Reformation

Remember Blind Date, that show starring Roger Lodge?

Me too.  I loved that show.  Something about watching totally hapless folks who have essentially nothing in common crash and burn in their feeble attempts at a relationship.  Like most good reality TV, all it does is make you feel better about your own life.  Anyhow, if you're unfamiliar with the concept of a blind date, allow Therapist Joe to explain it to you:

A blind date is when you go out on a date with someone, without knowing anything about them, including what they look like, their interests, whatever, in the hopes that things will totally spark between you.

That's a blind date.  And with most folks (oooooh, I'd say almost the vast majority of folks), they end up blind dating churches.  And you know how blind dates work, don't you.  Of course you do. You've heard about them from complete strangers. The way blind dates work is that a friend of yours offers to set you up with the cute girl that he and his son know from work.  And you head out to the park / nightclub / library and meet up with her, and only after you've spent some time together do you actually find out what she's all about.

Now, one of the points that I made on Sunday was that being in a church is an awful lot like being in a relationship.  No, scratch that.  It is being in a relationship.  A relationship with a congregation is a lot like a relationship with a human being:  First of all, for a lot of us Lutherans, it was a sort of arranged marriage, where our parents brought us to church, and we stuck around.  But for a lot of other folks, churches get introduced to people in the same way that blind dates do, by saying "Hey, I know this Anglican down the street, and she's super-cute.  Maybe you should go check her out sometime."

And so it goes.  Like with the majority of relationships we enter into, church relationships are frequently not based on too much substance.  It's about looks, it's about music, it's about movies, it's about going bowling, hanging out in the park, whatever.  And then you find out what a person's really all about waaaay later.  Growing up, in high school (grades 10-12, saskies), the most important things someone could have going on were how they looked, and what kind of movies and mu sic they liked.  Aside from that, not much else mattered.  And we all thought, growing up, that if you found someone who shared your same values, your same beliefs, your same views on the future, all that, but they didn't like the same movies as you, then the whole thing was shot right out of the gate.

Well, in a desperate attempt to get things together, this last Sunday was our observation of Reformation day, the time in the church in which Martin Luther broke off from the church on earth as it had been at the time, and reformed it.


Seriously, these two guys are not the same guy.  How are you still getting them confused?













The idea was that the church was corrupt.  Big deal, I hear some of you saying, the church has always been corrupt!  Okay okay, but hold on a moment here.  The corruption of the church was at a spectacular high, partially due to the lack of belief in what the Christian church actually taught.  Yes, saith everyone, the church offered up a different reality from what was contained in the Bible, and in the words of Jesus Christ.  As it seemingly always has, right?

But the difference was, back then, nobody could possibly keep the church to account.  Because nobody else knew what was in the Bible.  The relationship that you had with your church was completely stuck permanently at the phase of admiring her beauty, without ever getting to know what she was all about.  If you do yourself a favor and take a stroll through the greater and more elaborate churches in Europe (less so here in Canada), you'll find a whole bunch of very pretty things.  You will find glorious, gorgeous sanctuaries, bedecked in tapestries, carvings, sculptures, paintings, and the like.  A lot of art, including the stained glass windows.  All of this stuff was put in place for a couple of reasons:  First of all, to look pretty, which it does.  Second of all, to tell the story of the Bible.  You should all know how picture books work by now, that children who are pre-literate can sit down with a book full of pictures, recognize the pictures, tell you what they are, and all that, without having to know a single word.  It was like that in churches too, in that a great many folks who were attending churches during those great middle ages period were functionally illiterate.  And even if they were literate, they sure weren't going around chatting to each other in conversational latin.  And with latin being the language of the church, folks who went to church on a Sunday morning didn't understand a word of it.  And so they got to go and look at the pretty pictures.

These days, if you go to our church, you don't have a whole tonne of pretty pictures to look at. Some, yes, but not too terribly many.  

Nice, hey?

We have a couple of banners, some paraments, and those wooden carvings to either side of the cross.  That's it.  Why is that?  Because unlike pre-reformation stuff, you can listen to what's going on.  You can read the Bible for yourself, you can read the catechism for yourself, you can be up on absolutely everything, and perhaps most of all, we can get ourselves outside of the Gandhi view of Christians.  

If you get distracted by the bricks, or the paraments, or your smartphone during the service, it's not because you don't understand me, it's because I've gotten boring or irrelevant.  Both of those things, I'm sure have happened.  But the idea is that whatever you get from me, you don't have to just believe that I'm preaching the word of God.  You don't have to be here because of the prettiness of the place or whatever.  As far as blind  dates go, every week gives us a new opportunity to explore our relationship, both with the church and with God, based not so much on how everything looks, but more on the deeper content of character, of meaning.

Back in high school, deeper content seemed like the least important thing in the universe.  

Can you tell which one is pastor Jim?

When we were all young and silly, everything but values and culture and such and such seemed pretty important. Movies, tv, music, likes, dislikes, all of that stuff was super important.  But after the reformation, we can take some time to listen to the actual word of God.  Hear what he says, in our own language.  If the pastor of the church is mistaken, we can rebuke him.  If the church has fallen away from the teachings of Jesus, we can bring it back, because we can know what it says in the first place.  If our Christians are unlike our Christ, we can know that they are, because we know Christ and him crucified.  

Oh, and to disappoint Gandhi, Christians are always going to be unlike Christ. If they weren't, then they wouldn't need Christ.  But it's not incumbent on the Christian to be Christ (which is impossible), but to be genuinely honest about why they are not like Christ, and seek forgiveness for that.  So when someone says "you're not much like Jesus," we can say "I know.  Thank God he sent Jesus so that worthless screw-ups like me could have a chance."

PJ.

It's not for sale.

Yes, it was this time again.  The time for the camel, and the eye of the needle.  It's a good passage, mainly because it's from the Bible, and everything's good, because it's the good book.  But it does give us pause for thought, as to who the rich people in the world actually are.  To help you out with this, here are some percentages of people who live on less than $1.25 a day.  That's one dollar and twenty-five cents per day.  I'll let that sink in....... ready?  Let's begin.

Only one of these animals is not in poverty.
My vote is for the Hippo.

Bangladesh:  43%
Burkina Faso: 44.6%
Central African Republic: 68.2%
China:  13.1%
India:  32.7%
Indonesia: 18.1%
Madagascar: 81.3%
Pakistan: 21%
Swaziland: 40.6%
Uganda: 38%




Those are not small numbers.  And numbers don't lie.  Now here's an even more interesting activity that you can try in the comfort of your very own home.  If you're reading this on a library computer, or on your smartphone while riding the bus, don't do this activity yet, you'll probably get thrown out.  Grab your shirt, pull it up and over your head, and check out where your shirt was made.  Mine today was made in Cambodia.  Cambodia which has a ratio of 22% of people living on less than $1.25 per day.  Go ahead, check your clothes and see where they were made.  And then cross reference that nation with this data.  I'll wait.

Odds are, like myself, the nation that produced your textiles has some grindingly poor people in it.  And that seems like an awful lot of folks who have to live in poverty just so I can wear my fashionable polar fleece.  So, if you break it down, that means that 397, 277, 427 people live on under $1.25 a day in India alone.  In China, the numbers are 174,736, 900.  Combined, between the two countries, you have  572, 014, 327 folks in grinding terrible poverty.  These are the countries that make your shirts, your pants, your plastic toys, and your smartphones.  You know what that is?  That's sixteen times the population of Canada.

Wow.  You rich yet?  Rather, do you feel rich yet?  You should, because it's appalling, really, how rich we all are, and yet don't even think about it.  But like many other things in the Bible, you and I read it, and we read it to seek ammunition against other people.  Who's the guy that we're likely to be targeting as a rich man who probably won't get into heaven?

Hi guys!  Miss me?

Hey it's this guy.  He's rich.  And he's someone we can comfortably point to from our massive houses, with central heat and central air, and water that won't give us cholera if we drink it, and hot and cold running water, and hi-def tvs, and we can say "Look at that rich git.  How dare he claim to understand the plight of the common man? How dare he say he understands for a moment that he cares for the poor!"

But you're distractingly rich. And I mean that very sincerely.  You are distracted by your wealth, which, because you don't think about it too often, becomes a problem for you, and your camel, and the eye of the needle.

Why is it so difficult for the rich (including us), to enter into the kingdom of heaven?  Well, what do we do with our time, and how much time do we spend acknowledging our blessings?  The more you have, the more difficult it is to remain humble, and the more difficult it is to realize your place in God's universe.  I know I made this point on Sunday, but it's still a good one, so I'm gonna use it again.  If we have a life filled with distractions, if we have an experience in which we're constantly being pushed and pulled in a variety of directions, how easy is it to even see or hear God at all?

The psalms tell us how to recognize God.  Psalm 46:10 says "be still and know that I am God."  And that's so much harder to do if you've got a million and one things pushing you here and there and everywhere.  It used to be that the wireless radio was going to intrude into homes and debauch them.  And then it was tv, and then the internet, and then smartphones.  And with all these intrusions, it gets harder and harder to be still, to know that God is God.  We welcome distractions into our lives like crazy, we live our lives in a constant state of distraction, being pulled here and there, and even for some of us, when we sleep, we're still moving and grooving.  Ever used a sleep timer on a radio or TV to fall asleep?  Even in those moments leading up to losing consciousness, we're still busy.  Is it any wonder then that God, when he sent angels to people to communicate things, did so in dreams?  Those who are rich and powerful, who can afford a world of distractions, who feel as though they've earned everything, the only time they're still is when they're asleep.

That's when God talked to Joseph.
That's when God talked to Pharaoh.
That's when God talked to the king of Babylon.

For us, we who are wealthy, we spend a lot of time doing a lot of stuff, we're busy busy busy all the time, too busy to even listen to what God says to us.  If you're poor, as a lot of folks were in the time of Christ, it's a whole lot easier to listen.  Also, you recognize everything you have as a gift of grace.  You don't take much of anything for granted.  You can't afford to.  We rich, that's exactly what we do.

So what to do now?  Moving forward, how best to deal with your outrageous wealth that you have, but that you don't remember that you have?  Well, John the Baptist has some advice for all of us, or rather, he is telling us what will be happening.

"Prepare the way of the Lord,

Make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall become straight.

And the rough places shall become level ways,

and all shall see the glory of God."               

                                                                                          -Luke 3:4-6

Aha.  Another reason that the rich don't much care for the Gospel of God is that it has in it a promise to level things off.  It promises full and complete equality before God (In Christ there is no slave nor free, no male nor female, no Jew nor Greek.  All are one in Christ Jesus).  This is great news if you're desperately, grindingly poor, if you're living on less than a dollar a day, if you're suffering day in and day out with poverty.  This is bad news if you're wealthy.  Then the smelly, dirty people of Bangladesh, the textile workers of India, the malnourished of the Central African Republic, and the toy assemblers of China, you're equal to all of them in God's eyes.  all those fancy things you earned, all those toys you bought from them, all the houses and cars and wealth, all of it means nothing.  Because you are exactly equal in God's eyes.  He sees a sinner in need of salvation.  

Now to go off on a Lutheran tangent for a second, this is pretty much straight up Law/Gospel stuff.  Law and Gospel tell us something - namely that God seeks to redeem sinners.  When he looks at you, he sees a sinner in need of salvation.  That's good news if you have already seen your sin, then you see the salvation offered.  If you don't know that you have any sin, then it's terrible news, because it dares to mention that you're not perfect.  And that's a problem for you.  If you've been gliding along up until now with nary a thought to your sin, then it's a problem, because it tells you that you've got a problem, you've got a flaw that needs to be fixed.  You have to be humble, you have to be forgiven, beginning and end.  It's easy to do if you know that you're sinful, then the word of God is a joy.  If you think you're essentially okay, then the words of God are offensive and raw, even though they could be the very same words.  It's the same deal with wealth.  If you think you've earned everything, and it's yours by divine fiat, then you'll be disappointed when you depart this earth with nothing, just as you arrived with nothing.  If, however, you realize that everything you own is a gift, and every opportunity you have is a gift, then you're a whole lot more grateful for everything.  Lest we think that it only applies to material goods, the biggest blessing, life everlasting, is as much a gift as anything else.  Once you've worked out that what you have is a gift from God, then it becomes much easier to be thankful for everything.  House, home, family, and faith.  

PJ.

Inheritance, zombies, and wrestling moves.

I have a long and sad history of bringing something up with my parents every once in a while.  You see, they live in a palatial palace, which they earned through decades of hard work and sacrifice.  And whenever I go to their place, I like to mention that I have in mind to move them into a home, and to take their house for my own living quarters.  I know, for shame, right?  I'm a dreadful son.  

But here's the scoop.  I can either take what they own by force, or failing that, I can wait to inherit their stuff after they pass away and go to be with Jesus.  This concept of inheritance is one that crops up in an awful lot of the mystery novels my mother is fond of reading.  For those who are paying attention, I've mentioned her terrifying mystery novel covers before, but in case you're new here (and if you're new here, then welcome, Billy), here's another particularly terrifying one.  But here's the plot of a lot of murder mysteries:  Someone has something of particular value. You want that item.  You off that person, and get their item.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

But wait!  This is how the perp in question ends up getting busted:  it's not too hard to work out that if you inherit the sum of ten thousand dollars money shortly after your great-aunt Agatha has been bludgeoned to death with a golf trophy, you may come across as a bit suspicious.  If you've got something to gain from the murder of another party, and you subsequently gain that item, then it's a wee shade suspicious.  Now, that's the problem with inheritance.  It's the problem that lurked at the heart of the 'monkey's paw' story, which says that your wishes to have more money come at a terrible price: the death of someone you love.  

Now, let's extrapolate this to Jesus, because guess what:  his story is one of inheritance and murder.  Just because murder is accomplished through judicial means, that doesn't make it any less of a lynching sometimes.  When Jesus is arrested, it's in the garden of Gethsemane, where he had been praying with his sleepy disciples.  And the crowd who comes to arrest him is from the temple authorities, bringing him back to the temple courts.  And what gets decided there?  Only that Jesus gets railroaded, and that he has no defense.  But the temple authorities, legally, can't execute anyone.  They don't have authority under Roman rule to carry that out, for good reason.  The Roman government didn't get to be the leading empire of the world for five hundred years by allowing two parallel legal systems to run at the same time.  So they have to take him before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, who is well aware that Jesus has not committed any crimes against the Roman state.  If he's blasphemed against the Temple, or against the majesty of God's holy house, what problem is that for the Romans, who worship Jupiter, Apollo, and Uranus?  So Pontius Pilate is being asked to crucify Jesus of Nazareth for breaking laws that the Romans don't even have.  This is what I mean when I call this a judicial murder: just because you kill someone through ostensibly legal means, doesn't mean it's not murder.  

Now, this is where the story gets kind of funny.  Remember in the reading from Sunday where the rich young ruler asks 

"Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" And he said 

to him, "Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone.  If you wish to

enter into life, keep the commandments." He said to him "Which ones?" And 

Jesus said "you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery,

you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, honor your father and 

mother.  Also, you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

The young man said to him "All these things I have done from my youth.  What more 

do I lack?" Jesus said to him "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell

your possessions, and give the money to the poor, then you will have 

treasure in heaven.  then come, follow me." 

When the young man heard this, he went away grieving, for he had

many possessions.

Matthew 19:16-22

"Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Well, honestly, what do you to to inherit anything?  Normally, you wait until the person who has what you want dies.  Sometimes you kill them.  But hold on for a moment, because the story gets even stranger. The vast majority of people who had assembled to execute Jesus Christ, the vast majority of people who assembled themselves to shout for the crucifixion of Jesus, they had no idea what they were getting into.  Pilate tries to set them up for it, by saying to them 

So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot

was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before

the crowd, saying 'I am innocent of this man's blood.  See to

it for yourselves.' Then the people as a whole answered 

'His blood be on us and on our children!'

So He released Barabbas for them, and after flogging Jesus,

he handed him over to be crucified.

Matthew 27:24-26

Pilate tells them as clearly as he can that he's not responsible for the death of Jesus that they crave so badly.  He's committed no crime, and can't be punished by Roman law.  But Pilate is savvy enough to know what happens when people riot, so he allows them to have their wishes, and turns Jesus over to be crucified.  So everyone's complicit in his killing.  Pilate lets it happen even though he knows that Jesus is innocent.  The Roman soldiers nail him to the cross, thus actually striking the fatal blows of nails and spear.  The crowd is responsible for calling for his death, and threatening riots all over the place.  Nobody gets a pass on this one.  Nobody gets to say that they had nothing to do with the execution of Christ, not even us.  Even now, if you've botched anything in your whole life ever, it was sufficient for Jesus to go to his death.  Even if you were the only one.  

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the

unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

1 Peter 3:18

You're as involved in the death of Jesus as anyone else, because you helped to make it necessary.  Remember what Jesus says to the rich young man: If you want to be perfect, if you want to have life, then you have to keep everything perfectly, and live a life of wiling service.  And we don't really do that that often.   But as I say, this is the really strange twist of fate: The people who killed Jesus, calling for his execution, crying for his blood, meekly allowing him to die, nailing him up, whatever, what they didn't realize was that they were killing someone who had willed them the greatest inheritance ever.  They were murdering someone who has a pearl of great price, beyond anything else that could be purchased, a treasure hidden in a field, something worth more than anything else, he had this.  And the only way they could get it was to have the person who owned it die.  And they did that through killing him, taking away everything he had, and leaving him to die on a block of wood somewhere in a middle eastern desert.  And as he died, Jesus had this to say:

Forgive them, Father.  They know not what they do.

Luke 23:34

He died.  And upon his death, what he owned, that is, his right to stand before God, his sinless life, his righteousness and holiness and grace and perfection, not to mention eternal life, is what we inherited.  

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave,

though he is the owner of everything, but he is under

guardians and managers until the date set by his father.  In the 

same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the 

elementary principles of the world.  But when the fullness of time had 

come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem 

those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as 

sons.  And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of 

his Son into our hearts, calling "Abba, Father!" So you are no

longer a slave, but a son.  And if a son, then an heir through God.

Galatians 4:1-7

We are inheritors of the greatest prize of all time, from someone we murdered.  And if that isn't crazy enough, take a second to go back to the story of the monkey's paw that I included earlier.  First wish, they wish for money.  For that to happen, the couple's son has to die in a horrific accident.  Then they get the compensation that they required.  Second wish, they wish their son back to life.  But he doesn't come back to life just right.  He comes back, presumably, as a terrible zombie, smashed by his accident, and having been buried for a number of days.  So they have to wish him back to being dead.  And thus are their three wishes.  End of story.  With the story of Christ, he has something we want.  We kill him. We inherit his life and grace and eternity, as the rich young man asked for.  And then he rises from the dead.  Not as a zombie, not as the walking dead, not as something less than human, not as an abomination, but as a resurrected being, put right again.  Not just dead flesh walking around, but a living body, risen to die no more.  And that's the inheritance we all get too.  

Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?  Kill the one who has it, and find out that he willed it to you.  And now, you are children, and heirs of the promise, and of the life won for you by Christ Jesus.  Through inheritance of what he has that we want.  Life.  Everlasting.

PJ.

The B o C

It was an incredibly mind-blowing experience for me, learning that there was a reason that the small catechism was called the small catechism.  Mainly because there was a large catechism that I'd never heard of.  Now, unlike the vaaaaaaast majority of my blog readers, I didn't grow up exclusively in the Lutheran church.  When I got going in the Christian church, it was in the Anglican church, and we moved over to the Lutheran church when I was about seven, I guess.  Is that right?  Seven?  Whatevs.  The point is, that I didn't grow up exclusively in the Lutheran church.  There was no book of concord in our home.  Instead of the BOC, we had the BOCP.  That is, the book of common prayer, common to the Anglican church.  And here's where I get on my high horse, because of the disconnect between church and home.

Okay, here's how the Lutheran church works.  You have a Bible.  Your Bible stays at home, typically. Why does it stay at home?  Because it's big, clunky, and was given to you as a present from your godparents the day you were confirmed.  So, clearly, you can't be bringing that around.  And you may have a book of concord, but it is also thick, clunky, and not easily transportable (and yes, I do have a copy of the pocket one).  But even if you do have a copy of the pocket one, and even if you do bring it around with you, it isn't really a prayer resource, not proper.  The orders for the day aren't in there.  Your only other choice is the hymnal, but that's never really made the crossover between home and church life.  Right or wrong, it's still and perhaps always will be seen as for corporate, congregational worship only.  It's not a home devotion tool that the majority of our people use.

Why do I bring this up?  Because there's a significant shift between home and church worship, between home and church devotion.  We're not plugged into the same thing.  And it shows.

Think about your home devotional life.  If you have one.  Think about how it operates, and about how it tends to be if not in a separate room from what's going on in church, then perhaps in a different universe.  There are the readings for Sunday that exist in sort of a vacuum, and not in the real world of your daily life.  The hymns sung in church on Sunday don't exactly carry over to your home life, and the prayers you say at home don't show up in the prayers you say on Sunday.  And what this leads to is to a view that your church life is sort of separated from your home devotional experience.  And what does that lead to?  To a world in which, as usual, church and regular life run parallel to each other.

This breakdown in worship / real life is not limited to just how your worship life operates, it has to do also with your view of church and God as well.  Like it or not, typically we Lutherans view God and the real world as existing completely apart from each other.  God lives in church, and we go visit him once a week, like he's an ailing parent or something.  A shut-in, who needs us to stop by and spend an hour with him once a week.  And this is a problem not just with how we see the world, it's a problem with how we see God.

If you're a Christian (and reading this blog has automatically made you one, so congratulations), you don't have the luxury of believing in a God who lives in a temple, or who exists only in a monstrance or whatever.  You believe in an incarnate God.  What does it mean to have an incarnate God?  It means that when you come to worship God in church, it's not as though this is where he lives.  It's not as though he lives in palaces made with human hands.  Ask yourself what happened to the temple where God was thought to live.  It got torn down by the Romans, and will likely never be rebuilt, at least not as long as things stay the way they are.  You see, Jesus talked about this specific issue when he was speaking to a certain Samaritan.  And this passage is really telling, because it talks about our view of God, and where God lives.

¹⁹ “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.
²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, 
but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
²¹ “Woman,” Jesus replied, 
“believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father 
neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
²² You Samaritans worship what you do not know;
we worship what we do know, 
for salvation is from the Jews.
²³ Yet a time is coming and has now come 
when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, 
for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.
²⁴ God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

John 4:19-24

Not the smelliest or drunkest, but an
unexpected place to find God.

Jesus is the incarnate word of God, and as such, he knows that it's not about going to a specific place to find God.  He's everywhere.  Absolutely everywhere.  Now, we want to restrict him to churches, to where the paraments are ironed, and the albs are crisp.  We want to restrict him to nice places where nice people dress up nice, and sing nice songs.  But that's not the reality of things.  The whole point of the incarnation is that God is where you don't expect him to be.  He's everywhere.  He's spirit, and it's not as though he's in a temple or on a mountain.  We have to worship him in spirit and in truth.  What does all that mean?  It means that when you go home, when your devotional life continues, it's not as a parallel to your church life, as though it's something completely different.  It's all part of the same thing. The same God who is there with loud hosannas on Sunday morning is the God who hears your grace before meals, and the God who listens to your evening prayers.  Maybe you're not the type of Lutheran who feels disjointed by this, and in this case, you're a fortunate one.  The rest of us need to get our heads straight as to what the incarnation actually means: that God is in the dirtiest, smelliest, drunkest places on planet earth, because that's where the people who need him actually are.  

People probably like you.  People who aren't always proud of who they are and what they do.  People like me, too.  

PJ.

If a Skywalker's hand offends thee...

Darth Vader helps his son stick to Jesus' words.

It's funny, isn't it?  We Christians have a part in service in which we 'share the peace' with one another.  And in that sharing of the peace, we trot about shaking hands with one another, wishing each other God's peace.  It's all well and good, but after the reading that we just had for this Sunday, I'm personally and professionally amazed that any of us can possibly manage it.  We shouldn't be able to manage it, because Jesus tells us that if our hands cause us to sin, that we should cut them off.

⁴² “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea. ⁴³ If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. ^{[44] [a] 45} And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. ^{[46] [b] 47} And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell,⁴⁸ where

“‘the worms that eat them do not die,
    and the fire is not quenched.’^[c]

^{-Mark  9:42-48 (NIV)}

Oh, really.  That's one o' them readings that we tend to take with a grain of salt.  Jesus tells you to lop off your offensive hands?  Yeah, blurgh, he didn't mean that.  It's funny, that we as Lutheran Christians can say that the earth and everything else was created in six calendar days, that there was a literal worldwide flood that killed everything, that Jesus literally walked on water, that Jairus' daughter was literally returned from the dead, and that the disciples literally spoke in a multitude of languages on Pentecost.  No problem with any of that.

But the moment Jesus gives us a straight commandment on how to avoid hellfire, all of a sudden, that bad boy's an allegory.

Surely, Jesus didn't really mean to cut off your hands, did he?  He didn't mean to tear out your eyes, or remove your feet, did he?  Well, he seems to say so, and he's God, so two things.
1 - who are you to argue, and
2 - why do you still have ten fingers?

We don't think about this much, do we?   But we don't think too much about much of what Jesus says.  We're real good on Pauline Christianity, because it's about doctrine.  We're much shoddier on Gospel Christianity, because it has a lot to do with what you do.  Jesus really cares about what you get up to here in this world.  He has an eye for the poor, for the outcasts, for the hard done by.  And he has in mind your sin.  Jesus is concerned about your sin in a way that you might not be, for a very good reason. 

Remember a time before your first car? Remember when you had to drive around in the 'folkswagon?'  Your mom or dad or whoever let you use their car back when you were sixteen, and you got to drive it around and stuff?  Remember how your parents seemed really paranoid about you driving it around? Remember how terrified they were that you might crash the car, scratch it, fiddle with the radio stations, whatevers.  Everything had to be just so.  You had to wipe your shoes before you'd get in.  Why exactly?  Because your mom or dad or whoever paid for the car.  You didn't care so much.  You were happy to drive that car until it fell apart, because you did nothing for it.  It's the same way with the free gift of salvation.  And yes, my wife does still not exactly care for the term free gift.  But it's the same way with the free gift of salvation.   this gift that someone else paid for, and really squander it.  You see, we do that with free stuff all the time.  If you worked for something, if you saved up earnings, if you sweated away hours and hours, if you worked as hard as you can, then you appreciate what you have, and you take care of it like crazy.  It's the difference between renting and owning a home, or between renting and owning a car.  Have you ever wondered why, when they sell cars from budget or whatever, they go for so cheap?  Because people drive those into the ground, until they almost don't exist anymore.  People do things with rental cars that they'd never do with their own vehicles.  Why?  Because they did nothing to own this car, and they don't have to pay to maintain it, fix it up, nothing.  Nothing whatsoever.  There's no wonder all this stuff gets beaten up, as typically we're really bad at caring for stuff we didn't earn.

What goes around comes around.

So when Jesus points out the seriousness of our sin, when he talks about cutting hands off, cutting feet off, gouging out eyes to keep you free of hellfire, it should stand as a shock to our Christian sensibilities.  You, as a Christian have gotten too soft on the reality of what you do.  If daddy Jesus will take care of it all anyway, then why bother caring about what you do?  None of it matters because God will blot it all out anyhow, right?  Once you point out to Sunday School kids that Jesus forgives sins, all sins, every sin without cost or weight to you, then their first question always seems to be 'so, we can do whatever we want, right?'

Well, wrongo.  Jesus cares so tremendously much about what you do because he's the one fronting the cost.  He's supplying the hands, stretched out on the cross that you refuse to cut off to avoid hellfire.  He's the one supplying the feet that you refuse to remove to keep you free from the worm that never dies and the fire that never goes out.  He's the one whose eyes closed in death to cover all the stuff that you happily observe that you know you shouldn't.

What's the point of this passage?  Not to give you a how-to to remove your body parts, but to remind you complacent Christian about the price paid for you.  Yeah yeah yeah, Jesus died for your sins, big whoop.  But think about cutting off your hand to stay away from the internet porn, or cutting off your foot to keep from driving to your mistress' place, and you'll realize very quickly that you're not willing to do any of that.  Not one bit.  You're not willing to inconvenience yourself even in the slightest to avoid damnable sin, while your savior has his hands and feet nailed to wood, his side pierced, and his last breaths drawn from his body for that sin.

We Christians are particularly notorious for this issue, in which we say to ourselves, to each other, to whatever, that we're not really on the hook for this stuff, sooooooooo it doesn't really matter.  And it's true that Jesus will forgive everything, but think on the price. Think what it costs to keep you free from hell.  If it won't keep you away from sinning, it'll at least make you think a little harder about what you've done.

PJ.

Bonus decapitation.  Nothing to see here.