Lent 2 - On Being Born Anew

I was sick this past week and lost my voice entirely. So when I finished writing my sermon Friday night and my voice seemed all right for the moment, I recorded it just in case I lost my voice again Sunday.

If you've never recorded anything trying to hold a baby on your lap, let me tell you it's a new experience!

The production quality stinks and it was recorded at my kitchen table, but hey - it's a step in the right direction...and for those of you for whom the content may be less than interesting, at least enjoy the antics of The Girl.

Lent 1 - On Being Human

What does it mean to you, that you are human?

Maybe it means that you were created. That’s a good place to start. There’s an ongoing debate that pits ‘new atheists’ Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins against the biblical witness that we are created creatures of God. At issue isn’t just the simplistic argument: does God exist; but a deeper one: if we are spontaneous organisms at the end of a long evolutionary path, then why bother being in community? Why bother coming together – for any reason – at all?

The funny part is that both arguments begin at the same place. Everything is created out of dust – something both science and faith can agree on. Coming out of Ash Wednesday, when we heard the words “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”, it can be good to realize that there’s at least one thing that isn’t worth fighting over.

But what comes after that? God creates the first human out of the dust of the ground; even the word, adamah, means ‘earthling’ or ‘mudling’. But once that creation is finished, what then? Well, the man is put into the garden, dependent upon the grace and goodness of God to provide. We remember that when we learn Luther’s explanation of the first commandment in the Small Catechism – “we are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.” That’s where I think we are today.

But it turns out that that is harder to do than we think. Even for those first people, who turn from God so readily. Because that’s something that we miss – the serpent doesn’t actually force them to do anything – all it does is put the merest shadow of a question in their minds – do we really trust God?

It is the temptation to be self-sufficient and self-determining that seduces the first humans, nothing else. Somehow, though they are part of God’s good creation, that willingness to turn from God is a part of who they are. Instead of doing what they were created to do – to fear, love, and trust God above all else – they change their focus instead to wanting to be like God.

They turn inwards, caring more about who they are than about whose they are.

And that first, innermost sin spreads like a virus throughout history and all of humanity. It comes to us in the pre-eminence of human agency in our society.

‘Human agency’ is probably the single most overemphasized concept in our society. Because of it, we are led to believe that we can choose everything we want, and that lack of choice infringes on our ‘rights’ as human beings. We can choose grocery stores, sales, music, lifestyles; choice is always presented as a guaranteed fact.

But really, we don’t want that agency to extend to the consequences of our choice. We just want that agency to be total freedom of the consequences of our choices – really, we want to be how we so popularly conceive of God: absolute power; no responsibility.

And that is endemic through our society. People smoke, yet blame tobacco companies when they get lung cancer; drink to stupidity, and blame the alcohol for the tragedy of the day. Every day people die in silly ways as a direct result of their own choices…yet the blame is spread around…and usually, it gets laid on God.

We don’t often realize that the agency we demand is the agency that God gives us – the freedom, not just to make choices, but the total freedom which includes the consequences of those choices.

Remember: the serpent simply asks Eve and Adam if they really, really trust God. Everything else is their actions. They don’t anticipate that their choice is going to result in putting themselves in direct opposition to God; they just want to be in control, to be “all that they can be.”

In the same way, St. Paul wrote to the church at Rome so many years later. In the excerpt from the epistle lesson for today, he really just tells them: you want your agency? You have it. But here’s the bad news. That means everything is up to you. And if your salvation is up to you, then you have no way out. Even if you’ve never heard of Christ. But, Paul points out, if sin spread through one person’s choice, then shouldn’t God’s choice remove it?

When we think about our ‘humanness’, isn’t it curious that we automatically start by trying to explain what makes us, in and of ourselves, human? We try to define ‘who’ we are, and forget all about whose we are.

A crucial part of the Christian journey is honesty, both with ourselves and with God. If we are not willing to be honest, to be vulnerable, then we will never find a relationship deeper than the most casual acquaintance. St. Paul knew that – throughout most of his letter to the Romans he keeps asking questions of himself:

Why do I sin?

Why do I fall short?

And you know, those are the same questions we ask ourselves. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, “today, I’m going to make my friend feel miserable by gossiping about her. I’m going to sin, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

Even like we do now, Paul found that there was nothing he could do to avoid sin. And then, he realized that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we are pardoned and forgiven. If that is true – if, in fact, God acted in Jesus to pardon us without our permission – then our salvation rests not in who we are or what we do, but in whose we are. We are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.

So our spiritual journey then, does not become one of moving towards a goal that God has set for us in the future – as we often think – but rather in becoming more truly human, fully dependent upon God for all things. That is the example that Jesus shows in the wilderness, that strength is found in relationship with God.

The story of Jesus in the wilderness is a familiar one. Again, he’s in the desert for 40 days. The Holy Spirit leads him there after his baptism. And there, he meets the devil.

The devil tempts himself with Jesus’ power. The devil wants to see Jesus be independent – do it on his own, thereby committing the same mistake made in the Garden.

But Jesus refuses to establish his own worth and identity on his own terms, and remains in relationship with God. In short, he knows who he is by first remembering whose he is. He fulfills the first commandment, remembering to fear, love, and trust God above all things.

And that’s an interesting lesson. Because then the gospel lesson – and Lent itself – becomes less about resisting temptation, defying the devil, and growing spiritually, and becomes more about becoming aware of how insufficient our agency really is. That it is our belief that we can do things on our own that kills us – kills our relationships with others, and with God.

And now we think: C’mon…it’s not that bad. I don’t pretend to be God. But I can run my life without God. God is for Sunday…for funerals…for weddings…

But aren’t you just pretending you can dictate to God when God is allowed in your life? That, in fact, you are still trying to be God in God’s place?

The season of Lent reveals to us that Jesus did not come to show us how to be divine. He didn’t come to show that we could defeat the devil by proof-texting him into oblivion.

Instead, Jesus came in weakness to show us what it means to be truly human; to accept that we are created to be in relationship with God and with each other.

Through our baptism into Christ, God names and claims us as God’s own children, a gift that is given to us because God wants to give it.

Our human-ness may come from a realization that the Holy Spirit is always with us, and leads us to places that we may not like – that our agency is really only in our minds.

In Mark’s version of this wilderness story, Mark writes that the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness, in the same way a swarm of bees can drive a herd of cattle into a thicket of brambles. These forty days of Lent, then, teach us not that God can be found through fasting or prayer – but that we might find ourselves in those disciplines, and the courage to live out our own baptismal covenant that calls us to return from our high and lofty places, and be led by the Spirit into our own wildernesses.

And I’ll point out that Jesus just had wilderness to contend with. We have 21^st century society, and given a choice between the two I’d probably take the wilderness. The bare wilderness of the desert is for Jesus – our wilderness is a wilderness of conflicting ideas, conflating principles, and increasingly nightmarish moral and ethical dilemmas that continually confront us.

But our human-ness and our connection to community comes with trusting the Spirit of God that leads us out of this place and into those wild places, bearing nothing but the promise of the gospel and the presence of Christ. The same Spirit leads us to be witnesses for our faith in word and deed even when that witnessing exposes us to the shame and ridicule of Christ on the cross.

And it is in our realization of our dependence upon God – God on the cross, God in the tomb, God raised eternally -- that we become, truly, human: created, chosen, baptized, and redeemed.

Let the people of God say amen.

Ash Wednesday

I was reading on a news website the other day about a group that is travelling from city to city across the United States warning everyone who will listen that the end of the world – the day of Judgement – will be May 21, of this year.

That’s right, you have slightly more than two months to live. Of course, it depends a bit on who you talk to – some of the people, who are all followers of Family Radio Worldwide, say that May 21 will be the day of judgement, while others just say it will be the beginning of the day of judgement. I guess there is such a thing as hedging your bets on such an important topic.

But I don’t mean to sound flippant. The end of the world; the end of all time; the end of all flesh has long been a fascination of the Christian church, from the earliest church fathers to its latest messiahs. But I do have to wonder: what are the motivations of this group? They believe that only a small percentage of people will be saved from God’s wrath. A heartrending interview with a 8-year-old girl revealed that while she hoped she would be saved, she knew she wasn’t, “and was really afraid burning for eternity.”

And I ask myself: what good does that do? What comfort is there to believing that what God redeemed in love he will later destroy in wrath?

But no matter how we view the beliefs of other faith communities, when we as Lutherans embark upon the journey of Lent, when we repent and ask for God’s forgiveness, we are anticipating the same end of the world. We know it will come. And we ask God’s mercy.

But we do things a little differently. For the sign of the cross marked on your foreheads today with ashes – like the one at your baptism – isn’t put there in case you die. It’s in case you live; because it’s easy to die in the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ – but it’s something else entirely to aspire to live in it. You are marked with ashes today not just as a remembrance of your own mortality; but you are marked with the cross of Christ, through which you will gain everlasting life.

The Lenten season begins today and will last for more or less 40 days – though if you were to count, you’d find there are in fact more like 45 days until Easter. Sundays aren’t included in Lent, because they are always celebrations of the Resurrection. And just so you know, the word ‘lent’ originally meant ‘spring’.

And maybe lent has more in common with spring than we might think; spring is a time of newness, rebirth, and renewal out of the death of winter;

lent is a time to reflect on our baptism and its basis in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

As we opened this evening in the litany: for if we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. You may have recognized that from Paul’s letters. But maybe you recognized it for what it’s greater meaning to this worshipping community: the opening of our funeral liturgy.

As we reflect on the death of things past and things to come, lent becomes a time for rebirth and renewal in preparation for the celebration of Easter. Ash Wednesday is the lens through which we see ourselves in relationship to that crucified and risen Christ.

For lent, and today especially, is a time of reflection and penitence, and thinking about our own mortality and our own being. We become part of Christ through our baptism. We remember that God forgives and justifies us because of our faith in Jesus, who took our sin on himself. Ash Wednesday is for us to recognize the scandal of a God who chose to die so that his children could live.

About thirty years after the resurrection of Jesus, Paul wrote to the Corinthian community and begged them: we entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. In effect: let Christ be your Saviour. Stop insisting that you are an agent in your own salvation. You are not.

On Ash Wednesday, we consider how we have been drawn into God’s dialogue with creation, how God in Christ took on our sin, bore the brunt of our unrighteousness in putting him to death, and still gave to us his own righteousness, the righteousness of the Passover lamb, the utter and complete forgiveness of all our sin.

Tonight, we reflect on how we can be the recipients of such awesome gifts, and still remain the sinful and self-worshipping creatures that we are. And we come to admit our fault, our guilt, our culpability in Christ’s death.

But we also rejoice in our new life in Christ.

And this is part of the great Christian mystery, a paradox at the heart of our Lutheran theological tradition – and mystery is something Lutherans do well. But Luther wasn’t original in his idea; Paul wrote to the Corinthian community about that same paradox, how he could have all things through Christ, but that still the reverse was true, as well:

…be treated as an imposter, and yet are true

…as unknown, and yet well known

…as dying, and behold, we live

…as punished, and yet not killed,

…as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing

…as poor, yet making many rich

…as having nothing, yet possessing everything.

And the scandal of the Christian life is that we are justified – we are made right with God solely through the actions of Jesus Christ – and yet, at the same time, we remain sinners. Because our treasure lies coated, stained, and wrapped in sin.

Our treasure should be the grace and mystery of God. But we find our treasure in what we can do for ourselves, be it for our salvation, or simply to crown our own selves the regent of our own lives. We are caught in that, as we confess so often that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.

We can’t change that treasure. We can repent, and turn from it, but we will return to it again; faith is not a straight line; it is a winding path that leads to the kingdom of heaven. But we do not give up hope.

And Jesus says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” It can be depressing that because there is nothing we can do – we can never work hard enough to make a sign to God that we believe – that we give up, and so consistently reject the presence of God in our lives,.

We can’t change our treasure. But God can change our hearts. And we find, that through our baptism, God does, in fact, do exactly that. Because when our hearts are buried with Christ through the waters of baptism, then it is God who changes our hearts, who creates them clean and new, speaks words of hope and healing, and gives us a treasure absolutely beyond compare.

This is the one day of the year when, if you don’t scrub your forehead immediately after the service, everyone will know you are Christian. You are serious enough about it to let someone smudge ashes onto your head. But consider this: when others talk about the need to repent, for the end of the world is near, you are marked with ashes today as a sign that the new world is near: that God’s kingdom is coming, and that you are created new each and every day.

Someone once asked Martin Luther if he thought that the end of the world was coming. Martin replied that certainly, the end of the world was coming. But, “even if I knew for certain that the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree.”

And your world might end tomorrow. It might end on May 21. But God will still keep planting the seeds of his kingdom in your heart, and watching it change and grow.

Because are worth more than dying for. You are worth living for. I don’t mark you with ashes because you should die. You are marked so that you may live.

So that the tree on which was hung the Saviour of the world might become for you a symbol of hope, of renewal, of resurrection. You are grafted onto that great tree of life; but dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

But God created the world out of dust. What more will God do with you?

Let the people of God say amen.

Transfiguration

It’s beautiful up on the mountain.

It’s a calm, clear day. Jesus and the disciples have travelled far; a few days earlier Jesus had made his most intense demand of those who would be his disciples – that they should deny themselves, take up their own cross, and follow him.

Now Peter, James, and John follow Jesus up to the top of the mountain. They don’t know why they’re picked; they just know that if they’re going up to the top of a mountain, it’s probably going to be good.

You see, only good things happen on the tops of mountains. It’s like an immutable law of religion – if you want to find God (or any god) you find yourself a mountain. At the top of the mountain you can build an altar; you can receive stone tablets, you could maybe even get a supplicant’s eye-view of a little divine smiting, if you’re very lucky.

Everybody likes to be on the mountain. And maybe even yourself…maybe you’re the ‘faith is found in the mountains’ kind of person. Or, your husband is, or your children are, and that’s why they’re not here today. I can’t disagree; indeed, it’s beautiful up on the mountain.

On the top of the mountain those three disciples see Jesus transfigured before them; his face shines like the sun and his clothes become dazzling white. The Jesus who walked up the mountain with them, with whom they’ve spent the last few months and years...suddenly, he’s not that Jesus anymore. He’s vastly different.

And Moses and Elijah appear talking to him; we’re not certain how Peter, James, and John knew who they were; this is certainly before the days when they could be Facebook friends with them. But appear they do, and those three Apostles stand dumbfounded as their teacher speaks – on equal terms – with the two individuals that their own religious tradition epitomizes as the Law and the Prophets. There’s not supposed to be anyone equal to these two; even the Messiah is supposed to be answerable to them. But Jesus speaks with them as an equal.

In his awe of what is before him, Peter is the first of the three to speak: “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

If that seems a bit odd for you, remember that in the Jewish tradition the festival of tabernacles – of tents, or booths – is a time to recognize and remember when they carried God with them in the wilderness of Israel for 40 years. Peter is only suggesting what he believes to be religiously appropriate.

But that is not to be, because even as he is speaking a bright cloud overshadows them, and they hear a voice crying out “this is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” or as a more accurate translation, “hear him!”

Certainly, God speaking is reminiscent of Jesus’ own baptism. The cloud that surrounds them is quite likely the divine presence itself, but to whom is God speaking? Does God speak to Peter, James, and John, who already follow…We can make a lot of those three. Seeing the baptism, seeing the miracles, we can make ourselves feel a lot better by saying that we recognize Jesus as the Christ, when they didn’t.

Or does God speak instead to Moses and Elijah; and to those who insist that it is the Law and the Prophets that bring salvation, rather than the Son? Because it is only the Master who can determine the worth of a servant, and perhaps here God foreshadows that great Easter morning, when the grave yawns open and death is swallowed up forever.

Yes, it can be beautiful up on the mountain. And it is hard to come down from the mountain.

We all have those ‘mountaintop’ experiences, don’t we? Those times when we’re on top of the world, and everything is going our way – or so we think. But then sometimes, we come down from the mountain in a very hard way, and we land in the valley below.

I met a man named Dave who knew what it was like to fall from the mountaintop to the valley. Dave had been an engineer, a very good one, who had lived the storybook life. He’d married a nurse, raised three beautiful children. Had his own office, his own secretary. Dave and his wife celebrated their 25^th wedding anniversary with a month-long stay in Hawaii. They renewed their vows on the beach, using the words of the simple Christian ceremony of a quarter-century before. It was the pinnacle of their lives.

When they returned home, They found how quickly you can fall down the mountain, and how hard it can hurt. They came home to twenty messages on their answering machine from his wife’s doctor. A routine blood test had showed something wasn’t right. Subsequent testing showed breast cancer. Found it too late. Absolutely going to die.

Dave’s wife died in agony, four months after their anniversary. And the alcohol that Dave relied on to soothe the hurt of the vast aching emptiness he was left with came to control his life. And Dave lost everything. His home, his children even stopped speaking with him after two or three embarrassing incidents.

I met Dave when he came by the church I interned at, asking for a handout. As well as that, I sat down with him, and listened to his story. Dave told me he figured that his problems began when he got too comfy where he was in his life, and because he was feeling so blessed and close to God, God wanted to “teach him a lesson.”

It is hard to come down from the mountain. I’d imagine that everyone here knows the feeling of hitting the bottom of the valley, hard.

But God isn’t capricious; God doesn’t wait hiding for you, waiting for you to come seeking so God can smack you down. God is more surprising than that. God is more unexpected than even that.

Peter, and James and John got a foretaste of what it’s really like to be in the presence of the Divine; and they find that the divine tastes like dirt.

As they see and hear what goes on around them, the three of them are overcome with fear and fall to the ground. Then Jesus, just plain Jesus, touches them and says simply, “be raised, and do not fear.” It is the touch of the Saviour that raises them from the death of their fear, his presence that gives them new life.

And then, wonder of wonders, does Jesus stay on the mountain, on this holy place?

No. Jesus walks back down with them. This divinity just revealed to them continues to walk in the same dust and dirt. The glow is gone; the clothes are back to rough and dirty. But this is God who comes down the mountain with them. This hasn’t happened before. Fifteen centuries earlier, when Moses came back down the mountain, he had to veil his face so that the Israelites wouldn’t be so terrified of him, for his encounter with the Divine had forever changed his appearance – his face and beard were shockingly white.

Jesus is either a madman, bedazzling his followers with some well-timed illusions and hallucinations, or he is the Incarnation of the greatest mystery that the universe has ever known – because humanity and divinity don’t mix half-and-half. Plain humanity meeting the righteousness of God is death. Divinity meeting humanity forever alters that person.

But Jesus remains just plain Jesus. The measure of humanity, and the fullness of deity.

Just plain Jesus who walks down the mountain, facing fixedly towards Jerusalem and the next mountain he will climb. A mountain called Golgotha, upon which, instead of being transfigured, he will trampled under the heels of our sin. Yet Jesus still comes down the mountain; God still walks with us. And God knows how much it hurts to come down from the mountain.

I’ll tell you, though, that Dave is back working. He works as a handyman at a homeless shelter. On day, getting a meal Dave noticed that a load-bearing beam was beginning to crack. Drawing upon his background in engineering, he helped the shelter fix the problem with a minimum expense. In return for his work, Dave gets a small cot, his meals, and a stipend every month. Dave is still invisible. There’s no powerful story here – he didn’t go back to his corporate culture, didn’t get a new wife, new life. He’s still Dave. But there’s something different about him.

There’s a story told about an old violin that was brought out as the last item at an auction. It was dusty, battered, and scarred, and looked like it had seen many, better days.

And the auctioneer began his calling, saying “one dollar, who’ll give me one dollar? One dollar, maybe two dollars for this old violin?” And nobody moved. Nobody wanted it.

And from the back came an old man who walked to a place beside the auctioneer. He took the violin from his hand, wiped off the dust, tightened the strings, and rosined the bow. And tucking the old violin under his chin, the old man began to play.

And the sounds that came from the old violin then rivalled the song that the angels sing in glory. When the old man was done, he set the violin down, and walked back to his chair, and sat back down.

The auctioneer cleared his throat, and started again: “one thousand, who has one thousand? Two thousand? Who’ll make it three thousand?’

But some people didn’t understand what had happened. “What changed its worth?” they asked.

“Well,” the auctioneer replied, “it was the touch of the master’s hand.”

Beloved you may know that there’s more than one ending to this story. But let me tell you this: the value of the violin changed when people heard that it could be useful to them – but to the master, it was always priceless. It is through use – and misuse – that fine instruments become worn. But to the Master, they are always priceless.

And it’s beautiful when they can sing, and wonderful when they’re heard. But we discard them too quickly when we think they’re past their best, when they’ve gone from the mountaintop to the valley.

But through it all, the Master knows their worth. It is beautiful to be up on the mountain, when everything is clear. And it is hard to come down from the mountain. But that same Jesus who is lifted up before us, is the same one who will take our hands, touch us, and raise us up when we are battered and worn from our journey, and once having touched us, will never let us go.

And we will go up the mountain to see Jesus. But when we come back down into the valley it is Christ who comes with us, bears our burden, heals our hurts, and guides us home.

And let the people of God say ‘amen.’