Curses and Blessings in the Gospel

Luke 6:27-38

I am going to begin this morning by asking you to do something.

I would like you to move. Change seats. I want you please to get up right now, all of you, and go to a different place in the sanctuary, perhaps to a place you’ve never sat before, and sit in that new place. If you usually sit in the back, why not give sitting in the front a try? If you normally sit on this side, why not try that side? I’d like you to make a significant change in where you are sitting. I’ll wait while you do it.

            How do you feel now? Is it weird? You have a whole new view of things if you made a big change. I wonder if your new seat will change your perspective on anything?

For those of you new to sitting on this side, now you know this is really my better side. Those of you on this side, well, you may want to sit on that side next week.

            Was it difficult for you to change seats? Is it uncomfortable in some way to sit in a new place? Well Friends, if you’re feeling a little uncomfortable right now, my best advice to you is this: get used to it!

Because, the thing is, we are disciples of Jesus Christ, and Jesus is always asking us to do something new. Jesus is always inviting us to do something daring. Jesus is always drawing us into uncomfortable places, changing our point of view, and asking the seeming impossible- (like, really, change seats in church?) - because believe it or not, the new place Jesus leads us to is where we need to be, it’s where we’ll grow our best, and it is where Jesus needs us to be, for his sake and for the sake of the kingdom of God.

            I’m not going to stand here and lie to you. While “Jesus loves us, this we know, for the Bible tells us so”, that doesn’t mean Jesus is all about making us all comfy and cozy in our lives of faith and discipleship.

Remember the invitation Jesus made to those who want to follow him? “you must pick up your cross and follow me”. Nothing comforting in that!

            Today’s text reminds us that Jesus came to draw us all into a new life marked by love, forgiveness, generosity, justice, and mercy. That’s good news, right?

The struggle is, that as this Gospel text indicates, Jesus means for us to live out these qualities in our lives as ways of being that are always moving us outward – to new horizons – new ways of living in relationship with our neighbor and with God. That’s what discipleship means.

This grace, mercy, love and forgiveness all sound great when they are directed toward us and toward those we love and care about. We want and need all those things in our lives.

We know we are broken people and we yearn for the healing that Jesus brings. Yet Jesus came to deliver this mandate that to follow him, we need to direct those same things toward people that our culture and our egos tell us are the last people we should want to benefit from them: like, those who hurt us; those we those who hate us; those curse and abuse us. Yet, when we do this, the radical love of Jesus is evident in our lives; it changes our lives, our relationships, and our world.

            Today’s gospel lesson is a continuation of the one we heard last week, the so-called Sermon on the Plain.

In a reversal of all we have come to expect in life, Jesus gave the crowd some good news/bad news. To the poor, the hungry, and the mourning Jesus delivered the good news that they would be well off in the kingdom of God; and then to the rich, he gave the bad news that they wouldn’t fare so well if they continued to trust in worldly riches rather than in God, especially when they valued and accumulated those things at the expense of the poor.

            As Luke’ Gospel continues into today’s passage, Jesus invites his followers to demonstrate radical love, blessing, forgiveness, generosity, and trust. That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it? Except the thing is, Jesus tells his disciples that the recipients of all that benevolence can’t just be the people we love, or like, or even just tolerate, nor can our good intentions be a reciprocal act.

            Jesus says instead, that we need to shower these radical gifts of mercy and generosity even on our enemies. We’re supposed to love on those we don’t like, don’t know, and don’t really care to know.

            You think changing seats in church is challenging and uncomfortable?

Picture your worst enemy or a person who has created havoc and pain for you or others you care about. Picture a person who has slandered or cursed you or taken from you what is rightfully yours. Picture a person or group that have cost you something you treasure. Now, picture yourself loving that person, forgiving them, and bestowing kindness and mercy on them in their hour of need.

That is how Jesus is telling us we should live:

But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. That’s not all.

If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.

And finally, the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you.

How difficult do you find these words?

To be honest, I find them scorchingly difficult to hear. Because the core of this teaching centers on forgiveness and sometimes forgiveness can be so hard to give. This is not simply forgiving your child when they have lied to you or forgiving your partner when they didn’t take the trash out like they were supposed to. I think you know that. Jesus tells us we need to forgive our enemies for the bigger-badder things they have done that hurt us.

The thing is, sometimes it is so much more justifiable and righteous to hold on to grudges and withhold forgiveness from someone who has caused me or someone I love, pain.

There are people I’ve never even met that I have a hard time loving. I have always said that there is no one I hate – I taught my children not even to use that word in reference to another person – but I confess that in an era of toxic division and polarization in our world, I experience grave dislike toward some people. Seeing the pain and destruction of lives caused by the actions of other people, I get angry.  There are people whose words and actions I find so heinous or disagreeable, that I am brought to the point of feeling hatred.

Jesus seems to be asking something that is not only challenging, but in many ways impossible. It’s too radical. It’s too hard.

But then, I look at these words again and I realize that Jesus isn’t just demanding an unachievable standard, but Jesus is showing us the way. Jesus describes his own life, passion and death.

With the gift of knowing the full story of Jesus’ radical love as he lived it himself, we gain a new perspective of what radical love, mercy, forgiveness, generosity and grace look like. Jesus invites us not only to live out this radical love, but to trust and depend on him to lead the way. And Jesus delivers.

Throughout his life, but most especially in his passion and death, Jesus exemplified radical love and forgiveness, mercy and grace.

He spent time with and even ate with tax collectors and sinners; he received water from and gave forgiveness to the woman at the well; he healed and invited outsiders in to the party; through his parables he described the most extraordinary examples of unjustified mercy and generosity that is given to the most unlikely of characters.

He heals one of his arresting soldiers when his ear is cut off, and asks God to forgive his torturers, declaring that they do not know what they are doing.

During his passion and even at the cross, Jesus’ forgiveness and promise bring restoration to a common criminal.

Finally, Jesus forgives us and promises us life everlasting despite our sinfulness, despite our inablity to live out this command, and despite our many foibles and failures.

Instead of giving us what we deserve, Jesus gives us unmerited grace. In his unending generosity, Jesus invites each and every one of us to the table where we are fed and nourished and strengthened and given new perspective and grace.

With these words, Jesus challenges us to grow in living our lives in harmony with God’s desire of restored relationships based on mercy and harmony. What will our answer be?

Making the changes in our lives that Jesus invites today doesn’t happen overnight. We take one step, and then another. But, I wonder how many of you will go back to sitting in your usual seats next week?

I hope that little by little you will challenge yourselves to grow; to become the people God is calling you to be, willing to take on new behaviors and to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. The first of the steps we will need to take is to embrace love.

Amen.

Walls, Weddings, and Wine

John 2:1-11 – Weddings and Walls

          We hear a lot about walls these days. Walls that should be erected, walls that should come down, physical walls and virtual walls, and both the costs and opportunities walls may represent.

No, I am not going to talk about THAT wall – this is not a political speech, although we will talk about commonalities in all the walls that exist in our lives, and how in Jesus Christ those walls crumble and fall.

Walls are nothing new – that much is obvious. The oldest wall discovered so far was built about 11,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, modern-day Turkey. The Great Wall of China is considered one of the world’s greatest architectural feats, the first sections of which were built in the 7^th century, B.C., with the bulk of it being constructed during the Ming Dynasty in the roughly three centuries beginning in 1368.  

Robert Frost once wrote in one of his poems that “good walls make good neighbors.”  Too often, that is just how we view the barriers that we put up – as being only good.

Martin Luther King, Jr., whose work we celebrate in a national holiday tomorrow said in speeches delivered in 1964 to both West and East German audiences, “For here on either side of the wall” and of course, he was referring to the Berlin Wall, “are God’s children, and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact.” Those are words to remind us that regardless of what kind of walls we are facing, God is with us and God can remove our need for the walls we put up, and bless us in our relationships with people, for, “In Christ There is No East or West, in him no north or south!” as sung in an old African American spiritual found in our hymnal.

And yet, there still exist all kinds of walls in our lives. Some are composed of bricks and mortar, some of stone, some of computer-generated protective layers of technology we call firewalls. Perhaps the most damaging of all walls are those of heart and mind. What I would like to talk about is what lies behind our building of walls and how it relates to our gospel today.

Often we use that word – “wall” – to refer not only to the physical walls in the world, but to the limits of what we think we are capable of, or the threshold of our patience or endurance, or the externally-imposed restrictions on our movement or freedom, even our progress in something challenging.

The thing that most often comprises or causes walls to go up is fear.

I can recall times in my life when I definitely felt like I had hit a wall. I can also identify the fear that drove me to the wall. It was often the fear of failure of some kind – like the time I took a two-week intensive in biblical Greek, in what was called “Greek Boot Camp” at the beginning of seminary and as the mid-term arrived I was sure I would fail.

It was fear of not being good enough, smart enough, or spiritual enough that kept me – for way more years than I like to admit – from answering God’s call to ordained ministry in the first place.

Then there were the times as our children grew up and they were struggling with profound difficulties; I feared not being able to help them in ways that would make a lasting difference in their lives.

It was fear of being judged and fear of being incapable of being on my own that kept me for too long in an abusive first marriage.

Walls, built by fear, and fear is often driven by the principle of scarcity the guides the world. It’s the principle of the “not enough.”

This is the deep conviction that we aren’t enough, or we don’t have enough, or that there is not enough to go around. The principle of scarcity leads to protectionism – we protect ourselves from the embarrassment of not “being enough” by simply not engaging; we protect ourselves from our fear of not “having enough” of what we need or want by holding tightly to what is ours; and we protect ourselves from the fear of there not enough by grasping at what we fear will not be available later if we don’t get it now. All of this fear drives us to the wall. We can’t get over it, we can’t get around it, but we can – and do – hide behind it.

Of what are you afraid today? What kinds of walls might you be erecting around yourself because of fear? What fear-driven barriers do you need help overcoming? Jesus is here to break the tight hold of fear and offer us a life of abundance beyond our imaging.

Jesus came to conquer our fear and to break down the walls that divide us as people. Jesus came to eradicate the walls that keep us from being the people God created us to be. If we doubt that Jesus is capable of penetrating our well-constructed walls, we have only to look at the gospel today to see how God, through Jesus, is revealed to be our “enough.”

Imagine, if you will, that you were throwing a big party – perhaps even a wedding reception for your son or daughter, like the friends of Mary and Jesus were throwing in our gospel lesson. Imagine what it would be like if, just an hour or so into the reception the dessert bar was empty and the drinks bar had run out of wine and liquor. The humiliation!

Imagine living in an honor/shame society where keeping face and maintaining your good standing on the honor side of things was of supreme importance - the shame you would suffer from such misstep would be enormous. The embarrassment!  Your fear of not being a good enough host or hostess or of being judged as not having enough resources to afford feeding all your guests just got reinforced.

Given the fact that wedding feasts typically ran for days and often as long as a week in Jesus’ time, what happened at the Wedding at Cana would be a lot like that experience. Halfway through the party, you have lost the ability to provide for your guests, your family, and your children, and you’ve lost that ability in a very public way.

John tells this story in his Gospel at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry to highlight how, as God sent Jesus into the world and as Jesus begins his teaching and preaching and healing, we should have no doubt that what John writes about Jesus is true. In the miracle of changing the water into wine, Jesus shows that the fear we bear of “not enough,” in him, becomes an overwhelming supply, not only of “enough,” but of the very finest provisions.

In this twenty-first century world, our motto might well be “there’s not enough.” Whether we are thinking of food, water, shelter, money, or love, the repeated messages that there is not enough to go around reinforce our fears. This fear infects all segments of society – home, family, church, work, nation, world. In an increasingly insular world, where we function in a “it’s a dog-eat-dog world and we need to grab what we can first,” this text invites us to stop, and to look at what Jesus is doing.

Jesus takes a moment of supreme fear for the stewards who were charged with making sure they ordered enough wine and turns it into a story of abundance and wonder as they marvel that the very finest of wine – and so much of it – would be provided for the second half of the feast, assuring that all who attended not only “got enough” but were well-pleased at being filled with such a fine provision of food and drink to the end.

This gospel story reminds us that the magnificent, inexplicable love of God is a gift that is abundant and satisfying. God’s generosity moves us from wanting to satisfied, and from fear to fullness. In God walls are unnecessary, because in Jesus God provides for our every need.

Because God loves us we need never fear not being good enough, bright enough, rich enough, or loved enough. In the baptism that we remembered last week, God takes each of us and declares that in his eyes we will always be enough upon which his love and mercy and grace will rest. Each of us has been miraculously willed into being by God and saved through God’s grace. Therefore, we have no need to fear. As theologian Walter Brueggemann puts it, “the story of abundance says that our lives will end in God, and that this well-being cannot be taken from us. In the words of St. Paul, neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities nor things—nothing can separate us from God.”

Of what are you afraid today? In what ways is God providing abundantly for you in the midst of your fear?

When water was changed into wine at the wedding at Cana, Jesus proclaims the radical abundance of God. The wine is copious. God’s love is unending. God’s mercy is without parallel. God’s forgiveness is eternal. Just as the quality of the wine in Cana is not just adequate but is “the best,” in Jesus, God grants us not just a better story but the best. God gives us new creation, new life, new possibilities, new and eternal hope.

Trust that regardless of what fears you may be holding inside, and regardless of where you fear the judgment of “not enough,” God has already answered your scarcity with abundance – with overflowing answer to your prayer – with unending healing of your pain.

In Jesus, God is revealed and shines forth as the one who answers the myth of scarcity with a powerful new narrative, filled with abundant new life in Christ. may we learn to trust in the abundance of God, relinquish our fears, and live new lives shining forth with the generosity of faith and love, in Christ. Amen.

Freedom, Truth, and Luther

 Jeremiah 31:31-34; Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36

There is a television program called “This is Us” which has become quite popular in the past couple of years, but until recently I had never watched any of its episodes. Lately, however, curiosity has had me watching the first couple of seasons through a streaming app. This week I watched an episode in which one of the characters talks about the first time he got glasses with corrective lenses in them.

Before he could get the glasses of course, came the exam with what he calls the “Better Machine.”

Anyone who has had optical refraction is familiar with that machine. (Refraction is what they call it when they check to see how much – or how little correction your eyes might need to attain your best possible vision).

So, the “best machine” is the one where the doctor or optical technician flicks through combinations of varying strengths of lenses on a machine that you look through to read the chart on the wall. As lenses are changed, the patient is asked over and over, “Which is better, one or two?” click, click, “now which is better – one or two?” click, click, “two or one?”

The patient goes through a series of trial lenses in this way, while the world goes from blurry to clear and back to blurry again, until you finally arrive at the combination that provides the best correction you can attain to see the world.

I remember walking out of the optician’s office with my first pair of glasses when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I was amazed that the grassy lawn contained millions of individual blades of grass – and was not just the sea of green I had become accustomed to seeing. That’s what I remember most of that first step out into a vision-corrected world – individual blades of grass.

Today we commemorate Reformation Sunday, when we remember with gratitude the work of Martin Luther and the rest of the reformers, who gave us a clearer vision of God’s grace through their work with the Scriptures. We celebrate how, through the Reformation, our faith came to contain millions of beautiful blades of grass as we see God’s presence throughout our world, no longer a simple one-or-two-dimensional sea of green.

Luther and his friends never intended to split the church, or to create a new denomination in the Christian faith. They simply wished to share with the masses what they, through the power of the Holy Spirit, had come to understand more clearly; that what God has done in Jesus Christ, on the cross, is to pour our grace sufficient for new life for us all.

They wanted to devise better ways to teach the faithful that God’s unmerited, perfect grace is already accomplished for us all. They were, in a lot of ways, like the “better machine.”

They kept writing, studying, arguing and debating with each so that they could best understand and then convey the truth of Christ’s Word that is life-giving and not oppressive, as Jesus himself is life-giving and liberating.

In so doing, they looked through a variety of lenses and asked the question over and over, “which is clearer, one or two? two or one”? As they worked, their vision went from blurry to clear, back to blurry again, and then clearer than ever before, through reading Scriptures like those ones we just read.

Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you keep on living in my truth, you are really, truly my disciples; and you will know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free.”

The disciples answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.”

Somehow, I don’t think the disciple are on the same page as Jesus.

·         Jesus is speaking of spiritual truth; of eternal truth; of divine truth. This is the truth that will outlive every human-constructed world or cultural reality. He is speaking of truth and freedom as infinite possibilities that are known only through him – through God’s almighty grace.

·         They are relying on the finite history and stories of the path trod by their ancestors.

·         Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love and mercy to all the fallen world, but despite having recently declared that they believe he is the Messiah, they still identify themselves through their traditional Jewish heritage, where their identity is found in Abraham, the father of the faith. The trouble is, in this way they give their association with Abraham priority over their relationship with Jesus.

·         Jesus challenges them to own their new identity as Christ-followers, saved now by God’s grace apart from any Law that has bound them in the past, but they worry that he is equating them with slaves.

·         They associate freedom with the physical removal of the shackles of enslavement in Egypt, while Jesus is talking about a much more profound and lasting liberation, where the heart itself is set free from that which binds it so that it can grow in the new, unalienable life that God gives us.

As Lutherans commemorate the Reformation, we remember that freedom was a crucial element in faith for Luther and the other Reformers. The big question they were driven to answer was, where and how are truth, freedom, and new life to be found? What is the truth about our salvation? What is necessary for eternal life?

Those questions burned for those who live in the Middle Ages of Luther’s world. There was an urgency to such understanding that is lost to those of us living in the 21^st century.

          Their world was dark and dangerous, with death from plague, starvation, disease and poverty literally just around the corner in a way that we comfortable Americans cannot fathom; life was beyond hard.

          The desperate hope and desire of the people therefore, was that the life that awaited them when they departed this mortal coil would be better than the one they traveled in this life.  They were desperate to know that they and the loved ones who had passed on before them would not languish in a continual cycle of suffering, but that they had believed correctly or done enough or lived a sufficiently good life to be assured that they were heaven-bound. They desperately needed the assurance that God would judge them worthy of a sweet eternal life after this world of infernal suffering.

As the reformers studied and debated the Scriptures together, the core belief that God’s Word of forgiveness and grace won through the cross of Christ alone as the ultimate power to save us, became their battle cry against the forces of darkness.

They were convinced that this essential truth had been lost in the medieval pietistic teachings and indulgences of the church of their time. Determined to share the Word that only belief in Jesus Christ could save, that only God’s grace could save, and that on the cross, God’s determination of salvation was accomplished for the whole world, they turned to passage like the ones we read today.

This Word of God has the authority to grant perfect vision to all people by conveying to us the truth and light of God’s steadfast love and mercy for all God’s creation.

The world today may be different from that of the reformers of over 500 years ago. Faith is no longer deemed as essential to life as it used to be. The conviction that our salvation comes from God alone has been lost to the masses – even the need for salvation by Christ is questioned by so many people around us.

The thing that hasn’t changed is that there is still vast suffering in the world. The past week has exemplified this truth: children senselessly die and people are maimed in car accidents, bombs sent through mail terrorize us, faithful worshipers and first responders are gunned down in a worship place – a synagogue; millions of children suffer the evil and pain of starvation in a war-torn land, and gang violence drives thousands from their homes to seek the refuge which just a few of them will receive in time. There are times when the dimness of our vision may be fueled by our despair and hopelessness.

Yet, here we gather today, by the will of the Holy Spirit. Together we confess the faith of our baptism, the same faith that four young people will affirm during the Rite of Confirmation.

We are so much like the disciples – while we may not locate our identity in Abraham any longer, our faith and our trust in Jesus’ words still need to be clarified so that our vision of God’s grace might be renewed, and we might be freed to live in the light of Christ.

The lenses our world offers us can blur our vision. But God restores it. As Lutherans we confess that we are at the same time sinner (by our response to the temptations and pull of the world) and saint (by the sweet gift of God’s grace).

We are not saved by our own understanding but by the mercy of a God who loves us so much that despite our blurry understanding, despite our indistinct vision of grace, despite our frequent blindness, God forgives us and renews us over and over again for the sake of Jesus Christ.

Jesus makes it possible for us to grasp the new life we are given at baptism – the new life our confirmands claim as their own this day.

And so today and every day, let us offer our thanks and praise to God for the “better machine” of our faith – for the corrective lenses that give us not perfect faith or perfect life – only God can to that – but the best vision of which we are capable, until that day when God perfectly restores our vision and our understanding with the fine heavenly vision given all the saints in light. Amen.