In Healthy Congregation People Develop Caring Relationships and Empower Others

“We now want to return to the gospel, which gives guidance and help against sin in more than one way, because God is extravagantly rich in his grace: first, through the spoken word…second, through baptism; third, through the holy Sacrament of the Altar; fourth, through the power of the keys and also through the mutual conversation and consolation of brothers and sisters.” Martin Luther, Smalcald Articles, III:4.

When Luther wrote these words in 1537 he came close—very close--to placing our relationships within the Body of Christ on a par with Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. Caring relationships and loving conversations with other Christians are almost sacramental in the life of the church.

A Network of Connections

In itself the church is a gathering together of God’s people—a sharing of goodwill, energy and gifts of the Spirit. It’s not far-fetched to define the congregation as a “network of connections.” This tracks with the language of the New Testament which consistently favors organic—not mechanistic--images for describing the church, most notably as “the Body of Christ and individually, members one of another.” (I Corinthians 12:27)

Yet even within this lovely image there is place both for differentiation and togetherness. God doesn’t fuse us into a formless “blob.” The Body of Christ consists of members who are wonderfully diverse, but also connected inextricably, one to another.

Our challenge is to find balance between our identities as members of one another and the relationships that give us life. “How can a separate self relate with others in a healthy way?” asks Dr. Peter Steinke, in his Healthy Congregations training materials.

Steinke points to four ways that members of the Body of Christ relate to one another:
· Playing together. “If you cannot get connected to others through relaxation, spontaneity, and letting go,” notes Steinke, “ the only alternative is to connect through hostility or ‘dead seriousness.’”
· Touching one another, verbally as well as physically. Words we share are “touching” when they convey support, care, and comfort.
· Mirroring--simply looking into one another’s faces so we can tell whether we regard one another as important, noticed, and valued. How vital it is for us to know one another’s names and call each other by name!
· Nurturing connects people. There’s a reason why church suppers are so popular. “Half of Jesus’ parables,” observes Steinke, “are about food, feasts or farming.”

The Difficult Business of Helping

Helping one another, though, isn’t always as simple as you’d think. There are ways of “helping” that wind up hindering the growth of both the helper and the one being helped.

If our helping of one another always takes the form of fixing or rescuing someone, we could be tending to our own needs more than to the needs of the one being helped. Ask yourself: am I driven by compassion or by my own anxiety at seeing someone who is hurt?

There is a kind of helping that dis-empowers the one being helped. Some helpers have a sick “need to be needed.” Their tendency to over-function can foster an unhealthy dependency in the one being “helped.”

It’s important to watch for this sort of behavior in our congregations. Peter Steinke suggests that overly-needy helpers can be spotted by their tendency to
· Listen ad infinitum to a friend’s problems
· Volunteer for every job that needs doing
· Stay up all night to do a project
· Do others’ work for them
· Try to provide the perfect environment
· Please others at the expense of their own well-being.

Another example of unhealthy helpfulness is when leaders of a congregation adapt to the weakest or most disgruntled members of the church. When such leaders try to appease or satisfy the chronically anxious or complaining, the whole congregation usually suffers. Writes Steinke: “Healthier functioning on the part of leaders involves keeping their focus on a goal, a direction, not the noise of the needy.”

So what should be our goal in helping others? The founder of the modern servant leadership movement, Robert Greenleaf, has provided this helpful test: “Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”

Bishop Larry Wohlrabe

For reflection and discussion:
1. How well does your congregation play? Touch? Mirror? Nurture?
2. What connects people in your congregation?
3. How can you tell if your desire to help someone is motivated more by compassion than by your own anxiety?
4. Recall a time when leaders (perhaps in an attempt to be “helpful”) adapted to the weakest or most unhappy members of your congregation. How did this affect the whole congregation?

This is the final in an 11-part series of articles, based on the Healthy Congregations training materials by Dr. Peter Steinke. Bishop Larry encourages church councils and other leadership groups to use these articles for devotions/discussion as they meet together. All eleven articles are available for download on the Northwestern Minnesota Synod website: http://www.nwmnsynod.org/

Let It Fly!

New Salem Lutheran Church, Turtle River, MN
March 1, 2009
Installation of Pastor Karol Hendricks McCracken
Mark 4:1-9

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

Growing up on a farm, as I did, makes it both easier and harder to understand the Bible.

Growing up on a farm in southern Minnesota, as I did, makes it easier to understand the Bible….because the Bible comes to us largely out of an agrarian, rural culture.

The people of the Bible, by and large, were my kind of people—farmers, tillers of the soil. Rural folk have a leg up on urban folk in making sense of the scriptures….because rural folk know where the food comes from, they live closer to the land, they have an innate sense of how the natural world works. When a country boy like me hears this famous parable of the Sower, at least he knows something about what happens when seeds are planted in soil.

Growing up on a farm makes it easier….and it also makes it harder…to understand the Bible.

The “harder” part has to do with how much agriculture today has changed since “Bible times.”

For example, when my dad was farming between 1942 and 1975, we all knew that seed was precious and needed to be planted carefully.

Seed corn was and still is expensive. You dole it out sparingly, plant it cautiously, let none of it go to waste.

On our farm down near Mankato, one of the most complicated pieces of farm equipment was our corn planter. Right about now, every year, my dad started fussing with that machine, treating it almost like his fourth child. Integral to the operation of the corn planter were the round plates, situated at the bottom of the seed bins, that metered out the corn seed, in line with the speed of the tractor as it pulled the planter through the field, so that the corn plants would be spaced out just right….not clumped together too close, not scattered too far apart. Planting corn was a precision operation, designed to conserve the seed and sow it sparingly.

Take a look, though, at the Sower in Jesus’ story. He “spends” the seed like a drunken sailor….flinging it by the handfuls, in all directions. He lavishes the seed, wastes the seed, “broadcasts” the seed every which way.

You’d think, to read this parable, that there was an inexhaustible supply of seed!

Second, notice how and where the sower scatters the seed.

My dear father, back in the days before “minimum tillage,” prepared the seedbed with multiple passes of tillage equipment and administration of scientifically-measured fertilizers and herbicides. We planted the seed ONLY in the best possible seedbed. We avoided, wherever possible, the pathways, the rocky places, and the notorious weed patches.

Thanks to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we could “divert” those marginal acres with a cover crop to prevent soil erosion. The government paid us NOT to farm wherever the paths had run, wherever the ground was rocky or the thorns and thistles had taken over.

Not so, with this Sower in Mark, chapter 4. He is as indiscriminate as my farmer-father was discriminating, in deciding where exactly to plant the seed. This Sower in Jesus’ story—by my lights, at least—lets the seed fly in all the wrong places—flings recklessly the precious seed in areas where it doesn’t stand a chance of growing, or so it would seem.

What a reckless, wasteful, stupid way to plant seed!

And then there is one last thing that shocks a modern farmer in this parable. I’m talking about those fantastic, off-the-charts yields this Sower achieves. “Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold: (v. 9)

The farmers I have known are sober, realistic, scientifically-minded people. They deal in probabilities and hard realities, they work toward growth (of course!) but always within the bounds of what’s possible.

Growing up on the farm in the 150s, 60s and 70s….I remember seeing corn yields in southern Minnesota grow from 100 bushels an acre to over 200 bushels an acre, an impressive Green Revolution….but still not fantastic enough to strain sober reason.

Here in this parable, though, it’s as if the Sower is planting “magic seed,” achieving Jack-and-the-beanstalk yields that strain our credulity and make us wonder if it’s all smoke-and-mirrors. A hundredfold yield! Don’t be ridiculous!

And here, precisely here, of course, the Good News of the Gospel breaks through once again.

For the Gospel isn’t about probabilities and possibilities….the Gospel isn’t subject to hard realities and pure logic…..the Gospel of God’s extravagant love in Jesus Christ bursts through all of that, as it does here in the parable of the Sower.

Because, you see, the seed is the Word of God, and that changes everything. All bets are off!
The seed is the Word of God, and the Word, dear friends is inexhaustible. It’s meant to be flung, hither and yon, broadcast far and wide, unsparingly, “un-stingily”—just let it fly in all directions.

There’s a first Word for you, dear Pastor Karol, as you are installed today. God calls you to be lavish and wasteful with the Word. It’s none of your business to dole out the Word in measured, safe, bite-size, reasonable portions. Let it fly, broadcast it, spread it around rich and thick…and God will take it from there.

The seed is the Word of God, dear friends, and this Word wheedles its way into the most unlikely of places, finds a home in the most unworthy of persons. This world is full of persons who don’t, by rights, “deserve” the Word of God.

Come to think of it: none of us “deserves” the Word of God. We all, at various times and under certain circumstances are like the hard pathway, the stony soil, the prickly weed-patch. Look at any of us—honestly and directly—and it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say: “The Word will never have a chance with THAT person….”

But the Word finds a way. It’s not up to us to deny it to anyone—that’s way above our “pay grade!”

For you, Pastor Karol, there is another call here: never underestimate the capacity of the Word of God to make someone new in Jesus Christ. Some of your greatest ministry will happen with some of the least likely characters.

And then, one last thing: get ready to have your socks knocked off, with the results, the yield of all that indiscriminate, wild-eyed seed-flinging.

Stand back, and be ready to be amazed by what God will do with the Word. It’s like super-seed, it works its own kind of germination-magic, in our midst. The Word, truly does yield thirty-fold, sixty-fold, one-hundred-fold and even more…

I love stories about Martin Luther--who reformed the Catholic church in the 16th century and started the Lutheran movement within the church. One of my favorite Luther stories has to do with the Reformer’s utter confidence in the power of the Word to work in the world.

Luther once wrote: “See how much God has been able to accomplish through me, though I did no more than pray and preach. The Word did it all….while I sat still and drank beer with Philip and Amsdorf, God dealt the papacy a mighty blow.”[i]

If the Word of God is as powerful as Luther said it was, as mighty as Jesus proclaimed it to be in this parable, there is wondrous relief that should wash over us, especially us preachers of it: It doesn’t all depend on us. Hear that, Pastor Karol? You’re important—but you’re not indispensable. Neither am I. Nor are any of us, gathered here this morning.

God is at work through God’s Word, even when we’re blowing Z’s, taking our beauty-rest, or maybe (like Luther) quaffing our favorite beverage. We can be out of sorts, out of good ideas, or simply “out of it”—but the Word is still at work.

To be sure, we want to serve this Word as best we can. But most of all, we need to know when to let it fly and then get out of the way.

Our prayer, a prayer that will shape our life, goes like this: “Almighty God, grant to your Church your Holy Spirit and the wisdom which comes down from heaven, that your Word may not be bound but have free course and be preached to the joy and edifying of Christ’s holy people, that in steadfast faith we may serve you and in the confession of your name may abide to the end; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”[ii]


[i] Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Luther, p. 214.
[ii] Lutheran Book of Worship, p. 137.

Realer Than Real

Peace Lutheran Churches, Shelly, MN
The Transfiguration of our Lord
February 22, 2009
Mark 9:2-9

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

“Welcome to the real world.”

Anyone ever said that to you? “Welcome to the real world.”

If you’ve heard that phrase before, chances are you heard it when something unfortunate happened to you.

A romance turned south. A job came to an end. An investment went sour. Something you were counting on, hoping for, failed to materialize.

“Welcome to the real world,” someone said to you, maybe with a shrug of a shoulder.

Isn’t that interesting?

Isn’t it fascinating that we equate the “real world”, most often, with the dark or disappointing side of life. That is what strikes as most “real.”.

According to this way of looking at things, what’s not real is when a wish comes true or when a relationship grows closer or when a hope is realized. All of that is “unreal,” naïve, make-believe stuff from some never-never land.

What’s real is what hurts, what frustrates, what robs you of your innocence, makes you cynical, challenges your faith.

“Welcome to the real world!” we glibly say to one another.

But is that really the real world?

This morning’s gospel lesson begs to differ.

This story of the Transfiguration of Jesus, purports to show us a glimpse of the real world. Jesus is on a mountain-top with three of his closest followers. Suddenly Jesus is bathed in dazzling white, amazing light, conversing with two long-departed heroes of the Old Testament, within earshot of the very voice of God who declares: “‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

Welcome to the real world, dear friends. See the veil lifted momentarily. Perceive the Son-light piercing through the dreary darkness. Behold Jesus as he truly is—without limit, without peer, no longr subject to boundaries of space or time or circumstance.

What if, what if THIS is the real world, this fleeting glimpse that Mark chapter 9 affords us? What if this is how things are—that all the other stuff is, if not an illusion, surely not “real” in the sense of the lasting, permanent, final state of things? What then?

If on the Mountain of the Transfiguration you and I glimpse momentarily the “real world,” if in Jesus’ metamorphosis we catch a brief vision of our final future, our certain destiny, in the new creation God is ushering in….what then?

If Jesus’ transfiguration shows us “the real world” what can we say about that?

We can say that although we might feel distant from God, God is never far away from us. The veil between heaven and earth, between God’s realm and our world is far thinner, far more translucent, far more penetrable than we imagined.

We can say that for Jesus, all the things that hold us back—space and time and limits of all sorts—those just don’t apply. The dead are no longer dead—Moses and Elijah and goodness knows who else—are all alive and well in the fullness of God’s unending life.

We can say that the light triumphs, that the darkness does not win out, that the dimness of our faith will surely be overshadowed by the crystal clear voice of God who knows and declares Jesus’ true identity.

We can say that alongside this world, which we mistakenly imagine to be the real world….alongside this world is God’s kingdom, God’s realm,….that God’s future overlaps our own, indeed even now it is overtaking us.

We can say that we know how the story ends. It ends in Jesus, bathed in light, his identity no longer in doubt, his Sonship, his oneness with God, as plain as the nose on your face.

St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, puts it this way: “For…as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power….When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.” (I Corinthians 15:22-26, 28)

This, this, dear friends, is the real world. Welcome to the real world! God in Jesus Christ is making all things new. God in Jesus Christ is showing us how it all ends.

A friend of mine who pastors down in Texas, was leading a Bible study on the book of Revelation. He asked the class how they’d summarize the message of this perplexing book of the Bible….and a developmentally disabled man raised his hand. “I know, Pastor,” he blurted out. “God wins!”

Amen and amen. This man, though not seeming as bright as others, saw it all crystal clear. He cut to the chase. He knew the “point” of the Book of Revelation: in the end, God wins.

Welcome to the real world!

But what about us? Can we not start to see now, not just what’s going on here in Mark, chapter 9….but what’s going on in our lives as well? And what difference does it all make? Jesus was metamorphosed, Jesus was transfigured. Who cares?

Jesus’ transfiguration has “cash value” for us as we, too, are transfigured, as we start to see and be grasped by the fact that the so-called “real world” isn’t what we thought it was.

The real world, God’s real world for us, isn’t the dark and dreary side of life.

The real world is God’s future moving in upon us, even now. The real world is God getting a head start, even now, in making all things new.

So now, even now, we see the advance signs of that happening.

Now, even now, we meet people who refuse to abandon hope, persons who tenaciously pursue reconciliation, folks who are not cowed by death….all because they follow Jesus, the transfigured one.

Now, even now we catch glimpses of good overcoming evil, trust swallowing up cynicism, faith remaining unshaken by doubt….all because Jesus the transfigured one walks with us all the way.

Now, even now, we encounter communities of faith, hope and love….churches betting the whole farm on God’s triumph in Jesus Christ….congregations risking themselves, giving themselves away for others….communities of disciples doing whatever it takes to pursue God’s rescue mission, God’s work of renewal in the world.

Now, even now, we stumble upon tokens, examples of persons living here on earth as if the kingdom of God were already invading this present moment, drawing us forward, beckoning us ahead to God’s final future. Why wait? Why wait for freedom and justice and peace to prevail? Why not get on board with God’s way of doing things, now? What are we waiting for?

Welcome to the real world—God’s world, God’s side of things, God’s triumph, God’s future already invading our present.

The late British author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis wrote many books, trying to explain faith to ordinary folks. One of his fictional writings, The Great Divorce, depicted a group of folks, traveling on a bus, from hell to heaven. As they left behind their own “grey city” and reached the foothills of heaven, the riders on the bus realized how ghostly and unreal they were. When they stepped off the bus, to walk on the landscape of heaven, they noticed that “although the country was the most beautiful they had ever seen, every feature of the landscape (including streams of water and blades of grass) was unbearably solid compared to themselves: it caused them immense pain to walk on the grass, and even a single leaf was far too heavy for any of them to lift.”[1]

Rather than depicting heaven—God’s realm--as some light, airy, unreal place….like the proverbial cartoon heaven where angels play harps, flitting from cloud to cloud….C.S. Lewis portrays heaven as more solid, more substantial, more “weighty,” more real than any other country we will ever visit.

Welcome to the real world. Not the world of disappointment, dreary darkness or defeat.

Welcome to the real world of God’s realm, bursting into our lives, in Jesus the transfigured one, the crucified and risen one, who is “realer than real.”

I invite you, dear friends, to stop saying “Welcome to the real world,” when someone you know experiences some misfortune. Misfortune is not real, final or ultimate.

Instead, I invite you to catch your neighbor by surprise. Catch your neighbor in the act of living by faith, righting a wrong, fearlessly facing the future. Catch your neighbor acting like Jesus and in that moment say to your neighbor these astonishing words: “Welcome to the real world!”

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Divorce

The "germ" of this sermon comes from a chapel sermon preached in 1987 by the Rev. Steve Wohlfeil, when he served as campus pastor at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD.

The Missionary Back Home is You

Fridhem Lutheran Church, Lengby, MN
February 15, 2009
Epiphany 6/II Kings 5: 1-17

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

What a trip Naaman took, from Syria to Samaria. If he had known, if he had an inkling about what lay ahead for him—do you suppose he ever would have left home?

I’m not just talking about the one hundred miles or so, south by southwest, from Damascus in Syria to Samaria in northern Israel. That’s just geography….and surely longer, more daunting journeys have been taken.

No…I’m talking about the whole trip, the entire journey that Naaman went on….a journey down, to the depths….a journey up to the heights….and a journey out into the world again, by a man who was no longer quite himself.

What a journey---down, up and out….not unlike the journey of faith that you and I are on. Think about it.

Naaman took a journey down, not just down from Syria to Samaria, but down into the depths of humility, down to a place where all the pride was squeezed out of him, down to a river where he would die to all that he had been.

Naaman, you see, was a general, accustomed to giving orders and getting his own way. And Naaman was a successful general, to boot. His military prowess had won many victories. He had the confidence of his king. Naaman was, in so many ways, on top of the world.

Except that he was also a leper, which in that day was more than a skin disease. Leprosy brought disfigurement, uncleanness and shame. If Naaman could be rid of that, nothing would hold him back.

But to get rid of his leprosy, Naaman would have to go down, he needed to stoop down, get down, despairing of himself and submitting to the orders of others.

And that meant that Naaman needed to listen to the little people. Three times here in II Kings 5, Naaman the almighty must take his cues from the no-accounts, the servants, the slaves in the story. What a twist!

First there’s the little Hebrew maid, the slave girl Naaman had captured in an earlier victory over Israel, carrying her back to serve as his wife’s house-servant. The first glimmer of hope in this story comes from the slave girl—“There’s a prophet in my homeland,” she told her mistress. “He can heal your husband.”

So Naaman and his whole entourage traipse off to Samaria, the northern Kingdom of Israel. Armed with letters of introduction from the king of Syria, and a veritable “stimulus package” of gifts for the prophet, Naaman heads down to make contact with the man who could heal him.

But the prophet is not in the Israeli king’s palace. To meet the prophet, Naaman will need to bypass the palace and head out into the countryside, to the prophet’s humble home.

I bet Naaman was annoyed by that. Couldn’t the prophet come to him? Apparently not. So Naaman and company headed to the prophet’s hut, and when they got there, the prophet didn’t even bother to make an appearance.

Instead, for the second time in this story, a servant came to the fore. The prophet Elisha dispatched his slave with a simple set of instructions: “Go, Naaman to the River Jordan and bathe seven times and you will be healed.”

Here was mighty Naaman, a general of the Syrian army—standing hat in hand, before the prophet’s house—and the man couldn’t even step out, wave his hands and utter an incantation or two.

Naaman had had enough. He didn’t need this. He turned his face, north by northeast, back home to Syria…

But just then, for the third time in this story, the little people, Naaman’s own servants….came to him and spoke to him a word of pleading and hope. “What have you got to lose, O great one? You’ve come this far—why don’t you give it a try?”

And so again, Naaman relents and “goes down,” this time quite literally, seven times down into the muddy Jordan River….and when he comes up out of the water, his skin is like that of a teenager.

Naaman had to go down, down, down….for that is how God usually has to start with all of us.

Wherever we’re at, God needs to press in upon us, to reduce us, to diminish us, to soften us up and wear us down so that we become useless enough, powerless enough, worthless enough that God can do something great for us.

You and I have gone down like that. Life puts pressure on us. Though we may imagine ourselves in control and doing fine…. God has to recalibrate our lofty estimations of ourselves….and that’s a very good thing….because God needs us to be empty-handed, so that God can do his greatest work.

And what a great work that is. From the lowest of lowly places, Naaman is lifted up to the heights. Having gone down, down, down….Naaman is lifted up, up, up.

He receives more, far more, than the healing of a dermatological disorder. That would be wondrous enough, by rights….but God has bigger things in store for Naaman. As he rises up out of the River Jordan, Naaman receives a healing that is more than skin deep.

More than receiving the skin of a teenager, Naaman “gets it.” The pieces come together for him. Naaman isn’t just cured. He is saved—soul, mind and heart. Naaman is lifted up to the heavenly places where he confesses: “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.”

Isn’t this just like God—to always give us more than we’re asking for! If Naaman’s leprosy had left him and that was the end of it—we’d say that Naaman was cured. His skin disease was cured.

But Naaman was more than cured, he was healed. He received God’s deep healing of the affliction that would have killed Naaman. God healed Naaman’s unbelief. God didn’t just give Naaman a cure. God gave Naaman the gift of himself.

Having gone down….and having been brought back up….there was one more step in Naaman’s journey, though.

God now sent him out, back into the world. And not just anywhere, either! God sent Naaman back to his own country, to Syria, and when Naaman got back there he would have some “explaining” to do!

“How’d you get that peaches-and-cream complexion, Naaman?” Naaman had to explain that, and the only way Naaman could do that would be to name the name of the one true God who had healed him.

This was no fly-by-night, flash-in-the-pan cure Naaman received. He was a new man, inside and out. He belonged now, and he knew he belonged, to the one true God, the God of Israel.

And that’s what those two mule-loads of dirt were all about.

Toward the end of this little story, Naaman, when he realizes that Elisha will accept no gift from him, Naaman asks if he can take home to Syria a gift from the prophet. Naaman asks to bring a little bit of the land of Israel, back to his home in Syria, so that he can worship the true God, on Israeli soil.

That might strike us as superstitious or just plain weird….but in truth, Naaman “got it,” he realized that his new faith in the one true God needed a point of sacramental connection to the place where God had made himself known.

So, Naaman, with his two mule-loads of dirt, would have more explaining to do, back home in Syria….and my sense of this story is that Naaman was eager, as eager as he could be, to do just that.

When we walk with God we are on the journey of our lives. God sends us down….down to wherever it is we learn humility, wherever we come to despair of ourselves. For that to happen to us, dear friends, we (like Naaman) may need to listen to the little people in our lives!

And God sends us down, only so that God can bring us back up, so that God can do for us what we need most, give us the gift of himself, in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.

But that is never the end of it all. In the end, God sends us one more place. God sends us out, which for many of us simply means that God sends us back home, as Naaman went back home to Syria, a new man. God sends us home, washed in the waters of Baptism’s cleansing flood, new people with baby-soft skin and a faith to share.

This story, like every great story in the Bible, is finally a missionary story. And the missionary back home is Naaman, the missionary back home is you.

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

You Are What You Eat

“I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, ‘Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.’ So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter.” Revelation 10:9-10

What a weird passage! Whoever heard of eating a scroll, let alone a book? That doesn’t sound very healthy. It could give one indigestion—which, in this case, apparently happened.

It’s a strange passage, all right, but that’s what also grabs our attention. What if the Bible is more than “mere words”—inked symbols on a flat page? What if there is a power in this Book that lays hold of us, feeds us, and makes us new?

While on a brief retreat I recently read a splendid little volume that I heartily commend to you, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading by Eugene Peterson (2006, Eerdmans). Peterson reminds his readers that in the Hebrew language of the Old Testament the word hagah, often translated “meditate,” can also mean “growl.” The growling in question is what a lion does while gnawing on its prey (those of us who’ve been around farm cats have heard that growling when there is competition at the dinner bowl!)

Peterson invites his readers to imagine what it would be like to “gnaw” on the scriptures, to ingest and digest them into our lives. He writes:

Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son. (p. 18)

When we meditate/gnaw on the Word in this fashion, two things invariably happen. There will be sweetness in our mouths. The Book of Faith is “delicious.” It perks us up, fires our imaginations, sets us free, moves us out. This is “good stuff, Maynard” (remember that old Malt-O-Meal TV commercial?)

But this Word also will unsettle us. In Revelation 10 the scroll tasted sweet on the lips, but it was bitter in the stomach. Holy heartburn! We know that there are “hard passages” in the Bible, verses that rub us raw. But it’s bigger than that. The Bible itself is designed to get under our skin, kill the rebel in us, and raise up the faithful follower whom Jesus is always calling forth. Again, in the words of Eugene Peterson

This book makes us participants in the world of God’s being and action; but we don’t participate on our own terms. We don’t get to make up the plot or decide what character we will be. This book has generative power; things happen to us as we let the text call forth, stimulate, rebuke, prune us. We don’t end up the same.
Eat this book but also have a well-stocked cupboard of Alka-Seltzer and Pepto-Bismol at hand. (p. 66)

All of this will be “front and center” as our synod gathers in assembly, May 16-17 at Concordia College in Moorhead. Our theme will be You Are What You Eat, and our focus will be on the ELCA Book of Faith Initiative. Our worship, our speakers (Dr. Diane Jacobson and Dr. Mark Vitalis Hoffman), our learning opportunities, our deliberations, and our fellowship time together will all center us in God’s barrier-breaking, future-opening Word. Please consider this issue of our synod’s supplement to The Lutheran as the appetizer for our synod’s assembly as well as our ongoing engagement with the Book of Faith Initiative. Bon appétit!

Blessed Lord God, you have caused the holy scriptures to be written for the nourishment of your people. Grant that we may hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that, comforted by your promises, we may embrace and forever hold fast to the hope of eternal life, which you have given us in Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen. (ELW, p. 72)

Lawrence R. Wohlrabe
Bishop, Northwestern Minnesota Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
God’s work. Our hands.

In Healthy Congregations People Respond Graciously and Truthfully

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son,* full of grace and truth…. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” John 1:14, 17

These majestic words from the first chapter of St. John’s gospel show up in our worship during the days of Christmas, and we hear their echoes during the season of Epiphany. The newborn Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, enlightens us with God’s great gifts of grace and truth.

Grace and truth don’t merely enlighten us, though. They also—literally—lighten us, reduce our burdens, permitting us to “travel lightly” in this world. Without grace and truth, we are weighed down, heavy, lead-footed, stuck.

Grace Lightens the Load

Without Jesus’ grace in our lives, we are dragged down by sin—our sin and the sins of others who have done us wrong. We know what this means for our individual lives. If we are unable or unwilling to forgive someone else it is (as a pastor friend put it recently) “like you taking some poison, in the hope that it will kill the offender who has hurt you.”

But what does this mean for a whole congregation? What if a whole community of faith is not “lightened” by the grace of Jesus Christ? What does that look like?

It looks like a community weighed down by grudges, stalled by resentments and obsessed with keeping score. Certain ideas or topics are deemed “off limits.” This sort of condition is truly “heavy” for a community, so burdensome that a congregation can grind to a halt in following Christ and doing God’s work.

A former colleague in synodical ministry once put it this way: “I wonder if the folks in that congregation are actually using the Brief Order for Confession and Forgiveness during Sunday worship. To listen to how they’re at each others’ throats, you’d think that sins hadn’t been forgiven around there for years!”

Sound familiar? When folks in congregations are not living in the gracious forgiveness of Jesus Christ, everything goes sour. Well-laid plans and good intentions are ineffectual. The reason is that when we aren’t regularly forgiving one another, we are cutting ourselves off from God’s future. Martin Luther wasn’t kidding when he wrote in the catechism: “For where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation.” We have a future together—“life and salvation!”—when we walk in the forgiving grace of Jesus Christ.

Truth Unburdens Us

Walking lightly in God’s grace, we also are willing to face the truth. Truth-telling is another weight-reducing practice in the community of Christ.

Garrison Keillor likes to say that liars need to have good memories. Since they don’t live in the truth, liars have to work harder at remembering all the falsehoods they have uttered. It can be exhausting. Failing to be truthful in all things introduces another layer of “weight” in our common life.

It’s not just that occasionally church-folk tell fibs or even whoppers. It’s that we also like to “shave” the truth, hold back some knowledge, or cultivate secrets. A congregation will be weighed down to the degree that it allows clandestine meetings, permits some to be insiders and others to be outsiders, or fosters a cult of secrecy.

Peter Steinke suggests that such “heaviness” shows up when a congregation
· Values a rigid hierarchy, with lots of power at the top;
· Tries to “manage” or “spin” the truth;
· Puts on a “happy face” religiosity or a cozy unanimity; or
· Has a history of punishing or shunning truth-tellers.

A congregation that lives in the grace and truth of Jesus Christ will insist that all its members learn the gentle art of “speaking the truth in love.” Perhaps no text is more helpful than Jesus’ method (Matthew 18:15-22) for bringing “grace and truth” to bear in the web of relationships that make up a congregation. In short, if a congregation is so weighed down that things have ground to a halt, it’s probably time to cultivate both truth (“speak directly with one another”) and grace (“win back your brother or sister”).

FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. Recall and share with others a time in your life when forgiving someone re-opened the future for you.

2. Where in your congregation’s life are you experiencing the “weight” of sin, holding you back from fearlessly following Jesus?

3. What issue is most difficult to talk about in your congregation? How might truth-telling in this area “lighten the load” in your congregation?

Bishop Larry Wohlrabe
Northwestern Minnesota Synod ELCA

This is the tenth of an 11-part series of articles, based on the Healthy Congregations training materials by Dr. Peter Steinke. Bishop Larry encourages church councils and other leadership groups to use these articles for devotions/discussion as they meet together.

Present-Tense Powerful

American Lutheran Church of Long Prairie
Epiphany 4/February 1, 2009
Mark 1:21-28

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

Two words grab our attention in this gospel lesson, at the beginning and at the end of these eight verses. Two words stand out—two words that aren’t exactly winsome or inviting in our world.

First there is this word “teaching.” Jesus goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath and he teaches.

“Teaching” has fallen on hard times in our day. We’re not sure we want to be on the receiving end of “teaching”. We’re heard too many persons tell us that “now I’m going to teach you a thing or two.” Even our schools emphasize, not teaching, so much as learning. Classrooms have all sorts of learners or co-learners these days….but there may or may not be someone who willingly bears the title “teacher.”

Then there’s that other word: authority. Does that word warm the cockles of your heart? I don’t think so. “Authority” is way too close to “authoritarian” in our book….it makes us think about being under someone’s thumb, taking orders from them, not having our own say in some matter.

But here in Mark 1, both of these words—teaching and authority--are used with reference to Jesus, and in both cases, these words are used positively. Those in Capernaum’s synagogue are “astounded” to hear Jesus’ teaching….and they hear in it a NEW teaching….a welcome change that they’re ready to embrace.

And these same hearers are also opening their arms to the authority that Jesus brings. It’s as if they hunger for this authority, an authority utterly unlike what they had known.

So what are we to make of this?

As usual, the text of Scripture offers our best clues, starting with two things.

First, our text says that Jesus teaches and exercises authority “not as the scribes” did.

The scribes were the designated interpreters of the Bible in Jesus’ day. When their scriptures were read, the scribes offered the equivalent of the sermon on the text. They taught the Bible with authority, but it was the authority of the scribes and rabbis who had come before them. In fact, to hear a scribe teach was to hear a string of references to what earlier teachers had said about a passage. “Rabbi Yitzak says this…..but Rabbi Mordechi says that….and Rabbi Aquiba disgagrees, offering yet a third interpretation.”

The scribes taught with authority, but it was a “borrowed” authority, a derived authority. You sat, you listened, you perhaps nodded your head, you might have been intrigued or even moved….but the text of the Bible, the words of our Old Testament didn’t take you anywhere.

Jesus, however, taught in an entirely different way. Jesus’ authority wasn’t derived from earlier human interpreters of the Word. Jesus spoke on his own authority. Jesus spoke for God in such a brash, startling way that listeners couldn’t help but sit up straight. The “buzz” in Capernaum’s synagogue reflected the astonishment of Jesus’ hearers: “What is this? A new teaching—with authority!”

Jesus taught in such a way that the nearness, the right-here-ness of God was apparent for all to hear. Unlike the scribes, who tended to make God an historical point of reference…..Jesus spoke as if God were alive and well and present and very active in their lives.

But Jesus didn’t just speak the word of God. He also enacted this Word, in life-giving, future-opening ways.

Because….as if on cue….another voice interrupted Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue. There was a man there possessed by an unclean spirit. And all of a sudden the demon that inhabited the man spoke up, right there in “church.”

I imagine the demon speaking with a voice that came straight from hell: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’”

While the Sabbath-day worshippers at Capernaum’s synagogue are astounded, trying to figure things out….this alien voice makes clear what is happening. If no one else recognizes Jesus for who he is, the demon inside this possessed man lays it out plainly: “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

Now you and I aren’t so sure about this demon-possession business. We don’t expect persons with “unclean spirits” to speak up in worship!

But in that time and in that place, this was not out of the ordinary. Unclean spirits “happened,” it was too bad, but “such is life.”

Except that Jesus didn’t agree. Jesus saw no good reason why demons of any kind should have free reign in this world….so, taking matters into his own hands, Jesus spoke commandingly to the demon inside the man: “Be silent, and come out of him.”

Convulsing the man whose body had been his host, and crying out in a loud voice, the demon left the man….just as Jesus had commanded him.

And here we come to the second huge clue in this text. We see Jesus teaching and exercising authority in ways that actually change “facts on the ground.” Jesus’ word is so authoritative, so powerful, that even unclean spirits must flee before him. This poor possessed man, whose prospects in the world had been shut down by the unclean spirit within him, suddenly is given the gift of a new tomorrow. Jesus teaches and speaks authoritatively, delivering a fresh future for all who hear.

To say it plainly: Jesus’ teaching and authority “astounded” those around him, because Jesus—unlike all the scribes they’d grown up with—Jesus speaks words that actually change “facts on the ground.” Jesus’ words do what they say: freeing persons from evil, opening up a new future for all who are in earshot.

With Jesus in the house, God is no longer a quaint artifact of the past, God is no longer an “historical reference point.”

With Jesus in the house, God is alive and present and active. Jesus removes God from past-tense recollecting. Jesus makes God forever the present-tense nerve center of our lives.

And that is true today, right here and now this morning, no less than it was true in that Capernaum synagogue so long ago.

It’s true today because Jesus, “the Holy One of God,” is alive and well and present with us, even now, even in this moment….still delivering us from whatever evils may have us by the throats, still changing facts on the ground, still delivering a new future to us all.

We are people who believe, teach and confess that when we gather around the Word and the Sacraments, God shows up! Jesus doesn’t just loom large among us as a stirring figure of the past.

No. In the Creed we remove Jesus from the past and we confess that he—though crucified, dead and buried, all of it for us—is nonetheless “risen from the dead.” When we say that, we are saying that the present tense is the only appropriate tense to use in speaking of Jesus today.

This Jesus, who taught with authority in the synagogue in Capernaum, this Jesus who stretched out his arms at the Cross to embrace us all, this Jesus is now alive and present and active in our midst. He is closer to you than the person sitting next to you. He is here “for you” this Sunday morning.

Jesus looks at you, Jesus looks at me, and he teaches us authoritatively to know and to believe in our bones that our sins are forgiven, that whatever manifestation of evil that bedevils us is defeated, that he will continue to make himself known to us in the ministry of this church, and that now—even now—Jesus is catching us up in God’s great rescue mission in the world.

It all boils down to this: God is not past-tense memorable. God in Jesus Christ is present-tense powerful.

To whatever force of evil that has its icy fingers around your throat, Jesus says: “Let go!”

To whatever fear possesses you in this scary time of economic turmoil, Jesus commands: “Be gone!”

To whatever question gnaws at you, Jesus responds: “Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. Behold I make all things new.”

If you happen to have one of those old WWJD bracelets, dear friends, if you sometimes ponder “What would Jesus do?” I invite you to change just one word, and ask yourselves instead the question of a lifetime: “What WILL Jesus do?”

In the name of Jesus. Amen.