“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:”

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Faith does not hear or grasp everything at once. There is a time and place for understanding. There are many Christian doctrines, for example, that speak to various aspects of creation, sin, grace, the meaning of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and so forth. But when is the right time to confront them? When may they speak meaningfully to us?

Helmut Thielecke, the late pastor and theologian who lived through the traumatic years of Hitler’s Germany, pointed out that struggling with these doctrines is fruitful only when these questions arise in the midst of our experience of either the absence or the presence of God. Pastor Thielecke observed that when Martin Luther wrote his introduction to the Letter to the Romans, he pointed out something very insightful regarding the architecture of the book. The first eight chapters deal with the great doctrine of God’s grace. Only then, in chapters 9-11, does Paul move on to his discussion of the doctrine of predestination. The order is significant.

The doctrine of predestination – not determination – is appropriately confronted only after we have been brought to the heart of God by His grace. Just as when out of suffering and injustice we ask, ‘Why has this happened to me?, The question of grace then becomes not an academic one but a question that arises out of our experience of grace. For since grace comes upon us, we have no recognizable key by which we may control this grace; free will, moral striving, pure doctrine and so forth.  When the awareness of being saved by grace alone comes upon me, only then may I ask the critical question, Why has this grace come to me? Only then is it possible for me to see not only the God who rejects but the God who selects.

The great doctrines, the great questions of the faith were not hatched in a theological hothouse, removed from the questions of life, the questions good and evil. They each have their time and place for the individual Christian and for the Church. They represent the struggle of God’s people to come to terms – literally – with the reality of the God who is utterly hidden from us, and yet chooses to reveal Himself, by His grace, in Jesus Christ our Lord.

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

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“23 For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

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When I flew back and forth from Wisconsin recently, I was in a total of five airplanes, packed in with hundreds of others. We were isolated in a shared space but we were not communities because nothing happened among us or between us. When we landed we scattered, never to be together again. If, however, we had been hijacked or crashed, those who survived would have shared a story that was defining, in some sense, for the rest of our lives and of our lives.

The Scriptures were born out of the preaching, teaching, complex life and worship of the early Christian communities. Imagine hearing the gospels and the letters read in the early Christian communal worship gatherings where the context of hearing very often included baptisms and the sharing of the Lord’s Supper. How would these events have shaped their hearing? How would they have heard the feeding stories around the Sea of Galilee? Or the baptism of Jesus? Or the eating stories in the parables of Jesus? Or the key stories of accusation against Jesus, that He ate with sinners?  

The Lord’s Supper was the central ritual, liturgical action – the central story – of the early Christians. The Scriptures do not run on endlessly about the Lord’s Supper for the same reason they do not run on endlessly about baptism: they were assumed aspects of the Church’s life. When you read the Scriptures in this way, you get a very different New Testament.

Many people suffer from what I call a ‘ritual bias’. The great value, even necessity, of ritual is lost on them because liturgical ritual assumes a deep investment in the community that is given shape and form by the rituals of worship. People who are shaped by the values of the isolated individual do not know what to do with ritual because meaning is always defined by ‘me’ and not ‘we’.

Liturgy and the ritual of worship are not simply matters of church etiquette for altar guilds to fuss over and for worshipers to endure. Nothing about the words and actions of worship is peripheral, not for the community that is brought forth out of the orthodoxy (right worship) through which the Gospel is given.  That is to say, the gospel at work in Word and sacrament through the living, ongoing rituals and liturgies of the community both create and shape that community. 

Families are shaped and defined largely by the stories they carry with them from their ancestral heritage and the ones they write with their lives. These are unique to each family and are, in some sense, unrepeatable. But the ritual worship of the Church is different. The words and actions of Word and Sacrament are repeated over and over because it is through them that the Christian community is brought forth and sustained in the midst of many other stories that compete for the crucial place of definition in our lives.

Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and the proclaimed Word stand centrally in Christian worship and ritual because through them we are incorporated into the story of Jesus. The rituals of liturgy and worship, therefore, provide the means through which individuals are brought into the story of Jesus and formed into a community in the Spirit. Such rituals serve both as the means of ongoing interpretation of the story of Jesus even as they invite us to participate in that story as new persons and as a new people, a new community in Christ.

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

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“For it is by grace you are saved, and this is not your doing; it is the gift of God…”

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Someone once observed that we have no choice about choice. Thrust into the world, life is on our hands and with it comes an automatic culpability which we cannot escape. Life demands response in every aspect. Even choosing to sit it out is a choice. And if you do, someone else must choose to pick up your slack.

What this means is that, by nature, life is full of demands which force us to be responsible creatures. When the New Testament speaks of being born under the demands of the law, this is what it means. And these demands, which come at us in all the structures of existence, are the voice of God.

How do we respond? The story of Adam and Eve gives insight here. Faced with their culpability, both of them threw up their defenses. Adam blamed God for giving him Eve and Eve blamed the serpent for hoodwinking her. Their knee-jerk response to God’s inquiry was self-justification, self-defense. We can see this in ourselves all the time. We are quick to blame, quick to mount a defense. In a world of self-defenders this is how you get along. This is how life goes in a world of law.

In Jesus, God’s voice also speaks the dialect of grace. For if the voice of law is meant to call us to fulfill our responsibilities, even more does the voice of grace calls us to trust in the forgiveness of God. The law reveals our culpability. Grace reveals God’s mercy.

Jesus was a threat to many because He lived out His humanity not primarily in response to law but to grace. Self-defense was not His way. Entrusting Himself to the grace of the Father was His way, even to death on the Cross. 

The way of the Christian is this radical way of grace. The freedom of faith permits us to assume the responsibilities of life without resorting to self-defense or blame. Faith has nothing to fear. As a result, the Christian is free to live in love beyond the limits of law and trust in God’s grace – alone – with a joyful daring.

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

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“He taught not as the scribes but as one who had authority…”

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We don’t want to be too hard on the scribes of Jesus time. They stood in a long tradition of rabbinic teaching, building on the insights and reflections of the great rabbis who thought long and deeply about the the law, the prophets and the writings. The scribes gathered together the collective memory and reflection of Israel, transcending individual, personal experience and enabling the people of God to carry with them a vast body of teaching and reflection on the meaning of God and His people. Their work was a constant reminder that God’s people build on the past even as they must come to terms with their own time and place.

At the same time when the New Testament tells us that Jesus spoke as one who had authority, we must ask; Is he simply a mindless radical throwing out everything before him? Or does he in some sense transcend human wisdom and knowledge? For the kind of authority Jesus claimed originated either from a revolutionary “dumb dumb” or from God. Those are the alternatives.

It is the unwavering testimony of the New Testament that Jesus words and actions were those of the Living God. We see this expressed in the Resurrection, where Jesus puts death behind Him. He has the authority to make unconditioned promises, promises unconditioned by time, limitations or the ultimate qualifier of promise, death. Our promises die with us. The promises of Jesus transcend death. Therefore, His word has eternal, unconditioned authority. Nothing is able to overcome His will for you. 

When Jesus told His disciples that all authority had been given to Him, in heaven and earth, it was statement about the final destiny of all things. This is not the statement of a personal Jesus, reduced to the level of our appetites and agendas.  It is the word of God’s eternal promise that the human condition and your place within it are in the hands of this crucified and risen man, this man of hope and grace, and no other. 

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

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“Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.”

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Hope is hard for narcissists like us. Oh, I don’t mean the kind of hope that expects God will safely tuck us away in His pocket while others suffer misfortune. The less said about that phony hope the better. I mean the hope that entrusts all to God when everything is falling apart and prospects are dim – on a good day.

Any sober reading of the Bible will see that the polished God on the pedestal who delivers the goods here and now, is largely a fiction. The God we meet in the bible is a deliverer all right, but His methods often, quite often, bring those who trust Him right to the brink of catastrophe and sometimes beyond. This accounts for some of the problems we have when we encounter this God in the Bible.This God brings down and raises up. He kills and makes alive.This God forgives the unrighteous and blasts the religious with withering words of judgment. This God sent His own Son and lead him all the way to suffering and death. There is a grittiness to this God, a refusal to be in any kind of denial about the mess He confronts in this world.

The book of Job is among the greatest literary accomplishments in human history. For it looks at God and the suffering of the faithful with the clarity and harshness of a Klieg light. Job cuts right to the chase. “I’ll hope in Him even if He kills me.” These are the words of a faith so raw and so real, one can only marvel and remember Jesus words when he said, “When the Son of Man comes will He find faith on the earth?” 

The true sign of Christian hope is not in the winning (as we variously define it) but in the losing, in the tears, sack cloth and ashes when we are caught in the crucible of God’s judgment and mercy. Faith in God is just that, faith in God. It is to entrust one’s life to God no matter what, without expectations. Job’s last and only hope after all, as his world crumbled around him, was the God who permitted it all to happen.

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

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The blog resumes today after a bout with a cold and a week in Wisconsin visiting my folks. Thanks to everyone who sent their good wishes and prayers. 

      Pastor Mark Anderson

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“But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. 26 It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; 28 even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

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What’s in a name? Just about everything, actually. Over a lifetime your name accumulates a reputation. Your name becomes invested with the totality of your experience, for good or for ill. When the name Adolph Hitler is mentioned, for example, it carries the freight of cruelty and evil. No one names their kid Adolph anymore. 

Imagine yourself a fly on the wall in a room full of all the people who have ever known you. What would they say when your name came up? What would your name represent to those who were close enough to really know you?

The naming of God is at the very heart of the Christian faith. When the message came from God to Joseph and Mary, they were instructed to name Him, Jesus (Joshua), which means “Yahweh is salvation”, for he would deliver people from their sin. In time, Christians came to use four words to name the one God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For this is how the Scriptures named the revealed God.

This is the name, therefore, into which we are baptized. We are baptized into the name of the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit, because to trust Jesus is to think about God in this way.

This means that for Christians the name of God is centered in Jesus Christ. That is to say, the meaning of God’s name is clarified and given expression in Jesus. To call God ‘Father’, therefore, is to recast the word in the light of Jesus. In the Biblical world, the word ‘father’ carried with it the freight of mastery and lordship. To call God the ‘Son’ cast that word in a new light. Now, mastery and lordship were characterized not by the raw assertion of a power role but by vulnerability and love. To call God the ‘Holy Spirit’ is say that this mastery, this lordship that is based upon vulnerability and love of the Son is available to us.

Jesus described the mastery, the lordship of the Gentiles as lording it over people. And is this not, in fact, the world’s definition of mastery, of power? Then He went on to say that this definition of lordship is not what God intends. The lordship of God is now defined by the Son, the crucified one, who gives Himself in vulnerability and love.

Baptism wraps your name in the death shroud of the Son, in the death of Christ, in order that you might take the daily plunge out of death into life, living by grace through faith in the name of the One who has put death behind Him. In the water of baptism your name was drowned, you were drowned in order that the name by which you would now live, by which you would be known, is the name into which you were baptized – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  His name is above every name, including yours and mine, because the Son has invested the name of God with the vulnerable currency of grace, the greatest, richest power in the universe. In Word and sacrament, the Holy Spirit brings this grace to you, adopts you into this name directly, personally, so that everything the name of Jesus graciously signifies, represents and does belong to you, are for you. 

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

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“Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

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When we’ve had enough of ourselves, in whatever form it takes, we start looking around for a messiah. And when we do, they usually come in one of three pre-conceived forms: revolutionary, moral reformer or revivalist.

The revolutionary gathers up all our grudges and grievances and pummels our enemies with them, for some enemy or another is the problem.  He\she leads the army of the righteously disgruntled in storming the battlements of injustice, in order that our particular form of justice may be violently forced on others. Many wanted, and still want, Jesus the revolutionary.

The moral reformer rails against the vices and corruption of the age. Society and it’s institutions are falling apart because people – other people – are misbehaving. The corrective to society’s ills may be found in the moral realignment of society and it’s values. The moral reformer wants to see moral/ethical revision extend from the board room to the bedroom. Many wanted, and still want, Jesus the moral reformer.

The revivalist sees the dilemmas of both church and state deriving from the lackluster faith of backsliding believers and stodgy religion. The world is a mess because we do not have enough energetic, sincere faith to make it otherwise. The revivalist summons us from religion set on simmer to religion turned up to a full boil. When we are serious enough about God, things will change. Many wanted, and still want, Jesus the revivalist.

There may be a place for all three of these concerns as sinners struggle to tidy up the messy world we have made for ourselves. In fact, turn on your television any day of the week and you’ll find these salvation stories being given back to you in any manner of law and order programming. But to equate one, or all three, of these with the Messiahship of Jesus is to miss the mark by a mile. Tidying up the world may make us feel more secure and better about ourselves but it will save no one.

When Peter made his confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, it was some combination of these three salvation motifs he had in mind. You probably do too. But when Jesus began to explain that the Messiah would be handed over, suffer and be killed, Peter raised a furious objection. It was then that Jesus called Peter ‘Satan’ and told him to knock it off.

Now, perhaps, we can see why Jesus told His disciples to not spread the word that he was the Messiah. For he knew that the word would aggravate the misunderstandings already in place. Then, as now, people would hear the title Messiah, Christ, as revolutionary, moral reformer or revivalist. These, in fact, are the programs of many Christian congregations.

The meaning of the title’  Messiah’, ‘Christ’ does not come from human projections of what we think needs redemption. Jesus was telling His disciples that it was, in fact, at the hands of the revolutionaries, moral reformers and revivalists that he would suffer and die.

The god of the revolutionary, moral reformer or revivalist is simply inadequate to deal with the enormity of the evil we inflict on each other. To call upon these gods in the name of salvation is like putting band aids on terminal cancer. Forget it.

The title Messiah, Christ, may rightly be given to Jesus because through His way of innocence, vulnerability, suffering and death He took upon Himself our justifications, defenses and prejudices – our devilish programs of salvation. God refused to be a party to our programs of revolution, reform or revival. He came, and still comes, in the way of mercy and grace, consigning all our works and all our ways to death on the cross in order that He might have mercy on us all. 

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

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“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy.”

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When I was a young man in the 1960’s the “good news of great joy” of which we sang were institutions and movements that seemed bright and promising. The United Nations held out the prospect of real international cooperation; fresh optimism filled many with hope and energy to work for a better world; technologies were developing at an unprecedented rate; communication was opening the world; universal education was emerging as a real possibility.

Now, many years later, all of these institutions have proven themselves to be flawed, delivering as much down side as up side. The world continues to provide itself with what it has coming. The U.N. has exposed nations to be a quagmire of bickering and grievances; optimism has lost the steam of it’s dream as the hard and gritty realities of life in this world have emerged as the formidable obstacles they truly are; technology has proven to be a poor, soulless substitute for the development of real, human capability and interaction; creeping ignorance continues it’s march in the face of educational opportunity.

It is easy to be disappointed in such a world, to question the will of God. But do we have that right? After all, who is responsible? All our blaming and finger pointing just adds to the dysfunction and chaos we have set loose in this place. The One who should really be disappointed is God. What kind of a world does He have to look at? Or are we going to point the finger at Him, too? Why not. Adam did.

When we are hurt or disappointed, we tend to draw back, to look for a place where we will not be hurt or disappointed or for a place to cast blame. It would have been easy for Jesus to have finished His prayers in Gethsemane, gotten up and walked out of the garden, out of the city and into the hills, away from the police. His thirty or so years in this place were more than enough time to draw the conclusion that there is no deserving here. So why did He do it? Why did He let us kill Him? 

The only answer is the greatest mystery of all; God’s mercy. Martin Luther observed that in Jesus God has refused to pull rank on us. That’s the mystery. There is nothing more unfathomable in all the Christian faith than this one, simple fact; faced with the enormity of His disappointment, His grief over the mess we have made of this good earth and our lives, God has chosen to have mercy on us. Paul called this salvation by grace, apart from anything we can think, say or do.

In our broken lives and world we receive what we have coming, for this is the harvest of weeds we have sown in the landlord’s vineyard. But in Jesus we receive what we do not have coming, what God would give us; pure, unmerited, undeserved grace and mercy. This is the “good news of great joy” of which the angels sang – and so may we, we who were once ‘nobody’s’ but are now ‘somebody’s’ because of God’s mercy.

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

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” For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all. O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory for ever. Amen.”

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The photo above is of the baptismal font in our sanctuary. It stands centrally in the aisle and greets worshipers as they enter. Seeing it reminds of me of an event from years ago.

I was visiting a friend who had just started his ministry in a new congregation. While I was there he asked it I would help him with a project. With toolbox in hand he took me to a closet located near the altar at the side of the sanctuary. He opened the door to reveal a wooden baptismal font on wheels. An hour later we had removed the wheels and permanently attached the font to the floor just inside the entrance to the sanctuary. 

The explosive language of Paul in the text above is not language that wonders at a God we can’t figure out. It is the language that marvels, wonders at the unfathomable grace of God that has not given up on this tiny world. To go a step further, it is the language of one for whom the story of Jesus, His cross and resurrection, have become defining. For not only has God not given up on this world, in Jesus He has committed Himself to this world, in justice and mercy, when there is no obligation for Him to do so.

The Gospel of Jesus, mediated through the word and sacraments, bring us into the story of God. Sacraments are the living events through which God continually comes to us and keeps us in His grace, shapes us and conforms us to the death and new life of the cross and resurrection. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not ambiguous events, shifting sands. The sacraments are events in real time, part of the actual story, history of God’s people, where we are encountered by God’s faithfulness, through which God creates trust by extending His mercy and grace.

My friend was absolutely right in reaffirming baptism as a symbol of permanence, and to locate that symbol in a place where the worshiping community could not push baptism into a closet. Now, they would come face to face with baptism every time they gathered. They would come face to face with an unbuffered view of the self and God in the light of the cross.

As you come and go from worship, the font stands as a reminder of the certainty of God’s judgment on sin and the certainty of God’s grace and mercy. The sacrament of baptism is not a symbol, an ambiguous spiritualizing of God. Baptism is a tangible, on going God-event in which He commits Himself to the death of your old self and the bringing to life of the new you in Christ.

A movable font is symbolic of how we can make destructive even the story of Jesus. For such a practice presents us with baptism as a perfunctory ritual, removes it from it’s central place in worship, in effect rendering ambiguous and uncertain the utterly reliable certainty of God’s grace. It becomes a symbol of our ambivalence about baptism, about God, about ourselves.

On the other hand, the immovable font, the place of grace, plants God’s decision for us firmly in our midst as a worshiping community. It states clearly that grace comes before faith. It makes clear that the Church is not first and foremost a community of faith but a community of grace. For, the great story of Jesus is the story of God’s faithfulness to a disobedient, faithless, violent and corrupt world. No wonder Paul marvels at the “depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God”. For He owes us nothing. Yet, in Christ Jesus, He has given us everything. This is the utterly gracious, reliable and unshakable promise of your baptism.

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

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