“I often laugh at Satan, and there is nothing that makes him so angry as when I attack him to his face, and tell him that through God I am more than a match for him” Martin Luther
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Gracious Spirit of God, you gave the Church your words on the first Pentecost, give us your words today that we may tell the story of Emmanuel, God with us, and through your power many may come to believe in Christ our Lord born in the flesh. Amen.
As we now approach Christmas and are in the season of Advent it is a good time for us to focus on sharing the story of Jesus. The Christmas story is widely known in our culture and that gives us both some help and some challenges. Almost everyone thinks they know the Christmas story whether they are Christians or not. That means that is a conversation that can be easy to open but, also, one where it can be hard to be heard clearly. That means we must be clear about what we want to share and be efficient in what we say and do to capture someone’s attention and that means we need to be prepared. I ask you to stop and think for a moment about why the Christmas story is so important to you as a Christian. Think about what the stories say about Jesus. His humble beginnings, the risks that Mary and Joseph took over against the expectations of their society, the threats against the baby Jesus’ life, the protection provided by Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt. Consider the faithfulness of the Biblical characters in the face judgment. How does this express the best of what we expect parents to be in difficult circumstances? How does it express good parents’ fight to protect a child? Now practice saying what hearing those stories has meant in your life. Write down what it once meant as it was told within your family, as you now teach it to a new generation and as we tell it here at Messiah in our church family. Take ownership of the importance of these stories and their impact on your relationship to Christ. Finally, consider how you would share those personal things with a friend and a stranger. Being able to share the Gospel begins with considering its impact on our own lives and why it is important to me in real world day to day living. Only when we lay hold to our own faith and the meaning of the story of scripture to our own lives can we hope to communicate to others the value of what we have to share. As we approach Christmas I challenge you to find people with whom to share the story of Christmas and its impact on your life. Tell them why its important to you and how it helps shape who you are and how you use your life. Tell them about how we share that story at Messiah in the ways in which we decorate and the ways we worship. Tell them about how our proclamation of Jesus in Word and Sacrament helps you in the challenges you face daily. Lastly, invite them to come join you Sunday mornings during Advent and the Christmas season. Invite them to join us Christmas Eve. Invite them to be part of your experience of Jesus Christ and the story of Christmas as we share it this year. And when you bring them to church with you be sure to introduce them to me and give me the information I need to follow up and make contact with them so that I can help you tell them the story of Jesus, making disciples, baptizing them and teaching them all that Jesus has commanded. As I said previously, we are partners in this work. Let us move forward on our Advent journey together learning to tell the story of the infant Christ from our hearts and our lives and sharing what the Gospel and grace of God has done for each personally. Thanks be to God for his grace and love. We are all saints and sinners and it is the story of God's love that makes us whole. Who loves not women, wine and song remains a fool his whole life long. Martin Luther
Precious savior, you gave your life for every sinner and every person who has been labeled as "other." Teach us your love that we may hold every person with your grace. Amen.
We are now a month removed from the elections. One of the most disturbing things during this past campaign season has been the way in which truth has been so easily discarded to the side of the road. Many politicians and the people supporting them no longer seem to feel any accountability to the truth. What is worse is that the people we count on to help us sort out the facts from fiction no longer seem inclined to make any effort to do so. We now live in a media culture that seems to pander for directly to ratings and profits. The art of exaggeration and hyperbole has always been part of the campaign season raising up your work or intended work in the future and criticizing the opponents weaknesses and or "questionable" goals. But what we had been immersed in for this season seemed to entirely ignore any connection to reality or at least any need connect to what is measurable and real in the world. Our President, Barack Obama, has been accused of falsifying his birth certificate, of being a foreign born plant from Kenya, of being a closet Muslim and dozens of "other" things. Every effort has been made to paint him as "other." At the same time Mitt Romney has been treated similarly sometimes during the nomination process, sometimes later during the main campaign, as other, he is a "Mormon," his grandfather was "a polygamist" who had fled to Mexico, he is "too wealthy," he is "detached" and has no understanding of what it is to be middle class. Again, he is "other." From the earliest stories of the Bible the people of God have struggled with the "other." Sometimes God defining "the chosen people" over against the "other" Canaanites who occupied the land. Sometimes the heritage of Sarah in Isaac over against the child of Hagar, Ishmael, and the two were sent away. There was the "other" in the northern kingdom Israel and the southern kingdom Judah. The was the "other" in the Samaritans and the "other" in the powers of Rome. Again and again "other" is continually present. We even find it in some of the sentiments expressed by Jesus on occasion, but always in transition to new teaching and new ways of seeing. Human beings have always been suspicious of the "other." Often it has been with good reason when an "other" arrived as a conquering force on the shore of the homeland. But when Jesus speaks of "others" like the Samaritan woman at the well, or the women who touched the hem of his garment, of when he eats with Matthew the tax collector he suddenly throws open the doors of the kingdom to the unexpected embracing the "other" and bringing them into his circle. How much more effective might we be as the church if we stopped seeing the "other" in every "other" group or person. As Christians we need to demonstrate our openness to embrace and hold fast in Christlike love to those who find themselves defined as "outside" the culture, the group or simply as "other." |
Pastor Bill Esborn
Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for 30 years and, finally, coming of age after six decades of living by the power of water and the Word. Archives
September 2015
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