I Promise

Lent 5B, 3/22/15
Jeremiah 31:31-34

Glorify your name, God. Draw us close to you. Help us to follow the leadership of Jesus. Keep us faithful in our covenant with you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Why do you come to church?

Lately you can go to the religion section of any news outlet and read about the decline of the church.

Mainline Christianity doesn’t matter any more, according to some experts.

Membership is shrinking, giving is down, and congregations are closing their doors.

Depending on who is doing the writing or the talking, they’ll attribute the decline of the church to ordination of women or failing to ordain women, to acceptance of gay people to failing to accept them completely. Mainline Christianity is too political, too hypocritical, too traditional, too wishy-washy.

Some people claim that the church is shrinking simply because it is irrelevant. In today’s society, people make their own meaning. They don’t need an institution like the church to help give meaning to their lives.

And yet, here we are.

For some reason, each one of us decided to roll out of bed this morning and come to worship with this community.

What led you here?

I don’t need you to shout out answers, but that’s not intended to be a rhetorical question.

Answer the question for yourself… What motivated you to make the effort to come to worship this morning?

Do you know?

[pause]

I can’t tell you why you, specifically, came to church this morning.

But I do think that Jeremiah can tell us something about the importance of coming to church in general.

In today’s reading from Jeremiah, we heard about God making a new covenant with the people of Israel.

God promises some pretty awesome things to the people, regardless of whether they actually follow God’s law or do what God asks of them.

I think that that is why we come to worship.

We come to hear the good news of God’s promise of grace and forgiveness.

Church is a place where we know that we are accepted and welcomed and received as beloved children of God.

If that weren’t the case, I don’t think that any of us would be here today.

Let me explain a little bit more about this promise from God, as described in today’s reading from the book of Jeremiah.

Now, if you’ve gotten to know me at all over the past several weeks, you’ve probably learned that sometimes the way that I make a point, or give an explanation, is by telling a story.

So, allow me to tell you a story about one of my spiritual practices.

As part of the requirements for ordination, I spent a year doing a full-time internship in Eugene, Oregon.

It was a great internship, but one thing that was challenging for me was to actually take a day off every week. You see, I didn’t have any other friends in Eugene, or even on the West Coast, so it was easy to become a workaholic.

But I made myself take the day off.

Here’s how it worked.

I had Fridays off each week.

I made sure that I could get home every Thursday by 9pm to watch CSI.

You know the show CSI?

This was well before the days of TiVos, and I didn’t know how to set a VCR to record something while I was out, so if I wanted to see the show, I had to be home in time.

It worked surprisingly well.

I lived right next door to the church, so even when we had meetings on Thursday nights, as long as I could get out of there by 8:59, I would be home in time to catch the opening credits of the show.

CSI was the beginning of my Sabbath time each week.

And I still watch CSI for Sabbath time.

There’s something about that TV show that, for me, has become connected to truly taking time off.

I don’t know what I’ll do if they cancel the show some day.

Having said all of that, there’s also something about CSI that bugs me sometimes.

When the characters are working on a case, and they’re talking to a victim who is afraid for their life, or to the family members who are grieving the loss of a loved one, sometimes they’ll say something like:

                  We’ll get the guy who did this. I promise.

Now, why in the world would someone promise that?

The investigators don’t know for sure that they’ll be able to find the perpetrator of a crime and bring him to justice.

Why would they give their word to a victim when they don’t have the power to follow through on the promise?

It’s a very human thing to do. We want to see something happen so we believe that we have the power to make it so. Have you ever made a promise like that?

I’m guessing that most of us here today have either made a promise, or had a promise made to us, that ended up being broken. We may have tried our hardest, but we just don’t have the power to do everything that we would really like to see done.

You know what, though?

God is pretty amazing.

Unlike you or me or the characters on CSI, God can promise ridiculous things and will actually have the ability to follow through on them.

We call a promise from God a covenant.

It’s more certain and more meaningful than a promise between humans, especially considering that some of our promises are ones that we may not have the power to keep.

Let’s consider a couple of the covenants that God has made with humankind.

In the Old Testament, God keeps offering covenants to the people of Israel, even though the people never seem to be able to fulfill their side of the promise.

In the time of Noah, God makes a covenant with the people never again to destroy the world by a flood.

With Sarah and Abraham, God makes a covenant with their offspring forever. In the words of a confirmation lesson I used to teach, this covenant was for a people, a place, and a purpose.

After rescuing the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, God makes several covenants with them in the wilderness. This includes the giving of the law, and the Ten Commandments. It also includes the promise of health, if people look up at bronze image of a snake, God will save them from poisonous snakebites.

If you have been here for worship each of the past four weeks, you’ve heard these stories read in worship.

During the season of Lent, we hear a lot about the covenants that God has made with the people over the ages.

Today we get another one.

Jeremiah writes: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Previously the law had been written on stone tablets, but now it’s going to be written on the hearts of the people.

The promise continues: No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.

Previously, God had spoken directly with Noah and Sarah and Abraham and Moses, and sometimes with the priests or the prophets. But now, God is going to get up close and personal with all the people, not just a chosen few.

The promise concludes: For I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

Previously, God had punished the people when they didn’t follow the law. When Jeremiah was writing, the people were in exile, living in a foreign land, because they had been unfaithful to God.

With this covenant, God says, your actions don’t matter any more.

I’ll forgive you no matter what.

The covenant of Jeremiah 31 – the promise that God makes to the people – is that when the day of the Lord comes, it won’t be full of judgment and fear, like the prophets have been telling the people for a couple hundred years.

The Day of the Lord, according to this passage, is a time when God will forgive the sins of all the people, and when everyone will know God, and be in relationship with God forever.

That’s why we come to church.

No matter what the statistics say about growth numbers or lack thereof, no matter how relevant the Christian message is to popular culture or not, there is a piece of Christianity that will always resonate with us.

That piece is God’s covenant.

As Jeremiah tells us today, God forgives all our sins.

And unlike you or me or the characters in CSI, God really has the authority to make this forgiveness happen.

We come to church to be reminded of that covenant.

We come to church to renew that covenant.

Because, you know, even though God’s forgiveness is not conditional on our behavior, God still likes it when we follow the commandments and seek to live in close relationship with one another and with the divine.

And so, in worship, we refresh the covenant.

We remember all the promises that God has made to humanity over the generations, and we show our thanks by trying our very hardest to uphold our end of the promise.

And yet, we know, that even when we fail, God’s faithfulness endures.

Thanks be to God.

Amen. 

Rejoice, Give Praise!

A Call to Worship

Written for the service of installation of a pastor to a congregation 

Based on Psalms 96 and 118

This is the day that the Lord has made,

Let us rejoice and be glad in it!

Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised,

God is to be worshipped above all else.

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice,

Let the sea roar and let the field give praise,

Give thanks to the Lord, for God is good,

Let everything that lives in all the earth give praise to God!

Lose to Save

Lent 2B, 3/1/15
Mark 8:31-38

Jesus says: Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

God, help us to hear the words of Jesus and let them change our lives. Draw us closer to you, and help our faith community make a difference in the world. Through us, bless all your people. Amen.

Last week, I had a meeting with a group of other pastors. One person in that group talked about how every congregation seems to have a banner year, the year that becomes the point of comparison for all future ministry of the church.

If someone is talking about the success of the children’s education program, for example, it will always be compared against that year when we had 47 kids in confirmation.

Remember that?    If only we could get back to those days.  

Or when a new program is being developed, or worship is being planned, or basically whenever anything changes in a church, there will always be someone who says, “that’s not the way we’ve always done it.”

It doesn’t really matter whether that something actually was always done the same way or not – what matters to people who think like this is that the new idea doesn’t mesh with their memory of the banner year in the church’s history.

And so, by the most important comparison they can muster, this new thing is set up to be an automatic failure.

I’m assuming that most of you have had experiences in communities like this – if not in a church, then maybe in another organization that you’ve been involved with – or maybe even in your own families.

Does anyone else have those holiday traditions that you thought you did every year? If you go back and count, it turns out that the most memorable traditions maybe only happened half the time.

But our most meaningful experiences of something are deeply tied to our emotions, and so we often go back to “the way we’ve always done things” because it’s comforting to us.

It can help us find meaning.

This is especially important when the world around us seems to be changing. When things that are familiar to us are disappearing, we turn back to places and rituals that give us comfort as a way to deal with the changes, because we don’t know any other way to handle them.

If you do a quick online search for trends in the church today, you will find countless experts writing about how to keep the church the same as it has “always been.”

The headlines don't actually say that, of course. They state things like “Sunday morning worship continues to decline” and “growing interest in small-group ministries” and “more emphasis on families in church.”

Continues to? Growing? More? In comparison to what?

Clearly, the people conducting studies and writing articles about the church today have an unspoken assumption about what the church of yesterday was – and everything that the church is today is compared to what it used to be.

This is not healthy.

Whether it’s a church member complaining about a different way of doing Sunday School, or a professional researcher comparing worship attendance numbers today to an unspecified historic benchmark– the church today is not and cannot be what it used to be.

Thank God.

The ideal church that lives in the back of many people’s minds is the church of 1942 or 1976.

It is a church that only recognized the professional ministry of men.

It is a church that condemned gay and lesbian people.

It is a church with buildings that were not wheelchair-accessible.

It is a church that occasionally participated in the institutional oppression of other groups of people – you would be shocked to read about the role of Lutheran churches in Germany in the 1930s and 40s.  

But maybe even worse than that, the idealized church was characterized too often by inaction, or passivity, or ignorance of the injustices that were being done in its name. 

Jesus says, “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

What about, “those who want to save their church must lose it, and those who lose their church, for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

Thank God that our church no longer suppresses the voice of women, or excludes gay people.

Thank God that we now pay attention to accessibility for people with various physical needs.

With God’s help, we can overcome our history of oppression and inaction, and instead work for justice for all people, in our neighborhood and around the world.

But in order for the church to become what it is today, that old church had to die.

We had to let go of those things that were preventing some people from hearing the Gospel, in order to keep the church alive.

The people who stuck with the church, who carried it through the times of transition, were the ones who weren’t afraid to try something new, even though there were huge risks involved in the new way of doing things.

Let me tell you a story.

I’ve been pastor at your congregation for a whole month now.

I certainly don’t know everything about how this congregation works, but I have been to a lot of meetings!

Here’s one of my first impressions that I’d like to share.

At the council meeting in February, we had a report on some of the updates that are needed to our original church building. Some building materials were used that we now know to be unsafe, so at the very least, those need to be replaced. But a few other suggestions were brought forward also, to make the space more user-friendly, and more welcoming overall.

         Here’s the part that was surprising to me.

I didn’t hear a single person say that we needed to restore the original building because it’s always been there, or because their parents donated the money to build it, or because having a newly refinished building will help grow our Sunday School program.

The suggestions for building use were mostly social outreach programs.

What do we need to do so that the school can still keep meeting in our building?

What other community groups might need a place to meet?

How can our building be an asset to the community?

These were the questions that seemed to be driving discussion. Sure, if our congregation needs it, having some more usable space would be great. But supporting our own desires is not the ultimate good here. Supporting the needs of the community is more important.

If we’re going to update the original church building, it won’t be for our own sake, but for the sake of Jesus and for the sake of the Gospel.

We can put aside the baggage of what that building was created for in the first place and realize that it might serve a different purpose in the new reality of what our church is today.

This is a very faithful way to think about how we use our possessions.

At some level, our congregation has already moved past the trap of the way it’s always been and has started focusing on the way that is best for the Gospel.

The people who have made our church what it is today are like the disciples in the Gospel lesson.

Jesus rebuked the disciples and told them that they must change or die.

The disciples didn’t like this any more than you or I would like being given such a harsh ultimatum. Peter especially didn’t like what Jesus had to say.

But Jesus said – it’s not about you.

It doesn’t matter what you like or don’t like, it doesn’t matter whether the new reality fits in with your preconceived notions of what a faithful community should be.

What matters is Jesus.

The disciples had to be willing to give up their lives for the sake of Jesus, and for the sake of the Gospel. Only then could they truly appreciate the importance of their lives, and of Jesus’ sacrifice on their behalf.

Judas didn’t get it. Judas stuck with the old way of doing things, with legalism and the tradition and trying to appease the powers that be.

It didn’t work out so well for him.

If you’re not familiar with the story of Judas, come back for worship on Maundy Thursday when we hear the story of how he betrayed Jesus for his own gain.

Most of the disciples though – even Peter, despite his argument with Jesus today – most of the disciples finally decided that it was worth putting their own egos aside for the sake of spreading the message of Jesus to the world.

The leadership at our church has found ways to set their own egos aside for the sake of Jesus and the Gospel. We don’t do it perfectly, but at least some of the time, we listen to Jesus’ instructions to lose our own lives for the sake of the greater good.

The leadership of our denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has at least occasionally done the same thing.

On a more personal level, I’m sure that all of us have had to do this for our families at some point in time – putting our own priorities on the back burner for the sake of a spouse or child or parent or sibling.

Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for Jesus’ sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

         The same goes for the church.

We can’t live our lives, as individuals or as a community, by constantly focusing backwards on some idealized time in our memory.

The only way that we can continue to live, and do ministry, and grow together, is by looking forward to the ways that God can use us in the future.

So let’s move forward together, like the disciples did, and like Jesus asks us to.

And may God guide us on our way.   

Amen.