Lessons from Quackgrass

There are some things that I live with, whether I like it or not!   Monday was a glorious day (one of VERY few this spring), which gave me a chance to go out and work in the garden.  We were crazy enough to plant some peas and beets a few weeks back (just in time for the snow), so I wanted to see if they peeked their first leaves out of the ground.  When I got to the raised beds I saw no peas or beets, but I did see my old nemesis: quackgrass.   Already twice this spring I’ve worked those beds to get every scrap of grass out but the quackgrass would not be denied.  It travels underground in long roots, sending springs of grass up at random intervals.  I’ve tried for years to get rid of it with no luck.  No matter what I do in life, the quackgrass will still be there.  It’s tough stuff.

A couple thousand years ago the religious establishment in Jerusalem had a rogue teacher named Jesus on their hands.   He undermined the power and privilege they had in interpreting God’s will for the nation of Israel.  This Jesus dared to give hope to the outcast, to tax collectors, to sinners, and to foreigners.  The religious leaders knew that they had to do something before the movement got out of hand.  They conspired to have Jesus put to death.  They watched in satisfaction as Jesus hung on a cross.  They thought that they had one less problem to worry about in life.  Within a few days, they heard word that the old nemesis no longer lay in the tomb.  They tried to get rid of him with no luck.  No matter what they did, Jesus was still there.

Lately I’ve heard a lot of talk about the future of the Christian Church in America.  The in 1950’s the Christian Church dominated American culture.  The numbers show that this is no longer the case.  Over the past decade there is not a single denomination that has shown growth.  Not one.  The number of people who do not claim any congregation continues to grow significantly.   By following the trends, people infer that in the future the Christian Church will become insignificant.  They assume that the day will come when nobody cares about God anymore.  Their predictions forget one thing: the power of God!  The Jesus who rose from the dead still works in our world.  Jesus isn’t done with us yet!  The Christian Church in American may look different in the future.  It may not dominate the culture as it had in the 1950’s, but God will not just pack up and go home.  Just as quackgrass spreads through small roots, God will use people to spread the Good News of Jesus.

God just won’t go away and leave us alone!  God chose us in baptism and has refused to sit idle, even on days when we haven’t been so sure that we want or need God to work in our lives.  God has kept after us, bringing us faith.  We can try to get rid of him, but we’ll have no luck.  No matter what we do in life, no matter how hard we try to get rid of Him, Jesus will still there.

It's all about the cross

Jesus said, “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. (John 12:27)

On a recent trip to the Cities, I passed the new statue of Jesus outside the Christian Family Church and World Outreach Center just north of Owatonna.  The statue, titled The Coming King, depicts Jesus as a conquering warrior on a white horse, sword in hand, ready to slay his enemies.  It’s a powerful statue, based on images from the book of Revelation.

That statue raised some questions in my mind.  How do we depict Jesus?  When do we see Jesus the most clearly?

This is a good week to ask this question, for Holy Week has arrived!  It began on Sunday with the waving of palm branches and shouts of hosanna.  Jesus rode into Jerusalem as a conquering king with crowds shouting his praises.  Holy Week ends on Easter Sunday with an empty tomb and amazement at a resurrection.  Glory at the beginning.  Glory at the end.  The statue in Owatonna fits these days well.  Nothing can stand in the way of our conquering Lord!  But what about the rest of Holy Week? 

We can’t just build a bridge from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday and pretend that nothing comes between them.  Even before Jesus arrived in Jerusalem he knew full well that he went to his death.  In these next few days we will join Jesus in his walk to the Last Supper.  We will journey to the Garden of Gethsemane to hear Jesus’ anguished prayers.  We will stand by as Jesus is arrested…convicted of trumped up charges…beaten and spit upon by the religious authorities…hauled before the governor…whipped mercilessly…mocked and laughed at…sentenced to death…nailed to a cross…hung to die.  We will hear Jesus’ anguished cries of pain…abandonment…and death.  The image here is of a beaten and bloody body nailed to a cross.  The Coming King statue makes little sense in this context.

We see Jesus the most clearly on the cross.  As powerful as the images of Palm Sunday and Easter might be, they cannot overpower the image of cross.  The cross shows how much God loves us, willing to die so that we might live.  Jesus conquered death by enduring death.  Jesus came to give his life so that others might live.  That's not weakness - that's love!

It can be tempting to only want to see the glory of our Lord.  Without the cross, the glory makes no sense.

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,

   did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;

rather, he made himself nothing

   by taking the very nature of a servant,

   being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

   he humbled himself

   by becoming obedient to death—

      even death on a cross!

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place

   and gave him the name that is above every name,

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,

   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,

   to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2:5-11

In God's Time...Not Mine

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.

(Ecclesiastes 3:1)

This past Sunday was a day that I’ll never forget.   159 people came to celebrate a new day in the history of Peace Lutheran Church.  We came to break ground on a new ministry building.  For the past 7 ½ years I’ve grown accustomed to worshipping God in the elementary school gym.  Others at Peace have been at it for 12 years now.   While the gym has served our ministry well, after a while it’s felt a lot like…a gym!  No matter how many banners we put on the walls it still has that ‘let’s play basketball’ feel to it.  Every week we’ve come early to set up.  Every week we’ve stayed late to tear down.  We’ve packed tubs to go back and forth from the office to the school (and invariably we’ve forgotten something!).  Worshipping in a gym was fun for a while but the novelty has worn off for me.  I’m ready for a move.

When I came to Peace seven years ago we thought we were just a couple years away from building.  We owned land.  We had a good down payment in the bank.  We were ready to roll!  In 2005 we sensed God calling us to move ahead and build.  We filled out applications with the ELCA and waited for a positive response.  We didn’t hear what we wanted to hear.  The ELCA said, in no uncertain terms, “Build a strong community of faith and THEN worry about a building.”  Peace was a much smaller congregation back then.  Our annual giving didn’t come close to covering our expenses.   We buckled down, took the conversation of a building off the table, and focused on ministry.  It was a time for waiting.  People wondered if it would ever end.

This past Sunday, that time of waiting came to a crashing halt!  The time for building has arrived.  As all those shovels turned the soil Peace I stood in awe of the moment.  I saw tears filling the eyes of some long-time Peace members.  I still have a hard time believing that it’s underway.

God definitely works in God’s own time.  If we’d had our way we would have built a long time ago.  Something always happened to stop us.  Even though we didn’t like it, we had to admit that God led us in different directions.

In this past year, as we’ve slowly walked forward into this building process, there were many places where we could have been stopped again.   We had to be approved by the ELCA.  We had to have a capital campaign that raised enough money to cover a mortgage.  We had to design a building that was both affordable and large enough for this ministry.  We had to get bids that fit into our budget.  We had to get loan approval.  Any one of these things could have derailed the process.  Any one of them could have thrown us right back into the gym.  None of them were ‘sure things.’

One by one, God broke down the barriers.   The process hasn’t always been smooth but God has been at work!  God has made it quite obvious that THIS is the time to build.  It’s been hard to wait.  For the past years it’s been easy to explain to God that we should start building NOW!  God heard all those prayers and answered them with a simple word, “Wait.”

The time for waiting is now over.  Now, in God’s time, the construction can begin.  I thank God!

Trusting sounds so easy

Trust in the LORD with all your heart
   and lean not on your own understanding;
⁶ in all your ways submit to him,
   and he will make your paths straight.

(Proverbs 3:5-6)

Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed (to Jesus), “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”

 (Mark 9:24)

Trust in the Lord.  It sounds so straightforward…so simple.  We can place our lives in God’s hands and trust that God will care for us.  Deep in my heart, I know that this is certainly true…so why did I have so much anxiety last week?

As many of you know, we at Peace Lutheran Church are all set to build our first building this summer.  We officially break ground during our worship service this coming Sunday!  All the pieces are in place: the building permit, the builders, the sub-contractors, the zoning.  At the beginning of last week everything was in place; everything, that is, except the loan!  Through some preliminary conversations with the Mission Investment Fund (the folks we get a loan through) we’d been given the impression that this would be as simple as sending in an application and receiving approval.  Apparently the person in charge of underwriting the loan didn’t receive that memo!  Last Wednesday I took part in a conference call that made my stomach hurt.  They didn’t know if they could process the loan.  Trust in the LORD with all your heart.

We’d applied for a $500,000 loan with the understanding that the pledges towards our building project more than covered the monthly payments on a mortgage.   The rule of thumb that the underwriter worked from stated that we could only count 75% of the pledges.  We’d also been told it would be amortized over 20 years, but, as a Mission Congregation receiving a special rate, the loan would be amortized over 15 years.  Put those two things together and we no longer had the ability to make monthly payments.  Our loan was being referred to a committee to review our ‘special situation.’   There was a real possibility that we’d have a ground breaking celebration…with no loan in place!  Was it possible that the whole project would get scuttled?  After celebrating the coming building project, would we have to stop and say, “Oops, sorry!”  Can you imagine the impact that would have on this congregation?  Needless to say, I had a couple sleepless nights.  This is why we asked for your prayers!  Trust in the LORD with all your heart.

The good news was that the bids on the project had come in much lower than we’d anticipated.  While we originally thought we needed a $500,000 loan, the reality is that we only needed $420,000 to do all that we wanted to do.  We sent the revised numbers to the Mission Investment Fund and received approval the next day.  Trust in the LORD with all your heart.

Why was it so hard to trust?  Through this process we’ve constantly talked about God leading us forward.  We’ve prayed over and over that God would guide the building process.  Would God lead us that far down the road, only to pull the rug from under us?  I should have slept like a baby last week, knowing that God led us in God’s paths.  I didn’t.  I allowed the anxieties of this world overcome my simple trust in the God who provides.  God remained faithful.

I join the father speaking to Jesus in Mark chapter 9, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”  May God continue to teach me to trust.