NW MN Synod Theology for Ministry Conference
September 18, 2012
Colossians 3:12-17
Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each
other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own
thing. And cultivate thankfulness. Let the Word of Christ—the Message—have the run of the house.
Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using
good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in
your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every
step of the way. (The Message, paraphrase by Eugene Peterson)
The
fireworks were a dead giveaway that these folks had
come together to “cut loose”….with bottle rockets, gaudy balloons, a mariachi
band, and lovely young chiquitas in
their dancing clothes.
Houston: we’re
not among the Lutherans of the upper Midwest--God’s frozen chosen!
No, we’re in the countryside near Esteli, Nicaragua. Forty rural families are giddy with joy over
a new, hand-cranked well bringing cool, clear water up from 130 feet below
ground. Lutheran World Relief provided
the funds, the local well committee made the plan, the community rolled up its
sleeves and did the work, and now the beneficiaries of such service couldn’t
help themselves.
“This
water is God’s gift to us—of course, we will share it with everyone who is
thirsty.”
Irrational exuberance crowns a service project that
means life for God’s people. El agua es la vida, it says on a nearby
sign: “Water is life!”
The
snake-dancing on the floor of the Mercedes Benz Superdome was another dead
giveaway. Thank God
the youth of the church had taken control of this stadium in New Orleans, and
they were getting pumped as a soulful saxophone led them--35,000 youth and
adult leaders--in singing Jesus Loves Me.
Houston:
these are not the ho-hum Lutherans who furnish ever-ready laugh-lines in
Prairie Home Companion monologues.
The youth of our church were there in full force
last July, listening spellbound as a speaker, acknowledged that some had
protested her presence there. Pastor
Nadia Bolz-Weber confessed astonishingly that her sharp critics were right
about one thing: she wasn’t worthy to be there, speaking to all
those Lutheran young people—“but this is the kind of God we’re dealing with”—the
God who is forever qualifying flawed persons to do God’s work!
And just like that the whole crowd was up on their
feet, making a holy racket, giving Jesus another standing ovation. More irrational exuberance.
Even
in the austere, thousand-year-old English cathedral of Durham, dominating the
verdant landscape of Northumberland, a heavenly choir signals another dead
giveaway about the joy of serving. Tow-headed little boys who should by rights be
running around on a rugby field, instead are decked out in cassocks and
surplices, belting out John Rutter’s “Gloria” with their fluty little treble
voices filling the sanctuary of a shrine that still holds the moldering remains
of old St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and the Venerable Bede. I kid you not, you can almost hear the
singing of “angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven” in that
place.
Houston: even
the walls of this ancient cathedral cannot contain the hilaritas of the Gospel as it soars in song from the sweet voices
of little pre-pubescent choristers.
More irrational exuberance—and where you’d least
expect it!
All
summer long, I kept stumbling on to it:
the flashes, the outbreaks of evangelical fervor that burst forth
whenever (as Eugene Peterson paraphrases our text) “the Word of Christ—the
Message—[has] the run of the house.”
This is where our being in Christ and our doing
as the Body of Christ lead us: to
the giddy joy that inevitably accompanies even the humblest service, done in
the name of the Lord Jesus.
But really now—“Joy
in Serving?”
That phrase has always seemed a little like a “con”
to me. Yes, yes, you worked hard, got sweaty
and dirty, rubbed elbows with down-and-outers, but wasn’t it fun? Isn’t it wonderful to experience such “Joy in
Serving?”
Joy in Serving:
Really?
Yes, really!
This hilaritas of grace is
what we were created for….and now in the mercy of God, it is what we are being recreated
for, in Christ Jesus.
But, in truth, we glimpse flashes of such crazy joy,
such irrational exuberance breaking out all through the biblical story….
Miriam and the other Hebrew womenfolk, kick up their
heels, shake their tambourines, create a song we’re still singing, and invent
the line dance--right there by the Red Sea….even as Pharoah’s army (what’s left
of it) washes up on the shore. (Exodus
15:20-21)
King David, having recaptured the Ark of God, strips
down to his boxers so that he can dance “with all his might” in advance of the
ox-cart that bears the Ark back to its rightful resting place in Israel. (II Samuel 6)
Isaiah paints a gaudy, over-the-top portrait of what
the exiles’ return will look like, in punch-drunk images of greenery filling
the desert, lame beggars leaping like Olympic athletes, stuttering deaf-mutes
singing arias like Pavarotti, and a Royal Interstate Highway being carved
through the wilderness…talk about “rebuilding the infrastructure!”(Isaiah
35:1-10)
And Jesus, even as Jesus faces the horrors of Holy
Week, even Jesus cannot contain his exuberance, in the haunting words of
Hebrews, even Jesus “who for the sake of the joy that was set before him
endured the cross, disregarding its shame.”
(Hebrews 12:2)
But it doesn’t stop there: Paul and Silas, shackled in the bowels of a
Philippian prison, singing hymns at midnight, so raucously that the ground
trembles and the prison doors burst open.
(Acts 16:25-34)
You get the picture….the joy of it all, the joy of
being God’s beloved ones, the joy of doing God’s work with the least and the
last and the lost, this crazy joy just keeps breaking out….because “this is the
kind of God we’re dealing with,” as Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber proclaimed it so
powerfully down in New Orleans.
My dear friends, I am not here this morning to
encourage you to please be more joyful in your serving. The last thing I want is for someone to go home
from Fair Hills and tell their church council that “now the bishop says we all have
to be more joyful.”
Please don’t do that.
No human being can make someone else more joyful.
That’s ridiculous—like trying to make flowers grow by pulling on them!
No, it is not up to us to get our acts together and
be more joyful.
God is already taking care of that, you see. God will provide your joy. God creates the hilaritas of grace, and most of the time we realize that only after
the fact, only after a little irrational exuberance has broken out in our
midst.
Perhaps
you and I simply need to be on the watch for it—and to get out of the way when
it comes, this unfathomable joy that inevitably accompanies our serving.
And maybe, just maybe, God might use us to put in place the conditions wherein
God’s joy will break out.
Do you know, for example, that we have a few
congregations in this synod where the passing of the peace is starting to last way
too long? Why--everybody gets out of
their seats, crosses the center aisle, and mills around, administering even
hugs and a few furtive “kisses of peace!”
This sort of thing could get out of hand, don’t you
think? Perhaps someone needs to craft a
new liturgical dialog for the ELW, for when the passing of the peace goes on
too long. Something like: “P: All
right, all right, break it up and sit down for Pete’s sake,” to which the only
possible liturgical response from the faithful would have to be: “C: Nothing
doing, Bub!”
For when the joy of serving breaks out, as it will
when God’s message of mercy “has the run of the house,” our best response is just
to stand back, let it happen and simply be carried along by its swift,
overpowering current!
For if it is God and God’s people whom we serve, how
will we do so with anything less than the hilaritas
of our Savior, “thanking God the Father
every step of the way?”
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
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