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This past Sunday I preached one of the sermons for the installation service for Ervin Stutzman, the new Executive Director of Mennonite Church USA. The worship planners tasked me to preach on the imagery of fruit in John 15:1-5John 15:1-5
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
Jesus Is the True Vine ^{15 1} Jesus said to his disciples: I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. ² He cuts away every branch of mine that doesn't produce fruit. But he trims clean every branch that does produce fruit, so that it will produce even more fruit. ³ You are already clean because of what I have said to you. ⁴ Stay joined to me, and I will stay joined to you. Just as a branch cannot produce fruit unless it stays joined to the vine, you cannot produce fruit unless you stay joined to me. ⁵ I am the vine, and you are the branches. If you stay joined to me, and I stay joined to you, then you will produce lots of fruit. But you cannot do anything without me.

To see this fruit that dies into resurrection, we have to spend time in the compost—the manure, the waste pile, the places where we’ve thrown rotten fruit, unwanted gifts. We need leaders who will not let us forget the compost, leaders who become familiar with the compost, who dig into the compost—the storehouse of gifts from the past, and discarded fruit in the present, the unwanted and forgotten and dismissed. We always seem to give our leaders the jobs we don’t want to do—they are servants, after all. That’s why we are asking you, Ervin, to spend time in our smelly and mucky compost—and to help us see the seeds of resurrection, to open our eyes to the beauty of God’s work in the places we’d rather not step into with our clean, white shoes, without spot or wrinkle.

Yesterday I preached a sermon for the second Sunday of Lent. A bit of it is posted below:

We are restless—in a constant frenzy of innovation, always on the move, reaching beyond our limits, our desires are never satisfied. In their Manifesto, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels prophesied an age of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation.” We are caught up in a whirlwind, “swept up…[and] at once driven and aimless.” We are impatient and bored, agitated yet aimless. (See Harrison, Gardens, 138, 150). In such a world, it’s easy to let fantasies of heaven become an escape. Work hard now, slog it through life now, choose the path of suffering now, because heaven is our escape and will make everything worth it. Life is tolerable because we can hold onto our fantasies of heaven, of a future rest, a repose, stillness, a state of quiet forgetfulness—like an long weekend, an eternal weekend, one where we don’t have to be troubled with thought of work on Monday, or Tuesday, or forever.

The danger is that we may begin to live for the escapes. We grit our teeth and try to make it to the weekend, or to happy hour. I’ve had jobs like that. The trouble is that we close ourselves off to the ordinary gifts of life, the mundane pleasures, the usually unremarkable delights and goodness happening all around us and in us, sometimes even in spite of ourselves. If we live for escapes, we slowly lose our ability to say thank you to God for the life we have, for the gifts that sustain us. We slowly dull our senses of gratitude and become unable to receive joyfully everyday graces.

I’m struck by the last few lines of Psalm 27: “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Ps. 27:13-14). The goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. God’s goodness is available. It’s not only a heavenly reality, an experience we can have after we escape from this world. The goodness of the Lord is for the living, for us. It’s always already here, predating us and anticipating us—the goodness of God makes room for us. God welcomes us with goodness. We live by grace.

Lenten Prayer

Lord God, today is the first Sunday of Lent, a season of repentance, of self-examination, of silence and waiting for the leading of your Holy Spirit. Through your Spirit you lead us into the temptations of Jesus, forty days in the wilderness, where our lives are laid bare, and we come face to face with our desires for power—power over our lives and the lives of our friends and enemies and maybe even power over you.

Open us to your grace and mercy, your love and provision, as we confront the devil’s temptations, the demons that try to run our world and our lives. Give us the power of your Son that we may also throw off the insidious powers of sin—the forces of selfishness and pride, the forces that keep us from confronting the truth about our lives and the world.

During this season of Lent, shatter our illusions, save us from ourselves, and open us to the new life of your Holy Spirit—a life of faith, hope, and love. As we let your Spirit lead us into repentance, may we discover the goodness and fullness of life in your kingdom of peace. In the words of Psalmist, may we find in your presence a refuge, a dwelling place, a place of rest (Ps. 91).

May we also resist the temptation to find our rest in places that muffle the cries of injustice—the desperation of the needy, the anger of the wronged, and the despair of the hopeless. May those voices echo in our Lenten silence, for the call of your Spirit also speaks through those voices. As the apostle Paul says, your word is near us, on our lips and in our hearts (Romans 8). May we use this season of Lent to empty ourselves of all that makes us deaf to that word, the Word of God, Jesus Christ, who is already on our lips and in our hearts.

Last night we had our Ash Wednesday service. Below is the beginning of my short sermon:

March 9th, 1522. Zurich, Switzerland. It was the middle of Lent. About twelve people got together at the house of Christopher Froschauer and had a feast of sausage. Eating sausage during Lent was strictly forbidden by the church, and back then church laws were the laws of the land. If you didn’t obey the church, then a police officer (or magistrate) would show up at your door and take you away for punishment. But they ate the sausage and defiantly broke the mandated Lenten fast. The event would be known as the “Wurstessen”—the sausage eating. It was a protest, an act of civil and ecclesial disobedience. Among this sausage-eating group were some of the same people who, three years later in 1525, performed the first re-baptisms. They became the Anabaptists, who later became the Swiss Mennonites. So, we can follow some of the roots of our church to a Lenten protest of sausage eating.[1] If that’s the case, why in the world do we care about Lent? Isn’t it strange that we’re gathered here, at a Mennonite Ash Wednesday service, to begin a season of Lent? Shouldn’t we be eating sausage?

My sermon this past Sunday focused on Christian freedom: what does it mean to be free? I preached on 2 Corinthians 3:172 Corinthians 3:17
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
17 The Lord and the Spirit are one and the same, and the Lord's Spirit sets us free.

We could also talk about U.S. freedom from the people of Haiti. This story started with the racist Western vision of freedom that put people on that island and used them for economic growth. And now that same vision of freedom has restricted Haitians from creating lives for themselves in the United States if they want to. We are comfortable sending money and resources for the rebuilding of Haiti, but we’re not about to change our immigration policy to allow Haitians into this country. We want to be free from them—freedom from the possible chaos of a mass of people invading our lives and messing with our happiness. Apparently, to enjoy our freedom means that we have be free from others—freedom from intimacy, freedom from the complications that come with relationships.

This vision of freedom insinuates itself into our own lives. Sometimes—maybe most of the time—we think about freedom as freedom from others. We want to be free from the commitments that come with relationships: with family, with friends, with work. We want to be free to do what we want to do, without asking someone for permission, or without worrying about offending someone. We want to be free from considering how our actions may actually hurt somebody. We want to be free from changing our ways for the sake of someone else’s feelings. We want to be free from being bothered—from chaotic relationships, from unpredictable people, from tensions, from whatever seems to get in our way. Freedom, American-style: this my first snapshot of freedom, a very selfish kind of freedom—one that is all around us, and in us. But none of this can be what it means to be truly free. At the very least, we know that the apostle Paul has a different kind of freedom in mind when he says, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:172 Cor 3:17
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
17 The Lord and the Spirit are one and the same, and the Lord's Spirit sets us free.

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). What is this freedom? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do we know that we are free? Free for what? Freed for what purpose? To what end? It can’t be freedom from others; we know that much.

I’ve had a number of people email me and ask for the unedited version of my review of Ted Grimsrud and Mark Thiessen Nation: Reasoning Together. In an earlier post I had asked people to email me if they wanted me to read the full book review instead of the shortened one that appeared in the Mennonite Weekly Review. But instead of keeping up with emails, I thought I would simply include it as a pdf in this post. So, here it is: Reasoning Together: A Conversation on Homosexuality.

This past Sunday I preached on Paul’s stuff on human genitalia in I Cor. 12:22. Here’s an excerpt:

Paul uses human anatomy to make a basic point about the corporate body of the church. Every part is necessary; without eyes or feet, the body cannot function as it is created to function. Every part, every member, is absolutely necessary—that’s Paul’s basic point throughout this section in I Corinthians. But then he adds, with a wink and a smile: Yes, even that “necessary member” is absolutely necessary, it’s the most necessary part of the body. As Paul says, “God has so arranged the body, giving greater honor to this lesser member” (v. 25). The lesser member, the part of the body that we keep hidden, that is least presentable, is actually the most necessary member, the most honored, the most beautiful.

Paul doesn’t say anything new when he talks about people as if they were one body. Everyone in Corinth understood that kind of language—it was as old as the ancient philosopher Plato. Citizens form one body—together, all of the people form a political body. But here’s the difference between Paul and all the other Greek and Roman philosophers and politicians: While Paul’s contemporaries talked about every member of society as being an absolutely necessary part of the body, everyone knew that the head was the most necessary. And the head of the political body was the sovereign, the king, the one at the top of the masses. While people were told that they were necessary to the health of the social body, the king was the most necessary member of society. Without him, everything would fall apart.

But Paul takes this body language and turns it upside-down. The head is not the most necessary member; the necessary member is the most necessary member—the genitals, not the head. And then Paul talks about the nature of that necessary member—it’s hidden, fragile, weak, and vulnerable. It’s easily forgotten as you go about your daily work, unless you have to use the bathroom—then you quickly discover its necessity. Or for sex. I won’t go into details.

Well, for what it’s worth, I preached my first sermon of 2010. It’s a meditation on two letters I received on the same day—one from a dude who wanted me to give him money so he can make my prayers come true, and another from a family who used to worship at our church. Here’s a passage from my sermon:

Verse 17: “Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.” Notice how the Spirit comes through the hands, through the flesh, through bodily contact. Some people like to separate body and spirit, material and spiritual, what we do with our bodies and what we do with our thoughts—but that’s not what happens in this story. The Holy Spirit goes to the people of Samaria with Peter and John, all the way from Jerusalem. The Spirit travels with people; the Spirit happens in human contact, a material point of contact, the laying on of hands, a touch.

This touch is the affirmation of fellowship, of solidarity. The laying on of hands is the communication of the Spirit, which makes possible their communion, their fellowship, in the same body of Christ. Now the same Holy Spirit circulates through the church in Jerusalem and this new church in Samaria. They are all wrapped up in the same movement of God. These two different groups become part of the same movement through something done with human hands, with bodies that travel, with the material of this world. The Holy Spirit comes through human contact. The Spirit flows through material, fleshy stuff like our hands.

To celebrate MLK Day next week, I wrote a short piece on Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Mennonite Weekly Review. It highlights the King that won’t be remembered on his day. Here’s an excerpt:

Most of us don’t want to remember what King didn’t want us to forget: that the racial violence that birthed colonial America is remembered in the genetic code of U.S. power. Amnesia doesn’t change the past. Repressed memories always come back to haunt the forgetful. This land is populated with the ghosts of genocide. “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” King wrote in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait. In a speech in December 1967, King described how this initial racism unfolded: “While they refused to give the black man any land, don’t forget this, America at that same moment … was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest to white peasants from Europe.” King continued: “Never forget it.”

Instead of preaching a single sermon, I gave three brief meditations throughout our worship service. Joel Miller gave me the idea a few weeks ago. I think it worked out pretty well. Below is an excerpt from one of the meditations. For the full text of all three, follow this link to my church website: “Christmas meditations.”

How strange is it that the news of Jesus’ birth first comes to lowly shepherds? “[T]he angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Lk. 2:10-11). Notice how the news is so personal: twice the angel addresses the shepherds as “you”—“I am bringing you good news,” and “to you is born this day.” Yes, this news will change the world, but it is also for the shepherds, maybe even primarily for the shepherds, because they get the news first.

The lowly get the news first, not Emperor Augustus. Everyone would expect that Augustus would get the news first. His reign extended throughout the known world. Many even thought he was more like a god than a human—all powerful, all knowing, a benevolent leader. Roman citizens hailed Augustus as a force of peace since he united the empire and efficiently put down insurrectionists and invaders. War in the name of peace is the oldest play in the warrior playbook. Our recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient shows that some things never change, when he said a few weeks ago: “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”

But that’s not who first get’s the news. The good news comes to the shepherds, to the lowly, to the ones without any plans to change the world, to the outsiders. Maybe that’s why they get the news first. Unlike people with power, the shepherds have no reason to make the good news useful for their own plans. The shepherds don’t need to manipulate the news, the fact on the ground, because they don’t have any desires or dreams or responsibilities that can corrupt the news. They don’t need to manipulate the news for their own ends, for their security, for their economic prosperity, for their hold on power.