From Slavery to Freedom

Where Are You Leading Us, Lord?  From Slavery to Freedom

Bishop’s Bible Study on the Exodus

Dedicated to Dr. Darold Beekmann and in memory of his wife Marlene who died on December 21, 2011.

“‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous….”  Deuteronomy 26:5

The journey that began with God’s call to Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 12—last month’s Bible study) continued in the adventures of their children, Isaac and Rebekah, and their descendants—Jacob (later named Israel) and his twelve sons.    These rich stories form the fabric of the Book of Genesis.

When we come to the Bible’s second book, Exodus, the worm has turned.   At the end of Genesis, famine had forced the Jacob’s family to leave the scarcity in Canaan for the abundance in Egypt—abundance which reflected, in part, the faithful stewardship of Jacob’s son Joseph, who rose from imprisoned slave to become second-in-command in the royal court of the Pharaoh.  (I once heard Joseph described as history’s first “Secretary of Agriculture,” who conceived of the idea of the ever-normal granary in which crops are stored in good years, to tide over the hungry in the lean years.)

The word “Exodus” means “the way out.”    Although we rightly associate the Book of Exodus with the compelling figure of Moses (its primary human actor) and the astounding escape from Egypt (the ten plagues and the wondrous crossing of the Red Sea), the book is primarily about God’s continuing journey with his people.   “Where are you leading us, Lord?” wasn’t just the question of Abraham and Sarah; it continued to animate the conversation God’s people had with their traveling Lord and Leader.

“When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.”  Deuteronomy 26:6-7

This part of the journey starts with God’s remembering of his people.   The journey we’re on with God includes times of trial and tribulation—harsh treatment and affliction.  God does not shield us from hard labor or oppression.   But also, God does not forget us when we are down.   Exodus 2:23-25 notes:  “After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”

Israel groaned.   God heard.   And God remembered his promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Notice the verbs and the intimate interaction between God and his people.

Darold Beekmann was my first bishop when I became a pastor over 30 years ago.  He was steeped in the scriptures.  After graduating from Wartburg Seminary he did graduate study in Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York.  I have never forgotten Bishop Beekmann’s observation on Exodus 2:23ff:  “When God remembers, things happen.”   When God remembers, it’s not for nostalgia’s sake.   When God remembers, God acts to save his people.

“The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm….”   Deuteronomy 26:8a

To accomplish this rescue God calls forth the unlikely leadership of Moses, God oppresses the oppressor (Pharaoh) with ten uncanny demonstrations of power, God opens a path through the sea for Israel to escape—and for Pharaoh’s army to be annihilated.    These are the familiar stories of Exodus we’ve treasured from years of Sunday School or VBS lessons, not to mention epic movies like Cecil B. DeMille’s classic, The Ten Commandments (1956), or more recently, The Prince of Egypt (1998).

But what I want us not to lose sight of is the fact that all of this—the saga of Moses and the razzle-dazzle of the Escape—was part of a larger journey God was again taking with his beloved people.   Exodus means “the way out,” –and that way out involved a forty-year journey through the wilderness of Sinai to the banks of the Jordan River.

Here’s what may not add up for us, though.   It’s less than six hundred miles from the Nile delta (in Egypt) to the banks of the Jordan River (east of Jerusalem).   Even with a company of well over 600,000 travelers (Exodus 12:37), it didn’t have to take forty years to complete that trek!   This four-decades-long journey was about more, much more, than “getting there.”   

The Book of Exodus narrates Israel’s foundational salvation-history.  Read the whole book, if you will.  But for now, let me lift up four themes that emerge Exodus—themes that speak powerfully to our own life as God’s journeying people in the 21^st century:

1.   No turning back.   Almost immediately after they escaped from Pharaoh and his army, the children of Israel started grumbling and pining for the good life they left behind in Egypt.  How quickly they forgot the oppression of their task-masters!   Just six weeks after escaping from Pharaoh, “the Israelites said to [Moses and Aaron], ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’”  Exodus 16:3

Again and again the children of Israel grumbled, and again and again they had to re-learn a hard lesson:  the supposedly “greener grass” back in Egypt wasn’t all that green, and there would be no turning back.   It’s as if the Israelites had contracted a perverse sort of amnesia! 

God had orchestrated their escape from slavery, and God would never allow them to sacrifice their freedom.  God had a preferred future for the children of Israel, and God was going to take them to it.   God’s goal for his people was nothing short of the Promised Land.

What about us?   When the going gets tough in our faith-communities, do we sometimes pine for a golden age in the past?  Do we allow nostalgia, for an era that will not return, to prevent us from doing God’s work today and moving forward into God’s tomorrow?

2.  Faith for now, bread for today.   When the Israelites bewailed their hunger, God gave them unexpected food—a wondrous bread from heaven they called “manna” (literally “what is it?” in the Hebrew language, Exodus 16:15).  Every morning there was enough manna to get God’s people through another day.  

If anyone tried to hoard this amazing bread for more than one day, though, it became infested with worms.   “Leftover” manna went bad.   God insisted on leading and feeding his people, but only in a day-by-day way.   And this went on for all forty years of their journey to the Promised Land (Exodus 16:35).   It was as if God said:  “Don’t worry about your future.  That is in my hands.  Trust in me today.”    

We echo the experience of the Israelites when we pray, as Jesus taught us:  “Give us today our daily bread.”   But is that enough for us?   Are we not, even as the church, constantly tempted to secure our future?   How can we live in the trust that God holds us and sustains us—God gives us whatever we need, but on a “one day at a time” basis?

3.  God is with us for the long haul.   Although we associate the Israelites’ time at Mt Sinai with the giving of the Ten Commandments, it was a promise that first grabbed them by the ears.   “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…” Exodus 20:2.  This was God’s first word from the mountaintop.   God committed himself unreservedly, unalterably, to being in relationship with his chosen people.   God’s gracious decision for Israel called forth their answering response of faith, hope and love—which is still the basis for our whole life with God and with one another.

Here too is a call that constantly comes to the 21^st century church.   In our well-meaning efforts to serve faithfully and effectively, we can start thinking that the church is our “project.”   But it’s not!   The church is always God’s gratuitous gift to us and to the world, grounded in God’s fierce determination to be our God--to keep announcing God’s promises that establish us, sustain us, and move us forward in God’s mission.   God is with us for the long haul, and that is enough!

4.  The journey transforms both the people and their God.  A lot can happen during forty years of traveling--as we read about in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  The journey made a deep and enduring impression on God’s people; it solidified their identity as a nation. 

But as often happens in long family trips, the travelers got on each other’s nerves.   The Israelites complained repeatedly, lost faith, and stretched God’s patience to the breaking point.   In Exodus 32, following the golden calf incident at Mt. Sinai, God was ready to wipe out the Israelites and start fresh just with Moses and his offspring—to make of them a new “chosen people” (Exodus 32:10).   But Moses argued persuasively with God, on behalf of the people of Israel (read about it in Exodus 32:11-13).  “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people,” (Exodus 32:14).

The Book of Exodus, along with other portions of the Old Testament, challenges the notion that God is impassive or aloof—an Unmoved Mover (as the philosopher Aristotle liked to say).   Rather, God is intimately connected with, and related to, the people of his choosing.  God affects his people, and the people affect God.  In the depth of this relationship--slowly over time—the children of Israel learned the rudiments of trust.   They were transformed by God’s giving, guiding, chastening hand.

This month, on Ash Wednesday--February 22, we will begin another Lenten season.  For forty days (an echo of the forty years’ journey of the Exodus) we’ll reflect anew on God’s grace toward us, God’s chastening of us, and the journey God is taking us on, with our Lord Jesus Christ.   Use this Lenten season to ponder your own congregation’s journey with God, how that journey has been transforming you, and where God is leading you.   Consider using the synod resource,  Lent 2012:  A Season for Prayer and Renewal, Seeking a New Vision for our Congregation’s Purpose in God’s Mission available at http://nwmnsynod.org/assets/documents/resources/Lent-2012-resource.pdf?utm_source=January+25%2C+2012+-+NWMN+Synod+eNews&utm_campaign=Northern+Lights%3A+Jan+2012&utm_medium=email.

Journeying with you in Christ,

Bishop Larry Wohlrabe

Northwestern Minnesota Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
God’s work.  Our hands.

For reflection or group discussion:

1.      “Bringing good out of evil,” is a theme we encounter throughout the Bible.  How do you see God bringing good out of evil in the Exodus story?   In your story?   In your congregation’s story?
2.      Why is it so tempting to get lost in nostalgia for a “golden age” in the past?   How does such nostalgia sometimes keep you or your congregation from moving ahead, into God's future?
3.      How are you (or your congregation) learning to trust God, one day at a time?
4.      As a disciple of Jesus, what difference does it make to know that the church is God’s gracious gift—not our human “project?”
5.      What is one way you and/or your congregation, during Lent 2012, might ponder the question:  “Where are you leading us, Lord?”

This is the second in a series of monthly Bible studies during 2012 focused on the question:  “Where Are You Leading Us, Lord?”   These columns are designed to equip the disciples and leadership groups such as church councils, for faithful and fruitful ministry.   Feel free to use the column for personal reflection or group discussion, e.g. church council meeting devotions/discussion.

Jesus Takes On Sin

Baudette Lutheran Parish (Clementson, First and Wabanica)

January 8, 2012/ The Baptism of Our Lord

Mark 1:4-11

In the name of Jesus.  Amen.

This first Sunday after the Epiphany always wakes me up—rather rudely!—in much the way a cup of overly-caffeinated coffee might jolt me out of my holiday slumbers. 

Christmas always concludes too quickly, with the season of Epiphany knocking on our doors….and Lent not that far behind.

1.      Why, most of us haven’t even gotten all our Christmas decorations “down” yet!  And yet today the Baby Jesus has suddenly grown into an adult.   We’d rather linger longer at the manger, with the Christ Child in swaddling clothes….but the church’s calendar forces us to see him as a full-grown man, who shaves and is making his way in the world.

It’s as if someone hit the “fast forward” button on the DVD player, making thirty years of Jesus’ life disappear just like that.

What a caffeine jolt to our systems!  

And yet, it’s probably a good thing.  For the fast pace, especially of Mark’s gospel, obliges us to remember that God in Christ assumed human flesh, not to make small talk with us, not to have a picnic or a joyride, but to get on the road and make his way toward the Cross, for us and for our salvation.

If the season of Epiphany is about the meaning of that word (Epiphany)—a revealing, a drawing back of the curtain about Jesus….this first jolt reveals something magnificent and world-turning:   that the Word became flesh not for beating-around-the-bush….but for the sake of doing vital business with us, rescuing humanity and renewing the whole creation.

2.      But there’s a second “jolt” in this morning’s gospel lesson—a second “shock to the system” that wakes us up.   Jesus doesn’t just come on the scene a grown-up adult.   He comes to the River Jordan to be baptized.

 The “jolt” in this is that baptism is for sinners.   Baptism is a washing-away of filth and dirt, a cleansing from sin.  Baptism is for the desperate, the lost, the god-forsaken!

Baptism is for sinners.   And Jesus is no sinner.

The second “jolt” this morning’s gospel lesson administers to us is that it shows us the one, the only person who has ever lived who doesn’t need baptism…and yet he comes to be baptized:  “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”

And there’s nothing “accidental” about this.   Jesus fully plans to be here, up to his neck in the muddy water, with all the sinners who flocked to John the baptizer.

Jesus insisted on getting in line with everybody else, to receive “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

What jolts us here is that Jesus isn’t the least bit shy about getting “up close and personal” with all manner of sinners.  Jesus isn’t worried about being caught in the wrong crowd.  Jesus seems to have no interest in keeping himself above the fray, unstained by contact with the ungodly.

Here, once more, we receive an epiphany, a revelation about who Jesus is and what he does.   Jesus befriends sinners.   Jesus gets close to sinners.    Jesus, we can say, even “takes on” sin.

Here’s a little image that might help.   During the recent holiday season, I washed a lot of dishes.   We hosted a staff party and family. Dirty dishes piled up, and so I spent some time at the kitchen sink.

When you’re washing a lot of dishes, the water can get pretty grungy.  In fact, you reach a point where a dish going into the water might come out dirtier than it was to begin with.

I picture the Jordan River like that.   It was literally a muddy river….but it got even dirtier with all those sins being washed away.      

But Jesus came to this dirty water and intentionally insisted that he be washed in it….even though he probably came up out of the water, dirtier than when he went in.   Because the sins of others--the sins of the whole world--were now clinging to him.

St Paul takes this whole notion as far as he can in II Corinthians when he writes:  “for our sake [God] made him (Christ) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”  (II Cor. 5:21)

3.      And this leads me to the third jolt we get in this gospel lesson:  Jesus gets baptized with sinners, Jesus “takes on” the filth of sin in the muddy river, and God lets it be known how pleased he is with that!

In a way, this is the sharpest jolt of all.  It’s surprising to see Baby Jesus all grown up, even though we still have the manger scene set up in our house.  It’s shocking to see this adult Jesus getting baptized with all those sinners.

But what defies all our customary ways of understanding God is that God looks upon this baptism scene and smiles broadly.   God is utterly pleased with what is happening as his beloved Son “takes on” sin in the Jordan River. 

God wants it this way.

And we see that here in three ways.   First, God himself “tears open” the heavens.   It’s a jarring word in the original Greek—“schizo” (related to “schizophrenia”).  God rips the heavens apart.  God makes a deliberate tear, a permanent opening in the veil that separates heaven from earth.   There is no turning back from this!  This tearing-apart of the heavens signals a new state of affairs.  Indeed, it is an overture to the New Creation God is initiating in Jesus.

Second, the Spirit of God descends like a dove on Jesus.   The same Spirit who “moved over the waters” in Genesis 1, the dove that Noah released from the ark—the dove that flew “over the waters” of the receding Flood--the Spirit and the dove come together as one, a powerful image of blessing.

And third, the Voice of God is heard, for the first time in Mark’s gospel:  “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

This is just how God wants it to be:  Jesus, doing vital business with humanity and the whole creation, Jesus taking on sin and rising from the water to begin his journey toward the Cross and the Grave, for us and for our salvation.   Capture that image—hang on to it.   This is what God has had in mind since before the first star began to twinkle.

For here, the most amazing epiphany, the greatest revelation, “shows itself” before our wondering eyes:  God knows how to do what we’re never all that sure about.  God knows how to deal with sinners.

Our natural inclination is to keep our distance from sinners--notorious, headline-grabbing sinners especially.   Someone messes up big time—and we turn away, we shun them, we keep them at arm’s length.   We avoid being tainted by them, “spoiled” by their manifest sinfulness.

But Jesus always made a bee-line toward sinners.    Jesus got close to, befriended, embraced sinners.    Not to roll around with them in the mud like a bunch of pigs, though.   Jesus didn’t “take on” our sin so that he might revel in sin with us.

No.   Jesus “took on” sin in order to “take on” sin, in the sense of defeating it, once and for all.  
Jesus “took on” sin but only so that he might “take away” sin.   We might say that Jesus captured sin, kidnapped sin, in order to bear it away from us, so that sin might no longer control us, have its way with us and kill us.

Jesus is head-over-heels in love with sinners, and that’s great news for all of us here this morning—a bunch of sinners, gathered together on January 8, 2012.

But just because Jesus loves sinners unconditionally, he does not love sin.  Jesus positively cannot stand our incurable obsession with ourselves.  Sin and Jesus have no future together.   One of them must go away,  disappear.   And that’s exactly what happened whenever, wherever Jesus encountered sin. He took it on in order to make it go away.

So Jesus cast out demons, healed sickness, rebuked the recalcitrant, and finally went to the Cross to nail sin onto that accursed Tree.   Jesus buried sin in his own Grave, to send our sin away from us forever, as far as the east is from the west.

But there’s even more.   This same Jesus who died to take our away our sins, rose again to pour out his Spirit upon the church—even as Jesus is making all things new.

And we get to be in on that action—with our Living Lord, reclaiming God’s whole creation, one sorry sinner at a time.  One broken relationship, one god-forsaken wanderer at a time.   God enlists us—forgiven sinners—to be part of that great rescuing action.

And that just might be the best “Epiphany jolt” of them all.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen.

The Light We've Been Waiting For

Kirkebo Lutheran of Perley, MN

Nora Lutheran of Gardner, ND

Advent 3/December 11, 2011

John 1:6-8, 19-28

The fact that we are in a thus-far “snowless” December is freaking some folks out.   Just the other day I was speaking with a friend, a fellow who is prone to SAD—seasonal affective disorder.   He was bummed that there isn’t snow on the ground yet.

Why? I asked (thinking that a break from the record snowfalls we’ve seen over the last few years isn’t all bad).   “Why do you miss the snow?” I asked my friend.

“It’s because the snow reflects light.  It makes the daytime brighter.   Right now it’s too brown, too dark out there for my soul.”

My friend has a point, of course, and maybe you share it.  We need light to live—to get around in the world.  Our bodies need light for good old Vitamin D, if nothing else.  Our eyes need light for them to work.  Our souls need light because God did not create us to be bottom-dwellers of the ocean, like those fish who live so far below the water’s surface that they don’t even have eyes.

We need light to live, pure and simple.

But there is a catch here.  Like so many other good things God has given to us, we need some but not too much.   If we utterly lack light, we die (in one way or another).

But too much light will kill us, too.

My mother, who passed away at age 93 this past July, was a Twin Cities girl transplanted to the family farm in southern Minnesota back during WWII.   She went from being an urban dweller to being a dirt farmer, helping my dad in virtually every aspect of farming.   My parents farmed at a time when no one was wearing sunscreen—when we weren’t conscious of the cancer-causing qualities of ultra-violet radiation.

So in her latter years, my mom—perhaps like some of you—had to make repeated visits to her dermatologist, to have a little slice of her beautiful face removed—little patches of skin cancer on her ears, her forehead, her cheekbones.

Light is good.   Without light we die. 

But with too much light, we also suffer and die.   Light is also bad.

So which will it be?  Is light good or bad?   The biblical witness is clear on this point—it always “sides” with light.   The scriptures that we treasure are not big on window-blinds, shades, curtains or sunscreen.   In our story of God, light is always something to be welcomed.

In fact, our faith consistently describes God in terms of Light—God is filled with Light.   God is always dispersing the darkness.  In the first epistle of St John we read:  “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all”  (I John 1:5).

So in today’s gospel lesson from the first chapter of St John’s Gospel we have John the Baptist.  Only, in this gospel (as opposed to Matthew’s, Mark’s or Luke’s gospels) John the Baptist isn’t so much a water-guy, as he is a light-guy.   The Fourth Gospel emphasizes John as a testimony-giver more than as a washer-away-of-sins.

John the Baptist, to be sure, was a pretty bright fellow.  No wallflower, he made a splash wherever he showed up.

And yet, to John’s credit, he knew his place.  John realized that he wasn’t the Light of God itself…but rather, he came to “testify to the light.”

There’s a reason why so many artistic portrayals of John the Baptist show him with his forefinger outstretched.  It’s because John was always a “pointer”….his finger was always directing the gaze of others toward Him who is the Light of God in this cold, dark world—Jesus Christ our Lord.

Friends, we have this gospel lesson before us in these Advent days because this Light is coming to us once again.   He who is the Light of the World is making tracks in our direction once again.

And, as always, he comes to us “in the bleak midwinter.”   Well that’s not exactly true.  Christmas doesn’t come in the middle of winter.  Rather, Christmas falls just a few days after what is technically the start of winter—the winter solstice, the shortest, most light-deprived day of the year.

In that winter darkness, when we wake up in the dark and come home from work in the dark, precisely when light is most scarce and therefore most precious, as the hymnwriters like to put it:  in the darkness of our sin, Jesus comes bearing light.

So, to give our own witness to that fact, we go a little nuts in Advent and at Christmas-time decorating our homes and workplaces in ways that spread the light of Christ.    This becomes the time of the year when I hope and I pray that the fire marshal will not visit the Wohlrabe home in north Moorhead, where Mrs. Wohlrabe (She Who Must Be Obeyed) goes a little overboard with the decorating.  She loves Christmas because so many of her decorations have her name on them (her name is Joy).   And she really loves Christmas lights and candles—and like a typical guy, I just hope we don’t knock over a burning candle or blow a circuit breaker or two and burn the whole place down.  Now THAT would be a light to behold!

But, all kidding aside, there are good reasons why we upper Midwestern “Luterans” crave the light right about now.  It’s because we know, deep down, that despite the perils of too much light, most of the time we never get enough of it.  We all have a touch of SAD—seasonal affective disorder.  We all crave the light.

And I think that’s because we know, deep down, that the light is good for us.  And the light of God that comes to us in Jesus Christ is the best Light there is—end of story!

This Light is always, always, always good for us—but not because it is always gentle with us or kind to us.  No, that’s not how it works.

The Light of God shines upon us and the first thing it always does is to expose us, to bring to light all the things that are making life miserable—all the things that are killing us.  Luther nicknamed them “sin, death and the power of the devil”—an evil trio!

God shines his light upon us, and at first we want to cover our eyes.  It’s a little like when the eye doctor dilates your pupils and shines that awful-bright light into your wide-open eyes, to see if your retina is A-OK (I know—I do that twice a year!)  It hurts like the dickens!

And God does that sort of thing to us as well.   God’s light exposes all the ways we’re pretty much “stuck on ourselves,” all the ways we imagine that the world revolves around us—what we call sin.   God’s light exposes how, even though we think we’re in control of ourselves, we’re not.   We’re prone to being led astray—we call that “the power of the devil.”   And God’s light forces our eyes to see how we do not possess life—how easily and swiftly life slips through our fingers.   We call that death.

The Light of God is good for us, but only because the first thing it does is diagnose us and confront us with all the things we’d rather keep under wraps, hidden in the darkness of our souls.

God’s Light in Christ forces all of those things out, into the bright light of day….not so God can hold them over us, but so that God can deal with that old nasty trio on our behalf.

God’s Light in Christ exposes what is wrong with us, so that it can reveal to us all the ways God in Jesus Christ is going to work to forgive sin, to defeat the power of the devil, and to put an end to death’s hold on us.

In Jesus, in the Baby who came at Christmas-time, God’s Light shone with a clarity and a power, the likes of which this world has never seen.   Jesus pulls back the curtain and puts the spotlight on who God is for us and what God graciously does for us:   ending sin’s stranglehold, sending the devil scurrying, depriving death of its stranglehold on our souls.

This is the Light John the Baptist came to point us toward.  This is the Light that is coming right toward us this Advent.

My dear friends, don’t flee from this light.  Embrace it.  Bask in its beauty.   Allow the Light of Jesus Christ to burn away all that needs to be discarded in your lives.  Let the Light of Christ shine as you decorate your homes—even if you risk getting a citation from the fire marshal!

For this is the Light we’ve been waiting for forever.

In the name of Jesus.   Amen.

The Next Generation: Going the Distance

The Next Generation:  Going the Distance

“In [Jesus Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.  And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him…”   Colossians 1:19b-22

“The offense of the Cross began with the offense of the Incarnation.  The bloody public death was foreshadowed by a bloody stable birth.”    Virginia Stem Owens, “A Hand in the Wound”[1]

Once more we enter the season that remembers how far God has gone to embrace us, to melt away our distrust, to enter deeply into our fleshly lives.   Advent and Christmas reveal a God who goes the distance from highest heaven to the lowest spot imaginable:  a crude cattle shed.

And there is nothing airy or vague about this.   It is a shockingly physical, jarringly specific, jaggedly concrete thing that God does:   taking on “bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh” (Genesis 2:23) in the wailing newborn son of Mary.

Isolating Ourselves from the Incarnation

Recently, in my daily devotions, I read a piece that woke me up to this reality in a fresh way.   Reflecting on her regular visits to the sick, writer Virginia Stem Owens observes:  “We are not so familiar with freaks as Jesus was.  He daily handled as bad or worse than what I see weekly in the hospital.  People coming to him for healing were maimed, mutilated, and desperate.  They didn’t even have on clean pajamas.  It is we who have isolated ourselves from the Incarnation.  Our fear of the flesh is so deep that we institutionalize death and decay wherever it breaks out.  There would be little chance of Jesus meeting a leper on the road today.  Any kind of freakishness, whether physical, mental, or emotional, must be put away from our midst.  People on public view must be at least superficially healthy.  The lame, the halt, and the blind may not have had Medicare in the first century, but neither were they incarcerated for their offense against the sensibilities of the whole.”  

Although they sting, Owens’s words also ring true.  And perhaps such reflections can help us resist the urge to reduce our December holy days to the gauzy, disembodied sentimentality so prized by our culture.   Owens seeks to recover “our ardor for the Incarnation and…our sense of the profundity of our Lord’s bodily death and resurrection.”   Encountering real live persons in the extremities of life—mental confusion, chronic illness, horrible abuse, tragic death—makes plain the lengths Christ went, going the distance for us and our salvation.  

“Are we not already a little secretly ashamed of the stripes that heal us, wishing instead for an unscathed savior, Jesus Superjock, borne aloft by teams of angels unwilling to let him stub his well-shod toe?” Owens asks.   “As I struggle to insert the purple swollen foot of a [hospitalized] diabetic into his slippers, I am also asserting my allegiance to the flesh, loved and not rejected by our Lord, who did not hesitate at the unhealthy, the flesh he clothed his own glory in, thus sanctifying it forever.”

The same Lord Jesus Christ who went the distance for us in his Incarnation, invites us to go the distance for our neighbors—including a willingness to enter deeply into their embodied lives.    This, too, is part of the Next Generation vision we’ve been pondering over the past year.     “Calling forth, raising up, forming in faith and spiritual leadership, and sending the next generations of disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ” is not a vague, airy enterprise.    There is nothing disembodied about it.    Our Lord invites us to roll up our sleeves and be ready to address the particularities of fleshly life, including the fleshly lives of our precious children.

The Safety and Well-Being of Children and Youth

Here’s a recent, disturbing example.  In the last weeks we’ve been stunned by revelations of long-term sexual abuse of young people by a coach associated with one of the most successful programs in Big Ten college football.    As a forty-count indictment is being drafted, new reports of abuse surface daily.   Most shocking is the fact that some responsible adults had some awareness of the abuse that was happening—but they did little or nothing to stop it.

Our Lord’s incarnation among us, deep within the flesh of Jesus, son of Mary, commits us to care about things like the safety and sexual well-being of children and youth.  Our Evangelical Lutheran Church in America stands squarely on the side of “the least ones” in such matters.   In social statements like Human Sexuality:  Gift and Trust[2] our church has identified specific ways in which we will pursue the health and well-being of the Next Generations among us.   For example:

·        “Safety within and outside the family is of overriding importance because the damage done to children and youth through sexual abuse or molestation can be remarkably deep and lasting….”

·        “This church supports the prosecution of any individual who commits a sexual crime against a minor, including people in leadership positions in the church….”

·        “The ELCA also recognizes that congregations and other ministry sites must continue in their efforts to be safe places for children and youth….This church calls for the adoption of preventive measures, including educational programs, appropriate policies, and screening of individuals who care for, supervise, or work with children within this church. It expects that all church leaders will report all instances of suspected child abuse….”

·        “Commercial sexual exploitation is widespread throughout the United States and around the world. It continues to grow and involves surprising numbers of youth by taking advantage of their vulnerabilities….The ELCA regards the over-exposure of emotionally maturing children and teens to adult sexuality as a failing on the part of adults and society….”

·        “Expanding cyberspace and other electronic media create new challenges to the protection of children and youth….How to address this problem is one of the most important child-protection issues of our time, and our church will be an active participant in this important conversation….”

·        “The sexual education of children and teens will be supported as a priority by this church. Anecdotal evidence among teens suggests that few parents or congregations meaningfully engage young people in either sex education or healthy conversations about sexuality, even though teens would welcome them….”

·        “…the ELCA reaffirms its interest in and responsibility for the care and protection of vulnerable children and youth. It understands itself as called to this mission through the vocations of its members, its own institutional practices, and its public policy positions. This work involves all adults, not only parents, since all contribute to the well-being of children and youth in untold creative ways. It understands that all children and youth, both inside and outside the church, are deserving of this church's concern.”

Going the Distance, Despite our Discomfort

You may be chagrined that I’ve dwelt on such an uncomfortable topic at such length—at the start of Advent, no less.   Yuck!  Not very “Christmasy” is it?

Oh but it is, my dear sisters and brothers.   The Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ is about God entering deeply into the thorniest, most anxiety-producing, disturbing aspects of human life.  This includes all the joys and perils of human sexuality.   While it might seem that we’ve been paying too much attention to this topic in the life of our ELCA over the past two years, in truth we have focused so narrowly on one aspect (same-sex relationships) that we’ve virtually ignored all the other facets of human sexuality.   And we adults have--in my experience in many congregations--largely left our children and youth out of this critical conversation.    

Our God, who has gone the distance in becoming flesh, calls us to go the distance with our children and youth—to wrap them in a crucible of safety, to share with them our core values about human life in all its splendor and perplexity, to listen deeply to their piercing questions, to pick them up when they fall and reassure them of God’s unconditional love, and to walk with them and engage them in honest conversation about how we might faithfully incarnate the life of Christ in our flesh—including our sexuality.

In the name of the Incarnate Lord Jesus Christ,

Bishop Larry Wohlrabe

Northwestern Minnesota Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
God’s work.  Our hands.

For reflection and discussion:

1.      Why do we tend to isolate ourselves from the Incarnation?    How do you see this played out in today’s world?

2.      When you read news stories about abuse perpetrated against children and youth, how to you respond?

3.      How does your congregation foster the health and well-being of the Next Generation?   How many of the seven topics mentioned on pp. 2-3 of this article have been engaged, in some way, by your congregation?   How might your congregation do more?      

This is the twelfth and final in a series of columns on Bishop Wohlrabe’s “Next Generation” vision (available at http://www.nwmnsynod.org/BISHOP'S%20PAGE.htm)  for the NW MN Synod.   These columns are designed to equip the disciples and leadership groups such as church councils, for faithful and fruitful ministry.   Feel free to use the column for personal reflection or group discussion, e.g. church council meeting devotions/discussion.

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[1] “A Hand in the Wound,” by Virginia Stem Owens, quoted in For All the Saints:  A Prayer Book For and By the Church (Volume IV) 1996, American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, pp. 980-982.

[2] Available at http://www.elca.org/What-We-Believe/Social-Issues/Social-Statements/JTF-Human-Sexuality.aspx#IV.    All quotations in the following portion of the column come from the section of the social statement entitled “Protecting children and youth in and for trusting relationships.”

Comfort, O Comfort...

Trinity Lutheran Church, Detroit Lakes, MN

Second Sunday in Advent—December 4, 2011

Isaiah 40:1-11 and Mark 1:1-8

On this Second Sunday in Advent I am drawn—as a moth is attracted to bright light—I am drawn to our reading from Isaiah 40:  “Comfort, O comfort my people…”

I am drawn to these words not because I need the soft, downy comfort of a warm winter-time comforter on my bed….and certainly not because I need the comfort of mashed potatoes and home-made meatloaf, those quintessential comfort foods.

No, my friends, my heart is longing for the industrial strength version of what old Isaiah sings about this Second Sunday in Advent.

Comfort.  Comfort.   What my heart longs for more than anything else…is the deep comfort, the wide consolation that can heal the dull ache in my heart since July 6^th when I became an orphan.

And this year, 2011, it wasn’t just I who lost a mother, but my dear wife, too…less than a month ago.   Grief may not be stabbing the two of us with sharp pain these days.  But it is there, like a constant, lowgrade gnawing…grief chews at us from the inside out.  

We are fresh out of parents—my wife, Joy, and I—it’s down to the two of us, now.  We are next in line.  We have our own reasons for hankering for Isaiah’s “comfort, comfort” in these dreary blue days of Advent.

And maybe you are, there, too.  Maybe you are nervous this morning because everything we thought we could count on seems up for grabs:  our economy sputtering, our government flummoxed,  the sorry state of our world—all so uncertain.  

Perhaps this old dying age has taken its best shot at you…leaving you feeling out of sorts, off-kilter, at odds with yourself.  Maybe you or someone you love is struggling with a bad marriage or a chronic illness or unemployment or under-employment.  Or maybe some great or not-so-great loss has overtaken you….a dull, nagging ache now tugging incessantly at your heartstrings.  

It makes you want time to stand still and simply allow this ancient prophecy to wash over you:  “Comfort, O comfort my people.  Speak tenderly….speak ‘to the heart,’ …bear this dull ache away.”

But this is more than a fond wish on our part.   Isaiah tells us in no uncertain terms that it is God’s will that we be comforted.    The grammatical form here is an imperative:  “Comfort!   That is:  you shall be comforted!  

“Comfort is what I the Lord your God intend to be yours.  I will make it happen.”   There is a blessed insistence here, and the repetition of the word underscores that fact:  “comfort, comfort”…..comfort must wash over you, ready or not, whether you deserve it or not.   It is God’s will for you, to be comforted.

When these verses were first spoken, God’s people were in a world of hurt, hauled off to Babylon, forced into exile in a foreign land.  And, as if to add insult to injury, they had brought it upon themselves.   God’s people had blown it, time and again—their cheating ways, their wandering eyes, their willingness to settle for less than the promises of God, their waywardness had caught up with them.  God loved them enough to chastise them—Isaiah tells us again and again—in order, though, to bring them back…back from exile.

What made it “exile” for God’s chosen ones to be stuck in Babylon was their profound sense of being away from home, cut off from the place and time and circumstance that marked their true soul, their deepest identity, their safest and most secure homing place.   Exile isn’t defined by your enemies or the strange place they may have taken you.  Exile is marked, rather, by your longing for that one place on earth that you call home.

But exile was not to have the last word for the chosen people of God.  “Comfort, O comfort my people.”   Even if you had it coming—and Israel most certainly did have exile coming!—exile was not to be the final word.   God may have allowed his precious people to be wrenched from their homeland—but God was also going to set it all aright again…even if God himself had to bulldoze a super-highway, right through the desert wasteland, as Isaiah envisions it.

And all of this—this return to home--would come about not because the children of Israel finally got their acts together.   God released them not because Israel had “learned its lesson and would never sin again.”    No—comfort, O comfort would come despite the here-today-gone-tomorrow inconstancy, the utter undependability of God’s people.  

Comfort would come purely because of who God is, how God goes to work, how God pursues God’s purposes—in us, with us, usually despite us.

The then-and-thereness of exile in Bablyon, would be replaced by a new Now…a new thing God would be doing that would spell “comfort, O comfort”….a return to home.

And for the ultimate shape of that new Now in all its fullness, we have to crack open our gospel, from the first chapter of Mark.  

One thing you and I will learn again in this “year of Mark” is just how urgent, how breath-takingly immediate everything is for Mark.   There is no beating around the bush here.  Mark doesn’t go into a big long rigamarole to get his gospel launched…

No, it’s as if Mark simply spills his words out on the page, and here it is:  “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God…”

Mark can’t hold back.  He just has to spill the beans—just like that.   Whatever Jesus means, it always starts with “good news.”   In Jesus, comfort takes on flesh and bone and DNA and personality—all of it for the sake of those he came to rescue.

Jesus is God’s embodied “comfort, comfort” par excellence.   Jesus is God’s consolation of a people who feel out of kilter, “homeless” even at home.   Jesus epitomizes the new Now Isaiah spoke of…the advent, the coming of God into our lives, to set all things right:  Jesus, Jesus…comfort, O comfort!

And make no mistake about it:  Jesus knows just what we need.   Jesus knows we need more than a “little dab will do you” kind of comfort.

Jesus knows that the ache in our hearts, wherever it comes from, will be healed only by the very coming of God into our lives.   We must settle for nothing less.

So, even as old Isaiah envisions the coming of God, along a royal highway hewn through the desert wilderness….a highway that has had all the twists and turns, all the ups and downs wrestled out of it--so that God might come to those ancient exiles….

Even as old Isaiah envisions God coming to restore his wayward people via a road through the waste places…

Mark envisions Jesus, following in the footsteps of his Way-Preparer, John the Baptist, and giving us something even better than John was able to give:  “I have baptized you with water;” cries John, “but he—Jesus!-- will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Here, we would have settled for pardon, and a fresh start, and a shimmery hope….and Jesus comes to us and gives us even more, gives us God, the Holy Spirit, God present-tense, in our aching lives, right here, right now.

And even then, there is more.  

For with the Holy Spirit unleashed among us, God keeps bringing it on, “comfort, O comfort” for those with whom we Spirit-endowed ones now come into contact.

Jesus puts a word on our lips, a word for others:  “Comfort, O comfort my people…speak tenderly, speak to their hearts.   Tell them that this is God’s good and gracious will for them:  that they be comforted in the deep and wide way that only God doles out comfort.   Tell them that their sentence is completed, their time of aching and longing is over.”

And don’t just tell them of such comfort, my dear friends.   Be the comfort, even as God became our comfort in Jesus.

Once again, comfort takes on flesh and blood and DNA and your personality, for the sake of your neighbors.

You make God’s comfort real in generosity shared, in acts of mercy accomplished, in deeds of advocacy enacted for those whose voices are drowned out by din of this old dying world.

Comfort, O comfort….that is God’s will for you and by Christ’s mercy, it is God’s will in and through you, as well.   No matter how much others might even deserve the anxiety or the aches they have, it is God’s will that they be comforted—deeply, widely, finally, in Jesus and through you--a living, breathing embodiment of “the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.”

Comfort, O comfort…

In the name of Jesus.   Amen.