Pastor Ron Jansen

Reformation

I won't be posting a sermon this week.  Rev. Quentin Poulson, the mission networking director of the board for Black Ministry, preached.  The members of the congregation who are immigrants from Africa sang the preacher into the pulpit.     

The Mark of Cain; The Mark of Christ

                            Pentecost 22, 2010, Immanuel Chapel, Genesis 4:1-16

            It’s been a wonderful fall.  The blossoms are vivid.  The fruit is ripened and bountiful.   Donius’s brought pears again today.  Before that Pam shared her tomato crop.  What a terrific day God gave us yesterday for our Prayer Walk through the surrounding neighborhoods.

            It was likewise for Adam and Eve.   Life outside the Garden continued under the Creator’s gracious blessing.  Though God had evicted them for their disobedience, earth was not a desert drear.  God enabled them to “be fruitful and multiply.”   Eve, the life giver, gave life to a son.  She exclaims, “I have created a man together with the Lord. His name is Cain.”  Would he be the promised serpent-head-bruiser?

            Repeatedly, the scripture witnesses that all life is from the Lord.  Abraham and Sarah had Isaac long after they could have done so on their own.  The Lord knew the prophet Jeremiah while still in his mother’s womb.  In their old age Zechariah and Elizabeth had a son, they named John.  Hold a newborn in your arms and you are holding a work of the Lord.  It’s only two months until we celebrate that great work of the Lord in the womb of Mary, when the Holy Spirit over shadowed her.  At the birth of Mary’s son the angels announced that a Savior was born, Christ the Lord.  They named him Jesus, God’s Savior.  He is the Seed of the woman who bruised the head of the  serpent- tempter and delivered our life from the grave.

Though Eve delivers a son with pain multiplied, she soon gives birth to a second child.  He is named, Abel, meaning “vapor.”  Is this a hint of things to come?  James writes, “What is your life?  You are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”

         The boys grew up fast, as children tend to do.  And as children tend to be, they were not carbon copies of each other.  They too join in the task given at the creation of humans.  Cain subdues the earth, working with the ground to produce its fruit.  Abel rules over the animals, tending flocks of sheep.  It’s all as God intended.

            In the course of time they gathered to worship the Lord their Creator, offering thanks for the bountiful blessing.  Worship of God and returning to God is also a natural part of life.  Worship was part of the daily life of Adam and Eve in the Garden.  In the cool of the evening God walked and talked with those first humans.  They found that the Lord is good and his steadfast love endures forever.   Cain and Abel, sons of immigrants from the Garden of Eden, reflected the words of the Psalmist, “Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity…for there the Lord has commanded the blessing, life forevermore.”   We too have been blessed with such unity in Christ, chosen before the foundation of the world to possess redemption through Christ and the forgiveness of our sins.  Through Jesus Christ, God has fulfilled his plan “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”  We are workmanship of Christ’s creation, bound together by His love.  How good and pleasant it is.

            Then we read, “The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.”  Why?  Some would say that Cain didn’t offer the best he had.  But there is scant evidence for such a conclusion.  God’s regard for Abel and not for Cain raises an issue.  Why does the work of one person flourish and the work of another flounder?  Is it because the one who succeeds is more faithful than the one who fails?  What if the faithful one fails and the faithless person succeeds?  The author of Psalm 73 struggled with that question.  He writes, “My feet almost stumbled…When I thought to understand this it seemed to me a wearisome task until, I went into the sanctuary of God.”  He concludes, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

But for Cain being near God wasn’t enough.  His rejection led to dejection.  Angry, his face fell.   God talks with pouting Cain.  If Cain lifts his lower lip off the floor and does well, will he not be accepted?  For sin was crouching at the door of his heart, waiting for him, desiring him.  The thing he can do well is rule over sin’s animal lust, or it will rule him.

  Sin is an active demonic force that needs to be battled.  When God sent his Son, Jesus, he didn’t run campaign ads promising to fight for us.  He did it.  At beginning of his ministry he spent 40 days of fasting in the wilderness, when he was finished and famished, there was the tempter waiting for him. He did not give in to the temptation.  At the end of his ministry Jesus met sin head on at the point of its greatest power, death. That did not happen in the desert, but outside the city of peace, Jerusalem, - on a cross.

Cain did not bruise the serpent’s head. Bruised his brother.   Instead of taking his anger out on God, he turned toward his brother, rose and killed him.  We know that experience.  Have a bad day and who do we turn on?  According to Beth Orton’s song, “We only hurt the ones we love, why we don’t need a reason.”  Furthermore, we don’t need to take a life to be guilty of murder.   Jesus preached, “But I say that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.”  We are all Cain’s.   This morning we face the altar of God with the juices of death in our bodies. Bruce Springsteen in his song, “Adam Raised a Cain” speaks of baptism.  Even as we stand in the rain of baptism we have the same hot blood of Cain in our veins

God comes again to Cain.  He asks, “Where is your brother?”  Like his parents, Cain blames God.  “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  “God, you are the Keeper.  If You do not know the whereabouts of Abel, You haven’t been doing your Job.”  God is to blame for Abel lying in the field, dead.  However, no matter how we might shift the attention away from ourselves to avoid responsibility, God will not be side tracked.  “”What have you done?”  God does not focus on what he has seen, but what he hears.  He hears Abel’s lifeblood, crying from the ground.  The earth has opened its mouth and gulped Abel’s blood.

God heard lifeblood he had put in Abel crying out. But God let the blood of his Son, Jesus, flow into the ground that He might not only satisfy the cry of Abel’s blood but the blood of all humankind shed by a brother in our fields and streets.    This morning, we will take of that shed blood of Christ as we kneel before the altar and receive Holy Communion.  Christ’s blood does not cry for vengeance, but pronounces forgiveness, life and salvation.  As we sang in the opening hymn, “There is a balm in Gilead, that makes the wounded whole.”

In the end, God cannot let Cain go.  He who would not keep the life of his brother now cries out for God to save his life.   God proves to be his keeper.  For his protection, God places a mark on Cain.  Might we not also see in Cain’s mark the mark of our salvation too?   God has tattooed us with his cross.  We are marked by the cross of Christ in baptism.  We are His.  We will live.  “To him be the glory, forever and ever.  Amen.”      

 

                  

Grabby Gets a New Name

Pentecost 12, Proper 13, Genesis 32:22-31

Grabby Gets a New Name

His name was Grabby. We know him as Jacob, meaning deceiver, heel grabber - Grabby for short. In exchange for a bowl of stew, Grabby bilked his brother Esau out of the bulk of his birthright. He deceived his father into giving him the blessing. His crops would be bountiful. He would rule over his brother. The future of other people depended on blessing him.

He even managed to outwit his father-in-law, Laban, escaping with his wives, 11 children and a wealth of possessions. God had revealed himself in the dream of a stairway between heaven and earth; yet, he did not know God well. Still, he lived by his wits. Now, as he settled down for the night at the River Jabbok he was at his wits end. Tomorrow he would meet his brother Esau, coming with 400 men.

In the night, a man attacked him. In English we would say, Grabby grappled with a man in the gravel of the river Apple. “Ready! Wrestle!” begins the six longest minutes in the life of a high school wrestler. However, in this bout there were no 30 second breaks between periods. This was a marathon-no-holds-bar struggle in the dirt, mud and rocks of the River Jabbok. As dawn broke, no one had been pinned. No one was ahead on points. Grabby and the man had grappled to a draw.

It dawned on Grabby, that he wrestled with no ordinary man. In C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan, the Lion, is the figure of Christ. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Aslan appears and as suddenly vanishes. A character says, “It’s always like that, you can’t keep him; it’s not as if he were a tame Lion.” The One with whom Grabby wrestles is not a tame God. God had appeared as a human before. He appeared in three men who visited Abraham, Jacob‘s grandfather. God told Abraham that his wife, Sarah, would have a son within the year. God visited again via the womb of the Virgin Mary. Nor was Grabby the last one to wrestle with God. On another night, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus got down in the dirt and grappled with God’s will so intensely that he sweat drops of blood. In the darkness of the next afternoon he wrestled with sin and death as he hung on the cross. Grabby grappled with God in order to receive a blessing. Jesus wrestled, to gain for us the blessing of the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation.

As light shone in the Eastern sky, Grabby’s opponent touched his hip putting it out of joint. All Grabby could do was hold on. Both now gasping for air, began to talk.

Grabby demanded a blessing. However, God asks him his name. Now he must own up to his name - Grabby. He must admit spending a life time living down to it. Alcoholics Anonymous has a phrase, “Let go, and let God.” Grabby must let go. He must stop trying to control everything by his own wit, wisdom and work. He must admit to being what he is, a grabber and deceiver. It’s not unlike what we did earlier in the service when we confessed our sins, saying in effect, “I am a sinner and I can’t control my sinning.” We ask God to forgive, renew and lead us, that we might delight in His will and walk in His ways to the glory of His holy name.

R. T. Kendall in his book, All’s Well that Ends Well, writes that a sermon so moved him he got down on his knees and asked God to make him like Jesus. And God said, “All right. If that’s what you want, I will make you a bit more like Jesus.” He wrote, “Within 90 days, at the time when I was sitting on top of the world and I had friends and a future, everything - my world collapsed, and I lost so many of the things that were so natural and so right to me at the time. But God said, ’No, you cannot keep these things if you want my blessing.’”

Do you want to be like Jesus? Then we need a new name and a new nature. As Grabby and God lay in the gravel, God said, “Your name shall no longer be called Grabby, but Israel, one who strives with God.” God changes his nature as well. He no longer strives against God and against men. Israel strives with God for a blessing. Israel will cling to God despite his injury and whatever happens in his future. Finally, he is able to be a blessing to the world. He is able carry out the promise first given to grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac and now to him. Through his descendants the entire world would be blessed. That blessing finally came to fruition in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In Jesus, the only name by which all people, including Israel, might be saved we have received a new name and a new nature. The old sinful person has passed away; “behold, the new has come.” No longer are we simply known as sinner. We are called saints, holy people of God. Now the love of Christ controls us. All of this is from God who through Christ has made us his friends again.

It dawns onnewlynamed Israel that “I have seen the face of God and now my life is preserved.” Israel crosses the Jabbok to face his brother. Earlier, he sent ahead three groups of gifts to appease Esau. Thereby, Israel hoped his brother would accept him. However, God also had gone ahead of him years before and changed Esau’s heart. When they finally met after a twenty years, Israel discovered that Esau had long ago forgiven him.

Our life and future are preserved in the face of Jesus, God‘s Son our Savior. When the time came for Jesus to depart this world he turned his face toward Jerusalem to face his suffering and death on our behalf. In the Garden of Gethsemane he fell into the dirt on his face and prayed for strength. The day of his trial people spit on his face. In the grave a cloth was put over his face. Yet, when Peter went to the tomb on Sunday he saw the face cloth neatly folded and laying to the side. Jesus was not there. He had arisen. Thus St Paul writes that when we, in faith, look into the face of Jesus Christ we see the glory of God. One day we shall stand at the River of Life flowing from God’s throne. We shall see his face as it is in all its glory. We shall have the name of Christ imprinted on us. God will know that we belong to Christ. We belong near his throne forever and ever.

As Israel limps away from the scene of his struggle the story teller still calls him Jacob. Some of the old self will continue to haunt and hinder his faith and his life. However, God goes with him as He has always gone with Jacob. We will find, once again, this week, that our walk with God will not be perfect. Then next week we limp back into church. We cast all our sins on Jesus. We will go out again in the presence of God, limping saints though we may be.

 

 

 

Treasure in Clay Pots

                                                     2 Corinthians 4:7

            What do I have if I smash this clay pot?  That’s right, I have a mess.  I can take some spray paint and cover up the brown clay, but underneath it’s still a plain clay pot.  However, if I plant flowers in the pot, it becomes a container that holds a treasure of beauty and life.  It can even be chipped or slightly cracked and still it can hold a treasure.

            In his letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul writes, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”

St. Paul reaches back to the creation reminding us that we are the work of God, who formed our bodies out of the red clay earth.  In fact, Adam means man of red clay.  After finishing His perfect pottery piece, God breathed into the man of red clay, the treasure of His life.  Every time a baby is born there is that critical moment when it draws its first breath. Without that first breath the treasure of life will not remain in that tiny work of clay made flesh.   At the opposite end of life, when a person exhales their last breathe, life leaves them.  No matter how the funeral director tries to make that person look life-like, the makeup does nothing to restore life.  The shell of a vessel of clay lies there, broken and empty.  The treasure of life has departed.  From clay we are made and to clay we return

We are flawed. We are fragile. Therefore, we will suffer fatality.  Immediately, after speaking of the treasure Paul contains in his pot-of-clay body he lists a number of afflictions and sufferings he has undergone.    A pastor acquaintance, now deceased, often commented that whenever you get a group of senior adults together you have an organ recital.  Each of us can recite the organs in our body that are functioning more and more as if they were clay.  When we are younger we might not see that life is fragile. I think of Perry Bowers, who grew up in our farming neighborhood.  We teenagers regarded Perry as invincible.  So we could not believe it when we heard he had been killed in an auto accident at age 19.  As Blaise Paschal wrote in the 17^th century, “A drop of water or a breath of air can kill us.”  Four hundred years before Christ, the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes wrote, “Mankind (is), fleet of life, like tree leaves, weak creatures of clay, unsubstantial as shadows, wingless, ephemeral, wretched, mortal and dreamlike.”   Because of sin we are all people with feet of clay.

            There is a credit card advertisement that ends with the question, “What’s in your wallet?”  Though we are all too easily like cracked and broken pottery, the question for us is, “What’s inside us?”  We can become so caught up in what is broken that we no longer recognize the treasure within. God has placed in us another treasure, a priceless treasure, “Jesus, priceless treasure.”  It’s the priceless jewel of the gospel of Christ crucified.  In Jesus, God took on our clayness, save for the feet of clay.  He was born in the image and likeness of God, an image we had marred because we are no longer perfect pots, but marred, cracked and chipped.  He took upon himself our weaknesses, our chips and the cracks in our lives.  He allowed himself to be smashed and the shards of his body to be thrown on the potsherd dump of broken human pottery, buried and useless.  However, God, like an archaeologist, retrieved the fragments of his second Adam.  He restored Jesus to mint condition once again.  Thus when we see Jesus, we see the very image of God in which we were created and the hope of the glory to which God promises to restore us.  We who are the descendants of the first Adam, the first man of red clay, will one day be retrieved by God and restored to a wholeness which we have never known.  As Paul writes, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come…To show the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” 

The grace of God in Christ Jesus is not only contained in our bodies, but it seeps into the cracks in our lives.  God uses our bodies, cracked and broken as we may be, “to spread the knowledge of him everywhere.”

There is a story out of India which tells of a servant whose daily task was carry water from the well to his master’s house.  Every day he carried the water in two earthen jars attached to a yoke which rested on his shoulders.  However, the jar on his left was cracked so that by the time he got to the masters house half of the water had leaked out.  Whereas, the other jar was perfect and arrived full. 

Finally, after years of arriving half-empty and feeling guilty, the cracked pot apologized to the water-bearer.  “I’m sorry that I couldn’t accomplish what the perfect pot did.”

The water-bearer said, “What do you have to apologize for?”  The pot responded, “All this time, I still only deliver half my load of water.  I make more work for you because of my flaw.”

The man smiled and told the pot, “Look at the side of the path where I carried you.  Notice all the flowers growing there, the flowers grew so beautiful because of the water you leaked.  There are no flowers on the perfect pot’s side.”

God uses us, cracked pots though we may be to leak the water of life upon the people we encounter.  The Lutheran Women’s Missionary League has been doing this for some time.  We at Immanuel are now in a mission initiative to discover how we might spread the water of life in our community.   We  have within us the priceless treasure of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Our task is not to keep this good news safely stored in ourselves, but to let it leak through our grace filled cracks.  Because unlike the cracked pot in the story, no matter how much of the water of life we allow to leak out of us, we will always remain filled with the treasure of Jesus Christ, our Lord.  As we spread the gospel of Christ, the Holy Spirit goes with it.  And it’s the Holy Spirit that gives life-giving-power to our message.

Thus, as God’s treasure in Christ extends to more and more people there is an increase in thanksgiving to the glory of God who is able to fill all the cracks in the lives of the people of the community surrounding Immanuel Chapel.  People will be able to see the light of the gospel treasure shining even through the cracks in our lives.

In the words of Canadian poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen,

“Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack, a crack in everything.

That’s where the light gets in,

That’s where the light get in.”

Amen. 

         

               

 

The Righteous shall Live by Their Faith

Pentecost 19, 2010, Immanuel Chapel, Habakkuk Chaps. 1-3

    While driving on I-170 on Thursday I saw a small orange pail, like a child might use on Halloween, lying on the striped lines as cars sped by.  When an auto sped on the left, the plastic pail would spin one way.  As a car passed on the right it would spin back the other way.  It sat twisting back and forth, not able to escape the monsters roaring by.

    The prophet Habakkuk speaks for those in a similar predicament.  Righteous people in Judah were surrounded by iniquity.  The righteous are people, like himself, and you and me, who know we are dependent on God for life, limb and deliverance.   Therefore, we cling to God in trust that he will set things in order again.  Later, we read, “The righteous shall live by his faith.”  Habakkuk was a person of faith.  He trusted in God.  However, he makes an urgent appeal, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?  Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong?  Destruction and violence are in my face; strife and contention arise.”

    How is it with us?  Oil in the Gulf, “How long, O Lord?”  Handguns on the streets and in the schools of St. Louis, “How long, O Lord?”  People march to stop violence, but the violence continues, “How long, O Lord?”  A child is beaten to death, “How long, O Lord?”  Millions of unborn lives do not see the light of day, “How long, O Lord?”  Terrible carnage afflicts parts of Africa, “How long, O Lord?”  Jobs are lost, the economy sags, “How long, O Lord?”  Strife and contention in political ads, “How long O, Lord?”  Legislatures enact laws to stop greed and corruption, but the laws are circumvented, “How long, O Lord?”   Plagues of lady bugs, bedbugs, and stink bugs, “How long O Lord?”

     Habakkuk calls people to turn to the living God and follow His precepts.   St. Paul advises Timothy in the epistle lesson, “Trust in God who sent Jesus Christ to save us.  God’s plan from before the beginning of creation was to save us from the consequences of turning from God and turning on each other.  Through Jesus, God demonstrated his grace by abolishing death and in its stead brought immortal life to light through the gospel.”  Isn’t that also our confession of faith?   We are given the gift of faith and in the power of the Holy Spirit to fan into flame the gift of salvation in the hearts and lives of people everywhere.

    But how do people react?  Much like they did in Habakkuk’s day 2,600 years ago.  Some don’t respond at all, they are not interested.  Others tell you to stop forcing your beliefs on other people.  They say, “I will follow my ways, not your ways.”

The Lord does answer Habakkuk’s prayer.  But it won’t be the righteous who through their testimony of a good and gracious God who will immediately win the day and turn the nation.   God said, “I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told.”  Then God tells Him. God is raising up the Babylonians who will be His instruments to discipline and bring judgment on the sins of His people.  God says, “They are dreaded and fearsome.”  They come with even more violence than Habakkuk saw among his own people. They will sweep by like the wind and go on their way.  They are guilty of unimagined atrocities.  Their god is their own power.  They are a law unto themselves.

St. Paul writes that even those who have a law unto themselves have a law.  No matter what law we live under, we will break it.  Then our conflicting thoughts will either accuse us for our failure or we will have to find a way to excuse ourselves.  However, God judges us by Christ Jesus.  Do we believe and trust in him or do we not?  That is the one and only basis upon which God judges us.  Thus God’s wrath, his judgment comes not because he hates us, but because he loves us and seeks to turn you, me and all humankind toward Jesus Christ.

However, we, like Habakkuk, live in the meantime, between God’s promise of salvation in Christ Jesus and the fulfillment of that promise when He comes again to set things in order.  In the meantime we grow weary of the world as it is.  Then of course, God refuses to be tamed and do things as we think he should.  Habakkuk wonders how God can let things go on as they are.  He confesses that “We will not die.”  He recognizes that God is sending the violent Babylonians to reprove his people that they might turn back to God.  But Lord, “You who are purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at the wicked swallowing up the righteous?”

Then Habakkuk tells God, “I’m going to station myself in a watchtower and look out and see what the Lord will say to me.”  Will the Lord answer?  Indeed, he did.  God tells him to write the vision he is about to give him so everyone can read it.   Today, God would have said, “Put it up on an electronic billboard, so that anyone driving on I-270 can read it.  The vision may seem slow in coming, but actually its hastening to its appointed time.”  Under God’s governance, the future is always secure even if the present world seems terribly out of control.  God’s answer to human suffering is always hope.

   What is the vision?  It is what we see with the eyes of faith.  It’s a line from the prophet that inspired St. Paul in his letter to the Romans.  It is the line that led to Martin Luther’s great break through, when he finally understood that God sent Jesus Christ not to judge him but to save him.    That line is, “The righteous shall live by their faith.”

In the times of suffering and living in a world and life that is out of control we live on the basis of what we see with our eyes, but trusting in God’s promise of deliverance.  You see, Habakkuk could not understand how a pure god could look at such evil as was about to descend on Judah.  What Habakkuk did not know was that in the fullness of God’s time God would send his own Son to be born in the flesh.  And in the person of Jesus God would see his only Son, betrayed, denied, beaten and sentenced to death on the cross.  But it is through such violence against himself that God has saved Habakkuk, and you and me.  We become right with God through faith in Jesus Christ.

In the gospel lesson the disciples ask Jesus to “Increase their faith.”  Jesus doesn’t give them what they want.  Instead he says that if you have faith no larger than a mustard seed, we might say, than an atom, you have all the faith you need.

It takes faith to cry out to the Lord in times of distress.  It takes faith to trust that the Lord will answer. 

    Habakkuk ends up where live today, living in faith.  At the very end of the book he writes words that resonate with us today.  This is what he says, “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.”

    Though economy fail and violence overtakes us, yet, I will declare, God, the Lord, is my strength and I will continue to live in faith and trust in the Lord.