Resurrection Life

The thing about your identity in Christ is this:

2 Pentecost 2013

 

2 June 

 

Galatians 1: 1-12

 

Pastor Chris Enstad

 

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

 

Carrie and I joined about 150 other people for a truly blessed moment on Friday night.  Brooke Boon, the founder of Holy Yoga, was in Minneapolis leading a conference and so we went to Christ Presbyterian Church for worship and Holy Yoga.  It was a blessed time, preachers are not often ministered to.  But Brooke did something at the beginning of her sermon that I am going to bring in here today and that is to bring an awareness of breath into even sitting still listening to someone else speak and so we are going to do that right now.  Let’s take two deep breaths and on each exhale, a sigh.  Do that with me.

 

There.  Do you feel it?  It is good to settle into an awareness of our selves and now we can take that awareness and apply it also to our awareness of God.

 

And here’s what I know.

 

You can not be something apart from who you are.  You are who God created you to be.  It can take a lifetime’s journey to become comfortable in one’s own skin.  Or not.  Either way, you are who God created you to be.  

 

You can pretend.  You can work really hard to change.  Some of those changes will work.  Some won’t.  And you’ll learn from your failures and you will try again.

 

But your core identity has been set.  Your code was downloaded into your heart when you were baptized at the font in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  And your identity as a child of God was sealed with the sign of the cross.

 

You cannot be, any longer, something apart from who you are.

 

But other voices will tell you otherwise.  They will give you cause to question your identity in Christ.  Life will happen.  Life.  Man, if life hasn’t given you cause to ask questions about your faith and Jesus Christ then you are either really really lucky or you haven’t been paying attention.  

 

Voices in our culture will tell you otherwise.  What do you need from God?  You can worship God, if you even think you have to believe in him, out here with us in the world.  Or why even give time to faith?  What difference does it make in yours or anyone’s life?

The Galatians were running the risk of living into the identity of someone other than who they had been called to be.  Professor Mary Hinkle Shore likens it to when you are driving into a car park how the spikes in the ground drop out of the way when you are going the right direction but if you try to reverse they will shred your tires.  The Galatians were about to shred their tires.

 

Galatia is a region in the center of Turkey.  The Roman govenment put it together from people that were not related to each other.  The southern towns were put together with the country folk to the north.

 

It was the country folk who we believe Paul ministered to along with Silas.  And they weren’t even really Galatians... these were Celts who had been part of the invasion of Greece by Brennus some three hundred years before Christ was born.  These were the people that Paul was writing to.  The Celts.

 

Celtic spirituality was an easy thing for Paul to work with because the Celts Gods did not live up on Mt. Olympus like Zues.  Celtic spiritualty from the earliest days believed that the divine and the human exist with only a thin line separating them.  A liminal place.  Modern day seekers who experience faith in this way will often talk of liminal places those places where night is about to change to day or where we can sense that the spiritual and corporal worlds are interacting.  I’ve experienced that liminality along the north shore of Lake Superior but also in the city dump of Juarez, Mexico.  The key is to have eyes and hearts that are aware of just how close God is.

 

The Celts were ready, then, for the message that in Jesus Christ God had been made incarnate in man.  Ok.  Great!  We can do that.  Paul was there to preach not Gods but God, the God who created the whole kit and caboodle and the Celts in Galatia were converted.  And Paul left.

 

And new teachers showed up.  Paul said what?  Him?  But he wasn’t even with Jesus or even the disciples?  By what authority can he say those things.  No, if you want salvation you have to do it by first becoming Jews.  We have the law, we have Moses, it is to the Jews that Jesus preached.  Trust us.

 

And when he received news of this Paul tried to jump in front of the car as it was about to reverse over the spike strips.  NOOOOO.

 

Paul reminds the Galatians that God alone is incarnate in Jesus Christ and the Gospel that Jesus preached is the only word that one need hear or heed.  No extra rules, no ceremony other than what Jesus commanded.  

 

We can receive it wherever we are at and be transformed by it.  But the unique way in which any person is caught up by the Gospel is going to look different.  There is no one story that brings a person in God except the story of Jesus Christ however that story is received.  You cannot be something other than what you are.

 

And Paul reminds the Galatians, as he reminds each of us here today, we are woven together in the story of Jesus Christ not despite our differences but because of them.

 

Jew or Greek, male or female, Norwegian or Swedish, white or black, gay or straight, those differences should not be cause for alarm or even surprise but can now be received as evidence of just how majestic and amazing and diverse the Gospel was, is and will be.

 

Now breathe.   Breathe again.

 

On the seventh day, God rested.   He allowed creation to just be creation.

 

Let this Word, this Gospel good news, be.  Whoever you are, whatever brought you here, whatever awaits your return when you leave this place, you are God’s children.  A family of unique, different and beautiful people that spans the ages.

 

Amen.

 

Gotta love a good Lukan head-fake: A sermon for Advent 2 2012

2 Advent 2012

Luke 3: 1-6

Pastor Chris Enstad


Being a Christian follower of Jesus is at the same time the easiest and the hardest thing to be.  Easy in that one need merely declare oneself a Christian and there you are, a Christian.  Maybe, then, you buy a cross to wear and find a church to attend.  And there you are, a Christian.

And for most of us that is where our following ends.  I mean yes, we give to the church, we volunteer to make programs and services work but, even then, it is typically around 10 to 20 percent of a congregation’s membership that makes church happen for the other 80 or 90 percent of us.  

But, if we show up enough eventually the Word that we are hearing starts to make a claim on us.  We start to hear words like repentance, confession, transformation, and purification.  And then, one day, at the call of the Holy Spirit, we wake up and realize that hey, that Book, that Bible, those Words that are written in there are talking about things going on out here in the world, they are talking about me  and my life.  And that’s when things start to get hard, but the work that God calls us to in following his Son, while not easy, is definitely filled with joy and, as we are reminded in our theme for this week, it is a life filled with peace.

Advent is a season of preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ.  We spend these weeks making things ready for the birth of Christ.  This space is gradually being transformed to the festive and cheerful sanctuary where we will soon sing, “Hallelujah!” Our homes are being transformed as well, our tree is up, the lights are lit, our girls have discovered the thrill of wrapping little presents for each other to the joy of the wrapping paper industry, we discovered that our internet radio station has not just one but eight different 24 hour Christmas music channels from country to family Christmas music all the way to my new favorite “peaceful holidays” channel... yes, our homes are ready for Jesus to come.

But Advent doesn’t exist for any of those reasons.  Advent is a season of preparing our own lives for the coming of Christ.  We are accustomed to taking all of the good feelings that come with this season and forget one important truth: Christ is coming!  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “It is very remarkable that we so calmly face the thought that God is coming, whereas people previously trembled at the day of God, and the world fell into trembling when Jesus Christ walked over the earth.”  

For you see, God coming so close to us in the form of an infant child was not so that we could gather around his manger and fawn over him, God comes close to us to lay claim to us and to sever our relationships with all of the things of this world that we so falsely believe will give us the security, status and prestige that we long for.  And so, yes, while we do get excited about the birth of Christ, this season let us also reconnect with our fears and questions: if you were to hear that Christ was coming to your house tomorrow, that you could expect a knock on your front door, what would your first reaction be?

Listen to how Luke sets it up for us today:  In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Traconitis and Lysanias rulers of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas...  the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in. the. wilderness.

Luke firmly roots this story not only in the historical facts of who was ruling and when, but after this long list of the high and mighty, naming the political and religious elite, he then, pulls our gaze away from Jerusalem to the woods.  Not to Caiaphas and Annas the high priests, but to John, the son of... who?  Zechariah?  

And, John began to preach, he preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.  Every valley will be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight.”

God is coming near, today is the day to prepare your hearts and your lives for his arrival.  What in your life needs straightening out?  What valleys of resentments do you need to fill up with the love and grace of God?  What mountains of ego and accomplishment need to be leveled out in the perspective that it isn’t about you and that we can’t all exist together if we are all at the center of our own little universes?

That’s where my thoughts go when I hear that Jesus is about to arrive, the fully human fully divine Son of God coming near to us in the form of the exact opposite of what we would expect from God, not another mighty ruler, not another religious elite, an infant child, sent to us in judgment, God’s judgment that we cannot be saved on our own.  We need help.

But, then, we give thanks for in coming to us as one of us God’s judgment on us came also with a gift, a gift of salvation wrapped up in the body and the blood of this little baby boy.  We do not have to do this stuff alone for we now know that God is with us.

And that, my friends, is Advent, the coming of the Lord.  That’s why Carrie and I love the joy in our girls’ faces when they hang the ornaments on the tree and sing Christmas carols and are nearly popping out of their bodies counting down the days until Christmas, but it is also why, after they are asleep, we catch ourselves sitting by that same tree with a different kind of joy, the joy of knowing that through all of our struggles in this last year since the last time the tree was up, God has also showered us with all sorts of goodness.  And we know that if Christ knocks on the doors of our home or the doors of our hearts, we would turn and see that yes, it is still pretty messy in our house and it is definitely messy in our hearts and yet we will open our doors regardless to worship the God of judgment and mercy.

May our Church reflect those same truths, may our mission and ministries be done in the fervent expectation that we do them always to be ready for Christ to come again, and may we find ways to open our doors to Christ who comes to us unlike anything we could expect, may we welcome him into our homes, into our church, and into our life together.

Amen.

Let the children come, Let Thy kingdom come

19 Pentecost 2012

 

October 7

 

Mark 10: 2-16

 

“Let the Children Come, Let Thy Kingdom Come”

 

Pastor Chris Enstad

 

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

 

“Let the children come to me”

 

Children have been elevated nowadays to the point that adults almost worship childhood in unhealthy ways.  One only needs to turn on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to get at that idea.  Children have such a high status in our culture and society today that it is often hard for us to remember that it was not that long ago that children had absolutely no status in society at all.  There was a time not long ago that children had to work at hard jobs, daylight saving time was instituted to allow children, in part, to get home from school in time to help in the fields, children were to be seen and not heard.

 

That is the culture into which Jesus is speaking today.  The culture where children were an annoyance, where they had a status less than human, where they were a distraction and drag on families until they were old enough to contribute to the chores and the family purse.

 

Jesus was receiving children that were being brought to him by the people but the disciples found it to be a distraction.  They rebuked the crowds.  But Jesus, when he saw that, was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.  Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.  And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.”

 

Let the children come to me; do not hinder them.

 

Jesus invited the least and the lost and the lowly into his presence elevating their status by lowering his to be with them just as he lowered his divine status to come and live with us in the first place.

 

In a culture that is so hung up on status and power it is a telling thing to watch how our Lord and Savior acts with those who have been relegated to the outside of society by their status.  Children, women, non-Israelites, all were treated as less than human but then Jesus comes along and not only gives women the right to divorce but then commands his disciples to let the children come to him for to such as these belongs the kingdom of heaven.

 

Whoever does not receive the kingdom like a child cannot enter it.

 

That phrase has caused a lot of problem in Christianity throughout history, maybe not as much trouble as it should have caused, but problems nonetheless.  You see we can intellectually acknowledged what it means to receive the kingdom of God like a child.  Oh, sure, we just need to remember that faith is simple and no matter how many questions we might have about God we should just suck it up and act like a pure unpadded uncynical little child.

 

But when the phrase is translated using a better work for “like” from the Greek word, “hos” we get another truth altogether:

 

Whoever does not receive the kingdom as a child cannot enter it.

 

Whoever does not receive the kingdom as a child cannot enter it.

 

Ahh, you see, where we always like to make these Gospel teachings about us, more often than not Jesus turns those expectations on their head and makes us think more about God and the kingdom of heaven.

 

For just as children were relegated to the sidelines of society with no status or regard, so is the kingdom of heaven.  If we cannot get over the fact that our God has chosen to act in the simple way of sending his Son to die on a cross, and that the kingdom of God will enter into our lives and world with little regard, little status, and little for people to get excited about, if we cannot wrap our brains and our hearts around that truth then we will not enter into that kingdom.

 

God comes to us in the form of the opposite.  The opposite of just about everything we could ever expect.  He comes to us in the form of a prisoner, someone we would rather put away and forget about for thirty years, he comes to us in the form of the homeless, the hungry, the ultimate outsider, asking us for our hand and our blessing.  My brothers and sisters, if we cannot figure out how to lay our hands on the least and the lost and the lowly, then how can we ever fathom the truth of the kingdom of God, and how will we ever enter it?

 

Ask yourselves in this coming week where the outsiders are in your lives?  Where have you come across the least and the lost, how have you withheld your blessing and attention from someone or something that seems beneath your time and energy?

 

And then give thanks to God that he has not done the same thing to you and to me for while we were outside God sent his Son to die for you and for me.  Let us share that blessing with those in our own lives beginning today and in all the days to come.

 

 

Alleluia!  Alleluia!

 

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Thoughts on Caine's Arcade

This video:

http://cainesarcade.com/

Is making the rounds of the internet.  I think it is a tremendous teaching tool for companies, entrepreneurs, and congregations.

The lessons I take away from a story like this in regards to church life go like this:

1. Do what you are called to do as a church.  Don't look around wondering if you're doing it right, just get moving and figure out the details as you go.  Many congregations are stuck in "talk" mode and don't ever get to "do" mode.  Caine just started doing it, and he made it his young life's mission to staff that arcade... that's what we're called to do for the Gospel Good News!

2. Find your congregation's square root button.  It slips by so fast you might miss it but did you notice that Caine uses square roots to determine the validity of the fun pass?  What's your cool button at your church?  Or did yours fall off years ago and no one has thought to clue it back on?  The highest functioning congregations are the ones having fun doing what they're doing.

3. It's ok to be proud of something you and your church have done.  We often, as congregations and leaders, don't like to wear our "Caine's Arcade" shirt to school because we're afraid someone will make fun of us.  In the church world we are reknown for eating our most promising young leaders because of the scorn heaped on them for trying something new and breaking established traditions.  The last words out of Caine's mouth in the film credits are, "I'm proud."  I think God says the same thing when we forget about the critics and the naysayers and just get to work doing what He has called us to do as congregations.  Celebrate the victories!

 

"It is Finished": A sermon for Good Friday

Good Friday 2012

Meditation on the Cross


“It is Finished”


And so this is what it has come to… in the end this day is about the news of a death is it not?

And after these last years of war and death and famine with the nightly news showing us picture after picture of what human beings are capable of doing to each other do we really need to be confronted by one more casualty of human sin and brokenness?

This evening, here in this place, we are gathered in order to contemplate the crucifixion of our Lord, Jesus Christ.  We gather to contemplate and to see what it is that we have done to this innocent man, this teacher, this friend to the friendless and comforter to the afflicted.

Together we contemplate this cross and the body that hangs upon it.  Does this scene depress you?  Does it scare you?  Or does it give you hope?

“It is finished.”  These are the words uttered by Jesus in his last breath on the cross.  We don’t often pause to think about what these words mean for God or for us. “It is finished.”  What is it?  And how is it finished?

What we are confronted with this evening is not a picture of how our worldly wisdom defines success, it is not a picture of how our individualistic culture defines leadership and it is certainly not how the American version of Christianity defines salvation is it?  A successful man knows how to manipulate the political process and can hob-knob with the elders and the politicians to get what he wants.  A true leader knows how to fight evil and combat the forces of darkness does he not?  A true savior shields us with his strength and defends us with his might.  A true Christian would not have stuck out of the crowd enough to get killed for his views.  

But we will contemplate this cross and the body that hangs upon it.  We cannot run, we cannot hide, we cannot pretend that something else happened to our Lord and Savior.

When you look upon this cross what do you think about?  Do you perhaps understand with your head but not your hearts?  Do you seek to distance yourself from the reality of Jesus’ suffering and death as though it were some act that happened too long ago to affect us?  

Can we dare to pretend that we do not know this young man?  Will we deny Jesus Christ?  Will we deny that it is through suffering and death that we were won from suffering and death?  

You know this man, brothers and sisters, you know him intimately.  You were there when he was born in a manger to an unwed mother who held him tenderly in swaddling clothes do you remember that?  You were there, remember, when he was baptized in the River Jordan?  You were there and watched his ministry to the outcast, the helpless, the excluded… you have seen the miracles he performed bringing the dead to life, feeding the masses, changing water into wine.

Listen to what I am saying to you, you know this man, brothers and sisters… and he knows you.  Tonight we can no longer pretend that the crucifixion was a distant act in a distant time in a distant land.  When we look at this cross this evening we must be reminded that the sons and daughters of God are being killed every day… they are killed in war, they are killed by hate, and they are killed in prisons both with and without walls.  Every time the status quo is threatened to be upset it happens, again and again.  

Remember tonight that it wasn’t Jesus’ enemies that did him in; it was his friends.  Remember tonight that it was not unbelief and lack of order that killed this man but it was the religious authorities working in conjunction with a very well oiled Roman government that nailed him to the cross.  

As we meditate on the cross… a pilgrim church gathered around the hill at Golgotha do you see yourself there?  In his crucifixion and death, Jesus Christ draws us all to himself… each and every one of us.  In his body hanging on this cross do you see yourself looking back?  In Jesus Christ, our perfect mirror, we are confronted by our own sin and suffering.  

We are reminded that when confronted by evil God fought back not with evil but with longsuffering love.  We are reminded that in Jesus’ love for the world we must confront our own hardness of heart, in Jesus’ ministry to the sick and the poor and the hungry we must be confronted by our own hoarding of wealth, our endless pursuit of honors and glory, our striking out at those who might hurt us in the name of protecting what we have.  We are reminded that this body hanging on the cross is someone we know… it is us.

In drawing us to himself on the cross Jesus Christ draws all of who we are… our entire sinful selves.  What of you will be left on this cross this evening?  Contemplate that.  This is the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world… including yours.  What are they?  

Know in your heart that just as sure as Jesus was nailed to this cross 2000 years ago so he is nailed to the cross each and every day in our transgressions against God and each other.  When we are confronted by the pure light his body reflects back at us our instinct is to hide from him or smash him into nothingness.  Every time we choose to stand with the strong against the weak, every time we keep our mouth shut in the presence of injustice and inequity we nail him to this tree.  

Contemplate this cross this evening brothers and sisters and ask yourself what you see reflected back at you.  Do not turn away, make yourself look… you cannot get away from this tree today though you may choose to ignore it the rest of the year… look at what lengths God will go through to win you back for himself.  Do not run, do not hide.

I stand here to proclaim to you that tonight Christ draws you to him, he takes all of your sins on himself, and he gasps one last word… “It is finished” It is accomplished… leave your sins on this cross tonight brothers and sisters for they have no more power over you… they are done… we are done… we now belong to God, we now belong to one another.

Thanks be to God.

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.

 

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: 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?

 

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...