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.

 

Cross Roads by Wm. Paul Young: a review

I opened Young's first novel, The Shack, with the same apprehension I brought to this new book.  It had been much-hyped, suggested reading from way too many different sources, and would prove to be just another fad.  I was proven wrong both times.

Cross Roads is a simply-constructed, yet beautiful novel.  Tony Spencer, a rich, paranoid man with no friends and an estranged family, finds himself in a coma.  In the in between place he meets the Holy Trinity and in real life he finds his spirit slipping from one character to another as he struggles to come to terms with his life, death and the ability for even the most lost of sheep to be healed.  

Young has really done it again here.  I sat down to read this and could not put it down.  Young's grasp of the frailty of life and his especially poignant soliloquy on the ego and sin are just absolutely spot-on.  I hope you will pick up this book for discussion in your small groups, with a friend, and with your own soul.

#speakeasycrossroads

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.

My comments from the 90th Anniversary of Elim Lutheran Church

Remarks on our 90th Anniversary

When a congregation turns 90 there is usually an existential question that usually goes unasked, but it is one that Elim has, in many forms, been answering for these last few years... is this congregation going to age gracefully or fitfully?

Church experts have studied growth and decline patterns in church organizations and they have discovered an interesting but very important fact: churches experience their highest rates of growth in their first 10 years of existence and then after they turn 110 years old.

Why might that be? Well, the first ten years of growth are easy because everyone is playing on the same team... they are often not only the music team but also the ushers, the bulletin producers, they are usually renting a building so there are no internal fights about that, etc. etc. After a church matures it often falls into patterns of work with certain people holding the reins and those reins seldom changing. They can quickly become a closed world very indifferent to outsiders or those who do not fit the picture of who built the church in the first place and why... but after 110 years growth starts happening again? Why? Because all of those who would dig in their heels against change or innovation have gone and that has created space for new leadership and ideas to emerge.

Churches that embrace change early in their maturity are those who choose to age graciously, those who refuse to accept the issues that come with old age, and we know people like this as well, age fitfully. The aging itself, you will notice, never stops.

If Elim continues along its present track you will see that this church and its leadership have chose to age gracefully. We are excited about the possibilities that exist within the walls of our church and in our community. We are exploring what it means to be Christian without letting our denominational walls hinder us with our Pentecostal and non-denominational African American church communities who worship in the building. We are building strong bridges with the Laotian immigrant church as we celebrate our common theological roots and look for ways to do more things together including the possibility of bringing our two congregations together on Sunday mornings.

We are building two local partnerships with Lakeview Elementary School and the Good Samaritan Specialty Health Communities not in an effort to expand our ranks but it is what good neighbors do, we help each other to be ourselves.

Our council is building a frame through which we will take all that we are; our mission (what we believe we are called to be doing in this unique place)), our values (why we are doing it) , and use them to not only form a strategy for our future, but a system that will allow us to be accountable to each other for more than just numbers. We are becoming convinced that God is calling Elim to put together a picture of what an Elimite looks like and how they act and how they understand themselves in the world not just on Sunday but for each day of the week. We will be able to define what makes our church unique and why someone would want to be a part of it. That’s exciting because we will be able to tell each other and our neighbors just where it is we believe God is calling us as a congregation and we will be able to articulate how we are going to get there together.

And for all of this we have to pause and remember that this is not just a birthday party it is a gratitude party. I am thankful for all who have come before me in the pastoral office, I am thankful for each of you who form the real backbone of our church community and I am thankful for each current and former member who added whoever they were and whoever God was calling them to be to the great recipe called Elim Lutheran Church of Robbinsdale.

May God grant to this church at least another 90 years of fruitbearing branches at the Oasis on 40th and Broadway.

Alleluia, alleluia!

Technorati Tags: Elim Lutheran Church, Lutheran

Shaking the Dust from Your Feet: a sermon on Mark 6: 1-13

6 Pentecost 2012

Mark 6: 1-13

Pastor Chris Enstad

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

I give thanks for each and every one of you who are gathered here this morning. The mere fact that you are here at all is a testament to the power of the Holy Spirit who called you here today. Indeed, we proclaim a faith that is given to us as a gift, even to the point of finding ourselves here, gathered in this sanctuary, worshipping God.

But maybe you don’t think it took a miracle. Maybe most of you are thinking to yourself, I don’t see where the Holy Spirit was in my alarm going off and me dragging myself out of bed, into the shower and into my church clothes this morning. Or maybe it was the sharp elbows of your wife or your mother who got you into the car and got you into this building today. It wasn’t the Holy Spirit Pastor, it was my mom, it was my alarm, it was my dad saying, “you will go to church or else”. Or maybe it is just what you have been doing for sixty or seventy or ninety years, it’s like clockwork eventually those old habits of going to church on Sunday morning.

But our faith tells us that something else happens when the people of God find themselves gathered into a place like this singing hymns, praying for ourselves and others, listening to the proclamation of God’s word. Our faith tells us that it is not just the mundane habit of life that brought you here this morning, but it was the Holy Spirit who has called us together to worship God in the faith that that very Spirit has given to us as a gift.

But more and more people are falling away from having the institution of church being a part of their lives. Not only are 2/3 of our neighbors non-believers but another 25% of those who were in the faith as youth have now left the church.

Ask someone why they have left the church and you get all sorts of answers: it’s full of hypocrites, those in charge have abused their power or used their power to harm children and others, all the church cares about is itself not me, the message doesn’t mean anything to my life and my problems.

Then go and ask someone who does not believe why they do not take the question of faith more seriously and you will also get a whole bevy of responses: Christians are hypocrites, I don’t like what I see Christians saying about social issues on TV, all they want is my money, the Bible doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t work for my scientific mind, or the best is, “well, some Christian knocked on my door and said I would go to hell unless I joined their church!” Great. Our PR department is not the best at winning people over for Christ.
People don’t trust institutions like the church because they don’t trust that the church has their best interests in mind. They see us coming a mile away and whether we have a chance to even declare: no, we’re not THOSE kinds of Christians, well, their argument is made for them.

Jesus runs into much the same problem when he arrives back in his hometown of Nazareth. Here he has healing people left and right and preaching the coming kingdom of God but he gets back to his hometown and what happens? “Wait a minute,” the townsfolk say, “Isn’t this guy Joe and Mary’s kid? Didn’t we watch him grow up and aren’t those his brothers and these his sisters? Who is this guy to be claiming all these great things? This is just Jesus.”’

And Jesus marveled at their unbelief. He healed a couple people, Scripture tells us, and then moved on teaching in the villages.

Later he called his disciples and commissioned them to go out two by two spreading his message taking nothing with them but the clothes on their back. They would be utterly dependent on those to whom they were preaching and if their message was not received what were they to do? Shake the dust from the shoes and move on. Not put together a campaign chest and take over the airwaves trying to show how mighty their message was, not yell and kick and scream if people would not hear them, just shake the dust and move on, knowing that in the end everyone is accountable to God whether they know it or not.

That is the position that the church is called to take, even in this age of uncertainty. This church, you see, is not ours, it is God’s. It only exists because the spirit brought you here to this corner. If you go somewhere else to worship God, the building may stand but it would only be a building.

And while we are an institution, yes, we are not like any other institution on earth because we exist not for ourselves but for the sake of those who have yet to hear the saving Good News of God! We mistakenly puff up our chests and pound on them when we are offended by someone or something but our true posture in the world must be one of humility, of being on our knees in prayer not just for those who have yet to hear God’s saving Word but for all of the barriers we, as a church, have put up to keep people who might not be like us away from God’s word, we must confess our sins and ask for forgiveness each and every day.

And then we move on, and we proclaim God’s word again and again and again.

Remember that even Jesus’ own people had trouble wrapping their heads around the truth that this hometown boy was the Messiah of God, but, in the end, Jesus did not have to win the argument or score a point, no, in the end he took his message of freedom and peace to the cross and he died. All of humanity rejected his message, but the open tomb of Easter morning was heaven’s response. We said, “No” but God has said, “yes.”
That freeing word is the word that we are called to carry forth from this place today. It is the Word that the World is thirsty to hear. And, in the end, may our feet find themselves more and more dusty.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Technorati Tags: lectionary, preaching, Scripture

Easter 5, 2012: In which the preacher invokes "The Big Lebowski" in a congregation full of 80-year-olds. Crickets chirped. Oh, and Jesus teaches us to "abide".

Gospel: John 15: 1-11

 

Today’s Gospel text follows on the heals of the message that Glenndy Ose brought to us last Sunday.  Last Sunday Glenndy spoke of Jesus as the Great Shepherd of the Sheep an image we quite like to have until we recall that, hey, Jesus is calling us sheep.  All we do is just kind of stand there and let Jesus do all the work.  To which I respond: exactly.

 

This morning we hear Jesus refer to himself as the vine and to us as branches.  Another quite intriguing picture of who Jesus Christ is but again, kind of a disheartening image for someone who wants to know what it is they need to do to get into heaven.  

 

Each of our girls developed their independent gene in similar ways and they both made those developments known to us in their use of language.  For one of them it was they word, “Self”.  If we tried to do something for her she would snatch whatever it was out of our hands with the words, “self self!”.  Likewise our other daughter notified us of her independence by grabbing the spoon or whatever we were trying to do for her with the words, “Oni me, oni me!”

 

Those traits continue in each of us as we grow and develop as adults.  We are a people who are proud of the things we accomplish for ourselves.  We pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and soldier on making our way through life to each his own.  

 

The news has had quite a few stories on the decline of the mainline church and the rise of the mega non-denominational church.  Why is this happening one radio commentator wanted to know?  One young woman phoned in and said, “I go to such and such church because their message is relevant to my life and is filled with good advice.  The sermons teach me how to be a better spouse, a better Christian, and a better person.”

 

We like to have a checklist of things we have to do so that we can then be assured of our place in God’s presence.

 

But then these little vignettes pop up in Scripture and it turns everything that we want to do on our head, instead it is showing us what it is God is doing to bring us together and to give us life.  We just sit there in the sheepfold or stay clinging to the vine.  No branch gets to exclude any other branch, it’s not our job, God does the pruning and tending to His garden.

 

Our job, if it can be called that, is to abide in Christ.  In the movie the Big Lebowski the character played by Jeff Bridges was called simply, “The Dude” and the dude was known for one thing and one thing only... the Dude Abides.  The dude was always around and always would be.  The dude stays the dude even when everything else around him was going crazy.

 

So when Christ is talking about the branches abiding in the vine is he using the same definition as the dude?  I think so.  We cannot win our salvation by doing checklists of good works, our salvation was won for us by Christ, our good shepherd, our vine.  

 

We, in turn, have been grafted into Christ by virtue of our baptism, we have become part of the vine.  It is our job to make sure we stay that way, thus, while good works are not our salvation, making sure we stay near Christ is.  Like any living thing our faith our relationship with Christ needs to be nourished to stay alive, thus, when we come to church, study God’s word, find fellowship with other people on their life’s journey’s, we find ourselves drawing our life and our light from the true vine, Jesus Christ.  But, when we do not we find ourselves soon lost and dried out, ready to be thrown on the fire.  When I get into conversations about faith with seekers or with those who just aren’t sure about the whole God thing yet I like to explain our my spirituality, my faith, is like having an extra gear waiting for when the going gets rough.  People of faith have been proven to be more resilient to life’s curve balls because we know when confronted by these things that we are not alone.  It is not up to us alone to walk through this life.  We have each other, and more importantly, we have our true vine, jesus Christ.

 

Amen.

 

"While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering": a sermon on the future of an established, declining congregation with great things in store for it.

3 Easter 2012

Luke 24: 36b-48

Pastor Chris Enstad

Christ is Risen!  He is Risen indeed!  Alleluia!  Alleluia!

Brothers and sisters, I bring you grace and peace in the name of our Risen Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ.  Amen.

“While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.”  

What an amazing statement by Luke. “While in their joy they were disbelieving and wondering.”  

In truth, those could be the words stamped on the outside of just about any Christian congregation could they not?  Oh, I know that there are plenty of Christians walking around feigning certainty but, usually I find that that certainty is really a smokescreen for uncertainty.  Indeed, often times the louder a Christian shouts at an unbeliever or questioner about the faith, the more often you have to wonder what they have that the rest of us don’t.  Christ appeared in the flesh only between the Resurrection and the Ascension, so, unless you have Jesus locked away in your basement then you are in the same boat as the rest of us.

We possess a very real but a very fragile faith.  Faith in and of itself is a gift given to us by the God who created us.  But, in giving us that gift, God entrusts it to some very human humans,  frail, easily distracted, sinful, judgmental, and capricious.

I have had friends in the faith who have had awful things happen to them or to someone they love, get lost in that most scariest of questions, “If there is a God, why would he let something so awful happen to me or to that person?”  

I also have friends who have so many crazy things going on in their lives that they seek a Christian faith that is unchanging, unshifting, uncompromising.  Both of those extremes, unfortunately, miss out on the living breathing gift of the fragile but real faith granted to us by the God who created us and loved us.

Elim: A people of joy who still, at times, disbelieve or wonder about this whole God thing.  I wonder if a church put that phrase on the outside of the door if more people might not darken the doors.  A church is all too often seen by those who are questioning, those who perhaps are in active states of disbelief, they are often seen as clubs for those who have it all down pat when, in fact, if folks out there knew that, “Hey, we have questions too,” might they not join us in our journey as a church?

I wonder….
“While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering”.

You know, I wonder about this whole thing all the time.  Who is this Christ that we claim has risen from the dead and what in the world does it have to do with us?

We say that we meet Jesus when we walk in the doors of this place.  Pr. Theim referred to the sign that is in the pulpit up here “That we would see Jesus”.  Well, if I’m doing my job and Pr. Marcia is doing hers and Pastor Theim is doing his, and we are meeting Christ in the flesh when we walk in here... what is keeping us from sharing that amazing news with all of the souls walking past the doors of this place.

The last verse you heard in the Gospel text this morning says, “You are witnesses of these things.”…….You are witnesses of these things.  

But, man oh man, don’t we wish we could just be witnesses and not have to testify to what we have seen?  We don’t want to be seen as being too pushy or too in your face like some other kind of Christian that we see on TV or on the street corner.  But, we can testify to the wonder of the resurrection in many other ways.

Being a believer gives us the story to tell.  It gives us the path to walk.  It gives us our way forward.

Elim is taking great steps in faith did you know that?  I don’t think we have all grasped the significance of four congregations worshipping together in the same building.  Do you know what kind of seed it is that God has planted?

Pr. Theim preached on Easter Sunday.  Some folks questioned that decision, others got it.  The way ahead for our congregation will not look or sound like the Elim of 40 years ago.  This afternoon a team made up of the pastors and 4 lay people from Lao Lutheran and Elim will gather around a meal to begin dreaming of new ways to expand our relationship with each other.  The opportunities are really and truly amazing.

But tell me this: What do you think might happen to us when we move beyond a landlord/renter relationship with Monument of Faith or All God’s Children churches?  One is a Pentecostal denomination, the other is non-denominational, what kinds of new ways of being Elim might happen when we take those next steps?  

And, what about new ministry opportunities in our community that are making themselves known to us?  We are actively putting together outreach teams for Lakeview Elementary School and Good Samaritan Speciality Health Community.  Please, let me or Shirley know if you would be a part of those teams.  

Or, how about our soon to be made, agreement with the Red Cross to become a disaster response location or with Families Moving Forward as they seek to increase the number of places homeless families can stay for a week at a time.  Or, North Memorial as they dream with us about ways we can serve as a health care outpost for them?  

The opportunities for us to make a positive structural impact on our community are amazing.

But, the question I have been holding out to our leadership is the same one I am holding out to you:

“What can Elim do uniquely better than the 1,000 other congregations in our area?  And why are we doing it?”

A pastor friend of mine put that question in an even more powerful manner: “If Elim were to cease to exist tomorrow would anyone in our city notice?”

I pray the answer to that last question would be, “Yes.”  My answer to the first two questions is from our scripture this morning: “Because we have witnessed the resurrected Jesus Christ, we have received the promise of salvation we have been commissioned today to proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins to all nations.”

We are called to get over the fact that we are at once a people of joy and disbelief and are a people called to witness to our city, our families, and our world what an amazing thing God has done.

I asked our council last week to think about what kind of newspaper headlines might be written about Elim in three years time.  We had several pretty awesome submissions.  Let me share mine with you, and mind you, this is just visioning so, don’t get too freaked out:

The headline reads: “93 year old congregations closes its doors and reopens as The Oasis Church.  Come and see a multi-cultural, multi-denominational church as it works for transformation in the Robbinsdale area.  Come and experience the Oasis, a cup of cold water for your life’s journey.”

If you thought having the Laotian pastor preaching on Easter was pretty far out, just hold on to your socks.  

Christ is Risen!  He is Risen, indeed!

Alleluia, Alleluia.

Amen.

Technorati Tags: Elim Lutheran Church, Lutheran, preaching, Luke 24, sermons

Challenge: Try preaching 1000 of your best words this Sunday

In listening to a singer-songwriter speak about his craft recently, he said something that struck me as quite poignant.  A woman asked, "How do you know a song you are working on is 'done'?"  His response, "When I am making an album I know that I have to say everything I want to say in 3 1/2 minutes, that kind of economy forces me to be creative with what I am saying and how I am saying it."

As preachers we have often been led to believe that we should preach until we are done, but there are often no brackets around the sermon moment.  Often preachers circle the landing field three or four times before landing the plane, as they say.  

And so I have been challenging myself to paint my sermons as though the canvas is only so wide and so high.  I have been crafting sermons that have a limit.  In self-limiting the sermon I believe two things are happening: I am making my points in a clearer, more succinct way and two, I see fewer glances at the wristwatch.  

How am I doing this?  By challenging myself, each week, to limit myself to 1000 of the very best words I can use to preach on any given text.  1000 words is a lot of words, why not try it and tell me how it goes?

When I mentioned this challenge on my Facebook page it ignited a small firestorm of pushback from several of my ordained colleagues but several more "attaboy" thumbs-ups from my friends who have to sit in the pew and not stand in the pulpit.  I wonder if preachers were to challenge themselves to hone their craft on a more consistent basis, more like a singer-songwriter, if we might not find ourselves with a cadre of energized, talented preachers rather than burned out, dried out, emptied out ones?

What do you think?

This post was 319 words.

 

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.