The Meyer Minute

The Meyer Minute for February 11, 2022

I was raised in a loving Christian family, in a neighborhood of middle-class working families, friendly, church people. The United States was at peace and public morality was pretty much Judeo-Christian, no one complaining about the Ten Commandments on public buildings. “Children learn what they live,” and that’s true of me. Still in my Christian cocoon, I find it hard to believe there are people who are my enemies.  

“They make their tongue sharp as a serpent’s, and under their lips is the venom of asps…. Violent men, who have planned to trip up my feet. The arrogant have hidden a trap for me, and with cords they have spread a net; beside the way they have set snares for me” (Psalm 140:3-5). I might be naïve, but the psalmists weren’t. They often pray for deliverance and vengeance. “Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men; preserve me from violent men.” “Let the mischief of their lips overwhelm them! Let burning coals fall upon them! Let them be cast into fire” (Psalm 140:1, 9-10). So, should this be my godly prayer for people who are against me, “Lord, fry ‘em!”?  

The Bible teaches God’s judgment is more intricate than “let ‘em burn.” St. Paul quotes Proverbs 25:21-22: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:20-21). Two things happen when you and I do good to someone who does us wrong. “We provoke him to peace or even to reconciliation. But if he persists in his wickedness, he will bring down fire on his head” (Constantius, an early church father, in Michael Middendorf, “Concordia Commentary: Romans,” 1276-1277). So, the psalmist praying for deliverance and vengeance finally puts the injustice he’s suffered into God’s hands. “I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and will execute justice for the needy” (Psalm 140:12). “Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19). 

All of which leads me to thankfulness for being cocooned in God’s love, His love to me and through me to all, God’s love to you and through you to everyone in your life.  

The Meyer Minute for February 9, 2022

Educators talk about “teachable moments,” random times outside school assignments and classrooms when a truth about life can be learned. The Spirit of God is our teacher, leading us into truth (John 16:13), and if you are truly God-oriented, the Spirit’s teaching is not confined to church. Following this world’s news provides moments of learning, contrasts of the eternal to much that surrounds us in our present life. Johann Arndt, a German pastor who lived from 1555 to 1621, sized up what he saw in his day. The most basic things never change. Is the daily news your teachable moment? Can you hear the Spirit’s Word contrasting the kingdom of this world to the kingdom of Christ? 

“When the present world’s life is compared with Christ’s life and doctrine, we can conclude that most of the world’s life is contrary to Christ. What else is the worldly life but greed, concern for security, lust of the flesh and eye, and prideful living? This, now, is the world: great earthly honor, wide reputation, a big name, disloyalty, contention, war, unchastity, enmity, curiosity in word and work, fraud, falseness, and calumny. In short, the lives of world-children are today nothing but world-love, self-love, vain-glory, and self-seeking. 

“Contrariwise, Christ’s life is nothing else but pure sincere love of God and neighbor, friendliness, meekness, humility, patience, loyalty to the death, mercy, righteousness, truth, purity, holiness, contempt for the world and its lust and wealth, denial of self, a steady cross, tribulation and affliction, continual search for God’s kingdom, and a fervent desire to fulfill God’s will. 

“Where are true Christians? They are but a small flock in a little vineyard cottage. Only God know where they are. Yet Christ dwells with them and among them until the world’s end.” (Devotions and Prayers of Johann Arndt, 22). 

The Meyer Minute for February 8, 2022

“May you live in interesting times” was an ancient Chinese curse, but for a faithful churchgoer in our times? Thank you, Lord, for placing me in this time! My “three score years and ten” plus five, have seen unprecedented changes in America, including significant decline in the institutional church. Because of that, not despite that, but because “change and decay all around I see,” I am blessed to learn anew what Christian hope is really about.   

First Peter has been called an epistle of hope, rightly so. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). What exactly is that hope? Decades ago, when America’s public culture had a Christian worldview, when the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world often blended, hope could be in many things. “I hope you get better,” “I hope the children do well,” and so on. Of course, pastors tried to focus that hope, “Hope in God,” (Psalm 42:11), but laser focus was harder when American public life wasn’t challenging the church. 

Now the church is often on the defensive. So, what does hope mean now? Here’s a revealing fact about 1 Peter. This short epistle has only three references to the resurrection of Jesus, but it has, by my count, ten references to Christ’s return in glory on judgment day. Seeing Christ in glory is the object of hope, not my earthly lot. Even more focused, hope in 1 Peter is not in the resurrection of Jesus. Look closely at the verse quoted above. Our hope is “through” the resurrection of Christ. That is, His resurrection, without which our faith is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:17), has given us birth to hope of heaven, “to an inheritance…kept in heaven for you.” “Set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:4,13). The church’s loss of privilege in American society helps us see our hope, and leads us to pray, “grant that heav’nly minded He make us” (Lutheran Service Book, 617:3). 

“Christ is risen; He is risen indeed.” Reciting that at Easter never satisfies me, something is still missing. Maranatha. “‘I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20). 

The Meyer Minute for February 7, 2022

Christocentric. At the Seminary, that is how we say sermons should be written, Christ-centered, but now that I’m in the reflective mode of retirement, I’m not sure that is how we preachers in fact preach, and I definitely include myself. It seems to me… I intentionally wrote that because I don’t have a statistical study on sermons… It seems to me that what we think are Christocentric sermons are actually sermons on Christian living.   

Many years ago, I attended the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville. It was at the Gaylord Hotel, a massive, I should have put that in capitals, hotel complex. That year the NRB was going to honor Dr. Oswald Hoffmann, the beloved Speaker of The Lutheran Hour. Because the Gaylord is a sprawling facility, I was asked to guide Dr. and Mrs. Hoffmann to the banquet hall. Making the long walk, he asked me how it was going. “Sir, I’ve noticed that they talk a lot about the Lord’s work, but I don’t hear them talking about the Lord.” “Oh, is that so,” and he said nothing more. I assumed he was thinking, “dumb, Dale.” Nope. After Dr. Hoffmann received his honor, he spoke, and for 10 minutes or so, he talked about Jesus Christ, Jesus’ person and what Jesus did and does. His speaking about Jesus had the audience in the palm of his hand. That last sentence is a rhetorical analysis, but pastorally it is better to say he took us off ourselves and showed us Jesus. 

Yesterday I preached in Lansing, Michigan, but I struggled preparing the sermon. The text was Luke 5:1-11, where Jesus tells Peter, “From now on you will be catching men.” That’s the ESV. The Contemporary English Version is more gender sensitive, and still a proper translation of the Greek, “From now on you will bring in people instead of fish.” The expected presentation of the text is to speak about evangelism, which is preaching about one aspect of Christian living in the life of the church. To put that off center and speak about Jesus, what He did in that historical incident and what He, not me, not you, not your evangelism program, not the church… what Jesus is doing today is far more challenging. For now, I’ll leave it at that. We Lutherans may not be as Christ-centered as we imagine.  

The Meyer Minute for February 3, 2022

When you read the Psalms… I mean read them casually, not academically, not like we pastors often present Scripture. We easily go off intellectually, far from daily life… No, when you read the Psalms in your comfortable chair, no hurry, what is this passage saying to me? you notice that many psalms begin their reflections in the world of nature.  For example, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” begins Psalm 19, but the psalmist moves to personal, spiritual meditation. “The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple” (Psalm 19:1, 7). 

Today is day two of being slammed with a winter storm. I’d like to shovel, but Diane won’t let me… and she’s right. Anyway, the wind is blowing snow over everything; shoveling would be useless. And it’s cold, 17 degrees. Our neighbor’s furnace went out. How many space heaters can we round up? Here’s my snowy spiritual Minute: Nature shows us how vulnerable we are. Science and technology have done a great job of making our lives far more comfortable than our ancestors ever experienced, but with that comes a false sense of our invulnerability. When we forget our weakness before nature, we act like atheists, forgetting our assigned place in the cosmic scheme of things. Only “the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple,” us. 

For the psalmists, things on earth and things in the heavens were rungs on the ladder of spiritual thought that led up to the great Creator. What they saw and experienced in the physical world lifted them to higher thoughts. Apropos to today, the Lord, “sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly. He gives snow like wool; he scatters frost like ashes. He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs; who can stand before his cold?” But the psalmist turns to the mercy of the Creator, spring will come. “He sends out his word and melts them; he makes his wind blow and the waters flow. He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and rules to Israel” (Psalm 147:15-18). “Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins,” including presumptuous thoughts before our Creator (Psalm 19:13). Good day to curl up with a psalm!

The Meyer Minute for February 2, 2022

Happy Groundhog’s Day! The people of Punxsutawney were out too early this morning but heh! An excuse to get together and party. I can never remember what happens with the groundhog’s shadow, more winter or less? It doesn’t matter. A yearly ritual to enjoy, but recall Bill Murray?  

Think about your daily rituals. Times when you talk with someone dear. Regular times to go out to eat. Super Bowl, an excuse to party? Little things too. We’ll miss our rituals when they’re gone, but we won’t miss other things of daily life. It’s in daily time that we experience our troubles. It’s in this body we experience health issues and decline. It’s in these times that we feel too much the damage of sin. 

Too many people, Christians too, live only in present time. “Carpe diem” said the Roman poet Horace, “Seize the day.” Ancient Greeks and Romans believed their eternity would be disembodied spirits, nothing to look forward to. The Creator “put eternity in man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11), but we can go through our daily routines without looking forward to eternity. Groundhog Day over and over again. 

What I’m getting at is how to look towards death. When a pastor receives a call to another congregation, the rule of thumb is, don’t take the call to get away from your present situation but accept it because you whole-heartedly want to go. There is so much good in this life that death will take away; how can we become even more eager for the life to come? That sense of eternity that God put in our hearts needs to be identified, meditated upon, nurtured. That’s why you put yourself into the Bible, to look forward to the life to come. 

This Groundhog Day, we’re having a winter storm in southern Illinois, rain, sleet, and now snow is falling. I’m told there will be no wintry storms in heaven. “So do Thou guide and govern us, that every day whatsoever betide us, some gain to better things, some more blessed joy in higher things may be ours, that so we, though but weaklings, may yet, God-guided, go from strength to strength, until at last, delivered from that burden of the flesh, through which comes so much struggling, we may complete our pilgrimage in triumph and enter into the land of harmony and eternal peace.” (George Dawson) 

The Meyer Minute for February 1, 2022

It’s a great time to be the church, especially because our changed and rapidly changing times make us rethink what Christian faith is and how faithful people live. An example was in yesterday’s New York Times, an opinion piece by Tish Harrison Warren, a priest in the Anglican Church of North America. 

“Even as most churches now offer in-person services, the ‘or online’ option has remained. I think this is good, given how unusual the past two years have been. Now I think it’s time to drop the virtual option. And I think this for the same reason I believed churches should go online back in March 2020: This is the way to love God and our neighbors. 

“For all of us – even those who aren’t churchgoers – bodies, with all the risk, danger, limits, mortality and vulnerability that they bring, are part of our deepest humanity, not obstacles to be transcended through digitization. They are humble (and humbling) gifts to be embraced. Online church, while it was necessary for a season, diminishes worship and us as people. We seek to worship wholly – with heart, soul, mind and strength – and embodiment is an irreducible part of that wholeness.” 

I wondered about those who are confined to their homes because of sickness or frailty. Ms. Warren points out that congregations have always gone in person to those who couldn’t come to worship. Since visitation to members has traditionally been a high priority for pastors, I think on-line is a supplement but not a replacement for personal visits. But back to the bigger question, what about people who can come? 

“People need embodied community. We find it in book clubs or having friends over for dinner. But embodiment is a particularly important part of Christian spirituality and theology. We believe God became flesh, lived in a human body and remains mysteriously in a human body. Our worship is centered not on simply thinking about certain ideas, but on eating and drinking bread and wine during communion.” (New York Times, January 31; A17).   

Over its 2000 years, the church has worked through many heresies about the body, our bodies and the physical body of Christ. If I were pastor of a congregation, I’d encourage our people to start studying what incarnation and sacraments mean for how we offer worship. How stimulating!