Bishop Craig Schweitzer

Ash Wednesday • March 1, 2017

Brothers and sisters in Christ, grace and peace to you on this holy day from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.

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Hopefully by now you know that today is Ash Wednesday and that is part of the reason why you are in worship today. At least I hope so… On this day, you and I join millions of Christians throughout the world as the holy season of Lent begins. Ash Wednesday is a day when brothers and sisters in Christ gather in worship and receive a mark on their foreheads with ashes as they hear the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” These words and an insignificant amount of black ash placed upon our foreheads remind us of our mortality. But that’s not all.

In this sacred moment on Ash Wednesday, we are also reminded of whose we are. And whose we are is something that we need to remember every day of our life in Christ as we journey through all of the wildernesses that we experience along the way.

And believe it or not, whose we are has nothing to do with how many times a year we go to church or how morally good we think we are – especially in comparison to our neighbor – or how successful we are professionally or how much money we make or how many toys we have in our garage. None of that matters to God. Ash Wednesday helps us re-center our lives on that fact.

From today’s psalm – by God’s strength we are redeemed. By God’s strength we are saved. By God’s strength we are set free. By God’s strength we are able to walk through any wilderness we encounter. By God’s strength – not my strength.

The older I get and the deeper I grow in relationship with brothers and sisters in Christ like all of you; relationship with God through my savior Jesus, more and more I believe that Lent might just be the most important time of the year for those who claim to be stewards of God and disciples of Jesus.

Because I think we struggle believing in God’s strength.

At Good Shepherd this year, Lent will provide us with many of the same things as it has in the past – additional opportunities to worship; important times of conversation and sharing our life together in community through events like weekly dinners hosted by our youth; and daily invitations to grow in faith practices and disciplines – this year that includes a Reverse Lent mission project and cute little pink piggy banks that will bless the mission of ELCA World Hunger.

Our theme during each Wednesday’s worship is Into the Wild. Over the course of the next six weeks, we will reflect upon baptism, hunger, power, faith and the good news Jesus proclaims to the poor, the oppressed and the captive. Each week will invite us to look more deeply upon our communion with God and our alienation from God.

In the Bible, wilderness is often associated with times of trial and testing and at the same time the promise of God’s closeness to us in the midst of wild places. Wildernesses, or wild places, that can be exciting, frightening, strange, unknown and sometimes scary.

In one of the earliest stories of wilderness in the Bible, God calls Moses back to Egypt to free the Hebrew people from slavery. Moses tells the people that God will lead them away from Egypt, into the Promised Land, where God will take care of all their needs. What they don’t know, though, is that they will have to travel through the wilderness for 40 years before they get there!

Needless to say, the people got impatient and sometimes let their impatience get the best of them. The Hebrew people made idols, they doubted Moses and God and they sometimes even lost faith in God’s promise. I know, I know…that never happens today, does it!?!? Of course, Moses & the wandering Hebrew people in the wilderness is just a Bible story. A Bible story that has nothing to do with our life and how we live out our faith today in 2017. Right? Right.

The gospel reading from the fourth chapter of the gospel according to Saint Luke will guide our journey. It’s the story we just heard a few minutes ago. It begins right after Jesus’ baptism, with his time in the wilderness, and ends when his ministry officially begins.

As Lutheran Christians, we believe God calls us to go into these wilderness places to be with people who are hungry, lonely or hurting. After all, people who are baptized actually promise God that they will do just that.

That’s kind of what trusting God, proclaiming Christ through word and deed, caring for others and the world God made and working for justice and peace is all about in the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Those are promises made in Baptism that actually should cause us to get up and do something. Maybe even challenge us to step outside of our comfort-zones. We can only begin to imagine the ways that others will be blessed if we do as God’s love shines in some of the most broken and dark places of this world because of just that.

On Ash Wednesday, as you feel the grit of ash rub across the smooth skin of your forehead, may you remember that you are God’s child – yesterday, today, and in all the tomorrow’s to come. And as we join with God’s children who have made this journey since the beginning of creation, it is my hope and prayer, that as we go into the wilderness over the next six weeks – we go there confidently because we already know we are God’s child. We go there together as brothers and sisters in the body of Christ. Amen.

Matthew 5:38-48 • February 19, 2017

Brothers and sisters in Christ grace and peace to you from God our Father and Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.

It’s a story that is nearly as old as humankind has existed in God’s creation. Or at least since the 3rd or 4th chapter of Genesis.

It’s a story repeated on every elementary school playground, every day in our country – and in every language and other country of the world that has school playgrounds or places where people live in community.

Two fourth-graders get into a little dispute during recess; something about “he did this, so I did that.” When they get back to the classroom, Billy trips Joey. After lunch Joey breaks Billy’s pencil on purpose. When nobody is looking, Billy writes on Joey’s desk, and later, Joey steals Billy’s folder. After school, Billy and his friends face Joey and his friends and insulting names are exchanged that would make their gra
ndmother’s blush. Somebody gets hurt. Somebody else gets hurt worse. And tomorrow this cycle of hurt starts all over again.

You’ve heard that story before, right? A story of escalating pettiness, judgement, hate, and pain. A story that is not about fictional characters like Billy and Joey, but maybe about a husband named Steve and a wife named Jackie. Or a business that we know as Target and another as Walmart. Or an addicted parent named Amy and her daughter Madison who is stuck in the middle. Or republicans and democrats and independents. Or someone name Jim and another man name Ron who lives on an Indian reservation near Jim’s town.

The 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters of the gospel of Saint Matthew are known as the Sermon on the Mount. The words from Jesus contained in these 3 chapters of Holy Scripture may be the most profound, intense, and often avoided words in all of scripture.

And here’s why I think that’s true.

Becoming a Christian is one of the easiest things that a human being can do. And saying that you are a Christian to someone else is just as easy. It’s much harder, if not impossible, to actually be a Christian. And that is most definitely true if we think of a Christian as someone who claims to follow the Jesus that we hear from in the Sermon on the Mount.

I think I’ve come close to living like a Christian as Jesus calls us to live in today’s gospel reading, but most often I strike back instead of turning away. I tell and show my enemies just what I think of them – often in a very passive aggressive way – rather than reflecting God’s love shining through me.

Martin Luther is well known for saying that “the Christian life is not about arriving, but always about becoming.”

Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount are striking and counter-cultural – in Jesus’ day and in February 2017.

Return hate with love.

Engage violence with peace.

Turn the other cheek.

Pray for those you love and those whom you can’t stand the sight of.

Jesus calls this new world the Kingdom of God – where violence doesn’t always breed more violence and hate doesn’t always kindle more hate.

In a reflection on today’s gospel reading, Pastor David Lose wrote that, “It’s not our job to bring in the kingdom; Jesus does that. It’s our job to live like we really believe Jesus actually is bringing in God’s kingdom, and to realize that we get to practice living like Jesus’ disciples and citizens of this new kingdom in the meantime.”

As Pastor Bob reminded us last week, this is hard stuff! But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And you know what, I have very little confidence that you and I are actually going to do any of this perfectly, but that’s not really the point.

In 2006, Pastor Brian McLaren – one of my favorite Christian authors and theologians by the way – wrote a monumental book called The Secret Message of Jesus. The centerpiece of McLaren’s work in this book is the Sermon on the Mount. He offers a summary of Jesus’ message from the sermon in language that might help us better understand it within the context of our 21st century ears and experiences.

So…if you can remember our worship life together over the last four weeks along this journey through the Sermon on the Mount, I hope Pastor McLaren’s words help you connect all of this together in a way that might be beneficial.

Here we go…imagine that we are back at the beginning of the 5th chapter of Matthew’s gospel.

“Be poor in spirit, mourn, be meek, hunger and thirst for true righteousness, be merciful, be pure in heart, be a peacemaker, be willing to joyfully suffer persecution and insult for doing what is right.

Be salt and light in the world – by doing good works.

Do not hate or indulge in anger, but instead seek to reconcile.

Do not lust or be sexually unfaithful in your heart.

Do not presume to make vows, but have simple speech, where yes means yes and no, no.

Do not get revenge, but find creative and nonviolent ways to overcome evil done to you.

Love your enemies, as God does, and be generous to everyone, as God is.

Give to the poor, pray, and fast secretly.

Don’t let greed cloud your outlook, but store up treasure in heaven through generosity.

Don’t worry about your own daily needs, but instead trust yourself to God’s care, and seek God’s kingdom first and foremost.

Don’t judge others, but instead first work on your own blindness.

Go to God with all your needs, knowing that God is a caring Father.

Do to others as you would have them do to you.

Don’t be misled by religious talk; what counts is actually living by Jesus’ teaching.”

[The Secret Message of Jesus, Brian McLaren, ©2006 W. Publishing Group, pg. 135-136]

Brothers and sisters in Christ, here’s the point that I hope we can carry beyond this time of worship. As you return this week to your school playgrounds and business meetings and relationships with other people – both the healthy ones and the dysfunctional – I believe that we are being invited by Jesus to practice living like Jesus’ disciples and citizens of the kingdom of God right now, in the meantime. Blessings to each of you and the people blessed by you this week as you do just that. Amen.