A great calm

There are a number of obscure passages from the Gospel, but what we had from this weekend isn't an obscure one.  The passage that we had from the Gospel for this weekend is astonishingly familiar, one that almost everyone knows about.  Even if you're a real fair weather Christian, you know about the bad weather from the Gospel of Mark.  The passage where Jesus calms a storm. 

When Jesus calms the storm in the Gospel of Mark, he does so after waking up.  In the passage, he's napping in the stern of the boat, on the cushion, because he was awfully tired.  Don't forget, Jesus is fully man as well as fully God, he gets hungry, thirsty, heck, he even dies, obviously, which is the core of the Christian faith.  As a man, he's going to get tired, he's going to run out of gas, and he's going to have to sleep.  Which he does. 

But while he's napping, a storm starts up.  And the fishermen who are in charge of getting this boat moving, they start to lose control.  These are guys who are familiar with storms, they've been through this enough times to know how to move through storms, how to get through the squalls that arrive.  They know more about this than most of us do, which is why when they start asking for help, things must be bad.  This has to be a really rough storm, in order that the disciples, some of whom were previously employed by Zebedee and sons fishing LLC are going to wake up the napping carpenter to find out if he can help. Their call to Christ is a familiar one for most of us, we've all made this call out to him at a certain moment, either in these words or not, saying to him 'Don't you care that we're dying? Don't you care that we are perishing?'  I don't know how many people I've spoken to who have asked a similar question of God, asking either him directly, or about him 'why doesn't God care about my situation? Why, God, don't you care about me?'  So Jesus gets up, and he rebukes the wind and says to the waves 'peace! Be still!'  And immediately there was a great calm.  There was a great calm in the wind, there was a great calm in the waves, there was a great calm in the sea, there was a great calm in the clouds.

There was a great calm everywhere except IN the boat.

If you read the reading carefully, you'll notice something interesting.  Unlike that classic song that suggests that with Jesus in the boat you can smile at the storm, there are literally no smiles going on in that boat, neither during nor after the storm.  In fact, the disciples in the boat seem to be more agitated before the calming of the storm than after it.

Honestly, these disciples seem way too calm.

And that makes sense, of course.  It makes sense if you consider the magnitude of what happened, and who Jesus revealed himself to be in that moment.  For who is this Jesus? Well, the calming of the storm would have brought something to the minds of the disciples, one of those things that would have come to their minds would have been the reading from Job from Sunday.  The reading that we had from Sunday is from the 38th Chapter of Job, which is funny because there's a good chance that you didn't even know Job had that many chapters.  There's a good chance that you figured, as we all did, that Job only had two chapters.  God and Satan have a discussion about Job, about how he is a fair-weather friend, Satan tells God that Job only likes God because God has been good to him, God disagrees, and Satan takes things away from Job piece by piece until he has absolutely nothing left.

And that's the first two chapters, and those are the parts you know.  The rest of the book is a long conversation between Job and his friends about why this is happening to him, what he should do now, how best to live in the world now that God has taken everything away, that kind of thing.  And after a long enough time of talking back and forth with this, God finally deigns to come down and talk to Job directly. And what he tells Job is that Job is missing something that he'll need if he wants to take part in the remainder of the conversation.  He's missing perspective. When he considers the works of God and his majesty, Job is part of the picture, which means he can't see the picture.  It actually isn't possible for him to take it in.  Job, as a part of creation can't see all of creation, and he certainly can't see God and all his works from that perspective.  Not at all.

But God says to Job that he won't understand the works of God unless he has been engaged with all the works that God has done, including, but not limited to setting the limits for what the sea can do. The disciples would have known this, and that was why they were filled with fear, because they were in the boat with the one whom even the wind and the waves obeyed.  And that's way more frightening than a storm!

These are men who have likely been through plenty of storms. These are men who live on the water, who have had to navigate this area consistently, this is their world, and they know what a storm is.  They know how storms start, and they know how storms quit.  They know storms can come up suddenly, they can calm down suddenly, but they sure don't just cease, which is exactly what happened in the reading from Sunday.  The wind and the waves quit, and everything calmed down.  No wonder the disciples were agitated at that moment, for they had encountered, they had seen the living God incarnate, the creator of heaven right in front of them, he had demonstrated his awesome power, shown his mighty arm, and had shown them that he was able to command the wind and the waves.

And that's terrifying.

We often ask Jesus to handle our problems, we look to him to forgive sins, heal infirmities, to handle our issues and difficulties, of course we do.  But here's the deal, which is that when Jesus shows his authority over these things, it should cause us to pause, cause us to consider the magnitude of the power that we are playing around with.  God is big, he is wild, he is untamed and untamable, he is the consuming fire and the lion of Judah.  He's not your pal, he's not your chum, he is the Lord God, king of the universe, Lord of lords.  He split the red sea and drowned Pharaoh's army, this is the man whom the wind and the waves obey. The only thing worse than being in a storm is having the incarnate God, the power that made and created everything in the boat with you.  Awesome power is terrifying, thrilling, fills us with awe, certainly, and all the more so when we realize that it is working for us.

For you see, the essence of this issue is going to come down to the understanding of the power you invoke.  If you're expecting Jesus to handle your big problems, which you are, you're going to have to also understand that he's bigger than all the forces of this world, bigger than your sins, bigger than the forces of the universe, bigger than anything else.  He is the creator of the universe, the alpha and the omega, the one who flung the stars into space, the one who tamed the cosmos, who flooded the earth, that's him, and he is working to overcome your sins.  The God of the Universe who took on flesh, dwelt among us, and shed his blood on the cross of  Calvary.  That's what the God of the universe did, and he did that for you.  That should cause you to tremble, ever so slightly.  That should remove the great calm from you, you really ought to be thinking about the enormity of the power that you invoke so lightly.  You really should contemplate who this God is, understand what he is all about, and see how the Lord, the God of the Angel armies, is working for you.  It's really really big news, and if you take it seriously enough, that calm that you're looking for won't be there, but a healthy sense of awe, of reverence, of fear of the Lord and confidence and courage in what he does will be.

Mustard with that?

It's the parable of the mustard seed. And the parable of the mustard seed is all about small things growing into big things.  I made a point on Sunday that the biggest plant in the entire world, in case you didn't know, is a California Redwood named Hyperion. Hyperion is 380 feet tall, which is so big that I had to get a size comparative for it, and I was shocked to find out that Hyperion is taller than the tallest building in Regina.  This is an awfully big tree, you understand, a six hundred year old tree, and this tree was born from a seed that is exactly this big

The seeds of a California Redwood are the same size as a mustard seed - 3mm long.  That's not very big.  For a tree that gets to be so monumental, it sure starts out awfully small.  But that's the real trick behind the parable of the mustard seed, isn't it? The real trick of the parable is to know and understand that we're talking about something that starts off awfully small, and gets awfully big.  Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like this.  Like a mustard seed that is a teeny tiny seed that ends up growing into a massive plant. Now, of course, the mustard seed isn't the smallest seed in creation, that belongs to an orchid that has seeds smaller than a mm.  And the mustard plant isn't the biggest plant in the world, that would obviously be Hyperion.  But Jesus is going through this parable for the same reason that he goes through any of his parables - he is using the familiar to explain the foreign, the comfortable to explain the alien.  He is using what you know, what you can understand, to explain what you can't possibly conceive of (more on that next week).  He's talking about mustard seeds because, well, that was a seed that people actually used.  A parable doesn't work if it's about something you've never heard of as the referent, either.  The mustard seed is a seed that the people of the time of Christ planted, and also that they worked with in their kitchens. Just like using salt to describe the disciples, Jesus also uses mustard to describe the kingdom of Heaven.  They used mustard just like we use mustard, they were familiar with that awesome condiment just like we are.  And when Jesus brings up the mustard seed and the mustard plant, he's bringing up an immense disparity between the size of the seed, and the size of the plant.

 

That's a big old tree, isn't it?  And trees like this, every tree that there is grows from a seed much much smaller than itself. The California redwood and the mustard plant are just two examples of how that works, and we all know that this is how it works.  But here's what we might have forgotten about this parable.   Massive plants grow from tiny seeds, but they do this slowly.  Very very gradually.

For we are now in the throes of green stole time, and green stole time, common time, the time of the church, is when great growth happens.  We'd expect it to be in other times, which is why church attendance spikes at those times.  We'd expect growth to happen at Christmas, Easter, the Christmas Eve candlelit service, all that stuff, we don't expect growth to happen on the seventh Sunday after Pentecost, or whatever.  But on these weeks, these weeks that are in common time, those weeks that are just sort of there, not a festival, not a red stole, not a white stole, but a green one, those weeks are times in which great growth happens.  And you know this, because you've all seen plants grow.

Plants don't grow well if you only water them twice a year.  Plants don't prosper if you weed around them once, or if you fertilize them one time.  They don't mature and grow if they never get any moisture.  They have to be tended regularly, and if they are, then they grow growing slowly as they are tended.  You've seen this happen with plants, and you've seen this happen with people too.

It was also Father's day on Sunday, and on Sunday, it was time to think on all the work our earthly fathers have done, what they have done to make us, raise us, and turn us into the people that we are today, and the older you get, the more you understand that the work that your father does is heavily grounded in one vitally important factor - patience.  Patience is a hallmark of the work that fathers do, for they have to do the same things over and over again.  They have to go to the same job every day, they have to drive you to the same places every week, to buy the same groceries every week, to do the same things around the house all the time, they are vigilant, and they're patient.  And if you're a child of a father, you will know that you can't pinpoint the exact moment that you learned something, that you grew up, that you magically turned from a boy into a man.  Odds are your father didn't sit you down and tell you life lessons.  Odds are he lived them out day by day, minute by minute, by living out his values, by being the person that he needed to be for you, consistently and patiently.  And it's an accumulation of those tiny tiny moments, over dozens of days, a couple of decades, and it forms you and shapes you into a man, into a woman, who learned what it was to be a grown up over all that time through the presence of your father.

Which brings us back to the mustard seed.  Teeny tiny.  You look at that, and it doesn't amount to much.  You look at a baptism, and it doesn't look like too much.  You look at a Bible and it looks like a book, you look at communion and it looks like a tiny flat circle.  You look at a worship service and it looks like an hour, just by itself, isolated.  These things all look like nothing on their own, but live in them frequently enough, and boy oh boy, things start to happen.  The faith grows, the kingdom is revealed, God works through the means through which he promised to work, he is present in with and under the elements, he is in the waters of baptism with you, where there are two or three gathered there in his name, there he is in the midst of them.  None of this is magic, and it certainly doesn't work all in one shot Damascus style.  But if you allow that steady growth to happen, bit by bit, moment by moment, like a plant grows, first the blade, then the ear, you'll see that growth that you are looking for.

Don't see it yet? then echo those same words that we hear from the Scriptures 'Lord , I believe.  Help thou my unbelief.'  Then take your sins to Christ to have them forgiven.  Again.  Take holy communion.  Again.  Hear the word of God.  Again. Realize that this is just like watering a plant, tending to it, like teaching a child to walk, to read, to ride a bike or throw a baseball, or any of the other things our fathers taught us to do on the road to full grown adulthood.  Consistency.  Steady growth, until the result is a hundred thousand times bigger than the seed.

Unforgiven

We come, as we typically do, to the sin that will not be forgiven.

This is a sticking point for Christians, of course, because so much of what we do and say revolves around forgiveness.  The  essence, core and focus of the Christian faith has always been around the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.  The Christian belief is the one in which you and I have, through our words and deeds, angered our God, and he is justly livid with our sinfulness.  We would be lost forever unless delivered from sin, death and everlasting condemnation.  But the God of all grace and mercy has sent his son, our Savior Jesus Christ, to shed his blood on the cross, to open the kingdom of heaven to all believers, and to forgive the sins of all who trust in him.

All the sins except one.

And this is the strangest thing of all, is that there is a sin that Christ specifies will not be forgiven.  Now, Jesus, in his ineffable wisdom, is always right, that's a function of being God, and when he says things, it's wise for us to listen to his dialogue, for he knows what's up.  And when he talks about how there are sins that cannot be forgiven, it's worth listening, especially in a universalist age in which we all assume that all dogs go to heaven.  But if all dogs go to heaven, if all sins are universally ignored, then who is God, after all?  Is he good? Or does he not care.

I hate to inform you that the universalist God doesn't exist. That's an idol, and you really ought not take him too seriously.  He's a forgery based on wishes and hopes.  As all idols are.  The idea and conception that you can possibly, happily have a God out there who doesn't care, who is happy to shrug his shoulders and not be too bothered about things, well, that should give you pause for consideration.  Even people who say that they want a universalist God, who doesn't care that much about sin, what they really mean is that they want a God that doesn't care about their sin.  That's about it.  They still know about right and wrong, good and evil, as long as it applies to other people.  We all know Trump is a dummy, that Hitler is a bad dude, and that Pol Pot was a disaster, but we get to be relatively laid back about our sins, and those of people like us.  But that's not a universalist God, that's a tribal god, and those two things are really really different.

The point I'm trying to make is, although we many kick and scream, we may get all agitated about it and pretend that we won't, we're looking at a matter of God actually caring about sins, and we all seem to agree with that.  That is, as long as you believe in God.  If not, you're a fool.  For the rest of us, we agree that God does seem to care about sins, and like it or not, if he cares about Hitler's sins, he cares about yours too.  They may not be equal in scope, but that doesn't mean he doesn't care about your sins at all.  He really, really does.  This isn't ranked on a curve, and as long as you've got a real dunce like Hitler the rest of us look okay.  He absolutely cares about everyone's sins as individuals, which is why he sent Jesus from the very beginning.  At the very beginning ,from the moment of The Fall, Jesus was promised, and came to the earth at the right time, the appointed time, to shed his blood and die for the sins of the world, to atone for everyone.  It was the good look, and one that prevented mass damnation.  All good so far, and that leads us to the unforgivable sin.  Or rather, the eternal sin.

This isn't the sin that God hates worse than the others, the one that he has hand-selected as the Bad One, but rather, sinning in this capacity ruins and destroys your ability to be forgiven in the first place.  The way that Jesus describes it in the Gospel is in the framework of a man's house being safe from plunder if he isn't tied up or incapacitated in some way, and we all know that this is true.  It's not that you want to steal the man in question, or his gun, but you can only steal anything else from him if he's not home pointing said gun at you.  If he is, the only thing you're going to end up stealing is a bullet.  To understand this is to understand what this passage is all about - you can't steal anything unless the strong man is tied up.  Once he is, then everything else can be stolen.  If the plunder of your house, your temple is not protected by the strong man of the Holy Spirit, then it is ripe for robbery.  Once the guard is down, once the wall is breached, it doesn't matter how nice everything looks, none of it can last. Think of it like military spending, which is to say that military spending seems expensive, of course, but if you don't have that part of your budget worked out, it's not going to matter where you're spending the rest, because someone, somewhere is going to take everything that belongs to you.

What happens when you blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, when you bind him, excise him, chase him away, is not that that sin won't be forgiven so much, as you have effectively removed the conduit through which your sins are forgiven.  You can't have the rest of the ugly sins forgiven if you've removed the means through which sins themselves are forgiven.  You've cut off the branch that you were sitting on, which was the means through which you were connected to the tree.  You've gone to all the effort of removing from yourself the means through which forgiveness of sins is given, and then you can't get too terribly confused if the forgiveness of sins doesn't show up.

Think of the creed for a second.  I know, nobody wants the dogma, I get it, but think of the creed.  What do you believe in?  I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.  The Holy Spirit, the conduit through which sanctification happens, the means through which you are made Holy, the part of God that lives and dwells with you, who encourages, builds faith, and equips you for every good work.  To quote Dr. Martin Luther's large catechism, 'We believe that in this Christian church we have forgiveness of sin, which is wrought through the Holy Sacraments and absolution [Matthew 26:28, Mark 1:4, John 20:23] and through all kinds of comforting promises from the entire Gospel.'  It also says, in a question and answer session 'How does the Holy Spirit make me holy, what are his method and the means to this end?' 'By the Christian church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.'

This is the best edition of this book. Because it's the one I grew up with.

This is the province and ability of the Holy Spirit, how he makes us holy.  If you blaspheme against him, if you reject him, deny him, turn from him and forsake him, then how is that forgiveness of sins supposed to happen?  Magic?  This isn't a matter of saying that this sin is worse than all the others, because if you break part of the law, you break all of it.  Rather, this is a rejection of the means of grace, the sanctification that God brings, the rejection of the promise of the Gospel, and the forgiveness of sins that the Holy Spirit brings.  It's not as though this sin is worse, but committing this one means that the rest cannot be forgiven.  Not that they won't. They can't.

So how to avoid committing this sin?  Daily and richly renew your Christian activity.  Remind yourself of the activity of the Holy Spirit in your life.  As much as I hate to keep on quoting Dr. Martin Luther's catechism, but he has you begin and end every day blessing yourself with the Holy Cross, saying 'In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.'  He wants you to be immersed in the word and attending the sacraments.  He wants you to be mindful of the means of grace, and to be strengthened through them in your faith.  In other words, he wants you to be ever aware of the great gift of the forgiveness of sins that the Holy Spirit gives, to find Him where He promises to be, and to delight in his presence.  And above all other things, to bring to him all our sins and iniquities, and to delight in him taking them away.  To do otherwise is to live and dwell in our sins alone, and to stand before the Lord our God coated with them.  If you're in this frame of mind, receptive to our Lord's gifts and excited for his sacraments, then you're going to be in great shape.  When you find yourself seriously wondering if you even need this forgiveness of sins thing anyway, well, that's when you need it the most.

shabbat

The seventh day is a day of rest, thus says the Lord.

Great, fantastic, and that's good news even for the heathen and the rascal.  For everyone, no matter your beliefs, no matter what you may think about God, and the Bible, you probably don't mind having a day off.  A day off, a day in which you do no work, it sounds good, doesn't it?  Everyone wants one of those, perhaps more than one.  When you ask people how they're doing, do they say 'busy?' When you ask people how their weekend or their holiday was, do they say 'Not long enough?' 

This is the curse of the modern age, that we are too busy.  It wasn't always like this, but it's sure like this now.  and consider the elements that go into this fiasco.  For us, in the modern age, we have found a problem in which the weekends have all become every bit as busy as the rest of the days midweek.  There are really no other ways that people live these days, they're essentially always trying to move and work within a system that never ever gives up.  They're trying to work with their FOMO, trying to make sure they can cram the maximum into all their time, and they're working as hard as possible to make sure that their time is filled with buying, selling, and greasing the wheels of commerce.

For the merchants don't take a day off.  The merchants don't rest, you know, not on the sabbath or ever.  They are active wherever you are, following after you.  They know you have money, they can smell it, and they're not going to rest until you've given that money up.  They're not going to wait, not going to take it easy, until you've handed over every last penny to them.  And they're not going to want you to take a day off.  Things can't shut down for a day, you've got to buy, sell, and be engaged all day every day.  The ancient Hebrew people had a great way around that, of course, which was a mandated day off, mandated by the Lord their God himself, who told them in Exodus, as well as Deuteronomy, that they were to do all their work in six days, and in that seventh day, they were to do no work at all . No work.  None.  Zippo.  No buying, no selling, no engaging in commerce, no patronizing merchants, none of that at all.  Now, that's a good idea, a day where you have to rest from all that stuff, a day that, at the end of the week you would be mandated to rest, to take it easy, to do no work, that's a great idea.  There was one problem with it though, which is that people got really specific about what a lack of work would be.  For what is a lack of work? It's not enough to say that you shouldn't do any work, because not everyone views work the same way, so the Jews had to end up creating a big long list of what counts as work and what doesn't, and what they did was to set that list of things as a matter of things to be avoided, and they turned the sabbath into a passive experience.  That is, the sabbath observance was about what you didn't do, and not about what you did. It turned the most moral Sabbath into one that you did absolutely nothing whatsoever, in which you stayed in a coma, so nobody could accuse you of working.

And we learned that, and learned it hard.  We all believed in the sabbath so much that the concept of the weekend, of having a day off, became sacred to us.  We believed very hard in the concept of a day off, believe in it so thoroughly that we all internalized it, and grew very attached to time off.  But, the definition of that day as a day off, it became a mandated day off in which nobody was supposed to do any work, but the answer came back, loud and clear 'well then, what are we supposed to do?'  And that's a great question.  For what we had done was to create a vacuum, something that nature abhors.  We made a vacuum, where we weren't doing any work, and then the question came up, of what then should we do?  And people, in their desire to do nothing, and in their forgetting of God, elected to do what they always do, which is to consume, to buy, to brunch and to sport.  But if you're going to brunch and sport, if you're going to shop and peruse, then someone is going to have to sell those things to you.  And if you're going to go out a-brunching, you're going to use your car, and so is your waitress, your chef, and all of a sudden, you're in a world in which it's turning into a day exactly like any other.  You go to the store, buy linens, pick up a hat, go to the market for avocados, all that noise because, well, there are a bunch of things to do because Sunday isn't a Sabbath, it's just a day.

That vacuum has to be filled with something, you know. The people in the Gospel reading were so desperately holding onto the notion of not working, that they didn't realize that we were moving into making a vacuum that would be filled.  For every vacuum is, you know, even the vacuum of space.  And if the vacuum is going to be filled by something eventually, why not have it be filled with the right thing?

Christ, oft accused of being a sabbath breaker, was actually the only one who ever truly kept the Sabbath, you know.  Sure, while he was here on earth, he did wondrous works, healing, cherishing, gathering God's people together on the Sabbath, doing good and not doing evil on the Sabbath, being about the Lord's work, and comforting God's people on the Sabbath, which is wonderful work.  And after accomplishing that, the people looked upon him, and wondered how they might kill him.  They asked this because Christ was about his Father's work, of course, but they wanted to preserve that vacuum, telling themselves that the most important thing was to not work, not to worship God in his fullness, in his grace and in his grandeur.  The Sabbath had to be kept as completely passive, inactive.
So those who wanted to kill him succeeded.  They took him away, and had him crucified.  And Christ called out, loudly and clearly that it was finished, all his work was done.  But Christ had the temerity to not die right away, and the crowd became concerned, worrying that they might have to handle a dead body on the Sabbath, quite forbidden indeed.  So they made sure that Christ was lanced through his side, and that he was fully dead.  They took him down off the cross and ensured that he was buried before the sabbath started.  And Christ rested.

This man accused of being a Sabbath breaker, of taking the sabbath too lightly, he was the only man who had ever fully and completely kept the Sabbath in its entirety.  He quite literally did zero work on that Sabbath way back between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Rather, instead of doing work, he rested from all his labor, from all the work that he had done, from all the work he had completed and finished, which he did.  He rested so well on that Sabbath that he didn't even breathe, not even a heartbeat, not a motion, not a twitch, nothing.  He rested. 

And by resting, he fulfilled, he completed the Sabbath, and he gave his people a new day for worship. The first day of the week, the Sunday, the Lord's day. The day not when you are commanded to do nothing, but rather the day in which you are impelled and compelled to remember the work that Christ did on that day.  He rose from the dead that day, the Sunday, the most important event that has ever happened, the greatest thing that has ever been done, the most world-altering thing that has been done, and you and I get to come together to commemorate that every Sunday.  To remember that if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.  Your job on Sunday isn't to keep a vacuum for the sake of just a day off, trust me, the merchants will get a hold of you one way or another.  But they can't get a hold of you if you are filling that time with something else - with prayer, praise, rejoicing, and celebrating the victory of Christ over death and the grave.  You're celebrating that great victory of Jesus of Nazareth over death, where he finished all his work by sundown on Friday, rested on Saturday, and rose back from the grave on the Sunday.  The Lord of the Sabbath fulfilled the Sabbath in a way that you and I would be incapable of doing.  He is truly the Lord of the Sabbath.  Listen to him on the day he has given you.  Fill your morning with his prayer and preaching, grow in your faith, push back against that vacuum that is there, and fill it with grace and truth.

I promise, the brunch will still be there when you're done.