(Note: This blog entry is based on
the text for “God’s Work” originally shared on September 8, 2024. It was the 327th
video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced
with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
The official tagline of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America, my home denomination, is “God’s work. Our hands.”
It’s too long. Today, we’re going to find out why.
The official tagline of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America is “God’s work. Our hands.”
What’s a “tagline” you might ask, and how
does it differ from a “motto”, or a “slogan”, or a “catch phrase”?
Well, if you’re asking, I’m answering: “not
much”. Except that a “motto” might have a little more connection to your
core beliefs.
This coming Sunday is “God’s work. Our hands”
Sunday in the ELCA. It’s intended to be a day of service, though some churches
schedule it for a Sunday around this time. And, yes, for Christians, every
day is a day of service.
So why do we do it? Why is social
service the annual defining event of my denomination, as it says in the ELCA
toolkit for that day?
Well, it makes more of an impact when many
ELCA churches are doing it. And, if many are doing it at any time, it makes a
bigger impact in the community. And you can buy event T-shirts for $12.95.
Customized for a little bit more. 😊
It’s also a good tagline. It’s memorable and
it gives people good feelings and a sense that they’re doing something.
The world likes it because it tells them
that we do useful things. We help people. We help the environment. We aren’t
harmful. We save tax dollars by doing good works.
It can also provide an alternative to
sharing our faith. It gives people a chance to say things like, “I don’t talk
about my faith, I show it in the way I live”. It distracts us from the fact
that most of our churches have no expectation that people will be led by God
from zero to faith, from repentance to new life, and have no process for
leading them from convert to disciple if they did. The world gets kind of hostile
to us when we do that. Even some people in the Church oppose it. It’s way
easier to point to our good works.
And people get to quote Francis of Assisi
saying, “Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words.” Which he
never actually said, and which would be odd if he did say as he is only known
to us because he used a lot of words and a lot of words were
written about him. Because words are necessary. Sharing our faith is
necessary.
And this special day gives people a chance
to point to the end of Matthew in chapter 25, verse 40, where Jesus
says,
40 And the king will answer
them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who
are members of my family, you did it to me.’
As if that was the only thing that the Bible
says about salvation. Which is truly odd thing for a Lutheran to say. As if good
works could get us into heaven. As if they were ends in themselves and not an
expression of our ultimate end, salvation through faith in Christ, made
possible only by God’s grace, through the death of Jesus on the cross to
restore the living relationship with the one true living God for which we were
created. A gift.
Which brings us to this coming Sunday’s Gospel
reading that will be shared in the vast majority of churches all over the
world, Mark 7:24-37.
Jesus did great things for two people. He
cast a demon out of the daughter of a foreign woman because of the woman’s
faith. And He healed a deaf man with a speech impediment of both things.
Why? And why them and not everyone who was
oppressed by the consequences of human rebellion against God from the beginning
of Creation? Or just everyone in Jesus’ time, or just everyone in Israel, or everyone
in Galilee, or even just only all those in his hometown?
Jesus performed miracles, and the miracles
got word of mouth going around about who He was. But miracles aren’t about overcoming
the laws of nature. They are what John’s gospel often calls “signs”.
Jesus’ “signs” point to something. They
point to the way God Created the world to be in the beginning, and the way God
will restore all things to be in the end, in the new heaven and in the new
earth.
What’s in between? The greatest miracle of
all. Paul describes it in Romans 5:8-9,
8 But God proves his love for us
in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. 9 Much
more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved
through him from the wrath of God.
That’s the Good News! God made possible what
we had made impossible.
The Gospel reading for this Sunday begins
with the story about an outsider, the foreign Syrophoenician woman, in verses Mark
7:24-30,
24 From there he set out and
went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to
know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25 but a woman whose little
daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and
bowed down at his feet. 26 Now the woman was a
Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her
daughter. 27 He said to her, “Let the
children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw
it to the dogs.” 28 But she answered him,
“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 Then he said to her, “For
saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” 30 So she went home, found
the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
A non-Jew, a gentile
like us, received the miracle, the action of Jesus that points us to the way
that the world was intended to be and the way that it will be again in the new
heaven and the new earth. She was a foreigner, she did not keep the religious
Law, yet her daughter was healed instantly. Because of her faith.
Her faith, her
relationship with Jesus, fully God and fully human being, her connection
to God was all that was necessary.
But her daughter
wasn’t healed by the woman’s faith, she was healed by Jesus, the
agent of her relationship of faith. That faith made her part of God’s people.
We are God’s people
and, like the Syrophoenician woman, we have received mercy. Why? Not by
keeping letter of the religious Law, and not because of our good works. We
are not people of God because of who we are, but because of Whose
we are!
It’s not what
you know. It’s Who you know. And we have been given the gift to know
Jesus.
When our son James
was in the college application process, his school invited an admissions
officer from Stanford to come and explain how things work. She said that,
contrary to popular belief, they didn’t look for well-rounded students. She
said that their goal was to make well rounded student bodies, so that a-typical
abilities and experiences carried a lot of weight.
And then there are
the alternative admissions routes, like donating a big chunk of money, as we saw
in the college admissions scandals of a few years ago. Or, being a “legacy” kid,
that is, being related to people who attended that school. Legacies ensure that
the right kind of people will be admitted and that they will support the school
for generations. The supreme court has now made some kinds of preference
admissions illegal.
The Heaven
admissions process is not based on merit, or on bribes, or on who your parents
were/are, or on what you have or haven’t done. It’s based on the gift of new
life. It’s based on grace, and that grace is given on the basis of the great
gift of God revealed and given to us in the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.
All the Syrophoenician
woman had going for her was that she knew Jesus. She was connected by the gift
of faith. The connection that brings us life in His name.
Sally and I were in
Alaska about a year ago on our 40th wedding anniversary trip, and we
visited St. Michael the Archangel Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Sitka. After we
left the cathedral, we walked across the street to the Grandfather Frost
Russian Gift Shop. There was a sign prominently posted in the window near the
entrance that said, “We Support Ukraine.”
They wanted people
to know where their connections were.
Because connections
are important. They often define us.
Jesus reminds us in today’s
Gospel reading that we are called to do everything we do, including for others,
in response to the gift of salvation.
We are not to let our
works define us, because we are connected to God.
We are defined by
faith in our connection to God. That’s what produces what we do. It is all that
we need for this life and for the life that is to come. It’s “God’s Work.”
We see a similar
message in the second part of today’s Gospel reading, in Mark 7:31-37,
31 Then he returned from the
region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the
region of the Decapolis. 32 They brought to him a
deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his
hand on him. 33 He took him aside in
private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat
and touched his tongue. 34 Then looking up to
heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” 35 And immediately his ears
were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36 Then Jesus ordered them
to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they
proclaimed it. 37 They were astounded
beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to
hear and the mute to speak.”
Let me ask you a question.
If you had to lose one of your five senses,
sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, which sense would you least
want to lose. I think that most people today would say “sight”; we are a visual
culture. But in Jesus day it probably would have been “hearing”. People were
illiterate. Hearing was how most people learned.
And what does Paul say hearing comes
by? In Romans 10:17,
17 So faith comes from what is
heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.
It was a big deal that Jesus made a deaf man
hear.
But, by our customs, Jesus healing the deaf/mute
man was a little gross.
When you were a kid,
did anyone, usually a female relative, ever see dirt on your face and take out
their hankie, touch it to their tongue, and then use their saliva to clean off
the spot? Gross right? You probably make that “Ick!” face. But you were clean
and presentable. Jesus didn’t even use a hankie!
People back in
Jesus’ day believed that saliva had actual healing properties. Jesus used it as
a signal that a healing was about to take place.
It was a “sign”, pointing back to what God
intended in Creation before we messed things up, and forward to what God will
make it in the coming new heaven and the new earth. It was about the mighty
acts of God.
“God’s work.” Period.
As with Christian Stewardship, God doesn’t
need our money, but we need to give it because giving it is an expression of
our faith. God has changed us.
God doesn’t need our time or our talent
either, but we need to give it because giving it is an expression of our faith.
God has changed us.
Our hands, without God, don’t change
anything. They may give us the illusion of goodness, but our goodness can only
come from God.
Our tagline, “God’s work. Our hands.” is two
words too long.
“God’s work.” is everything. Creation, liberation
from slavery, the law and the prophets, the cross, the resurrection, salvation,
the gift of the Holy Spirit, the coming new heaven and the new earth, and more,
are all God’s work. They are all that’s necessary. It is what has accomplished
salvation for all who receive salvation in faith and are baptized. “God’s work.”
We just live in response to God’s work in a
natural and organic desire to make everything about this world more like
what God intended. Not because we get points for it, but because it is the
natural outcome of who we are. And because who we are is a product of Whose we
are.
Shohei Ohtani has been a superstar for the
Dodgers this year. Last week was Shohei Ohtani bobblehead doll night. People
stood in line in the heat for two hours to get one. I saw on TV that the cheap
seats for the game were around $125. But, if you went the next night and saw
the Dodgers play the same team, the Baltimore Orioles, the cheap seats
were around $25. So, you paid around $100.00 for that bobblehead. Now, you could
have sold it online and maybe you made $100.00, minus the cost of parking,
gasoline, and two hours out of your life.
People will spend their lives for very
little.
Our message is that there is something more.
Our faith is more than a signature word for
a friendly membership club. It is our word for “reality”. It is the only
means, by God’s grace, for salvation through Jesus Christ, as He said in John
14:6,
6 Jesus said to him, “I am
the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through
me.
Our faith is a gift that anyone can receive for a new start, a new life, because it’s not our work. It is “God’s work.”
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