Sermon for November 13, 2016 – “Testifying Together”

Twenty-sixth Sunday After Pentecost
November 13, 2016
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

click here to read scripture passages for the day

Testifying Together

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

In the story we just heard, Jesus tells the disciples, “do not be terrified.” That is a message we also need to hear right now after a divisive and painful week in our country, as we hear reports of harassment and hate crimes, as people protest in the streets. We need to hear the most repeated phrase in scripture, “do not be afraid, do not be terrified.” We also need to know why it is that we’re told not to be afraid.

Sometimes people say “don’t be afraid” as a way to minimize the problems we face -“it’s not so bad, it’ll be fine.” Yet sometimes there are very real reasons to be afraid. Fear alerts us to the potential of danger for us and the community. If we ignore and minimize the fear, we may also ignore important information and not take the action needed for us all to be safe and well. Right now people of color, Muslims, refugees, immigrants, women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people have very real reasons to be afraid due to the actions of supremacists who’ve been emboldened by hateful campaign rhetoric that they feel has now been endorsed.

Other times people say “don’t be afraid” as a way to critique people from all across the political spectrum who have very real concerns about the state of our country and our world right now – as in “don’t get all worked up about it, just relax already.” Yet it’s much easier to say “don’t worry about it” from a position of safety and privilege. Both the Muslim woman suffering abuse and the unemployed factory worker have real concerns that we as a country need to hear and address. Still other times people say “don’t be afraid, God’s got this” as a way to excuse us from taking any action.

Notice, Jesus doesn’t minimize the reasons the disciples have to be afraid. In fact, he tells them things are only going to get worse before the end of the world as we know it, before the dawn of God’s new day in which all will live in peace. Jesus doesn’t say, “relax, don’t get worked up, God will fix this.” Jesus doesn’t deny or diminish the power of fear or encourage his disciples to avoid it. Fear is a powerful force that can lead to hatred and despair. We need to take it seriously and address it; Jesus encourages us to do just that. He tells his disciples to challenge the power of fear by testifying against it.

To testify means to be like witnesses in a courtroom, witnesses who make the case that God’s love and God’s mercy will prevail over fear. We make this case in the court of public opinion by how we speak and how we live. Our words and our lives provide evidence that love is stronger than all the reasons to fear.

Living as witnesses to love allows us to bring a challenge to fear, hatred and despair. We challenge fear with courage, hatred with compassion, and despair with hope. We say to the fear within and around us, “it may look like you are all powerful but we know differently and we will show it with our lives and with our words.”

This can feel like a daunting task especially when we’re tired and confused. Yet Jesus promises we will receive what we need to testify, to challenge the power of fear. We will be given words and a wisdom. We need these gifts now more than ever. In a time of so many angry words, so many fearful words, we need words born out of wisdom and prayer, not quick, reactive words. We need words that bear witness to God’s ways of love and mercy. So today we spend time in prayer and we listen for God’s Word so that we will be shaped into witnesses of God’s ways.

Jesus also promises that we will not perish, we will not be overcome by fear, we will be held safe in God. That is, we are in God’s witness protection program. Even if we are put in prison, even if we die, even when we die, we are held always in God and given new life each day, new life that fear cannot destroy.

Finally, we are also given a community that helps us to testify. All of the instruction and the assurance in this passage is given to the community. Each ‘you’ in this passage is a plural ‘you’ – “This will give you all an opportunity to testify. I will give you all words and a wisdom. You all will be betrayed. By the endurance of all of you, you all will gain your souls.” We aren’t just individual witnesses; we are part of a class action lawsuit against the power of fear. We’re in this together and we have a great cloud of witnesses with us as we make our case.

One in that great cloud of witnesses is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader in the confessing church when the Nazis ruled Germany. Bonhoeffer testified against the forces of fear and hatred that were so pervasive in Germany in his time. He was a witness to God’s ways in his words and his life. Bonhoeffer’s prayer and study of God’s word ultimately led him to the awareness that he needed to challenge the power of fear by working to overthrow the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and ultimately killed by the Nazis.

While he was in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote a number of letters. One of these letters was set to music to create the hymn we will sing as our Hymn of the Day. This hymn conveys Bonhoeffer’s trust that his fear would not prevail, that he could face whatever came with confidence and hope while living as a witness to God.

May this hymn, By Gracious Powers, be our prayer; may it help us to receive words and wisdom so that, in the face of fear, we might be witnesses to God’s ways of love and mercy.

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November 6, 2016
All Saints Sunday
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Click here to read scripture passages for the day.

No More Ladders

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

In American culture, there’s a lot of emphasis on going up. We value upward mobility. We say, ”Things are looking up, onward and upward, it’s on the up and up.” We want faith to be uplifting and to provide mountain top experiences.

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, the version more familiar to us than the version we heard from Luke today, seems to fit our religious sensibilities. According to Matthew, it happened up on a mountaintop and it seems to lay out qualities we should aspire to achieve. We should become poor in spirit, or humble; we should become merciful; we should hunger and thirst for righteousness; we should strive to ascend to great heights of faith like saints before us. (I actually don’t think that is what Jesus is saying in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, but it’s how it often gets interpreted.)

The way Luke remembers Jesus’ famous sermon doesn’t let us go there at all. Luke’s version, and the whole Gospel of Luke, upends all our “moving on up” thinking. For one thing, in the Gospel of Luke Jesus doesn’t give his sermon from lofty mountain heights. He has been up on a mountain praying but then, we’re told, “He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people and began to heal them.” Rather than remaining at lofty heights, Jesus came down into the midst of the crowd of people who were vulnerable and in need and said, “Blessed are you who are poor”- not poor in spirit like Matthew says, just poor; “Blessed are you who are hungry”- not hungry for righteousness, as in Matthew, but just plain hungry; “Blessed are you who are down and out, downcast, at the bottom of the ladder. God is with you, God is here to help you. You are blessed. And woe to you who are high up on the pecking order. You may not know it now but you are in a really perilous position, clinging to the top of a rickety ladder, trusting in wealth and honor rather than God. You are in for a great fall.”

Back in Jesus’ day, this was pretty radical stuff. Wealth was considered a sign of God’s favor and poverty a sign of God’s judgement. To say that God was with the lowly was a challenge to the whole religious order that kept some on top and other below. In our day, things have changed a lot but we still tend to look down on the poor and look up to the wealthy. The poor are judged for not being able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

And even if we reject that bootstrap mentality, many of us still prefer to avoid a lot of contact with people who are really downcast or really down and out. We much prefer uplifting, upbeat stories about people who overcome great odds, inspiring rags to riches stories We also tend to think that we are where we are on the economic and social ladders because of our own striving and upstanding moral character. We disregard all the other accidents and privileges that have positioned us where we are. So to hear Jesus bless those at the bottom and critique those of us who are quite wealthy, by global standards, is pretty unsettling. What do we make of all this?

Is Jesus just reversing the whole ladder by putting the poor on top and bringing the rich down into judgement?

Luke tells us over and over that Jesus has come to lift up the poor and bring down the mighty. So is Jesus just flipping the ladder around? That’s how some have interpreted it. Then our only hope really is to try to become poor. Except that in Jesus, we see that God is really not interested in ladders, in having people on top and people on the bottom, people trying to scramble up and people looking down on others. Rather God longs for us all to have abundant life together in God. So God in Jesus is doing something much more radical than just changing who gets to be on top and who has to be on the bottom. God is lifting up the poor and bringing down the mighty so that we’ll all be on the same level place with one another.

God is making all the ladders tumble and fall onto level ground so that they become paths that connect us to one another. None of us is better than another, none of us deserves to be higher or lower. We all are vulnerable and valuable, we all are dependent upon God and one another. Woe to us when we think people’s value comes from the heights they have achieved rather than from God. Woe to us when we think wealth will protect us from vulnerability and depend upon wealth rather than God. Woe to us when we think we’re saints because we’re nice people. Rather, we live out our God given identity as saints of God when we acknowledge that we are vulnerable and look to God and when we honor the value of all people.

Jesus came down from the mountain to challenge all ladder-like thinking, to lift up the lowly and bring down the mighty so that all could be connected there in that level place. Jesus does the same today. Jesus is here among us to bless and heal all who are poor, hungry and reviled and to comfort all who weep. Jesus is also here among us to bring us down from the perilous heights of trusting ourselves and judging others. Jesus is here to help us know our connection to one another in the communion of saints. Jesus is here to help us experience the abundant life God gives us now and forever.

Thanks be to God.