(93) Toleration!

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Toleration!, originally shared on February 25, 2021. It was the ninety-third video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Is tolerance enough for Christians? What are the limits of tolerance? What do we have to offer the world that is better? Today we will look at how Christians are uniquely equipped for service in these days of pandemic and political turmoil?

   More than 50,000 people have died of the coronavirus so far in California, and more than 500,000 in the United States, which I suppose makes sense since California is about one tenth of our country’s population. In the middle of March, we are expected to have so much vaccine that many more people will be able to make an appointment at the public sites. However, and there always seems to be a however these day, variants of the coronavirus are emerging that bring into question how long we will be facing virus mitigating actions and restrictions. It’s both a hopeful and discouraging time, and many people are coming to the end of their tolerance. Of course, some people never were able to tolerate the new realities in the first place. And, the hardest part of a marathon is just before the last leg.

   I read once that there is a French saying that goes, “To understand everything (about a person), is to forgive everything.” This, of course, assumes that everyone has good intentions, and/or cannot be held responsible for their actions.

   We are taught from an early age to, at least, be tolerant. We are taught to be tolerant of people who are different from ourselves because it’s better for everyone that we get along and, well, they just can’t help it. Tolerance means that we should put up with things or people.

Tolerance is said to be one of the goals of a liberal arts education but, since that rarely happens anymore, we have seen a decline of tolerance.

   In fact, for Christians, it’s not enough to be tolerant. It never was. And that kind of tolerance has no integrity.

   The belief that all people are created by God as human beings in God’s image and therefore all people have the potential of a living relationship with the living God, that the common relation we have with from our common relationship with God in Jesus Christ produces our common relationship with all Christians, and our belief that we have been made children of God and are therefore brothers and sisters of one another, are ultimately expressions of love.

   The Christian ethic of both the love of God and love love of neighbor takes us way beyond putting up with people. The selfless love of God with which we are called to love even equips us to love our enemies.

   Paul writes to the church at Rome, the 1^st chapter, starting at the 9^th verse:

*Romans 12:9-21  

   Why do we care for our enemies in need? Because that would be heaping burning coals on their heads? Does that sound right to you? Many scholars have looked at this passage as being an example of a literal translation, that misses the dynamic equivalent. Have you ever seen someone who is truly embarrassed? Their face turns red, their ears turn red and the tips of their ears are even redder. The “burn” with embarrassment. That is the result and purpose of acting in love. It brings shame in an honor and shame culture that results in life transformation.

   That is what the love of God at work in us does. It brings forth transformation. It brings forth repentance. It brings forth forgiveness. And it brings forth more love.

   And it brings forth the limits of tolerance.

   The term “toleration” kind of sounds like a hillbilly expletive, but it’s actually a word. It comes from the Latin word “tolerare” and means “to put up with”. It means to tolerate actions or practices that a person considers to be wrong, but tolerable.

   Toleration is expected to be lived today on steroids. We are we are expected to endorse behavior that we may find problematic, and even to advocate for those whose world view is hostile to ours, even as they grow into the majority and then vote tolerance out of existence.

   There are many things that our culture has tolerated in many places that we no longer do, like racial prejudice, cruel jokes, sexual harassment, and behavior that demeans other people. At least, it’s no longer publicly acceptable. Respect for all people is fundamental to the Christian life.

   But respect for all people, as people, is not the same as toleration of all behavior, though the world and even many in the Church have ignored the difference in order to further their aims. There are limits, or better in today’s language that one colleague called, pastel prose, “boundaries”.

   Christians were persecuted in the first few centuries of life by the Roman Empire, but they weren’t persecuted because of their faith. Christians were persecuted because of their intolerance.

   The Romans could care less what their conquered peoples believed, if they believed that the beliefs of every other conquered people in the empire were just as valid. The expected all conquered peoples to believe the same of the religions of other conquered people, as well as those of the Romans. Any exception could threaten the unity and peace of the empire.

   The Romans and Greeks and their conquered nations had many gods. The stability of the Empire depended upon internal unity.

   Christians and Jews believed and taught that there was only one God. That made all other gods invalid, untrue, and without any actual existence. To make things worse for Christians, the Romans had a high regard for ancestors. Christians were seen as a sect that had broken away from the beliefs of their ancestors.

   And then the Romans declared that the Emperor was a god. Their subject peoples could believe in however many gods they wanted, as long as they also recognized the Roman Emperor as a god and worshipped him by at least throwing a pinch of incense into the flames in the emperor’s temples, to provide the glue that would hold the Empire together.

   Christians said no, and that the empire could not tolerate. They were persecuted for their insistence that there is only one God, and that this God entered human history in Jesus as fully God and fully human being and suffered and died for all humanity. That he had died on the cross, a punishment reserved for the worst of the worst, the penalty for treason. That he was the messiah. That the Kingdom of God was at hand.

   This was difficult even for Christians. I read once that archeologists could find no churches that were built in a cross-shape, or that had recognizable crosses within them, for the first few hundred years of the Christian Church. (It was kind of an embarrassment, the scandal, the skeleton in the Church’s closet. It would be, as Fr. Nicky Gumbel has said, as if people today were wearing little electric chairs around their necks and saying “Our god died in the electric chair for you. There would be kind of a stigma attached.) Christians often called themselves, “followers of The Way”.

   This was absurd to the Romans and intolerable to the empire. Christians were denied entrance into the army (the only path to public service jobs), they were imprisoned, tortured, and put to death, sometimes for entertainment in public spectacles. Christians persevered in their proclamation of the reality of God’s and said that it was better to be faithful without compromise, even if they were to lose everything.

   Suppose the circumstances of the Roman Empire were in force today in the United States. Is there any doubt that many voices, including the most progressive in the Church, would be calling for tolerance and acceptance of other religions?

   It happened in the first centuries. People would say, “Why should I and my family endure the consequences of persecution. I’ll throw the incense in the flame. God will know I don’t believe it in my heart,” and they avoided the pains. When the persecution ended, and those who had endured came back from prison, when the families of those who had suffered, even lost loved ones, where brought face-to-face with those who had taken the path of avoidance, what do you think happened? They were reconciled with one another. That’s not tolerance, that is love for the sake of Someone outside of ourselves.

   One of the contributions to this tension that Lutheran have made and which I believe needs to be better promoted and taken more seriously is the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. Simply put, it means that God reigns in this world through both the Kingdom of God in the Church and the Kingdom of This World through good government.

   What saves us is the acknowledgement that we are one nation “under God”. Without that clause, Christians would find it very difficult to live with integrity in any country.

   We, like the first Christians, believe that there is one true living God and that all others are false. The one true living God makes people uncomfortable because God calls us to be good citizens by recognizing that God reigns through both the civil and the religions expressions of God in the world. But, we all live under the judgement and grace of God.

   Let’s look at our current circumstances. How comfortable do you feel talking about your faith with someone who is not a Christian? How comfortable do you feel talking about your faith with someone who is a Christian? We are taught tolerance for the sake of national unity, not even cultural unity because that would be prejudice.

   How comfortable are you when you hear or read, “the one true living God?” Does it make you want to respond with the voice of the Church or the voice of the world?

   Tolerance is not the chief value of the enlightened. It is the chief value of empires, or of those seeking to build one.

   But Christians don’t live in empires. We live in a kingdom, the Kingdom of God. We don’t seek social or political uniformity.

   We seek a community built around another ethic, the ethic of love, love for one another, because we have first been loved by the one true living God.

   I appreciate the words of the president of the World Parliament of Religions, which gathers leaders of the world’s religions every 10 years, who opened one such gathering by saying something like, “Our task is not to agree with one another. Our task is to acknowledge that we have rival truth claims without killing each other.” To the world, that is a ridiculously low threshold for tolerance, but for people of all religions, that is a goal that has integrity.

   We don’t cast down altars. We tolerate that which we don’t agree with or even like. But, we also do not give up any of our beliefs in order to be accepted by our culture, to be thought of as good citizens, or avoid persecution.

   Is this a problem for making Christianity attractive to our cultures and country?

   But, we don’t attract people by pandering to them, at least not for long. We can make church members, but not Christians. We attract people by proclaiming something that is actually true, by faithfulness to our core beliefs. That is what make our faith go viral. It’s alive, it grows, and it reproduces.

   We are a particular people, called to an exceptional ethic. It is exceptional because it cannot arise from human selfishness. It can only come from God, because it is in the nature of God: Love. The kind of love expressed in the Greek word: agape. The kind of love with which God loves us, expressed mist plainly in the death of Jesus Christ at the cross so that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life forever, starting right now and extending in its perfection in the life to come.

   Let’s soak in those word of Paul in his letter to the Romans one more time:

*Romans 12:9-21

   We are people of the Holy Spirit, living water, the third person of the one true living God.

(92) The Temptations

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for The Temptations, originally shared on February 22, 2021. It was the ninety-second video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Do you think that Lent is a dark season about keeping random rules out of a fear of punishment? Think Again. Today we will consider the victory that Lent points to, and how we can live in its light.

   It’s been said that many people feel that the music that was the best is the music that was popular with their group in their youth because listening to it brings back memories and makes them feel young. Be that as it may, I think that The Temptations is the best R&B group in history, and that their greatest album is a tossup between The Temptations’ Greatest Hits and The Temptations Sing Smokey. There. I’ve said it. Let the disagreements fly.

   We are now past the First Sunday in Lent, the 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter that focus on introspection and sacrifice. Garrison Keillor, who wrote and spoke of the fictional Lake Woebegone on his radio show A Prairie Home Companion (of which it has been said that that if you think A Prairie Home Companion is a documentary, you might be a Lutheran), once said that, “For Lutherans, every day is Lent.”

   I suppose that he might have meant that many Lutherans are notorious for a certain reserve. I hope that it also means that Lutheran are known for a focus on the cross, the death of Jesus who was fully God and fully human, for the salvation of the world, that we were given the means by which to receive the gift of faith, a living relationship with the one true living God through grace of God, without any achievement of our own at all, the major themes of Lent.

   The First Sunday in Lent features a Gospel reading about Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry and the temptations by Satan that he faced in the wilderness to give up the road to the cross and ease into a more comfortable life instead. This year, it was the version from the Gospel according to Mark, the 1^st chapter, starting at the 9^th verse:

*Mark 1:9-15

   I shared a cartoon by Cuyier Black last week that I had found online. It showed a woman wearing a headscarf reading a note. The caption said, “It sure wasn’t easy being the mother of Jesus…” The note read, “Dear Mom, Gone into the wilderness for 40 days to be tempted by Satan. Don’t worry! xo J.”

   I suppose that wouldn’t be easy. Neither is resisting temptation.

   I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “I can resist anything but temptation.”

   I suppose there are some people like that who have no moral core, no sense of civic responsibility, no desire to act in response to the love of God in Jesus Christ shown on the cross.

   Like the pastor who needed to keep an appointment to visit to a member of her congregation before her church council’s meeting but could only find parking in a red zone outside the member’s apartment building. She parked there and put a note under her windshield wiper that read, “I’ve been driving around the block for 12 minutes. Please don’t give me a ticket. If I don’t park here now, I won’t be doing my job. ‘Forgive us our trespasses’.” When she returned to her car, she found a ticket and a note that read, “I’ve been driving around this neighborhood for 12 years. If I don’t give you a ticket now, I won’t be doing my job. ‘Lead us not into temptation’.”

   But most of us, I think, want to live lives that please God.

   In the Small Catechism by 16^th century Church reformer, Martin Luther, Luther explains the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation” or “Save us from the time of trial” with these words:

   “What is This? or What does this mean?  It is true that God tempts no one, but we ask in this prayer that God would preserve and keep us, so that the devil, the world, and our flesh may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great and shameful sins, and that, although we may be attacked by them, we may finally prevail and gain the victory.”

   I heard about a woman who had read

*1 Corinthians 10:13, “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” And she said, “I know that God won’t give us any more than we can handle. I just wish God didn’t think so highly of me.”

   We are going to pass 500,000 deaths in the United States from the coronavirus today. A key model used by the University of Washington predicts that there will be 90,000 more by June.  And yet, people still go around without masks, or practicing any of the well-known things that could easily lower that number. And, with the return of the 700,000 doses of the vaccine to areas like ours that had run out because of weather-related resupply issues, more people will be tempted to let their guard down, and more people will die.  

   Luther once said that, “You cannot keep birds from flying over your head but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.” We can’t keep from having thoughts that are contrary to the will of God, but we can keep from acting on them or allowing them to change who we are. We get this power from the Holy Spirit who strengthens us and shapes us. That’s why living water is used as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit in both the Old and New Testaments. Living water was a way to describe moving waters, like rapids in a river. It pushes things, it powers things, it shapes things, and the Holy Spirit does all those things to us, if we open our hearts, our true selves, to receive the gifts of God.

   How does God preserve and keep us? The Bible that points to Jesus Christ, and the Sacrament of Holy Baptism that makes us children of God and Holy Communion that reminds us that we are never alone. Our strength is God’s strength.

   We have the means to resist temptation not in ourselves, but in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, the person of the Trinity, the one God, who is God’s ongoing presence

   We are often tempted to rely on our own, however. We all pass the tests that we write for ourselves, like the guy who regularly brought donuts to the office, and ate most of them, until one day he announced that Lent was coming, and he was giving up donuts. The day after Ash Wednesday he arrived at the office with an arm full of donuts. One of his coworkers said, “I thought you said you were giving up donuts for Lent.” The many replied, “Well I was, but then on my way to work I was approaching the donut shop and I prayed, ‘Lord, if giving up donuts is not your will, please open a parking space for me in front of the donut shop.’” “So, there was a parking space?”, the coworker asked. “Well, yes,” he said. “But I had to drive around the block six times.”

   Jesus did not yield to temptation. He conquered it. In the letter to the Hebrews, the 4^th chapter, starting at verse 14:

*Hebrews 4:14-16

   The Gospel lesson for last Sunday, the First Sunday in Lent, that we read earlier is like a Gospel sandwich. The top layer tells of Jesus baptism by John in the Jordan river, and as he was coming out of the water “he saw the heavens torn apart”, and the Spirit descended on him like a dove, “And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Sight, touch, and heart. The whole Trinity was there, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

   The middle layer tells three things that happened to him in his 40-day experience in the wilderness: tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. And it tells us how he got into this. Satan didn’t send him there, it first tells us, “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”

   The bottom layer tells us, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

   Everything in this text points us forward to the work of Jesus, the light of the world, who shows us who God is and how God is disposed to us, on the cross. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  *John 3:16

   We are not Jesus. We are the servants, not the Savior. And we don’t always do the right thing. We don’t always resist temptation. And sometimes we are doing wrong when believe we are doing right. And sometimes we don’t know the difference, and other times we don’t care.

   By our Sin, we are separated from God.

   The Gospel, the reason it is literally good news (that’s what the word Gospel means), is that we don’t need to get better to be saved. To be saved we need a Savior. And we have one in Jesus Christ. The paradox is that the more we depend on Jesus, the more we are formed to live the life we are called to live, not because Jesus was strong, and has given us the Holy Spirit to help us in our times of being tempted to throw it all away.

   This final section tells us what to do. Jesus says, “Repent and believe in the good news.”

   That’s a great way to travel through Lent, even when we are providing essential services, or are safer at home.

   This Lent let’s make it a practice to spend time in self-examination and show our appreciation for what God has done for us in Jesus Christ at the cross in love for God and for one another. And, though the temptations to give up the narrow way and follow an easier path may come, let us be grateful that we are not alone. That we are never alone. That Jesus fights with us, and that Jesus, the light of the world, has overcome!

(91) Be Purple

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Be Purple, originally shared on February 18, 2021. It was the ninety-first video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Yesterday was Ash Wednesday. Most people marked it in their homes or in their cars. They missed seeing the color of the season: purple, unless there was a flash of it on their pastor’s stole. How purple are you?

   You may have heard that you only get out of something what you’re willing to put into it. Today, we’re going to see how, during Lent, you get much more.

   Yesterday was Ash Wednesday.

   Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the Easter Cycle. The Easter Cycle, like the Christmas Cycle, begins with a season of preparation, a season of the event itself, and a season of reflection on the event.

   Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, the season of preparation for Easter, lasting 40 days.

   Forty days is a significant number in the Bible. It is the number of days that Jesus, Moses, and Elijah fasted in the wilderness during which Jesus was tempted by the devil, a text most churches will read this coming Sunday.

It’s the number of years that the nation of Israel wandered in the wilderness after being liberated from slavery in Egypt.

It’s the number of days between Jesus’ resurrection and ascension,

It’s the number of years that Saul, David, and Solomon reigned over Israel, and more.

   Ash Wednesday is the day that the new season of Lent gets its color: purple.

   Ash Wednesday can be the beginning of a new life for you, or deepening a renewal of a life you have already been given in Jesus Christ.

   The question is, “How purple are you?”

   Lent is a wildly misunderstood season.

   Lent is a season when some people give up something, as a sacrifice like that of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

   It can include giving up something that we are doing that is bad for us, like smoking, or overeating, or being sedentary, or alcohol, or the materialism of retail therapy, and so on. Or it can be giving up something we that like, like Diet-coke or chocolate. That’s what Mardi Gras used to be about. “Mardi Gras” is French for “Fat Tuesday”. It started as the day when people would give up using fat for Lent. The Tuesday before Ash Wednesday was the day to use it all up. Then it became a day to cook extravagant meals with the fat. Then it became a day to party. Then it became a day for entertainment. Then it became a pretty much secular day for debauchery.

   Other people don’t subtract, but add something like, being a more generous giver, spending more time in prayer and Bible study, doing God’s will for the poor, contacting the isolated, reconciling with relatives and friends, and so on.

   What Lent is not is something we do to impress people or to “virtue signal”. All we can do in Lent is act in response to and in gratitude for what God has already done for us. It’s a time to focus on that and be renewed or to deepen our shade of purple.

   The Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday is from two sections in the Gospel according to Matthew, the 6^th chapter, starting at the 1^st verse:

*Matthew 6:1-6; 16-21

   The coronavirus is now in decline, but it’s still bad. But, this is still 2021 so something else seems to have thrown a wrench into the works and, today, it’s the weather. The uncharacteristic cold that has gripped Texas and points east have put people in a very dangerous place. People are gathering wherever they can find heat. They are unable to get to vaccination centers. And the dangerous road conditions have stopped new deliveries of that vaccine.

   Here, our weather is fine and temperatures might get in to the 80’s. But, as one of the local newspersons said on TV this morning, this is not the time to gloat. People aren’t just uncomfortable. There is some real suffering in Texas and beyond.

   And here, large gatherings are still taking place, people are still walking around without masks or practicing social distancing, and we still haven’t felt the full force of people’s indifference to practicing safer behavior on St. Valentine’s Day.

   There is good news today, however. Remember the flu? I read this morning in “Morning Brew” online that, as of last week, the CDC reported that there have been 165 flu-related hospitalizations in the whole country since last October. In the previous flue season, there were 400,000. “Flue has been essentially nonexistent,” infections disease expert Dr. William Schaffner told NPR.”

   Why? Because all of our efforts to fight the coronavirus. Reducing hospitalizations from the flu wasn’t an end in itself, but a byproduct. Like the good works we do in Lent. They are not the purpose of Christianity, but a result of it.

   The color purple that we use as the color for Lent is significant.

   It’s the color of the robe that the Roman soldiers threw around Jesus while thy were torturing him before his crucifixion. It was their way of mocking the claim that he was a king. That was when they placed a crown made of thorns on his head (John 19:1-5).

   Purple could only be worn by the royals and the uber rich in Jesus’s day. It was made from crushed seashells that could only be found in the right conditions in a few areas. It was very expensive and never faded.

   It’s the color of the dye sold by Lydia, in wealth woman who became an fervent early Christian, the first to be baptized with European waters, and provided hospitality and possibly a place for community worship in her home.

   In popular culture, The Color Purple is a book by Alice Walker that became a Broadway play and a movie with Oprah Winfrey.

   On the other end of the spectrum, it’s the color of Barney, the purple dinosaur.

   It is also the color of rain in an enormously popular song by the artist Prince. And that brings us back to Lent.

   Lent is a time not for Purple Rain, but for Purple Reign.

   It is the time to come to the reign of God.

   It is a time to deepen the shade of purple from pastel pink to deep purple, to color our behavior with the blood of Jesus, to live in response to God’s gift for us on the cross, to take away distractions and give time to the shaping of our true selves as servants of God, redeemed by Jesus, and shaped by Living Water, the ongoing personal presence of the power God in the person of the Holy Spirit.

   Lent isn’t about what you do. It’s about who you are in Jesus Christ. It’s about the gift of God’s grace at the cross, the power of the Holy Spirit to make of us a new creation, God’s people, born again. It’s about a time of focus, meditation and growth, a time when we get so much more than we give, because God’s presence is so much more that we can ask or imagine.

   The color purple is expensive. Lent leads us to a reminder of just how expensive it was at the cross and, in Lent, we respond by living in response to the love and presence of God for the sake of others and sharing our faith with others generously and at some cost. And, like the love of God, it never fades.

    This season, this 40 days, this Lent, wherever and whatever you are: be purple. And, if you are already purple, pray that God would make of you a darker shade.

(90) Something Pure

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Something Pure, originally shared on February 15, 2021. It was the ninetieth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Do you long for something pure, something real, in your life? You might already have it. Today, we’re going to take a look at living through this pandemic in a way that gives our lives meaning.

   There were just under 2,000 of new cases of COVID-19 reported yesterday in LA County, and 82 deaths. Things are better but, with those kinds of numbers still being reported, they aren’t good.

   Timothy Keller, a widely respected Presbyterian pastor and author, who developed a growing church approaching mega-church status, I think, in Manhattan recently tweeted, “Both secularism and devout faith are growing. What's going away is the mushy middle of everyday religiosity.”

   I haven’t really seen the shift happening, but then we don’t get out much these days.

   If it’s true I think that things are better for the Church, but they, like the pandemic, still aren’t good.

   I would hope that church attenders in that “mushy middle” might be changed into people with “devout faith”. But I can’t say that I see it happen much after people became comfortable with a kind of cultural Christianity, a veneer that looked real but peeled away with a little pressure. Though I’m hopeful that it could happen.

   I can’t tell you how often I felt like Charly Brown trusting Lucy not to, once again, pull back the football he was charging forward to kick. For example, when I was asked to preside at a wedding for people who were not church members, but who I thought were interested in becoming a part of the community that supported the worship building and the grounds in which they wanted to be married. It rarely happened but, every time I thought, “This time it’s going to be different!”

   But if it is true, that the church is losing the “mushy middle of everyday religiosity”, does it mean that the Church is becoming something purer? Only God knows.

   I do know that mediocrity is not a Christian value. In fact, in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, which describes the return of Jesus and the last judgement in highly symbolic terms, judgement falls on various churches, including this on the church of Laodicea in Revelation 13, starting at verse 3:

*Revelation 3:14-22

   The Laodiceans were rich but believed that they could depend on themselves for the things they truly needed. Jesus urges the church to turn to him. They are the only church of the seven churches in this section of the book, about whom no good word is said.

   What do we need to be more pure? Two things. Soap and water.

   Soap makes us clean by using itself up. Every time we wash, the soap is used up. This is like the cross. Jesus died on the cross, he uses himself up to make us clean, to take away the sin that separated us from God. He made us clean so that we could be in the presence of the one true living God and that the holy God could dwell within our hearts, our true selves. We are therefore God’s saints.

   We see who Jesus is on Mt. Tabor, in the gospel reading for last Sunday, the Sunday of the Transfiguration, the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany. Mt. Tabor isn’t much of a mountain, but it stands out on the plain near Nazareth. I climbed it when I was a student on a semester abroad in college and it’s no big deal.

   Jesus is on the mountain top with three of his disciples, Peter, James and John. “And he was transfigured before them,” the Gospel reading in St. Mark 9:2-9 that was read last Sunday said. He took on some of his heavenly appearance, and Moses and Elijah appeared, and they spoke together, and his disciples start babbling in terror. Then, it got worse for the disciples. A cloud overshadows him and a voice from the cloud says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” And then, suddenly, they way no one with them any more, but only Jesus”. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus tells the three disciples not to tell anyone about this, “until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” That resurrection validated what happened on the cross. The Law and the Prophets represented by Moses and Elijah, disappear in the presence of Jesus. We are free of them. The Word of God, Jesus, reveals this to us.

   But we are still sinners. We still do the things that defy and therefore separate us from God.

   Water is the means by which the power of the cross is made manifest in our lives, a theme of these final days of the season of Epiphany.

   Water in our baptisms that, as Martin Luther describes in his Small Catechism, “brings about forgiveness of sins, redeems from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe it, as the words and promise of God declare.”

   Streams of living water that is the Holy Spirit, that shape and nourish us for the work God mission work God has given us.

   The reality of who we are as a new Creation, people who have been born again. People who are like water in the presence of Jesus Christ, the Light of the World.

               Through whom sometimes the light shines.

               From whom sometimes the light is reflected.

               And, into which our essential “shape” takes on the shape of that which contains us, the steadfast love of the one true living God.

   This is the one, true and certain thing in our lives. The love of God shown at the cross of Jesus.

   This is the nature of the one faith that unites us, that calls for no mediocre lives, but lives that are luminous with the light of God in Jesus Christ, the Light of the World.

   This is the one hope that we share, that sustains us through the vicissitudes of this current pandemic and this present age, all temporary.

   This is the water and the Word. The things that bring us into the eternal presence of the living God, who alone can make us pure, and does so in Jesus Christ.

   Pray for that, or say your gratitude to God for that, today.

(89) Less is More

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Less is More, originally shared on February 11, 2021. It was the eighty-ninth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   What if the most important personal value of our culture is upside down? It is. Today, we’ll find out how to set it right.

   Cases of COVID-19, hospitalizations and death are all down, and vaccinations are now available.

   But, it’s 2021, or 2020 The Sequel, so there has to be a grey cloud behind that silver lining. And that gray cloud is that there are not enough vaccine doses for everyone who qualifies in this current early phase, to get one. The second dose of the vaccines currently being given in the field are time-sensitive. They have to be given about three weeks after the first, so they have been reserved for those who have been given the first doses.

   Everyone else is waiting. How a first world country like ours came to this juncture is a sad tale, but it’s our present reality. It diminishes our self-image which, in our culture, is everything.

   There are few personal values that are more valued and protected than feeling good about ourselves. It is at the pinnacle of the scale of values for the most popular religion in America today: Moralistic, Therapeutic, Deism. I did a video on this a while ago called Pop Religion, and you can find a pretty good Wikipedia article on it. I’ll put links to both below.

Pop Religion Video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiYFJhQSkjU

Wikipedia Article on MTD:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism

   And yet, that value is misplaced. It is the reverse of what Jesus calls blessed in his most famous sermon, The Sermon on the Mount.

   Here’s some of it from Matthew, chapter 5, starting with the 1^st verse:

*Matthew 5:1-12

   Do these traits strike you as what the world would called “Blessed” or what some translations of the Bible call “Happy”?

   Nope. They couldn’t be more counter cultural.

   Why? Do they describe the best way to live? No. It’s because they are the conditions that don’t point to self-satisfied success in this world, but in the recognition that, with no where else to GO, we need a Savior. And that we have one in Jesus Christ.

   When do we pray more, when things are going just fine, or when they are falling apart?

   Which is more likely to lead us to Jesus, positive self-esteem, or feeling like there is nowhere else to turn?

   The history of Israel demonstrates a pattern: The people of God experience prosperity and security and forget about God; things fall apart and they remember God; God saves them and they begin again to experience prosperity and security and forget about God.

   Finally, God comes and breaks the cycle. God acts unilaterally and saves Jew and non-Jew alike, not by keeping a covenant but through a relationship of faith, a living relationship, sealed in our Baptisms.

   Jesus once told this parable:

*Luke 12:15-21

   So, if both our personhood and our livelihood are lived as being wholly dependent on God, who am I and where is my true self.

   Paul writes to the Church at Colossae, the Colossians, in the 3^rd chapter, starting at the 2^nd verse:

*Colossians 3:2-4

   The scale of our lives is not apparent. It is hidden, hidden with Christ, who is coming to judge the world.

   My favorite sports quote comes from comedian Jerry Shandling, who once reflected on Leo Durocher, the ruthless coach of the Dodgers when they were the Brooklyn Dodgers, and who said, “Nice guys finish last.”

   Gary Shandling said, “Nice guys finish first, and anyone who doesn’t know that doesn’t know where the finish line is.

   The Christian life is lived in many paradoxes: the more I give the more I have, I am both a sinner and a saint, and this one: the less I focus on myself the more I am my true self, the more I depend upon God the more free I am.

   The difference in all these things is the love and steadfast love of God expressed most wholly at the cross, and the gift of a living relationship with the one true living God (that is, faith), given by the Holy Spirit, God’s ongoing personal presence for good in the world, what the Bible describes as like streams of living water, nourishing, unpredictable, and transformative.

   Let this be your Dependence Day. Place your trust in God and not in the world. Seek God’s affirmation and not your own. Prepare the way for Jesus in others and make your affirmation that of John the Baptist’s in John 3:30: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

   This is the upside-down version of the world’s focus on having a positive self-image and feeling good about one’s self. It’s not, though, that Christians don’t value these things. We reject their pursuit as ends in themselves, on the focus on the self. Instead, they are the byproducts of lives lived with a focus on others. In addition, our focus is not on personal happiness, but on joy that is foundational to the Christian life, even when we aren’t feeling particularly good about ourselves or our place in what the world values.

   Little David killed a giant with a sling and stone, 5000+ people were fed with 5 loaves and 3 fish, Gideon’s army of 300 defeats a vast army of Midianites, one jar of oil paid humongous debts. All these things, though small, were mighty because God is mighty.

   Jesus says we are like salt, light and leaven, which change everything around them even in small amounts because our character as agents of change comes from God. We have been made a new creation. We have been born again.

   Confess your sin before God turn away from it. Believe in Jesus Christ and his power to save you. Receive the living presence of the living God.

   You cannot save yourself by your own efforts, but God will save you. Be mighty because God is mighty. Empty yourself to be filled with God.

   Less is more.

(88) Believing & Seeing

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Believing & Seeing, originally shared on February 8, 2021. It was the eighty-eighth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   It’s been said that “seeing is believing”. Is it? Today we’re going to look at both the truth and the limitations of that statement, and how the statement “believing is a way of seeing” is also true and limited. And, how we can benefit from both ways of seeing.

   Remember the two-colored dress controversy. It was a picture online of a dress which some saw as black and gold, and others saw as white and blue. Others have popped up since.

   People looking the same image see it very differently based on how the brain “sees” color in light.

   I posted a picture yesterday of what look like two cushions, one grey and one white. Yet, if you put your finger over the line in between, they both appeared to be grey.

   One commenter on another site said that, “Shading influences your eye. Kinda like truth. It can be distorted depending on how it’s shaded.”

   Is seeing always believing? Can our senses always be trusted? Is truth what we see or what we believe?

   It’s been said that we don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.

   It can be argued that the role of science is to force us to not do this, but to see things as they are.

   And that’s possible, up to a point. After that, we see things in light of certain assumptions about the way the world works.

   Science also seeks to remove the assumptions that aren’t true.

   But, it can only do that under the assumption that the only things that are real and true are the things that can be measured numerically or confirmed physically.

   Everything can be described and measured numerically or confirmed physically on a superficial level. After that, we have to start making non-scientific philosophical assumptions, such as that nothing exists that can’t be understood numerically or physically, which seems to be just to convenient. That is, that we always pass the tests that we write for ourselves.

   For example, if everything has a cause, what is the first cause?

   If beauty can be completely described with mathematics, why does it inspire?

   Where does the inspiration for double-bind experiments come from, and why?

   What do you see when you look at a stained-glass window? If it’s daytime and you’re looking at it from the outside, you see a dark brown blob. If you’re looking at it from the inside, you see colors and patterns, and meaning. If it’s nighttime, the opposite is true.

   Day or night, what is making the difference? The light.

*John 8:12  Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

   Science gives us one kind of factual knowledge. It uses principles that have been shown to be consistent in the material world to describe the material world. That’s all it can do. It can’t speculate on the purpose of life or what exists that cannot be measured and therefore controlled. It can’t say that a thing cannot exist because it can’t be described with material laws. It can’t say something has no meaning because it has no measurable form.

   The contribution of science has been a blessing and a curse on the human race. Look at where we are in the pandemic. We are happy that science is focused on an effective vaccine to thwart a global pandemic, and not another weapon of mass destruction like, say, a biological weapon, for example.

   There are lots of people floating all kinds of theories about the origin of COVID-19, the reason for its spread, the nature of the vaccine. What science has done for us is give us easily verifiable reasons for having confidence in effective means for slowing the spread of COVID-19 like wearing masks, washing or sanitizing our hands regularly, maintaining social distance, avoiding crowds, staying at home unless providing an essential service or seeking one, and so on, more reliable treatments, and vaccines that will stop it in its tracks. People have lots of opinions about these things, and everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. Sally and I have received our first vaccine doses and will get our second in a few weeks.

   Revelation is another kind of knowledge. It is a kind of knowledge that can only be revealed by God. Its contributions have also been a blessing and a curse, as by itself, it is very difficult to tell who is telling the truth.

   And, the stakes are high. Who does and does not speak for God?

*Deuteronomy 18:18-22

   You tell who is speaking for the Lord by seeing if what they prophecy takes place or proves true.

   But, how do we do that in real time? What would you make of this story, and the many like them?

   I read a feature in Readers Digest a few years ago called something like, “The Best Salesman I Every Knew”.

   In one of the stories, a man told of being a new employee on the sales team of a company with an excellent sales department. He was sent out to shadow one of their best sale persons.

   One of their company’s clients was a small church in the rural south. The two salesmen attended an evening meeting of the board to make their pitch in back corner of the worship space. When their presentation was finished, the president of the board said that he needed to bring the matter before the Lord.

   He excused himself and went to the altar and prayed.

   The president returned and said, “The Lord said, ‘Wait’”.

   The supervising salesperson excused himself and also went to the altar and prayed.

   Then, he returned and said, “He’d like to speak with you again.”

   Did the salesperson speak with the Lord? Did the Lord change his mind? If not, do you think God is pleased by this kind of cynicism. Seems kind of self-serving on the part of the salesman, but how would you know?

   Reason and Revelation.

   Reason and revelation can both be our guides but they both need to be rooted in the truth.

   We use our reason and seek God’s revelation. We look to our experience and to the Word and the Sacraments, with one as a check on the other.

   And, we exercise humility, knowing that, as Paul writes at the end of 1 Corinthians 13, verse 12:

   For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

   How do we know the truth?

*John 18: 37-38   Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belong to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

Jesus answered a few chapters earlier in the Gospel of John, we see the conversation with Jesus’ disciples:

*John 14:5-6 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one come to the Father except through me.”

   How do we seek the truth? You’ve heard that phrase, “the truth will make you free” it comes from the Bible and is usually quoted out of context and thrown in our faces. Here is in its context, just a few chapters earlier from the verses we just read:

*John 8:31   Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

   The truth is a person, not a proposition. How do we determine the truth?

   How do we determine the truth?

   We don’t. We discern the leading of God, the Holy Spirit. Yes, that is very subjective but that’s how God works, with people. We consider the whole testimony of the Bible, the witness of the Church, our reason and the voice of God within us, through Creation that declares the majesty of God, Jesus, the Light of the World, and through the Holy Spirit, the streams of living water.

   That is the blessing of both reason and revelation, seeing and believing, comes from the eyes to see and the ears to hear the movement and the voice of God.