Trout and Resurrection

A sermon for Faith Lutheran Church, Marion

Scripture: Luke 24:36-48

In the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus appears to the whole crew of disciples, he asks for something to eat, and I don’t believe for an instant that it was a coincidence that the disciples give him a fish. You may recall that in the Gospel of John, Jesus appears to the disciples on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, telling the disciples to cast their nets on the other side of the boat, while he waits on the shore, cooking—you guessed it!—fish.

            If you trace the fish through scripture, you will find that they are there in the beginning—in the Genesis creation story; they are killed off in the plagues in Exodus; and they are extolled in the Psalms. Ezekiel was certainly into fish as that book mentions them in three separate contexts; and then of course we have Jonah, the biggest of fish. But it is in the life and ministry of Jesus that fish come to the forefront. Fish are mentioned 32 times in the Gospels—from the feeding of the 5000 to the disciples who left their boats to follow Christ. It is little surprise that the fish has become a symbol of Christ—and that Greek word, “Ichthys,” has entered our popular lexicon as a Christian term and acrostic, meaning “Jesus Christ, Son of God. Savior.”

            My ears perk up when I hear about fish in the Bible for another reason: I love to fish. From long days casting for muskies up on Lake of the Woods to slow days jigging for walleyes, casting spinners for perch; and even shore fishing for carp and catfish or leaving traps for minnows. I love to wonder about what is in the water and to discover a little more of that unseen world. But the fishing I love more than any other involves casting a fly in a clear river in search of one of God’s most precious and most fragile creatures: the trout.

Into the Wilderness

Sermon for Christ the King Lutheran Church, Iowa City

Mark 1:9-15

“And the Spirit immediately drove Jesus into the wilderness.” –Mark 1:12.

Leave it to the camp guy to ignore the other stuff and head straight into the verse about the wilderness. Then again, if you’ve been paying attention these last several weeks to the Gospel readings in Mark, the wilderness shows up a whole lot. Six times in the first chapter of Mark alone we get this Greek word “eremos,” a word that is the basis for J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Eriador”—the land of the free peoples of Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings.

Two things you will get with me: Love of wilderness and nerdy stuff.

“Eremos” means a place that is desolate, lonely, solitary, and uninhabited; in other words, not really the place we expect Jesus to be. Yet, Mark 1:12 says that the Spirit drove him into the wilderness immediately, and there he stayed for forty days, being tempted by Satan and hanging out with the wild beasts.
            Why? Why would the Spirit send him there in the first place—why immediately go from baptism to temptation. Why does the wilderness matter to our faith?

I want to share with you a bit of my experience with wild spaces and why I believe they matter so profoundly to faith. I’m going to get to camp—I know you were worried—but I’m going to start with my experience out in the wild—in this case, on a hike.

In 2019, I took a sabbatical from my pastoral call in northwestern Minnesota and spent a month hiking the Superior Hiking Trail along the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota’s arrowhead, starting at the Wisconsin border just south of Duluth and finishing at the Canadian border. I meandered through 310 miles of forest and rivers over rocks and roots, spending days on end in wild spaces. It sounds silly to admit, but if I’m being completely honest, for the first week or so, I did not know why I was out there. Like so many places we find ourselves in life, I was just doing a thing that seemed like a good idea at the time only to find out it was hard and uncomfortable, and any day I might end up getting eaten by wolves.

Near the end of my second week on the trail, I paused at a sign along the trail—a pleasant wooden sign that shared how many miles you still had to walk to find the next campsite—in this case, too many miles. While I was standing there reading the bad news, I saw what appeared to be a blemish in the face of the wood—like somebody had taken a knife to the soft wood and pealed it back. I don’t know how long I sat there staring at that blemish, but it was probably a couple minutes at least since I was taking the opportunity to eat M&Ms—and, let me tell you, those were prolonged breaks—before I chanced to look closer. Only then did I realized that the blemish was not a blemish at all, but a moth of the same color and texture as the wood beneath it. All I was seeing was the shadow of the moth’s head lifted up from the flat wooden sign. It was remarkable.

That is the picture behind me today. That moth—partially covering the letter “A” in “CAMPSITE.”

I am 100% confident that had I come across the same sign on day one on the trail—or day five on the trail—I would not have noticed that moth. It was day 10 and I had only just slowed down and opened my eyes long enough to see, but when my eyes were opened, I started to see more and more.

What happened to me was perhaps a less dramatic version of what happened to Jesus—and indeed what I believe happens to everybody who spends time in contemplation in the wilderness. The things that we pray in our hustled and bustled lives back home find their answers when we slow down enough to see what God is doing before our eyes. In the wilderness, we discover that answers to prayer are not given, they are discerned through discipline. Even Jesus Christ, the Son of God, needed that distance from distraction to discover it.

Once I get started on that whole alliteration thing with all of those “d” words, I can’t stop—I apologize.

We need the wilderness

Scripture: Mark 1:29-39

“In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”

            I don’t know about you, but that sounds awfully nice to me. Away from the kids. Away from the bustle—the demands on his time and attention. Away from dinging phones, emails, social media. Just away. We probably don’t talk enough about Jesus’s penchant for leaving it all behind and heading off into the wilderness. And Jesus wasn’t alone. It seems like most heroes in the Bible would go off from time to time, whether Abraham, or Moses, or Elijah, or John the Baptist. They all went off to pray and reflect.

            When is the last time you prioritized going off on your own?

            I hope you don’t hear that question as judgment. Lord knows, we have so many forces in life begging us to never take a break. There is always more work to do—more, more, more. There is so much to do, in fact, that it can never get done, so we keep at it—more, more, more. Because our work is important—so very, very important. Raising a family is important—so very, very important. If we don’t give it 100% all the time, we will regret it—we will wonder why we didn’t do just a little more. We want to give our kids, our families, and our selves our best shot. What could be wrong with that?

The wrong side of town

For St. John Lutheran Church, Cedar Falls

John 1:43-51

Jesus is always hanging out in the wrong side of town, but we shouldn’t be surprised—that’s where he’s from. Always the wrong side of town—hanging out with the wrong people—sinners, mostly.

The story starts with Jesus out recruiting disciples one day. He finds Philip and says, “Follow me.” And we know right away that Philip is a good catch, because the first thing Philip does is go about recruiting more friends for the party. He really takes that fisher-of-men thing to heart. So, he finds his friend, Nathanael, and straightaway tells him that the Messiah has come and he is Jesus of Nazareth. However, Nathanael, you might recall, is not listed amongst the original twelve disciples, and the reason for this may soon become obvious, because Nathanael has his concerns about the origins of this Messiah. Nazareth? “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he asks.

You can substitute every wrong side of town you can imagine here, if you like. Even for those of us who try to see the best in all dark places, we can certainly list a few—places with a negative connotation in our minds—places we wouldn’t want to go—places we mistrust.

Then again, of course Jesus came from Nazareth! Of course, Jesus came from a backwater nowhere. I sat at home over Christmas and caught a bit of the Lutheran worship service from Bethlehem broadcast on Facebook, which they called “Christ in the rubble.” Today, Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, is a majority Muslim town in the West Bank. In those days, it was a quiet place—a nowhere place. Of course, Christ was born there! Not Jerusalem—not even Nazareth—not New York City—not London or Tokyo. Nowhere.

“Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Could anyone good be born in Bethlehem?

Well, here’s the backward, amazing thing about the Christian faith: Jesus Christ only ever dwells in those dark places. Jesus Christ only ever shows up on the wrong side of town. Jesus appears in A.A. meetings and under the rubble of natural disasters and war; Jesus shows up in dementia wards and children’s oncology units; Jesus is found in underpasses and in redlight districts and wherever the poor and neglected and hurting gather. Jesus Christ came into a world of darkness to meet us when it appears all hope has turned to dust.

The problem for those of us in the church is a practical one: That backwards, wrong-side-of-town mentality is not marketable, which is a problem because it means that Jesus is not marketable. After all, Jesus tells us that in order to be his disciples we must pick up our crosses and follow—and those crosses are not the kinds of minor inconveniences that we so often talk about to tone down the enormity of this calling. Our crosses are not our children or our relatives. Our crosses are our very lives—that is what Jesus ultimately calls us to give up. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When Jesus Christ calls a disciple, he bids them come and die.” You won’t see that on many billboards: Come, die.

You also won’t see that on any Ewalu brochures. And, yet… Ewalu is a place where faith is sticky—where kids depart at the end of the week singing songs—where adults look back on their time at camp as their deepest experience of faith formation—and I believe this happens so often at Ewalu because camp is a place where Christ does bid us to come and die. We die to the self we construct in our life apart from camp. We forget about the Instagram posts, and whether that one person read our text or not, and who won that game, and what you scored on that test. All that stuff dies at the boundaries of camp. At Ewalu, campers encounter this Jesus Christ who comes from a lowly, unexpected, wrong-side-of-town place kind of like many of the places they come from. For the first time, many of them experience this backward faith that seeks after lost sheep and celebrates the wrong sort of people—Samaritans and women and the poor and the sick—and campers latch onto that with all their might because so many of them are desperate for it to be true.

Why?

Because they already know that they are the lost sheep—they’ve just never had anybody spell it out for them! Because they know that they were born in the wrong place. They know that they have the wrong cheek bones and they carry weight in the wrong areas. They know that they can never be skinny enough or muscly enough. They know that they are fundamentally imperfect people, and their whole lives have been spent with adults (who hopefully love them and care for them, telling them that they are beautiful children of God), but they also know that those adults lie—that those adults, who we call parents, also aren’t very smart. They know we are faking it, and most of us are just doing exactly what our parents did (or exactly the opposite of what our parents did) and our parents didn’t know what they were doing either.

Our kids know this. Now, don’t get me wrong, you should be telling your kids you love them; you should be telling your grandkids you love them. I know many of you come from stoic, Nordic-heritage families like my own where all feelings are to be treated like a game of charades—where you act them out but it’s against the rules to actually say anything about them. Yeah, don’t do that. Do tell your kids you love them, but don’t be surprised when they run away from that love—and when they don’t believe you.

The reason the camp experience sticks with campers is because they discover that Jesus Christ loves them not because they are good, but because God is good. Better still, Jesus Christ comes to us from places like Nazareth—places from which reasonable people like Nathanael can wonder: Can anything good come from there? The Christian faith is not a reasonable faith. It is a faith that only makes sense in a broken world—it is a faith that can only be practiced by broken people. Cross-bearers.

Camp and church are after the same thing, but camp has an easier time marketing ourselves because it is temporary. One week of discomfort—full of fun, sure—but discomfort nonetheless. Nobody is arguing that Foresters village is more comfortable than your bed at home. Instead, we are saying that there is very good reason to get out there—to encounter Christ in creation—if only for a week. I don’t envy your congregation. I was a parish pastor for nine years, and I struggled with this myself quite often. As Christians we are called to go into all the backwards wrong-side-of-town places where Jesus is, but in a world that often feels so mixed up, we often come to church just needing a refuge. It’s hard to see that the refuge we need is to go deeper into discomfort. Churches have it hard because this is your calling every single week.

All of this is why I am glad we are in this work together. Help us help you (and your kids) to encounter Christ on the wrong side of town. Let us work together to discover how God shows up through discomfort. Together, we can meet a world of Nathanaels, who say, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” with an emphatic, “Yes! Come and see.”

In fact, the best things only ever come out of the wrong kinds of places. After all, that’s where God has promised to dwell. In our pain. In our hurt. In our grief. In our discomfort. This faith will drive you crazy, but it will also save you.

On curiosity and the moth

A sermon for St. John's Lutheran Church, Arlington and St. Sebald Lutheran Church, Strawberry Point

Scripture: Mark 1:1-8

        In the Mark year in the lectionary, Advent is contained exclusively in these 8 verses. The next verse after this passage reads: “In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” We fast-forward straight to adult Jesus baptized by John. In Mark’s Gospel, there is no baby in a manger, no shepherds in the fields, no kings bringing gifts; and before that, no Mary wondering what these things mean, no Elizabeth, no Joseph, no angels. There is no Christmas at all, and the entire season of Advent is distilled into this single passage about John, the baptizer in the wilderness.

Now you know why the Christmas pageant is never read from the Gospel of Mark.

So, while we have none of the Christmas story to contend with, we do have themes—whispers you might call them. We have John the Baptist, and we have this opening salvo from the book of Isaiah, 

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

   who will prepare your way;

the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

   “Prepare the way of the Lord,

   make his paths straight” 

Creek stomping in the river of justice and righteousness

A sermon for Bethel Lutheran Church, Parkersburg, IA

 Amos 5:18-24

The scripture readings for today are like a river in and of themselves—to follow that river I think it’s best to start at the confluence and to wind our way back upstream, which means I’m going to begin with the Gospel of Matthew and the reading from Thessalonians—both of which are about Jesus Christ coming along to reconcile and redeem a broken world. This is the central hope and belief of the Christian faith—that what Christ did on the cross, dying for all of us, will be work that is completed when the world has ended and when our lives here are over. “Keep awake!” says Jesus in the Gospel reading—for you do not know when Christ is coming.

            However, there is one thing about Jesus telling us to stay awake that can be misconstrued. The goal of life on earth is not to escape life on earth. It is to be awake; it is to see Christ when Christ appears before you. And Christ will come when all of this is over—for most of us, most likely, that will be when we die. And that day could be years from now or today. But Christ also comes to us in the form of others who enter our lives—others who do not know they are being Christ—and all of us can see Christ in those encounters if we are awake to it. Christ comes in a child who wants you to read a bedtime story. Christ comes as a beggar, or a prisoner, or a reject. The incarnation of Christ means that Christ has entered into all humanity, and as Victor Hugo said, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

The missing grace ( Or why wrestling with scripture we don't like is way more reverent than ignoring it)

Preached at Peace Lutheran, Clayton and St. Peter Lutheran, Garnavillo

Philippians 2:1-13

           I am going to preach on the Philippians hymn today, which I do with some measure of trepidation, because I feel I should be up-front about this from the start: I don’t particularly like this passage. Maybe this is very familiar scripture to you, it is for me (now), but once upon a time, I was sitting in a class at seminary and the professor told us that we would be meditating on this scripture to begin class… every period… all semester long. Our professor expected that we would already know this scripture pretty well, seeing as it was so commonly read in church, which was news to me (who had a degree in Religion at the time), but the professor also said we would see and hear new things when we meditated on this passage over and over… and over again.

            Perhaps you all have experienced the sensation of repeating a word ad nauseum until it loses its meaning—a phenomena that is called semantic satiation? Well, what I experienced with this passage is what I am going to call theological satiation. Rather than opening up new thoughts, ideas, and possibilities, the more I read, the less meaning I found. It began to feel like meaningless ideas that I was obligated to nod along with, because that was what it meant to treat the scripture with the reverence it deserved.

            “What word stuck out to you today?” the professor would ask.

            “Humbled,” I would think for the seventh time.

            “And what image do you see when you hear the text?”

            “Nothing. Meaninglessness. The void.”

            These were all things I wouldn’t say, so I mostly didn’t say anything at all, which—looking back—was a huge mistake, because I was so fearful of saying what I truly felt (which was nothing) that it kept me from being honest. And whenever we are lying, or faking it, or whatever, because we feel obligated to do something or be something or think something, it is precisely then that we are not giving the scripture the reverence it deserves. I forgot in that class that all scripture is meant to be wrestled with—that’s what faithfulness looks like—not ignoring it, but wrestling—confronting what I found to be, frankly, boring.