Category Archives: sermons

Older Brother

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My son tells me his fears and I tell him mine are remarkably similar–fear of the tragic loss of love.

Sometimes he and I get to the end of an ordinary day and he says our crew is still together, Mom.

We are citizens of a dangerous and lonely kingdom.

But only because the true King travels in disguise.

He is this magnetic force–scarred forever by his tragic love for us, hole in the chest and again in each Vitruvian extremity.

Stranger at the party.

You should get to know this guy.  His words and actions may seem either simple or radically divisive, but His gaze is irrevocable.

He is the perfect older brother, fierce in both love and justice.  When I dread this fallen world I turn to Him.

Knowing He will never fail.

Walmart Sunday School

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As much as I feel like I have won the lottery when I go to Walmart and snag a short checkout line, I have a pocket full of unforgettable stories that only happened because I had to wait in a monster line.

Last night I did not have to wait and got the story too.

I asked my cashier if Father’s Day was a busy day.  She said not too bad but that Sunday after church is no picnic.

Apparently some of the church crowd can be a little preachy and impatient, lecturing the minimum wage employees of megastores on how they should not work on Sundays and…goose things up and move the line faster.

While she and I commiserated on the hypocrisy she very efficiently checked through my groceries, including a bundt cake.  The customer next to me exclaimed toward the cake–

What-is-that!?

Unlike our often fussy, judgmental, loveless brand of Christianity, the bundt cake was unmistakable inviting.

Memorial Day

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It has been almost a decade since my father died after his helicopter crashed on descent.

I still feel flashes of pain when I am reminded of that pain.

Ordinary haunting is a longterm normal for we who grieve.

The death of one man changes the world.  

Evoking Jesus.

He took every crash, every act of misery and self-destruction.  Drained the cup of history to the dregs of genocide, exploitation, war, famine, epidemic, deadly contagion.

Hell to pay for us. The wrath of holy Love, the grief of God poured out. 

For us.

To atone for the transgressions of a single garden-variety human would be unwatchable, unlivable, unthinkable, unbearable– awful.

The ransom for all our billions is so beyond reckoning, we do not try.

But we should.  

We should at least reckon the cost and the pain, fear, horror and brutality it took to redeem our ordinary wrongs-gluttony, lust, prejudice, and greed.

We should; we shall.  

We will either be defined now by our debt to this Eternal Savior or we will be defined forever by the life we squandered at his great cost.

The Movable Cross

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The sermon was solid, but my attention was caught by the cross behind the pulpit.

Resin?  About 5 feet tall?  With a base set on wheels for handy transport.

I have always wondered if Jesus had been hung in a noose or electrocuted would we have made the noose or the chair an easy talisman around our necks?

We cannot afford to think that the cross is a light and movable thing.

Jesus’ cross was massive, heavy, and blood-soaked because I am a sinner.  I have to run the horror straight back to me or I run the risk of not taking it personally.

If I don’t take it personally I don’t mourn.

If I don’t take it personally I lose my hunger for justice and my debt to grace.

We all search for love stories.  And many of us find them in the cheap trinkets of small gods and egoism–no love there at all.

But for a man to give his life for his friend?  

And to be that friend….

Deserve versus worth

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We can say we do not deserve what we get–either lottery or traffic ticket.  We can even get quite indignant about it.

And yet if we are to believe the Cross, we always deserve worse than we get. Death, plague, betrayal, are all the carrion birds circling the dilemma of our sin.

We do not want to face what we have earned in our rebellion against love.

Which brings us to our worth.  

We are by native value just pennies on the ground.  But we have been purchased at such an extravagant cost by the One who loves us.

This extravagant sacrifice is the center longing of every human love story–to be redeemed, raised, and transformed by a love that will not relent or tarnish.

That is Passion.  Death by crucifixion passion.  Resurrect us in His arms passion.

I-will-never-leave-you-or-forsake-you-love.

The Other Guys

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i love the story of Peter falling into the water.

Oh, wait, that is right–the story of Peter walking on water?

Of all the accounts of Jesus’ miracles, this one most resembles a Mark Wahlberg action movie.

And then Jesus walks out in the middle of a night storm on the sea and they think he is a ghost?

Are you kidding me?!

And then Peter decides that the best way to test the identity of the physics-defying apparition is to get out of the boat and walk to him?

It all feels pretty sci-fi.  Until Peter looks down and sees “reality,” panics, and plunges into the pitch-dark stormy water.

There were moments in this story that were both freakishly exhilarating and unnecessarily terrifying.

Jesus does not engineer this event in the lives of Peter and the others simply to give everyone a good fish tale.

He does what he does because he can.

He does what he does because they need to see him the way he really is.

He does what he does because life is scary and dangerous and we all need to know that there is just this one Person who can fish us out of the storm and break the rules of physics to save us.

Think about the time Peter spent in the drink–cold, surrounded by heavy waves, dark, gasping for both life and breath.

Where were the other guys?

Shocked and useless in the boat.

People are wonderful, sometimes gracious creatures, but when it comes to drowning in the darkest storms of life, it is best to keep your eyes pinned on Jesus.

He can do the impossible.  And the impossible is what we all need–hope in the storm, life after death…

Walking on water.

Pictures in the wind

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I have a tennis ball, Gatorade bottle top, and an ailing succulent in front of my house.

For three very different reasons I will need to move them soon.  I haven’t yet because I am lazy.

Lazy, and prone to markers in the wind.

Leaves fall and God says I love you.

Rubber bands, hair bands, flossers, and pennies are flotsam God sends to us in the unlikeliest of places–I love you.

Considering that we are puny and mean and He is the God of the infinite universe, His extravagant love notes are bewildering and lovely.

People can be love notes as well.  The baby singing in the car, children building sand castles, anyone doing anything brave and true–I love you.

Do you know He loves you?  Do you look for signs of Him in the world?

To paraphrase the famous conversation from The Count of Monte Cristo–even if you don’t believe in Him, He believes in you.

Unfaithful

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Dante, in his fictional portrayal of hell, put traitors at its dark, tortured core.

To betray love and abandon those close to you was a big deal for Dante.

As a writer, that is…as a man he was no hero.

Few of us are.  We are all unfaithful to someone or something–our high school crush, our diet…something.

To be human is to cheat a little, I guess. But we must acknowledge this–we, each of us alone are responsible for the lines we draw around what we hold dear. 

Draw the lines wrong and the “dear” slips away.

We tell ourselves–I will not go past this point of demarcation–a line drawn just past a “something” we should already not covet or consume.

We say to ourselves either–

I will not do this

Or…

I deserve…

It is the “I deserve” part we should pause to examine.  Sinners (a quaint old word for all of us) tend to justify their infidelities with deserve and must have.  Then cloak the indulgence in the illusion of secrecy–no one will know.

But Someone always knows.

He knows because He is God, and by definition omniscient.

He knows all our secret stories of unfaithfulness, squalor, and sin because they were poured out on Him 

In the rictus of the Cross

In the jeers of the crowd

In the agony of physical abuse

In the final unbearable…

In the final unbearable He bore to make us 

Faithful.

The narrow road

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We talk about the two roads: (notice there are no others) one narrow, one broad.

I picture the broad one littered with neon signs, carnival-lit and well-paved.

The narrow one is hard to find, off the the side, obscured by overgrown vines and branches. Because, let’s face it: not much traffic.

You climb through the overgrowth to get there and once on the Path the going is any but easy. Rocks, besetting ills, humiliations, and the echoing loneliness of it all.

But always the figure of the Man in front of us. Stick close to Him. After all He is the way itself. The narrow path to life–home waiting at the end.

There we will belong.

The lottery ticket paradox

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I have a bag of parables and pet theories I used to bore my youth group with…regularly.

One of them was the lottery ticket theory, which goes something like this:

If a rude person verbally assaulted you in a parking lot and insisted that they were handing you a winning lottery ticket you might be put off by the assailant, but you would be a fool not to take the ticket and check the numbers.

Jesus is that ticket.

We Christians are absolute morons–rude, pushy, myopic, prejudiced, morally flaccid.

You name it, we flub it.

But Jesus did not. He flubbed nothing. He gives us back our lousy, flea-bitten lives, whole and restored.

Why bother restating an old story from my former life?

Because I believe.

Because I still believe.