Christ Crucified

Christ Crucified

A Good Friday Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 25, 2016

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s such an odd thing, although maybe “odd” is too mild a word for it. It’s such a bizarre thing, such a fantastic and improbable thing. We Christians follow a crucified Savior. I suppose we take it for granted. We’ve heard the stories all our lives. We sing the hymns: “Where you there when they crucified my Lord,” and so many others. We wear the cross, we put it up in our homes and in our churches. We take it for granted, but think about it for a minute. The one whom we call Lord and Savior, whom we call God Incarnate, the Word of God made flesh, got himself crucified. The world killed him as a common criminal—or worse, as a political troublemaker who was a threat to the good order of his society. The One whom our tradition says rules in glory at the right hand of God the Father was, from an earthly point of view, an abject failure. His followers saw in him manifestations of the power of God Almighty, but he was so weak that the Roman Empire was able to snuff him out without giving the matter a second thought. Christianity is the only major world religion whose founding figure was executed by the ruling authorities as a criminal and a thread to public welfare.

Tonight we commemorate that execution. Tonight we recall and relive that terrible day nearly two thousand years ago when the Romans—and make no mistake about it, it was the Romans not the Jews who did it—when the Romans executed the Son of God upon a cross. We know, of course, that Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t the end for him, but for that part of the story we have to wait until Sunday morning. Tonight we enter into Jesus’ death not his rebirth. Tonight is about the tomb, and it is about the cross.

So tonight we consider what it means, this crucifixion of the Son of God. For you see, as much as Christians have clung to the Resurrection as giving meaning to our faith and to our lives, we Christians have also, from the very beginning, sensed that there is some ultimate meaning in Christ’s death too. We have sensed that, out of the thousands upon thousands of crosses the Romans used to eliminate troublemakers, this one has special meaning. We have believed from the very beginning that there is profound meaning for us in the cross of Jesus. It has to have meaning or else our faith is in vain. In the passage from First Corinthians that we just heard Saint Paul calls Christ crucified the power of God and the wisdom of God, and that seems so contradictory. What could the power and wisdom of Christ crucified possibly be? I invite you to bear with me while I try to answer that question in a way that makes sense to me and that I hope makes sense and might be helpful to you.

We begin with a question: Who do we say that Jesus is? We say that he is the Christ, and we generally mean by that that he is, as I have already said, the Son of God, or God the Son Incarnate. The Gospel of Matthew has a really good name for him, but it’s one that we generally hear only at Christmas because it appears only in Matthew’s birth narrative. That name is Emmanuel, and it means “God is with us.” Matthew 1:23 That’s who Jesus is for us Christians, God with Us. He is a real human being like us, but he is a human being in whom God is fully present in a unique way. In him we see God revealed to the fullest extent that we mere mortals can comprehend, and in him God lives and experiences human life in God’s own person. In Jesus we see humanity and divinity in total solidarity. We see Jesus’ total solidarity with God, but we also see God’s total solidarity with us. We see God in the person of Jesus taking on and experiencing human life. God always experiences human life of course, but in Jesus we see God experiencing human life in person, and we see how God experiences human life. We see that God does not experience human life remotely, or from afar, not indifferently or dispassionately. In Jesus Christ we see that God experiences human life personally, intimately, compassionately, in divine solidarity with humanity.

In the life of Jesus Christ we see how God experiences human life in reaching out and saving the least and the lost, accepting sinners and welcoming those whom the world casts out, teaching peace and crying out for justice. More importantly for us tonight, we see how God experiences human life in Jesus’ death. God in Christ could reject human death. Jesus could have avoided the cross, perhaps through a display of divine power and certainly by denying his mission, his ministry, and his identity, but he didn’t. Instead he accepted the cross, he accepted a cruel and unjust death. Why?

The Gospel of John suggests an answer. There Jesus’ last words are: “It is finished.” John 19:30 What is finished? Presumably what Jesus came to accomplish, his mission in the world. The important thing about that for us tonight is that Jesus’ mission wasn’t finished short of the cross and death. It couldn’t have been. It couldn’t have been because without the cross and death God’s demonstration in Christ of how God experiences human life would not have been complete. Those harsh realities of human life, the realities of suffering and of death, would have been left out. We would not see God’s unshakable solidarity with us in our suffering and in our death. The cross is the ultimate demonstration of God’s unshakable solidarity with us in all aspects of our lives, even (or especially) in our suffering and in our death.

And that, my friends, is the best news there ever was or ever could be. What, after all, is the real tragedy of human life? Is it not that we live separated from God, or believe that we do? How often have you, how often have I, called the world or some miserable part of it “God-forsaken”? How often have you, how often have I, felt abandoned and alone? In Mark’s account of the Crucifixion, and in Matthew’s, Jesus cries out from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46 Have you ever been tempted to call out the same thing? Most of us have. Especially in times of great despair, pain, or grief it is so easy to feel that God has forsaken us. When we look at the world around us, at all the evil, the hatred, the violence, the unjust suffering and death, it is so easy for us to ask: Why has God forsaken God’s world? Surely God is not present in all that suffering! Surely that suffering represents the absence of God not the presence of God.

But I say: Look to the cross of Jesus. There is God the Son Incarnate experiencing the same things we suffer, and worse. There is God experiencing human pain, suffering, injustice, and death. There is God experiencing nothing less than God-forsakenness. And what does that mean? It means that God has transformed God-forsakenness into the very presence of God. It means that God has shown us the way into human suffering, and the way out of it. It means that God goes with us every step of the way in complete solidarity with us, in complete solidarity with all who suffer and all who die. It means that we can have the courage to bear our own pain and suffering because God bears them with us. It means that we can bear our own death because God bears it with us. It means that we can enter into the suffering of others and work to alleviate it because God enters it with us.

God is not aloof. God is not remote. God does not sit in heaven and observe from afar. God showed us what God is like on the cross of Jesus. The cross shows us that God stands in complete solidarity with us in our lives, in our suffering, and in our death. God does not reject those things. In Christ Jesus God entered into them, experienced them, and sanctified them. Because Jesus had the courage to go all the way to the cross to show us God’s love, we can bear our own crosses with the assurance that God bears them with us. Because God is with us we can bear whatever we must bear. We can help others bear what they must bear and work to make their bearing easier. Because God is with us though we suffer and die we can risk everything for peace, we can risk everything for justice, we can risk everything for love. That’s what Jesus did; and because he did it, we can do it too.

That’s the wisdom and the power of Christ crucified of which Paul speaks. It is the wisdom and the power of God entering into complete solidarity with us humans in our lives and in our deaths. That horrible cross that we remember tonight completes God’s demonstration of that wisdom and that power. In that cross it is indeed finished. Thanks be to God. Amen.

A Palm Sunday Sermon

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Donkey

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 20, 2016

Scripture: Zechariah 9:9-10 Mark 11:1-11

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s the beginning of Holy Week, that most sacred week of the Christian year, when we enter Jerusalem with Jesus in triumph, share his last meal, weep at his cross, and only then rejoice in his glorious resurrection. Let me ask you something: Have you ever noticed how each of those central events of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life has an object at its center? Well, each of them does. Today, on Palm Sunday, it’s the donkey that Jesus rides into Jerusalem. Mark just calls it a colt, but trust me on this one, it’s a donkey. More about that donkey in a moment. For Maundy Thursday one central object is the table. Others are the bread and wine. On Good Friday the central object is of course the cross. For Easter it is the empty tomb. Each of the named days of Holy Week has an object associated with it.

All of these things—the donkey, the table, the bread and wine, the cross, and the empty tomb—are material objects (even if one of them is an animal), but the important thing about them for us Christians is that they are much more than mere objects. They are symbols. They stand for something. They point beyond themselves to some profound meaning, a spiritual meaning, a meaning that tells us something about Jesus Christ and about God. Through them we find our connection with Jesus Christ and with God. We don’t do a Maundy Thursday service at this church—yet, maybe next year—so I won’t have a chance to talk to you about those symbols; but in our Good Friday service next Friday evening I will explore the meaning of the cross of Christ, and next Sunday on Easter I’ll talk about the empty tomb. This morning I want to talk about the donkey, the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem.

The background of the Palm Sunday story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is that after Jesus has spent perhaps about a year teaching and healing in Galilee to the north of Jerusalem he has made the fateful decision to go to Jerusalem. It is hard to overestimate the importance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people. It was the site of the temple, the seat of the religious authorities of the day. It was by far the biggest city in the region, and it was the city the Romans worried about most. It had been the scene of violent rebellions against Roman rule in the past, and the Romans feared that it would be again in the future. (They turned out to be right about that, by the way.) It wasn’t where the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate hung out most of the time, but it was where he would go, bringing a whole lot of Roman soldiers with him, during the Passover, when the population of the city swelled dramatically because of all the pilgrims coming to the temple. So when Jesus entered Jerusalem that fateful day he was entering the center of both the religious and the secular powers of his time.

Jesus could have snuck into the city unnoticed. After all, it’s not like his face was all over the television the way it would be today. No one in Jerusalem knew what he looked like, and his followers were hardly tweeting about his going to Jerusalem. He could have done it quietly, in a way that would not draw attention to himself. He didn’t. Instead he rode in on a donkey—why that would draw attention to him I’ll get to shortly—to the acclaim of the crowds who lined the road to hail him. Why? Why would Jesus come into Jerusalem that way?

To get an answer to that question we need to go back several hundred years before Jesus and look at those two verses we heard from Zechariah, an otherwise deservedly obscure Old Testament prophet. There the prophet tells of a king who is to come. He says that the king is, or will be, triumphant and victorious; but he comes not in a war chariot or riding a magnificent Arabian steed but “humble and riding on a donkey.” The prophet says that this king will “cut off the chariot from Ephraim,” that is, from Israel. He will cut off the battle bow and “command peace to the nations.” This king of whom Zechariah prophesies is pretty clearly a different kind of king. He is humble. He comes in not on a symbol of war, not in a military chariot like an earthly king would, but riding a symbol of peace, a simple donkey, a farm animal not a war animal. And we know the colt Mark mentions is a donkey because Zechariah says that the king comes in riding on a donkey.

When Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem he is acting out this scene from Zechariah. That he is doing so isn’t necessarily obvious to us. I mean, who knows anything about Zechariah today? Jewish people in Jesus’ time, however, would immediately have understood what Jesus was doing riding into town on that borrowed burro. He was saying through his action rather than through words I am indeed a king, but I am a very different kind of king.

Some scholars suggest that we imagine this scene this way. On one side of town Pilate and his Roman legions are marching into the city. Consider that scene for a moment: The military commanders ride in war chariots drawn by grand horses with magnificent tack. They are animals of war, animals of might and oppression. They make a fearful sight. The troops follow wearing their armor that flashes in the sun. They carry shields and spears, the implements of war. It is a grand procession, and a fearful one. It is Rome saying we have the power, and we’re not afraid to use it. It is Rome saying do not dare to defy us, for we can and will crush you, which they indeed did about forty years after today’s scene.

On the other side of town Jesus is riding into the city on a donkey. Now consider this scene: It is a parody of the Roman military procession. There are no implements of war. Instead there is a humble animal from the farm. A useful animal to be sure, and perhaps a cute one, but hardly a grand one, certainly not a frightening one. The donkey is a symbol of the peaceful life of the ordinary people. His time is the time of peace, the time of plowing, the time of pulling a cart taking the produce of the field to market. He is Zechariah’s donkey. He symbolizes the beating of swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. He symbolizes a world in which everyone sits under their own vines and their own fig trees, and no one makes them afraid, to use the words of the prophet Micah.

None of that may be obvious to us, but it would have been obvious to the people who saw Jesus engage in this prophetic act of riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Certainly Jesus must have intended people to understand what he was doing in this way. The parallel with that passage from Zechariah is too strong to be mere coincidence. Jesus didn’t sneak, or even just walk, into Jerusalem unnoticed. He didn’t do that precisely because he wanted to be noticed. He had come to Jerusalem to make a proclamation. He had come to Jerusalem to proclaim to the powers of his world that their way is not God’s way. During the week that lay before him he would do that with words. Upon his entry into Jerusalem he did it with his actions, riding on a humble donkey.

Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was nothing less than a provocation. It was a provocation directed to the powers of the place, to the Romans and to the Jewish temple authorities. Later on that week Pilate will ask Jesus if he is the king of the Jews. Jesus has already answered that question. He answered it when he acted out the prophecy of Zechariah. Yes, he said it with action not with words; but he still said it. His action said I am a king; but I am a very different kind of king. I am a king of peace not war. I am a king of peacetime pursuits, of agriculture and peaceful trade. I am a king from among the people not a king reigning over the people. Maybe the Romans didn’t get all of that from Jesus’ symbolic act of riding in on a donkey. They probably weren’t up on their Zechariah. The Jewish people of the city, however, surely did. Or at least they did if they knew their Zechariah as well as a good Jew of the time should have. If they didn’t get all that, if they saw only a reference to a king but missed the clear depiction of what kind of king Jesus is, then they missed his meaning altogether. Maybe that would explain why five days later these same people were shouting Crucify him!

The Romans for sure and the people of the city perhaps missed Jesus’ meaning when he rode into the center of power in his world on a donkey. Christianity has pretty much missed his meaning ever since. We’ve seen his riding into Jerusalem on a donkey as an act of humility. We haven’t seen it as a provocation aimed at the powers of the world. Yet that surely is what it was. We haven’t seen it as a prophetic act proclaiming the kingdom of God as a very different kind of kingdom from the kingdoms of the world. Yet that surely is what it was. Jesus prophetic act of riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was a proclamation to his world, and it is a proclamation to ours. It says don’t pursue the values and ways of the world. Pursue the values and ways of God, the ways of peace and justice for all people.

So thank you little donkey, and thanks to whoever owned you for letting Jesus borrow you. You played a role you could not possibly understand. You became a symbol, a symbol of peace triumphant over war, a symbol of ordinary, productive pursuits over military ones. A symbol of providing for people not conquering them. Most people who saw you, and most people who have read about you ever since, have misunderstood you. As we begin our journey with Jesus through Holy Week, may we at last understand what you were all about. Amen.

Jesus First

Jesus First

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 13, 2016

Scripture: John 12:1-8

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So we just heard John’s version of a Gospel story known as The Anointing at Bethany. It is one of the few stories that appears in all four Gospels, although Luke’s version of it is very different from the other three. In that story a woman whom John identifies as Mary, apparently the sister of Lazarus, pours some very costly perfume on Jesus’ feet. In other Gospels the woman is not identified as Mary, and she pours the perfume on his head not his feet, but never mind. Those differences don’t matter, or at least they don’t for my purposes this morning. In the story a disciple whom John identifies as Judas Iscariot but the other Gospels don’t identify at all objects to what she has done. He says the perfume could have been sold for nearly a year’s wages for a common worker and the money given to the poor. John says he objects not because he cares about the poor but because he wanted there to be money for him to steal, which the other Gospels don’t say about the man who objects to what the woman has done, but again, never mind. In John’s version of the story Jesus responds to Judas saying “Leave her alone. It was intended that she should have save this perfume for the day of my burial. You always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

I have to say that I used to find this to be a very difficult story to accept. See, I always tended to agree with the disciple who objects to what the woman has done. I mean, why is she pouring this expensive stuff on Jesus anyway? Nearly everyone we meet in the Gospels is extremely poor, and in Jesus’ world essentially everyone except a very few at the top lived only at a subsistence level. They all needed more money than they had. Many people were hungry because they could neither produce nor buy enough food. So why is this woman wasting all her money to buy this stuff and pour it on Jesus? It always used to sound like a waste to me. Beyond that, why does Jesus say something that sounds so much like he’s dismissing care for the poor as unnecessary? Of course care for the poor isn’t unnecessary. Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus commands us to do it and sees it as among the central works of faith. So why does he say here “You will always have the poor among you,” like there’s nothing you can do about poor people anyway so don’t worry about them? It sounds so un-Jesus-like. It sounds like a slap in the face to all Christians committed to social justice. Frankly, it just sounds wrong; and it used to bother me a lot.

It used to bother me a lot, but it doesn’t anymore. It doesn’t anymore because some time ago when this passage came up in the lectionary I finally figured out what’s going on in this story. I figured out that this story is making a profound and really important point about the life of faith. To understand what the point is, let’s look a bit more deeply at what’s going on here. In John’s version of the story Mary pours some very expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet. One way to understand why she does that is to understand the burial customs of her time and place. It was the Jewish practice at the time to anoint dead bodies, usually with some kind of perfume or spices. Jesus refers to this custom in our story when he says that this Mary had the perfume for the day of his burial. Mary is anointing Jesus’ body in advance of his death.

And we ask: Why would she perform a burial ritual while Jesus is still very much alive? That question leads us to another way of understanding what she’s doing, one that I think is much more important. What she’s doing is “anointing” Jesus. She is showing him to be the anointed one. That’s really significant. As Christians we confess that Jesus is variously the Messiah or the Christ. Those two words, Messiah and Christ, mean the same thing. Messiah comes from Hebrew, and Christ comes from Greek, but they both mean “anointed.” When we call Jesus the “Christ” the most basic meaning of our confession is that he is God’s anointed one. Now, the word Christ has come to have a lot more meaning than that for us, but Anointed One is the word’s original meaning.

Which tells us what Mary is really doing here. She is performing a prophetic act, an act of confession. She is confessing with her actions rather than her words that Jesus is God’s Anointed One. He is the Christ, the Messiah. She’s using her expensive perfume to confess her faith in Jesus.

That’s what she’s doing, and Judas will have none of it. I’ll set aside John’s snide comment about Judas’ motives for now. None of the other Gospels says what John says about the person who objects to what the woman has done. In three of the versions of this story in the Gospels someone says that they think the valuable asset that the perfume is should be used to help the poor. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always agreed. More than that, I find Jesus comment in John’s version of the “you will always have the poor among you” to be unfeeling and dismissive of people in need. OK, so we won’t ever end poverty. Maybe not, but surely that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care for those who live in poverty. I used to hear Jesus as just wrong in this passage.

Then I figured out that he isn’t. Here’s why he isn’t. What he’s saying here is “faith comes first.” Faith is actually more important than helping the poor. Jesus doesn’t mean don’t help the poor. He means faith comes first. He means faith in him comes first, and he’s absolutely right about that. See, caring for the poor isn’t exclusively a Christian thing to do. All the world’s great faith traditions tell people to care for the poor and others who are in need. Islam does that. Judaism does that. Buddhism does that, and so do many others. Caring for the poor can be a Christian thing to do, but it is our Christian faith that makes it Christian, not the actions we take themselves. I suppose it doesn’t matter much to most poor people if the person caring for them is Christian or not, but it should matter to us whether or not we’re acting as Christians. And what makes our actions Christian is our faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus comes first, then come Christian actions.

Faith comes first, and any of you who have done extended work with the poor or others in need know that it isn’t so easy to sustain that work. When we do that work it is so easy to burn out, to get exhausted, to get discouraged, even to get disillusioned. Real work in the world isn’t easy, and doing God’s work in the world can be harder than most other work. If we’re going to keep at that work, we need something to sustain us. We need fuel to keep us going. Faith is that something we need. Jesus is that fuel. They have to come first for us, or we don’t stand a chance of really doing much good Christian work in the world. That’s what this story is trying to tell us. Jesus first, then care for the poor. Not Jesus or care for the poor but both in the proper order.

And the story is telling us something else too. See, Mary doesn’t confess her faith in Jesus with words. Words are cheap, or at least they can be. What Mary does in this story isn’t cheap. This nard that she uses was immensely expensive. In today’s terms the perfume Mary poured out was worth several tens of thousands of dollars. Mary has probably used every material resource she had to obtain it. It represents not a commitment of her mind only but a commitment of her whole being, of everything she has. That’s the kind of commitment Jesus calls us to. Not the words of our mouths only but the commitment of our hearts, of our whole being. That’s the commitment that can keep us going. Words fade, real commitment doesn’t. Or at least we have a better chance that it won’t. Jesus first, yes, but Jesus really, truly first. First in everything we do. First in every use we make of whatever we have. That’s the radical message of this story, and it’s not an easy message. Of course, God forgives us when we don’t measure up to it, but the call is still there. It’s one thing this story is trying to tell us.

So. Jesus first. Jesus first in all we do. Jesus first with all we have. That’s faith. That’s our call from God. Putting Jesus first sustains us. It fills us. It lifts us up when we sink from exhaustion or despair. Yes, we always have the poor with us; and we are always called to care for them and to try to remedy the causes of their poverty. But Mary was right. Jesus first. Always. In everything. May we have the faith to do it. Amen.

Only Then

Only Then

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 6, 2016

Scripture:
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Some weeks it’s not like that, but this week reading the lectionary selections for today was for me a pure delight, for they contain two of my absolute favorite passages in all of Scripture. The parable of the prodigal son has long been my favorite out of all of Jesus’ parables. It is such a powerful statement of God’s unshakable love for all of us no matter what we might have done in our lives that I can hardly read it or talk about it without choking up a bit. It really tells us as lot of what our faith is all about. Then there’s the passage we heard from Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth. It contains the wonderful, foundational line: "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them." Like Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, this verse tells us what our faith is really all about.

There are at least a couple of things that I want to draw out of these wonderful readings for us this morning. The first has to do with repentance. The issue of the necessity of repentance before forgiveness is a really big one in Christian theology. The most common understanding in our tradition is that God forgives those who repent and, by implication at least, does not forgive those who do not. I’ll be blunt here. I don’t see it that way. I believe that repentance is a way in which we can make God’s forgiveness real in our lives but that forgiveness itself does not depend on repentance. I find powerful support for that position in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. What happens? The younger son of a man with a considerable estate took his share of the estate early, went away, squandered it, and ended up envying the pigs he was reduced to tending the slop they were given to eat. Then it occurred to him that he could go back to his father and ask to be taken on as a hired hand. Surely that would be better than envying pigs in a foreign land. But he, like so many of us, thinks that there is no way his father will take him back unless he repents first. So he rehearses his repentance speech: "I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’" I don’t really doubt that his repentance was sincere, although it was rather motivated by self-interest. Still, he was prepared to repent, and he thought repentance was necessary.

So he set out to return to his father, all prepared to grovel and to call himself a sinner. And what happened? As Jesus tells the story, "while he was still a long way off, his father saw him...." The father sees him coming. He hasn’t yet heard the son say anything. He as yet has no idea what is in his son’s heart. He hasn’t heard a single word of repentance. Nonetheless, Jesus says, the father "was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw arms around him and kissed him." The father extended the arms of love, grace, and forgiveness before the son had said a single word! Before a single iota of repentance had been expressed! The father didn’t care about that. All he cared about was that his son had returned.

The father says as much at the end of the parable. Responding to the faithful older son’s grumbling about the extravagant welcome the father had given the prodigal, the father says: "We had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found." Luke 15:32 Not: It’s OK to welcome him back because he has repented. Not, I have forgiven him because he’s really sorry, he feels really bad about what he did. No. All that matters here is that the son who was lost has been found, the son who left has come back. When he came back no questions were asked, no explanation was demanded. Oh, sure. The prodigal delivers his little speech about having sinned. I mean, he’d rehearsed it and all. He was going to give it no matter what. The speech, however, isn’t what produced the father’s grace. All that was needed there was the son’s presence, his return. The father was there all the time the son was gone, watching, keeping a look out, longing for the return of the prodigal. The father embraced the son, and only then, as far as the father knew, did the son repent. Only then.

You see, this story is about reconciliation, about closing the gap between people and the gap between people and God. I suppose it’s obvious that the father represents God here, and the way the father is in this story truly is the way God is with us. God is already reconciled with us. God is there all the time, watching for us, keeping a look out for us, longing to throw a big party for us if we will only give God the chance. There is a place for our repentance, but God doesn’t require it any more than the father in Jesus’ greatest parable required it. All God requires is that we show up, and really, I think there’s a sense in which God doesn’t even require that. The prodigal’s father was reconciled with him while, as we are told, the son was still far off. The reconciliation was were there. It’s just that the son didn’t know it until he came home.

That’s what Jesus has done for us. In Jesus we are reconciled with God. Paul knew it and said so: "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself." That’s what Jesus is all about. Our faith is all about our reconciliation with God, about the world’s reconciliation with God. In Christ, the entire world is reconciled with God. And not just the world but each and every person living in it or whoever has lived in it. The problem is not that we are separated from God. The problem is that we don’t know that no matter how separated we may feel from God, God never feels separated from us. Or at least, God longs not to be separated from us and, as far as God is concerned, any separation has already been healed. All we have to do to make that healing real in our lives is wake up and realize that God’s healing is already there, just waiting for us to figure it out.

Paul knows that, but Paul tells us something else that is worth paying attention to. In this wonderful passage from 2 Corinthians Paul doesn’t stop with telling us that in Christ God was reconciling the world to Godself. He goes on to draw out the implications of that statement for us. In Christ God was not only reconciling the world to Godself, God has "committed to us the message of reconciliation." That’s our mission, folks. That’s the church’s mission. Reconciliation. Reconciliation pure and simple. We are called to bring the good news that God is reconciled with the world and everyone in it to the world and everyone in it. And especially to those who don’t know it, those who think God rejects them, or who think that Christians think God rejects them. Reconciliation. Not judgment. Not demands for repentance. We are called to Christ’s ministry of reconciliation. Can we do it? Will we do it? With the help of God I trust that we can and we will. Amen.

The Richest Fare

The Richest Fare

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 28, 2016

Scripture: Isaiah 55:1-3, 6-9

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We just heard a few verses from the book of Isaiah. They’re from the part of the book that was written in the mid-sixth century BCE when many of the leaders of the Hebrew people were in forced exile in Babylon, some six hundred miles or so away from home. These verses were written over 2,500 years ago, yet every time I read them I am struck by how contemporary they are. That of course is how it often works with Bible. Texts written in ancient cultures so different from ours that we can hardly comprehend how foreign they would be to us speak truth us in our time and place. These verses from Isaiah 55 are among my favorite verses in the entire Bible. They begin with a divine invitation to a heavenly banquet: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” It’s a magnificent heavenly invitation to everyone, especially the very poor, to come to God’s table and partake of the food and drink that God offers. I’ve always been able to buy the food I need, but even so these words always lift my spirits and kind of make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. They are God’s unconditional invitation into the life of God. They say God welcomes everyone. Absolutely everyone. Without condition. Without any admission test. It is an invitation to those the world considers unworthy, expressed here as an invitation to the very poor. The fare the God offers is for everyone. Absolutely everyone. That, my friends, is great good news indeed.

These words come to us from the sacred traditions of Judaism, our mother faith. They come to us from a very long time ago. Yet they speak powerfully to us, or at least to me. I need the food that God offers as much as anyone. I suspect that you do too. Our world needs God’s feeding as much as the ancient world ever did. These words speak God’s invitation to all people in all times and places. Thanks be to God!

Yet these words of invitation to a feast aren’t actually the part of what we heard that I find to be the most surprisingly contemporary and the most powerful. Those words come next. Isaiah has God ask God’s people a truly profound and very current question: “Why spend money on that which is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” Every time I read or hear those words I’m amazed that they were written so long ago, for they seem to me to be speaking directly to our current circumstances and needs. OK, maybe that’s because I hear them speaking so directly to my own life story, but I think they do a lot more than that. We all know that our society has more problems than we can keep up with. High rates of drug addiction and alcoholism. High divorce rates. A huge number of homeless people, some but not all of whom are addicts or alcoholics or who suffer from mental illness that we do such a lousy job of dealing with. Perhaps most of all violence. Violence is all around us. Our nation uses it around the world. Domestic violence is far more prevalent than most of us realize. Gun violence wracks our homes, schools, mall, and work places. Yes, there is much good in our society. Much caring and taking after, but the social ills never seem to go away. They just seem to get worse. Perhaps they seem to get worse in part because with all of today’s mass media we hear about them more than we used to, but there’s more to it than that. We really do live in a world with massive dysfunction.

Now, I’m no sociologist. I haven’t done in-depth study of any of these problems, but I have lived in this world for quite a few years now. I have worked in this world for quite a few years now, in various capacities including the one that has me up here in front of you this morning. Based mostly on my life experience, I am convinced that a foundational cause of all of those problems is that we spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. Let me use some of my experience as an example. Back when I used to work as a lawyer in downtown law firms we all knew that the research showed that easily half of all lawyers said they would rather be doing something else if they could. They just thought they couldn’t. So did I. We called it “golden handcuffs.” What we were buying wasn’t bread. Our labor did not satisfy, but oh my was the money good. I also knew that in the downtown professional world in which I was trying to pass the divorce and alcoholism rates were through the roof. High powered lawyers for whom I worked had extramarital affairs with their associates and legal assistants, and sometimes with their law partners, all the time. Many lawyers saw legal ethics as nothing so much as meaningless barriers to them making even more money.

Somehow I managed to avoid those traps myself, which I can only ascribe to the grace of God; yet at some level I think I always knew that I wasn’t cut out for life in that world. Still, I kept trying. I kept working. I even tried to run my own law office for a few years, something that led me into depression and an emotional/spiritual crisis that eventually landed me in ordained Christian ministry, which came as at least as much of a shock to me as it was to anyone else. And what was the problem? I was buying that which is not bread and laboring for that which did not satisfy. The prophet we call Second Isaiah knew that dynamic over 2,500 years go. I came to know it twenty-five years ago.

Here’s what I think my problem was and what I think our society’s problems are grounded in. We get a hint at it from the wonderful last lines of our reading from Isaiah this morning. Isaiah has God say “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways….As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” God’s ways are not the ways by which the world lives most of the time, not the way most people live most of the time. Yet God created us in God’s image and likeness. God created us to live, as fully as we can given our mortal limitations according to God’s ways. When we seek to live according to God’s ways we are fed the bread of heaven. When we seek to live according to God’s ways, we live lives that truly satisfy. Why do we spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy? Because we rely on ourselves and the world not on God. Because we think living up to the world’s standards will bring us wholeness of life.

But here’s the truth: It won’t. Living the way of the world leads to a dead end, or at least it does for an awful lot of people. Living the ways of God brings us true bread and true satisfaction. What are the ways of God? Pretty much the opposite of the ways of the world. A life lived in love not in hatred. A live of cooperation not competition. A life of inclusion not exclusion. A life of peace not violence. A life of caring not indifference. A life of service not selfishness. Yes, those are generalizations, and it is up to every one of us to discern what they mean specifically for us in our own time, place, and life circumstances. Whatever the specifics are, that way lies health, wholeness, salvation. That way lies God’s richest fare, a banquet of true life and true love. May we find the grace to live as God calls us to live, with real bread and true satisfaction. Amen.

Unwanted Grace

Unwanted Grace

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 21, 2016

Scripture: Luke 13:31-35

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s Lent, although I suppose you all know by now. Lent is one of the seasons of the church year that is about anticipation and preparation. In Lent it’s anticipation of and preparation for our annual commemoration and celebration of the central events of the Christian story of grace, the events of Holy Week. That week we walk once more with Jesus through his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his last meal with his disciples, his arrest, trial, and crucifixion by the Romans, and then only after all that his glorious Resurrection. Lent is preparation for marking those events in God’s story of grace. Lent is nothing less than preparation for grace itself. It is preparation for receiving anew God’s free and unmerited love in which we are saved and reconciled to God. Thanks be to God!

Thanks be to God indeed, but recently I’ve been struck by something about God’s grace that I haven’t paid much attention to before, at least not in these terms. I’ve been struck by how much of the time we people don’t want God’s grace, or at least we sure act like we don’t. I first thought about this dynamic when I read a story in the early pages of Thomas Merton’s book The Seven Storey Mountain, that some of us are reading together these days. Merton tells a story about himself and his younger brother from when they were very young. Thomas would be playing outdoors with his friends. His little brother desperately wanted to play with them, but they wouldn’t let him. They’d throw stones at him to chase him away. Despite the stones, he just wouldn’t leave. He’s stand some distance off, afraid to come closer because of the stones. Merton describes him as “standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction…, as insulted as he was saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. Yet he does not go away.” Merton sees this story as an image of God’s grace and our rejection of it, with his little brother playing the part of God and Merton and his friends playing the part of sinners.

Merton comments: “This terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it.” We reject God’s love, God’s grace, he says, “simply because it does not please us to be loved.” It doesn’t please us, he says, because “being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we need love from others” and because we think that being loved so unconditionally seems “to imply some obscure kind of humiliation” Merton is saying that he and his friends didn’t want the unconditional love that Merton’s little brother was offering them. He points in his usual powerful way to a paradoxical fact of human existence: Even when we know that God offers us unconditional grace, much of the time we just don’t want it.

People not wanting God’s grace isn’t just a phenomenon of the modern world, although I suspect that it is far more widespread in the modern world than it was in antiquity. Jesus saw it in his own time and in the history of Israel. We heard him comment on it in our passage from Luke this morning. There he says “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (That by the way is a feminine image of God, but I’ll leave that matter for another day.) Speaking in effect as God, Jesus uses an image of a hen and her chicks as an image of God’s free offer of love and points out how unwilling we are to accept it.

And I can hear you saying: What’s he talking about? I want God’s grace. Of course I want God’s grace. Who wouldn’t? Maybe I say I hear you saying that because I hear myself saying it too. Well, let me suggest what I think is going on when Merton says that we don’t want God’s uninterested love and I say we don’t want God’s grace, by which I mean the same thing. To do that, let’s go back to Merton’s story about his little brother wanting to play with him and his friends and they not letting him. What would have happened if Merton and his friends had let the younger child play with them? They would have had to change what they were doing, that’s what. In this story Merton is about nine, and his brother is about five. Nine year olds and five year olds don’t play the same way. They aren’t interested in the same things. They aren’t capable of doing all the same things. So if Merton and his friends were really going to play with little brother they would have had to change their play. If they had accepted little brother into their lives, having him in their lives would have made demands on them. Letting him in would have had a cost. It would have cost the older something, and they didn’t want to pay the price.

That, folks, is how it often is with us when it comes to accepting God’s grace. We want it, but we want it free. We don’t want to have to pay for it. We don’t want it to make demands on us. We want just to say thank you God and go on with our lives as before. The great martyred German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke powerfully of this dynamic around grace. He called what we want, and what we mostly accept, cheap grace. He said that we make God’s grace cheap when we accept it without cost, when we accept it and change nothing in our lives. When we accept the gift without accepting the demands that come with the gift. That, he said, is cheap grace.

Bonhoeffer said that God’s grace is free, but it isn’t cheap. That may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it isn’t. God’s grace truly is free, that is, God offers it unconditionally. We don’t have to do anything to earn it, and indeed we really can’t do anything to earn it. God offers it anyway. Freely. God’s grace is free, but it isn’t cheap. It isn’t cheap because it has two very high costs associated with it even though it is free.

Bonhoeffer says that God’s grace isn’t cheap because it costs lives. First of all it cost a man his life, Jesus, who died to bring us God’s grace. That’s hardly cheap. It came at a very high price, the price of a man’s life. But Bonhoeffer had another life that he said God’s grace costs. That life is our life. It is the life of every woman and man who truly understands God’s free gift of grace. Of course it’s not that we physically die as soon as we truly understand God’s grace, but that grace still costs us our life. That is, it costs us the old life we had been living before we truly understood God’s grace. When we truly understand God’s grace we really have no choice. We must leave our old lives behind. We must leave the lives we lived according to the standards of the world and start living according to the standards of the Kingdom of God.

See, God’s grace is free; but it comes with strings attached. Not strings that mean we must do something to earn it. No, God’s grace really is free. Strings, rather, that mean that God’s grace comes with demands. God’s grace demands not that we earn it but that we respond to it. That we respond to it with transformed lives. It’s not that God’s grace goes away if we don’t, but God’s demand that we do is still there. Or if you don’t like the word demand, think of it as God asking us, God pleading with us, to respond to God’s grace in our words and in our lives. Yet demand is the word that works for me. I’m often reminded of the line from one of the verses of the hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” where it says “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” That line nicely sums up what I mean when I say God’s grace isn’t cheap. It demands that we respond with transformed lives.

Transformed how? Well, that’s a complex and difficult question, and I’m not going to try to answer it this morning. Answering it is truly the work of a lifetime. If you want to start exploring answers to that question, please join us this coming Saturday morning at 10. We’re going to have a discussion around precisely that question. It will only be a beginning, but it should be a meaningful time, and I hope you can join us.

God loves. God saves. God calls. God demands. God’s grace is free, but it isn’t cheap. May we have ears to listen and hearts to respond. Amen.