its still a draft, the first, but it is a formulation of what will become a sermon.

How do we Respond

Front Yard 1 Juniper hole

My front yard needed something to replace the juniper that had taken over the front of the porch, toxic as it was to some of us living in the house. So I bought a plant to replace the juniper that was cut off last fall leaving a stump.

The Question of the sermon: how do we respond?

Through all the lessons for today a theme winds its way: How do we respond? Who do we respond to?

In Isaiah, God is ready for the people to respond to God, but they tell him to stay away. The Psalmist cries to the Lord for rescue from the enemies, God saves the Psalmist, and the Psalmist with all who fear the Lord, sing God’s praise. They remember who God is and whose they are.

In his letter to Galatians Paul recounts how we are to respond to the demands of the Law. We can set it aside. And how we are to respond to the Gospel of Jesus. We can trust it fully to justify us before God, for our faith is a gift from God and it alone is what we need to be counted among God’s own children, and heirs of God’s own Kingdom!

The Gospel story recounts how a mass of demons respond to Jesus’ arrival with great fear, how the herders respond to the drowning of their pigs in the lake, and how the towns people respond to Jesus driving the demons out of the man they’ve possessed for so long. Most significant is how the healed man responds. He sits at Jesus’ feet in worship, asks to come along, and when denied that request follows Jesus’ command to tell everyone all that Jesus has done for him! He becomes the one who proclaims in this foreign land Jesus’ Good News!

Trump

This past week Trump found himself in another brinkmanship showdown this time with Iran. He stood minutes away from ordering an attack that would break out in another long and costly war. Threatening had spiraled down to making good on extreme threats, had come to ordering a military preemptive response.

Despite advice from many corners to stop such brinkmanship showdowns, and this one in particular, Trump had carried on. Then a phone call from Fox News came, alerting Trump that his planned attack would certainly lose him the next election. So Trump stood down the military attack.

Front Yard 2 Snow-shovelled ‘salted the earth’

My front yard also needed something to fix a foot wide strip of grass along the driveway where no grass will grow. Each winter snow was shoveled to the side of the driveway, the only place to shovel it, and all the salt from the vehicles from the streets has been dumped on the lawn. Generally it’s suffered, but that first foot has been thoroughly salted earth. A few brave weeds try to conquer it each summer with little success. I had tried, as many others had, to ignore that I’d salted the earth there, but enough was enough.

So I planned to put in some kind of walk way, which would absorb the salt and snow melt, and not need to have anything grow there, without just extending the ‘salted earth’ effect another foot into the lawn.

Responses that deny anything is wrong

Sometimes it is just easier to deny that things are wrong.

In Isaiah, God stands ready and eager to have the people respond, but they do not. They go so very far as to tell God that they want God to stay far away.

Tevye, in the Fiddler on the Roof, when he is asked, proposes such a blessing for the czar: He asks God to bless the czar and keep him from them very far. Of course the Czar wishes no good for Tevye and his community. Good wishes Good for us all!

Sometimes it is just easier to assume that someone else is the source of the problem that we encounter, or to pretend there is no real problem at all, even as life itself seems to melt away to viruses, antibiotic resistant bacteria, or cancer.

Woman without the Cookies

A woman waiting to catch a flight bought herself a book and a bag of cookies, settled in a chair, and began to read. Suddenly the man beside her started helping himself to her cookies. Not wanting to make a scene, she read on and ate cookies. For every cookie she took, he took one, too. She got more irritated and muttered, “If I wasn’t so nice, I’d give him a piece of my mind!” She wanted to move the cookies to her other side but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. When only one was left, with a smile on his face and a nervous laugh, he took it and broke it in half.

Then he offered her half, and he ate the other. She snatched it from him and thought, “This guy has some nerve, and he’s so rude. He didn’t even show any gratitude!” When her flight was called, with relief she headed for the gate, refusing to look at the ungrateful “thief.” She boarded the plane and sank in her seat, reached in her bag to get a book to read and to forget about the incident.

Next to her book … was her full bag of cookies.

Front Yard 3 Porch covered HOLE

My remembering had not completed the whole picture. Under my front porch, with the ground for a good 12 to 20 feet around, there is a sinkhole in the corner of the foundation that had dropped a good three feet below grade. The sump pump was right there. Good. It pumped out the water about 12 feet away along the other wall right at the rhubarb plant just three feet from the porch corner where the juniper stood, so all the water freely flowed right back down the foundation to the sump pump again. No wonder the rhubarb and juniper did so well every year, no matter how dry a summer we had!

So I planned to fill that sink hole in with extra black dirt, but then thought that I’d better fill it with clay, so the water would not just seep through the black dirt.

Cookies, Clay, Good Creatures, possesed but redeemed by Jesus

Sometimes we not only get it wrong whose bag of cookies we are eating from, we forget the big hole that we have at home, right in our own hearts, and we simply do not remember what will fill it.

Clay is fine for my hole under the porch. But what of all the holes left by all the losses we encounter through life? What do we fill them with?

According to the Norsky Sunday School song, the workers wouldn’t work and the painters wouldn’t paint, so God in creating the earth thought the quickest thing to do was to fill it up with dirt.

But when God came to us humans, God did not create with just dirt. God breathed into us, gave us spirit and life, memories and regrets, and thoughts and hopes. God gave us the ability to fear and love God, and each other. God made us Goooood. Then when we were possessed by the demons of sin and evil, God sent Jesus, God’s own Son, to demonstrate for us what we can barely comprehend, but we can remember: God so loved the world and all of us in it that God rescues us from all the demons.

In our baptisms God claims us and makes us God’s own children. There is no greater thing that God can do for us.

ML Baptized I live in the face of all demons

Martin Luther knew about demonic powers. In his early adult life, after being near-struck by lightning he completely gave himself over to fighting against demonic powers. He became a monk serving God with his whole being, disciplining himself harshly, even flogging himself, to drive the devil’s demons out, and to make penance for the many sins he committed every day.

Then one day, Martin Luther again read the letter to the Galatians. That simple word, justified by faith, not by works, turned his whole understanding of his part in God’s Kingdom right-side-up. Luther read that it was not his doing or even believing the right things that saved him. Rather God acted, through Jesus, to create faith in him, a faith that trusts the story of Jesus’ sacrifice for him. This faith saved him.

Thereafter when Luther encountered demons he fought them off with a little word: “I am baptized” (although he said it in Latin). …He did not battle Satan with, “I believe in Christ” or “I am a Christian.” His confidence was not centered on his faith or beliefs, but on an act of God — God’s claim on his life given in baptism. (Stoffregen 2010- reworked )

After baptism, after we know we have faith given to us, then the battles against demonic powers are not ours any more. We simply surrender 100% of our lives to Christ, and the war is won, though the battles still rage on.

Lutherans believe that trusting God’s actions to create faith in us is the Gospel within the Gospel. It is the central Word of God by which we discern the Word of God in the rest of Scriptures, in the rest of literature, in the rest of our lives.

We respond to God’s gifts with fear, love and diligence: We pray as if everything depended on God. But we do not rest. We work as if the salvation of the world depended on us.

There are pathways to be built, holes to fill, grass to sow and plants to plant. There are broken hearts to heal. There are broken dreams to re-form into something possible. There are the denials of sin and evil to overcome … not with more threats, but with love and the promise of healing.

Like the man free of the demons, we each have a story of God’s work in us to heal us and give us new life. Our work is to tell our stories, which are really God’s story of God loving us, and to tell it with an abundance of love for each other, even love for our enemies.

Front Yard 4 Remembering the whole project together

As I shared with Tim my plans to plant that replacement for the juniper, I remembered that the sink hole would be filled part way with the clay dug out from along the drive where the earth was salted. The whole area where I wanted to put that plant would be a construction site, and it needed to be this summer.

I also remembered that all the ground around the porch, rhubarb, and the new plant spot needed to be sloped with fresh black dirt so that water drained away from the building towards a trench in the lawn that would take it to the street.

I also remembered that flagstone was possibly the best for that path: solid but with space between the rocks to allow water and salt to seep down.

Well, I was reminded so I remembered, which was just as good.

So I went to Burnco to chose stone with Tim, and then got out of the way as he took his three days plus to pull out the juniper stump with the truck, dig out the salted black dirt and 8 inches of clay along the drive, toss that clay and more under the porch more than filling the hole. He then layered the bottom 6 inches of the resulting trench along the drive with road crush and topped that with a layer of sand. With help from Richard lifting the heavy rock to save Tim’s back he danced the irregular stones into a pattern for the walk and filled in the gaps with more sand. Then he took new black dirt, re-sloped the grass area to be, and planted seeds.

That’s when I stepped back in to help ensure the area was watered lightly many times each day. A week later the seeds have sprouted.

Remember that was all to replace the juniper with the plant I bought two weeks earlier. Meanwhile it had to be planted elsewhere, to be out of the way, and so as not to die in it’s pot.

Respond by remembering, working, fearing, praising and telling

How do we respond? Sometimes it’s all about remembering.

Remembering how God created us, made us good, and sent Jesus to save us from our sins. Then we can see the steps, hard as they may be to bring living beauty back into our lives where something toxic has grown and even the ground has been salted.

Sometimes, remembering will remind us that there is a great deal of work to be done. God needs us to be the hands of Christ to make things happen, to make the Goodness of Creation possible also today. Often that will be something completely new, un-imagined until we see the desperate need of those around us.

As we remember God’s great gifts given to us, we will be fearful, awestruck, and we will give God praise. We will go out to tell all everything that God has done for us, healing us of our every ill, naming us as heirs to God’s great promises.

Amen

Thoughts

The lessons present powerful images, critical issues, and connections to issues today are profound.

This is a sermon not to missed, not to be sloughed off as something ordinary, or made into something other than what the lessons present: The reality that is ours: God verses Evil in our own hearts> God wins every time, and it always looks like Evil wins, because our measure is tainted, while God’s measure of winning (and everything else) is pure, simple, clear and based in truth.

I could just jump to write a sermon, it is after all already Saturday morning, the week being a series of tasks that once started commanded my full energy-time-focus so that here I am, not starting with the sermon process, but putting it to paper (so to speak) for the first time this week.

Reminder of the steps I take at a minimum to prepare to write a sermon:

1. read the texts at least once through.

2. re-read each text, highlighting in yellow all the crucial phrases, and in green the really outstanding phrases or words, so that in a glance I can see the text again with the significant points clear before me.

3. I read others’ take on the lessons. This presumes that I have already through the years done many proper exegeses of the texts. I wish I had time to delve back into the original language but those resources were jettisoned when there was no room for me in the Inn.

4. I develop an outline from the crucial ideas of the lessons, connected to this world, connected to this week, and this congregation (which sometimes is an actual congregation and sometimes, without a congregation I place it in any one of many congregations I am a part of this week): I organize, prioritize, and start to develop the flow, the point, the purpose of the sermon, and the story of the sermon as a whole. All this answers one question first: What will the sermon proclaim?

5. I rework the outline, to that crucial question: does everything help or hinder proclaiming what the sermon will proclaim.

6. I look again at the outline, and sometimes the paragraphs I’ve written to fill out some points: I ask: does this proclaim Gospel or Law. Does it proclaim the freedom from sin and the bondage to Christ? Because if it is the other way around, it needs to be fixed. This is often a matter of a few degrees, and it is so easy to allow one’s writing and preparation slip away from Gospel into ‘laying on the people what they must do to please God.’

7. I write the outline into paragraphs.

8. repeat 6

9. I shorten the sermon to 13.35 minutes give or take 5 minutes. While shortening I use the criteria of the question in 4. Everything that can be dropped or shortened or tightened, so that the Sermon remains the proclamation it is intended, that’s what’s done to shorten the result. This is where good thinking, good writing, and excellent language skills come into play. The editor.

10. Then I repeat 6 again, and invariably there are a few degrees that need to be made. When there is not, I become suspicious of my ability to see the Gospel.

11. I repeat 9 and 10 until I run out of time or energy. Sometimes, rarely, I need to add an idea back in, or find a completely new idea. Unfortunately, if that happens, that usually happens Sunday morning, requiring 9 and 10 to be repeated yet again. It helps to know I can preach well from an outline, so if I need to jettison the whole thing and start over, I only need an outline. But that’s got to be significant, because … well see 9 and 10: doing those on the fly is nearly impossible!

These ideas from the highlighting:

From Isaiah 65:1-9

God is ready. What is it like when God is not?

God calls Here I am! But the people are rebellious. As always? Or often!

The people follow their own devices. Today the language means something interestingly different and significant: the people follow all their electronic devices, instead of being able to think clearly for themselves, and like following GPS directions, they/we often end up someplace wrong! Which applies to the original meaning of following their own devices.

The people provoke me: and in the sense of the old law: sacrificing in gardens, incense on bricks (other god worship … see devices above), sit in tombs (see the Gospel: the man who lives in tombs), eat pig with abominable things in the broth.

Then the staple of worshiping other gods prevalent still today: the people say to God: keep to yourself. That’s Tevye’s blessing for the Czar: may God bless him and keep him from us very far!

But then the real kicker: Stay away God, for I am TOO HOLY for you!

God’s response: smoke in my nostrils, fire that burns all day. In the wake of forest fires leaving the air difficult to breathe we know how putrid and tiresome smoke in the nostrils can be.

How does God respond!? Look out! (here is the temptation to become the proclaimer of the LAW:

God will repay, I will measure into their laps as they have done to me!

But then that extreme judgment is taken back: and the whole is spared the judgment of the few.

Instead, the chosen will settle the land of those who worship other Gods.

And from that we have ages of wars over whose land it is anyway. As we all forget that it is God’s creation to be shared equitably!

From Psalm 22:19-28

The cry, the deliverance, the freedom, the praise.

God does not despise the poor their poverty! Unlike the world!

The Psalmist will praise God, and the poor will eat and be satisfied.

All who FEAR the Lord will praise God!

All the ends of the earth will REMEMBER! That one’s green!

REMEMBER, it is not to learn something entirely new, though it may seem so, it is to remember God as creation’s creator, as faith’s giver, as life’s breather into us!

And Dominion (green) is God’s. All that we seek to take as our dominion, all that is false, corrupt and the core of the demonic! All dominion is God’s.

I had a friend who came to me amidst great lies and gaslighting and worse, and proclaimed to me that God was not out there somewhere, but in her. So that she could create a false reality and make it true! It is the same kind of thing that the movie Vice portrayed Bush and Cheney shows motivated them, as one must surmise may motivate Trump: the unitary executive theory claims that if the president does it, it is legal. Which is a bunch of hooey and trouble for everyone.

From Galatians 3:23-29

The wonderful Galatians: the source of Luther’s realization (remembering) that we are not saved by what we do, but by faith, which is what God does to us.

There was the LAW, imprisoning and guarding us, but with Christ we are freed from the LAW, we do not need it?, at least we are not saved by it.

Instead we are clothed in white clothes of Christ’s righteousness. We are justified by faith (which is God’s gift to us.)

There is no distinction upon which civilizations are built: Jew or Greek (nationality or land of origin or culture practiced), slave nor free, NOT even male distinct from female! All ALL are ONE in CHRIST!

And we are all HEIRS, offspring of Abraham (by God’s act, not by blood), and heirs according to the PROMISE. The Promise is after all that by which Abraham became significant for us all in the first place!

From Luke 8:26-39

First Jesus has passed into the foreign territory and there encounters a demon, not just a single demon but a legion of demons.

This is a serious case: the demon has possessed him for a long time, and many more demons have entered the man. He no longer wears clothes, lives in a home (but tombs instead, the the OT notes). The people have sought to control him with chains and shackles, but like a person on Meth he breaks the bonds and goes wild. See the movie, A Beautiful Boy (2018 with Steve Carell), if you wish to begin to understand Meth and other drugs’ destruction of and attraction in a young person’s life.

The demon knows Jesus is God’s Son. Demons may be evil, but they do know the truth of what they are and who God is. They just present it differently to those they possess.

The demons want to know what Jesus has to do with them. They expect to be tormented, as they torment their victims!

Jesus asks first what the demons’ name is. The name is the handle. It’s sort of like computer programming. If you do not know the name of a procedure or event or function or container it is really hard to even start programming or make anything happen, without getting stuck in the goo or gui.

So the demon gives up it’s name, and then begs not to be driven back into the abyss. Speculation is rife on what that means, with plenty of scifi to go with it. But the result is the demon begs to be sent into the pigs, Jesus does that, and the unclean pigs drown themselves. They are not that dumb, they know a demon when they see one! And the demon ends up in the abyss anyway. Water is the pre-creation void and abyss welling up from below.

So Jesus sends them to the abyss after all and the difference is that a whole herd of unclean animals gets eradicated in the process. Of course we eat pork. And we understand the waste. So is this cleansing good for the poor pig farmer? Is it fair? Is it necessary? All questions beyond the Gospel of the day, but worth another look at some other time than in a sermon, maybe?

The result is clear: the people of the country side are seized by fear, and they want Jesus to leave them. The thing that the demon wanted. The thing that the people of the Isaiah lesson do to God, which raises God’s ire!

And Jesus leaves.

For these people who want nothing more of him, Jesus leaves a witness and no better witness is to be found. The man, once demon possessed and driven mad and wild for a long time, now healed, tells all the people all that Jesus has done for him.

It is those that know their illnesses most closely and clearly, who Jesus heals, who can tell the wonders of God most poignantly, so that God can create faith in many more people.

And those people can recognize their illnesses, honestly, and they will be healed as well.

That’s the Gospel: If you do not know your illness, there are plenty of people who can tell you the power of Jesus to heal, how it healed so many people. Thus armed and emboldened, many will be able to face their own horrific illnesses, the ones that drive people to dishonesty, destruction, and false claims of being healthy, even while cancer, viruses, and diseases eat the very life out of them.

And to heal us, sometimes there are things that we or others must lose in the process, even things that are our livelihoods. Instead we are left with the bread of life, the Good News of all that Jesus has done for us.