Apr 7, 2013
The Snake Was Wrong
Series: (All)
April 7, 2013. Pastor Penny relates two stories today to help us understand the meaning of Easter: "The Snake," by Anne Herbert, and "The Birth of the Pointless People," by Daniel Erlander.
 
*** Transcript ***
 
We begin this morning in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 
Even if you're not a basketball enthusiast, you know probably that tomorrow is the final game in the NCAA tournament. And I'm sure that after the event is over, there will be a lot of analysis of it. And there will be talk about what it means, putting it in perspective, and where to go from here, so that the winning team will probably talk about how this is the high point of their lives and they've been working toward this goal for years. The winning coaches will feel validated in their strategies. And when they talk about where to go from there, they'll probably make some guesses as to which players will be drafted to the NBA, and what the teams will look like next year, and what coaches will get moved around. After any event, we always want to try to analyze it, put it in perspective, understand what does it mean and where do we go from here.
 
Well, we're one week away from the most important event in the Christian church, and that is the celebration of Easter. And Jesus, in today's gospel, was one week away from that event. And he gathered his disciples together to understand that event, to ask really what did it mean, and where do we go from here? Those are good questions for us a week out of Easter to ask: so what really did Easter mean, and where do we go from here?
 
I think before we tackle those questions though, we probably need to remind ourselves of why we needed Easter to begin with. And to do that, I'd like to tell you a story that I first heard in the seminary. It's a story written by a woman named Anne Herbert. It's her rendition of the Garden of Eden, not meant of course to displace the one in the Bible, but maybe to shed some light on it. She tells it in the first person, as one who was there. And her story is called "The Snake."
 
"In the beginning, God created more than two people. God created a whole bunch of us, because God wanted us to have fun. And God said, 'You can't have fun if you don't have a whole gang of people.' And then God put us in this playground, this park called Eden, and said, 'Enjoy!'
 
"And at first we had the kind of fun that God expected us to: we rolled down the hills, and we waded through the streams, and we swung on the vines, and we frolicked in the forest. And there was a lot of laughing.
 
"But one day the snake said to us, 'You're not having real fun, because you're not keeping score.' We didn't know what keeping score meant, so he told us. That didn't sound fun, until he said, 'I think you should give an apple to the person who plays the best. And the only way you're going to know who plays the best is to keep score.' Well now that sounded like more fun, because we all knew that we were the best.
 
"But things began to be different after that. There was a lot of yelling. And we spent hours creating rules that we could score for our games. We had to give up on some games like frolicking, because we couldn't think of any rules for the game.
 
"And by the time that God noticed that we were playing differently, we were spending about 45 minutes a day playing and the rest of the time working on our scores. And God became angry. And God said, 'You have to leave my garden because you're not having fun.' We said, 'We are too having fun' — and we were having fun. And God shouldn't get angry with us just because we weren't having fun his way.
 
"But God didn't listen.
 
"God kicked us out of the garden. God said, 'You can't come back until you stop keeping score.' And then, just to get our attention, God said, 'You know, someday you're all going to die and these points aren't going to mean anything anyway.'
 
"But God was wrong. Right now my all-game cumulative is 15,548, and I feel very good about that. It means a lot to me. And if I work really hard before I die, I think I can get my score up to 20,000. And that will be quite an accomplishment. But even if I don't do that, my life has value because I have taught my children to be high scorers. And they certainly will get to 20,000 or maybe even 30,000.
 
"When you think of it, life in Eden wasn't very meaningful. I mean, fun is good in its place. But it doesn't mean anything if you can't keep score. God has a very superficial attitude toward life. I'm glad that my children aren't being influenced by God anymore — that we've left. And we're all very grateful to the snake."
 
Well, that's kind of a sad story. And it has unfortunately the ring of truth: that we so often take our accomplishments, which are important and necessary and good, and we make them into what is most valuable in our lives and what gives our lives meaning. Because we are naturally competitive and selfish, we tend to quantify everything we do. And I remember when I taught remedial reading, and already in first grade every child knew whether they were in the best reading group or not. We quantify, we measure, we compare grade points, how many friends we have on Facebook, how we look, how much money we make. And that's what gets our energy going, trying to get better in those areas. And we are so hard on ourselves, and we can become so depressed when we don't do well. And it's too bad, because God was trying to tell us that what we accomplish is not where we get our true value.
 
But back to Easter and what does Easter mean then, now that we see that we have a need for something here? I'd like to tell another story. It's a sequel to the first one. It was written by another person, a pastor named Daniel Erlander. And this story is called "The Birth of the Pointless People."
 
"When God looked at the old gang that used to have so much fun rolling down the hills and frolicking in the forest, and saw them tragically working hard to add up scores and condemning people who didn't have high scores, God became angry — so angry that God said, 'I am going to destroy them.'
 
"But then God wept and said, 'I can't destroy them.' And God repented.
 
"And so God tried different ways to move them back into a life without points. And finally God smiled and said, 'I have an idea. I will enter their world of point keepers, but I will do it very gently.'
 
"And so God entered the world of point keepers as Emmanuel, God with us. And this is how Emmanuel did it: he would tiptoe up to someone who had very few points, or no points at all, and whisper to them, 'You don't need points.' And they would smile and think maybe that's true. And then he would gather all these people together, and they would have a party and they would eat and drink and dance. And one of them would say this is a pointless party, and they would all laugh. And people who weren't at the party would stand around on the sidelines, waiting to see what would happen. And Emmanuel would turn to them and say, 'Come to me, all you who are burdened by keeping score, and I will give you rest.'
 
"But the people who were in charge of the points were threatened by Emmanuel. So they put him in jail, and then they killed him. And Emmanuel's friends wept. And then they said, 'We knew it was too good to be true. The only thing left for us is to go back to keeping score.' And they buried him in a borrowed tomb, and they went back to Jerusalem to work.
 
"But God said, 'Aha! So the point keepers think it's back to normal, do they?' And God called out, 'Get up, Emmanuel. Get up.' And Emmanuel did. He got up, and he called his friends together. And he said, 'Let's continue with the party. Let's continue our work.' And at first they were hesitant. And then they joined hands and made a big circle, and started the party all over. And then Emmanuel breathed on them and said, 'Now I give you the power of my yoke, the power to care for each other, and to care for the world.' And then before Emmanuel left he said, 'And remember: the snake was wrong.' "
 
Well, the people in charge of keeping points in Jesus' day were probably the Pharisees. They had all kinds of rules for how you could become a child of God by what you did. And they too were threatened by Jesus. And of course, as we know, they had him tried and killed. But Jesus didn't stay down. I'm sure that the disciples felt just the way the people in the story did. And they thought after Jesus died, "Well we thought it was too good to be true." And that's why when he came out of the grave, as we heard in today's gospel, it was so hard for them to believe that he was really alive. When he came out of the grave Jesus showed that his way, not the way of the point keepers but his way, was the true way — that our value is already here, that he gives it to us, all the value we could ever want, that our points mean nothing compared to that, that we are children of God through Christ. The writer of John tried to tell us that at the end, where he says, "I put these words down so that you would believe in Jesus, and so that in believing in him you would have life."
 
The meaning of Easter is that we have this new life, this freedom from judging ourselves and others. But where do we go from here with this? Well, when Jesus got the people together he, like in the story, breathed on them and he said, "As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you." And that's really where we go from here. We are sent out with this freedom, this new joy, this sense of confidence to live out our lives wherever we are — on the playground, or on Facebook, or in the boardroom, in the kitchen, behind the wheel, in front of our friends. We are just simply called to live out this freedom and not to judge others. And as they see that, and as they see that we are working to make the world a place where people are not condemned for not having points, things will change. The meaning of Easter is simply that we have a new freedom, and we've been sent to share it. The meaning of Easter is that we can know beyond a shadow of a doubt what Jesus always knew, and that is that the snake was wrong.
 
Amen.
 
*** Keywords ***
 
2013, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Penny Holste, John 20:19-31, The Snake, Anne Herbert, Tales of the Pointless People, Daniel Erlander
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  • Apr 7, 2013The Snake Was Wrong
    Apr 7, 2013
    The Snake Was Wrong
    Series: (All)
    April 7, 2013. Pastor Penny relates two stories today to help us understand the meaning of Easter: "The Snake," by Anne Herbert, and "The Birth of the Pointless People," by Daniel Erlander.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    We begin this morning in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
     
    Even if you're not a basketball enthusiast, you know probably that tomorrow is the final game in the NCAA tournament. And I'm sure that after the event is over, there will be a lot of analysis of it. And there will be talk about what it means, putting it in perspective, and where to go from here, so that the winning team will probably talk about how this is the high point of their lives and they've been working toward this goal for years. The winning coaches will feel validated in their strategies. And when they talk about where to go from there, they'll probably make some guesses as to which players will be drafted to the NBA, and what the teams will look like next year, and what coaches will get moved around. After any event, we always want to try to analyze it, put it in perspective, understand what does it mean and where do we go from here.
     
    Well, we're one week away from the most important event in the Christian church, and that is the celebration of Easter. And Jesus, in today's gospel, was one week away from that event. And he gathered his disciples together to understand that event, to ask really what did it mean, and where do we go from here? Those are good questions for us a week out of Easter to ask: so what really did Easter mean, and where do we go from here?
     
    I think before we tackle those questions though, we probably need to remind ourselves of why we needed Easter to begin with. And to do that, I'd like to tell you a story that I first heard in the seminary. It's a story written by a woman named Anne Herbert. It's her rendition of the Garden of Eden, not meant of course to displace the one in the Bible, but maybe to shed some light on it. She tells it in the first person, as one who was there. And her story is called "The Snake."
     
    "In the beginning, God created more than two people. God created a whole bunch of us, because God wanted us to have fun. And God said, 'You can't have fun if you don't have a whole gang of people.' And then God put us in this playground, this park called Eden, and said, 'Enjoy!'
     
    "And at first we had the kind of fun that God expected us to: we rolled down the hills, and we waded through the streams, and we swung on the vines, and we frolicked in the forest. And there was a lot of laughing.
     
    "But one day the snake said to us, 'You're not having real fun, because you're not keeping score.' We didn't know what keeping score meant, so he told us. That didn't sound fun, until he said, 'I think you should give an apple to the person who plays the best. And the only way you're going to know who plays the best is to keep score.' Well now that sounded like more fun, because we all knew that we were the best.
     
    "But things began to be different after that. There was a lot of yelling. And we spent hours creating rules that we could score for our games. We had to give up on some games like frolicking, because we couldn't think of any rules for the game.
     
    "And by the time that God noticed that we were playing differently, we were spending about 45 minutes a day playing and the rest of the time working on our scores. And God became angry. And God said, 'You have to leave my garden because you're not having fun.' We said, 'We are too having fun' — and we were having fun. And God shouldn't get angry with us just because we weren't having fun his way.
     
    "But God didn't listen.
     
    "God kicked us out of the garden. God said, 'You can't come back until you stop keeping score.' And then, just to get our attention, God said, 'You know, someday you're all going to die and these points aren't going to mean anything anyway.'
     
    "But God was wrong. Right now my all-game cumulative is 15,548, and I feel very good about that. It means a lot to me. And if I work really hard before I die, I think I can get my score up to 20,000. And that will be quite an accomplishment. But even if I don't do that, my life has value because I have taught my children to be high scorers. And they certainly will get to 20,000 or maybe even 30,000.
     
    "When you think of it, life in Eden wasn't very meaningful. I mean, fun is good in its place. But it doesn't mean anything if you can't keep score. God has a very superficial attitude toward life. I'm glad that my children aren't being influenced by God anymore — that we've left. And we're all very grateful to the snake."
     
    Well, that's kind of a sad story. And it has unfortunately the ring of truth: that we so often take our accomplishments, which are important and necessary and good, and we make them into what is most valuable in our lives and what gives our lives meaning. Because we are naturally competitive and selfish, we tend to quantify everything we do. And I remember when I taught remedial reading, and already in first grade every child knew whether they were in the best reading group or not. We quantify, we measure, we compare grade points, how many friends we have on Facebook, how we look, how much money we make. And that's what gets our energy going, trying to get better in those areas. And we are so hard on ourselves, and we can become so depressed when we don't do well. And it's too bad, because God was trying to tell us that what we accomplish is not where we get our true value.
     
    But back to Easter and what does Easter mean then, now that we see that we have a need for something here? I'd like to tell another story. It's a sequel to the first one. It was written by another person, a pastor named Daniel Erlander. And this story is called "The Birth of the Pointless People."
     
    "When God looked at the old gang that used to have so much fun rolling down the hills and frolicking in the forest, and saw them tragically working hard to add up scores and condemning people who didn't have high scores, God became angry — so angry that God said, 'I am going to destroy them.'
     
    "But then God wept and said, 'I can't destroy them.' And God repented.
     
    "And so God tried different ways to move them back into a life without points. And finally God smiled and said, 'I have an idea. I will enter their world of point keepers, but I will do it very gently.'
     
    "And so God entered the world of point keepers as Emmanuel, God with us. And this is how Emmanuel did it: he would tiptoe up to someone who had very few points, or no points at all, and whisper to them, 'You don't need points.' And they would smile and think maybe that's true. And then he would gather all these people together, and they would have a party and they would eat and drink and dance. And one of them would say this is a pointless party, and they would all laugh. And people who weren't at the party would stand around on the sidelines, waiting to see what would happen. And Emmanuel would turn to them and say, 'Come to me, all you who are burdened by keeping score, and I will give you rest.'
     
    "But the people who were in charge of the points were threatened by Emmanuel. So they put him in jail, and then they killed him. And Emmanuel's friends wept. And then they said, 'We knew it was too good to be true. The only thing left for us is to go back to keeping score.' And they buried him in a borrowed tomb, and they went back to Jerusalem to work.
     
    "But God said, 'Aha! So the point keepers think it's back to normal, do they?' And God called out, 'Get up, Emmanuel. Get up.' And Emmanuel did. He got up, and he called his friends together. And he said, 'Let's continue with the party. Let's continue our work.' And at first they were hesitant. And then they joined hands and made a big circle, and started the party all over. And then Emmanuel breathed on them and said, 'Now I give you the power of my yoke, the power to care for each other, and to care for the world.' And then before Emmanuel left he said, 'And remember: the snake was wrong.' "
     
    Well, the people in charge of keeping points in Jesus' day were probably the Pharisees. They had all kinds of rules for how you could become a child of God by what you did. And they too were threatened by Jesus. And of course, as we know, they had him tried and killed. But Jesus didn't stay down. I'm sure that the disciples felt just the way the people in the story did. And they thought after Jesus died, "Well we thought it was too good to be true." And that's why when he came out of the grave, as we heard in today's gospel, it was so hard for them to believe that he was really alive. When he came out of the grave Jesus showed that his way, not the way of the point keepers but his way, was the true way — that our value is already here, that he gives it to us, all the value we could ever want, that our points mean nothing compared to that, that we are children of God through Christ. The writer of John tried to tell us that at the end, where he says, "I put these words down so that you would believe in Jesus, and so that in believing in him you would have life."
     
    The meaning of Easter is that we have this new life, this freedom from judging ourselves and others. But where do we go from here with this? Well, when Jesus got the people together he, like in the story, breathed on them and he said, "As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you." And that's really where we go from here. We are sent out with this freedom, this new joy, this sense of confidence to live out our lives wherever we are — on the playground, or on Facebook, or in the boardroom, in the kitchen, behind the wheel, in front of our friends. We are just simply called to live out this freedom and not to judge others. And as they see that, and as they see that we are working to make the world a place where people are not condemned for not having points, things will change. The meaning of Easter is simply that we have a new freedom, and we've been sent to share it. The meaning of Easter is that we can know beyond a shadow of a doubt what Jesus always knew, and that is that the snake was wrong.
     
    Amen.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2013, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Penny Holste, John 20:19-31, The Snake, Anne Herbert, Tales of the Pointless People, Daniel Erlander
  • Mar 3, 2013The Higher Way
    Mar 3, 2013
    The Higher Way
    Series: (All)
    March 3, 2013. Pastor Keith's sermon is about the higher way of thinking that God has, and how Jesus came to be an example of this higher way and show us how to live this higher way.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    We continue to talk about this lesson from the Old Testament, and the one from the New Testament that Jesus gave us in the gospel. We begin in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
     
    Years ago I saw a painting, by an artist known to some of you I know, that quoted our lesson from Isaiah today. It talked about "'My ways are not your ways,' says the Lord. 'My ways are higher than your ways. My thoughts are not your thoughts.'" And that's been a favorite verse of mine ever since. I don't remember the details, but I believe the occasion of the picture was that some tragedy had happened in someone's life, and it was done to help this person through this hard time. And I think especially at awful times in people's lives, tragedies or times of untimely death, sometimes we just don't understand it ourselves. We can't figure out why this thing happened. And so we do commend it to trust God, who we believe has a higher wisdom, and trust that God has thoughts that are higher than our thoughts, and a wisdom that's different than our wisdom — that somehow this does make sense to God, who will ultimately take care of us all. I think that's still a useful and valid and comforting way to look at these verses. But I've come to see that there's another way to look at how these show a kind of "higher way" of thinking as well, show the higher ways and the higher thoughts of God. And I think they come through in both the Old Testament lesson today and in what Jesus says in the gospel.
     
    One Bible editor put a caption over these verses of Isaiah 55 saying "An Invitation to an Abundant Life." It invites the listener to come to a place that was never available before — that is, new ways of thinking about how God addresses the world. And it's the beginning of an explanation of what this higher way is. The very beginning of the text says, "Ho, everyone who thirsts, come and drink." It's an invitation to everyone. It's a radical idea of who "everyone" is, because in most societies there's a hierarchical structure, and some people who are closer get invitations before others do. Some people are never invited. And certainly in ancient cultures, virtually all of them are hierarchical. And some got the invitations and other ones didn't get the invitations. Here, Isaiah says — and God says to us — everyone is invited. If you need water you are invited, and every human being needs water. And he says if you're thirsty come and get it, but you'll be getting wine and milk — the expensive things, not just water — but you'll be getting wine, milk, things like them. He says you use up your life going after bits and scraps here and there to try to survive with, but that's what you strive for. But what I give you is rich and abundant food. So this is the higher way. Everyone is invited, no matter what their status is. What they receive is rich and satisfying, and everyone receives it as a gift.
     
    The way of God that is demonstrated here is a higher way also, because it comes as a one-way, everlasting covenant. Isaiah says when you come and listen to the word and receive this free, abundant life I'm giving to you, he says in so many words: I am promising to you, God says, this isn't just a once-and-forget-it kind of thing and if you ever stray away the deal's off. No, this is an everlasting covenant God makes, he says, just as I made with David I'm making with you. And the promise to David was that he would always have someone from his lineage on the throne. And there were no "ifs" in that covenant; it was just a one-way covenant. God promised there always be someone from your lineage on the throne. God is making a long-term promise here and there are no conditions, no ifs involved. It's just a promise: I am there for you. And then he further outlines this higher way. This higher way is for all peoples — even peoples they don't know about. They will bring the word to peoples unknown to them. And he says peoples unknown to you will be coming for the word, to hear it. It's for everyone.
     
    The normal way is to kind of keep things close. We usually gravitate towards the groups and the people that we know. We tend to be kind of "cliquey" as human beings. But in the Jewish way, they were usually very particular in those days about not inviting other people in, because they didn't want the things of God to be defiled. And more typical was the response of Jonah. When Jonah was asked to go to Nineveh, he went the other way. That's the more human reaction. "No Lord, I don't want to go to a new place. Let me be comfortable where I am." But that's the lower way, the human response. So we see this higher way of thinking put out here as, he says: go invite everyone no matter where they are. Even if you don't know them, invite them. And so there are several examples already here in Isaiah of this higher way of thinking God has, to invite everyone with no matter to class or wealth. It's a promise made unconditionally to people, not on the basis of whether they deserve it or not, whether they've earned it or not. The promise is there for them, and it is to invite everyone — not just to care about the insiders or the in-group.
     
    So that's what we hear from Isaiah. Now, what do we hear from Jesus? We see how Jesus came to live by this higher way, how Jesus came to be an example of this higher way. And he showed how to live this higher way. Jesus knows that very troubling things happen in the world. In our gospel today, he cites both a mass murder (we could say) that happened in his day, and this tragedy of this tower falling down and killing 18 people in the south side of Jerusalem. So Jesus knows how tragedies and bad things happen to people. Jesus makes an example from these by saying that these men from Galilee — who probably work in a guerrilla warfare band and thought they could come down to Jerusalem and somehow take on the Romans — were put down by the Romans, killed by the Romans. And just to rub it in, Pilot took their blood and mixed it in with the sacrifices in the temple, and just kind of really rubbed it in everybody's face that you're not going to do this anymore. This is a horrible fate for those men though, for this to happen to them. And then Jesus reminds the people of this tragedy that happens with this tower falling down and killing several people.
     
    The common thinking of that day was that how you die is a reflection of how God regards how you live. If you die an untimely death, or if you die a particularly tragic death like happened in these cases, that meant those people were living badly, and God was judging them for their bad lives. And Jesus says no, that's not what it's about. God doesn't send worse death to some and other deaths to others because God wants to punish people because they're living poorly; that's not the way it works. But the point Jesus does make is that these people died, but he says this means all of you need to repent because everybody will die. No matter when they die or how they die, everybody will die. So he says it is for everyone to be repentant and to receive the promise that God makes.
     
    Here again, Jesus begins to show the higher way. The next thing is this parable he tells, the way of patience that God has. God's higher way is to be patient with people, to give the person every opportunity to live in tune with God. The lower way, the sinful human way to handle things, is to require that person, the other person, to live up to our standards of excellence, and to be off with them if they don't live up to those standards. There's little room for less than excellent performance. And the rationale is always there to judge the other person who underperforms. We can be quick, by human standards, to fire someone from their responsibilities if they aren't living up to them, or if things aren't working out — to either send them away walking or to walk away ourselves. We think that being decisive is a justified way to do things. Jesus says there's a higher way. He tells the example of this man then, who has a fig tree, who wants to fire the fig tree right away and be rid of it. He expected it to bear figs, but it didn't. He told the worker to cut it down, but the worker said no, if I work with it I think it will do better. Let's give it one more year to give it some extra attention. Let's see what will happen. This is the higher way, of having patience and giving another chance. Jesus reflects this in his statement: the higher way of God is to live with patience towards others and to call them to do better, rather than to cut them off right away.
     
    In all of this, Jesus is telling us that God has taken the higher way with each one of us. God could cut us off immediately. God has every right. He could have cut the world off at Adam and Eve. He could have just said that's it, I'm done with this experiment. But he didn't. He was patient with the whole human race. But it's true that all will die. It's a fact. We don't know when. But God is patient with us, but we will all die. That's what we're about since Ash Wednesday, when we put ashes on our head to remind us of that fact. But Jesus tells us yet that amidst this reality of life, there is a higher way. Our God is a God of patience, a God of second chance. Our God receives all, and the covenant of God is everlasting and it is unconditional. So we want to be ready though to receive our God. He calls us to line up our lives and line up our minds so that we are aligned with God and can receive all the grace and mercy that God wants to give us. If we're open to it we'll see it, we'll receive it, we'll live by it.
     
    Well God showed the ultimate higher way, when his love toward us allowed Jesus to be lifted up high on the cross. God's higher way ultimately comes to us in the lifting up of Jesus on the cross for our sake. That ultimate act of love, which was the willingness of Jesus to die, allowed our deaths (deaths that we know are coming) to be covered over, and to be clothed instead with the robe of righteousness and the robe of resurrection. The new life is promised to us because of Jesus, his death, and his resurrection. His being lifted up brings us to a much higher way with God. These deaths of ours which will surely come, as well as those of others, are blanketed by the death and the love and the resurrection of Jesus. We have been given new life.
     
    Because now that our lives have been renewed and been redeemed, God looks to us to live a higher way ourselves. By baptism we've been called to this new life in Christ, to live a higher way than what we were before. In 1 Corinthians Paul says to the people in Corinth, as they were going through some struggles: let me show you a yet more excellent way. That's the last verse of chapter 12. That begins then the great love chapter of chapter 13, a more excellent way to live: the way of love — a higher way to live, that does away with selfishness, does away with vengefulness, and does away with cliques. It's a way of love for one another. God has called us, God has given us life, and we're like fruit trees then, that God has planted that we might bear the fruit of the Spirit. Love is the first of the nine spiritual fruits that Paul mentions in 2 Corinthians. God gives us the ability and plants us to produce love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are the fruits we produce as we are rooted in Christ in this new life he gives us. These are the fruits of living the higher way. God has planted us to produce these fruits. Thankfully, God has patience with us and allows us to grow these fruits. When we see these fruits of the Spirit as opportunities for us to live and to serve, we readily make them a part of our ongoing lifestyle. And when we practice them as our way of life, we are demonstrating a higher way. We are showing the way and thought of God — that it is of steadfast love, steadfast promise, loving everyone no matter of status, loving everyone no matter of their origin. We pray that remembering our baptism, we will live by the higher way. Amen.
     
    Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2013, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Keith Holste, Isaiah 55:1-9, Luke 13:1-9, Barren Fig Tree, 1 Corinthians 12:31, 1 Corinthians 13, Gift of Love, 2 Corinthians, Galatians 5:22-23, Fruit of the Spirit
  • Feb 3, 2013Tear Down the Walls
    Feb 3, 2013
    Tear Down the Walls
    Series: (All)
    February 3, 2013. Does God love poor people more than others? We build up walls around ourselves, to separate our in-group from outsiders. But what if our mission were hospitality to those outside our walls? Pastor Penny's sermon today is on outgrowing the groups that divide us and tearing down the walls.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    I know some of you are in high school, and many of us have been to high school. When I think back about my high school years -- they might be different from yours -- but my high school years were years of cliques and groups. There were in-groups. There were outsiders. There were lots of groups. There were athletes. There were popular kids. There were students. There were probably the geeks. There were ones who were quiet. There were the ones who always got in trouble. And of course it was nice to be in a group. That way you knew you had someone to sit with at basketball games, and you knew that you always had a chair there saved for you at the cafeteria. But there was a downside to some of these groups too. Our group felt like we were put down by another group, and we felt superior to another group as well. You didn't move around between groups very easily; it was very hard to do it. And there were people I never talked to in my class. I never thought though, at the time, that my group had held me captive, that there were these walls. I never really thought of it at the time.
     
    But that's exactly what Jesus was thinking about in today's gospel. He was talking about the in-groups and the outsiders, and it really got him into trouble. As you remember from last week, Jesus was the "hometown boy made good" and he came back to his hometown of Nazareth, and he was invited to read the scripture. And he read the words of the prophet Isaiah, who said that he had come to bring good news to the poor and to bring release to the captive. He said that he had come to give sight to the blind and to let the oppressed go free. And after he read those words that the prophet Isaiah spoke, Jesus said in so many words: and that's what I'm going to do, too.
     
    And at first his hometown friends or probably relatives and people thought, wow that's beautiful. That's wonderful. And then they began to think, what is he saying? Who does he think he is to say that this is what he's going to do, and he can speak for God? He's not a religious ruler. He's just Joseph's son. He wasn't born into the family of the high priest. He's not a Pharisee or a scribe. He's an outsider. And they began to get angry. And then, just to prove that Jesus was more of an outsider, he brought up something they did not want to hear. He said: do you remember how in the Old Testament there are two prophets of Israel, prophets sent by God to Israel who didn't help the Israelites? Instead they went outside of the country. They went to Sidon and helped a widow who was starving. They went to Syria and help Naaman, who had this skin disease that we heard about in the children's sermon. He said there were plenty of people they could have helped in their own country, but they didn't. And suddenly they realized that what he was doing was challenging their idea that they were in the in-group, that they were God's chosen people. Therefore that God loved them more than anyone, and that God would bless them. And he was challenging that, and they became furious and tried to kill him.
     
    Well, why did God pass over all those people that needed help in Israel and send prophets to help people in other countries who are heathen? Does it really mean that God loves poor people more than others? You know, it's interesting because Jesus himself said, "I came for the poor, I came for the oppressed." And his mother, in a few chapters before this, has that beautiful Magnificat where she praises God for lifting up the poor and putting down the rich. And when Jesus preaches he will preach, in the Beatitudes, woe to the rich and blessed are the poor. Now, "poor" can mean a lot of things. You can be poor financially. You can be poor in the way people look at you and your prestige or your honor. You can be poor because you don't have good health. But is Jesus really trying to say that God loves the poor more than anyone else?
     
    I can think of two reasons why God comes to the aid of the poor. They have no one else; they're powerless. But also because their voice needs to be heard. Because they have a unique perspective that we need to hear. Because you know, one characteristic of being in the in-group is a sense of entitlement. Yep, I've got power and that's the way it should be. A friend from the Midwest told me that the first time that he was out in California and heard everyone speaking Spanish, his heart kind of sank and he thought oh, they're taking my country away from me. So it's our country because we speak English? Or should it maybe be the Native Americans' because they were here first? We so easily feel that if we're in a position of power, that's the way it should be. And you know, what we see is that people who are on the margins, people who have less power, have an insight to share with us. Ask someone who's poor what the gaps are in our public transportation system. They will know. Someone who does not have a car will know what the gaps are, what the problems are in our society. Ask someone who is poor and doesn't have health insurance, or the money to pay doctors' fees, what the gaps are in our healthcare system, and they will know. Whereas those of us who may be blessed enough to have health insurance or be able to pay for those fees feel like the plan's working fine. But we don't see it from their point of view.
     
    Children often are the ones who can speak the truth when we don't see it, because in a sense they also are powerless. Or often they're standing on the fringe, watching us. A woman told me how she spent all morning getting her house ready for a Bible class that was going to meet there that afternoon. She was scrubbing and cramming things into closets, and her little boy was watching her. And when she was all done he said Mom, isn't this kind of like lying, because aren't you being dishonest to let your friends think this is the way our house always looks? He was onto something, you know, that we do tend to put up a false front. We need to hear the voices of those on the fringe, of those who could stand back and see what we're really doing.
     
    I wonder what it would be like if our congregation would have the same mission that Jesus did: to listen to those voices of the people not within our walls, the people outside of us. You know, we are kind of at a plateau here as a congregation. Through the generosity of individuals and the congregation as a whole, we bought the Mead Center and it's paid for. We've addressed the concerns of our youth. We do things in house. And then we also have hired a joint youth worker to provide additional activities. We feel like we've kind of taken care of two things, and so we're kind of looking for a mission. What if our mission were hospitality to those outside our walls? What if (and okay, I'm dreaming now) we would hire someone who would be the face of this congregation for the community, who would go out and look for more groups than the ones that are currently using the Mead Center? Because we have nonprofits using the Mead Center and we give them a fair and good rate so that they can use it. What if there was someone out there looking for more people and bringing them in, and managing that facility? And then (and this is the key) what if we as congregation members volunteered to be the face of this congregation for the groups that meet there? What if we were the ones who would open up the building and say hi to them, and then just listen, stick around a little bit, find out what's going on and what their needs are and what they see happening, people on the outside? What kind of connections could we make? What could the Holy Spirit do with those connections to help us see new and better ways to bring release to the captives and good news to the poor, and raise up those who are oppressed?
     
    I think that God does not love poor people more than anyone else. I think Jesus came for all of us, really to release all of us -- surely to release those who are suffering from health problems or financial problems. But also to release those who feel a sense of entitlement, from their fear and from their blindness. Jesus came so that there would be no walls. And you know, when I went back for my 10th year reunion of my high school class, that's what I found. We had all outgrown those cliques and those groups and those walls. I talked to people at length that I had never talked to for more than a few minutes when I was sitting next to them in class, and I came to value people that sadly I had not valued when we were students together. That's really why Jesus came. He lived, he died, and rose again so that we would be free to be all part of the in-group, all part of a group with no walls: the family of God. We have been released and freed from fear, from sin. We've been freed and now we are sent out to fling wide the doors of other people's prisons, so that with the power of the Holy Spirit we might tear down the walls that divide us.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2013, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Penny Holste, Luke 4:16-20, Luke 4:21-30, Isaiah 61:1-2
  • Jan 6, 2013The Spirit at Work in Non-Believers
    Jan 6, 2013
    The Spirit at Work in Non-Believers
    Series: (All)
    January 6, 2013. Epiphany is the day we celebrate when the Gentiles came to learn of Jesus. Gentiles like us. Pastor Penny's sermon today is about the story of the Magi: why the writer of Matthew would include it in his gospel, and how God uses people with different faiths to reveal the truth even today.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    We begin in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
     
    Well it is Epiphany, January 6th, a day when we remember that Jesus was shown to the non-Jews, to the Gentiles, to the wise men. And there are lots of traditions connected with this story, and we know them. Like if I said how many wise men were there, you would say three. Of course, it's not in the Bible. There were three gifts. No mention of three wise men. But you know, that's part of our tradition. Or if I asked you did they have names, you would probably say yes. Can anybody name one of the wise men? Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar? Wow, you guys are good! Again, that's tradition. That's not in the Bible. But you know, we have a lot of traditions. Well, here's something that might surprise you: were they kings? No. No, I just gave the kids crowns, but they really weren't kings. They were Magi. Now, long before Jesus the Magi were given maybe a royal significance in Persia. But in Jesus' day they were not. Our word "magician" or "magic" comes from the same root as Magi. They were not very highly regarded. They were stargazers. Some would would say they were horoscope fanatics. I think today maybe eyebrows would go up, like maybe they do when people say they're a Scientologist or that they thought the end of the world was coming because of the Mayan calendar. These were not people of the faith of Judaism, and they were magicians. When Paul bumped into a Magi in the book of Acts he said, "You child of the devil, you are the enemy of every good thing." That's what he said. So we have to wonder, how did the Magi get into the Christmas story? Why would they be included at all? Why would God have guided them to find Jesus, and why would the writer of Matthew include this incident in the story of Jesus' birth?
     
    Well, I think the first reason they're included is because the kingdom of God is for all people. So of course it is for them, too. But I think that the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical writers to keep this account in the story for people like us, because we are surrounded by people who do not believe exactly the way we do, people with different faiths from ours and sometimes no faith at all. They are our relatives, our neighbors, our fellow students. They are our coworkers. We are surrounded by people who don't share our faith. And I think that this account of the Magi is very helpful in avoiding two pitfalls. One pitfall is to resent people who have a different faith, to kind of be guarded about it, to maybe not want our children (if we're parents) to learn about the other faiths -- and that's not at all what we see God doing here. God used these men, who probably worship Zoroaster, to give a truth to the world. They were these pagans. They would have been called pagans in those days. These non-believers were the first people to realize that Jesus was a king, and the first people to fall down on their knees and pay him homage. We kind of like to think the shepherds did that, but there's no recorded event like that. These were the people who could look at this little baby and believe that he had the authority and power of a king. So God used people with a different faith to reveal the truth.
     
    And I think that God continues to do that through all faiths today. I remember when I was a student chaplain in a hospital when I was in the seminary, and I was assigned to the oncology, the cancer ward, and I felt a great burden on my shoulders. I was visiting people who were struggling with life and death issues, and I had this word of joy and hope. But how would one person convey it? And of course they had to be open to it. And then one afternoon, I was having lunch with a friend who was also a student chaplain. And she said, "I just went into the room of a woman who said she wasn't Christian, but I've never heard such words of grace. I didn't have to say a thing." And I thought, that's it. The Holy Spirit is already out there in that hospital, working with the people through different faiths. It's not all up to me.
     
    And I think when we can set aside the political uses of some of the faiths in our world, we can see that God is using them to reveal truth. We think of the example of the Muslims, their commitment to their faith. They pray five times a day. They memorize the Quran from little on. We think of Native Americans, and how they are good models for us in how to take care of the environment, how to believe that it is God-given and not for us to abuse. We think about the great example of philanthropy in the Jewish Community, as can be seen by lots of Jewish names on different institutions and buildings in St. Louis. God continues to use people of other faiths to reveal the truth to all of us.
     
    But then that can lead us to yet another pitfall, and that is to say then it doesn't matter. Don't we all worship the same God? Aren't we all trying to go to the same place? It really doesn't matter. But do we all look at God in the same way? Do we all understand God the same way? Because if you look into Islam, you see that Muslims view God very differently than we do. They see God as merciful as we do, but as a master, not a father. They have no understanding of God as a loving father, and they certainly don't understand that God would allow God's self to suffer and to die for us. And the way that they feel they have a connection to God is through their knowledge. And so they're never really sure how strong that connection is, because it really depends on how well they understand the will of God. And we, on the other hand, know that we can never connect ourselves to God because we are just basically in rebellion. So we rest entirely on the life and death and resurrection of Christ. And so we don't worry about our connection. We don't worry that we are not saved.
     
    I assume that you, because you're here today -- and certainly I can say this for myself -- while we can revere and respect other religions, we feel that Christ has given us the best understanding, the best picture of God. And that's why we're here. And if that is true for us, and if we find in our lives that we are supported and comforted and allowed to be loving and kind people because of Jesus, then is it really right to just let other people who have never heard about him, or have fallen away from him, be on their own? I mean, should we really just say "to each his own" and "this isn't my business?"
     
    Now, I'm not trying to say we should be knocking on doors with a Bible under our hand. What I am suggesting is that we look at what God did in the story of the Magi. God drew them to Christ using the thing they were already looking for. They were looking for knowledge through the stars. Well what are the people looking for that are surrounding us, that maybe haven't found the grace of God? Well we know, what we're all looking for. And if you come to church when it gets a little warmer, you'll drive by lots of people who are jogging and lots of people who are riding their bikes, because one thing we all look for is a healthy, balanced life. Another value of our society is certainly to be part of a community. We see how popular social media is. Because we want to be known. We want to have people know us and know them. And the last thing that I think is a value of our culture is that we want to have control. You know, we have lots of self-help books to get our lives in order. We have a lot of tools to organize our lives because we want control. And I think what we want is to know that the future is safe.
     
    Now, all of those things -- a safe future, a need for community, a sense that there is a focus in our lives -- are given to us by Jesus Christ. So what happens is that our lives, the lives of all of us in this room, are the stars that draw people to Christ, whether we realize it or not. Now I'm not trying to say that's because they're so perfect, but it's because as we live out what we've been given, people notice. People sense, for instance, that when you're under pressure at school or at work, that you handle it in a different way. You don't throw everything to the winds. You don't only concentrate on your work. You're still able to give your time to your family and to your faith and to your community. They see that, because God is working through us. They understand that we have a connection that maybe not everyone has. We certainly know that we're connected as a family of faith. But we also create community where we live and work and go to school, by the way we treat people, by the way we respect them. And people see that. And people also sense if we have confidence and hope for the future. In all of these things, it is God working through our lives to draw people to Christ. The only thing we really need to do besides living the way we live is to have, in our back pocket, a few sentences we might offer if someone asks us, "Why do you seem so calm? I wish I had the kind of optimism you do." And then we can explain.
     
    The end of the story of the Magi says that they went home using a different route. They didn't go to Jerusalem because again the Spirit was working through these non-believers, and they knew that if they went back and told Herod where the baby Jesus was, he would not come to worship Jesus. He would kill him. So they went home a different way. I think that has a double meaning there. They went home with a different outlook on life. They came looking for a king and they went to the palace first, you remember. They came thinking there would be this child surrounded by riches and comfort, and they found instead a king willing to be a fragile, vulnerable baby in a poor family. And they must have realized this is the kind of king he would be all his life. He would always be one willing to give of himself. And of course he did. He gave up all those things that are near and dear to us: a balanced, calm life, the community, and even life itself, he gave up so that we would have it. And above all, so that we would know his love for all eternity.
     
    Epiphany. It's the day we celebrate when the non-Jews, when the Gentiles came to learn of Jesus -- Gentiles, non-Jews like us. It is a day to celebrate.
     
    Amen.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2013, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Penny Holste, Matthew 2:1-12
  • Sep 16, 2012A Change in Abraham’s Perspective
    Sep 16, 2012
    A Change in Abraham’s Perspective
    Series: (All)
    September 16, 2012. Pastor Keith preaches on the story of Abraham and Sarah from Genesis. When Abraham lamented that he had no child, God told him to change his perspective. "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be." God kept his promise to Abraham, and he keeps his promises to us.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    We continue to reflect upon these verses from the Old Testament today. We begin in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy spirit. Amen.
     
    Abraham, whom we are hearing about today, had quite a life. He was first mentioned in scripture when he was 75 years old. That's when the story picks him up. He was living in Ur at the time with his family. His father was still alive. His father was like 205, and his father decided they were going to move. Ur is probably in southern Iraq, and they moved to what would be Eastern Turkey today. Haran is the name of that area. And Abraham was there in Haran for a while with his wife, and then God spoke to him and said, "Abraham, I have something in mind for you. I'll lead the way, but you're going to leave from here and go to someplace that I will show you." He just tells him to pick up and go. So Abraham, with his wife Sarah and his nephew Lot, take all their cattle, all their possessions and start traveling. He starts going to where he doesn't know he's going to go. And we don't know how God led him; there's no word there about a pillar of fire and anything like that. He just goes. He comes to Canaan, which was probably in what we would call Northern Israel today. And the Bible is clear that he comes to this land and it's already inhabited by the well-known Canaanites. And so there's a problem for him right away, and that problem persists down to our own day, of two peoples wanting to inhabit that same land with different religions. There were the Canaanites, and there was Abraham and the people that look to the one God from his family. So two peoples in the same territory. Abraham was pretty clever in dealing with his neighbors and did pretty well there, but it was always challenging keeping peace with the neighbors.
     
    And then there was a time when there was a famine and there was nothing to eat there. But there was food down in Egypt. So he picked up all that he had and went to Egypt, took his family and everybody with him. But that was tricky too. He did get food, but he had to get food without being killed, because he knew the way of the Egyptians and that they would want to kill him so that they could claim his wife to be their wife as well. So he had to get out of that. When he got back to Canaan and reestablished himself after the famine, it became apparent that both he and his nephew Lot were doing quite well, and their herds were growing, but they were growing so much they were competing for the same land. And their shepherds were not getting along so well, so Lot came to Abraham and said what are we gonna do about this? And Abraham said I guess we're gonna have to part, just going to have to go to separate areas. You go where you want to go, you pick. And so Lot chose the Jordan Valley, which has the town of Sodom at the end of it. Well that put him in Sodom and that became part of an alliance. There was an alliance of cities that were politically gathered, militarily gathered, and there was another group. And then those groups had a little war, and Lot's side lost. And so Uncle Abraham, though, can't just let his nephew lose. They were carting him off, him and his family, to Damascus, to Syria to where the victors were. And Abraham couldn't let that happen to his nephew. So he fashions an army of his own and goes and attacks, so that he can get Lot freed again and bring Lot back to Canaan safely.
     
    All this time, as Abraham is looking out for his nephew, he and Sarah have no children of their own. He does a lot for Lot, but they really would have preferred to have their own child. They struggle with the problem of infertility. They're pushing being a hundred years old, and no child. There was no one to love, no one to liven up their home. And there was no one to carry on the name. Why would God lead them to this land with all these foreigners, make them deal with the problems of living with these easily-offended, often warlike neighbors? Why would they have to continue to look out for their wayward nephew and suffer famines and natural disasters? Why should God lead them to this place where they have all these problems and have no children? What was God up to? Why did God do this to them? Why couldn't they have stayed back with the rest of the family, they must have thought, where life was more comfortable? Why all this moving? But most of all, why no children?
     
    Sort of seemed, I think to them, like it was more like being led out to a slow death in the wilderness rather than being a place of promise as it was supposed to be. Abraham did have plenty of wealth, especially after defeating the king who had taken Lot off into captivity. But when Abraham overtook him, he got all that king's wealth, he had plenty, and then the prophet Melchizedek blessed him. He had lots going for him. But even as he's blessed Abraham is interested in more. He needs a meaning for life. The riches and the spoils of the war that he had captured really don't mean much to him. He says I don't care about them. Somebody else can take them if they want them. He's troubled in his soul.
     
    At this point is where our text is today: chapter 15 of Genesis. He receives a vision from God, and the voice of God says to him, "Don't be afraid Abraham. I will shield you from danger and give you a great reward." But Abraham has the courage to argue with God. He says, "God, I don't really need more reward. What are all the blessings good for if I have no one to pass them on to? I need someone to share them with, to pass them to. I need a child." As it stood, everything he had would go to his servant Eliezer, because that's the way the court worked in those days. And so he was okay with that. He would do that, but there's not much meaning in that. He'd much rather have his things go to his own child, especially in a religious culture where one's meaning after death came from your family and how your name continued on with your family. His life was without meaning. He was a man wandering around, following God, growing older all the time, but with no apparent purpose. What was God up to?
     
    Well God isn't finished with the conversation here yet. There is more to this vision God has with him. The Lord says a slave will not inherit your property. Your son will. So this means that God is promising him a son. There's another step here. And he says step outside the tent, I have something to show you. And so he steps outside and God says look up. He wasn't saying look up to watch the comet crash into Jupiter, don't look up to see if the man in the moon is smiling at you, or something like that. He says look up and look at the stars. Count the stars. As impossible as it is to count the stars, that's how many descendants will come from you. You don't have a son now, but you will have a son. And the descendants will be more than the stars. That was the promise of God, and Abraham trusted the promise. Abraham trusted the promise, and God said, "Because you've trusted me in this way it will indeed happen." God accepted Abraham, even knowing all of his faults, his sin, his lies, his doubt, his hopelessness. Because Abraham trusted and followed God, God accepted him. And what God promised came true.
     
    When Abraham had trouble a little later seeing this as God's plan, God took him to a new place. That is, God had taken him to a place to get a new perspective. When Abraham is in all that trouble God said, "Come out of the tent, look up, and when you look up you'll see the important things." And Abraham was able to hear and to believe the promise. Before this point of this vision, life had been pretty worldly for Abraham. He'd had faith to follow, but he was caught up with battles, trying to get Lot out of trouble. He was always doing things with Lot and his predicaments. He was trying to keep peace with the neighbors, trying to keep food on the table. He was caught up in this day-to-day situation and the promise of God was hard to see, and all these things just making daily life work.
     
    But when God took him outside, instead of looking around him and kind of down like where everything is, he had him look up and changed his perspective completely. He was able to get out of himself and look to a new direction, to look up to the heavens. To know that the promise of the descendants as numerous as the stars gave him a new lease on life. He believed it and good things happened, though we know they didn't happen very easily.
     
    Well I remember times when our family would go camping, we'd go into the Rockies of Colorado -- high up, seven or eight thousand feet, and camp. And we'd be looking at the sky at night, and the numbers of stars were just unbelievable. It was like there was a haze almost, the stars were so, so many. But you don't really have to go that far to be impressed by the number of stars. Just leaving the bright lights of the city, you can go not that far from here and see many more stars than you do in town. I'm sure many of you have been on a vacation of some kind this summer, and you've gotten away. And maybe you've been able to see some natural things and wonder, maybe been able to see some nice stars on your trips. But more important than maybe the perspective you got from looking at all these stars was what happened when you looked back home from where you got to. When you were away you were able to get away from your daily things. You were able to look back and think about what life was like back when you were at home. Psychologists say that getting only an hour or two away from where you normally are changes your perspective. A person is able to be more objective about what's going on with life at home, life it work, and other things, when you get some distance from it. Just being away from it you can look back and say, these are the things that are going on. Maybe some changes need to be made. Maybe everything is really good. But just getting away gives a new perspective on what you're doing. God had given Abraham a new perspective. We get new perspectives in different ways.
     
    And the same things that bothered Abraham often bother us. We have issues with people around us. Whether we're at home or at work, we get in each other's space. Or we wonder where God is leading us as the days of our lives tick by. We need to be concerned about the provisions we have for ourselves and for the people we might be responsible for. We need food, and yet we like he know that material things really have no value in the end. There's more meaning to life than in the stuff that we have. And we have family issues. Whether immediate or extended family, there's always some anxiety there that comes with the families we're involved with. And any number of us have had to deal with the issue of infertility. It's a very difficult issue, and leaves us with strong disappointment, sometimes disappointment with God, when the sign of new life that we so desperately want doesn't come.
     
    For all these things, changing the point of view can help. A new perspective can help us be more objective. Sometimes the objective distance can be achieved just by talking with someone about it. If you can't get away from it and look at it, maybe that doesn't necessarily fix it anyway. Talking with someone helps us say, this is the stuff I'm dealing with. What are some solutions? What are some ways I can move forward with it? Particularly if we do that with someone who's trained to do it, as a counselor, or maybe a trusted friend or trusted relative. Sometimes just talking about what we're doing, what's bothering us perhaps, gives a new perspective and leads us to look at it in a new way.
     
    And if we can't see it ourselves, sometimes it takes another person, whoever it might be, to remind us that there are promises out there. There are stars out there and they represent the plan and promise of God. When we hear the promise of God that is indeed a plan out there, and God leads us in that way, it's like looking at the stars and remembering that the promise of God is far more than we can count or know about. It's greater than we can know.
     
    But having the promise doesn't make all the difficulty go away. We know the rest of the story with Abraham. Later on, he and Sarah doubted God's promise. And they came up with a plan of their own to have a child, when it seemed like they were getting too old for God's promise to come true for them. But their plan just complicated things further, and in the end they did have a child named Isaac, who was theirs. It was a hard way to go and they were severely tested by God's promise, that even they were flawed and sinful people who doubted the promise of God. But God came through on the plan and kept the promise.
     
    Well, thankfully we have something even more reliable than the stars for our promise. We have a very accessible way to take on life and a new perspective. That word comes to us often through different people. Sometimes through scripture. Someone says, "God loves you." That's a promise from God. That word comes to us. And if we're feeling forgotten or feeling left out, or if we're feeling abused, that word comes to us and says, "I have a new perspective. God loves me, even if I feel all alone right now." Someone says to us the promise of God, "You are forgiven." Our life has changed. It has a new perspective. We don't take our guilt around with us anymore. We are free from it. Someone says to us, "God's promise is true. God is leading you. Follow God no matter how unlikely the path seems."
     
    Bigger than the sky. Bigger than the stars. We have the king of heaven making promises to us and looking for us to trust those promises. The king of the heavens leads us as we are on earth and never lets us go. The word that Abraham uses to respond to God's promise is the same as the root for the word when we end prayer and say "amen." That, in effect, is what Abraham said to God when God gave him these promises: amen. That is, "Yes, I believe. I believe it." As we trust God's promises, God regards us well, as he did Abraham. And God keeps the promises to us. Amen.
     
    Now may the peace of God, which passes all human understanding, keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2012, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Keith Holste, Genesis 11:27-30, Genesis 12, Genesis 13, Genesis 14, Genesis 15, Genesis 16, Genesis 17
  • Apr 8, 2012The Ability to Hope
    Apr 8, 2012
    The Ability to Hope
    Series: (All)
    April 8, 2012. Pastor Penny preaches this Easter morning on the ability to hope, and to expect that the good will overcome the evil.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    Quite a few Easters ago, when my sister invited us over to her house for dinner, and our nephews were pretty young, my cousin came too. And as she opened the door and entered the house, she said something to my sister — without realizing the age of the audience that would hear it. She said, "Oh, I think someone just ran over the Easter Bunny out there." Then she looked at my little five-year-old nephew's face and realized she shouldn't have said that. But it didn't matter to him, because he just squared his shoulders and looked at her and he said, "That wasn't my Easter Bunny. My Easter Bunny knows to look both ways." I think we see in children the ability to hope, and to expect that the good will overcome the evil.
     
    It was a little harder for the women at the tomb on Easter morning, those two Marys and Salome. Maybe they were sort of the "extended family" of Jesus. Salome is thought to have been the mother of James and John, Jesus' disciples. And we hear that those three women were ones who provided for Jesus during his ministry in Galilee. So they were probably like his aunts, inviting him over to eat, and always pushing a little more food onto him, and listening with rapt attention to what he said and laughing at his jokes. They must have loved Jesus like their own sons. They had the courage to leave their safe little towns in Galilee and follow Jesus to the dangerous and big city of Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. They were the ones that watched as events unfolded that week. And they saw the storm clouds brewing, and they saw Jesus arrested and put on trial and beaten and brutalized, and finally hung on the cross. And they were there when he hung on the cross. They were there to see the limp body taken down off the cross and put into a tomb for a grave. And when they rolled that stone in front of the tomb and it shut, they must have felt that was the end of hope. And so when the young man they saw in the tomb that morning told them that Jesus was alive, they couldn't believe it. They ran away in fear and told no one anything.
     
    I don't think they have a corner on hopelessness. I think we have all felt it at times, maybe for days. Maybe weeks, maybe years. When hopelessness just seems to slither into our lives and curl around a dream or a plan, a hope that we had for ourselves or our families, and squeezes the life out of it, and we're left hopeless. I think we're probably all here this morning looking for something better, believing that there is something, somewhere, better than what we experience in this life. Something better for the world than tyrants and factions that kill each other. Something better for our country than gridlock in Washington and people without jobs and healthcare. And something better for us.
     
    How many of us have, after a long week, just hoped for some respite, just reached out hoping that we could have some peace of mind, some certainty, some satisfaction in life, only to discover that fruit is elusive and we never quite get it. A friend said once she thought that Easter was a time of renewal. And she'd been reading about centering yourself and being present, and believed that if she could master the technique of feeling present in the moment, and work at it, little by little, that life would be better. But I don't know of anything that I've read or any skill that I can acquire that can change my heart. I know how to forgive; I just don't want to do it sometimes. And unless we change our hearts the world doesn't change, and there is no hope.
     
    But Martin Luther said the cross, of all things, the cross of Jesus teaches us hope when there is no hope. And I think what he meant is that the cross is the greatest proof we have of God's love and the extent of God's love. The extent of Christ's love, who was willing to be crucified for us, who on the cross was like a magnet pulling all of the animosity and violence and failures and selfishness of the whole world onto himself. And it destroyed him. But it left us healed. What we could not do for ourselves — create hope — he has done. And all he asks then is that we receive it, accept it, believe it.
     
    But even there we waver, don't we? It is so hard to believe, like the women wavered at the tomb. But the offer still stands. Jesus holds out his hands: "This is my gift for you." Once when he was on the cross he cried out, "It is finished." He meant more than his life. He meant the plan that God had created when sin came into the world, to rescue us, was just about complete. And on Easter morning it became complete. When Jesus was raised from the dead, that exchange with him was complete. His perfection for us. Our sins for him. In the Easter morning light, God looks at us and sees us as blameless.
     
    Now that is hard to believe, isn't it? It's hard to grasp. It's hard to understand the resurrection. And there are those who call themselves Christians who don't believe in the resurrection, some of them scholars. There are several, I suppose. You can read many. John Dominic Crossan is one, and he thinks that when the disciples said they saw Jesus, what they really meant was that after Jesus' death they had a sense that they could live in a more loving way and they began to do so. Another scholar, Spong is his name, believes that when Peter said he saw Jesus alive, what Peter really meant was that he (and these are his words) "felt embraced by a sense of forgiveness and it forever changed his life." Yeah, those are easier things to understand, to interpret the resurrection psychologically. But really would you give your life for a feeling or a sense?
     
    Because that's what these men did. Eleven of the twelve disciples, tradition tells us, gave their lives up because they wanted to tell the story of Jesus' resurrection. People saw him. People talked about it. It changed their lives. They began the Christian church. N. T. Wright is a scholar, and I think he has it right. He says really, the only rational way to explain what happened on Easter is to assume that they were right: they saw Jesus; he was alive. They felt him, touched him, saw him eat, they knew he was there. And because of that they knew for certain that God is stronger than their leaders, the Roman Empire, and even death. And that, and that alone, is what motivated them with the gift of the Holy Spirit to turn their lives around. Peter began preaching. Peter, who cowered before and denied Jesus. They found their voices. They believed it. And I think that the young man at the tomb knew that in not too long a time, the women too would believe him — which of course they did. Because he gave them an assignment that morning. He said go, go tell the disciples to go home to Galilee, because Jesus has gone there ahead of you. He's waiting for you with the gift of the Holy Spirit.
     
    In the movie "No Country for Old Men" there is very little hope. If you've seen the movie, the villain, played by Javier Bardem, is an evil man. He's a hitman for drug runners, and there's nothing good to say about him. The law enforcement officer who's always trying to catch him and never quite does, played by Tommy Lee Jones, also seems to be a man without hope. Except there is this moment in the movie where Tommy Lee Jones tells his wife a dream that he had just had, a dream about his father, who also had been a law enforcement officer doing the same kind of work, but who had died some years earlier. He told his wife the dream took place in olden times. And he said, "I was on horseback going through a pass in the mountains at night. It was dark and it was cold and I was alone. But then suddenly I saw my father on horseback, and he was riding alongside me. And when I looked over, I saw he was holding a horn with a flame with fire." That's apparently how they transported fire from one place to another. And he said, "And without a word then, my father just went by and went out into the distance ahead of me." And he said, "In my dream, I knew what my father was doing. He was going to build a fire. In the cold and the dark he would build a fire, and he would be there waiting for me when I got out of that pass. He would be there for me."
     
    And that's really an image for our Easter hope — that however hopeless things seem to be, whatever we are experiencing, God is there alongside of us, reclaiming that experience for the good. And whatever we think might be out there in the future, God is there waiting for us, through this life and into the next, waiting to bless us so that we would work with him to bring the word of hope to others. This Easter may we accept that gift, may we believe that hope, and with it experience the freedom that comes — freedom, like walking out of a building after a long day at work or at school, walking out of the hospital after a long illness — and you step into the clear, clean air and sunshine like stepping out of a tomb into a new day, into a new life with Christ.
     
    Amen.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2012, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Penny Holste, Mark 16:1-8
  • Mar 11, 2012Wake-up Call
    Mar 11, 2012
    Wake-up Call
    Series: (All)
     
    March 11, 2012. Pastor Penny preaches on the story in John of Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. The gospel is a warning. It's a wake-up call from God to help us take account of our lives, especially our time.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    We begin this morning in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
     
    Well, Greta loved going to church on Easter Sunday. She loved the Easter egg hunt and the Easter brunch and the Easter lilies. But she also loved sitting there with everybody singing those happy songs, and hearing the trumpet in the background. There was just one thing that Greta didn't like about Easter, and that was her mother was never there. Her mother was always home making Easter dinner. Greta's mother was a consummate cook, and the Easter dinner was her centerpiece — and she invited lots of friends and relatives to it. And it was a wonderful ham dinner with a cross-shaped cake for dessert, presented on a round mirror. And Greta always saw her mother presiding over the meals, sitting at the end of the table, glowing as the compliments would continue coming. But then one year on Good Friday, a wind storm came through her neighborhood and they lost their electricity for a few days. So, Easter dinner had to be canceled at their house. So that Easter Greta's mother came to church, and sat next to her of course. And as everyone was singing those hymns Greta was just beaming, because it was wonderful to hear her mother's lovely soprano voice joining in. And she looked up and smiled at her mother, and she thought to herself that her mother shared her joy in being there. And truly she did, because her mother was always there, every Easter, from that time on.
     
    Now in contrast to that happy story, we have a rather stark gospel lesson. Jesus is violent. Our Jesus, our peacemaker, is violent! First, we see him perform his only negative miracle: he curses a fig tree and it withers. And then he gets involved in a chaotic scene, an angry scene in the temple, at the height of Passover. Now, the cursing of the fig tree we understand a little more when we know that the fig tree was a symbol in the Old Testament for the children of Israel. And scholars tell us that what Jesus was doing was performing a parable. He was warning his disciples that there was something desperately wrong with the spiritual health (or lack of it) with the kingdom of Israel. And it was dangerous, and they would be cursed for it. And what was wrong with them would clearly be seen in the next event, when Jesus walked into this crowded temple — ten times as many people as normal (we're in Jerusalem at Passover) — and began throwing furniture around. I mean, you can imagine the sound of knocking down wooden tables on the stone pavement, and the crashing and the money being flown around, and the animals: the sheep and the cows that were there to be purchased for a burnt offering, the sounds in this chaos.
     
    And Jesus must have had a terrible look on his face. His eyes must have been flashing with anger, because people did what he said and he cleared the place out. But it's so unlike Jesus, and we have to ask: why now? Jesus saw many injustices, and he was troubled by them and sometimes spoke harshly — but never, never throwing furniture around. Well, he was witnessing the desecration of his Father's house — the temple, the meeting place of God and human beings — where there was a holy of holies, containing the Ark of the Covenant, containing the Ten Commandments. This was God's house. And he watched as people desecrated it in three different ways.
     
    First of all, they brought the smells and the sounds of the marketplace into the temple itself. And he said not only that, but secondly they were cheating the people as they did it. Those who were changing the money from the foreign coinage to the Jewish half shekel, and those who were selling the animals for a burnt offering, were cheating people. He said: you are making my Father's house into a den of thieves. But the third way they were desecrating the house of God — and maybe it's the saddest — is that they carried on this buying and selling in the only place where Gentiles were allowed to worship. It was the court of the Gentiles, and those people who believed in the Jewish god but weren't of Jewish background were allowed there and there only. They had taken it over — in other words, pushing these people out so that they couldn't worship at all.
     
    And Jesus' quotes Isaiah, where we hear God describing God's plan for the temple as it's being rebuilt 500 years earlier. God said: I want my house to be a place of prayer for all Nations. I want everyone, from all backgrounds, to be able to come and be part of my family. And so, because of the selfishness of the sellers and the money changers, and the leaders who allowed it and encouraged it because of their selfishness, because of their greed for money, they had turned God's dream for the temple into a nightmare.
     
    Now this didn't happen all at once. For hundreds of years this selling of animals and the exchange of money had been going on, and it was an important part of being able to worship on the Passover. It hadn't, however, gone on in the temple. But slowly, people began to be greedy. And they began to be selfish about what they did. And the leaders allowed it and encouraged it. But I'm sure it took a while to get to that point, and that's the scary thing: because we all know how easily we can make subtle changes for the worse.
     
    We can head to the store to buy one thing, one thing that we really need, and end up buying a lot of things we don't need. But it just happens a little bit at a time. You see one thing and well, that would go and that would go, and pretty soon you have a lot of things you had never intended to buy. Well, you know our banks will tell us when we've come to the wall on that one. We can't keep doing that. But time is a whole different thing. We can squander our time little by little, and no one calls us into account. I think that probably for many of us, we are like Greta's mother. We want to be good and perfect. We want to do things well. We appreciate success and the feeling it gives us, and the admiration of other people. And so we throw ourselves into what we're doing, whether it's our work or our school work or an athletic endeavor or even a hobby. We say well, if I do a little more, well then I can do it perfectly. If I take on a little more responsibility at work, then I will be more successful. Then I'll have a little more clout, a little more power, a little more prestige, I'll feel better about myself. Or if I write one more paper for extra credit, my grade point will improve a little more and it'll be perfect. Or if I get up earlier and do 20 more minutes of warm ups, I will be much better in my sport. And little by little, we squander our time. We take it all for ourselves so that there's not enough time left over for our family, for our friends, or for God. We're too tired at the end of the day for a time of prayer. We're too weary at the beginning of the week to be in church.
     
    And what Jesus is saying in this dramatic and vehement action in the temple is that it's dangerous. He's warning us that we are on the verge of giving away nothing less than our relationship with God. Giving away that experience of God's love, and forgiveness, and guidance, and healing, and the joy of repaying God by worship. That's what's at stake.
     
    Well our gospel isn't all bad news. There is hope. First, there's hope because we know that the very Jesus whose eyes flashed in anger continued on Holy Week, to the cross, where he died for the very people that were desecrating his Father's house — those people who, after his demonstration, began to plot to kill him. For those people and for us, he was willing to die to forgive our sins, and to give us power to change. He said: see that mountain that the temple is built on? If you believe and pray, God can even change that. In other words, God can take the biggest barrier in our life and help us reform it or change it, or even replace it.
     
    An example: I was with some pastors from Kansas City this last week, and they talked about some of their parishioners who were frustrated, because their sons were involved in hockey and all the practices and the games and the tournaments were on Sunday morning, and they never made it to church. They decided to change that. So they partnered with local clergy, who provided a worship service on the rink. There in the arena, in between games, they would gather for a time of prayer and singing and a short message. And the result they hadn't counted on was that it was a witness to all the other families who weren't involved with church, who saw them being that passionate about their faith, and who were then invited to join.
     
    Our gospel today is a warning. It's a wake-up call from God to help us take account of our lives, especially our time. To evaluate it, to open our hearts and let God tell us what God thinks of what we do — so that we, through the power of God, cannot be the tree that withers, but the tree that is fruitful and healthy and that bears the fruit of love, for our families and our friends, for our community. And especially for God, the one who loved us enough to die for us, to make us part of his family.
     
    Amen.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2012, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Penny Holste, John 2:13-22, Jesus Cleanses the Temple
  • Feb 12, 2012The Value of Traditions
    Feb 12, 2012
    The Value of Traditions
    Series: (All)
    February 12, 2012. Our values and traditions can be a good thing, but they can also take on a life of their own and become destructive. Pastor Penny preaches today that it's important that we hear what Jesus is saying about values and tradition, to trust in him and listen to the word of God with open hearts.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    We begin this morning in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
     
    The story of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" begins as the sorcerer, or the wizard, is finishing his day in the workshop and going home, and leaving his apprentice to clean up. But his apprentice does not like to clean up. Especially he does not like fetching the water from the well outside and bringing it into this big cistern in the workshop. The apprentice doesn't really know magic, but he's watched the wizard, and so he gets this idea that if he takes a broom, maybe he can cast a spell on it. And he does, and it works: the broom grows arms and legs and feet and hands, and he teaches the broom to fetch water. So the apprentice sits back, gleefully watching this broom doing all his work, going back and forth, bucket after bucket of water. But then he begins to realize something: the water is getting close to the top of the cistern and the broom is still gathering water. And he doesn't know enough magic to make it stop. Well, he just watches as it starts overflowing. And finally in desperation he grabs an axe and he chops the broom in half, only to discover that each half then grows arms and legs and begins to fetch water. Well, catastrophe is averted when the wizard, or the sorcerer, unexpectedly comes back and breaks the spell. But the broom, which was a useful tool and meant for good use, took on a life of its own and became a real danger.
     
    In the gospel today, Jesus is saying that is exactly what can happen with tradition or rules or values. They are a good thing, but they can take on a life of their own and become destructive, even weapons. The laws of the Jews were something that were given to them as a gift. They were chosen to be the people of God and given the Ten Commandments. And they tried hard to obey them, because they wanted to stay connected with God. It was their response to God's love. It was a pleasure for them to strive to obey the Commandments. But of course, the Ten Commandments are pretty broad. And they need to be applied to daily life. So for that they looked to the leaders who came up with other laws, which they call the Oral Laws or the Tradition of the Elders. These were laws that would help them apply the Ten Commandments. But this is where the laws began to have a life of their own. And I think what happened is that the religious leaders began to lose their trust in God. They began to fear that if they didn't keep all of the laws perfectly, that God would turn God's back on them and let their nation be destroyed.
     
    And by the time of Jesus there were six hundred and thirteen of these little laws, which the religious leaders taught the people they must keep perfectly. Now, the religious leaders were of the middle class and upper classes, and they had some leisure and they had some money. But the common people, called the people of the land disdainfully by the leaders, couldn't keep all of these. And so the leaders taught them that by failing to keep these, the Tradition of the Elders, they were failing God. They were unholy, they were unclean, and most heartbreakingly that there was no place for them in the Kingdom of God.
     
    Jesus said to the Pharisees, you have rules that are human rules and you've elevated them above God's rules, and they go in opposition to the very heart of what God wants. Now these things happened over years, and they happen subtly, these changes in how they thought about the law. But I don't think we have to look very far back in the history of the Christian church to see how easily that happens. It wasn't even 200 years ago when many Christians believed that slavery was accepted by God. Paul had written that slaves should be diligent workers for their masters. And Jesus had never said anything about slavery being bad, so they assumed that slavery was acceptable. And for years the church taught that, until finally they woke up to see what a horrible and wicked thing slavery was, and how it was tearing apart our black brothers and sisters.
     
    Well, there's another issue that people take sides on in the church today. And that is whether women should be pastors -- women's ordination. And I really understand why the tradition that only men should be pastors is so deeply felt by people, because I felt it very deeply. I grew up without seeing any women ministers, and I felt it was wrong for women to aspire to become a pastor. It took years before I felt differently. And only after I talked to people who had thought through the process, and prayed and studied and had come to the decision that it was destructive, and was a poor tradition that was destroying the church to bar half of the population from using their gifts to the glory of God. But it was a deep-seated feeling, and it still is in the hearts of many people.
     
    Another issue over which I have changed my feelings is when I grew up I was taught that if you weren't a heterosexual, you were wrong and your lifestyle is wrong. I don't think I was taught that so much as society taught it to me. It was just a deeply ingrained tradition and value. My parents, however, taught me that you always are kind to people, even if you don't agree with them. And so when I was at a workshop once, I went to a breakout session where a woman and her partner did the presentation. This woman talked about her love for Christ, and how active she had been in church and how much she loved it. And then she talked about how when she was a little girl, she knew there was something different about her. But she never really understood it. And then when she was an adult and understood the difference, she found that her church no longer wanted her. And that made me start thinking. And I started reading and praying, and reading the scripture, and talking to people. And I slowly changed that value, that tradition that had been so deeply inside of me, to believe that however we are born -- whatever gender, or however we understand ourselves -- that we are in the image of God and that God wants everyone's life to be full of relationships and the ability to share their gifts with the church.
     
    Now, I know not everyone agrees with me on this. Not everyone in our country or our church body, or I'm sure the congregation. But that's why it's so important that we hear what Jesus is saying today about values and tradition. He is saying we are not united because we all agree on how to live out the Christian life; we are united by Christ. We are united by our love of Christ, which bridges the differences that we have. We are called here by the Holy Spirit to be one Christian community, to love and respect one another in spite of differences. If ever we tried to find a way to avoid using our traditions and values as weapons against each other, it would be to look at the model of Jesus. He did not agree with the lifestyle of prostitutes and tax collectors, and yet he was willing to eat with them and talk with them, and he cared about them.
     
    In this highly politicized world, I thought it was interesting to hear a story about two men who considered themselves to be enemies. One, whose name is Gene Gregory, is the president of the United Egg Producers of America. The other is Wayne Pacelle, and he is the president of the Humane Society of America. And they were at opposite ends on the issue of how you handle animals in the process of producing eggs. Pacelle really took on the egg producers, and said you have these chickens in these little tiny cages, and you cram the cages into these little tiny rooms, and it's wrong. Well, between them they were spending millions of their organizations' dollars fighting each other. And last summer they used kind of a go-between to ask each other: could we sit down and talk? And they did. And what they decided was they could spend the next 10 or 15 years throwing millions of dollars of their organizations' money back and forth and get nowhere. And better would be to see if they could devise a compromise they could both live with. And that's exactly what they did, and there will be a bill before Congress, if it passes, that is a compromise for both of them. And most interestingly what the article said is they discovered at the end of their conversations together they had respect for each other. Gregory said of Pacelle: he is a man of his word. He didn't really want to destroy the whole egg producing industry. He just wanted things to be right. And Pacelle said of Gregory: I learned so much from our talks. I learned all the pressures that farmers are under and why we have to move slowly so that we don't destroy their livelihood. Two men who had different values decided to stop using their values as weapons.
     
    It is so very hard as Christians to know how to live out our faith. Culture does not teach us well. There are pitfalls all over. We can't go by the culture. We have to struggle with these things. But one thing, and one thing alone, is what Jesus asks us to do. And that is not to trust our traditions and our values and our laws above God, but to trust in Christ, to listen to the word of God with open hearts, to pray with an open heart, and to believe that the Holy Spirit has been given to us. And that as we trust in Christ there will be changes along the way. We may change our mind about things. We may ask for forgiveness, or we may not. We may find that what we believed was the right thing. But as we rely on Christ, we can be sure that the Spirit walks with us through all those questions and quandaries in life, and will never leave our side, and finally will bring us safely home into the arms of a loving God.
     
    Thanks be to God. Amen.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2012, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Penny Holste, Talmud, 613 laws, LGBTQ, Matthew 15:1-9, Mark 7:1-23
  • Feb 5, 2012The Call to a Difficult Journey
    Feb 5, 2012
    The Call to a Difficult Journey
    Series: (All)
    February 5, 2012. Pastor Keith's sermon today is on Jesus' rejection in Nazareth, from Mark 6. Jesus did not receive a hero's welcome, because the people didn't want to hear what he had to say. We would probably prefer a more divine kind of messiah too. But we are reminded that the calling of a Christian to faith is a call to a difficult journey.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    We look a little further at this long reading from Mark. We begin in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
     
    I think most people probably think of Jesus as a kind person, a pleasant person, someone to help people, and someone who cares about them a lot in a tender way. Often Jesus is pictured as a good shepherd, someone who cares for people in that way. He knows his flock. He cares for each lamb with untiring devotion and concern, and they maybe think of him as a mild and meek person. "Pleasant" and "attractive" are some of the adjectives that might go with his name. We think of him as the kind of person we may eagerly bring home to meet the family and be around the table with us. But in our lesson today we hear of a day when Jesus came home to his family, to his neighbors. And when he did, he received a mixed reaction. They no doubt heard about his teaching and healing. That reputation had gone before him as he had been out and about, now came back to Nazareth. And we might think he should have gotten a hero's welcome for being this person from a small town. Now he's making such a commotion in the countryside that he's become a hero in a sense, the good things he says and the miracles he does. It says they were astounded at what he said, and there was lots of amazement.
     
    But the point of our reading today is that they actually didn't receive him with the hero's welcome. Maybe they used it as an excuse. Because they didn't really want to hear what he had to say, because it cut them and was a way to call them to repent before God, they said well, he was the carpenter's son. He was a carpenter himself. He wasn't a religious professional. He's Mary's boy. He's got four brothers that are named in the text, and sisters. He's just one of the family kids down the block. We don't need to listen to him. So either because they didn't want to hear his words, or because they just said it didn't fit with who they thought the messiah was to be, they used every reason they could to discount what he said. The first reason was that he was a carpenter. How could a carpenter say such words about God? He wasn't a rabbi. He wasn't theologically trained. He wasn't the son of a priest. He had no credentials of any kind for the kinds of things he was saying and doing, and they were pretty emphatic saying he's just a guy from a regular family -- maybe even one of the poorer families in town at that. It names his four brothers and talk says he has sisters. If he's just a regular guy from a regular family, how could he be a person of God?
     
    The problem seemed to be that he was speaking the word of God with authority, and he was doing the works of God -- healing and teaching. But they didn't believe that God would work through such an ordinary person as this Jesus guy they'd always known. They either seemed to think he was unbalanced in his thinking, or just saying things that would put him in danger. In an earlier lesson in Mark, Jesus is speaking and his family wants to come and kind of rescue him -- take him out of a house -- and he refuses to go with them. He says everybody here's my brother and my sister, so these are my family. So we don't know at that point if the family was trying to prevent him from being ridiculed, or to keep him from being arrested. But his own family was trying to withdraw him from a social scene. It seems like the people knew him as a person, and what they expected was a message. When the messiah came through they thought we could know this message. But when it came through a person who lived in their midst, they found this offensive. How could this person be God? How can this person live out God? This is offensive to us. And they couldn't believe that this was a person of God.
     
    We don't know what his particular message was on that occasion in Nazareth. It doesn't say here. From other gospels we know that at other times when he spoke in Nazareth -- because he blasphemed and said that these words were fulfilled in their hearing and said as much, that he was God -- they wanted to put him to death right away. But for this crowd, he was too much of an ordinary town boy, too much a regular carpenter to be a regular religious teacher and miracle performer. And so they resisted him with all their might.
     
    I think we have to admit in our time there's a resistance that we have to Jesus too. He was awfully ordinary, in a way. He was one who suffered abuse. He was one who died for the cause. When those people come along, can we really say that this person was a person of God? He challenges us. In our day and age we tend to prefer someone more spectacular, someone more successful, someone more extravagant than what God gives us in Jesus: this carpenter guy who goes around has kind of a motley crew following him, and ends up on a cross. We'd probably too, like the people of Nazareth, really prefer a divine kind of messiah that comes with all the signs of a messiah, rather than a human messiah who was fully human. And so we in our minds sometimes try to "upgrade" Jesus. We try to transform this carpenter to kind of a Superman, who relentlessly battles for truth, justice, and the American way -- and of course always prevails as he does it. The Jesus as a Superman looks like a person, but inside this Superman Jesus is more than human. He wouldn't be killed and then rise again -- he'd be smart enough not to be killed in the first place. So as humans, we think we'd rather be taken out of our humanity also and say, "God, rather than save me as a human being so I have to go through more days like this, why don't you be a Superman to me and take me out of where I am as a human being, so that I can live above all this fray that I have every day." So our inclination is to make Jesus someone more divine than human and to wish that God would take us somehow away from this world of all of our troubles. We'd like to rise above it.
     
    The resistance of the town people to Jesus results in a very low number of miracles being performed there. He could do no mighty acts there, it says, except that he healed a few sick people. Sounds big enough by itself. But in other places he'd done much more than that. What Mark says is that there were just a very few miracles done there because there were very few believers. They didn't believe in him, so he could do no actions. It had to be faith that received these miracles for the miracles to happen. When we think about it, in Mark's gospel there's really more authority and power of Jesus shown over things of nature than over people. Jesus heals diseases. He casts out demons. He orders the wind to be calm. But he doesn't control people or dictate what they do. They're on their own for that. He commands people to be quiet about the miracles he's performed on them, and they go do the opposite: they tell everybody they can find. So he didn't have control over people. They feel like they need to tell others, and so even if Jesus tells them to be quiet they don't. He can't tell people what to do. And this all points to the fact that since Jesus doesn't control human beings, it's more the people's attitudes or faith in him that determines what he can do among them. Whether it's in his time or our time, it's a faith that receives what Jesus does. If the faith isn't there, the actions won't be there.
     
    He can't help people who don't desire to be healed. Jesus can't forgive people who don't want to be forgiven. He can't teach people who have closed minds and don't want to be taught. He can't bring new life to people who have no desire for it. He can't create peace among people who prefer to live in worlds of hate and revenge. There has to be a faith and an openness to what Jesus has, to receive it. And so this means the attitude that we have towards Jesus affects the works that he can do among us in our time. It's our faith that brings Jesus into our lives. It's our faith that transforms us to be people who are not only nurtured by him in different ways, but also turned into people who will serve him.
     
    Some of the reports I've heard from missionaries over the years in different cultures, some of those who have attended faith healing events too, say the same thing: that it takes a person willing to believe for this thing to happen. That is, if the culture is open and believes that there are evil spirits and demons, then it's possible to have exorcisms and so forth, and that kind of thing is alive and well. Or if there are people open to having words said and be healed by what we call "faith healing," then it can happen. But where a culture is, shall we say, scientific and doesn't believe that those things exist, then the things don't happen. But you can go to different places in the world today where the culture allows these things and believes that they are there, and the healings and exorcisms and that things like that can happen.
     
    To show how transformative Jesus is, Jesus calls the disciples to himself. He says this is Nazareth, let's go on now. And he sends them out. He walks among the villages and says: you go out two by two. Go into the villages around here. And these disciples were able to heal people and they were able to forgive sins. The group goes out with a sign of the good that can come with a person who follows the Lord. There was faith with the disciples. When Jesus told them, they believed it and they did it. They could heal people. And the people that they encountered evidently believed too, because once he left Nazareth there were all kinds of healings that happened. The disciples do well. They're excited when they get back. They've been able to do these things. They believed, and they performed many miracles of healing.
     
    Well, this all led to a lot of confusion in that day about who Jesus was. They didn't know what to make of him. Jesus caused such a clamor because of his healings and the words he said, that word about him got out -- even rose up to the leaders, to Herod, ruler of his territory in Galilee. And Herod wanted to know: is this guy human? Or is this guy of God? And Herod had John the Baptist on his mind, since he had put him to death. And so he says this Jesus must be John the Baptist come back to life again. So that was one of the theories that was out there: Jesus was John the Baptist come back to life again. The fact that John had lived his life and then met with such a horrible end is a warning, alongside the other lessons of today, that there is rejection. Whenever the ministry of Jesus is in action, there's rejection. The people of Nazareth rejected him. The authorities rejected John the Baptist. Herod rejected him so much he killed him. Jesus, when he tells the disciples to go out, he says: be prepared, people will reject you. So he tells them to shake the dust off their feet when they're done with the town, if they've been rejected there. The follower of Jesus finds resistance. Just as John found it, Jesus found it, and the disciples found it. Mark wants to prepare us all for that fact. If we're transformed, believing in ministry in the same style Jesus had, we will encounter resistance. It's part of being a disciple.
     
    The calling of a Christian to faith is a call to a difficult journey. It's not putting on the Superman cape and thinking that everything's going to be great. It's willingly enrolling in a life of servanthood, even though there are many opportunities for joys and for thanksgivings at every turn on this journey. Even though there are difficulties along the path, many fulfillments come with it. All of the parts of our reading today hint that when the truth of Jesus gets close to people, they react to it. Often it's a word that calls to a different kind of life, and says the life you're living right now isn't very close to what God wants for you. And you hear that word and it changes you. Sometimes it's the application of God's law, and we find out that strikes a nerve and there's a strong reaction. What we're doing isn't fitting what God wants for us very well.
     
    The word that Jesus spoke at his home church hit a nerve and energized that crowd against him very much. He spoke and brought up things that were very close to home for them. They didn't want to hear and learn what Jesus had to say. So they used his humanity as grounds against him. We don't want to hear this, they said. So they kind of covered their ears and said: you're too human for us. You're too ordinary for us. We don't want to hear it, whether it's right or not. Jesus knows that the disciples, as they said, will find this resistance as they go out. Some will welcome the word and some will not. And then when we hear about the story of John the Baptist again, we hear in a horrible recounting of his death that it was all about his speaking a word that hit a nerve. He called what Herod was doing wrong. He said you're committing adultery with your brother's wife. You shouldn't be doing that. And it met resistance that hit a nerve and it ended up causing him to lose his head. Herod and his wife then are angry with John. He points out what's not right and it costs him, and they get rid of him.
     
    So the word comes close to all of us, and when it does we react. It reminds us of who we are and reminds us of who we aren't. It convicts us of the wrongs that we've done. It reminds us how we don't like a Jesus too much like us, and how we are slow to serve. As he sent the disciples out, maybe we're a little slow to get in gear to serve as he wants us to. The word of Jesus comes and shows us our moral weaknesses, reminds us that as we follow Jesus, others will be out to pull us away and take us away from this mission of the Lord. It's not an easy path. But it also reminds us that we are children with Jesus in baptism, children of God. We are brothers and sisters of Jesus. It reminds us that we can celebrate the humanity of Jesus because that means he is like us. We are like him. He is one of us. He got into the water and was baptized as we were baptized. He entered into our world. He knows what we go through. So we can build up faith, so that we can receive the miracles, so that we can receive the healing. We can receive the forgiveness that he wants us to have. To those who believe, there is much to be received. God is there. He wants to give it. Believe and it will come to you. So we keep the faith so that we can receive the wonderful gifts God has in mind for us. Amen.
     
    And now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2012, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Keith Holste, Mark 6:1-13
  • Jan 15, 2012Words and Actions Together
    Jan 15, 2012
    Words and Actions Together
    Series: (All)
    January 15, 2012. Pastor Keith preaches on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech, his "I have been to the mountaintop" speech, and compares King's words and actions together with Jesus' own words and actions that lift us all up.
     
    *** Transcript ***
     
    We begin in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
     
    The other evening I listened to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech given, as it was recorded. It was a speech that he was reluctant to give, because he was very, very busy at that time. There were threats upon his life at that time. And he was in the eastern part of the country and had to make a trip to Memphis. But he had committed himself to the cause of the workers -- the sanitation workers, particularly -- in Memphis, and upheld his commitment and went. That's an interesting speech to listen to, and I encourage you to do it if you have time this afternoon, or tomorrow on the holiday. Just dial it up on YouTube. And it's not that hard to find. It was a very moving speech, with references about practical matters in the strike that was at hand in Memphis. But it also contained a lot of biblical imagery and included the famous, "I have been to the mountaintop" and "I have this vision of everyone together." He had this hope for a triumphant people and a gathered people altogether. He had that vision. Of course, as kids pointed out, he was a preacher first. He was the son of a preacher himself, and very well trained in Christianity, as a graduate of a seminary. He had great oratorical skills as we all know, but having read a number of his sermons, you may not know that he was very skilled at composing sermons. And they are a delight to read, how he put the thoughts together no matter what part of the Bible it was. He was a great speech writer.
     
    But being so familiar with scripture, it's probably no accident that his speech in Memphis contains many of the same kind of approaches, I think, that we see from Mark's writing about Jesus in Capernaum today, and some other things that Jesus said along the way. Martin Luther King, Jr. learned a lot from the way Jesus did things. Mark was writing to a downtrodden people as he wrote down the gospel of Jesus. They were a struggling people, trying to survive the threats of the Romans and the Jewish authorities around them. They were looking for a way to build up their hope, and to give them some sense that they could continue on. So Mark tells them the story of Jesus in such a way that it would build up their encouragement and their hope that indeed they can live as Christians. And so he conveys to them the life and the teachings of Jesus in such a way that it gives them life and gives them hope for their struggles.
     
    Well, we're at today's lesson -- only 21 verses into the chapter of Mark -- and we hear Jesus already perform his first act of ministry. We heard last week about how he was baptized and how he was led into the wilderness and tempted there. He chose four disciples. And all that's the first 20 verses only. Now in verse 21 he's in Capernaum, which was a commercial center, an agricultural center, a fishing town and kind of a trade center, as caravans moving from east to west through the known world would come by Capernaum, there at the picturesque place at the north end of the Sea of Galilee. Well, Sabbath comes and Jesus goes to the local synagogue, and he preaches there. Mark doesn't say what the content of Jesus' sermon was, but we know the reaction he got. Mark says all the people were astounded. He preached like no one they had ever heard before. The scribes they were used to hearing usually would quote the rabbis from the past, and kind of mine the books and the scriptures for what so-and-so had said about this and that text, and they weren't so inspiring. But Jesus was different. He didn't remind them of what other people had said before. He spoke himself of what he knew to be true. He preached with authority. He didn't have to get words from the scholars who had gone before him. This was something very different for them to listen to: someone who spoke out of his own authority.
     
    Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a great gift too. And you can tell, listening to the people's responses as he gave his speeches, that they believed he was a prophet in his time. They saw him communicating the truth to them, and they followed him. There were others in his entourage who had great oratorical skills: Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young, people like that. They all could hold their own, but none of them moved the movement the way that Martin Luther King, Jr. did. The response to him was such that great change did come above. He elicited the kind of response that did bring people to action. He couldn't do it by himself; it was because people responded to what he said that change happened.
     
    Well Jesus did two things in Capernaum that day. He preached in an astounding way, and he dealt with a man who, it says, suddenly rose up from the midst of the congregation, who had a demon or unclean spirit. The man didn't possess himself. He wasn't, you might say, in control of himself. This demon spirit controlled him. He was a prisoner in his own body. And this unclean spirit that came out of this man taunted Jesus and said, what are you here for? Have you come to destroy us, spirit? We know who you are, the Holy One of God. And he also said, what are you doing here from Nazareth? We're here in Capernaum. It says that, maybe as though someone in Memphis would have said, why do you come from Atlanta, Martin Luther King, to bother us? And so he held his geography against him too. But Jesus rebuked, it says, this unclean spirit and it came out of this man with a convulsion and with a crying out. And when the people witnessed this they were amazed, it says. They said, a new teaching with authority. The action of Jesus exorcising the demon from this man, backed up the astounding words of Jesus. And so words and actions go together to be the most convincing. The people said, we behold something completely new here. Not only were the words he said astounding, but the actions he said are heaven come to earth. This is new too. This man is a prophet to behold.
     
    Well that coming together, words and actions, was something that Martin Luther King, Jr. did very well also. He didn't just speak from podiums and pulpits. He was also the one leading the marches, giving the instructions and the tactics, and being arrested himself and going to jail. And as we know, word spread about him. And when he was speaking in Washington D.C. at the Lincoln Memorial, some 200,000 were thought to have been in that crowd to hear him speak. His actions and his words together made him have great impact.
     
    Well in his sermon at Capernaum, Jesus took on an evil spirit. Jesus knew it as it showed itself to him, and he brought the power to bear to exorcise this demon from the man. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not afraid to name the ills of the society that not only affected him and those of his race, but all those ills that affected all of society, whether it be issues of hunger, housing, the way finances work, and war that was going on at the time -- all these things that were of concern to all people were of concern to him. And he named them. Just as Jesus named the demons in that man, Martin Luther King, Jr. would name the demons' expression in the society of the day. The powers that profited from and enjoyed the status quo, as always happens, began to marshal forces so that his protest would be quelled. The resistance to King was predictable, and he was feeling it by way of threats, even on the day that he gave the speech.
     
    As Jesus would name himself, more and more authorities, especially those in the religious institutions as the ministry of Jesus went on, and he would point his finger and show how the church was acting in evil ways in his day -- those evils that he named would push back to him too, as we would say these days. He would say that the religion of his day was full of evil. It was full of corruption and needed to be corrected. And this cleansing of the devil from this man was the first step that he took. But we know how the institutions of his day pushed back against Jesus and finally took his life, because they couldn't stand to hear the naming of them amongst the evil of the world.
     
    For this man with the spirit to have been in a synagogue was a transgression of boundaries. The pharisaic Jewish system was all based on cleanliness, was about keeping a system of ritual cleanness. We heard something about that in our second lesson today, as Christians later on who had been Jews weren't sure how to handle certain meats. Were they clean or not clean? Were they under those rules or not? But for the Jews of that day, it was all about keeping this ritual cleanness: not touching certain things, not eating certain things, not touching certain people. But here was an unclean man right in the midst of their worship gathering. What could be worse than that? But Jesus lives in an unclean and messy world, in Mark. He's bumping into unclean people who have various ailments and bad spirits throughout his ministry. But what he does is that he rids them of their demons, he rids them of their diseases, so that instead of being outcast they become the welcome ones. Instead of being the ones shunned from the community, they become healed. To other people he'll say go show yourself to the priest, you are clean, you can join the community. He'll say that to some lepers he heals later on. Jesus was about rubbing shoulders with the outcast, so that they might be cleansed and then be welcomed into the community.
     
    Well that vision of Jesus is what Martin Luther King, Jr. was about too, in that which he brought to the work. He talks about it in that Memphis speech. He knows it will be messy. He and all African Americans were seen as unclean ones in the country: not welcome to eat in many places, not welcome to drink in many places, to share motels, schools, many other institutions with whites. They were the same as unclean. His dream was to name the ill, to come up with strategies that will confront that evil and make a new world. But again, the vision wasn't just for people of his race. It was for all people. He wanted there to be equality for all. That's why he worked, that's what he worked on and spoke and lived, and what he finally died for himself, as the pushbacks came in such a way that they took his life. He wanted everyone to be included. He named the outcast. He wanted there to be a cleansing so that everyone could be together.
     
    When Penny and I were in El Salvador a few months ago, the Lutheran Bishop there, Bishop Gomez, spoke of his dream for the ELCA church in El Salvador. In his country where machismo reigns and where women have little on their own and children are fortunate to go to school, his hope was for the ELCA church and his congregations, that they would become places of welcome and openness to all. He wanted them to be models of openness in a repressive society, and to be that way in the name of Jesus. That made me think that that's what our church is about here in the United States as well. Not that our society is all like that in El Salvador, but we still have plenty of problems to go around, plenty of people feeling outcast, plenty of people feeling not wanted, not important, or too ill or too different to be included in. The reign of God breaks in when our congregation and any congregation is an open and welcoming place, where all are welcome and know they are welcome. All are to be received in the name of Jesus.
     
    Last week we heard how the heavens opened up at the baptism of Jesus, and that's no accident as God comes down. But it is a kind of a compressing of heaven and earth together. That was a way of saying God's power was being unleashed in the world. It would be there with Jesus, and wherever he went heaven would come down to earth through him. The boundary of heaven and earth is blurred and collapsed as God's power comes to earth in Jesus. God is active and God is alive in Jesus, and the people of Jesus. That power of God unleashed comes out in the words of Jesus, as he speaks to that man and says, "Devil be out. Be cleansed." And he was. It comes out in the cleansing of that man. Heaven on earth. Heaven involved in the work of earth. In following weeks we'll see now in the first seven chapters or so of Mark how the various powers of God are unleashed on earth to do different things that show that God's power is active.
     
    Martin Luther King, Jr. was sensitive to this collapsing together of heaven and earth. He knows that any talk of heaven is empty unless it touches the earth. What use does it have, he says, of talking about the riches of heaven when people live in poverty? What use does it have, he says, of talking about milk and honey flowing in heaven when people don't have anything to eat and they are starving? He believed with Jesus that it doesn't have to be that way. God breaks in. God is active. God gives his power to be with his people to bring about change. With Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. it was all about getting and putting people together. Let them get together. By uniting and working together, they could accomplish good and great things. God could use them to bring about change for a more perfect earth. We hear the words of Jesus. We see the actions of Jesus. He lifts us up so that together we may be a force for good in the world around us, forming an accepting community of faith as we go. Amen.
     
    And now, may the peace of God which passes all human understanding keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
     
    *** Keywords ***
     
    2012, Christ Lutheran Church, Webster Groves, sermon, podcast, transcript, Pastor Keith Holste, Mark 1:21-28, 1 Corinthians 8:1-13