Sermon Video: "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover" Luke 22:14-20

In his last opportunity to celebrate Passover before his time of trial, Jesus expresses how important this act of faith in God is for him. Just as the people of Israel have done for thousands of years, Jesus celebrates the Passover with his disciples. On this night, the simple fellowship of this shared faith allows Jesus to draw strength that he will need during those long dark hours on the cross.

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Sermon Video

The Road to Freedom, April 9th, 1945

On the monday morning, with the war only weeks from ending, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Gestapo.  It marked the end of a decade of resistance by Bonhoeffer, first to the offical German Church's embrace of Hitler's Nazi racial theology, eventually to the Hitler regime itself culminating in his joining with the plotters in the failed Valkyrie plot.  In the end, Hitler personally ordered the death of Bonhoeffer and many other of the conspirators while he cowered in the rubble of Berlin awaiting his own suicide.  Evil, when it cannot have victory, is content with spite.  Similiar scenes were taking place all over Nazi occupied Europe as concentration camps hurried to kill as many innocents as possible before Allied troops arrived.

To Bonhoeffer, this end was a choice he would embrace if it was what God asked of him.  He could have stayed safely in America with rewarding teaching opportunities at seminaries that certainly would have benefited from his wisdom, but he chose to return to Germany to be with the Confessing Church (the opposition church formed to counter the Nazi takeover of the offical German Lutheran Church) pastors in their ongoing struggle against Hitler.  To give oneself wholly to God was the passion of his life.

If we allow ourselves to be sub-divided into a spiritual side that we give to God and a secular side that we reserve to ourselves, we will never be the Christians that God wants us to be.  Nor will we ever be as useful for the Kingdom of God as we could be.  It is only when we have decided firmly in our hearts that our lives are not our own that we can truly find lives of purpose and meaning.  This radical wisdom comes from Christ himself who said, "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 10:39)  Bishop Bell, a friend of Dietrich from his ecumenical efforts in London, ended his memorial sermon with the words, "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church".

Sermon Video: Jesus Weeps over Jerusalem - Luke 19:41-44

On his day of triumph, as Jesus approaches Jerusalem, he is overcome with emotion as he considers the fate of this city and it's people.  The Messiah was the last prophet to come to the Covenant people in hopes that they would repent, but the misconception that the Messiah would be a political savior and not a spiritual one was too firmly rooted for the people to listen to Jesus' message of repentance.  An so, the Son of Man weeps for the hardness of men's hearts and reminds us today that we too must listen to God's call for repentance when we hear because we are not guaranteed another chance.

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"It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love."

Those words of wisdom were written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a letter to his best friend, who was soon to be married, from the Gestapo prison he was held in during the last years of his life.  The idea that marriage sustains love, and not the other way around is one that our culture today need so desperately to understand.  Far too many marriages end when the two people in it don't feel like they're "in love" anymore; the emotions that brought them together have lapsed or faded (as most honest people who have been married a long time will tell you they at times do), and therefore the rational for the marriage itself is gone.
From God's perspective, the value of the sacrament (to borrow a word from our Catholic friends) of marriage is that it sustains us as a union of two of God's children through good times and bad.  It is not dependent upon what is felt but rather rests upon the promise and commitment that has been made before God and man. 
What is it that brings a marriage through a rough patch or dark days and back again into the light and joy of love?  The very commitment that is needed from both man and woman to stay with this union regardless.  It is when we honor each other by remaining true to our word that we allow God carry us through the circumstances that may destroy a marriage not founded upon trust in God, so that we can rediscover what made love bloom in the first place.
When a marriage breaks up over the ebb and flow of life a profound opportunity for growth and character has been forever lost.  It is for our own benefit that we should remain and strive for our marriages.  Our culture would like people to think that they deserve to find happiness and therefore should leave when a marriage isn't "happy", but that lie is selling something is cannot deliver.  Where is happiness without someone to share it with?  Where is happiness in selfish decision making?
It is when two become one, till death, that love can truly be that which sustains us.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games movie was just released this week after years of sales of the trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins.  The moral effort made by Collins in her books, and in this movie version of the first book, are to be applauded.  The books and movie are a blend of Lord of the Flies,and The Gladiator, with a sprinkling of The Runing Man, Survivor, and The Truman Show.  The combination of Roman style gladiatorial fights to the death with modern reality television works well as a commentary upon our society's willingness to entertain itself with the misery of others.  Our morbid fascination with violence can be seen in the countless Youtube videos of street fights, the growth of the UFC and other extreme fighting shows, and the violence filled video games that children and adults love so much.
The emotional impace that The Hunger Games is able to have is due largely to its use of children as the fighters (as opposed to the adult slaves being used in The Gladiator or the classic Spartacus).  With each death of a child competitor our own innocence is further lost a bit unless we reject (as Collins hopes we will) such trivialization of life.  It isn't good enough to say that this is the world we live in; to throw our hands up and admit defeat.  As in Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Andrew Peterson (the Wingfeather Saga), there are things worth fighting for.  To defend the weak and the innocent against the strong is a noble pursuit, but to simply revel in violence for its own sake, for entertainment, or for cynical political purposes (as the government in The Hunger Games does) is to begin walking down a path that leads back to mankind's oldest obsession: self-destruction.