St. Mark’s Lutheran

I probably should not add this, but I’m going to write it anyway. Read Luke 5:1-11 in your favorite translation. When I was translating the lessons for the week what I see is a very funny moving to a very serious situation. I want to focus on Luke 5:5, Simon’s answer to Jesus.

Jesus has commandeered Simon’s boat to continue teaching. Simon has worked all night and got nothing. He’s cleaned the nets and just wants to go home. This itinerant preacher gets in his boat and starts making requests. Peter obviously complies, but then when Jesus is done teaching he turns to Peter and tells him to go back out to sea. Peter has just finished cleaning up and wants to go home.

My translation would be something like – “Chief, although we worked this whole night and nobody caught nothing, now at your word, I will let down the nets.” Reading the situation and the language his reply is sharp sarcasm. The ESV translates it as – “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets. (Luk 5:5 ESV) ” If you are giving it a close read, you might catch it. But c’mon man, that is pure Biblish. You can see the Jesus as Washington crossing the Delaware with his hand out and a golden halo with Peter rowing the boat and gazing doe eyed at Jesus. And that is boring.

The change in this story is in Peter. He goes from this sarcastic put upon peasant calling Jesus “chief” to a man scared for his existence at his encounter with God and grabbing at Jesus’ feet and calling him Lord. A purely literal translation like the ESV misses that. Unless you are going to read the Bible very closely, everything comes off as this pious gauzy picture. These people were real. They had real lives and wants and emotions. And those real people met a real Christ. It is that real encounter with the living Christ that the Word causes.

Do yourself a favor and get a translation that lets you read God’s Word. The danger of swallowing bad theology from the translator is much less than the danger of never opening the word because you think it is boring or just pious stories.

Tags: Culture, Luke, Word, translations // Add Comment »

This is from Rod Dreher and takes its jumping off point from an evangelical church that is holding mixed martial arts (MMA) viewing/fight nights. The Fight Club for Jesus title is kind of funny, but the larger point is not just to ridicule the impulse. Rod takes the efforts as good faith actions to address a perception.

The Lutheran emphasis is law and gospel. Law is the requirements of God that we can’t keep. Gospel is what God does for us in Jesus. We will even talk about active and passive righteousness. Active Righteousness is the outward keeping of the law, but that active righteousness does not earn you anything. Salvation, justification or absolution is a gift. We receive it passively through faith in Christ. Passive will never make anyone’s list of masculine virtues.

Yet Christ ordered us to pick up our cross and follow him. That is an odd mixture of active and passive. You get nailed to a cross. (Mel Gibson’s line in his current flick – you need to choose if you are the one on the cross or the one pounding the nails – comes to mind.) Yet especially in the Gospel of Luke which we are reading this year – Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51). Jesus chose the cross. He put himself on the cross. And he tells Christians to do the same.

The world would like to tell us that religion is for wimps – all that talk about compassion and love and what-not. But scratch below the surface. The call of Christ is to be a full person. Don’t be conformed to the easy road of callousness and the whims of your body and mind. Instead, with the intervention of the Spirit, bend and shape yourself in the proper ways. Pick-up your cross and follow. Justification is passive, but the Christian life, especially in this world, is active. I don’t know if MMA for Jesus is really bending our wills in the proper direction, but recovering that dare I say it Wesleyan sense of active struggle for holiness is important. We co-operate in our sanctification and it is a daily activity. I am that sinful a person. The laws of God are good. Jesus came to fulfill them, not to abolish them. By fulfilling them he secured my salvation, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore them. They are still the task before us.

As an add on as part of the numbers that we track, I look at the male/female ratio in our worship. There are many different puts and takes, especially in an active and growing but smaller congregation a couple of people can make a big difference in the percentages. I’m not really sure what to make of this type of statistic if anything should be. Any thoughts?
Male/Female

Active Attendance Attendance
14586 Roster 2010 2009
Male 50.1% 44% 53.0% 45.4%
Female 49.9% 56% 47.0% 54.6%

Tags: Church Direction, Culture, males, virtue // Add Comment »

I’m Lutheran – I believe teach and confess this. But I also like to think or lay claim to the title catholic – as in the one holy, catholic and apostolic church.

This article from the Wall Street Journal on Catholic schools had one of the most hopeful sentences I’d read in a long time.

Tim Busch has an answer to the epidemic of closing Catholic schools. And it has nothing to do with vouchers…”We can’t wait for vouchers, and we can’t look to the old model of relying on our pastors and bishops to come up with the money and answers,” says Mr. Busch. “If we want Catholic schools for our children and our society, we have to adopt new models that let us compete.”

That is a sign of hope and renewal. And if the stodgy institutions can’t adapt or move fast enough, well, its too important to wait. As a minister, I would pray that we could provide some of the leadership. If we can’t or won’t, don’t just sit there. The gospel is too important to be locked up in old wineskins.

Tags: Culture, Word, catholic, schools // Add Comment »

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The gospels present everyone as recognizing the authority of Jesus. They all knew he was different. What they didn’t all do is react the same way. Luke portrays a difference in the Synagogue resposne and the response of people gathered in the house.

Our society places a high worth on work and money. So high that we have been willing to destroy or at least seriously lame our communities and social stuctures. We work 12 hour days away from where we live. When we return we don’t have the energy to do anything. So we make up words like quality time. Leaders are divorced from those ruled. Children from parents, neighbors from neighbors, family from family. All of this in the name of making a living.

If we are being honest, unless the peak oil scenarios are right and we are all forced closer to home by just being energy poor, this isn’t going to change any time soon.

Being the church will mean operating within those constraints. It also means pointing out the consequences of certain decisions. The distinctions that Luke calls out in the responses of two groups to Jesus are paradigmatic. The synagogue sits in wonder and makes reports, but fundamentally does nothing. Way too many of our churches are really synagogues. The houses respond in service and bringing all the wounded to
Jesus.
A world divorced and divorcing itself from community creates a lot of wounded. The house has the cure. It may look like many of the churches are dying, but that is how God works. Things die, so that he can take the glory in bringing them back. The real choice for churches is do they want to rise, do they want to act like the house, or are they content being the synagogue and burying the dead?

Tags: Culture, Luke, Sermons, economics // Add Comment »

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This Sunday there were two things going on. In our community, we had a baptism. In the larger world – the disaster in Haiti. We might not link such things, but the biblical answer is actually very close. The Bible talks about Baptism as being a dying and a rising. In Baptism we are burried with Christ so that we will also rise with Him.

There are some common refrains when looking at disasters – what did they do (a la Pat Robertson), why would god allow this (the agony of theodicy), or just how do I avoid them. Jesus is pretty clear in Luke 13:1-5. Sorry Pat Robertson, but disasters are not special judgement. That does not mean we don’t deserve them. Jesus’ answer is that it is only grace theat the whole world doesn’t get them. The entire world is that sinful. That response really answers the second – why would God allow if he was good? The answer is that a non-loving and graceful God would have destroyed everything long ago. Both of those answers are heavy on the law. They are good and true, but hard words for sinners.

The gospel is the answer to the last question – how to I avoid disaster? In this world, you really can’t. It is a fallen world that is groaning under that curse. But God came to share it with us and to redeem it. We pass through the disaster. In baptism, God pulls us through the disaster.
Putting on eternal eyes, this world is one big Haiti to God. It is one big disaster operation. And Baptism is the rescue operation. The hopeless, poor and defeated of this world, find the cure in the waters of Baptism. We die to this world, but we rise to the next through the promises of Baptism.

Tags: Baptism, Luke, Romans, Sermons, Haiti, law and gospel // Add Comment »

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The text is pure gospel – the wedding at Cana in John 2:1-12. The wine, the joy in the days of the messiah, has some amazing qualities. Overflowing, deep, given before we knew we were out and free. The first of the signs Jesus did at Cana in Galilee. We see the messiahs glory and believe in him.

Tags: John, Sermons, Cana, gospel, Wedding, Wine // Add Comment »

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The text was Luke 3:15-22 which is Luke account of Jesus’ Baptism. I had three questions in this sermon. Why the silence? Why does Luke (or the other gospels for that matter) go from a 12 year old in the temple to this adult standing in the Jordan. This account is one of three things in all four gospels, yet they all “look away” and report this event very matter of factly. Think about that, there is a voice from Heaven, John the Baptist, the start of Jesus’ ministry, and a bunch of weighty theological stuff. And books dedication to a theological view, all look away, why? The last question that springs to mind is: where is the fire? John the Baptist promised a baptism of fire, what happened?

The answers are all tied up in the baptism Jesus got, which enables the one we get. His sanctified the waters for ours.

Tags: Baptism, Luke, Sermons // Add Comment »

There are actually two background stories to this post. The original story is the Tiger Woods saga. No expansion necessary I presume. The secondary story is Brit Hume, the Fox News Analyst and former anchor. Mr. Hume had audacity to publicly practice Christian evangelism. Here is a great round-up of that background from getreligion.org, a blog dedicated to looking at the coverage of religion in the press.

The net is that Mr. Hume on live television gave the advice to Tiger Woods to look into Christianity because it is a religion of forgiveness, it is a religion of sinners. Mr. Woods is thought to be Buddhist, which Mr. Hume correctly noted does not have a concept of personal sin nor of personal redemption.

The central teaching of Buddhism is “you suffer because you desire.” The central prescription of Buddhism is “purge yourself of all desire so that you won’t suffer.” It is fascinating that in Tiger’s case this is true. (No “great religion” would be that if it wasn’t a true description of a large part of the human experience.) Tiger desired many different women (all of them apparently who look like Barbie). Tiger also desired a pretty wife, kids and family core. Tiger’s desires led to his suffering. But here is the rub. To avoid suffering, the Buddhist teaching is not just to avoid letting your lust run but also to let go of the desire for the nice stable family life. It is your desire that causes suffering. There is no judgment made on the goodness or badness of the desire.

The Christian teaching is not that desire in itself is bad. The Christian teaching is that mis-ordered desire acted upon, otherwise know as sin, is what leads to suffering and eventually death. God created the cosmos to function in certain ways. Roman Catholics would call that natural law. In the Lutheran tradition is is all part of the Kingdom of the Left which is governed by the law. It is when we make choices that operate outside of that law that we sin and bear the punishment for that sin. The orthodox christian teaching goes further than that. It says that our desires after the first sin known as the fall are by their very nature mis-ordered. Natural man, if not constrained by some other force, would every time choose to exercise his desire contrary to God’s law. Without the grace of God we could not choose correct desires or restrain bad desires.

That horrible condition known as original sin is man’s predicament. As St. Paul would cry out, who will rescue me from this body of death. (Romans 7:24) Under no obligation to do anything, it was man who chose to sin, God chose grace. And that grace was something very specific. It came through a specific people – the Children of Abraham, the Jews. It comes in a form that our natural man would despise – a powerless peasant tortured and killed. God out of His grace sent His son Jesus who atoned, made restitution, payed in full our sin. He experienced in full all of our due suffering. And he did that while never making a choice that went against the desires of God. Jesus suffered without a mis-ordered desire. And the Father would not let that be the final judgment and raised him from the dead and placed him on the throne.

Buddhism, if all you know is the law, is attractive. Under the law, the best you can do is minimize suffering. One break with the law and you bear its full penalty. But the law is only half the story. The law is only a teacher. It points us toward the one who by grace has restored us. It points us to the one who desired a people and actively came to call one out of the wreckage.

Christians, that people called by God, are sinners who have been made saints by the grace of God. Brit Hume was right in what he said. If Tiger wants to have hope of something beyond the suffering produced from his desire, He needs the gospel. Natural man doesn’t desire grace. He wants to save himself, even is all he can do is avoid more suffering. God through his Word and Spirit offers grace and forgiveness. And only in that Spirit can we be saved from this body of suffering and death.

Tags: Culture, Romans, cross, News, Tiger // 1 Comment »

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That is the question that Jesus, in his first words in the gospel, puts on Mary and Joseph. And it is rhetorical. It is posed not to get an answer, but to force us to answer it for ourselves. Why do we seek Jesus?

That is a sticky question theologically. This sermon posits that the deeper answer has nothing to do with us, but everything to do with Jesus. Why do we seek Jesus? Because we heard His voice. Because God calls us. Because Jesus is the only one who can forgive our sins. It looks like we are doing the seeking. It looks like we are the ones who “find Jesus” or “find our path”. Mary and Joseph look like the ones finding the “lost” Jesus. Perceptions are tricky. Jesus knew where he was and was at the correct place the entire time. Who exactly is the lost one and who is the seeking one?

Tags: Luke, Sermons, Lost and Found, seeking // Add Comment »

Text: Luke 2: 22-40

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I don’t know what to say about this one. Just looking at the word picture above in comparison to almost any of the other sermons shows something is different. And that something different could be a very bad thing. The job from that pulpit is point at Christ as our salvation in as many verbal images as scripture allows. Jesus, Christ or God don’t appear in big words anywhere there. Probably the best thing that could be said is it is pietistic (and if you aren’t in the know on that word within Lutheranism it is one of those ill-defined put downs akin to calling someone a liberal in politics – it substitutes for argument). The pietist wears the heart on the sleeve and has a tendency to let the head go fuzzy. In the 17th – 19th centuries, to the hard headed Lutherans, the pietists were all law. They put the demands of piety upon you. This sermon does some of that – probably too much. Prayerfully the gospel was present.

Tags: Luke, Sermons // Add Comment »