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“Give diligence to present yourself approved by God, a workman who doesn’t need to be ashamed, properly handling the Word of Truth.”

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Properly handling the many ways words can be used is among the greatest of human responsibilities. And among these, none is more important, more crucial, than the proper handling of God’s word. For many Christians, the right tool for the proper handling of God’s Word is learning to distinguish between Law and gospel.

Law words properly handle God’s concern for justice, righteousness, holiness. Jesus used law words. Sometimes God has to use them on you. Law words say things like, “No more games. No more lies. No more nonsense. Stop! Turn around! Knock it off!” Law words confront us with the fact that innocence is no longer possible. Law words show us our need for a Savior. Sometimes, taking care of God means using law words.

Gospel words are the other side of law words, like a coin. Gospel words properly handle the forgiveness of sins. Jesus called them ‘keys’. Their main job is to open, not close. Gospel words give access, permission, promise, freedom. Gospel words say things like,”Your sins are forgiven. Yes, you may. You are loved. Grace is for you, too. This is my body and blood, for you. God works everything for good. Christ Jesus will raise you from the dead.” Gospel words give us the savior we need.

When the Church struggles with itself over which words to use as we seek to properly handle the faith, this should neither surprise or dismay us. After all, if a surgeon takes care to use the right instrument in order to ‘properly handle’ a critical procedure, and if a master carpenter makes the effort to insure that his blades are properly sharpened before carving the wood, how much more ought the people of God be attentive to the proper handling of the Word of God? 

“May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ.”

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My library, divided between my home and church studies, is full of books. They cover a wide range of topics.  But there is one book that towers above them all. That book is the Bible.

Like other books, you can cast your line into the pages of the Bible and pull out wisdom, poetry, history, letters, stories and other forms and types of literature. The knowledge and information gathered there can be enlightening and informative. At the same time, if knowledge and information is all you take from the Bible, in a very real sense, it has fallen short of its purpose. For unlike other books, the Bible is an instrument of revelation. Through the Bible God catches you!

The history of the Church, long before the Protestant Reformation, is filled with the stories of those who were gripped by God’s grace through an encounter with the Bible. The written page became the sacred page. In this respect, Martin Luther took up a lens that had been in use for centuries and adjusted its focus.

At the center of the Biblical story is Jesus Christ, the very Living Word of God. This fact reveals to us that God is a wordsmith, using the symbols and sounds of language to forge faith in the hearts of those who hear His voice. This is why St. Paul could say, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ.”  When you pick up the Bible, explosive pontential is in your hands. Read expectantly, for God is seeking you through the words given there. 

“May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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“We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

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It was my first Spring in the congregation. David shook my hand on Sunday morning after the service and said, “We’ll be planting soon. Would you come by and say a prayer?”

A few days later I went to the sanctuary and took the beautiful, oak and walnut processional cross out of its stand. After loading it in the back of my pickup, I headed out of town. The streets of Fergus Falls, Minnesota blended away into a landscape of farms, stands of  budding trees and broad fields that stretched to the horizon.

Before long, I rolled to a stop next to a row of  huge silver silos. My parishoners, David and Debbie, were waiting to greet me. I asked David to take the cross out of the bed of the truck. “Doesn’t this belong in church?, he asked. “Yes”, I replied. “That’s why It’s here.” We walked together a bit awkwardly, stumbling over clods along the deep furrows then paused. I planted the cross firmly in the black earth and we prayed. We gave thanks for life and health, for the good earth, for those who work the soil and their families. We prayed for the safety of David and his workmen, for a productive season and a bountiful harvest. We prayed for those who would be fed by what was grown here. We remembered the words of Jesus that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it cannot live.

It was such a simple gesture. But it connected Sunday with Monday. It connected worship with creation and vocation. That was the idea. There is no place where the cross is out of place. Not for God’s people.

The following Sunday David and Debbie again stopped at the church door. “From now on church won’t be quite the same”, she said with smile.  “When we look at that cross and that field we will remember your visit, how the church came to us.”

When you were baptized you received the sign of the cross so that you might know that wherever you are, there Jesus is. That’s His promise to you. And where Jesus is looks like, dying and rising, planting and growing, good soil, abundance, “newness of life”. He came on a cross so that all avenues would be opened, all impossibilities resurrected. Forgiveness is like that. God comes to us. Jesus plants His cross, His baptism, willy nilly, in the thick of living, your living; in fields, offices, schoolrooms, board rooms and bedrooms, laying claim to sinners where they are, where they live, bringing new life.

A postscript: The following Saturday I was walking through the sanctuary as the Altar Guild was preparing for Sunday worship. One of the ladies called me over and asked if I knew anything about the dirt on the processional cross. I examined the end of the long, wooden shaft, now stained with the earth from David and Debbie’s field and a few, small scratches. “It looks to me”, I replied, ” like Jesus has been making house calls.”

“May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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Once, in late summer, there was a woman who stood in the doorway of a farmhouse in Iowa. She leaned heavily on the frame, her hand over her mouth, not so much fighting back tears as waiting for them to come. Her son placed his bags in the trunk of the old Chevy and slammed the lid shut. With one last wave and a smile he got in the car. His father started the engine and drove away from the house down the long the dirt driveway, made a dusty turn and disappeared, swallowed by the tall corn. Her little boy was gone, really gone. He was off to war.

The tears were coming now. She watched for a long time, still feeling his embrace, his kiss on her cheek, his words of reassurance. Finally, she turned on the old oak floor. The screen door clapped quietly behind her as she slowly walked to the kitchen, sat down at the table and opened her Bible. She turned to the Psalms. She searched and found words that came from someone else, long ago, who sought comfort. Now these words sought her; pleading words, words heavy with concern, seeking protection and guidance for one who was loved. As she read, she prayed. The psalmists words and her own became one.

There are stories behind the Psalms. Stories of flesh and blood and God. Like you, people felt things, knew things, saw things. And in the feeling and the knowing and the seeing God was there. Sometimes this simple insight eludes us. We see the words, printed and published, and forget that hurts and hopes, joys and sorrows gave birth to these words. A man struggles with the loss of friendship and betrayal; a warrior gives thanks for victory after the sweat, blood and terror of battle; a thankful man, who happens to be a priest, pens words of thanksgiving and invites others to sing them with joy, from the heart. And there are laments. Most of the psalms, the majority in fact, are laments. Sorrows, fears, griefs, anger and bitterness pour out of them like a flood; the same way they pour out of you and me when we are in those places.

I call these ‘Psalm Places’, these times and places when we search for words to express the depth of our faith, or lack of it, the depth of our feeling. And isn’t this why God has given us these words? Like our Lord Jesus Himself, they remind us that nothing in our experience is alien to God.

If the Living Word of God would come in the lament of the psalmist, the cross of a young man, and if that same Word would sit at the kitchen table with a weeping woman on a late summer day, in a small farmhouse in Iowa, then that Word will meet you in your ‘Psalm Places’, too.

“May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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“This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

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I have nothing against books. I like them. I have nothing against painting. I like painting. At the same time books and paintings, it seems to me, always want to go to how it was before the book was written and before the color was applied to canvas.  Books and paintings reflect stories.

You know stories. You know more stories than you know facts. When you want to translate your life, your faith, your theology, what you believe, you tell stories. You tell your story.

This is how we hear the gospel writers. Before anything was ever written, something happened. The gospel writers did not set out to write theology, expecting dispassionate academics to parse out every jot and tittle ad nauseum. They wrote of what they had seen and heard. They had a story to tell. A story that was a written upon their experience with Jesus. They told the story before they wrote the story. What do you do with something when you know it and want to make it known?

So much more was said. So much more happened – to them, for them. Worlds of books could not report it all. How utterly inadequate writing it down must have seemed. John says as much. His life was so full of Jesus, he could not imagine a world big enough to contain all that could be said. What a picture John was imagining; books filling valleys, tumbling over mountain ranges, filling oceans, smothering continents, books piled so high they reach like skyscrapers into the clouds and beyond; a vast, library of grace consumed with a single, glorious theme: “the old, old, story of Jesus and His love.”  It is a story mighty enough to consume worlds and tender enough to fill your heart.

“May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep you hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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“From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brethren, this ought not to be so…”

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During the Revolutionary War, General Geroge Washington issued an order condemning the widespread use of profanity among the soldiers of the American army. He urged his officers, by example and influence, to address the problem, observing that such speech is an insult and impiety before heaven.

Today, many would scoff at such a concern. The use of profanity is ‘cool’, chic and worldly. The expression, ‘Oh my God’, for example, has become as common as dirt. Many use the name of Jesus Christ in the same breath with words I will not use here.

The tongue is the mightiest weapon, even in the day of nuclear bombs and other weaponry of unimaginable power. With the ungodly tongue dictators fan the embers of hate into flames of war. With the ungodly tongue, the sensitivities and intimacies of human sexuality are regularly cheapened; ungodly men and women use the power of speech against the very God who gave them that power, and one another.

Today, in your congregation, you will join with others in songs of praise and prayers of thanksgiving, the language and speech of worship. One person called this our “Sunday speech”. We choose our words carefully that our “Sunday speech” might honor the One in whose name we gather, Who has given us life, by Whose cross we have been redeemed, into Whose name we have been baptized. And having tuned our tongues to the sound of praise and thanksgiving, it is our prayer that our “Sunday speech” will sound in all our words, seven days a week.

“May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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“For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility…reconciling us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end.”

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The former Black Panther radical, Eldridge Cleaver, traveled the world for a number of years from one communist country to another. During these travels his eyes were opened. Racism, cruelty, oppression and corruption were at least as prevalent, if not more so, in these countries. He began to realize that calling racism a black-white issue was to miss the point. He began to grasp the comprehensive nature of the human dilemma. This was the painful but inescapable truth that Eldridge Cleaver came to see as he traveled the world: racism and injustice are equal opportunity employers.

Enforcing quotas and legislation designed to combat injustice will never result in people openly and freely loving one another. These measures are damage control, at best. What people need is a power that can actually reconcile, actually bring them together; a power that can erase the past, free the present and open the future.

A painting by a well-known black artist came up for sale at a Manhattan art gallery. The technique was masterful, the colors vivid and alive. But it was the subject that left some viewers touched, others dismayed. The painting was of two men, one black, one white. They were kneeling, their left hands clasped, their right arms extended, touching the base of the cross, their eyes looking up at the crucified Jesus. The painting was entitled, ‘Reconciled’.

Our reconciliation with one another must begin at the cross because the One whom we have wronged, above anyone else, is God Himself. When those forces that separate us are met by a greater power, a new life emerges. The forgiveness that is in Jesus Christ is that power.

“May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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“Speaking the truth in love…”

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I have read books that contain voluminous footnotes, some filling nearly an entire page. On occasion one can become so engrossed in them that the momentum shifts to these parenthetical matters and you can lose focus.

This reminds me of the seminary intern who had a disagreement with his supervising pastor over biblical authority. The intern was assigned to preach on the Gospel text for the day, John 3:16, the verse that Martin Luther once called “the Gospel in miniature”. He read the text and then concluded, “So says the Bible. The Bible is true and you can know the Bible is true for the following ten reasons.”  He was off to the races on the “ten reasons” and left the text in the dust. An important footnote displaced the even more important central theme. When his supervising pastor inquired of him why he had ignored the assigned text, the young man replied defiantly,  “The truth of the Bible must be defended.”

One way to trace the history of the Church is to trace this pattern of parenthetical matters demanding to be the center of attention. In recent decades the Lutheran church, of which I am a part, has been torn apart by the tensions resulting from this dynamic. 

During the decade of the 1970’s, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod was at war over the question of biblical authority, resulting in a split and the formation of the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, a moderate splinter group.

In the 1980’s, concern over dwindling church attendance led to conflict between traditionalists and those who were designing “churches for people who don’t like church” .

Beginning in the late 1990’s, insistence on the adoption of a form of the historic episcopacy led to widespread protests within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. This bitter conflict has produced numerous opposition groups and one entirely new Lutheran denomination.

These matters (and many more that could be mentioned) are legitimate subjects, worthy of the application of our concern as Christians. To say something is parenthetical is not to say it is unimportant.  At the same time, the behavior of the young intern should caution us. Truth without love can be willful, cruel and destructive.

The Church has no shortage of voices in these days demanding that the truth be heard. We could use a few more voices inviting the truth to be heard in love.

“May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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“But God raised him from the dead…because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”

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The Golden Gate, as it is called, is located on the eastern side of the famous temple mount in Jerusalem. The current gate was built over an earlier structure dating from the time of Jesus. According to tradition, this is where the Messiah will arrive when he comes to establish the new Jerusalem.

In 1514 the muslim conqueror, Suleiman, had the gate sealed in an effort to prevent the Messiah from entering. For insurance a cemetery was placed around the entrance since it was believed that the Messiah would not enter a cemetery. Somehow I don’t think stone walls and dead bodies are much of a deterrent. Not for the Messiah I know.

Three days after others put Him in a cemetery, in a tomb sealed with stone, Jesus brushed the stone aside and re-entered life. In His own body Christ Jesus gave us a sign that no barrier will hold Him and no cemetery is off limits. But Christ Jesus did not come out of that tomb as a vengeful conqueror, bent on destruction. Oh, He came out as conqueror to be sure. But it was death that lay vanquished at His feet and the great barrier of sin no longer stood between humanity and God.

Suleiman had no clue who he was dealing with where our Messiah is concerned. Christ Jesus will break down every dividing wall, empty every cemetery, and on that great and glorious day, establish the New Jerusalem – with gates wide open – where all the promises of God will find their fulfillment in Him.

“May the peace of god that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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“Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth.”

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This is Paolo. For generations his family has been riding the waters of the Venetian lagoon, guiding gondolas through the maze of canals and waterways. Linda and I began our excursion with him at the great landing next to St. Mark’s square. But it wasn’t long before we were gliding along the narrow canals, in the fading light of dusk, with no idea where we were. This is when I turned around and took this picture. I was struck – and reassured – by Paolo’s calm demeanor and steady gaze. His handling of the gondola was elegant and effortless. This is someone who knew where he was, where he was going, and how to get there.

When I look ahead at the day before me, there is reason enough to wonder about what the right direction might be. Even if I am convinced, obstacles, threats and dangers may cause me to question my course. When I look at the wider world, I have even less reason for confidence. Their appears to be no real direction in life. The course seems to be one of random chaos and confusion.

If the Bible makes anything clear it is that the hand of God is on the tiller of history. The voyage is not without tumult and danger, to be sure. But the direction is set and the course, however torturous, will end in the fulfillment of God’s good and gracious purposes. Knowing this helps me step back a bit and remember that I am not wandering blindly through life, in the hands of chaotic forces.

In your baptism, God gave you the Holy Spirit, to be your Comforter and Guide. If an earthly guide, like our friend Paolo, can navigate so adroitly, how much more is the Spirit of Christ, Who is the way, the Truth and the Life, able to guide us through the convolutions and perils of living?

 “May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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