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First Advent – November 29^th 2009

Jer. 33:14-16 Psalm 25:1-10 1Thess 3: 9-13 Luke 21: 25-36

Hiding in Christ

Just a few weeks ago on November 9^th we celebrated the falling down of the Berlin Wall. Now if you had experienced it in Berlin, you too may never have thought it possible. It was an atrocity. It went right between a nunnery and its cemetery, where the sisters were buried, so that the nuns could not visit the graves of their own departed. The wall went right through the front door of a church, sealing it off and making it appear as if it were gagged by the wall, to stop the proclamation of the Gospel. When I was ordained in Berlin some of my relatives were on one side of the wall and some on the other, not allowed to attend. What an atrocity! It could have stood there for another thousand years, with its no man’s land, land mines and tank-stoppers, police dogs on wires, watch towers and check points. Many were shot trying to cross it. But suddenly it came down.

We also have little hope that the Kingdom of God will come, just like it seemed impossible for the Berlin Wall to come down. But Jesus started his ministry proclaiming that the Kingdom was near, it was at hand and today on the First Advent, we consider the in-breaking of the Kingdom, the coming of the Son of Man, the Lord of Righteousness, Jesus Christ, to judge the living and the dead. If we keep thinking it impossible, then it will catch us like a trap – but if we check out the signs, we can avoid falling into a trap.

I remember as a boy, we would dig a hole in the yard, maybe a foot and a half deep. We would stick branches up near the top, put newspapers on top of them, and then cover it with an inch of dirt. You had to be careful that you left no sign of it. You had to spread the dirt on top so that t looked just like all the other dirt around it. Then you got your sister, who unsuspecting, walked on it, fell in, and you laughed and laughed.

That was child’s play, of course, but it is no child’s play when soldiers try to eagle-eye their road ahead and see a trip wire, the sure sign of an I.E.D., an improvised explosive device, that they have to defuse so that it does not blow them up.

The fig tree here in our lesson stands for Israel or other nations, such as our nation, and trying to see the signs of the times. Are we a tree planted by the rivers of water, do we bear our fruit in due season, and are our leaves green so that they do not wither? Are we a tree that bears good fruit or a tree that bears evil fruit – or a tree that disappoints Jesus by a lack of fruit?

Now in those days the nation and the person or individual were considered much the same. A goy or “guy,” a word possibly derived from this word,[1] was a person and goyim were nations in Hebrew. A person was considered a representative of his or her nation. And the coming of the Son of Man meant Judgment Day, where the nations as well as individuals stand to be judged.

Now if judgment is coming, then what can we possibly hope for? But do you notice how it says, “lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” That does not sound like judgment and condemnation. That sounds like our salvation is drawing near.

The commentary was very helpful here. When we are in Christ, then there is no judgment. We will sing, “He hideth my soul in the cleft of a rock and covers me there with his hand and covers me there with his hand!” So the judgment passes over us.

The commentary also helps interpret the words, “This generation will not pass until all these things have taken place.” This was written after many of Jesus’ followers had already passed away. So it must mean something different. It could be understood: “This generation as part of the world, will pass away [with sin, death, and the devil]. This generation as part of the Word, will not pass away, [because the Word of God remains and endures forever.]” So if we let the Word of God dwell in us richly, then with the Word of God we will endure forever.

Again when we hide in Jesus Christ our Lord, then there is no judgment. Our sins are already forgiven. We do not preach cheap grace, of course, but we preach a grace that is completely free. What that means, however, is that we already start living the Kingdom-life here and now.

The commentary says, “You will either pay now or pay later.” If you walk in the light of Christ, you will become very conscious of your sin as well as the sins that resulted from your sin. Sin is your separation from God, sin is when you have broken faith with God. Sin is when your relationship with God has evaporated into thin air, because you stopped worshiping, praying, stopped letting God’s Word dwell in you richly, stopped inviting Jesus Christ to live in your heart and rule you right now so that you live the Kingdom-life.

Just think of alcoholics who have to do their twelve steps. They realize that the bottle has become a demon controlling their lives, that they are powerless of their own accord and they will fail if they rely on their own strength and effort against this demon, and they realize that they need to surrender to God as they understand God, and ask God – we would say, the Holy Spirit to overcome the demon of the bottle, ruling their life. Have you ever tried to take a bottle away from a baby? The bottle demon controls the alcohlic completely and the Holy Spirit alone can redeem them from this demonic force. Then they see all the rot that the bottle made them do – or the drugs, whatever the addiction, and they have to go to those that they hurt and ask for forgiveness. That’s what’s meant by paying now. When we confess our sins now and have to die the death of having scandalized our good name and what’s worse, have tarnished the holy name of God, then we are raised up by the forgiveness of out sins. Now when you have confessed your sins and have been forgiven for them by our gracious Lord and Savior, then you can’t have double jeopardy. You have already gone through the judgment and the Word of God has made you clean. If you have never changed your attitude, however, and have kept hitting and running over people in your relationships, if you steal the good name of other people with your gossip and rumors, if you are drunk with your own pride and self-interest, and trample a lot of poor souls under your feet – there will be judgment and it will catch you in a snare, in a trap, like a thief.

So our baptisms remain a fearful thing – but how could we have real communion without our baptisms? We have to drink our cup of repentance and call upon the name of the Lord in order to live the Kingdom-life – that loves justice and mercy and walks humbly before our God.

Think of a priest, unable to contain himself and with poor judgment impregnated a young woman in his parish. Well, imagine he was caught, his name was dragged through the mud and he had to live down his sin and make amends. Despite appearances to the contrary, that one is fortunate to be paying now and I believe God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love – as we sing in our liturgy. Now imagine a priest who was never caught, never confessed, and never made amends and remained self-righteous. That one will not be looking up and greeting Christ when he comes, because how will he stand in the judgment? That’s what’s meant by “paying for it later.”

Remember Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter? The Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale is the most respected man in the Puritan village, because he is their pastor, a man requiring complete respect and of the most high moral standing. And then there is Heather, an adulteress who has to wear a large red capital letter ‘A’ on her blouse. She is a sinner. She and her little daughter are shunned by everyone and she is put into prison, because she refuses to divulge the name of the man who made her pregnant. All along it was the “most reverend” Arthur Dimmesdale, who in a moment of weakness, had fallen into her arms and made love to her. Then he never related with her again and even shunned the little daughter, whom he had conceived. He was not willing to go through it all, the scandal, the descent into the depths of derision and own up to what he had done. He was going to have to pay later. Poor Heather paid for it every day of her life.

Often our sins can be so deep that only our own dying can make amends. That really goes for us all and not only for those who have killed someone or lived such a complete life of hypocrisy as Dimmesdale. But our Redeemer is gracious. Look what Luther says to explain the sacrament of baptism:

[Baptism, for our daily living] means that our sinful self with all its evil deeds and desires, should be drowned through daily repentance; and that day after day a new self should arise to live with God in righteousness and purity forever.

St. Paul writes in Romans 6: “We were buried therefore by baptism with him into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” (The Small Catechism)

So in this dying to ourselves and coming alive to God, one of the most difficult of all things, we escape the judgment. When we die with Christ and are raised up with him, we escape from the last judgment, because we have been forgiven by the grace of God and we have been marvelously changed and have become righteous because of God’s grace.

So, on the other side of our baptisms and in communion, holy communion, that is, with the people of God, we can look up. When the Son of Man comes, when Christ our King comes again, we can look up, because on the last day we will be redeemed and not judged. Isn’t that good news? Don’t you see how the Gospel gives us a sweet heart for Christ, to us Luther’s words, and makes us fall in love with our Redeemer, our beautiful savior?

Now like the Berlin Wall, massive changes that we think impossible, can take place in the twinkling of an eye. Sometimes little portions of ice break away from the Arctic glaciers and sometimes a piece as large as a country breaks off, and now we fear that all the ice of the polar caps will melt.

The oceans are so mighty and cover such a large portion of the earth. Now we discover a place in the Pacific Ocean filled with plastic and garbage twice the size of Texas. There is a huge dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf. Could a whole ocean die? Those kinds of questions should lead us into a life of repentance and a change of ways or we could get caught in the trap of judgment.

The seminary that I attended underwent a very great change. We had four new young professors and a dynamic new president and they decided to introduce a new curriculum. Those of my class who stuck with the old curriculum, received bachelors of divinity, while those of us who stepped into the new, received masters of divinity degrees. The new curriculum was designed not only to teach us theology, but also to help us mature in Christ. Wednesday mornings, the whole seminary formed into groups like families, eight to ten of us would meet with two professors and we would work on our self-knowledge and get to the growing edge of our maturity. I called it the work of the soul. Now I was elected the chair of the whole community council and I stepped boldly into the new curriculum, but I did not realize how immature I was. I was very book smart, but I could not tell my butt from my elbow, as the saying goes. Wow, what a harrowing experience I had to go through. But you know, the only way through it is through it. I was hiding in Christ and I did not realize that one professor was out to get me. As immature as I was, he said that I could never be a pastor. He said that I would just line everyone up in my hang-ups and call that ministry. I had to take the ministry exam, over which he was in charge, with all its seven parts, three times and he failed me every time – in all seven parts. I had to learn how to do politics and divide and conquer. I got his arch enemy on the faculty to take four parts of the exam and he only had three, and I finally passed. That delayed my ordination until four years after my leaving the seminary.

What my opposing professor did not understand is that he saw me as a ruin coming down, but Christ saw me a new construction going up. You, too might see your life full of sin. You too might be torn and split so that fear and despair often floods your heart. Hide inside Christ. Christ is our sweet Lord, and in the twinkling of an eye, you will no longer be a ruin coming down, you will be a brand new construction going up. Both are a mess, of course, and it is hard to tell one from another. We are sinner and saints at one and the same time, but Christ makes all the difference. If you hide in Christ, as sinful as you are, Christ will raise you up a new construction – and facing the music with him, he gives us the victory. Picking up our cross and following him, raises us up like him, raises up a whole new house of the Lord, O Bethlehem, in the strength that comes down from heaven above. The cross means constantly humbling ourselves with him and confessing our sins one to another. Christ has this gentle way of passing us through the judgment, letting judgment Passover us, so that we live the Kingdom-life of mercy and justice already and we can look up on that great last day and greet our Redeemer our beautiful Savior, joyfully when he comes. Amen.

 

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[1] The dictionary says that the word “guy” came from the name Guy Fawkes. But where does the first name Guy come from?

Words at the Memorial Celebration for Karl Barth on December 14^th 1968 in the “Münster” in Basel

by Helmut Gollwitzer

“I’m for you, I am your friend” – that’s how he summed it all up one time, that’s how he heard the voice coming out of eternity, from out of a place in time, from the human being Jesus, from out of the “ineffable reality of Jesus Christ,” as he once wrote. That’s what he heard the living Jesus saying and in him the living God, and so he passed it on, saying it to others. It gave him material to think about, as soon as he understood the opposition that the friendship of God for human beings ran against the voices of the abyss, of death, loneliness; and against the voices of wrath, of conscience, of guilt. It threw a light of great compassion and mercy into the darkest places of the earth, gave the impulse for friendship and friendliness [needed] for living in unfriendly times; and gave material for thick books, countless essays, booklets, and sermons, inexhaustibly until the last evening of his life, for this bottomless, not to be thought out Immanuel: “I’m for you, I am your friend,” whom he has now finally reached.

“Where are we going?” is the way he persistently questioned visitors in his last years, in order to receive help from them for better understanding of the hope grounded for us in Immanuel and he himself answered from what he had heard out of the gospel: in the understanding of Immanuel, who in a moment quiets and fulfills everything, quiets the burning hunger for immortality and reconciles us fully with the limit, with the finitude of this, but once happening life, and fulfills the promises that have become ours, through the revelation of the one, who indeed had thought everything out well: the cross of his Son as well as the sufferings of Job, the loneliness experienced by an old Theology professor, like the dancing of each mosquito in the sunlight. There are no Auschwitz and no Vietnam, without what was suffered through and fought out on Golgotha in advance. What are we heading for? We are headed toward the revelation of the one, who in advance has made right what could never be undone and what could never be made right again: the children’s shoes of Auschwitz and the burned skin of the children of Vietnam and skeleton of the child from Biafra – which only through God and God’s own suffering could be made right again. From this already-in-advance, he was walking with Jesus Christ toward the day of revelation, and all his teaching in the Church was a teaching of the praxis of constantly beginning again on the way of this forward looking being on the way.

“The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11). That the Eternal Truth freely determines and openly declares itself to be the friend of human beings, that it does not want to be against human beings, but be unconditionally for them, – hardly one of the Christian theologians has dared to proclaim that in such an unqualified way, the Α and Ω, the atonement of all, so that all ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ of which the other theologians felt they had to remind before all, now only appeared in brackets before this unconditional: “Jesus lives – and with him also I”, [and] this world of humanity also with him.

Looking forward fifty years ago, who would have ever dared to say, that this one who from standing against any friendly attempt of making the cross of Christ inoffensive, proclaimed eternity to be the crisis of time, as the wrathful, vertical in-breaking of the cross from above, crossing up our possibilities; would become the great preacher of unconditional and insuppressible grace? Looking back, it now no longer appears like a break: in his early expressions, we already notice the Mozart-tones of thankfulness for the resurrection’s song of praise, and only where the contradiction of the ‘no’ was experienced, the deep ‘yes’ [planted] under the ‘no’ becomes the discovery that releases awe, which for him became the life-long ground, from which his theology emerged.

To hear the Gospel as the voice of the living God, as a friend’s voice, makes [a person] into a friend of people. The word “friend,” like hardly another, characterizes him, from whom we now take our leave “for a little while” (John 16:16). Standing under the friendship of God, he was allowed to experience a great deal of friendship in his life and turned to many with friendship. “Bergli” as a true place of friendship remains bound up with his name. We Germans were privileged to have experienced the friendship of his that had sprung out of the philanthropy of God; privileged, because he worked for 14 years with us as a professor in Göttingen, Münster, and Bonn, and that in his characteristic openness and resolve, immediately made our problems his own. He certainly could not count on being thanked from all sides in the face of the broad mentality in our country at that time, but now many in our country are with us in their thoughts with great thanks, for the one from whom we have gathered to take our leave. What he tried to introduce as Swiss experience, was often enough used as evidence to rid and reject his Swiss “inability to understand.” Finally through Schub he was ushered out, and even the Confessing Church, which was unthinkable without him, did not fight enough to keep him working with us. But where have we Germans, who like so much to circle around our own problems and illuminate the whole world with them, had a place in Switzerland or anywhere else in the world, like here in this book-filled room – first in Albanring, then in Pilgrim Street, and at last in Bruderholz – a place, in which we were so welcome, in which we were listened to so carefully, where our questions and concerns were so attentively [heard and] thought about with us?

He places the word with which I began, as a very peculiar and valid summation of the Gospel, beyond the scope of that time, into the mouth of Jesus Christ, as a gospel for the Germans. At that time, in that lecture, “The Germans and Us,” in January 1945, the first one that we Germans could read, there he was and he himself came again, ready to sacrifice and do without, bringing us material and spiritual gifts, giving the best proof of his friendship. The call of Jesus Christ: “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden!” he translated at the time for us: “Get over here you unsympathetic, you evil Hitler-rogues and Hitler-girls, you brutal SS-soldiers, you evil Gestapo scoundrels, you sad compromisers and collaborators, you people of the herd, you who so long and so patiently and stupidly ran behind your so-called ‘Führer.’ Get over here you guilty and you accomplices of the guilty, who now experience and have to experience what your deeds are worth! Get over here, I know you well, but I do not ask who you are and what you did. I only see that you are at your end and for good or evil, you have to start from the beginning all over again. I will revive you. Precisely with you, will I myself again, from your zero point, with you begin a-new. I am for you. I am your friend” (“For the Recovery of German Essence,” Stuttgart, 1945, p. 35 f.).

At the time he often spoke to us about the great opportunity the Germans now had because of the fact that they had failed so completely taking an evil way and now new possibilities stood open before us. What did we make of the offer given us? How seldom countries perceive God’s offer of grace in the hour of trial! That at least the Church would recognize, perceive, and accept the offer [of grace], for that he fought. But he himself was an offer [of grace] for the Church, this valiant man, and none of us know another to match him, this thorough going and complete Christian and theologian. They are not all theologians, to use a favorite expression of his, in a night in which all the cats are gray. There are chosen instruments among them, for whom the issue is not theological systems, directions, and differences of opinion, but who represent [another] chance for the Church, that can be grasped or failed, through whom a whole period of the way of the Church becomes decided. With the Barmen Declaration, written by him completely awake, while others slept, we have a formulation of such a decision, but it has to be carried out on a daily basis. We now cry after him like the forsaken Elisha: “Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” “And he saw him no more”, it says there (2 Kings 2:12). We would have had more need of his counsel, his reproof, his criticism, his instruction, his encouragement, his heart-felt nature. He, however, our friend, thank God! with his Christomonist, Christological theology, in advance, had already pointed away from himself to the Resurrected One, who goes forward from victory to victory through the dark places of also this century and says to us: “I’m for you, I am your friend.”

(A Separate Printing from “Karl Barth, 1886-1968”, Zürich: EVZ-Verlag)

Pentecost XXIV – November 15^th 2009

Daniel 12: 1-3 Psalm 16 Hebrews 10: 11-25 Mark 13: 1-8

2012 and the Apocalypse

 

Sometimes the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark is known as the “Little Apocalypse.” “Apocalypse” as a word, derives from the Greek and means uncovering, revealing, or revelation. Thus the last book of the Bible, “Revelations” is sometimes called the “Apocalypse.” Luther complained, however, that Revelations concealed more than it revealed; but it is typical apocalyptic literature.

In a time of untold suffering and crisis, apocalyptic writers want to assure us that the Kingdom of Heaven will come and God’s will, will be done through Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord. All the signs in the heavens, the disturbances in our climate, our failing environment, not- with-standing; the collapse of our economy, earthquakes, wind, and fire; or the fact that someone can stand up in a heavily guarded military fort and shoot our soldiers down, or that suicide bombers kill below while drones fire missiles and kill from above, that wars go on like quagmires and threaten to sink us; yet and still, God is in heaven and the Kingdom of Heaven will come, in God’s dear Son, Jesus Christ, who on the cross died for us.

Even if we should see the same turmoil in heaven as we see on earth, it will not be the end of the world, but the birth-pangs, the contractions for the birth of salvation, as our prayer said. And the Prayer of the Day is oicking up the words of Jesus.[1]

I have a critical mind and I’m sure that you do too. Some arguments are convincing and some are not. A friend of mine is convinced that because of prophesies from the Mayan Calendar, the world will end in 2012. Now I really don’t place any stock in the Mayan Calendar; you can’t buy one in Office Depot – and I put less stock in astrology, your star signs and such. I do want to be a bright and shining star of heaven that Daniel writes about, but I don’t feel that the stars determine the course of my life. Even Shakespeare said, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves that we are underlings” (That’s from Julius Caesar).

Now a churchman told me that all the planets were going to form a straight line before the sun and all the gravity from the planets could affect the sun and pull the earth off course or tip our axis, meaning the end for us.

I confess: that worried me. I became frightened, because that was not astrology but astronomy and gravity is very real. So what do we do now-a-days? We go to the Google search engine. There they have an encyclopedia called Wikipedia and that sent me to a site where you can enter a date and it will position the planets around the sun. As one scientist said, this February past, the planets were more aligned with the sun than they will be on December 21^st 2012. And when they were aligned that way, nothing happened! I didn’t notice that the axis of the earth tipped or that our planet went flying off into space. Did you?

So it is good to have a critical mind and I don’t know how some people can think we will be invaded by aliens from space or that the sun, moon, and earth will drop into a black hole. I looked that up too and found that that’s also impossible. Our Milky Way, like all galaxies, does swirl around a black hole, but our solar system never gets near it. We are out on the edge of our galaxy, light years away from the black hole.

When people tell you about 2012 and how the world will end, especially after seeing the movie 2012 that will come out, then remember that Jesus did not even know when the world would end. He said that only his Father in heaven knew that time.

But like the times of the apocalyptic writers, our times could also become very hard. Those are still two very nasty wars we have on our hands and we are up against the violence of evil spirits, where suicidal believers, sacrificing their own lives, slip in and keep taking a toll. More and more serial killers do that too. They factor their own death into the equation of their crime. How is capital punishment a deterrent? They believe in it and inflict it on themselves by exploding with their bombs or they count on being killed while they are shooting others. The most recent fellow was wounded before he could do himself in and now he probably wishes he were dead. But now he has to face his life after the murderous crime he has committed. I like the way President Obama said, “He will face judgment in this world and the next.”

In our pastors’ bible study someone said that we could not understand apocalyptic times. But I think that our situation is beginning to resemble those kinds of times, just a little, because, believe me, times can be far worse. If you had been in Hamburg when it was bombed, then just imagine coming out of your door, seeing fires everywhere, and the city of Oakland nothing but a pile of rubble. Times can be worse.

We have 10.2% unemployment and far more when the long term unemployed are counted. That problem threatens another huge wave of foreclosures, so that millions of Americans again stand to lose their houses. The whole city of New Orleans went under with Katrina. We saw the Twin Towers, the highest buildings in America crumble, collapse, and fall, over three thousand people were killed and over 4,500 soldiers have been killed in the wars that have been the aftermath. We never talk about how many Iraqis were killed. We also do not fathom the tens of thousands of soldiers who are wounded and sometimes worse, the psychological casualties that sometimes take a life time to heal or never do.

When the former Soviet Union was mired in its war in Afghanistan, we helped train Osama Bin Laden and what Pres. Reagan at the time called the “Freedom Fighters” to fight the Russians, hoping that the war would become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. And lo and behold, the Soviet Union did collapse. And here we are seven years later, mired and stuck in Afghanistan in a war where even Obama can’t find a hopeful way to proceed.

But enough about wars and rumors of wars; enough about our earthly powers and principalities: it’s the Kingdom of Heaven that we are all about and it will come. The Daniel text is usually used for St. Michael’s Day, September 29^th, where the archangel, the great prince of heaven guards and protects God’s people, even through times of anguish, the likes of which we have not seen before.

Ah, but Jesus says that these times are the beginning of our birth pangs. And the people of God will be delivered, like a baby delivered from the birth trauma, through the squeeze and the pushes and pulls, the life and death contractions, when a mother is giving birth to her child. Ah, but thereafter, as tired as if she had just climbed a mountain, she can hold the baby to her breast and feel the elation, that she has brought a new child into the world! So through untold anguish and suffering, the new kingdom will come, because the old creation, which God has made, is pregnant with the new one, but we have to continue to fix our faith on God, trusting that God will deliver us through these times.

A commentary said that Jesus was wrong about the destruction of the temple: that it was burned by the Roman armies and the stones were not thrown down. We can know a little. We have to know a lot. A geography professor in Jerusalem, that we visited on our Israel travels, explained how a whole series of Jesus’ prophesies came true. When the temple burned, all the gold melted and went in between the rocks, and the soldiers and the people quarried and mined for gold in between the rocks, not leaving one stone on top of the other.

Now we have a temple not made with human hands. The Babylonians destroyed the first temple and the Romans destroyed the second, Herod’s temple; but now the body of Christ is the third temple, and all who worship in Christ worship in spirit and in truth. One rabbi said that when the temple was destroyed, the glory of God moved from the Temple Mount to the Mount of Olives, and that glory is now resting in Jesus. (Here in our lesson, Jesus is teaching his disciples on the Mount of Olives.) As Jesus said, “Destroy this temple and I will raise it back up in three days!” He was talking about his own body. He was talking about us, we who are in the body of Christ. And Jesus is raising us up!

Next Sunday is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the Pentecost Season and then we’ll enter Advent and the new church year.

Ah, Christ our King – but what happens to our king? The head with the wisdom of God gets a crown of thorns. The Christ, the Anointed One, becomes anointed because of the love and devotion of one woman, the woman with that alabaster jar full of perfumed ointment, while the disciples try to prevent her from anointing him. That’s the Christ, the Messiah, whose titles mean the anointed one!

He had no great ceremony to anoint him like for a king or queen or the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example.

Christ our king is a friend of the common people. So even in the worst crises, we hear the Gospel; we hear the friendly voice of the living God, who was right there in the human being Jesus, suffering before us so that God continues to be with us. God is with us, no matter the severity of the crisis we go through. He went through it all before us. But Christ is King, no matter that he will be betrayed by one of his own, arrested by religious leaders, brought before alien governors, scourged and crucified for you and me. God vindicated him, you see, and raised him from the dead, and we can pray to God that we too might become bright and shining stars. Christ, however, shines brighter than the sun in the sky, because he is the real Son of Heaven.

So as we continue our life’s journey, let us have our eyes fixed on his coming kingdom, knowing that God is with us even now and continues to keep the promises he has made to our hearts, fulfilling them even in the here-and-now, despite appearances to the contrary.

Like the great theologian Karl Barth said, “Jesus lives and with him, so will I, and the whole world of humanity with him. And there are no ifs or buts about it.”[2]

I don’t know of another theologian who has had a transit system named after him: the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). Think of the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, when you ride the BART. He said that eternity could be described as the crisis of time, breaking in when all our time is engulfed in crisis. The cross should not be seen as a decoration; it’s not a harmless cross. From heaven it descends like the wrath of God, crossing up all our human purposes.[3] But Christ remains our friend and Christ routes for you and me, to cross the finish line of the race that represents the righteous life lived by grace, the grace of God. It’s the race that makes us the shining stars of righteousness. Be assured though, Karl Barth says, that we live in God’s unconditional love and with access to God’s divine and boundless grace. Under the assault of all the “no’s” that life hands us, God plants a deep “yes,” affirming us[4] through it all with an acceptance that overcomes the world’s rejections. And all of that boundless love of God is ours, because we have come to believe in God’s Word and trust God to keep his promises.

So like Hebrews says, let’s provoke one another, not to anger, but to good works. Let’s provoke one another to random acts of kindness and senseless acts of love. “Senseless acts of beauty” is how the saying goes, and they are all right too, but I like to say, senseless acts of love.

Let us enter the sanctuary of Christ with confidence and make the true confession, encouraging one another again and again through these hard times. Amen.

Communion Blessing: “Through it all, through it all, I‘ve learned to depend upon God’s Word. Through it all, I’ve come to know that I’m God’s child” (From the song).

 

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[1] Almighty God, your sovereign purpose brings salvation to birth. Give us faith to remain steadfast amid the tumults of this world trusting that your kingdom will come and your will be done through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, whom with you and the Holy Spirit we worship and praise, one God, now and forever. Amen.

[2] From Helmut Gollwitzer, “Words at the Memorial Ceebration for Karl Barth on December 14^th 1968 at Basel,” (A Separate Printing from “Karl Barth, 1886-1968,” EVZ-Verlag Zürich), page 2. I put “Wenn and aber,” that is, ifs and buts, after, while it comes before the passage. I’m working to translate this speech by Gollwitzer and to get it into this website.

[3] Ibid.  These passages in my sermon are inspired by Gollwitzer’s words.

[4] Ibid.

All Saints Day November 1^st 2009, Bethlehem Lutheran Church

Isaiah 25: 6-9a Psalm 24 Revelations 21: 1-6a John 11:32-44

Saints are Made out of Grace

Yesterday was not only Halloween but also Reformation Day. Martin Luther chose October 31^st in that year of 1517 to nail his Ninety Five Theses or 95 Points against the church door at Wittenberg. At that time a professor usually marshaled 100 points challenging opponents to a debate. They never went right to a hundred. Luther stopped at 95. With them he wanted to drive corruption and evil out of the church and out of the hearts of believers. His first point or thesis read, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent,” he meant that our whole life should become one repentance.”

Luther’s call for repentance was heard and the great reform of the church began. Because of the protest of the Reformation against a church unwilling to reform, we are called Protestants. And we at Bethlehem are part of that tradition and a great tradition it is. Because of Luther’s teaching, you and I are called to be saints. We don’t wait for a pope to go through a rig-a-ma-role to canonize us. Out of our baptisms, we all come as new selves equal to popes, cardinals, bishops, and priests. Thus Luther declared us to be the priesthood of all believers – as St. Peter said, “[We] are a royal priesthood, a peculiar people, a holy nation, called to declare the praises of him, who called us out of the darkness into God’s marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).

Now saints are often depicted as two dimensional characters, as goody-two shoes, nice guys, milk toast kinds of people, like angels playing harps in heaven. But saints are made out of flesh and blood. They are complicated and nuanced people.[1]

Thus Luther said, no, we are sinners and saints at one and the same time. Like a recovering alcoholic, we are recovering sinners; and like they do in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, when they begin by saying, “I’m an alcoholic;” we begin by saying, “I am a sinner.” But we are the sober saints, who are “justified through faith for Christ’s sake by grace.” That is article four of the Augsburg Confession.

So that we are saints is no merit or deserving of our own. “For it is by grace that we have been saved through faith, and this is not of our own doing, it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). That we are saved is a pure gift of God, we cannot earn it by doing righteous works. I could set myself afire, immolate myself as some monks have done for a certain cause, but that would not make me a saint. It is by grace that we are saints.

God lifts us sinners up and carrying us in the power of his almighty love, works all kinds of miracles through us. We can do what is humanly impossible to accomplish, because we let God work through us. In the words of Isaiah, “Yea, may all our works be thy doing, O Lord” (26:12b).[2]

Luther himself is a good example. He said it is not by our works that we are saved. But Luther’s Works stand on library shelves over 100 huge volumes strong and we ask, “How could one man have written so much?” Meanwhile he was also a professor, pastor, preacher, translator, hymn-writer, musician, and leader of the Reformation, in addition to being a writer. As a professor he taught classes at Wittenberg University. Philipp Melanchthon was Luther’s close associate, who wrote the Augsburg Confession. Luther and Melanchthon sometimes had from 200 to 600 students in their classes. Luther also preached regularly in the Wittenberg city church. Not only that, but Luther never left his monastery, while all the other monks did. He remained in the Black Cloister, married the run-away nun, Katie von Bora, and gave shelter to refugees and students, who waited for him to come down the stairs and recorded everything he said. That is where his famous Table Talks come from. He translated the Greek New Testament into German in 1522 and the illiterate peasants learned how to read from it. Then in 1534, with a group of other scholars, he translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into German. Not only the Protestant, but even the Catholic Bibles have based their translations on his.

Tyndale, the great master of languages, studied under Luther, and began translating the Bible into English. Henry the VIII had him assassinated for it. Only the priesthood was supposed to read the Bible (even though they didn’t) and they said to allow common people to read it was “casting pearls before the swine.” That was their attitude. Luther refused to hide important issues from the common people by keeping them all in Latin, in a language they could not understand. Tyndale was inspired by Luther to translate the Bible into English and therefore Henry VIII’s assassins killed him and Coverdale had to finish his work.

Luther also wrote many hymns. Over ninety, I believe. My brother Philip and I translated nine of them in our book, Luther’s Spirituality. He was also quite a musician, who played the lute, (a stringed instrument like a guitar), and he had a fine singing voice. But back to the point: How could Luther have written all those works, been a pastor, professor, translator, and been the leader of the reform and renewal movement of the church in his day? The answer is: God worked through him.

We saints of God are sinners, but when we let God fashion us anew through faith, then a heavenly power, a power from on high, makes us accomplish what is humanly impossible to do.

We can see how Jesus accomplishes a whole train of miracles each one greater than his previous one. The Gospel of John calls them signs. They are the signs that point to God’s saving work on earth. Jesus heals the blind, the deaf, gives voice to the mute, makes the lame to walk, heals the sick, cleanses a leper, raises up Jairus’ daughter from the dead, stops a funeral procession and wakes up the son for a widowed mother. In our lesson here, Jesus raises up Lazarus from the dead after four days, when his soul no longer hovered over his body, but had already gone beyond, up into heaven.

On the earthly side, Mary believed that her brother would be raised on the last day, but Jesus was going to raise him in the here and now. “If you believe, you will see the glory of God!”

Mary said, “Lord, he has been in that tomb for four days and it is filled with the stench of death and decay.”

In a deep disturbance of weeping and anger, Jesus called Lazarus out of his tomb and like in a Halloween horror film, Lazarus comes out shrouded and covered in white strips of cloth, in which they wrapped the dead in those days. He must have looked like a zombie stepping out of the tomb’s entrance, but he was alive and Jesus said, “Unbind him and let him walk!”

We are staring something in the face that is quite humanly impossible. But all things are possible for God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead and created this whole world. And all things are possible for the saints, the sinners, who come to God for forgiveness, and through whom God brings life, love, abundant life, fulfillment, and salvation to the people of the earth.

We marvel at this story and rightly so. But if you have worked in a hospital, you hear “Code 99” or “Code Blue,” or some such other alert, and then you see doctors and nurses all rush to someone who just died, give them electric shocks, beat on their chest, and using many other methods, revive the person once again. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Such a person later on in life, of course, dies again, but Jesus is giving us a sign that God will raise us all up on the last day, when the trumpet sounds, and God prepares the great heavenly marriage feast for us, for all the saints, who from their labors rest.

That’s when we want to be in that number, when the new Jerusalem descends from heaven like a bride all adorned in her wedding gown, and God comes down to be with his people. Ah, sickness, suffering, pain, disease, and death will be no more; neither will droughts, famines, and epidemics; nor storms, earthquakes, floods, Tsunamis, and global warming. All these things will be past and not be able to cause harm any more. Death will be behind us and we will be with God, who will wipe every tear from our eyes. Immanuel! God will be with us and will be our God.

That exchange from the end of Psalm 24 is about the children of Israel approaching the gates of Jerusalem with the Arc of the Covenant and shouting to the gate-keepers to open them. Like those people of Israel carrying the Arc into the gates of the Holy city of Jerusalem, all the saints of this church who are carrying Bethlehem into the marvelous promises of our salvation, will stand before the gates of heaven and shout:

“Open up the gates! Open up you everlasting doors, so Christ, the King of Glory can come in.”

And on the jeweled walls of the holy city of the New Jerusalem, the saints who are the gate-keepers will ask, ask the saints who are carrying Bethlehem into the promised future: “Who is the King of Glory?”

And we will answer, “It’s the Lord, Jesus Christ, the Lord strong and mighty, mighty in the battle, for he vanquished our sin, death, and the devil.”

And again the gate-keepers will ask, “Who is the King of Glory?”

And we will answer, “The Lord of Hosts. Jesus Christ is the King of Glory!”

And the gates of heaven will open and we will enter into the New Jerusalem. We will receive our seats around the welcome table, receiving there God’s wonderful gift of salvation, prepared for all the saints who from their labors rest. Amen.

Communion Blessing: The saints are made of flesh and blood;

They’re sinners who live out of God’s love!

A children’s song for Children’s Time:

Why Should I be Sad and Blue

Why should I be sad and blue

when I know what God can do?

I’ll simply call on Jesus’ name,

so gladness fills my soul again.

For saints are made of flesh and blood;

They’re sinners who need love!

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[1] A more sophisticated theological anthropology from Old Testament characters like Abraham, Moses, and David recognizes the complex and often contradictory nature of human beings, who have strengths and weaknesses, flaws and moments of greatness, who are often caught in a fierce tangle of tensions between good and evil. This anthropology does not divide a person into body, soul, and mind, but considers the whole person from different aspects of the self, such as body, soul, mind, conscience, and heart. Each one is the whole person merely considered from another aspect. The heart is defined as the center of the responsible self.

 

[2] This captures the sense of this Isaiah passage and makes it into a prayer.

Pentecost XX October 18^th 2009

Isaiah 53: 4-12 Psalm 91: 9-16 Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45

We Can’t Have Christ without his Kingdom

Some explorers were trying to be the first to get to the North Pole with their dog sleds filled with supplies and equipment. They would take off at six A.M. in the morning, go at top speed all day and until the evening. You know, “Mush, you huskies!” That’s how they made the dogs run. And in the evening they would take out their compass and sextant to check their progress, (because they didn’t have a GPS, a Global Positioning System, in those days,) and to their surprise, they would be father from the North Pole than when they had started out in the morning.

The question to ask is why?

They discovered that they were on an ice-flow that was heading south faster than their dogs could run them north!

I read this story in a book about family systems. The point of the story was that individual effort could not succeed if we didn’t take account of the system. Larger invisible social forces also play a role in our lives, as for example: millions of houses have had foreclosures. The people involved were not all irresponsible. There are thirty million Americans unemployed. They are not lazy. There are social forces larger than any individual operating in our lives. Like, it is one thing to paddle your canoe up a river against the current and quite another when you are going with the current. In that case you’ll say, “Look at how successful that fellow is, how strong, how decisive, how skillful!” But no one points out that he is paddling his canoe with the current. He could pick up his paddle and do nothing and he would still go forward: as Luke Skywalker says in Star Wars, “May the force go with you!” Meanwhile the poor fellow paddling against the current could work until he is blue in the face and still be going backward. As the saying goes, “If hard work made you rich, every mule in Latin America would be a millionaire!” But your labor for the Kingdom will not be in vain!

When Jesus proclaimed that the Kingdom of Heaven is near at hand, he was proclaiming a new system, a new order. He was making the space in our old human order for a new order that new persons could participate in. It is not the order of this world and because we go to sleep, become blind and deaf as those North Pole explorers, the order of this world creeps into our churches, and before we know it our lives begin to be lived according to our human order and not according to the Kingdom of God that Christ proclaimed.

The language we use for it is “backsliding”. But when using that word, we usually think of someone starting to drink again, or going back on drugs, getting caught up in pornography; or someone who stops going to church, stops praying and reading the bible. But a whole church can backslide and lose sight of its mission, can think that we need members to save our church, rather than becoming disciples, sent out by Jesus to save the sorry folks, who are blind as bats, deaf as doornails, and laden with heavy burdens of debt, un-forgiven debt.

Now the same way that we look at the order or system, we can look at debt from an economic point of view. Individually we sin and need forgiveness, but we also become debtors and we need to get out from under all our debt, especially from those credit cards, reducing our desires and saving more. It is so hard to pay off those credit cards! In our system people make money with their money and some keep loaning money and paying interest for it, that is, some make money with their money; the money of others costs them dearly. They pay for their money. That’s what interest is.

Back in St. John’s one of the deacons kept praying that her sons “would not be the tails but be the head.” I thought that expression must have come from Africa. But reading the last chapters of Deuteronomy (28:13 and 44), it’s in there – it’s in the Bible. There it says that the debtors are the tail of society and the creditors are the head. It says be a lender of money and not a borrower or you will be the tail of the dog and others will be your head, wagging you whichever way they want.

Jesus would talk about the Kingdom of Heaven or the new order in terms of a new wineskin. The new people were the new wine and they belonged in a new order, a new wineskin. When new wine is poured into a new wineskin, when the wine expanded it would stretch out and you would have no problem. But when you put new wine into an old wineskin that had already stretched as far as it could go, then it would burst, and all your new wine would spill out over everything and be lost.

Jesus said the same thing by speaking about old and new cloth. If you sewed a new patch on an old garment, the new patch would shrink in the wash and tear from the old garment, because it had already shrunk. Jesus was saying that the new person filled by the Holy Spirit also had to be in a new order, that is, the new Kingdom that he was proclaiming and introducing. When Jesus proclaimed this new order, he established it, and our churches confess Christ, but often we are slipping in and out of his new order and are backsliding into the old order.

What does the new order look like? Jesus is the Lord of this order and it is the place where Jesus reigns. We confess that Jesus is the Lord of it when we confess the Apostles’ Creed. In the Black tradition, we say, “King Jesus.” He is the Son of David, the peculiar King. What kind of a king writes poetry and plays the harp, then dances naked before the Ark of the Covenant in the procession bringing it into Jerusalem? His wife saw him from a window and rejected him afterward.

Like David, Jesus is our sovereign king, but do not let your hearts be troubled and neither let them become afraid, he is a suffering servant king. In his exalted position Jesus says, “I am over you, so I am your servant and the servant of all.” Now the word “servant” is just the old word for a slave. When the Europeans first saw the Slavic serfs in the Middle Ages, they had been beaten down so low, they started using the word “slave” for “servant.” (The word seems to have Latin roots, too.)

Now when we belong to God and enter the reign of God, we become the people of God’s possession. To become great is to become a servant. Moses was the leader back in the Old Testament and he knew that God was the King and he was the servant of God, Ebed Jahwey, in Hebrew. He did not lord it over others and he was not a tyrant over others. We all become servants and Jesus is not only our servant, but our suffering servant, our Melchizedek, which means, our King of Righteousness in Hebrew.

So James and John, the sons of Zebedee had it all wrong. They were thinking in terms of the old order. “Let us sit at your right and your left in your glory?” They wanted honor, status, and power – and they did not realize that they were heading south on that old ice-flow, farther way from the glorious suffering that the new order is made of. It makes you drink the bitter cup. It makes you go through the baptism that tests your metal.

At home we used to joke: “Are you a man or a mouse?”

“Shut up and pass the cheese” we’d answer.

Just go through the trial of loving and taking care of someone stricken with Alzheimer’s. They not only no longer recognize you, they start saying embarrassing and violent things sometimes. You love them for who they were. It is a cup of joy, but also one filled with suffering. Just be part of an aging and cantankerous old congregation. It is a cup of suffering. Let us be faithful and fill our cups with patience, loving kindness, and be gentle to one another. A fellow had a fight with his wife and she was later in a car accident. How he wished he had said, “I love you,” before she left! Getting old makes us have to cope with so much that we often become too edgy with others. But a faithful community is a cup filled with joy.

Now I’m not saying that you won’t see that joy through a whole lot of tears. But our tears do not only wash out our eyes, but also our soul, like the rain washes out our old days and makes them fresh and new. Ah, you just see and feel how thankful the grass is for all the rain.

So our Lord did not come to be served, but to serve and to lay down his life as a ransom for many. We confess Jesus with our lips, but like James and John, we don’t get it. Like, I’m a man. I want to be served! If I get rich, I’ll have people work for me! We just don’t get it. The same thing happens in the church. If I come to church I want it to serve me. John F. Kennedy would have said, “Ask not what the church can do for you; ask what you can do for the church!” God nudges us to do something for the kingdom, some mission, and we say, “Let the pastor do it” or “Let George do it!”

But look at Jesus. He says, “I’m going to serve you” and “I’m not a tyrant, who wants power over you. I will be your slave and I’ll be the slave of all people.” When Jesus humbles himself that way, we dare not step on him, but allow him to open our eyes and ears, and especially our hearts, so that we humble ourselves.

We can’t change the system, the way we used to say. Things are much more complicated than that. One theory speaks about a life-world and two systems, a political and economic system. The two systems are there for the life-world and not vice versa. That gets complicated. We need to pray for the in-breaking kingdom. We need to ask Jesus to come and open the space in our human order for his new order, the reign of God. They say that Michelle’s mother, Marian, is wearing out her knees praying for her daughter and Barack Obama. We all need to, because the new order breaks in with our change of hearts. When we see our greatness in our helpfulness – when we give up the power with which we try to control others and live by trusting each other, it breaks in among us.

Have you heard of the couple front? A husband and wife go everywhere together; never is one seen without the other – and people say, “See how they love one another.” No way. He does not trust her, so he never lets her be alone or out of his sight!

Lenin said, “Trust is good; control is better!” In the political system, you need control. But that kind of power and need for control causes havoc in relationships. So become more trusting. We need control at times, of course. You have to control a child, when it could run into traffic.

But Jesus gives up his control over us and says, “I’ll be your slave and the slave of all people. Now you can sit in the council of God. You come and sit on my throne and I will sit on your lowly stool.”

In our prayer this morning[1] it says, “All of God’s greatness pours into goodness” lifting up all the people of the earth. “Shape us into willing servants” we prayed. Our hearts say, “Thank you God, for not hearing us! We didn’t mean it!”

You certainly know what happens to us when we give up our power: we get trampled under foot. We become rugs that people clean their feet on. We get walked on, treaded on, trampled into the ground. What do they say in Texas? “Don’t tread on me!”

But that’s our baptism and we soon get overwhelmed. “Help us Lord, the water has come up to our neck and I’m about to go under and drown!”

But did you think you would escape death? Does Bethlehem think it can escape death? No way! But if we go down doing God’s mission, helping the people that God loves, then the power of God and the Holy Spirit becomes unleashed and lifts us up into the renewal of Christ’s glorious resurrection. In this sense, we can say, “May the force be with you!” In that glory there is no left or right, no up and down, but just an unbroken circle full of helpfulness and service bringing life, abundant life, love, and blessedness. Amen.

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[1] Sovereign God, you turn your greatness into goodness for all the people in earth. Shape us into willing servants of your kingdom, and make us desire always and only your will, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, whom with you and the Holy Spirit we worship and praise, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Pentecost XVIII – October 4^th 2009

Genesis 2: 18-24 Psalm 8 Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12 Mark 10:2-16

Can a Church Be Born Again?

This sermon will be about women and children but also about why Jesus features children and why we have to become like children to enter the Kingdom of heaven and you will see that goes for our church, too. Usually, however, the matter of divorce smacks people right in the face when hearing these lessons, so I do not want to fail to speak about it.

Many of us condemn ourselves, because we are divorced and we have to realize that if our hearts condemn us, Jesus is greater than our hearts and we do not live our lives under the law, but under grace. Look at the woman taken in adultery, whom Jesus comes upon as men are getting ready to stone her to death. Jesus says, “He who is without sin, throw the first stone.” And they all go away – and Jesus forgives her. He probably thought, “Where is the man? It took two to commit adultery. Why are these men stoning only the woman to death?” I realize I’m claiming to read Jesus’ mind!

When Jesus treats divorce, he speaks into the heart of our human condition. Meanwhile the Pharisees are asking abut divorce to test him. Herod had just divorced his wife, a Nabatean princess, in order to marry his brother’s wife, Herodias. John had just gotten his head cut off because he took a stand against Herod’s divorce and the Pharisees may have been hoping that Jesus would hang himself by taking the same stand as John.

But Jesus championed the vulnerable and the oppressed of the day, the women and the children. A man could just write a letter of divorce and send his wife packing, should she offend him in any way. Now adultery would be a real reason, according to Matthew, but the offense could just be that he did not like how she cooked his dinner, that she did not obey his authority, or merely that he found someone more beautiful. Different rabbis argued that each of these issues constituted an eligible offense.

In Rome divorce was rampant, but the woman also had the right to divorce her husband. The Jews were more Patriarchal, only the man had the right to divorce, and adultery could only dishonor the man; women and children had no rights in the first place. At most, it was an insult to the wife’s father. But Jesus taught that it had to be mutual. The man, who marries another and divorces his wife in such a hard-hearted way, also commits adultery against her. He gave the woman standing, too.

Divorce is part of our human brokenness and Jesus says that it is not how God intended our creation to be. A marriage made in heaven is still a little bit of paradise on earth. Both can be naked together and they are not ashamed. What a powerful bond sexuality becomes with one another, when it issues out of love and respect and reenters love and respect, where both partners trust each other and can count on each other. There is this one person with whom you can be safe; a person with whom you can bring up anything and with whom you can share a life of love together; later even sharing your memories. You go through life together sharing everything, with this precious person at you side.

The woman does not belong to the man, but with the man, because she is taken from his side and it is not good for a man to be alone, he needs his partner at his side. Jesus also points out that the woman is more important. She is stronger than the man. Have you ever read Ashley Montegue’s, The Natural Superiority of the Woman? Jesus says, “A man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one.” We would say, “A woman leaves her father and mother and cleaves to her husband.” Jesus turns it around.

Now it is not one half a person and another half person adding up to one. Men and women multiply, so you have to use multiplication. One whole person multiplied by another whole person make one whole person. That means that single people can be whole as well. But let’s not put down marriage. Marriage in Hebrew is Beulah, and Beulah-land is filled with happy marriages.

Back to the strength of women: mostly despite the greater public visibility and voice of men, in reality the man revolves around the woman, like a satellite around a planet, like the earth. She brings life into the world; the man as a warrior, is supposed to have virtue because he can take life away, unless he has learned the lesson of Jesus, to be able to give life too.

The word for virtue in those days was “manly”. Vir means “man” in Latin. To be a man meant that you had virtue and favor. To be a woman, well, it meant you had none.  “Don’t be womanish! Don’t be a sissy!” “Sissy” stands for sister. They also believed that to speak to or relate with children destroyed your manliness. It weakened men and made them unfit for battle. That’s why the disciples want to protect Jesus and keep the children away.

We often want to have the sentimental pictures of children coming to a sweet Jesus with long flowing hair, like our Sunday School pictures. But you have to think they were probably sick, sniveling, whining and crying children, the ones the mothers want Jesus to heal. Jesus has to straighten out his disciples to accept the children even as men and as leaders. Jesus always turns what we consider important up-side-down. Imagine a man teaching Kindergarten! Jesus would not look down on such a man. Jesus not only touches the poor children, he takes them up into his arms. How do we knock the false values of our society in the head today, the way Jesus did back then? I ask you?

Of course, not all marriages are made in heaven. If only they were, what a safe place for children and all living things this world would be! For a marriage made in heaven Jesus has to be really present in the partners. Some couples living together, however, do not have Christ in their midst, but a devil. That gives them a marriage made in hell. Jesus did not want a man and a woman to stay together to destroy each other. Like, divorce is bad, murder is worse. You can become an accomplice to your own abuse in a marriage and Jesus did not want that. So you divorce. As Luther says, “Sin boldly, but more boldly still, believe!” Ah, children often become the victims, but that is our sorry brokenness. Where you continue to live your life in the gracious forgiveness of Jesus, the past is a bucket of ashes, and Christ raises you up into a new life.

Don’t forget, however: you never have a wonderful marriage handed to you on a silver platter. You need to do the work of the soul, get over some of your selfishness, surrender to God and offer yourself and your marriage to the will of God. Couples need to push and pull each other into heaven.

But you have to get through the sticking points in your marriage to the good stuff – and no matter how many times you marry, you will have to get through those same issues. It’s like you have a honeymoon, then you go through the wilderness to reach the Promised Land, the promised marriage, which is so helpful to us human beings.

We certainly need God’s grace and forgiveness to make these breakthroughs. We truly need to forgive ourselves and each other not seven times, but seventy-times seven times, because we get to the edge of our growth and get frightened, and then we go back into our garbage can existence, like Oskar on Sesame Street, and we miss out on the wonderful life in the garden, the quality relationships filled with mutual love and concern.

Someone recently argued that polygamy in Africa was better than our monogamy. I think of the Mormon who has eight wives talking about polygamy with a reporter. Trying to quote one of his wives, the reporter wrote, “His better one eighth said….” We often say a man’s better half, but I have already explained that a man and a woman are not half persons, but need to be whole persons. What would a man think if we had polyandry, like in Hawaii in the old days, when a woman could have eight husbands! He would have to wait his turn, night after night, to have a chance at his wife’s bed, and he might discover, he was not at all her favorite! Can we walk a mile in a woman’s shoes or in our children’s shoes? Those small feet are precious!

The old words for Psalm 8 say, “Out of the mouths of infants, babes, and children, you have fashioned a bulwark, a defense against your enemies.” Children come into our world completely dependent and full of trust. The bulwark or defense against doubt, cynicism, skepticism, and faithlessness is the consummate trust that little children have. It is this trust that Jesus championed, as well as their zest for learning, their curiosity in seeing everything for the first time, and wanting to grow up. We have to be filled by trust, be tender hearted – it’s all right to be tough minded, but we have to have tender hearts and open minds of children to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

A congregation needs to become a safe place filled with these wonderful attributes of children so that we can say “Our Father” and be the children of God and then eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor any heart imagined the beautiful things that God has prepared for those who love him and are called to his purpose!

Yes, we become children, children of God. But take one more step. To become a child a church has to become a mission. Bethlehem has to start over again the way it first began for it to enter the kingdom of heaven. Ah, we have to gather everyone together breathlessly, to grow together in God’s work and to do God’s mission. An old church puts fund-raising into the forefront. Fund-raising helps a little, but it is only a band-aid. We have to become a mission again and be carried by the marvelous vision of the wonderful things that could happen to us, if this church came alive here on this street in West Oakland, if it started over again. When this church started, it did not have money and it is not about money, but about throwing ourselves completely, like children, on the resources of God’s love and mercy.

Look at the heroes of CNN, the news channel for the year 2009. They fed the homeless, they healed the sick. One fellow was a bartender, who saw so many people wasting their lives on barstools, and he thought, “We can turn wine into water!” He started a project to dig wells to bring clean water to those dying of putrid and contaminated water in the villages of Africa. And they did not have to leave the country to go to Africa. Another fellow helped homeless veterans and another opened an orphanage for 48 homeless children. We need to search for what God wants Bethlehem to do in this place. It always starts small. What about the community garden? It would give us a way to reach out to this community. This is the vision that Pastor Megan Rohr placed before us and in it I for one could see our way to real mission. If we trust in God and not in money and what not, but I mean completely depend on God, Bethlehem, like a child, could become a mission and start to grow again! Amen.

Communion Blessing: God gives us the grace to become the children, who enter the kingdom of heaven!

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost – September 20^th 2009

Jeremiah 11:18-20 Psalm 54 James 3:13-4.3,7-8a  Mark 9:30-37

Sermon Hymn # 474 “Children of the Heavenly Father”

(from the Green Hymnal: Lutheran Book of Worship)

The Surprise of the Cross

Jesus tells his disciples how he will be killed and rise again on the third day. He is trying to buy time, so he wants his disciples to keep his whereabouts a secret and he himself has returned to Galilee in secret.

I can understand this secrecy, because my father was an American citizen in Hitler’s NAZI Reich and he would always say to us, “Never tell anyone what we say here in the family.” And there he often had to go into hiding. Now when we came back to America, he still said it and sometimes it seemed like he even hid in the house, even though our situation had changed. That was being paranoid.

But Jesus was not being paranoid. He knew that it was just a matter of time and he would be arrested and killed and he told his disciples so.

Now they were so frightened they did not understand him. I imagine the disciples, when Jesus drove the demons out of Legion, all hiding behind gravestones until it was over and Legion had come to his senses.

If we read between the lines and put two and two together, we can surmise that the disciples were probably arguing about who was the greatest among them, because if Jesus was killed, they asked themselves, which one of them would take over in Jesus’ place?

That is why they were so embarrassed when Jesus asked them what they had been arguing about.

They certainly did not understand. We can look back and say perhaps Peter became their leader. But he denied Jesus three times; then he took the wrong side in the discrimination issue. At one point he no longer ate with the Gentile Christians and Paul had to stand up against him to his face. Perhaps Paul became their leader? People still have trouble understanding Paul and he had a thorn in the flesh. The Corinthians said, “His letters are weighty and strong, his physical presence is weak, and his speech is of no account” (II Cor. 10:10). They said that about St. Paul!

Was he the greatest? James, the brother of Jesus, took over the congregation of Jerusalem, but he wanted all Jesus’ followers to be circumcised and to become Jews.

The death of Jesus was going to make Christ rise in every Christian’s heart and his words were going to touch his followers in a more powerful way than even when he walked on earth among us, but the disciples at that time could not know that.

That is why Jesus said to them, if you want to be the greatest, if you want to be first; then you have to be last of all and the servant of all. He took the least of these, a little child and put it among them and taking it into his arms he said, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me and whoever welcomes me, does not welcome me, but the one who sent me.” God is in that child that we welcome. The Father in heaven is welcomed when we welcome, when we receive such a little child.

We dare not become sentimental concerning the children of that time. In those days and many times in ours too, children were considered non-persons. A Roman father had the right to beat and kill his son or sell his children. He would only have to pay a small penalty for it. Children were the most vulnerable and the most helpless and there is Jesus saying that those who would be the greatest had to identify with such a child, really become the last of all, really become the servant of all. To welcome such a one was to welcome the greatest human being on earth, to identify with a child, was to be capable of being a Christ, like Jesus leading all his disciples.

When the women brought children to Jesus to bless, the disciples wanted to turn them away. Jesus had to stop them. Men did not think relating with children good use of their time. They felt that they were more important than children and they relegated the care of children to the women and by and large we still do.

Jesus, you see, was turning the order of this world upside down, because God is just helplessly in love with this world and God will not allow that you have to be on top to be a leader, that you have to exercise your power, attain power, have influence, get on the road to wealth and success, even if you have to walk over dead bodes to get there. The Lamb of God heals the sick, brings people to life, makes people come alive.

When Jesus died for us on the cross, he connected heaven and earth in God’s love again. Now God’s will has to be done on earth just like it is done in heaven. But although we sometimes confess Jesus with our lips, we refuse the business about the cross and children. Say a family is moving. The children are not asked. The decision is made over their heads. They have nothing to say. Janusz Korczak, who ran a Jewish orphanage in Poland and remained with the children all the way to the gas chambers of the Treblinka extermination camp, wrote a child’s bill of rights, but that is way out ahead of us, where Jesus already was, but we have not yet followed.

For us to be Christ is to be first and we don’t hear the part about being last. To be great is to be served by everyone. Whoever heard of someone great having to serve everybody? If you are rich and famous, you don’t go to your doctor, your doctor comes to you. In the old days, family doctors came to your house and treated you. Today they are way too important for that. We also had visiting nurses. The nurse from our congregation still makes house calls and doing so she sets an example for our community!

You see it is much easier to confess Jesus Christ with our lips than to follow him by making ourselves last and becoming the servants of all. Mostly we contradict most of what Jesus stood for with our lives and we turn a blind eye to these words, because to be last and to be such a servant is a cross too heavy to bear. Let’s face it. This teaching of Christ is humanly impossible. But all things are possible through Christ who strengthens us. We have to beg the Holy Spirit to transform our spirit and to change our hearts. But then how can we survive? We become lambs for the slaughter.

This inward change is so very difficult. We would rather change what’s out there. For example, we voted for a new president so we have changed our administration in our country, but ask yourself, do you think we have really changed our hearts? We cannot expect Americans to have a change of heart, but we can expect that from Christians; whether we are republicans or democrats if we are Christians, we should have had a change of hearts.

Doesn’t identifying and having empathy for children mean having it for the most vulnerable and helpless people in our society? Immigrants are like that. They are like the powerless and vulnerable children that Jesus lifted up. How can we round them up, hold them in prisons, let them sicken and die there or evict them from our country?

Look, we stole the Southwest and Texas from Mexico fair and square. How dare they cross our border and live here once again? What if God forbids us from coming into the kingdom of heaven? The American flag is not over the cross. The cross is over the American flag and every country and its people will have to answer to the Lord Christ in the kingdom of heaven. When you welcomed that undocumented immigrant, you welcomed Christ, and not only Christ, but the Father in heaven who sent him to save us. Before God we are all aliens, like Abraham, called to be strangers in a strange land. Like Barny Frank asked, what planet have we Americans been spending the most time on recently? This planet earth belongs to God and all the countries on earth have to answer to God and Christ, who rules from heaven and God cares about the immigrants as much as for those who came over on the Mayflower. That is one story. Others came over on slave ships in a direct contradiction to the Gospel of Christ, in wanting to be masters and bringing others to be their slaves. Then there are the Native Americans, who did not realize that the new comers said they followed Christ, but all their actions would contradict him. In the name of Christ they did not make themselves last but first and did not serve others, but “lorded” it over them, putting the Native Americans onto reservations and enslaving the African Americans.

Being last and the servant of all is usually the last thing we want to do. I’ll be a Christian and take all the privileges attached, and you can take all the responsibilities. Being last and a servant of all, like a child, means to carry the cross. So the Christians in Europe took power and they let the Jews carry Jesus’ cross. They came to America and said, we are the Christians and they put the cross squarely on the backs of Black people and made the Native Americans the last people to be considered in our country. The cross is too much like failure. Let somebody else be a loser. “Nothing succeeds like success!” as we say.

Ah, but the children of the heavenly Father, have to suffer the cross. Carrying your cross is like digging your own grave. I remember a movie about the Mexican revolution, where a fellow had to dig his own grave before being shot by a firing squad. He said, “Hold it!” Went and picked up his sombrero, put it on, and tumbled into his grave when they shot him. I have fond memories of a theologian, Helmut Gollwitzer, whom we called Golly in Berlin. He said, When we try to carry out Jesus’ words, then like his, they nail our hands to the cross, so that we cannot do God’s will. And they nail the feet to the cross of the one bearing glad tidings of peace.[1]

But Jesus did not only become last of all and the servant of all, he also laid down his life for us all. When we are baptized we suffer and die as well, the way Christ did. But the surprise is that when we thought becoming last and becoming that suffering servant was death, new life rose up through that death. Becoming a child of God brings certain suffering, but God blesses us through it. Golly said, God lets you suffer until you get the full blessing contained in it.[2] When you become last and servants and children of God, then you will fail. But Jesus placed all your failures and mine into God’s hands, when he died for you and me on the cross. Your body that has become sick [is in God’s hands], your soul that has sustained such damage [is in God’s hands], Golly continues, your children [are in God’s hands], the years of your lives that you have senselessly wasted [are in God’s hands], your failed profession [is in God’s hands], your failed marriage [is in God’s hands], your bad parenting [is in God’s hands], all your burdens and all your needs, Jesus placed and still places them into the hands of his Father,[3] who forgives you and receives and welcomes you as his heavenly children.

Once when I was young, I realized that to follow Christ I had to live a life in which it was impossible to survive. I turned away and said, I want to live not die. But I failed to see that I had chosen to die and not to live. Choosing to be last, the servant of all, and laying your life down for others, brings the cross. But the surprise of the cross is that it is the source of life.

I can preach for you here, but Jesus himself has to come and touch your hearts with the words from heaven and give you the faith to see life in that death and death in a false life. Golly quoted a Russian bishop who was before a firing squad, being shot by the Communist Bolsheviks: “Farewell to you the dead; I am entering life!”[4] That takes faith. When you and I and Bethlehem place ourselves last and become servants of all, when we become joyful and helpful children, then it seems like we will suffer failure, loss, and die; but really God will make us the heavenly children filled with empathy and compassion for others. The surprise is that we will experience the adventure and thrill of fresh new life. Our eyes and ears will be opened and we will recognize the living presence of God turning death into life. Forgetting about our own survival, becoming the last, becoming suffering servants, ready to lay down our lives, places us in the presence of God, whom we left all alone, when we turned away concerned for our own interests, our own survival, our own thing. But out there in faith, we find God, whom we deserted but who did not stop loving and saving us.[5]

Ah, who is the greatest? Those who become the least of these, those who become last, those who become helpers of everybody, those whose faith lets them lay down their lives with love, who awaken in the likeness of Christ, the greatest human being who ever lived on earth, leading many into the new life. Amen.

---

[1] Helmut Gollwitzer, Jesu Tod und Auferstehung, (Muenich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1956), page 61 and 63.

[2] Ibid., page 78.

[3] Ibid., page 80. (This citation is freely translated.)

[4] Ibid., page 97.

[5] Ibid., page 55: This is the actual core of sin, that we deserted God in his struggle [to save] the world.

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 3^rd 1982

Jeremiah 11:18-20 — Psalm 54:1-4,6-7 — James 3:16 – 4:6 — Mark 9: 30-37

To Receive Each other as our True Selves

Text:  Then they came to Capernaum; and when [Jesus] was in the house he asked [the disciples], “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. He sat down, called the twelve and said to them, “Whoever wants to be the first must be last of all and servant of all. Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (Mark 9:33-37).

In our church we need to foster a friendly and gentle environment, in which people can dare to come out and be their true selves. It’s like everyone has to have a coming-out-party – and feel the challenge as well as the security, that is, the safeness to do it. So often fellowships which were Christian have been admired – and outsiders [observing them] have said, “See how they love one another!”

In the summer program in Cincinnati, I could not believe how the daughter of the minister spread her arms and asked, “Who needs a fuzzy?” I did not know what a fuzzy was. But I realized what it meant when someone feeling low ran over to her and got a real fine hug. At that time I did not have the nerve, nor the self-confidence to just run over myself and be hugged by this real fine girl. But how often do we just need to be hugged, do we just need to be stroked or gently touched, have our hands held, so that we experience bad and ugly feelings melt within us and we feel that we are joining the human race again.

But we do not only touch each other by hugging, holding hands, or stroking each other, we also touch each other with words, spoken gently right to the other person’s feeling, right into the person’s need. We touch people with our words or we bruise them and hurt people – or heal them with our words.

Let us try to receive each other as we are. Why make people have to be an image? Why put people on a pedestal? Why hide behind masks? Why have to use all our energy to try to act like someone we are not?

The reason is simple. When we show our true selves, we are very vulnerable. We are like children, who need to be received. Like children, when we burst forth as our real selves, we can be cut down, nipped in the bud by some unkind by-stander, whose false front is being threatened by our honesty.

From a few years ago in my clinical training, I remember the feeling among the patients and the staff of the Los Angeles Community Mental Health Center. Everyone participated in the reaching out and healing of one another. The love was so thick you could cut it with a knife! Sadly it has been in only a few churches that I have felt the same kind of reaching out and being there for one another.

How can desperate hearts be reached? The elderly woman who jumped out of the window this week attended our church a few times. We did not know that she would jump out of the window. Maybe nothing that we could have done could have prevented it. But it sure would have been fine, if she could have poured out her heart to somebody, if she could have shown her terrible fears to somebody.

To receive some one else is to receive their true self, whether they feel angry, ugly, nasty, or “feeling like a faded pair of jeans” – there is love, there is acceptance. God is there with us.

The world will not take friendly to those who be themselves. To survive is a miracle. But God is with those who reveal themselves as they are. And sometimes we don’t even know where to begin. We don’t even know how to allow our feelings to be present with us…, how to allow our feelings to show for someone else. But let’s take heart and do it. We might sin, but love covers a multitude of sins. Jesus himself became sin, so that we might be righteous.

One person keeps saying, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” He must be speaking about a person hiding behind a façade with an open grave in the heart. But then confess to God that our heart is dead. Then God will come and raise us up by God’s powerful life-giving Word. It is all right to die to ourselves, because we know that at the right time, God will raise us up for others in our true selves. And what an adventure it is to get closer in this way. We end up not only receiving the person, but the one who raised the person, the one who sent the person. Suddenly we see the face of God, because we have entered upon holy ground. Amen.

Outline:

1. Receiving a child
2. Receiving our real selves in all our feeling, needs, and vulnerability
3. The suffering, the cross, as a consequence, but the promise, the hope, the being raised up like a fresh loaf of bread – whereas the other choice is death-bound
4. The true self has thoughts, feelings, and a being-there for others, a being-sent by God for reception
5. and the one who receives a true self, receives God, sees the face of God
6. Some people would rather choose power than to reveal their true selves. They make a weapon of their self, have a proud self, carry a vindictive existence.

_________________________________________________________

This sermon had a different start that I did not preach, but what I preached built on it.

The first version: What kind of a person is this Jesus? Again he speaks of suffering and dying and takes our sense of order and turns it upside down. What can we make of it? I think it is easier to understand when we take the teaching about who is the greatest and place it first and then realize that the suffering and dying is the consequence of trying to be last, trying to be the servant of all – and doing this out of love.

How precious is a person? If we do not receive a person and the person does not receive us, then we can be passing others on the way down. The point, however, is to lift each other up.

Is a leader supposed to be above his or her people? Jesus says no. the leader has to be the last, the servant of all. This gives a very different spirit to our leadership and it does a number on the order understood and maintained by the world.

Jesus places a child in their midst. Men often feel too important to acknowledge children and to care about their needs. That’s why they often relegate women to take care of the children. Men consider themselves more important than women and children.

But Christ lifts up a child and says it is the most important. And we all have a child in us. This child in us is our true self and we need to welcome our true selves in one another. Our faith lets us be reborn. The Sunday after Easter is called, “Quasi modo geniti,” that is, like new born babes. And we have to grow up as little children and mature in our faith. Even if we are old, growing has to take place. And we need to receive each other, welcome each other.

The power factor cuts all this away. I do not show my feelings so that I can have power over you. I control my feelings so that I can control you. As Lenin said, “Trust is good; control is better!”

In our true self, we are honest with our feelings. Some suppress their feelings, so that they can take advantage of the poor, whom they consider peons, who obviously show their feelings, like children, and can therefore easily be controlled and manipulated as a result. Whalers hold a whale pup, until its mother comes in for the rescue. They then harpoon the mother.

We can make a choice and become our true selves, honoring our feelings. That choice is for a life with promise and hope. But suffering and the cross become a consequence. Just look at Jeremiah and Jesus. This world wants to be on top, even if they have to walk over dead bodies to get there.

Note: really, I reiterate, this first attempt at the sermon, is the preparation for the second version, with which I’ve here begun.    I believe these words are as true today as I type them as they were in 1982, when I preached them.

Pastor Peter Krey

A Funeral in Coney Island (1977)

Let us take a passage from Romans for our text:

None of us live to ourselves or die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord; if we die, we die to the Lord; so living or dying, we belong to the Lord. Therefore Christ died and was raised to life again, so that he might become Lord of both the living and the dead (Romans 14:7-9).

We all belong to the Lord and heaven is where we actually live and find our rest.

We are visitors on earth. All of life can be gray and empty, but God’s divine self offers to live in us. God’s life in ours is genuine life in all its rich colors, because through God’s love, a rainbow of promises radiate over us and through us to others.

God has appointed a rendez vous with each of us and this is how God keeps it – with those who respond to the calling to be for others:

In the poor, God lets us experience riches,

In his prisoners, we appreciate God’s freedom,

In the confused, the direction for our lives,

From those that stray, the path of righteousness,

Among the lost, God shows us the way,

From the mentally ill, the health of the Spirit,

And here by the dead, the fulfillment of life.

By the Law of God’s love, through the very least, we receive the most precious gifts, and what’s more – a rendez vous with God-Self, so that no one is excluded; yes, all become included in God’s plan of salvation.

Pentecost XIV – September 6^th 2009

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

Don’t Name a Sin what is not Sin

Once watching a documentary on Gypsies, I saw a young woman on a hill at sunset, screaming at the top of her lungs at a village below her: “You treat your dogs better than you treated me!” Her anger and her rage at her rejection went right through me. It was a cry from her soul against rejection, discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry.

The Jews in the time of Jesus considered themselves clean and righteous, (we would call them self-righteous) while they thought of the Gentiles, the Greeks and Romans, as unclean. The Gentiles had to be baptized to become cleansed proselytes, while Jews were clean and did not require baptism. They called the Samaritans dogs and probably even referred to the Syrophoenicians, like this woman in our story – as dogs.

The geography in our story is important, because Tyre, Sidon, and the Decapolis are Gentiles territory that Jesus seems to enter because he is so sick and tired of the self-righteous bigotry of the Jews of his day. Before our lesson in Galilee, Jesus had just confronted the Jews, the ones who called themselves the chosen people of God. He was challenging them to have more integrity. They are condemning Jesus and his disciples for not washing their hands before they ate. Jesus retorted, “You are a people who honor me with your lips, but your hearts are far from me. You teach human traditions rather than the commandments of God. For bringing a holy offering to the temple, the Pharisees seemed to give people an excuse for not supporting and taking care of their aged parents. Then Jesus said, there is nothing outside a person that going in can defile him or her, but the things that come out are what defile us and make us corrupt. Thus Jesus annulled the kosher food laws.

So whether you ate pork or only kosher beef, whether you were vegetarian or vegan did not make you moral. You could take three showers a day and you still might be full of prejudice. A drug lord might wash his hands before every meal, while having hundreds of people murdered. Jesus showed that hygiene and morality were two different things.

When our hearts are full of filth, taking a shower won’t clean them and the filth spills out of our mouths. It is corrupt to be bigoted and to name those who are different from us as evil, unclean, and non-human.

I believe that Jesus became so angry with the religious bigotry of the chosen people that he went right into Gentile country. Tyre and Sidon are Roman and Greek areas. The Decapolis, or the Ten Cities, were Hellenistic and Roman. That meant that you could go to the Greek theatre there, you could watch the games with the gladiators killing each other for your entertainment, and of course there were many temples for other gods.

I believe that Jesus was leading the holy people of his following into sharing a common humanity and saying that the bread of heaven, the wonderful teaching of Jesus, was also for the Gentiles and they were not unclean unless they were immoral, and truthfully the smug attitudes of the self-righteous can drive people to immorality. Luther spoke of self-righteousness as a monster capable of all manner of sins. Ah, we can become furious. But we can have no excuse. We all have to take responsibility for our selves and we cannot blame our acting out on others.

When the Syrophoenician woman in our story comes to Jesus, he starts breaking taboos. In Greek, Jesus uses the word, “little dogs.” I do not think he is slamming her with religious prejudice, but showing and introducing his disciples to the common humanity they shared as Jews with the Greeks and Romans, and even with this Syrophoenician woman.

Jesus says, “It isn’t right for me to take the bread from the children and throw it to little dogs.” Was he referring to the little demon possessed girl? Was he encouraging his disciples to draw closer by merely calling these very different people “little dogs”? The bread that Jesus is speaking about stands for grace and forgiveness and the very special relationship we have with the One true God and God’s Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit that fills us.

The desperate mother says, “But even the little dogs get to eat the children’s crumbs that fall under the table.” She uses a more inclusive word for children than Jesus used and she helped make the cross-over, which can be so difficult, easier for the disciples who were trying to forge a new relationship with someone very different from them. Jesus says, “For saying that, you may go. The demon has left your daughter.”

When we are crossing a bridge between very different people, it is most important to press on while being humble and sensitive to one another.

Now we usually just ascribe a miracle to Jesus as a common place. But the words here show that Jesus and the woman discussed what was going on with her daughter and Jesus gave the bread, provided the grace and forgiveness that healed the little girl.

This mother was not asking for herself, but for her daughter. Perhaps Jesus was using the word “little dog” or maybe “puppy,” for the girl. But don’t forget that dogs were considered pests in those days and we have no evidence that they had the concepts of dogs as pets in those days. Like some children have pet rats. I can’t get my mind around that yet.

Again, what the mother had in her favor was that she was not asking for grace and help for herself, but for her daughter. And think about it. She was even taking a stand for the little dogs that fed on the crumbs under the table. That kind of a stand for others, especially and literally, the under-dogs, quickly won over Jesus himself.

Now Jesus did not only break the taboo about the One True faith only being for the Jews and bringing grace and forgiveness to the Gentiles. He was also speaking to a woman in public. In those days men were not allowed to speak with women that way. In some Moslem countries, men still are not allowed to. In Saudi Arabia some young men try to get away with text-messaging women, but they can get punished severely if they are caught. In Jesus’ time, rabbis were told that they should speak as little as possible even with their wives. Back in the street, the man was educated and she was not. So if they talked, they could only be speaking about one thing, so their misogynous reasoning went. They said that any woman that approached a man in public had to be a prostitute.

I kid you not. Aren’t you happy that Jesus broke this taboo and we are no longer in that kind of a distorted society, which is so dreadfully set against women and is so dreadful for women? But that is how the people of that day thought and felt and Jesus spoke to that woman, discussed her daughter’s plight with her, and healed her, not caring what the disciples were thinking about it. He led them into fearful territory away outside of their comfort zones. Yes, he was crossing boundaries that made them very uncomfortable, but that is why we know and love Jesus as the Lord of life, the Bread of heaven for all people.

Jesus told us to look at the heart. When you go by the color of a person’s skin or by a person’s gender, then you make something that is not sin into sin, and sin and evil themselves are set free. The sin of bigotry, whether it has to do with religion, race, class, or sexual orientation, gets set free to raise havoc amongst us.

In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. it is the content of a person’s character, that is, their heart, their sense of personal responsibility that makes them moral or immoral. Whether a person is rich or poor does not determine the content of their character. A rich person can be immoral, witness Bernie Madoff, who made-off with 65 billion dollars of other people’s money. Witness the Kennedy’s, who keep fighting for the underdog and for more justice for the poor and oppressed. It all depends on the change of heart brought about by the grace and forgiveness of God.

Most people in our society idealize millionaires and view poverty as a crime. In our society, if you are poor you are considered like a criminal from the get-go. Jesus teaches us that love covers a multitude of sins. In our society, money covers a multitude of sins.

We know that it is similar when we look at the racial issue. You can be a Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor or you can be an attorney with a father that is a policeman and a mother, who is a peace officer, and you can have just gotten out of the Navy and a white cop can man-handle and arrest you. That is what Jesus also confronted. They call sin what is not sin, and their sin of bigotry and prejudice is set free and they open the door for all kinds of evil and injustice to come out.

Now there is real evil, real uncleanness, corruption, and immorality. But to label a poor person, a woman, or someone of a different race in and of themselves immoral, names what is not sin to be sin and lets real sin rampage amongst us, come out of our hearts and raise havoc in our society.

Now this will probably take you out of your comfort zone, but I believe Jesus would cross this barrier as well today. Just because someone is Gay or Lesbian does not make them into sin. They too have to be judged by the content of their character. Jesus I believe would break that taboo today and say, only if they have a corrupt heart are they sinful, for very many cannot help their sexual orientation. To say that Gays or Lesbians are immoral just because of their orientation is to name sin what is not sin and can allow our sin to rampage unchecked.

So to follow Jesus we need to go to the heart. Are you giving your Christianity lip-talk, well then Jesus will give you some soul-talk. Let’s not only honor the Lord of Life with our lips, but also from our hearts. Let’s have our hearts draw close to Jesus our Savior, who broke all these taboos for us. Let’s cling to Jesus even when he asks us to have the courage to get to know people who are different from us, who draw us out of our comfort zones. Christ is full of grace and forgiveness for all people and our hearts have to beat with his heart as if they were one. Ours has to be the throbbing heart of Jesus within us.

If we name sin what is not sin, real sin will rampage amongst us. How will we take the speck out of someone else’s eye, when we have a log in our own?

To take easier examples, the Roman Catholic teaching that eating meat on Fridays was a sin can make people blind to real sins. We used to live among French Canadians when I was young. My mother also served us fish on Fridays, but not because we thought it was a sin to eat meat. She explained that it was on Fridays that the fish was fresh. Now a Catholic can eat fish every Friday, and can still be completely immoral. Just being a vegetarian does not make you moral and being a meat-eater does not make you immoral. The Hindus do not eat beef, because for them cows are holy and the Moslems eat beef, but do not eat pork because it is not kosher. So they kill each other because each names sin what is merely a human tradition, letting evil rampage between them. The Moslems had to flee the Hindus up into Pakistan and they have had armies facing each other since their religious prejudices tore up India.

Another example, when an innocent man is executed for rape and murder, as may well have happened, the real rapist and murderer is still out there doing those horrific crimes.

We have to name sin what really is sin: hatred, religious violence, prejudice and bigotry against those who are different from us. To follow Jesus takes us over boundaries that make us uncomfortable. To follow Jesus is to become challenged to our very core. In our baptisms we die to our old selves and Jesus raises us up into our new selves, giving us the upbringing of the children of God. If you think our new birth in Christ is easy and comfortable, then just ask any mother what it was like to give birth to a child. For the change we need, keep your eyes fixed on the cross of Christ. To follow Jesus is to experience the cruel rails of the cross. It is the only way to our glorious resurrection. Amen.