2023

Sermon 03/26/2023 – Sinew and Skin

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Ezekiel 37:1-14

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

So I prophesied as I had been commanded, and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”

Sermon Text

As far as I’m concerned, Ezekiel’s vision could have taken him to this very moment and in this very place. The valley of dry bones was not a literal place, it was a vision God placed in Ezekiel’s mind of God’s people – not as good as dead, but long dried up and left alone. It was also a vision of their revivification. For him this vision meant the people of God in exile – the Israelites scattered across what once was Assyria and the Judahites scattered across Babylon – would someday leave there exile and come home. But, what does it mean for us now?

We are in a difficult time in the Church. The ages of being the default social group people in society is long past. Denominations are all shrinking – non-denominationals are seeing the end of their peak period and are experiencing a slide much like what the mainlines before them felt. The majority of people in the United States still identify as Christian, at least in name, but that will change.[1] We will shrink, we will see more churches close, and more denominations struggle to keep up the image they once held of themselves. We are in a waning period in our history, the collapse of the world as it was, and the start of something new.

The simple truth of prophecy, of the words which God offers us to inspire us to change and to embrace the work of God in the here and now, is that it is never positive in the short term. There is abundant hope in what God has to offer us, a future where all will be made right, but in the short term you seldom see a prophet bring good news. Jeremiah, in a moment we all can relate to, rebuffs a false prophet on a single basis. When prophets come to the people of God, they bring news of a world that is broken and about to break even more, and that false prophet only had good news about what was coming down the pipeline.[2]

We are at a point where the heat of the sun is beating down on the people of God. We are tired, we join in the cry of the dry bones in today’s text, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost…” I don’t know about you, but there are plenty of times where I find myself feeling that my hope is gone. The troubles of the world, multifaceted and terrible as they are, have very little hope of clearing up in our lifetime. Poverty, war, an unbridled and impossible to combat materialism that has reduced the world into a countdown clock to environmental disaster, all weigh heavy on the mind. Things are grim dear people. Things have given us every reason to worry about what the future may bring.

We who gather here are not given the escape of just imagining things will get better on their own. We know that there has to be a revivification of the world or else it will continue to dry out, to die bit by bit. Sometimes we think we could just magically flip a switch, and everything will be like it was. We’ll worship how we did then. We’ll have as many people as we did then. We’ll do everything we loved and took pride in then. And you know what that would do, if such a miracle could be achieved? We would just postpone our decay for another twenty or thirty years. The slow decay of the world, of a congregation, is exactly that – it is slow. By the time we notice that the pews are emptying, and the waters of life seem to be drying up in the wells we dug long ago, the problem has been around much longer.

I know sometimes we will try to point to singular moments or events that caused our present troubles. The Pandemic is the current monster we look at and say, “If only this had not happened, we would be so much better off!” Well, I tell you that the pandemic was the head of a beast that came out of the sea for sure, but it had been gnawing on the roots of many a congregation for years before that. We just called it a million other things, a million small cuts and fractures that eventually had a chance to burst into a problem we had no answer for.

The Prophet did not come into the valley of dry bones and prevent the thing that brought about disaster. The damage had been done, the bones were as dry as they possibly could be. If anything was going to happen, it was not going to be from fighting the battle that got them there in the first place. Looking to blame some Satanic force like we did in 80s won’t bring renewal. Coming up with some imagined culture war will not inspire people to take the leap into a new life. Even singing and preaching for weeks at a time won’t be enough to change the world as it is. The only thing that can revivify the world we are in is a movement of the Spirit, and it will only come when follow the lead of prophecy as we see it in our text today.

We have to walk in the valley of dry bones, we have to count them and notice just how much we have let go fallow, and then we have to cry out to God. We have to call for God to bring the Church back together – to unite us in love and power. I talk all the time about how the Church needs to fight to sort itself out, but we need to see that we go to war with one another more often than we have any healthy family spat. Our denomination is exploding, and it is not because one group is Biblical and the other is not. Both parties in this struggle are trying to serve God however they feel convicted to do so. No, the reason things are exploding is because we cannot bring ourselves together enough to begin to be the body of Christ.

The thing that the prophet sees happen is firstly that the body of the slain comes together, and then and only then does the Spirit fill them and give them life. The Church is definitely going through a rough time, and it will get rougher before it gets better, but the first thing we have to do to get better is to come together. We’ll be a charge soon, and that is the most obvious sign of coming together, but it needs to be more than that. We need to serve one another, we need to love one another, and not just in this room – but across churches and across denominations. We have to reach out a hand, to draw the disparate pieces of God’s body back together, and we have to pray to God each and every day for the Spirit to bring us together and give us life. – Amen.

[1] Even if denominations do experience growth, the present trajectory of belief in the United States is toward increasing loss of belief, and shows no sign of increase.
Pew Research Center. “Modeling the Future of Religion in America.” Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/

[2] Jeremiah 28

Sermon 03/19/2023 – Shine a Light

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Ephesians 5: 1-14

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

But sexual immorality and impurity of any kind or greed must not even be mentioned among you, as is proper among saints. Entirely out of place is obscene, silly, and vulgar talk; but instead, let there be thanksgiving. Be sure of this, that no sexually immoral or impure person or one who is greedy (that is, an idolater) has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore do not be associated with them, for once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly, but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,

“Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Sermon Text

 Recently I had the chance to watch a sunrise. It is a simple fact that we have a sunrise everyday, and there is often very little keping us from observing it except our own tiredness an the clouds that seem to constantly cover our view of the sky. This morning where I saw the sunrise was a special day though. I got to wake up early, climb up a hill where I was staying, and look out at the world before it had woken up. Some deer just over the nearst gulley, light creeping over the mountain in front of me. Several minutes after the sun had crested the horizon line, it crested that distant hilltop, and shone out, wreathed in clouds that made its light seem even brighter by contrast.

Light is a common image we go to in scripture, but outside of moments like this, we get inoculated to just what a difference light can make when it chases darkness away. I think power outages are about the only time we get a good idea of what real darkness looks like. Some of us who camp might also know something  about that, but I can’t stand camping myself so that’s not where my mind goes. The precious nature of just being able to see where we are going is something we cannot understate. It is no wonder then that we constantly go back to it as a means to talk about life with and without God’s presence.

For people of Jesus’s time there was a fairly common understanding of people as broadly fitting into two categories – children of light and children of darkness. Now, splitting people into these categories is dangerous, and nothing I say here should have you start sorting people into one group or another in your head. Still there are good things and bad things in this world and the way that we conduct ourselves matters. We work constantly to try and make more good come from us than bad, and it is in doing that we push ourselves more into our identity as “children of light.”

My mother raised me with some very particular expectations about how I should act in given situation. I remember one time I was telling a story about how my step-mother had reacted to something I said back to her one day in a funny way, how exactly I don’t remember. My mother, rather than laughing with me at the strange situation, looked me dead in the eyes, face suddenly grave, and asked one simple question. “Are you telling me you’ve been talking back to your step-mother?” I quickly learned that my mother raised me to have sense in my head, and I would not find sympathy for the moments my senselessness caused anything to happen.

As I was reading this scripture and discerning what the message for us here today should be, I kept coming back to the way we talk. I think that there are few lessons we can take closer to heart, and meditate more upon, than how we speak to one another. 90% of what we do in a relationship is based in speech, and far fewer things are based in the work of our hands or feet. When I am interacting with friends, family, the people of God wherever they might be – I am interacting primarily through the words of my mouth.

Paul lists three kinds of speech that are not helpful, and he might go even further to call completely unworthy of being spoken. These are called “obscene, silly, and vulgar…” Those each have their own meaning for us today, but as always, we have to ask what Paul meant and then work forward to where we are now. We’ll spend a little time on each and then work toward something we can take with us into the world.

Firstly, there is obscenity. The word in Greek just means, “unclean,” and is not explicitly a word used for how a person talks. Paul is talking about talking though, so we can make that leap. What is obscenity? That’s hard to say because most every topic of conversation has its place in certain contexts, except I think, the sorts of things we can just call, “Gross.” What is a “Gross,” talking point? Well, let me try and explain.

There was a year when a stamped happened during a Muslim festival. Stampedes are unfortunately common in large groups of people. I heard multiple people afterward say something to the affect that they hoped more stampedes happened at these events. – that is obscenity. The conversations that several of my friends chose to have when women walked away from us where they felt the need to share their general inability to see them as something other than an object – that is obscenity. The words we speak in malice, or close mindedness, that deny the humanity of those around us – these things are obscenity.

The next category of language is “silly,” in the translation we read this morning. The word really means pointed jokes at another person’s expense. Plato uses it to describe when a student picks on their teacher and their teacher, graciously, allows it as part of youth.[1] I am not someone who believes you can never pick on someone a little bit, I would not be able to preach in this Church if I did not believe that lighthearted ribbing has its place in a community. Still, the difference between a joke that lands well and a joke that causes great harm is very, very slight. We have to be considerate, and careful, of how we talk to people around us, being aware of their sensitivities and backgrounds, so that we never harm them in what we say.

Finally, we are given “vulgar talk,” which we usually think of as cursing. I do not, as a rule, care about whether someone curses or not – context depending. My family is full of people with the mouths of sailors, and I do not see an inherent sin in their word choice. Time and place for everything of course, but I will not moralize the frequent and flippant foul mouths of my family. No, I think that we are better to see that this word is μορολογια, (Morologia,) Moros – Stupid; Logia – words. This is a warning against talking without thinking, and I found some amazing texts talking about this. In particular, people at Paul’s time thought that talking too much, and with too many words, was a sure sign that someone was not being earnest.

Now, as a long winded person, I am mildly offended, but I see what is meant by it all. Plutarch, an ancient writer, describes someone who speaks without thinking as being like a sieve. The second you pour knowledge in their head, they start talking about something completely unfounded until any benefit they might have gotten from the lesson is completely lost.[2] Again, a bit harsh, but there is a powerful lesson in our ability to think before we speak. More important than not saying things that are cruel, or things that are more serious than we treat them, is to not say something we have not thought to its end.

If you are thoughtful about what you say, then you’ll find yourself avoiding those other problems. When we speak, we need to take time to make sure what we say is really worth saying. Once we know it is worth saying, we have to be sure that we say it in a way that reflects what we really feel, and what is really the case, and not just what we would want to say. Sometimes you all will notice that I start a sentence and then stop one or two words in to rework what I want to say. This is not because I’m trying to clean up what I want to say (usually,) but because I let my wordiness get ahead of me. I have to stop my words, redirect them, and then hopefully have something to say that is true, helpful, and reflective of what I am thinking of.

Speech, the source of so many problems, is often times the one thing that we have complete control over, if we can only reign in our initial tendency toward these three vices. Going back to our initial image, light shining out on the world, and from that our identity as members of God’s family. Like my mother when I told her I talked back to my stepmother, we have to know that God wants us to act like we are children who have been raised with some sense. And the most sensible thing we can do, it be careful how we talk to one another. – Amen.

[1] Plato. Republic. VIII

[2] In particular, Plutarch describes word without thought as being like, “vain and silly discourse,” that comes from being drunk. Plutarch. De garrulitate 4.

Sermon 03/05/2023 – Beyond John 3:16

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

John 3: 1-17

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with that person.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Sermon Text

Our scripture from last week focused upon the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. While it was our decision to disobey, and not the fruit of the tree itself that sealed our fate, the tree and the serpent hanging from it remain a strong symbol of human sin. We see in that image, in the shadow cast over all life, an emblem of what is broken. What is wrong in this world is easily described with those three simple images – a serpent, a tree, and humanity. Simple and clean symbolism.

Yet, when Jesus comes to this world, lives his life and carries out his ministry, he is not drawn to this image at all. Aside from a teaching on divorce, he seems completely uninterested in using the opening chapters of Genesis for anything. How sin entered the world, for Jesus, seems to be far less important than its cure. It is only when Paul begins his ministry of letters that any real attempt to relate Adam and Jesus comes about. To Paul, the relationship between a first and second Adam is more important than just about anything to explain how salvation is possible. Jesus, however, looks to something else in the history of God’s people to explain the ins and outs of salvation.

In the Wilderness, one thousand-odd years before Jesus walked through Judea, Moses led Israel on a decades long trek. They were fed by God with Manna and quail, led by pillars of flame and smoke that housed presence of the same God. They faced trouble after trouble, each moment carrying equal parts faith and doubt within their souls. Every step along the way we are given story after story of highs and lows. Few of these episodes carry more significance and power, than the arrival of “burning snakes,” and God’s deliverance of Israel from the fire of their venom.

The people became discouraged after seemingly walking in endless circles for years and years. They begin to speak openly against God and Moses. Their complaints echo through the ages and reflect other complaints they made earlier in their journey. Having now been free of Egypt and slavery for years, the Israelites are able to forget the evil they once faced. The terror of slavery has dimmed, and now they are imagining their past oppression as if it was some kind of salvation. “If only we were still in Egypt! They had so much food.” “If only we had never left, Pharaoh was a lot, but he really wasn’t that bad!” “If only… If only… If only…” The wilderness was tough, but to call enslavement better than wandering, well only time allowed them to imagine that was the case.

God, not pleased with this rebellion, sends snakes to infest the camp. What that means is a little unclear – whether the snakes were summoned to the area or if they already were there – but whatever brought them there, the result is the same. The snakes are called, “Seraphim,” or “Burning Ones.” These attack people and when they do, those people die. Moses eventually intercedes for the people and God provides a cure. Craftsmen beat bronze into shape and a snake takes form from the hot metal. This snake is lifted up on a pole for all to see. Now if you are bitten by a snake, all you need to do is look up to the bronze serpent and you will find yourself saved.

This story is easily lost in the rest of the book of Numbers, but it is the background from which Jesus draws out an explanation of what it means to be born again. Jesus says that his actions on the cross can only be understood if we know how, “Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.” Salvation is coming to the world and to understand exactly what that means we have to first understand how the arrival of poisonous snakes, and the making of a bronze copy of them showed God’s love and mercy long ago.

When we see Nicodemus come to Jesus to understand what his teachings man, we enter into a conversation about the “New Birth.” Jesus says that to be born again, a person must be born “of water and the Spirit.” The waters of Baptism initiate them into the community of the faith, but only the Spirit can really “save them.” This salvation is not just an escape from Hell, but a rebirth. Once the Spirit touches us, we should be different than we were before. Some parts of us will always be around – the defining traits that define who we are, what makes “us,” “us.” The things beyond this, the evil we take part in and the wrong we perpetuate, these fall away from us. The light and goodness of God take their place, and we find a completely renewed, “us.”

The Spirit does the work here, but we choose to follow “the sound of the wind.” The wind that blows over our life, guiding us to be better than we were before is the Spirit that gives us life, and life renewed. It allows us to know God more fully, to see things as they really are. The Spirit, though given freely by Christ to the Church, did not begin with us. It crafted the world around us, sustained its life and inspired the prophets and the people of God in the scriptures.

The Spirit led Moses somewhere he never would have dreamed of going. To save his people, God told Moses to build a bronze serpent. The making of a an image like this, cast in metal or wood or stone, was forbidden by the Teachings Moses brought down from Sinai. God had asked them to do something that, logically, would seem impossible – even forbidden – but he did it to save the people. Could something even as basic and important as the prohibition against a graven image be superseded by a need to save people? Moses only followed because he trusted that while he did not know where God’s spirit was coming or going, he trusted that God sent it for good.

Jesus’s work on the cross exists somewhere adjacent to the work of those metalworkers who were called to make a serpent at Mount Hor long ago. Jesus becomes the image of an invisible God, an εικων. God, in becoming incarnate, becomes the ultimate graven image – taking on flesh and bone which, in resurrection, exists to this day alongside God the father. Jesus acts not only as the image of a perfect God, but of sinful humanity. Though perfect himself, nothing about Jesus’s physicality is different than ours. The same ingrained temptations and pitfalls are present within Christ, yet in his rejection of all that is not good, he shows us what humanity could be.

The image of divinity, of perfected humanity, and of sinful humanity, two natures at once present and three aspects existing as an emblem of salvation. Christ, the cure for the sin we have chosen time and time again, looked no different than sinful humanity. Christ, the ultimate peacemaker between God and humanity, was the perfect image of both. This imaged lived a human life and then was lifted up to die on a cross. All so that, now, all who look upon him, wherever they are, may know salvation from sin, from pain, from death itself.

Like the Israelites long ago, for who the snakes did not disappear, we too still face life’s troubles. Yet those troubles have an answer, a way we can find peace, and it is through Christ. Christ who lived, died, and rose again for us. The Spirit is rushing around us, from where and to where we cannot know, but we still can follow it. We follow it because through it we are born again. And we have work to do! We must go now and proclaim the truth, beyond even God’s love, such that Christ may die for us. Yet that love is so wide and far spread that all may know Christ is here – not to condemn, but to save. Our call is to spread the same truth – one of salvation, not condemnation, of transformation and not rejection. Lord, may we live into that call and may we never forget the power of the salvation we proclaim. – amen.

Sermon – 02/26/2023 – Everything, but That

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Genesis 2:15-17

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Sermon Text

Limits are hard to accept. We always want to push against the things imposed upon us, and sometimes do so to our detriment. As we make our way up I-79, taking that long slow slog up to Morgantown, we face a continual desire to get there just a bit quicker. The signs tell us, 65 mph, 70 mph when we are lucky. Construction that constantly stalls us slows us to 55, but we are always looking to see if work is really being done that day so we can punch that gas pedal just a little harder. We seem to ignore that, even if we go 80 the entire way up to Morgantown, we will only save 4 minutes. We want to push against any limit, because we feel it will serve us better to do what we want than what is asked of us.

American culture is founded on this kind of rejection of limits. We began as a country because taxes were imposed on import businesses, and those with money and means wanted unlimited wealth, not metered income. That is shown in the radical independence of American culture. “Who cares what benefits those around me, as long as I get what I need? Who cares what I can do for my country, when it can do so much more for me? Neighbors? Who needs them, I want a house and a lawn, all as far away from the world as I can get it.” Rugged individualism, the idea that “greed is good,” it is as American as apple pie.

We pretend that our problems are new, that they are the result of generations younger than ourselves that have poisoned the future we have worked so hard for. However, the problem is much older, as is our tendency to blame anyone but ourselves for it. It goes all the way back to a garden planted at the source of all rivers, a garden with every good fruit and vegetable you could ever want, and a single tree that was off limits.

Scripture does not tell us what kind of fruit was on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We usually think of it as an apple, just because “Evil,” in Latin is “Malus,” which is the same word for apple – a bit of a literary confusion we never quite got over. However, whether it was pomegranates or apples or even something we have never dreamt of or seen, the fruit itself is far less important than what it represents. In chasing after that fruit, humanity was gaining knowledge of everything they could ever want to know, and in chasing that fruit, humanity gave up the joys of paradise they had once known.

The Garden is one of the stories in scripture that we can easily get wrapped up in the details of and miss the point of. Countless oceans of ink have been spilt justifying why God would plant a forbidden tree in the garden, and trying to explain why humanity would be given a choice so massive and dangerous as this to begin with. I’m uninterested in that kind of exposition. In my mind, the Garden and the tree tell a story that is played out eternally all around us, there are choices that we can make and when we make them poorly there are consequences.

We talked at length about the finality of choice just a few weeks ago, and we looked at how God gives us guidance to choose life again and again. It is important to point out that God also imposes limits to prevent us from making choices that would ultimately harm us as well. Despite attaining all knowledge they could ever want, no good comes to Adam, Eve, or the Serpent who mislead them. The serpent loses its limbs and becomes a slithering thing, robbed of intellect and now a beast like any other. The primordial couple meanwhile must face the reality of life outside of Eden, a world where childbirth is dangerous and where weeds are far more common than produce.

In our own life, the limits imposed on us by God take many forms. For one thing, there are restrictive commandments – things like do not steal, lie, or kill. For another, there are the human limitations imposed by our mortality. We cannot know everything, we cannot do everything, and while most of us get our three score and ten no one ever gets more than one hundred twenty years to sort their lives out. Limits abound all around us, and they are as frustrating as can be.

The writer of Ecclesiastes spends most of the book complaining about how limited life is. The seasons of pain cannot be seasons of joy, because God has ordained both for their set purposes. The waters from the ocean race back to the rivers to race back to the oceans. Life and death are always chasing after each other, and we have no control over what anyone does to our legacy once we die. God set a knowledge of eternity in our hearts, and yet has made us limited. For Qoheleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, there are few things as miserable as that.

Yet, on the other side of those frustrations, is an acknowledgment of the good that they can produce. The hard times are made bearable because they do have an end. The waters that constantly replenish one another sustain life. The legacy we leave may be out of our control, but we can work to enjoy what we have now, and set up a future where others can continue and enhance what we have begun. The life we live is limited, and that can be frustrating, but every limit can also impose a blessing if we are open to understanding the fullness it provides.

For the first humans the choice was between expulsion and continued presence in paradise. For us today, the issues are much more layered and sometimes not obvious. The teachings of Moses, for example, make sense if you are in an ancient agrarian community, but are sometimes hard to translate to our modern life. Do the teachings of Moses, then, only cover so much of what we now face? The prophets seemed to think so, as their own proclamations augmented and clarified these teachings in a different era. Even Jesus, the one who fulfilled and preserved all of Moses’s teachings, gives us new insight into the “Yes,” and the “No,” that God has given time and time again.

For us today, we are interpreters of scripture for a new era. We cannot answer questions the same way we always have. What does it mean to bear false witness in an era where it is easy to share falsehoods accidentally? What does it mean to build fences to protect people from accidental injury, not on the roof of a house, but in the way we build the world around us? How do we leave an ox unmuzzled as it mills grain, when we are no longer dependent on animals to produce our food like we once were?

Every generation is given unique opportunities to understand what God commands. We do so as limited people, people who easily can make mistakes and misinterpret what is set before us. Yet, we do so with an understanding that everything we want to be able to do, is not always what we ought to do. We want to have freedom in every aspect of our life, but we are reigned in from that for the good of all people. We do not horde, so that others can have what they need to live. We do not say whatever we want, however we want to,  because others are worthy of fair treatment and dignity. We do not get everything we want when we want it, because to do so we would have to exploit those around us and enforce an autocracy of the self.

The Church is known today as a place that tells the world what is shouldn’t be doing. So much so, that I think we often forget to represent what we as people of faith are called to do, rather than what we seek to abstain from. However, I think that we are also guilty of telling the world “No,” and ourselves “Yes.” When we want something, it is fair and reasonable, when we are asked to give something up it is the worst thing we could ever be asked to do. Today I invite us to be honest with ourselves, about the bad habits and behavior we tolerate in ourselves and put limits upon them. We must tell ourselves no sometimes, if we ever want to be better at saying “Yes,” to what God has for us. Learn to glory in limitation as well as in freedom and find that both have their place in God’s economy of goodness. – Amen.

Sermon 02/22/2023 – Ash Wednesday 2023

/ John Langenstein / 2 Comments

Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

“So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you…

“And whenever you fast, do not look somber, like the hypocrites, for they mark their faces to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Sermon Text

There is always something different to lift up in Lent. Sometimes the simple idea that we can be better than we currently are, is worth remembering. Sometimes the emphasis can sit on the reminder that this life has an end and so our decisions matter. An infinite amount of lessons to be learned, all to be lifted up in the forty days that we call “Lent.” Yet, in the modern world I think that there is a lesson that might be more important than any other – the lesson of privacy in our devotions.

It is easy to share online, in-person, or simply to the void around us, all that we embark upon in our life of faith. Maybe we hope to inspire others to follow our example, maybe to keep ourselves accountable, or sometimes even to just look good and holy. Whatever the case, there is a real benefit that can come from us not sharing anything and everything we do, a holiness and joy that can come from privacy in our life. In an era when we can share, at any moment, our thoughts and feelings with infinite numbers of people, sometimes it is enough to simply do things and let nothing mark that they were done.

How holy would our world be if we kept our opinions to ourselves sometimes, rather than fight over every little detail. How blessed would life be if our failures and successes were sometimes between us and God, and not every follower we have on Instagram. How much mor honest might we be, if we were not always projecting our best selves to a world we imagine is judging our every moment. Perhaps, for this Lenten season, we should all work to give up some of the publicity we all have accepted as normal in our life. Let us embrace the prayers Jesus taught us to pray in secret, that we might in public focus only on living a good life, and not on what people may thing of us while we do so. – Amen.

Sermon 02/19/2023 – Dazzled by Reality

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 17:1-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will set up three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they raised their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

Sermon Text

Reality is a beautiful thing. Despite our ability to dream up infinite worlds, and our love of fantasy and fiction, it is often hard to surpass the beauty of what is already around us. The beauty of the natural world, the wonders of the sky at night, and even the simple complexity of the bodies we live within – all of these can wow us without any embellishment. God too, in all the complexity and beauty of the divine, needs nothing additional to wow us. When we meet God, in moments of prayer or worship, or in the face of someone else, we see something raw, unfiltered, amazing in its own right.

Scripture, the record of people throughout the ages encountering God, likewise gives us beautiful and unfiltered glimpses of God’s beauty. The stories of God’s people facing hardships, and yet overcoming reflect our own difficulties. The visions of God’s brilliant being gives us words to describe our own glimpses of the divine. The teachings passed down for ages show us what it means to live as people of God, and to create a community worth bragging about. Time and time again, we are given things to be dazzled by. Yet, dear siblings, we are not always satisfied with the simple majesty of scripture.

In seminary we would sometimes joke that the hardest part of the classes we took was not anything to do with relearning how to read scripture or how to run a church. The hardest part was actually learning that many of the sermons we heard throughout the years told stories that were made up, or used images that had no basis in reality. Harder than any challenge to our faith that came from deep diving into the history of the Church and scripture, was facing the reality that a great many ministers were  not content to let scripture stand on its own, and so dressed it up with a variety of seemingly benign pleasantries. By decorating the pages of scriptures with flowery exposition, I think many ministers felt they were doing us a favor, but I disagree on its effect.

There are mountains of books and sermons that take scripture and dress up the bits that seem a bit barren. The warning from Jesus that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter heaven was too challenging, and seemed too abstract. Therefore, someone invented the idea that there was a gate in Jerusalem called “the Eye of the Needle,” that required a camel be unloaded of its cargo before it could enter.[1] The image is meant to make people think of what they must give up to become holy, but it detracts from Jesus’s message – that something as impossible as a rich man entering Heaven is possible with God.

At a funeral for a colleague of mine, the preacher told a grand story about Cyrus the Great setting up a throne in town and asking random people what they would give up if he spared their life. The story was longer than it needed to be, and was meant to illustrate God’s love for the Church – that while a man would give up any object for his children, he would give his own life for his wife. The image led me to have several questions, mainly why the story would separate out what God would do for the Church and what God would do for the people in the Church, but also why it was necessary at all. Cyrus was a real person, Isaiah calls him a “Meshiak,” or “Messiah,” and he ended the Babylonian Captivity. Why tell this story, made up whole cloth, and confuse what history and scripture has to say about a very real person?[2]

These serve purposes for instruction, sure, but they pollute our understanding of what is real and what is not. This past Christmas I was introduced to a set of teachings about how Jesus was laid in a manger because that is how unblemished lambs for sacrifice were kept safe. I saw this shared by other ministers no less, and when I spent just ten minutes looking into it, I saw it was not true. Some may say, “Who cares! It is a good story and it gets the point across.” But I care very deeply, for a multitude of reasons, and I think we all should.

You see, truth is a fragile thing. Just one word spoken improperly can destroy it in an instant. Think of the times in your life where a rumor has gone out of control. All it took was one person saying something carelessly, or intentionally to deceive. Soon you have people calling you asking about evils you never committed and things you have never said. Even when the dust settles and the truth is theoretically made known to the world, those rumors will linger in the back of people’s minds, forever mixed in and entangled with the truth. Truth is a fragile thing, because the second we start adding to it, it ceases to be a thing we can call, “true.”

We’ve talked before about my love of debunking conspiracy theories and mysteries. That love is not just because I’m weird and therefore have weird hobbies, but because I am infatuated with the preservation of truth. I was criticized by a colleague of mine for suggesting that there is no benign conspiracy theories. I believe that because the moment we deny truth in any form, we make it easier to accept the next lie we are given. Looking back, I wish I had fought harder against that criticism, because more and more everyday I stand by the idea that anything but absolute truth is a dangerous thing to hold onto.

Our scripture today shows the disciples meeting truth in a way they had not before. They climbed the mountain of transfiguration and saw Jesus take on, just for a moment, the glory that he would have in his resurrection. This was not an addition to who Jesus was, per se, but a lifting of the veil to show what Jesus had always been. The God-man who could say, “Before Abraham was, I am,” shown out in that moment as our human eyes were not yet equipped to see.[3]

I think that it is important that we study as much as we can about scripture, and understand the history the underpins the beliefs we hold about it. However, if in the pursuit of understanding, we begin to create a false scaffold around our beliefs that makes them easier to handle, then we can never really see the glory they hold for us. Like we talked about last week, God did not put scripture far away from us, but put it in front of us all to wrestle with and understand. Those who proclaim they have secret knowledge or know some obscure bit of history that “unlocks,” scripture, are probably misguided themselves or lying for clout.

The greatest wonders that come from God are seen because God is never hiding from us. God is always showing us more, always opening doors that used to be closed. There is no need for us to dress up the reality around us, because it is dazzling on its own. Peter wanted to build tents for those that appeared on the mountain that day because he had added to the story he was seeing unfold in front of. He believed Moses and Elijah were not just there to speak to and encourage Jesus, but were worthy of tabernacles to house them. He added to what was happening, He decided that this was something other than it really was. Ironically enough, by building these tents, he would have hidden the beautiful thing in front of them.

We too can decide if we will hide the beauty and glory of God. We can try and make beautiful what is already radiant, but when we do so we will just be carpeting over hardwood, hiding beauty in convenience. We must defend truth, we must preach it unfettered, and that requires us to let ourselves be dazzled by reality as it is, and not as we might invent it.

[1] This myth is very old, likely dating to or before Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century. See –
Ziemińska, Agnieszka. “The Origin of the ‘Needle’s Eye Gate’ Myth: Theophylact or Anselm?” New Testament Studies 68, no. 3 (2022): 358–61. doi:10.1017/S0028688521000448.

[2] I can find no particular origin to this quote, except that it is used in too many sermons. It may be rooted in a book of Sermon illustrations from 1986, but the illustrations contained there-in are probably older.

[3] John 8:58

Sermon 02/12/2023 – Two Ways Forward

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.

But if your heart turns away and you do not hear but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall certainly perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him, for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”

Sermon Text

One of the most common images we see in literature is that of the crossroads. There was a time when the meeting of two roads marked something profound. Down one path would be an entirely different world than another. They were places of business and of decisions. They were deeply spiritual, with spirits both good and bad lurking around their thoroughfares. Thieves could lurk here to make sure that they would meet their mark, and good Samaritans could likewise find those to help. At the nexus of one thing and another, the imminent moment of choice, it was there that magic could happen.

In life, we often look back on the choices we make with a feeling of bittersweet wonder. Did we make the right choice way back when? Were we meant to live the life we are living now, or was something better down a road we never took? Sometimes those alternate worlds we imagine are small, “What would have happened if I had gotten a Subaru instead of a Ford.” Other times they are much bigger, “What if I had never lived all those years chasing after the approval of someone who would never give it to me?” The reality of these past decisions is, of course, that they cannot be undone. Unlike the roads we drive on every day, there are no exits we can take to go back the way we came.

Recently driving to my friends in Vinton, Virginia, we crossed by a town called “Crow.” For miles, we kept getting a dire warning. “Crow, West Virginia. No Eastbound reentry.” If we were going to go to Crow, we were not going to make it back to where we came from. Life is like that, the choices we make are locked into time the second we make them. When we think of how final every decision we make really is, it is amazing that we ever go into anything without careful consideration. We can never take back the words we say. We can never undo the things we have done. Even if the damage can be repaired, the action itself will be locked in forever.

I think that reality scares us more than most things. The entire genre of time travel stories showshow much we want to have life be able to be redone. We want to be able to fix the damage of the past, to make everything better than it once was. Back to the Future despite being about fixing a timeline that has somehow gone wrong, captures the protagonist making his life better through his meddling with time. Countless episodes of Doctor Who, likewise show its titular character going through history and saving people from tragedies. We imagine for a moment that something as dire as Pompei or the Titanic could have had even a few more people saved than actually were. We want more than anything to turn back the hands of the clock, to save what is lost. Time is not our friend though, and a decision once made cannot be unmade.

The reality of this is dire, and our scripture sets a similar situation down in front of us. Israel is gathered together across the Jordan, Moses gives one final message to the people he has led for decades. The generation that suffered in the wilderness is dying away, and now their children and grandchildren are going to inherit the land promised to them so long ago it feels like an eternity. Moses summarizes the teachings he has given across their journey, and he asks them to reflect on what the wilderness has meant. Every triumph and every mistake is laid out before them, and a central truth is made plain. Choices have consequences, and what has been done cannot be undone. The people who left Egypt cannot enter Canaan because of what they did in the wilderness, and neither could Moses. The choices of the past had solidified the life that they were living now. However, the way forward could still be changed, if not for them then for their children, if they can make the right choice.

I have two stories to tell you – one a riddle and the other more philosophical – as a point of contrast for the choices we are given in this scripture. The first is a riddle. Two doors are put before you, one leads to an escape from the room you are in, the other will tumble you into a pit. Two guards stand there, one who only tells the truth and another who only tells lies. You are given a single question to determine which door is correct, and you cannot take back that question or your final choice of doors. What question would you ask?[1]

Put another way, Frank Stockton tells a story where a rich man seeks to keep his daughter from getting married. He has a gift for matchmaking, and anytime is accused of a crime, he finds their perfect match and has them stand behind a door. Behind the other door, a tiger sits. The choice is simple for the criminal, pick a door and either find perfect bliss or immediate death. One day a youth is given this choice, not for a crime, but because of something that gives him an advantage. The man’s daughter is in love with the youth, and knowing the answer to the doors, tells him which he should pick ahead of time. Stockton interrupts the story before it concludes and asks us a question of our own. Would this woman, facing the loss of her one true love, tell him to go to a door where he can live happily with another woman, or tell him to open a door that would kill him, but keep him as her love and her love only?[2]

This tends to be what we imagine when we think of crossroads. There is a right answer and a wrong one, and everything is conspiring to have us pick the wrong one. Perhaps that is out of the selfishness of the person who has given us that choice, or because of the ambiguity that life naturally carries within itself. Either way, we worry if we have made the right choice, because it is not always obvious which way we should go.

Even with good guidance, there are moments where we will not know the right way to go immediately. Sometimes what is good, best, and right are different things. Imagine that you could save someone’s life, but to do so you would have to lie. You are bearing a sort of false witness, but in preserving a life, a greater good is being accomplished than by telling the truth. Withholding help to someone who is better served by someone else can be hard, but sometimes an incomplete act of kindness is an enemy to recovery and goodness. Life can be hard, and decisions harder, but we need to be careful making them, because once we do, that is locked in, in a moment we cannot take back.

So, where does the hope come in? We now are thoroughly aware of how hard life can be, but how can we relax? The anxiety of making choices is heavy on us already, what relief can we enjoy? Siblings in Christ, we are blessed more than most in this. Moses gave this dire warning long ago, but he did not give it without hope underlying the whole thing. The past is gone, the choices we made final, but the road ahead is still open to us. It is never too late to choose life, and the choices we make are not hidden in deception in the way our riddles were. I have hidden what Moses said before this dire warning until now, but hear these words of hope from verses 10-14.

“Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”

God, in God’s mercy, has given us all we need to make decisions we can be confident in, if only we are willing to stick to the teachings we have been given. God did not hide the truth, but brought it down to us. We do not have to fly to Heaven or dig deep into the earth to find it, it is right here with us. We have an advantage even above Moses, even above the one who met God face to face. Christ, who came and lived among us, showed us what a life of perfect choices could look like. It was not easy, it was probably harder than it would have been otherwise, but it was a good life. When Christ left us, the Spirit remained with us. It lodges in our heart, and it offers us a way to be that is better than what we could ever find on our own.

We will not always make the right choices in life, but we have to own each one that we do make. We must be confident that we did all we could to do what is right. Likewise, the choices that we made long ago have to be something we can forgive ourselves for, because we cannot change what has already transpired. What matters, in our ministries, in our relationships, in every part of our life, is that we are moving forward and choosing life now. We have the guidance of God with us, we have nothing to fear from anything or anyone, if only we can own our choices here and now.

Blessed are we, as children of God, that we can charge forward unafraid. When we come to difficult choices, we must be careful and give them the care and attention they deserve, but we do not have to be paralyzed with fear. We have the people of God around us to support us. We have the scriptures to inform us. Most of all, we have the Spirit of God within us to comfort and transform us. There are many crossroads in this life, and we must make a decision between the two ways forward we are presented with. Praise God that we are never left to make those decisions alone, and that God is always ready to help us more and more. – Amen.

[1]  Smullyan, Raymond (1978). What is the Name of this Book?. Prentice-Hall.

[2] Frank R. Stockton “The Lady, or the Tiger?” in The Century. 1882

Sermon 02/05/2023 – Salt and Light

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 5:13-20

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Sermon Text

 In the past few years, the importance of salt has stood out to me. We often talk about how the ancient world valued salt, it being necessary for food and worship and medicine, but it is not as if we stopped having a need for salt today. Food without salt is just not worth eating, we need the sodium to wake up our taste buds. Our roads are not usually coated with rock salt, instead having calcium chloride or some other tri-atomic salt, but sea salt has more than just sodium and chlorine in it, so I’ll call “salt”, “salt” in this case. We still use salt, we still need salt, the only thing that gets strange about Jesus’s metaphor here, is that salt is usually good as long as you keep it dry in a cupboard.

What can we take from this idea of “salt that has lost its saltiness,” is useless? What does it mean for a person to suddenly become “less salty.” Today, we use the term “salty,” to mean irritable or bitter, but Jesus is talking about living a good life as being “Salted,” properly. In truth, I think Jesus is a victim of the metaphor in use, the expression does not translate well from one language to another. Jesus does not say here that salt can become less salty, but that it can become “foolish.” In fact, the word he uses here is the same one as we used a few weeks ago to talk about God, “making foolish,” the wisdom of the world.[1]

Mixed metaphors are something we all accidentally run into now and again. You start out saying that the road was twisting like a snake and then somehow wrap it around to a different image of knotted rope or something and before you know it, everyone is just a little confused what you were going for. I do not know if Jesus is caught in a similar issue, where in trying to be relevant he picks salt as an image, but then realizes that does not quite work for the topic, or if Greek audiences ever used “foolish,” to talk about inanimate objects and we just do not have the records of it.

Either way, if we think of ourselves as salt, an important thing in the world, and then think of how easily we can become “foolish,” then maybe the parable can snap in a bit more concretely. Jesus too seems to understand that this parable needs to be built up a bit more. “You are like salt, if you are not salty enough, then you cannot be made more salty… Well, let me try saying it a different way, if you have a light then hiding it away wouldn’t be helpful. In the same way, if God gave us Jerusalem to be a place of goodness and life, then how can it be anything but that. Therefore, make sure you are acting like the good people of faith you claim to be.”

Light and visibility generally are easier to grapple with than saltiness. Jesus does this several times in his teachings, it is what good teachers will try to do as often as possible. By giving the same idea in three or four different ways, more people are likely to get it than if only one version of the message was attempted. I struggle with getting a good metaphor off on the first try. Grace makes fun of me for this, because in attempting to explain something I will often get more obscure than where I started. So if we are watching Doctor Who, or some other time travel story, I might say, “Oh, of course it’s like the Tralfamadorians.” And then I get blank stares as I then realize, not everyone has read Slaughterhouse-Five, so then I go to Bill and Ted, which is maybe a bit better, but only one more person knows what I meant, and then… It just degrades from there.

Jesus is a better teacher and storyteller than we are, thankfully, and so those second images make clear what Jesus is talking about. Salt, light, a city, all are things that have uses. Salt for food, light for illumination, and a city to be a place of community. If any of those things fail to be what they are meant to be, then they have no purpose. The final one makes a stronger point than the other two. Lamps that do not light a room are useless, and salt that does not salt is even more so, but one could claim to prefer bland food or a dark room. A city though, has to be a city, it cannot stop being what it is. In the same way, Christians cannot choose some days to be good and some days to be evil, we have to always be a city on the hill.

Jesus goes further. The people who teach you to be good, the scribes and pharisees, people Jesus elsewhere says to listen to, we have to be better than them. Jesus is very critical of the leadership of his day, as any prophet must be, but he does call them heirs to the “seat of Moses.”[2] It is easy for us to hear Jesus’s teaching as, “Be better than hypocrites,” but he is saying be better than the people society accepts as good. For me in my role as minister, I try to do well and be good in all things, but my hope is that you all exceed me in all goodness. As Jesus says here, the people in authority are often held up as benchmarks, things to aspire to, but Jesus says we must only aspire to be perfect, and in that aspiration overcome even those who teach us what it means to be good.

As Christians, and especially Protestants, we do not like being told to do things. Faith saves us, so why do anything else? If the transaction for my soul is complete, then why go above and beyond in being good? It is so much a concern of the Church, that our articles of religion address works of “supererogation,” that is, works above what is required. “I have my faith, I have my Church, I send my tithe. What more is required of me?” The answer, to spoiler the game, is “Everything.” Our Articles of Religion ban works of supererogation because there is no such thing.[3] When the goal is “Be thou perfect,” anything less than that is not too much, it is always lacking.[4] We are called, not to salvation by works, but as saved people to do the work before us.

Jesus says our righteousness must be exceptional because we are the visible part of Christ on earth. We are the city on the hill, the world is looking and they will judge how we act. We must act in goodness, we must do more goodness than we might thing is required of us, and we must be willing to take a few hits in the name of what is right. We are to be useful people, not as our primary existence, but as an outpouring of the grace we have been given. Jesus is very careful in his teaching, the person who fails this mission is not excluded from God’s kingdom, they still have a seat, but the joy they have will be lessened by their inability to understand what is good. They will be called, “least in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

I always talk about this life, not as a test or a trial to be overcome, but an opportunity to learn. We can learn to love as Christ did, to serve as Christ did, and to know our limitations and need for rest as Christ did. We can engage in all goodness and joy, but only with practice. It takes time to get good at being good, sometimes a person’s entire life is spent just learning how to not be quite so fussy with the people they see every day. We have people we call Saints for a reason, they figure it out long before the rest of us do. They are the salt and light that shines a way for the rest of we wayward souls.

Whether we think of this call in terms of salt, or light, or as a visible and inescapable reminder of who God is, it is a call we all have. To excel in goodness, to exceed the lessons that were taught to us by those who came before us, and in all things to be the body of Christ to all the world until Christ returns in final victory. We do this through Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, and within this Holy Church, we stand and testify as the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood. – Amen.

[1] 1 Corinthians 1; from the root μωρός where we get the modern, “Moron.”

[2] Matthew 23:2

[3] Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church. Article XI

[4] Matthew 5:48

Sermon 01/29/2023 – Wisdom’s Warring Madness

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. In contrast, God is why you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Sermon Text

            I have always had people look at me strangely when I tell them what I majored in in college. They hear that I had a religious studies major, and that I focused mostly on historical theology, and that all tracks for them. However, the minute that I bring up that my primary work for most of college was actually in Chemistry, heads tend to go to one side. People do not expect ministers to be scientists, or as the case may sometimes be, scientists to be ministers. Yet, as many people in the sciences are religious as people outside of them, so why wouldn’t some of them take the step into ministry?

I believe some of the issue is that we have created, in the past three hundred years broadly, but really in the last hundred years locally, a separation between science and religion, faith and reason, that is completely artificial. We in America especially, envisioning the Scopes monkey trial and the entire career of Ken Ham, imagine that there are two kinds of people – scientists who abhor God and faithful people who abhor science. This “Great Divorce,” between the two worlds has led to a central problem – wherever there is not communication, there is misunderstanding. That misunderstanding can cause a lot of trouble, it can even kill.

I can only really speak to Christianity on how these two interact but let us look at some facts. Mental health issues affect 20% of Americans, but because we have put a separation between mental health sciences and the Church, only recently are people in churches comfortable engaging with getting help.[1] Not specific to Christianity, but certainly present within the Church is a lack of understanding about medicine on a wider scale as well. Hesitancy to vaccination has expanded in recent years. This has led to a resurgence of Measles, Mumps, and other childhood diseases we had nearly eradicated.[2] More than that, the perception of a war between Science and Faith has led to an inability for faithful people to engage with those scientific issues that become mainstream.

This issue is not just an issue of the Church either. While many scientists of faith, and even secularists like Carl Sagan, worked for years to educate the world and to bring down the hifalutin jargon of science from its ivory tower, there are few people willing to do the same work today. As a child of the nineties, I hate to admit that I find Bill Nye obnoxious today – less of an educator and more of a media figure. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, brilliant though he is, exists in the public consciousness only to shame people and media for not being 100% accurate 100% of the time.Gone is the humility and skill of someone like Sagan, who first awakened my love of science with a rerun of Cosmos in my childhood, now is only personality and outrage media.

Yet, there are figures who continue to bridge the gap. Science was truly an exercise of faith for many people throughout history. Algebra, Optics, and Chemistry as we know them today were begun by Muslim scientists during the Islamic golden age. Modern genetics was begun by a monk named Gregor Mendel. The Big Bang was rejected at first as a  theory of cosmic origin, because a Catholic built the model, Even the current Pope, before he was a priest, was a chemist. The two worlds of science and religion, faith and reason, are always seeking after one another, always trying to reconcile, but there are always obstacles to that reconciliation.

On one hand, it is impossible to inject faith into scientific hypotheses and still call them scientific. Science is, first and foremost, falsifiable. You cannot disprove that God might have done something in a situation, and so you cannot include God in a hypothesis you are creating. Some people of faith have issues with scientific theory as a result of this, but like the book of Esther where God is never mentioned once, I think the discovery of all causes physical does not mean that we cannot use the material to learn about the immaterial.

On the other hand, faith often struggles against the cold rationalism of science. As I said above, you cannot include God in scientific theory to avoid biases, and that makes some people uncomfortable. More than that, science can sometimes expand our conceptions about God, and that makes us uncomfortable. Take for example the realization that the universe is fourteen billion years old, and the earth is four billion years old. For some Christians, this has to be rejected, as the church has always held the earth is a few centuries over six thousand years old. For others, this is a chance to rethink what we know about God, to marvel in a deity that took billions of years to craft a cosmos fit for our small little lives, and to hold that cherished thing in his hands.

Frequently cited in this conflict is the verse that we read today. “God has made foolish the wisdom of this world,” is applied to all pursuits of knowledge that seem to conflict with our faith. If something is new and challenging, it is weighed against the world as we know it and rejected. Faith, this interpretation demands, means that no matter how major or material an observation is, it cannot stand if it challenges orthodoxy. God’s wisdom, the wisdom of the Cross, overcomes any earthly observation or truth. Why else would Paul elsewhere reject, “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental principles of the world, and not according to Christ.”[3]

Context is, as always, how we can uncover what Paul means by this. In Colossians, the source of that latest quotation, Paul is addressing a group in the Church promising secret knowledge and a next level faith. “Yes, you’ve heard about Jesus, but have you considered purchasing the Jesus+ plan.” Paul is therefore warning Christians from the fact that other Christians might deceive them by sounding very knowledgeable about spiritual things, but who are really only after more power. In our Corinthians text, the context of wisdom and foolishness is specific to one thing only, the one place I will always insist faith must overcome reason. That issue is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

There is nothing logical or rational to it, it attacks and destroys any neat theology or philosophy we might form around it. Try to explain why God, the infinite God of the universe, chose this one specific way to reconcile us to that same divinity. A thousand answers probably swarm into our head, answers we have been told in seminary and in Sunday school all our life. Paul attempts to explain it time and time again, but Paul bases all his explanation on the reality that it happened, and the faith that it was sufficient and necessary, and only secondarily makes any attempt to fully understand and wrestle with those two things. The cross is a place where infinite questions emerge.

God died. God suffered. God, who could have found another way, or else would be lacking in the divine freedom that defines God’s power in creation, chose this one as the one and only way. Why? How? In what way really? Paul cites two potential opponents to this idea – his fellow Jews who would be thinking of the scripture, “Cursed is he who hangs on a tree,” and so would deny a criminal’s death as holy.[4] On the other side are the Greeks who want a coherent philosophy behind this faith. To both of them he says, “I am a fool! I have nothing for either of you except that this is true, that this is real, that I have seen it as real and cannot argue anything else.” Later on, he doubles down on this, saying that he may be a fool for believing in the cross, but if his faith in the resurrection is misplaced, then he really should be pitied.[5]

The fact is, that outside of this one core conceit, there is nothing to battle between faith and reason. We have different things we address in daily life. I cannot, in talking about the keto-tautomerization of compounds, draw a circle around a mechanism I do not know and say, “God did that part.” However, neither does the knowledge that the intricate systems of our world have material foundations and explanations prevent me from marveling that the God I believe in had a part in it. There is antagonism from secularists against people of faith, to be sure, and antagonism from people of faith toward the sciences. However, that antagonism is not inherent to our ways of being. The Jewish sage, Maimonides, argued that to really understand God’s work in the world, we all ought to know the sciences, and I like that way of thinking.[6]

There is a symphony present around us, the thrumming of electrons not just in the lights above us, but in every cell of our body. Every molecule is a sea of energy, swimming around a densely packed collection of protons and neutrons that associate with each other out of energetic convenience. Machines forged by eons of fine tuning are at work every moment, making new bones and tissues, cleaning out the old and disused. The air we breathe swirls in turbid spiral that only Van Gogh dreamt of before science imaged them. God ordained a heavens that is precise as a clock, and interrupts it only to shower mercy and love upon it.

We ought to be Holy Fools, to proclaim a crucifixion and a resurrection that has no explanation except that God loves us and God alone was enough to set things right. Yet, we are not to be fools in understanding the world itself. We should take time to learn the sciences, to learn history, to appreciate art, to engage with all the wisdom of the ages. Why? Because there is one truth in this universe, the truth God has given, and whatever ways we can get it, we ought to. The more we know of the universe, the more we can see God’s hand in it. Let us commit ourselves then to understanding this beautiful cosmos we inhabit and cease the warring madness which have so long prevented us from learning from one another. – Amen.

[1] Matthew S. Stanford (2007) Demon or disorder: A survey of attitudes toward mental illness in the Christian church, Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 10:5, 445-449, DOI: 10.1080/13674670600903049

[2] Patel M, Lee AD, Redd SB, et al. Increase in Measles Cases — United States, January 1–April 26, 2019. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2019;68:402–404. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6817e1external icon.

[3] Colossians 2:8

[4] Deuteronomy 21:23 c.f. Galatians 3:13

[5] 1 Corinthians 15:19

[6] Shafer, Sara Teresa. 2012. “The Wisdom of this World: Maimonides and Paul at the Interface of Science and Faith.” The International Journal of Science in Society 3 (3): 95-106. doi:10.18848/1836-6236/CGP/v03i03/51335.

Sermon 01/22/2023 – Call and Response

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 4:12-23

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the gentiles— the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.”

From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishers. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

Jesus went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

Sermon Text

I want you to picture yourself on a Galilean shore long ago. Two fishermen are casting nets, a man walks up to them. You recognize him from a distance, Mary and Joseph’s boy, the first one, the one all the rumors were about. Jesus greets the two, says something to them, they seem shocked for a moment, and then they throw down their nets and follow him. Weird, but hey it’s the sixteenth year of Tiberius’s reign, weird stuff happens everyday. Then that man, Jesus I think his name was, walks a little further and calls out to two men, but his words are lost on the wind. You walk over to one of the men left on the shore and ask what he said. The words that changed their lives, that made them leave, “I will make you fishers of people.”

Even if we were looking in John’s Gospel, which gives a bit more provocative promise from Jesus, “I teach you how to snatch people!” we do not see something that would entice people to join a movement. If I were watching people on a seashore go with a guy who had such a simple call to action, I’d be confused. Maybe I’d go home and tell the strange story of what I saw that day, maybe I’d follow the group and see what was going on. For me as someone on the sideline, those few words would probably not carry much power. However, as we stand on the lakeside, we must understand that those words were for Peter and Andrew, James and John, they were not for us.

Everyone in this room had something that brought them into the Church. Some of us were born into it, raised from the moment we left our mothers arms to be a follower of Christ. For others we never knew the Church, except maybe occasional visits with a relative. We never knew Christ, until something happened where God came close to us, and we suddenly saw what our life was truly meant for. Whether born into the faith or welcomed into it later, there came a moment for every person in this room where the life we knew was transformed with a word given to us from God. A word likely spoken through another.

Faith for me came alive step-by-step. First by acknowledging that I truly believed in God. Secondly by seeing in my faith in Christ a need to change who I was into someone better than I had been. Finally, and across the longest span of time, the call I had to take on leadership in the Church. That final call is the message I remember best, because it was in a crowd at a youth camp. We were asked to stand if we were a leader among the people around us, and I felt a burning need to stand up. More than that, in the moment that everyone stood following that, I was struck by something undeniable. There was no distinction between anyone in that crowd. The ones God called to leadership disappeared, making me realize that the job of a leader is to lead others into their own mastery of mission. We are all leaders of something, all servants of something, all workers in a mutual work together.

For me, “You will be fishers of men,” would not be enough to awaken my soul. “You will support and equip others to thrive,” did. Jesus finds a way to grab a hold of us, a way to call us into what our purpose is, if we are willing to listen. For the fisherman on the lakeshore they were faithful members of their synagogue, they believed in the power of  God’s salvation, but they were not awake and alive in the faith until they heard Jesus call to them from the shore. Their hearts were ready, they just needed to be told that God was too. Jesus spoke to their hearts and what they knew God wanted of them. Even without all the details of what was about to happen, they were willing to leave their nets and go.

All of us here are at different places in our faith. Some farther along in maturity than others, some going in circles that trend upward and downward at different times. All of us here, however, have a call to something. Take a moment, close your eyes and chase away all the bits and bobs that might distract you. Do not think about lunch, do not think about this coming week, just for a moment, and ask what God has placed on your heart. What passions flare up? What desires are latent and ready to become a burning fire? All of us have something. When I do this, I feel the great desire to support people, to push them to be their utmost, and to live that ideal and joy-filled life that can come from living to our greatest potential.

Your desire may be to pray without ceasing. It might be to feed the hungry. It could be to tell the whole world what God has done for you. Whatever it is, there is a call that you have ready to come alive. Last week we talked about the importance of encouragement. Let me tell you that encouragement matters for more than just what people are currently doing. Encouragement can be the word we need to go forward and take the leap into what God is calling us to do. Sometimes people have no idea that God wants them to teach, until they are told they have a gift for it. I would never have gone into ministry if a teacher had not told me that the dream God had put in my heart was ministry work.

There are things that happen in our scripture today – a call is given and a call is accepted. Both are important. God may be using us to give the call someone needs to hear to start something new in their life. We should not think that our opinion is equivalent to God’s or that we can perfectly discern what people should do with their life, but we should be unafraid to trust when God has given us a message to light someone’s life up. Likewise, we who are told that someone sees God working something in us should accept that, pray on it, and discern if it is really where we are being called to. Sometimes the answer will be no, sometimes someone will see something that is not quite right for what God is asking of another person. Yet, only with consideration, discernment, and decisions, can they become anything more than a few spare words shared between people.

As I said earlier, the calls we get are not always just for what God is calling us to do. My first two big realizations in faith were just faith itself. That God was real and I could have faith in Christ. Both of those had their own messages that brought them to life, their own words that awoke something within me. The dire teaching of a Calvinist missiologist, the ancient words of scripture where God visits the elders of Israel. These awoke my faith and brought me into the Church I had only been an attendee in before. There was a transformative power in these words, and again they would not have happened if someone was not willing to share them with me, and I was not willing to accept them.

Paul had his big experience on the road to Damascus, knocked off a horse by a bright light, blind and disoriented – but it was the gentle words of Ananias that healed his blindness and welcomed him into his renewed faith. Simpler than this was the Ethiopian eunuch, reading the Septuagint in a carriage one day, who needed only to have someone tell him about Jesus to jump into the nearest puddle of water and ask to be baptized. Simpler still were the fishermen on a muddy lakeshore, smelling of fish and funk, who only needed to be told they could fish for something else to change their entire life.

Do not be afraid to speak what God has upon your heart – with discernment and prayer – but freely and proudly. God has given us our messages for a purpose and that purpose is the transformation of the world. Likewise, do not be afraid when someone brings a message to you. With prayer and discernment – we can sort what is human of them and what is divine – and from that conversation, that dialogue, we find a deeper truth together. That truth is the redemption of the world, the saving of souls, and the fulfillment of our true purpose in Christ. Listen, speak, act, and do not fear the calls that come into our lives. – Amen.