This Time I Have to Say Something

The shooting at an Orlando Nightclub that killed 49 people and injured 53 more has it all. It has radicalized hate filled religion, LGBT community, guns. It was a mass shooting, hate crime, and a terrorist attack all rolled into one. It has all the social things that we are fighting with each other over for a long time. Just like all the other tragedies of this year and last year. Just like Newton, Aurora, Columbine, and Oklahoma City our politics is what drives our reaction. If you are liberal you will see this as an assault by a crazy person who hated gays. You will call for gun laws. If you are conservative you will blame Islam and say that maybe they deserved it. But what will be lost for all of us is our humanity. We will all struggle to find a way forward that helps to get rid of hatred and violence.

            Because of this I am always trying to find a way to speak out that encourages us to love each other through horrible times of crises. I am trying to build bridges with people who do not share my world view.  I have believed that our politics have been driving our hatred and dislike for each other. I want peace. I want us to get along. I want us to talk to each other, and to listen. I want us to read and listen to those who have done their homework. I want us to use reason, science, and facts to make well thought out reasoned arguments as to why we believe certain things. However, this time I have to speak out. I have been silent for too long.

            Because despite all the evidence that having more guns is making us less safe we will still resist and say that people kill people and not guns. Despite the fact that the United States has a murder rate 15 times higher than that of other wealthy countries, which have tougher gun laws. Some will still argue that we need more guns. Some will still believe that there right to own a rifle designed to kill people in combat is more important than my right to live. No one is talking about taking your hunting rifle. We are talking about making laws to keep guns away from bad people that use those guns to kill people. We are talking about restricting what types of guns you can own. There is no reason to have a military grade gun except if you plan at some point to kill someone.

            As a person who follows Jesus Christ I cannot condone violence. I can see that violence is part of our sinful fallen world. I know that there are times when our country in extreme circumstances needs to go to war. But even in those times I cannot condone it. I cannot say it is OK to do. Jesus Christ told us that “if we live by the sword we will die by the sword”. Jesus refused to use violence to save his own life. Because, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and loose his soul?” Jesus showed us what living in God’s kingdom looks like on this earth. And that kingdom does not include guns or weapons of any kind. Jesus lived a life of inclusion, he lived a life of peace, and as a person who attempts to follow that example I cannot condone using or owning a gun. Especially a gun like the one used in the shooting in Orlando.

            I have been quiet about this issue for a long time. I believed it was one of those issues that was just lost in the mud. I was surprised that even after children were shot and killed in Newton that we didn’t do anything to stop people from buying the kinds of guns that kill a lot of people. If the person in Orlando had a knife do you think he would have killed as many people as he did?

            I know that many people are going to blame the Islamic faith for what happened. We hear all around the world as radicalized Islamic groups kill people. I am not. I have known Muslims who are in no way shape or form murders or killers. I know them as people who seek peace. I know them to be thoughtful caring people. The problem is not Islam. It is religion. It is when we cling to the idea that our religion is the only one. The problem is when we believe that we know all the answers, and everyone else is wrong or bad. It is when we use that religion to make ourselves feel more important. For me as a Christian the end result of my faith is to try and make the world a better place. It is to take this life that I am blessed to live and use it to make others lives better. My faith is what gives me courage to seek peace and love. Religion is a powerful thing. It is why politicians use it to make us vote for them, or so we will go to war believing that we have done the right thing.

            More than this it is the twisting and perverting of religion to make God into a vindictive killer. True religion honors God. And God is love. God is creation. God is hope. God is the one who desires for all of us to “have life and have it in abundance”. God wants life for gays, lesbians, transgendered, no gender, or whatever other groups we can think to name. If you believe that your religion wants you to kill other people. No matter your religion you are doing it wrong. God does not desire that of any of us. All the religions I know are about caring for others, finding compassion, and honoring God by loving the world God created. To say otherwise is to pervert and twist religion to serve our own selfish need to feel superior.

            The thing that I struggle with is that even the people who will hate what I am saying here. Even the people who have totally different views than I have, the people who think that it is normal for someone to have a military grade assault rifle, the people who think that Jesus hates any group or people. The people who have twisted Christianity into something that is anti Biblical. Even those people I care about. I love them. I want to have a dialogue about the issues. I want us to build a relationship. I love them, because Jesus has told me to love my neighbor as he loves me. I know that Jesus loves me through all of my craziness and all of my backward thinking. I can’t just ignore those that disagree with me, or write them off as “Crazy people”. No they are much more than that. They are children of God.

            And that is what has kept me from speaking out in the past my love for those who will read this and hate me for it. I want you to know I still love you. I want us to talk in a way that does not call names. But I also cannot be silent any longer. I have to speak my truth just as you have to speak yours. I can’t sit around and wait for the next mass shooting. I cannot sit and listen to a presidential candidate call for surveillance of all Muslims, or for the US to deport millions of people. I can't listen to another religious person talk about how God hates people who are LGBT. I can’t listen to it anymore and not say something. I have to say this is not what Jesus wanted! This is not how Jesus would act!

            Love is the only answers to these acts of evil! Not more guns. Not finger pointing. Not blaming each other. Love. I rest on that. Because that is the way that Jesus taught us, showed us, and encouraged us to live. Even then our love is always humanly imperfect. However, if we want to stop the killing, and if we want to come together love is the only answer I know. We have to see the best in our neighbor. We have to stop talking bad about each other and start talking to each other. We have to find our way back to our shared humanity. And we have to have laws that stop people from buying military grade weapons!

The Cincinnati Zoo and Jesus!

On my day off I was at the Nissan dealer getting some work done on our car that had a recall.

In the waiting room a couple where on their phone and commenting on things they saw.

They started talking about the incident that happened at the Zoo in Cincinnati.

They were talking about the mother of the child who fell into the gorilla cage.

“She is a horrible mother.”

“I would never let me kids out of my sight.”

They were morally outraged by what had happened.

I heard other people this week on Facebook, and in general conversation say something similar.

So it goes in our day.

Something happens and our reaction right off the bat is to be outraged.

To find fault and to criticize what someone else did.

To say, “I would never to do that!”

What struck me about this particular incident at the zoo is that few people had any sympathy, or compassion for the mother.

What was she feeling?

How was this for her?

I don’t know all the details of this case, but I am sure of one thing.

She didn’t go to the zoo that day thinking, “I hope one of my four kids falls into the one of the exhibits.”

Some of you may remember that about 3 years ago my son Charlie fell out of a second story window.

We were at a wedding rehearsal and we were waiting for dinner.

Charlie and I were playing a game.

He was backing up to get a running start and leaned against a window that had a screen in it and fell through.

I fell to the ground.

Thankfully nothing serious happened to him, besides scaring himself, me and everyone else to death.

But you know nobody, that I know of, was blaming me for being a bad father because Charlie falling out of the window.

I think everyone realized it was an accident.

I know that I felt horrible.

I have replayed that moment many times, wishing that I had told him to stop backing up.

Wishing I had done something different.

But that is the thing about accidents they happen in a blink of an eye.

I thought of that this week as people attacked this mother of four.

I thought of what she must be going through.

And I wondered why our first reactions when these things happen are not more towards compassion than judgment.

We know from our Gospel this morning that Jesus when seeing a mother in pain, from losing her son, was moved to compassion.

Jesus didn’t know everything about this woman.

Maybe she was a bad mother?

Maybe the death of her son was her fault?

Maybe she didn’t deserve having a second chance with her son?

All we know is that she was a widow.

She was someone who would have been in bad shape without a husband or a son.

In Jesus day women were completely reliant on the men for their needs.

Jesus sees her and has compassion.

It is his first instinct.

And it is not the only time in the Gospels that Jesus is moved to compassion for someone.

It happens all the time.

Even when the person is guilty of a sin Jesus is moved to compassion.

Even when they deserve to ridiculed and scorned.

Even when the appropriate action is to have righteous indignation Jesus is moved to compassion.

Jesus is often moved to compassion for people.

It is really unfortunate that we don’t always have that same first reaction.

This was the sermon I was going to give most of the week.

I was going to encourage us all to be more compassionate.

But then God intervened yesterday to give me a second thought.

Because I was in the mall of New Hampshire, in Manchester, yesterday with my kids, I was sitting on a chair in the middle of the mall taking a break and having a cup of coffee while one of my kids went into a store.

This woman came and sat a chair on the other side of me.

And I am not making this up.

She had a tattoo of a naked woman on her calf.

I thought, “What the hell was that woman thinking!”

Why would anyone, but especially a woman get a tattoo of a naked person on their body.

And why would they get it in a place that in the summer is often exposed.

I was outraged and disgusted.

And then I thought about the irony.

I was going to give a sermon about not judging and having compassion, and here I was doing the opposite.

I didn’t know this person.

I didn’t know her story.

I don’t know why she had that tattoo.

My first thought wasn’t about how she was the product of a system that degrades woman and reduces them to sex symbols.

How she was the product of a society that over sexualizes everything.

You can’t watch television with your kids without being embarrassed for what is on.

As a father of a girl who is growing into a woman, I feel it necessary all the time to combat the messages she receives about how her worth is more about what is on the inside than on the outside.

Maybe this woman with the tattoo didn’t have a father who told her that she was wonderful and loved?

Maybe she didn’t have a mother who modeled for her what it was to be a self assured woman?

But my first reaction was not compassion it was judgment.

And maybe for all of us that is simply going to be our reaction.

Maybe as human beings we are simply built to judge others.

Because we want to make ourselves feel better.

We want to feel superior to others.

We want to believe that it will never happen to us, because we are too noble, too good.

We want to believe in our own ability to make everything around us perfect and good.

So we will judge.

And we will fail to be compassionate.

And my message for you this morning is not to be more compassionate, even though I hope to God we all can be.

My message this morning is I don’t know what we will do the next time a kid falls down and his mother wasn’t looking.

Or what we will say when a woman with a tattoo of a naked woman sits next to us in the mall.

What I do know.

What I want to say this morning is that Jesus will be walking towards that person with compassion.

Jesus will be heading over to lay a hand upon them and offering a blessing, a word of encouragement, a healing touch.

Jesus will bring out of death new life to whatever they are facing.

What I want to say to all of us this morning is I hope that is also part of our thought process.

Maybe after our moral outrage we will be able to see Jesus walk towards the person we have scorned.

And in that moment we too might find compassion.

The Good News is that because we believe that Jesus is compassionate we know that Jesus also has compassion for us when we mess up, when our lives are not perfect.

I know that left to our own devises it is hard, maybe even impossible, for us to do.

But what is impossible for us is God’s very business.

I hope for you this week to know of the compassion that Jesus has for you.

That in your sin, in your mistakes, in your shame, in what is broken in your life, Jesus is walking towards you in compassion, to lay his hands upon you and heal you.

And because of that truth I hope you can find that compassion for others.

Amen

Bags and Pens

The other day I was driving through Main Street in downtown Concord.

I stopped to let someone cross the street.

I didn’t know the person crossing the street but I did notice that she was carrying one of our churches bags.

A couple of years ago the outreach committee ordered lots of those bags.

We still have them and we continue to give them out.

And here it was walking across the street.

A couple of days later I was in the New Hampshire coffee shop getting a cup of coffee for my wife.

I paid with my bank card.

The woman working there handed me a pen to sign the receipt.

The pen she handed me was a Concordia Lutheran pen.

Not one of our new ones, but one of the old pens that don’t work.

This is exactly why the outreach committee bought those bags and those pens.

We were hoping that people would take them out into the world and loose them, or give them away.

We wanted them to end up in the hands of someone who has never heard of Concordia Lutheran Church.

We wanted them to make their way into our community.

The worst thing you could have done with the pen or bag that you got from Concordia is take it home and used it for yourself.

It would have been good for you, but it wasn’t the intention of why we bought those things.

We wanted them to make their way into the community.

We wanted people who are not part of our congregation to see them, to use them.

This serves two purposes.

One is that perhaps someone will be looking for a place to connect to God.

And perhaps when they get to that point in their life they will think about the pen or bag that they saw.

And perhaps they might make their way through our doors and into our worship.

That reason is a bit self serving on our part.

It is also fairly unlikely to happen.

But you never know what the Holy Spirit will do.

The second is that our congregation will simply become a part of our community.

We will be known because we desire to not be confined to a building, but a people shaped by God’s love, sent by God’s love.

It is a lot to ask of bags and pens.

But I am using them as tangible examples of what happens at Concordia on a weekly basis.

We gather to receive the Spirit of God.

We gather to eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus.

We gather to be created into the people God calls us to be.

We gather to have our lives shaped by God.

But it is not meant for us to hog.

It is not meant for us to go home and keep to ourselves.

It is meant to be brought into the world.

It is meant to be given away so that others will also carry with them God’s Spirit.

I say this because today Vanessa and Ella join us at the Lord’s Table.

For both of them it will be the first time.

And I think we can all see how excited they are.

I am excited for them.

One of the things I love as a pastor is to teach first communion class.

It brings such joy to my heart to have young people come to the Lord’s Table.

But this morning I want you all to know we don’t do this just for Vanessa and Ella.

We do it because we believe that with us they will be moved by the Spirit of God to go out and share what they receive here with the world.

We send them out like a bag or a pen to give it away for others.

This is why Jesus sends us the Holy Spirit.

It is so that we can grow in our faith.

We cannot bear all the things there is to learn about God right now.

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

Faith is a process for all of us.

It is a process for us to learn how to live out the words that Jesus gave us.

It is a process to learn how to be the people God created us to be.

It is about constantly learning and growing.

And it is a gift from God to us that is meant to be shared.

This process is different for all of us.

We all come to God in our own time and pace.

That formation work that takes time is the Holy Spirit too.

It moves in and out of our lives drawing us closer to God.

And sometimes we don’t know it is even happening.

Sometimes it only makes sense after the fact.

The Holy Spirit is also working on us to share the love that we have been given with the world.

We never know how the love we share affects people.

We never know what happens to it after we put it out there in the world.

It is like we have lost it, or thought we lost it, and we don’t know where it is going.

And then one day it shows up crossing the street, or in a coffee shop.

I believe that also to be the work if the Spirit.

It takes our offerings of love, care, concern, and makes them into something more.

After College I worked at a pizza place in North Conway.

I had a boss who was by his own admission an atheists.

Often times at the end of the night we would sit and talk about God.

He would ask me these really hard questions.

And at times he would mock me for my faith.

I tried to be patient and understanding.

But I never thought it did any good.

I just thought that he believed what he believed and I believed what I did.

A couple of years later I went back to have lunch at that pizza place and my boss was still there.

He came out and sat with me for a while to talk about things.

He told me that he was going to Church now regularly.

I was surprised.

He told me, “You played a big part of getting me to believe in God. The way you listened to my questions without judging and the way you were my friend.”

I had no idea.

I also have to say that I wasn’t trying to convert him.

I was just trying to have a conversation, and answer with honesty the questions he asked me.

I tried to have a relationship with him.

And the Holy Spirit took my offering and made into something awesome.

The Holy Spirit is doing the same thing with your offerings of love that you put out there into the world.
And because of that there is someone right now crossing the street whose life is a little better because you are in it.

It sounds hokey, but that is how life works.

We care for each other and in doing we lighten the load a little for each other.

Because life is hard enough without people telling you how horrible of a person you are, or all the things you should be doing different or better.

So the Holy Spirit is meant to lift us up shows us God’s love given through Jesus Christ.

And then we are meant to share it with others, and let the Holy Spirit work on their lives.

To Ella and Vanessa we are all so overjoyed that you will be receiving Jesus special meal today.

We are also glad that you will be co-workers with us in bringing God’s love to others.

May the Holy Spirit dwell in you and lead you into truth, so that we might glorify God together.

And keep a look out for those bags and pens.

Amen