A psalm of thanksgiving

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.  He makes me to lie down in green pastures.  He leads me beside still waters.  He restores my soul.”

I lie in the cool green grass and rest.  It gives me time to quench my thirst and to pause and to rest.  The demanding voices which are my constant companions are silenced.  I can close my eyes to the temptations of flashing lights and images filled with false promises.  I can close my ears to the lies that rage all around me.

Until, in this quiet space, I am finally able to quiet my breath and face my truth: the broken place from which I have have been the dangerous one and  launched a barrage of damaging words at friends and neighbor alike.

I can face my deep desire that God arrange all things to my liking, and that my cry to Jesus is not repentance but is rooted in my expectation that Jesus will make my road smooth and fill me with all good things.

In the silence I come face to face with the fact that  I prefer my sin to the healing God offers and have brushed aside the rod and staff of your love, wandering far from the safety and guidance that they offer to me.  I am more exhausted by 1000 haunting fears, than I am by the work of each day.

You have given me this moment.  Now I can realize that there is nothing more I could want than to be in your presence, to be known by you.  There is nothing more, nothing greater, than to lie at your feet, to be filled by your Spirit….touched by the cool breeze, cushioned in the green grass.

Yet, this is but a moment on the journey, a morsel of the meal you have prepared by your own hand and with your own body.  You have given me this moment to rest in you so I might have the strength to finish the tasks ahead

            To live as one of your sheep

            To love as you have loved

            To walk alongside you, and alongside others so 

                                           they might hear your voice and follow.
            To trust that you will always be there even as I enter the abyss.

For this time part I give thanks, even in the busy-ness and chatter and challenges of these days ahead, that this might be a time of renewal, re-discovery of your presence all around me, and reminder of the sound of your voice calling and leading.

For all the gifts you grant me O Lord, I give thanks.

Get ready for difficult but important truth: Jesus and the cross

 It is so well written I commend to you the time it will take to read it.

Robert Saler is an author and theologian.   Executive Director of the Center for Pastoral Excellence and Research Professor of Lutheran Studies at CTS.

This is so well written I commend to you the time it will take to read it.

"The theologian and poet Christian Lehnert tells how he once preached about the love and nearness of a gracious God in an East German village, and afterward, an old Polish woman met him on the road and asked, “You prayed for God’s nearness? Do you know what you’re asking for?” She then explained how, in 1939, she hid in a ditch in a field and prayed for her life as the German tanks came. Then she felt God’s nearness and lay hidden in the earth’s arms. The tanks rolled on by. But a few days later, everyone who lived in the next house over was found dead, shot, with their tongues nailed to the kitchen table. The one was saved, the others were murdered.

Is that God’s nearness and grace?

On this Reformation Day, many edifying things will be preached about Martin Luther and his nailing of the theses 500 years ago in Wittenberg, about his protest against the the arrogant claim that a human being could secure salvation and paradise with money, his recognition that God’s grace saves human beings and not their own accomplishments, about freedom, conscience, and individuality. That’s all well and good. But nevertheless, so many pastor’s and even bishop’s orations will sound hollow today: “You’re fine just the way you are. God is there and loves you, is holding you and the world in the palm of his hand. And if you’re having a hard time, God is still there.”

That’s it? Where is he when Assad’s barrel bombs rip children apart in Syria and so-called holy warriors decapitate people? Where is he when people die in anguish from hunger or sickness? Is he in the torture chambers of the world, or with the drowning refugees in the Mediterranean? Does he whisper to them, as they draw their last desperate breath: “Hey, you’re okay just the way you are?” Does he stand by the elderly, who draw near to their end, lonely and forgotten, in the neon light of a hospital ward? Or is all this talk of help nothing more than a cheap lie?

The writer Guenter Franzen reported in the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung about the death of his wife, whose body, wracked by pain, was being consumed by cancer. “Now my eyes have seen thee,” he quoted from the biblical Job. God took away everything that was dearest to Job, one after another, in order to put him to the test in a bet with the devil. In the moment of the abyss and forsakenness, he becomes visible, but he doesn’t fix anything. The abyss and the forsakenness remain. Franzen writes that he struggled with the people leading the Protestant church, the soft sellers of consolation in all life circumstances. No, time doesn’t heal all wounds. It was no pious pastor who brought him him back to life, but a therapist who, after his wife’s death, sat with him for a long time in silence and then said “damn this shit.”

Damn this shit. That is actually much closer to Martin Luther than most edifying sermons on Reformation Day. Luther’s search for God was desperate and despairing his whole life long. He wrestles with this God who gives no answers, who draws back and gives ground to the devil, who unpredictably hides himself when a revelation in power and glory would have really been timely. He sees himself cast out and forsaken by God. “Each one must himself contend with those enemies, with the devil and death, and lie in ring with them. I will not be with you, nor you with me,” he wrote. And his answer, that faith alone makes the terrifying God into a gracious God, and this brief human lifespan can indeed have a meaning and a goal, this is an act of trust with no external guarantee. Less than a thread’s width separates this trust, not based on any this-worldly rationality, from that “no” to God when faced with this inconceivable demand of faith.

Five hundred years separate Martin Luther and the people of the year 2017. In Germany they are free and equal in a way that would terrify the Reformer. They can alter genes, fly into space, and access the whole world on the smartphone in their pocket. The thread that stretches from this distant man of the late middle ages to today is the search for grace in a graceless world, for a reality beyond perception and eye-witness testimony, for the last foundation of threatened, fragile, broken existence. It is the search that has to drive Christians to the limits of their faith, faced with a silent and hidden God, who mocks all self-help literature. That explains the fear of many theologians, Protestant and Catholic alike, of talking about this existential search for God on the edge of the abyss. It endangers all certainties, forbids easy answers, and drives back everyone who would wish for security in faith.

Martin Luther’s extraordinary answer was this: the Christian God is not a God of triumphs in this world, of heaven on earth, no spiritual leader for a more enjoyable life. For him, the God of grace was the crucified, suffering God, cruelly executed and humiliated, robbed of all human dignity. It is a God on the side of the anguished, drowning, the cancer patient, and the bombed, who has no humanly understandable answer, except perhaps, “damn this shit!” There are good reasons why the Protestant church considers Good Friday, the day of the crucifixion, to be the most important holy day. And it is characteristic of the worst advances of contemporary theology that it backs away from this story of the Cross because it is too cruel, and might scare children and sensitive adults. Whoever filters out the terrifying and disturbing from reflection on God makes it hollow and banal.

When will you show your grace, gracious God? In all moments of humaneness and of desperate love, in all unexpected good. But also in all hope against hope, in the trust in the sinking ground, that even in a world full of devils, God is a mighty fortress, as Martin Luther’s hymn says. And this continues even today. There are those unbelievable moments when one senses God and hears the music of heaven. There are also those when all humanity seems to have been murdered. And no Enlightenment in this world has been able to explain them away. Nor can anyone confect them or preach around them. No pastor or bishop, not on Christmas or on Reformation Day. The last words that Martin Luther wrote down on February 16, 1546 shortly before his death say: “We are beggars, that’s true.” And that too is as true today as it was 500 years ago."

 Dr. Saler posted this article; the original was in German thus the translation.  It was posted on Facebook. H/T and translation by Kyle Rader

The same message 500 years later

In recognition of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's bold statements in the 95 Theses

If Martin Luther were to preach on this the celebration of the 500th anniversary he would tell us that the message needs to be about Jesus, the one we call the Christ, and Jesus' cross needs to be in the center of it all. Not because we understand this divine drama of cross and tomb but because if God is to be found anywhere, God will be found in the very hiddenness of the cross, the God of mystery and majesty.

As humans we struggle with God; we try hard to bring God down to us, thinking that God's ways are our ways, only nicer and kinder.  Therefore we think God only loves those who love God in return, and is looking for any opportunity to rain down destruction on imperfect human beings.  We think God shapes us through fear and punishment.

At the same time, we are busy building a ladder to ascend to God - each rung signifying a good work, good intention, clean living.  This way we can prove our worth and secure our place at the table and in God's kingdom.

The truth is our lives are lived somewhere in the middle.  We know that most of our suffering is a result of our own choices and we are not as good as we would like to have others believe.  We live in a place where confession and absolution are gifts.  So most of the time we are confounded by this Divine Creator, awed by our encounters with God and a little fearful of the power which lies behind it all.

We cannot understand this God who is all mystery and majesty, but we do believe that everything began with a love powerful enough to bring into being all of creation, a love powerful enough to breathe life into our clay bodies, and powerful enough to offer itself to us in the eternal gift named Jesus.

God tucks the great Divine in surprising places.  It is tucked in, with, and under the human infant from Bethlehem; it is folded in, with and under a first century Jew named Jesus, and in the end, it is hidden from all but the eyes of faith in the face of the suffering Christ on the cross. This is the God whose love is powerful enough to empty a tomb and open a path for all to return to their origins in God.

This is the God who so loved the world that he gave.....eternally withdrawing from the Divine Treasury - not merits so we can earn our own salvation, but instead God withdrew the beloved son and then offers Jesus - offers God's very own being - as a gift....and an invitation...and a model....and our eternal hope.  This is the self-giving God who tucks the divine in, with and under the bread and wine of a peasant's meal.  Thus an ordinary meal of peasants becomes a holy encounter with the Savior.

We gather in worship of this God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit who meets us in the waters of baptism, pulling us out of the death of darkness and welcoming us into the life of light.......again and again, forever and ever.

Nothing can separate us from the love of the God we know in Jesus Christ our Lord: the one born as a pauper so that even the poorest among us might be made holy; a compassionate Jesus who made all flesh holy and opened the way to the heart of God for rich and poor, male and female, Jew and Greek, straight and gay, black and white.  This is the Jesus who insisted on justice from the powerful and stood shoulder to shoulder with the weakest.  This is the cruicified Jesus who accepted death as a criminal out of love for a creation imprisoned by bars of our own making.  And, in the last, the risen Jesus, a vision of God's power and plan for the new creation to come.

500 years later, Martin would tell us that all we need to know is Christ: crucified and risen, for it is Christ alone who can bring us into the Divine life, it is through grace alone that this gift comes to us; and our lifelong task is to hold fast to this faith alone.

Dr. Luther once wrote "if you see yourself as a little sinner you will inevitably see Jesus as a little savior" Instead, Jesus is the gift of all eternity, forever mystery, forever love, forever life.