ministry

Aug

2023

Earthly needs, heavenly priorities

While we live amid everyday concerns, we yearn for eternity. While we live in this world, we yearn for a better world to come. Having a focus on spiritual realities will guide how we live our lives and use our resources in the present, material world.

Earthly Needs, Heavenly Priorities

by David Sellnow

Sometimes comedians are the best truth-tellers. They can look us in the eye and tell it like it is, because they make us laugh at ourselves and our fallibilities. In the 1980s, which scholars called “The Decade of Greed” or “The Decade of Excess,” sharp-tongued comedian George Carlin said it best. He got at all of us, not just the Wall Street traders and business tycoons. Carlin’s stand-up bit was called “A Place for My Stuff.” He said, “That’s the whole meaning of life, isn’t it? Trying to find a place for your stuff. That’s all your house is. Your house is just a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time! Your house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. And sometimes you gotta get a bigger house. Why? Too much stuff! Now you gotta move all your stuff, and maybe put some of your stuff in storage. Imagine that: there’s a whole industry based on keeping an eye on your extra stuff.”

It’s not the 1980s anymore, but Carlin’s diagnosis still rings true. We earthbound persons struggle to live spiritual lives because we have too much affinity for the earthly things –for lands and lawns, for houses and vehicles, for stuff and stuff and more stuff. We easily get attached to our stuff, and our lives tend to revolve around our stuff. That can get in the way of deeper things, of spiritual meaning, of soulful relationships with one another and with God.

Life in this world is a constant tension between that which is healthy and enriching for us as spiritual persons and that which appeals to our material needs and wants. Jesus described the field of this world as a mixture of weeds and wheat growing together, side by side (Matthew 13:38). He also described how God’s life-giving word is spread across the world everywhere, but for many, it’s like seed sown among thorns. “The cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing” (Matthew 13:22). In each of our hearts there’s always a struggle between weeds and wheat, between invasive concerns of this life and productive fruit of a godly life. We are caught up in the daily struggles of a created world that has been “subjected to futility” and is “in bondage to decay” (Romans 8:20,21), while at the same time we are inspired by hopes that we have inwardly, longing for the redemption of our bodies in the resurrection, looking for eternal realities that we don’t yet see in the visible realm (cf. Romans 8:23-25).

It’s not that earthly things are bad. It’s a matter of keeping our perspectives in order. We can get so concerned about dollars and diamonds and dividends–things that seem to make this life secure–that we forget how insecure eternity can be if we don’t have God in our hearts. Having a piece of what seem rock-solid earthly investments won’t mean much when the earth gives way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea (Psalm 46:2). God has declared, “I am the first and I am the last… There is no other rock” (Isaiah 44:6,8). Even if a person could gain the whole world, what good is it if it costs him his very self, his life, his soul (Luke 9:25)? No earthly gain of any kind can ever compensate a person for the loss of life and soul, for the lack of a relationship with our Creator, our Lord.

The good Lord does know that we have daily needs. He is concerned about the well-being of our bodies as well as our souls. For example, consider a time when Jesus was personally in mourning, after he’d heard the news of how John the Baptist was murdered. Jesus went to a deserted place by himself to be alone, but the crowds of people did not leave him alone (Matthew 14:12-13). They followed on foot by the thousands, looking to him as their helper. Though he himself was in the midst of anguish caused by this world, Jesus could not look away from the troubles of the people who came to him. “He had compassion for them and cured their sick” (Matthew 14:14). Then, because they were in a deserted place and almost no one had brought food along, Jesus did a miracle to feed them all a meal. He multiplied five loaves of bread and two fish into enough food to feed “five thousand men, besides women and children” (Matthew 14:21)–so much of a miracle that they even had twelve baskets full of leftovers after everyone had eaten (Matthew 14:20).

There was a sad aftermath to that event, however. The crowds that experienced that miracle wanted to take Jesus by force to make him their king. They wanted a political icon, an economic savior here on this earth. Jesus had to pull away from them and go elsewhere. When the crowds chased him down and found him again the next day, Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you” (John 6:26,27). The people who clamored after Jesus needed him not just as their bread king, to make their bellies full and their lives comfortable. They needed him as their main source of sustenance, the true Bread of Life. Even if you get manna from heaven as a gift from God, that daily bread isn’t enough to sustain you. Jesus told those crowds, ”Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:49-51). When Jesus said that, that claim was too much for most people. At that point, many of them turned away and stopped following Jesus, stopped listening to him (John 6:66). They wanted earthly ease and comfort from him. They weren’t in the mood for challenging spiritual realities.

It can be a delicate balance in our lives and in our ministries to maintain–between giving attention to day-to-day concerns and staying focused on our eternal calling. We pray to the Lord for daily bread, that God would lead us to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving. At the same time, we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” asking God to give us his Holy Spirit, so that by his grace we believe his Word and lead godly lives (cf. Luther’s Small Catechism). Daily bread (meeting our bodily, earthly needs) is essential, but the higher calling of Christ’s kingdom puts all our daily affairs into perspective. His spiritual truths give depth and meaning to the day-to-day aspects of our lives.

People who are called to follow the Lord too easily get sidetracked from spiritual priorities. We can forget what’s important, can become self-important and self-indulgent. It’s hard to stay growing in healthy directions. It’s easy to become entangled, overgrown, unproductive. Weeds are always trying to creep into our own hearts. All churches in this world also will be both weeds and wheat, intermingled. Don’t be too eager to root out what you think is an unwanted plant or unwanted growth. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Even people who seem the most godly may have deep struggles of soul, and some who appear roughest around the edges may, in their hearts, be the closest to God. Don’t be too eager to push aside those you think have rejected the gospel or are unwilling to listen. After Saul, the self-righteous Pharisee, was turned around to see God more fully, more truly, he did not turn his back on the people from whom he had come. As the apostle Paul, he deeply desired to bring others of his own people, steeped in the heritage of Judaism and the Hebrew scriptures, to see the life and beauty that is in Jesus, to know Jesus as the Messiah the scriptures had prophesied (cf. Romans 9:1-5). Paul toiled and struggled, with all the energy that God inspired in him, to reach out to both Jews and Gentiles, to both slaves and rulers, to everyone and anyone, to make the word of God fully known and reveal the mystery of Christ given for us and living in us (cf. Colossians 1:25-29).

When we get caught up in the concerns of this world, we can forget that our mission is to everyone and anyone. In our personal lives, we can become more concerned about maintaining our own earthly comforts and neglect the others’ needs. In our church lives, we can become more concerned about preserving our own institutions and traditions than about the spiritual needs of others. We can unthinkingly place ourselves in a position of importance and crowd others out, making them feel unwelcome. Maybe we say all are welcome, but then if they come to us, we try to force them to be like us, think, like us, act like us. We fail to appreciate that God calls all kinds of people, with all kinds of perspectives, into the wide boundaries of his kingdom.

We also can make a mistake if we become so otherworldly that we ignore the everyday needs of those whom we would seek to serve in Christ. Remember that even though Jesus was drawing people to higher, spiritual priorities–and even though many of those following him seemed to want only mundane, earthly blessings from him–he still did not ignore their basic human needs. He healed the sick. He fed the hungry. He lent a hand to those who needed help to stand up, even while he was lifting souls up higher still to a heavenly hope and calling.

I’ve known some church organizations that were inconsistent in their approach to such things. Their stateside congregations very much avoided providing assistance programs to people in their communities. They said (with disapproval) that was “social gospel,” trying to fix and improve our present earthly society. They said the church’s concern should be with eternal things only. As a result, the communities in which these churches operated saw them as aloof, unresponsive, uncaring. Their ministries were stifled by their unwillingness to do what Jesus did, attending to the blind, the lame, the deaf, the sick, the poor (cf. Matthew 11:2-6), and caring “for orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27). They cared for their own, within their own congregations’ membership, but did not do so in wider outreach toward others outside, in their communities.

Yet, in foreign fields of work in developing nations, they attended to both the physical and spiritual needs of the people in the villages. They built wells for clean water. They established medical missions to provide healthcare. These things were in addition to and in conjunction with the churches they established and worship they held. That was the better model. When Christians and churches do such things because they truly are concerned about people’s whole lives, this is a sign of love moved by the gospel. Like Jesus’ miracles of love, these things will help people see what the gospel is and does within our hearts.

On the other hand, I’ve also sometimes seen congregations and church organizations offering things to the community just to hook people’s attention, while their real goal is building up their own church numbers. I’ve been at church meetings where it seemed the motivation for outreach was a desire to get more members in the building so they could balance their budget, pay the bills, keep their organization afloat. The same thing that can be said of us as individuals can be said of us as churches: Whoever wants to save their life–to preserve what they have in this world–will lose it, (Luke 9:24). If we are reaching out to others only for the sake of preserving our own institutions, we are losing our soul as a church. We dare not expect the blessing of God on such efforts. When we are willing to lose our lives for Christ and for the sake of the gospel, then we find blessing.

May God give to each of us and preserve in all of us a proper focus for our lives and for ministry. As Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6). Our primary hunger, our greatest need, is the hunger of the soul to have a satisfying relationship with the creator, to have the righteousness that comes from God. At the same time, we won’t neglect the needs of those who are hungry, those who are hurting, those who are homeless, those who are friendless. We will befriend our neighbors and community members in everyday ways, in unassuming ways, with ordinary blessings–genuinely aiming to help others, not promote ourselves.

Hopefully we can become a little less attached to all our stuff and stuff and more stuff. Our lives do not consist of the abundance of our possessions (Luke 12:15). We don’t live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4). So, let’s do what we can to share our bread, share our stuff … and share the words of Jesus and the love of Jesus and the spirit of Jesus with everyone we can. God help us to maintain both heavenly priorities of faith and earthly priorities toward our neighbors, in Jesus’ name.

Scripture quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Feb

2023

Not hiding from our own flesh and blood

We share love in a lonely, hurting world

February 5th / Epiphany 5

Readings: Isaiah 58:1-12, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20

More than fifteen years ago, The Barna Group conducted a survey of non-Christians aged 16 to 29. The predominant perception about church people was quite negative. 85 percent of church outsiders said they perceived present-day Christianity as hypocritical and judgmental. I remember when the book from that study came out, called unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity…and Why It Matters. I attended a study group that discussed the book and its implications. The group spent much of its time protesting conclusions the book presented. One participant kept objecting that survey respondents were using an incorrect definition of what “hypocritical” means. I found myself getting frustrated with the discussion. If we sat and debated whether outsiders’ perceptions of the church were unfair, we were failing to acknowledge what we needed to acknowledge. If churches and their members lived up to the calling we have in Christ, would public perception of the church be so low? Jesus said, “Everyone will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). The corollary is also true: If we are not known for the love we have for others, if we are not seen putting love into action, people will question whether we are indeed Jesus’ disciples.

Barna Group graphic from https://www.barna.com/research/christians-more-like-jesus-or-pharisees/

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (in April of 2020), religion writer Jonathan Merritt argued that some of the most visible Christians in America were failing the coronavirus test. “In place of love, they’re offering stark self-righteous judgment,” Merritt observed. He followed up with David Kinnamon, coauthor of that 2007 book, unChristian. Kinnaman told him the Barna Group continued to monitor attitudes toward Christianity and perceptions hadn’t improved. There has been a further erosion of connection by young people to churches. Kinnaman reported that “those who walk away from the church are most often struggling with the hypocrisy of other churchgoers” (The Atlantic, April 4, 2020). Many are viewing the church today the way the Pharisees were seen in Jesus’ day—as people who talk amongst themselves about being righteous, but do nothing for people in their communities. We need to exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees (Matthew 5:20). We need a better sort of righteousness, keeping the highest command, to love our neighbors as ourselves (cf. Matthew 22:39, Romans 13:8-10).

The first generations of Christians put love into practice toward their neighbors—and it led people to think differently of Christians. As Christ’s followers let their light shine before others, others saw their good works and gave glory to God (cf. Matthew 5:16). A writer about the church’s early history has said: “At no other time in the history of Christianity did love so characterize the entire church as it did in the first three centuries.” As a result, “Christianity spread rapidly throughout the ancient world, even though there were few organized missionary or evangelism programs. The love they practiced drew the attention of the world” (EarlyChurch.com).

The early Christians had a dramatic impact on their world by serving, in quiet, unassuming ways. They busied themselves with everyday actions of kindness and compassion. Some of the most prominent times when their faith-filled behavior was a blessing to others was when Christians served the sick and the dying during epidemics and pandemics (Barnabas Today, 4/19/2021). COVID-19 is by no means the first pandemic the world has seen, but now in our own lifetimes we have seen what a pandemic can do to society. Imagine the devastation in the ancient world, when there were no vaccines or antiviral drug treatments. For fifteen years, from 165 to 180 AD, the Roman Empire experienced its first pandemic. It was known as the Antonine Plague (named after the imperial dynasty in power during that time). Roman legion troops brought the disease back with them from the eastern frontiers of the empire. People died by the millions. The mortality rate is estimated by scholars to have been 7 to 10 percent of the population of the empire, in some places as high as 15 percent. One chronicler documented a year during the plague when 2000 people a day were dying in the city of Rome. What were Christians doing during those days? Early sources document that Christians did not abandon their neighbors or their communities. Rather, to quote Dionysius of Athens, they were “unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ” (quoted in Barnabas Today). In the process, of course, many Christians lost their own lives to the pandemic. But their actions had impressed the world around them, and interest in their faith grew.

Epidemics and pandemics continued to occur in the decades that followed that first plague. The conduct of Christians remained resolute in those difficult times, loving their neighbors even to the point of death. Within a couple centuries, even the most powerful opponents of the church had to acknowledge the love Christ’s people showed. The emperor Julian, an enemy and persecutor of Christianity, wrote a letter in 362 AD to a high priest of the Roman religion. Referring to Christians as “Galileans” (because Jesus was from Galilee), he wrote that Christians were making his priests look bad. He said that while “the poor were neglected and overlooked by the [pagan] priests … the impious Galileans … devoted themselves to philanthropy. … [They] support not only their poor but ours as well, [while] all can see that our people lack aid from us” (Letter to Arsacius, quoted in BibleMesh, 3/20/20). Julian, by the way, is known as “the last pagan emperor” in the Roman era. He had tried to restore the old Roman religion to dominance, but by his time, Christianity had taken too deep a hold in too many people’s hearts.

Photo by Chalmers Butterfield, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

In today’s world (and rightfully so), we look to public health departments and medical facilities to carry the largest share of helping our communities through public health emergencies. That doesn’t mean opportunities are lacking for Christians to help and comfort people in need. There are so many needs of so many kinds across all our communities. There is, in fact, another sort of public health crisis calling out to us now, calling us to reach out to others with compassion and kindness. This health crisis afflicts millions of people. Research has shown it to be as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. It’s a condition that creates a 20% overall increase in the chance of experiencing an early death (Michigan State University Extension). What public health crisis is this? Research by Cigna has shown that more than half of U.S. adults (58%) are experiencing loneliness. Researchers at Harvard, Columbia University, and elsewhere are calling it the loneliness epidemic. We are surrounded in our communities by people who are deeply lonely. Maybe we ourselves are affected by the same loneliness and isolation. Can we, as Christians in our communities and as church groups, become Christ to our neighbors who are lonely? The loneliness epidemic is not like smallpox (such as Antonine Plague) or a dangerous coronavirus (such as COVID-19). We won’t be risking our lives by making efforts to engage with persons who need befriending. If anything, our own spirits may also be lifted and encouraged by sharing life and love with others.

Many years ago, I did a year of internship in Houston, training for ministry. I was a northern boy in a big Texas city. The congregation where I served was wonderfully friendly, but I was many miles from home and away from familiar surroundings and classmates I had known. The congregation had set me up in an apartment of my own, and there were nights I would get lonely. First I felt sorry for myself, feeling like I was stranded by myself. Then I decided to make the most of opportunities that were, quite honestly, right in front of me. The church in suburban Houston had a long list of outreach contacts. My internship duties didn’t require me to go out visiting those persons as much as I did. But I learned that the best cure for my own loneliness was to take time to go out and visit with people who’d had some contact with our church. Making efforts to show friendship to other persons in the church’s neighborhoods brought benefits to me as much as to those I visited. We gave encouragement to each other.

My friends, you and I are “the salt of the earth,” as Jesus has told us (Matthew 5:13). We are here to preserve and extend the lives of others, the way that salt was used as a food preservative in Bible times. We are also here to enhance others’ lives with flavor, making life less bland. As the apostle Paul said, “Conduct yourself with wisdom in your interactions with outsiders; make the most of each opportunity [treating it as something precious]. Let your speech at all times be gracious and pleasant, seasoned with salt” in the way that you relate to others in the community (Colossians 4:5-6, The Amplified Bible).

The prophet Isaiah described the sort of actions we will undertake as God’s people, striving to bring goodness to others in our world. We will seek to “loose the bonds of injustice … to break every yoke” (Isaiah 58:6) that weighs on the bodies and souls of others. As Scripture says elsewhere, “ Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). Isaiah urged us to share our bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into our homes, clothe those who are lacking clothing, satisfy the needs of the afflicted (Isaiah 58:7,10).

Isaiah told us also: “Do not “hide yourself from your own kin” (Isaiah 58:7). “Our own kin” is more than our own immediate family or the relatives at our family reunion. God’s prophet was calling us to think of all our fellow human beings as our own flesh and blood, because, ultimately, “from one blood [God] made the whole world of humanity” (Acts 17:26, The Aramaic Bible in Plain English). So, we can’t hide ourselves away and ignore others’ needs, pretending we can’t see them or what they are suffering. All the people in our neighborhoods and communities are our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and countrymen. We want to see them, pay attention to them, be there for them.

I’m not saying you individually are going to take away the loneliness and needs of everyone around you in your communities. But each of us can do what we can do. We can start small. We can do the little things. Let me make a proposal to you. In a short time, we’re coming up on Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day can be a difficult day for persons who don’t have the companionship in their lives that they wish they had, or who are missing family members far away or out of touch. A couple weeks ago, I got an email from Etsy (an online company) acknowledging the difficulty of such holidays for lonely people. The email said, “We understand this time can be tough. If you would prefer not to receive Valentine’s Day emails from us, you can opt out by clicking below.” I was reminded of an old Peanuts TV special from years ago, when Charlie Brown went to school hoping to get many Valentine’s cards from his classmates, and got none (Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, 1975).

So, maybe if you want to reach out to someone this month, someone who may be lonely, someone who may be hurting, or maybe someone you just haven’t connected with for a while, you don’t need to make it about Valentine’s Day. You can reach out just because. You can take time to connect with others in a variety of ways. You can send a card—a general friendship or encouragement card. You can write a letter, sharing with someone what you have appreciated about them. You can go knock on someone’s door, say hello. As one Christian writer has said, “Showing love needn’t be that involved: a compassionate phone call made, a greeting card sent, a door held. If you bake, make a batch of cookies or brownies for a friend. Provide an ear and heart to listen. All these gestures communicate love” (Warner Press blog). We can apply to our own witness what the apostle Paul said of his: Our speech need not be with “persuasive words of human wisdom” (1 Corinthians 2:4, Young’s LIteral Translation). We need no fancy language or elaborate efforts. Our simple words and acts of kindness will be “a demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4).

If you’d like some resources for ideas about showing kindness or helping the lonely, here are some worthwhile ones:

Very early in the Bible, we are told, when God created human beings, that it is not good for a person to be alone (Genesis 2:18). “That statement of need actually predates the first sin” (Christians for Social Action). Think about that. Even when the world was perfect, loneliness would have ruined the joy and beauty of the Garden of Eden. How much more difficult loneliness can be in our fallen, fragile, imperfect world! We need each other. The people around us need us.

As Christ’s people, filled with the Spirit of fellowship in our hearts, let’s reach out in fellowship to others. “Whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all” (Galatians 6:10). “Let mutual love continue” (Hebrews 13:1)—not only within our own family of faith, but also showing hospitality to strangers (Hebrews 13:2). And perhaps let’s focus our efforts by thinking about those who may be lonely, those who may be isolated, those who might be the Charlie Browns of our neighborhoods, not receiving many encouragements or greetings. Let’s pick up a pen and write, pick up the phone and call, step outside of our comfort zone and visit people we may not know very well. May the light that has brightened our lives in Jesus be like a lamp on a lampstand, (Matthew 5:15), bringing light to our neighbors in our communities by each small act of kindness that we can do.

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Sep

2022

Ask God to Remember Who He Is

We pray to the One who is faithful, even when we are faithless

A sermon for September 11, 2022 (Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost)

Scripture for consideration: Exodus 32:7-14

There is a tension inside of parents. Parents want their children to be good, to behave well, to do well. You have a godly desire for them to live productive, well-directed lives. You are upset when your children do things wrong, when they run away from you, when they do the opposite of what you know is good for them. At the same time, the core of a parent’s character is unconditional love. A parent will be there always for them, will never abandon them. A parent will search and strive and keep reaching out if ever children wander off or lose their way, intent on holding them close again in love, embracing them with forgiveness.

God describes himself to us as a parent to us; he is our Father. There is something of that same tension within God’s heart and in his Word to us. God has a righteous desire for rightness, obedience, and well-ordered lives for us. The Ten Commandments serve as a summary of the Law of God, his plans and principles for us. But law alone is not the essence of who God is. Above all, God’s love for us and promises to us always will be paramount. God’s essential character will not let him turn away from unconditional love, commitment, and caring for persons he has called to be his own. Even when we are not “good children,” when we are like prodigal sons who run off and squander our inheritance from our Father in “dissolute living” (Luke 15:13), our Father is waiting and watching for us every day, filled with compassion. Hi is ready to run and put his arms around us and welcome us home the moment we come back to him (cf. Luke 15:20).

Mount Sinai (via Wikimedia Commons)

Today (in consideration of this Sunday’s Old Testament reading), we ponder what happened when Moses prayed on behalf of God’s people, and we hear that God “changed his mind” in response. This happened when the people of Israel were gathered in the southern Sinai Peninsula, at the base of Mount Sinai. Just three months prior, the people had exited Egypt amid astonishing signs and wonders and miracles that God enacted to deliver them from slavery. But when Moses was up on the mountain receiving teaching from God for forty days, the people lost faith. They reverted to the sort of worship they had seen in idolatrous Egypt. They crafted a symbol, something like the Egyptian bull god Apis, a sacred cow, an image of fertility and strength. The LORD God, who had delivered Israel from Egypt, was angry at their apostasy. He announced to Moses that he was ready to destroy them and start over, making a new nation out of Moses and his descendants. Moses, whom “the Lord used to speak to … face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11), spoke back to God and said, “No, you don’t want to do that.” Moses asked why God would turn his power against the Israelites when he had promised to carry them forward as his people. “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants,” Moses said. “You swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants.’” (Exodus 32:13). Moses reminded God of his own character, his own promises, his own ultimate goal of gospel and mercy. At that, we are told, “The Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people” (Exodus 32:14).

This is amazing, isn’t it? Do you sense the conundrum in a statement like, “The Lord changed his mind”? Haven’t we been taught that the heavenly Father “does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17 NIV)? And regarding the path of our lives, we confess that “all the days that were formed” for us were already written in God’s book “when none of them as yet existed” (Psalm 139:16). So, if God knows all things in advance, how can he have had one plan in mind and then changed plans? How is it possible that God was intending to end his relationship with the people of Israel, and then, in response to Moses’ prayer, turned around and “did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened” (Exodus 32:14 NIV)?

Well, that is the wonderful mystery of prayer, isn’t it? It also reveals something of the wonderful mystery of God’s being and how he deals with us. God already knows what is best for us before we ever utter a single prayer, and assures us that he has foreseen the whole plan of our lives (cf. Psalm 139). Yet he also urges us to pray and promises that he responds to our prayers. Pondering a deep mystery of God such as this makes us say, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it” (Psalm 139:6). It is true that God knows all things, and therefore knows in advance all that will transpire in our lives. On the other hand, it is also true that God hears and responds to our prayers, even changing the course of history in reply to the prayers of his people. We do not try to reconcile this logical paradox; rather, we acknowledge that God’s knowledge is far past our understanding.

It’s good that there are two differing perspectives in how God deals with us, because It’s not just Israel’s idolatry with the golden calf that deserved God’s punishment. Scripture says, “There will be anguish and distress for everyone who does evil” (Romans 2:9), and, ultimately, everyone is guilty of evildoing. “There is no one who is righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10). Yet the same God who handed down the law that holds the whole world morally accountable also is full of mercy for us sinners. This is indeed a happy contradiction! God’s gospel (good news) stands opposed to his law of judgment. If it were not so, we would all be condemned forever. But God makes this promise to us:

Let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts;
let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. …
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:7-9).

The higher wisdom of God goes above and beyond rules that say, “The person who sins shall die” (Ezekiel 18:2). God provides an answer to his own demands from the depths of his own mercy.

At a later time in the history of Israel, when the people were about to be carried away to Babylon for 70 years of exile, God instructed the people to pray for a return home. God’s knowledge of their future included the prayers they would offer to him. “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile” (Jeremiah 29:10-14).

Notice that God’s plans for us that look into the future include also plans that we will pray and he will respond to our prayers. That doesn’t mean that our prayers are all pre-scripted, as if God has programmed us like computers. Think bigger than that. No matter how many options or scenarios there may be, there is nothing of our lives that is outside of God’s awareness, including our prayers and all the different possibilities of our actions day by day.

The Christian church father Augustine commented on our freedom to act (and to pray) fitting within God’s overall knowledge of all things: “Our wills themselves,” Augustine wrote, “are included in that order of causes which is certain to God, and is embraced by his foreknowledge. For human wills are also causes of human actions, and he who foreknew all the causes of things would certainly among those causes not have been ignorant of our wills” (quoted from City of God, Book V, chapter 9). That’s complicated, I know, but did you catch what Augustine was saying? God’s knowledge and will is so vast and all-encompassing that every possible change of direction by us, or every petition of prayer we might offer, is included. Our God is not small!

September 11 (via Wikimedia Commons)

As Christians, we are not fatalists. We do not believe that God has pre-chosen every detail of our existence in such a way that all we are doing is going through mindless motions. We are not God’s puppets; we are his people. In a prominent confession, Lutheran theologians rejected all notions of fatalism. “We reject and condemn as contrary to the standard of God’s Word the delirium of philosophers who . . . taught that everything that happens must so happen, and cannot happen otherwise, and that everything that man does, even in outward things, he does by compulsion, and that he is coerced to evil works and deeds [such as] robbery, murder, theft, and the like” (Formula of Concord, Epitome, Article II). If you take a fatalistic view, then you would have to blame God for the behavior of the Israelites in worshiping the golden calf, as if he made them do that. Or you would have to blame God for the actions of the terrorists that caused so much destruction on September 11th twenty-one years ago, as if God willed for them to do that. In a history classroom at a religious college, on more than one occasion, I had to correct students who wanted to say the Holocaust–the massacre of Jews and others hated by Hitler and the Nazi regime–must have been God’s will because God is in charge of everything. That sort of thinking is an atrocity in itself and an affront to God’s character. “God is love” (1 John 4:8). “God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:13). When human beings do evil things, we do that of our own accord. Persons are tempted by their “own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin” (James 1:14-15).

Do not assign death and destruction and harm and calamity to the will and desire of God. Moses knew God cannot do evil. So, when God denounced how stiff-necked and unfaithful his people were, and said, “Let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them” (Exodus 32:10), Moses said, “No, Lord, that’s not who you are.” The goal of God is never our destruction but our salvation. He is patient with us, “not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Think of someone like Paul, who had been such a self-righteous Pharisee, “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” (1 Timothy 1:13). But God showed him mercy, redeeming him from his ignorance, outpouring on him an overflow of faith and love in Christ (1 Timothy 1:14). Think of how Jesus described God’s intent and purpose–like a shepherd who will keep seeking and not give up on even one lost sheep, like a woman cleaning every corner of the house in search of just one lost coin (cf. Luke 15:1-10). Emmy Kegler, in her book, One Coin Found: How God’s Love Stretches to the Margins (2019), describes God’s loving purpose toward us well. She writes: “We too are lost and dusty coins. We have gone unnoticed, rusted from others’ indifference, misspent and misused, and our friends and leaders did not see our neglect. But God, in big and little ways, has picked up a woman’s broom and swept every corner of creation. God, in big and little ways, has tucked up her skirts and flattened herself on the floor, dug through dust bunnies and checked every dress pocket. God has found us, dustier and rustier and without any luster, and held us up to the light to say: No matter how you rolled away or what corner you were dropped in, you are mine.”

We may wander. We may roll away. People near and dear to us may go astray, may lose faith and begin worshiping other things rather than staying true to God. But God remains faithful to us and to them. Even “if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). God invites us to pray to him (Psalm 50:15, Ephesians 6:18). He invites our prayers in response to whatever is going on in our lives and in the world around us. And he promises he will respond to our prayers. We pray with confidence that prayer indeed can change things, for God has promised: “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20).

We have a God whose character is anchored in a desire to rescue, to help, to save, to forgive. Our God invites us to be in conversation with him, to ask him to change his mind when we or others have sinned much “and indeed deserve only punishment.” Though “we are worthy of nothing for which we ask, no have we earned it … we ask that God would give us all things by grace”–and he does. Let us keep calling on God in prayer, asking him to remember his gospel promises. Like Moses prayed boldly even when his people were at their worst, we will keep on praying to our God “boldly and with complete confidence, just as loving children ask their loving father.”

(Quotations in final paragraph from the Small Catechism, cf. Lutheran Book of Worship, p. 1163, 1164).

Sep

2022

Humility = Service (part 2)

For Labor Day, 2022

Be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58).

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This post is a follow-up to last week’s post on Humility = Service. The thoughts stemmed from readings for Pentecost 12: Proverbs 25:6-7, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, and Luke 14:1, 7-14.

Acknowledging our ability to be of service to others

As we consider, humility and service, a second point needs to be made. If you read the previous post, maybe my descriptions missed some of you. Quite likely, a number of you are not pushy or bossy or intrusive or insistent. You let others go ahead of you. You’re patient while waiting your turn. You are completely content to be the quiet person in the back of the room. You aren’t looking to be on center stage. That may be just fine … but it also may be unhelpful. Let’s consider what can happen when you are too humble, too self-effacing, too willing to keep quiet on the sidelines.

I’ve seen humility go too far and impede godly service to one another. Too often, people who have gifts to serve and gifts to lead are asked to use those gifts, and they say, “Oh, no, not me. I can’t do that.” They sound like Moses when he hesitated, saying, “O my Lord, please send someone else” (Exodus 4:13).

I remember a meeting of a board of elders at a congregation. It was suggested that the elders do more than have meetings. The proposal was that every other month–instead of just meeting around the table at the church–they would start with a prayer, then go out to scheduled appointments to visit with church members. The elders around the table turned pale as ghosts when the suggestion was made. Doing the actual work of ministering to others frightened them.

Or there was a woman in a congregation, someone others looked up to. Others would approach her for advice. She was spiritually well-grounded, and others could see that. When her pastor asked her to take on a more formal role, as a deaconess in the congregation, she professed all sorts of humility and said she wasn’t worthy of such a role. Maybe that was okay. Maybe she didn’t need any official title. If she continued doing the mentoring she was doing when others approached her, that would still be good. But she needn’t have shied away from stepping up to higher responsibilities, when asked to do so for the good of others.

When someone calls upon you to “come on up” to a higher position of responsibility, or to a task of leadership to which you are particularly suited, are you ready to answer that call? Or will you let an excess of humility get in your way?

If you are called to come up to a higher place and serve others around you in your life, don’t wave a white flag of humility and say you’re not worthy. It’s quite true that none of us are worthy by our own virtue to serve as ambassadors for Christ. But Christ, in his mercy, has given each of us gifts and calls each of us into unique roles of service. “If your gift is to encourage others, be encouraging. If it is giving, give generously. If God has given you leadership ability, take the responsibility seriously. And if you have a gift for showing kindness to others, do it gladly” (Romans 12:8 NLT).

This principle applies not just in your church life, such as the church examples I gave. Being ready to step up and serve applies daily in your personal life. Each of you has connections, situations, opportunities that arise day by day. When an occasion arises which calls you into action, that’s not a time for you to hide in humility and say, “Oh, it’s none of my business,” or, “Someone with more knowledge or skill should be the one to help.” The situation is in front of you now. The friend or neighbor or family member is needing you now. Don’t pull back, afraid. Be open to others’ needs. Be ready to help as best you can. Most of all, just be. Be present. Be there for people when they need you. When someone is calling out with a need, recognize that God may be calling you to step into action. Often those calls are not verbally expressed, but you know the need is there. Without being a busybody, you can offer yourself as a friend, as an ally in Christ. You can offer resources and referrals to other sources of help too. Look for those real-life opportunities to be Christ to your neighbor. “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to [the position you are in] for just such a time as this” (Esther 4:14).

Acting on behalf of others is a way of exercising proper humility. You don’t use humility as an excuse in such situations, backing away and ducking out. You exercise humility by putting others’ needs ahead of your own, others’ comfort and care ahead of your own potential discomfort and fears. You use your time and your talents in the interests of others. Having humility and compassion means you’re not just looking out for yourselves. Through your love and labor, you become humble and devoted servants to one another (cf. Galatians 5:13).

In your lives, what opportunities are presenting themselves where someone is saying, “Friend, come on up” to a higher place, to an added responsibility, to a role of helping or leading others? Keep your eyes and ears open for those opportunities. Keep your spiritual senses tuned in. Recognize that God is calling you to use your gifts in humble service to your neighbor. When you see someone hungry, you’ll be ready to give them food. When you see someone thirsty, you’ll give them something to drink. As Scripture urges (Hebrews 13:1-3), you will “let mutual love continue.” You will “show hospitality to strangers.” You will “remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them.” You will do whatever you can to assist those who are feeling tortured (experiencing pain or suffering in their lives), ”as though you yourselves were being tortured” along with them. You will “continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God” by doing good for others and by sharing yourself and what you have with others, “for such sacrifices are pleasing to God” (Hebrews 13:15-16). You will welcome into your life “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind”–those who cannot repay you–knowing “you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Luke 7:13,14). In doing even just the little things for those who seem the least significant or least influential in this world, you offer service to Christ, who says to you, “‘Truly I tell you, just as you” do these things for “the least of these who are members of my family,” you do it for me (cf. Matthew 25:35-40). Amen.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Feb

2022

Why church?

I initially sketched out the thoughts of this post as a conversation starter for a church committee. I’ve reworked the thoughts for sharing here. Feel free to join the conversation here via comments, or to share with others if you find the thoughts useful.

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Why church?

Our mutual need for spiritual encouragement

Attendance at church services was dropping year by year before COVID happened. Getting people back into church settings after pandemic lockdowns added further challenges. When anyone can access anything they want online, including spiritual videos and writings, who needs church?

We do need church … although not necessarily in the sense of buildings we meet in. Martin Luther reminded us that a building “should not be called a church except for the single reason that the group of people assembles there.” Those who gather give the house of worship the name “church” by virtue of their assembly (Large Catechism: Apostles Creed). We gather in order to connect with each other and with the Lord, to keep “encouraging one another” (Hebrews 10:25). The first Christians (in the first century) didn’t have church buildings to meet in. They gathered in each other’s homes. They met wherever they could meet, knowing that holding onto hope and living in love wasn’t easy (cf. Hebrews 10:23-24). Like those first century believers, we still need community with each other and communion with God. As another writer on this blog has attested: “The benefit of having a close community with your church is immeasurable–a family of believers who all look out for one another in love, support each other in faith, and build each other up” (The Electric Gospel, 6/13/2014).

Image credit: Liturgy.co.nz

As Christians, we want to share the life and fellowship that we have with others. We invite others to join us in church–to be included in our prayers, in our songs, in listening to words from God together with us. At the same time, we seek to extend Christ’s message outside the church walls too, in every form of outreach available to us. Technology has been a blessing, allowing us to connect with persons near and far through blogs, emails, videoconferencing and live streaming. Where the ancient church used letters (“epistles”), disseminated from congregation to congregation, we rely on the information technologies of our time to stay in touch. If you’re reading this as someone outside the church, and you’re not yet comfortable stepping inside a church, by all means explore, browse, stream, investigate from where you are. Look for ministries that convey Christ’s love and welcome for all people. Listen for the warmth of Christ that says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). I pray you will find a gospel-focused ministry in your area that could become a church home for you.

I’ve known plenty of people who have been uneasy about churches and ministries, as they had been deeply hurt by religious institutions and individuals. There are now institutes and studies examining religious trauma, which usually stems from struggles within an authoritarian religion or religious group, and then persons begin to “question the true extent of what they’ve been taught to believe” (Apricity Behavioral Health, 2020). There are podcasts, such as Cafeteria Christian, for listeners who want a connection to Jesus but have been disillusioned by the actions of many professed Christians. It’s understandable for non-churchgoers to be skeptical of the church. It’s imperative for those of us who are churchgoers to show our neighbors that they truly are welcome in our community. The church is to be a place for mutual spiritual uplifting, a place where Jesus guides how we treat one another: “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37). When someone is in need of encouragement and seeks spiritual guidance (whether by attendance at church or accessing ministries online), we want them to know they have a friend in Jesus–and in us.

Let people come together–inside the church and through the extended outreach of the church–in ways that provide mutual spiritual encouragement in the spirit of the Savior.

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Just as I am, though tossed about
with many a conflict, many a doubt,
fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

Just as I am, thy love unknown
has broken ev’ry barrier down;
now to be thine, yea, thine alone,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

– “Just As I Am,” Charlotte Elliott (1835)

Feb

2022

Keep fishing

for the 5th Sunday after Epiphany
David Sellnow

Christ calls us to reach out to others, even when it seems an impossible task

If you are a church member, you recently became part of a minority in America. For the first time, the percentage of Americans who belong to a church or synagogue or mosque fell below 50%. When Gallup did its first poll about church membership in 1937, 73% of Americans said they belonged to a church. That number remained consistently around 70% up to 1999. Since then, the numbers have dropped precipitously, down to 60% by 2010, down to 47% as of 2020. (1) Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who do not identify with any religion has grown from 8% in 2000 to 13% in 2010 to 21% by 2020. In the United States overall, persons who attend church regularly represent 24% of the population, compared to 29% who never attend religious services at all. (2)

In broader terms, you’re not a minority yet, but your majority status is shrinking. Apart from church membership or attendance, how do people see themselves? Fifteen years ago, for every person in this country saying they were non-religious, there were five persons who professed to be Christians. Today, for each non-religious person, there are maybe two Christians as their neighbors in the community. (3)

Jacopo Bassano, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons

I hope such news doesn’t make you uncomfortable. I hope, rather, that it makes you feel like going fishing. I don’t mean giving up on your religious life and spending all your time at the lake. Quite the opposite—I mean that we devote ourselves to living the faith in the way Jesus called us to be “fishers” of men and women. We learn something about our calling from way Jesus called his first disciples–fishermen by trade–to come follow him (cf. Luke 5:1-11). After a long night out on the lake, catching nothing, Jesus told Simon Peter and his colleagues to go out again and let down their nets–in deep water and in broad daylight. This was not how Galilean fishermen approached their work. They used trammel nets near the surface. In deep water, the fish would typically not be within their reach. (4) Also, until the introduction of transparent nylon nets in the 20th century, “trammel net fishing was done only at night. In the daytime, the fish could see the nets and avoid them.” (5)

So, when the fishing partners caught so many fish that their nets began to break (Luke 5:6), with loads of fish so heavy they barely could keep their boats afloat, this clearly was a miracle of Jesus’ doing. It also was an object lesson in what “fishing” is like for us in a spiritual sense. Fishing isn’t easy. It takes great patience and persistence. Sometimes you can fish and fish and fish and catch nothing. Sometimes the fish just aren’t biting, no matter what lure or bait or method you’re using. Bringing others into the family of Jesus is like that. You can do outreach effort after outreach effort, and nobody seems to respond. You try every traditional method you know to do ministry and evangelism, but people from the community aren’t interested. On that day at Lake Gennesaret, it took a miracle by Jesus to bring fish into the nets of Peter and the other fishermen. On any day that we seek to bring a person’s soul into the arms of our Savior, it takes a miracle of God’s Spirit to make that change happen. After all, “no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3).

Perhaps many decades of cultural dominance by Christianity in America have made us think ministry should be easy. Historically and globally, that has not been the usual situation for witnesses of the gospel. In the present day, the world watch list details the fifty countries around the world where being a Christian is the most difficult and dangerous. Relatively speaking, here in the United States, while things are changing for us, we still have a much easier path for faith and ministry. Back in the first years of the Christian mission, times were enormously challenging. Persecution and opposition were common. For the most part, the apostles died as martyrs for the faith. (6) The early Christians had no church buildings or public presence. They met together in each other’s homes. They met wherever they could meet, sometimes in secret. They encouraged each other, but they were going against the flow of the society around them.

It was during those same years, though, that the Christian faith grew exponentially. One prominent sociologist has estimated that during the 300 years following Jesus’ death and resurrection, the number of Christians increased by about 40% per decade–continuing at that rate decade after decade until the Christian church came to be dominant in the Mediterranean world. (7) What enabled the early Christians to have such a steady, growing influence on the people around them, so that people wanted to know more about them and more and more people began to join with them?

One thing those early Christians had was a powerful story that they shared, “a better story than their neighbors. … Christians told their neighbors a story about a big God who was deeply good and who loved human beings … who out of love for humanity, stepped down into humanity to lift human beings up to himself.” (8) That story transforms the way we live our lives. Let me share an example. Some years ago, there was a woman in my congregation in Texas, just a regular person, someone like you. At her workplace, there was another woman, a single mom, who was struggling to get through the day most days. The women frequently took breaks and lunchtime together and talked about life. One day, the younger woman said to her older friend, “How do you do it? You seem to have such a sense of calm about you. Somehow you always are pleasant, even when I keep dumping my problems on you because I’m so tired and stressed and frustrated. What’s your secret? Where do you get your strength?”

Image via depositphotos.com

“Oh, dear,” her friend replied, “I don’t feel like I’m all that well put together. I have plenty of days when I’m frazzled and at my wits end. But the thing that gets me through is faith. I just keep hanging onto Jesus, because I know that when I am weak, he is strong. I go to church to get strengthened, because I need the comfort and forgiveness and encouragement I get there.”

The two hadn’t talked about faith before, but they began to talk about faith and the gospel quite a bit from that day on. That’s how relationships of faith begin. You have the same strength of faith at work in your hearts and lives, the power that God “put to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead” (Ephesians 1:19,20). Our lives have been resurrected with Christ–already now in the hope that we have, and knowing that through the resurrection that is to come, “we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thessalonians 4:17,18). So we encourage one another with these words, and we can encourage our friends and neighbors too.

When the early church was constantly growing and influencing people, “people were drawn into Christianity because of an experience of the resurrected Jesus.” (9) The knowledge and confidence and joy of the resurrection radiated in people’s lives. Remember why it was that Christians chose Sunday as their day for gathering to commune together. If anyone ever asks you, “Why do you go to church on Sundays?” you have a powerful answer. Every Sunday is a reminder that Jesus came back from the dead, alive again. That miraculous truth is the center of our hope as Christians. We “know Christ and the power of his resurrection” (Philippians 3:10). “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, he was buried, and he was raised on the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3,4). That truth is of primary importance, for if Christ did not rise from death, our faith would be futile and meaningless (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:17). “But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. … God gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:20, 57). So, as believers of that truth, we can be “steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord,” because we know that in the Lord our labor is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58).

You may feel like laboring for the Lord is too much for you, like the call to be an evangelist is too hard a thing to do. You’re in good company if you feel that way. Every faithful servant called to go and speak for God has had similar misgivings. Moses said, “O my Lord, I have never been eloquent … I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). When Isaiah was called, he said, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:6). When Jesus filled Peter’s nets, preparing to send him as someone who would fish for people, Peter said, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8). When Paul was called by Jesus, he was stunned and for three days didn’t eat or drink anything (Acts 9:9). So if you don’t feel up to the task, that’s understandable. But remember what God showed Isaiah. His mercy had touched Isaiah’s lips. All Isaiah’s guilt was gone, all sins and shortcomings forgiven (Isaiah 6:7). Paul felt that he was unfit to be called an apostle, because he previously had persecuted the church of God. “But by the grace of God I am what I am,” Paul said. He realized that God’s grace toward him was given to him for a reason (1 Corinthians 15:9,10). God’s grace has been given to you for a reason too. Each of you has a story to tell. You have a message to share.

Maybe, though, you feel like your opportunities to reach out are limited. Around the region where I live, there are many rural churches facing declining numbers in both congregation and in community. When we think of our congregations in rural America, the weaknesses and challenges tend to be the only things we see. But one ministry advisor has focused on a key strength of small congregations in small communities. ““People in rural churches share common experiences,” he said. “That’s certainly a strength of these churches. [They understand that] people are more important than programs. … Relationships are key. Everything in a small church, a rural church, revolves around relationships.” (10) I might add that relationships are key for all Christian congregations, in urban and suburban settings too.

Perhaps in the past we’ve had the mindset about our churches that if we have a building, they will come. If we have church services, they will come. If we have programs and activities, they will come. But that’s not generally true. The mission of the church is not to figure out what strategies to use to get people to come. Rather, our mission is to see what opportunities exist for us to go into all the world and speak the good news to every person (Mark 16:15). That doesn’t mean buttonholing everyone you meet and saying, “Are you saved? If you were to die tonight, where would you be?” Conversations don’t start that way. Relationships built on trust don’t start that way. The strength of your witness for Jesus is in how you relate to others, human person to human person–like the story I shared about the woman and her work friend in Texas. It’s about how you extend hope and healing and heartfelt caring to people in daily life. The first followers of Jesus “initiated the largest movement in the history of the world, and they did it without an invite card.” (11) They didn’t even have church buildings to invite people to. You can share the faith simply by a willingness to live in faith and talk about your faith.

So, keep fishing. Keep putting your nets out in the water in the community around you. Drop a line to someone you know who needs good news. Christ calls us to reach out to others, even when it seems an impossible task. Jesus also promises to work miracles of his Spirit as we do what he calls us to do, just as he demonstrated that he could bring all sorts of fish into the boats that day on the Sea of Galilee. Keep fishing, my friends … knowing that when Jesus told us to go and make disciples of all nations, in the very next breath he said, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). He is with you, and you will be his witnesses (Acts 1:8).

(1) Jeffrey Jones, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time,” Gallup, March 29, 2021.

(2) Church Attendance of Americans 2020,” Statista, January 15, 2021.

(3) Gregory A. Smith, “About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated,” Pew Research Center, December 14, 2021.

(4) Cf. “Fishers of Fish,” by Gary M. Burge, Christian History Institute.

(5) David Bivin, “Miracle on the Sea of Galilee,” En Gedi Resource Center, June 14, 2019.

(6) Cf. Ken Curtis, PhD., “Whatever Happened to the Twelve Apostles,” Christianity.com, April 28, 2010.

(7) Cf. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, by Rodney Stark, PhD, Princeton University Press, 1996. Review available in the American Journal of Sociology, January 1997.

(8) Cabe Matthews, “Evangelism in the Early Church and Today,” Firebrand, October 21, 2021.

(9) Cabe Matthews, “Evangelism in the Early Church and Today,” Firebrand, October 21, 2021.

(10) Dennis Bickers, quoted in “Rural Churches Struggle as Resources Flow to Urban Churches,” by Brian Kaylor, Center for Congregational Health, HealthyChurch.org.

(11) Preston Ulmer, “Stop Inviting People to Church,” Relevant, August 5, 2021.

Jan

2022

Hidden in Plain Sight

The Quiet Power of God’s Presence

Thoughts for Epiphany (January 6) and for the Baptism of our Lord (Sunday after Epiphany)
David Sellnow

They say that heaven is 10 zillion light years away
But if there is a God, we need him now
“Where is your God”
That’s what my friends ask me
And I say it’s taken him so long
‘Cause we’ve got so far to come

-Stevie Wonder, “Heaven is 10 Zillion Light Years Away,” Fulfillingness’ First Finale (Tamla, 1974)

Some of you might recognize those lyrics from a Stevie Wonder song from 1974. It was the case then–and remains the case always–that human eyes look for evidence of God’s presence in big, obvious ways. We think that if our lives are overflowing with an abundance of wealth and good health, that’s when God is with us. When times are hard, we assume we’ve been abandoned and God isn’t there. There are problems with this point of view. For one thing, having riches and success rarely indicates how close to God a person is. In fact, many powerful, successful persons often achieve such glories by godlessness–not by prioritizing kindness and walking humbly in the ways of God (cf. Micah 6:8). Another thing: The testimony of Scripture shows that God never abandons those who trust in his name, and he is especially with us in the experiences that challenge our faith in him.

Think of Job, who lost all his wealth and lost loved ones and cried out wondering where God was. God knew everything and was, in fact, striving to connect Job’s heart even closer to his own.
Think of the parables Jesus told. It was not the well-to-do Pharisee who was right with God as he bragged proudly of how much he’d done. The social pariah, the tax collector, who prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 9:13)–that’s who Jesus said was exalted in God’s eyes.
It was not the rich man “dressed in purple and fine linen … who feasted sumptuously every day” that ascended into heaven on the day he died (Luke 18:19-31). The beggar who sat in the street outside the rich man’s home, whose only friends were stray dogs that licked his open sores–that’s the person Jesus said was blessed.

When we look at the world through our usual human perspective, we don’t see God in action in the obvious ways we want to see.

The way we see things and the way things really often are out of alignment. As we go about our lives, we focus on physical, material, tangible things that can easily be measured. We are not attuned to sensing spiritual realities–the ways that in God “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Psychologists have noticed something called “inattentional blindness” in how we interpret the world. Rather than noticing each detail around us, we tend to concentrate on the things most important to us. We see things in the context of existing mental frameworks that we have adopted (Kendra Cherry, “Inattentional Blindness in Psychology, VeryWellMind, 5/4/2020). If you’ll allow me to apply that principle in a broader way, our earthbound primary focus notices the flow of what’s happening outwardly in our lives, and we miss many details of what God is doing in and through and underneath those events. While “no one has ever seen God” (John 1:18), the hand of God is evident in things that can be seen. “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Romans 1:20). But we tend not to look past outward appearances, and so we miss seeing important truths. “Focusing our attention on one thing can cause us to overlook another” even if the other is right in front of us. (Daniel Nevers, “A Brief History of Hiding in Plain Sight, Mills College Art Museum, 2019). That’s how we tend to be with the manifestations of God that are given to us. God shows himself, but human beings mostly fail to pay attention to these evidences of God. Spiritual realities escape our notice, hidden in plain sight all around us.

Think about the ways God made himself known when Jesus Christ came into our world. There were clear manifestations of the miracle of redemption God was bringing about, but most people’s attention was aimed in other directions. When God chooses to make his presence seen and known, he often does so in what seem like insignificant ways.

When Jesus was born, he arrived in one of the world’s least significant places, the little town of Bethlehem. The King of kings might be expected to be found in a palace, at the center of politics and power. Yet when astronomers from an eastern land came looking for him in Jerusalem, the king in Jerusalem had to consult Jewish religious scholars to ask where the Messiah was to be born (Matthew 2:4).
The woman who had given birth to Jesus was no one of fame or acclaim. She and Joseph, the legal father of the virgin-born child Jesus, both were “descended from the house and family line of David” (Luke 2:4), but otherwise they were pretty much nobodies. Joseph was a carpenter (Matthew 13:55). Mary was his teenage wife, who herself said the Lord had “looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant” when choosing her to bear the Christ child in her womb (Luke 1:48).
When Jesus was anointed to begin his work as Teacher and Savior, there was no grand national ceremony with parades and dignitaries. Rather, John, a cousin of Jesus, served as the prophet to point to Jesus as the Messiah. John lived in the wilderness by the Jordan River, wearing clothing of camel’s hair and subsisting on a diet of locusts and wild honey (Matthew 3:4). John proclaimed “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4), and people did come to be baptized. Then Jesus requested that John baptize him also–“to fulfill all righteousness,” as Jesus insisted (Matthew 3:15). At Jesus’ baptism, “the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:22). But I wonder if most people who were there when that happened heard and saw things differently. “Look at that, a dove just landed on him,” I imagine many said, not understanding the spiritual significance. And, as happened on another occasion when the Father spoke audibly from heaven, rather than hearing the words “This is my Son, the Beloved,” the crowd standing there may well have thought, “Was that thunder?” (cf. John 12:28-29).

Our eyes and ears aren’t attuned in such a way that we grasp the workings of God, even when they happen right in front of us. Think of baptism itself, the holy act by which God claims us as his own. What do we see? Ordinary water, nothing special. A few simple words, as we are baptized into “the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). When we have our baptisms, there is no dove that miraculously appears or audible voice speaking from the skies. But with eyes of faith, we confess that “baptism is not simply plain water,” but that “it is water used according to God’s command and connected with God’s word.” We believe beyond what we can see, that baptism “brings about forgiveness of sins, redeems from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe” (Martin Luther’s Small Catechism). So also with communion, the Lord’s Supper. We eat and drink the most basic sorts of things – little bits of bread, small sips of wine. But because such simple actions were directed by Christ himself, whoever believes his words “has what they declare, namely, forgiveness of sin” (Martin Luther’s Small Catechism).

Such is God’s way of making himself known to us, his way of connecting himself to us, of doing the miraculous for us. It’s not typically in the spectacular, but in things that seem everyday and ordinary. Do you remember Naaman, “commander of the army of the king of Aram, a great man and in high favor”–but who suffered from the disease of leprosy (2 Kings 5:1)? Naaman had a slave girl who had been captured from the people of Israel. The slave girl urged her master Naaman to go see the prophet in Israel for healing. Naaman went to Israel, and the prophet Elisha merely sent a messenger to tell him to go wash in the Jordan River seven times and he’d be healed (2 Kings 5:10). Naaman became angry and began to leave, because he was expecting some great and mighty prophet to “come out and stand and call on the name of the Lord” and wave his hand over Naaman in dramatic fashion and cure the disease (2 Kings 5:11). Naaman had to be convinced by others of his servants, who said to him, “If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it” (2 Kings 5:13)? So, Naaman did the simple thing the prophet had said, and he was healed.

That’s how it often is with God. As Elisha’s teacher, Elijah, had learned, don’t expect God to show up by splitting mountains in half or shaking the earth beneath our feet. God more likely will make his presence known in what Elijah heard as the “sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:12), or “a still, small voice,” as the King James Version of the Bible expressed it. Every day, in all sorts of seemingly ordinary ways, God makes his presence known and shares his grace by the life and witness of people who are acting in his name.

There is the son who visits his elderly mother every weekend, spends time with her, takes care of chores around the house for her, cooks a meal for her. And when she has to go to a nursing home, the son continues to visit, even as his mother becomes more confined, her health diminishes, and her memory fades away.
There is the mother whose toddler is throwing a tantrum and cannot calm down, so she sits down on the floor and gathers the child in her arms and just holds on, closely, securely, through all the kicks and screams, until the toddler finally melts into her embrace and hugs her back and says, “I’m sorry, Momma. I love you, Momma.”
There is the student who sees a schoolmate being picked on by others, avoided and ostracized and gossiped about for being different–and this classmate seeks out and befriends the outcast. They sit together in the cafeteria, spend time together studying and not studying (just hanging out), making it clear to everyone that acceptance and understanding are better than prejudice and pettiness.

Those could be just human actions of kindness, yes. In many cases, though, they are far more than that. They are the acts of God’s people making God’s love known in the ordinary course of events, doing things that are, in fact, extraordinary. God is working to make himself known to others through you–ordinary people in your everyday lives. Nothing spectacular. Nothing dazzling. Just you laboring patiently to serve your family, your neighbors, your community. Just you loving earnestly and committedly, caring for others with hearts that have been invigorated by the Spirit of Christ. That’s your calling as God’s people. God says to each of you, “I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. … You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you” (Isaiah 43:1,4). He also says, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior” (Isaiah 43:2). How does that help, that strength, that rescue from the Lord usually show up in your lives when you are hurting or in trouble? Through the actions of people doing simple things, basic, necessary things, in God’s name. The neighbor who shovels your sidewalk or snowblows your driveway–because he knows you are away from home, caring for a sick relative. Fellow church members who take turns dropping off meals at your home–because you are the caregiver for a disabled family member or for your spouse who is going through chemotherapy, and they want to help bear your burdens. Complete strangers who contribute to an online plea for funds to help with extensive medical bills incurred from a major surgery or a lengthy stay in the hospital ICU recovering from disease.

Every now and then, God has intervened in history with supernatural interruptions of natural events. But more often, God does his work through us, his people, in less astonishing ways. Let me remind you again of the experience of God’s prophet Elijah. Elijah had the experience of God making his presence obvious and forceful and explosive. Elijah prevailed over the enemies of God by calling on God to do a miracle, to consume a sacrifice with fire sent from heaven. And God did so, spectacularly. “The fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench” around Elijah’s offering (1 Kings 18:38). But the perspective of the world doesn’t readily change when a miracle like that happens. In fact, the enemies of God (and of Elijah) only got more determined against God’s plans and against God’s prophet. Death threats were issued from the royal household against Elijah, and he ran. He ran back to the mountain where God had once revealed himself to Moses, and felt ready to die. “I’ve had enough,” he said to God. “Take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). Instead, God told him to get up and he would reveal himself to Elijah. God did show himself, but not in expected ways. Not in a mighty, raging wind. Not in a rock-smashing earthquake. God revealed himself In a still, small voice, in the “sound of sheer silence” (I kings 19).

God’s powerful presence is often in the still, small voice–a voice carried out into the world by individuals, one at a time, by people like Elijah, by people like you and me. God’s way of enacting change in the hearts of people, one person at a time, is by the simple testimony of his words on our lips and his love lived out in our lives. He brings about the miracle of salvation by one baptism, then another baptism, then another, sending his Spirit to live in each baptized person’s heart and life. He carries out the actions of salvation in our hearts and lives, as we who have been saved by grace through faith, “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Ephesians 3:10), go about doing those works on behalf of one another, and for our neighbors, and for our communities.

When you feel like God is 10 zillion light years away, like God is so far distant from your life that you wonder if he’s even there at all, look again. Listen again. Feel again. Take notice of the little things, the inconspicuous ways that God is showing himself. Others’ actions. Your own actions. All the everyday words and actions whereby God makes his presence known and shares his peace among us. The smallest of kind words and actions toward one of the least of those whom Jesus considers his brothers and sisters are gifts to Jesus and blessings from Jesus (cf. Matthew 25:40). As Martin Luther taught, “God is so in control that the good we do is really God’s work. We’re nothing but the hands of Christ …. In the good we do, we are ‘little Christs’ to each other” (Luther’s Works, Vol.34, p.111, Volu.24, p.226, Vol. 31, p.367-368, quoted by Mark Ellingson in Living Lutheran, August 11, 2017). May our lives each day appreciate and extend the Epiphany of Christ in this way.

Dec

2021

Living in hope (though life is difficult)

We wait for the Lord — hopefully, patiently, responsibly

Message for 3rd Sunday of Advent
by David Sellnow

Readings for the day: Zephaniah 3:14-20, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18

Stephanie grew up under the weight of demanding, overbearing parents. Their way was always the right way, and their children were going to toe the line and become obedient, upstanding, model citizens. Stephanie’s older sister fit the model perfectly. At the strict religious school their parents enrolled them in, Stephanie’s sister got all A’s and was considered the impeccable child. Stephanie lived in her sister’s shadow, got mostly C’s, and was seen as far less than ideal. Later in life, Stephanie gave up on church, because the sternness of the church in which she was raised made her feel that who she was and how she was always was wrong. Her parents were mortified when she stopped going to church, and they distanced themselves more and more from her. Stephanie lived her life, but she lived with a sense of shame, felt like an outcast from her family, and was haunted by a lingering sense of judgment looming over her.

Derrick had labored diligently year after year. He always had a job, sometimes a couple of jobs at a time. He would do whatever he could to keep shoes on his kids’ feet and food on the table. He didn’t give a lot of attention to his own needs, because he was too busy taking care of the needs of others. If he could do that, he was happy. Then one day, the manufacturing plant where Derrick worked shut down. He found himself out of work for the first time in his life. The town where he lived with his family was shrinking. Derrick was in his mid-50s. Finding a new job was no easy task. The bills began to pile up while Derrick kept applying for any and every position (but not getting hired). He told employers in the bigger city 40 miles away that he could commute. They looked at him skeptically when he got as far as getting an interview … and that’s as far as he ever got, it seemed. Derrick began to feel worthless to anyone and a failure to his family. When he started feeling fatigued and worn down physically, he figured it was all part of how generally low he was feeling. But the physical symptoms got worse and worse. He wouldn’t go to the doctor because he no longer had insurance. He eventually did go to the emergency room–when his wife, who had struggled by his side during the difficult months, found him collapsed on the floor and had to call an ambulance. Derrick’s life had gone from stability to disaster in a short span of time. He needed help. He needed health. He needed to find hope again somehow.

Those are just a couple of stories of shame, of judgment, of disability, of disaster. What is your story? What is your shame? What makes you feel weak and lame and hopeless and helpless? What are the judgments against you that make you feel like an outcast? What difficulties and disasters have you encountered? I’m not asking you to give those testimonials here in comments/replies to this blog post. I anticipate, though, that each of you has had (or now has or will have) tales you could tell of troubles and worries and woes. What do you do in the midst of your hurts and hardships and upheavals? Where do you turn?

Listen to the voice of a prophet calling out to you, telling you where to turn. Inspired by the Lord, Zephaniah said:

The Lord has taken away the judgments against you; he has turned away your enemies. … You shall fear disaster no more. … Do not let your hands grow weak. The Lord, your God, is in your midst. … He will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love. “I will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach for it. I will deal with all your oppressors. … I will save the lame and gather the outcast,and I will change their shame into praise. … I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you; for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes,” says the Lord (Zephaniah 3:14-20 selected verses).

You may be unfamiliar with the context of the times in which Zephaniah was writing. His ministry was, after all, over 26 centuries ago, around 630 BC (Christianity.com, Bible.org). Zephaniah’s ministry likely was very early in the reign of King Josiah. Josiah came to the throne as just a boy, and later in his career sought to institute religious reforms in the nation of Judah, because the people had lost track of the law of God (cf. 2 Kings 22, 23). But those reform attempts hadn’t happened yet. Zephaniah was speaking to a nation that had been living under God’s blessing for several hundred years and was growing distant in their hearts from God. They were worshiping other things, following other priorities, with individuals seeking their own advantage and ignoring their neighbor’s needs. Sound familiar? Sound a little like our own lives in our own times? Back in those Old Testament times, Josiah’s reforms were short-lived. A couple decades after Zephaniah, the prophet Jeremiah would be speaking out again, even more dramatically. When Zephaniah called for repentance and a return to God, regular, everyday people in Judah lived under the sway of the powerful and immoral in their own nation—and they were caught up in plenty of apostasy themselves. One commentator described the cultural context as a time “of great darkness … of violence and pain,” adding: “God never brings destruction to a place or a people that haven’t already destroyed themselves” (April Motl on Crosswalk.com). As Zephaniah (and later Jeremiah) foretold, there next would come a time when the regular, everyday people of God would live under the sway of other powerful nations and people, their fates held in the hands of first the Bablylonians and then the Medes and the Persians.

At the same time as Zephaniah prophesied impending judgment from God, however, he also gave the people a message of hope. When God judges or destroys, he does so “for the purpose of protecting or rebuilding” (April Motl on Crosswalk.com). The hope held out by Zephaniah would find some fulfillment when Judah was restored from captivity under Babylon and Persia. Hope would be fulfilled still more when the Messiah would come, when Jesus was born and brought new hope to this world. Hope will be fulfilled ultimately when Jesus comes again at the end of time, vindicating the faith of those who have continued to trust in him through all the pains and shames and sins and disasters of this life.

We are called to hope as the people in Zephaniah’s day were called to hope. That same call to hope was issued by the apostle Paul in New Testament times. When Paul wrote his letter of encouragement to the church in Philippi, he was being held imprisoned in Rome, and the Philippian church members were facing an array of troubles and persecutions. They had judgments against them. They had enemies. They were reproached. People in their community opposed and oppressed them. But, at the beginning of his letter, Paul told them, “[God] has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well—since you are having the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I still have” (Philippians 1:29,30). Many of our churches and church members today are facing struggles and challenges of their own. You may be feeling insecurity about where things are at right now, and much uncertainty about where things are headed in the future. But listen to the voice of Christ’s apostle calling out to you, telling you where to turn. Paul urges you, as he did the Philippians:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:4-7).

We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. But we do know what forever holds in store for us, through our hope in Christ. And so as we wait for Christ—for Christmas in this season and for Christ’s return to us at the end of days—we strive to live with hope in our hearts. We encourage one another to be hopeful, even when the circumstances in which we find ourselves look bleak. We wait for the Lord hopefully, hanging onto his promises as the gospel truth.

And we wait patiently … or at least try to be patient. We are, by nature, impatient people. We tend to want what we want and we want it now. If the package we ordered doesn’t arrive in a couple of days, we get irritated. If the trip to the store takes up too much time with too long of lines, we get irritated. If something we want for ourselves, for our house, for our farm or business, or for our church is not available to us right now or is out of reach of our budget or unrealistic in our present situation, we get irritated. We are impatient.

Life as it is, in the here and now, often doesn’t align with our ambitions or with the comfort and stability we want. Life is often painful and hard. Things don’t go our way. Things get in our way. Sickness interrupts health. Lack of resources limits our options. Other people don’t think the way we think they should think, or do what we want them to do. We turn from hopeful and happy to being frustrated and ornery. We may take out our frustrations against others, even those closest to us. Within our families and within our churches, each of us starts seeking our own interests rather than maintaining concern for one another and for the well-being of all. So we become less ethical, more self-centered in our own attitudes and behaviors.

Our impatience and frustrations lead us to become ungrateful, uncooperative, unyielding–all of which, of course, are the opposite of God’s call to us. We are called to “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely and … run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1). Only by keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus as the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2) can we stay on a path of rejoicing always, displaying gentleness to everyone, not worrying about things but maintaining thankfulness. It feels so impossible for us to live in such an attitude, but we are assured: “The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard [our] hearts and … minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7).

So we strive to live hopefully and to live patiently–hoping in Christ and his promises, patient with each other as we face life’s challenges, and leaning on each other as brothers and sisters. Living such a life together as God’s people calls us to live honestly, ethically, responsibly with one another.

Listen to the call of another of God’s prophets, John the Baptist. When the crowds asked John, “What then should we do?” (Luke 3:10) …

In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” [When] tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” [John] said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages” (Luke 3:11-14).

You get John’s point. Be ethical. Be responsible. Be thinking of others, not just of yourselves. “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” as Jesus said (Luke 6:31). Treat everyone with respect and consideration and caring as you interact with one another. That is our calling in our communities, with every neighbor in our world. That is equally and especially our calling also within our churches, as we plan and work and do ministry together.

Many small and medium-size churches today are facing significant challenges as they seek to carry out ministry. A national survey of churches conducted just prior to COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 found that “half of the country’s estimated 350,000 religious congregations had 65 or fewer people in attendance on any given weekend … a drop of more than half from a median attendance level of 137 people in 2000” (Religious News Service, October 14, 2021). The pandemic has reduced worship attendance even further, standing now at about three-fourths of pre-pandemic levels as of August of this year (Baptist Standard, November 4, 2021).

Maybe the way you’re feeling about your own life or your congregational life these days is something like the feelings of Stephanie or Derrick (whom I described at the start of this message). Feeling like you’re the outcast, the down-and-out little sister, not as good as big churches somewhere else that seem to be flourishing. Feeling like you have labored and toiled and worked hard for many years, and now are up against challenges that have you searching desperately for resources and answers that are nowhere to be seen. Again, we don’t know what tomorrow will bring. We can’t cast our eyes into the near (or far) future here on earth and know exactly what plans the Lord is working out for us. But we do have his promise “that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And we do know what forever holds in store for us, through our hope in Christ. And so as we wait for Christ—in this Christmas season and anticipating his return to us at the end of days—we will strive to live in dignity and love with one another. We will set our minds on thinking about things that are true and honorable and pure and pleasing (cf. Philippians 4:8), rejoicing in the Lord always (Philippians 4:4). And we will set our hands about whatever tasks we can take on–to advance our relationships with one another, our care for others in our communities, and our commitment to honoring Christ in everything we say and do.

Life on this earth is not easy. It was not easy in Zephaniah’s day, nor in the days of John the Baptist and the apostle Paul. It’s never easy. As Paul and his missionary companions said to the members of churches they had established, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22 NIV). But we have God’s promise that he doesn’t abandon us. So we will not abandon him in our hearts, but keep trusting and hoping and persevering. We will not abandon him in our actions, but keep loving and helping and befriending. This is the life to which we are called by the prophets and apostles. This is our calling in Christ. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7). Amen.

Scripture quotations, except where indicated otherwise are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotation marked (NIV) taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Jul

2021

Time to Have our Hearts Checked

Hearts Full of Faith Beat Boldly in Christ

Ephesians 3:14-21, with reference to 2 Kings 4:42-44 and John 6:1-21; 9th Sunday after Pentecost

by David Sellnow

Ask kids what their favorite foods are. They’ll more likely say hot dogs, candy bars, and chips than tuna, spinach, or brussels sprouts. We don’t always wise up and change our habits when we become adults. I had a roommate one summer after college who, as far as I could tell, ingested nothing all summer long except coffee and cigarettes and occasionally mooched slices of pizza. I wouldn’t say he was the picture of health, but then, with my pizza, neither was I.

Some years ago, a study was done on the blood vessels of presumably healthy young adults (between ages 15 and 34) who died from causes other than illness. Among those in their early 30s, they found that 20% of males and 8% of females already had advanced stages of plaque buildup in their arteries. The American Heart Association has recommendations on cholesterol intake, on what foods to avoid or eat only in moderation. But as a leading doctor on that research team said, “It’s a hard sell [to] teenagers …. I have a grandson who, despite all our family discussions, still orders the double cheeseburger with bacon and fries.”

As you probably can guess, this Electric Gospel post isn’t primarily about your cardiovascular health. Each of us has a spiritual heart in us also, and what goes into our spiritual heart will determine our spiritual well-being. Let’s consider how hearts full of faith beat boldly in Christ; hearts that take in the love and strength of Christ will live in love and strength.

Consider words from this day’s Epistle lesson, Ephesians 3:14-19:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

When you begin a check-up on your spiritual heart’s condition, you realize that your spiritual heartbeat itself is a gift from God. When Paul said “for this reason” he thanked the Father, the reason is a theme that runs through the whole preceding portion of his Ephesian epistle: God’s saving activity for his people. God gave Christ as the Savior of the world; God raised Christ from death to reign in glory; God brought these Ephesians to trust in Christ rather than in idols; God caused the church at Ephesus to begin and grow; God gave these people a unity of heart and mind to work together for Christ’s kingdom. For all of it, God was responsible and God was to be praised. He is the one from whom the Ephesians received their spiritual heartbeat; he is the one from whom his whole family derives its name.

The same is true for us. We were in a dead, sinful state before God brought our spirits to life in the miracle of baptism. From that moment on God has been the one to strengthen and preserve faith in our hearts. In order for us to stay healthy spiritually, we need a steady, nourishing diet provided by God’s Spirit. Soaking in all the stuff you can absorb from contemporary culture can progressively harm your soul, like junk food impacts our bodies. You can get temporary boosts to your emotions or thoughts with other things, like you can artificially stimulate your body with substances like coffee and cigarettes. But there is just “one thing needful” (Luke 10:42 KJV) that can truly keep our spiritual selves healthy: the good news of love and forgiveness in Jesus.

Admittedly though, our sinful side doesn’t want the good things God gives. When the children of Israel were fed by God with manna in the desert, suited to meet all their nutritional needs, what did they say? “We detest this miserable food” (Numbers 21:5). They wanted other things (cf. Numbers 20:5). They got tired of what the Lord was giving them. We do the same thing spiritually. We look at what God is giving us in the Bible and in church, and we say, “Too much manna all the time!” We gravitate toward video games over Bible reading. We find streaming TV more interesting than sermons. We follow sports events and statistics more diligently than we search the Scriptures.

But it is through the gospel that Christ establishes himself in our hearts. We come to see how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is. We get to “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” Paul knew the amazing heights and depths of Christ’s love. He once wrote, “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy …. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:13-15). Christ died for every sinner, for the worst of sinners. That includes you and me.

Those who by God’s Spirit come to know this wonderful truth about Jesus’ love then overflow with that love. Hearts that are “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” will result in lives that are healthy, vibrant, and active in joyful service to others.

So, are you feeling healthy, vibrant, and full of love and joy and service? Or are you feeling a little tired, feeling worn down, feeling old? It’s not easy going through the stages of life–whether in our own individual lives or the shared life of a congregation. The Christians at Ephesus were in the first years of their church experience when Paul wrote his Epistle to the Ephesians. Paul had started the ministry in Ephesus in the late 50s. [Not the 1950s — just the 50s, the first century AD.] His letter to the Ephesians was sent back to them around the year 62. Another apostle, John, served in Ephesus later as part of his ministry. Around 95 AD, when persecution exiled John to an island off the coast from the areas he’d served, John had a different sort of letter to send to the Ephesian congregation. Jesus himself spoke these words:

I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance. I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers; you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them to be false. I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first (Revelation 2:2-5).

In our individual lives, as we get older, it can be hard to maintain the passion and energy and zest for life that we had when we were younger. We may be stable and solid, but we can also get a bit stodgy, a bit stale, a bit set in our ways. Congregations can be that way, too, as they age. We can lose the love that we had at first. We grow weary. We become more mundane than spiritual, more routine than revitalized, more dreary than dynamic.

We need a reminder of the refrain that Paul put at the end of his prayer for the Ephesian church, the final verses of today’s epistle lesson: To him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever (Ephesians 3:20-21).

Too many times in our churches, we think small thoughts about our ministries. We want our congregation, our little corner of God’s kingdom, to do okay. We focus on scraping together what we’ll need to maintain what we’ve got, fund our budget, populate our programs and committees. Meanwhile, while we’re thinking about earthbound goals of that sort, God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. God has plans for our futures that we don’t even envision. Christ says, “My power is at work within you. My gospel is like dynamite for you, exploding with love and truth and joy and will accomplish more than you’d ever think could be done.”

Consider the other experiences which were related in the Bible readings for this Sunday. People didn’t think there was enough food to go around. In Elisha’s day, there was a famine in the land (2 Kings 4:38). Yet by the Lord’s grace, one sack of bread and grain became enough to feed 100 men in ministry training (the school of the prophets). When throngs of people kept following Jesus and had no food other than one boy who had a handful of bread loaves and a couple of fish, Jesus had no difficulty in making sure all were fed (cf. John 6:1-21). Often we think like the servant of Elisha, who looked at the resources they had and the need in front of them and said, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” (2 Kings 4:43). We can be like the disciple of Jesus who saw thousands of mouths to feed and said, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little” (John 6:7). When we find ourselves in situations where it seems like our cupboards are empty, or our strength is gone, or storms are swirling and raging, our tendency is to think we are sunk, we will starve, we will wither away. But when we think there are no solutions, Christ creates solutions. The Lord calls on us to start with what we have and do our best. He calls us to use every opportunity and resource and talent we’ve been given and trust Christ to make it enough, to multiply it, to expand our realities beyond anything we ever thought possible.

That’s how it has always been in the history of God’s people. When his people were held in bondage in Egypt, they didn’t imagine they could be rescued. Then plagues pressured a powerful ruler to let them go; God’s miracles enabled an exodus and a return of God’s people to their own land. When the earliest Christians were banned from the temple in Jerusalem and shunned from synagogues, when they had no church buildings of their own and were persecuted as if they were some dangerous cult, they could not have imagined that in time, the Christian faith would become predominant throughout the whole Roman Empire. When the organized church got sidetracked in the centuries that followed and became stuck in its institutionalism, in its rituals and rules, in its laws and legalism, the people didn’t dream there was much hope left in the church. Their hope grew fainter still after a horrible pandemic (the Black Death) had ravaged their communities and killed a third of the population, and the church’s highest-ranking clergy had no answers. (They were more likely to preach fire and brimstone than provide comfort or reassurance.) But then the Spirit of God raised up voices of reformation, voices such as John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Martin Luther. The good news of Jesus and the riches of his mercy were proclaimed again with eagerness and energy and grace and renewal for everyone.

You may be at a time in your life right now where you are starving for sustenance and don’t know where it will come from. You may be at a time in your congregation right now where you have mostly questions and no clear picture of what’s on the horizon for your future. But be assured of this. Our God is “able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). The love of Christ is wider and longer and higher and deeper than you could ever measure (cf. Ephesians 3:18). Keep feeding on the Bread of Life, the spiritual food that Christ gives us, the life and truth that is Christ. He will fill your heart’s need, and he will revive your strength.

Lift up your eyes on high and see: .. [God] is great in strength, mighty in power ….
Why do you say … “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint (Isaiah 40:26-31).

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Scripture quotations, except where indicated otherwise, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Jun

2021

A suffering woman and a dead girl

Jesus is our Hope when Problems are Unsolvable

[Readings for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost: Lamentations 3:22-33, Psalm 30, 2 Corinthians 8:7-15, Mark 5:21-43]

Chances are, a number of you currently are experiencing or recently have experienced a loss, a hardship, some source of pain in your life. Just in terms of those who’ve lost a loved one, statistics say there are people reading this blog post dealing with that form of grief. “About 2½ million people die in the United States annually, each leaving an average of five grieving people behind” (The Recovery Village: Grief by the Numbers). In 2020, that number of deaths in the US was estimated at over 3½ million by the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System–the death toll expanded greatly due to COVID. An Associated Press poll conducted in March of this year found that 20% of people in the United States had lost a friend or close relative to COVID. “That means a potential bereaved population of about 65 million.” A psychiatrist at Columbia University warns that because of isolation due to the pandemic, a significant percentage of the bereaved could experience prolonged grief disorder, a condition of persistent grief that lasts longer and aches more deeply than the typical grieving process. Some studies have shown more than triple the typical rate of prolonged grief disorder have been occurring over this past year. (See “COVID Has Put the World at Risk of Prolonged Grief Disorder,” by Katherine Harmon Courage, May 19, 2021, in Scientific American.)

Those are some general truths, some national and international statistics. More than likely, some of you reading this are grieving over a loss, some are struggling with persistent pain, all know community members whose lives are hurting.

“Encounter” by Daniel Cariola, Magdala Chapel – https://www.magdala.org/

The Gospel account for this Sunday (Mark 5:21-43), from the days of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, shows powerful examples of persons dealing with grief and trauma … and their dependence on Jesus as their only hope. First there is the case of Jairus’ daughter, a young girl who should not become deathly ill, but who was deathly ill. Then, even as Jesus was on his way to Jairus’ home, the girl died. That did not stop Jesus from his desire or ability to help. We’ll say more about that momentarily. Meanwhile, Jesus was the only answer for a woman whose problem just would not go away, and she was at the end of her rope. She had been suffering for twelve years with “an issue of blood,” as the King James Version put it. Our translation says “hemorrhaging.” Modern scholars, assessing what may have afflicted her, deduce it was menorrhagia — “abnormally heavy and long menstruation that causes enough cramping and blood loss … that it makes normal daily activities impossible” (Nigerian Biomedical Science Journal, August 29, 2017). We feel anguish for that woman, experiencing such a condition for twelve years. Now think also of the social stigma that it placed on her in her culture. Jewish cultural norms, following the laws of Moses, stipulated that anyone with a bodily discharge (bleeding or secretion) was considered “unclean” and was to stay socially distanced till after the bleeding or discharge stopped. It was a religious rule but also something of a public health rule for the Jewish people back before anyone knew much about bloodborne pathogens protocols. So, on top of a chronic, frightening health problem, this poor woman was supposed to remain in something like COVID-19 lockdown when the community around her was not in lockdown. Think of the isolation and abandonment and frustration she must have felt. She seems to have been a woman of some means, and had spent every penny she had going to various doctors, trying to find a cure for her problem. But none of them could help her. Her condition only got worse. Coming to see Jesus was an act of desperation, her last hope. She’d heard about Jesus. She’d heard he could do miracles. So she violated the social distancing policies that prohibited her from going out into a crowded space. She made her way through the throngs of people following Jesus, hoping just to get close enough, thinking, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well” (Mark 5:28).

Indeed, the woman was made well from the moment she came in contact with Jesus. But Jesus did not want her to remain in hiding (or to hide from him). He stopped the crowd. He took note of the woman, who was afraid and confessed what she had done–which actually was a confession of faith. Jesus commended her and promised his ongoing presence with her. “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease,” Jesus said (Mark 5:34). Think a bit about the context too. Jesus was on his way to the home of a high-ranking person, Jairus, who was a leader of the local synagogue. And Jairus had a significant need for Jesus’ attention; his daughter was deathly ill. But Jesus paused to pay attention to the woman who just wanted a quick, incognito encounter and nothing more. She was like a person who comes to a church hoping against hope for something, sitting in the back row, not wanting to be noticed, but the Lord wants her to be noticed and wants people to care about her. No matter how insignificant we feel we are, no matter how ostracized or shoved aside by society, no matter how helpless we think our situation is, Jesus wants us to know we are welcome in his presence, that we are worthy of care and attention.

Gabriel von Max, “The Raising of Jairus Daughter” (1878) – Wikimedia Commons

And Jesus will care about us even when our situation is more dire than twelve years of incessant bleeding. For example, when a twelve-year old girl is dying–and even when she dies–Jesus does not turn away from helping. To everybody else in the situation with Jairus’ daughter, her death was the end of the story. People came from the family’s house to say Jesus need not be bothered anymore, because the girl was dead. When Jesus came to the house anyway and told the mourners the girl was only sleeping and he would wake her, they all laughed at him. But we see the ultimate power of Jesus and the reason he had come to be with us on this earth. Death is the ultimate problem that plagues us as human beings. The sicknesses we have point to our mortality, to the eventuality that we all die. The death of a child points out the cold reality of death in a particularly harsh way. But the shocking finality of death is the very reason Jesus became incarnate as a human being, to reverse that curse. As Scripture says, Jesus came down to our level “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” Since we are beings of flesh and blood, he “shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death” (Hebrews 2:9,14,15). Jesus’ actions healing the suffering woman and raising the dead girl are evidence of the healing and salvation he came to bring to all of us.

Maybe the problems you experience in your life aren’t exactly like the cases we looked at today, a woman hemorrhaging blood for twelve years, a family mourning the death of a child. Their experiences are examples within the range of so much human suffering that occurs. So many people experience deep hurts of so many kinds. In my years in the church, I’ve known …

dear souls who bore the scars of childhood sexual abuse for years and years in their adult lives …
dear souls who struggled with addiction …
dear souls who lost their jobs and struggled to maintain self-respect …
dear souls who experienced excruciating pain from terminal diseases …
dear souls who lost loved ones in senseless ways — in a car accident that occured on the way home from attending a funeral, or in a plane crash that occurred while attempting a stunt for a military air show.

In the work I’m doing now in human services, I encounter persons …

who need skilled nursing care and hospice care …
who need mental health hospitalization …
who have all manner of disabilities and need ongoing care and supports …
who are challenged by poverty and have little or no resources ….

So, while I don’t know exactly what you’re going through in your lives right now, chances are, there are losses, hardships, and no shortage of sources of pain. Maybe you feel like your soul has been bleeding for years and you don’t know how to make it stop. Where do you turn when the hurt in your life is constant, when the aches of your heart never really go away? Maybe you’ve tried everything–self-help books, practicing self-care, seeking professional help, any kind of help from anywhere and everywhere. And some things help some, but nothing is a complete cure. Only the hope we have for resurrection in Jesus can keep us going through the pains and losses and devastations that are so much a part of life on this earth. Jesus is our hope when our problems are otherwise unsolvable. Like the woman pressing through the crowd for even just a touch of the hem of his garment, we reach out to Jesus as our only eternal source of hope.

And how does that work–to reach out to be touched by Jesus when Jesus isn’t physically walking through the streets of your town? Certainly one way is in coming to church, where you gather to hear Jesus’ words and receive his touch through the sacraments. There’s another way, too, that I’d like to say a little something about before concluding this message. I’d like you to think about today’s Epistle lesson also (2 Corinthians 8:7-15), which maybe seemed to go in a different direction than the other readings of the day. Paul wrote to the Christians at Corinth: “As you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in your love for us—so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking” (2 Corinthians 8:7). The generous undertaking going on at that time was a special gathering of financial support for Christians elsewhere, particularly in the regions of Judea and Syria, who were experiencing food shortages and famine conditions. Actually, the original statement in Paul’s letter simply says, “We want you to excel also in this grace” — the Greek word charis (from which we get our English word “charity”). It’s somewhat limiting that in English we use the word “charity” (charis) mostly in terms of financial gifts. Scripture uses the same word not just for gifts of financial support but for the ultimate grace, God’s gift of his Son Jesus, the One and Only, to be our rescuer. Jesus now calls us to be gifts of grace to each other–with financial contributions, yes, but more than financial contributions. We become embodiments of Jesus to one another in our times of need.

At a church I was associated with in Texas some years ago, the congregation was in a bit of a financial crisis. A series of cottage meetings were planned, gathering members together in small groups at host members’ homes, to talk about how to address the financial crisis. At the first of those meetings, before getting to the stewardship agenda for the evening, there was an icebreaker activity planned, just to get people talking. Each person could respond to a prompt on the icebreaker card, which had prompts such as, “The most embarrassing moment in my life was ___________” … “One of my favorite vacations was _____” … “Something I’m praying about right now is ______,” and others. The first person at that first meeting started the conversation circle, choosing, “Something I’m praying about right now” and saying, “I’m praying for my daughter, who was just diagnosed with cancer.” There followed many minutes of fellow members showing concern for the woman, for her daughter, for her daughter’s husband and children, and actually engaging in prayer right there as a prayer circle. The next person in the circle then also chose to share something heavy on her heart, something she was praying about, and the members listened to her hurt and ministered to her as well. For over two hours that evening, the members shared their needs, consoled one another, prayed for one another. They never did get to the planned agenda about the church’s financial situation, and that was okay. They did what was important. The other cottage meetings that occurred in the days and weeks after that first one all followed the same pattern. The gathered members all focused on the prompt about what was heavy on their hearts, what they were praying about, and they acted as missionaries of gospel to one another, encouraging each other. Oh, and by the way, the church’s financial situation turned around too–because for the first time in a long time the members of the congregation began to realize the value of their ministry to one another and to others and, like Paul said, they began to excel also in that grace and in the generous undertaking of gifts to support needed ministry.

In the midst of famine and hunger, in the midst of grief and abandonment, in the midst of sickness and death, in the midst of all this world’s problems and pains, Jesus is our hope. And as brothers and sisters to one another in Jesus, we become miracles of grace and hope to one another as well.

Brothers and sisters, may Christ be with you as you endure whatever hurts or sorrows are happening in your life today and whatever troubles you may face in days to come. And may you be with one another in Christ, supporting each other, praying for one another, reminding each other of the gospel hope we share. We know our Redeemer lives, and that he will be with us when we are on our deathbeds, and that at the end, he will stand upon our graves, and that even after our skin has been destroyed, we will yet see God, we will be raised by Christ to be with Christ forever. How our hearts yearn within us! (Cf. Job 19:25-27.) Amen.

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Earthly Needs, Heavenly Priorities

We share love in a lonely, hurting world

We pray to the One who is faithful, even when we are faithless

Acknowledging our ability to be of service to others

Why church?

Our mutual need for spiritual encouragement

Christ calls us to reach out to others, even when it seems an impossible task

The Quiet Power of God’s Presence

We wait for the Lord — hopefully, patiently, responsibly

Hearts Full of Faith Beat Boldly in Christ

Jesus is our Hope when Problems are Unsolvable

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