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Pentecost
IX
First
Second
Gospel:
Matthew 13:1-9,18-23
Listening to God By Richard Holmer
Listen.
The
first and last word Jesus speaks as he tells the parable of the
sower is: LISTEN.
He
begins: “Listen!
A sower went out to sow . . .”
He
concludes: “Let anyone
with ears listen!”
If
you’ve got ears, use ’em! God
gave you one mouth and two ears, so you should listen twice as much
as you speak. Listening
means paying attention, taking what you hear to heart.
Jesus brings good news. The
gospel is a message – a message that needs to be heard, to be
received.
This
is why we continue to take the time to read the scriptures aloud –
they are meant to be heard. It’s
why preaching has been central to Christian worship for 2,000 years:
preaching is an auditory event.
Reading a sermon is not the same has hearing it.
How
else do we know about the grace of God except by hearing it?
We come to know Jesus by listening to the words of Jesus –
and listening to those who know Jesus speak about him.
Jesus is God’s life-giving Word to us.
To take this word to heart is to be saved.
Which is why the appropriate response to hearing the Word of
the Lord is always, “Thanks be to God!”
Thanks
be to God that we have a God who speaks to us, a God who addresses
us in our deepest need and speaks to us in both truth and love.
Our God tells it like it is:
the truth about us that is in many ways uncomfortable,
and the truth about God that is our lasting comfort and joy.
The
first and great commandment is to love the Lord our God.
An essential way to do this is to pay attention, take the
time, and listen. You
and I know intuitively we are being loved when someone listens to us
with undivided attention. It’s
the same with God. So it
is our place, first of all, to listen to God.
This
is the primary purpose of worship.
Worship is our time to set aside all distractions and agendas
and open our hearts to God. For
worship to have any value, we must be good listeners.
*
The listening starts
even before the service begins, as we enter the sacred silence of
this space and remember God is here. *
We listen for God in
that moment of the confession set aside for reflection and
self-examination. *
We hear God speak
words of assurance, announcing the entire forgiveness of all our
sins. *
Of course we listen
for God in the readings from scripture (many times I hear something
as the lesson is read aloud that I had not noticed in my silent
reading.). *
We listen to the
sermon not only as the words of the preacher, but also as the
Spirit-filled Word of God. And
there is not one sermon preached, but as many sermons as there are
listeners. *
In speaking the
ancient words of the Creed we hear again the essential truth about
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. *
And then as we share
the peace, we hear not just our friendly greetings – but the peace
of God that passes understanding. *
And here at the
table we hear those most reassuring words:
“This is my body, given for you,”
“This is my blood, shed for you.” (if we’re not
listening, the we’re just chewing.)
*
* *
*
Listening
is a big part of what prayer is all about.
Prayer isn’t mainly meant to be our laundry list of needs,
wants and concerns offered up to God.
The fact is, God knows what we need better than we do.
Prayer
is our time to listen to God. “Be
still and know that I am God,” the psalm says.
Prayer is giving God time to make himself known to us – to
be God for us.
*
* *
*
Listening
is also a way to be in this world, listening attentively for a word
from God that can be easily overlooked.
We pay special attention to those whom Jesus told us to
notice: the poor,
hungry, homeless, sick, prisoners, strangers, the ones in need, the
ones who are easy to ignore.
To
listen is to love your neighbor.
Between
his first and last word, instructing us to listen, Jesus describes
the real impediments that exist to listening.
He tells why it is that people fail to take the good news to
heart. It does make you
wonder why when God speaks, not everyone listens.
God’s
word is good seed, the highest quality – a seed that is scattered
abundantly, you might even say recklessly.
There is no shortage of seed – it gets spread all over the
place.
*
In some cases it
falls on hard ground, on hardened hearts – hearts made hard by
circumstances or cynicism or despair or stubbornness or willfulness.
The seed can’t grow on hard ground.
Is your heart ever hard like that? *
In some cases the
word is first welcomed with excitement and joy – but it is not
embraced in a lasting way. The
roots are shallow. The
response is all on the surface.
There’s no abiding commitment.
Is your spiritual attention span ever short like that? *
Sometimes the good
seed gets planted, but then it is choked and overshadowed by the
weeds and thorns of so many competing messages.
Jesus calls them the cares of the world and the lure of
wealth. Does that sound
at all familiar to you?
*
* *
*
Yet
in those who receive the word, who take it to heart, it bears fruit
abundantly. In the words
of Isaiah: it
accomplishes the purpose for which God sent it.
From a single grain came many times more:
30 – 60 – 100 fold ®
Abundance.
Good
things come to fruition when we listen, when we give Christ our full
and undivided attention. Jesus
saw firsthand how hard this can be for us – how hard it is to
listen.
*
Maybe it is when our
hearts get broken, cracked open by tragedy, that we are finally able
to truly listen to God (after all, who was most eager to hear
Jesus?) *
Perhaps when we grow
beyond the shallowness of short-sighted immaturity we become more
able to take the gospel to heart. *
Or when we finally
see the lure of wealth for the thorny weed it truly is, maybe then
there will be room for grace in our lives.
God’s
word is good seed. It
still yields bountifully. It
grows in us when we take the time to listen.
Faith
is always a mystery – why some have it and others don’t.
The seed is widely scattered:
the Good News is proclaimed not just to some, but to all.
Faith in the gospel promise is a gift from God.
To call faith a gift is to recognize it is God’s doing –
yet we have our small part to play all the same.
A gift is truly and fully given only when it is received. When
Jesus knocks on our door, our small but necessary part is to open
that door and let him in. Like
newborn hatchlings in the nest, we must open our mouths, our hearts,
to be fed by God. Otherwise,
we go hungry.
God
is speaking to us all the time – just as radio waves are
constantly being broadcast.
What
you and I need to do is tune in.
Let
the seed of God’s word be planted in you.
Listen!
Amen.
Pentecost
VIII
First
Second
Gospel:
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
This week we heard from Guest Preacher Reverend Terry Dufur. Pastor Dufur blessed us all with his warm and humorous words on the Gospel.
Peter
and Paul, Apostles
First
Second
Gospel:
John 21:15-19
This week we heard from Guest Preacher Reverend Terry Dufur. Pastor Dufur blessed us all with his warm words on the Gospel. He will join us again this Thursday, July 3rd and Sunday, July 6th.
Pentecost
V
First
Second
Gospel:
Matthew 10:24-39 Letting Go By Richard Holmer
One
of the remarkable things about infants is the strength of their
grip. When a three-month
old baby latches on to your finger, that grasp is impressively
tight. At that age they
will grab hold of anything: glasses,
earrings, necklaces, hair. At
a baptism I had an infant grab my lavaliere microphone just as I was
about to baptize him – almost as if he wanted to share a few
remarks. Another baby
grabbed my pectoral cross as I leaned over the font. (Grabbing the
cross at baptism seemed very appropriate.)
And the thing about a baby’s grip is that they don’t know
how to let go. Once they
get a hold of something, it’s like they are clamped on – and you
must gently pry their fingers loose.
This pattern of grabbing and holding on tends to continue
throughout our lives. We
hang on tight to our stuff, our ideas and opinions, our habits and
traditions, our relationships. At
times, like an infant, we don’t seem to know how to let go.
*
* *
*
Death
is letting go. Truly,
when we die we can’t hold on to anything.
Ready or not, when we come to die, we must let go of
everything. “
. . . all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were
baptized into his death.
Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism
into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we
will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
Baptism
is our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection.
It is about both dying and rising.
These verses from Romans are read at the opening of the
liturgy for the Burial of the Dead.
I have always found them to be powerful and full of
assurance. These are
wonderful words to hear at the end of life – to be reminded of the
hope and promise of resurrection.
How
about at the beginning of a life?
If we like to hear the baptismal promise of life in the face
of death – how do we feel hearing about death at the beginning of
life? What’s it like
to be reminded that baptism is a way of dying with Christ?
(It’s also a way of rising with Christ – but before the
rising comes the dying.)
This
talk about dying isn’t something unique to Paul.
Remember that Jesus said that whoever would save his life
will lose it, and whoever loses it for his sake will find it.
In our own time, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: “When
Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Dying
means letting go. Life
as a baptized child of God is a life lived letting go – letting go
because we trust that God will never let go of us.
This was the freedom that Jesus enjoyed:
he didn’t hold onto anything in this world:
not possessions, not family, not friends, not even his own
life. Jesus traveled
light, and he was even willing to let go of his life in the prime of
life. It’s not that
Jesus didn’t appreciate things and family and friends and life
itself. He just didn’t
cling to them.
And
so instead of always grabbing and grasping, living with hands
clenched and refusing to let go – you and I can live with hands
wide open to love and to serve.
-
We can live as
Christ lived; -
We can “let go and
let God;” -
We can go through
this world with open hands instead of hands that are always
clinging.
*
* *
*
It
would be nice if it worked that way – but that’s not quite how
it goes, is it? It would
be beautiful if we could all manage to be “dead to sin and alive
to God in Christ Jesus,” as Paul puts it.
But baptism isn’t magic.
Baptism doesn’t suddenly transform us into clones of
Christ, letting go of all our sinful ways and always doing what
Jesus would do.
No
one knew this better than Martin Luther.
Luther did see baptism as the drowning of our old, sinful
self – but he also observed that the old sinful self proves to be
a pretty good swimmer! Luther
compared sin to the whiskers on a man’s chin:
you can shave them all off, but they always grow right back
the next day. Baptism is
not a cure for sin – not this side of heaven.
*
* *
*
I
appreciate the frankness of Ronald Goetz, who served for many years
as a professor of theology and ethics at “Most
of us know in our souls that we have no intention of fulfilling
Christ’s incredible demands: sell
all, resist not the evil man, take no heed for the morrow, leave
one’s family, bear the cross.
Our premeditated disobedience makes our claims to being
Christian somewhat curious. Our
worldliness leaves us hoping that Jesus’ grace will in the end
overwhelm his demands.”
Truth
is, you and I are no different from all the Christians who lived
before us. We can be
fickle and faithless. We
are anything but sinless.
*
* *
*
So
is “It
means that our sinful self, with all its evil deeds and desires,
should be drowned through daily repentance; and that day after day a
new self should arise to live with God in righteousness and purity
forever.”
Dying
to sin means shaving those whiskers, day by day.
It means letting go each day.
Rising with Christ means claiming the promise of grace, one
day at a time. That is,
we need to be born again and again and again as the children of God.
Each day you and I need to ask:
what needs to die today so that I can live a new life in
Christ? What do I need
to let go of: grudges,
resentments, privileges, fears, pride, lust, selfishness, envy,
greed?
All
the recent flooding reminds us that sometimes circumstances compel
us to let go of things. When
your house is flooded, your stuff gets ruined, and you have no
choice but to let it go. The
waters of baptism don’t compel us – but they do empower us to
let go of what we cling to. We
can let go because we trust that God will never let go of us.
That
same freedom has been given to each of us.
-
It is not an easy
freedom, but it is genuine. -
We have been named
and claimed in baptism. -
We have died with
Christ – and we shall live with him.
-
It’s for each of
us to claim the promise each day.
*
* *
*
The
Christian life has to it the quality of “already and not yet.”
We
are already in God’s hands, and we have not yet let go of this
world.
We
are already assured of a home with God, and yet we’re still living
in this world.
We
are already richly blessed, and not yet fully trusting and grateful.
The
victory over sin and death has already been won by Jesus Christ, and
yet we still fight our battles each day, fighting to let go of what
finally doesn’t matter – and depending on what really does.
Amen.
Pentecost
V
First
Second
Gospel:
Matthew 9:35-10:8
Sent
to Serve By
Richard Holmer
Last
week we were reminded of the great mercy of our God.
When Jesus called a despised sinner like Matthew to be one of
his disciples, he demonstrated that the love of God truly does
extend to every last, unworthy one of us.
We hear echoes of that same mercy in today’s Second Reading
from Romans, where Paul writes: “at
the right time, Christ died for the ungodly . . . While we
were still sinners Christ died for us.”
The
Savior who reached out to the likes of Matthew has mercy on us all
– he invites each of us to know and enjoy his grace and peace.
As
the gospel narrative continues today, we see that those whom Jesus
invites, he also sends out to serve.
The original 12 disciples are listed by name – and here for
the first time they are referred to as “apostles”:
those who are sent. We
see Matthew, the tax collector’s name on the list along with Peter
and Andrew, James and John and the rest.
This “sending out” of the twelve in chapter 10 of the
gospel anticipates the so-called “Great Commission” which comes
at the close of the gospel in Chapter 28.
We might think of this as a little commission – kind of
like a short term internship. Jesus
sends them not to the whole world, but only to the house of
The
twelve are sent to do what Jesus does – to have a share in
Christ’s ministry. Jesus
gives them authority to -
proclaim the good
news -
cure the sick -
cleanse lepers -
cast out demons -
even to raise the
dead!
Jesus
places major responsibility on their shoulders.
That’s what is challenging about their task – it is also
what is glorious: to do
the work of the
The
appropriate response to receiving mercy is to act mercifully toward
others. This sounds
basic – even obvious – but it is all too easily overlooked.
The training Jesus imparts is consistent: -
Love others as I
have loved you. -
Forgive as you have
been forgiven. - | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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