Yup! We're Still Standing (Reflections on Thanksgiving 2025)

 

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. (John 6:35)

I’ve always loved this story (John 6:25-35). All these well-fed folks go running after Jesus because they think he’s paying off like a broken slot machine. This is just after Jesus has fed 5,000 people and come up with a sizable surplus. This looked pretty good to the crowd, and they’re thinking this Jesus guy might make a pretty good king—especially if he’s going to bust out with free bread! But Jesus is on to these guys. He sees how shallow their motives are. He’s not fooled by their small talk.

(Of course, Jesus understands their confusion when they ask in verse 25, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” He could explain the reason they hadn’t seen him get into a boat was because he’d just walked on water across the Sea of Galilee, but that would be something of a distraction.)

No. Jesus, who, when he had many mouths to feed and what appeared to be not enough food, had the folks sit down while he said grace over what little food they did have. He didn’t lament the scarcity. He knew he was in the presence of God’s abundance. He wanted the crowd to know that too, but they were too willing to make Jesus their provider without understanding he wanted them to develop faith. They were hungering for more, not recognizing the blessing God had already given. Their selfishness betrayed their lack of gratitude.

Why is it, do you suppose, that when we’re well-fed we keep asking for more? I’m always amazed that the phenomena of scarcity and anxiety are much more effective in bringing us to a place of gratitude. Our American Day of Thanksgiving owes its origins to people who were getting their butts kicked by circumstances, but who could turn around and say, “At least we’re still standing.” Those stout pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower experienced a 50% mortality rate before they celebrated their first harvest on these shores. Thanksgiving Day became official during the Civil War when President Lincoln noticed that, even though Americans were tearing at each other’s throats, no foreign power had invaded us, and our crops hadn’t failed. FDR fixed the date for Thanksgiving in 1939 as the U.S. was crawling out from the Great Depression and teetering on the lip of World War II. Each of these milestones saw Americans clinging to survival by our fingernails. What else could we do but offer our thanks to God?

I get nostalgic at Thanksgiving time when I remember that participating in an ecumenical Thanksgiving service was my first official act as pastor of Faith Lutheran 27 years ago. I had been called as pastor on the Feast of Christ the King, and four days later I represented our congregation at the ministerium’s Thanksgiving Eve worship at Good Shepherd United Methodist Church. I remember looking out at the assembled worshipers that evening and seeing only one face from Faith—Rich Aicher. I felt terribly disappointed that no one else from our parish had bothered to come out and support their new pastor. What I should’ve felt was deep gratitude that I had a parishioner as dedicated to worshiping our Lord as is Rich Aicher.

So, for this Thanksgiving I will be repentantly grateful to God and to my congregation. We are small and not wealthy, but we are still standing. There are still small children here who will learn about the love of Jesus, and funky almost-twenty-somethings who are willing and excited to teach them. We are still bleeding money, but not anywhere near as badly as we had feared. We have a roof which doesn’t leak and a new sanctuary organ which we got for free from a Lutheran church which has gone the way of all flesh. We still have VBS in the summer, and great Youth Sunday. We have a new prayer and praise ministry on Wednesday evenings started by a lay woman with a heart for evangelism. A few days ago we invited the whole neighborhood to our church for our resurrected Fall Festival.

(And I’ve got to be honest here. When 19-year-old Emma told me we could bring this pre-holiday bacchanal back from the dead I thought she might’ve been smoking something! The old Fall Festival—which we’d not held in six years— involved an army of Lutheran ladies and took months to plan. Two teenagers put this thing together in nine weeks, and it was sensational!)

All the above are terrific examples of how God has been good to us. Nevertheless, there are deeper, more moving causes for our gratitude. We have each other to love, to pray for, and to share our ministry. We do, in our humble way, the work Jesus commanded us to do. We collect food for the hungry and cook meals for the lonely. We welcome the stranger (We’re really good at that!), and we provide a safe space for local seniors, Haitian Adventists, and alcoholics who want to get their lives put back together. And we gather every Sunday to feast on Jesus, the Bread of Life. We have reason to be grateful.

I’m grateful to this congregation and the years I’ve been privileged to be pastor here. I’m thankful for the children I’ve been able to see grow up and for the little ones who come to kids’ sermon each Sunday. I’m grateful for the faith and support which has been given to me by the people of God in this place.

We are still standing. May God be prasied!

Not a Shakespearean King (Reflections on Christ the King 2025)

 

There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.” (Luke 23:38)

Did you have to read Shakespeare in high school? Most American high school students are required to attain at least a passing familiarity with the Bard, and legions of English teachers have heroically campaigned through the years to cram the poetic verbiage of the most accomplished playwright in our common language into the skulls of youngsters weaned on Instagram, addicted to Tic Toc, and possessing the attention span of a squirrel with a concussion.

It must’ve been a little easier back in my high school days. You know—in those bleak, prehistoric times before the internet and the cell phone, back when we actually read books. Having been a survivor of a Missouri Synod Lutheran Sunday school where our only Bible was the King James Version, I took to Shakespeare like Travis took to Taylor. For a guy who lived 400 years ago, William Shakespeare really understood what made people tick, and that’s why we’re still fascinated by the characters he created. He could get under the skin of real people while giving them some pretty fancy words to say.

I think of Shakespeare on the Feast of Christ the King as so many of his plays involved kings and kingly ambition—an ambition which Shakespeare almost always paints with a very dark brush. Throughout his history plays and even in some of the great tragedies like Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. he shows us men (and sometimes women) who have an unconquerable thirst for power, position, and control. They all seem to be asking the same questions: Who do I have to eliminate in order to be king? Who do I have to eliminate in order to keep being king? The ruthless quest for dominance always leads to copious bloodletting and paranoia.

My particular favorite of Shakespeare’s kings is Richard II. Here’s a guy wallowing in the medieval assumption that he’s king because God wants him to be king. He says,

“Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord…”

 

The trouble is, this particular deputy sucks at his job, and there’s another guy just itching to knock him off his throne and take over the operation himself. Not long after proclaiming his divine right to rule the kingdom, Richard gets a kick in the pants on the battlefield and has to come to terms with the idea he’s not so divine after all. Changing his tune to a minor key, he declares,

“…within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life,

Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus

Comes at the last and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence: throw away respect,

Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king[i]?

 

How can we say to Jesus he is a king? Our gospel lesson[ii] for this feast depicts Jesus in a scene more dramatic and tragic than even Shakespeare could’ve imagined. The so-called king is less than a peasant. He’s a condemned criminal, executed for a crime—wanting to be king—which he didn’t even commit. He is beaten, abandoned, alone, reviled, ridiculed by the highest and the lowest in his society alike. He’s become a nothing, and, impaled on a piece of wood as an object of scorn and horror, he can’t even wipe the blood from his own eyes.

What kind of king is this?

There is no triumphant majesty in this king. No gorgeous palace lined with gold, no army to command, no household cavalry or legion of courtiers. This king is not in regal robes. He’s naked, in pain, helpless, and dying. That’s what makes Christ the King different from all others who would wear the crown and place themselves above their fellow mortals. This king, with all the glory and power of the Heavenly Father, has chosen to forsake it all. He doesn’t fear the loss of power—he willingly relinquishes it. He does not rise above us. He comes down to be with us, to know us in our worst, most brittle, fragile, lost, and lonely moments. This king loves us so much that, with his dying breath, he bestows grace and forgiveness on those who would be his enemies and reaches out in comfort to the lowest of the low.

What kind of king is this? The kind we should follow, because all others are just mortals with no divine right to their authority. Their victories and achievements are and have always been temporary. Yet the king who died on the cross lives within us, teaches us compassion, mercy, and humility. He teaches us—or at least, has tried to teach us—gratitude for our shared humanity, a humanity he loved enough to embrace himself. For this we offer him our respect, tradition, form and ceremonious duty.

May we all be worthy subjects of this king. God bless you, and thank you for reading my blog this week.

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[i] William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard II (Act 3, Sc 2), courtesy of OpenSourceShakespeare.org.

[ii] Luke 23:33-43

Big Buildings and False Prophecies (Reflections on Pentecost 23, Year C 2025)

 

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” (Luke 21:5-6)

Sometime around 20 BCE King Herod, the tool of the Roman Empire which had been occupying and oppressing the people of the Promised Land for about forty years, decided he’d make a name for himself. The temple of Jerusalem, the place where pious Jews were supposed to make pilgrimage and offer sacrifices, seemed a little too shabby for a king as magnificent as Herod imagined himself to be. Even though this structure had been the Jews’ place of worship for the last 500 years—ever since their ancestors had returned from captivity in Babylon—Herod just wasn’t impressed. I guess he figured there were more awesome buildings back in Rome, and, wanting to be one of the cool kids, he decided to take the backhoe to the temple and rebuild it bigger and gaudier, making it a titanic reflection of his own titanic ego[i].

Have you noticed how despots love to build gargantuan buildings to celebrate themselves? Hitler planned to build a gigantic domed hall in the center of Berlin which would be so huge it would have its own climate. Of course, he decided to invade Poland instead, and I believe you know the rest. Even if old Adolf had actually constructed this behemoth, it would doubtlessly have been bombed into a giant pile of rubble, ending up not unlike Herod’s great temple which was destroyed by the Romans in the war 70 CE.

In our gospel lesson for Pentecost 23 in the Revised Common Lectionary (Luke 21:5-9), Jesus’ disciples are marveling at Herod’s humongous masterpiece, but Jesus isn’t about to gush over this collection of stones and mortar. He knows that the real temple—the real place of worship—is in the heart of the believer. He also knows that trouble is coming and, however grand this temple might be, it wouldn’t take too much for the Roman army to knock it all to the ground.

This observation rather naturally causes some alarm for the disciples. You can’t blame them for wanting a little bit of a heads up if there’s going to be a massively destructive war on the homefront. Like everyone else, they want to be able to read the tea leaves and predict exactly when and how the future will play out.  But Jesus isn’t going to play that game. What does he tell them? The truth. Bad stuff will happen. You know: Like wars and famines and plagues. But this stuff always happens. One disaster won’t necessarily spell the end of time. Nevertheless, there will always be some loud-mouthed bozos who will claim total annihilation is bearing down and will destroy life as we know it unless we follow their inspired lead. Don’t believe those guys.

Interpreting biblical prophecy seems to be a cottage industry in the U.S. For over fifty years we’ve been told by many that we are living in the End Times. “The Rapture is coming,” they say. “Biblical prophecies are unfolding as we speak!” [ii]

If you want to crack the code of Bible prophecy, there’s something important you should know. There is no code. Any coded language used by the Bible writers was meant to be understood by the audiences to whom they wrote and the situations in which those folks found themselves. Some of that message may be permanently lost to antiquity, and we can only speculate on its meaning.

Now imagine Shakespeare saying, “I’m going to write this play called Hamlet. People will think it’s total rubbish, but 400 years from now they’ll understand the secret message in it and it will be a smash!” He’d have been a doofus to have done that. No. He wrote for his own audience in his own day. So did the authors of the Bible. The beauty in our scriptures lies in the fact the wisdom inherent in these stories transcends time, place, and culture and can still speak to us. But the Bible is not a crystal ball for divining the future. To use it as such is disrespectful to the scriptures themselves.

The message about the future in this gospel passage is pretty clear. Jesus tells us that bad stuff will always happen, and that we cannot predict when it all will hit the fan. Nevertheless, we are to persevere in faith. We are to trust God will give us the wisdom we need to withstand everything this unpredictable world wants to throw our way. We’ve made it this far. We can go farther. Buildings and empires crumble. God doesn’t.

Today pious Jews still gather in Jerusalem at the only remaining section of Herod’s massive temple complex, a section of the western wall called the Wailing Wall. One has to wonder why this site causes wailing. Rather than lament for what has been destroyed, wouldn’t it be so much better to rejoice over the faith which has endured? I’m just asking.

It means a lot to me that you came by to visit this week. Leave me a message, copy this post, and have blessed week. See you next time.

 

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[i] If you’re into this sort of thing, you might want to know the original temple built by King Solomon around 960 BCE was less than the size of a football field. Herod’s temple complex covered 30 acres.

[ii] The whole doctrine of the rapture (if you can dignify it enough to call it a doctrine) is quite specious. It’s based on a 19^th century heresy called dispensationalism. I always recommend you check out The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation by Barbara Rossing (Westview Press, 2004).