OK, it doesn’t star Jimmy Stewart and maybe it’s just in time for summer when everybody takes a hiatus, but I’ve been off-line too long. Consider this the Return of the Blog. What you’ll find is a few select sermon blogs from Lent soon to be followed up by the sermons of the Pentecostal season. I think the Lenten sermons are telling in that they are referred to quite distinctly in the Word that follows Easter. In a strange way, maybe the connection backward will be more transparent for the delay. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be back on track. Be sure to look for audio file links ot the sermons at the start of each blog or just click on the links on the Mt Zion home page (www.mtzionluthercan.org).
Readings:
1 Samuel 16:1-13
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41
Audio sermon link:http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/BFF89116-D8DD-4C4F-C43B-D7DA7B3DCE39.mp3
Everyone’s confused. What’s up??
God looks beyond outward appearances to read what is in your heart. He looks beyond the anonymity of David as the 8th child and sees in his heart that he lives th 23rd Psalm. He was the King no one thought would be King.
Oddly enough, there is a level of comfort in being well-enough off and helping a blind beggar. But we don’t want the donkey cart turned around. It’s not always a welcome thought that it is in times of illness, crisis … it is hard to believe that it’s in times like these that God is really at work. In the sinfulness, in the blindness, in the shadows, God works His ways through us and through our blindness.
Why, Pastor Johnson asks us, do you think mud is wiped in the blind man’s face and washed away before he sees??
To remind us … mud comes from dirt and dust, that of which we are made. It takes water to wash our nature away and cleanse us, the clear the way through the dirt enough for us to really see. Our Baptism (the waters) is what allows us to walk out of the darkness and walk with Jesus. Just as David is not the likely choice to be King, so the blind man is not the likely choice. It’s all supposed to look more official than this!
But Pastor Johnson reminds us it takes a certain humility to accept that it is our Baptism that enables us to see, that it’s our Baptism that takes us from mud to the light of walking with Jesus.
We take our sight for granted.
“Only once you appreciate and accept your ‘mudness’, are you able to open your eyes and see.”
Not too long ago, I and my family walked away from what, on any other day, any other time, would have been a fatal car crash. My children in my arms, alive and OK, I slept very differently that night of the accident. I awoke very early the next morning – in fact, I arose very early for weeks afterward … very much more aware that this day before me was a gift, a gift I did not deserve. A gift from my Baptism. The mud had been washed away from my eyes. I went to school to see people arguing over what that day seemed like petty annoyances, but about which I might have been just blind enough to have argued just days before. A good friend shared with me that I'd be seeing the world through new glasses ... for awhile. They were right.
Before we are shown the light, had the mud cleared from our eyes, it is too easy to be complacent in our mirage of self-control. It is too easy to dismiss hope in favor of cynicism masked as realism. Many’s the time a messenger of hope arose that he was greeted with the proverbial “We’ll decide when we need to hope, thank you very much.”
Every green light on our way comes from above. Even ones we may never see ourselves to the other side of. We cannot see Him until we humble ourselves. We can’t see Him through eyes that are cynical, focused on laws and rules, through day planners filled with “the daily routine”. There’s a lack of humility in our thinking we know where we’re going.
Pastor Johnson shared a story that repeats a theme he’s spoken on before – the possibility for change, to “make a new thing”. Pastor’s Uncle Sonny was a happy drunk, one of those characters that told great stories, did voices and impersonations, told the best jokes, did card tricks. One day, he stopped drinking and got sober. And funny thing was he was still funny, still told great jokes, still lit up a room. God broke through his barriers and “made a new thing”. But the reaction to that breaking of barriers was not unlike in so many other families. Nobody really wanted to believe Sonny’d gotten sober. Not yet, they thought. He’s only this far away from his next drink. There was a weird air of cynicism, almost disappointment. Disappointment in a a weird way like when someone we thought of as “behind us in line”, fatter, slower, somehow takes themselves up by the boot straps and passes us up in line, loses weight, takes the lead. We view the world through the microcosm of ourselves at the center.
There is disappointment because it shed light on the rest of the family’s drinkers … those still choosing to hide behind their own ‘mudness’. “Uncle Sonny, hemade us look good … or at least OK”. His was the distraction you looked at ‘over there’ that prevented you from seeing the ‘mudness … over here’. Without that, people just might look for the next best thing. Maybe us?
We’re still not humble enough to see our own mudness, choosing rather to hide behind the façade of another’s, we’re still unable to see. We’re still complacent and not realizing we’re in need of a better brand of hope.
Lent is a time for us to turn some of our focus inward enough to see the mud. Inward enough to look at what’s really there, inward enough to allow the sight there to humble us, humble us enough to a point where we can ask for the waters of Baptism to once again flow over us on Easter and make us see.
Readings:
Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/A0E5455E-933F-E254-339C-E8BE45C1F045.mp3
Today we hear the unforgettable story of the woman at the well, Jesus comes out during the day, at noon specifically, in order to be there when no one is there, to encounter a woman, a marginal member of society. It is known that women in Jesus’ day were marginal, accustomed to being discarded. The woman at the well remains intentionally nameless to drive the point home.
But this is no ordinary story. In his encounter with the woman at the well, Jesus undertakes the single longest conversation with any single person in the entire Bible. And it’s with a woman. It’s rich, deep, and profound. And it’s real. It’s not a patronizing lecture. Jesus makes her the centerpiece of his revelation: that He is the Messiah! Of all the ways in which to be born … in a manger, a cave. Of all the ways to announce you’re The One … to a woman, a person without name, status, rank, pedigree, power. Today Jesus brings us face to face with this woman. She almost brings us to shame. There are undertones of shame at her very image image. Shame over ourselves, our society, our culture for how we can marginalize with discrimination. And this shame, Pastor Mohn reminded us, has a power in its ignorance, its denial.
Pastor Mohn reminded us that Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House says a lot about how far we’ve come. It’s a positive thing, but it also reminds us that we are still discussing gender at all. Gender still matters … today. There is a refusal ongoing, to fit into some prescribed series of expectations that challenges us and challenges our culture. Hillary has stood as a monumental figure to many women today, a symbol of transcending those expectations.
And in his conversation with her at the well, this is precisely what Jesus is doing. He transcends the culture and its lowly expectations. He invites her in. He gives to this woman the gift of his attention, of a story of a people God has not discarded. He lives the story in the telling of the story. By encountering this marginal, nameless person at the well at the height of day, He is announcing the message that ALL are invited to the table!! All are invited and welcome in His house … where God provides “enough” water, enough to sustain us. The message He brings is of a God who provides enough water, enough sustenance.
Now, as with the encounter with Lazarus next week, this story almost guarantees misunderstanding. Jesus is beginning to undertake the discourse with humanity of coming to terms with our brokenness. He is venturing into spreading The Word that He has come to “make a new thing”.
To be an inspiration through your actions is a true calling. It is water enough.
For in so doing, it calls to our inner prejudices, our inner demons and it calls us to a better place, a higher ground, a grander purpose, a place where there is water enough.
Readings:
Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/2EE8DA73-76FB-207B-6703-12AA2E32DAB2.mp3
In today’s Scripture readings we are told of two calls, the responses to which are different.
Nicodemus knows Jesus is “the real deal”, “the guy”, but when Jesus speaks metaphorically to him, he doesn’t get it. It doesn’t make sense. We like a world that makes sense. It’s our nature to try to make sense of things. We like to think WE are in control. We crave things predictable, we look for and gravitate toward routine
But ...
… with God, nothing is routine.
Pastor Johnson used a great metaphorical expression himself when he said:
If you want to travel with God, you have to ride the wind, not knowing from whence it’s come nor where it’s going.
If you truly want to follow God, it’s a scary thing lacking in security. But I heard a great sermon once where the preacher said, “If what you’re after is security, you better forget about ecstasy!! It’s really hard to be after both.”
Traveling with God is risky. Remember, Jesus has reminded us in Scripture that “the Son of Man has no home”. In traveling with God, we may be asked to leave family, friends, home, security, familiarity … for the cause. Nicodemus is the 1st born son. If he leaves, he will incur the wrath of his family, he will have abandoned family obligations, skirted rigid and well-defined cultural expectations. And when He is asked WHERE he is going, Nicodemus is told “to the land I will show you”. Not very specific … like this is no AAA trip-tick. It’s almost for sure an open-ended proposition. We’ll be asked to go to a place we don’t know where it is …
Readers of this blog will have to forgive the seemingly constant analogies to Dyersville, Iowa, but Ray Kinsella is asked by “a voice” to “build a field” because “if he builds it, they will come”. Nothing too specific about “they”. Later, after asking for, begging for clarification, he is told it is to “ease his pain”. No reference to whose pain or what kind of pain. One of Amy Madigan’s memorable lines from the movie is “This voice is not very specific, Ray!!” Townsfolk and fellow farmers more than once think Ray’s lost a few marbles plowing down his crop to build a field in hopes “they” will come and ease “his” pain. When pressed to abandon the folly, Ray often responds with “I don’t know … I just know I’m supposed to do this.”
We are told by Scripture today that we are to trudge on for the cause even when we lack as much detail and specifics enough to make us comfortable. We are told that anyone who questions us, curses us, calls us crazy, God will deal with. We are told to let God deal with those that would stand in our way … we are to just listen to “the voice”, the call.
The second call was that to Abraham who heeded “the voice”. Most of us are not sure “we’re going to make it”. All kinds of people telling us we shouldn’t go. And yet Abraham delivers … Ray Kinsella knows he must continue on.
There is an old Gospel spiritual that chants:
“Abraham, what God is this that requires your only son?” It’s the God with The Voice that is hard to ignore. And one that if we choose to ignore it (for a time), returns again and again. Abraham is called by That Voice to do the thing he thinks he cannot do.
For this time next year, Pastor Johnson reminds us …
… someone will be singing in the choir who thought they couldn’t sing
… someone new will be volunteering at a homeless shelter
… someone will see something unjust on the news and it will eat away at them
Do we ride the wind … or keep our feet planted firmly on terra firma? If we avoid the risk and trade it for security, we will miss the thrill of the ride that only the wind can offer. If what we’re after is security, we can forget about ecstasy.
It’s not a sin not to ride the wind … but what we’re gonna miss is nothing short of … … ecstacy.
