Whose Line Is It Anyway

We have to start this morning by admitting one thing.

None of us knows what happens in the resurrection.

None of us here has ever died.

This morning’s exchange between Jesus and the Sadducees seems a little weird.

It seems like an argument of the absurd nature of religion.

Like when people argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Who knows?

But the bigger and more important question is who cares?

Who cares who will be whose wife in the resurrection?

For many of you that question seems absurd because in our day many people have more than one partner.

Many people get divorced and remarried.

So who cares?

I think that Jesus answer is somewhat along this line of thinking.

He basically says, “It won’t matter.”

The resurrection is not like this world.

It doesn’t have the same rules and obligations.

I bet that if I sat down with all of you individually and asked you about your belief in the resurrection I would get a lot of different answers.

There would be some who think it is just about our spirit floating away to heaven.

There would be some who would think that it was about waiting for the final trumpets to sound and our bodies being raised from the day.

There would be some who would have some kind of hybrid version taken from different religious beliefs.

We would be like the religious people of Jesus day.

We would have different views, with different beliefs.

Just like for Jesus it was Sadducees who only used the first five books of the Torah to draw on their understanding about God.

The Sadducees were the conservative religious people of their day, and because of this did not believe in the resurrection.

On the other hand we have the Pharisees who also used the prophets and the oral tradition.

There was no one group who spoke of some “Jewish” belief but it was varied.

The same is true with us Christians today.

There has been in recent weeks an argument floating around the internet about the resurrection.

Some prominent Christian thinkers are saying that Jesus did not actually rise from the dead.

Others are arguing how important that is to our belief system.

Just to be clear I fall into the camp of an actual bodily resurrection.

I thought about preaching about how important that is to our beliefs as Christians.

But then I thought that maybe that would be just another way of making it seem like a theoretical exercise.

The resurrection means more than the doctrinal or theological argument.

So what I want to look at is not the doctrine of the resurrection and what camp we fall into, but something deeper.

I want us to consider this morning why we believe it?

Why does it matter to us and our lives?

This week on NPR I heard the story behind the song, “I Drive Your Truck.”

The song won this year’s song of the year at the Country Music Awards.

The song was inspired by a report on the Boston NPR station about a man named Paul Monti, whose son, Jared Monti, died in Afganistan while he was trying to save a fellow soldier’s life.

Jared Monti won the Medal of Freedom for his bravery.

Paul still drives Jared’s black Dodge Ram.

He does it because it reminds him of his son, and when he is in the truck he feels close to him.

Paul has been working on a project called Flags for Vets that puts American flags on soldier’s graves on Veterans Day, which is another way to honor his son and what he believed and died for.

I was thinking of how we all do this in some ways.

When we lose someone we love how we keep them alive.

We tell stories about them.

We keep things from them that remind us of them.

I have some of my Dad’s clothing that my mom gave me after he died.

At times I will take out those pieces of clothing to remind me of him.

This past week when the Red Sox won the World Series the first thing I wanted to do was pick up the phone and call my Dad.

That was the first thing I did after they won in 2004.

I thought about how much he would have loved this year’s baseball season.

We do things like this to ease the pain, to remember, to not let go.

This is why resurrection means so much to us here now.

It is our way of saying that we believe that this is not the end.

That this is not all there is.

Our way of saying that there is more than merely what we see.

Jesus this morning tells us, “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

What we see as death, what we experience as the end, God sees very differently.

God does not see death but God sees life.

There are many Sundays when I stand up here and talk about the importance of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

I was wondering if perhaps sometimes I pass over it too quickly.

We should take more time to linger on that phrase.

These are not just mere words, but they are life giving for us.

So that death and resurrection are not some absurd thing for religious folks to argue about, but something that we carry around in our lives.

How does the world and our lives look different in light of our belief in the resurrection?

It means that all of the things that look to be worn out, dead, burnt out, over, are all just ways that God is bringing new life.

That a truck that seems to be useless takes on a whole new meaning.

Those things that we think should be discarded really have value.

Our pain and loss can be transformed into things that give hope and life to others.

With God there are no endings only new beginnings.

Our God is not a God who brings death, but a God who is alive and brings life to all of us.

That is powerful.

Even though none of knows for sure what happens in the resurrection we know by faith its power in our lives.

We know how important it is for us to believe that God is at work bringing life from death.

Our faith is what gives us strength.

And faith is about what we don’t see and don’t know for certain.

It gives us power in our lives to not be afraid of what comes next.

Jared Monti’s last words were, "I've made peace with God. Tell my family that I love them."

A solider about to die confesses his faith in God’s eternal promise.

Resurrection means everything to us.

It helps us do heroic things even though we know it might mean death.

But God does not see death but life.

This morning I am asking all of us to consider the words of Jesus, to take them not as mere doctrine or theological guess work but truth.

Truth that sets us free from the limits that the world tries to impose on us.

The limits that says that this is all there is, and it is just dead.

Instead to continue to have faith that God is of the living.

To be honest I am not sure how we live without that faith.

I am not sure how we navigate the world.

How do we live in a world of violence, hatred, vengeance, and meanness?

Jesus suggests this morning that we don’t have to.

We can instead see the world through the eyes of God.

We can see our lives through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

May all of us have faith in, and live in the promise of that resurrection so that our lives are strengthened.

Amen

Oh When the Saints Go Marching In.

There will come a day when I am no longer the pastor here at Concordia Lutheran Church.

My time with you is limited.

We only get to know each other for a short time on this journey of faith.

I am wondering what will be said of the time we have together.

What will be our memories of each other?

I am sure like all things in life there will be good and bad.

We will leave each other as saints.

We will have this time together and we will know that we spent time doing something that was holy and worth our time.

We will know that what we did together was not about our accomplishments, but it was about how together we experienced the grace of God.

We will know that what we experienced together was the hearing of eternal promises.

We came together around sacred stories, mysterious faith, and awed in reverence at the wonder and beauty of it all.

All the churches that Paul started had problems after he left.

He would write the letters we have in our Bibles to continue to support them, to encourage them, to remind them of their callings.

He wrote these letters to remind them of what God did in their presence.

Not one of those Churches was perfect, but they were all left in the hands of God.

This is what the Church is a collection of flawed people who come together to know “the hope to which Christ has called us”

We come together to bask in “the glory of knowing riches of Christ’s glorious inheritance among the saints.”

This is the best any pastor can ask for.

This past week I was at the Bishop’s convocation.

It is that time of year when pastors get together for fellowship, worship, and continuing education.

This year’s speaker talked about the need for us church people to get out into the world to see what God was doing.

The speaker told us that our problem is that we are asking the wrong questions.

We are wondering how to get people into the church, and what we should be wondering about is what God is doing in the world and how can we join in.

It was a good topic, and if you know me you know I am in favor of it all.

We should be out in the world joining God in God’s redeeming activity in the world.

But later that night I was hanging with some colleagues and one of them started saying something like, “We have to change the culture of the Church.”

This bothered me.

Here is why.

It is the assumption among some pastors that our job is to change people.

It is the assumption that our job is to take ignorant people who don’t know better and enlighten them about how God really works.

There are a couple of problems with this.

One is that it has been my experience in ten years in ministry that people don’t change.

I am not saying they don’t like change.

I am saying that fundamentally people don’t change.

We are who we are.

And that whoever the pastor might be at some time is not changing them.

My colleague said to me, “So you are telling me you have not changed since you were 18.”

Another colleague of mine who was standing nearby and who has known me since I was 16 said, “I can tell you he hasn’t.”

Here is the second problem with what was being said.

It assumes that none of you knew what you were doing before I got here.

And we all know that is simply not true.

Concordia for a long time has been a place that tells the world of God’s amazing love and grace.

This place has been blessed with saints since its founding.

I hear those tails of people who sacrificed and loved so Concordia could be a place of God’s people.

The fourth thing I think was wrong is that I am not sure that we are talking about anything new.

The idea that God is out there in the world is not a new idea.

It is an idea that has been around since Jesus day.

It was surely an idea in Acts.

The final thing that is wrong is that the Church is built not on the leadership of the clergy or the laity, but on God alone.

The foundation of what we are doing is built on the idea that God chose you to be the saints of the church, and on this God built a new people that are meant to be a God’s hands and feet in the world.

Today is all saints Sunday.

And we read the names of people who have gone before us.

Those are the people in our lives who we look to and find solace, but also examples of what it means to live a life in Christ.

And one thing about that list is that all the people on it had two things in common.

One they were imperfect people.

None of them did everything right.

Two, they were all loved by God.

That is what it means to be a saint.

It simply means that God loves us, and that even though we are imperfect we have a God who is working for our redemption.

And the Church is meant to be the place we come together to remember that very important truth.

I am well aware that in our world today the Church seems like a dinosaur from another era.

We sing old songs, we read an old book, we come and listen to someone else talk, we worship with people who are not only our age and income bracket.

We do things here that are really uncool.

I am well aware that lots of people think they don’t need it, or don’t want it.

Who wants to get up on a Sunday morning and be with people you may or may not like that much, sing songs you may or may not like, listen to someone give a lecture about things that may or may not seem relevant?

Maybe the Church had its time and people have moved beyond it.

But then I think about the list of names again.

I think about this time that I am here with you as your pastor.

I think about those things and I come to the conclusion that perhaps there are some things still worth saving.

That this old story about God saving God’s people is still worth telling, because we still need to hear it.

This hour on Sunday morning is so out of the ordinary of my everyday life that it is sacred to me.

This hour I am able to let everything else go, I am able to give thanks, ask for forgiveness.

I am able to lay down my burdens and reclaim my true self.

This hour of nothing new becomes sacred.

This does not mean I never want to try anything new; it is just to define what we are doing here together.

We are not changing cultures.

We are not changing lives or people.

What we are doing is remembering the inheritance that we are given.

We are remembering that through everything in our lives God matters to us and the world.

One of the people on the list today is Nils Johnson.

Nils was my college chaplain; I actually talk about him a lot.

(Sorry about that.)

I will never forget the first sermon that I heard Nils preach.

He said, “If it wasn’t for Jesus I would be dead.”

Nils had a son who killed himself.

I am not sure how you get over that, how you move on, how you live after such a tragedy.

I know that for Nils the only way was through his faith in Jesus.

I bet that with every person on our saints list today we could tell a similar story.

We could tell of a time in their lives when the needed something more in their lives.

We could also tell those same stories of our own lives.

When I look out on Sunday morning and see all of you what I think about is your story.

The stories that you have shared of failure or of triumph, stories of sin and redemption, the stories that you have shared about ways that God saved you.

When I leave here someday that is what I will remember.

I won’t remember if we changed the culture, or had some great program, or brought in lots of new members?

What I will remember is how God did some amazing things among this congregation of saints.

I will remember the stories that we shared and how we gathered to bask in God’s promises and love.

Amen

Most Complicated!

There is an Indigo Girl song called the least complicated.

One of the verses goes like this,

“Some long ago when we were taught
That for whatever kind of puzzle you got
You just stick the right formula in
A solution for every fool”

It would be nice to believe that life was as simple as we were taught it was as kids.

It would be nice to believe that everything had a correct answer.

It would be nice to believe that our problems were easily solved.

But most of all it would just be nice to believe that we somehow can control things.

That all we need to do is eat our vegetables, work hard, do our best, not curse, be nice, and everything will work out.

The religious version of this is that all we need to do is pray, attend worship, give money, care for the poor, and follow the Ten Commandments.

If we can do those things then we can control God.

We can make God act in the way that we find appropriate.

Not only that we can then put people into boxes.

Here are the good people, the ones who follow the rules and do what is right.

Here are the bad people, the ones who break rules and deserve what is coming to them.

How I wish that life was so simple.

Instead it is more complex isn’t it?

Bad things happen to good people.

We don’t always get what we worked for.

We don’t always get what we deserve.

Now that can work out one of two ways for us can’t it.

Because depending on how we view ourselves and life not getting what you deserve can either be a great thing or a horrible thing.

If you believe that you have worked hard and put in your time, and that you are really great at something then you would expect more.

If you don’t get it you are angry that more has not been given.

But if you feel inadequate or guilty and you get more than you deserve and are thankful.

Today’s Gospel we have the portrait of two kinds of prayer.

We have the self-righteous person who feels that he has done some great things.

And the sinner who knows that he is in need of God’s mercy.

Now I am sure that we have all heard a sermon (in fact I may have given one at some time) about how this parable is about humility.

That the lesson we should get from this is to be more humble.

I think that is a trap because then we make humility the key to unlocking the puzzle.

The way we control things in life is to be humble.

The best way to be a Christian is to be humble.

This is not a parable about a humble man and arrogant man.

It is a parable about who is in control.

Are you in control or is God?

Who has your life?

The Pharisee who prays about how great he is never mentions God.

What he talks about is himself, how great a religious person he is.

“I have done…..”

He has made himself the center of the universe, the answer to all his problems.

If things are not going well all you need to do is work harder, be better.

Perhaps you could give some more money to the church this year and then you will really know that you are a good person.

This is the way it worked at one time.

The more you did religiously the better person you were.

If you were worried about paying for your sins simply pay to get sprung from purgatory early.

The whole reformation was fought over this central idea, that we as humans could somehow control God by doing good things.

By giving more money, going to church more often, confessing our sins, praying really serious prayers.

At the heart of the reformation is the idea that we cannot control God.

We cannot decide how or when God gives out grace and mercy.

God simply gives it out without our permission.

We have no control.

Again this is a good news bad news kind of thing.

If you think that you have control in your life what I said just really annoyed you.

But if your life is constantly out of control then what I said is good news.

It means that it wasn’t intended for you to have control, but it was intended for us to rely everyday on God.

Again this week I was reading what people wrote on their cards last week.

People wrote all the things in life that they were thankful for, all the blessings that God has given.

What I noticed is that none of them were things we really have control over.

Lots of people wrote they were thankful for their families.

We don’t get to choose our families.

We are born into them.

Some people wrote they were thankful for their health and we don’t always have control over if we are healthy.

I have learned that lesson this year.

As many people I know have cancer, and all of them are very healthy people.

They don’t smoke or drink a lot, they are not over weight.

And yet they have cancer anyway.

The number one thing that people wrote is that they we grateful for a loving God who forgives sins.

And we certainly have no control over that.

It is only God’s enduring love that gives us grace in our lives.

Now I don’t want my message to be misunderstood this morning.

Because there are lots of people who like to have control in their lives.

I don’t want the message to be just give up control and everything will be all right.

Or that people who like to have control are somehow less faithful.

That would simply be another way to say that in order to be better you just give up control.

It would be another way to answer the puzzle.

My message is that all of us depend on the grace and mercy of God.

Nothing we can do to mess that up.

The issue is how we see our lives.

Are they based on what we do, or what God has done and will do?

Are we on our knees every night thanking God that we sinners have another day of life?

It takes lots of guts to admit that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.

It takes guts to admit our brokenness.

Do we dare to admit to ourselves and to others that we are not as good as we let others think we are?

Do we allow people to see us as sinful people, forgiven by a loving God?

One of the things that is interesting to me about the sinner in this parable is that he never says, “and now I am going to go out and try to do better.”

There is no better.

There is only our life, our brokenness, our sin, and how God has redeemed us and set us free.

At the center of it all is a loving God.

Here is the question do we dare believe it to be true?

Do we dare believe that God is in control?

All the evidence points us away from it.

Think about all the ways that we mess up our lives.

All the ways we don’t measure up.

All the ways our world is sinful and scary.

Can we say with confidence, “The Lord is my rock and salvation, whom shall I fear.”

Even in these times, even with our controlling selves can we rely on God’s grace?

Can we let God be in control?

There is no perfect answer.

There is no way to make everything fine.

There is no way to make all the puzzle pieces fit perfectly.

But there is God.

And the God we know in Jesus Christ tells us that we can be justified not by what we have done, but by what God’s love has done in us.

Amen