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Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

The Odd Observance of Reformation Sunday – Pastor Thoughts

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A Mighty Fortress is our God…

I am in a Facebook group for young(er) Lutheran and Anglican clergy “born after 1973.” By the world’s standards we are decidedly middle aged. (I had to explain to my kids the story of Come From Away or 9/11 this week and it made me feel old). But in the Church we still seem like children to many colleagues and lay folk alike – so we still think of ourselves as young, despite the fact that many of us have been serving 10, 15 or even 20 years!

Anyway, each year right around Thanksgiving, one or another of the Anglicans will post a question about when All Saints Sunday is being observed. All Saints is always November 1st, and in years when it gets pushed back to November 6 or 7th, it can run into Remembrance Day observances. So the question is whether to have All Saints Sunday on the Sunday before November 1st or after. 

Since the group is about 10% Lutheran and 90% Anglican, I usually find myself chiming in with a reminder that for Lutherans, the Sunday before November 1st is Reformation Sunday and it is kind of a big deal for us. So All Saints is always on or after November 1st. Mostly my reminders go unheeded and probably sound like I am speaking Greek – or maybe German – to our Anglican siblings (whom I still love dearly).

It doesn’t help that Martin Luther chose to post his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31st, the first of a 3-day string of festival days – All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day. 

It also doesn’t help that Reformation Sunday is an odd and difficult-to-observe day to begin with. Is it a celebration? Is it a commemoration? Are we happy to be Lutheran? Are we sad because of the wars and division caused? Are we bold to confess our faith? Are we humbled by our need of God’s mercy?

As is often the case with our historical observances, especially in recent years, things are more complicated then we always know how to handle. We know that Martin Luther stood up for the things that he believed were right: against injustices taking place at the hands of the Church, against the attempts to sell salvation by the Pope and the Church, against church leaders keeping control of the Word and the Sacraments. But there are also the hundreds of thousands of people who died in revolts and war directly inspired by Luther’s stand against Rome. There is the long-lasting division and splitting apart of churches who disagree with one another that it still going on today. 

The Reformation was a transformative moment for the Western world. The combination of the printing press and Luther’s writing made it one of the most significant events of the past 1000 years. But 505 years on from Martin Luther nailing his list of grievances to the door, what this all means for us today and how we move forward are still being unpacked. 

We are a Church born in a time of tumult and change, and we are still a Church in the midst of tumult and change. Yet, along the way the reminder that God’s faithfulness will lead us through is the same. And ultimately, Martin Luther’s reason for posting his 95 theses was to make sure that God’s faithfulness is the foundation and centre on which we stand. 

A mighty fortress indeed!

Sermon, Theology & Culture

Thanksgiving, 10 Lepers and giving thanks isn’t the point

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GOSPEL: Luke 17:11-19
On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, 13they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” 14When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. 15Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

*Note: Sermons are posted in the manuscript draft that they were preached in, and may contain typos or other errors that were resolved in my delivery. See the Sherwood Park Lutheran Facebook Page for video

Thanksgiving has always been kind of weird Sunday to preach on. The theme of Thankfulness seems like a pretty obvious one for the church. Thankful seems like a good thing to be as people to faith. We use the term Thanksgiving regularly in worship. The greek word Eucharist, which is one of the names we use for communion, is translated as “Thanksgiving.”

And yet, Thanksgiving is a decidedly secular holiday. It is rooted in the meal shared by the pilgrims who arrived in North America with their indigenous hosts… or least the myth goes. Of course colonialism was not that at all, but is another sermon. Thanksgiving is also a harvest festival and its date was decided by an act of parliament in 1957, though it has a much longer and varied history going back to the 16th century. 

But it is not a church holy day. There is no thanksgiving story in the bible nor any commandment to set aside a day to give thanks. Maybe more difficult is that at the heart of Thanksgiving is an imperative for us to be thankful – something that we do.  Whereas the Gospel is rooted in God’s action – something that God does for us. 

Still in some kind of twist of fate, today’s Gospel lesson from the regular set of Sunday readings is all about thankfulness… and this story of the 10 lepers is centred around the return of the one to give thanks for what Jesus had done. 

So here I am, on Thanksgiving, having to preach about thankfulness!

As we pick up with Jesus, he is on the road, presumably still with his followers who were asking for increased faith last week. As comes into a village he is met by a group do 10 people with leprosy. Lepers were often segregated outside of towns and villages, even though leprosy in modern times we have discovered that it is likely not to be spread between people. The 10 lepers must have heard of Jesus before so they call out to him by name. They ask for his mercy. Now because we know the end of the story, we assume that what Jesus does next is heal them. But that isn’t so obvious. Instead, Jesus appears to redirect these lepers towards another source of healing, Jesus tells them to go to the priests. Whether the Jesus meant the priests of Jerusalem or some in this borderland town between Galilee and Samaria, the 10 turn and go.

Along the way, the 10 lepers are made clean. One of them notices that he was healed and turns back to Jesus in order to give thanks. When he returns praising God, Jesus asks why the other 9 haven’t returned along with him. Oh, and Luke mentions that this one was a foreigner, a Samaritan. 

The message here, especially on Thanksgiving Sunday, seems pretty obvious: Don’t forget to demonstrate your gratefulness. Maybe Luke was wanting to make sure we don’t forget our manners. 

Except it wasn’t good manners that allowed this Samaritan to turn back. It was that he likely didn’t know where he was actually headed to in the first place. It would have been difficult enough for these 10 Lepers to make their way through town and reach the priests being considered dangerous and unclean. But even if cleansed of his disease, the Samaritan would still have been unclean and unable to access the priests. 

Maybe what this one Samaritan recognizes is not the need for gratitude but something else. As an outsider in this borderland town, one existing on the margins, he cannot help but see that he has been healed from an unexpected place. 

The other 9 perhaps never even considered that it was Jesus who healed them, but assumed it was the cleansing rituals performed by the priests. According to their religious understanding this would make sense. They had gone and followed the commandments, they had fulfilled religious law and they had achieved righteousness. 

When we hear this story with 21st century ears, we want to learn the lesson of gratitude. We want to be the like the obedient ones who don’t just move on with life selfishly, but give thanks for our gifts. It is an easy position to take. 

Pointing to the ingratitude of others is all too common. Boomers claiming that millennials are entitled and self-centred, and millennials out of touch and unaware of their privilege. The rich giving thanks for their power to earn while slagging the poor for not doing better. The educated look down on the uneducated. Political tribes believe they are righteous while their opponents don’t get it. 

We are pretty good misidentifying the source the blessings, benefits, mercies or righteousness  that befall. Far too often we thank ourselves for our good fortune and good luck. And as people of faith it is no different. 

Like the 9 lepers who incorrectly identified the priests or their own obedience to the law as the reason for their healing and salvation, we too often forget the source of our salvation. Even as we hear and proclaim the gospel week after week, our thinking so easily flips to our salvation being because of our goodness – our being moral, loving our neighbour and doing good works.

Failing to remember who has granted us mercy, who has saved us, is all too easy.

Now if you have been paying attention the past number of weeks, you might catch some familiarity with the numbers 10, 9 and 1. Just a few weeks ago we heard the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin. The shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to find the one and the woman  10 coins who tears apart her house to find the lost one. The 10 lepers are meant to evoke connections to these stories. 

And the one leper who returns? He isn’t the point of the story, his giving thanks is only incidental to the action – he doesn’t even get any lines. 

Instead as Jesus narrates the action, we are reminded again – just as we were in the parables of the lost – of what God is up to in our world. Jesus’s healing and salvation is given whether we know it or not, whether we see it or not. The Samaritan leper’s return highlights this: unclean because of his disease, unclean because of his ethnicity he has nowhere else to turn, nowhere but to Jesus. 

And once the Samaritan returns Jesus identifies his station, “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Jesus makes it clean that this one leper who has returned is one who is still on outside, still marginalized, still excluded from the faithful and righteous community. 

Then Jesus changes all of that. “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

Faith, trust, relationship to the one who is trustworthy and who grants faith… this One makes well. The God of Israel, the Messiah sent to save, the One who has been healing and teaching throughout Galilee, the one who is about to go to the cross and be raised on the third day… this One has declares the Samaritan acceptable and righteous, this One welcomes  the man into the Kingdom of Heaven.  

Whether this man was a leper or a Samaritan or a beggar – Jesus says that he is one of the faithful. This man to belongs to God… We belong to God

Then… just like the ones that Jesus has been sending out in his name throughout the book of Luke, like the Apostles on the road last week who asked for increased faith, Jesus sends this man too. Out of the borderlands, away from this place of isolation and into God’s world.

Today, Jesus says the same to us. As we come needing Jesus’ mercy, as we beg for healing and wholeness… Jesus grants us salvation whether we know it is from him or not. Jesus makes us whole even if we think it is because of something we did all on our own, or whether we have nowhere else to turn. 

And in this world that wants to convince us that we are the source of our own righteousness, Jesus brings us into God’s Kingdom. Jesus reminds us that God is the source of salvation. Jesus doesn’t wait for our gratitude or praise, but sends us into the world healed and renewed. 

Then Jesus declares that our faith makes us well also. Our trust in the One who is trustworthy, our faith granted by the One who is faithful restores us to health, returns us to community and joins us to the Body of Christ. 

On this Thanksgiving Sunday, we given the same reminder that we receive every other week. That here in this community of faith, that here gathered around the Word, here made clean in the waters of Baptism, that here fed at the banquet table of the Lord… here God is doing what God has always done. God is giving out mercy to all who are in need – God is giving salvation to us. 

Artwork: Ten Lepers by Bill Hoover, 2013

Pastor Thoughts, Sermon, Theology & Culture

Thanksgiving and the passage of time – Pastor Thoughts

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As I write, it is the coldest day of Fall so far, the wind is blowing, flurries are falling but mercifully melting on the ground. After hanging on for longer than usual, the leaves are finally turning those beautiful shades of yellow and red for fall. 

Here we are at Thanksgiving weekend already and it feels like Fall snuck up on us. Weren’t we just sitting at the beach on a hot sunny summer afternoon just yesterday or something? 

The change of weather reminds us of the passage of time. These days my relationship with time feels forever altered; maybe you feel the same. Days of the week and months of the year all feel a little more fuzzy than they did just a few years ago. The wet weather this Spring and Summer certainly changed the way time passed in the natural world with a delayed Spring, delayed Summer and now a delayed Fall. 

Time feels “off” from the pace and routines that we used to follow. There used to be structure and order to the way we experienced time. 

When I was younger I used to measure the days by orchestra and football practice, youth group events and the freedom of weekends. In university and seminary, time passed as semesters, reading weeks, exam dates and essay deadlines.

Then it all changed 13 years ago. Once I was ordained and in the parish, my life became governed by Sundays. Every seven days another Sunday arrived. And in between I needed to prepare for worship, write a sermon, collaborate with all those involved in various roles of making music, reading scripture, making and distributing bulletins, choosing hymns, setting up communion, etc. In some ways it is like putting on a small-scale musical theatre production every week, but different in that all the people attending participate in some way. 

We all have rhythms to our weekly cycle, but in the church during all the other days, and considering whatever other responsibilities, activities and stuff  we have to do, Sunday is always in the background. All the other days point to Sunday. Most pastors take Monday off because it is the furthest from the next Sunday, and the urgency to prepare is lower. My colleagues who do work on Mondays often cite a desire to get a head start on that Sunday urgency. Others have other tricks, like I start memorizing the dates of the Sundays about two months out from wherever I am – it feels helpful to know what is coming. 

Along with the rhythm of Sundays, there are the seasons and festivals that orient us to “when” we are in time. The liturgical calendar has governed my months and years in a way I could understand since I started serving in ministry. It is the same for teachers and the school calendar, for accountants and the fiscal/tax year, for business owners and the schedule of holidays and sales times, etc.

And so here we are being governed by calendars and schedules that have been knocked off their axis by the pandemic. Thanksgiving arrives and it doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving as we once knew it. Re-orientation to the structure of time as we once knew it isn’t an easy thing. 

And yet, through all that we have been through these past years, the grounding of God’s story in time has remained the same. Even as we did not work, play, serve or worship as we were used to these past years, we still found ways to tell the story of God. Of God’s death and resurrection each week. Of the coming of Messiah in Advent, of the birth of Christ at Christmas, of the revelation of Jesus at Epiphany. We still walked in the wilderness of Lent following our Teacher and Master, and we still bore witness to the drama of Holy Week, and rejoiced on the Day of the Resurrection at Easter. 

In the midst of “fuzzy” time and holidays that don’t feel like the versions that we used to know, God’s story still holds us, and, indeed, holds us close. The story of God’s promise to carry God’s people through this life with mercy, grace and new life is clear and true. 

Happy Thanksgiving,

Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Turning up the faith? – Pastor Thoughts

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“Increase our faith!”

The gospel reading for this week has the apostles asking this (demanding this?) from Jesus. 

It is a request or demand that we could make too. With all that is going on in our world today: Hurricanes in the Maritimes, Puerto Rico and Florida. An increasingly unpredictable Russia that is now losing the war in Ukraine and the threats of nuclear war. Orange Shirt Day and the reminder of the hard work of reconciliation that is before us as settler peoples and indigenous peoples. Gas prices shooting up once again and inflation still running rampant and out of control. The front-runner in our Winnipeg mayoral election facing allegations of workplace harassment. 

And that is only the stuff this week…

A little more faith feels like something we could use. Or some hope. Just something more. 

Something more as a group. We could benefit from an increase in faith collectively. Something that bonds us together and helps us through. More faith as neighbourhood, congregation, community, city, nation or world might be the thing that helps us work together, that allows us to overcome challenges, strive to help the weaker and needy among us, or maybe to just stop the social media bickering for awhile. 

There is also all the stuff that we are each facing individually too. Health challenges or crises, work stress, school stress, family conflict, or just the exhaustion of adapting to a fall time that has been completely different from the last two in how the world is approaching pandemic and activities. 

Each of us on our own could use an increase in faith, a little boost to carry us through each day to allow us to see the hope of making it to the other side of whatever obstacle or challenges stand in our way. 

Increase our faith!

But we know that this isn’t how it works. Jesus doesn’t just turn a knob and we become more faithful. 

Faith is relationship. Faith is trust. Faith – like so much in this world – is something to be worked at and practiced. The way it increases is over time as we live life in faithful community that supports and cares for one another. A community shaped by the continual telling and re-telling of the gospel story over weeks and seasons, until that story become grafted onto our bones and we cannot help but see the world through it. 

“Increase our faith!” we might say. 

And even then, our faith isn’t increased. Rather, we see that God’s faith in us has been holding and carrying us all along. We learn that God’s faith placed us – God’s promises of mercy, forgiveness and new life – have been our foundation since before we were born and will be there long after we are gone. 

God says, “My faithfulness is always given for you.”

Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

What is the Church again? – Pastor Thoughts

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“What is the Church?”

The most recent article of the Canada Lutheran splashed this question across its cover. It sounds like an open-ended question with a myriad of possible answers. If you asked 5 different people sitting in the pews or watching online on Sunday mornings, you will get 5 different answers. Asking 5 different pastors might even yield 5 different answers. 

And yet, here we are, all participating and engaging in this thing called “church.” Somehow we figured out how to do something in common and we seem to carry with us some kind of agreement about what the body we all belong to is and what it is about. 

In our post-modern world, defining what the church is feels like it is something that we each get to do, that we can form and shape the church in whatever way suits us. One version of the church is all about fancy music and fancy liturgy. Another version is all about serving the local community through outreach, food banks, social programs, community meals. And still another has all the programs that someone of any age could need to feel a part of the group: children’s ministry, youth, young adults, families, men’s groups, women’s groups, seniors groups and so on… Still another is all about connections and fellowship and relationships –  a big happy family. 

If you visit enough churches, you will find versions of these and more across the Evangelical Lutheran Church In Canada, across North America, and the denominational spectrum. 

Post-modern Christianity can really be a choose-your-own-adventure reality. 

However as Lutherans, the answer to the question “What is the church?” might not be as open-ended as we sometimes act like. In fact, Martin Luther and the Reformers had a very specific and clear answer to this question. 

The church in the Reformers day was shaped by the Pope acting like an emperor, Bishops acting like princes and clergy who exploited the people. So the Reformers looked to have an answer that stripped away all human power and preference. They sought to articulate what the church was at its most essential.

What they came up with is written in the Augsburg Confession Article 7. “The Church is the assembly of believers where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered.” Or in other words, the church is:

  • People of faith gathered together
  • The Gospel proclaimed 
  • People receiving baptism and communion

The next part might be surprising, even difficult, to hear: Everything beyond Word and Sacraments is secondary. Everything we do beyond gathering around the Word and Sacraments flows from that central foundation. 

That means that the way we worship, the programs we run, the committees that meet, the buildings that we build, the fellowship gatherings we host, the causes we undertake and so on, are things we do that are because of, or in support of, gathering around Word and Sacrament. 

The music and liturgy that we use in worship are meant to be an expression of our unity of the body. 

The outreach we do to feed the hungry are because God first feeds us in communion and transforms us into the Body of Christ – bread for the world. 

The programs we run: small groups, bible studies, youth, children’s ministry etc… are places to help us grow in faith by hearing the Gospel in new and different ways. 

The building, the fellowship events, the committees, the kind of coffee we drink, the pews we sit in, the lights and heat, the screens and bulletins, the bathrooms and couches, the eNews and volunteer teams etc… are pieces that exist in order to facilitate our gathering around Word and Sacrament. 

Even though so many of those things I listed above feel like they are essential to being church, they are actually secondary. Important, but secondary. When they serve the essential purpose of being a community around Word and Sacrament, they are worthwhile. But all too often the secondary things supplant the essential things. Suddenly Word and Sacrament takes a back seat to all the variety of versions of being church that each of us hold in our own minds and preference. More significantly, in times of change and transition – such as during the past 3 years – those secondary things that once served our gathering so well might begin to fail us or they might stop working all together. 

This is hard. Hard to understand how things that we thought were about what it meant to be church seem to be crumbling before us. Hard to let go of things that we thought were such an important part of being church. 

This is why we need to be reminded of the foundation, the core things that make us the church. “The church is the assembly of believers where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered.” And even when so much about being church is changing and different, this core remains. God transforms us into the One of Christ by gathering us around the good news of the Word that gives us life: Baptism that makes children of God, and Communion that makes us food for the world.