Immanuel Lutheran Church - Benson

I know I already posted today, but I just read a wonderful piece that I wanted to share with you.  You can read it here: 

http://lifestyle.msn.com/relationships/articlegh.aspx?cp-documentid=17405325&GT1=32023#atoolb

It is an article about how to maintain a happy marriage is to learn how to laugh more, to turn your anger into laughter.  This is really hard for us to imagine, but sounds incredible!

I thought I would share it with you because, while this talks about a marriage situation, I think we could use this advice for our church “family.”  Too often, I think, those little, random things that go on here only lead to boiled blood, hurt feelings, and a lot of anger.  But if we keep perspective, and remember that whenever people try to share space, there will always be silly, random things that happen.  And none of those silly, random things are worth all the pain that comes out of getting angry.  And laughter (gut-shaking, side-splitting, whole body laughter), I’ve been told, is the best medicine.

May God bless us all with more humor in our lives, because this life is too crazy to take it seriously!

Pr. Bryan
“Laugh with me if it’s funny.  Laugh at me if it’s fun” Edwin McCain

“Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Luke 14:11

I think that humility is one of the least understood virtues of the Christian life. 

My little dictionary on my shelf describes the adjective “humble” as “marked by meekness or modesty, unpretentious; lowly.”  This is a characteristic that is definitely rare in this world, and is definitely needed more.

Most of us are not taught to humble ourselves, to present ourselves as meek or modest.  We don’t want to put others needs in front of our own desires.  We want to be first, foremost, to be number 1.

I see this quite often driving around, and am guilty of this so much driving on the highway.  I find myself, usually unconsciously speeding up to get around other drivers, even if they are driving at the same speed I want to cruise at. 

As much as the activity of driving has become, for me, the prime source for examples of sinful behavior, we do similar actions all the time.  We want to be waited on first at a restaurant.  We want to be first on or off the elevator.  We always want to be first, to win.

I think that this attitude has arisen from the confusion of humility with humiliation.  Both have the same roots as words, and both have similar definitions.  But generally, humility is how we treat ourselves, and humiliation is how other people treat us.  And we definitely do not want to be humiliated, especially in public.

Our personal pride, our self-esteem, is still important to us, even though in our world we do not suffer much for public humiliation.  Sure, there might be some problems if the humiliation is very public (like Kelsey Grammer’s character in the short-lived sitcom “Back To You”).  Or if your job requires you to be a public representative, like a salesperson.  But for most of us who work relatively private jobs and live relatively private lives, humiliation does not entail long-time problems.

Such was not the case in the world in which Jesus grew and preached.  A public humiliation could result in loss of wealth, loss of public position, loss of position in the society, and loss of face.  A person who was publicly humiliated would seriously consider taking their life!

That is the practical reason Jesus told this story recorded in Luke 14.  Jesus, when seeing guests at a dinner scrabble for the best seats, told them that when they are invited to a party, pick the worst seat, the lowest position at the table.  In other words, humble themselves, so that they would not be humiliated.  Because if they took the best seat, the highest position, and someone of a greater standing in the community attended the party, they would have to vacate their seat, and thus be humiliated in from of all the other guests.  But, if they picked the lowest seat, and they were the highest ranking person in social status, they would be asked to move up the table, and they would be respected more by all of the other guests.

In that world, the social ranking was everything.  In our world, social ranking does not matter as much, but we all crave respect from our contacts with other people.  This promise that Jesus gives us holds the key to earning respect: humble yourself.  Decide to be last in line.  Be respectful to everyone, regardless who they are or what they do.  Be meek and modest.  Give up the desire to always have to be correct, but always be polite in public dealings.  Doing this will heap respect on your head, and you will be exalted.

But this is not easy to do.  We have been reared to win.  But especially in our public discourses, we need more humility.  We are presented with various positions on various subjects always as an either/or conversation.  Our public debates always seem to shape as polar opposites take center stage, and the meek and modest are pushed out of the discussion.  And in our world where everyone has to win, we refuse the compromise, the humble middle road, in favor of one side winning a battle only to lose for everyone.

There is a famous hymn that says, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”  I would much rather have that hymn read, “They’ll know we are Christians by our humility,” but that wouldn’t fit the meter of the song.  But humility is one of the best traits Christians can show in our world, where so many other groups do acts of charity and mercy as well, and it is not a given any longer that only Christians do acts of love for others.  But it seems that only faithful believers have the ability to be truly humble, to be the modest and meek voice of Jesus in this world.  And this world needs a quiet voice to speak to the best of what the Spirit is leading us into, not the screaming of a world gone mad in it’s own power.

The Holy Spirit is leading us down that unpretentious road of humility, not into humiliation but towards final, heavenly exaltation with the Lord and all the heavenly hosts.  The Lord has promised this himself, that humbling ourselves will lead to exalted status in this world now, in the company of all who witness our actions, and forever when Jesus comes again.  What a promise!

Pr. Bryan

Give us this day our daily bread.  And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.  And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.
Matthew 6:11-13

When we pray this prayer, we ask God to give us all that we need.  That is what is meant by, “daily bread.”  We are not just asking for God to give us bread.  But our daily bread is a metaphor for everything that we need.

What we need, however, is different than what we want.  In Luther’s day, it was easier to define the difference between things we want and things we need.  Our world, however, has changed so much that we don’t always recognize this difference.  You can ask almost anyone today, and receive many different answers as to what “need” means today. 

For example, many people “need” a cell phone.  Now, there are many good reasons to own and carry a cell phone, and they are wonderful devices that have improved our ability to communicate with each other.  but they are hardly a need.  In fact, our needs haven’t changed at all since the dawn of humankind.  What we need is fairly simple to explain: food, water, shelter, clothing, and affection.  If it is not one of those five, it is not a need.  Television is not a need, despite how much we enjoy it.  Cell phones, and even telephones, are not needs.  God will not provide you a cell phone, despite how much you pray for it! 

We trust that God will provide us our needs.  And this is easy for most of us to see.  We go to the grocery store, and we usually have enough money to get the food we need, and a lot of food that we want. 

But what about the people who cannot afford their needs?  Does God ignore them?  Does God not love them?  How do we understand God’s promise to provide us all with our daily bread when thousands of people around the world are starving to death, malnourished, and hungry?

At least one way for us is to understand that God has indeed provided enough for all people.  But our selfishness leads us to take more for ourselves so that others do not have enough.  And our enemy, the devil, has conspired to make it seem like it is all God’s fault, not our own fault.  But it is our fault that there are people who are hungry.  Now, individually, we may not be directly responsible.  But some of those patterns that we take for granted contribute to world hunger and starvation in this country.

Because of this prayer, we must recognize those sinful patterns and systems in our world, and seek to change them!

We also must recognize how much forgiveness we have received and how much forgiveness we must give.  This next petition is the hardest one for me to come to terms with, because it asks so much more of me than any other. 

We ask that our sins (debts, or trespasses - depending on which translation you like) should be forgiven, but notice the phrase that Jesus teaches us: our sins are forgiven as we forgive others.  This would mean that however we do not forgive others is the same way that God will not fogive us.  When we keep grudges, when we hold sins against others, we are harming ourselves more than the other.  Our reluctance to forgive is of more danger to us than to any one else.

So what are we to do?  It is easy to say, “Forgive others more.”  But that’s not easy to do.  We are a grudge-bearing people, and have always been.  Our parents raise us to not just keep grudges, but to love them, pet them, and take them out for walks.  Our national heritage is based on which other people have helped and which have not, and we do not easily move on.

Are we at risk because of our tendency to not forgive?  Yes and No, I think.  Yes, because Jesus warns us: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matthew 6:14).  Our forgiveness is dependent on our willingness to forgive. 

But also No, because Jesus also tells us that:  “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).  So what does this mean?

Simply, it means that God is much more forgiving to us than we are to others!  And that is glorious, good news for us bitter human beings.  But this does not exempt us from forgiving others.  If you want to be certain that your sins are forgiven, if you want to feel that forgiveness in your life right now, then the best way is to forgive others, and pass on the love that God has given to you to others!

The next petition, summing up the teaching of this prayer, asks to not lead us into the time of trial but deliver us from evil.  My favorite joke is: “Lead me not into temptation, because I can find it on my own.”  And this is true.  We find our temptations daily, and often, we fall into them.  It is easy for us to fall into temptation.  Temptation is what will lead us to sin.  Temptation is the thought, sin is the action.  We believe that temptations do not separate us from God as our sins do.  But temptations lead us to sin, and we ask that God would protect us from those times.

And we also ask that God would deliver us from evil, and we ask this because there is so much evil in this world.  Evil is what is opposed to God’s will, like the devil, our sinful selves, and processes and organizations that oppress people in this world.  Evil is in this world, and we see it on a daily basis.

But we do not ask God to keep evil away from us, or eliminate all the evil.  We could ask those, but we ask in this prayer that God deliver us from the evil we experience.  Deliverance is an odd word that we don’t use that often any longer.  Deliverance, though, in the Bible, has specific uses.  This is the word that describes God protected Daniel in the lion’s den.  Daniel was thrown into the den, although God probably could have prevented that.  But God protected Daniel while he was there and brought him safely out, and because of that, some of the evil that led to Daniel being thrown in was brought to an end. 

This is what we pray for: that God would protect us while we suffer from evil, which will show God’s power to all and bring some of the evil we see to an end.  Because when all the evil ends, we will see clearly the kingdom of God come fully into this world, and we will see our Lord Jesus Christ come again.

And that is why we end our prayer with a doxology that is not part of the scriptures, but sums up our intentions for praying this prayer: “For the Kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.”  We know that the kingdom belongs to God, because it is God’s kingdom.  We know that in all the universe, only God has real power, and all the power we have is just reflections of God’s power.  And we know that God alone is full of the glory that brings us together for worship.  This is the way God has always been, and the way God will always be.  And that is good news for us, so we say, “Amen,” which means “Yes, let it be so.”  We want the kingdom to come, and power of God to change this world, and to worship our Lord together.

Let us pray this prayer together from now on, realizing how wonderful our God has been to us, how good our God is to us now, and how wonderful this prayer is.  Amen!

“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’”
Matthew 6:9-10

Right now, we are finishing up our confirmation lessons on the Lord’s Prayer.  We’ve been teaching (or at least trying to teach) our middle-schoolers the Lord’s Prayer and Martin Luther’s explanations to the petitions because we believe (we being not just us pastors, but this whole ELCA church) that Luther’s explanations help us understand what we are saying when we say this prayer.

Luther used this prayer all over the place in his teaching, especially for children.  In the Small Catechism, Luther not only tried his best to explain this prayer, and how to understand what we say, but advised that believers pray this prayer all the time, especially as part of morning and evening prayers, and at meal times.  What is it about this prayer that spoke to Luther, and still speaks to Christians all over the world today?

First and foremost, I think, is Jesus’ command to pray in this way.  Now, Jesus didn’t legislate the words.  We could use any words like these.  But Jesus commanded us to pray in a certain way: in private, in our heart, with sincerity.  And in that, Jesus gave us these words to express our humility, our dependence on God, and our adoration for who God is.

Second, I think, is the tradition that this prayer has become.  Out of all the subjects in the Small Catechism, this is the one that is used all the time, almost every worship service in every church all around the world.  Some churches may use the Apostles’ Creed, but others leave that out depending on the service.  Few churches actually use the Ten Commandments in worship (which is probably the reason so many people can never remember them).  In our worship, we have Baptism and Holy Communion, but we do not use Luther’s words.  Outside of the Roman Catholic communion, we rarely practice private confession and forgiveness, although Lutherans might want to start bringing that back as a helpful and beautiful way to hear God’s forgiveness for all those sins that burn in our hearts and make our souls black.

The tradition is not only the act of praying, but praying these specific words that make up the Lord’s Prayer, and these words have touched the hearts and souls of millions of Christians throughout all of time and space.  So let’s look at these words, borrowing quite a bit from Luther’s Small Catechism explanations.  I’m not going to completely re-type the Catechism, because you can find that online or in your book form, so I invite you to explore that again even as our confirmation students are exploring it for probably the first time.

The intoduction, “Our Father in heaven” begins this prayer by addressing to whom we are speaking.  We are not saying this prayer to each other, or even really for each other.  We are speaking to our Heavenly Father.  Of course, where heaven is, I can’t say.  Heaven has no physical space.  It is not simply “up” as our forebears thought, with their flat universe and flat earth.  Heaven is something outside of the realm of creation, somewhere beyond sight and sound, somehow real but in no way that we can touch.  Heaven is the place of God, where God exists, and where God’s will is always done. 

We address God as “Father” not because God is the “ancient of days” old-man-with-a-long-white-beard guy sitting in heaven watching football, but because Jesus addressed God as Father.  But actually “Father” might be a bit too formal for us.  The word Jesus used was “abba” (no, not the Swedish 70’s band), which means “daddy” or “papa.”  This was an intimate form of address, something a young child would use, before they were taught manners or propriety and address their father as “Father” or “Sir.”  This address should bring to mind those close relationships with loving parents, and make us realize that that is exactly the kind of relationship God wants with us.

In our world, though, sometimes “Father” is a difficult word to use.  We hear too many stories of fathers hurting, destroying, or abandoning their children.  How is a young child with no father at home to understand how to call God a Heavenly Father?  That is a hard task for teachers, parents and pastors to help our children understand that the title Father is a demanding, tricky, and sometimes impossible title for humans to earn and keep.  But that that is the kind of relationship God wants with us - as close as a loving father to his first-born son.

Next, we enter into the petitions of the prayer.  To petition is to ask, to beg, to request.  And that is what we do in this prayer.  But notice what we are requesting!  The first petition is “Hallowed be your name.”  We are not asking for any thing for us, but are asking that God’s name is kept holy in all times and places, and among us that call on God for all we need.

But what is God’s name?  The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible/Tanakh had a certain name for God, and unpronouncable 4-letter all-consonant name that could not be spoken (called the tetragramaton).  What good is that name for us?  In the ancient world, knowing a name gave away power, so while God revealed the holy Name, God did not reveal that Name for use.  So the ancient Israelites made up other ways to address God:  Lord, King of Kings, Ancient of Days, Lord God, God Almighty, and many, many others.  The name of God is however you choose to address God.  In this prayer, we address God as Heavenly Father, and that name should be holy and used only for God.  Holy means to be set apart for God’s own use.  While we have fathers here on earth, they are human fathers and do not receive the title of Heavenly Father.  Same with any other way we use to address God.  Those words should be holy, set apart, and used only for God.

How do we keep God’s name holy?  Simply, we do what God tells us to do.  We follow God’s Word.  We teach God’s Word, which includes this prayer and the lessons it teaches us.  We live according to what we discover in the Word of God.  This is the same way we respect our earthly parents, by following their rules for us, whether we understand them or not.  But like with our earthly parents, we are not always so good at following God’s rules.  We rebel against God.  We disobey the rules.  We fail to listen to the Word.  We want our own way.  In doing so, we are not keeping God’s name holy, and we are not loving God as God should be loved because God is no longer our God.  We always and repeatedly try to usurp the role of God in our own lives and in the lives of others. 

When we ask in this prayer that God’s name be kept holy, we are staking our lives and all we are on God, and asking that God be in charge, that God be God and not us, and we trust that God will continue to feed us with the Word so that we will not go astray.

To be continued…