Archives for June 2020

Sermon – May 31, 2020 – Pentecost

            It’s Pentecost, and one would think there would be more birds. It is, after all, the Holy Spirits big day and in his most recognizable appearance in the gospels, at the baptism of Jesus, the Spirit comes down from heaven dressed as a bird. That was the first impression, and it really stuck. If you view the early paintings and drawings of the baptism of Christ, you usually see the same picture, an old man, a young man, and a bird. And many of our Pentecostal hymns sing of a dove or wings. I guess once you take on the appearance of some creature, you are remembered as that forever. Even most Pentecost bulletin you get a dove.

            But today’s scripture lessons today are totally bird less. No birds in Acts, no birds in John, no birds in the Psalms, none in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. And the readings just would not make much sense if you put bird images in them. So no birds in todays readings. Just wind.

            Just wind, and just us, trying forever to grasp the wind. As the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us, is vanity. There are many reasons to cling to the bird image, the number one would be that we could actually cling to a bird. You can see, hold, touch, cage a bird. But you cannot see the wind, you cannot touch it, you cannot hold it, you cannot cage it. It is a mystery that sweeps through our world that has no beginning or ending. Sometimes gentle and refreshing, sometimes violent and devastating, always out of our control.

            And although it is difficult to paint wind into these ancient drawings with young man and old man, grasping wind is a much more accurate description of our relationship with the Holy Spirit than is birdwatching. Our human minds delight in solving problems and unraveling mysteries and decoding codes, we like to figure things out, we like to put our trust in the proven.

            And our faith is hard, because we are asked to put our trust in things we cannot see or understand. We are grasping at wind, finding that we are forever empty handed. I have baptized Brecken and Kollins Dybdahl into the body of Christ and I hope to do many more. When I baptized these twins, no dove from heaven descended on them. Instead, the Holy Spirit hid in the air around them and us, unseen. I invoked the Holy Spirit in the water over the font and the water stayed perfectly still. I traced the cross on their foreheads and declared to them that they were sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism. There is no way to display this seal permanently. It is quite a thing to give ones life to an unseen mystery. But that is what we as Christians are asked to do.

What potentially makes it easier is that we do it all the time. We live by the breath of life and we cannot see it. Our souls are sustained by the beauty of music, and we cannot see it. Our bodies are grounded by the force of gravity, and we cannot see it. Our spirit runs on hope, and we cannot see it. Love is the most powerful thing in the universe, and we cannot see it. There is more going on than meets the eye. This Spirit, this Holy Spirit is so close to us, that we have difficulty finding our focus. We live and move and have our being in the Spirit of God. The Spirit envelopes us. The Spirit holds us and sustains us whether or not we believe it. Even though we cannot see it. Even though we cannot hold it firmly in our hands.

            What actually happened in John’s gospel is that Jesus breathed on his disciples. He simply breathed on them. Just air coming from his mouth. The average person does that 23,000 times a day. It’s amazing on how our mysteries are so wrapped up tightly in simplicity.

            Jesus pushed the Holy Spirit into this world through his lips. No birds, just wind. The Spirit moved on the breath of Jesus, entering and leaving and entering and leaving the lungs of the disciples. All of them, breathing together. So the Spirit rolled on every breath they took, and on every word they spoke. Jesus filling their lungs, and Jesus filling their world. Spreading like a virus. Unseen, and impossible to grasp. Unseen, and impossible to stop.

            What actually happened in Acts was a violent wind pushed the disciples out of the room and into the streets. Like a tornado that could not be resisted the Holy Spirit carried them into their mission field to speak the gospel of Jesus into the world, so that what was in them could now be breathed in by others. Jesus filling their lungs, and Jesus filling their world. Spreading like a virus. Unseen and impossible to grasp. Unseen, and impossible to stop.

            You are breathing the same air. Air passed through the lungs of those who came before us. You are held in the same wind. Jesus is filling your lungs, and you are breathing Jesus back into your world. Inspiring those who are suffocating, breathing life into dead places.

            We live and move and have our being in this Holy Spirit. The very atmosphere that envelopes us. We truly are surrounded. And our only recourse is surrender. To allow the wind to blow us away.

            Birds are ok, birds are nice. Dove on a bulletin cover, very sharp. But our destiny is blowing in the wind.

A lot of people today think there is a war going on today, science and the Bible, you can’t have both, you need to choose. As we think about that we have to ask the question, “what is it that the Bible claims?” It may indeed be contrary, contradictory toward science claims. If we are going to try to deal with this kind of topic, we have to make sure we understand the claims we made on both sides, otherwise we won’t be able to assess where we land.                                                                                                                                            And that’s the kind of origin story that has deep theological meaning for us, and would have been the kind that the Israelites would have been likely to tell.                                                                                                        

If in Genesis 1 we have a home story rather than a house story then even something like the seven days is not something about the material cosmos, rather it might talk about how the cosmos became sacred space. For instance, when they built a temple in the ancient world, it took a long time for them to construct the temple, and that structure was being built to be a residence for God, it was being prepared to be a home, but first they had to build the house. When they get to the stage where all the preparation, all the material building is done, it’s still just a house. It’s not a temple, it’s not a home. But then they have a temple inauguration, a ceremony, in which this temple house becomes a home. You would find the origins of the home, that story, in the inauguration, the dedication, rather than in the long story of the buildings construction. We realize then that those inauguration and dedication ceremonies that we have in the Bible, and that we have throughout the ancient near-east, those home stories, those inauguration of sacred space stories often take place in even days. As a result it would be no surprise that in Genesis 1 we have a home story that is structured in a seven day sequence. And at the end of it God rests, which means that God is done ordering it as a home, as sacred space, therefore he takes up his residence and his reign in that sacred space.                                                                                                                     

If you look at a house, for instance, you could address the houses origins question by telling how the house was built. You could talk about the foundation, the wiring, the insulation etc. That would be the house story, and that would be a legitimate origins story. Alternatively, we could talk about how the people who live in the house have made it a home. That would be the home story. That is, how this house became these peoples home. And describing how they made it a home. That is also an origins story. And usually the latter is the story most people looking at a house would be more interested in.                                                                                     

So what is it that we think about when we think about the Bible’s claims in Genesis 1 and 2? To assess that, we have to make sure that we understand that the Bible is indeed an ancient text. It’s not written to us, it is written for us. But God has communicated through Israelite authors, to an Israelite audience, in their terms, and it’s that communication that we can benefit from as we try to understand the Bible’s claims. We should not think that the Bible is going to anticipate our world and our issues and address them, either explicitly or suttlely. We have to read the text for what it is. So when we come to Genesis 1 for instance, we have to ask the question “what kind of origins account is this?”  You could do a number of different approaches to try to understand origins. So we have to figure out what origin account they are telling.                                                                                        

The home story is about how this world was tailored for us, by a loving, creator God, who wants to be in a relationship with us. The home story will talk about how God himself intended to make this cosmos God’s home as well, where he could relate to us. The home story is an important origin story that has significant theology connected to it. And so we would have to ask the question “which origin story are they telling, what do they want to know about?”                                                                                                                                          Theologically the home story is extremely important. We find that most of the cosmologies in the ancient world focus on a home story. A home story talks about how the world is ordered, and how it functions. What role and purpose does it have. And those kind of things were important in the ancient world, and they are important to us as well. The fact that we have molecules and atoms and quarks and supernovas and expanding universe, that’s of interest and important for us to understand. But in the end what we really want to know is God’s involvement in this world and how he made it a place for us, to relate to him. That origin story that we find in Genesis is an origin story that is focused on theology, not so much on science. As such the claims that it is making may be claims that have more to do with theology than with science.                                                     

When we read the Israelite account in Genesis 1 we have to ask the question, well, the same kind of question. Would they be interested in the house story, how the cosmos was constructed by God, because of course it was constructed by God, and they know that and we know that. But do they want the house story, or are they interested in a different origins story, the home story.

Genesis Lesson #2

We discussed last week about the thought of a war between science and the Bible. And how we are in the awkward position of having to choose. This controversy is everywhere.

So, we must decide how we make our decisions. We have to know the claims of each side. So now, we will look at the claims the Bible makes. We will look closely at what the text says. We will look at the text of Genesis through ancient eyes, that is thinking about the text as an ancient document. We have to be careful about reading the Bible as a modern text. We need to find where the Bible’s authority comes from.

We know that God’s purpose is carried out through human purpose. We have a duo authorship going on here, human and divine. And God decided that he was going to communicate through particular human beings, in a particular language, a particular culture, in a particular time and place. This was God’s decision. That means if we are going to get God’s message we have to go through that author. So, there is authority vested in the human author. It is not the human author’s authority; it is the authority of God. But we have to go through the human author to get it. That means we have to try to understand what that human author is communicating, because what he has to say, in his time and place and language, to his audience, that has authority. So, we understand the Bible was written ‘for us, but not to us’. The message transcends culture, but the form is culture bound. We get a message from scripture that we can all benefit from, it is sound theology and is revealing God to us. But the message is culture-bound and that means we have work to do to understand it. We must take our place in that ancient audience. They will not have our questions, our issues. For instance, when they thought of kings, it was not the way we know of in recent history such as the kings of France and England. When we read of cities in the Biblical text, we can’t think of New York or London or Paris, Jerusalem and Babylon are far different places. When we talk of marriage in the Biblical text don’t think love and romance, marriage was not built that way. When we think of slavery in the Biblical text, we don’t find ethnic exploitation or the bigotry that comes with that, because that’s not what slavery was in the ancient times, we have to try to think about the world the way they thought about the world. We have to think this way, so we don’t impart our thinking about the text without realizing it. So we have to see the world the way they did, and we will start taking that up next week.

June 21^st Sermon – 3^rd Sunday after Pentecost

                  A difficult Gospel this week, a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, our foe would be members of our own household. Jesus and his vision of a non-utopian future. A future in which would drill its way even into the foundations of the family unit. A future in which generations would clash over allegiances and values. It is a grim picture indeed.

                  Fortunately in 2000 years of steady progress finds us in a 21^st century utopia in which such talk of division can scarcely be found, int the news, or on social media, or around a family gathering. We so many years removed from these words of Jesus, I’m sure we are relieved to find ourselves in the comfortable state, unaffected outsiders curiously glimpsing the struggles of the first century faithful, it must have been hard. It is almost impossible in modern America to imagine such division. Especially in ones own family, I mean if you take politics out of it, and race out of it, and religion out of it, and opinions generally, the world in which this sort of conflict would happens seems inconceivable. Or perhaps not.

                  It is amazing how timely these 2000 year old texts can be. Jesus is talking to that 1^st century Palastinian audience and he could just as well be talking directly to us, to our nation. To a people who know division all to well. Families are still not perfect. Neither are the individual members and division does happen. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, and deepest desires. But reality makes it no easier to hear these words coming from Jesus. Not just because of our lingering scars and fractured relationships, because not only does Jesus name the thing, in this gospel passage, Jesus owns it. Before listing the divisions I previously mentioned, Jesus says I have come to set a man against his father.

                  This is a difficult gospel passage because when read in isolation it confronts us with a picture of Jesus that feels odd, even disconcerting. How do you make sense of a Jesus who comes to set family members in opposition. With a Jesus who brings a sword instead of peace. With a Jesus who warns his followers to temper their love for their own parent and children.

Lutheran pastor and scholar David Lose remembers that as a child he recalls that this passage always troubled him because no matter how many times he heard it in church and Sunday School, he never could get past the feeling that he really loved his parents more than Jesus. And as a 10 year old he concludes that he is in serious trouble with Jesus. And he confides his indiscretion his mom, who in turn tells her child that she made the same confession to her dad as a young girl. This passage has been haunting Christians for centuries. It is an image of Jesus that tends to clash with those images that most often dominate our Christian piety. The image of Jesus carrying a lamb over his shoulders. The image of a compassionate Jesus feeding the hungry crowd, or touching the lepers clean, or raising a little girl from her deathbed with his gentle hand, or blessing a group of children, it is difficult to see that Jesus in this gospel.

                  Here Jesus says “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth, I have not come to bring peace but a sword.” But also, this is the same Jesus who says “blessed are the peacemakers.” And commands Peter to put away his sword in the Garden of Gethsemene. This is the same Jesus who the prophets named the Prince of Peace.

                  Here Jesus says “I have come to set a man against his father, but this is the same Jesus who takes care of his mother while dying on the cross, who restores dead and dying children to their grieving parents, who gives to his followers the ministry of reconciliation.

                  Here Jesus says “whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me and whoever loves son and daughter more than me is not worthy of me, but this is also the same Jesus who twice in this gospel of Matthew quotes the commandment to honor one’s father and mother, who once in a confrontation with the Pharisees who he believes do not take this commandment seriously enough, and the same Jesus who asks a rich young man which commandments he must keep in order to enter into eternal life. This is the same Jesus who says let the little children come to me, for it is such as these in which the kingdom of heaven belongs.

                  There is more to Jesus than what we find in todays gospel passage, but this too is Jesus. Earlier in this same chapter of Matthews gospel Jesus sends out his disciples. He gives them their mission, and he promises them a fruitful ministry, they will cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. In short, they will be like Jesus, they will preach his message, they will proclaim the good news of his love. They will do his amazing works.

                  But also, he makes this quite clear, they will experience his suffering. They will go into the world to do good, to proclaim the good news of Christ by word and deed, they will do justice and offer mercy and share God’s love and for their reward they will be persecuted, they will be beaten, they will be disowned.

                  Those who follow in the footsteps of Jesus find that those footsteps end at the foot of the cross. This gospel, this gospel passage is difficult. It is difficult because we want to believe that good things happen to good people. We want to believe that we get what we deserve, we want to believe that folks understand that the Good News is good news.

But then Jesus comes along and his good news causes family strife, his good news breeds conflict, his good news finds him nailed to the cross. Jesus is preaching the good news, but that good news is shaking things up. Redefining family, overturning tables, clashing with powerful people, ruffling feathers.

                  Walter Bruggerman reminds us that the gospel is a very dangerous idea. We have to see how much of that dangerous idea that we can perform in our lives, there is nothing safe about the gospel. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man.

                  The problem with the gospel and why it raises our human defenses is that it is just so bothersome, so confrontational, so disruptive. It brings life to dead places and shines light in dark corners, and heals sicknesses and breaks the bond of addiction. Love could really put some folks out of business. God is making all things new and that is good news unless you are invested in the old stuff.

                  Jesus in the gospel is launching a revolution, a revolution built on love. Richard Rohr writes that it is no surprise that the Christian icon of redemption is a man offering love from a crucified position. Cupid is not our icon of love, the crucified Christ is. Our great hope as Christians is that we share in Christ resurrection, but of course, one does not share in Christ’s resurrection without first dying with him.

                  The goal of the gospel is not to make nice people. It is not to make polite citizens. The goal of the gospel is as C.S. Lewis says ‘to draw people into Christ, to make them little Christs, to live out the love of God until it hurts, and sometimes it will’.

                  This is a difficult gospel passage. And maybe we have been reading it wrong. It is not a prophesy or a threat. It is not just Jesus being realistic. Its obviously not Jesus hope for the world. This gospel is lament. This gospel is the heartbreaking reminder that since the Garden of Eden, since our very beginning, human brokenness has time and time and time again caused us to rebel against God’s love.

                  Jesus revolution was opposed back then and it is opposed now. Nonetheless, God’s love is on the move. God is not discouraged. Its funny how peace brings out our swords. And still God continues to reach out in this world in love, and now through us, sending us out into the world as little Christs. Where there is hatred we sow love. It is good news, God is making all things new, Jesus is leading a movement that promises to overwhelm this planet in his love. But change is hard and not everyone is going to get on board. It wasn’t easy for Jesus, and it won’t be easy for us.

This gospel passage is difficult because it is true. Love in this world is both threat and salvation. And yet this is the work that Christ calls us, this is what we are sent to do. It’s not an easy job, Jesus knows that better than anyone. Those who follow in the footsteps of Jesus find that those footsteps end at the foot of the cross. Those who stand at the foot of the cross will find Truth.