Resurrection Life

Sacrilege: Finding Life in the Unorthodox Ways of Jesus by Hugh Halter

Hugh Halter is a well-regarded church planter, pastor, consultant and missionary to the United States.  He builds and maintains a network of missional church communities called Adullam in Denver, Colorado.  He has street cred.  He is not just a talker, he is a doer.  

Halter's book, Sacrilege, is an interesting take on the Jesus story and what it means for the church in the present age.  His pithy and trenchant stories are not as much grist for the mill as much as they are food to sustain those who are striving to lead intentional communities particularly if they come out of the evangelical traditions of church planting.  I say this because much of what Halter is discovering has been present within the mainline traditions for sometime.  The Emerging Church movement has actually freed the mainline and some questioning evangelicals to discover new freedoms and new ways of preaching Christ that don't necessarily follow the paradigms of the past.  As such, people in Halter's world often will accuse some of his communities of committing sacrilege.  Halter, like many of my Lutheran tribe, will turn to the Scripture and respond, "Oh, really?  How so?"

This is really just a book of stories from a pastor who is on the ground.  There are six footnotes to the whole thing and one of them is from a book about Bono so that means there are five footnotes.  I would use the book to open up discussions within existing communities or if a leader is seeking to get people to dream about church lived an other way.  It is good stuff but not necessarily a lasting tome for the library.

My uncle: a eulogy (of sorts)

My dad is a fraternal twin with my uncle Paul.  Paul died last week at the age of 64 of all sorts of issues but whatever they were they were complicated by Paul's addiction to alcohol.  Addiction is a disease.  I have seen all the email forwards and read all of the hard-hearted things that people have to say to someone like me who insists that addiction is about more than just "quitting cold turkey".  It is an illness and it is a terribly destructive one at that.  Families affected by alcoholism are turbulent, often crazy-feeling, and kids raised in those households enter life with two strikes against them 1. that they were raised in an unstable environment and 2. their parents aren't there to provide the kind of safety net a normal family provides.

Alcoholics need to be intervened upon by friends and family and put through treatment.  Yes, I've seen the stats and they are, forgive the pun, sobering.  But sobriety without a program is not real sobriety.  Would you believe me if I told you that to this day I am convinced that George Bush's actions and decisions were affected by his untreated alcoholism?  He exhibits many of the symptoms of what we call being a "dry drunk"... what kind of man would he be if he were in a 12-step program that led to his truly being "in recovery"?

If you or someone you love is in the midst of addiction of any kind do yourself a favor and intervene.  There are websites that show you how to do it here's one.  Denial is more than just a river in Egypt.  Paul was intervened on many times and none served to break his addiction, but we can all rest knowing that we tried.  It shows just how powerful the drug of alcohol is that not even family and grandkids can get you to turn around.  

I loved (love!) my uncle Paul.  He reminded me of Paul in A River Runs Through It not that my dad was any kind of Norman but Paul definetly insisted on raising the crazy-bar at every turn.  He was bigger than life, as many alcoholics are; but you knew that in the glint of his eye he gave a crap about you and the world.  God bless the memory of Paul O. Enstad

Sermon from 16 Pentecost regarding Matthew 21: 33-36 in which the Preacher takes a good look at our "Christian" "Moral" nation

16 Pentecost 2011

October 2

 

Matthew 21: 33-46

 

Pastor Chris Enstad

 

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

 

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.  Do you understand what you are doing here?  Why oh why are you continuing to mouth off to the religious authorities?  Why oh why are you challenging their authority in front of the crowd, don’t you understand that they work with the Roman government?  Don’t you understand what is going to happen to you if you don’t just keep your head down?  You are standing in the temple, in Jerusalem, in front of the chief priests and elders of the people talking down to them and telling parables that aren’t quite parables are they, they aren’t quite as hard to understand as some of your other parables, it’s like you’re not even trying to protect yourself from the charges of heresy and even treason.

 

Just last Sunday we heard you respond to the questioning of the authorities who came to you challenging your authority and you responded by challenging theirs and in fact knocked their authority down a couple rungs by forcing them to respond to your question regarding the baptism of John with the answer, “We don’t know.”  You told the parable of the two sons one who said he would go to work and didn’t and the one who said he wouldn’t go to work and then did asking which one did the will of the father... clearly it was the one who changed his mind.  You held out to the people of Israel yet another chance to repent and to live not just as children of God by title but by deeds as well.

 

And now today, today Jesus you continue to press your point with yet another parable, right on the heels of the first.  And now you are really going to far.

 

Why are you doing this?

 

Jesus tells this story:

 

A master of a house planted a vineyard, dug the winepress and then wanted to turn the business over to tenants who would pay rent freeing him to pursue other endeavors.  He sends his servants to get his payment, the first fruits of the harvest, and the tenants beat one, killed the other and stoned yet another!  And so the owner sent MORE servants and they did the same to them!

 

So the owner said, “Ok, maybe if I send my son they will respect him.”  But the tenants thought to themselves, “hey this is his only son if we kill him we can have the inheritance for ourselves.”  So they killed him.  “What do you think the owner will do to them,” Jesus asks the religious authorities?

 

“He will put them to death and give them vineyard to someone who will do right by him.”

 

“Ahh,” Jesus said.  “You know that it is written that the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” (that’s Psalm 118)

 

“Therefore the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. “ 

 

And it turns out the chief priests and Pharisees didn’t have to think very hard to get it, and they they decided they needed to get him.

 

There are two very important, life and death important, things that we need to grasp by faith this morning. 

 

The first is that our God is a loving God.   A young pastor out in California named Francis Chan wrote a book about God’s love and he titled it, “Crazy love”.  For God’s love is indeed crazy, it is irrational, it makes no sense to us in how we treat each other and go about our daily lives of judgement, lack of mercy and compassion, it is truly a crazy God who would love us so much that he sent his prophets to proclaim His commands as our Creator and we rejected them.  

 

You don’t believe me?  Well how about let’s see how our lives and actions and politics and government and communities line up against God’s word then?  There are a whole lot of preachers getting up into their pulpits today to make a point that the church should be involved in vetting politicians.  My guess is that their sermons will be more about the empire than the Kingdom.  What politician can possibly measure up to the Word of God?  Shall we see how we are doing as a country?

 

How about Jeremiah? “ Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, who makes his neighbor serve him for nothing and does not give him his wages, who says, “I will build myself a great house with spacious upper rooms, who cuts out windows for it paneling it with cedar and painting it with vermilion.  Do you think you are a king because you compete in cedar?  Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness?  Then it was well with him.  He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well.”

 

Oh yes the words of the prophets were rejected.

But this crazy God, this love-crazy God did not end it all for us then for good, no, he sent MORE prophets.  How about Ezekiel?

 

“If a man is righteous and does what is right and just -- if he does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, does not defile his neighbor’s wife does not oppress anyone but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry, and covers the naked with a garment, does NOT lend at interest or take any profit, witholds his hand from injustice, executes true justice between man and man, walks in my statutes, and keeps my rules by living faithfully -- he is righteous, he shall surely live, declares the Lord God.”

 

Our crazy-loving God offered us the means to repentence over and over again and we rejected those efforts every single time.

 

And so God sent his Son.  And we killed him too.  But our God, the God who loved us so much that he sent his Son to win us back to him.  That God who had all rights under any sense of justice anywhere in the world to call it quits for us once and for all.

 

That God won us back because that rejected stone became the cornerstone of a whole new world. 

 

Oh the chief priests and Pharisees got it all right, and they, in the end, got Jesus, but Jesus got us back.

 

Second, we must always remember that this world, our lives, our families, our time, our money, our possessions are not ours.  We are leasing them from the one who created them all in the first place.  God asks of us the first fruits of our labors and our worship and praise and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Think back to the roots of sinful thoughts or occasions in your own lives and how many of those sins can be traced back to the moment when you forgot that this whole thing is on loan from God and mistakenly thought it was all about you and your will and your desires and YOUR opinions of your neighbors and the poor and the weak and the downtrodden?

 

When I turn on the TV and find people cheering that an old person be allowed to die because they couldn’t afford insurance, that a gay soldier might be booed for asking for equal rights from the countrymen he is protecting, and then cheered a state that has committed 237 execution supposedly because we are so certain of our own judgement that we see fit to take the life of another human being... we are so dead certain that we take it on ourselves to remove from God’s vineyard a person he created.  

 

Where is our Ezekiel today?  Where is our Jeremiah?

 

I don’t care what party you are from, I don’t care about your politics, I care about your souls, I am going to be held accountable for those.  So line your lives up to God’s word today people?  Would you not have rejected the Son sent to claim what was his Dad’s to give it to someone more deserving?

 

Thanks be to God that our God loves us more than we can love each other and forgives us for taking it upon ourselves to sentence his Son to death.  I pray that each of us and our own egos and wills and desires may fall on the rejected stone of Christ, to be shattered today once and for all... and a new house be built from those pieces, with Christ as our cornerstone, as our head, the first fruits of the true life to come.

 

On the Verge: a journey into the apostolic future of the church by Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson. A Review

On the Verge is an amazing snapshot and leadership guide to what church just may be in the first part of the 21st century.  Hirsch and Ferguson have teamed up to give us a look inside 12 churches that are experimenting with life "on the edge" of where contemporary Christian communities are in an effort to bring forward the best practices for how we can be church whether large or small, urban or suburban and yes even rural!

Because, face it, we aren't being churches all that well right now.  But the authors' main point is salient and very well-taken... churches as they are constructed and run today are basically competing for the same share of the marketplace with other churches and so they are in the arms race of being the "best" everything to everyone.  We have lost our missional impulse, the impulse that says, "No, the real market is the world of unbelievers who are running around outside our door and never being invited into a community of faith!"

These 12 profiled communities are examples of those who "get it" in the 21st century... there will be no more institutionalization of the church, we simply can't affort to calcify traditions.  What is needed is a constant cycle of imagination, shifting and innovation.  If a church leader can help his people capture that process as their new life together, they will have every chance of surviving and thriving in the new era.

The book is hard to put down.  It is something every leader will want to explore with their council or elders.  I especially implore pastors in smaller mainline churches who think they don't have much else to offer the world to give the world that Hirsch and Ferguson are painting a look.  It may just be the hope you are looking for.

A Sermon in which the Pastor combines Rally Sunday and 9/11 around a Bible verse on Forgiveness.

13 Pentecost 2011

September 11

Pastor Chris Enstad

Matthew 18: 21-35

Brothers and sisters, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

Rally Sunday has become in our church culture another high holy day.  The air is festive, the choirs are back in full swing, Sunday School and Confirmation, Adult Education, all of our new Health and Wholeness offerings, things are back in gear at Elim Lutheran Church.  But, we have not been hibernating over the past three months, when we put our regular ministry offerings on hiatus, it gives the church as a whole, a chance to breathe and think and pray.  We are putting together at this very moment our Community Ministry Project Team who will work with our Consultant, Joy Skegstad, and me to plan for our next 90 years of ministry on the corner of 40th and Broadway.  Our mission is not longer restricted to inside these walls but, we aim to be a church that equips our members to serve their community and their neighbors, multiplying our reach and our impact throughout Robbinsdale, North Minneapolis and beyond.  I invite you to pray for the team as they begin their work next week and then, keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities to become a part of this work.

But, today also carries with it an air of remembrance of the events of 10 years ago.  I’m sure just about everyone in this room who was alive that day remembers where they were and what they were doing when those planes hit the World Trade Centers.  

That day changed us as a country and a people in some good ways but, also some bad.  I received an email written by the CEO of Meetup.com on how he saw an opportunity in the shadows of 9/11 to help neighbors come together, to see each other and perform community service and other things together.  

But, we also have retreated to many stereotypes and tribal instincts.  When we are threatened it is easy to respond with a defensive stance that means we begin to distrust people who look act or talk differently than us.  Those things have and continue to happen today, yes, in some cases it has proved to be worth it but, I continue to wonder if our ability as human beings to grow in our understanding of people who may not have been born in the same circumstances, or who believe in quite different things than we do, I wonder if that ability has been stunted in some way and if that is a permanent condition.  The hatred and fear of Muslims and Islam, or dark skinned Arabs, is deep.  It’s all over the internet and on the 24 hour news stations.  People are profiting from keeping us afraid of each other.

Fitting then, that this Matthew text might appear today, on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, this text from Matthew 18 on forgiveness.

Forgiveness.  That has got to be the trickiest part of the Christian message that there is.  Peter approaches Jesus and asks, “How many times should I forgive my brother if he sins against me, seven’?  You see, traditional Jewish faith taught that forgiving somebody three times was a sufficient display of a humble and forgiving heart.  

But, Jesus responded, “No, seven times isn’t enough.  How about seventy times seven?”.  In fact, Jesus is saying, you shouldn’t even keep count... just keep on forgiving.

And, he then, tells the tale of the unforgiving servant.  The servant had a debt of ten thousand talents.  It was forgiven.  Do you know how large a debt ten thousand talents is?  Well a talent was roughly equal to 20 years of labor.  If a laborer earns $15/hour and works about 2,000 hours/year he earns about $30,000 a year.  So, a talent would be equal to $600,000.  So, 10 thousand talents is worth, in today’s terms, about $6 billion.   In other words, that servant was forgiven a whole lot of money... an unpayable debt was forgiven.

That servant then went and found a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii which was about 20 weeks worth of labor or $12,000 and had him thrown in prison.

The one who was forgiven an unpayable debt repaid that grace with impunity at someone who owed him so little.

Brothers and sisters, forgiveness is tricky isn’t it?  So often we want to hold onto our grudges or the wrongs that have been done to us in an effort to wait for our offender to ask for forgiveness.  But, what if that conversation never happens?  We think that holding a grudge means that we have power over another person, but, in reality we are still allowing our offender to have control over us because, that grudge or fault eats away at our very soul.

How many times must I forgive a brother that has sinned against me?  Seventy times seven times.

Remember this,God did not wait for us to come to him to ask for forgiveness.  God did not wait for us to get our act together and come on our knees asking for admittance to the kingdom of heaven and the family of God.

No, while we were still dead to sin, God wiped our debt clean.  Our invoice from God says, “You owed me $6,000,000,000 but, that debt has been paid in full by my Son, Jesus Christ.  

How do we repay that debt?  By forgiving our brothers and sisters from our hearts. whether they ask for it or not.  Whether or not their heart has experienced God’s forgiving Word, yours.  Yours has.  
May God continue to work his transforming ways with each of you today and in all the days to come.  It has to start somewhere, why not start with you.  Today.

A little girl heard this passage one day and said to her pastor, “You know, forgiveness must be like the aroma of a flower after it has been crushed.”  

Life does that to us, doesn’t it?  Who of us has not been hurt at some point or another.

May each of you be given the power to forgive by the Holy Spirit, that we might each become the aroma of Christ in an unforgiving world.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Reading the Bible: End in sight!

Well, instead of a closing remark I thought it best to just say, "Thank you".  Thank you for joining me on a journey through the Bible.  I have already noticed that I have incorporated more history into my preaching and teaching and it has been good to be reminded of our broad God's Word really is.  The scope and depth of it is amazing!  In one book!

May you all make this a regular part of your journey.

Blessings to you!

Reading the Bible: Day 87: Acts 22 - Romans 4 (August 31)

Well we are getting close to completing the challenge of reading our entire Bible this summer!  Some of you have already finished, I hear so way to go!

Today I am going to focus just a bit on the Book of Romans.  The entire book is dedicated to Paul's theology of the Righteousness of God over and against the unrighteousness of man.  In the letter he exhorts the church in Rome to preach the Gospel rightly divided between law and gospel.  It is this little hook, law and gospel, that launched the reformation and continues to inspire churches in their evangelistic endeavors to this day.

We live lives under the law.  Follow the rules and you will not get in trouble.  When we mistakenly bring this line of thinking into what Christ did for us we miss the point of the death and resurrection completely.  It is because we cannot follow the law, for instance the Ten Commandments, that God sent his son to fulfil the law on our behalf.  This now frees us to live new lives in him.  And so we go about our lives ministering to the needs of others and proclaiming that good news not because we have to but because we can.

So the first four chapters of Romans center on God's righteous judgement.  We are not the judge, God is.  And God has already judged mankind and found us to be lost and hopeless.  The birth of Jesus Christ, that we celebrate on Christmas, is actually a judgement day for us!  Could we make our way back to being right with God on our own?  God determined the answer to be, "no".  And so he sent his only begotten Son to get us back.

And so our righteousness is not counted to us by the number of rules we follow but by another important reformation phrase, "faith alone".  To those who believe in Christ comes the justification of the sinner... you and me.

Reading the Bible: The Home Stretch! Day 86 Acts 12-21 (August 25)

The Acts 16 story of Paul and Silas in prison is a powerful image, for me, of the life lived in Christ.  Remember that they landed in prison for healing a demon-possessed girl.  They were not imprisoned, it seems, for the healing itself but because they took away the means of making a living for the girl's parents.  For this the two men were thrown in prison.

Two things to take away from this: note that throughout the entire book of Acts, as the early church was being planted, we see the profit motive bumping up against the motive of the Gospel.  My bible finds comparisons with Simon the magician, Elymas and Demetrius the silversmith!  It does seem that pure capitalism and the Gospel are incompatible.  I am not advocating pure socialism, either, however what does a system look like where the wealthy put their hope not in wealth but in something else entirely?  Read 1 Timothy 6:17-19.  Feel free to comment on this comment as well, I'm curious to know what others think.  Truly, in the name of healing that girl, Paul and Silas actually stole from her parents... so how do those two things exist in the same world (healing and profit?)

Secondly, look at how Paul and Silas reacted to their imprisonment: by praying and singing hymns to God.  It is vitally important that we continue to teach our young people to know their story by heart so that in times of trouble they have a deep spiritual well from which to draw the water of life.  So many young people are suffering at the hands of our amoral world because they do not know enough the love God has for them.  They do not have a liturgy to draw upon.  They have not been read the Psalms.  They have not memorized the Lord's Prayer or the Creed.  How can we be surprised that they are showing the signs not just of physical but of spiritual illness?

 

Look It Over

I read the following reflection this morning by Wendell Berry. Wendell has authored fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. This piece is from his first volume of poems call Leavings. I read it a few times through, for some unearthed reason it resonated and reminded me of the gifts God gives us each day...with no cost.

via mcwright.blogs.com

Reading the Bible: Day 78: Matthew 28 - Mark 8 (August 17)

Ahh, tradition.  The Pharisees had a bit of a problem.   Jesus and his disciples were walking around not washing their hands before they ate.  They weren't following the rules.  If Jesus and his disciples were supposedly such holy men, why this dismissal of the most basic of rules regarding clean and unclean hands?

Jesus responded by calling them, "hypocrites".  You see, they followed the rules with their hands but not their heart. 

If we put the Ten Commandments on the walls of our courtrooms we would have a better country (folks who say this appear to miss the irony that this is a Christian version of sharia law).

If prayer were allowed in school, bad things wouldn't happen there.  (A friend posted something to this effect on her facebook page today)

"You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men." - Jesus N. Christ

Outword piety and appearance of holiness is, in fact, the lowest common denominator of a life in Christ.  It is the transformed heart that Jesus came to get for the kingdom.  So, yes, post the ten commandments in the courtroom, but also post the Sermon on the Mount... you know, the part where Jesus presses the ten commandments and makes them EVEN HARDER.  You know, like, when you stab someone in the back you are murdering them?  How are our Christian politicians doing in this regard?

Did you know that prayer is actually allowed in schools?  Yes it is, ask any kid who didn't study the night before a big test what they are doing right before they pick up a pencil.  It is the organized prayer that all too often ends up being, again, outward displays of piety with no corresponding change of heart or life towards helping the outsider, the least, the lost, the lowly.  I'm quite ok with not making prayer another piece of bling that a "cool kid" wears to school.  

What if that kids mom and dad taught them how to pray "without ceasing" so that the fires of faith fanned on the home hearth transferred through their child to their friends as they became, then, the "aroma of Christ" to all those to whom they came in contact each day?

Traditions do not save us like some kind of magical talismen or chant.

Jesus Christ saved us.  Let's get back to that good news rather than doing our best to establish the coolest, hippest, savviest tradition and then banking on that to get us into the kingdom...