The Bungee Cord

Hello,

The last time I was in Memorial Stadium to watch a football game at the University of Illinois was in 1976, fifty years ago. But I am going to revisit the stadium this weekend to watch the Fighting Illini play. I am wondering what it will be like. I’ve heard that many updates have been done. The concours area which I remember being crushed limestone has, I believe, been upgraded with concrete floors and nice concessions areas. A huge luxury/press box has been built above the home team stands. The brand-new scoreboard brags about being the largest screen of all of the college stadiums.

But more than seeing what is new, I look forward to seeing what was there when I went there. I look forward to seeing the students in the “Block I” section wearing shirts that when all of the students have taken their place there is a huge “I” in the stadium. I look forward to seeing those students’ flip cards during half-time to make pictures that align with the band as it marches around and does it’s show. I look forward to hearing the band trumpet out “Oskeewow Illinois!” when we score and see the cheer leaders do a push-up for every point each time a score happens. It isn’t quite heaven, but going there again feels pretty much like going to heaven to me.

I’ve been a rabid University of Illinois fan ever since I went there, even though I only spent my first two years of college there, transferring to Valparaiso to prepare me for seminary. The University of Illinois has always been dear to my heart, because it was there that my heart came alive with life. It was there that I found myself among people who treasured me as a friend. It was there that people saw in me a value that I had a hard time seeing before. It was there that I stretched out my wings and people lifted me up to fly, and they were also there to catch me when I tumbled to the ground. Despite the struggles that came along with those first years of dawning independence, I hold great memories and thanks for the years that I spent there. I am really looking forward to going there this week!

It is with the same sort of anticipation that I find myself “going to heaven”, the real heaven, when my days in this life are over. I look forward to experiencing with magnified amplitude the wonderful things that I have experienced in this life: the warmth of love that comes with deep friendship, the restfulness of peace that comes with the embrace of God, and the explosion of joy that is sung around the eternal wedding feast. And I look with excited anticipation to experience new things that I have never experienced before: the silence that comes when pain and suffering is no more, the hope that becomes tangible when death is unknown, the surprise of delight when faith becomes sight, and the wonder of living where no clock ticks the rhythm of time.

It has been 69 years since the waters of Baptism splashed over my, and I had my eyes opened to see a glimpse of heaven, and Sunday after Sunday since then I have tasted the foretaste of the feast to come at the communion rail. Each time when I partake in the Lord’s Supper, I experience a measure of the hug that awaits me in heaven. And each time I experience the peace that surpasses all human understanding when I pray, I look forward to being in the total presence of the one whose has listened to my prayers and be awash in that divine peace.

Although I have no immediate plans on venturing to heaven, I do, with even greater anticipation than my visit to the University of Illinois, look forward to going there!

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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 The Bungee Cord

Hello,

What do the following people have in common?

The unrepentant person.

The lazy person.

The ungrateful person.

The prideful person.

The manipulative person.

The answer: people who Christians are not meant to help…..at least according to a person who posts “reels” on Facebook.

The first time I watched and listened to this post, I thought it must have been a joke. Surely the young man who was confidently putting his perspective of the Christian life must be trying to see how many people he could get riled up over something that makes no sense. After all, if I were to answer what all the aforementioned people have in common, my answer would be that those characteristics are common to everyone, including the one who was posting them on-line.

After all, who among us is not guilty of unrepentance and keeps on doing the thing that brings pain to the world? How much sleep have you or I lost over the children throughout the world who are starving, while we worry about weight control?

Who among us can say we are free of laziness? Just consider all of the things that we buy to make our lives easier, or how much our time is consumed on ourselves that we don’t have the energy to reach out to others, or even reach out to God in Sunday morning worship?

Who among us can say that we live life in total gratitude? Think of how the commercials that bombard our eyes work on our sense of what we “need” in life, making us people full of “grabitude” (my word) instead of gratitude.

Who among us can say that we are free of an inflated ego? When one listens to the conversations that often take place in living rooms and church parlors, people hold onto their opinions with eagle-like talons, pridefully convinced that they are right.

Who among us doesn’t engage in manipulation? We all know what buttons to press on those around us. The world teaches us well how to get our way, and there are books and conferences that instruct us how to manipulate others for our advantage.

If the young man on the reel is speaking the truth, then it seems to me that we, as Christians, and thereby God, himself, need help no one.

It may be true that these supposedly precluding characteristics may be more obvious in some people than others, but when it comes to such characteristics, I don’t believe that degree really matters, it is kind of like “being a little pregnant”.

As I listened to this reel several times, it became clear to me that this young man was not joking around. I felt myself wanting to tell him that it would do him well to look into a mirror rather than a camera lens. It is true that he justified his position with Biblical passages, but as it is with Biblical justification, sinful eyes can find words to justify their beliefs as they read the Bible.

I find myself driven to write this Bungee Cord to tell you that I do not believe that there is any reason not to help someone, or to believe that God would impose any reason to not help you. Jesus came to save sinners….each and every one of them. Jesus did not measure the amount of sin in a person’s life; Jesus came to rid all sin from a person’s life. Jesus came to put his name on each person and erase the name of the sin that had staked their claim on them. There is no person that Jesus is not meant to help, and likewise, then, there is no person that we are not meant to help.

Rather than cancel some people out of God’s loving grace, we might begin out efforts to help all people by praying for them, opening our hearts to them, and seeking how we might best help them. Obviously, help requires wisdom. So, know this, no matter who you are, you are someone to whom Jesus reaches out his hand in love, and therefore one to whom the body of Christ, the church, extends a hand. And for those of us who bear Christ’s name, Christian, the best way to assure us of our part in helping others might just be to look in a mirror.

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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 Hello,

Is grace easy?

Some people have told me, after hearing me, that in preaching grace I make Christianity too easy. That is their comment when I say what I read the Bible to be saying, and that is that my relationship to God, and likewise yours, is founded on and continues to be built on God’s unconditional love for you and me. Ephesians 2:8,9 puts it this way, “8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— 9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” 1 John 3:1 says it this was, “See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.”

“You mean,” they tell me, “that a person can say or do anything and still consider themselves to be fully embraced by God’s child-claiming love?”

And when I say, “Yes,” they say that’s too easy and it cheapens the cost of Jesus’s suffering and death.

“I don’t think so,” is my response, “and as a matter of fact I think to live entirely trusting in the grace of God is a very hard thing to do.” I think it is a very hard to entirely entrust oneself into the care and judgment of another. Consider the angst that comes with trusting a doctor when you are facing a life-threatening illness…especially when the doctor’s treatment doesn’t seem to be doing much to the illness. We are told to get a second opinion…or a third or a fourth, or we take things into our own hands by grabbing onto something that proposes a miracle cure. Consider the research that someone who is accused of a serious crime puts into in hiring an attorney, and then when one is in trial to keep their mouth shut and let the attorney speak. Or consider the hesitancy of jumping out of a 10th story window with the promise of a person below, “I will catch you.”

If it is that hard to completely entrust oneself to another in worldly matters, it seems to me that to do so in eternal matters is infinitely harder. I have found this to be true over and over again as I have presided over funerals. People have come up to me and said, “I know that my mom is in heaven because she was such a good Christian person.” Or they have said of one whose life was not so faithfully adorned, “I know that down deep my dad believed.” Although it may be true that there are things about you and me that God smiles upon, it is hard to lay those aside as still not making us worthy of God’s love more than others, or even at all. It is hard to completely let go of our hold, even our hold on our goodness, when it comes to one’s relationship with God. It is not easy. It is hard!

And to those who say that to proclaim that those whose lives show little to no semblance of God’s love are still children of God cheapens the cost of Jesus’ suffering and death, it seems to me that to have to add anything to Jesus’ suffering and death to enable God’s love for someone actually cheapens what Jesus went through. Anyone who washes clothes would say the same thing if you had to run a load through a second time with an additional ingredient to get them clean. Dr. Mark Hoffman, of United Seminary says it with this clarity, “Grace but….isn’t grace.”

All of this is to say that the reason that the Bungee Cord is always a message of God’s grace, of God’s unconditional love and welcome, is that I think it is hard to trust in God’s grace. But in the end, to do otherwise is deadly, as deadly as saying to a person to whom you have offered a glass of water, “Don’t worry. This glace was full of arsenic but I got it pretty clean.” The “arsenic” in our lives eats away at our relationship to God and others. It is the smallest spiritual cancer cell just waiting to explode.

It is clear to me, as it was to St. Paul in the 8th chapter of Romans, that Jesus wants us to know that he is all we need to be held in the embrace of God, and as Ephesians 2:10 says that through Jesus we have been transformed into children of God who have the “genes” to do God’s work. I hope that in every Bungee Cord you read you are reminded of and reassured of what God, by his grace, has done for you. God has made you one who God will eternally call his child, and one who has been made to bring God’s matchless love to the world.

Child of God….have a great week!

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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 The Bungee Cord

Hello,

Kate and I are on our way back home after spending two weeks in the Northwest. Apparently and unusually, every day was a sunny and warm day, and so we got to see the best of the “Evergreen State”. However, there was something that we did not get to see over these weeks, the news.

Although we had a TV to turn on, we never did. The world went by without us….or at least without us knowing it did. Actually, it has been nice. No word wrestling from Washington, D.C.. No earth rumbling from crimes. No meaningless distractions from athletic venues. No saber rattling from muscle pumping countries. No forecasts of weather that are rarely right. None if it for two weeks, and it has been nice.

That is not to say that I think it is good for a person to climb into a hole and hide from the world in which we live. It is important to take a productive place in this spinning circus in which we live: to silence the cries of babies whose hunger cannot be satisfied, to give a lift to those who have been kicked to the gutter, to throw a pebble of love into the lake of society and watch the waves it makes travel in every direction. “Out of sight, out of mind,” only adds to the pain and misery of the world when it is the mantra of one’s life. Nevertheless, swimming in the rough seas of life can be wearisome. Our legs can become so tired that they just flop through the churning waters. Our arms can become so weak that they just splash and we just motionlessly flutter. We need times to refresh and revitalize.

It may not be two weeks, but refreshment and revitalization are two of the main things that God gives us when we “remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.” I heard Prof. Jim Nestingen give the Biblical understanding of “to keep it holy,” and he said it means that holiness is when something does what God intended it to do. That is holiness. When we remember the sabbath by gathering together in worship to hear God’s word and share in his supper, the Sabbath gives us the strength and courage that we need to get back into the fray of life. A time of respite from the world’s news. That is what God intended it to do.

Instead of being bombarded by the news of the world, when we gather in God’s house we hear God’s news, good news. That is what the word “gospel” literally means. Euangelion (Greek, the language the New Testament is written in) which is translated as “Gospel” is good (eu) message (angelion). The “sanctuary”, the place where we worship, is a place where peace is fostered. The stained-glass windows tell the story of God’s never yielding love and keep the world’s screeching brokenness out. The food from the table and the fellowship amongst the pews fill our souls with resiliency and grace. The music restores our heartbeat to beat with God’s heart. And the word that comes from Scripture and the pulpit are the hands of the potter restoring his works.

The repeated practice of weekly worship is God’s gift to us. It may not always be thrilling. It may not always be earthmoving. It may not always be exhilarating. But it will always be a time where the news of the world is silenced by God’s good news…news of hope, news of forgiveness, news of compassion, news of joy, news of victory…..news of Jesus! And like the two weeks silence of the world’s news that Kate and I have experienced, the hour of silence of the world’s chaotic news ….. will be nice!

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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 The Bungee Cord

Hello,

I have been attending my current church for about four years now, and for as long as I have been going there, the same thing has been posted on the sign in front of the entrance and facing the wall. Along with the church’s name and the time of worship, is this question, “How do you reflect God’s glory?”

Recently, I suggested to the church council that the sign be changed. I suggested that instead of asking the question, “How do you reflect God’s glory?”, the sign would say, “God’s grace awaits you here.” I made that suggestion because I believe that going to church and even the life of faith is primarily about the measure of God’s love for us, and not the measure of our success in reflecting that love.

I say that because the people with whom Jesus found himself most often butting heads were the ones whose focus was on people’s lives, the scribes and the pharisees. They focused their teaching on rules to live by and rules to worship by….things like, delineating how many steps you could take on the Sabbath and still keep it holy and eliminating from worship people who were “unclean”. Although they never said it quite this way, if they were to have put a sign in front of their places of worship, that sign would appropriately ask, “How do you reflect God’s glory?”

But when one reads the Gospels, Jesus never says to those he encounters, “How do you reflect God’s glory?” Instead, he said to a taxpayer named Zacchaeus whose reflection of God’s glory was mired with greed and theft, “I am coming to your house today.” He said to a leper who everyone shunned because of his frightening image , “Go and show yourself to the priest,” and having said that the leper was healed. He said to a paralyzed man who everyone measured as worthless, “Take up your pallet and walk, “ and that is exactly what the man was able to do. He said to a man dying on a cross, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” Jesus did not evaluate how well people were reflecting God’s glory, he, by the power of God’s grace, made them a reflection of God’s glory.

To me, to be asked by a sign at the door of the church, “How do you reflect God’s glory?” seems to invite only those who have done it well, and telling those whose reflection is marred that they need to go and work on their reflection and come back when their lives provide a more vivid response. That is why I suggested the sign change. After all, no one reflects God’s glory with significant accuracy….God knows that…and that is why God sent Jesus, to wipe the dirt and grime off of our lives and make us people of brighter hope, of clearer compassion, of blinding love, and exploding joy.

If you don’t see these things in you when you look in the mirror, and if others are unable to make these things out in you when they look at you….there’s a place for that to change: at church. Inside the doors of the church, God awaits you with his grace to transform you and your life into a pure reflection of his pure grace. God encounters us with his word, which like a cloth dusts us of our sins. God splashes the waters of Baptism on us which cleans deep below the surface, all the way to our hearts. God invites us to his table and personally shines up every cell of our bodies. God polishes us up when we rub shoulders with the fellow forgiven. Church is all about encountering God in the fullness of his grace and then going back out into the world radiating it.

Please receive this Bungee Cord as an invitation from a pastor standing outside the church, welcoming people in, standing in front of a sign that says, “God’s grace awaits you here.”

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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