A Place at the Table

Saturday I drove to Pocatello to stay with cluster dean Pastor Wayne Shipman and his wife Janet–always grateful for their hospitality. I drove up to Bethel Lutheran in Firth Sunday morning. This is a small congregation that has not had a pastor for over four years. It was good to worship with them and have good discussion about their future. I stopped at Emmanuel, Blackfoot on my way back to the interstate. Emmanuel sold half of their building to a bank and is in the midst of a partial remodel. The outside looks so different and I look forward to seeing photos when the inside is complete.

Hebrews 10:11-25

My focus this morning will be on our passage from Hebrews chapter 10. I must admit that I have a weird relationship to the book of Hebrews. As a whole, it would perhaps not make my top ten list of favorite books of the Bible and yet there are a few choice passages that I absolutely love.

The book is a sermon written for a community of people who were never eyewitnesses to the ministry of Jesus. The sermon addresses a situation of malaise experienced by Christians some decades after the ministry of Jesus ended. It brings a word of encouragement to discouraged people. They once had a vivid sense of God’s presence and later showed bold support for others during an outburst of persecution. Yet, as time dragged on, the malaise set in. 

The author attempts to embolden them by telling of the way Jesus went through suffering into glory, making a way for others to follow. As high priest, Jesus Christ brings others into a new covenant relationship with God. People are therefore called to persevere in faith, knowing that God will be faithful.

The passage most applicable to a church’s life together today begins with some language that may feel as distant as the Middle East: 19 Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

It helps to know that the inner chamber of Israel’s sanctuary was the holy of holies, where only the high priest was permitted to approach God. People like you and me simply would not have access to God. Yet here, the author of Hebrews invites all who have been redeemed by Christ the high priest to follow him into the presence of God in the sanctuary. 

The invitation flips everything. First the invitation does not refer to a physical movement into a holy place. Instead, the invitation is to a movement of faith. By holding firmly to the confession of faith in what Christ has done, people (you and I) can approach God confidently in prayer and continue joining together with others in worship. 

It might be hard for us to imagine not having access to God through Jesus. In some ways that’s a good thing, it illustrates our familiarity with the miracle of the incarnation, God living among us. But we don’t want to fall into a type of malaise like the original hearers of Hebrews. 

The primary reason we read scripture, alone or in an assembly like this one, is to be reminded of the good news of Jesus Christ–bringer of salvation and healing for a broken world and broken people. God did not look down from a distant heaven and say, “There, there, it’s all right.” Instead, in Jesus, God entered into the full range of human suffering and tragedy.

The author of Hebrews has two interconnected goals: renew a sense of personal trust in this God of healing and wholeness and a revitalized commitment to life in community. The words from Hebrews are a directive for all of us, “let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith.” What is this “faith” the author speaks of? In the very next chapter we read, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Bring to God your faith/hope or your hope/faith. And never doubt God’s own faithfulness; it is the thing that gives us hope.

I love that the author lifts up both the need to approach God on one’s own and the necessity of community. German Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about this balance in his book Life Together: “Let him who cannot be alone beware of community… Let him who is not in community beware of being alone… Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair.” 

Why is the embodied community part of the life of faith? Can’t we simply know that Christian community exists? Is actual participation necessary? When participation is possible, we would have to say yes, because that’s how Jesus set it up. Following Jesus, the Messiah, the Christ, being Christian means being part of a meal-fellowship. 

Hearing the Word and gathering at the table is central to who we are and how we are shaped. You return to the table to meet one another and to encounter the risen Christ in wine and bread. You are sent from the table for, as this morning’s author says, love and good deeds. As the author is exhorting the original readers, so the readers are to exhort one another.  

“And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” The author’s specific words are almost eerie to me, as if peering centuries ahead into America’s culture of individualism. The writer emphasizes that these practices are best cultivated within the life of the Christian community as it comes together to worship, enjoy fellowship, and provoke one another to acts of Christlike service.

For over 125 years, Bethel, Firth has been a place where people came together to hear about God’s love for each person, each follower of Jesus. It does not matter our age; we always need to hear that good news. Worship, in its many forms, has been sustaining the faithful for millions of years: hearing the Word, sharing the meal, praying for the world, being sent out for love and good deeds.

Dorothy Day put it this way, “We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know [God] in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship. We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” Thanks be to God.

Messiah Lutheran, Spokane

Nov. 10, 2024

John 15:1-8

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. 

I am grateful that the sermon is not the only thing to carry the weight of today. Music, prayers, the Lord’s Supper, rituals, blessings, and more music, will all help us move through emotions. We need it all to celebrate the many years of Messiah Lutheran’s ministry and to grieve the completion of that ministry. 

Likewise, I love that you selected John chapter 15 as the gospel text for today. Although, I started to prepare this sermon on election day, and I was not crazy about how it convicted me. How easy it is, I was reminded, to turn to anything and everything else than the true vine? I could actually feel myself veering to certain candidates, specific issues, movements in my home state of Idaho and across the country. If we can win, I thought to myself, then I will have all the sustenance I need, all the belonging I need. How foolish but how easy it is to veer off in any direction but Jesus, the true vine.

Thanks be to God for all the ministries and congregations across the Northwest Intermountain Synod, the ELCA, and the whole Christian Church that have been places to tell a different narrative, a life-giving narrative, a story that is always true: Jesus is the vine, and you are the branches. Today we celebrate that Messiah Lutheran has been such a place to proclaim and hear this good news in North Spokane since 1951. 

Notice, if you will, that Jesus’ statement is declarative: I am the vine, and you are the branches. There are no qualifiers, no conditions, no if, then. There is nothing we do to earn being a branch, whether as a person or community. Washed in the font and showered with promises, you are connected to the vine forever, even if I try to escape it and find nourishment and love and belonging elsewhere. Instead of if/then, what we have is a because/therefore. Because you are the branches connected to the vine, therefore you will bear fruit.

I asked our synod executive admin Cathy Steiner to send me a history of Messiah Lutheran. What I read there was years of not just being part of the vine but bearing fruit in so many ways—loving children and adults in the neighborhood and making sure they knew the abundance of God’s love and mercy, lifting up future pastors who went on to share the gospel elsewhere, calling associate pastors who came here and who were loved into being servant leaders, and utilizing the gift of music to praise God, cry out to God, and bring unity to the followers of Jesus gathered in these walls.

As much as we celebrate today, it would be disingenuous to not name the grief as well. I was surprised how I mourned when Emmanuel, Cheney closed. They were my internship congregation for one mere year, and it hit me hard. And so, I cannot fathom what those of you who have called this place home for so many years are feeling. Please do not diminish your grief; make room for it, acknowledge it when it arises, tell stories, journal, use all the stories to move through that grief when it comes. And give thanks to God, because we worship a God who can hold all our sorrow and grief.

In grief, it might be natural to develop a case of what one of my closest friends calls a case of the should haves. We should have done this. Our Pastor should have done this. That member should have. The bishop or synod should have. I should have.  In my experience, the should haves usually only leads to a cycle of blaming and shaming, neither of which leads to transformation, growth, or bearing fruit. In fact, blame and shame are things I presume we are better off pruning. As with a funeral in which we acknowledge that the person at the center had imperfections, go ahead and name that this congregation’s journey had bumps and difficulties. The Holy Spirit bore fruit despite them and is bearing fruit still.

I hope you take some comfort, though it might be small today, that even in completion, you are bearing fruit. Instead of a multi-plex business office or luxury condos being built here, this building will be inhabited by another church, which means more gospel proclamation, more singing praises to God, more people finding a welcome, more children knowing the love of Jesus Christ, more branches connected to the true vine.

Those of you who feel like you will have no church home, you are still connected to the vine. Jesus the vine is tenacious. The seal made on your brow at baptism can never be rubbed off. A strange part of being bishop is being somewhat of a wanderer. I have a new home congregation, but they tease me about my attendance. It can be unmooring to step into a new sanctuary Sunday after Sunday, but after a year I know what to look for.

In our Lutheran tradition I can depend on certain places and symbols to ground me. They are the same ones we will give thanks for today: table, font, place for the scripture and proclamation. These are the places where we are sure to meet the Word, God incarnate, Jesus, the vine who gives life. And though their size changes, the color of wood varies, the decorative etchings telling a local history, they are in all our Lutheran sanctuaries. 

And seeing them reminds me that every congregation, every single one, is temporal. Every congregation has a lifespan, just like every living creature. What goes on and on and on is the body of Christ gathered around the means of grace and sent forth into the world. Much as I love big beautiful historic sanctuaries, they are not necessary for people to partake of the bread of life or the cup of salvation. And so, I know that you will find new communities with whom to worship, impossible as that might sound today. You will continue to hear the story of God’s forgiveness and love for you. Jesus is the vine, and you are the branches—even still. 

Thanks be to God for the ministry and ministries of Messiah Lutheran, thanks be to God for a new church which will take over stewardship of this place and this building, thanks be to God for the ministry that will happen through the legacy gifts of Messiah, and thanks be to God that our hope and trust are in Jesus the vine, no one and nothing else.