Immanuel Lutheran Church - Benson

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”  Jesus answered them, “Beware that no one leads you astray.”
Matthew 24:3-4

Regular worship services will be held at Immanuel Lutheran Church at 8:15 and 10:40 AM Sunday morning!

This Saturday, May 21, is supposedly the date of the rapture, according to one radio evangelist.   http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43051889/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/end-times-math-equation-predicts-may-judgment-day/

This is not the first time the “rapture” has been predicted.  http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl2.htm

And more than that, it’s not the first time that the world has been predicted to end.  http://www.livescience.com/14172-doomsdays-apocalypse-world-infograhpic.html

What are we to do about all this?  What can we trust?  What does it all mean?

First of all, the idea of “rapture” is itself an odd bit of theology.  It is the basic idea that the chosen, righteous few will be picked out of the rest of humanity, taken up to heaven in order to avoid the punishments that the rest of us unrighteous people will have to suffer.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture

There are two primary passages in the Bible that are used to support this idea:

1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.  Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.” 

And Matthew 24:40-41 “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.  Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”

Paul, in 1 Thessalonians, is reassuring the faithful people that those who have died since Christ’s ascension will not be left out of the salvation Jesus will enact once he returns.  Hence, Jesus will rise up the dead first.  Then, who are alive at the time will be united with Jesus Christ.  But clearly, Paul’s assumption of those “who are left” means that certain persecutions and punishments will reign before the righteous people are united with Jesus.  They are not exempt from the trial and tribulations of their lives.  Instead, they are the ones who remain faithful through the tough times.

Matthew’s account of Jesus’ statement is even starker.  Jesus has just told his disciples that his return will be like the days before Noah, when the majority of people are living their lives as normal until they were taken away by the flood.  (My translation says “swept them all away” but the Greek words written down here and then in 40 and 41 are synonyms!).  To be “taken” according to Jesus is not to be saved or raptured, but instead to be destroyed.  The ones who are left are the ones to whom Jesus returns!

This is fulfilled in the Book of Revelation, where John on Patmos is given the vision of the heavenly places, and the 144,000 that are gathered around the throne of God and of the Lamb are described as, “…they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” (Revelation 7:14)

Those who Jesus gathers for him are not removed from the trials and tribulations.  To be “raptured” would be horrible!  Jesus is searching for followers who remain faithful through all ordeals and troubles.

So who are we to trust?  This radio evangelist with a numerological idea of what it means to run the universe?  Who attributes to numbers practical, not theological, significance?  No, we trust in the one Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Even if we see the rapture that this person hopes to receive, we cast our hearts to Jesus Christ, trusting only in him.

So, what are we to do about this Saturday; this impending date of Jesus’ return?  Well, if you want, you can dress up real nice and wait and see if you’re one of Jesus’ chosen.  For me, I’ll be planning worship for Sunday.  I’ll be preparing to worship Jesus Christ with all my heart, all my soul, all my strength, and all my mind.  If my sermon preparation is unnecessary, then Jesus will find me faithful to him alone, and not to false Messiahs and false prophets (Matthew 24:24-26).  And, if my sermon preparation is necessary, then Jesus will still find me faithful to him alone!

So I recommend to you the same: whatever you do, do it in his name, in his grace.  You have already been saved, by grace through faith in Jesus.  Waste no more time worrying about the “end of the world” and worry instead about living your life (no matter how much more of it you have) in response to the grace you have received.

And plan to come to worship on Sunday!

Love the Lord, all you his saints.  The Lord preserves the faithful, but abundantly repays the one who acts haughtily.
Psalm 31:23

On this holy week, this year, during these days, it’s important to love the Lord.

There are all kinds of crazy things going on in the world.  Of course, there’s always craziness going on.  That’s just the nature of human beings.  We make things crazy, do crazy things, and make other people feel crazy because of the crazy things we are doing.

Because that’s the normal human condition, because that always happens, it is always important for faithful people to love the Lord with all their heart, all their soul, all their mind, and all their strength.  It takes loving the Lord to make it through crazy times.  

The people who love the Lord are called saints.  Saints are the result of sanctification, or being made holy, or set apart for God’s use.  “But,” you might ask, “how can we be made holy if we still do crazy things?”

Sanctification is the process by which God takes crazy people and makes them useful.  It’s a slow, long process, which takes up more than our lives.  All along the journey of your life, you are being made and formed by God to be useful to God.  You are a holy person, set apart to be God’s ambassador to the crazy world.

At the same time, you are part of the crazy world, not exempt from making things crazy or doing crazy things to other people.  And we will always have to fight our urges to do crazy things while at the same time our desire to be God’s saints.

But for as long as God chooses to work sanctification in us, we are saints, chosen to be God’s workers in this crazy world.  And because God chose us, we know that God will keep us and preserve us, even in the midst of crazy things.

Another word for God’s preservation is “deliverance.”  God delivers us through all the crazy things going on in our world.  God does not always prevent these crazy things from happening to us or even from us, but God has promised to deliver us through all kinds of crazy things, just like God led the Israelites through the Red Sea on dry land (which was a pretty crazy miracle!).

God promises to continue to deliver us through all these crazy things, and because we have seen God do that before in our own lives, we trust that God will do it again and again and again.  This trust in God is called faith, so as God preserves us and delivers us, we trust in God to deliver us and preserve us again and again.

And then we tell other people about the deliverance we have received.  That is the good news, the gospel, that we are sent to tell: that God has delivered the saints before and will continue to deliver the saints and the faithful people over again through all craziness that comes our way.

But if we don’t trust God, if we think we have delivered ourselves and act boastful and proud (or haughty, as the Psalmist writes), than we will not trust God to deliver us.  We will think we can do it on our own.  If we aren’t looking for God to deliver us and preserve us, how will we ever recognize it when God does? 

Thus, it’s not a matter of God giving more craziness to those who don’t trust God, but that those who don’t trust God don’t see God trying to work in their lives.  They don’t witness God’s saving grace through the craziness of the world.  And then they can’t tell anyone else what God is doing, because they can’t see it.

They can’t see it, at least until someone else points it out.  And that’s when the faithful step back up to the plate again.  We need to be able to recognize what God is doing, and speak it out loud especially for those who don’t see it!

Us faithful people, God’s chosen saints, can only make our way through this crazy world, through these crazy days, by recognizing and talking about God’s deliverance.  So as we travel this week through Holy Week, remembering the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, let us call to mind how trusting in his salvation brings life to us, even in these crazy times.  And let us not be afraid to share that good news!

While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.  And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.
Luke 24: 51-53

Have you ever noticed that Lent can bring about a kind of Christian amnesia?

I think about this every year as I begin to plan worship in Lent.  We spend so many weeks and so much focus on Jesus’ suffering and death, that sometimes it seems like we’ve forgotten that we know the end of the story. 

(Just like at Christmas, it sometimes seems like we have forgotten that this little baby grows up to die and be resurrected like he does!)

I always try and remember that not only do we get to remember the beginning of the story at Christmas, and the middle of the story during Lent, but that we already are living in the afterwards, the A.D. (which is the abbreviation of the Latin “Anno Domini” meaning “Year of Our Lord”).

We are living in the time after Jesus died, rose again, and ascended into heaven, described here in the Gospel According to Luke.  Here, Jesus led his disciples out of Jerusalem to Bethany, where he blessed them.  As he blessed them, he was taken up to heaven (which has only happened a few times in the history of the Bible – Enoch and Elijah I remember for sure!) 

Now this sure would be a horrible way to end the story.  After all, here was the Son of God, who was dead and now raised from the dead to new life.  Surely he could have stayed around a while, maybe a couple thousand years, and that maybe I could have seen him?  Right?

But notice the disciples’ reaction to this.  After he was gone, there was no moping about, no sadness, no grumbling.  They worshiped him, and then returned to Jerusalem with great joy!

They were happy Jesus left them again!?  That doesn’t make any sense.

Or does it?

See, just before this, Jesus promised to send to them the power to witness to the things that they had seen.  That power, of course, comes at Pentecost with the tongues of the Spirit filling their tongues with power.  But here, the disciples realize that Jesus leaving so they could receive the Holy Spirit is the best thing to happen.

After all, knowing that we are made right with God by God’s grace through our faith in Jesus Christ, we need to ask whether it would be possible to have faith if Jesus were still around!

The point of Jesus leaving was to allow faith to grow.  If Jesus showed every day to every one of us and told us what we would need to know, we would never need faith.  We would have fact.  And while some people like having the facts all tied up neatly with a little bow on top, it does not engender faith.  Facts create at the most, belief; at the least, silent submissive assent.

And God doesn’t want to just be another fact on the page.  God wants to love us with that thrilling, exciting but also mysterious love.  Like two people who proclaim their love for each other.  You can’t prove it by fact.  You take it by faith, by trust.

And so we remember God’s love for us in this season of Lent as we hear the stories of Christ’s betrayal, arrest, abuse, crucifixion, death and burial.  We know that, as horrible as all this is, it was the best thing to happen to us.  Because we know the end result: that being the Son of God and Son of Man, giving up his sinless life, Jesus reconciled us back to God, brought us back into that love.  And we believe the witnesses and have faith in God that this actually is the truth (without fact). 

And we praise God for allowing this to happen to us.  God certainly could have left us in our sins, but chose instead to send Jesus to set us free.  Our only response is to continually worship God and to do what God has set before us, living and working in our world with the faith that what has happened is the best thing to happen to us!

God bless you!

Obey your leaders and submit to their authority.  They keep watch over you as men who give an account.  Let them do this with joy and not sighing - for that would be harmful to you.
Hebrews 13:17

I have to say, as a pastor, that I love verses like this one! 

After all, as an “authority” in the church and in a congregation, it’s kind of a power-trip to think that God has put me in this position, and people shouldn’t argue with me or cause me trouble.

But that’s just a shallow, surface-level understanding of this verse.

After all, despite the position of authority I might hold, there will always be those who hold authority over me.  After all, in my current position as Associate Pastor, there is a Senior Pastor to whom I must answer.  And even above Senior Pastor are Assistants to the Bishop, the Bishop him/her self, and the Presiding Bishop.  And, of course, there is the Written Word of God that has authority over all of us, and the Person, Word of God Incarnate, Jesus Christ, who is the absolute authority over all things.

And even outside of this chain-of-command style of authority, there are others to whom I must obey.  Civil Servants, Elected Officials, Parents, and Mentors all have authority over me in many and various ways.

So it’s not like I can willy-nilly make up anything I want whenever I want, because I too must obey my leaders.  And hopefully, if this all works out right, my leadership will be the best reflection of my leaders’ own leadership, trickling down what is right and good from God down to through all the channels and fields of influence in this world.

Martin Luther explains this in his explanation to the Fourth Commandment in the Small Catechism:  “We are to fear and love God, so that we neither despise nor anger our parents and other in authority, but instead honor, serve, obey, love, and respect them.”

We should all realize that no matter how high up on the authority ladder we climb, there are still those that have authority over us. 

And those who are already high on the authority ladder don’t necessarily have an easy job, do they?

In modern-day United States, there is such an overwhelming feeling of distrust for anyone in authority.  Now, this used to be just a youth-thing, distrusting all authority because they found out that their parents were flawed, human beings.

But now those youth have grown up, and passed their anti-authority feelings on to their children, for another generation growing up doubting the efficacy and intentions of all those in authority.

But yet, there’s also no shortage of people who want to take authority over others, and who are quick to abuse the privilege. 

But real authority, good and true leadership, is quite hard to come by.  It takes time, trust, and hard work to make someone into a leader, a person others will follow.  And even after that, it’s so much easier to lose the trust of your followers than it is to gain it the first time, or especially to gain the trust back after it has been lost.

So when you find a leader, someone you can trust is looking out for you and helping to guide you through the calamities that this world likes to throw our way, cut them some slack.  They have a hard job, trying to remain trustworthy despite the sinful inclination to stray from their own leaders.

But also give to your leaders people who want to be led.  They are pointing out a direction, and if you will follow, you will find yourself in greater communion with God and with other people.  Because that’s what a good leader wants for their followers!

Leadership is not about making the leader more powerful, or making more money, or even really changing the sinful world (because that’s God’s job).  Leadership is really about leading people into deeper communion with God and wider fellowship with other people. 

And your leaders will have to answer for how well they functioned at that job.  Those leaders that sought personal gain and/or abused their followers will receive their penalty on the last day.  But the good leaders, those who have led their people well and true, will not need an answer, because their followers will speak for them, in words and actions, about how well they led.

And that’s why obeying your (good) leaders is good for you, and not obeying your (good) leaders is harmful for you. 

So God bless you today with a good leader, someone willing and able to show you a little bit more of who we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to do!

I have set the Lord always before me.  Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.  Psalm 16:8 

Psalm 16 is one of those wonderful, uplifting, and short psalms in the middle of the Bible.

The Bible contains 150 psalms in the book by that name.  There were all, at one point in time or another, the hymns and songs that the ancient Israelites sang for worship.  So just like the hymns and songs we sing now, there are all kinds of different songs contained in the psalms.

There are psalms of lament, crying out to God in sadness and despair.  There are psalms of coronation, proclaiming the greatness of the new king.  There are psalms of thanksgiving, thanking God for what God has done.

Psalm 16 is a song of faith - of trusting in God.  The psalmist proclaims that God protects and upholds the faithful people in times of distress.

Now this doesn’t mean that God takes away all our worries.  In fact, we know that to be false, or else us Christians would have fewer worries than anyone else.  But that’s not the case, is it?  Christians have the same worries as just about everybody: we worry about our families, our friends, our careers, our financial stability, even our death and afterlife.  Add to that are our worries about the Christian Church, our intereligious dialogue, our own congregation, and our concerns about our own personal spiritual journey.

That’s a lot to worry about.

But Psalm 16 tells us about a God who, even while we worry about all this and more, protects us, guides us, and gives us rest.  God holds us as we worry like a loving father holds his children during a dark and stormy night.  I remember nights like that when I was young: the winds would howl, the thunder would crash, and the lightning would break the dark of night.  Oftentimes, during spring storms, we would worry about tornadoes.  How do you calm a child’s fear?  My parents were very good about trying to calm us down, but I remember that I was calmed the most by knowing that they were near.  Just hearing my parents’ voices was enough to calm my fears and go back to sleep.

And so it is with God in our lives.  Keeping the Lord before you means that you watch for when God protects you and guides you through this scary world to places of peace and rest.  God holding onto your right hand means that your own strength (the right hand was usually an euphemism for strength and power in the Bible) is lifted even more, to face those worries with a calm and quiet heart.  To not be shaken is to not be moved off of the security we have found resting in God’s peace, even when we are bombarded with worries.

Psalm 16 reminds us that God is always with us, even through the dark and scary times, keeping us and protecting us even in all the scary and worrisome times of this world.  After all, we have a God who, time after time, has demonstrated deliverance - bringing people through dark times into peace and safety.  And this is what God promises to us: trust in God and you will be delivered through your worries into the peace and rest that only God could provide. 

God bless you today!

So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. 

Ephesians 4:25

What is truth?  How am I supposed to recognize it when I see or hear it?  What makes truth for one person a lie for another?  Is there such a thing as absolute truth-with-a-capital-T Truth?  How do we speak to truth to our neighbors if we don’t even know what truth is?

Chances are, you’ve never thought that hard about this question.  We almost instinctively know whether what we say is true, or what we are told by someone else is a lie. 

But my question is the same as Pilate’s question to Jesus: What is truth?  Can you point out to me what is the truth?  After all, Pilate was questioning this prisoner, accused of disrupting the business of the temple and fomenting rebellion against Rome.  He was, in Pilate’s eyes, a terrorist.  Now, is that the truth?

Well, Jesus did disrupt the business of the temple.  All four Gospels tell the story of Jesus “cleansing the temple” (Matthew 21:12-17; Mark 11:15-19; Luke 20:45-48; and John 2:13-25) which is really an interpretation of what Jesus really did, which was make a whip and drive out all the animals, money-changers, and sellers of religious items.  And the three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) recount this story in the context of Jesus being arrested, seeming to say that this was the primary charge of which Jesus was accused.

And you’ve probably heard sermons on this before, trying to justify what Jesus did by cleansing the temple, but in reality (in truth?) his actions were both religious and political.  In the temple the animals were sold for offering to God, for cleansing from sins.  This was the very point of the temple, the reason it was there: to be the place where the Jews could sacrifice offerings for atonement.  The money-changers were there to exchange your daily Roman coin for Jewish temple coin (only one kind of coin was allowed for purchases in the temple).  In order to buy the animal to sacrifice, you needed to change your coin.  And the sellers of religious items, trinkets, baubles, etc… well, they were just trying to make a living based on peoples’ faith.

But the Roman government also made money off of this religious institution, by taxing all the transactions that went on.  In order to change your money, it cost you.  The animals were taxed, so that you have to pay a little bit extra.  You see?

So Jesus, ruining this days business, created not just theological havoc on the people, but seemed to be starting an insurrection.  This was a bad idea when Herod was king of Judea, because he had a bad habit of killing people in the street, or chopping off prophets’ heads when they said something bad about him (John the Baptist!)

So was Jesus a terrorist?  In Pilate’s view of the truth, probably.  But did Pilate see the truth?  What is the truth anyway?

After all, truth must be more than subjectivity.  If truth was what I alone see, or what Pilate himself saw, then truth has no grounds for any of us.  Truth becomes what I say it is.  But what then happens if you say that truth is something other than was I say it was?  Are we both liars?

An interesting take on the idea and usefulness of truth can be found in Harry G. Frankfurt’s essay “On truth”  (http://www.amazon.com/Truth-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/030726422X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295290371&sr=8-1).  For Frankfurt (and for me), I find the best definition of truth to be “a statement that relates a fact” (pg 67).  Now that doesn’t easily answer our questions, but it seems to be a start.  If we have the facts of the case, we can begin to know the truth.

But are the facts good enough, or does that just make us like the Whale Biologist on the episode of Futurama, “Three Hundred Big Boys” (http://futuramaepisode.org/episode-11-three-hundred-big-boys/ WARNING – not for all audiences, mostly not for those without a well-defined sense of humor!)  Around 11:14, the Whale Bioligist tells Leela, “Your lumpy and you smell bad.”  Now, these are the facts.  After all, she stuffed a rather snug one-piece swimsuit full of dead, rotting fish in order to make the whale vomit, so the facts of the matter are that she looks lumpy (with dead fish crammed into her swimsuit, even poking out the sides) and she most likely smells bad (what with all those dead fish about).  But is it the truth?

What the Whale Biologist doesn’t know is that Leela is doing a favor for her friends.  And that fact changes the interpretation of the truth of the matter.  Which is why then the writer of Ephesians writes that we should speak the truth in love (4:15).  This interpretation of the truth, that what we speak should be for the best for both us and those who listen to us, means that we interpret what the other person does in the best possible light (as Luther wrote in his explantion of the Eighth Commandment in the Small Catechism).  After all, if we love our neighbor, speaking the truth to them in such a way that will help them becomes paramount.

But we also know another fact that changes the way we look at the truth, and that is that Jesus said “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6).  If Jesus really is the Truth, then everything we speak and know comes through him.  We cannot be like the Whale Biologist, speaking whatever pops into our heads, but we speak to other people like we speak to Jesus, who is the Truth and the Life.  We cannot be like Pilate, only seeing what we want to see in any situation, but seeing only Jesus, we interpret our life through him.

This, then, is why we put away all pretenses of lying or untruthfulness, or even pretty falsehoods or close-minded interpretations of others’ actions: because we are children of God, followers of Jesus Christ who himself is the Truth.  The author of Ephesians writes to remind us of our higher, better calling as children of light and truth.

So what is truth?  First of all, truth is Jesus Christ, the man, the Son of God, the 2^nd Person of the Trinity, the Word of God.  Truth for us becomes interpreting all of our reality through him, through the framework he provided us of being brothers and sisters with one another, neighbors to care for each other. 

So I believe any statement that pretends to be truth but which is spoken in a mean spirit, or to harm others, or to make fun of others is not truth at all, but falsehood.  We are children of God, and we know that truth is God alone.  And so we live that out in our daily lives, speaking the truth to our neighbors for their benefit.

God bless you today as you go and do so!

Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.
Proverbs 3:3

I know it’s been a long time since I wrote anything here, but I wanted to try and get back into commenting on various Bible passages as a way to continue my study of scripture.

The book of Proverbs is one of my favorite books of the Bible.  I enjoy reading the wisdom literature (as it’s called because it imparts wisdom instead of fact or history) and pondering the ancient wisdom that is still applicable for today.

So Proverbs 3:3 here reminds us of what is truly important: love and faithfulness.  We all have ideas of what is important in our lives, be it food, clothing, reputation, profession or anything else that can take up time and energy on our part to sustain.  And some of these things really are important.  But sometimes we need to take a step back from all those things that vie for bits of our time and see what the really important things are - those things that, holding them as important, give veracity to the rest of our lives.  And the writer of Proverbs would have us believe that it is love and faithfulness that are the most important. 

So what is love?  Pastors ask this question to all those planning to get married, to see if they really know what their getting into.  But all of us (married forever or newly married or single) should ask ourselves this question on a regular basis, to bring us back to the reality of our life lived among other people.

Love is more than just that funny feeling we get, although the feelings are a big part of it.  And love is more than just “like” (ask any teenager, and they can tell you that!).  Love is more than actions, although actions are the primary way we can tell if we love someone or that they love us.

Love is an emotion.  That is, a movement of our inner being that seeks to make other people better than they currently are.  And love is one of the most prominent themes of the entire Bible.  Without looking anything up right now, we read somewhere that God is love.  God identifies the entire movement of the Trinity with this motion of love.  And God includes us in that movement, blessing us, giving us the gifts we need and the feelings we have to spread that love to other people.

We read somewhere else that we are to love even our enemies.  This has never made sense to me, because I always thought that an enemy is by definition someone outside of my sphere of positive feelings.  But if love is the motion, the movement of our insides to help make someone better, than loving our enemies is the only right way for Christians to interact with those who upset us.  After all, if we get mad and get even, what difference has Christ made for us.  But if we get mad, and then get loving, we see (and the world sees) what good Jesus is for us and for the world.

So that’s what love is.  But what about faithfulness?  What’s that?

Faith is trusting in God.  That is something that all of us have in little bits from time to time, but that’s hard to maintain for any length of time.  We turn to ourselves or other people or organizations to provide what we need instead of waiting for God.  Faithfulness is the steadfast trust in God all the time for all things.  This, I contend (and the history of Christian theology would probably agree with me) is impossible for human beings.  After all, we are sinners, living our lives turned away from God, not trusting God but trusting in ourselves.  This is what I think Luther meant when he said that human sin is “curved in on oneself.”  We want what’s best for ourselves, so we think about how best we can get what we want for ourselves.   It’s all about me, me, me.

But Jesus came to be an example of faithful living.  Fully human, he lived a life waiting for God to provide everything he needed.  And fully human, he did God’s will even to the point of death, showing us by his clear example that faithfulness is hard, probably deadly, but yet the only way to live with the God who loves us.  Thus, Jesus, fully human and fully divine, fulfilled God’s plan for him and for us, so that we get to rest in the grace of his faithfulness.  We know that we can’t be faithful.  We know sometimes it’s hard to even have a little faith at all!  But Jesus was faithful, and through him God trades our faithlessness with his faithfulness, giving us this grace to reside in.

Through this grace, we can love others (even our enemies) because we know we have been loved first.  Once we know that, and trust in that, we can live more and more that life God has planned for us.

So keep God’s love and faithfulness with you.  Don’t ever forget how good God has been to you.  Bind this love and faithfulness around your neck and write it on your heart, and give to others the same love that has first been given to you.

God bless you!

“Love covers over all wrongs.”
Proverbs 10:12

So I’m sitting in my office on the Tuesday of Holy Week, trying to distract myself enough so I can hear God’s Word in the readings for Maundy Thursday so that I can compose a sermon.

See, if I concentrate on myself too much when I’m trying to write a sermon, then the sermon just ends up being about me: what I want, what I think, what I feel.  So, every time I get to this point, I have to read these lessons every 10 to 15 minutes, and then distract myself from my own thoughts, so that I can try and tease out even a little bit of what God wants, what God thinks, and what God feels as revealed in these lessons.

So as I’m sitting here, I thought, “You know, maybe you should write on your blog about something totally unconnected to Holy Week at all.  That will distract you!”

Well, that’s what I thought.

I pulled out this little verse from Proverbs (one of my favorite books of the Bible by the way) and lo and behold, I think that it has everything to do with Holy Week.

After all, this verse tells us simply that, “Love covers over all wrongs.”  That is what Holy Week is all about!  This week is about God loving us poor pathetic little human beings so much that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was not only willing, but actually did get killed to save us.

This is the type of love that covers over all wrongs.  Not like our human love for one another, that can cover over a lot of wrongs, hurts, betrayals, and all the other horrible things that will happen to us in this life.  This is a type of love that only God can give: a love so pure and right that it won’t just cover over the wrongs that happen to us, but the wrongs that we do to others!

The blood of the Lamb, shed for you and for me, covers over all the wrongs, all the hurts, all the betrayals that we have committed.  And yes, to some of us, this just means that we will do them all over again.  But then the blood of the Lamb will cover them over too.  And to some of us, we will accept being covered over by the blood of the Lamb and turn from our sins - although most of the time it’s just to turn to another sin.  But the blood of the Lamb will cover them up too.

Our sin is like a chasm, separating us from God.  Only the love of God, made human in Jesus Christ, made suffer under our sin and die on the cross can cover up the chasm so that God, who loved us from the beginning of the world, can come be with us - Immanuel!

As we sit and ponder what this week means for us, what the stories of Jesus betrayal, passion, death, and resurrection matter for our lives today, please don’t forget the reason behind all of this: God just wants to love you!

Thanks be to God!

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23

We are approaching St. Valentines’ Day, a day that has Christian roots but that has largely been a secular holiday, when we give our loved ones cards and candies and shower them with love and attention.

And this is a great day.  It’s a great idea to set aside time, not only once a year, but every day to tell the people we love that we love them.  It helps to build up that relationship and enrich the bonds and promises we make to each other.

But the history of St. Valentines’ Day is very interesting.  According to Wikipedia (which I know is not a very reliable resource, but it’s kind of fun and easy to look up) this day remembers many different saints named Valentine, who were all killed for their faith.  These ancient martyrs were killed because they refused to recant their beliefs in a God who loves us all so much that Jesus Christ was willing to be killed to prove it.

But what does that have to do with Valentines’ Day as we know it?  Simply, it is all about love.  Out of love for us, God sent Jesus Christ into this world.  Because of love for us, Jesus Christ followed God’s will even to the point of being put to death.  Because of God’s love for Jesus and for us, God raised him from the dead.  And through all of this, God the Holy Spirit loves us so much that we are continually showered with the powers and gifts to love one another in word and deed.  And, in the end, God loves us so much that despite our sinfulness, we are given the free and undeserved gift of salvation. 

Many different words are used to describe this gift.  Salvation, Eternal Life, Grace, Love - all of these words describe what God is giving to us, freely and bountifully, so that those who believe in Jesus Christ and call on his name will not be lost into darkness of death, but be raised up to new life.

We cannot earn this gift from God, just like we cannot really earn the gifts we receive on Valentines’ Day.  Sure, we love our family and friends, and because of that relationship, they give us gifts and we give them gifts in exchange.  But a true gift, just like the gift of eternal life from God, is not earned, but always given freely. 

We cannot earn the gift of salvation from God, but we can receive it joyfully, happily this day and every day.

Thanks be to God!

“Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.”
Psalm 34:8

Just so you know, I love food.  I especially like a real good cherry pie.  And candy.  And chocolate.  Yeah, good food.

Are you hungry yet?  Good.  Go get something to eat.  Something really tasty, something that you really, really like.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait here.

Okay.  Now this treat that you’re eating, this meal that you gave yourself, came from somewhere.  It may have been organically grown in your backyard, cared and cultivated by you alone.  Or it may have come from a factory, undergone many chemical processes, with all kinds of additives and preservatives, shipped half-way across the world until you bought it in the grocery store, brought it home, put it in your pantry, forgot about it until now, when you finally ate it.  Or it could be somewhere in between.

But this food came from somewhere.  You didn’t magic it up, create it out of nothing.  You planted a seed, toiled over the dirt, or you worked hard to earn money so you could buy it, while someone else worked hard to farm the land, making the base food stuffs that you are eating.

But the food came from somewhere.  And ultimately, whether you’re eating food you grew yourself or food you bought pre-packaged, we can trace the roots of that food back to God.

God gives life to humans, animals and even plants.  God makes the plants grow in their seasons, makes the rains come (or the snow as it is today).  Food comes from God, through other people, and finally to us.

This, I believe, is the real reason why we like food so much.  Food is a sign, for me, that God loves us.  God created us, and in fact created us to consume food.  Now, food doesn’t have to taste good (as you would know if you tried some of my failed recipes).  But food nourishes us, helps us grow as God has designed us to grow.  But God has made us to like certain foods, has made foods to taste good to us, and given us these foods to enjoy!

What a blessing food is for us.  Taste your food again, and see how good God has been to you, to provide you with this delicious food.  Taste and see that the Lord is good!

Thanks be to God!
Pr. Bryan