St. Mark’s Lutheran

This article by Mr. Charles Blow in the New York Times is an interesting article that confirms a longer running idea in kids or young adult ministry. I can remember 12 years ago when the catch phrase was mystery. Youth didn’t like “religion”, but they dug that mystery.

The opening story of the young woman going to Costa Rica for a month to lose her religion, get over hang-ups from it and reconnect as a spiritual person just screams lost. God works in a bunch of ways which we can’t limit Him, and he could meet this young woman in Costa Rica between fifth of rum, but that would seem slight. The Christian witness is that God has told us he will be in very specific places. God has promised to be present where two or three are gathered – i.e. God is present in the church. God has promised to be present in the sacraments, in baptism and the Lord’s supper. God meets us from the outside. In the proclaimed Word and in the Sacraments. God can meet us in what gets labled as spiritual today, but that is not guaranteed. There is no promise of God associated with trips to Costa Rica or in individual seeking.

Unfortunately that is way uncool – emphasizing religion (the communal gathering around a shared belief) at the expense of personal spirituality. Especially when you add the statement that the important religious institution is the congregation – the local place where the word is taught and virtue encouraged and built up. Christ is present in the gathering and the life of that community. That is where grace happens. Larger groups may be necessary as practical matters, but they are not the church. Saying to sacrifice some of you personal spiritual freedom for the good of a local community is way uncool. St. Paul would see this in speaking in tongues and say if you don’t have an interpreter – shut up. Being spiritual and on your own quest is just so much more romantic, but less likely to actually find grace.

Tags: Culture, Word, cross, grace by Parson Brown
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Here is an article reviewing a split perception of what “Catholic” Universities do to the faith of their Catholic charges.

The money quote…

The CARA report now suggests that Catholics at non-Catholic schools tend to fare worse as far as fidelity and practice goes. But the larger issue is that Catholic higher education simply can’t bear all the weight of passing on the faith.

Parents and families are the greatest single influence on a young person’s faith, experts note, and the deterioration of family life often leaves Catholic students religiously adrift even as dioceses, parishes and the shrinking priesthood are increasingly ill-equipped to take up the slack.

In teaching the faith there are always two components. There is the academic stuff, the faith that is believed. I bring out what in the modern world is a dirty word, the dogma or doctrines of a church. Those are the content of what a church teaches. Then there is the actual faith. Not the faith that is believed, but the faith that believes. This is most definitely taught. Most importantly that faith is taught by God through the work of the Spirit (1 Cor 12:3, John 6:45). That faith is also most clearly taught through the parents. God works through means. He can work directly, but more often in this world through his agents – in teaching faith through parents. (Prov 22:6, Deut 6:7, Eph 6:4)

This teaching is the fundamental work of a congregation. The commission in Matt 28:18-20 is to make disciples. Our congregations are the kingdom. They are the seed-bed where teaching and learning takes place. Both the academic kind, and the living kind.

The article ends with what is essentially a prayer. “Viewed from that perspective, perhaps Catholic colleges should be praised for providing young Catholics a sanctuary and incubator for at least some of the tenets of their faith until, let us hope, these men and women help birth a wider Catholic culture to better support their own children.” That culture the author is praying for only comes from the faith that believes. We don’t built monuments and institutions, as important as it is, to doctrines or things we firmly grasp. We build them to the transcendent Christ – the author and perfecter of our faith (i.e. the one who lived it perfectly). And how was that exactly. He feared, loved and trusted God the Father above all things. Enough to carry the cross and commit his spirit. The living Faith of Jesus.

Tags: Culture, Meditation, cross by Parson Brown
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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 by Parson Brown
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This sermons subject – sexuality and specifically divorce – is a hard word in our culture. Jesus doesn’t allow it – divorce that is. Divorce is not in God’s plan. And we can’t keep that – neither in what our society formally calls marriage, nor in our sexuality that assumes marriage rights without the committment. And it is a standing judgment against us – sexual sins are those we can’t fix, are those we commit against our own bodies. Wouldn’t it be easier if Jesus was just more laid back about divorce? Go that way if you want to lose the Gospel. Marriage is how God describes his relationship with His people – and he took reconciliation all the way to the cross – no divorce indeed. We are sinners, but our God’s grace and mercy are much larger than our ability to mess it up. Trust in that faithful relationship sealed on the cross made sure at the resurrection.

Tags: Culture, Mark, Marriage, Sermons, cross by Parson Brown
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The gospel text for the day was Mark 16:1-20 or the ending of the gospel. The non-scripture reading that was paired with it just bowled me over to the point that you wonder if it was just another “preacher story” – truthfully I would hope that it was a pious fiction, but sorrowfully knowing that it was real because our fiction doesn’t imagine stuff like this. I’m probably breaking 50 copyright laws (although the readership is not so great that even on the internet it might be considered private use ), but I’m just going to type it out.

From Paul Tillich:

In the Nuremburg war-crime trials a witnes appeared who had lived for a time in a grave in a Jewish grave-yard in Wilna, Poland. It was the only place he – and may others – could live, when in hiding after they had escaped the gas chamber. During this time he wrote poetry, and one of the poems was a description of a birth. In a grave nearby a young woman gave birth to a boy. The eighty-year old gravedigger, wrapped in a linen shroud, assisted. When the new-born child uttered his first cry, the old man prayed: ‘Great God, has Thou finally sent the Messiah to us? For who else than the Messiah Himself can be born in a grave?’ But after three days the poet saw the child sucking his mother’s tears because she had no milk for him…When I first read it, it occured to me more forcefully than ever before that our Christian symbols, taken from the gospel stories, have lost a great deal of their power…it has been forgotten that the manger of Christmas was the expression of utter poverty and distress before it became the place where the angels appeared and to which the star pointed. And it has been forgotten that the tomb of Jesus was the end of His life and His work before it became the place of His final triumph. We have become insensitive to the infinite tension which is implied in the words of the Apostle’s Creed: ’suffered…was crucified, dead and buried…rose again from the dead.’ We already know, when we hear the first words, what the ending will be: ‘rose again;’ and for many people it is no more than the inevitable ‘happy ending.’ The old Jewish gravedigger knew better. For him the immeasurable tension implicit in the expectation of the Messiah was a reality, appearing in the infinite contrast between the things he saw and the hope he maintained.

Tags: Mark, Meditation, cross by Parson Brown
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Complete Text

It has been claimed in the past that I have a problem with authority. There are probably a couple layers of truth to that. First, as a sinful human I do have a problem with authority. My sinful nature wants to be God. But of course that is never what that claim means. It means “you” have a problem with “my” authority. Given that perception is reality in almost all circumstance, that claim is probably true, or the person in authority would not be making it. The real question becomes – is the problem justified? [In any such situation there are always the practical concerns of could I really do anything?]

Skipping the longer confessional, after looking at the text, my reaction was ‘ok, I better be careful given my anti-authoritarian nature.’ What this text asks of us thought is a radical realization followed by radical action. That realization is that we are nothing before God. Only Jesus has the authority to forgive and raise. Any like authority is completely derivative from Jesus. On God’s pecking order we don’t make the list. The action is living out that realization. This does not level authority in the worldly realm (i.e. governments are still valid, city zoning is valid) but it does call on Christians to recognize those not on the world’s pecking orders as people under God’s care to whom the gospel needs to be brought. The bum and the executive have exactly the same merit on God’s list and as far as we are Kingdom people the executive has a call to recognize that and act on that. Is that practical? No. Is that part of the Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus and which weare waiting for it complete revelation? Yes.

Tags: Culture, Mark, Sermons, cross by Parson Brown
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The guy puts up seemingly 30 posts a day on a huge variety of topics. There are all kinds of reasons for tuning him out or just not bothering. And then Andrew Sullivan posts something like this…

I have never found the theodicy argument against faith convincing. My own faith teaches me that suffering is part of a fallen creation that lives and dies – how could it not be? But it also teaches me that suffering in itself can be a means of letting go to God, of allowing Him to take over, of recognizing one’s own mortality and limits. That to me is not some kind of crutch. It is simply the paradox of the cross.

Or in a follow-up, like this…

My notion of a fallen world is related to the fact of mortality, which embraces almost everything on our planet, and causes terrible suffering to animals as well as humans. The difference is that, so far as we know, only humans experience this suffering as a form of alienation; we feel somehow as if we belong elsewhere, as if this mortal coil is not something we simply accept, as if our home was from somewhere else…That’s why I do not experience faith as some kind of rational choice or as some kind of irrational leap. I experience it merely as a condition of being human.

The man has a firm grasp of what Lutherans would call living under the law and the need for the gospel. But maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising. Said in the best of ways – “only the sick need a doctor.” Would that God would send His church a crop of ministers with that deep understanding and turn my own heart toward that cross.

Tags: Culture, cross, grace by Parson Brown
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Text: 2 Corinthians 12:1-10

Paul makes complete sense, and then he doesn’t. In some ways it is easy to understand Peter when he said of Paul in 2 Peter 3:15-16 – “His letters contain some things that are hard to understand…”

The daily readings have been taking us through 2 Corinthians, and I’ve ignored them here by and large. The overwhelming sense of 2nd Corinthians to me has been of unease and unsaid recognition. (The Eastern District convention took its theme from 2 Cor, and we as a church have read it from the lectern this year, but it is still difficult.) Paul took these people to the woodshed in 1 Corinthians, and I wonder if that experience colored their entire communication from that time on. They (or some of them) question Paul’s authority. Paul defends it, but with a desperate mood – like he knows they won’t listen. As a parent you know that when you pull the “because I said so” card out, the child is probably not listening. You’ve lost the argument and now you are hoping against hope that the child still has a healthy fear of you as their parent. And so Paul says – “I must boast; there is nothing to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions…” Paul is pulling the becuase I said so card. I’ve seen the surpassing glory of heaven.

But he backs down from there. Instead he points at his troubles. “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamaties, for when I am weak, then I am strong.” The authority of a Christian comes not from the glory first, but the glory after the cross. When our lives and our witness take a cruciform shape, then we are strong. The authority of the World will not brook insult. It owns the sword and it uses it. The authority of the Word resides not in power, but in weakness. In our weakness, in what the world says shouldn’t be, it is there that God is able to work – because only the power and grace of God could sustain it though the thorns.

Tags: Meditation, cross, glory, grace by Parson Brown
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Full Text

The OT text for the day was Isaiah 6:1-8 but I lengthened it to Isaiah 6:1-13. Anything less felt like taking stuff out of context.

When you read the rest of that passage the first reaction is, “How did that get in there?” But without the rest you don’t get the gospel. Without the failure of the law, without the reduction of Israel to one, the seed in the stump, Jesus Christ, you don’t get the gospel. Sitting on the other side of Jesus we have something similar. Our call by Jesus is to pick up the cross and follow him. The call is not to victory and glory in this world. Salvation is free and clear – by grace through faith. What God is asking is for those who will jump up and down saying Here I am, send me! because they trust the one who saved them. Trust Him freely, even though crosses come first. Trust him knowing that placing your life into those nail marked hands is the only sure thing in this world.

Tags: Isaiah, Sermons, cross, glory, grace by Parson Brown
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Mark’s Palm Sunday Text (Mark 11:1-11) ends oddly. “Jesus looked around and it being late went back out to Bethay with his disciples.” The donkey, the cloaks and the palms, the hosannas and the shouts, all end with a quick look around and a walk back out. The question to ask is who are we welcoming – The Kingdom/Son of David or the Kingdom/Son of God. The Kingdom of David restores and refreshes all the stuff that we like. To those hailing Jesus that day that meant kicking out the Romans, making all the nations bow to Israel, restoring the proper temple worship and priesthood. The Kingdom of David says “have it your way.” The Kingdom of God says “pick up your cross and follow me.” Welcoming the Kingdom of David is easy, but there is no life. The presence of the Lord has left the temple and razed it. The Kingdom of David is like a showy tree full of leaves or palm branches, but that never produces any fruit or coconuts. Are there any areas in your life where you are shouting hosanna for the coming kingdom of David – and you are missing the life, the drawing near of the Kingdom of God?

Tags: Lent, Mark, Sermons, cross by Parson Brown
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