Blog Posts

Are We Alive Yet!?!

6/2/2015

Gracious Spirit, Breath of Life, you renew all things. When you moved over the face of the waters you called forth life. You became our breath and life when you entered Adam. You sustain us now in the rhythm of inhale and exhale. Renew us always in the possibility of new things. Amen.

There are at least two ways to read the title above. One way is to hear it as a question of the weary asking if we are still yet alive or are we the walking dead. The second is to read it as a question of anticipation and hope. Have we received yet the breath and life of the Spirit that makes us new. Sometimes the two are inseparable.

Have you ever paused to think about the rhythm of breathing? Every breath does two very important things. With every inhale we bring in precious oxygen, the energy, the combustible that is essential for life. Equally important, however, is exhaling and expelling from the body CO2 the residue from what has been used. In with the new and out with the old. Receiving life energy with every breath and releasing back out the used and cast off.

If we really stop to think about it that exhale and expelling out of the used is in many ways the first, the a priori cycle. Out with the old and then in with the new. If we have not emptied our lungs we are unable to receive any new energy with a breath.

Take a huge, deep breath and dive into a pool holding that breath and in a short time your body will be screaming for more air. Your lungs are still inflated in the pool and at capacity but the vital O2 and energy has been spent and your lungs burn as the body demands more fresh O2 and energy.

The Body of Christ is much like the human bodies that make it up. It constantly needs to be breathing in the breath of the Spirit for new energy and vitality. It needs to receive the power of the life it receives from God. This is reflected in our hymnody in songs like "Breathe on Me Breath of God." Sometimes, however, we can forget to exhale and to release the things that are used up and no longer serve the Body and the work of the kingdom.

The challenge in every generation is to know what things have served their purpose and can be released and what is vital to the body like the skeleton, muscles, and skin. As Ezekiel stood in the valley of dry bones he spoke the word of God to the existing bones, he called for muscle, tendons and flesh to come together and then he spoke into those bodies a new breath of life. A new breath of life from God speaking life into the people dead in their isolation and exile from God. It was a new breath of life to animate dry bones and call them back into relationship with God.

In what ways is God challenging you to breath out the old, the used up, and the lifeless so that you can receive a new breath and new life? What must you let go of so that you can receive something new and fresh from God?

The same is true of congregations. What is foundational and the core that is unchanging and what needs transformed by a living Spirit. Or as Luther would suggest what is essential and what is adiaphora, What although it has been useful can be released like old breath. What must we let go of so that we can receive a deep breath of the Spirit? This is a crucial question.

As community of broken saints and healing sinners we are called to be a place where dead wood is trimmed and fresh, green wood is grafted on to the body. The community of the future may look nothing like it does today; it must, however, always be built around the Gospel of Jesus Christ that is bone, flesh and sinew. Then exhale with all your strength until gasping and letting loose of what no longer sustains life you take in the breath deep the Spirit, "cuz Dem bones, dem bones are gonna rise again, Hear the Word of the Lord."

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The Times They Are a Changin'

5/26/2015

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God of Spirit, you have blown across creation from the very beginning and in the Christ you gave your breath to the Apostles and sent them out into all the world and you breath upon every generation that faith may continue to grow. Breath on us in the midst of creation where the rate of change is continually accelerating and make us new once again. Amen.

       A great deal has been made out of recent PEW Foundation survey concerning spiritual and religious trends in the U.S.. The percentage of Christian but unaffiliated persons, meaning those not attending and not identifying connection to any specific Christian denomination grew by 6.7% from 16.1% to 22.8%. Every other category of Christian denomination including, Roman Catholic, Evangelical Protestant and Mainline Protestant (including the ELCA) all decreased from 2007 to 2014. At the same time non-Christian faith traditions grew from 4.7% to 5.9%.

http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/

        Clearly, the American religious landscape is changing. The trends above are most pronounced among 20-30 somethings but it is not limited to those age groups. It, also, cuts across racial lines.

        What does this mean for us as a Christian community and as a Lutheran community? It means that we need to continue to recognize that the faith community no longer grows internally and needs to move outside the doors of the church as I noted in a previous coverletter. It means we, also, need to consider how we do things internally. Sunday school has been a program dying across much of the church for a full generation. It is statistically being diminished quicker than worship participation. I am presently reading a book by Rev. Dr. Rich Melheim entitled, “Let’s Kill Sunday School (Before It Kills the Church).”

        What Rich Melheim is saying is that we as the church, the Body of Christ, need to recognize is that the same old, same old no longer works in our present culture. We can whine and complain about that, we can lament that, we can fear that or we can step out of our comfort zone and take risks seeking to find new ways and new opportunities to do ministry.

        What this means is that we must learn new ways of listening, seeing and engaging the world. Note that I began that sentence with listening. Just like the old political saw, “People need to know you care before they care what you know,” our path into the unknown begins with listening. It begins with listening to the challenges our families, our neighbors, our neighborhoods, and our world all face. Listening means more than hearing the words it means hearing the emotions and hearing the realities of their lives. It means having genuine interest in them as persons and children created by God whether they already know the story of Jesus or not.

        I am presently part of a synodical task force working to create an 18-24 month program for congregations across the synod based on Dr. Stephen Bouman’s book, “The Mission Table” because more than at any time in the last two generations we need to discover new ways of serving Jesus in our world.

        Bob Dylan sang, “The Times Are a Changing.” For this reason we, too, must be transformed by the Holy Spirit. Below are are Rev. Dr. Stephen Bouman’s marks of a congregation in mission. Read them, learn them and most of all pray them they can help to lead us out the door and into the world. Jesus said to his disciples, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” Hear those words, “preach the good news to ALL creation.” It is all outside our doors.

A congregation in mission is always listening.
A congregation in mission mentors and trains its leaders.
A congregation in mission nurtures communal leadership.
A congregation in mission faces paralysis with courage.
A congregation in mission reroots in its community.
A congregation in mission risks new things.
A congregation in mission makes all decisions based on its mission.
A congregation in mission is clear about money and relationships.
A congregation in mission is propelled by the resurrection of Jesus.
A congregation in mission is shaped by Word and sacraments.

Bouman, Stephen P. (2013-08-14). The Mission Table: Renewing Congregation and Community (p. 40). Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Kindle Edition.

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Lift every voice and sing!

4/13/2015

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Gracious Lord who sent out your followers to make disciples teach us to be bold in sharing the good news in Jesus Christ. Take away our fear and raise us up in the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim that Christ fills our hearts and minds with his grace moving us out into community to serve in his name. Amen

              The message of Easter is that the tomb is empty and “Christ is risen” but the message to the church is to get out and share the good news that the tomb is empty and Jesus lives. All four of the Gospels in some manner share the importance of passing on the story of the empty tomb. Mark and Matthew share a command to go out and make disciples. Luke speaks of the power of the Spirit God will send upon the disciples, the Spirit that arrives in Acts on the Pentecost celebration equipping the disciples to speak the story of Christ in a way that the people of the world can hear and understand beyond the barrier of language. John celebrates the faith of those who have heard the story of faith and believe without seeing. Whatever else is to happen following the death and the empty tomb the story of Jesus is to be passed on. It is in a paraphrase an old movie title, “The Greatest Story That Must Be Told.”

      How did you receive the story of Jesus? Most likely it was from parents and grandparents. You may have had a children’s Bible Story book. It may have been around the Christmas tree reading the story of the birth of Jesus, or in Sunday school with teachers who shared the stories of the Old and New Testaments with you and those stories of Jesus miracles, healings and more. In other words there was telling of the story. Stop for a moment, however, and think for a moment if you hadn’t had that experience as a child. How would you know about Jesus Christ and God’s love for you in him?

      If no one tells the story of Jesus Christ then how will any people know? If the early church had thought this way how would you or anyone know?

      The work of sharing the good news, the gospel, about Jesus Christ his ministry, work and teachings is the most important thing that the church can do, that WE can do. This sharing happens in a multitude of ways including charitable giving, serving, visiting, healing, feeding and most important of all telling Christ’s story.

      St. Francis is purported to have once said, “Preach the Gospel in all things, if necessary use words.” His point was that if you want to reach someone’s heart you learn to serve them and to care about them and their life circumstances. It is an empty promise to speak about a Jesus who cares for the brokenness of people’s lives but does nothing to heal it. And yet only offering compassionate care, food or water or healing, however, is an unclear and incomplete message if people do not know why we do so. The story needs to be told, as well.

    This care and telling is not a conditional relationship. It is not if you let me tell you this story I will feed. That is manipulation and not compassion. Rather it is a relationship in which we truly care for the poor and needy and that caring and serving them we stand ever ready to share the source of our compassion and love for them. Because Jesus loves them so do we. Because Jesus loves us so we serve.

     James says faith without works is dead but works without faith and sharing the story of Jesus and God’s love is to fail at the central mission given to the early church. The Gospels are clear on this, what are you and I going to do about it?

     Let us lift every voice and sing and tell the old, old story of the empty tomb and Jesus Christ and his love.

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Made New in a Word

3/24/2015

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As we enter into the story of Christ's love and passion for the world and his children fill us with the power of your Spirit that our faith may overflow and our lives be filled with trust and love for God and neighbor. Amen.

     Within a week we will be hearing shouts of, “He is Risen! He is risen indeed!” We are close to our Easter celebration and the promise of resurrection and new life.

        It is this resurrection that we confess in baptism. Lives defined by brokenness reimagined and redefined in the promise of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. When celebrated with sufficient water the image as Paul writes is one of being raised from death to new life. Broken saints becoming healing sinners.

        And yet it is not the amount of water that accomplishes this new life but rather the promise of Jesus Christ that our brokenness in sin is forgiven and that our relationship with God is wholly restored. We are now one with the God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, through the creative power of God’s Word. The power of a Word present in creation and in the person of Jesus Christ.

        In response to the question, “How can water do such great things?” Luther writes, “It is not the water indeed that does them, but the word of God which is in and with the water, and faith, which trusts such word of God in the water. For without the word of God the water is simple water and no baptism. But with the word of God it is a baptism, that is, a gracious water of life and a washing of regeneration in the Holy Ghost.” This proclaims to us that it is the promise of God’s Word that accomplishes these things through our trust it is ours with the water.

        So then what we celebrate as the words, “He is risen!” ring on our tongues is that the very power of God’s grace raising Christ from the dead reigns in us and our lives. We no longer live in fear of death but celebrate instead that our lives freed from that fear empower us to use our mind, body, and spirit to serve both God and neighbor as Christ served all of creation trusting God’s will and laying down his life.

        This conviction that our lives are freed from the threat of death and the power of sin transforms sinners into saints and broken lives into lives lived with empathy, compassion and power for others. God’s healing poured out into and through our lives. It says, “NO!” to greed and self absorption and instead extends its own gifts in the service of others. This attitude must touch our concepts of stewardship of creation, our use of our fiscal resources, our willingness to serve in our communities over against personal interests and use of our time, our willingness to be organ donors, to provide shelter, to feed the hungry, to visit the imprisoned, and to risk doing a good thing for our neighbor even knowing it may not be valued.

        To confess that Jesus has risen and that we have been raised with him from the waters of baptism is to insist that we have been and are being made different by those events. We cannot go back denying the promise of God’s Word has ever been spoken over us. We have been made wet with that Word.

        "He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!” Go in Peace and serve the Lord.

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Turn, Turn Turn ... to What End?

2/24/2015

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Lord, gracious and majestic God, during this time of Lenten reflection on our lives and our relationship with you, help us to be open to your calling and vision for our lives that we may be filled with your forgiveness and less mindful of our past sins and consciously be turning to you and your saving will for us. Amen.

       As we are now in the midst of Lent it is good to remind ourselves of the spiritual opportunities and insights the season affords us. Taking hold of these opportunities can help us to grow in our walk with Christ.

        The season of Lent is often thought of as a season of repentance, a season of letting go sinful behaviors. For many people this then often becomes a kind of spiritual New Year celebration where we give up things or make sacrifices like a series of end of winter resolutions. Too often these ideas are more self-serving rather than Christ serving.

        The word metanoia is the Greek word translated in the New Testament as repent or repentance. Often it becomes focused on as a turning away from our sinfulness and sinful behaviors. In contrast, the opposite is true when we understand its origins. Metanoia is more of a turning to something, specifically, turning to God. Metanoia in its root meanings from the Greek means to directed to or to have a higher mind or higher knowing. It is for one to be filled with the will and knowledge of God.

        So instead of turning away from our sinful self-desires with no clear place or idea of where or what we are turning to among the myriad of possibilities we instead are turning to God and divine wisdom and insight for our lives. Beginning with Jesus baptism by John in the Jordan and the temptations in the wilderness our Lenten lessons point us to God as our source or life and knowledge of how to live in a hostile and dangerous world.

        Consider this example. A person struggling with addiction may know their life is in complete chaos, broken and not working. They may again and again attempt to stop abusing drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, eating or whatever in their life holds them captive. Again and again they fail and return to their physical, emotional and spiritual captivity. In the Gospel of Matthew this very idea is put forward. 12: 43 "When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. 44 Then it says, 'I will return to the house I left.' When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. 45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. In the insights above we can expect this failure because they are only attempting to turn away from something; they are not turning to anything. Instead we need to turn to and be filled with the Spirit and Word of God.

        Metanoia points us and the addict to the idea of turning towards God and trusting that God’s love is sufficient to free us, keep us, and hold us safe from our past and our failures. Metanoia means finding a higher knowledge and allowing that new way to become our way.

        How does this happen? It can happen through daily reading scripture privately. It can be by participating in Bible Study and Sunday School in community with other Christians. It can be through conversations with people like pastors. And it can be through rededicating ourselves to participating in worship and the means of grace remembering our baptism in confession and receiving God’s forgiveness in the promises of the Lord’s Supper.

        One thing I can promise you is that if you are truly repentant in the sense of metanoia it must be about receiving a new mind and a higher wisdom. Simply trying to walk away for our past and our sins is a recipe for failure because it receives nothing new. Only God who is the source and power of all creation and makes things new. He promises us a new heaven and a new earth and that you are, also, made new in Christ.

        This Lent start now discovering ways to learn about and to receive this new life, every day and every way. Grace and peace to you from the one who makes all things new.

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Leading with Love

1/31/2015

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Gracious Savior, Jesus Christ, you showed us that true leadership proceeds from the heart of a servant. Teach us to humbly submit to your example living our lives as acts of grace towards our neighbors. In your holy name. Amen.

      As we enter the month with the Valentine’s Day and President’s Day holidays we can reflect on the connection between love and leadership. Pope Francis has been consistently taking public stances and making statements encouraging the Roman Catholic Church and I believe the world to grow and embrace the importance and the power of Christlike love to transform our world in powerful and positive ways. He is using his mantle of leadership to call the church to faithfulness in its walk with Christ.

        Valentine’s Day has become about romantic love, roses and chocolates, and has forgotten that the love exemplified by the saints of the church is less about romance and more about how Christ modeled for us the love of sacrifice and pouring out our lives for God’s call and our neighbor. Real Christ like love understands that to love another means that we are willing to accept real personal cost for the benefit of others. Christ went to the cross and died for us and our brokenness in sin not for his benefit but that instead that we may be saved.

        Understanding this gift of salvation and its accompanying deliverance from the power of death we are freed to risk living in love for our neighbor like Jesus. Understanding this real power of love thus leads us into true leadership like Jesus’, like Francis’. The power of this belief and faith is what has led Francis to challenge corruption within the church and the world. This leadership understands that sometimes the most faithful act is to challenge the powers of this world, inside and outside the church, and their visions of wealth and glory in service of self.

        Pope Francis has challenged us to see the various ways we cause destruction and harm to neighbor and creation. He has done that repeatedly and is steadily calling us forward on a new path, one that clings conservatively to the calling we all received in the waters of baptism. We are called to rise from the waters and our dead, sinful, self-centered lives to be a saint, a saint who is set aside for the work of God.

        In this new life we are to consider the impact our lives can have on each other helping and healing those in need, respecting and loving neighbor and creation. Francis has spoken about the dangers of economic systems that exploit rather support the poor. He has spoken about the damage we inflict upon creation with conspicuous consumption. He speaks of our responsibility to work for the healing the least of these and so reflect Matthew 25 in our daily living. And he has now challenged us to reflect on the responsible size of our families and how we out strip both personal resources and global resources with indiscriminate population growth.

        Christ’s love and leadership are a responsibility we all share as people called by God. How can you allow your life to be transformed by God’s love for you in Christ? How can you can grow every day in every way to reflect that love into the lives and the world around you? And how can you embrace the mantle of leadership and help show the glory of the one we call, “the way, the truth, and the life,” our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? We do these things not out of concerns for political power; we do them for Christ and to be like Christ and we accept the cost even unto death.

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Every Time and Place

1/6/2015

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Lord of creation you have made us and we are yours. May that be sufficient for us in the midst of every moment and every place. Help us to understand the failures of ideas to describe are simply the by product of our finiteness and creaturely limitations. Open our eyes and our ears to your truth revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.

      Happy New Years’ greetings have been ringing in our ears as January 1st rolled round. For those of us who live out our lives in the Church and by its calendar we will already have had a month head start on the new year which we began with Advent.

        Time is an incredibly arbitrary thing. In the ancient Roman world the year began on or about April 1st. When the calendar was changed to starting on January 1st, April Fool’s Day was derived from those who insisted on continuing to call April 1st as the start of the year. We, also, know that the Mayans, the Jewish community, the Chinese and others all observe a different New Year’s Day and marker for the count of the current year.

        All this variation only occurs within the limits of creation and finite beings trying to grasp how to mark the days of our lives. We seem to have some need by which to impose a sense of order onto the experience of past, present and future.

        God, whoever, or whatever we mean by that, has no such problem as the Alpha and the Omega, the one who was, who is, and who shall be. For God as we confess God in the biblical name of “I am” everything is present at once. For God omnipresence is not just a concept of being present in all places but, also, in all times. How can this be? Because time itself is a creature. In fact, it is a creature of the first day in Genesis 1 when God creates light, separates the light from the darkness, a first day.

        Now why is all this important? It is important because it assures us that God is present with us; present all the time, wherever we go. God is there. This concept was a huge discovery for the people of the ancient world. Often it had been expected that gods were limited to particular areas and particular lands. To be away from that land was to be away from that god.

      Israel’s God, however, traveled. He met Abram/Abraham as a wandering herdsman. God sent Joseph into Egypt and then went into Egypt to bring Moses and God’s people back out of Egypt to the Promised Land, this God traveled with the people in the wilderness with a tent for a home and was perturbed with David and Nathan when it was proposed to build God a home, the Temple. In time God sent the people into exile and the people who had forgotten about God’s presence with them in Egypt thought it was no longer possible to sing songs to God in a strange land. Again and again this monotheistic God was so much more than they could understand.

       Our attempts to define and express God today are little better than the ideas of the ancient peoples of Israel. We, too, want a sense of where God is rather than simply accepting a belief that God is. We attempt to capture visions of the world that mark God as inside or outside of creation. We create mathematical models not just from anthropocentric or geocentric views of creation, nor solar centric or galaxy centric, and not even universe centric understandings. Every time we lay out a plan that seems to define the totality of creation either in its greatness in time and space or in the minuteness of the micro scale of quarks and beyond, there is always something more, bigger or smaller. We want a theory of everything. Then we can include God in or out like the ancients.

       I doubt, however, whether God will be so defined anymore than God stayed within the limits of the temple or the Promised Land. Wherever we go God will go with us because God made us and we are God’s creatures.

         As we enter this new year or whenever we as finite human beings arbitrarily think it starts let us go believing and trusting that God goes with us. Knowing that God goes with us let us not find any kindness too small to extend to our neighbor nor any pursuit of justice too big or too far that we cannot accomplish it with God’s help. God is the Alpha and the Omega and all of creation is God’s temple.

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It's a Wonderful Time of the Year

12/22/2014

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Gracious Lord, you are the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. As finite creatures of your creation we can often be overwhelmed by the dangers and fears of this world. May we always remembers that you shared our lives in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth who saw life as something to be poured out for all without fear ever trusting in you. Teach us to boldly proclaim this faith he stirs in us. Amen.

      As the Christmas song goes, “It’s a won…, wonderful time of the year.” There is so much seasonal excitement. Stores are ringing with seasonal songs. Trees big and small are decorated with sparkling lights. Shoppers busy bustling around to find the perfect present for family members. Rush, rush, rush. Too often all the excitement misses the most important about the season. Too often it all misses the reason for the season.

      Above everything else Christmas is about the incarnation of Christ in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The message is that the God of Israel, the one who held all the terrible power of the creation, the one who raised the mountains, who dug out the depths of the sea, who stills the storms and makes the earth quake this horrible divine power has now drawn near in a human child and is called Emmanuel, God with us.

      The divine presence that is behind all the order and power of the universe has donned swaddling and accepted the humblest of beginning just like you and me. He is the king the magi seek and who is promised to the shepherd high in the fields working and caring for their charges.

      Ebola, ISIS, political division and anything else that makes our knees quiver and shake in this world, everything that scares and unnerves us is nothing compared to the power resting gently in Mary’s arms. This child shielded from the threats of this world like Herod, poverty, and an itinerant life is so powerful that even death will not hold him in the grave.

      It is because of this power captured in the promise of a child that we need not fear cancer or any illness, that we can celebrate everyday easy or hard, that we whistle in the face of darkness and the grave because God is with us. Faith and trust that God is present in the child of Bethlehem and in the promise of the Eucharistic table is all the real hope we can pray to hold.

      As we moved through Advent and watched each week for the coming celebration of the Christ child I pray we kept our ears and our hearts open so that Christ may be truly present in our celebrations. This Christmas please invite friends and family to join in the glorious festival of lights in our Candlelight Christmas service at 10:00pm on Christmas Eve.

      Please, “Go Tell It on the Mountain that Jesus Christ is Born.”

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Sing to the Lord a New Song ... or an Old One!

10/29/2014

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Gracious Lord, teach us to lift every voice and sing, to praise you and to hear your Word through voice and meter. Help us to hear the story of faith through the words we sing and share together as your people. Amen.

      There was an interesting discussion on the ELCA clergy board concerning “A Mighty Fortress” on Reformation Sunday afternoon. The original poster wrote, ”Am I the only Lutheran pastor who finds "A Mighty Fortress" increasingly less helpful? I remember one day thinking that it resonated with me and modern life. But most Reformation days it feels very disconnected to modern life and the modern church.”

      That post produced an extensive discussion that I think is helpful for us in reflecting upon how we hear hymns and weave them into our lives as worshiping Christians. I mean when we sing ”A Mighty Fortress” we are singing a hymn that is almost 500 years old. How can it possibly relate to our world today? It opens with symbolism of warfare in the first verse and our battle spiritual battle against whatever opposes the kingdom or people of God. It captures the tension between our struggles in this life in the midst of a world filled with injustice and evil and the power of God’s promises and God’s faithfulness. In the fourth verse we boldly confess that even losing everything we hold most dear in this life, house, goods, honor, child or spouse and even life God’s victory will not be denied and the Kingdom is ours forever.

      These are bold ideas and confessions and they lie at the very heart of our faith and who Jesus is and what is the result of his life, death on the cross, resurrection and ascension. As Paul says in Romans 14, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.”

      Living in an era where so much of life seems so uncertain and insecure because of ordinary life threatening illnesses like cancer, rarer ones like ALS, or new ones like Ebola, a world where life is often treated with meaninglessness by beheadings or terms like “acceptable collateral damage," where foreclosures put families out of homes but banks are protected from the consequences of their own actions with terms like “too big to fail,” our world is still filled with devilish hordes that attack faith and justice. In that world singing “A Mighty Fortress” is still an act of bold confession that despite all appearances God is still and will still be ultimately victorious and our lives secure because, “we are the Lord’s.”

    Just as it is the work of the preacher to mine the words of scripture to understand how they address us in the midst of our contemporary world so, too, we must approach the proclamation of God's Word in our hymnody. It is a task too often easily overlooked and often neglected. We should never think that it is sufficient to simply pick three hymns any more than three points and a poem or a joke is the basis for a good sermon. Our faith and proclamation demands better treatment.

      Hymns are the breath of the Spirit and they teach us the faith, strengthen our confession, and prepare us for daily living in the Kingdom of God. Each Sunday as we sing the hymns guiding and shaping our worship for the day, listen carefully to the words and reflect on how they can connect to your life. Do not just sing the words but hear them and let them feed your faith. Pray them and let old words and tunes become a marvelous new song.

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So What Does the Bible Say? Or Mean?

9/24/2014

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Lord keep us steadfast in your word, raise up in us a passion for your Word revealed in scripture,  teach us your vision and will for our lives and by your Spirit help us to walk in your ways and to be faithful to our promises to you, our neighbor and our community.   Amen.

     The issue of Bible literacy or illiteracy is a significant issue today. The vast majority of people own a Bible, about 80% of Americans report having a Bible in their homes, but many, many people are ignorant of just what is in the Bible and how the Bible came to be the book that we have today. Many people can quote Bible fragments and yet in doing so they significantly alter the historical meanings of those passages by taking them out of context. Many idioms and sayings exist, such as, “God helps those who help themselves,” people attributing them to the Bible yet they are not scriptural in origin but are quoted with a vigor and belief that they are the very word of God.

    Christianity.com recently noted, “Fewer than half of all adults can name the four gospels. Many Christians cannot identify more than two or three of the disciples. According to data from the Barna Research Group, 60 percent of Americans can't name even five of the Ten Commandments. "No wonder people break the Ten Commandments all the time. They don't know what they are," said George Barna, president of the firm. The bottom line? "Increasingly, America is biblically illiterate."

    As Americans one of the great freedoms and great responsibilities we have is our freedom of religion. This means that for us as individuals we are responsible for exercizing our own faith. Our faith is not given privilege over against the faith of our neighbor. Neither Roman Catholic, Neo-Evangelical, Presbyterian, Jew, Muslim, Krishna, or Lutheran is given advantage over each other in our confession of faith or teaching of its precepts and literacy in its scriptures.

     Ultimately, the responsibility for addressing this problem lies in the hands of parents and congregations. Together we are the ones who have made promises at baptism for the care and instruction of the baptized. Our public schools have not made these promises. Their responsibility is to educate our children in the broader studies of our world; math, science, language, history, etc. You and I are responsible for teaching the Bible and how to follow Jesus. This is our work. We made the promise.

     This means that as Christians and, in particular, Lutheran kids and adults we are responsible for being intimately aware of the Bible, its content, and how it works as witness to God’s work in and among God’s people. That means we need to make a commitment to studying and learning the Bible. We cannot teach the Bible to our families unless we as parents and grandparents are committed to learning about the Bible ourselves.

    As a pastor I take seriously the responsibility to continue studying God's Word. It is a necessity in order to preach and to teach. What a pastor cannot do, however, is to force people to make a decision to attend Bible studies or Sunday School. We can only offer opportunities and encouragement.

    I challenge all of you, grandparents, parents, and kids to get your noses in the Bible. Read it every day. Start with Mark’s Gospel and read ten verses together every day. Make it part of your saying grace at your evening meal. Don’t worry about if the break doesn’t make sense tomorrow you will continue to read. Talk together about what you read. Do it at dinner or before bed, it doesn’t matter when but do it consistently. Do it faithfully.

     Get involved in a Sunday school class in your home congregation or your local community. In confirmation class at Messiah this year, we focus on learning about the Bible. We will study how different parts and passages of the Bible functioned for their original audiences and we will talk about how it speaks to us today. We are learning the difference between history and story, facts and truth. Parents and members are always welcomed to sit in on a class. We all need to learn God’s Word, even pastors need to keep studying and growing in our understanding of the Bible.

    We are all sinners and can do better in our personal spiritual disciplines but we are, also, all saints raised by God from the waters of baptism to a new life in Christ including studying the living Word. God bless you as you immerse yourself in the Bible and fulfill our baptismal promises.

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The Times They Are a Changin'

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Sing to the Lord a New Song ... or an Old One!

So What Does the Bible Say? Or Mean?

Pastor Bill Esborn

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