St. Mark's Lutheran » grace

Joseph Bottom has been Listening to the Lectionary…

Parson Brown — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:38:10 +0000

Here is an essay by the above mentioned Joseph Bottom at First Things. Warning, it is deep and political and not a simple read. Truly about First Things as an American.

We come across these hard sayings like, “I’ve not come to bring peace but division (Luke 12:51)” or the refrain “the first will be last and the last first (Luke 13:30)”, and they shake us a bit. All political orders are built on the law. And the law is good. We understand the law. The law gives us sure ground to stand upon. But when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away (1 Cor 13:10). And the perfect has come in Jesus Christ. The perfect is the gospel of grace. Just like those sayings, the gospel is counter-intuitive. That’s why it needs repeating. It is also why any institution or political order, as good as the law is, must make room for something other than itself. It is very hard for any institution or order to admit to another sovereign. Primarily because we make them up, and we aren’t too good at it ourselves.

The Narrow Door…Big Enough for Everyone

Parson Brown — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:56:10 +0000

Text: Luke 13:22-30

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I like the word cloud. Grace makes things topsy-turvy. It scrambles our hard won pieties. But thankfully, the narrow door is one opened by grace. A door made of anything else and nobody would be thin enough.

The text is interesting to me because of who it appears to be addressed to. The questioner calls Jesus Lord. That usually implies a follower, disciple or believer. The parable that follows puts this fellow outside of the narrow door. And the replies of those in the parable are of shock. They can’t believe they are outside. It is not a large problem today – those who are religious, but not very spiritually attuned. But that is the problem addressed. The core of the gospel, what brings people from the east and the west, the north and the south, is grace. A grace that puts the first last and the last first. A grace that doesn’t pay us what we deserve, but pays us all the same regardless of when we entered the field. A grace that big enough to let in the uncountable multitude through a narrow door.

A Thousand Miles in the Footsteps of Martin Luther

Parson Brown — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:10:51 +0000

Here is a WSJ article about an interesting trip. Here are the author’s ongoing site.

a snipet…

But we and Luther do share one significant similarity: We’re both living in the midst of a communication revolution. For Luther it was the printing press. He and his followers were able to use pamphlets and ever-cheaper printed books to promote the Reformation cause. This ability to spread the word also hardened the opposing teams in a divided and dividing church…In the discourse between Lutheran and Catholic ecumenists over the past half-century, however, a new picture of Luther has emerged. Both sides have acknowledged that the claim of a severe cleavage between pre- and post-Reformation Luther is simply inaccurate. Luther’s revolutionary insights were firmly grounded in the long tradition of the church. Both Catholic rejection and Protestant triumphalism fail to do justice to the real man and his work.

Grace Alone, Faith Alone, Word Alone. Those are the three “solas” of the reformation. And they are all radical positions. By radical I mean that put on a spectrum, none of them are the middle path, a reasonable man would not gravitate to those poles. And I think that order is telling. Nobody ever really debated grace alone. There were debates over obscure terms like prevenient grace and saving grace, but that was splitting hairs. It was all grace. The debates intensified at faith alone. Faith alone to Lutherans really repeated grace alone. We are saved through faith which is a gift of God by grace. Faith is a visible form of grace. The Catholics of the time and still today will nod that yes it is faith that saves, but faith is fruitful in works. The last sola, Word Alone, is often misrepresented. We often take it today as just the scriptures. The Scriptures were definitely the source, but the reformation understanding is larger. Think through the foolishness of preaching, the proclaimed word, an almost mystical understanding of the active Word in our lives. The Catholics made the same leap we often do. They heard Word Alone as sola scriptura and gagged. The scriptures require interpretation. Tradition, the church, the creeds and the teachers of the church are required. The mystic monk met the legal institution and they talked past each other.

Its a blog, so I can be grossly wrong and retract it later. At heart I’m real simple. It’s all grace. The Christian proclamation is that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we were driving the nails and saying we don’t want this grace, the Father gave it anyway. Faith alone, yes, true, but because its all grace. Word alone? That one also, but because God condescended to tell us anything. Everything else kinda falls under Paul’s words, “All things are possible, but not all things are profitable.” Am I going to divide over Word alone – no. Am I going to divide over Faith alone – very doubtful. Am I going to divide over grace alone – yep. If you think anything you do will earn you merit, we part company. I’m not strong enough or wise enough to figure it all out. I need the grace.

So, I wish Sara Wilson grace on her 1000 miles. And in her endeavor. Once things are divided, putting them back together takes a lot of grace. Thankfully I believe in the resurrection – when things do get put back together.

Specific Grace – Relooking at the Prodigal Son – Lk 15:11-32

Parson Brown — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:43:28 +0000

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There are a number of points I review and judge a sermon on. Being cut and thrust personality, I like criteria for evaluation that are as crunchy (vs. squishy) as possible. Coming out of a number of sources (CFW Walther’s Law & Gospel, Dr. Schmitt my Homiletics Prof at Concordia, Robert Dabney through T. David Gordon, St. Gregory’s Pastoral Rule and a few others) I’ve got three big criteria, and some small ones.
The big ones
1. Textual Fidelity – by this I mean did I fairly proclaim the text itself or did I abuse it to serve my own ends. Given our understanding of 1st century culture (or 10th – 5th century BC for the OT) and the original language, can I accurately translate the main point of the passage especially in the larger context it is set within.
2. Evangelical Tone – by this I mean is the Gospel prevalent. Have I pointed to Christ for the listener as the savior, or have I just shown them where He is accusing them and with-held the gospel?
3. Have a Point – does what I am saying have a purpose, or is it just meaningless air. Was it the equivalent of Chinese Food and you are hungry again 15 mins later, or might the hearer think about what was said beyond the confines of the hour.
Some smaller ones
1. Rhetoric – by this I mean the nuts and bolts of how the sermon was put together. Was it logical, did the structure move along, was the argument valid and the supports actually help
2. Audience engagement – did the length fit the audience, did the sermon address issues the audience would care about, was the physical presentation adequate
3. Instruction – was there something being taught, would the average listener go away with something new
4. Confessional expression – has the sermon strengthened a true confessional worldview of the hearer or helped to demonstrate that coherence of church doctrine and teaching, has it helped the hearer think theologically
Some of those smaller ones are really pre-requisites. Rhetoric and an understanding and appreciation of the audience are necessary things. We’ve all sat through sermons that were poorly delivered, didn’t move or the points didn’t make logical sense. This is usually a failure at the rhetoric level. The preacher’s toolbox wasn’t used correctly be it from lack of ability, lack of use or lack of time to prepare correctly. We’ve also all been in places where the speaker has completely missed the audience. They go on for 40 mins in a sit-com world of 15 min attention spans. The high-brow examples used with lunch-pail people, or the talk filled with emotional stories given to 50 something men.
I tend to be more intellectual, so I will find myself constantly checking that audience engagement line. Do I really need to use this $5 word? Is that story or support really as logical and easy a jump as I think it is? I’m also male, so I naturally shy away from the emotional content. I find I need to intentionally ask the emotional questions to force myself to look that way.
Assuming that I meet minimum standards on rhetoric and audience, then the big criteria take over.
That is a large lead up for the following observation. The sermon for last week (posted under Deep Lent below) I think failed to balance textual fidelity and evangelical tone. It had a point, and it was textually faithful, but the accusing function of the law overwhelmed the hope of the gospel. It was a sermon that would have been appropriate for an audience of unbelievers, but not for the gathered church.
In contrast, I believe this week’s sermon balanced things better. The prodigal son is a text that from my study last week I became convinced that most sermons are not being textually faithful. Most sermons want to use the characters as moral examples – “see, live your life this way or not that way”, or they want to proclaim the overwhelming grace of the Father. But the purpose of the text is an invite to see the world and yourself the way the Father sees it and you. It is an invite into the eschatological banquet. And that invite is a specific grace. It is not a cheap grace that just accepts you as you are. It is specific in that it requires repentance and acceptance of the Father’s view as real.

Spiritual, not religious…exactly the wrong attitude?

Parson Brown — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:10:40 +0000

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.

All Saints – Two Calendars telling a story

Parson Brown — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:19:53 +0000

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Let me just say two things about this sermon: 1) I really hate it as a sermon. I think it misses the audience, doesn’t point to Christ enough, lacks a real solid textual foundation and doesn’t have the unity of message it should have. 2) I think some of the parts of it by themselves are bleeding raw and cut right to the heart of life. Modern life has lost the saints and the One who makes them and as a result is childish and soulless. We can’t see the problems even though they are right before our eyes. Being a Christian is a call to a life with a larger canvass, not a safe harbor.

Any sermon is a balance or weaving of separate threads. I have a comfort zone being very textual. In my own walk I can’t get over the fact that God speaks in this book, and I want to know as much about it as possible. That comfort zone moves through to application. Basically I have about five outlines: Very simple text-application, a little more complex 4 pages outline with the four pages being trouble in the text, gospel in the text, trouble in the world and gospel in the world (the individual pages can come in any order, when they are text, text, world, world it reduces to text-app), a three point outline (have something to say and say it well, or if you took debate/speech this tends to be a classic argument outline), a question and answer outline, and a refrain structure (multiple images or examples from life that end with the same biblical refrain). All of those outlines are about relating the text we are reading to our lives, or in reality relating our lives to the text. You could say I’m usually about trying to get people to let the biblical text read their lives. This sermon had a different basis in that the liturgical day (All Saints Day) was really the theme. Textual exposition was greatly reduced and the theology of being a Saint was brought forward. The general outline was compare and contrast – living life and interpreting reality from a secular veiwpoint alone (living with a calendar that only has Halloween) and living life with a church calendar (living with All Saints). Instead of being textual this sermon was theological and thematic.

It needed to be better.

After lives…

Parson Brown — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:13:36 +0000

This is from a review of a new book called after lives…

Augustine won out in his battle against two early Christian thinkers, Origen and Pelagius, who were declared heretics for suggesting that moral self-help could co-exist with divine grace as a means of gaining salvation. Mr. Casey notes an irony: The Vatican has never formally repudiated predestination, but the church “now in practice allows the faithful to be as cheerfully and unconsciously Pelagian as everyone else.” And “everyone else” is just about right when it comes to the U.S. A recent Gallup survey reported that 71% of Americans believe in heaven and that 93% of them think they have an excellent, good or fair chance of getting there.

I’m not sure if there is a better definition of what is wrong with religion and specifically Christianity in America. Last week we read Jesus in the Gospel of mark telling the disciples “how hard it is to enter the reign of God” (Mark 10:24) and that it is only possible with God (Mark 10:27). 93% of America has accepted the cheery notion of an easy heaven. They have accepted the Gospel without feeling the weight of the law. Matt 7:21 might be instructive to those thinking of a warm-fuzzy Jesus.

And you get the quip that we are all Pelagians now, which goes hand in hand with the above. If you think you can save yourself thorugh moral improvement, the natural consquence is a watering down of the the level of moral improvement needed until the general notion of I’m a good person, after all I’m not Charles Manson, is the required bar. What I’d really like to know is why those 7% didn’t think they had a good chance at heaven. Probably the 3.5% hard core atheists who object to the question and the 3.5% that have read the gospels.

Sermon – “Who can be saved?” – Mark 10:23-31

Parson Brown — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:55:05 +0000

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The gospel texts are sparse. What I mean by that is they relate just enough information to tell the story and expect you the reader to fill in the gaps from your knowledge and experience. We do this type of stuff everyday of our lives. The closer the person is to us, the sparser our communication can be. Husbands and wives often fall into this trap thinking that one fills in the gap correctly when they don’t. I’ll let you fill in the gap of the example. In the process of fleshing out the story, a peril for a preacher is preaching on the gaps. To preach or pull the main lesson for the text from what the reader has filled in is usually bad. At its best it is an orthodox sermon because the person in the pulpit has the Spirit and the gap filling in pious, but even then it usually has the effect of being distracting as the fill-in does not naturally fit the text. At its worst, the gaps are filled with stuff that contradicts the plain text and lessens or overrides its teaching. The sermon on the gaps becomes a sermon straight from probably the worst places of the preacher.

This sermon has one fill-in that in my studies for the week I could not find another who took it this way. That would usually mean that I would not use it to try and avoid preaching on a gap. I struggled with this because Peter’s reply to Jesus in the text – “look, we’ve left everything…” just did not make sense within the text as it is normally read. The typical reading is to see this as Peter comparing himself to the Rich Young Man and expecting that he will come out looking better. Jesus says is it hard to enter the Kingdom. We’ve already given up everything, so we must have merited entry. Here is why that makes no sense to me. First, if it was really Peter expressing a claim to merit, Jesus would have immediately struck it down. One does not merit the Kingdom. That is a doctrinal point, but one so basic that if you find your reading of a text going against it you’ve got a wrong reading. Second, Jesus has just said that with man it is impossible. Would Peter really respond to with man it is impossible with an assertion of his own work? Third, Jesus’ response is a blessing and a very confusing one as it gives a whole bunch in this time. Eternal life is an afterthought. Something else is going on here.

I leaned on Matthew to fill in the gap a little. The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) all follow a similar outline. (If you want more on that ask me.) Often you can look at the others to get a clearer view of what is happening. Matthew also records the encounter with the Rich Young Man and right after it records the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. My filling in the gaps to make sense of Peter’s response and Jesus’ response to that in this sermon was:
1) The disciples ask who can be saved
2) Jesus says everyone – because God is doing it, with man it is impossible
3) Peter’s response is that’s not fair (The NLT has a good translation from Matthew – We’ve given up everything to follow you. What will we get?)
4) Jesus promises stuff here in this life – the stuff he promises is a new community the church
5) In Matthew Jesus follows this teaching up with the parable of the workers in the vineyard which ends with the saying ‘the first are last and last first’ that Mark just tacks onto the end of Jesus’ response
I filled in the gaps I think in a way that makes more sense than the typical Peter trying to justify himself reading, but since I went out on a limb so to speak and it does play a role in the general outline of the sermon I add wanted to point out from where and why I filled in the gaps.

Theology of the Cross in the Oddest Places?

Parson Brown — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:27:34 +0000

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.

The turn to fall, the fig and the command to Watch!

Parson Brown — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:05:50 +0000

A quick note – I’ve been a slacker about writing most of this summer. It has been a summer full – full of joys and of sorrows. I intend to get back to a 3 – 4 day a week cycle God willing.

Text: Mark 13:28-37

Maybe it is a psychological thing, my good daughter Anna has returned to school and candy corn is appearing in the store aisles, but today felt like autumn. The sun felt that much less intense on the forearm. The air felt crisper than the summer fullness. We pick up those signs. The longer we live on this earth, if we are perceptive, the more we just know what is coming.

Jesus is telling the disciples something that they will know and something that they won’t in the gospel reading for today. The first part most scholars think is talking about 70AD, the distruction of Jerusalem. Jesus is telling them to be observant, learn from the fig, you can tell when the seasons are changing, so when you see these things the end of the temple is near. While that will seem like the end of the world, it won’t be. That time, when Heaven and Earth will really pass away, you won’t know. You know what? The command is still watch. We watch and we can discern when an older order of things is passing away, when the temples of the world are being judged and torn down – a small letter day of the Lord. That watching is preparation for the capital letter Day of the Lord so that we might be found awake and faithful on that great and glorious day.