Nothing!

Nothing!

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 30, 2017

Scripture: Romans 8:35, 38-39

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.

If you were here last week you heard me say it. If you have read the text of last week’s sermon on line you’ve seen me say it. Romans 8:38-39 are my favorite verses in the Bible. If I could keep only one sentence out of the Bible Romans 8:38-39 would be it. You’ve just heard them, but let me give them to you again: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I mean, just think about what Paul is saying here. We live and move in the love of God that we know in and through Jesus Christ, and nothing in all creation can separate us from that love. Think about it. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. And if nothing can separate us from that love, then God’s love is with us always and everywhere. Every second of the day and the night. When we are home and when we are away from home. When we are young and when we are old. When we are well and when we are sick. When we are good and when we sin. As we live and as we die. In this life and beyond this life. Absolutely nothing can or ever does separate us from the love of God.

Now, when I saw that these verses were in the lectionary selections for today I knew that I would preach on them, but my first thought about how to preach on them was: Read the verses, say thanks be to God, and sit down. And yes, I can see that some of you would like it very much if I did precisely that, but I’m not going to. I’m going to because I realized as I continued to contemplate these verses that there actually are a few more things that need to be said about them, or at least that I want to say about them.

To begin with: Many Christians are strongly convinced that these verses just don’t and can’t say what they appear to say. Paul says nothing can separate us from the love of God, but a great many Christians are convinced that there are a great many people who are separated from the love of God, whom God does not love. Some of them read the “us” in Paul’s statement to mean only us Christians, or even only us certain type of Christians. They’re quite happy to read everyone else out of Paul’s “us” and to believe that everyone not like them is permanently and irretrievably separated from the love of God. I don’t think that’s what Paul meant by these verses, and it sure isn’t what I mean by them. It just doesn’t make any sense to me that God would create a world with as many different faith traditions as the world has, then provide that only one of those traditions—and quite conveniently the one that is ours—is the only way to stand in God’s love. No, if Paul’s great affirmation that nothing can separate us from the love of God is to speak to many of us today it has to mean that nothing can separate anyone from the love of God.

Next, sadly there are a lot of people who just can’t and don’t believe that they are not separated from the love of God. Some of those people are among those I just mentioned, among those who the Christian tradition has told they are separated from the love of God. Tragically, many people take those false words to be trued, and they believe them. Here’s one example. Many LGBT people are filled with self-hatred because the church has told them they are sinners damned to spend eternity in hell. They know deep inside that their orientation or gender identity is just who they are, just how God created them, but people claiming to speak with the authority of scripture and even of God have told them they are sinners and God doesn’t love them. Other people can’t believe God loves them because they have done some wrong in their lives. Maybe they committed a crime. Maybe they got divorced, and the church told them divorce was a sin. Maybe they think their sexual desire is sinful and God doesn’t love them because they feel it. Maybe they were just unkind to someone, perhaps even someone they love. They can’t forgive themselves, so they can’t believe that God has forgiven them and loves them. The Christian tradition has done far too good a job of convincing all sorts of people that God doesn’t love them, or that God won’t love them unless they do something the church tells them to do. Sadly, these folks can’t hear the truth in Paul’s words that nothing can separate them from the love of God.

You know, there are powers at work in the world that seek all the time to separate us from the love of God. These are powers of culture, the powers of wealth, prestige, power, and worldly success. These idols call to us constantly saying worship us and not that God of yours. Saying ignore that God and follow us. Saying we will make your life complete. We will grant you satisfaction. You’ll find the good live with us. The love of God, they say? Phooey on that. That’s not what you need. You need a bigger house and a bigger car. If you’re a lawyer you need the corner office. If you’re a doctor you need to be chief of staff for a big hospital or to work in the most prestigious clinic in some big city rather than in some rural clinic where people really need you. You need designer clothes and vacations on the Riviera. You need money. You need to be respected or at least envied by all the people who want the same things you want. The love of God? Forget about it, they say.

These things and many others try to pry us away from the love of God all the time. Paul says they can’t, and I am convinced that at least as far as God is concerned he’s right. If we think we’re separated from the love of God it is a separation of our own making not of God’s. It is actually an illusion of our own making, for the love of God is always still there. God never takes it away. We may think we’re separated from it, but we’re really not; and we can always come back to the truth that we’re not and make the love of God real in our lives once more.

And there’s one more objection that people raise to the idea that nothing can separate us from the love of God. People have said it to me any number of times, so often that frankly I just expect to hear it when I preach the message I’m preaching today. They say you’re taking away people’s incentive to behave properly. You’re taking away their incentive to avoid sin. To do good. To be kind. To do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with their God. This objection to the notion that God’s love is universal is grounded in the idea that the only reason people behave themselves is fear. It says people behave themselves only if they fear God’s judgment if they don’t behave themselves. This belief is, frankly, grounded in a misunderstanding of God, but it also makes good behavior perfectly selfish. If I care for someone in need it’s not because that person has need but because I’m really looking out for myself not that person. I care for that person because I’m afraid God will damn me if I don’t. The idea that people act properly only out of fear actually makes moral behavior immoral. It becomes immoral because it becomes selfish. Now, it’s better to do good things for selfish reasons than not to do them at all, but isn’t it even better to do them because they’re good? Isn’t it better to care for and about others because it is good to are for an about others than to do it to benefit myself? I think it is.

But here’s the thing. Saying that nothing can separate us from the love of God actually doesn’t remove our motivation for being good, it just changes what that motivation is. God does indeed want and expect a great deal from us. God wants and expects us to be people of the kingdom not people of the world. God wants us to care for people in need. God wants us to be witnesses for peace and justice in a world where those things are in such short supply. God wants to love God, neighbor, and self. God wants us to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. But God doesn’t want us to do those things so that God will love us. God wants us to do those things because God loves us. God calls us to a proper way of living not to earn God’s love but in response to God’s love. Paul says somewhere in effect “how can you who have died to sin go on sinning?” His answer: You can’t, but not because it is your works that will save you. Rather it’s because you know that you are already saved. You know the love of God, and when you truly know the love of God you can’t help but respond. Respond by rejecting sin. Respond by living a life of love, a life of caring, a life of justice.

We can’t earn God’s love, and the great good news is that we don’t have to. Nothing ever separates us from that love, and our call is to realize that great truth and live into it. Live into it and live out of it. Live into it, and make it real in God’s world. No, believing that God’s love is unconditional and universal doesn’t remove all motivation to be good. Rather, it liberates us from fear and frees us to live the lives God calls us to live out of love not terror. To accept God’s grace as a gift not a payment. To love not in order to be loved but because we already are.

Folks, it’s the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a nutshell: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And now, after all that, I’ll say what I was tempted to say at the beginning and just sit down: Thanks be to God! Amen.

Search Me, O God

Search Me, O God

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 23, 2017

Scripture: Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24

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.

Do you have favorite Bible passages? Most everyone who knows the Bible does. I certainly do. My most favorite passage is Romans 8:38-39. I’ll paraphrase it: For I am convinced that neither life nor death nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It’s in the lectionary for next Sunday, and it’s a pretty good bet that I’ll be preaching on it then. Part of another of my favorite passages is in the lectionary for today. It’s Psalm 139, or most of it anyway. We just heard some of it. It speaks so powerfully to me that all through seminary I kept a copy of it at the front of class notebook. I suppose it spoke so powerfully to me back then because my sense that God had searched me and known me was why I was in seminary in the first place. God surely knew me better than I had known me. When my subconscious first started to tell me that that I really am is a preacher my ego dismissed that thought as utter nonsense. When my subconscious began telling me in dreams and otherwise that I had come to the end of my time as a lawyer and that I needed to be doing something else, my ego resisted and denied what the Spirit was telling me through my subconscious. God knew better than I did who I really am. God was calling me to do something new with whatever gifts and abilities God had given me. Psalm 139 speaks the truth that God knows us better than we know ourselves: “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.”

That’s how Psalm 139 begins. It says God knows our thoughts. God knows our movements. God knows what we are going to say before we say it: “Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.” Yet Psalm 139 is so rich that it speaks other truths as well, and some of that other truth I think is also part of why I find this psalm so powerful. One other truth that it speaks is that God is with us always and everywhere. It asks: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” It answers, in effect, “nowhere.” God is with us everywhere. Whether we are in heaven or in hell, God is there. If we flee to the farthest corners of the earth, God is there. If we try to hide from God in the darkness God is there, for darkness is as light to God. The psalm’s line “if I settle on the far side of the sea” reminds me of the story of Jonah. He thought he could run away from God by heading in the opposite direction from where God had told him to go. It didn’t work, and Jonah ended up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit before he figured out that he couldn’t run away from God. Psalm 139 speaks that truth without anyone getting swallowed by whale. No matter where we go, Psalm 139 says, God’s hand will always guide us and hold us fast. That, folks, is perhaps the most profound truth of our faith. It says in different words what that favorite Bible passage of mine, Romans 8:38-39, says, that nothing can ever separate us from God and God’s love. Our response to that great message of God’s unfailing presence and love can only be one thing: “Thanks be to God!”

Or at least our response to that great message of God’s unfailing presence and love must begin with “Thanks be to God.” That’s the starting point of our response, but when we really think about it we quickly realize I think that it is only a starting point. After all, Psalm 139 doesn’t just say God is with us everywhere. We know that it also says to God you have searched me and known me. It returns to that theme in its final lines. It says: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” The NIV translation we use here says “know my anxious thoughts.” The NRSV translation just has “know my thoughts” here, and surely God knows more than our anxious thoughts. Surely the psalmist would want God to know all his thoughts, not just his anxious ones. Moreover, right after the psalm asks God to know the psalmists thoughts the psalmist calls on God to lead him “in the way everlasting.” That’s how the psalm ends, and that seems to be the point to which the whole psalm leads up. Lead me in the way everlasting.

That last line suggests, I think, that God being with us always and everywhere and God knowing our thoughts has consequences. God knows us. God knows us intimately. God knows us better than we know ourselves, and God loves anyway. God certainly loves us better than we love ourselves, and God loves other people a whole lot more than we love most of them. God’s love is free and unconditional, but it calls for a response. That’s what being led in the way everlasting is about here. God leads always in new ways, and God expects us to follow. That surely is one of the messages of Psalm 139.

I think the psalm really does say that, or at least it implies it pretty strongly. That is part of Psalm 139’s message. Yet that really is not the good news of Psalm 139. The good news of Psalm 139 is rather in the parts of it that tell us that God is with us always. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had times in my life when it was only my awareness of God’s presence with me that has gotten me through. For me those have particularly been times of grief, but we all have times of pain, sorrow, loss, despair, that only God can get us through. Psalm 139 assures us that God is always there in those difficult times.

That is surely very good news, but really, presence by itself doesn’t necessarily mean much. God could be present in a way but be passive, or uncaring, or even harmful. Yet that is not how it is with God’s presence with us. See, God’s presence with us certainly isn’t uncaring and even more certainly isn’t harmful. God’s presence with us isn’t even passive. God’s presence is an active presence. It is a presence of solidarity and care. It is a presence of love, a presence of grace. When we are in need, when we struggle, when we suffer, God is there with us offering us the help that only God can give. God is there acting in solidarity and love. God lifts us up when we are burdened down with grief, pain, or guilt. God gives us hope when all seems hopeless. We can hope in the presence of God in a way we never can without God because with God we know not that everything will be all right from a worldly perspective but that everything will be and is all right from a cosmic perspective, from a divine perspective. We can find strength, courage, and hope in situations where those things seem in very short supply because we know that however we may be suffering God has suffered too in the person of Jesus Christ. God has suffered what we suffer, and worse. God is always there not just to be there but to help in ways only God can. Thanks be to God!

That’s why, I think, Psalm 139 connects God’s unfailing, universal presence with a call for God to search us and know us. God searches us and knows us not to condemn but to save. Not to punish but to sustain. God searches us and knows us so that God will know, deeply and intimately, what we need every hour of our lives. Only when God has that knowledge of us can God give the divine help we need. Now please understand what that does not mean. It doesn’t mean we won’t suffer. It doesn’t mean we won’t die. In Jesus on the cross we see that ending suffering and death is not how God relates to them. Rather, God relates to them the way Psalm 139 says God relates to them. By being present with us in them. By suffering and dying with us and promising us that suffering and death are never the end for any of us. That’s the good news of Psalm. 139. That’s the good news of the Christian faith. Again, thanks be to God!

In one of the Old Testament’s great stories Jonah tried to run away from God and ended up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit. The psalmist of Psalm 139 knew both that it isn’t possible to run away from God and that there is no reason to run away from God. So let’s take our cue from Psalm 139. Let’s open our hearts and minds to God’s loving and saving presence with us every moment of our lives. Let’s open our hearts and minds for God to know us fully and deeply. Let us rejoice in God’s unfailing, sustaining, grace-filled knowledge of us and presence with us always and everywhere. That is the good news of Psalm 139. It is the Good News of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Becoming Loam

Becoming Loam

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 16, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

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.

My mother, may she rest in peace, loved to grow flowers. About the only vegetable I remember her growing was tomatoes, but she always grew flowers. I remember roses, dahlias, daphne, sweet peas, zinnias, and many others. I remember that at least once and maybe more than once she had a load of loam delivered to the house. She worked it into her flower beds to create better soil for the flowers to grow in. That was many decades ago now, but I still remember the loam. I remember its rich, dark brown color, its smooth, dense feel, and its rich, earthy, organic aroma. It has an air of fertility about it even as it sat in a pile in our driveway. That wonderful smell is what I remember best. It is a fond memory that evokes find memories of a happy childhood now long past. Loam is a type of soil that produces abundant plant growth when used with skill and care. It is wonderful stuff.

As I contemplated Jesus’ parable of the sower that we just heard that wonderful memory of dense, rich, aromatic loam came to my mind. So did the way Mom would work it into her flower beds to foster the growth of her beloved blooms. That parable is, after all, about different kinds of soil. The parable’s farmer sows seed, presumably working to produce some kind of crop to feed his family or to sell in the marketplace in town. Now, I’m no farmer, although when I was about four years old I thought I wanted to be one when I grew up. I of course had no idea of what hard and risky work farming is. No, I’m no farmer, but it seems to me that the farmer of Jesus’ parable was being somewhat careless about where he sowed his precious seed. Did he really think some of it would grow in the path that got walked all over every day? Or in rocky ground? Or among thorn bushes? Yet I suppose that is how it is with God and God’s word. God sows it everywhere, hoping that in at least some of the places where it lands it will sprout and produce a good harvest. And of course we’re dealing here with a parable, not a handbook on good farming practices. And some of the farmer’s seed falls on what the parable calls “good soil.” This seed sprouted, grew, and produced the abundant harvest the farmer was hoping for.

This is a parable, a little story that Jesus told to make some point. So what is this parable’s point? It is, I think, that we are called to be good soil for the word of God. We are not to be the barren path, nor the rocky soil, nor the soil infested with thorns that will choke out the word. We are to be the good soil. In other words, we are to be loam for the word of God.

OK, we are called to loam for the word of God; but that statement raises as many questions as it answers, or maybe more questions than it answers. To me the two most obvious questions it raises are: what does it mean to be loam, and if we aren’t loam already how do we become loam for the word of God? So let me tackle those question one at a time in that order.

What does it mean for us to be loam for the word of God? Our parable actually suggests an answer to that question. It says that the good soil produces abundant crops in the person who hears the word of God and “understands” it. All parables have their limitations, and one of the limitations I see in this parable is that it makes “understand it” sound like something that either happens right away all at once or doesn’t happen at all. Well, that’s not how I experience the faith, and I doubt that it’s how many of you experience the faith either. Understanding the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a lifelong undertaking. I have worked with it professionally for years, and I don’t claim to understand it fully. I doubt that I will ever understand it fully. It’s too grand a subject for us fully to understand. It’s too mysterious. I will always remain a bit of mystery that we are called not to understand but to live into.

When we think of “understand” the word about the kingdom this way, then understanding as something that fosters the flourishing of the kingdom makes sense. After all, the kingdom of God isn’t something that comes about magically. It comes about when we humans cooperate with God in creating it. And we can hardly cooperate with God in creating it is we don’t know what it is. If we don’t understand it.

Yet with all due respect for Matthew and the explanation of this parable that he puts in Jesus’ mouth, it seems to me that surely there is more to the kingdom of God thriving and producing an abundant harvest than our understanding. Understanding it seems to me is mostly a head thing. When I at least hear the verb understand I think first of all of cognitive processes. But surely there is more involved in being rich soil for the kingdom of God than just thinking the right things. Thinking correctly is a necessary starting place, for having wrong ideas about something blocks proper understandings and gets in the way of the right things prospering and producing abundantly. But we humans are more than our thoughts. It seems to be that there are a couple of other things involved if we are to be loam, to be rich soil for God’s kingdom.

In addition to our heads we must accept the word of the kingdom in our hearts. In the Bible the heart is a symbol of the wholeness of a person, of the person’s entire being. In this sense heart is about more than thoughts. It is about feelings, emotions, urges, drives, desires. Our heads think, but our hearts motivate. If we are to be rich soil for the kingdom we must enter into the kingdom not only with our heads but with our hearts, with our whole being. Only if we do that will the kingdom flourish in us so that we be agents of its flourishing in the world. There’s a saying in theological circles that means a lot to me. We say the heart cannot love what the head cannot accept, and I certainly believe that that is true. I’ve spent a lot of my time as a professional Christian working out the head stuff, coming up with theological understandings that my head accepts so that my heart can love the Christian faith, Christian ministry, Jesus Christ, and God. The head stuff matters, but growing the kingdom of God takes more than our heads. It takes our hearts too.

Here’s another way of putting this point. I can understand a lot of things in my head and do nothing to make those things real in the world. If I am to be loam for the kingdom of God I must feel passion for the kingdom. I must love the kingdom. I must want to see the kingdoms of the world transformed into the kingdom of God. I must be willing to work to make that happen. I must be willing to risk to make that happen. Indeed, I must be ready to risk a great deal, even my life, if I am truly to be loam for the kingdom. After all, being loam for the kingdom got Jesus crucified, and it has gotten a huge number of Christians killed over the centuries as they worked to make the kingdom real in the face of the world’s very different forces and priorities. I suppose all of those other things that I must be in order to become loam for the kingdom are a kind of understanding, or perhaps they just flow from a proper understanding. Whatever. I know that my being loam for the kingdom involves a lot more than just thinking the right things.

So how do I, how do we, become loam for the kingdom. Well, first of all we have to figure out what it is. A woman at the lectionary study I do on Wednesday mornings are the retirement place in Monroe asked me this last week what the kingdom is. I told her that’s not an easy question to answer. What it comes down to is the the kingdom of God is the way the world would be if God were king of the world and the kings, or other rulers, of the world were not. The kingdom of God is the world ordered according to God’s values and desires. It is the world transformed from a place of injustice to a place of justice for all. Transformed from a place of violence to a place of nonviolent peace. From a place of material values to a place of spiritual values. From a place of prejudice and hatred to a place of acceptance and love.

Then to be loam for the kingdom we have to love Christ’s vision for what the world can be and what God wants the world to be. We have to give our hearts to it. We have to long for it, pine for it, ache for our world that is so far from it. We have to love it even it making it reality means we have to give up our privileges. Give up some of our wealth. Change the way we live. Change the things we value. Love God so much that we can’t just sit by and let the world go on its hateful, harmful ways like it always has and still does.

That, folks, is what would make loam for the kingdom of God. Being that way would make us fertile soil for the seeds of the kingdom that Jesus sowed during his life on earth and that God continues to sow among us every day. Being loam for the kingdom isn’t easy. It isn’t safe. The world resists the kingdom of God, and when people try to establish the kingdom of God the world fights back. But God is like the sower in Jesus’ parable. The farmer sowing his seed in that parable didn’t want it to fall on barren ground and never sprout, never produce a harvest. He wanted all of his seed to sprout. He wanted the plant it produced to take root, to grow, and to produce abundantly. That’s how it is with God and God’s seeds of the kingdom. God doesn’t want those seeds to fail. God wants them to thrive, and God wants us to be the ones in and among whom it thrives. God wants us to be loam. God calls us to be rich, dense, organic, aromatic loam for the seeds of the kingdom. Can we be loam? Will we be loam? May it be so. Amen.

Easy? Really?

Easy? Really?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 9, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 11:28-30

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 all love the Bible, right? It is the foundational text of our Christian faith. Christianity simply isn’t possible without it. It contains the texts about Jesus Christ that our tradition says are necessary for a full understanding of him and of our faith. It contains divine wisdom of the ages. From it we learn as much as we can know about who God is, who Jesus Christ is, and what God wants from us. In it we find hope and comfort. We also find challenge and confounding paradox that points toward ultimate truth. Christians spend entire lifetimes seeking to understand just small parts of it, and Christians who have never done that nonetheless read it for the truth they find in it, the hope it gives, the comfort it provides in the travails of life. It is the world’s greatest faith document. All of it serves us Christians, and part of it serves Judaism, our mother faith. It is the one book we Christians simply cannot be without.

You love the Bible. I love the Bible, but here’s the thing. Sometimes the Bible can drive us, or at least drive me, nuts. That passage we just heard from the Gospel of Matthew is one of the places where it does. Someone once said that every preacher has one good sermon that she or he gives over and over again. I’d say that each us has a few good sermons not just one, but we do give them over and over again in different guises. One of my good sermons—at least I think it’s good, I can’t speak for you—is about how hard the Christian faith can be. Jesus really speaks to me when he says that to be his disciple we must deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. I don’t think he meant “take up your cross” as a metaphor even if we do understand it that way. I think in the world of early Christianity being Christian could lead you to the cross, or to some other brutal form of execution by the ruling powers. I think and often preach in one way or another that being Christian is immensely difficult because if we really understand the Christian faith that’s precisely what we must do, take up our cross, understanding the cross here at least as metaphor. Christianity calls for radical transformation of the world starting with a radical transformation of each human heart. At the close of our service this morning we will sing the hymn “The Summons.” It’s one of my favorites. It speaks powerfully of this truth about the faith. Its lyrics have God asking us “Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name,” and “Will you love the ‘you’ you hide,” that is, will you love your true self not the false self that most of us live in most of the time, and saying over and over again “and never be the same.” Those lines are about a radical transformation of our very selves, and they speak to the heart of the Christian faith. Maybe I think Christian faith is hard because mine caused me to undertake a radical transformation of my life that I was too old to do and couldn’t afford when in my 50s I left the private practice of law and went to seminary. Whatever. The truth remains that Jesus calls us to take up our cross, and he knew full well that that isn’t easy.

Then we come to our verses this morning from the same Gospel in which Jesus says deny yourself and take up your cross. In our verses this morning he says: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” That’s pretty much the opposite of what he said when he told us to deny ourselves and take up our crosses to follow him, or at least that’s what it looks like at first blush. There Jesus challenges us to risk everything for him. Here he tells us that with him we’ll find rest for our souls because following him is so easy. Of course I’ve known for a very long time that those verses are in our Bible; and, frankly, they’re kind of always in the back of my mind niggling at me when I preach about how hard it can be to follow Jesus. Then for today up pop those verses in the lectionary. When I saw them I think I groaned. Yet I decided to preach on them this morning precisely because I find them so troubling. Because I wrestle with how to reconcile them with “take up your cross and follow me.” So that’s what I’m about to do—attempt to reconcile these two seemingly diametrically opposed sayings.

When we take these two sayings together, when we hear both take up your cross and follow me and my yoke is easy and my burden is light, we, or at least I, want immediately to find a way to make them both true. They are both sayings of Jesus and, frankly, it sounds to me like he probably really said both of them. And actually, that hymn we’re going to sing in a little bit I think gives us the answer to how these sayings can both be true, or at least it points toward an answer to that dilemma. It’s in the last verse, which I suppose is where it belongs, for it speaks an ultimate truth about following Christ. That verse says:

Lord Your summons echoes true

When you but call my name.

Let me turn and follow You

And never be the same.

In Your company I’ll go,

Where Your love and footsteps show.

Thus I’ll move and live and grow in You,

And You in me.

The answer to the dilemma Jesus creates when he says both “take up your cross and follow me” and “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” is solved by just one line in that last verse of The Summons.” It’s the verse that says “In Your company I’ll go.” The answer to how taking up our cross can be an easy yoke and a light burden is that we we never take up our crosses alone. God is always there with us when we take them up. Jesus knew that life isn’t easy. He knew that the radical new way he was calling and teaching his people to live would put them squarely at odds with the religious and political culture of their time. That’s why following him involves taking up your cross. To take up one’s cross is to live into the realm of God while still in the realm of the world, and is far from an easy thing to do. Jesus knew that. God knows that. Jesus called us to do something that’s almost impossible, to overcome the culture that formed us and to live into the culture that is God’s dream for the world. And he knew that we couldn’t possibly do it alone. He knew that without God’s help we wouldn’t even come close. So Jesus never said we had to do it alone. He never gave us a task and said go do it on your own. He said remember that I am with you always to the end of the age. He said God will send you the Holy Spirit to be your aid, your guide, and your comforter. Yes, the life of faith can be challenging, but we never have to do it alone. God is always there to help us do it.

Now, on level we know that God is with us always, but let’s be honest here. Sometimes, maybe much of the time, God’s presence is pretty hard to detect. So just how does God’s presence make what is otherwise a hard yoke easy and a heavy burden light? Well, for God’s presence to do that we have to turn to God for help when the yoke feels too hard and the burden feels too light. When we do, we will find that God is there to give us strength when we feel weak. To give us courage when we are afraid. To give us energy when we feel tired. To buck us up when we feel frustrated and think nothing we do will ever make much of a difference. God is there to strengthen our spirits. God is there to show us the way. God is there to forgive us when we fail and rejoice with us when we succeed. God is there to hold us in everlasting arms of grace when we need to be comforted. There are so many ways in which God’s presence with us makes the yoke easy and the burden light. There are as many ways that God does that as there are problems we face and difficulties we think we can’t overcome.

So, is Christ’s yoke easy and his burden light? From the perspective of the world no. From the perspective of the world the life of faith is more challenging than it is easy. But from the perspective of the spirit yes. From God’s perspective, yes. The yoke is easy and the burden is light because we bear them together with our God. The yoke is easy and the burden is light because nothing we do or fail to do will ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That’s why Jesus can know full well what challenges the life of faith brings and still say my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Thanks be to God. Amen

Abraham Was Right

Abraham Was Right

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 2, 2017

Scripture: Genesis 22:1-14

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.

I have to be honest here. I hate this story. Most everyone I know hates this story. It’s a terrible story. This story has it that God told Abraham to go to a specific place that God would show him and there kill his son Isaac as a human sacrifice to God. That’s bad enough, but then Abraham sets out to do it. Isaac is the son through whom Abraham was to become the father of great nations. In this story Isaac is still a child. If he died there would be no way that God’s promise to Abraham could be accomplished. Nonetheless, Abraham sets off to obey what he takes to be a divine command to kill his son as a sacrifice to God. In the process he lies to Isaac, he lies to Isaac’s mother Sarah, he lies to his servants. Just as he is about to slay his son and burn the boy’s body as a sacrifice to God, God intervenes, tells him not to do it, and provides a ram that Abraham sacrifices to God in Isaac’s place.

Everyone I know hates this story. For me the most powerful reason I hate it is that the notion of a father killing his son is abhorrent. Repulsive. Appalling. I have a son. Many of you have sons, though it’s the same if we’re talking about a daughter rather than a son. To think that it’s what God wants from Abraham or anyone else just makes it worse. To me and to a lot of people God in this story is a monster. I can’t, and don’t, believe that God would ever order anyone to kill anyone, let alone kill your own child. I and a lot of people hate this story because it says God did something that the God we know, love, and seek to serve would never do. This story confounds our core beliefs about who God is.

Now, people try to make this story less horrible in a couple of ways. They say it never really happened. Or they dismiss it because their God would not do what God does in the story. They try to minimize the horror of the story by saying that Abraham would never really have done it. This story so sickens us that we try to explain it away, and if we can’t do that we just ignore it. That’s what I do with it most of the time, ignore it.

We hate this story, but here’s the thing. As much as we hate it, this awful story speaks a powerful truth about faith. The great Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote a whole book about the truth that this story speaks. It’s called Fear and Trembling, and in that book Kierkegaard insists over and over again that Abraham was justified in his intention to kill Isaac and that Abraham must be justified if faith is truly to be faith. Now, I suspect that you reject that assertion as much as I did when I first heard it years ago; but I don’t reject it anymore. I have come around to thinking that Kierkegaard is right. At least within the confines of this story Abraham was fully justified in his intention to kill Isaac and would have been fully justified had he actually done it. And I assume that that conclusion needs a lot of explaining. So here goes.

To understand Kierkegaard’s assertion that Abraham was and must be justified in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac I turn to one of Kierkegaard’s great intellectual descendants, to Paul Tillich, unarguably the greatest Christian theologian of the twentieth century. And I look to Tillich’s teaching on what we mean by the concepts God and faith. Tillich taught that to have faith is to have an “ultimate concern.” He said that that which is our ultimate concern is our god. Tillich taught that whatever is the most important thing to us, that thing is our god. He also taught that anything that we make our ultimate concern, that we make the most important thing to us, that isn’t truly ultimate, that isn’t truly God, is an idol, a false god.

So how does this understanding of what we mean when we say God help us get meaning out of this terrible story about Abraham going off to kill his son as a sacrifice to God? We have to start by not arguing with the story. We have to take what it says as the truth of the story, or the truth in the story. I know that God never ordered anyone to kill anyone, but I have to set that conviction aside when I seek to get meaning out of this story. In the story God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. So we accept that God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. We accept that for purposes of the story only Abraham was doing what God wanted him to do.

Now, Abraham could have overruled God and refused to do it. He could have said “No, God, my son is more important to me than you are, and I just won’t do it.” To return to Tillich’s terminology, if Abraham had said that, he would have been saying that God is not his ultimate concern. He’d have been saying that there was something more important to him than God. I’m sure that that’s what I would have said if I thought God had told me to sacrifice my son or my daughter. I just wouldn’t do it, but if the reason I wouldn’t do it were that I valued my child more than I valued God I would be guilty of idolatry. I would have made my child more ultimate, more important, for me than God, and that is the sin of idolatry.

That’s why Abraham was right to be willing to slay his son as a sacrifice to God. He was willing to do it because God truly was his god. God was more important to him than anything else. God was his ultimate concern. If your ultimate concern tells you to do something you do it. Otherwise your concern isn’t truly ultimate. Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac because God really was God for him. Nothing else was.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think God ever told Abraham to kill Isaac. This is story not biography or history that we’re dealing with here. But there is a powerful lesson in this story, and a powerful question as well. The question this story poses to every one of us is: Who or what is our ultimate concern? Who or what is the most important thing in our lives? In other words, or what is our god? Is it the one true God? Or is it something else? That is a question each of us has to answer for ourselves, and if you’re like me you might well have to ask forgiveness for how you answer the question.

That’s the question. I think the lesson is this: Faith makes great demands on us. It’s not going to demand that we kill anyone, but it makes great demands on us nonetheless. It demands that we put God’s ways ahead of the world’s ways. It demands that we we consider what God wants in every decision we make. It demands that when we are faced with a choice between what the world wants and what God wants we choose what God wants even if it costs a good deal to make that choice. Our faith demands that we all be more loving, caring, and compassionate toward all people than most of us are most of the time, myself included.

Folks, it can be so easy to make our Christian faith easy, undemanding, unchallenging. We do it all the time, and I include myself in the “we.” We say God loves us and pretty much leave it at that. But that is superficial faith. It gives us what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. When we take God seriously God makes demands on us, and how can we not take God seriously? I don’t know what specific demands God is making on you today, but I know that God is making them. Abraham heard God’s command and was prepared to carry it out. Are you prepared to carry out God’s demands on you? Am I prepared to carry out God’s demands on me? Are we prepared to carry out God’s demands on us? Big questions with tough answers. May we answer those questions well. Amen.

God's Kindness

God's Kindness

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

June 25, 2017

Scripture: Genesis 21:8-21

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.

It's one of those unpleasant stories in the Bible that we don't pay much attention to. There's a worse one in the lectionary for next week, but this one is bad enough. Here's the background to this story. God has promised Abraham that he, Abraham, would be the father of offspring more numerous than the stars. Yet Abraham and his wife Sarah have grown old, well past childbearing age, without having any children of their own. With Sarah's consent Abraham has fathered a son with the slave woman Hagar. That child's name is Ishmael. I won't go into the morality of what Abraham did to and with Hagar, but trust me, it's not good. Moving on. After Hagar bore Ishmael, Sarah conceived and bore her and Abraham's son Isaac. She then became jealous of Ishmael because as Abraham's firstborn he, the child of a slave girl and not of Sarah, would be the one to inherit most of Abraham's estate. So Sarah decides to get Abraham to send Hagar and her son Ishmael out into the desert to die. Make no mistake about it. Sending someone out into the desert in that part of the world with only a little water is a death sentence. Sarah is perfectly willing to kill off Ishmael, and his mother along with him, so that no one could challenge Isaac as Abraham's son and inheritor.

Abraham isn't quite so sanguine about it. Our text says “The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son.” I guess he didn’t care about Hagar any more than Sarah did, since the text doesn’t say it distressed Abraham because of her. She’s just a slave, so she didn’t really matter. We of course find that attitude to be grossly immoral, but never mind. Abraham is distressed about sending his son off to die of thirst in the desert. I guess that’s decent of him, although it seems pretty elemental to us. The story tells us that God allayed Abraham’s concerns by saying to him “Do not be so distressed about the boy and your maid-servant. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your off spring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the maid-servant into a nation also, because he is your offspring.”

Notice a couple of things about what God says here. First of all, God tells Abraham not to be distressed on account of both the boy and his mother though Abraham has expressed no concern about the boy’s mother. We see already that God’s concern and kindness are greater than Abraham’s. Abraham doesn’t care about some insignificant slave woman, as Abraham apparently thought Hagar was, but God does. Note also that God speaks to Abraham, but God says nothing to Sarah. Abraham may have reason to be confident that God will take care of Ishmael and Hagar, but Sarah doesn’t. The story says nothing about either Abraham or God giving Sarah any assurances about their wellbeing. So as far as Sarah knows she’s sending her slave and her husband’s son off to die. Sarah, as far as we know, has no qualms about doing so. Abraham has received some divine assurances, but Sarah hasn’t. She’s the one being really cruel here. She is, that is, the one being really human here.

Sarah planned to get Hagar and Ishmael killed by sending them off into a place where they could not survive. We don’t know if Abraham would have gone alone with Sarah’s scheme had God not reassured him about the boy’s fate, but he might have. Sarah would do anything to advance her son’s place in the order of succession to Abraham and in the process improve her own standing in the story of her people. We may not at all like Sarah for what she did here, or at least I don’t. We must admit however that Sarah is being perfectly human. We humans are so often perfectly willing to make others suffer and even die to benefit ourselves and our loved ones. In the world of big business people do whatever it takes to advance themselves over their coworkers. Most of us buy products, often from Walmart or other retailers like it, having thought only of saving a little money and having given no thought to what suffering workers around the world endure to get us those low prices. All of us, myself included, drive petroleum burning cars though we know what greenhouse gases are doing to the earth. All too often we resort to violence against other human beings when we think, usually wrongly, that our violence serves some good purpose or at least advances our own interests. We tolerate immense suffering by the poor and ailing among us because we don’t want to pay what it would take in taxes to provide for them. We elect politicians who advocate laws that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor pretty much for the same reason—we don’t want to pay money to benefit someone else.

Even worse examples of cruelty are easy to find if we look to world history. Just take the twentieth century for example. The nations of Europe, and eventually the US too, slaughtered a whole generation of men in World War I, and afterwards no one really knew why. Then came the Bolsheviks in Russia, who established what was probably the cruelest system of government the world has ever seen, a government that killed tens of millions of its own people for it own purposes. Then the Nazis, and I don’t think I have to tell you how cruel they were. Then the Japanese with their atrocities in Korea and China. And all of that is just the first half of the twentieth century. Sarah was cruel when she sent Hagar and Ishmael off to die, but she was in good company. Human cruelty often knows no bounds. Most of the time we prefer to ignore that reality, but we really can’t. In her cruelty Sarah was a model of all too typical human behavior.

And then there’s God. If Sarah is the villain of this piece, God is the hero. Sarah tried to kill Hagar and Ishmael. God saved them. God’s kindness in the peace outweighs Sarah’s cruelty. Hagar and Ishmael are about to die of thirst. God provides a well of water. Sarah and Abraham removed Ishmael as Abraham’s legitimate heir. God made him the patriarch of the Arab people, for today the Arabs trace their lineage back to Abraham through Ishmael. Sarah intended evil, and Abraham went along with it. Sarah intended evil. God intended only good.

Folks, that’s how it is with God. We humans intend and inflict evil all the time. God intends only good. Good for us. Good for everyone. We humans can be incomprehensibly cruel. God is incomprehensibly kind. In our Genesis story this morning God is profoundly kind to Hagar and Ishmael. Sarah wanted them to die. God wanted them to live. God wants all of God’s people to live. Of course God knows that we’re mortal. That’s how God created us for God’s own purposes. But God wants life—abundant life—for all people. We humans can be incomprehensibly cruel. God isn’t. God never is.

That doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen to us. Human cruelty hurts and kills God’s people all the time. We live in a created world that includes various kinds of natural phenomena that hurt and kill people. My point about God’s kindness is that God never wills harm for anyone. When bad things happen, and they do, they’re not God’s doing.

And here’s one more thing. God calls us always to kindness. God calls us always to compassion. God calls us always to peace. God calls us always to justice. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says “be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Perfection may be beyond us, but transformation isn’t. God is always there to help us be more like God, more kind, more loving, more compassionate. God’s call to transformation can be hard to hear over the clamor of the world that tries always to make us more worldly, not more divine, but if we’ll listen we can hear it. When we hear it we can respond. May it be so. Amen.