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The Gospel of Matthew Bible Studies
The Gospel of Mark Bible Studies
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007 Ordination of Louise Christensen
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007 |
Ash Wednesday (C) As many of you know, I just returned from an amazing adventure--visiting the Churches of the Cape Orange Diocese in South Africa with a delegation from our Montana Synod. Rest assured, you will be hearing much more about my trip, but today I would simply like to tell you about a few of the interesting people that I met. While I was in South Africa these past weeks I was blessed to meet three young pastors of the Cape Orange Diocese (all three were only a few years older than me and all three had been students together at the seminary in South Africa). First there was Pastor Jacques of the Upington Parish (our sister congregation in South Africa). Pastor Jacques is a quite, gentle and joyous giant—a very large man, with a contagious smile. Pastor Gerhardt Bok (his friends call him Boki and he gave me that honor)—Pastor Bokie was in charge of making arrangements for our Montana Synod delegation while we were in South Africa. He was lively and gracious host. And finally, Pastor Anna. She was the last one that I met along my journey. She was also lively and joyous but I could also sense a sadness about her. As it turns out, I learned through our conversation, that she had been married to another Pastor named Clifford. In 2003, however, Pastor Clifford happened to go to the wrong gas station at the wrong time somewhere in the city of Johannesburg. He was shot and killed, this young Christian leader, by a man who was busy robbing the gas station. A few days after meeting with Pastor Anna, we had traveled on to a town were we met with Pastor Boki at a resturaunt It was during this conversation that I realized that all four of these young pastors that I had met had been through the seminary together. There were four but now there are only three. And while we were sitting in this restaurant together, Pastor Bok taught me something... Just as this waitress was passing the table, he greeted her. And although they didn’t know each other, they took each other by the arm in a warm embrace, they spoke for a while in the Afrikaans language and when she had left the table, he said to me, “Pastor, this is how it is with the black people in Africa…we greet each other and when we greet each other we have to touch each other, and we show love to each other—even to the stranger—because in Africa, with crime and HIV/AIDS and unemployment and poverty, we never know when our lives will end. Everyone is aware, at all times that we may never see each other again. Throughout my journey I was continually struck by the vibrant, joyfulness of the people, the African zest for living. How ironic that this life, could be directly correlated to their familiarity and awareness of death. Pastor Boki caused me to reflect on this thing called life—with all of it’s concerns and busyness. He caused me to ask myself …”What is really important?” and “Who or what do I want to be during this short lifetime?” Do I take this life and the people around me for granted, or do I take advantage of the opportunity to love the people God has given me to love—even the strangers? It struck me how satisfied Boki obviously was with his life amidst an impoverished people. Brothers and Sisters, today is Ash Wednesday, and this is really what Ash Wednesday is all about. In a few moments, each of you will have the opportunity to approach the altar of God, and have an ashen cross rubbed on your forehead as a reminder of whose death you have been baptized into. And you will hear these words…”From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return.” From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return, meaning you don’t have control over where you came from or where you wind up…, but, guess what, you do have some control over right now. And so, what about today? Today you are alive, so what is really important? Who do you want to be during your time here? This is the question of the season. Lent is the Church season, which spans the 40 days prior to Easter. Traditionally it is a stark and barren 40 days in which we recall the 40 days of testing that Jesus underwent in the desert wilderness before he began his public ministry. This was a time when Jesus himself must have made significant decisions regarding what his life was to be about. And obviously he was facing the same question, “who do you want to be during your time here?” In a way, this seems to be an often neglected part of our own Christian spirituality and I don’t know why that is? Why do so many of us want to let life happen to us, rather than deciding what we want to do with our time? God gives us freedom and hopefully the will to choose what we want to do with our lives. In our Gospel we hear these familiar words from Jesus, “For where your treasure is, there you heart will be also.” And it seems that this quote is often quite misunderstood. Biblical scholar Mark Allen Powell has helped me greatly to understand the good news of this saying of Jesus’. He writes: Where your treasure is, there you heart will be also. I have noticed over the years that seminary students and pastors often get this backwards. I recall one sermon in which the preacher asked us to consider this text. What it means, he said, is that we can tell what people really care about by how they spend their money (or their time and energy). People put their treasures where their hearts are. How much do you spend on entertainment? The preacher asked. How much do you spend on your family? How much do you give to the church? This reveals what your values are.
I think he had it backwards (says Powell). He was thinking, “Where your heart is, there your treasure will be.” But Jesus said it the other way around: “where you put your treasure—that’s where your heart will end up.” The point isn’t that how we spend our resources reveals what sort of people we are, but that how we spend our [resources} determines what sort of people we become.” This may sound scary, but it is actually very good news that Jesus gives us! What it means, essentially (in essence), is that the sad songs we hear on the radio and the message we are bombarded with on TV, telling us that we have no control over our hearts and that we are somehow completely enslaved to the seat of our emotions, simply aren’t true. We can control our hearts, direct them in ways we want them to go, and as Mark Allen Powel says, “we can do so in a very practical way, by deciding what sort of people we want to be, and then giving our treasure—our time, our talents, and even our money—to those things we want to care about.” This to me, is an interesting hypothesis that Jesus makes, but, this begs another question. How do we figure out what we want to care about? One of the problems we all face is the endless number of voices and agendas clamoring and marketing for our attention and support. How do we figure out what we really want, let alone what God wants for us. In the Bible, God often teaches people and calls them by having them remove themselves from circulation for a time. Moses went up on a mountain, Jesus (as we already said) along with other prophets went into the wilderness, so what about us? What should we, do? Is Jesus telling us to go into the wilderness or climb a mountain? Pastor, I’ve got a family and a job and I can’t afford to go out into the wilderness for forty days. Here again, brothers and sisters, Jesus seems to have very practical advice for us today. Notice, he does not tell his followers to “go to the wilderness.” What he does say, however, is kind of ironic. He says, “Go to your room.” He says, “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” And this is necessary brothers and sisters. Jesus warns us that we are liable to loose ourselves, becoming hypocrites if we don’t take the time to separate ourselves from all these voices in order that we might consult with God—discern the truth. What I think Jesus is saying here is that if we don’t pray privately, if we don’t nurture a prayer life privately, we have a much greater risk of having contaminated motives. Because we are sinners, we will be tempted to do things for the wrong reasons, and there will be no peace and no joy in our lives—we will be storing up treasures on earth (honor and privilege and prestige and popularity), all things that can and will be taken away from us eventually. So he tells us, rather than storing up this kind of treasure—treasures where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, store up treasures in the realm of God, a treasure that is characterized by the love and peace of God—and will leave you forever with peace of mind and heart—this kind of treasure will be timeless, even as God is timeless. Brothers and sisters, I wish you a blessed Lenten season, that during the forty days ahead, you might find wisdom through your prayer, that you might learn anew to treasure the things that are worthwhile in this world, and that your heart will find contentment as you carry out the mission of God to the people around you. -------------------- Joshua W. Magyar, Pella Lutheran Church 418 W. Main Street Sidney, MT 59270
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