Messy Grace

Scripture: Luke 8:26-39; Galatians 3:23-29

I remember my first summer here at First Lutheran I went on the National Youth Gathering to New Orleans with the kids and several of the adult chaperones. I was a recent seminary graduate… had spent most of my life in other fields of work. For 36 years of my life, I had been known simply as “Rebecca.”

So when one of the chaperones was trying to get my attention, she kept saying “Pastor! Pastor!”

I didn’t respond. Didn’t turn to look at her – nothing.

Because I still did not identify myself with that name, that label. It was not, in my mind, a part of my identity yet.

I think she yelled that for a good five minutes before she had to resort to using my name to get my attention.
But that’s what we do – we use a variety of different labels to identify each other. Sometimes we’re identified by our occupations or our abilities…

“Hey, you know Jan?” “Jan?” “The lawyer?” “Oh yeah…”

Other times, we’re instead known and labeled by our inabilities and failures. By things we can’t do – or that we are prevented from doing.

Which is what is going on in our Gospel story for today.

Fearing Failure

I remember taking my first geometry quiz on theorems when I was a sophomore in High School. It was a pretty dismal day. I think I got 24 out of 100 questions right.

Needless to say – Geometry was not my thing. In fact, I was a downright failure at understanding Geometry theorems. I passed the class, but to this day, I could still not tell you the point of a theorem.

I tried golfing for a while, too. Parents made me take lessons, the whole thing. Let’s just say the trees around the fairways are a lot healthier and retain a lot more of their bark when I don’t play golf.

Truth is – I’m a failure at quite a bit in my life. Some failures I’m willing to share… others not so much.

I’m not as willing to share some of the bigger failures, because…well, we don’t like that term in our culture. Failure. We don’t like to talk about the things we’ve failed at.

The Call To Journey

This is the first sermon in a five-part Lenten mid-week sermon series, "Faith Journey through Middle Earth"

Scripture: Exodus 4:1-17, Luke 5:1-11

Through the next five weeks, we’re going to be exploring the Gospel story through the illustration of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, one of the most well-known fantasy sagas of our time. If you’ve never seen the movies or read the books, that’s ok. You don’t need to in order to follow along.

Today's message will focus on “The Hobbit” and our theme is “the call to journey.” To give a little background – in author JRR Tolkein’s world, there are many different forms of life - humans, elves, dwarves… and hobbits.

Hobbits are quiet, unassuming “Halflings” that live in a place called “the Shire.” They don’t bother others, and typically, others don’t bother them. Few hobbits ever even venture outside the Shire, because they know it’s safe just staying right where they are.

"What Can We Do?"

Scripture: Luke 3:7-18

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to start a sermon off by going “You brood of vipers!”

Eric typically starts his sermons off with a prayer that says something similar to “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you” that comes from Psalm 19.

Pastor Meg frequently starts hers off with the standard Pauline greeting, “Grace and peace to you from our God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…”

I don’t typically have a standard opening to my sermons, but I was thinking maybe I could adopt John’s. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Can I get an “Amen”?

(Surprisingly, the congregation at all three services gave me a resounding "Amen!" Hmmm... perhaps I should actually look into this preaching style)

But in all seriousness… I guess starting your sermons off that way was more popular back in John’s day. And their definition of good news was apparently a little different, too.

Unlikely...But True.

Scripture: Luke 21:25-36

I don’t know how I keep getting all the apocalyptic end of the world type texts to preach on but here we go again. It always seems such an odd pairing – as we get ready for Christmas, we hear these earth-shaking, somewhat disturbing texts about the second coming. You expect more baby Jesus, cute and cuddly type texts rather than talk of war and destruction.

Yet, that is indeed what advent is about – awaiting the coming of God into our very tumultuous and frightening world. It’s what Christmas is about – God entering into our world, entering into the human experience and becoming like one of us so that he might save each and every one of us. An unlikely – but true event. A fantastic event that is difficult at times to believe – so much so many continue to reject its validity.

Because it sounds like sheer fantasy. Too good to be true. Beyond our understanding. Yet, we Christians not only believe it, we still wait with the hopeful expectation of the fulfillment of these fantastic and unlikely promises of God.

Today we once again hear about the promise of Jesus’ return. That there will be extremely distressing events and people will react with fear because they do not understand what it all means. We’re actually going to pick up that idea for our Wednesday night mid-week services – talking about how we fight fear with faith so we hope you join us at 6:30 on Wednesdays starting this week.

But Jesus’ point is that while most people will indeed react with fear to such events, it should not be fearful for those who know and trust in God, because it simply means that their redemption is drawing near. Christ’s coming in all his glory will arrive soon.

The problem is, we focus on the disaster element so much because I think it’s hard for us to imagine such a scene. It just seems so… fantastic. So… transcendent and other-worldly. I mean, how do you picture this occurring? How do we envision Jesus arriving on a cloud? As a baby… ok. But a cloud?

Are You Ready?

Scripture: Mark 13:1-8

I don’t know how many of you tend to watch the National Geographic channel, but they have a fun little show on Tuesday nights called “Doomsday Preppers.” People who stockpile food, weapons and medicine in the event of a “doomsday” event of some sort. On the one hand, I find the show fascinating. How all these people are preparing for some big “end of civilization as we know it” event and all the work they put into it. On the other hand, I think, “Gee… now I know where you stockpile all your food and weapons so I know right where to go, thanks.”

But in all seriousness… it highlights something very real and very disturbing about us. How we try and retain some kind of control in a world we never had control of in the first place. To try and pretend like we can do something to make our lives more “secure” from outside forces. Security from the government, from an economic crises, from other nations, from medical issues, even from our neighbors. Maybe if we stockpile enough guns, food and medicine, we can keep these forces at bay. That we can somehow escape or protect ourselves from whatever calamity the future might hold.

The Great Divorce

Scripture: Genesis 2:18-24; Mark 10:2-16

What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?
That question was asked in the “what if” section of the XKCD.com website. They broke it down basically to this:

Assuming your soul mate lives at the same time as you and, to keep things from getting creepy, we’ll assume they’re within a few years of your age… most of us have a pool of around half a billion potential matches. And let’s say you meet 50,000 people in your lifetime – the odds of finding that one soul mate are one life out of every 10,000 lives.

So… odds are – most of us who are married aren’t married to our soul mates. Sorry. Given the stats, it’s actually a wonder that any of us get married.

Soul mate or not, people actually still do get married in this world. And… when people get married, that means, some people also get divorced. When I realized I was the one preaching this week’s lectionary texts, I thought this is either a tremendous teaching opportunity – or a tremendous disaster in the making. Because let’s face it - it’s a delicate and controversial topic, and I have seen this text get utilized on more than one occasion to bludgeon someone over the head with why they either need to stay in a bad or even an abusive marriage or used it to condemn someone who has gone through a divorce.

No matter how you want to frame it, no matter whether it was a divorce that “needed” to happen or not – it is never an easy process – and it hurts. A lot. It hurts the two people involved, it hurts their children if there are any, it hurts their families, it hurts their friends. When that one flesh that you were joined into gets torn and ripped apart – that doesn’t heal easily. A part of you is going to be damaged and changed forever because of whatever happened in that relationship that led to tearing the two of you apart. But flesh does not rip apart by itself. Something has to pull it apart. Divorce does not just “happen” – something forces two people apart. Something has happened that is so hurtful or so beyond repair. Some sin has run amok.