Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
July 22, 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.

It must be all the work we’re doing around here – I seem to have construction on the brain. Last week’s sermon was all about plumb lines – God’s word should be our plumb line, says the prophet Amos. This week, a phrase from our Ephesians reading has captured my attention: Jesus “has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” I keep picturing Jesus as God’s singular wrecking crew, smashing through all the hostile barriers we put up.

    That’s not how we usually imagine Jesus. We talk about Jesus the Good Shepherd, the light of the world, the bread of life, but Jesus with a sledgehammer? Not so much. Jesus as God’s wrecking crew isn’t a warm, fuzzy image, but it’s one we really need.

Our world is full of walls, fences, gates, partitions, all manner of barriers aimed at keeping something or someone in and something or someone else out.

We do need some walls. Walls in our homes protect us from the elements; fences keep livestock safely in and predators out; partitions inside buildings allow for privacy and increased functionality.

Yet walls, both literal and spiritual, can also increase the hostility in our world. All walls serve a purpose, but not all walls serve the purposes of God.

God’s purposes, according to Ephesians, are to create one new humanity thus making peace, and to build us together into a dwelling place for God.

That all feels like an awfully ambitious building project, especially these days. It makes the work we’re do- ing around here seem much more manageable. Yet, God who raised Jesus from the dead can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. God is at work to build a new heaven and new earth and a new humanity without divisions. In order for this construction project to happen, however, Jesus has to do some demolition work within each of us because we all help to build up hostility in our world. We’re all master builders when it comes to putting up walls between us and others.

It’s so easy to judge the walls others build – in Israel, on the southern border, in Berlin, between Jews and Gentiles in ancient times. Yet, when we do some honest digging within, its apparent that we build walls, too – on a smaller scale, but the results are just as divisive. We draw sharp lines between us and them – black/white, Liberal/ conservative, gay/straight, and on and on and on. We pile on the raw materials of fear and hatred and there’s no shortage of those very raw materials within us. We cement it all together with our stereotypes and prejudices and fortify it with our pride. The walls grow taller and thicker. Our sin cuts us off from one another and from God. God has commanded us to love and it grieves God when we do not.

But Jesus is at work to break the power of sin within us, to free us from the tall prisons caused by our sinfulness and hostility. On the cross, Jesus proved that nothing – not sin, not evil, not violence, not hatred, not even death – nothing can separate us from the love of God. Jesus tore down the curtain, the barrier, that would keep us away from God.

We now have a place in God’s household – a very large house with space for all tribes and nations, a dwelling place with many rooms, but no walls of hostility. We now have a place as citizens of God’s kingdom, a kingdom with wide-open borders. We are no longer aliens or strangers but citizens with the saints. We have a place to belong, a place to call home.

Most of the time, when we belong somewhere we are the insiders and others, outsiders. We belong to a family or nation and others don’t; we are part of the tribe and others aren’t.

Yet God is creating one new humanity with no distinctions between people. To accomplish this, Jesus not only tears down walls. He also preached peace to those far off and those near and draws us all into God.

As Jesus brings us together with people that we’d prefer to keep at a distance, he also keeps chipping away at our walls. When we’re in proximity with other people; when we know their names, their stories, their hopes and dreams; it is so much harder to hate them. The walls of hostility begin to crumble.

Lawyer, author and civil rights leader Bryan Stevenson talks often about the lessons he’s learned by being in close contact with people in prison. He says, in his book Just Mercy, “Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

We need to be in proximity to those we fear, those we hate. This is so hard to do, but we aren’t on our own as we do it. Jesus is our peace and he is with us; we can follow where he leads into uncomfortable and even risky situations.

In God’s kingdom, we have the assurance of a home, a place to belong; but this assurance is not for our comfort. It’s so we’ll stop worrying about whether we belong and start working to make sure everyone knows that they belong to God. It’s so we’ll stop feeling the need to build walls of hostility and, instead, join in God’s work of building a whole new humanity.

In Christ, we have been given the tools we need to join this work. We’ve been given Jesus, who is both God’s wrecking crew and God’s peace. We’ve been given forgiveness, reconciliation and access to God. We’ve been drawn near to those we fear, as Jesus shows us that we are held together in the very heart of God.

We have all that we need.

Let’s take a moment for prayer.

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
July 15, 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.

When we hear this awful story, it is so easy to see King Herod as a monster. It’s so easy to demonize him and people like him, and there are plenty of people like him in our day. Certainly, his actions and actions like his need to be addressed. John the Baptist called Herod out. We as Christians are called to address injustice and violence. Yet to do that faithfully, we also need to examine our own lives in light of John’s call to repent and follow in the ways of God’s Kingdom. We have much more in common with King Herod than we’d care to admit.

We pick up Herod’s story as he’s starting to hear about the preaching and teaching and healing of Jesus.

People are asking, “Who is this Jesus?” King Herod leaps to a strange conclusion based on his own guilt and fear. He decides that Jesus must be John the Baptist reincarnated – that John must have come back to haunt him after Herod beheaded him.

Dead or alive, John the Baptist has been troubling Herod for a while. When Herod takes his brother’s wife as his own, John does not hesitate in telling truth to power. John never hesitates in calling everyone, of every station, to repent.

Herod’s new wife, Herodias, is furious and wants John dead. Herod does have John arrested. Yet some- thing stops him from killing John – fear and confusion and the minute stirrings of the soul. We’re told, “Herod feared John, knowing that John was a righteous and holy man, and Herod protected him. When he heard John he was greatly perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him.”

So, Herod keeps John in prison, locked away. He keeps John from interfering with his daily life, and yet, he likes to listen to him.

How often we do this same thing. We keep God’s word, God’s call to repentance, locked away where we can listen to it when we have time, when it won’t cause us any trouble. We don’t allow God’s word to really impact our lives – to be the plumb line for our lives.

A plumb line, the symbol used by the prophet Amos in our reading today, is a simple builder’s tool – a string with a weight at the end. Hold it to the top of the wall and it hangs straight down, showing you if your wall is built correctly. Amos says that God’s word and God’s ways are to be our plumb lines, to guide our lives.

Part of Herod’s problem is that he has too many plumb lines working as he ponders what to do with John the Baptist. One plumb line is John’s preaching – preaching that challenges and convicts him and could set him free. Another is his wife’s pressure to do her bidding. And then there’s public opinion – John is a popular preacher. Killing him may not be the politically savvy move, yet Herod also needs to save face after John challenges his authority. Herod’s also got to consider the will of his supporters and the will of his enemies.

No wonder Herod is perplexed – his plumb lines are getting tangled, calling him in different directions.

Herod can’t decide what to do, so he tries to get away with doing nothing. His hand is forced when the plumb lines come together and he can no longer delay. There’s a party, he drinks too much, then he makes a rash promise. His wife seizes her moment and demands the death of John and there Herod sits, again perplexed and bothered. In the end, he chooses to silence the prophetic word. He picks the wrong plumb line by which to measure his life.

We know what it is to have a whole mess of plumb lines working on us – a whole bunch of different standards. Social media tells us to measure our lives by how many likes, followers and streaks we’ve got going. We judge our own and others’ worth as people based on financial net worth. We feel pressed to do what’s politically savvy even when it goes against our core values. We’re told we have to put America first, family first, our own health first. We feel pressure to measure up at home, at work, in our families, with our weight and appearance.

This gets us all tangled up, unable to address bad behavior in our own lives and in the world, unable to live out God’s ways of justice, mercy and love.

We need God to set us free from all this. We need God to reframe how we measure ourselves and others.

God does this through the Word. So, we can’t keep God’s word locked away in a prison of our own devising bringing it out to look at and listen to at our convenience; we can’t seek to silence it. We need to really pay close attention to it as a builder looks to a plumb line.

God’s Word shows us where we are tangled up, where we are crooked, where we have gone astray – it convicts us. Yet God’s Word also sets us free from trying to measure up to so many competing, impossible standards. God’s Word assures us that we are loved beyond measure and forgiven without fail. We are children of God, beloved of God as is every person on earth. This assurance frees us and also guides us to treat all people as God’s beloved, for if we don’t we are off track. God’s Word of love, justice and mercy needs to be the measure of our lives.

It may sound naïve and narrow to think that God’s word could really function as a good and true plumb line for us in our day with all the challenges we face.

But a new movement of Christians, entitled Reclaiming Jesus, is calling the church to live as followers of Jesus before anything, guided by the plumb line of God’s word. This focus on putting Jesus’ message, God’s word, first is allowing them to call out injustice and oppression in the US the way John the Baptist did with King Herod. They have issued a statement which begins with the words:

We are living through perilous and polarizing times as a nation, with a dangerous crisis of moral and pol- itical leadership at the highest levels of our government and in our churches. We believe the soul of the nation and the integrity of faith are now at stake.

They then continue with six affirmations grounded in scripture that also lead them to reject things happening in our country today. I encourage you to check out the full statement at www.reclaimingjesus.org, but here are a few snippets:

WE BELIEVE each human being is made in God’s image and likeness (Genesis 1:26).

THEREFORE, WE REJECT the resurgence of white nationalism and racism in our nation on many fronts, including the highest levels of political leadership.

WE BELIEVE how we treat the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick, and the prisoner is how we treat Christ himself. (Matthew 25: 31-46).

THEREFORE, WE REJECT the language and policies of political leaders who would debase and abandon the most vulnerable children of God. We strongly deplore the growing attacks on immigrants and refugees who are being made into cultural and political targets, and we need to remind our churches that God makes the treatment of the “strangers” among us a test of faith (Leviticus 19:33-34).

God’s Word is a good and true plumb line for us in these challenging times. It matters for you and for our world. God’s Word comes to you today to say … You are loved beyond measure and forgiven without fail.

You are God’s beloved. Go out to treat all people with God’s love, to love and serve God’s world guided by God’s word of justice and mercy.

Let’s take a few moments for silent prayer.