Who is your god?

I am the Lord your God you shall have no other gods before me.

There are a few passages in the Bible which are succinct statements of the core of our Christian faith from a Lutheran perspective.  This verse from Exodus 20, however, is at the core of everything, because who or what you claim as God directs and defines your life.

Christians claim as God the YHWH who spoke to Moses in the book known as Exodus.  (Jews too BTW).  From creation through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and eventually Egypt, the God who called itself YHWH - I am who I am (or I will be who I will be) - is the 'father' of Jesus, the God of creation, the source of life and love.

In Martin Luther's Large Catechism he says, 'that in which you put your trust is your god' which, of course means we all have a god, we just don't all have the God revealed in Jesus and through the Bible.

So the next time someone....including me and you....claims to be doing something in the name of God, you might want to check out which god is being talked about.....because everything is being done in the name of one god or another.  Mine is Jesus....most of the time.

Looking for God in all the wrong places?

Lately, God has been amazingly present in places I didn't expect, with a force that reminds me of days of great passion, yet wearing a face that is unfamiliar to me.  At the same time, God has been frighteningly distant - unknowable, behind a cloud, leaving me with more questions than answers and a deep sense of unease.  Same God.  Crazy pastor?

For me, God is palpably present when I am leading worship.  In those moments when I stop at the altar and call on the name of the Lord, emptying myself of the world I brought with me and opening myself to the Spirit moving among us, God is energy and presence.  It's not the same each time; some Sundays I am more dense and disagreeable.  But God is present and the Spirit is the power by which I can stand and share a Word with you all.  This is most certainly true.

Except when God is not.  Oh, I am sure that God is present among us because I trust God's promise in Jesus to be with us.  I simply cannot connect....like when the internet is down and all that you see on your screen is the message 'failure to load.'  Some Sundays, I experience a decisive failure to load.

If that happens too many weeks in a row, I panic.  (there is very little middle ground in all of this for me).  Last winter, I traveled in the darkness of God for 6 weeks.  God's presence was out of my reach, beyond my ability to draw in the Spirit's energy.  The light of the Gospel was now a darkness and I was thirsty for a clear word of grace and forgiveness - the primary arteries of God for me.

Nothing special happened to set this whole terrifying episode in motion.  One Sunday I was fully engaged and the next Sunday I was a stranger to myself, and God to me.  Suddenly the water was too deep and instead of laying back and floating, I began to thrash about and dreamt dreams about drowning.

Yet in all my crazy heroic struggles, God continued to be present.  This is the rock on which I live my life.  God is always present - bringing the sunlight through the exquisite fall colors, holding my hand in my fear, weeping with me in the great tragedies of our times, pushing me forward when I want to hold back, and standing quietly in all God's dark glory in the deepest darkness of my life.

I am told that coming to know God in the darkness is a terrifying gift - the greatest most frightening time of relationship with God.  Hmmmm.   Hmmmm.

Don't know what to say about that.

You want me to do what?

"Please let me be counted among your beloved ones....Just don't ask me to leave THAT behind."

That could be us talking to Jesus, right?

What the rich man who approached Jesus wanting to inherit eternal life really wanted was to maintain eternal wealth.  Jesus' command that he Go and Sell and Give away his wealth, and then Come and Follow was just too much.  He turned away; he had many possessions.

We could call it greed or entitlement.  Perhaps it was simply a lack of imagination.

He couldn't imagine that life could happen without the wealth that made his life bearable.

He couldn't imagine that he would find something to eat and drink or shelter in the rain.

He couldn't imagine that Jesus was serious and therefore concluded that Jesus had lost it.

He couldn't imagine a life that so far exceeded the one he was living that any price required was reasonable.

He couldn't imagine that even if a life did exist that didn't require the wealth he had that he would want it in the end.

That's the best spin I can give this.  It is also possible that he couldn't imagine being asked to simply give away what was his to those people.  It is possible that he considered his wealth to be a sign of his personal worth as a human being, ergo the poor had no worth at all in the sight of the Creator.

It is also possible that he went away sorrowful, but one day, down the road, began the journey back towards the Lord of Life, giving away bits and pieces, growing in generosity, learning that he was a worthy human without his wealth and all those poor folks were human beings too. Possibly the humility of that day wrought humbleness in his life.

Just perhaps, when he re-played that day again and again, remembering when Jesus invited him to be one of the beloved ones and he turned away... perhaps he was sure he had lost any chance of being counted among Jesus' beloved ones.

He'd be wrong.  Jesus is always inviting, moving down on the bench and making room.  But the room is for you, not all that stuff that you drag along with you.  Jesus wants you because the life he offers exceeds our best imagination.

Are you ready?

In memorium: Lucas Leonard

All Saints Sunday is fast approaching.  It is a day within the Lutheran tradition (and others as well) that we take a moment to remember those who have joined Jesus in life beyond and those who have joined Jesus in this life as well.  That is, we recognize those who have died and those who have been baptized into the faith.

This year, we approach All Saints Day with the front page news of a church....an avowed Christian Church....who systematically beat a young man until he died....in the name of repentance and, I expect, as a punishment for some sin which he apparently never confessed.

My heart is breaking for the young man, who like the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53 was silent before his attackers.  In his memory, I post this passage

The servant grew up before God - 

        a scrawny seedling, a scrubby plant in a parched field.

There was nothing attractive about  him,

        nothing to cause us to take a second look

He was looked down on and passed over,

        a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.

One look at him and people turned away.  

       We looked down on him, thought he was scum

But the fact is, it was our pains he carried -

        our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us

We thought he brought it on himself, 

       that God was punishing him for his own failures

But it was our sins that did that to him, 

       that ripped and tore and crushed him - our sins!

He took the punishment, and that made us whole.  

       Through his bruises we get healed.

We're all like sheep who've wandered off and gotten lost.

       We've all done our own thing, gone our own way.

And God has piled all our sins, everything we've done wrong, 

                            on him, on him. (Isaiah53.2-6 The Message)

Perhaps you can see why many interpreters apply this description to Jesus, but on that terrible day, it was Lucas Leonard who took the blows that originate in the the great brokenness of this world, the brokenness which lies within each of us.  On that day, Lucas was Jesus among us.

I know Jesus was with him and holds him now, but I deeply wish none of it had happened.  Now, I am left with trusting that Jesus can redeem even this terrible evil, forgiving all.  One day I will need that promise of redemption and forgiveness for myself so today it must be offered to the others.  All the others.  That's Jesus' command to us: to pray for our enemies and forgive those who persecute us.  It's been a difficult week in Upstate NY.

The cross........problem or solution?

If you find it difficult to 'explain' the cross to others, you are in good company.  The cross rivals calculus and theoretical physics for making our heads spin. (You can tell I am neither mathematician or scientist, right?)

Crucifixion is an inhumane, albeit effective, form of torture and execution.  It was used by a powerful nation as a deterrent (questionable effectiveness) and a solution (always effective).  Anyone looking at a poor victim hanging on that cross would conclude that 'there must be a better way.'  The fact that the one we call Son of God, the Savior and Anointed One was executed in this manner defies logic for most of us.

Yet there it is.

In the middle of our gathering, at the center of our worship, there is the cross.  It is the great coincidence of opposites: death and life in one.  We believe that Jesus took on the evil of his time and, although it appeared at first that the Powerful Ones had won, the tomb was empty and Jesus was alive.  By his great sacrifice, Jesus defeated the one thing we fear above all others - death.

It is around the cross, where Jesus turned the end into a new beginning that we gather to hear again a word that gives us strength and hope.  This word convinces us that through this Jesus our Creator God is doing a new thing - something never before imagined.  God is making a new creation, offering a life that is not like the old broken one but a new life that empties the tombs and creates a new community.

When we begin to grasp that all of this was given out of love as a gift, we too ask with the psalmist, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them?  Mortals that you care for them?

Jesus says, Come to me.  Trust in me.  Believe in me.  Live as I live. Forgive as I forgive.  Care for one another as I care for you.  Be brother and sister to each other so that life might truly be life and not the crazy, dangerous game it is now.

Come to me Jesus says, and I will show you a more excellent way for God is doing a new thing in me.

There is much that I cannot explain, but this I know: without Jesus and the kind of grace that loves the unlovable and embraces the pariah and binds up the wounds of the guilty, we would be lost.....I would be lost.

 I do not understand the cross, but I cling to the Jesus who died there.

A really good question to ask......

Has it always been this bad?

I know all the explanations about how the 24 hour news cycle and social media and a host of other things have resulted in me knowing bad stuff more frequently, with relentless repetition thus creating an illusion of children being kidnapped daily, murder-suicides every other city and a myriad of other horrific examples of the world gone mad.

But my question is, has it always been this bad?  Have others felt as hopeless and helpless as I too often feel as my phone fills with news alerts, pictues of disaster, and stories that break my heart.  Some of it is to be expected - accidents and disease and natural disaster.  Not that I am saying these are any less hurtful and sometimes grievious.  But some of that will always happen.

It's the racial hatred, religious warfare, inhumane treatment of others, abuse of children and other powerless ones, the use of power without regard for ethics, morality, even decency.  The concept of the Golden Rule, present in every society, seems to be lost in the 21st century.  My head aches and my heart is broken by all the ways we have of destroying each other and the hope that comes with every life.

When God rested on the seventh day, God saw that it was very good.  It took us a nanosecond to destroy that harmony......forever.

So in God's second great act of love, God sends us Jesus.  Taking on human flesh, presenting to the world the face and heart of God, Jesus comes to us to live as we live in the muck and mire of everyday life - while being a member of an oppressed nation, a minority religion and a marginal ethnic group.

Jesus stepped into exactly the kind of horror we know - and frankly, some in the world know horror much more intimately than I do.  Why did Jesus come?  as an example?  as a glimmer of hope?  as a judge and jury?  as a reminder of God's great love?

Or, possibly was Jesus our second example of God creating light in our world to show us the way, to be the beginning of one more 'new creation'?

It's a good question to ask, but here is an even better answer.  Whatever God's reason, Jesus is the gift that knows no boundaries.  This one called Jesus took on the evil of his time and in his great sacrifice defeated the one thing we fear above all others - the end of it all, this life, our life, and the life of those we love.

Isn't that why we lift up his name?  Isn't that why we bow our heads in prayer?  Isn't that why we come to the table of bread and wine every week?

Why do we turn to Jesus?  That's a really good question to ask. Why do you?