Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday - "God Is Already Here"

Preaching Texts

            Hearers of God’s Word, grace and peace to you from God the Creator, Jesus Christ our Redeemer, and God the Holy Spirit, active here in our midst this morning.  Amen. 

            One of the names you’ll hear a lot from me over the next few years is Larry Meyer.  Larry was my campus pastor, mentor and friend.  He died after a long battle with esophageal cancer in 2005.  I graduated from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in 1998, but instead of enrolling in seminary straightaway, I decided to take a year off and work.  Larry knew my plans and made some of his own – when the seminary which had supplied our campus ministry with interns came up short for the coming year, Larry asked me to come on staff and work full time for campus ministry until I enrolled in seminary.

            One of the first things Larry asked me to do was write a fundraising letter to parents, friends, alumni and other supporters.  I don’t remember much of what I wrote, except for one sentence.  Originally it was something to the tune of “you are helping us bring Jesus to campus.”  When Larry and I sat down to go over it, he said, “We aren’t bringing Jesus to campus.  God is already here.  Our work is to find where God is already at work.” 

            Today is Trinity Sunday.  It is, according to theologian Mary Anderson, “the only Sunday that asks us to ponder a teaching of the church instead of a teaching of Jesus.”  You won’t find an explicit reference to the Trinity in the Bible, at least not in any way that establishes Father, Son and Holy Spirit in a doctrinal, dogmatic way.  Trinity is not God’s thing for us – it’s our thing for God.  In other words, just like Larry said, God is already here.  Trinity is just the way we try to wrap our heads around who God is and how God is already at work. 

            Trinity Sunday is not something God needs.  God does not descend from on high with an order: “Every year thou shalt devote one Sunday to the pondering of trinitarian theology.”  Honestly, I think God couldn’t care less about whether or not we have an intellectual grasp of what “the Trinity” means, because claiming you’ve got God figured out if you can wrap your head around the Trinity is like claiming you’ve seen the whole ocean once you’ve scooped up some seawater in a glass.  It might seem like a silly distinction, but it’s important: God is beyond our comprehension.  God is bigger than anything we can conceptualize.  In an age where instant communication across the globe is possible, where we’ve split the atom and sequenced DNA, we tend to think of God as just one more piece of information to be processed, understood and tucked away for when we need it.  If we’re not careful, we can turn God into just another being, just one more person we have to keep satisfied as we go our way through this life.  This will not do at all.  The great 20^th century theologian Paul Tillich said,

“God does not exist. [God] is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny [God]…We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: “Does God exist?” Now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all.”[1]

Spend too much time thinking intellectually about theology, about the Trinity, about the concept of God, and you wind up losing the wonder of the experience of God.  It gets banal.  Ritual for its own sake.  It might look something like this:

            Compare this ‘prayer’ with what Dr. Rolf Jacobson has to say about the Isaiah.  How many of you have always thought of the angels song as heavenly, a beautiful hymn to a God they love?  Not Dr. Jacobson.  He reads it far differently.  He says the angels are crying out in agony and ecstasy, delirious and terrified at being so close to God’s unmediated holiness.  The hem of God’s robe fills the temple.  The great doors shudder at the thunder of God’s voice.  Smoke and fire fill the air.  The Source of all that is, was, and ever will be is here, the Being who knows you down to the very first sub-atomic particle – you stand exposed before Being itself.  Would you not also cry out, “Woe is me!”

            So, in the face of this, our insistence on a Trinity Sunday seems trite at best, utterly banal at worst.  Except that it isn’t trite at all.  Trinity matters because that same Being in the throne room has revealed itself to us through a Trinitarian means.  Two thousand years ago, the Being whose robe filled the temple took on flesh and bone and came to dwell among us in Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus walked into the darkness where we hide from the holiness of God the Creator, bearing His holy light in humility and love.  Jesus of Nazareth is Emmanu-el, “God-with-us,” and in this way God loves the world and reveals himself to us.  And not only this, but our very belief in this same Jesus of Nazareth comes through the work of God the Holy Spirit, the one under whose power we can actually call ourselves children of God.  We Lutherans have a particular love for the Trinity because without the work of the Holy Spirit, we cannot come to faith at all:

I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with [Its] gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith; even as [It} calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian Church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith. In this Christian Church [the Spirit] forgives daily and richly all sins to me and all believers, and at the last day will raise up me and all the dead, and will give to me and to all believers in Christ everlasting life. This is most certainly true.[2]

You are not here by coincidence.  God has been at work all along; calling, gathering, enlightening and sanctifying here, now, in this place, for this time.  The Trinity matters here and now – not as some doctrinal proposition or theological checklist to be marked off so you can go to heaven when you die, but for this day and life that you’ve been given.  The gospel reading for this morning tells us that God is already at work here:

Nicodemus said, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God."  ³Jesus answered him, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above."

Nicodemus saw it, even though he didn’t understand it.  He knew God was working through Jesus, and Jesus confirmed what Nicodemus saw – “You wouldn’t have seen the kingdom of God at work in me without God showing it to you, Nicodemus.”  The Spirit shines the spotlight on Jesus, “God-with-us” who bears all the holiness of Existence itself in his human flesh and bone.  Trinity is how we understand that God is already here.  Our work is to reveal what God is doing in our world. 

            My prayer as we start this journey together is that we might always be looking for ways God is already at work.  It will mean seeing things in a new way, breaking free of what we think God ought to be doing so we can see if that’s really what God is doing.  God is already here.  The Creator continues to make all things new.  Jesus our Redeemer fills the world with his love and mercy.  The Spirit moves and blows the Breath of Life within us, creating faith where there was none before.  God is already here.  Let’s begin by looking for what God is doing in our world, together, and may the peace of God, which truly surpasses all our human understanding, keep our hearts and minds, this day and always.  Amen.

---

[1] Armstrong, Karen (2009-09-11). The Case for God (p. 282). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

[2] http://bookofconcord.org/smallcatechism.php#creed [bracketed edits mine]

Friday Five: Summer Edition

In my neck of the woods folks who have children of a certain age are doing a dead sprint through end of school year activities: piano recitals, baseball tournaments, travel soccer games, gymnastics meets, dance recitals, graduations, band concerts, field trips and end-of-the year fill in the blank.

When Did You Realize You Were Lutheran?

I enrolled at Luther Seminary in August 1999.  I'd love to say that, upon discerning my call to ministry, I was a Lutheran through and through.  I certainly thought of myself as Lutheran.  I was born and raised in this tradition.  My ancestors come from Sweden and Germany, staunch Lutherans all (even if my parents' marriage was "mixed" between Augustana and Missouri Synod families).  I planned to follow my vocational calling in the ELCA, and aside from briefly investigating the groups breaking out after the passage of Called to Common Mission, I've never wavered from that plan.  But these things meant I was a person of faith by circumstance, not conviction.  That came later.

In my classes with Jim Nestingen and Gerhard Forde, I began to understand what it meant to be Lutheran by conviction.  Upon reading Forde's article "Caught in the Act," and then his book On Being a Theologian of the Cross, a whole new theological world was opened to me.  It was in those months of study in spring 2000 that I became Lutheran by conviction.  I realized that not only was I Lutheran because my parents had raised me that way, but the teachings of our church and the theological viewpoints of Luther, Melanchthon and other reformers made sense to me.  When I really started to dig into Lutheran theology, I discovered an interpretation of God's creation and our place in it that seemed to fit what I saw all around me.  This is how and when I realized I had been fortunate enough to be raised in the faith tradition that closely reflected the way the Spirit was showing me the world as it was.  I felt swept up into an understanding of faith and life that included

• Our utter dependence on God for life and faith.  
• A fresh understanding of "I believe I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to him, but the Holy Spirit has called me with the gospel, enlightened me with its gifts, sanctifies and keeps me in the Christian faith..."  
• When God says "You shall have no other gods before me," it's as much a promise and statement of fact as it is a demand (possibly more promise than demand).
• We live in dialectical tension all of our lives:
• simultaneously sinners and saints
• God's kingdom already/not yet here
• Christian freedom, in which we are perfectly free lords of all, subject to none/perfectly dutiful slaves of all, subject to all
• being saved by grace by faith, apart from works of the law / faith without works not being true faith
• Baptism drowning the old sinner in us, putting us to death in our sins, that God might raise a new saint to live and serve daily in Christ's name

This is the Lutheranism with which I fell in love in those heady years.  It is the way I continue to interpret the world God has created, the lens through which I see my life and the lives of the people I serve as pastor. It is more than a label, more than a construct or group.  It is, at its core, who I am.

This is not to say that everything fell into place in those times.  I still struggle with what this all means.  And there are a plethora of Lutheran lenses through which we can look at the world - within our own ELCA, we have some serious disagreements on a host of issues, to say nothing of the breaches between this branch of the Lutheran tree and other branches like the LCMS, WELS, LCMC, NALC and all the other bodies out there.

So I'll ask the same question of you:  when did you realize that "Lutheran" was more than the name on the sign outside your church building?  Who or what helped you realize that "Lutheran" made more sense than any other faith?  Or, are you still figuring out that part of your faith?  (Note:  this does not mean you're not welcome at any Lutheran church, particularly the one I happen to serve.  By all means, come with questions.  If you're not asking questions, you're not growing in your faith, either!)  If you're reading this from another faith perspective, when did that one start to make sense to you? 

We are all called to be proclaimers of the good news, by whatever means we have at our disposal.  But this means we're called to understand at least a little bit about what that good news is for us, where we are, in our own lives.  Take a moment and think about what it is that has made you the person of faith that you are - and share a bit about it if you will.  The better we are at telling our own stories, the better we will be able to see where God has been weaving us into the Story that is creation itself.

Blessings to you all,
Pastor Scott

New Starts

These are the bookshelves in my office at University Lutheran Center today.  In two days, I'll begin a new call at St. Petri Lutheran Church in Story City, Iowa.  Seems a good time to get a fresh start here as well.

There are a lot of reasons why I haven't been posting regularly over the past two years.  Most of them have to do with time: I simply haven't had much free.  Some others I won't bring up here.  I've learned a lot about ministry since about December of 2009, and much of it has been the kind of wisdom that comes from challenging circumstances. What I'm going to try to focus on in this new start is how to handle those challenging circumstances better as a minister of the gospel, leader of a congregation and child of God.  That we are broken and make mistakes should surprise no one anymore.  The problems rise, from what I've seen, when we compound those mistakes by additional misbehavior.  Humility, kindness, patience, humor, a healthy dose of self-deprecation, teamwork, and joy: these are the traits I believe every faith community must have if it is to survive into whatever is coming next for the church.  So these are also the traits I need to develop more fully in myself and in those to whom I minister.

I leave this current adventure with joy and sadness.  There have been some wonderful, wonderful moments of ministry here.  I think on the whole I've done good work.  But we could have done more, and I've been trying to reflect on why we didn't and where I'm called to change to be better in the future.  But regardless of our mistakes, I believe we've been as faithful as we knew how to be, and there's not much more anyone can ask.  That's the mission going forward as well: to be faithful to the future God has in store for us.  Please pray for me and for the members of our new church as we set out together!

Peace,
Scott

Sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Easter - "Hunger and Nourishment" (Bread for the World Offering of Letters)

Tonight our Lutheran Campus Ministry was joined by a local Bread for the World group inviting us to take part in the 2012 Bread for the World Offering of Letters.  So, fortuitously, the gospel reading addressed eating and community.  Sometimes pastors get lucky like that.  

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Easter - To Be a Child of the Light

            You know this song – sing it with me:

                        I just wanna be a sheep – BAAAAAA.

                        I just wanna be a sheep – BAAAAAA.

                        I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

                        I just wanna be a sheep – BAAAAAAA.

            What if we wrote a verse about Thomas?  Would it go like this?

                        Don’t wanna be a doubting Thomas.

                        Don’t wanna be a doubting Thomas.

                        Don’t wanna be such a total wuss.

                        I just wanna be a sheep – BAAAAAA.

           

More than a Sentence

In addition to being Holy Week, last week saw the annual publication of articles from major newsweekly magazines addressing faith, the church, God, etc.  Andrew Sullivan's piece for Newsweek/The Daily Beast, "Christianity in Crisis," was a valuable contribution to the conversation about the end of Christendom and the new reality in which we who profess faith in Jesus find ourselves.  But I was dismayed by one sentence in particular: 

 For their part, the mainline Protestant churches, which long promoted religious moderation, have rapidly declined in the past 50 years. 

Sermon for Good Friday - "Behold the Life-Giving Cross"

O sacred head, now wounded,

with grief and shame weighed down,

now scornfully surrounded

with thorns, thine only crown;

O sacred head, what glory,

what bliss till now was thine!

Yet, though despised and gory,

I joy to call thee mine.

Sermon for Palm Sunday: Caught In The Act

Mark 12:1–34, 14.1-2

Jesus spoke to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the winepress, and built a tower. Then he rented it to tenant farmers and took a trip. ² When it was time, he sent a servant to collect from the tenants his share of the fruit of the vineyard. ³ But they grabbed the servant, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. ⁴ Again the landowner sent another servant to them, but they struck him on the head and treated him disgracefully. ⁵ He sent another one; that one they killed. The landlord sent many other servants, but the tenants beat some and killed others. ⁶ Now the landowner had one son whom he loved dearly. He sent him last, thinking, They will respect my son. ⁷ But those tenant farmers said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ ⁸ They grabbed him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

⁹ “ So what will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others. ¹⁰ Haven’t you read this scripture, The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. ¹¹ The Lord has done this, and it’s amazing in our eyes? ”

¹² They wanted to arrest Jesus because they knew that he had told the parable against them. But they were afraid of the crowd, so they left him and went away.

Sermon for the 4th Sunday in Lent - "Bearing the Light"

            Let us pray:  God of light, you reveal all that we are, and we choose darkness.  You would love and redeem us, but we choose the false security of the lies we believe about ourselves.  Draw us to Your light.  Put us to death in our lies, and raise us up in truth, made new in the blaze of your glorious love.  Amen.

           

Sermon for the 1st Sunday in Lent: "Baptized for the World that Is

We celebrate a baptism today!  [Name] receives the gift of baptism tonight.  Baptism is water joined with God’s promise, connected to the story of the flood by our reading from 1^st Peter.  God is making a promise to [Name] tonight, a promise we are privileged to witness and which we will be pledged to support and cherish.  But this is not a safe, lovely promise of fuzzy rainbows, clouds and happy little cartoon Bible people.  God’s promise in baptism is perhaps best seen in what happens in our reading from Mark:  Jesus is baptized, and then is driven out into the wilderness.  When God claims us in baptism, God isn’t just inoculating us for the life to come: God is claiming us for the world that IS, now, a life in this time, in this world.  Baptism claims all of us into a covenant of steadfast love, God’s promise to God to have mercy, to forgive, to heal and to send us back out into the wilderness where the wild beasts live. 

An Evening with Shane Claiborne

 Tonight I had the rare privilege of meeting and listening to Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistable Revolution, Jesus for President and Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals.  Here, posted without comment, are some of the many noteworthy things said throughout the evening.  What a night!

"This country spends $20,000 every second on war. Don't you think that's a little messed up?"

"We're gonna stop complaining about the church that we see and start becoming the church we dream of."

Quoting a judge who ruled in favor of The Simple Way against the City of Philadelphia: "If it weren't for people who broke the bad laws, we'd still have slavery."

"Everything in the world is going to push you away from suffering."

"How do we re-imagine our lives in the light of pain and suffering?"

[American soldiers in Iraq, asking why their Christian Peacemaker Team would want to go into Iraq to visit friends]: "No one crosses this border without a gun in their hands." [Response]: "Well, that's part of the problem, isn't it?"

Quoting Tertullian, "When Jesus disarmed Peter [at the garden of Gethsemane], he disarmed every Christian."

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Happily Weary, Ready for Rest

http://www.imagesbyjasonandtonja.com/

This seems to be the picture of a pretty happy guy.  Thankfully these days I'm the one who gets to be that guy in the picture.

"Half a Mile a Day"

So, worship at University Lutheran Center last night was stumbling, to put it kindest.  Halting singing - unfamiliar hymns - a discombobulated delivery of the sermon - there was a general feeling of unsteadiness to the entire affair.  I say this not to denigrate our musicians, the students or myself, but just to acknowledge what was there.  As one community member put it afterwards, "Worship isn't a 'performance' but every performer knows that some nights you're just off - it happens in churches, too."

Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany - "By Whose Authority?"

            A few years ago, my brother and his wife gave me a Stephen King book on tape for Christmas.  It was an early Stephen King book, so it’s got all the subtlety of a freight train; he goes straight for the throat with blood, guts, nightmares and boogeymen.  One of the stories involves a machine at a commercial laundry that is possessed.  The main characters try to drive out the demon in “The Mangler” without success, mostly because they don’t know the kind of demon they’ve got on their hands. 

Friday Five: Odds and Ends

Sally from RevGalBlogPals has had a crazy week. Just like all of us, I suppose.  :-)  She asks what, in the past week, has:

1. Inspired you

2. Challenged you

3. Made you smile

4. Made you cross/ made you want to weep

5.Kept you going?

To Ainsley, the Day AFTER Your Fifth Birthday

Sermon for the 1st Sunday after Christmas - "At the Name of Jesus"

Simeon said, “Lord, now you are letting your servant go in peace…for my eyes have seen your salvation…”  What did Simeon see?  How is it that Simeon knew, in one instant, that something of God was at hand?

Today is the first day of a new year.  Sure, in cosmic terms there’s little difference between yesterday and today, but we begin the new year in hope all the same.  What do we see?  What are your hopes?  Your fears?  Where might God meet those hopes and fears in this place, at this time, in this life you’re living?

Random: Posting a Friday Five

One possible way to get back to more regular posting is to use the memes like I had done in the past.  One of my favorites was the Friday Five at RevGalBlogPals - which is just random this week.  Count me in!

1.  I might actually reach my goal of 50 books read/heard/digested this year, if I work particularly hard over the next few weeks.  Unfortunately, some of the books on my upcoming "to read" list are rather thick, but they aren't particularly taxing, so we'll see if I get it done or not.  This year 50, next year 60, right?  In the next few weeks I'm going to go through my book list for the year and give short reviews of everything I've read - hopefully I'll get through it all before New Year's Day.

2.  The past few months have been pretty rough in the exercise department.  It's hard to find the energy when you're only getting 5-6 hours of sleep per night, but I don't know any other way to do what I need to do in a day.  Here's hoping sometime soon I can look back on the past few months as one of those "it was rough but we lived through it" times in our life.  At any rate, I'm back up to "hefty" size right now.  I'm hoping to drop five pounds in the next month by choosing my moments for holiday splurging wisely.  Task #1 on that list will be getting all the leftover cookies from last night's Open House out of the kitchen, right?

3.  I had a lovely hour reading by the fireplace at the Lutheran Center this morning, even if it did get interrupted a couple of times.  I haven't had time to sit and read at work in a long, long time, but there was time and a need for it today.  Hopefully I'll find some time to do more of it after finals week.

4.  Ainsley will be 5 in January.  That just doesn't seem possible.

5.  Alanna has to have her tonsils and adenoids removed on the 23rd of December.  On the good side, at least we get it in this year and insurance should cover most of the cost.  On the bad side, that means no trip back to Nebraska for the holidays.  After our wonderful Thanksgiving in Oregon on vacation, we were looking forward to quality time with the other half of the family for Christmas.  Here's hoping we get back sometime soon!

2011 Book List: December Update

Pretty much my idea of a perfect day.