A Matter of Heart...

          What is this?  Is this Church?  Why isn’t everybody in pews?  Where’s the organ, the chancil, and the altar?  What about the sanctuary and all those other hard to remember terms they don’t teach in seminary?  And what about those funny guys in the long dresses?  How can this be worship?  How can this be Church?

                Well, sometimes things are not always what they seem, and just because it isn’t what we are used to, doesn’t mean it isn’t just as true.  But mistaking something for its trappings, getting fooled by the outside and not looking within is something we as humans will always struggle with.  We don’t like change, we don’t like it when differences crop up into our lives.  Between bills, work, family, and all the drama that gets put into that mix we like things to stay the same, we like things the way we are used to, the way we can handle them.  Humanity’s been like that since Adam and the fall, and it was no different for people living in Jesus’ time as it is today.

                Most people don’t really appreciate how different Jesus’ ministry was, how so very radical  compared to what was going on at the time.  I want you to imagine yourselves as Israelites living in Palestine, as 1^st century Jews living within walking distance of the Holy City. The temple and the synagogue are the biggest contact points of your faith, the places where you fully embraced your identity as Jews.  The synagogue was where you learned about your ancestral religion: Your learned what to eat, what to wear, and what to do.  The temple, however, was where you most publicly proclaimed your identity and where you performed the most important rites as an Israelite.  Here the Day of Atonement was performed, here the sacrifices and the various offerings were made to absolve all Israel of her sins.  Here was where you were supposed to meet God.

                But not all of your fellow Jews are happy with things the way they are, indeed the strife with your countrymen is almost equal to the strife you feel with your Roman conquerors.  In the first century there are four major divisions of the Jewish faith that you must contend with, all quite different from one another.  There were the Sadducees, the ruling class of Israel.  Surprisingly secular believers, they do not believe in angels or spirits nor do they really believe in an afterlife.  They pick and choose from their Bible, taking the verses they like and conveniently excluding what they don’t.  Only the first five books of Moses were Scripture to them, you see.  Cutting out ¾ of your book means cutting ¾ of your responsibility and where life would be at odds with the Prophets, the Prophets could simply be discarded.  Still, while deeply flawed by power and compromised by convenience, it must be noted that these are the only Jews among your people who are not racist, that do not believe Gentiles are bad simply because they are gentiles and by extension they do not believe Jews are good only because they are Jewish.

In addition to the Sadducees, however, there are the Pharisees and they are not so far from our evangelical movement.  They are a Scripture driven movement, a missionary movement, and a grass roots association interested in keeping the Scriptures central in the daily lives of their fellow Israelites.  No one person leads it, no organization heads it, rather it is rallied by its charismatic preachers who often decried their government and were quick to advocate war against foreign powers.  Their adherence to the whole of Scripture often makes them legalistic, obeying the bare words on the page but caring little for the spirit in which those words were given, but at the same time you will be hard pressed to find a Jew more openly living their faith or more interested in relieving the suffering of their people than this group.  

After the Pharisees are the Essenes, Puritans and End Time Believers.  They believe most of the country has fallen into horrible sin, so they do not mix with the common Israelite, seeing them as too tainted, too unclean for Holy Living.  They have removed themselves from society and live in the desert far away from the false government and the false religion that have taken on God’s name.  When God comes to judge their nation, it is their intention to be “Left Behind”, looking forward to the destruction of the temple and the coming of a great teacher.

There are also the Zealots, a group of Jews who feel that the only response to an unclean and gentile ridden government is its violent overthrow.  They were inspired by the Maccabees, the Jewish generals who threw off gentile oppression and foreign entanglements by the sword.  These are your constitution party members, the liberty lovers and the militiamen seeking to return their society to its perceived origins.  They are believers in their weapons and are fervent in their opposition to their government, but they are also the Jews most willing to give their lives in defense of their friends.

But finally, there are the people like you and me.  People who are somewhere in the middle, perhaps seeing one side or another but in all honesty just trying to eek out an existence that both gives credence to your people and shows faithfulness to your God.  You know the Temple isn’t perfect, you know the flaws of your leaders, and you know the dangers of losing your way of life, but it’s also all you’ve got to work with.  And so you work, you live, and you wait.  You endure the times and raise a family, doing your best with what you have…that is until someone comes along and shows you a better way.

And that someone comes…a man, a lowly carpenter’s son, rumored to be of illegitimate birth.  He is a rabbi, but he is not like the other rabbis.  He has no education, no formal training.  He didn’t apprentice himself to another teacher like the others did, he simply took up the mantle one day and, shockingly, people listened.  But people did more than listen, they followed.  They followed by the thousands.  And when this rabbi took disciples, he didn’t take the cream of the religious crop.  He didn’t go to the Scriptoriums, the religious schools for their best students, he took everybody.  He took fishermen, tax collectors, Zealots!  He even taught women!  And what did this man teach?  He taught that the root of all evil was neither Sadducee nor gentile, but the love of money and power and any Jew was quite susceptible.  He taught that gentiles were not an enemy of the religion or the state and they were indeed capable of great faith.  He taught the Temple was about to be judged and replaced with nothing, that the new holy community could be comprised with just two people without any buildings or sacrifices for sins.  He taught that there are no unclean foods and that working on the Sabbath is not necessarily against the law if those works are for good.  He taught that the Scriptures are Holy and Good, but they need filling to be complete.  But more than any of that, in a land of schisms and disagreements, in a land more and more given to violence this rabbi taught that Peace was the answer, that love for neighbor was the solution, that simple faith in God even unto death was the way.

                Now, all of you may be wondering, what in the name of the Holy of Holies does this have to with our gospel text?  Well, I’ll tell you.  As a Jew or even a Gentile in the first century the question arises, indeed begs to be asked how then is this Jesus still a Jew?  How can this sect of Christians still consider themselves part of Judaism when they will eat any food, have no use for temple or sacrifice, are willing to include gentiles into the people of God, and understand their Hebrew Scriptures as now secondary to the message of the gospel?  Yes, this Jesus might be important, indeed he might be the most important man who ever lived, but how can Christianity be thought of as having Jewish roots?

                And the answer is that appearances can be deceiving.  What looks one way can in fact be another and THAT is a theme that Luke deeply addresses in his gospel.  Luke begins his tale as a Gentile would.  Important people, people of divine importance, are often heralded before-hand.  So important is this Jesus, however, that even Jesus’ herald John is heralded beforehand.  Yes, this all occurred as a gentile would think fit, but these heralds are not gentile, they are Jewish.  Jesus and John are born to Jewish parents.  John’s father is a Jewish priest and Jesus’ parents have him circumcised and presented at the Temple according to Jewish law.  The inherent Jewishness of the Jesus story is hammered home time and time again and the relevance of the Jewish scriptures and their filled-full-ment in Jesus is not some outlying afterthought or a tangential footnote, but is central to the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people.  Indeed, where the story seems least Jewish, it in fact shows quite the opposite.  Joseph and Mary are recorded in Luke as obeying the Roman census.  Most jews rebelled at every census, but Joseph and Mary did not.  Their scriptures told them to obey the gentile king, to pray for them and indeed intercede for them while under their rule.  The Prophets proclaimed this, and Mordecai in Ruth lived this, even to the point of seeking royal permission to defend themselves against Haman and their enemies.  Joseph and Mary were not less Jewish for obeying Caesar; they were in fact more Jewish than all the rest of their countrymen.  And so it is for this part of the story, Jesus having just proclaimed the faith of a centurion now goes into Nain and raises a widow’s son, just like Elijah the Jewish Prophet did so many centuries before.  But unlike Elijah, who raised a gentile widow’s son, Jesus goes to the Jews and returns a Jewish widow’s only son back to her.  God has indeed returned to bless his people.  They were not left out.

                So yes, things changed.  The trappings of the past, the trap-things, the outside appearances that ensnared, yes they were discarded but the heart was no less true to its heritage.  God is not an exclusive God.  Claiming the Gentiles did not mean dismissing the Jews, and the blessings of the future in fact did not include the cursing of the past.  Both were upheld and one did not happen at the expense of the other.  So it is with us.  So often we look at the future and we see great cataclysmic change.  We look at our society and our children. We say “look how different it’s all going to be”…except it’s not.  2000 years from now we will still be silly, ridiculous humans in need of Jesus, but I will not lie to you, my friends, things will look different.  We will have a different president, we will live in a different world.  Our children will grow, they will not be exactly like us and our church will look very different in the years to come.  It’s only looks.  God is the God of the old and the new, and he gives the same heart to them both if we ask Him.  So yes, things will change, just not really.  And we can take heart in that.               

An Easter to Remember

Happy Easter.  I have to admit those words are hard to say this morning.  Easter is supposed to be time of great joy: a welcoming of new life, new possibilities into the world at spring time.  It is reveling in the triumph of life over death – and I don’t feel it this year.  With everything going on, with the attacks in Belgium that happened earlier this week, with the bombings in turkey and elsewhere that the media failed to report, I just feel … numb.  And that’s just with everything going on over there; over here it isn’t any better.  As Americans we live in the wealthiest nation on the planet, and yet despite this we lead the industrialized world in child poverty, and we use that wealth to have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. Whereas similar countries like Germany incarcerate 76 out of 100,000, Italy 85, and Saudi Arabia 161, the U.S. manages to find ways to imprison a whopping 716  people out of 100,000.  Child sex trafficking continues to rise, making up 40% of all human trafficking cases and the FBI has identified the twin cities as one of 13 US cities with high incidents of child prostitution.  Agencies say you cannot be homeless for 24 hours in the twin cities before you are approached to enter a prostitution ring, and the fact is reports also say they only ask so many times.  Urban food deserts are on the rise, our inner city poor have to travel miles to even get to store that has fresh produce and healthy things to eat, slavery is a real thing on our shores AGAIN, and not only does our elected leadership continuously do nothing about any of it, but as a pastor who also is a law school graduate, it infuriates me that I am continually asked to support one of two parties whose frontrunners are either scandal ridden lawbreakers or people who actively advocate war crimes.  So, no, I must confess I’m not feeling it this Easter season.  Everything we’ve done today feels rote, a ritual done because it is expected, not because it is relevant.

                And so I ask myself, how did we get to this place, how did we end up this way as a nation?  Easter has always been the highest point of the Christian year.  Indeed, from what I can tell about the Earliest Church from the writings and structures they left behind, every Sunday used to be an Easter, every Sunday was a celebration of the continuous renewal of God’s blessings of life and when Easter itself actually came around – THAT was a blowout party.  How can it be that Easter, a day that had so much joyous meaning for our ancestors that they would sooner be put to death than abandon it, how can it be that this day has dwindled down to a mere tale, an hour long service where we sing sunny hymns and act joyously for a little bit, only to go home afterward unchanged?  For the Christian, Easter is not just a holiday, it is not just a day where we dress up nicely and allow our children to ingest copious amounts of sugar to move on to a nice ham dinner afterward, Easter is the celebrated Supreme Reality.  Through the eyes of Easter, Death is an aberration, a disease well on its way to being cured.  Through the Eyes of Easter, this body, this world, this existence, are not a dime-store knock offs.  We in fact would not be better off if we were never born; that this physical life of ours contains blessings that not one other creature in this universe gets to experience.  Through the eyes of Easter, I see that Good wins.  That evil cannot have the day.  That all suffering is fleeting, and that one day cruelty, injustice, hatred, and pain will all be things of the past.

                And so I cried out to my God and my Savior, “What happened?”  Easter is supposed to be the Christian identity, how can we live out the joys of Easter, how can we embody its meaning, how can we make it relevant to people, when we ourselves have never once experienced it?  Where … did Easter … go?

                I remember many an Easter from my own childhood.  We’d wake up that Sunday, my brother and I, and we’d go hunting for our Easter baskets.  The sun was usually up, the air crisp; we’d find our Easter baskets and devour the chocolate rabbit plus a few jelly beans before breakfast.  Mom would make pancakes and sausage, but the end result was always the same on Easter Sunday – The church would swell up as exhausted parents would force their children to sit still on a sugar high for an hour.  The pastor would muddle through a sermon, having already done a Good Friday (and sometimes a Maundy Thursday service), learning to crack a joke when a child’s energy levels exceeded the fear of their parents.

                My parents brought me to church every Sunday, not just Easter, but they didn’t really believe.  Like many today they were agnostics and practical atheists.  They didn’t really believe in Jesus or any of this resurrection stuff.  Like the Greeks and their festivals to Zeus, so was Easter to the Christians – a people thoughtlessly playing out their stories and that was about it.  They didn’t come to church, they didn’t bring me and my brother to church, because they believed they were imparting essential life truths to us; they brought us to church to appease their own parents and the society around them.  In truth, as a pastor I don’t really blame them.

                As the first generation after the 2^nd world war and as the first generation to really go to college, they had questions honestly raised by their education, questions that quite frankly their rural blue-collar parents had no idea how to answer.  A factory or an office worker knows little of history or the historical process and the only archeology a farmer engages in is when the plow happens to dig something up.  Of course, as a man with a law degree who graduated seminary, I now know those questions could have been answered.  The scholarship to answer those basic questions of faith had been around since at least the forties; my parents simply chose not to look for them.  At the end of the day, feeling forced into doing something they didn’t want to do, it was easier to surround themselves with shallow worldly questions than to be honest and seek after deep spiritual answers.

                Of course, I don’t really blame my grandparents for this either.  Times were changing and changing fast.  Their children moved far away into the city, got an education.  They entered into a profession, instead of just finding a job.  As a nation we went from horse drawn buggies to muscle cars and propeller planes to jets that broke the sound barrier.  Computers, smart watches, and phones that most people don’t talk on but just use to take pictures and text.  Gay Marriage, Transgendered people, multiple religions, it was a dizzying array of changes to throw at a people who grew up having their milk delivered by wagon.  To ensure their children didn’t lose their roots, they did what their own parents did to them and what their parents did to them: they used the power of the family to drive their children into their place.  They called, they nagged, they threatened to cut people from their will and at times even exiled their own children to make an example to the rest of the family.  They didn’t foster faith so much as they drove home the words and practices that made themselves feel comfortable.  They didn’t love their children no matter what, if they wanted to do that they would have journeyed with them in their questions instead of insisting they repeat the supposed answers.  When their children asked them if Jesus was real or if the resurrection was myth they could have responded “I believe so, but that’s what I was taught.  Let’s ask our pastor, or let’s see if we can go to a seminary professor and see what they have to say.  In fact, let’s make a project of it this year.  Let’s talk to many pastors and lots of different professors and see if we can’t help.”  To be honest, however, I don’t know that my grandparents ever made their children feel safe enough to ask those questions.  Tradition has been called the “Tyranny of the Dead”, and with every act that my grandparents did to isolate their children, to manipulate family, it was done with exactly one haunted look in their eyes – the look that asked “What would my parents think if they were alive today.”

                Ladies and Gentlemen, I propose to you that we are not achieving the Easter Experience because none of us want to go through Good Friday to get it.  We all want the incredible joy, the freedom, and the triumph that Easter represents, but we refuse to put to death the things that are keeping us from it.  Like a dog with a large stick, we want to hold on to the things we feel entitled to and yet we remain baffled when we can’t seem to get through the door.  Christianity began as a Jewish sect, and to experience the phenomenal life-changing joy of the Resurrection they had to put down everything that they were raised to value.  The Jewish people of the first century commonly believed in a Messiah of War, that violent righteousness and vindication would ever somehow inaugurate God’s kingdom of Peace.  That had to die.  Many Jews dreamed of a Jewish theological state, that tenets of true Jewish religion would become enforceable by law.  That had to be killed.  The Jews of that era also believed that the Jewish way made them better than everybody else and they believed that the gentiles could never be the people of God, too.  That racism had to be put down.  Everything they hoped for, everything they felt entitled to, everything they ever believed in, all of it had to be shattered and the broken pieces of their desires piled up in a heap at the foot of the cross before they could experience the fulfillment of God’s promises to them and before the enduring pieces of their faith would be revealed.  It is no different for us.   Easter, ladies and gentlemen, was the good news no one was looking for or even would have wanted, but once lived it was the joy that could not be stamped out.  We can have that Joy too.  Even in today’s world that seems to create one new nightmare after another, we too can experience victory.  It is not gone, it is not irrelevant.  We too can embody the resurrection reality and when confronted with those nightmares we can know it’s just a dream.  The terrible evils that we encounter are passing, we will one day wake up from them.  But even so, through Easter we are given power and we are reminded that even though we are asleep we can still control the dream.  What makes a nightmare a nightmare is the feeling of our own powerlessness.  Easter tells us that powerlessness IS A LIE.  The world as we experience is not the world as it has to be, it can change!  But it takes us putting down that which makes us a nightmare to others.  It takes us going through our own Good Friday and trusting God to pick up what’s left.  

                So, ladies and gentlemen, what will it be?  Will this Easter be just another themed Sunday, one out of 52 others but with a duck or a bunny motif, one where we sing sunny songs and then return to the world at large; to our businesses, to our homes, to our lives that force us to be fake people eternally hiding behind a shallow mask, serving a world that literally just wants you to pay bills, mop floors and die?  Do we want that or do you want something more?  Because a better life is waiting for you if you do.

Amen and Amen.

The True End of Our Religion

Sermon from John 6:24-35

Good Morning!  As someone who has earned both his Master’s of Divinity and his Juris Doctorate, a lot of people ask me what it’s like going from the legal profession to that of Christian ministry.  Well, for one thing I find I can cross running water now, and the ability to cast a reflection really helps when shaving.  People wonder why I have only half a beard… well to be honest it’s the half I still can’t see.

In at least half seriousness though, I sum up what it’s like going from attorney to pastor as my Moses moments and my Rameses moments.  I called being in the legal profession my Rameses moments.  Most people think it’s because the Pharoah was the villain in the Exodus and that we like to think of laywers as villains, but truth be told that isn’t really it.  I call them my Rameses moments because I would be at party, a social gathering, or just waiting in line for a burger and someone would inevitably ask me that terrible question: “So, what do you do for a living?”  And I would answer them like this, “I’ve graduated law school and I am trying to be an attorney.”  And at that point these waves of people looking for free legal advice would come crashing in almost drowning me with thousands of inane selfish questions.  Now, however, I have what I call my Moses moments.  People ask me what I do professionally and I say, “Oh, I’m a preacher,” and it is as if the breath of God goes before me, driving back the seas of people looking to avoid the religious person, and I can walk to my destination unhindered as if on dry ground.  What can I say, it’s handy if there’s a line at McDonalds and I’m in a hurry.

It’s unfortunate, but as any parent of any child knows, offer heavenly advice that pays dividends both in this world and the next and it goes largely ignored, but offer earthly advice for earthly gain and people will mortgage their houses and spend their children’s college money to get their hands on it.  I guess the logic must be that since heavenly advice is given freely it must be worthless.  Such is not only the world that we live in today but it was also the expectation of the crowds in our gospel lesson for today.

Our lesson begins where last week’s left off.  Having performed the deeply Jewish miracle of feeding the crowds in the wilderness with an unending supply of food, Jesus  disappears up the mountain when the crowds saw him merely as another human prophet and yet sought to make him king by force.  Jesus, however, did not stay on the mountaintop but rushed to be with his disciples during the night as they were caught in a sudden storm.  The crowds, already painted by the apostle John as quite thick-headed and oblivious,  set off to the nearest city in order to look for him: Capernaum.

   When they found him on the other side of the lake they ask him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”  Jesus, however, as he so often does in John’s gospel, answers the crowds by not answering them, at least not directly.  He replies to their question by going deeper, by answering not their words but addressing the very reasons why they are there in first place.  He says, “Truly, I tell you are looking for me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate and had your fill.”  Now, in John’s gospel, the word that he uses to describe Jesus’ miraculous actions is not the word for a miraculous act, not “du-na-mis”  but “say-my-on” literally the word “sign”, the word used to describe the placard outside a merchant’s stall  or the wooden boards outside of town telling you what city it was.  To John, Jesus’ miracles were not mere acts of power, they weren’t  just interesting abilities or strange supernatural events - they were signposts, acts that by their very nature pointed the viewer to something greater, something heavenward.  Jesus says to the crowds, you are not here because you saw something that pointed you to the Father, you are not here because God is even remotely that important  you, rather you are here because your bellies were filled in especially interesting manner and that’s about it”.  He tells them “Do not work for food that spoils, but rather put your efforts into food that endures unto eternal life.  This food the Son of Man will give you, for upon him has God the Father given his seal.” 

It is here that John leads us to believe that perhaps, at least on the surface, that Jesus has finally broken through to them.  “What must we do,” they ask, ”to do the work that God requires?”  While on the surface it would seem that perhaps the crowds are finally reaching out in faith, seeking honestly to live life the way God wants them to.  The reality is this answer is incredibly odd.  For a Jew, steeped in the law and prophets since their birth, for a Jew to ask anyone what the Hebrew God required of his people is akin to a lawyer asking a judge when it would be okay to object.  It’s a very basic matter and the fact that you are asking that question betrays what your priorities truly are.  A lawyer who didn’t bother to read up on basic trial procedure is one who doesn’t value his client or his profession.  Likewise a Jew who doesn’t know how God wants them to live is a Jew who saw no value in either his God or his people.  It is an answer that betrays the hearts of the speakers and foreshadows how this conversation with Jesus is going to end.

Working with what he has, however, Jesus answers them in very basic terms.  “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”  It’s a very basic answer, one that is practically meant for children.  The whole of the Jewish religion was based on this precept, to be a Jew was to obey God’s messengers, to believe in the people that God sent to them.  That’s what Prophets were, from Moses down to Malachi.

How do the crowds reply?  With something that is just mind-numbingly ridiculous.  Like little children waiting for the great Zambini to do another magic trick, and specifically after the miracle that mimicked both Elisha and Moses, they ask, “what miraculous sign will you give, that we might see it and believe you?  Our forefathers ate manna in the desert, as the scriptures say, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”  A people who did not believe Jesus after his first miracle want another one?   Are miracles mimicking, no outdoing, your own Prophets so commonplace that you need more to verify where this man comes from?  But still they want to see another miracle, going so far as to quote the Hebrew Scriptures as their reasoning, except in fact that exact line is not found in the Hebrew Scriptures.  It is a hazy rememberence, something close enough in the fog of memory over an item of only passing importance to them.

But Jesus does not quibble semantics, rather as he does throughout John’s gospel he goes to the very heart of the problem.  “You want a sign to prove that I am a Prophet, believing it was Moses that somehow gave your forefather’s bread from heaven.  Moses does not give you bread from heaven, my Father does.  The true bread from heaven is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

Still not remotely getting it, the crowds respond, “Sir, from now on give us this bread.”   

Now, if you all are beginning to think that this is by far the worst pastoral visit ever, you’re probably not that far from the truth.  What is amazing, here, is that Jesus does not ever throw up his hands and give up on them.  Rather, he takes the opportunity to once again reveal who he really is.  Using the Divine Name reserved for Yahweh, he says, “I am the bread of life.  Whosoever comes to me will never go hungry and they that believe in me will never be thirsty again.”  Unfortunately, however, as the scene continues, the crowds despite being given another chance at faith don’t take it.  Indeed, as John’s account continues it becomes extraordinarily evident that this group of people just never will. 

You see, ladies and gentlemen, to be among the faithful is to argue with those who just will not get it.  There are people so mired in this world’s darkness that when the light comes to them they reject it because they will not understand it…they will not understand it because they will refuse to even try.  Reading through our gospel lesson today, it is clear that the crowds cannot see what Jesus is talking about. They cannot see because they are so very occupied with what is worldly.  Indeed, as Jesus tries to help them by confronting the very motives the crowds have for seeking him; it seems the crowds are just completely obsessed with getting Jesus to give them more bread.  “What sign will you do this time, will you give us bread like Moses?  How about now, will you give us the true bread from heaven?  We want this bread from now on!”  Jesus was right about them, they didn’t come to Jesus because they saw the signs, they didn’t come because their hearts yearned for a relationship with the God who made them sustained them and redeems them, they came because they ate their bread and had their fill and that’s about it.  They came not to be fulfilled, but merely to be filled full.

Such was the problem of the faithful in John’s day and such is the problem with the supposed faithful in ours.  In our day and age the Church seems absolutely beset by problems that are a constant tangent, worldly issues that tangle believers down and gets their priorities set on something other than God.   Turn on the television for even a second and you’ll see many things, like Christians arguing with evolutionists - because Scripture makes it clear that God cannot make adapting life.  The LGBT and the homosexuality question still rages hot - because Christ made it such a focus of his ministry.  Angry hateful people on street corners shout with picket signs - because picking 10 of your own favorite Bible verses to memorize out of context is what makes us Christian.

But what are we to do about this?  How are we at Eastside, a small community little C church, supposed to address the problems of the Big C Church?  I’ll tell you what we do.  We remind the world that there was a reason why Lutheran’s went into the business of church reform in the first place. 

My apologies, but was it the Presbyterians or the Pentecostals that nailed up those 95 theses?  Were the Baptists at the Diet of Worms in front of the Holy Roman Emperor; or was it the Episcopalians protesting indulgences, the selling of heavenly pardons for earthly coin.  In my opinion, I say it’s high time we remind these newbies how we kick it old school!

We need to loudly and proudly remind our brethren just what this business of the Reformation was really about because everybody seems to have forgotten.  The Great Reformation was about Values, Community, and Conscience, not about getting caught up in earthly tangents.  It was about education, in granting the public access to the very Scriptures that revealed who their God is and in a language they could understand, it was not about warring with the sciences.  The Reformation was about Christian community, about valuing everyone from lowly farmer to clergy as well as the king.  It was not about fighting over which people to exclude from bathrooms.  Finally and most importantly, the Reformation was about putting Christ back into center of the life of faith and allowing good men and women the ability to follow their consciences without needless burden by the Church and its earthly traditions. 

At the end of the day, ladies and gentlemen, if I know every aspect of the fossil record and can without a doubt disprove evolution for all time, but I have not Christ, what good is it?  If I come down with a signed document from God Himself, saying that he agrees with the Westboro Baptists saying that homosexuals need to be stoned and we should applaud when a one of them is bullied into suicide, but I have lost the meek self-sacrificing rabbi in the wilderness, what good is it?  Though I have memorized every verse in every translation of Scripture and could quote it flawlessly in any language alive or dead, but I miss the Savior, its central point, what good is it?      

John’s Message needs to be our message, and that message is if the point of our faith is an earthly agenda, something other Christ, whom John calls the very Word of God, the true revealer of the Father, if our agenda is anything other than him then it is folly.  If our agenda is only proving other people wrong, proving ourselves right, or simply picking out a good book to turn into an idol, a book where we care about the words on the page but not one whit for the spirit in which they were given, then we are the fools mired in the darkness of our own worldly wants.  In whatever questions we ask and in whatever side that we take, Jesus must be at its very core or our efforts will be worth nothing.  Let us not be afraid to embrace our Lutheran heritage, the rascal whose name we bear as our tradition, and let us not be afraid to remind the world that it still needs us Lutherans to show these Protestant upstarts how it’s done.  Can I get an Amen!?!