Sermon For October 2, 2016 – “Help for Days Like This”

Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
October 2, 2016
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Click here to read scripture passages for the day.

Help For Days Like This

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus. Amen.

The Gospel reading today is so strange. It’s the kind of stuff you don’t want someone who’s skeptical of Christianity to hear. I mean, really: “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’, and it would obey you”? That sounds crazy. Outrageous claims like that can make people dismiss Christianity as sheer nonsense. And then Jesus says we’re supposed to call ourselves worthless slaves? Doesn’t that just fuel the mistaken notion that Christianity is all about shame and guilt, that it just makes people feel bad about themselves?

This reading is really strange and off-putting. It’s troubling that Jesus uses images of slavery to talk about the life of faith, especially amidst all the racial tension in our country. Other places in scripture we see how the message of Jesus is a critique and a challenge to the practice of slavery, but here Jesus simply uses a common image from his time to make a point. I wish he hadn’t done that as I’m sure this text has been used by slave owners to justify slavery. I wish he had always challenged slavery as contrary to his message that the last shall be first. This text can seem outdated, irrelevant, embarrassing and so very unhelpful. Yet, underneath all this strange language there is profound good news and wisdom that is both timeless and needed now more than ever.

The apostles are feeling inadequate. They don’t feel up to the task of living as Jesus’ followers so they ask Jesus to increase their faith. Jesus has been giving them hard teachings about the dangers of loving money and of causing others to stumble. Right before our story for today. Jesus tells them that if someone sins against them, even seven times a day, they must be ready to forgive, even seven times a day. The apostles are understandably a little daunted by this so they plead with Jesus, “increase our faith.”

Their plea resonates with many of us in these trying days in which we live. As we look at all the challenges in our world and all the questions about God that they raise, as we think about what is asked of us as people of faith in all roles we have, it all can be a little daunting and can leave us feeling pretty inadequate. We are often like the apostles, thinking we need to have more faith, stronger faith, growth in our faith in order to meet the demands of our world and the demands of each day. And you’d think that Jesus would be all about this impulse, saying to the apostles and to us. yes, finally, you want to get serious and grow in your faith. Let me help you do that. Instead Jesus tells the apostles, and us, that we have all the faith we need to be part of God’s work in the world- God’s work of uprooting injustice and transforming creation. This is good news that we need today even more than ever.

These days we are barraged by marketing that tries to tell us we’re inadequate. We’re constantly told that we need to have more and be more and so, need to consume more to help us grow. This carries over to our faith life as well. if we don’t feel strong in our faith, we should buy another book, or listen to some inspirational music, or find a new church that will make us better. In contrast, Jesus tells us that we have all that we need.

Jesus asks us not to focus on our sense of inadequacy but instead to get to work. Granted he says to get to work as slaves, which is problematic, but there is some important wisdom here that we need more than ever now. In an age when we’ve become dependent on positive reinforcement and the affirmation of others, Jesus tells us not to concern ourselves with getting thanked or being recognized for our work, but to put our faith into action. Rather than waiting until our faith is bigger, deeper, greater; rather than waiting to be acknowledged for having such a strong faith; we are to put our faith to work. Rather than waiting until we have all our beliefs figured out, or until we really feel a powerful sense of faith, we are to act on our faith.

As we act on our faith, we find that we have enough. As we show up to serve at the community meal, or to lead a small group of Sunday School kids, or to help flood victims, we find that our faith is sufficient. As we seek to carry out all our various callings – at home, at our jobs, in our families – with kindness and patience, we find that our faith can help us to love and forgive. We find that we can, and do, make a major impact on the landscape around us. Often it won’t feel like we’re making a difference. Often days will go by when there will be nothing to show for our labors. Often no one will say thank you, but that is OK. We are doing our duty and as we do, we find that we have all the faith we need to live out God’s call for our lives and to be part of God’s work in the world.

This Gospel reading has strange language but timeless wisdom that we need now more than ever. However, we also may need more current language to help us grasp it. So, I offer a portion of the poem “If I Should Have a Daughter” by Spoken Word poet Sarah Kay:

There’ll be days like this, my momma said.
When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape;when your boots will fill with rain, and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment.

And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you. Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline,  no matter how many times it’s sent away.

We can keep on kissing the shoreline, we can keep on loving and forgiving, we can keep showing up for our part in God’s work even when no one says thank you, even when we are sent away. We have all that we need even for days like this.

Thanks be to God.

Sermon For September 25, 2016 – “No More Separations”

Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

click here for today’s scriptures

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Today we hear another of Jesus’ parables, those stories he told to shock us and get our attention. In this parable, Jesus tells about a rich man who completely ignored a poor man named Lazarus who lay at his gate.

The rich man must have noticed that Lazarus had nothing to eat and that he was covered in sores. He had to have seen the dogs licking his wounds! But he did nothing. He just passed Lazarus by again and again. The rich man’s inability to see a fellow human being caused a great chasm to come between him and Lazarus and between him and God. The rich man lived his life separated from his neighbor and separated from God who commands us to love our neighbor and care for those in need.

What happens to you when there is someone who is very visibly poor right in front of you? Do you pass by?  Do you stop and help? Do you feel paralyzed by questions about what is the right thing to do and how to best respond? Most of us here don’t pass people in great need on a regular basis. Especially in Decorah, we rarely encounter people who are visibly poor. We rarely see people who are homeless, people begging on the streets. Part of that is because, while rural poverty in the US is so real, it is often more hidden and ignored.

But it is also because there is a great chasm between those of us who are comparatively rich, by global standards, and those who are poor in our world. Our lives are vastly different from those who have to walk miles each morning simply to get clean water or from those who live on less than a dollar a day. Sometimes we even talk as if we are living in different worlds – “first world countries and third world countries”, “the developed world and the developing world.” That is problematic language because we share one earth, yet that language highlights the very real chasm between us. It can feel like we live in a different world than two-thirds of the earth’s population. Even here in the US, as income inequality grows, we live in vastly different realities than many of our fellow Americans. Since we tend to isolate ourselves with people who are like us, we often remain separated from those in great need. All of this leads to a great chasm between us and a large number of God’s people.

A similar great chasm has grown up between white people and people of color in the US. African-Americans, especially. face major long standing, generational obstacles to equality. Unjust laws, housing codes, and revenue policies, to name just a few issues, have left so many black people lying in our streets covered with the sores and wounds of racism. We who are white often can’t even hear their desperate cries because we live so separated from communities of color.

These chasms lead to torment for all of us- not just those who are poor and visibly in need. God intends for us to live in harmony together loving God and loving our neighbor. When we don’t, we all suffer. Those who are poor are most negatively impacted by the divisions in our world, but these separations impact us all.

We get trapped in deep pits, cut off from life-giving relationships with one another and with God. We see the great chasms between us but feel paralyzed about how to address them – about what to do and how to live in the face of such disparities in our world. We want to help that homeless person on the street but don’t know what will be helpful. We want to support the refugees fleeing Syria but there are so many obstacles between us and them. We want to address racism and yet the task feels overwhelming.

Our parable today gives us a vivid picture of how great the chasms between us and God and between us and our neighbors can become. It offers a stark image of the reality of our sin and brokenness. As the parable ends, things look pretty hopeless for the rich man and his brothers. They’ve ignored God’s law and the prophet; they won’t be convinced even if someone rises from the dead. Yet this one parable does not give us the whole story. There is a bigger reality at work in our world.

God doesn’t just long for us to have life-giving relationships with God and one another and leave us to our own devices. As we heard two weeks ago with the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin in chapter 15 of Luke, God goes to great lengths to find us and help us. God, in Jesus, has entered into our sin and brokenness, into death, even into hell to search for us. And God searches for us, not to tell us what to do or to try to convince us to act differently, but to set us free from the sin that binds us, to raise us up from pits of despair and into new life. God searches for us and finds us through the Word, worship, and sacraments, through others, through creation. God finds us and convicts us of the sin that keeps us separated from one another. Then God forgives us and sets us free from paralysis to do what we can. We discover we can’t overcome all the divisions in our world but we can make a difference right where we live. We can’t fix all the problems but we can show love because we are loved and forgiven.

God has fully entered into the chasms that separate us from God and now, as the book of Romans tells us, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. And that love of God is a love for each person throughout the world. So as we are drawn into the love of God, we are made part of a love that encompasses all humanity, all of creation. We are loved, we are forgiven and we are set free to be in relationship with God’s people. We are set free to see others, to love them, to do what we can to help, and to trust that God is at work in and beyond us. We have what we need.

Let’s take a few moments to pray and rest in this love that then sends us out to serve.

Amen. Thanks be to God.