Message from Pastor Stanton for August 2022
You’re lucky. Let me tell you a story about why.
The text for Sunday, July 24, was Luke 11:1-13. It was VERY familiar to most of us who attended worship at 8:00 (indoors) and 10:00 (outside on a perfect, beautiful day). Within this text is the story of Jesus sharing the Lord’s Prayer with his disciples. And to further explain this prayer, Jesus says these famous words, “Ask and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.”
Tens of thousands of churches across the United States and the world used this gospel text, and I feel certain that many preachers saw this text and served up a terrible-no-good-very-bad sermon that said something like, “See! If you pray right—you’ll get what you ASK for. If you seek God in the proper places, times and ways… if you ‘seek’ correctly, you will find! If you knock hard enough, persistent enough and in the right ways, God will open doors for you.”
That sermon is garbage.
Coming to worship only to hear that 1) I need to figure out how to get God to give me things I want, 2) It’s on me to search in the right and proper ways in order to find truth and meaning and that 3) I am responsible for knocking on God’s door in such a way that pleases God—or at least doesn’t anger God—so that God opens the door to me… that worship service would leave me feeling weighted down and worse off than when I arrived. Bad preaching pushes people away from the living, loving God.
But First Lutheran is lucky. When you attend worship, you hear preaching that takes the Bible seriously. Your pastors study hard, pray often and invest a lot of our imagination into providing faithful messages about a God of grace. Pastor Karyn’s sermon on this July 24 text took a deep dive into prayer and the text itself. And she found a really important jewel: that when it says, “Ask and it will be given,” it is essential to remember what Jesus is referring to with “IT.” “IT” is the Holy Spirit! “IT” is not “whatever I asked for.” Jesus is not saying, “Ask for an ice cream cone, and an ice cream cone will be given you.” “IT” is the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ point is, any time we ask for the presence of God to show up in our lives, the Holy Spirit will be given to us. Any time of life, any place, any way we ‘search’ for God… will lead to finding that the Holy Spirit is there! Knock for God, and God will open the door! The whole text is not about me or you and how much we have to do right in order to manipulate God. It’s about how available God is through prayer. And Pastor Karyn’s sermon “NAILED IT.”
You are lucky to have a church that knows: good preaching changes lives. I celebrate this with my newsletter this month, because one thing I learned (again) on sabbatical is that there is a LOT of bad, sometimes lazy, preaching that comes more from one guy’s opinion than from the text. “Where’s that in the text, preacher?” was something my preaching prof regularly asked seminarians. We bring no outside ‘agenda’ and are even open to seeing that the way we’ve understood things in the past—as faithful as our efforts may have been then—were possibly in need of more prayer, more study, more thoughtfulness.
Sabbatical reminded me (again) that I am lucky to serve a faithful, energized congregation in a beautiful, mostly safe part of the world. I love First Lutheran! And upon my return, hearing Pastor Karyn preach, I was reminded we are lucky to have the staff, musicians and ministries we do. For good church-ing, thanks be to God!