I heard a story on the radio yesterday that asked the question “what was the worst year to be alive on the earth in recorded human history?” The story originally aired in January of 2022, right on the heels of the pandemic, and the question had been spurred by the hosts trying to decide which year had been worse, 2020 or 2021. The host then wondered which was the worst year of all years, the year it would have been the worst to be alive. After some research, he came to the conclusion that the worst year to be alive on earth was approximately 536 CE. Quoting research done by a team who had discovered concurrent phenomena in about the year 536, and then expanding the research to other civilizations around the globe to see if they were experiencing the same thing. Their research discovered that, in fact, there was a nearly global and simultaneously occurring experience that made 536, along with the rest of that decade, arguably the worst time to be alive in human history. It seems that a chain of volcanic explosions coupled with debris in the stratosphere leftover from Haley’s comet the year before, made the sun appear bluish in color, preventing its warmth, and plunging the planet into perpetual winter from February of 536 to June of 537. Yellow ash fell over China like alien snow. Crops failed from Scandinavia, to Syria, to Korea. The Mayan Empire, in what historians call the classic period, has a smaller documented period called the ‘classic period hiatus’ where in the Mayans stopped keeping records for roughly the same period of time. The world over, crops failed and famine ensued. As fields lay fallow, rodent moved closer to human populations. Without the sun, already malnourished humans produced less Vitamin D, and their weakened immune systems succumbed to diseases. Those who didn’t die of starvation, died of disease. Entire Swedish villages were abandoned en mass. Ireland recorded a “failure of bread.” A Roman official recounts being unable to see shadows at midday. A Syrian writer recounts that the birds died from the prolonged winter and lack of food. Desperate for food, people began to butcher corpses for meat in China. To date, the 530s CE is the coldest decade in the last 2300 years. A time without warmth or shadow, without food or birds, with blue sun and yellow snow. Honestly, is there anything we take for granted more than the sun? A vail of dust which caused a temperature drop between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees Celsius was enough to cause mass death across the planet in just 15 months, with ripples that spanned the reminder of the decade. The sun is a constant, to the point that the likelihood of the sunrise tomorrow is a euphemism for certainty. With the exception of that one decade 1500 years ago, of course. The pharaohs would rule forever until they didn’t. The Roman Empire would last for eternity, until it collapsed. Pompeii counted on Mt. Vesuvius to be a silent constant of the idyllic scenery, until it exploded and killed everyone. The Library at Alexandria was a wonder of the world, until it burned. And the Jewish people would offer sacrifices in the temple in Jerusalem, until both Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed. The Gospel of Mark is most likely written in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. The Jewish people, already scattered across the Roman Empire, would have to find a new way to worship, to make atonement, to orient themselves in the world. Jewish followers of Jesus, already differentiating themselves from Jewish worship practices, weren’t sure what to make of this development. Non-Jewish followers of Jesus were likely even less sure what to make of this. Mark is writing his gospel to the gentile followers of Jesus, who are trying to make sense of following this Jewish guy who is the son of the Jewish God, whose house was just destroyed. The gentile gods of the Roman pantheon would never let something like that happen. Seems pretty weak sauce for a deity. So as Mark writes, presuming that Jesus must have known what would happen in Jerusalem, he records a conversation to that effect between Jesus and the disciples. This gives Jesus the chance to address the fears and concerns of Mark’s audience directly. What are they to make of the destruction of the house of God? Well, stuff happens, to paraphrase another famous saying. Institutions fail, temples crumble, empires rise and fall, kingdoms rise against kingdoms, there will be wars and rumors of wars, there will be famines and earthquakes, blue sunlight and yellow snow. But this is not the end. If you are even a passive observer of the news, you may be able to relate to the disciples’ sense of tectonic shift in the institutions and individuals they once took for granted. We see in our churches a decline in influence and attendance. We see dysfunction and chaos in our government. We see our children gunned down in school. We see monster hurricanes, devastating wildfires earthquakes from fracking, lead-poisoned municipal water supplies, domestic terrorism, the threat of global nuclear war, and a thousand personal tragedies that never make headlines, but tear our lives apart, nonetheless. When, Lord, will the treatments start to work? When, Lord, will these pews be full again? When, Lord, will my daughter come home? What does it look like, Lord, to pay all of my bills every month? What does it look like, Lord, to be free from addiction? What does it look like, Lord, to live without fear? It is in exactly this uncertainty, Precisely this anxiety, Specifically this foreboding, That Jesus meets the disciples With hope and honesty. Jesus teaches the disciples that stuff happens, and no matter how terrible things look, no matter how much things hurt, no matter how dire their circumstances become, this is not the end. False messiahs will come, This is not the end. Many will be led astray, This is not the end. Wars, and natural disaster, and hunger will all threaten to kill them. This is not the end. In fact, Jesus himself Would be betrayed, and arrested, and wrongly convicted, and beaten, and humiliated, and killed, and buried. This is not the end. No, what feels like death, what looks like destruction, and what hurts like. Hell. Itself, is just. the beginning. Birth pangs, Jesus says, As though he’s trying to tell them The pain means it’s time to push, Because there’s new life on the other side. The promise hidden in this text Is that when the temple is destroyed God is set loose. No stone can hold the God of the Universe. And, In just 6 days from this conversation, the disciples would find that no stone could hold Jesus either. Beloved, when we find ourselves in the grip of fear, when we struggle to find hope in the headlines, when we can’t see past the diagnosis, can’t muster confidence in our institutions, can’t wait for this time, this season, this struggle to Just. Be. Over. Jesus meets us in exactly this uncertainty, precisely this anxiety, specifically this foreboding, and teaches us that no matter how terrible things look, no matter how much things hurt, no matter how dire our circumstances become, this is not the end. Illness may come, But it is not the end. Our system of government may crumble and fail. But this is not the end. Wars, and natural disaster, and hunger will all threaten to kill you, But this is not the end. Beloved, God is redeeming our pain, bringing new life and new creation through Jesus. God remakes us in the waters of baptism, And nourishes us in the Eucharist to remind us that though we are spiritually stillborn and continually given to sin, we are reborn and redeemed from our self-destruction by the self-sacrifice of Christ. We are called to live this life, with all its pain and heartache, in the confidence that for every death we die there is a resurrection. Jesus invites us to be midwives of this new creation, bearing witness to each other’s pain, holding each other’s hands, reminding each other to breathe, and promising that even if this kill us, This is not the end. Birth pangs are the beginning of our work, not the ending. We are the descendants of survivors, resilient men and women who endured the vail of dust and the cold, blue sun. We are the inheritors of the apostles and martyrs, who weathered the collapse of sacred institutions and followed the Holy Spirit from the ruble of the temple to the rock on which Christ would found his church. I have no idea what the future will bring. Likely, we will have no idea just what we are taking for granted until we are standing in the cold, blue sunlight of some terrifying tomorrow. In that day without food or birds or shadows, remember you are midwives of a new reality and the time has come. There is work to do to get to the new life on the other side. Amen.

It has been very difficult to watch TV, to peruse social media, to listen to the radio to have a conversation with a friend, or the person behind us in the check-out lin e, that doesn’t turn to the news. What a week it has been. A community divided, swirling rumors, some locked in their homes from fear, others giddy with delight. In case you haven’t heard,… 43 monkeys escaped the Alpha Genesis research facility in Yemassee, South Carolina, and are still on the loose. [1] The facility says all the monkeys are healthy females, bred for use in research facilities across the country. An employee left a door unlocked during feeding time, and eventually the whole family group escaped into the surrounding canopy. The facility assures the public that they are not a danger, but highly skittish, and will flee if approached, making them harder to catch. The Associated Press quotes a long-time researcher from the University of Colorado Boulder who begs to differ. She says these monkeys, rhesus macaques, are dangerous in groups and will turn violent to defend their family group. The facility has been fined by the USDA several times, partly for previous escapes of 26 monkeys in 2014 and 19 more in 2019. For that matter, the facility is home to some 6700 rhesus macaques while the town of Yamassee is home to only 1100 people. The AP characterized a conversation with University of Chicago behavioral scientist Dario Maestriperi, author of Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World, as follows: “The animals are very family oriented, siding with relatives when fights break out. And they’re adept at building political alliances in the face of threats from other monkeys. But they can be painful to watch. Monkeys with lower status in the hierarchy live in a constant state of fear and intimidation.” “In some ways,” Maestripieri said, “they kind of represent some of the worst aspects of human nature.” This is likely because we share 93% of our DNA with the rhesus macaque. It is only the other 7% that separates the human from the beast. And it’s in that 7% where things get messy. When we hear reports of desperate men, women, and children fleeing their own country to seek asylum in the United States, on the one hand, we are moved with pity that these people are fleeing such terrible circumstances, and on the other we are scared of what this will mean for us, for our country. We tend to be inundated with these types of heart-wrenching stories and moral conundrums to a point of emotional fatigue. This is where that 7% kicks in. Compassion fatigue affects healthcare workers, and social workers, and counselors, and the clergy; all of the “helping professions.” Meeting wave after wave of terrible stories and inconceivable circumstances can cause a person to sort of go numb to their own emotion and it becomes much harder to empathize, to see the people and not just their situation. Then the other 93% kicks in, and we become inseparable from the beast. Perhaps, you have found yourselves there. It is terribly easy to shut off one’s emotions, to become invulnerable, or, at least to convince ourselves that we are invulnerable. We seal the boarders. We buy more guns. We convince ourselves that the poor are not our fault and not our problem. But then, lest we be thought heartless beasts, we send our thoughts and prayers, we bow our heads for a moment of silence, and then we go about our business of making sure we are safe and secure. We spiritualize the teachings of Jesus and convince ourselves that, somehow, we can leave our secular selves at the sanctuary door and put on our church selves for an hour like Mister Rogers’ cardigan and sneakers, and somehow fool Jesus— if not ourselves— into thinking we love our neighbors with a simple costume change. So, when we hear passages like this one today, we glide right over Jesus’ warning to the scribes, thinking that, clearly, Jesus is talking to someone else. I know in my own head I think of the Creflo Dollars and the Kenneth Copelands and the Jesse Duplantises who prey on the economically depressed and promise that if they will help pay for a new jet then God will reward them. These folks have covered themselves not with robes, but with self-assumed titles, as though calling oneself Reverend makes one deserving of reverence. But we tend not to examine our own lives, and the ways in which we have spiritualized the words of Jesus in order to avoid self-sacrifice. In today’s gospel, Jesus warns his hearers of those scribes who would use boisterous displays of public piety to cover up their greed and self-aggrandizement. These scribes would use their religious authority as a pretext for the exploitation of the most vulnerable members of their society. As this passage continues, we see Jesus sit down “Opposite the treasury” drawing a contrast between the contributions made by the wealthy and the contribution made by a poor widow. Jesus says the widow gave “all she had to live on,” whereas the wealthy had only given out of their abundance. At a first read, This passage probably feels all too familiar. Jesus says, “Your religion is neither a status symbol nor a free pass to do as you please.” Jesus says, “These rich folks gave their leftovers, but this widow gave everything she had.” It’s really easy to think, “this doesn’t apply to me.” It’s really easy to intellectualize this into a theological maxim, or over-spiritualize the passage until it has no bearing on how I live my everyday life. Jesus sits down in the middle of this passage And invites us to sit with him. Jesus sat down “opposite the treasury” This is probably better translated “in opposition to the treasury.” Jesus opposes and exposes the system that allows the scribes to “devour widow’s houses” while widows are left with nothing to eat. Jesus points out that these “religious folks” are little more that macaques in Mr. Rogers’ cardigans. Jesus is opposed to the temple treasury, having spent the entire day prior preventing anyone from buying or selling in the temple and follows this teaching in the temple with a teaching about the temple, telling his disciples it will be destroyed, stone by stone. Jesus is opposed to the system that made the scribes wealthy and well-respected without caring for the widows. Our first reading tells us how God cared for the widow of Zarephath, her son, and Elijah, by calling all three to trust that God will provide. The appointed Psalm for this morning, Psalm 146, tells us directly, “Do not put your trust in princes,… the LORD… gives justice to those who are oppressed, And food to those who are hungry. … the LORD sustains the orphan and the widow.” Beloved, This is the good news for us this day, too. Just as Jesus did not extol the system that asked the woman to give all she had, Jesus lifts up the faith of this woman whose desperate dependence on God for her “daily bread” freed this woman to give all she had. Jesus is calling us by his own self-sacrifice, by his body and blood on the table to pour out our lives for the most vulnerable among us. This means we must examine the way we participate in our political and economic systems, asking, ‘Does this politician or this party support caring for the most vulnerable among us?’ ‘Does this politician claim to be a Christian as a pretext for taking the food out of the mouths of the most vulnerable in our society?’ It means examining our investments. ‘Is my money tied to systems that profit from foreclosing homes? ‘Use of prison labor? ‘Abuse of the environment? ‘Propagate mistrust and anxiety? ‘Rob my neighbors of dignity and bodily autonomy?’ It means asking ourselves ‘Am I practicing a desperate dependence on God, Or am I giving God my leftovers?’ By our baptism, God has swept us up in God’s plan to care for our neighbors. We are practicing an intellectual dishonesty if we presume we can love God without loving our neighbors, or that we can love our neighbors and bear no responsibility for their well-being. Further, we, like those scribes, are risking the greater condemnation, by participating in systems that marginalize or commodify people for profit. We are like macaques in Mr. Rogers’ cardigan, hoping we can make up that 7% difference by at least appearing to be human. Beloved, we are called by our baptism to share in the humanity of Christ and our neighbors by devoting everything we have in service to the solidarity of God to give justice to those who are oppressed, food to those who hunger, freedom to captives, and care for the most vulnerable among us. This is what separates us from the beasts; a common humanity, shared with Christ and neighbor, and which transcends any familial or political bonds. It is animals, common apes, who will follow a misguided leader toward what feels like freedom without knowing the danger ahead. But we have the good fortune of that other 7%, the good fortune of a humanity shared with Christ, if we will only use it. Amen. [1] https://apnews.com/article/monkeys-escape-alpha-genesis-south-carolina-640eb78119c66b88a418ccd1e361318e 

When our family moved to South Carolina to begin seminary in 2016, we made the decision to send Zion to a Catholic school rather than the school across the street fro m the seminary. We had been advised by the spouse of a fellow seminarian who had taught there the year before that we should NOT send our son there. Her experience was so terrible that she left the profession of teaching altogether. One of the things about this arrangement is that Zion took religion classes from a Catholic perspective, and then he would leave third grade, and come and sit with us in a master’s level course studying the Gospels in Greek at a Lutheran seminary. For the most part this is a wonderful thing, and when there is a disagreement, Jennifer and I have the opportunity to have a conversation about the nuanced differences between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. This is good for Zion, too. He is still in Catholic school, and being the son of not one, but TWO seminary educated pastors, Zion is kind of a rock star in religion class. How many adults do you know who could articulate the difference between the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the Lutheran doctrine of ‘real presence’ in the Eucharist? Well, our 11-year-old could! Once in the 4 th grade, during a school assembly, the principal made an off-handed comment about her Lutheran roommate in college, telling the students that Lutherans don’t believe that Jesus is really present in the bread and wine at communion. After the assembly, Zion told his teacher that he needed to speak to the principal. Zion took his hall pass, sat down in the principal’s office, and proceeded to explain what Lutherans believe about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, and how, by and large, we actually believe the same thing as Catholics, we just articulate it slightly differently. As you might imagine, this raises the bar for the kind of questions Jennifer and I get at home. We missed the sort of questions that children normally ask about faith and the Bible, like, ‘Can God make a rock so big that God can’t lift it?’ Instead, Zion once asked, “Dad, if Jesus died for our sins so that we could have eternal life, why do we still have to die?” Good question, Buddy. We hear some very similar words in today’s Gospel— and maybe even in the depths our own hearts. Mary, repeating exactly Martha’s words from a few verses earlier, says: “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Those standing nearby, seeing Jesus weeping, ask, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Who can’t relate to these huge questions? Who has experienced the death of a loved one and hasn’t wondered why Jesus didn’t show up on time? Who hasn’t borne in their soul Martha’s accusation, Or Mary’s lamentation, Or the bystanders’ consternation At the graveside of one gone too soon. Jesus’s response to Mary, To those grieving with Mary and Martha, Is compassion. Jesus is moved not only to tears, But to anger at the death of his friend. The NRSV says Jesus was “greatly disturbed,” But this word in the original Greek actually means That Jesus was enraged at the death of his friend. Jesus’ tears are not just sadness for his friend but condensing steam from a boiling rage at what death has done, not only to Lazarus, but to Mary and Martha and to the whole community. Perhaps Jesus is even angry at what death has done to humankind. Perhaps he is overwhelmed by the knowledge of his own death, which is coming all too soon. Whatever the source of these tears, This anger, Jesus enters it willingly. There is an old spiritual That goes Rock-a my soul in the bosom of Abraham, Rock-a my soul in the bosom of Abraham, Rock-a my soul in the bosom of Abraham, Lord, rock-a my soul. So high you can’t get over it, So low you can’t get under it, So wide you can’t go ‘round it, You must go in at the door. This slave song speaks a truth about death. The bosom of Abraham is the grave, death, sheol, Hades, and the song teaches us that the only way out is through— through the anxiety, through the anger, through the sadness, through wishing things had turned out differently. God has been bringing God’s people to these thresholds from the beginning. God led creation through the flood. God led the Hebrews through the Red Sea. God led the Israelites through the wilderness. and through the Jordan. God led God’s people through captivity, Though the fiery furnace, Through the lion’s den. And here, at the opening to this cave, Jesus does not go over, under, or around his grief; Jesus does not avoid his anger or try to blunt it; Jesus does not tell Martha to buck up and get over it, nor does he make space for Mary to wallow in her despair. Jesus walks right into the stinking reality of it. Jesus knows what he will do. Jesus knows that Lazarus will live again. Jesus knows that he will raise Lazarus from the dead. But Jesus does not tell Mary not to weep. Jesus weeps with her. Jesus does not tell the crowd not to be angry. Jesus gets angry, too. Jesus is not repulsed by the stench of death, put off by their tears, put out by their anger, Or hindered by their ideas about what was possible. Jesus enters willingly into their grief shakes a defiant fist in the face of death and shouts his name into the darkness. LAZARUS, COME OUT!!! Beloved, The good news for us today is that this same God who saved creation in the flood, brought the Hebrews through the Red Sea, and the Israelites through the Jordan; this same God who brought Daniel through the lions’ den and stood with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace; this same Jesus who cried with Mary and raged with Martha, and woke the dead by calling his name, is the exact same God who speaks into our deepest, darkest tombs and call us out by name. Jesus is not repulsed by the stench of death, put off by our tears, put out by our anger, Or hindered by our ideas about what is possible. Jesus enters willingly into our grief shakes a defiant fist in the face of death and shouts our name into the darkness. BELOVED, COME OUT!!! Our hope is not that God will lead us over, under, or around our grief and anger at all the changes and loss we will endure. Our hope is that God will bring us through it; Through the waters of baptism to new life now, And through the darkness of death to new life at the resurrection. So let us be unbound by the shroud of death and set free to love our neighbors as Jesus loves us. May we refuse to be repulsed by the stench of death, may we enter willingly into the grief of our neighbors, may we shake a defiant fist in the face of death and may we call out to a world entombed in anger and fear, NEIGHBOR, COME OUT!! Let us wipe away your tears, let us unbind you. Death has been swallowed up forever! Let us share the Feast. Amen. 

Reformation Sunday is one of those times when we read virtually the same texts, if not exactly the same texts, every time the observation rolls around. I would most oft en rather preach on the 23 rd Sunday after Pentecost on some rather obscure text from the Gospels than I would on Easter or Christmas Eve. I preach about the resurrection and the incarnation all the time. I am running out of new things to say. And now we have been commemorating the Protestant Reformation and the remarkable legacy of Martin Luther for 508 years. We have been in talks with the Roman Catholic Church for more than 50 years— which is why we are calling this a ‘commemoration’ and not a ‘celebration’— and we have found in that time that we have such wide theological agreement that a joint statement by both churches declaring our agreement on the doctrine of Justification, the primary point of division at the time of the Reformation, is now 25 years old. So, what exactly are we commemorating? For a lot of us, our heritage. Afterall, we are immigrants to this land, and when our forebears landed here, and set up homes and raised crops and families, institutions and livelihoods, they also brought their uniquely German, or Swedish, or Norwegian, or Finnish, or Icelandic, or Danish, faith with them. Some of us were confirmed in our great-grandparents’ language, celebrating with lefsa, or lutefisk, or a potluck, or copious amounts of beer and sausages, or whatever Icelandic people eat. We throw huge Oktoberfest celebrations, we sing old German hymns and Swedish tunes, even if the words are now in English. We memorize Luther’s words in the Small Catechism, even if all we remember 20, 30, 50 years later is ‘Sin boldly.’ We break out the red shirts, sweaters, sport coats, socks; We don our Luther roses and will spend most of the rest of today singing “a bulwark never failing” and maybe Googling “What is a bulwark?” Dr. Lisa Miller, in her book The Awakened Brain, tells us that her research has concluded that religion is 100% environmentally received, meaning that religion and culture are virtually synonymous. To practice our religion is to practice our culture. We receive from our ancestors and we pass on to our progeny these cultural exercises, expressing where we come from and who we are. Dr. Miller contrasts this religious expression against spirituality, an innate sense of transcendent connectedness to something or someone who loves us, holds us, and guides us through this life. While religion and spirituality overlap to a large degree, they are not the same thing. And I think this is Jesus’ point in our Gospel reading. Jesus is speaking to the Jews, and that word itself would be better translated as ‘Judeans,’ because it is referring to people from the region of Judea who expressed their cultural identity by being from this place and worshiping the One God in the Temple in Jerusalem. Only later, once these people from this place who worshiped in this way, were no long in this place and the temple was destroyed so they could no longer worship in this way, did the term come to mean anyone of this common ancestry and religious heritage. Jesus is speaking to these people, who are from this place, and who worship in this way— and even though he is also from this place and worships in this way, he tells them they might have missed the point entirely. Jesus explains “If you continue in my word, you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” And these people, who have been practicing a yearly ritual where they reenact God’s deliverance of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt, say to Jesus, “We are children of Abraham, we have never been slaves to anyone.” A lot of good all those Passover’s have done? It’s almost as if the seder begins “What makes this night different from other nights?” and the reply came back, “I have no idea. Pass the lambchops.” Were I to ask you, “How has being a Lutheran had an impact on your experience of God?” What would you say? Would you point to the lefsa or the Luther rose? Would you point to the altar or the font? Or would you say, “I have no idea. Pour me another beer.” Jesus doesn’t disparage their place or heritage, but Jesus calls them to see through it to an experience at the heart of this reality shared by all places, cultures, religions. The freedom that Jesus was bringing was larger than any one place or any one time, any one religion or culture. And these Judeans who believed in Jesus were not being called to set aside their Judaism but to include their Judaism in a bigger universe than the one they had been invited to imagine. Jesus was inviting them into relationship with the One God of the Temple who transcends culture and place. I believe that this is the calling of the reformation. If we are beholden to a culture, or a single expression of religion, we too are likely to miss the invitation to relationship with the God who transcends our culture and place. I was not born to Lutheran parents, or grandparents, or great-grandparents. In fact, to my knowledge, I have zero Scandinavian blood, and you have to go back several generations to find a German relative. I learned of Martin Luther in my World History class memorizing the date of the Reformation alongside Johannes Guttenberg and the printing press. I grew up in church, hearing of God’s hatred of sin, of God’s jealousy and vengeance, of God’s wrath and terrible recompense. I sang “Jesus Loves Me,” and as soon as I could read, sounded out the tiny plaque on my grandmother’s wall, that promised me “God is Love.” But I also being taught that while God may love me, that love is conditional. If I didn’t accept that Jesus had received on the cross the punishment that I deserved, and if I didn’t ask for forgiveness, if I didn’t ask Jesus to come and live in my heart to shield me from sin and God’s judgement, that this God would righteously and justly damn me to an eternity of conscious torment in the literal flames of Hell. Weighty stuff for a 7-year-old. But the older I got, and the more of the scriptures I could read for myself, the more I learned of this God who is Love, the more I experienced of this God who is Love. Eventually this experience of God’s unconditional Love led me to a break with the church of my upbringing, and I began to search for a tradition that resonated with my experience. When as an adult I read of Martin Luther’s experience of rediscovering the Grace of God hidden in plain sight in the very passage from Romans we read here today, I knew that this was my spiritual home, even though I am not German or Scandinavian. There is a whole movement of folks out there deconstructing their faith of their childhood, unlearning the God who is mad and vengeful. I was lucky that I John 4:8, “God is Love,” was written as plainly on my Grandmother’s life as it was on her walls. I was lucky to have found Luther’s writings online, to have wanted to reform my faith and not abandon it. But so many of our Lutheran churches are far more concerned with maintaining a cultural heritage that by and large, Lutheran evangelism has looked more like colonization. We have not invited people into a relationship with the God of Love and Grace so much as we have invited folks to be German. But until our experience of God’s Love and Grace transcends time and place we will be as bound up in the trappings of our culture and place as these Judeans who thought they were the only ones who knew where to find God. So, what might the Lutheranism of the Future look like if it isn’t all lefse and lutefisk, beer and potlucks, or whatever Icelandic people eat? I believe it will be a spirituality that leads people to a language they can use to express their experience. Lutheran Spirituality will begin in what I like to call “Paradoxy.” Lutherans excel at non-dual thinking. We are simultaneously saints and sinners, bound and freed. We are beholden to both the law and the gospel. Jesus is both God and Human. The Eucharist is both bread and wine AND body and blood. So we can abandon language about what is right and wrong, in favor of what is helpful and unhelpful. God both includes everything and transcends everything. So a Lutheran Spirituality will have to unlearn unhelpful pictures of God and relearn the God Who Is. For this we will need the Cross. Martin Luther says that Theologians of the Cross call a thing what it is, while Theologians of Glory call good evil and evil good. Jesus said that you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. The Cross becomes for us the new tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, and we eat its fruit in the Eucharist. Then knowing the difference between what is good and what is evil, we can trust God to reconcile both, first in us as saints and sinners, and then in all the world, including all things and transcending them. The truth can only have its fullest impact in relationship, because only relationship can handle the vulnerability, accountability, and transformative power of truth without imposition or colonization. God Loves us by becoming us; that is, in relationship with God we are being transformed into the Love that God is. Grace, then, is the way that Love behaves. We become this Love by practicing this Grace, through Hospitality, Generosity, and Solidarity, by making space in ourselves for our neighbors as God has made space within God’s self for us. We Love our neighbors by becoming neighbors. Luther said, “God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does.” We need long, slow, loving relationships with folks who disagree with us, without canceling, scolding, or chiding each other. We need church. We need communities were we can walk along the path until the path becomes clear. We also need the church because we cannot do the work of Justice, wrestle with the scriptures, come to faith, or even live our lives alone. We need access to doctors, lawyers, teachers, community helpers in relationship and not just behind a pay wall. We need access to mothers and aunts, to fathers and uncles, to elders and sages, to brothers, sisters, siblings when we have had to escape the culture and place of our birth to survive. We need meaningful work and a place to do it, especially if and when we cannot do what we love for a living. The Lutheranism of the Future cannot be a cultural heritage project, inviting folks to be German, to come and sing our songs or observe our festivals. The Lutheranism of the Future will require us to know the truth through the lens of the Cross and to be set free from all the mighty fortresses we have constructed to prevent change. The Lutheranism of the Future will be a common spirituality more than a common religious expression. So, what are we commemorating here today? What new thing might a preacher find to say? Luther experienced the truth and it set him free. Lutherans of the Future won’t be born, so much as freed— by the truth that the God they feared doesn’t exist and the God Who Is Loves them already. Amen. 

I imagine that our first reading sounded familiar to you. It is a common reading during the season of Lent, especially during Holy Week, specifically Good Friday. “T he Suffering Servant” is a motif in the book of Isaiah, “crushed for our iniquities,… on him was the punishment that made us whole.” Its somber tone, its tale of suffering and woe, its narrative of God’s desire to punish sin, of God’s need for satisfaction, even God’s need to inflict pain and sorrow, became the narrative context for the Crucifixion, and the motif— even much of the language— repeats in the Gospels’ retelling of Jesus’ death. As the early Christians looked back on the Hebrew scriptures and tried to make sense of their heritage and their faith in the light of their faith in Jesus, the suffering servant became the common explanation of how God could let something as awful, humiliating, excruciating as a crucifixion happen to the Son of God, to the Messiah. The Church and her theologians tried many different analogies and explanations over the centuries to try and make sense of the senseless, meaning from the meaningless, salvation from damnation. Most of them involved some measure of ransom, paying off someone to free hostages. But who was paying whom, and for what? Was God paying off the devil? Was Jesus paying off God? Was Jesus freeing humankind from sin, or was God freeing Jesus from death? And why was the cost so high; and why was it blood, and suffering, and death? All analogies breakdown at some point, but this one seemed flawed from the start. Other theories tried a legal approach, where God is the judge, Satan the prosecutor, and Jesus the defense attorney, but at the end of this trial, somehow the defense attorney is the one sentenced to death, so this one falls apart too. We can also see in our reading from Hebrews that very early on, there is also analogy where Jesus is the high priest, following in the footsteps of a legend about a priest who suddenly appears to Abraham, offers a sacrifice, and makes things right between Abraham and God. But in this analogy, Jesus is also the sacrifice. The assumption being that Jesus’ death, Jesus’ blood sprinkled on the high altar of heaven— itself the template for the high altar in the temple on earth— was the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, and the proof in the readers’ minds would have been the destruction of the temple. No altar, no sacrifices. But this one breaks down too. Why is God so blood thirsty as to only be satisfied with the self-sacrifice of God’s only Son? I think what all of these theories and analogies fail to ask, is who, exactly, is doing the sacrificing? I also think the obvious answer is God. Because of human sin, God has a right to damn us, but God sacrifices this right instead. Because of human sin, God has the right to judge us, but God sacrifices this right instead. Because of God’s sovereignty and because God is spirit and has no body, God knows nothing of obedience or the limitations of time and space, or of suffering, humiliation, and death, but in Jesus, God sacrifices these rights instead. The incarnation of God in Christ Jesus is the solidarity of God with the human condition, God sacrificing every privilege of God-ness to embrace the fullness of human-ness. The incarnation of God in Christ Jesus is the downward mobility of heaven toward earth. James and John want to climb the ladder of success. They want to sit at the right and left hand of Jesus when he comes in his glory. Ever so gently, Jesus tries to tell them that if they want to share in his glory that they are climbing in the wrong direction. This ladder is for climbing down. The path to glory, to salvation, is the same as the path of incarnation. It is the path of descent. Jesus promised that James and John they will drink of his cup and partake of his baptism— that is, they will suffer and they will die. The path of descent is to choose this suffering and death, to sacrifice our desire to be free of it, to welcome suffering and death as honored guests, to set the table in our hearts for humiliation and pain, and raise a toast with the cup of Christ. The path of discipleship is the ladder down into our own hearts where we will find that we don’t have to struggle to make sense of the senseless, meaning from the meaningless, or salvation out of damnation, because there in the depths of our own hearts we will find that God has already been at work doing just that. Carl Jung once said, “My pilgrim’s progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am.” We, like James and John, have been climbing in the wrong direction. We are dizzy and disoriented from the altitude. We so long for that last, highest rung that we have assumed it was God calling us there. Many of us have even reached this rarefied air and been disillusioned in our failure to find God at the top. Beloved, God climbed down a long time ago to reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth in each of us. If you are lucky enough to have never known suffering or humiliation in your own life, then climb down a little further and choose the suffering and humiliation of your neighbor. The path of discipleship is the path of incarnation, the downward mobility of heaven toward earth, the chosen service of the suffering servant, the sacrifice of God to free the many. So, climb down, into your hearts, into the world’s suffering and you will find yourself shoulder to shoulder with God’s very self. Amen.