It Is Hidden From Us

I grew up a Lutheran in New Hampshire.

The church I grew up in as a child was a small church.

The large churches were for my Roman Catholic friends.

Most of the people I knew outside of Church didn’t even know what a Lutheran was.

I was surprised when I first got into the ministry to hear stories from my congregation about “the good old days” when church was filled with people.

I simply never had that experience of Church.

It is easy to believe in Church growth.

In fact, one of the problems I think we face in the Church today is that we have been running on the idea of infinite Church growth for so long that we are shocked that it hasn’t continued.

But I want to suggest this morning that this is not a bad thing.

For us as Christians kingdom building is always a bit problematic.

Kingdom building can lead us down some very tricky roads.

It can, if we let it, lead us away from seeing the real kingdom of God.

All of our parables this morning talk about the kingdom of God.

They are all different ways Jesus gave us to understand what this Kingdom of God looks like.

And all of them are in contrast to the kingdom of the world that Jesus lived in and that we live in.

All of them are about finding treasures in hidden places.

They are all about small things that add up to more than what it is valued at.

We don’t have enough time this morning to go through all five parables.

I want to focus on just one of them.

“The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour until it was completely leavened.” (different translation than the one we had this morning from the NRSV)

It would appear that this parable is about growth.

That in taking leaven and adding it we get growth.

The sermon I thought I was going to give this morning was about leavening our lives so that we can grow the kingdom of God together.

But after reading the passage a couple of times, and doing some reading, something else stood out.

The women hid the yeast in the flour.

(We have a different translation from the NRSV.)

This is the thing about God’s kingdom it is often hidden.

It is hidden from our eyes and our view points.

I like that it is hidden from us.

It should be hidden from us.

Because when we get involved we usually mess it up.

We make following Jesus about a triumphant march, instead of a slow and often unsteady walk of faith.

If we could make the kingdom happen I would hope we would have done it already.

If all that was necessary to make the kingdom of God appear is that we have everyone go to Church, and everyone believe in God than we would have had it already.

But the truth is that the message of the Gospel cannot come to us in this way.

It is hidden, buried not in our institutional involvement, but what is in our hearts.

It is hidden in the interactions we have outside of these four walls.

And what we come here to do is to uncover it.

We come to dig through the doe so we can find what leavens the bread.

This is all too theoretical for me.

So let me try to give an example.

People want to know about Family Promise, “Pastor how many people have we helped?”

They want some numbers to show progress of the good we have done.

Of course there are numbers.

I can tell you we have helped 12 families.

I can tell you the stories of those 12 families.

Families like Christina and her son.

She came to us with no job, no place to live, no money, no future.

She will be leaving the program with a steady job, and a new house that habitat for humanity helped build.

She will leave with a life.

But all of that does not tell the full picture.

All of that are only surface things.

None of those things is the real picture of the good that was done.

There are things that came from Family Promise that none of us will ever see, or know about.

There were lives changed, epiphanies received, and growth.

We will never know, because it wasn’t just the families who were helped.

The people who provided that help were also helped.

The people, who brought a meal, stayed the night, provided some money, the people who prayed for someone they didn’t know.

How were those lives affected?

How was the agenda of God advanced within each of us, or the hundreds of other volunteers?

It is always hidden from us.

We do these things not because of the numbers.

We do the things we do because of faith in God.

We believe that the help we offer, the volunteering we do on behalf of another is far beyond our ability to see the outcome.

That is why we have Church.

Not because we can give God a spreadsheet of all the good we have done for people, but because we believe in faith that we are participating in the kingdom of heaven.

In our trip to Germany we saw the dangers of kingdom building.

We saw what happens when the Church is obsessed with building bigger and bigger churches.

When it is consumed with political power it forgets that everything we do is based on faith.

At camp once a pastor got up and gave a very nice sermon.

At the end he told us that we were going to go out and change the world!

I don’t believe in that message.

It is nice to say, and perhaps it will make everyone feel good about themselves.

But that is not what Jesus is teaching us this morning.

He is telling us that the kingdom is found in small and foolish things.

He is telling us that it is found in God’s ability to take hidden things and turn them into enough bread to feed a hundred people.

That is always what we must believe in.

That God’s plans are bigger than ours.

That God’s ways are beyond our ability to make them happen.

I am not saying that we don’t have a part to play.

The Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel would never say that.

I am saying that we will never know the full impact of the love we share, the things we give away to others.

We are not to build the kingdom, but rather to participate in it.

We are to live in faith, totally dependent on the wonder and beauty of God.

Always believing that hidden underneath everything, the good, the bad, the sinful, the strange, the unexplained, is God at work.

So may all of our lives be filled with the yeast that is hidden.

And may we always live in faith that God is growing the kingdom in that hidden yeast.

Amen

"Where There Will Be Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth"

“Where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

I don’t know about any of you, but I have always struggled with this part of Matthew’s Gospel.

It actually doesn’t just appear in this one parable we have this morning but multiple times.

It is usually at the end of the parable, and is thrown out as what appears to be a warning to us.

If you are like he evil ones then you too will be thrown into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I think this interpretation of the text comes from our general understanding of the religion, and the Bible.

Religion is seen as a way to keep people in line, to make sure they do the right things.

And the Bible is a book of rules to keep us out of hell and helps us get into heaven.

This morning I want to explore with you some possible interruptions of this text that will be more helpful to us.

I want to start by asking if any of you have ever been in hell?

Have you ever felt that life was awful, horrible?

Have you ever felt the sting of death, or maybe multiple deaths?

I know that there are times in people’s lives that multiple things happen to people that are devastating.

This week I had a woman come visit me.

She didn’t say that she felt like she was in hell.

But her life was hell right now.

She was trying to care for her disabled son, her mother who had early dementia.

She had lost her job.

She was sleeping on a friend’s couch.

She had medical bills she couldn’t pay.

She was about to lose her storage unit with all of her worldly positions in them.

Her life was hell.

As she told me her story she wept, and she gnashed her teeth.

This is the privilege of being a pastor is to be with people in hell, to hear people’s stories of loss, of addiction, of hurt, of pain, of sin.

It is a privilege to go with people to the places that are awful, the places of fire.

There is a real hell.

I have seen it many times with my own eyes.

When we are in that place the only response is to cry to wail and gnash our teeth for relief.

Jesus was naming a reality.

It is a reality that sometimes we experience.

Some people experience more than others.

This is life.

Is it possible that in these parables that Jesus tells about the kingdom of God he names this reality.

That while we grow here in the world there will be moments and times when we are burning.

There will be moments when our lives are in hell.

And the only appropriate response is to wail and gnash our teeth.

Maybe that doesn’t do it for you.

Maybe you want to say, “But Jesus mentions evil pastor.”

Isn’t there real evil?

Yes evil is real.

And I like you pray every day that evil will be removed from our midst.

But the idea that God wants to punish us for eternity is not something I can get behind.

I have made the case many times that it is simply unbiblical.

That the view in the Bible is of a God that wants the best for us.

We fight against what is best for us.

That even though we fight God the God who is full of grace hangs in there with us.

But I will admit that accepting this God of grace is not easy for us.

And this leads me to my next point.

Entering the kingdom of God is not easy.

And so entering the kingdom of God there usually is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

It is not easy to accept what Jesus wants from us.

Matthew Gospel is filled with teachings about love that are really difficult for people to live out.

Matthew’s Gospel starts with The Sermon on the Mount, which is Jesus interpretation of what it means to faithfully follow God in the world.

And Jesus’ teachings are really difficult, and so we fight God and in that fighting there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

There is blood and tears as we try to have it our way instead of God’s way.

When Vicki and I were in Germany learning about the Reformation we saw this.

It would be easy to think that Martin Luther showed up and told everyone that the Church had forgotten the Gospel and needed to reform.

And then everyone saw the errors of their ways.

The Church then reformed and everyone was happy.

But the true history is much more complex.

Many people resisted reform.

Many powerful people within the church who did not want to give up power and prestige.

Or who just thought that Luther was being difficult.

The Reformation led to wars, and death.

It led to weeping and gnashing of teeth.

It led to bloodshed.

The Kingdom of God comes with difficulty.

The world will not easily want to accept what Jesus had to say.

And people in the Church will not easily accept it either.

There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth as God tries to get us to accept living in grace and love.

Hell can be found right here on earth.

Our lives can be fraught with difficulties that we might face.

We can bring hell on ourselves as we fight to accept a God of grace and love.

As we fight against a God who blesses the poor, peacemakers, mourners, and the losers of the world.

What this parable does, as all good parables do, is take this world and turn it upside down.

Because the truth is that Jesus is a horrible farmer.

Of course you separate the wheat from the weeds!

That is really bad advice.

But Jesus refuses to let that be the answer.

Only through love can God win our hearts.

Only through patience as the good and bad grow together.

Only through times in our lives individually when we fight through the bad can we come to see the good.

Only through times as our life as the Church when we fight and weep and gnash do we come to see the good.

In other words we live all the time under God’s grace.

In grace we live in a place where the head farmer doesn’t tear down the field as we go through hell.

Instead the farmer waits, and asks us to wait, waits for the weeds and wheat to be sorted.

Waits for us, waits with us.

God comes to our hell so that we might rise.

Is there evil?

Yes!

And it is in us, around us.

It is in others too.

But only God has the fire that burns it away.

Only God can bring the grace and love that kills our sins and rises us to new life.

I hope for you this week that you will not be in hell, that you will not wail and gnash your teeth.

I hope for you to be renewed in the patient farmer who breaks convention to give us grace and love.

So that you will know the great love of the Lord toward you, and you will be delivered from the fire!

Amen

Put Our Money Where Our Mouth Is!

There is lots of talk in the ELCA about the existing clergy shortage, and how it will grow worse as more pastors retire. When I was in college back in the day (1992-1996) the recruiter for all the seminaries would come once a year to Muhlenberg and give us the pitch. At that time the pitch was, “Soon lots of pastors will retire and the Church will need new leaders like you.” In short, they were offering us job security. So this is not a new problem. However, it is upon us and worse then maybe even those recruiters thought back in the 1990’s. I have heard seminary presidents and bishops say, “The next seminarians are in your pews or confirmation classes.” This might be true but there is a deeper problem that never gets brought up.

            I did not get my call from my congregation. I got it from outdoor ministry and campus ministry. During the time in my life when I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life these two things became the Church for me. It was at college that I saw my college chaplain do things that I wanted to do. He was passionate about the world, cared about people, pushed the boundaries of the Church, and asked hard questions. I did not see those things in the congregation.

            In the congregation I saw people concerned about money and buildings. People concerned about institutional survival not mission and ministry. I did not see the freedom to ask difficult questions, or explore new possibilities. This is not the fault of my home congregation. I was a kid when I was there and didn’t even realize that is what I was looking for. I didn’t ask hard questions because I didn’t know I needed to. I found that out in college. Thank God there was a campus ministry to keep me engaged.

            It was at camp that I found authentic Christian community. I found how imperfect people tried to love each other unconditionally. It was at camp that I was given leadership roles in worship and Bible study. Again, I didn’t even know I could do that stuff until I went to camp. I came back to my congregation and organized a “youth service”. I preached for the first time. Camp gave me the courage to do that, and the confidence to know I could.

            My point is that every year that I go to a synod assembly these are the two things that get cut out of the budget. The place where young people hear the call is no longer the place the Church puts its resources. And then we wonder why we don’t have enough young pastors.

            What I see is that the people in power in our church (ELCA) are concerned about institutional survival and have lost the very reason why we do this work. As budgets become tighter we cut out the things that people really care about. I have a radical idea. In the next synod budget cut out a bishop’s assistant’s salary and use that money for campus ministry and/or outdoor ministry. Instead of having annual appeals for the synod have one for campus ministry and/or outdoor ministry. Have that campaign be about mission and ministry in the next century. We want young people to remain in the Church so let’s put our money where our mouth is. Stop begging me to get kids in confirmation to go to seminary, and do your part to have a Church eco-system that promotes church vocations when young people are making those critical decisions.

            I tell the people in the congregations I serve that if we live out our mission the money will take care of itself. In every case that has been true. People are not giving money to a failing institution in order to keep it alive for a couple more years. They will happily give to something that is living and breathing. They will happily give to mission and ministry. So we should stop doing what is not working and take drastic action to focus on what we know does. This is just my humble suggestion to all the seminary presidents and synod bishops telling us about the great shortage of pastors.