Daily Devotions

PLEASE NOTE:  This Advent season at Faith Lutheran we are using Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “God is in the Manger” devotional booklet for daily devotions and weekly sermon themes.  What follows has been taken from that booklet.

I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.  Colossians 2:2-3

The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty.  A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery.  We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery.  Therefore, children have open, wideawake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery.

They are not yet finished with this world; they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do.  We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery.

Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world.

It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation.

Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.

Let us pray:  Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way of your only Son.  By his coming give to all the people of the world knowledge of your salvation; through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

PLEASE NOTE: This Advent season at Faith Lutheran we are using Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “God is in the Manger” devotional booklet for daily devotions and weekly sermon themes. What follows has been taken from that booklet.

Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. Revelation 3:30

Jesus stands at the door knocking. In total reality, he comes in the form of the beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you. That is the great seriousness and great blessedness of the Advent message. Christ is standing at the door; he lives in the form of the human being among us. Do you want to close the door or open it?

It may strike us as strange to see Christ in such a near face, but he said it, and those who withdraw from the serious reality of the Advent message cannot talk of the coming of Christ in their heart, either…

Christ is knocking. It’s still not Christmas, but it’s also still not the great last Advent, the last coming of Christ. Through all the Advents of our life that we celebrate runs the longing for the last Advent, when the word will be: “See, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

The Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

Let us pray: Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. By your merciful protection alert us to the threatening dangers of our sins, and redeem us for your life of justice, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

PLEASE NOTE:  This Advent season at Faith Lutheran we are using Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “God is in the Manger” devotional booklet for daily devotions and weekly sermon themes.  What follows has been taken from that booklet.

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”  Luke 2:8-14

When the old Christendom spoke of the coming again of the Lord Jesus, it always thought first of all of a great day of judgment.  And, as un-Christmas-like as this idea may appear to us, it comes from early Christianity and must be taken with utter seriousness….

The coming of God is truly not only a joyous message, but is, first, frightful news for anyone who has a conscience.  And only when we have felt the frightfulness of the matter can we know the incomparable favor.

God comes in the midst of evil, in the midst of death, and judges the evil in us and in the world.  And in judging it, he loves us, he purifies us, he sanctifies us, he comes to us with his grace and love.  He makes us happy as only children can be happy.

Let us pray:  Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come.  By your merciful protection alert us to the threatening dangers of our sins, and redeem us for your life of justice, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

PLEASE NOTE:  This Advent season at Faith Lutheran we are using Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “God is in the Manger” devotional booklet for daily devotions and weekly sermon themes.  What follows has been taken from that booklet.

Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.  Luke 6:20-26

Not everyone can wait:  neither the sated for the satisfied nor those without proper respect can wait.  The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them and people who look up with reverence to the greatest in the world.

Thus Advent can be celebrated only by those whose souls give them no peace, who know that they are poor and incomplete, and who sense something of the greatness that is supposed to come, before which they can only bow in humble timidity, waiting until he reclines himself toward us – the Holy One himself, God in the child in the manger.

God is coming; the Lord Jesus is coming; Christmas is coming.  Rejoice, O Christendom!

Let us pray:  Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come.  By your merciful protection alert us to the threatening dangers of our sins, and redeem us for your life of justice, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

PLEASE NOTE:  This Advent season at Faith Lutheran we are using Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “God is in the Manger” devotional booklet for daily devotions and weekly sermon themes.  What follows has been taken from that booklet.

Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.  Revelation 3:30

Jesus stands at the door knocking.  In total reality, he comes in the form of the beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help.  He confronts you in every person that you meet.  As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you.  That is the great seriousness and great blessedness of the Advent message.  Christ is standing at the door; he lives in the form of the human being among us.  Do you want to close the door or open it?

It may strike us as strange to see Christ in such a near face, but he said it, and those who withdraw from the serious reality of the Advent message cannot talk of the coming of Christ in their heart, either…

Christ is knocking.  It’s still not Christmas, but it’s also still not the great last Advent, the last coming of Christ.  Through all the Advents of our life that we celebrate runs the longing for the last Advent, when the word will be:  “See, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

The Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth. 

Let us pray:  Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come.  By your merciful protection alert us to the threatening dangers of our sins, and redeem us for your life of justice, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

Greetings everyone,

The last time I posted a daily devotion was on August 24th.  Since many of you continue to write asking “What happened?” I thought it might be good to send you all a quick note.

As you know I am now serving in a new call.  I’ve been at Faith Lutheran Church in Bellaire, TX, since January, 2011.  This has proven, as I hoped, to be a challenging and exciting call.  It has also meant many more early mornings and late nights, wrapped around a 20+mile commute in each direction.  The “old days” of serving a much less demanding parish just 2 miles down the street are over.

I made a commitment to myself this year to finish up a long slow walk through the Gospel according to Mark.  That came to an end on August 24th and I decided to give myself some morning breathing room.  I haven’t posted a devotion since then.

Does that mean that I’m through writing in the mornings?  I doubt it.  We spent September this year listening each week to James.  I read that letter every day for the entire month and kept running into these words:  “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.”

So that is where it stands with me right now.  I look back with gratitude at many years of showing up every morning to listen to the Bible with you, amazed at times that words came out of what felt like a very empty vessel.

For now, it feels right to focus on the ministry of Faith Lutheran Church.  And to trust that, should the Lord wish it, I will get a sense that it is time again to write.

God bless you all.

[The New Revised Standard Bible I use calls this the SHORTER ENDING OF MARK]  And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter.  And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.

[The same Bible calls this THE LONGER ENDING OF MARK]  Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.

After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.

Later he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table; and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.

There is no way – none, nada, nyet – that these verses were part of the original work we now read as the Gospel of Mark.  They are clearly – in tone, vocabulary, style, and substance – later additions from editors who, as I wrote yesterday, were probably uncomfortable with the abrupt ending at 16:8.  So they added stuff in a desire to “improve” Mark.  What do we make of this?

I’m sure that whoever (and I have to say whoever because some details of life will forever be lost in history…which is good for historians who need stuff to work on) added these bonus endings were well intentioned people just doing their best.

But I’m still left with two questions.

First, why do modern translations, put together by scholars who clearly recognize what they are doing, insist on keeping this stuff in line with the rest of the accepted text?  Introducing them with ALTERNATIVE TITLES IN CAPITAL LETTERS or [[double brackets]] while yet another “bonus ending” is hidden down in the small print of the notes doesn’t help when they don’t belong in Mark in the first place.

My guess?  Money.  If a translation left them out altogether, or relegated all of the bonus endings to the textual notes, they might run the risk of public rejection of the translation.  (It wouldn’t sell.)  So it is just easier to leave it in.

But my second question is far more serious.  Why is it, when we take the opportunity to “improve” the Christian faith, that we end up making it more harsh, less loving, and less Christ-like?

Consider these words from the longer “second ending” of Mark:  “Later he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table; and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen.” 

Does that honestly sound to you like the Jesus we know?  Can you honestly imagine Jesus scolding the disciples for their lack of faith and their stubbornness?  We might think that is something they (we) deserve but that doesn’t make it what Jesus would think…or do.

Or these words:

“And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

Seriously?  Am I less of a Christian than I ought to be because I can’t remember the last demon I cast out (other than publicly renouncing all evil at our last baptism service), because I pray in English, because I DON’T, AND WON’T, pick up a snake, or purposely drink poison?  And what do I say to the family of the man I prayed with this week who died last night?

Obviously, according to some Christians, I am.  At some point, someone thought these practices were so normative that they included them in the final verses of a Christian book of the Bible.  Well sometimes people are wrong.  And sometimes Christians end up holding very very tightly to very un-Christian beliefs, ideas, and practices.

I love the ending of Mark at 16:8.

Fear will forever hold us back from carrying and living the Jesus story in our lives but faith overcomes fear.  I love knowing that the first witnesses of a very unlikely event were as unlikely as the event itself – and if the Bible says anything, it says that God has a thing for doing unlikely things in unlikely ways.

But mostly, I appreciate that the story invites us, urges us, to write an ending.  Not by adding words to a carefully crafted story but by adding stories to the lives we touch along the way.

I hope that the ending we write is as direct, truthful, loving, gentle, inclusive, incisive, and hopeful as an ending that Jesus would write himself.

Let us pray:  Dear Lord, thank you for the gift of your love, your presence, your Word, your will, and the community which bears your name in the world.  May we surrender to your love, fight back against our fears, speak forth our truth, and be a sign of your inclusive, transformative, creative love.  Until we see you face to face.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.  Mark 16:1-8

Mark is widely considered the first of the four gospels to be written.  When you read these final verses you can see why later writers felt the need to “complete” Mark’s account.

“And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

After all they had lived, and all we have read, how could this story end with three women gripped by terror and amazement, who say nothing to anyone about discovering a tomb which, instead of the body that is supposed to be there, holds only a strange young man dressed in white who tells them that Jesus has been raised from the dead and will be waiting for the gang back in Galilee?

Mark says he is a “young man dressed in a white robe.”  We read that and inside we scream, “He is an ANGEL.  Mark, call him an angel!”  We want to complete the story for Mark.  We want to make it better.

We want to see Jesus here.  We want others to see Jesus.  We couldn’t possibly carry on the message of Jesus if the only eye-witnesses are three women.  Why not?  Jesus himself has told us, three separate times, that death would not be able to hold him.  Jesus has told us, several times, that the disciples would carry on with his work.  But that doesn’t seem good enough for us.  And three women?  Base our faith on the witness of three women?  Are you kidding me?  The story can’t end here.  We want to make it better.

So, as we’ll see tomorrow, other writers try to improve Mark’s ending.  Matthew improves on Mark.  Luke improves on Mark.  And John writes as if he has never seen a copy of the others.

But I’m thinking that Mark has ended his story exactly as he intended to end it. “And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  He knows that ending will be unsettling.

What he hopes is that we might end the story differently.  That, afraid or not, we DO tell someone.  That, whether we were there or not, we trust that Jesus was in fact waiting for the gang back in Galilee.  And that Jesus will ever be traveling ahead of us, that there be no place we might go where Jesus isn’t already there.

For the temple curtain has been torn in two, God is on the loose, and, like a bloody Roman soldier, we have come to believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

Let us pray:  Dear Lord, you swallowed up death to give us life.  You have taken upon yourself the weight of human sin, rebelliousness, and brokenness, that we might know forgiveness, acceptance, and new found purpose.  You call us to follow and we answer that call.  You invite us to trust and we surrender to your love. By the power of your Spirit, use us in writing your story, one not ended until time is brought to its fullness in you.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

When evening had come, and since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he had been dead for some time. When he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. Then Joseph bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid. Mark 15:42-47

Joseph and Mary were common names in first century Judaism.  To name a child “Joseph” or “Mary” was to honor the memory of great heroes of the faith.

Joseph, the 11th son of Jacob and Rachel, sold into slavery yet protected by God and put into a position where he could later rescue his family from a famine.  Without Joseph, there would be no story of the Hebrew people, no salvation history.

Miriam first appears in the Bible in Exodus 2.  Pharaoh, concerned about the growing Hebrew population, decreed that every male child born among the Hebrews was to be put to death.  When Moses was born, his mother put him in a papyrus basket in the Nile river, hoping that he would be spared.  Miriam, his sister, stood close by, watching what would happen.

When Pharaoh’s daughter came down to the Nile she discovered the baby in the basket.  Miriam the approached her and asked, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?”  Granted permission to do just that, Miriam brought Moses’ mother who was allowed to nurse and care for Moses as he grew.  Without Miriam, there would be no Moses, no escape from Israel, no salvation history.

Many years later, after escaping the Egyptians by crossing the Red Sea, Miriam, now named a prophetess and leader of the Hebrews with her brothers Moses and Aaron, gathers a chorus of women:  Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” Exodus 15:20-21

Many years later, at another turning point in salvation history, who should God choose to raise his only Son but Mary and Joseph?

And now at the cross, another Joseph and other Marys gather to do what must next be done.  This Joseph, a leader among the same council who have conspired to kill Jesus (though not listed among the parties at the trial) risks his life and reputation in demanding the body of Jesus from Pilate.  The Marys, having themselves been touched by the ministry of Jesus, see where Jesus has been placed and they begin their preparations to see that Jesus’ body is treated with respect and dignity.

Could this be the end of the story?

Let us pray:  Gracious Lord, we look back through history and see the signs, again and again, of the consistency of your love and care for those who bear your name in the world.  In so many surprising ways you confront the powers of evil with the persistence of love.  May we be numbered among those who do their part in caring and carrying your love to all.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.