Reformation Day Sermon: Sunday, October 27, 2013

Reformation Day Sermon: October 27, 2013

PREACHER: Pastor Carrie Smith

Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Yesterday, I was in Chicago for the wedding of a dear friend. At the reception, I mentioned that I would be going home soon to finish my sermon for Reformation Sunday. There were a few blank stares from the non-clergy in the room. “You know, Reformation Day,” I said, “It’s kind of a big deal.”

One friend-- an Episcopal priest—responded: “Preaching on Reformation Day shouldn’t be too hard! I mean, isn’t it just “Grace, Luther, Bible, Beer, and repeat?” Another clergy friend helpfully offered, “The best sermon ever is ‘God loves you—pay attention—Amen.’”

To which Luther might respond: “This is most certainly true!”

But this is indeed Reformation Sunday, and it is kind of a big deal for Christians in the Lutheran tradition. This is the day we remember how, on October 31, 1517, a priest named Martin Luther posted 95 talking points (we call them the 95 Theses) on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. He posted them to start a conversation, and instead started a movement. Luther’s ideas, combined with the invention of the printing press and the advent of general unease with the excesses of the church across Europe, resulted in what is known as the Reformation. We, who call ourselves Lutherans, are Christians whose ways of worshipping, reading the Bible, and structuring ourselves as a church, spring directly from this period in history. We are a Reformation church, still proclaiming 500 years later “ecclesia semper reformanda est”—the church is always to be reformed. Amen!

I love Reformation Day, and not just because we get to sing “A Mighty Fortress” and hang the Luther Rose banner and witness fifteen of our young people affirming their baptisms at this afternoon’s Confirmation service. I love Reformation Day because it’s an opportunity to preach, loud and proud, about God’s gift of grace. This is the day when I get to stand here and say, along with the author of Romans: “There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift”; and again, “We hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law”; and, with John’s Gospel, I get to proclaim to all my brothers and sisters in Christ, ““If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free!”

Sisters and brothers, say it with me: Grace alone, Faith alone, Word alone.

As a church of the Reformation we proclaim that we are saved by grace alone, faith alone, and Word alone. This is the saving truth that changed Martin Luther’s life and began a reforming movement within the Christian church: that no human being is made right with God by being good or following the rules, but that we are good and acceptable and worthy of being loved because God said so. In fact, God’s opinion on the subject of you and your worthiness is made clear on the cross, where our brother Jesus, Son of God, willingly gave his life for the sake of the world. This is grace, given as a gift, and revealed to us again and again through the Word. Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Amen!

But the truth revealed to us through the Holy Scriptures is just so good we can hardly believe it! The gift of grace is so beautiful, so bountiful, and so boundless that we spend our lives making up rules, laws, excuses and exceptions to explain it away.

It’s like this: Do you know that annoying commercial that comes on every year (In fact, starting in about a week…) where the husband goes out to get the morning paper and finds a luxury car sitting in the driveway with a giant bow on top? Or maybe you know the one where the wife goes to get an ornament off the Christmas tree and finds a diamond ring? Or, most annoying of all, the one where the kids come downstairs to find a perfectly adorable puppy under the tree with a set of tickets to Disneyland in its mouth? 

Are you with me? Well, I hate those commercials. I hate what they do to our brains and hearts, how they change our expectations of Christmas and gift-giving. I hate them because then, on Christmas or a birthday, when we present our friends and family a lovingly knitted scarf or a carefully chosen sweater or whatever other gift we can truly afford to give, somewhere in the back of our minds we are thinking “It should have been a puppy. Or a car. Or a car with a puppy in it.”

These commercials are crazy, and especially crazy is the way they undermine our appreciation of every reasonable, thoughtful, and true gift given or received in love.

But here’s the thing: what we do with God’s grace is the exact opposite. God has already given us the gift to beat all gifts. God has given us the luxury car with the bow, complete with the puppy in the front seat and carrying the tickets to Disneyland, and what we say is “Dear God, thank you SO much for the new car floor mats. They’re just what I wanted.”

Can’t you just hear God saying, “Wait, what? Didn’t you see the car? And the puppy? And the Disney tickets?”

And we just respond, “Well, I saw all that, but I didn’t think that was for ME.”

Friends, God has given the world this amazing gift of grace for all through the cross of Jesus Christ, and we look right at it and say “Thanks for loving all the good people, God.” We even read it in Scripture and don’t believe it. We think “Yeah, it says that, but that can’t be for ME.” 

So we make up our own rules:

“God loves everyone: but I can’t kick that addiction, so I’m the exception. Jesus is present in the bread and wine: but I’m not sure how that works, so he must not be there for me. Jesus died to save the world: except for my neighbor, because he’s a real jerk. I know grace is free: but I’m gonna earn it, gosh darn it.”

But friends, on this day of all days we can remember that Martin Luther (along with so many others) has already been down that road. He struggled with those same questions and tried to follow those same rules and even made up a few of his own. But it was through diligent prayer and study of Scripture that he was convinced of the magnitude of God’s gift of grace. He was so convinced that he stood in front of princes and church authorities to say, “Here I stand!” I cannot and will not take it back! For this Good News is just too good to ignore. It’s too good to hide. It’s too good not to share.

Theologian and food writer Robert Farrar Capon, who passed away just a few weeks ago, said this about the Reformation:

“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.”

 (― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace)

Sisters and brothers, my message to you this morning is that being Lutheran has nothing to do with Jello or casseroles or upper-midwestern culture. It actually has nothing to do with beer, either! Our understanding of God’s grace is the true gift and heritage of the reformation. We are Lutherans when we live into that grace. We are evangelical Lutherans when we share it with others! And we are truly free when we can look at ourselves and say “I’m not perfect, but I’m enough, because I am loved by God. Jesus has it covered. And this truth sets me free! I am free to love, free to live, free to appreciate each day I am given. I am free to drink deeply from the never-ending well of grace, and to bring others who are thirsty to the same waters. For if the Son sets me free, I am free indeed!

Today, on this Reformation Day, we gather to receive again God’s gift of grace through Jesus Christ. Together, we sing God’s praise, and pray that the gift of grace would continue to be a reforming presence in our lives, in the church, and in the world. This is what it means to be a Reformation people. This is what it is to be a Lutheran. This is most certainly true. Amen.

Sermon for Father's Day: from guest preacher Pr. Cordell Strug

Sermon for June 16, 2013 (Father’s Day)

Pentecost 4

2 Sam 11, 12; Luke 7, 8

PREACHER: Rev. Cordell Strug

When I realized that today was Father’s Day, I thought: “Well—I’m a father, and a picture is worth a thousand words, so maybe I could just stand up here and let you admire me for ten minutes or so.” But since the mother of those children I fathered was going to be here as well, I thought if I did that, I was unlikely to live to see another Father’s Day!

But I hoped at least I might find, in the day’s lessons, a fatherly story—something about Jesus in a bossy mood, telling the disciples to clean their rooms, get a haircut, or better yet—a tale of King David or King Solomon, fathers of families, fathers of their nation. Something noble, patriarchal: I saw in my imagination a tall man, strong, pure of heart, striding home across his own land, with lavish provisions in tow, greeted with joy by his dependents who had worked hard all day for his comfort; he would sit in an easy chair before the fire with his favorite dog at his side, settle accounts, adjudicate quarrels, and philosophize on the affairs of the state and the destiny of humankind. I thought I might find a story like that…

But when I looked up the lessons, what did I find?

Oh, there’s a story about King David, small comfort, and he is going to be a father—but he hasn’t exactly been devoting a lot of thought to children, not to mention nobility, his favorite dog, or the affairs of the state.

David had been coveting his neighbor’s wife—and that’s putting it mildly. David was coveting her so badly that he arranged a fatal accident for her husband and took her. We see him accused by an upright man, called to account. The story ends with the illness of their child, who will die—not the first, and not the last child to pay or to perish for a father’s behavior.

Well, that was sobering!

But who can deny that this is a word for today? Nathan’s cry “You are the man!” has probably been shouted in a lot of living rooms and kitchens: and a lot of the ears it’s fallen upon have been deaf to it.

I was watching a football game once, and you know how the players on the sidelines always wave at the camera and say: “Hi, Mom”, and I remembered my mother’s absolute inability to comprehend football. She’d say “Ooh! They all fell down!” –she couldn’t tell the difference between a football and a hockey puck, while my father was quite an athlete. And I thought to myself: “Don’t any of these clowns have fathers? Wouldn’t old dad like to get a little wave once in a while?” But then I thought, with a little shame: maybe they don’t. Maybe they don’t have fathers, or at least fathers that were there—maybe mother had to do it all.

Right now, the number of children growing up in families headed by single mothers is at an all-time high. And one of the saddest and bleakest stories of our time must be the story of lost and drifting boys: men who grow up without responsible men watching over them. They pay for it, and they’re not the only ones who pay for it.

Really, both mother and father are as much terms of honor and achievement, of places to be earned, as they are of biological fact. So we hear people say: “She was my real mother/he was my real father” – some of them might even get a card today! But we all have to step up and earn that place. This may be even more true of fathers than mothers, because of that uncrossable biological barrier. No one talks about being able to recognize a father’s heartbeat. Fathers either show up for duty or end of not counting for much.

I remember, when I was little, being a bit surprised to learn there was a Father’s Day. At least in my memory, it doesn’t seem to have been nearly as big a deal as Mother’s Day, a cultural after-thought, a consolation prize for coming in second in the sentimental sweepstakes. I though Mother’s Day was like the summer solstice: that it was part of nature and started on the sixth day of creation, while Father’s Day was a kind of made-up modern observance, like National Poetry Month of “Save the Whales Sunday”.

Maybe that says something about the fathers of my youth: as I picture them, they would have held themselves above such frippery and fuss: I can hear them sounding like Vito Corleone in “The Godfather” – “women and children can afford to care about such things. Men? No! Not men!” A lot of them were WWII vets, arms like sewer pipes. They seemed to think awards were for slackers: it’s the job that’s important, not the award! What mattered was standing up and getting it done, and not waiting around for the applause.

They all worked in heavy industry—steel mills, oil refineries, automobile plants—and, because of that, they had their own sort of absence. They were providers, of course, in those days, in that place, and they also provided mothers a kind of nuclear deterrent, a weapon of last resort: “Wait until your father hears about this!”

It’s been tempting, in our time, for our cultural complainers, the family values crusaders, to look back on that time with nostalgia for its male economic dominance, command and power. But that’s kind of a distorted picture, as nostalgia always is, and there are some hidden agendas in those yearnings. And it’s awfully hard to make dominance into a Christian virtue!

I sense in this nostalgia a resentment of the opportunities gained by women, a resentment I don’t see as part of the men of that time that I looked up to. There are reasons we got from here to there, and one of those reasons is that real families embraced opportunities for both daughters and sons. Real families are richer and more flexible than the ideologues would have us think.

Even in an industrial community like the one I grew up in, with its rigidly separated roles, the good families were partnerships because they wanted to make a go of it together. We weren’t that well off, and when my mother got a night job at a bank in downtown Chicago, life became even more of a partnership. When I was serving as a pastor in rural Minnesota, which had a completely different work cycle and role models, I still can’t think of a single farm family that wasn’t also a partnership.

It’s no accident that the 4^th commandment calls us to honor our father and mother as a pair, that new creature of one flesh that we proclaim in the marriage service. And when Luther explains the Lord’s Prayer in the Small Catechism, he says that to pray “Our Father” (to use, as Jesus did, “Father” as an address to God) is to believe “that we may approach God boldly and confidently in prayer, even as beloved children approach their dear father.” In other words, Luther (who drove his own father crazy, by the way!) sees the title “Father” not in terms of power and rule, let alone gender superiority, but in terms of loving accessibility. This is the name that should cast out fear and offer the welcome home.

Now let’s take these thoughts of fathers, families and values and look at this little episode from the life of Jesus.

Jesus didn’t have children of this own, and the only story we have of his growing up is one of him NOT obeying his parents, but leaving to do what he wanted and teaching in the temple! It might have been fun to see how Jesus would have reacted to his own son going missing for a couple of days to study in the temple—or to rebuild an engine in somebody’s garage. It would have been instructive to see how Jesus handled his daughter’s first date. But what we learn from him about family life we have to learn from his life as such.

And, really, it isn’t that much of a stretch to see this dinner at Simon the Pharisee’s house as a family scene, in a larger sense of family. It’s about who belongs and who doesn’t, how we treat on another, and how we go on together.

In fact, it has an eerie echo of the messy family scene from David’s life. There are two men facing off, one of whom speaks as a moral guardian, one of whom seems to be compromised, neglectful and careless of his authority and position. There is a woman involved, and what’s going on seems to demand the naming of a sin.

Superficially, it we have learned the lesson of Nathan and David, it might seem that Simon the Pharisee, the man who names the sinner here, the man with the hard word, is the name with a true and godly word. I bet if you left out the names and disguised the details a little, then showed this story to a random group of religion leaders, most of them would say Simon is the real Christian.

But the hard word of Simon is not the word of the Gospel, and don’t you ever forget that!

Simon thinks: “If this man were really a prophet, he’d know who and what this sinful woman is.” And it’s not irrelevant that Simon adds “This woman who is touching him.” He doesn’t exactly accuse Jesus of being like David with Bathsheba, but was thinking along that line!

But the point of the story is this: Jesus does know who and what she is—better than Simon does, and at a deeper level than Simon does. Jesus never let himself be blinded by his own goodness. Yes, he knows what she is; he also knows there’ more to her; he can see her and he knows what she needs. She can come to him without fear and he welcomes her home. The sin named in this scene is Simon’s sin; his treatment of Jesus, his scorn of the woman, his distance from which he looks down on them both. The way that’s shown in the scene is the way of God with the sinner.

We might say David’s story showed a failure of responsibility; Simon’s story is a failure of forgiveness, a failure of love. And, provocatively, they’re both blinded: David by lust, Simon by moral judgment—but neither one can see what he is doing.

It’s to David’s credit that he can respond “I have sinned against the Lord!” because these failures are more than personal. They’re failures in what and how God would have us be together.

Since I was looking at these scenes through the lens of Father’s Day, I thought there was one more light, or one more challenge, thrown here on the family.

Children are like guests in our lives, as Jesus was in Simon’s house: poor Simon probably thought he had a tidy little domestic arrangement completely under his control (like the Martha Stewart of the moral world): then all of a sudden this woman is at Jesus’ feet, like a little too weird-looking date your son or daughter might bring home. It’s a question children raise in lots of ways, as long as they are with us: “How flexible can our family be?” Can we see our children for who they are, not for who we want them to be; how far can the family be open to others and to the world the kids bring home with them?

So it seems very appropriate to me that today’s Gospel ends with a picture of Jesus walking around with an extended family of people who just sort of got attached to him: the 12 picked up here and there, Mary who had seven demons, the wife of Herod’s steward (How did SHE get there??)—and I think it’s very deliberately meant to show the rough-edged, ragged, uncontrollable hodge-podge of everybody, the sloppy bigness of the family of God, as big as God’s mercy, a mess from the human point of view, but all wrapped up in the real goodness of God’s kingdom.

Amen.

7th Sunday of Easter: May 12, 2013

7^th Sunday of Easter, May 12, 2013

Acts 16:16-34

PREACHER: Pastor Carrie Smith

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

A pastor-friend recently told me the story of going to church for the first time when she was about sixteen years old. A classmate had invited her to join the bell choir, knowing she was a musician and could easily follow the music. So she went, feeling skeptical and nervous and out of place, but hoping to hear something that would change her generally negative opinion of Christians and church.

The lesson of the day was about Jesus and the feeding of the five thousand. The preacher stepped up to the pulpit, and my friend tuned in with anxious anticipation to her very first sermon. And then the preacher began with: “Let’s get one thing straight. Jesus didn’t really feed all those people.”

The sermon went on to describe all the possible ways this miracle didn’t really happen, and how the story should teach us to share, but let’s not take it too seriously.

Well, the way my friend, the future pastor, tells it, she tuned out immediately after those first sentences. That sermon merely confirmed what she already thought about Christians: that they were all hypocrites; that they didn’t really believe the stuff in the Bible anyway; and all preachers were there to do was tell you how to live your life and make you feel guilty. Done, done, and done.

She didn’t go back to a church for a long while after that.

I’m telling you this story today, because as we consider the story of Paul and Silas and their dramatic escape from prison, I think it’s important that we’re careful not to over-spiritualize or take away the power of their story of imprisonment and freedom.

You saw the basic story played out just minutes ago, but let’s recap: Paul and Silas were thrown into prison for preaching about Jesus and especially for freeing a slave-girl possessed by a spirit. While in prison, they inspired the other inmates by continuing to pray and to praise God even from behind bars. When a huge earthquake shook the foundations of the prison, opening the cell doors and freeing them from their chains, the jailer was poised to kill himself out of fear of what his employers would do when they saw the prisoners had escaped. But Paul called out “Stop!” and announced that he, Silas and all the other prisoners were still there! The jailer, confused and in awe at this turn of events, fell to his knees and asked how he, too, could be saved. Paul and Silas not only answered that question, but followed him home, teaching his entire household about the Good News. That very night, the jailer and his whole house—slave and free—were baptized! And then…they had a party. All good stories should end with a party!

Now this is a story that grabs us, demanding our attention, complete with spirit possession, exorcism, false imprisonment, prison conversions and a mass baptism! Sounds like God’s own summer blockbuster to me! But, imagine for a moment hearing a sermon on this Gospel story that went like this:

“Let’s get one thing straight, folks: Paul and Silas weren’t really freed from prison during an earthquake sent by God! And even if they were, no one believes that all the prisoners would stick around afterwards or that the jailer wouldn’t kill them. This is merely a story about freedom from sins and bad habits. It’s about how if we believe the right things about Jesus we will feel free! But let’s not take it too seriously.”  Amen?

NO! Not amen! If preaching is about proclaiming God’s Good News for our Bad Situations, then exactly who is this good news for? I don’t need to come to sit in a pew for an hour on Sunday to hear how to feel free. I feel free when I have a real day off. I feel free on the last day of school. I feel free when I lose a few pounds or pay off the department store credit card.

But if it’s a beautiful spring morning, and I’ve come to a brick building to sit on wooden pews next to people I don’t even know, I want to hear about real freedom!

I want to hear about three girls, kidnapped and held captive for ten years, who gained freedom this week in Cleveland. I want to hear how one of those girls, Amanda Berry, said to the 911 operator after being rescued by a neighbor: “I've been kidnapped. And I've been missing for 10 years. And I'm here! I'm free now!”

I want to hear about Reshma, the Bangladeshi woman found alive after 17 days in the rubble of that illegally-built garment factory, who called out, “Brother, save me!” and then, when they pulled her free, “I never thought I would see sunlight again.”

I don’t know about you, but these days I desperately need to hear more real stories of freedom and liberation, of prisons broken open and slaves going free! I need to hear about people finding freedom from the prisons of addiction, of abuse, of guilt, and of shame. I need to hear about the poor and the elderly, the unemployed and the uninsured, finding freedom from systems of oppression we silently endorse.

I am standing here today to proclaim to you real freedom for real people, through the love of God in Christ Jesus. I take that seriously, and I hope you do, too.

We don’t come to hear the Word of God to make us feel better or to be entertained. We don’t come to the table because that piece of bread and that sip of wine can take the place of the Mother’s Day brunch we’re going to later today.

No, we come here each Sunday as a community, with all our differences and all our disagreements, from as many backgrounds and viewpoints as there are pews in this room, because we are hungry for freedom, and we know it is here for us in the water and in the Word, in the bread and in the cup we share.

Paul and Silas found freedom when an earthquake shook the very foundations of the prison. In the same way, we come here to be reminded of the day when the cross of Christ shook the very foundations of the world.

That event, when Jesus, fully human and fully divine, went willingly to the cross for the sake of people imprisoned by sin, turned the whole world upside down. The love of God we see when we see Jesus on the cross frees us today from the burden of trying to be perfect. Today we are set free from our past mistakes! Today the cross of Christ is stronger than the bars of injustice! Today God’s love tears down the walls of hate we love to build!

The cross of Christ is the earth-shaking, prison-leveling event which this very day breaks open our hearts and frees us to love extravagantly, just as God loves us through Jesus Christ. The cross breaks open cell after cell after cell, setting free the people of God to live lives that bear witness to the love of Jesus Christ.

This is real freedom for real people!

And…this freedom is not for us to keep to ourselves.

It was Martin Luther who taught the church about the responsibilities that come with freedom in his work “On the Freedom of a Christian”. He wrote:

“A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.


AND


A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

In other words, through Christ we are perfectly free and must answer to no one.

But, because we are free in Christ, we are also, at the same time, perfectly bound to our neighbors. Our lives are not our own! We, who were made free through Christ, are now “slaves of the Most High God” as the servant-girl called Paul and Silas. And being slaves of the Most High God means we are forever linked to the lives of others.

Because we are free, we are bound to look past the white picket fences in our communities and to care what’s happening next door, whether we live in Cleveland or in Crystal Lake.

Because we are free, we are bound to consider how the $5.99 shirt we purchase is imprisoning workers in a foreign land.

Because we are free, we are bound, through the cross of Christ, to every prisoner, to every forgotten child, to every sex worker, and to every human being deprived of dignity and liberty.

As Christians made free through the cross of Christ, it is our baptismal call to work for the freedom of all people. It is our duty and our joy to break open screen doors and let free abducted girls from captivity. It is our duty and our joy to use our purchasing power to end slave labor. It is our duty and our joy to speak out against racism, sexism, homophobia, and every wall which separates us from each other.

Sisters and brothers, Jesus prayed that we would be one as he and the Father are one. As we leave this holy place today, I pray that we would indeed be one: of one mind and one heart, living into the freedom we have through Christ. I pray that when we leave this table, strengthened and nourished, forgiven and freed, we will go out boldly speaking God’s words of hope and liberation to all who need to hear them, shaking down walls of injustice, exclusion, and hate wherever they are found.

And now, since we Lutherans can be a quiet bunch, please turn to your neighbor and practice by proclaiming: “Sister (or brother), if the Son makes you free, you are free indeed!”