God Turns What is Bad Into What is Best!

It was about five years ago now, when I received what would turn out to be the most fateful phone-call of my life, though I hardly knew it at the time.  Our long time friends Michael and Michelle Rogers knew of a particular Lutheran Church – Eastside Community Lutheran I believe was its name (you may have heard of it) – and this Lutheran Church was in need of a preacher for a particular Sunday.  It was late summer and a Wednesday when I was put in touch with now Pastor Emeritus Horner those many years ago and he told me he was going to be out of town fulfilling his duties in the air force reserve.  We chatted, we got along pretty well, and we agreed that I would preach on that particular Sunday.  Boy, did I have no idea what I was signing up for. 

Having a few preaching classes under my belt by that point, I prepared the only way I knew how.  I looked up the text in the lectionary, read my books, prepared my sermon, and showed up as rehearsed as a man halfway through seminary could be on that particular Sunday.  Upon entering the door, however, I was greeted by a stern looking gentleman with black horn rimmed glasses.  He greeted me in a strangely gruff manner, introducing himself as Pastor Richard Hodges, and quite soon afterward he began speaking in a curious language, uttering strange esoteric sayings like “Call to Worship”, “Prayers of the Day”, and most horrifically “Which do you want to take?”  My mind now like an office where the copier had just exploded, I tried to find a very polite way to say that Pastor Don had only requested that I do the Sermon that day and as I was not given a bulletin I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking on any more than that.  That’s what I wanted to say, what actually came out was closer to “Sure, I can take half the service.”

I remember Pastor Hodges smiling; it was a wry sort smile, the same smile you see that swimming teachers get when they wait to see if their students will do the backstroke or simply sink unceremoniously to the bottom of the pool.  A bulletin magically appeared in my hand and suddenly I found myself thrust into the sanctuary and strangely pining for one of Dr. Gurtner’s Greek exams.   I’m not sure what I did for most of that service, I’m sure I spoke once or twice; Deer caught in the headlights don’t retain a lot of knowledge about the oncoming truck after all, BUT I do remember that when the time came to read the gospel actually nobody told me I had to bring my own copy of it to the pulpit.  The gospel hymn was sung, the congregation rose expectantly, and I had absolutely nothing in front of me.  Searching around frantically I found this large white book with the words Holy Bible written in Golden Filligris, and it was as if a chorus of angels had erupted in the background.  I plopped that large book on the podium, its echoes reverberating through the church for several minutes as I searched for Matthew’s text, turning pages back and forth, because that’s just so encouraging for you guys in the pews, right.  I located the text at last, read it, had you all sit down, and now, completely flummoxed gave I think the most mediocre sermon I had ever given.  The good news, however, the one bright spot in the entire affair was that I found out that no one turned on the microphone on, so thankfully very few of you actually heard it.

And so, feeling like a cat caught in a constantly flushing toilet, I left the service that day feeling like I failed some very nice people, but, at the very least I felt we could all take some solace in the fact that I’d never be asked back here again.  For those of you wondering whether or not your heavenly Father has a mirthful sense of irony, I ask you to please wonder no longer.  But that is the life of faith, yes it is messy and humbling in every sense of that word, but it is also grace-filled and never dull.  It is a life where things may seem bad at the time, but as it turns out, those events are really just good news in the waiting.  Such is the nature of our God, who turns bad to good and dries every single tear, taking what is broken in our lives and turning Bad News into the best thing we’ve heard all day.

Indeed, if I could sum up our gospel lesson in only a few words those are exactly the words I would pick, for today our gospel is chock full of the joys of terrible news.  Mark starts us off by telling us Jesus and his disciples are passing through Galilee, that section in upper Judea that might be considered their home base.  But Jesus is doing something strange here: he is making his disciples pass through secretly…whatever is going to happen Jesus does not want the general public to know about it just yet, and Mark doesn’t keep us in suspense.  The text says Jesus is passing through secretly “for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again." 

Well, Gee.  Why wouldn’t you want other people hearing that?  Betrayal, Death, and Rising Again?  Sure, that makes sense.  But that isn’t all.  If you think this would seem strange to us, imagine what it would have sounded like to his disciples.  Imagine being a fisher or a farmhand, a man or woman from a poor simple family gleaning whatever meager living you and your family could from a desert by the sea.  It is in the process of this daily business, however,  that suddenly something remarkable happens!  A rabbi, not traditionally schooled mind you, but a rabbi nonetheless, comes into your vicinity and the things this man says!  The wonders you see him do!  And after performing these incredible feats and teaching your own Scriptures to you in ways that you never even dreamed , this rabbi approaches you and asks you to be his disciple!  He wants to train you to be a rabbi just like him!  That’s what happens when a Jewish Rabbi comes up to somebody and says “follow me”.  They’re training people to be the next generation of teachers.  This man, this Jesus, He sees in you the ability to teach and to lead!  Of course you accept!

Now, we all have our romantic ideas about when the first disciples were called.  We typically picture them simply hearing the call of Jesus and having something very deep trigger inside of them, so deep in fact that they simply drop whatever it is that they they were doing and they go.   And to a great extent I want to affirm that.  I do believe that when Jesus’ disciples were called, just as when we are called, something deep within us moves in phenomenal ways, ways that are more felt and experienced than can be truly understood.  But discipling us humans is nothing if not messy, and while a goodly part of us answers that heavenly call earnestly, we bring along with us no small amount of earthly baggage.  So it would have been for the disciples.  While I have no doubt that something spiritually magnificent happened in those moments, the reality is in first century Judea accepting the call to be a rabbi’s disciple is about entering into agreement to not only serve a rabbi, a place of honor in itself,  but you would in turn also be taught how to be rabbi.  At the end of that relationship, you become entitled to a rabbi’s lifestyle, a rabbi’s income, and a rabbi’s status amidst a very religious Jewish community – and for the sons and daughters of farmhands and fishmongers that would look very attractive.  Accepting the call to be a rabbi’s disciple was not a completely altruistic act, and it is precisely those self-interests that get the disciples into trouble.

So you see, when your rabbi, the rabbi whom one of your number, Peter,  has called the Messiah, and whom you just saw on a mountaintop transfigured while talking to Moses and Elijah, when he takes you through your hometown secretly so he can tell you, “Yup, I’m going to be killed, isn’t that wonderful?” it’s going to be enough to give you pause.  It’s going to give you pause because, no, it is not wonderful news… in fact it’s the most horrible news imaginable, Jesus.  I love you Jesus, and I’m not ditching you because of this (and to their credit they don’t), but I entered into this relationship for a very specific reason: it was a means for me to move up in the world.  There is no honor in being the old student of a condemned rabbi.  Moreover… you have claimed to be Messiah, a king, and failed contenders for the crown are not only executed, but their supporters are usually killed too.  If you are handed over and killed I’ll be lucky if the only thing that happens to me is I return to the family business to be ridiculed for the rest of my life.  So no, this is terrible news.  And what’s this business about rising three days later.  I’ve seen you do some pretty amazing things Jesus, but I’m kinda sure you’re not going to be able to do them when you’re dead.

The disciples are rightly confused by this teaching, and would be very much afraid, but what do they do in response to it?  The text says that the disciples do what any other red-blooded human being would do when handed a teaching by the long awaited Savior of the world – they ignore it.  They change the subject, move on to something else, do anything really EXCEPT actually ask your teacher to explain what he means by that statement because if you do you might just find out he’s being serious.  That the stress and worry over their master’s death, and indeed what that death might mean for them. The fact that it  is causing them serious problems is obvious.  The disciples begin arguing amongst each other, and moreso, in light of their own possible upcoming shame; it is no surprise what they are arguing about: namely who among them is the greatest.  Amidst a ship that the captain has said he plans on plowing into the rocks, the disciples begin arguing who is the most worthy of their number, who among them is most able to survive the coming social storm and its fallout. 

Jesus sees this, however, and upon reaching Capernaum he asks them nonchalantly what it was that they were fighting over.  The disciples, of course, don’t want to answer him.   Having fought amongst each other, turning on one another like jackals over a fate Jesus never said was their own, well I’d be ashamed, too.  Jesus sees that they don’t want to answer him. I picture the disciples’ heads turned down and unable to even look their master in the eye, and so he calls the twelve to him.  He sits them down, knowing very well what this kerfuffle was about, and decides to solve the problem by giving them even more bad news.  In their hopes of honor, in their wishes to be something great amongst their peers he tells them to be the greatest; they actually need to be the least.  In fact he says that not only do they need to be least among their brethren, they must be diakonos – a waiter of tables and a filler of errands for all.  To bring home his point, he then brings among them a child, a person who goes back and forth performing menial tasks for others all the time and without complaint, a person of no social status –children were considered things and property until they came of age - and yet at the same time a person too busy trying to make the people he loves happy to really care.

So you see much like my first time preaching here, what should seem simple enough upon first glance turns out to be a lot more involved than you’d expect.  Indeed, the more we delve into our lesson and try to put into practice the more we find out just how bad at it we are going to be.  But if we take away anything from this passage it is that the best news is often misunderstood to be bad news, and what can seem like hardship at first can in the end become a blessing beyond our wildest dreams.  The disciples wanted only to move up in their own small little worlds, to be a respected rabbi much like those who visited them in their own places of worship, and yet what Jesus gave them was so much more.  They came in wanting to be teachers and Jesus made them into apostles, leaders of a fledgling movement that would cross ethnic, racial, and class barriers to become the largest religion in the world.  While Jesus telling them about his death seemed to at first to be bad news, in truth it was gospel, for by Jesus’ sacrificial death the world was reconciled back to God in ways before that no faithful Jew would even dare to dream.  And while the disciples did not respond to that news especially well, Jesus stayed with them and addressed their deepest concerns, giving them still a better way.  He said, “You joined me because you wanted to be leaders of a religious community, and oh, believe me you will be, but let me show you how you do that.  You, my disciples, are to lead by serving and you are to gain honor by insisting that you have none.  Do not play this world’s game.  You fight amongst each other hoping for a position other than the bottom, and in doing so you only sabotage yourselves.  Perhaps, you would say you are the best among your siblings because you are the brightest, but in saying you should be valued for your intelligence you are in fact devaluing all the other gifts God gave you.  Why say that you only have value because you are smart?  Perhaps you would say you are the best because you are the most pure?  Why are you setting yourself up to lose?  If you are only to be valued for your abstinence, what will happen to you when someone comes along that abstains better than you do?  Do not play this world’s game of conditional love, the game that says you only have value if…  You are each of you God’s children and are adored beyond measure and loved unconditionally.  You lose that when you fight amongst one another and insist that others have to be less than you.  THAT, my dear friends, is how you lose at life.  If you need an example of how to live you need only look to the children among you.  They serve without question, love others and seek only to be loved in return.  Be like them, and you will find you will be blessed in far greater measure. 

And so you see, ladies and gentlemen, friends, what at first seemed like bad news really wasn’t.  In fact, the more we look at it; it really was the best news.  As we all know, the world has it games.  It seeks its victims in a mad scheme, pushing people into the dirt in hopes it never winds up there itself.  We’ve borne the brunt of that in this congregation, haven’t we?  But today we turn a new page, a new page that by God’s grace still has all our favorite characters in it.  In that page is the story of a congregation who weathered the worst for the gospel, who knew well the selfish games of the world and wanted no part of it.  Let us continue that, let us resolve in this new page to carry forward those old values of love, service, and humility.  Let us follow our Lord’s teaching, to be as those too busy loving and serving others to care at all what the world concocts in its silly futility.  I say to you friends, Rejoice!  We have been through what is bad; it is now time to watch God turn it into what is best.  Amen!  

Religious Abuse

Good Morning!  Grace and Peace to you from God our Creator, and Jesus Christ, our risen Lord.  To start off, I want each of you to look around you.  Just take a quick a look.  What do you see?  Do you see people? Do you see park benches and trees?  Well what we see isn’t the theme of our message today, but rather it is what we don’t see.  It is about the things we miss or skip over, the things that maybe we should be seeing, but in fact are not.

                In going over our gospel lesson for this week I was drawn inevitably back to my own childhood.  The thoughts of preaching in the park today drew me back to playing over at my cousin’s house in Conroe, Texas.  They had a fantastic pool that we would swim for hours in, and I remember fondly the time spent there playing games and eating probably a little too much food.  Every time we went over to my aunt’s house I remember the smiling faces of family, of my aunts and cousins.  Over time, however, I found out what was not there.  As I grew older, as I matured and put aside childish things and grew into the adult I would become I saw those years more clearly.  I discovered what was in the shadows, what lurked unseen as my aunts greeted me with a warm smile and let us play for hours on end with her children. 

                My aunts on my father’s side were Southern Baptist, and indeed, one aunt was actually a Holy Roller and spoke in tongues, but in truth, I never cared about any of that.  Christians were Christians to my young eyes and, yes, it was strange, but if that is what brought her closer to God who was I to get in the middle of that?  However, I found out their reactions to me were never so friendly or accepting.  My Dad you see was raised Baptist, too, but when he married Mom he decided to become Lutheran, and that was something his family never really forgave him for or me as it turned out.  My Dad was an apostate to them and I learned that they personally referred to him often as “Satan” and literally called me his Spawn.  When I went over to their house as a child, all I ever saw were the smiling faces there to greet me, but what I did not see was how those smiles turned to sneers when I was no longer in sight .  But it did not stop there.  Already prone to extremism, I found out in college that my aunts and even one of my cousins would gather together around the Bible and routinely and fervently pray to God for my Father’s death.  I am not joking.  When Dad’s road construction company grew and flourished they feared that if a Lutheran business person was successful it would only lead other people astray and into sin.  They prayed for God to judge my Father and send a message to all those other sinners out there so they would be afraid and return to God’s Word – which by the way they and they alone knew how to properly interpret. 

                There are still some things I don’t know about those times, some things still hidden from sight, but some things I do know.  My cousins, as they began to age, had less and less to do with me.  What was once fast friendship and family slowly eroded to silence.  But worse than this was my Father.  A man I knew who was hard-working and practical, whose determination knew no bounds and was obvious in his love for his boys and his family, over the years I watched him devolve into something heartless.  After years of working with brothers who put on that same fake face, that same false love but stood behind their wives evil intent, he became a man lost in his own anger, who cheated on his wife, threw away his business and his faith , and now is so estranged from his children he tells people that we are dead.  No, no that’s not entirely correct.  He tells strangers that I am dead, my adopted brother whom he raised from infancy he just says was never his.  In all honesty, there are times when I look back at what they did, at what my father became, and I wonder.  In those lonely moments before sleep embraces me, as my rational mind numbs and the shadows begin creeping inexorably into the room, I wonder whether as they fervently prayed for my father’s death if some dark terrible thing didn’t finally hear them and choose to act.

                You see, ladies and gentlemen, we tend to focus on what is seen, and quite frankly to an extent who could blame us?  Digging too deep in the human experience is to uncover things that are not so wholesome, in fact they are often ugly.  To not look beyond the obvious, however, is irresponsible, for God has commanded that we love the world and its people as they really are, not how we willfully choose to view them.  Such needs to be our attitude moving into our gospel lesson for today.

                On the surface, our story might seem that Jesus is making new laws concerning Jewish cleanliness and declaring all food clean.  Indeed, Christian Theologians from Justin Martyr down to Mrs. McGullicutty’s 3^rd Grade Sunday School class often use these stories to talk about moving from the Old Covenant to the New, but such a reading fails to look past appearances and see the betrayal and the outrage inherent in the text.

                Our story tells us that the Pharisees and the Scribes had gathered around Jesus and his disciples who were eating without washing their hands.  While 2000 years later we often paint Jesus’ long time foes as some kind of silent movie villain, the Snydely Whiplashes of a bygone era, the reality is these people were not.  The Pharisees were respected countrymen, a group dedicated to preserving Torah and the Jewish tradition in a conquered land.  And the scribes, they were the Bible publishers of their day, entrusted with providing new and accurate scrolls for the Jewish Community.  These were people that had earned the respect of their fellow Jews, and rightfully so.  To find suddenly what they think of you, to discover the smiles and the fellowship present when you were watching slip away into sneers and derision when you weren’t.  To at long last peek behind the curtain and see the whole story for what it was, the people for whom you honored and had only goodwill, saw you in turn only as unwashed filth.  With up-turned noses they declare the disciples to be apart from Israel, asking in a backhanded manner, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands as the gentiles do?”

                 And at this, Jesus is outraged.  He says to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;  in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as Doctrine.'  You abandon the commandment of God to love your neighbor and hold to human tradition." 

                In response to the Pharisees’ jab towards his disciples, a jab that was for all the world was not about faith but for being a working people who happened to get both hungry and dirty, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of being the very kind of Israelite that Isaiah preached against, a people willing to look holy and devout on the outside but inside were the furthest thing from it.  “So my disciples are terrible for not washing their hands, would you mind telling me what verse that was again?  You who are so knowledgeable of the Bible, please tell us where in Israel’s history did God ever require this of his people?  My disciples hands are full of dirt you say?  Perhaps that might have meant more if it came from someone whose heart wasn’t so full of rot.”

                It is here Jesus brings the crowds into the conversation and what began was a sly snide remark meant for a few is suddenly opened up for all the world to see.  He addresses his audience by saying something that we all thought was new but in reality was very old.  That there were wicked Jews who hid behind the religion of Israel to perform the deeds of their evil hearts was by all accounts not new, the prophet Micah reminded his religious audience that a thousand rams would not slake the Lord’s anger “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good… what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”  Likewise, the prophet Hosea who confronted the priests of Gilead and compared them to marauders, “God desires mercy and acknowledgment of Him rather than burnt offerings and sacrifice.”  What makes a man truly unclean, Jesus declares, has nothing to do with religious observance but the human heart, for out of that do all foul things come.

                I admit, this story hits me hard.  Not only is it because I have lived with Holy Bullies and shadowy headless monsters but I know that as Americans, indeed as a congregation, we know of this reality all too well.  People on street-corners shouting religion like bullets instead of applying gospel like salve, family twisting arms and spirituality so others conform to religion the way they like it, making ceilings and walls out of faith instead of floors that support.  But as disturbed as I am by this story, as terrible and ugly as the religious bullies are it disturbs me more that I can become it.  I can be the bully.  Yes, the same Peter cut by the Pharisees words in Mark was the same Peter in Acts whom God had to rebuke three times to not call Unclean what He has made clean.  This story hits home to all of us because we can see ourselves at every turn. We will live to be the Pharisee, the bigot who looks down on God’s children because they are different and we will use God’s religion as our excuse.  We will live to be victim, the faithful follower of God who will find ourselves in the shooting sites of the rotten.  But despite this, despite all of it I take hope, for though we can and will be the bully and the bullied, we can also be the Christ, the child of God who rises to the defense of his people and calling the evil out of the shadows where it thrives and into the light.

                That we need to learn these roles, that we as a Church must learn that are times we must stand up and be strong, times to sit back and nurse wounds, and even times to look down and be found guilty is self evident.  That we may need to risk taking a shot meant for another, that may need to be humble and let someone defend us who is better at it than we are, that we may need to be sorry even if we cannot see what we have done wrong, these are essential lessons for Christ’s church especially moving into the twenty-first century. 

As I talk around, as I keep in touch with seminary colleagues and even other church-goers, they tell me the same sad story – one of failure and frustration.  We talk and then the conversation turn to me, “Keven, how’s your church doing?” and I find I have an embarrassment of riches.  We’re growing!   adding members and having visitors, we’re helping people both at home and abroad taking care of orphans and mothers in need, we’re performing baptisms and interceding for people through Prayer, and let me tell you this Church has some spiritual oomph.  I’ve been here for over a year and every person I’ve put into that Prayer book has seen positive change.  These things are happening because of who we are.  They look at us, they look at the leadership of this church and the see Luther the priest and musician, Luther the teacher and scholar, and yes, even Luther the spitfire.  They say here is a place where people of vastly different understandings, philosophies, and background, and yet they put it all down to work together.  They look at you and see, here, here is a congregation that doesn’t care where I’m from.  They look at you and see soil to grow in, they look at us and see something else, they see home.  But if we are to continue this, if we are going to continue growing in the next decade we need to learn the lessons of our gospel story and learn them well and accept people for who they are because that is what Jesus did.

  And to do this, I have an actual practical assignment for you.  It isn’t homework, so we can all just calm down a little bit.  I have asked Pastor Don to include the Apostle’s Creed in our worship today, it is one of the earliest creeds of the Christian Church.  Before today you spoke it aloud and saw only what is there.  Today, as you read it, I want you to do the opposite, I want you to speak the words and notice what is not there.  I want you to see what the earliest church saw as important, and for the first time I want you to see what they did not.  In the creed you will see nothing on how you are to read your Bibles, you will find no trace of what to think of evolution or even what to think of other religions.  Indeed, I dare say that every major complaint and rift in the Christian Church over its two thousand year history, every fight that Christians bully each other over daily, you will find our forbears thought were extraneous.  To them all that was needed were the simple truths of God as our Creator Redeemer and Sustainer, for out of that lens of faith will all else be made clear.  It is not that they didn’t believe other matters weren’t important, it’s not that they didn’t disagree –sometimes they did so vehemently.  Rather, however, they believed that any important matters not in the creed would come in their own time as God would provide and it was not worth dividing the body of Christ.  Let us as Christians rejoice over what has united us for centuries and let us not be Pharisees over which people of good conscience may differ.  Amen.