July 2016

The other day I heard a report on NPR about the unforeseen problems that were growing out of a new kind of nuisance ordinance that many city councils had recently adopted.   In essence these ordinances allowed for fining a landlord if the number of times the police were called to his rental properties exceeded a certain limit.  The intent of the law was to enhance the landlord’s awareness and engage the landlord’s participation in the happenings of the neighborhoods.  It was supposed to be a way to discourage slum lords who simply collected their rents and neglected their properties.

However, despite the best intention of the city councils which adopted these ordinances, these laws were inadvertently making life harder for many of the tenants who occupied the apartments of the landlords who were being fined.  Landlords fearful of being fined would evict tenants who were close to exceeding their amount of police calls and that made the tenants reluctant to report crime.  In one situation a single mother was afraid to call police to remove an abusive ex-boyfriend from her apartment because she feared being evicted.  Caught between the rock and hard place of having to choose between making space for her abusive former partner and homelessness, she chose the former.

It is yet another example of how, despite our best intentions, our attempts to legislate good behavior sometimes end up creating an opportunity for more bad behavior.  The law is rarely an effective tool to transform bad behavior, it is primarily a tool to identify and punish it.  It seeks to build a fence around bad behavior to try to contain it, but it cannot change the hearts of people who engage in it.

Jesus made the same point again and again in his conversations with the Pharisees and scribes.  Laws that were supposed to ensure that people would respect the holiness of God (observing the Sabbath, following rules about ritual purity, etc.) often had the effect of isolating and diminishing the people who through no fault of their own were deemed unclean.  In short, obeying the law sometimes led to committing a more egregious wrong against another human being.

Mark 3:1-6 describes one such situation.  A man with a withered hand comes to the synagogue to worship on the Sabbath; Jesus sees him and reaches out to heal him.  Out of the corner of his eye, Jesus sees the “religious police” just waiting to accuse him for violating the laws about not performing a healing on the Sabbath.  So Jesus poses the obvious question to them: “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?”  It’s a good question; but the legalists, caught between their own rock and hard place, refuse to engage the question and meet Jesus’ query with silence.   So Jesus, by Mark’s report, “looked at them with anger. . . , grieved by their hardness of heart.”  And with this fury in his eyes he says to the afflicted man, “Stretch out your hand,” and the man’s hand was restored.

Jesus’ point is pretty clear.  Law that is not informed by the greater law of love and respect, has no power to restore.  It is, as St. Paul points out, a “stern tutor” who identifies  the wrong, but has little to offer when it comes to the work of making things right.  Religious laws are very good at doing the work of pointing out what is wrong.  But transforming hearts to the point that human beings desire to do what is right, is another matter altogether.  And Jesus is about this very thing.  For the Gospel (good news) that Jesus came preaching was that life is about much more than simply avoiding wrong; it is instead a matter of answering the invitation that God has been issuing since the beginning of time, to take up and rejoice in all that is right.

Dave Rohrer, 7/1/2016

June 2016

I have a friend who, when he tells the story of how he came to faith, speaks of reading the Gospel of Mark for the first time and being “absolutely captivated by the person of Jesus.”  He was a freshman in college and taking a Bible as Literature course.  He had come from a family where faith was not a part of the mix and this was his first exposure to the Bible.  The assignment was to read the Gospel of Mark in one sitting and as he read he became more and more fascinated by the character of Jesus.  The one about whom this story was written became someone he wanted to know more about.  More specifically, as he read Mark’s Gospel, Jesus became someone my friend wanted to know.

As someone who grew up hearing the stories about Jesus in Sunday School, my experience of the Bible was very different from my friend’s.  By the time I was a freshman in college I had pretty much come to the place of disregarding the Bible.  Jesus wasn’t fascinating to me, he didn’t captivate me.  Sure, I knew the stories about him.  But they had long since ceased to have any power in my life.  I held those stories in an archive of my imagination that I felt no need to access.  Like old yearbooks or trophies stored in a box in the attic, the Bible was a part of my history I could not bring myself to throw away, but it was also something I had no need to display on the shelves of my present life.

As I compare the very different stories of these two college freshman there is an element that unites them.  Quite simply, if we are going to have an adult faith, we are going to have to engage Jesus as an adult.  And when we do this, when we sit down and actually read the entirety of Mark’s Gospel in one sitting, when we see how remarkable and strange, how compassionate and driven, how mysterious and present, how loving and brutally honest the Jesus of the Gospels is, we can’t simply relegate him to some distant corner of the attic of our memory and imagination.   We either need to deal with him or reject him.

“Deal with me.”  I think it is another way of rendering the more familiar invitation that Jesus issues when he says, “Follow me.”  “Come and see what I am up to.  Come and be a part of what I am doing.  Take the risk of looking at the world through a different set of lenses and experience the joy that comes with accepting this challenge.  You were meant for something so much more than what you have come to be.  So come away from what is less than the best and follow me.  Walk with me and walk toward life.”

This summer in my sermons I want to take some time to explore Mark’s Gospel.  It’s hard to read Mark’s rendering of Jesus’ story and think about Jesus as someone who could fit in our hearts.  It is more of a tale of one who invites us into his heart.  It is not a story about finding a safe place as much as it is about stumbling along behind and working to keep up with one who is leading us on an adventure.  So I’d like to challenge you take on the same assignment made by my friend’s Bible Lit.  teacher.  Set aside a few hours and read the book of Mark in one sitting.  Let’s read Mark and accept the challenge of dealing with Jesus.

Dave Rohrer, 6/1/2016

May 2016

I pride myself on the ability to pronounce people’s names, especially Germanic sounding last names.  Somehow I think three years of high school German qualifies me for this.  However, our congregation has presented me with some challenges to this self-understanding.  The first time I publicly pronounced Walchenbach, I dutifully pronounced the “W” using the English sound we ascribe to the letter “v” and the “ach” with the guttural sound one makes when clearing the throat.  Jim let me know that a more anglicized version with a lot less throat clearing would be preferred.  Then I spent about a month referring to Mark and Marin Kaetzel and their sons as the KATEzels rather than the way they pronounce the name, which rhymes with “pretzel.”

Of course in both cases I still contend that I was perfectly justified in my mispronunciation; if we were in Germany, that is.  In the case of the Kaetzel’s, I remember explaining my faux paux to Mark.  I let him know that many German families who came to America transliterated the umlaut over the “a” (i.e. Kätzel) as an “ae” for an English spelling, thus trying to preserve the German pronunciation and this is why I pronounced it the way I did.  When I said this he graciously replied, “No problem, you were just overthinking it.”

Yes indeed, I was overthinking it.  Perfectionists tend to do this.  We like being right; so we learn the rules and then show off by letting other people know that we know them.  But sometimes the rules we have gone to the trouble to learn don’t apply, or different rules apply, and our “rightness” suddenly becomes wrong.  In this case, what might have been true in Germany, was not true here.  The fact that I was “right” was totally irrelevant to the situation here and now.   The way I was pronouncing those names was being controlled more by etymological abstractions  than by my relationship with the people to whom those names belonged.

And there is the moral of this story: relationship often trumps our rules.  And thank God it does.  Being right has certain benefits, but sometimes insisting on being right bears the fruit of being alone.  Insisting on our rightness can actually alienate us from others.  Insisting on calling someone by a name they do not call themselves is not a great way to build bridges.

The word “righteousness” gets thrown around quite a bit in religious communities.  Often we associate this word with the state of being right.  We think of people as being righteous if they know the rules and are good about following them, and also perhaps good at noticing when someone else isn’t following them.  By this definition someone who is righteous isn’t very good at relationship.  The irony here is that this way of using the word righteous is the exact opposite of what the Bible means when it uses the word.  In the Bible, the word righteous means being in right relationship with others.

The way of Jesus is a way of relationship.  He doesn’t hand us a rule book and say, “Here, memorize this, and I’ll be back to test you on what’s here.”  Instead he says things like, follow me, abide with me, and come and see.  He doesn’t set out to teach us how to be right.  He teaches us how to be in relationship.  On the way of Jesus, one rule is the lens through which we see all the other rules: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

Dave Rohrer, 5/1/2016

April 2016

In the Easter season the talk in the church is often framed in terms like renewal and new life.  We link resurrection with the season with Spring.  The images of bulbs blooming and dormant perennials springing to life become a means of representing new life in Christ.  Yet the springtime metaphors of butterflies breaking free of their cocoons and animals emerging from their winter hibernation don’t really do justice to what we are celebrating in the wake of the Resurrection of Jesus.  For what we are celebrating is not merely a continuation of the cycle of life, but a reordering of life itself; not the perpetual renewal of life as we have always known it, but the advent of an entirely new way of living.  A remaking of all things.

St. Paul sums it up well when he writes in 1 Corinthians 15, “Death is swallowed up in victory” and has therefore “lost its sting.”  In other words, because of the resurrection of Jesus, instead of an expectation of death, there is an expectation of eternal life, and that new perspective has a dramatic impact on the way we live our lives in the here and now.

The resurrection of Jesus reveals and disarms a lie that undergirds the way we configure our lives in a fallen and unredeemed world.  Eugene Peterson sums up this lie in his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction when he describes the primary motivators of our lives in this fallen world as “being in control rather than being in relationship [and] exercising power rather than practicing love.”(p.147)

When we live with the assumption that the acquisition of control and power are the keys to success, we live propelled by fear.  Fear of our own death and the need to gain power and control over the things that might hasten our death, takes all of our energy.  Protecting life becomes more important than living it.  The vulnerability and openness required for relationship and love have little room to grow in a world where our primary task is to be vigilant about the things that will merely insure our protection and safety.

When Jesus says “Follow me,” he is inviting us to explore this new life.  He is calling us to turn from a fear of death and trust that God has “delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom if his beloved Son.” (Col. 1:13)  There is a risk inherent in that invitation.  It is the risk of letting go of the lie that keeps us bound to a fear of death and reordering our lives around the truth that can free us to live an abundant life.  It’s the risk of embracing a truth that initially makes life feel a bit dangerous and wild.  But in the final analysis it’s the risk of giving up the power and control that we could never really keep in order to gain the love and relationship that will never go away.

Dave Rohrer 4/1/2016

Lent 2016

As a pastor one of the great comforts in my work, as well as one of the great challenges, is the way this work is framed by the rhythm of the Christian Year. Each year we move through the story of redemption as we walk through Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost and Ordinary time.  The calendar of the Christian year is a comfort in that I have a framework from which to operate, a rhythm that moves to the beat of a familiar story of Divine redemption.  But it is also a challenge in that this familiar story asks to be told in new ways.  It’s never a matter of playing the tape of last year’s episode.  But sometimes creativity gives way to the pressures of time and the pastor’s messages end up having more than a faint echo of familiarity with last year.

To be honest I must admit that there are seasons that are more and less enjoyable for me.  And since I am being honest, I can tell you without hesitation that Lent is my favorite season.  Now this is not simply because I am a notorious “glass half-empty” kind of guy.  It isn’t because I love ashes and thorns and the dour gong of the liturgical proclamation: “You are dust and to dust you will return.”  I love Lent because it invites us to consider the whole truth.  Lent tells the whole story.  It is a season that begins with the admission that we will die and ends with a celebration of resurrection.  Lent gives us the opportunity to both acknowledge our limits as created beings and live in the confidence of that the love and grace of our God is without limits.  We begin the season with the admission: “We are dust and to dust we will return,” and we end the season with the proclamation “Christ is risen, he is risen indeed.”

The journey of faith is always being lived out between these two poles.  When we answer Jesus’ invitation to follow, we do so aware of both our deep need and his deep love.  We walk carrying the burden of an awareness of all that we are not, and we walk in the hopeful confidence that death does not have the last word.  The movement from Ash Wednesday through Holy Week and Easter is a practice that shows us how the journey of faith is both a burden and a blessing.  It is filled with seasons of hard work and joyous surprises.  It is not a trek that is easy and safe, but it is a journey that is exhilarating and good.  It is a journey that travels through a wilderness of abandonment and temptation and a trial of betrayal and death.  But it also takes us through the mystery of an empty tomb and the promise of steadfast love and eternal presence.

To sustain this journey with Jesus we must carry the seemingly contradictory realities of death and resurrection close to our hearts.  The Lenten journey teaches us to do this.  It helps us to discover and tap into those renewable spiritual resources that fuel the everyday steps we take as we walk with Jesus through this world.  So as we anticipate embarking on another season of Lent, I invite you to be a part of a practice that will encourage and empower you on the Way of faith.  Dedicate this season to growing in your awareness of the death that overcomes death itself and so becomes the portal to abundant and everlasting life.

Dave Rohrer 3/1/2016