New Fruit

 

Exodus 20:1-4,7-9,12-20     

Matthew 21:33-46      

When I was a child, I was expected to memorize the Ten Commandments, as you might have been too. It was part of the Lutheran curriculum. We were made to memorize the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, some of Luther’s Catechism, and the Commandments. It was assumed that these were the items we needed to know by heart if we were to participate fully in worship.

Memorization is a chore, I never could see it any other way. Yet, once I knew them, I learned to love the Lord’s Prayer and the Creeds because they were always a part of worship and a joyful experience. Once I knew them, I felt pleasure in being able to add my voice to the congregation as we said the words together.

But the Ten Commandments – it was not easy to shift from that sense of duty to a sense of joy. The commandments are all “do this, don’t do that.” Kids don’t feel excited about rules.

Children need rules, of course, but don’t usually like them. The rules say you have to always remember to say please and thank you at the right times. You have to make your bed, clear your dishes from the table, and take out the garbage even if you have something you would rather be doing. Rules say you can’t hit somebody, even if they made you really mad. To a child, many rules don’t seem to make sense, and in some cases, adults feel the same way.

When I was serving as a campus minister a woman approached me and asked what denomination we were affiliated with. When I asked her the same question about her church, she said, “None at all! We’re independent. We don’t follow anyone else’s rules.” I assume they made up some of their own, but I didn’t ask her.

Generally speaking, I think we regard the rules kind of the way I looked at memorization when I was a child. It’s a chore. A necessity. It’s an impingement on our freedom.

But not a gift.

We don’t usually think of rules, or laws, as a gift, but that is the way the Bible speaks about God’s rules – God’s law.

In the book of Exodus, we find the beginning of the law God gives to the people of Israel. The 10 Commandments are only a small portion of it. There are more than 600 laws written in the scriptures, beginning in Exodus and going through Deuteronomy.

You might wonder how the people felt about it. Aside from the fact that they were utterly terrified by the actual presence of God in their midst, I wonder how they felt about the rules God gave them. All their lives they had been living under the oppressive rule of the Egyptians, their slave masters. They knew something about the pain of rules, they had seen too much of that.

But about some other things, they had seen nothing. In these ways they were like children, cast into a place not of their own choosing, a place they knew nothing about. Here, they were unable to even feed themselves, needing God to provide a daily delivery of bread and make drinking water spring out of rocks for them. They could not say where they were going but needed someone to follow. They did the things that children tend to do: they bickered, they whined, they cried out to be fed. They were afraid. They didn’t know how to behave in this time and place.

But God knew what they needed and gave them the law. What an extraordinary law it is! Some have summarized it like this: Put your trust in God. Take time to rest. Respect and care for everyone in your neighborhood. Don’t be greedy.

So different from the Pharaoh’s rule of brutality. Follow these rules and you shall live. Follow God’s rule and you will bear fruit.

But the one story we find all throughout the scriptures, and actually all throughout human history, is the story of people losing their way, straying from God’s way, forgetting what a gift it was – and is. And then they are no longer bearing fruit.

And so Jesus tells the Parable of the Tenant Farmers. He tells it in the temple in Jerusalem. He tells it to the Chief Priests and Pharisees. He didn’t approach them, but they came to him. They came demanding to know where he thought his authority came from. As far as they were concerned, he had no authority at all. As far as they are concerned, he is not following the rules.

So he tells them a set of three parables and this one is in the middle: There was a landowner with a vineyard. He put up a watchtower and he leased the land to tenant farmers.

The Chief Priests and the Pharisees know right away what he is saying, because these are almost verbatim the words from Isaiah 5. The Chief Priests and Pharisees get the message right away: Jesus is telling them they have failed in their duties. Just as the prophet Isaiah told the kings, Jesus tells the Chief Priests and Pharisees that they have failed God and Israel.

Isaiah’s parable says that the tenant farmers produced a bad harvest. Sour grapes. The prophet says to the rulers, “He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!” You are greedy, the prophet charges, and you let people starve. Therefore, it will all be taken from you and given to others, in the hope that these others will produce good fruit.

The Chief Priests and Pharisees know this story, and they get what Jesus is telling them: you are the bad tenants. But there is another layer to this narrative, too. Although Jesus is talking to these religious leaders, it is not a private conversation. Lots of other people are listening, ordinary people. The ones who are sometimes scolded and oppressed by the Pharisees, the ones who suffer the terrorism of the Roman soldiers while the Chief Priests make cozy deals with the Roman governor. The ones whom the Chief Priests and Pharisees have failed – they are listening.

Jesus is speaking on behalf of these people, who are listening. And the Chief Priests and Pharisees are afraid. The leaders are afraid of the people, and there was surely a good reason for that: they knew they were not bearing good fruit.

These tenant farmers have neglected to live in accordance with the rules. Do you remember them? Put your trust in God. Take time for rest. Respect and care for everyone in the neighborhood. Don’t be greedy.

Follow these rules and you shall live. You will bear good fruit. Amen.

The wonderful – and maybe awful – thing about parables is they always invite you, the listener, to find yourself in them. And to hear the message God has for you.

I know that the world we are living in makes it especially hard for us to see the value in God’s rules. The rules we absorb in our daily lives value work over rest. Suspicion over truth. Keeping over letting go. Competition over cooperation. The values in our world make God’s rules look foolish. And if we abide by God’s rules? We look like fools.

But God loves a fool.

God will bless the fools, enrich the fools. And God’s holy fools shall bear fruit.

 Photo by Kelsey Todd on Unsplash

Nostalgia

Exodus 17:1-7   

There is a writer named Michael Chabon who wrote a magazine article about what a good boy he was. He said all his life he has been the dutiful child who will sit and listen to the old folks. He will listen to the stories of the old uncles that nobody wants to listen to anymore. He will patiently explain the mysteries of the newfangled world we find ourselves in and agreeably listen as they explain how much better it used to be. As a child at family gatherings, he would endure all the questions they wanted to ask and he would politely listen to all their advice and cautionary stories, long after all the other kids had run off to play.

As an adult, he still does that – he’s the guy who listens to all the old stories about how wonderful life used to be, even branching out beyond his own family. At a wedding or a Bar Mitzvah, he is likely to be found sitting with somebody else’s Uncle Jack, patiently hearing the stories Uncle Jack’s own family long ago grew weary of.

Maybe it’s out of a sense of empathy, because he knows that, someday, he might very well be an Uncle Jack himself, looking for somebody, anybody, who will listen to him. That might have something to do with it. But he doesn’t say that. He wants us to know that, really and truly, he likes hearing the stories. He doesn’t mind all this nostalgia.

Nostalgia is something that has a bad rep, but it’s not all bad, is it? It feels pretty good. There is in it the fleeting sense of some lost beauty in the world – the wistful memories of childhood, a remembrance of youthful nights with friends, laughing together. It’s an appreciation and a longing for something wonderful that will never be again.

But one of the weird things about nostalgia that we have to acknowledge is that it often distorts the past. We remember how, when we were kids, everything was better. Sunshine was sunnier, snow was snowier, tomatoes were juicier.

In our memories, our accomplishments were more accomplished. Our values were more valuable. Our commonsense ways of doing things were just more … commonsense. In our memories, everything was better back then.

There are psychological reasons for this. Our memories are selective; we are just more likely to remember the good things. It’s not that we’re trying to deceive ourselves, but on some level we try not to remember the bad things, because they can be painful. And so the past takes on a softer focus, a rosier glow. And that is normal.

But our nostalgia really gets amped up when the present time is uncomfortable, when the future is uncertain. Hence, we have the peculiar complaints of the Israelites in the wilderness. It was only a short time ago that they were praying to God to be released from bondage in Egypt. And now they are looking at Moses with accusing eyes and asking why he has done this to them. It’s remarkable.

You can’t help but admire their complaints; they are so good at it. If there is such a thing as a creative complaint competition, they could definitely be contenders. My favorite is in Chapter 14, when they say: Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt?

When they got panicky, they seemed to remember a different experience in Egypt than the one they had actually endured. They reminisced about sitting around their pots full of meat, eating all they wanted. Their heads were full of memories of meat and fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, garlic and onions! As if!

Slavery never looked so good as it did in the heads of these scared and lost Israelites in the wilderness.

And that is the danger and the harm of nostalgia. As they stepped into an unknown place and an uncertain future, they pined for a gauzy, prettied-up version of the past. They remembered the best snippets of what it had been like, cutting out all the pieces that didn’t fit this rosy narrative – and there were a lot of pieces that didn’t fit. They turned their faces to this fictionalized memory of the good old days in Egypt. And as long as they were fixated on that memory of the past it was impossible for them to see the present into which God was leading them.

True, this present where God was leading them was a wilderness. Yes, we do have some sympathy for them. Imagine being led away from the only home you had ever known, by a man you barely know, into a harsh land you know not at all.

Yet, as long as they are looking back they cannot live into the future.

We live in a time not too different from this wilderness period. We face, every day, an uncertain future about the church. We have worries about declining attendance and the aging of our congregations. And we wonder what it means for the future. In a sense, we are in our own wilderness.

So, we look back at the good old days, when the sanctuaries were full. We look back to when the churches were full of children, the offering plates were full of envelopes, and the pulpits were full of – men.

And we remember a time when children were taught to pray in public schools, when the laws kept businesses closed on Sundays, and schools wouldn’t dare schedule an activity on a Wednesday night because that was church night. We look back wistfully at a time when the church held power. Oh, how sweet it was.

But was it? Really?

When I look back, I see a church that never used the word spiritual. In fact, most church members didn’t even know what it meant – it sounded suspicious. But now we use the word more and more, seeking an understanding of it, what it means to seek spiritual growth, and we find ourselves drawn into it. Isn’t that a good thing?

When I look back, I see a church that did not much concern itself with justice – a church that largely ignored so many of the injustices that were right outside our doors. But we were doing our thing, inside, and all that other stuff wasn’t really on our radar. Now, though, we see it. Now we ask ourselves: what would Jesus do about the injustices of the world?

Perhaps we do have a sense of the future God is leading us into.

I was once at a church leadership workshop where the question was asked: How many of you think your church’s best days are behind you? Many raised their hands. Then he asked this: How many of you think God’s best days are behind God? Not a hand was raised. So doesn’t it seem to make sense that if our interests are aligned with God’s then our best days are ahead of us?

Did you know that this generation of Israelites, the great complainers, never made it to the Promised Land? Perhaps because they were too nostalgic for the past. They couldn’t stop looking back. They couldn’t see the gifts God was placing before them. That is too easy to do. May you not let nostalgia get the better of things.

May you see the past for what it was – both good and bad, and past. May you live in the present, where Christ is with you. May you step into the future in trust. May you live in gratitude for what was, what is, and what will be.

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash 

  

Just What You Need

Exodus 16:2-15 

Matthew 20:1-16        

We have a bad habit of reading the Bible in all the wrong ways. We read stories as if they were instruction manuals when perhaps we should be seeing in them masterful paintings of what the world is like, what life is like. We read the epistles looking for universal truths instead of examples of how one particular community found a way to deal with their particular problem. We read the gospels looking for prescriptions for healing – take two of these and call me in the morning…but we come away feeling like our particular ailment can’t be found in the book. Or that the prescription just doesn’t work for us.

We have a bad habit of looking for gifts in the Bible that God never even intended to give us. And so we say things like, “God helps those who help themselves. And you know God never gives you more than you can handle. Cheer up; for your good deeds, you will be rewarded. Alas, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and this too shall pass. But remember, ask and you shall receive – if you have faith the size of a mustard seed.”

So, what’s the matter? Maybe you just need a little more faith. Maybe you need to try harder.

And so you do. You work a little harder. You give yourself little pep talks. You step carefully around all the cracks. You avoid questions that you fear might have no answers. And you keep digging, looking for a verse – just a verse, that’s all you want – to find that something that is just the right recipe, that is just what you need.

Sometimes you second-guess yourself. Maybe you shouldn’t have moved and taken that new job. Should you go back? Maybe you should have called her. Maybe you tried to do too much. Maybe you didn’t try hard enough.

The weight gets to feeling so heavy. Every day can feel so hard – when things don’t seem right, when heaven seems so far away. When the people you love are suffering. When you are suffering. When everyone around you is suffering. What are we doing wrong? or, what are they doing wrong?

There are moments, days, weeks, even long years, when you just feel lost…severed from all that matters. All that gives you meaning.

So what do you do? You call the doctor. You try a new exercise program. You scour the self-help section of the bookstore. You read your Daily Bread and Upper Room devotionals looking to decode the magical message written on the pages. There must be a solution. There must be a way for me to fix it.

There must be, because we know that we are on our own here. We have to do this ourselves. No one else knows, no one else will. No one else even cares to hear about your troubles. What is that thing we all say when anyone asks how we’re doing? We say we can’t complain. No one wants to hear it.

We all know we are the only ones who are responsible for our situations. We know it’s all up to us. We learned it at a young age – everyone needs to learn to take care of themselves. Every man, woman, and dog for themselves. So pull yourself up by your bootstraps; you want it?  earn it.

You have said these things to yourself. You have probably said some of these things to someone else. You have told your children to grow up. If you are as bad as me, you might have said that to your three-year-old.

Because, face it: it’s a dog-eat-dog world and like Naomi in the Old Testament story of Ruth, there are days when I want to say, “Call me bitter, for that’s who I am now.”

And then somebody looks at me and really sees me. Someone offers me a cup of coffee. Or takes a walk with me. Somebody actually wants to listen to my lament; defying the conventional wisdom that no one cares, somebody cares. Somebody shows me they do care. Someone is willing to be there. Not trying to fix it. Not trying to contradict it or deny it. just being there. That’s when I see that glimmer of hope.

Just when you think it’s all lost, God tells you, I’ve got just what you need today. Enough for today. Every day.

And if you can remember that, it’s all you need. You don’t need all the other words I have said. 

But, just for good measure…just in case…I offer you these words from the poet Wendell Berry, who can say anything so much better than I can:

So, friends, every day do something that won't compute.

Love the Lord. Love the world.  Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

…

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Expect the end of the world.

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

 

Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts. Because the fact is, today and every day, God’s got just what you need. 

*Wendell Berry quote excerpted from  "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front"

Operating Instructions

 

Psalm 149

Matthew 18:15-20      

This past week I was reading an article in Christianity Today about things that are going on in the Southern Baptist Convention. A few years ago, you may remember, there was a lot of news about acts of abuse by pastors that had taken place in Southern Baptist churches. The victims of abuse were speaking out and the denomination as a whole was forced to confront it. Last year at their annual meeting they voted for reforms that would make them more effective in addressing, and hopefully preventing, cases of abuse. That was a good move.

But it turned out the move was controversial in its own right. Some protested that it was unfair, that it was inappropriate, that it was too expensive, or that it was suspect in some way. It grew into a messy conflict-ridden problem. And this year at their annual meeting, it was almost as though they had decided to forget all about the matter. This year they were all about reasserting the commitment to male eldership, as they call it. Which means enforcing rules against women in leadership roles. They even removed certain congregations from their denomination – they call it disfellowshipping – because these churches have women leaders.

To use a term that session has been playing with lately, I would call that a squirrel: something that snatches our attention away from the task at hand. Maybe even a distraction that we intentionally create for the purpose of avoiding the real problem. The problem of abuse in the church was something they found very difficult, understandably. So they dug up an old favorite, dusted it off, and decided it was the most important issue of the day.

There is much more I could say about these issues, but today I only want to raise the point that we are very good at distractions, and we are not very good at dealing with conflicts. It’s true for Southern Baptists, it’s true for Presbyterians, it’s true for people, as a rule. We don’t know how to deal with conflict.

Our denomination has a book of rules, it’s a part of our constitution. We call it the Book of Order. It covers all kinds of things: how we govern ourselves, how we worship, how we handle membership, and what we do when a pastor or an elder crosses a line and harms someone or the church as a whole.

Or, in the words of Jesus in this passage, when a member sins against you.

This episode in Matthew is the only place we see Jesus speak about the church. And, actually, “church” is not the word that Jesus would have used because there was not yet a church. That came years later when the followers of Jesus moved outside the realm of Judaism. Whatever word he used when he spoke of these matters, what is most important is that he was talking about how communities manage conflict.

Jesus tries to make it simple, breaking it down into three easy steps. First, approach the one who has caused offense. Let them know how they have caused harm. And if that works, great. Problem solved.

But if it does not, go to step 2: bring a couple of other people with you to be witnesses. Sometimes that will work in bringing an offender to repentance. But if it doesn’t, go to step 3, which is basically to take it to the authorities. Let the church deal with this person.

Nowhere do Jesus’ instructions say: take it out to the parking lot. Nowhere does he say: go home and yell at the kids, kick the dog, have a few drinks – you’ll feel better. Jesus clearly tells us: when you have a problem? Deal with it.

He has to tell us this, because most of the time we are so bad at it. Most of the time we avoid directly dealing with a conflict as if it were electrified. Most of the time we would rather put our head in the sand or find a squirrel.

Someone once told me that if a church says they don’t have any conflicts, that means they have conflict all the time. Because if they aren’t dealing with it, it’s always just under the surface.

I think maybe we avoid conflict so religiously because we are afraid of the harm that could come from facing it. Explosions, fights, grenades. But then perhaps we are failing to understand the Jesus method for conflict management. Which is something that involves patience and love, forgiveness and repentance and reconciliation.

And if you get to step 3 in Jesus’ operating instructions, and the offender still doesn’t budge, then he says “treat that one like a Gentile or a tax collector.”

And don’t forget that Jesus built his church out of Gentiles and tax collectors.

The steps may be simple but that doesn’t make it easy. The good news is that Jesus is right by our side through it all. For when two or three are gathered in my name, he says, I am with them.

Thanks be to God.

Squirrel! Photo by Maddie Franz: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-squirrel-on-gray-tree-trunk-1571117/

Together

 

Psalm 105

Romans 12:9-21

During the years I was serving as a campus minister there were a variety of different Christian student groups, and I got to know some of the young adults who were active in the others. Our ministry focused primarily on learning and worship and fellowship. But there were other groups that focused on evangelizing. One of the students who was very active in one of those groups shared with me some stories about his evangelizing. He and another student went door to door in the dorms to invite others to join them for Bible study.

They didn’t get a lot of yeses. In fact, they faced a lot of angry people who would say things like, “You Christians are such hypocrites! You say one thing and do another.” That wasn’t unusual. But what was unusual was the way these two young men responded to it. They’d say, “yes, you are right. We say one thing and do another. We don’t live up to our hopes and expectations. We sin and fall short of the glory of God. We know that. We’re just trying to do better. And we want to invite you to join us in trying to do better.”

These guys were responding to the skeptics in unexpected ways. They were, essentially, confessing their sin to them.

It’s not unlike another story I heard about Christian students at a college in Oregon. Finding themselves in a distinct minority on a campus that was largely hostile toward Christianity, they decided to set up a confession booth during a college festival. But it was the opposite of what was expected. The Christian students invited others to sit down and hear the Christians confessing the sins of the church. They were saying to the non-Christians “I’m sorry” for the ways you have been hurt by the church.

It’s a little disarming, isn’t it?

And it is much like what Paul is exhorting the Roman Christians to do.

Unlike most of his other churches Paul wrote to, the church in Rome was not one that he had founded. In fact, Paul had probably never even visited Rome. But he knew this church and the problems they were facing simply because they were very human problems: the biggest challenge to peace and harmony is the fact of other people. If it weren’t for other people, we all could get along just fine.

Have you ever met someone who didn’t have tensions with other people now and then? If you actually have known someone like that, you probably thought they were really weird. When I think of the most angelic human I have ever known, someone whom everyone thought of as a saint, I remember the time she sat down with me and let me know how angry she felt at people who didn’t understand her ministry of serving the poor in our community. This saint, she would get really angry sometimes. Because she was human.

Like churches everywhere, the church in Rome was facing great challenges learning to live together in peace. Paul was concerned, because he loved them. But also because he knew if these tensions could not be addressed there would be great harm to the further growth and health of the church. How could they move outward and invite new people into the family if there was so much trouble within the family?

And so Paul wrote to the church attempting to counsel them without judging. Without taking sides. Showing love and honor to all the members. And here we see he is asking them to do the same.

Hate what is evil, he says, but let love be genuine. Love one another. Give. Bless. Honor. Rejoice. Overcome evil with good. There is no telling who he thought was perpetrating evil in the community, but it is likely everyone had their share in it.

It is a constant struggle the church faces, to live the way Paul encourages, the way Jesus teaches. But if we stop struggling…if we let these words become empty phrases, platitudes, that’s when we hear others say, “You Christians; you’re such hypocrites.”

The problems of the Roman church are no different, really, from the problems of the church anywhere. Sometimes it is hard to get along. Hard to show love. Hard to  avoid judging. Hard to be humble.

But do these things, Paul says, and you will heap burning coals on their heads. Not literally, of course, because he has just forbidden them to engage in any kind of retribution. What he is saying is something like “kill them with kindness.”

Again, not literally killing them, of course. Just a little humor to help the medicine go down.

Because it is not easy to follow Christ’s teachings. It is not easy to be Christlike. It is not easy to be the church. But it is good, and as many times as we fail, we must try and try again.

And so we do the kinds of things that we have going on today. We baptize children into the family of Christ, and we make promises to love them and care for them, guide them toward Jesus. And we send our children out into the world with our prayers and our blessings, and our tokens meant to remind them always that they are never alone, that we are all in this together with them. And we take the time to meet as a body and elect and ordain new leaders in our congregation with our gratitude and our prayers.

And may we never let the words we say be empty promises.

In everything we do, if we follow Christ’s way, we seek to live peaceably, to love one another, to respond to hate with love. We will never claim that it is easy or that we have it all under control – because it isn’t, and we don’t. We will never get it just right, but if we keep on working toward authentic love, we will be blessed with blessings enough to share.

Confessing Together

 

Psalm107:17-22

2 Corinthians5:16-21

A Lutheran pastor once told me a story about the “new and improved” Lutheran book of worship that had just come out. 

It’s actually a bit of a tussle whenever the church puts out a new book of worship because it means the congregations have to learn new musical settings for the liturgy. And, believe it or not, a lot of the congregants don’t like change that much.

But apparently some of the members of this congregation thought they had found a silver lining. They noticed that the confession of sin was no longer a required part of the weekly worship service. It was now optional; they could confess their sins if they wanted to, but they didn’t have to.

Well, they immediately brought this to the pastor’s attention. Because it seemed as though he had overlooked this important piece of information. He just looked at them and smiled. He said, No, actually, it isn’t optional. It might be the new and improved worship setting, but we’re still the same old and unimproved human beings. We’ll continue to confess our sins. Every week.

I guess I feel the same way this Lutheran pastor did. While it isn’t required in our Presbyterian worship – because in our Reformed worship there are very few things that are explicitly required – it is important in our faith and in our worship.

For Presbyterians, the confession of sin is strategically placed in our order of worship. It is one of the first things we do together on a Sunday morning, very simply because it is something we all need to do before we can enter the Word of God. Before we can hear the Word, before it can work in us, we need to remove any barriers that stand in the way. Pretending we are not sinners? That would be a major barrier.

So important is this act of worship, that some Presbyterian churches put the call to confession as the very first thing. It is as if to say you cannot even begin to worship God before you have made your confession.

The prayer of confession is, of course, a corporate prayer, meaning it is a prayer we make together as one body. And that is sometimes troublesome to some of us. Many times I have had someone approach me after the worship service to let me know that they have a bone to pick about some particular part of the prayer of confession. They will say, “I don’t do that, so I don’t feel I should have to confess it.” They might say, “That isn’t even relevant to me, and I am offended by the expectation that I should say it.”

It is true, of course, that some of the things we confess on any given Sunday we have not done personally. But we are confessing as a body; we are, in a way, all claiming responsibility for one another. We confess the sins of the church as a whole, and even sometimes the sins of humankind as a whole.

But even more, I would suggest to you that the corporate confession of sin gives each one of us an opportunity to search ourselves honestly and root out the hidden sin. The moment of silent confession gives a little time for that.

I know that the time of confession may not be the most upbeat and joyful part of our worship, but it can truly lead to joy. We confess our sin to God, we lift off the burden that is weighing us down, imprisoning us, and we rejoice in the glory of God, who is merciful and loving.

Because every time we enter into confession we immediately receive an assurance of forgiveness through Christ our Savior. In the words of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.”

In fact, the reason we can confess our sin so freely is because our forgiveness is assured.

We confess as a church, together, for the sins of all. We each confess silently, for the particular sins we have committed. And for all of it we receive forgiveness. But it may feel, somehow, that the sin clings to us, even though we have confessed.

I have often heard it said that the problem is that we don’t forgive ourselves. We remain troubled by sins because we continue to hold ourselves in contempt, even though God has already forgiven. Friends will encourage us to be kinder to ourselves, to forgive ourselves so we can move on. I know this is true sometimes.

But Bonhoeffer raises a question that I find nags at me: When we have made our confession in the silence of our hearts, naming our particular sins in silence, are we, perhaps only confessing to ourselves? Is it possible that in this silent confession we are trying to grant ourselves absolution, leaving God and everyone else out of it? and is this, possibly, the real reason we feel unable to leave that sin behind?

Bonhoeffer makes a strong case for each one confessing their sin to another human being. Not a priest, because there is no special power that the priest has to wipe out our sins, but to a brother, or a sister, in Christ. To say them out loud to another, and, of course, that is something we don’t care to do.

We say that our sin is between ourselves and God, but there are actually so many ways this is not true. When we have wronged someone else, when we have failed to give our time and our talents to the work of the church, when we have been callous about the needs of others – in all these cases our sins are relevant to others. In truth, our sin is between ourselves and God and our community. In the community of Christ, we are all called to be as Christ to one another.

We often say in the Presbyterian Church that we are all ministers, and that is true in the Lutheran Church as well. We believe that, by virtue of our baptism we are empowered to share the good news of God’s grace; we are given the authority to offer the forgiveness of sin in Christ’s name. And we are strengthened to give strength to one another as we walk this path together. This is a ministry that we all share. As Paul writes to the Corinthians, “God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”

There are moments in the life of a congregation when this act of reconciliation is crucial. A congregation where I once served went through a rough patch together. During that time people said things they should not have said. People did things they should not have done. There was a lot of hurt. Something needed to be done. So we held a healing service. We implored everyone to come, especially those whom we knew were suffering.

We made a prayer of confession a central part of our worship. We prayed together, using the printed words on the page of our bulletin. Then we took some time to move around the sanctuary to offer forgiveness to one another. We gave everyone as much time as was needed to approach the ones they wanted to approach, to say the words they needed to say, and to offer one another signs and words of forgiveness.

It was something that had to be done. These were not matters we wanted to carry around with us for years to come, like suitcases full of bricks. The church had to let it go and the only way to let it go was to ask for and offer forgiveness.

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” We find these words in the first epistle of John, and it is a reminder we all need to hear: that our confession of sin is not an add-on. It is not just one of many options we might choose on any given day.

The church is sometimes called a hospital for sinners, because all of these sin-sick souls are in need of healing, which comes to us through forgiveness. Anyone is welcome here. No one is expected to get their act together before they walk in the door. Just as God loves each of us just as we are, we are each called to love others, just as they are.

The church is also sometimes called a school for saints, because every one of us recovering sinners is in need of spiritual nourishment, to grow in grace and love. That is our hope for anyone who walks through our door, no matter who they are.

Only in church can we do these things. Only in the community of Christ can we give to one another what is needed to heal and grow. That is why we are here.

I don’t know how I would live without the church, because it has always been there for me. It feels as though losing the church would be like losing my heart.

I say this, even though I know that being the church is never easy. The work of community is hard work. When we would rather sleep in, we are called to get up and go be with the community. When we would rather spend our cash on our own private pleasures, we are called to give to the work of the church. When we would rather walk away from a hard relationship, we are called to stay in it, working toward reconciliation.

But I must say this morning, the ministry of reconciliation goes beyond what happens between these four walls. After the news of another racist mass murder on Saturday in Jacksonville, we are reminded there is much need for reconciliation out in the world, and once again we see how excruciatingly painful this problem is. We live in a society where hatred is allowed to grow freely and flourish. So free that some even believe they are justified in killing others simply because they have dark skin. This is the sin of our nation, a sin we all share, and we must face it. Hard as it is, we must face it.

Only church asks these hard things from us. And only church gives us the surprising and precious gifts in return.

Together we are so much more than any one of us could be alone. Together we are the body of Christ our Lord – to him be all glory and dominion, forever and ever.

Listening Together

Psalm46  

1Corinthians 1:4-9

Once when I was still in seminary I was invited to preach at a church whose service was broadcast on the radio. I felt like my big moment had arrived, my 15 minutes of fame. This was exciting.

Someone from the church called me in advance to fill me in on a few important things to know about being on the radio, and the most important thing was silence. There is no silence allowed on the radio. I was warned that after so many seconds of silence the broadcast will be cut off, and the station would go to something else. It wasn’t anything personal. They wouldn’t cut me off because they didn’t like my sermon. It’s just that there is no silence allowed on the radio. In fact, since they had been broadcasting, they had made certain modifications in the worship service to make sure there would be no silence, and this essentially involved the organist playing a lot of traveling music, as it’s called.

I did what I was supposed to do, and everything was fine.

Then they invited me back to preach again and this time it was a communion Sunday. A couple of things are different on a communion Sunday. For one, there is lots of traveling music – ask our organist Susan and she will tell you.

But the second thing that was special was that, because I was not yet an ordained minister of word and sacrament, I could not preside over the communion table. They knew this, but they invited me anyway. And they resolved this problem by also asking a retired pastor to participate.

Well, everything went fine, until I made a rookie mistake. I mean, I had never presided over the communion table before and I did something dumb, which threw everything off and I didn’t know what to do next. I looked over at my co-presider for help. But apparently, this guy thought his role that day was to just stand there and look like a pastor. He wasn’t even paying attention, so he was no help at all.

So there I was, a dumb rookie, with everyone looking to me, as if I knew what I was doing. Which I didn’t. It felt like an eternity as I stood up there trying to think it through. And because there is no silence on the radio, the organist played and played and played her heart out. She had no idea what was going on, but the whole broadcast clearly depended on her now.

During the after-worship coffee hour, I approached her and apologized for my awkwardness and all it put her through. And she turned to me with a wild look in her eyes that made my heart race. Through clenched teeth she said, “Why whatever do you mean?”

She was a little frazzled. I didn’t get invited back after that.

I had two thoughts after this experience: One was that I had better get my act together at the communion table. And the second was about silence. Is silence a good thing? Is silence dangerous?

The answer, I think, is yes. And yes.

Silence makes us uncomfortable. If we are with other people and there is silence, it feels like we are wasting time, like someone should be saying something. We may grow bored. We may even become angry.

I know that for people who live alone, silence is sometimes sad. So we keep the TV or radio on, so it doesn’t feel so alone.

Silence in church might make you feel like you’re not getting what you came here for. You came here to receive something edifying – a message, beautiful music, fellowship – not silence.

Maybe we acknowledge that silence has its place, but we like talking. As we were saying last week, humans are made for community, and a central aspect of community is talking to one another.

I selected this passage from Corinthians for today because in it Paul praises speech. But we find out shortly that he wrote this with a sense of irony. In a way, he is setting the Corinthians up for a dressing down.

Before we get into that, though, let’s take a step back. Corinthians is one of the New Testament epistles, of which there are 21, many of them written by Paul. Epistles are letters – letters someone wrote to someone else, and this means that when we are reading the epistles we are reading someone else’s mail.

He was actually speaking to someone else’s issues, in this case it’s the church in Corinth. And the church in Corinth, it is pretty clear from the letters, had issues.

Corinth had a long history as a prosperous trade city. Because of where it was situated, it was the perfect route for transporting goods between east and west. The city had a rich, diverse, and lively cultural life. But about 200 years before Paul wrote this letter, the city was captured by Rome and destroyed. The people of Corinth were either killed or enslaved, the ruins of the city were abandoned.

About 100 years later, Julius Caesar rebuilt Corinth as a Roman colony, basically, reopening Corinth for business. And it attracted people who were looking for a new start in life. Many of these people who came to Corinth were former slaves, hoping to make something prosperous of their new freedom.

We hear a hint of this when Paul says, later in this chapter, that when you were called into the church, not many of you were powerful, not many of you were of noble birth. We might say these people were strivers. They had ambition, but they weren’t there yet. There were some members of the church who lived very privileged lives, but many of them were on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.

From our point of view, it might be a surprise that all these diverse people were thrown together in the church. Actually, it might have been a surprise to them too. We can be sure that some of the problems they were experiencing were a direct result of the diversity in the congregation.

So, in these opening sentences we heard today, Paul is laying out some of the issues he will address, and among these issues is the matter of speaking in the worship gathering. It doesn’t seem like they had a problem of too much silence. On the contrary they had too much talking.

They weren’t Presbyterians. They didn’t have a well-established order of worship as we have now. They didn’t have centuries of tradition that informed their attitudes and behavior in worship – there is both good and bad that we could say about that. But what this church was apparently experiencing was competitiveness in the congregation.

They were in competition with one another about their spiritual gifts, and this is where speaking comes in: the most dazzling of the gifts of the Spirit is speaking in tongues. Basically, they were showing off.

Now, I have never met a Presbyterian with the gift of tongues, although I wouldn’t put it past the Holy Spirit to sweep in here and set us all aflame like the apostles on the day of Pentecost. But just because we don’t speak in tongues, it doesn’t mean this letter has nothing to say to us. The truth is, in any congregation, there is a temptation to see ourselves as, somehow, superior to the person who sits across from us in the pews. Or the one who just walked through the door for the first time. And that is a problem.

Arrogance is not a fruit of the Spirit. But self-control is. Modesty is.

Paul writes to the Corinthians that the gifts we are given should be used for the building up – not the tearing down – of the community of Christ. The gifts of God are for the people of God.

Bonhoeffer has a chapter in his book, Life Together, about ministry, and he begins it by addressing the danger of ego in the Christian community. Our egos will put us in competition with one another, always comparing ourselves to others. And it is to this point that Bonhoeffer lists the various kinds of ministry that are essential in the church.

The first ministry he names is the ministry of holding one’s tongue. The second is the ministry of meekness. And the third is the ministry of listening. There are, of course, other necessary ministries, but isn’t it interesting that these are the first three he puts forward?

I think it says listen: we all know what the greatest temptations are, the greatest dangers are, and so the first thing we need to do is check those things at the door: check our egos, check our competitiveness, check our judginess. And only when we have done those things can we really listen.

On the matter of listening, Bonhoeffer writes that this is a service we owe to one another in the community. Listening to another is a means of loving another. Everyone has the need to be heard, really heard. So everyone of us has the obligation to hear them – no matter what they have to say.

Because if we truly listen with the love of God in our hearts, we will then be in a position to speak from that same heart. Only by listening can we help in building up the community of Christ.

And so listening is an important discipline for the church. That means silence is an important discipline for each of us individually. And that goes back to the danger of silence.

Silence may feel dangerous to us for a number of reasons. Maybe it makes us feel alone. Maybe it makes us feel unimportant.

But I think the real risk in silence is that we might hear a word from God that is calling us to something new. A deeper commitment, perhaps. An openness new people or practices. Perhaps an anointing to take on a new role, a new ministry. In your silence you might hear it as the still small voice of God. Or you might hear it in the words of the person sitting before you.

Silence is good because in silence we might hear a word from God. That is also why silence is dangerous. And it is why silence is essential to the church.

Maybe silence is not good for radio, but it’s surely good for us.