Lutheran Church of the Resurrection

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With a little help from an encyclopedia this week, I learned something about thirst. The sensation of thirst occurs when there is a loss of water from the blood cells of our body. As those cells pass by a particular censor in the brain, the censor alerts the body that water needs to be added. First, there’s the dry mouth and a craving for fluids. Then there is decrease in the production of saliva and then difficulty swallowing.

If the body still doesn’t get the liquid it wants, it begins to suffer dehydration. The skin becomes dry and wrinkly. A fever develops, sweating stops, kidneys shut down, and death can result.

The thing that surprised me is that dehydration takes place with the loss of only 8% of the body’s water content. And under normal conditions, with no water intake, we loose 2.5% of the body’s water content per day. If it’s dry or we perspire a lot due to heat or activity, it goes up from there. That means that even under very ordinary conditions, we could experience fatal dehydration levels within 3 days of no water intake.

I. Israel in the desert
A. Exodus 15 ‘ Bitter water made sweet
Now maybe we can understand Israel’s complaint in the desert. Exodus, chapter 15 we read that after passing through the Red Sea, Israel entered the desert and for 3 days they couldn’t find any water. Finally, they came to a lake but the water was polluted (or bitter in the Hebrew) and they couldn’t drink it. And so they ‘grumbled’ against Moses saying, ‘What are we to drink.’ They were dehydrating! The Lord told Moses to do a very strange thing. Moses took a piece of wood and threw it into the polluted lake and the water, miraculously became ‘sweet.’ And all Israel drank and were renewed.

And if you were to listen carefully you could hear a faint, distant voice saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.’ Continue reading →

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‘I love you.’ Those are always welcome words to hear. They’re always welcome words to say too. But I suspect that there have never been three, more misused or misunderstood words in the human language than those three words. ‘I love you.’

What do those words mean to us when we hear them spoken to us? And what do we mean when we speak these words to someone else?

It’s such a simple sentence, yet so hard to understand. ‘I love you’ is a one-way road that runs from sender to receiver, from lover to beloved. In it’s purest form, ‘I love you’ means that I will surrender all of my wants and desires for the sake of your welfare and wellbeing and happiness, unconditionally, without any conditions attached.

Unfortunately, we fling this little phrase around pretty carelessly sometimes. We fail to understand that no other sentence in the human language requires the connection between words and deeds like this sentence does. St. John writes, ‘Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.’ (1John 3:18). Continue reading →

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It goes without saying that the human heart can become profoundly troubled. And when the heart is troubled, then everything is troubling and nothing is right. We’ve all been there. Some of us may be there right now. It’s an amazing thing really. When your heart is troubled, the things that normally give us great joy are completely ineffective. Where we would normally go about our daily life with a certain eagerness and excitement, where our heart is troubled, there’s a sense of fear and dread that overshadows almost everything and there’s no escaping it until our heart is set at peace again.

When King David’s heart was troubled, he didn’t try to compensate by overindulging himself or going shopping. He prayed, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew in me a right spirit.’

What do you do when you have a troubled heart? And I’m not talking about the superficial things that trouble us way more than they should. I’m talking about those things that trouble us to the very depth of our soul and that touch on matters of life and death, where God’s ways seem to be unfair or He even seems to be against us, or not even there at all. Continue reading →

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I. Things of the flesh

If you came into church this morning through the front door, you surely noticed that patch of bare ground. Some of you may have a similar patch in your lawn. When I pulled into the parking lot several weeks ago, I saw an amazing sight. Two crows were uprooting our front lawn in search of the grubs that were just under the surface of the ground. It looked like a little explosion was taking place. Grass was flying up in the air as these two crows were furiously pulling it out by the roots in search of, what for them, must have been a delectable gourmet delight. As a result however, we have this ugly patch of bare ground to deal with. Which we would have had to deal with anyway since grubs eat away at the roots of the grass. So, whether it was destroyed from above or from below, the grass didn’t stand a chance.

Quoting the prophet Isaiah, Peter writes, ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls”

‘The flesh’ is much more than the tissue and muscle that hangs on our bones, although it certainly includes the body. ‘The flesh’ is biblical shorthand for everything that does not last forever. Whether is gets eaten up by the sin that is within us, or whether it gets eaten up by outside forces that attack and destroy it, ‘the flesh’ will not last forever. It will ‘wither and fall.’ Continue reading →

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The rest of the world has already forgotten about Easter, if it ever paid much attention to it at all. Coming as late in the Spring as it did this year, Easter overlapped with Earth Day, and the message of God’s salvation of the world by the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ had to share the spotlight with the ecological message that we must do all that we can to save the planet from destruction. I read that some churches tried to cleverly combine these two messages into one, which I’m afraid in some cases, may have resulted in a Trinitarian confusion involving the Father, the Son and Mother Earth.
Continue reading →

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The dust is still settling from the earthquake that struck Japan on March 11th. It holds the dubious distinction of being one of the strongest quakes on record since the technology to measure such things has been available. It measured 9.0 on the Richter Scale and is responsible for the deaths of 10,035 people. The aftershocks are still happening. It will be a long time before the people of Japan recover from this disaster.

Almost forgotten now, but on January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck the nation of Haiti. Even though it only measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, it was responsible for 222, 570 deaths, over 20 times the number of the Japan earthquake. It will be a very long time before the nation of Haiti recovers from this disaster.

If your interested, the first earthquake for which we have a record of fatalities, occurred on May 19, 526AD in Antioch, Turkey. It was responsible for 250,000 deaths. The most devastating earthquake on record occurred in Syria on May 20, 1202. It was responsible for over 1,100,000 deaths.

Speaking of earthquakes, there are two other earthquakes on record that stand out as the most dramatic and life changing tremors ever to occur. Both are recorded in the Gospel according to St. Matthew. They both occurred in the year 33 AD. And they happened just three days apart. Continue reading →

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The scene that we heard described in our first reading from Exodus 24 took place in the desert at the base of Mt. Sinai where was Israel was encamped on their journey to the Promised Land. Moses had been on top of Mt. Sinai for 40 days and nights, and there God gave Him the 10 Commandments – rules for holy living. God’s people were to be a ‘holy people’ and ‘holy people’ live ‘holy lives.’ Sounds obvious I know, but you’d never get that idea just from watching the way God’s people actually live their lives.

When Moses came down from the Mountain, he told the people what God had told to him, ‘all of the words and all the rules.’ What Moses heard from God over the course of 40 days, he told to the people. It had to have been a pretty long sermon.

But by the end of it, ‘all the people answered with one voice, ‘all the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.” But words are cheap. Continue reading →

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‘Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing.’

When St. Paul writes, ‘have this MIND among yourselves,’ he’s referring to that inner compass that sets the course and direction for our life. Paul says that our ‘inner compass’ is to be set so that it points in the same way as the ‘mind of Christ.’ Because, after all, the mind of Christ is pointed to true north. The course of His life is in perfect alignment with the will of God. Every other course in life than this one is off course. To be off course from the course that Christ is on, is to be ‘lost.’

Paul details the course that the mind of Christ follows so that we may set our minds to the same coordinates. ‘He made Himself NOTHING.’ Now that’s a strange course in life to take. But what makes this course toward NOTHINGNESS really strange is His this life begins. ‘He was in the form of God and did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.’ He who is everything and has everything, ’emptied Himself’ of everything and became NOTHING. Continue reading →