Advent Lutheran Church

"Now I See! (First Lutheran, Tulsa)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            Since most of you don’t know me and I don’t know most of you, allow me to introduce myself.  My name is Roger Gustafson and I’m a pastor at Advent Lutheran Church in Olathe, Kansas, where your brother and sister Christians are gathering right now for worship.  I bring you greetings from them, and the assurance that you good people of First Lutheran here in Tulsa are in their prayers this morning.

            I’m here because following the departures of Pastor Jean and Pastor Todd your leadership felt that some immediate pastoral care of the congregation would be useful.  The interim bishop for this synod, Charles Maahs, is a member of my congregation and asked if I would assist in that regard.  I was happy to be able to do that, and have spent time since Thursday night in listening sessions with a number of you.  It is the intention that those sessions will continue with your interim pastor, Pastor Jepsen.

            One of the things I’ve learned in those listening sessions is that there is a tremendous amount of vitality in this congregation.  Yes, this is a sad time for some who might have been especially close to Pastor Jean and Pastor Todd, and it is a challenging time for the congregation as a whole as you work your way through the process toward new pastoral leadership.  You should know that your leadership team has committed itself to keeping you well informed about that process, and that in this interim period all of the ministries and worship life of the congregation will continue, because a number of people have been stepping up to offer their time and talent.  Yes, God has blessed you with tremendous energy.  That’s what makes this challenging time also a time of great possibility.  

So it’s a privilege to be here with you this morning and to share God’s word.  It’s also a relatively quiet time to be here: the Big 12 Basketball Tournament is a distant memory by now, and football hasn’t started yet, so there is peace in the Big 12 Conference.  We do share a love of our sports, don’t we?  And we share something else as well: because of our geographic location, we share some extremely interesting weather.

That fact was brought home to me a couple of years ago when an especially violent storm hit Kansas City.  This one was bad even by Tornado Alley standards.  It hit around 9:30 at night, so it was already dark.   Howling wind, driving rain, you know the story.  I was in absolutely the best possible place for a storm like that: I was standing in my garage, door wide open – I could see all the action, it was awesome!  The wind was as loud as a freight train (and you know what that means), the rain was coming sideways, sticks and small shrubs were flying by. 

My wife, meantime, was inside, glued to the TV.  She was paying special attention to that little strip that scrolls across the bottom of the screen.  That’s how she found out that a tornado had been spotted less than a half-mile from our house.  She came out into the garage, and said, “I think we should go down to the basement now.”

I said, “Oh, it’s not so bad.”  And no sooner were those words out of my mouth than the giant sycamore tree in our front yard uprooted and came crashing over.  I said, “But if you really want to, sure; we can go downstairs.”

So we went down to ride out the storm.  When it was over we came back up to inspect the damage.  I walked over to that sycamore tree, and it was very interesting: over the years the tree had sent out a network of roots that snaked out just under the surface of the soil, and the tree’s main taproot had extended straight down from the trunk and had sunk down into the depths of the earth, reaching for the deepest source of water and nutrients.  As the tree was fed in that way its branches grew and flourished.  In this particular case, the tree’s surface roots simply were not deep enough and the tree itself was too inflexible, so it toppled over.

But the principle in the growth of the tree parallels the life of faith: as we deepen our roots in God, our outward expression of faith becomes freer, more vibrant.  That’s what we see happening in our gospel lesson this morning, the story about the Man Born Blind.  His encounter with Jesus sets in motion a series of confrontations with various people in which the man’s faith and faithful witness increase.  First his neighbors want to know what happened, then the religious authorities demand some answers, and the questions become more and more hostile.  As they do and as the man responds, this man grows increasingly free from other people’s control and increasingly committed to Jesus.  This process of detaching from the human and attaching to the divine ends with the man’s confession of faith: “Lord, I believe.”  

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how the disciples view the Man Born Blind.  They have a question, a very human one: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  They weren’t necessarily looking for somebody to be the villain; it’s just that placing blame was a natural part of the process.  The question they asked Jesus was completely normal and expected in their cultural and historical context.  In their view, suffering was always a result of human sin.  That view was shaped by their reading of their Bible, what we know today as the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament.

In the book of Exodus, God says “I am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generations of those who reject me.”  According to that view, this man’s blindness was caused by the sinful behavior of his parents, or grandparents or even great-grandparents. They committed the sin; he’s paying for it.

But Scripture is not consistent on this point. Later on, in the book of the prophet Ezekiel, God says that “a child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own.”  According to that view, the responsibility has been lifted from the parents and grandparents, but it raises the possibility – strange to our ears – that the man’s blindness was caused by sins that he himself had committed while he was still in the womb.

Those were the only two options that the disciples could imagine as they tried to understand the man’s blindness. And so the question, Which was it? Who’s to blame here?

But Jesus tips over everybody’s working understanding of reality when he says, in essence, “Wrong question. There’s no fault here, no blame. This is a circumstance that God will use to reveal his creative and life-giving will for humanity.”  Jesus challenges our idea that when we assign responsibility or blame that we’ve somehow completed a process, we’ve somehow satisfied a requirement.   But when we settle for answering the “Who’s to blame?” question, we blind ourselves to the larger question, the question that Jesus asks: “What is God up to in this particular situation?”

“John and Mary got a divorce?  We’re shocked!  Who’s to blame?”  Wrong question.  Instead, what is God up to in this ending? How might God be planting the seeds of new life in this ending? How might God be using this ending as a passage to a new beginning for both of these people?  “Pastor Jean and Pastor Todd aren’t coming back?  What in the world happened?”  As irresistible as that question is, and it certainly must be answered with clarity and respect for all concerned, it is not the primary question.  Instead, what is God up to in this ending? How might God be planting the seeds of new life in this ending? How might God be using this ending as a passage to a new beginning for both of these pastors, and for this congregation of First Lutheran?

It is the Gospel truth that God’s perspective is different from our perspective, and Jesus is inviting us to operate with God’s perspective in all of life, and to do it by changing the subject of our questions.

A young man named Ernie Hinahosa was one of the most energetic young pastors I’ve ever met.  Fresh out of seminary, he was given the job of starting a mission congregation in downtown San Antonio.  He accepted the task with great anticipation and excitement.  A creative young man, Ernie rented a theater downtown for Sunday morning worship.  He got the place ready, recruited a core group of worshipers who helped him knock on doors downtown and in the surrounding suburbs, pulled together a worship band, got them rehearsed. 

The big day finally arrived, their first Sunday morning worship.  Ernie showed up at the theater early, made sure everything was set.  The worship band was in place, there was nothing more that could have been done in the way of preparation.  Ernie went backstage to one of the dressing rooms to get himself ready, and he began to worry.  “What if nobody shows up?  What if all of this getting-ready stuff has been for nothing?  What if this doesn’t work?  What if I fail?” 

So Ernie very tentatively stepped up to the curtain to peek around and see if any of the theater’s seats contained an actual person.  What he saw was very different: The place was packed!  Standing room only!

Ernie began to be terrified.  His knees started to knock as he made his way back to that dressing room.  He suddenly felt like a fresh-faced kid right out of seminary who was totally ill-equipped.  He fell to his knees and prayed, “God, I can’t do this.  I’m not smart enough, I’m not mature enough, I don’t know enough – I just can’t do this!”

And that’s when Ernie felt the voice of God speak to his heart: “Ernie, you’re absolutely right.  You’re not smart enough, you’re not mature enough, you don’t know enough.  But Ernie, whoever told you that this was about you?  This isn’t about you, Ernie, this is about me, so get up and get out there so I can speak to these people through you and so I can love these people through you.” 

From that moment on, Ernie felt a huge weight lifted from his shoulders as he refocused and connected with what God was up to in the world. 

The questions that we ask are important.  As you good people of First Lutheran enter a time of transition, I encourage you to ask particular types of questions, questions like “What is God up to in Tulsa, and how can we help?”  And I encourage you to shun other particular types of questions, like “How do we get more people in the pews? What services to we have to offer to be more attractive than the church down the street?”  Those are all questions that have to do with institutional survival, and at the heart of all questions of institutional survival is fear.

But we do not have a God of fear; we have a God of hope and new life and endless possibility.  “Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.”  God spoke those words through the prophet Isaiah to the nation of Israel at a particularly bad time in Israel’s history.  It was a time when all they had to hold onto was the past, because they couldn’t even imagine a future and wanted nothing to do with the present because they were in captivity.  And God chose then – exactly then – to announce a new vision: God’s vision for them.

I have to say that I’m proud of the leadership of this congregation.  They have labored long and hard on your behalf, seeking to do what they believe is faithful.  Their work is not finished; it will continue in partnership with an able and gifted interim pastor and under the influence and guidance of the Holy Spirit.  They will have to deal with questions that have to do with God’s desires for this ministry.  Those questions are yours as well, because there are no sidelines in the church, no bystanders; everyone is an active player.

So it’s worth asking: How would your life be different – today – if you changed the subject of your questions?  Instead of “What do I want?” or “What do I need?” or “What is my plan?”; how about “What does God want?”; “What does God need to have done here, and how has God uniquely placed me so that I can help?”  When we allow ourselves to become swept up into God’s mission to bless the world, we discover that we too are blessed.

Sometimes it helps to remind ourselves of who we really are in this world.  So to help us remember this morning, I’d like you to repeat four very brief phrases after me, and if it would help you to close your eyes to help you concentrate, please do so. And, if you would, place a hand over your heart, as you say:

I am baptized.
I am a child of God.
I am forgiven.
I belong to Jesus.

Thank you. And may God richly bless you today as you keep the questions clear, and as you live your identity in God’s world.  Amen.