When We Are Faithless, He Is Faithful...

Good morning!  

The gospel lesson we heard today, from Luke, about the ten lepers being cleansed, is one that many of us heard growing up in Sunday School.  And I suspect that most of heard it told something like this: 

“Jesus was walking along the road between Samaria and Galilee, and there were ten lepers who called out to him and said, ‘Jesus, Master, have pity on us!’ So Jesus healed them, and sent them off, and only one came back to say ‘thank you’.  Jesus praised that man, but wanted to know how come the other 9 didn’t come say ‘thank you.’  Boys and girls, we should all learn to say ‘thank you’ to Jesus!”

Am I right?

This is a story, which, like so many other stories, we are really, really good at turning into a lesson on “rules for how to be a good Christian.”  As though Jesus hands out healing to lepers the way we hand snacks to preschoolers – “here’s a cookie, now, what do you say?” “Thank you, Mommy.”  “Ok, you’re healed, now what do you say?” “Thank you, Jesus!” 

Of course, there’s an element of trying to encourage gratitude in this story, and the “rules,” if you want to call them that, absolutely would tell us the same thing.  Throughout the Bible, God’s people are constantly expressing their gratitude to God for all of the mighty acts he has done.  In the communion liturgy each week, also called the Eucharistic liturgy, Eucharist meaning “thanksgiving,”, we pray, “It is indeed right and salutary – meaning “correct” – that we should at all times and in all places offer thanks and praise to you, O Lord…” 

And it’s true – if you stop and think just at this very moment, what are the things that we can be grateful to God for?  Well, you’re alive, for starters.  Your lungs are breathing and your heart is beating and the neurons in your brain are firing and your fingers work well enough to fiddle with the bulletin or the candy in your purse, and you have ears to hear what’s being said and a voice to echo your Amen to all of the prayers.  You have clothes and shoes to wear.  You made it to church this morning – whether your healthy legs walked you here in the crisp fall air, or you have been blessed with a car that functions and the ability to pass a drivers exam and get a license and drive here, or whether someone else was kind enough to provide the transportation so that you could come to worship.  In just a few minutes you’ll hold Jesus in your hand and eat the actual Body, and drink the Blood, of your Lord.  And after that, there will be hot coffee and snacks out in the fellowship hall, and who’s not grateful for coffee?  J  So right there, there’s a whole list of things that we can be grateful to God for. 

And that doesn’t even get into, say, salvation, and the fact that your sins are forgiven, that death has been destroyed, and that the power of the devil has been conquered by the Blood of Jesus – on your behalf, and for your benefit.  More things to be grateful for, which are – technically – more important than coffee. 

And really, how many of us remember to actually express our thanks and praise to God for all of these gifts, and for the many, many, many more that we have been given?  It is indeed right and salutary that we should at all times, and in all places, offer thanks and praise to you, O Lord.  But we don’t.  More often than not, we fall into the category of the nine, rather than the one. 

And yes, we could argue, trying to justify the nine, and ourselves, that Jesus tells them all to go show themselves to the priests – because having been lepers, and excluded from the community, there’s a whole religious ritual of being reintegrated into society that starts with the Jewish priests verifying that you, are, in fact, healed of the disease.  So we could say, well, they were just doing what Jesus told them to do.  They were obeying the instructions.  And, well, yes. 

But at the heart of all religious ritual and observance, at the heart of the liturgy, and the order of worship, and the Sacraments, and the rites and rituals, the core of all of that is Jesus.  It is Christ himself, crucified and risen for you.  And so the nine healed lepers, while they certainly weren’t wrong to go do as they were told, to follow the religious process they had been given, well, in forgetting to say thank you to Jesus, in forgetting the One who actually had healed them, it seems like they maybe kind of missed the point. 

And we can be in danger of doing the same thing.  We can come to church and sing the songs and pray the prayers and listen politely and sit down and stand up and so on and so forth, we can serve coffee and help usher and share the peace nicely with the people sitting next to us, and we can do that every single week – heck, we could do it every single day – but if we trust in those rituals, instead of trusting in the person that all the rituals point to, the Christ who is the object, the target of our worship, the one who instituted the Sacraments and brings us life and healing and salvation through them; if we miss Him, then we miss the point. 

“Church”, at the end of the day, is not about church for the sake of church.  It is not, primarily, about “hospitality”, or about how often you come or how much money you put in the offering plate.  It is not about who sees you here, and it is not about coffee and treats.  Church is not about the building, or about how popular any given congregation is in town, or about being nice, or whatever else.  Church – this particular congregation called Our Savior’s, and the Church that is composed all the believers, across all time and space, church, is fundamentally, primarily, always and only, at its core, about Jesus. 

Hymns and songs, prayers and processionals, confession and Communion – all point to Jesus.  Hospitality and welcome and fellowship – all derive from, and point to, the hospitality and welcome and fellowship that Jesus offers to us.  Service projects – inside and outside the church building – come from, and point to, the Jesus who loves us, and serves us.  Religion is good.  “Go and show yourselves to the priest,” Jesus says.  Jesus doesn’t come to destroy religion.  He comes to make it known that He is the one who undergirds, who is both the foundation of, and the object of religion.  The Church’s One Foundation…is Jesus Christ her Lord…  If we miss that, we miss the point, and we become part of the nine. 

So by now, it may look like all is lost, and returning to memories of Sunday School, if you grew up in Sunday School, here comes the rest of the lecture about “being more grateful.” 

But what about this? What about, instead of a lecture on being thankful and “counting your blessings”, what if we turn to the second reading, from Paul’s second letter to Timothy?  And let’s look at one line in particular.  Paul is in the middle of quoting some sort of hymn or something about Jesus, and comes to, “when we are faithless, he is faithful.”  When we are faithless, he is faithful.  Even when we are faithless, he remains faithful.  

Look, the remaining nine lepers, say what you want about them – they weren’t appropriately grateful, they got so caught up in the machinations of religion that they missed the One who sent them to the priests in the first place, whatever else you can think of – but they weren’t unhealed because of it.  Yes, Jesus asks where they are, but he doesn’t chase them down the street and make them be lepers again.  God’s love and God’s grace and God’s power and God’s forgiveness – all of God’s gifts – are not dependent on us, and on our gratitude, or our ability to get everything right.  And thank goodness.  Because if they were, we’d be in real trouble.  But when we are faithless – when we don’t trust God, when we don’t offer him the thanks and praise he deserves, when we’re good at following religion but not so good at following Jesus, when we doubt that all the promises to keep us and love us and protect us might not really be real because they certainly don’t feel real in this moment of being diagnosed with a terrible illness or abandoned by the people I love or not knowing how I’m going to put food on the table this week or being overwhelmed with grief after someone’s death or swallowed whole by guilt and shame about what I’ve done or not done…when we are faithless, God is still faithful.  His promises and gifts and blessings still stand.  You can’t make everything fall apart because of your faithlessness – God simply won’t let you.  He doesn’t unheal us or take away what He’s already given.  He doesn’t stop showing up at your side each morning, or quit watching over you every night.  He doesn’t take away forgiveness or hand you over to the powers of evil.  When we are faithless, he is faithful. 

This is a tough life.  None of us – not a single one – have it easy.  It’s hard to be faithful in a world that doesn’t value faith.  It’s hard to trust Christ when everything around you says the only person you can trust is yourself.  It’s tough to remember to say thank you when there are just so many other things to do.  It’s difficult to keep our eyes fixed on Christ when the Sunday School rooms aren’t as full as they used to be.  And it’s easy to be wracked with guilt when we contemplate our own faithlessness. 

But when we are faithless, He is faithful.  God’s promises to forgive – to offer grace and healing and salvation and new life – they are not contingent on you.  You do not earn those promises in the moments when you are faithful, and you cannot stop them when you are faithless.  When we are faithless, He is faithful.  Your sins are forgiven, and you have been healed.  Go and show yourselves to the priest, and may God be praised!

Amen.

♪ He rules the world... ♪

...with truth and grace... ♪

The Hallmark Channel has been running some sort of Christmas in July thing, calling it a Christmas Classics weekend.  Don't go thinking it's all It's a Wonderful Life  and Miracle on 34th Street.  Not those kind of Christmas classics.  More like The Christmas Card  and Moonlight and Mistletoe. 

Now, this is actually perfect for me, because I love Christmas, and I love cheesy, predictable romantic movies, and these are all of that rolled into one.  Also, it's crazy hot out, and I'm really not all that into summer, and I'm ready for it to be winter and Christmas. 

So, yay, good weekend for me! 

Last night, though, one of the movies had "Joy to the World" in it, and it got me thinking.  He rules the world with truth and grace.  Truth, and grace.  Truth. And. Grace.  If that's how Christ rules, isn't that how we're supposed to rule, or live, as well?  With truth and grace?

It's such a hard balance.  Sometimes when we're busy proclaiming truth, we forget to do it with grace.  It's easy to stand on a mountaintop and get so worked up about what is right that we don't take care to find out what the people listening to us are actually hearing.  And sometimes, we're so eager to dispense grace that we take no care for the truth.  Sometimes, depending on what place people are at in life, truth can sting.  And when we try to offer grace with a guarantee that there's not sting involved, truth can get sacrificed.  I don't think anybody does either intentionally, but it happens. 

That's one of the reasons I really like Grace for the Good Girl - it gives me the truth I need to hear, but it does so with grace. There are parts that sting, but it's good for me, and it's followed immediately by grace.

Truth and grace is hard, but it's important.  I need to try to do a better job of it myself. 

He rules the world with truth and grace.  May we always remember that. 

Grace For the Good Girl

Something else that is changing my life is this book: Grace for the Good Girl, by Emily P. Freeman.  I've been meaning to get to this for a while, but then I loaned the book to a friend, and then I wanted to reread it, and then...  Nevertheless, here we are. 

Emily is a recovering "good girl" who spends this book exposing good girl syndrome for what it is - works righteousness - and then preaching the gospel to other "good girls" who so desperately need to hear it. 

I should start by noting that Emily has some theology going on that I'm not quite on board with (lots of "when you give your life to Jesus" and believer's baptism talk).  But I'm pretty well versed in working my way around that sort of stuff and taking what's good.  And there's a lot of good. 

I have so much of this book highlighted and underlined that I had to develop a system for marking the stuff that was good vs. the stuff that was really good.  For example, Freeman starts by noting the masks of fine/good/perfect/strong/responsible/busy/etc, and the way that we perform those roles. 

"I perform to prove my worth to you, to God, and to myself.  I perform because I don't know how not to.  When bad girls perform to get their needs met, they get in trouble.  When good girls perform to get the same thing, we get praise.  That is why the hiding is so easy for us.  We work hard, we do right, and we try not to ruffle feathers.  And even if we do all that by the strength of our own selves, we tell ourselves it's okay.  It seems to work, therefore it's acceptable.  So we keep right on with life, and our masks mix with our personality and circumstance.  Before we know it, we don't really know who we are, and nobody else does, either."

Part of the reason this book "works" is because it speaks to an experience, and to people, who don't often get spoken to. Because so often, the "good girls" are the ones who don't need the attention - it's the rebels, or the ones that manifestly do not have it all together who have books written for them.  And this is partly our fault.  Freeman notes that one of the hallmarks of a "good girl" is that we teach people that we have no needs - and then we secretly resent them for believing it.  So true.  And this book is incredible because it speaks from a place of "been there, done that", not from an outsider "I know some people struggle with this" perspective.

"I never seriously considered being a rebel.  There was that one time in high school when I was the only one not drinking at a party.  I looked around the room and briefly wondered why I felt so responsible to not be that way.  I wondered why I couldn't simply lighten up and have some fun.  But I just didn't have it in me.  There was too much at stake.  I had a good reputation to uphold, a sweetness to protect, an important list of rules to follow, and a long list of people to please.  This innate desire to be good indeed protected me from a lot of heartache and baggage.  It protected me from teenage pregnancy and bad grades and jail.  But it did not bring me any greater understanding of God.  It did not protect me from my own impossible expectations." 

The good girl reading this protests: "Well, true.  But this is how God wants us to be.  Somebody has to bear the burden of being good."  To which Emily responds,

"When we believe that God expects us to try hard to be who Jesus wants us to be, we will live in that blurry, frustrating land of Should Be rather than trust in The One Who Is.  We will do whatever we believe it takes to please God rather than receive the acceptance that has already been given.  We will perform to live up to what we believe his expectation is of us rather than expectantly wait on him....Our desire to be the good girl, the good Christian, the good wife, and the good mom becomes our number one priority, and Jesus isn't even in the room.  Our failures expose us and so we hide them.  We hide us.  We work hard to perform for acceptance, and most of the time we don't even realize we are doing it.  It has become the natural way of things, the only way we know how to live." 

Yup, that's me.  One of the reasons I loved reading this book is because, when you're a good girl like this, it's hard to even talk about because it sounds like bragging.  "Look how hard I try.  Look how much I do the right thing.  Look at me, look at me."  Because of the nature of our ailment, confession can sometimes feel (at least to us, on the confessing side of it) like showing off.  But Emily gets it.  She says it first, so that I can say, "OMG that's totally me."  Granted, the next part stings a little.  But the law always does.  (See, I'm such a good Lutheran.) 

"As a good girl, I formed my own definition of sin rather than understand God's.  Sin was the bad stuff people do, the heartache people cause, the poor decisions people make.  But my insatiable desire to be my own little god somehow didn't make the list of sin in my book.  My incessant need to be better than, to be important, to be liked and right and good on my own and by myself - those things pulsed just under the surface of my smiling exterior.  In Christian circles, we tend to call that self-righteousness.  And it is.  We could also call it self-dependence, and this gospel of self-sufficiency robs good girls of a life of freedom and victory."

 Well, damn.  But wait, what?  Aren't we supposed to be serving God?  Well, yes.  And Freeman exegetes the Mary vs. Martha story here.  Martha started from a good place, a place of wanting to serve Jesus and have him in her home. 

"Choosing to please God sounds right at first, but it so often leads to a performing life, a girl trying to become good, a lean-on-myself theology.  If I am trying to please God, it is difficult to trust God.  But when I trust God, pleasing him is automatic.  Anything we do to get life and identity outside of Christ is an idol, even service to Christ." (bolding mine)

Wow.  This one hit me right between the eyes.  When I read this, I was at a place in my life - and had been for 18 months - when I had most definitely been making an idol out of service to Christ.  I was trying so hard to serve him, in the way I thought he wanted me to serve him.  I was terrified of prayer, because I was convinced that everything I was trying to do still wasn't going to be enough, and I would "hear about it".  And then Emily's words just bowled me over.  Who would have thought?  Service to Christ can be an idol.  But she's right.  Yes, it was a measure of law - but the gospel followed almost immediately thereafter.  When I - mistakenly, even - make an idol out of the things that terrify me, because I think it's what God wants - hearing that I'm an idolator is freeing - because that can be forgiven, and there is Jesus on the other side. 

"As good girls, we are so used to hearing words like you ought to, you should, and you must.  With those same ears, we try to listen to Jesus and it sounds as though he speaks the same language.  But that is the language of the law.  It is time to say goodbye to fake, ought-to Jesus and meet the real one.."  She quotes Dudley Hall: "When you get miserable enough to die, you can be free.  Go ahead and live under the law - give it your best shot.  Ultimately the law will make you so miserable you'll want to die.  Then you will find that someone already died for you."

Hearing that was like a gigantic weight off my shoulder.  A breath of fresh air.  Somebody understands.  Somebody understands my weird, crazy self, and they have Jesus - real Jesus - to offer me in exchange.  "He is a generous, patient, compassionate God, and his expectations of us are not the same as our expectations of ourselves."

Seriously, this book just describes me to a T.  But not in a shaming way.  In a "Yes, it's terrible, go ahead and cry" kind of way.  To step out from behind our masks, to walk away from the "try-hard life", we're going to have to be vulnerable, we're going to have to get outside our comfort zone, we're going to have to believe that we're worth something. 

We're going to have to hear a little more law.  So let's dig into the Prodigal Son story. 

"Even though I know the Bible says I am not saved by my works but by faith, I still believe deep down that God is more accepting of those who perform well and do the right things than he is of those who do not.  And I believe that the bad girls shouldn't get the same rewards that the good girls get.  It's only fair...sometimes it doesn't feel fair that God seems to most powerfully use those who have chosen wrong and then come back again instead of those who did it right the first time.  Where is the celebration for us?"

But, she reminds us, this is not a good place to be: "my lack of common ground with the prodigal son has kept me from experiencing the limitless, compassionate love of Christ.  My unwillingness to admit my kinship with the prodigal, much like the older son, left me both right and lonely.  It caused me not only to be unwilling to receive forgiveness from my heavenly Father, but unable to freely offer it..."  The answer, of course, is that "He has always been with you, and all that is his is yours.  Are you willing to step into the celebration and receive the gifts of your inheritance, or are you hanging out with the servants outside the doors?"

How did we get here, outside the doors?  How did we fall into this weird sinful trap?  How did we come to believe that we had to do something, to be something?  Freeman takes a look at the story of the Fall.  Adam and Eve were made imago Dei, but Satan offered them the chance to be like God.  Wait, what?  "Satan was promising something to them that God had already graciously and lovingly provided.  Satan convinced them to forget God's gift and try to work for it instead....Satan had nothing new to give them that wasn't already theirs.  The only power he had was the power of the lie.  If he could trick them into forgetting that they were made in God's image, then he could get them to do crazy things, which is exactly what happened." 

This is what happens to us good girls.  Satan convinces us that we have to do crazy things to be accepted by God, and we fall for it over and over and over again.  "Where are you?  God asks, not because he doesn't know, but because he knows I have to come out of hiding in order to be found.  To be healed.  To be whole."

Which is precisely what this book is doing to me.  Dragging me out of hiding, where I can be healed. 

Part II to come. 

Something Good

So...I was trying to think of something good to write about, when suddenly it came to me: I preached in chapel this past week.  And I absolutely loved it.  It felt really, really good to be in the pulpit again, proclaiming God's word to people who were craving it.  Frankly, I was surprised by how good it felt. 

At the beginning of this school year, they offered the seniors a chance to preach, if we wanted it.  At the time, I was in my crabby Elijah-like mode ("God, I'm the only one left!), and I knew that if I took the chance to preach it would be all wrong - it would be about proving a point and having an agenda, and that is SO not the reason to preach.  So right away, I decided that I wouldn't do it.  But over a couple weeks, my heart kind of softened and I started to pray about it.  As in, I had one of those internal nudges that says, "Maybe you should pray about it."  So I did.  And I basically just said, "Ok, God.  If you want me to preach, you need to give me the text, and you need to give me the topic, because if I do it, it's just going to screw it up."  And lo and behold, over the course of this year, a text and topic slowly came to me.  It sort of evolved and refined itself, impacted by so many different events and experiences this year, until it was all just there.  And I kept thinking to myself, "I should go down to the chapel office and offer to preach sometime."  But I kept not doing it. 

Until a couple months ago.  I was having dinner with a friend, and relaying the end of this process.  "So, I'm thinking about preaching in chapel....I don't know...I told God he'd have to pick the text and the topic...but I don't know."  His response was, "So, do you have a text?"  "Yes."  "Do you have a topic?" "Yes."  "What's keeping you from doing this?"  "Um, walking over to the office and signing up." 

Ok, fine, God.  I'll do it. 

So, I did it.  I ditched the lectionary, and dove right into Matthew 8:1-17.  This was a good sermon, and it felt good to preach.  I don't say it was good as "look how awesome I am" kind of comment, but as a "look how awesome God is, because I certainly am not this awesome" kind of comment.  And I really never ever mail/email/publish my sermons, because, I don't know, it feels sort of arrogant.  But this one felt good, and it felt good to do it, and so I'm going to post the text.  It's behind the jump, so if you think it's lacking humility for me to put it out there, don't click on it, and pray that I would be convicted of the sin.  I beg your and God's forgiveness.  It just seems right, right now.