Baccalaureate Address for Colo-Nesco High School

I should start by offering a word of thanks to Pastor Fran Beyea for inviting me to speak tonight. It is an honor to be invited here; almost as much an honor as it was to change my daughter’s poopy diaper this morning. If you’ll bear with me for the next few minutes, I’ll tell you why.

Over the course of the next few weeks you’ll hear plenty of speeches asking you to dream big, to push your envelopes, to imagine bold futures for yourselves. I don’t mean to quibble with you at a time of such great excitement. The speakers who invite you to imagine possibilities? They’re absolutely right. You should look for challenges that inspire you. You should seek out experiences that will expand your mind and broaden your perspective on life and living. Go to college. Study in a foreign country. Join your parents and keep the farm in the family. Open a business. Love with abundance, even when it hurts. All of these dreams and more are good things, the kind of dreams that make us who we are. And yet…

You know that times aren’t good for a lot of folks. Some of you have watched your parents struggle to pay bills or keep their marriage together. My wife is a Family and Youth Minister in Ames; just yesterday she spent a long time talking with a family who’s high school daughter has been cutting. People are losing jobs, losing houses to floods and foreclosure, losing faith. Life can be bitterly, cruelly hard sometimes, and sometimes it makes you question whether or not anyone cares, whether you matter, whether the world would be different if you weren’t around.

This is where, for me, the poopy diaper comes into the story. I’m a Lutheran pastor, and one of my favorite sermons by Martin Luther has to do with marriage and faith. In it, Luther says this:

“Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool, though that father is acting…in Christian faith, my dear fellow you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other? God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith. Those who sneer at him and see only the task but not the faith are ridiculing God with all his creatures, as the biggest fool on earth. Indeed, they are only ridiculing themselves; with all their cleverness they are nothing but fools.”

My wife and I have two daughters: Ainsley, our two year-old, and Alanna, who was born last summer. About once a week, I have one of those moments when I think, “Holy crap, we’re parents!” I get those moments most often when I’m changing poopy diapers. I don’t know why – that’s just when it happens. In the midst of the most basic, disgusting task a parent has to do, revelation happens and I’m knocked off my feet by the holiness of the moment - this smelly, disgusting, sometimes surprising moment. In this holy moment, we matter to one another.

What Luther noticed was this: everyday, ordinary life is far more important than we realize, and everyday, ordinary work is far more holy than we know. Anyone here a fan of the show “Dirty Jobs?” My favorite episode takes place in a sewage substation underneath the city of San Francisco. The host, Mike Rowe, has to help one of the sanitation workers clean out a plugged sewage line. There’s a room in that substation that’s foul beyond belief: and if the sanitation worker doesn’t clean it out, who will? And if that work isn’t holy, what work ever could be?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor who was part of the resistance movement against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. On 21 June 1944 he wrote the following in a letter to a good friend:

"I discovered…and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner…, a righteous person or an unrighteous one, a sick person or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God …”

Bonhoeffer knew as well as anyone what it meant to “throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.” In 1933, when Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany and he began making laws to persecute people of the Jewish faith, Bonhoeffer was one of the first to speak out publicly. When most of the German churches aligned themselves with the Nazi Party, Bonhoeffer was part of a small group of people who started their own seminary to train pastors. In 1944, Bonhoeffer was arrested for conspiring against Hitler and planning an assassination attempt, and in 1945 he was executed at Flossenburg Concentration Camp. Yet this incredible man, described by many people as one of the 20th Century’s few martyrs, was an astonishingly ordinary guy. He smoked too many cigarettes. He liked to play music. He also played a lot of sports. He enjoyed travel. And he was engaged to a woman he loved very much. Bonhoeffer is one of my heroes, not only because he was a brilliant thinker and a man of great courage, but because he saw the holiness in all aspects of human life.

You’re going to be surprised at how ordinary life turns out to be, how many of your days will not be filled with fantastic journeys and incredible accomplishments. Some of your dreams may come true. Many of them will not. That doesn’t mean you should stop dreaming – it means that you should include your ordinary life when you dream about what the future holds for you.

There’s a story told about a cathedral in Chartres, France. During its construction, a visitor from Rome stopped to see the amazing new cathedral being built in this small French town. As the workers were leaving at the end of the day, the visitor would ask them what they were doing in the cathedral. “I make glass windows,” said one. “I am a woodworker – I make those beams you see over there.” “I carve the stones for the altar.” Finally the visitor from Rome met an older woman with a group of young people, cleaning up and sweeping and organizing tools left lying on the floor. The visitor asked her, “What do you do?” She looked around, then looked at the visitor. “I am building a cathedral for the glory of God.”

They all had it right: but the woman who saw the holy in her work had it more right than the others. Life in itself, with all its intricacies and banalities, with all its pleasure and suffering, is a great gift from God and meant to be lived fully and lived well. So in this season of celebration, when you rightly commemorate one of the major rites of passage in American life, don’t forget the depth of your experiences here. Don’t overlook the small gifts each day has brought you. And as you prepare for your future, dream not only of days marked by high achievement, but also of days marked by great contentment in surpassing ordinariness. Throw yourselves unreservedly into all of life, and you will find a life of rich abundance awaiting you.
Pay your bills.
Drink coffee with friends.
Pay your taxes.
Clean the bathroom.
Call your mother.
Shop for groceries.
Pick up after your dog.
Clean the litter box.
Brush your teeth.
Take out the trash, and most of all,
change those poopy diapers – and look within it all for the holiness of the ordinary. God bless you all, and thank you for inviting me to share this special moment with you. Good night.

Sermon for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost: "Words and Deeds"

Preaching Texts

Not too long ago I developed a pretty bad teacher's crush. Her name is Susan Briehl and she's worked in a number of different capacities in the church over the years: pastor, liturgist, lyricist, poet, teacher, and so on. Three years ago, she spoke at our pastors' retreat on a lake in northern Minnesota, and I was smitten. Hard. She's a solidly Confessional Lutheran. She loves her some Small Catechism. She can quote the Large Catechism from memory. She reads Luther's Works for inspiration. We spent our time talking about the lesser known aspects of Luther's work – the fact that Luther was a professor of Old Testament before he became the great reformer, and spent years working with the Psalms as a teacher of the church. All of these wonderfully Lutheran things, coming from a woman who had rarely been to the Upper Midwest and doesn't have a drop of Scandinavian blood in her. Hmmm. I think I STILL have a bit of a teacher crush…

In our time together, Pastor Briehl told us a great Luther quote. The first half of it is, "A person is not justified by works." You've probably heard me and other Lutheran pastors say those words before. They are beautiful words – and you should know that, as a writer, I love beautiful words. Words are important – possibly more than we can ever imagine. How important? Just try living in my shoes if I haven't said "I love you" to my wife more than once a day. When Kristin and I get home at night, it's check-in time; time for words about our day. Kristin loves to quote the study that estimates men need to speak about 7,000 words per day, but women require a few more: 20,000. So when we check in, if I know what's good for me, I listen as Kristin gets the last of her 20,000 daily words in. AND woe be unto me if she asks me, "How was your day?" and I reply, "Good."

Words are important, in pleasurable and painful ways. Think about the impact of these words:

Thank you.

I'm sorry.

Excuse me.

Help!

I now pronounce you husband and wife.

I'm pregnant.

I'm not pregnant.

I love you.

I hate you.

I promise.

The surgery was a success.

I'm sorry: your father has died.

Words have power – power to hurt, power to heal. Poets and writers have known this as long as we've had language, and they've been using words to change our lives from the moment we started recording things in words. Words are contextual – they mean different things at different times, and from different people. When we say, "I love you," a beautiful phrase, it means many different things to any different people, and if we use it incorrectly or inappropriately there can be very unpleasant consequences to suffer.

I love words – I always have. There are books galore in my office here at the Lutheran Center, and also in our house. I spend a lot of what little free time I have left reading words, and as a preacher words are a very important aspect of my vocation. It pays for me to be a connoisseur of words, but in this parable from Matthew's gospel, all these beautiful words come up against one harsh word from Jesus our Lord: words alone are not enough.

Two young men gave their word to their father. From one, the word was plain: I will not work for you in your vineyard. From the other, the word was just as plain: I will Neither of them kept their word, but Jesus said that one of them was right with his father. They both broke their word, yet one brother did the deed According to what Jesus taught, our deeds can outweigh our words.

I mentioned half of a Luther quote earlier. The whole thing goes like this: "A person is not justified by their works; but no justified person is without works." Lip service doesn't accomplish anything in the kingdom of heaven. Even a lover of words like me has to admit that words lose their power if they are not accompanied by deeds. I can say "I love you" to my wife and kids until I'm blue in the face, but if I abuse them, treat them with contempt or neglect, my words come to mean nothing. Without works to match our words we fall from grace and find ourselves bound to our own brokenness. The best example of empty words I can give you comes from my own life. When I was a teenager, I was irresponsible, selfish and lazy. (some of you are thinking, "as a kid?") Somehow, though, I developed the idea that if I said "I'm sorry" often enough, I could get away with whatever I wanted. That all ended one day when my dad finally had enough and said to me, "You know, I wish you'd say you were sorry a whole lot less and mean it a whole lot more." My works and deeds had made my words empty, meaningless, a lie even I no longer believed. How does our confession go? "We confess that we are captive to sin, and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone." Our captivity to sin holds everything we hold dear. Even our precious words are broken and stained by sin.

There is, however, one Word to which we can cling, even in the depths of our sin. There is One who has always been pure in thought, word and deed. Jesus Christ has always been and will always be the Word made Flesh – the Word that Does what it promises. The power of Jesus' Word never fails, because Jesus' Word is always accompanied by Jesus' Deeds. Jesus' Word comes to us in our baptism, joining with plain, ordinary water to drown us in our sin and raise us up in new life. Jesus' Word comes to us in his supper, the holy meal given that we might eat and drink forgiveness, the reminder that no deed was too great for the power of His love. Jesus is the Word that rebuked the Pharisees for their stubbornness. Jesus is the Word who called Peter, James and John from their fishing boats to a life of service. Jesus is the Word who came to Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon and the reformers in the darkest times of medieval Europe and offered hope to a people oppressed by a church that had forgotten the voice of her shepherd. Jesus is the Word who came to Susan Briehl and called her to be a pastor, called me to be a pastor, and calls you to seek the kingdom of God and find your role within it. Jesus is the Word who comes today and makes a promise to you, that no matter who you are, the Word of forgiveness will transform your life through repentance, making you "what Adam and Eve were meant to be, only better." This Word, Jesus' Word, is TRUTH.

We don't always like to hear this word of change and forgiveness. We like to think we've had it figured out all along, that our comfortable lives and our level of happiness are proof that we have no need of Jesus' Word of transformation. When Jesus spoke the words in today's gospel reading, he was talking to the established church. He was talking to people like us, the good kids. One scholar notes that "[Jesus'] ministry of transformation and reclamation offends those with a vested interest in reinforcing the status quo…Jesus' transformation of the world requires the self-examination of those heretofore in charge. Or, one can simply resist the transformation and challenge the authority of Jesus himself." [1] It reminds me of one of my favorite stories: "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor. In "Revelation" we are introduced to Mrs. Turpin, a woman who owns a small hog farm with her husband Claude in the deep South in the early 20^th century. Mrs. Turpin sat in the waiting room at the doctor's office and considered out loud how fortunate she was that God made her who she was. She wasn’t white trash or black – she was a woman of means who had the good sense to be thankful for what she had. Finally, a young girl named Mary Grace had enough of Mrs. Turpin's smug self-righteousness. She hurled a book at Mrs. Turpin, tried to strangle her, and then told her, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog!" This shocked Mrs. Turpin to her core, so much so that later that day, as dusk was coming on, Mrs. Turpin found herself standing on the fence of her hogyards, shaking her fist at heaven and accusing God, "Who do you think you are?"

Here Mrs. Turpin receives her second revelation:

[She saw] a vast horde of souls ... rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right....They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. [2]

In the end, nothing will matter except Jesus' Words and Jesus' Deeds. Tax collectors, prostitutes, good children, bad children, good church folk, whoever we are, we are only saved by Jesus' words and Jesus' deeds. Jesus Christ is the One who gives us both words and deeds together, whole and pure. You and I are here because God has called us here to receive this word: grace. You and I are here because we are recipients of this deed: forgiveness. Jesus Christ, the living Word of God, speaks and works in you, now and forever, with a power above all other words and all other deeds. Whether it is your sins or your virtues being burned away by Jesus' love, today is a day for both words and deeds, brothers and sisters, because the living Word Jesus Christ is our Lord, and we are his people through the power of his Holy Spirit, to the glory of the Father. And that, friends, is a good word, a powerful word, and the last word. Amen.

---

[1] Ira Brent Driggers. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=9/28/2008#

[2] Flannery O'Connor, "Revelation." From The Complete Stories. © 1971 by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. P. 508.

Wednesday Reflection: On Heaven and Work

“So, then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh – for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for hat we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Romans 8.12-25

What’s your vision of heaven? What does it look like to imagine heaven?

I’ve been intrigued this week by Paul’s words from Romans 8 and a quote from Joel Stein, which was printed on the side of a Starbucks cup and received some publicity a while back:

“Heaven is totally overrated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can’t wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the 17th century, but heaven has to step it up a bit. They’re basically getting by because they only have to be better than hell.”

I asked you about your vision of heaven because I’m not so sure my old vision of heaven is going to suffice anymore. Even before I heard Mr. Stein’s words on a sermon podcast this week, I was struck by the thought that eternal relaxation and leisure might not be the plan God has in mind.

We worship a God who chose to begin creation out of a desire to create. Forming existence as we know it was not a masters’ degree project for God: all that exists, exists because God has willed it so. Our God is not just an awesome God: our God is a creating, energetic, dynamic God – and we are made in God’s image. We are made to work, to envision, to create, and so I wonder: in the world to come, when all things worship their Creator as they were made to do, it seems logical that the children of a creative, energetic, dynamic God would be at work, in a creative, energetic, dynamic heaven. What we might be making is beyond my imagination, but as the adopted children of God the Creator, it seems certain that we will be reborn into eternal life with a creative purpose, to do more than lounge around and play our harps on fluffy clouds.

Creation and work and all of that are on my mind with this passage because Paul mentions labor pains, too, how the creation is groaning with the work of bringing forth that which God has envisioned. Of course, for me and my 38-weeks-pregnant wife, the term “labor pains” brings up a lot of thoughts, most of which have to do with waiting these days. It seems like all of our friends are either new parents or expecting kids in the next six months, so we’re all in this constant state of waiting for what will be coming forth. In our case, we know there’s a baby almost ready to come into the world, but we have no idea what she will look like (or even if she is definitively she, though the ultrasound folks seem pretty certain). And there is a certain amount of suffering here, too: not only Kristin’s suffering in her body, but also the knowledge that we are bringing forth something that will change our lives forever. There is something of God in the experiences that change our lives, the things for which we suffer, whether it’s bringing a child into the world, earning a degree from a university, running a marathon, envisioning a mission for campus ministry: all of these creative, energetic, dynamic endeavors are in some sense holy because in them we experience something akin to what God experiences suffering the work of creation. I wonder: if you asked God what it feels like to create the world, would God tell you that it is an experience of suffering? Perhaps so, for in our own work we suffer as we bring something new into being – and we are, after all, created in the image of God.

One fear which I find myself addressing quite often in my life is a fear that I’m not creative enough, that I am too much the consumer and not enough the creator. With the way this week’s readings and my thinking on them have moved and worked, I wonder if this is the voice of God reminding me that we are made for more than just satisfying our own desires – that we are creatures made to create, to work for the good of the world, even when such work might bring suffering into our lives. This, I think, is the calling of every Christian: to discover the unique gifts for work which God has given us, and to use them for the sake of the world. As J.B. Phillips translation of the New Testament says, “The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the [children] of God coming into their own.” The mercy of Christ sets us free to be creative, to work in God’s world for the benefit of others, and in so doing, we stand on tiptoe, waiting for the glory of God that is coming into the world. Amen.

Back From My Nice Trip To Lousybloggerville - Didja Miss Me?

I don't know why this happens sometimes. It's not as though I haven't had lots to blog about lately. There's this and this and and, as always, my girls. But I find that it's just tough lately to get focused enough to write coherently. The good news? I seem to be finding my way back into a writing groove. After a few hours this afternoon I've got most of this weekend's sermon written and the remainder blocked out, so finishing up tomorrow and Saturday morning should be a snap.

On This #1, let me just say that in a perfect world this would not be worthy of the salivating coverage provided by ESPN, et al. What has especially irked me this week is the "distraction" question (Will Alex Rodriguez' divorce prove to be a distraction for him and the Yankees as they try to get back into the AL East race?). Look, the AL East is a sports title - the Rodriguez marriage is a family thing. In my book, the problematic distraction was whatever led to the breakdown of the marriage - baseball, especially the Yankees, can step to the background for all I care.

On This #2, it is yet one more reason I'm proud to be a Husker. And, lest you think that my take on This #2 invalidates my take on This #1, I'm a faith guy first, family man second, and a Husker third (Granted, it's a close third sometimes, but how close is my business to figure out, right?).

As to the girls, they're fabulous. When I came home to pick up Ainsley and go to the gym while Kristin went to teach water aerobics, Ainsley came running, leapt into my arms and gave me a big hug. Could life be any better than a moment like that? I think not. Kristin is still GREAT WITH CHILD - heavy emphasis on the GREAT these days. Two weeks to go as of tomorrow, and frankly, I'm hoping and praying we make it that far, because she looks about as ripe as a pregnant lady could get without the baby actually falling out onto the floor vis a vis Monty Python and The Meaning Of Life.

Well, that's the good word from Cafe Diem in downtown Ames - see you tomorrow, I hope.