake. These aren’t just intellectual exercises. Our theology, our God –words, point to hope. The writer of 1 Peter understands that we’re Christians because of the “hope that is within us.” The gospel, the good news, the message of Christ is one of hope. God created the world. God loves the world SO much, that Jesus lived, died, and rose so that sin and death might be defeated and all of creation might be reconciled to God. We live in a now-but-not-yet world, where we still experience pain and death and the consequence of sin and our brokenness, but also live in the promise of the hope of the New Jerusalem. God is even now making all things new, and every act of mercy and justice and mission that we undertake is a foretaste of the feast to come of that final time. Every time we gather around the communion table we both remember Christ’s death and resurrection, and anticipate the great feast at the end of time when death and pain and tears will be no more. Our God words are words of hope, and our call is to share that hope with the world around us through what we say and what we do.

How then, do we do this? First of all, with gentleness. The root of the greek word here is the same one Jesus uses in Matthew 5:5 when he says “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” We associate meekness with allowing yourself to be a doormat for whatever anyone else wants to say or do, but what the greek is getting at is more of a sense of a gentleness of spirit. How often over time has the Bible, or the gospel message itself, been used as a weapon to assert power or authority instead of being used to convey the message of hope in Christ? How does this happen?

We forget the double meaning of hope. First, hope is something we want to have happen. Hope is a good thing. And the message of hope we find in the cross is the message that even when there was nothing that we ourselves could do to climb up the ladder to God, God came to us. God still comes to us. I’m sure many of you have seen the diagram showing two cliffs—us on one side, God on the other, and a great chasm representing our sin in the middle. Then a cross is drawn in the middle, showing that through the cross, that gap has been bridged. The problem with that diagram is that even with the cross bridging the gap for us, we’re still powerless to walk across on our own to God. The cross isn’t our pathway to God, the cross is God’s pathway to us. This is good news for the whole world! So then why doesn’t the world hear it as the good news it is? It’s because we often tie up our gift of hope with strings of condemnation and fear. We turn the God who has invited us all to the party into the heavenly bouncer trying to keep out the undesirables.

The other aspect of hope is that we often confuse hope with knowledge. We can be confident in our hope in Christ, we can have a confident faith, and the church is at its best when it’s active in ministry throughout the world, compelled by that confident faith and hope. But faith, hope, by their very definitions are things you can’t prove. We can become so sure of ourselves, so sure that we believe the right things, that our interpretation of the Bible and of who God is, is the right and only way to see it, that we lose the humility that naturally comes with faith. We replace faith and trust with knowledge. One of my favorite sayings is that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt—it’s certainty. Or knowledge. When we confuse ourselves is when mission and the good news both to each other and the outside world is sacrificed on the altar of being right. That’s not to say that what we believe isn’t important—but we must always deliver our message of hope with the gentleness and humility that comes from faith.

Finally, the good news is a message we speak with reverence. We think God’s message of hope is SO important, SO holy, such good news for the world that we do everything in our power to not allow our words and actions to get in the way of that message. If we preach forgiveness, but harbor grudges in our hearts, we are not treating our message with reverence. If we preach grace, but place strings on others, we’re not treating our message with reverence. If we preach Jesus and the cross but live as though there was no empty Easter tomb, then why should the world listen to anything we say? The way we go about loving either fully or with strings attached, disagreeing with one another either with respect or contempt, speaks volumes about what we really think about those things we say are important to us. The gospel is the most important message anyone will ever hear, whether it’s spoken or seen. How many people out there don’t follow Christ because of experiences they’ve had with the church? Or because the message they’ve heard or seen has not been the gospel of hope? Reverence here simply means respecting the gospel so much that we try as hard as we can not to obscure it for others with our own sinfulness.

Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Explicated and analyzed. Mrs. Wolford, I hope you approve.

Matt Schur
Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church
Lincoln, NE

Sermon for March 17-18: Grace, Works, and Poopy Treats

(My seminary classmates and those who have read this blog in the past may recognize the "nightlight" story...this was the first time my congregation had heard it, though...)

Grace, Works, and Poopy Treats

Ephesians2:1-10

March 17-18, 2012

Kiddo and Pumpkin (names changed for the internet) are a little older now, but in reflecting on the passage from Ephesians, I found myself thinking back to when each of them was two years old. 

Which makes sense, because this passage says a lot about grace.  And there’s not a lot of grace involved when you live with a 2 year old. 

These are all sentences Sweetie (name changed for the internet) and I actually found ourselves saying word for word at some point:  “IF you eat your supper, THEN you can have pudding.”  “IF you put away your toys, THEN you can watch Dora the Explorer.”  “IF you go poopy on the potty, THEN you can have a poopy treat.” You know those little Smarties candies? Perfect incentive to get kids to go potty when and where they’re supposed to. AND…unlike M&M’s, they’re also transportable in a purse or pocket without melting, even in the middle of the summer. If you get nothing else out of today’s sermon, you at least now have my one parenting tip.

At any rate, life with a 2 year old is a lot of IF/THEN…because it has to be.  IF you’re good enough, THEN you get rewarded.  2 year olds understand works righteousness very well.

On the other hand, moments of grace do come.  Ever since the kids have been able to sleep through the night, it has been my job when they do wake up at night to go to their room and comfort them.  In the interest of full disclosure…the reason I’m the one who gets up has more to do with common sense than  chivalry or anything like that—I am just a much lighter sleeper than Sweetie.  When one of the kids makes noise, I’m going to wake up either way, so it makes more sense for only one person to wake up than both of us. 

Not long after Kiddo had turned two, he had started waking up with night terrors.  It was completely normal for his age, but when you are woken up at 3 in the morning by the most inhuman screaming, it can be a bit disconcerting, to say the least.  When it first started, we got him a nightlight, and made a really big deal about how he has a “special light” in his room so he can see that there’s nothing to be afraid of.  After that, when the night terrors came, I’d go into his room, sit down next to his bed, rub his back and help settle him down.  Then we’d talk about his special light and how he doesn’t have to be scared.  I’d ask him, “does mommy have a special light?” 

"No.” 

“Does daddy have a special light?”

"No, only Kiddo.” 

“That’s right, only Kiddo has a special light.  So you don’t have to be scared.”  (Don’t ask me why that made sense, but for some reason it was a big comfort to his 2 year old mind.)  

Then, usually, he’d be comforted enough to lay back down and go to sleep.

After he had had the nightlight for a couple of weeks, I was pretty proud of how well our discussions about the nightlight were working in helping him go back to sleep.  So one night, I decided to take the discussion one step further.  We went through our usual litany, and then I asked him another question, to see how well he understood what we were talking about: “so why doesn’t Kiddo have to be scared?”

His answer?  “Because Daddy comes.”

The “Theology of the Nightlight” isn’t what mattered to him.  What mattered was that in the middle of the night, daddy comes.  Daddy doesn’t come because Kiddo ate his dinner or because he put away his toys or because he went poopy in the potty—Daddy just comes.  When Kiddo is so terrified that all he can do is cry out, he knows that Daddy comes.  That is faith. 

The theology behind justification isn’t what matters to us.  What matters is that in the middle of the darkness of our sin, our heavenly daddy comes.  He came to us in the manger at Bethlehem, he came to us on the cross at Calvary and in the empty tomb, and he comes to us today.  God doesn’t come to us because of anything we’ve done, God just comes.  When we’re so terrified, when we’re so lost, when we’re so dead in our sin that all we can do is cry out, we know God comes.  That is faith. Faith isn’t understanding and agreeing to a set of propositions. Faith is simply trust.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”   

The good news of the gospel is that you are not alone. The good news of the gospel is that it’s not up to you to get it all right, it’s not up to you to make yourself acceptable to God, it’s not even up to you to believe the right things to complete some magical formula to get God to save you. The good news of the gospel is that God has already saved you…if we were to translate the Greek literally in Ephesians 2:8 it would say, “by grace you have been and continue to be saved.”  This is something that has already happened for you, but it’s also something that is continuing in your present reality and will extend into your future. And it’s not because of anything you’ve done. Good OR bad.

In Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Bible called The Message, he describes the word “grace” as “surprise love gift.” Grace is a surprise—it’s not anything we expect. The way of the world teaches us that we ought to get what’s coming to us (good OR bad), or that we reap what we sow (good OR bad). God’s grace works backwards from what the world teaches us. Grace is a surprise to us because we DON’T get what’s coming to us, what we deserve. Instead of condemnation, we receive forgiveness.  Instead of death, we receive new life.

Grace is love—our Gospel reading today includes what is probably the most well-known verse out of the entire Bible: “for God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” God’s grace is love. It is love in action.

And grace is a gift. As we’ve heard in Ephesians, it’s not something we earn. It’s not the result of what we do. It’s a free gift from God.

We have been saved…by grace…through faith. And it’s not because of anything we’ve done. BUT…if that’s where we stop, we’ve missed the whole point.

Listen closely, because this is the main point not only of the sermon, but of our entire existence. We’re not saved BY good works, but we were created FOR good works.

In Richard Stearns’ book The Hole In Our Gospel, he writes about what he calls “The Great Omission.” His point was that we’ve taken God’s message of grace and love and have made it far too much about ourselves. About who we are as individuals. It’s too much of “me and God.” Now don’t get me wrong. That’s important. Faith is relationship, it’s trust, it is about me and God…but that’s not the finish line. That’s not where it ends. That's actually where it begins. It's just the starting point. The final end point of my faith is not me. It’s about being able to serve my neighbor. It’s about doing good works. It’s about saving me from my slavery to myself, to needing for it to be all about me, in order that I may turn my focus outward.

And that has been the Great Omission too often in the church. We’ve created this false divide, saying that the gospel is either about my own personal salvation, or it’s about bringing about the kingdom of God through acts of social justice. The reality, according to Ephesians, is that what we’re dealing with is a both/and situation, not an either/or. Verses 8 and 9 are often quoted, and for good reason, but look for a moment at verse 10. “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” 

This is how we were created to live. This is who we are.

How many of you have ever been on a mission trip or work trip?

How many of you have ever volunteered for a helping group or organization?

How many of you have ever helped someone who needed it?

When you did those things, how did it make you feel?

I realize that the purpose of our lives isn’t to feel good, but I would argue that the reason helping others is so fulfilling, so deeply enriching to our lives, is because when we do it, we are most fully living out who God created us to be. Seriously—there’s no feeling in the world like being able to walk away knowing that in some way, even if it’s a small way, you’ve made a difference in the life of someone else. As Lutherans, especially, it’s easy to fall into the trap of being so afraid of thinking that we’re justified by good works that we forget to actually do any.

My friends, you have been saved! You have been freed from having to live up to any standard, any measuring stick. This is a gift! The gift is FOR you, but it doesn’t end WITH you…you have been set free as a surprise love gift to live into who you were created to be, to live a life of good works.

And that’s better than a poopy treat any day.

Matt Schur

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church
Lincoln, NE