Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 18, 2018
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Today’s scriptures: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-12; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

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

Does change come through legislation or through a focus on hearts and minds? This perpetual question is as relevant today as it’s ever been. It’s a question asked of Daryl Davis – the black man who’s spent years befriending Ku Klux Klan members in hopes of changing their hearts. Daryl was at Luther College last week during the Hope over Hate week – a week that unfortunately ended very painfully with the letters KKK and a swastika stomped into the snow on the college football field. As we’ve seen so often recently, white supremacy is very much alive and well in this country. How do we stop it?

Daryl Davis has made a profound impact. He reports that over 200 Klansmen have given up their robes and cards as a result of interactions with him. He has a powerful story of making change – one heart at a time. Yet Davis is often criticized for not acknowledging the power of systemic racism in the US.

The Decorah paper this week had an article about how Winneshiek County responded to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. The Klan was rising in Northeast Iowa, but the county supervisors decided its presence put the safety and free speech of others at risk. So, they banned them from parading through local streets by day or burning crosses in local pastures by night This ban was successful in countering the Klan.

How will change happen? Attention to laws and systemic issues or attention to hearts and minds? We’re asking this question about racial issues, gun control, sexual harassment, the opioid crisis and so many other issues.

These days, many Christians are also wondering what role God’s law should play in our religiously di- verse, democratic society. What bearing should the Ten Commandments and other ethical teachings in the Old Testament have on our life together today? The ancient purity and holiness codes are bound to a par- ticular time, but what about commands that call us to honor life, family and the neighbor and to care for the poor, for strangers and resident aliens? How do we understand them today and how should they impact our public life?

Some would seek to impose their interpretation of the commands on others. Some think religion should have nothing to do with law – that it should be all about love, all about the heart. Still others see the law guiding us to work for justice and care for others.

Our first reading today is often used to say that religion should be all about the heart. It announces a new covenant given to God’s chosen people, and to us through baptism – a covenant that addresses our hearts.

So, it would seem, a change of heart is more important than the law. Except God isn’t saying here that the law is unimportant or that it will be abolished. Rather, God is saying the law is so essential that it will be placed within us, and written on our hearts. We will internalize God’s teachings. (The Hebrew word used God’s commands also means teaching.)

In the reading from Jeremiah and throughout scripture, we see that God’s law is crucially important for us and for our world. It is a key way that God’s concern for the well-being of all people is made known. It’s intended to help us live in freedom and to know fullness of life in community. God’s law is how we live out God’s love and God’s justice together.

The days are surely coming, says our God, when the law will be written on our hearts and will be within us. Then we won’t need to study and ponder God’s external teachings.

The days are surely coming but, oh my, we’re not there yet! Oh my, do we ever still need God’s teachings to lead us into justice, freedom, and well-being for all people. We need to study and ponder them.

We also need their guidance for our life in this society. That’s not to say that we as Christians should seek to impose our understandings of God’s law on other people in this pluralistic, democratic country. Rather, God’s law calls us to engage in our common life with a focus on justice, with a concern for the well-being of others.

In this country, that means advocating for good and just laws that enhance the well-being of all people. It means bringing our voices into the public square, into civil and respectful dialogue for the sake of the larger community. It means discerning with others, including those who hold very different beliefs, about how we can move towards justice and well-being together. As we do all this, we tend to our life together, both through attention to good laws and through conversations that can change hearts and minds.

This is all hard work. We’re reluctant to do it, we struggle with it, we fail. As we seek to live out God’s law, it shows us how much our hearts need to change, how far we stray from God’s ways of love and justice. It would be so much easier if God’s intentions for life together were just written on our hearts and everyone else’s hearts. The days are surely coming, says our God, when that will happen. Until then we are called to seek, wrestle, discern, risk, and be willing to make mistakes.

We can do all this because of the other key way that God’s love is made known in the world – through God’s forgiveness.

As the new covenant is announced, we hear that God forgives our iniquities and remembers our sin no more. Then Jesus announces a new covenant made with his blood, given for you and for all people, for the forgiveness of sin. This forgiveness changes our hearts. It allows us to experience God’s compassion and mercy so that we can extend it to others. God knows we need compassion and mercy as we work with one another in the public square seeking good laws and changed hearts, especially these days.

So today, and every Sunday, we hear these words of forgiveness and love spoken directly to us: This cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sin.

God, let this promise change our hearts and lead us in your ways.

Let’s take a moment for silent prayer.

Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 11, 2018
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Scriptures for today: Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus, lifted up for all.

When I was a kid, my mom had some strange home remedies. Anytime I’d come in itching with mosquito bites she’d bring out the toothpaste and smear it all over my arms. I got a big ugly wart once and she applied duct tape. Before long car trips, she’d have me drink lemon juice to prevent motion sickness. I was quite suspicious of these remedies. I wanted to go to the store and buy the stuff that said “results guaranteed” right there on the box. “Can’t I just take Dramamine like Stephanie does?” I’d whine. “Why can’t you keep calamine lotion around like every other mom?” I’d complain. “I am your mom. Trust me,” was her only response. I now use all of her strange remedies myself.

Our Old Testament reading today has two very strange remedies in the midst of a very strange story. What’s most strange, and very troubling, is that God sends a plague of poisonous serpents upon the people.

Up to this point in their story, God has been incredibly generous to the people: claiming them as God’s own people, committing to them with a covenant, bringing them out of slavery, leading them in the wild- erness towards the promised land, providing food in the desert. God’s tells them again and again, “Do not be afraid. I am your God, trust me, listen to me.” But the people just can’t get past their fear and anxiety. Instead of trusting, they hoard the food God provides and it rots. They worship idols. They get impatient and irritable – demanding the quick fix and the guaranteed result. They grumble and whine with com- plaints like we heard today, “there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” (Which one is it- no food or gross food? Can’t be both.)

So instead of moving forward into the promised land, God’s people get stuck – stuck in a seething pit of anxiety, fear, bitterness and whining. All of this stuff poisons them, draining their life away. Ever felt like that?

God refuses to just watch from afar as they dig deeper into a toxic hole. So, God sends poisonous serpents that bite them and many die. Actually, the Hebrew here doesn’t mean poisonous, it means fiery – it is the word seraph. God sends fiery seraph serpents to bite the people. Fiery seraphs also appear to Isaiah when God calls him to be a prophet. Seraphs get his attention. They do the same thing for the people here. They thought their life was bad; no, this is bad. Nothing like the possibility of your death to awaken you to the beauty of your life. Perhaps the fiery, seraph serpents that God sends aren’t so much a punishment as they are a wake-up call to the people – a strange remedy to startle them out of their anxiety and bitterness.

Except- Did God really send the serpents, or is that what the people thought in hindsight? Maybe serpents just got their attention and they interpreted it as a message from God? I don’t know. And even if serpents were God’s doing back then, does God still send things that hurt us? I really don’t think so; I just don’t think God is the cause of suffering. What I do know is that in my own life, there have been some painful wake-up calls that have broken through my grumbling and self-pity, that have helped me to notice God’s presence and God’s care. Did God orchestrate those moments to open my eyes? I don’t think so. Yet I do believe God used those difficult times for good, that God didn’t cause them but was at work in them. These days, our country is experiencing painful wake-up calls around issues of sexual harassment, race, and gun violence – to name a few. I do not believe God is the cause of these things – not at all. Yet I do believe God can use them for good- to get our attention and turn us around. Painful things can be strange remedies.

Whatever the cause, that strange remedy of the serpents works. It gets the people’s attention. They recog- nize how toxic their lives have become, how much they need God. They confess their sin to Moses and ask him to pray to God to remove the serpents.

But God doesn’t remove the serpents. Instead, God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent and place it on a pole. Then the people who are bitten can look at the serpent and live.

This sounds like hocus-pocus stuff; it sounds like worshipping an idol. Yet God uses that bronze serpent to heal the people. God doesn’t take away the pain. Instead, God provides a way through it, healing in the midst of it.

They look upon a serpent who cannot bite them. As they do, they find that all the serpents no longer have power over them. They don’t need to be afraid – another strange remedy that works. It works for them and it actually works for us, too. God asks us to look upon our sin, our fear, our pain, to face it all in order to see that it does not have ultimate power of us – it will not ultimately destroy us.

This is what the cross shows us. Jesus is lifted up on the cross – something that looks to all the world like failure and death. Yet the cross shows us that all that stuff does not have ultimate power over us; rather, God works new life from it all. The One who was lifted up on the cross to die was also lifted to new life.

The strange remedy of the cross means that, personally and collectively, we can face all our fears, our prejudices, our violence. The God who brings life out of death is more powerful than all of that stuff. God is in the midst of it to bring life out of it – now and always.

Let’s take a moment for prayer and reflection.

Third Sunday in Lent
March 4, 2018
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Click here to read scripture passages for the day.

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus who sets us free.

What’re the first things that come to your mind when you hear “the ten commandments?” Other than a scene from a movie, what other images arise? A giant finger wagging no, no, no, no? Heavy tablets that come down on us hard to get us in line? Sour faced people trying to restrict freedom and force the commandments on others?

The commandments have taken on a lot of baggage, a lot of extra weight, throughout the centuries and recently in the culture wars. God’s commands are weighty and important, but we miss something when we approach them only as obligations imposed on ourselves and others, as heavy burdens and restrict- ions on our freedom.

In fact, the commandments are all about freedom. They begin with a declaration of freedom. God says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” And what follows are ten commands, or teachings, about how to be free that are just as helpful for us today as they were to God’s people long ago.

God’s people, the Israelites, were in slavery because Egypt’s ruler, Pharaoh, wanted more – more power, more land, more wealth, more cheap labor. He feared scarcity. He kept grasping, hoarding and clinging. He used and abused the Israelites to feed his insatiable greed for more. God saw all this, and God remembered the covenant with Abraham, Sarah and their descendants, the people of Israel. God said enough, no more, “Let my people go.” And God brought them out of slavery.

Yet the forces that enslaved the people in Egypt are found in every land, in every time, in every heart.

Pharaoh, with all his arrogant violent greed, is not contained in Egypt but is all around us and within us.

Staying free from Pharoah takes more than a one-time rescue. It takes an intentional strategy. So, God renewed the covenant made with Abraham and Sarah and God gave the commandments to teach the way to be free. They are, as scholar Walter Bruggemann puts it, the strategy for staying free.

This is a countercultural view of freedom – to think that following rules and commands helps us to be free. So often we hear that freedom means getting to do whatever we want, not being bound to any higher power, no obligations. Yet, if we don’t follow the commandments, Bruggemann points out, we find ourselves back in slavery, back in the grip of Pharaoh and that insatiable hunger for more: “Back to having to produce on demand, Back in the rat-race of production and consumption, Back in fear, anxiety and alienation, Back in hostility toward the neighbor.”

God gives us a different way to live, a strategy for staying free. To stay free, we need to honor God instead of all the idols, all the other things we hope will give us more – more control, more security, more wealth.

We need to honor God rather than acting as if we are the center of the universe, as if we deserve to have whatever we want.

We need to not worship stuff, even stuff that is rare, precious, or empowering. We need to give ultimate loyalty to God rather than any race, gender, ideology, political party or nation. All those things promise a sense of belonging and security, but they can’t free us from wanting more and the drive to use and abuse others to get more. We need to rest, to keep Sabbath and worship God so we don’t fall into the rat-race of busyness and exhaustion that the Pharaohs within and around us demand. To stay free, we need to turn away from violence and greed and turn toward the neighbor – recognizing the worth and dignity of every neighbor, not craving or seizing what belongs to the neighbor.

The strategy for staying free can be summarized as love God and love the neighbor.

Recently, I read a dramatic story about one community seeking to live in the freedom of the commandments amidst all enslaving forces in our world. In 2008, an Augsburg College student, a Somali American, was gunned down as he left his work-study assignment tutoring neighborhood children. Augsburg’s President Paul Pribbenow reflected on this tragedy in a recent article. He describes how, in the wake of the shooting, the college’s Somali American neighbors were troubled and afraid – afraid of the violence and afraid of retribution for their community. The college also had to wrestle with whether it was safe for their students and faculty to be out in the neighborhood doing service learning, a central component of an Augsburg education.

Pribbenow writes, “Someone broke one of God’s commandments and we lived in the aftermath. It was in that moment that it became so clear to me … that God gives us commandments so that we might know the sort of lives God intends for us to live together … At a neighborhood meeting … to address safety concerns … we all experienced firsthand the wrenching emotional impact of the shooting on our lives together. Though we intended to talk about security cameras and safety patrols, instead we listened to urgent longing for community. When a Muslim Imam stood to speak, his first words were ‘God is good.’ And though we were a room of people of very different faith traditions, we could whisper, ‘Yes, God is good, and this is not what our God wants for us.’ In that spirit, our community came together to rededicate itself to the well-being of our neighbors – yes, to more security cameras and personnel, but even more urgently to finding common purpose in the health, safety, and well-being of our neighbors and neighborhood.”

After such a traumatic experience, the world would say that Augsburg should pull students and faculty out of the neighborhood and back into safety; but that would mean the college would be enslaved by fear and anger. Instead, Pribbenow writes, “We chose to stay, to be neighbor, to embrace the gift of God’s word in our midst and the commandments that offer us a vision of life with our neighbors, a call to defy and reject the forces that rule our lives, the command to love each other.”

Beloved, God has given us a strategy to be free. God has made a new covenant with us as we seek to live out this strategy. God, in Jesus, has come to be present with us, to challenge us, to forgive us and renew us so that we might live in freedom and love.

More on that when we get to that covenant in two weeks. For now, let’s join in a moment of silent prayer and reflection.

Second Sunday in Lent
February 25, 2018
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

First Reading:  Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:23-31; Second Reading: Romans 4:13-25; Gospel: Mark 8:31-38

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

So, after two weeks of Olympic coverage, how are you feeling about your own physical accomplishments? It’s inspiring to see the heights human bodies can achieve. At times, it can also make you want to throw in the towel. It’s hard enough to exercise in this college town swarming with the bodies of fit twenty-year olds – thank you very much!

That sense of inferiority can happen in our faith lives, too. Can we ever measure up to the great heroes of faith like Abraham and Paul, Dorothy Day, Bonhoeffer, Dr. King? They definitely knew what it was to carry their cross and give of themselves freely.

Today we heard a lot about Abraham in the first and second readings. The way Paul describes him in the Romans passage, Abraham sounds like a truly stellar spiritual athlete.

Paul writes: “Hoping against hope Abraham believed that he would become the father of many nations.” “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body which was as good as dead or the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.” “No distrust made him waver” and he was “fully convinced” that God would bring him a son. This guy should get a gold medal for faith.

Except, with all due respect to the Apostle Paul, his memory of Abraham seems a bit … selective. A cynic might even claim Paul is like some election year spin doctor who’s sanitized Abraham, air- brushed him, made him look spotless and spiritually splendid. Paul does have good reasons for his portrayal of Abraham. He emphasizes Abraham’s faith to teach that faith is more important than good works – a key thing to remember. Yet Abraham’s faith is a bit more complicated than Paul lets on which, it turns out, is good news for us.

The first time God promised a son to Abraham, then called Abram, he believed God. It “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” But when some years passed and a son still hadn’t been born, Sarai and Abram took matters into their own hands.

Sarai decided her slave Hagar, rather than God, would produce a son. Abram, we’re told, “listened to the voice of Sarai”. It’s not clear if he listened to the voice of the Lord about this. He embraced Sarai’s plan- literally- and a son Ishmael was born. Slaves did bear children for their mistresses, so maybe this plan wasn’t a lack of faith. But it still seems a little sketchy; and the way Abram and Sarai treated Hagar was really awful.

God promised Abram a son again, and gave him the name Abraham, ancestor of many nations. This time God promised the son would come through the renamed Sarah. But, once again, Abraham was anything BUT fully convinced. “He fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’ ” It seems some distrust did make him waver a bit.

We really need this more nuanced picture of Abraham alongside Paul’s version. Because if we see Abraham merely as a larger than life hero of faith, we may get the wrong impression about God. We might conclude that God works only with spiritual giants of Olympian strength – muscular Christians – and despair that God can work with garden-variety humans like us, who are a little more weak and wavering.

Abraham doubted plenty. He struggled, took matters into his own hands, and laughed in disbelief.  He also tried to pass Sarah off as his sister twice in order to save his own skin. I think you should lose style points for stunts like that.

Yet, God still did a new thing in Abraham and Sarah. God made them a promise. That promise work- ed its way into their lives and bore fruit. Their son was born and a whole new faith was born. Sarah and Abraham became the forebearers of the Jewish and Christian faiths. According to Genesis, God also made promises to Hagar and Ishmael and their descendants in faith, that is Muslims. Because of God’s promises, each of these ancestors was a blessing to the world.

God’s promise brought new life and new faith. Abraham became fully convinced, not because of some heroic ability on his part, but because of the power of God who gave the promise.

God’s promises aren’t the empty words of a spin doctor or campaign specialist. God, as Paul says, “brings life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” God’s promise, God’s Word, makes things happen. God’s Word calls creation into existence, rips open the heavens, raises the dead and brings new life.

God’s Word also creates faith and hope – in Abraham and in us.

It doesn’t depend upon us to muster up faith. It doesn’t fall to us to bring about change and newness on our own. God’s Word creates the hope we need, the hope our world needs.

God’s Word of promise is given to you – in the covenant of baptism and in worship today through scripture, song, prayer, preaching, and Holy Communion. God’s Word is at work to forgive you, to set you free, to give you new life – each new day.

In all the times you feel like throwing in the towel, in all the ways you think you don’t measure up, in all your cynical laughter or despair about the state of the world and your own life – God’s word is for you. You don’t need to worry about saving and securing your life; you have what you need to let go and follow Jesus into the unknown.

You have what you need to hope and risk and start again, and to be a blessing for our world. See, this promise is for you, but not only for you. The world needs people who can hope against hope, who remain open to new life, who freely give of themselves.

As God’s people together, as children of the covenant, we can do this. Not because we are heroic but because God is faithful.

Let’s take a moment for prayer and reflection.

First Sunday in Lent
February 18, 2018
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Click here to read scripture passages for the day.

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus. And, Beloved, what can we do about the gun violence in our country?

This week, yet again, we’re angry, we’re sad. We feel hopeless and yet we know we need to take action.

Something has to change. We cannot continue to watch these events unfold and do nothing.

It seems God has similar feelings. Today we heard the end of the story of Noah and the flood, but it helps to start with the beginning of the story.

We’re told throughout Genesis, chapter 6: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth … And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart … Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence … And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them, now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.’ ”                       

God also was grieved about all the corruption and violence on the earth. God refused to simply watch it unfold and do nothing.

God decided to act- to destroy all flesh and all creation and start over again with just a small remnant of people and creatures.

This is a troubling story. I’ve always wondered why we emphasize it with children so much. I know the animals can be cute, but why do we think divinely driven genocide and global annihilation make up a good bedtime story? Good night, sleep tight, don’t get washed away by a flood tonight?

This is a troubling story and yet I’m also grateful that we have a God who is grieved by human corruption and violence, rather than a God who’s some kind of unmoved mover – unaffected and uninvolved in creation. God is troubled by the ways we harm each other. God is bent on justice for the sake of the flourishing of all creation.

So, God sent a flood in the days of Noah.

But then after the flood, we hear in chapter 8, “the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never … again destroy every living creature as I have done.’ ” And then, in chapter 9, God made an everlasting covenant with all living flesh, promising to never again send a flood to destroy the earth.

God is still, and always, bent on justice; but it seems God has decided that anger from a distance is not the answer. Instead, God has committed to be even more involved with creation by making an everlasting covenant with all flesh. God has pledged to be actively engaged in the flourishing of life to bring about justice and compassion through relationship with flesh.

Anger and destruction from on high would keep God removed from all the violence and corruption. In- stead, God has moved in closer. We see this in all the covenants God makes with people throughout the Old Testament – covenants we’ll hear about this Lent. We see this most fully in Jesus who gives the new covenant in his blood – a covenant of non-violent, self-giving love.

God not only made a covenant with all flesh; God, in Jesus, also became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus entered into all that we face: desert times, temptations, suffering and death. He got angry at injustice but could not be stopped from loving us – even when we killed him. He rose again and comes to us still in his body and blood. God, in Jesus, does not remain at a distance but moves in very close.

We need to do the same when it comes to addressing gun violence and other difficult issues we face.

We need to turn away from anger at a distance. We can’t simply post rants on Facebook; we can’t get angry at everyone else from afar. We, like God, must get more involved with God’s creation for the sake of the flourishing of life. We must commit to engage and move in closer.

This is our work as people of God’s covenant. We have been brought into God’s covenant with all flesh in a very personal and powerful way through baptism. In baptism, we go through the waters that bring death to our sinful selves and we are brought into new life. As we heard in the 1 Peter reading, just as God saved Noah and his family in the flood, so baptism saves us from all that would cut us off from life, from God.

The new life we have been given is not for our sake alone. It is given to draw us into God’s work of bringing justice and mercy through us. Our baptism calls us into this work and compels us to move in close. We’re called to have difficult conversations with people we’d rather despise. We’re called to engage the political process for that is how we work for justice and mercy together. We’re called to go to places that make us uncomfortable, to keep working, to keep hoping.

We are doing this together now around the issue of immigration. Instead of just being angry from a distance about the broken immigration system in our country, we have become an AMMPARO congregation and are caring for the health needs of unaccompanied minors. We have moved in closer by calling and writing to our representatives in Congress. We have walked with our neighbors, the Campos family, as Raul was detained by ICE. Raul has been released on bail, but the journey still continues for the Campos family and we will stay in this journey for the long haul.

In these and so many other ways, we as God’s people are drawing near to others so that we can know God’s justice and compassion, so that life can flourish in our communities. We need to continue this work together, especially around the issue of gun violence

Beloved, we have what we need to do this work together. God has made a covenant with us in the rainbow and in the waters of baptism. We can move in close for God is always close to us.

Let’s take a moment for silent prayer.