St. Johns Lutheran Church
Evangelical Lutheran Church of America
Know Christ.  Love Christ. Serve Christ.

GOSPEL MESSAGE

March 2, 2025
TRANSFIGURATION OF OUR LORD
Chaos and Mystery

Ghost-like prophets from generations past, a face suddenly transformed, dazzling clothes, frightening fog, and a mysterious voice: today’s gospel text might sound like the beginning of a strange science fiction novel. Indeed, this passage has mystified theologians, biblical scholars, preachers, and followers of Jesus for centuries. What do we make of such an unusual tale?

Perhaps the chaos and mystery are part of the point: after all, who can fully describe an encounter with the Divine? How can we even begin to understand the glory of God? If this text leaves us speechless, we are in good company with God-seekers across the ages. Some experiences simply defy tidy explanations, and the transfiguration is one of them.

This story offers us glimpses of some of the most profound mysteries of our faith. Jesus is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, the one sent and affirmed by God. Jesus is the glory of God revealed among us. In him, we find our past, present, and future all wrapped up into one. Even the most devout disciples might find themselves confounded by these revelations. Perhaps we are given these truths only in glimpses to spark our curiosity and wonder, and to let the gift of faith reveal their meaning.

This story also assures us that although Jesus shines with God’s glory on the mountaintop, he is sent back into the day-to-day world to carry on the work of life-saving mercy, healing, and justice. Like Peter, James, and John, we might encounter God on the mountaintops of life and be tempted to set up camp there. But God is the one who leaves the mountain for the often-unglamorous work of serving others. We trust that here, too, God is with us—not just on the mountaintops but in the valleys and everywhere in between, transforming us for the work of discipleship here and now in the ordinariness of life.

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March 9, 2025
FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT
Journeying through the Wilderness

The wilderness has captured the imaginations of artists, adventurers, and spiritual seekers for thousands of years. It can be a place of profound self-discovery, exploration, beauty, and solitude. It is a place of few distractions: no commerce, no schedule, no business as usual. The wilderness can be a freeing place that opens us up to experience life in new and profound ways.

However, the wilderness is also disorienting and lonely. The landscape can be brutal and unforgiving. Wilderness wanderers can easily find themselves lost, exhausted, and dirty. The unbearable heat of the day, the uncomfortable cold of the nights, and the lack of food, water, or shade can bring people to their breaking point. The wilderness has been a place of exile and punishment, and a place where people’s strength, determination, and faith are put to the test.

The complexities of the wilderness set the stage for today’s gospel story, in which we get a glimpse of who Jesus is and who he is called to be. In the wilderness, we see the depth of Jesus’ faith. Jesus is not swayed by the allure of power, control, authority, or physical comfort. He does not buy into the tempter’s lies. Even in the disorientation and isolation of the wilderness, Jesus trusts in the Spirit, who has led him to this place and who gives him the strength to live into his call throughout his journey.

We are at the beginning of our own journey, a Lenten season of metaphorical wilderness wandering. The good news is that we do not go alone. The Spirit goes before us, behind us, beside us, and within us. Along this journey, the many voices of the tempter may try to lure us in with power, control, authority, or comfort. And yet, our trust and our identities lie with the One who already defeated the tempter. We already have all we need. In Christ, we are already loved, forgiven, and made whole, no matter where our journeys take us.

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March 16, 2025
SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT
Judgment in the Name of the Lord

Some of us in the room, likely more of us than we imagine, know what a conviction is like. We’ve had experience with a physical, undisputable, black-robed conviction, the kind handed down by a judge or jury. It’s a statistical fact that nearly half of the American population is personally affected in some way by the criminal justice system. Those numbers are staggering; even more so is the weight of guilt that welds itself to the convicted one’s shame like steel clenching iron. To be convicted, found guilty as charged, is no small matter.

It is with such certainty and severity that Jesus unleashes his anguish over Jerusalem—anger and grief that rail with the reverberations of a gavel’s blow in the courtroom when words, sharpened for penetration, are pronounced from behind a high bench. Judgments can last a lifetime, and they intentionally have the power to change futures. Jesus was about the work of God, to change futures.

There is no courtroom, no black robe, no jury of twelve peers in Luke’s account of Jesus’ encounter with some Pharisees. But there is an exacting judgment that rumbles like rolling boulders, a conviction meant to loiter hauntingly like shivering nightmares. Jesus’ words prosecute with a burden that few gospel lines expose so solemnly; the accusations are decisive. His judgment falls on the religious.

No, we do not escape, do not get away by dismissing Jesus’ words as ancient, frozen in a time long past, petrified among a people long gone, meant only for some others’ failures—not our own. The judgment lives on. Pronounced then in the holy city, it ricochets even now through our sacred spaces and hallowed sanctuaries, aimed at the pious and devout who with self-appeasing righteousness look to tame God’s word, rebuff God’s scandalous mercies, silence God’s voice, and break God’s will.

The judgment: “How often . . . and you were not willing!” And yet, the promise: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (Luke 13:34-35).

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March 23, 2025
THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT
We Have Choices

We have choices, right? Obviously. There’s little question about that; it’s a fact. Many of these choices are piled and piling up in the lockboxes of our upbringing and experiences, of our moral certainties, religious convictions, political opinions, or economic maneuverings. We make choices about our educational endeavors, vocational callings, use of our days and years, relationship commitments, dietary habits, travel destinations, color coordination, hairstyles, sexual behaviors, EV or gas, whole or skim, movie or book. All these choices—be they monumental or minuscule, automatic or sleep-depriving, public or private, frivolous or practical, courageous or cowardly—we shuffle, sort, and seal in one envelope or another: one labeled right and one marked wrong, the good envelope and the bad envelope.

Our choices mostly happen like that until for some reason, hard telling what reason, our certainties are disturbed and our absolutes begin to rattle like loose bolts under the frame of an old truck on a potholed road. It’s what happens when, by mistake or under force, good or bad luck, we discover that broccoli isn’t disgusting, snakes aren’t slimy, the earth isn’t flat, men may love men, more might not be better, aliens need not be strangers, and God’s justice surely demands mercy.

Jesus started tugging at a snag of choices with a parable about a tree, a vineyard, a gardener, a saw, and manure. The tree was a no-hoper (there could be lots of reasons). With not a fig on a limb, if it had been another variety of fruit tree you’d call it a “bad apple.” The choice: saw or donkey dung. Jesus rejects the blade, chooses the excrement.

Martin Luther (liking Latin) said, “Simul justus et peccator,” meaning we are at the same time both saint and sinner. Or as Jesus put it, love those bum branches down to their roots, put your hands in the dirt, and see what fruit they bear.

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March 30, 2025

FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT

Getting to the Fat Calf

Whatever you think of, however you feel about this story, don’t fool yourself into believing that it is all about a party. Pie-in-the-sky piety skims the fat and squeezes the fruit out of the parable, reducing a teaching about what is wildly prodigal to a mere morality play.

Here’s the bulk of the story: abandonment, longing, waste, famine, then hunger, humiliation, and dishonor, dying in pig dirt, shame unto pleading, resentment, sore bitterness . . . loss in every direction. Loss and falling—from comfort and certainty, respectability and character; from pleasure into pain, well-being into misery. Jesus told this agonizing, heartbreaking, undignified, lowdown, vanished-hope story for a reason. Jesus knew what life can be like. He recognized the deep ravines of loss and the gullies into which we fall. It doesn’t look as if the story begins in those sad places, but it surely lands and sits there for a while, the kind of sedentary existence that is too much like an awful eternity.

A father, bereaved and insulted (Was he not the parent he hoped, thought, intended himself to be?), is left gazing into an empty distance. A child disappearing (Why such urgency to run from his birth home?) is left in disgrace. A child dutiful, hard at work, utterly dependable (How had he come to feel so cheated, denied of love?) is left mucking in thick refusal.

And while it is so . . . And though it is true . . .

Suddenly, or maybe it’s eventually, the story becomes larger. The story collides with gospel. The late preacher and theologian Frederick Buechner observed, “The gospel is bad news before it is good news.” Jesus knew how we fail the world and how the world fails us. Jesus was a truth-teller, the whole truth: rags and robes, pigpen and dance floor, defiance and embrace, but no pie-in-the-sky piety. Instead, a festive roast in the oven! That’s how grace behaves.