July 12, 2020

The tumultuous times we live in are leaving their mark. Some days I realize that I am missing the life we had, wanting to turn the clock back to January, 2020. The urge to look backward, even just to the beginning of this year, at old desires and behaviors is strong. But then I realize that the past is gone. I am changing, as are we all.

We will, with time and effort, regain stability, but it’s unlikely that we can return to a pre-COVID- 19 world. Nor, I think, would we want to. COVID-19 has revealed too many inadequacies – medical systems unprepared for pandemics, imbalance between care and outcomes for rich and poor, white and black – and more lessons are sure to come. And as comforting as copying past personal habits may seem, doing so may be self-destructive or, at least, unfair to us and to the future. Do we really want to return to largescale dependence on fossil fuel energy, along with the resulting smog-filled cities, health problems, and oil spills. Should that be our legacy?

COVID-19 has toppled institutions and habits that once seemed unchangeable. But by doing so, it has opened the door to opportunity. By creating a vacuum, COVID-19 has gifted us with the choice of working to forge a safer, healthier future rather than struggling to rebuild a problematic past.

Why not see today’s disquiet as an invitation to enter a future without fear. I marvel at how a mere speck of life, an infinitesimal virus invisible to the naked eye, has been powerful enough to shut down global societies and economies overnight.

Then I raise my eyes and glance out at the wholeness and healing green of the Minnesota Valley. I can enjoy the birds and squirrels that visit our deck at home who trust that their needs will be met as they always have. These strengths of species and nature are, to me, much more powerful than the virus. God began life on this planet eons ago and continues to enable our world and its inhabitants to flourish day by day. May the Lord continue to bless us with courage and hope until God calls us to our eternal home.

July 5, 2020

Judgment (use of the law) against a person is often used to discredit a person’s message. John the Baptist’s message was to call people to turn to God because the kingdom of God had come near (Mt. 3:2), and it was a popular message (Mt. 3:5). Jesus’message was the same (Matt. 4:17): By welcoming tax collectors and sinners, he revealed the new way the kingdom of God works.

In order to prevent people being infected by COVID-19, gathering places (manufacturing, restaurants and bars, and houses of worship) have been closed. That required a mandate from each state’s governor. A few people used their judgment (the law) to speak against the message of the governor. The use of the law discredits a message.

The Law Is How We Justify Our Actions. People use the law to discredit a person or their message. Call it logic, reasoning, truth, fact, evidence-based science, it is all law. It judges, measures, accuses, and condemns. The law is used because it is trusted as an effective means to discredit a person.

People use the law to explain why they do things: “I made my decision after long and careful thought.” “After weighing the pros and cons of the situation, I thought this was the best thing I could do.” Some say they used evidence, facts, and that their next steps will be taken when those facts meet a certain criteria (the word “metric” is popular these days). Other people simply say they will do whatever they want to. But always an explanation is used. Always a reason is given. Always there is a justification for what we do. We use the law because we trust it.

The law is also used by humans to determine another person’s status before God. “He has a demon” is not only a statement to undermine the person and what the person says; it also declares that the person is without God. Saying that someone is “a friend of tax collectors and sinners” also indicates that a person is without grace before God.

When we trust the law to explain what we do or think, we have made the law what we honor and obey. We have made the law our god. The implication is we don’t think that God is worth honoring and obeying. We have a problem with God. Even worse, we have broken the First Commandment; that means that God has a problem with us. The very law we use to justify what we do, is the law God uses to justify his judgment against us. As it is written, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged” (Matt. 7:1).

Jesus Justifies Us. Into the world that prefers using the law, Jesus becomes God’s new way of dealing with those under God’s judgment. To know who God is and how God acts we are to look only to Jesus. “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. (Matt. 11:27). Jesus is gentle, not demanding like the law; he is easy, not difficult or hard like the law; he is light like a feather, not heavy or burdensome or crushing like guilt. Jesus ends the law by his death. By his resurrection he creates grace and mercy for us.

Jesus dying and rising is what Jesus did for us to give us his grace and mercy. He forgives instead of condemns. He gives us life instead of taking it. By looking at him we see what God is doing and what God is like. Because of Jesus, we are now people with grace and mercy before God.

Jesus Is How We Justify Our Actions. Jesus’ way of being a friend to tax collectors and sinners, his way of dying and rising for them, is grace and mercy. Grace and mercy are what he uses to justify all he does. It’s all grace and mercy for us. Jesus invites us to turn away from excuses and explanations and judgment, and to be with him in his way of grace and mercy, a way of grace which is easy and light and gentle.

Jesus’ gentleness, easiness, lightness and comfort gets us to trust him. When we trust him, he becomes the reason we do things; he becomes the justification for our actions. Following in his way of mercy and grace is how we honor and trust God. Jesus has grace and mercy for us, so in him we look good to God. He does not discredit us. He does not try to undermine what we say, so long as what we say is that Jesus is Lord.

We no longer need to use the law to discredit a person or their message. Our purpose or reason or justification of what we do is Jesus’ grace and mercy. We simply speak the goodness of Jesus to others. Instead of demanding people prove their worth, we give them the worth of Jesus. Instead of trying to make others look bad by attacking them, we use Jesus grace and mercy to make them look good. We do not burden others with hard and difficult tasks before we accept them; rather, we make it easy and light with our gentleness to show them they are accepted and loved by us as a gift, that is, by grace. We make people feel they are worth something by our words and actions of grace. Jesus is the reason and explanation for what we do. He is our justification for making others look good (forgiven) to God.

June 28, 2020

Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Our first reaction to Jesus’ words is bewilderment. We are often tempted to regard this as one of the great paradoxes of the gospels and respectfully pass on to those portions of Jesus’ teaching that are more agreeable to what we prefer to hear.

Jesus did promise peace. Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. John 14:27 (ESV). But within the same three years of His ministry He proclaimed: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

My Sunday School teachers spent most of our time together picturing Jesus as a gentle peacemaker. But this was not the whole picture. When Jesus dealt with the poor, the ill, the sinners, the publicans, the fishermen, He spoke words of comfort and challenge, peace and promise. But when he addressed the sanctimonious, hypocritical establishment of His day, He spoke like a revolutionary. His words were like a sharp sword, slicing into the hearts of those oppressive and self-entered leaders like a knife into soft butter.

We cannot avoid or ignore the violent events that transpire around us any more than did our Lord and His faithful followers in the face of Israel’s legalism or Rome’s paganism. Our responsibility is to put our reputations, jobs, incomes, even our lives, on the line to confront violence with courage and hatred with love. We can never be perfectly at peace in a world so fraught with pain and suffering. And yet we can claim Jesus’ eternal gift of peace even as we seek out and try to heal and comfort the victims of the world’s violence.

May God comfort and strengthen us in this effort.

June 21, 2020

“And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” Matthew 10:28a (ESV)

Do we have difficulty understanding or identifying with the words and inference of Jesus in the above Scripture quote? And do the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer strike us as harsh: “If we refuse to take up our cross and submit to suffering and rejection at the hands of men, we forfeit our fellowship with Christ and have ceased to follow Him.”

The prophet Jeremiah appears to bounce back and forth between complaints and praise in our Old Testament lesson. He honestly proclaims his gripes. He was depressed and discouraged. He felt at times that God had given up on him. Yet he knew, deep within his heart, that God’s love for him never stopped. God is ever faithful. The last words of the O.T. Lesson from Jeremiah are instructive to us: “Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For God has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of evildoers.”

In our Gospel Lesson for Sunday, the words of Christ are words of encouragement. It is quite possible that we could lose our lives if we follow Jesus. Jesus speaks words of warning because there is an enemy that we must contend with. He may be saying to us, “the apathy and neglect, the selfishness and self-centeredness we contend with can damage our souls and rob us of true joy.” We contend with good and evil, but we don’t need to be afraid.

We remain the children of God because God is a loving, forgiving God. We pray that God will graciously and patiently lead us into a relationship with God that will honor and glorify Him by demonstrating His love to the world about us. 

May God grant us the courage to face up to the demands of discipleship, and the grace to meet and deal with them. May we begin today to relate as God's child and servant to someone whose path we cross and whose life we might influence. 

June 14, 2020

Jesus tells us that discipleship means involvement. He set the pace, and He expects His disciples to keep it. He identifies with the agonies of humankind. He became involved in their crying needs. He even went so far as to bear the consequences of their sins. 

To be a disciple of Jesus means that we who accept Him as our Savior must also accept Him as our Lord and Master. We are expected not simply to criticize the distortions of humanity from the pews and pulpits of our churches, but to become involved in the blood and tears, the sorrows and sufferings, of God’s creatures wherever they may be found.

Because we are involved in the sickness of our world, we must, as the disciples of Christ, become involved in its cure. Discipleship means involvement. As our Lord suffered on our behalf, we are expected to suffer on behalf of others, to lose our lives in service only to truly find life anew in the incomparable joy of being the children and servants of the living, loving, eternal God.

“As the Father has sent me, even so I send You.” John 20:21

June 7, 2020

The last day of the Feast of Tabernacles commemorated what happened during the Israelites’ trek through the wilderness when, Moses at God’s command, smote a rock to bring water to thirsty people. In celebration the priests poured out water with choral song.

While they stood with their empty water containers, the temple’s silence was pierced with a loud voice, “If any one thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.” It was Jesus, unknown at that point to the temple crowd, who spoke the words.

“If anyone thirst...” The basis of humankind’s longing and desire is thirst for God. Jesus presents himself as the answer and fulfillment of that thirst: “Let him come to Me,” Our Lord stands before the crowd as the One who knows its deep thirsts, takes account of any created thing to satisfy our inner needs, and assumes the divine prerogative by saying: He who believes in Me shall never thirst” (John 6:34).

Jesus then says, “Let him come to Me and drink.” It isn’t enough to come to Jesus; one must drink – embrace, enter into, commit oneself to, appropriate Christ and the life He offers to all. It is the Holy Spirit working in and through us who makes all this possible in our lives.

May 24, 2020

Praying for others is important because prayer works! If we’ve ever had someone pray for us – not in general, but just for us personally – we know what Jesus is up to.

Some years ago, our District realigned our Circuits. At monthly Pastor’s Meetings, I was now meeting with a dozen pastors, half of whom I had not formally met with before. All of us knew only half of the pastors we were now meeting with.

At the conclusion of each individual pastor’s story, we would set the story-teller in the center with the rest of us standing around him with our hands upon his head or shoulder -- and we would, in turn, pray for him out loud based our intercession on the story he had just shared. 

I felt most comfortable when I was doing the praying. I don’t count myself as a great prayer, by any stretch, but can pray spontaneously when called upon. 

Being prayed for, on the other hand, left me feeling vulnerable. After all, I had just told them  my “story” – the good, the bad, and the ugly! Now they would pray for me. I could do nothing but receive their prayers. but receive their prayers. It was somewhat uncomfortable but at the same time quite powerful and moving. It was a good reminder that I was not a “lone stranger.” Other colleagues were there to support me, value and care for me.

That’s something of what Jesus is doing. He prays for his disciples. He senses their anxiety, confusion and fear, and so he prays for them. He knows he will soon leave them. So, he prays for them. 

And as he does, whether or not they fully understood everything he said, he told them that they do not have to do everything or even understand everything now. He will be there to support them. They will never be alone; they are valued and loved. 

It’s a powerful moment. And one of the amazing things about this passage is that Jesus doesn’t do this only for them, but also for us. As Jesus prays, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word.” We are the latest in a long line of persons who have been inspired and encouraged to believe because of the words and lives of those original disciples.