Why I Love Opera

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As I have posted about before, I am currently in my wife’s production of La Boheme.  I am playing Alcindoro, the old man that brings Musetta to dinner in Act II.  It is a great role, very funny, and has been a joy.  I did the role grudgingly, but now I’m very thankful to have the opportunity.

The whole experience has made me think of a number of things about opera and music in general.  Here are some of them, in no particular oder:

  • You can’t really know a piece of music until you’ve performed it. I’ve always known this at some level, but being in this production has really reinforced this for me.  You just gain a different perspective on the music by internalizing it that much, analyzing every line, every chord and entrance.  I’ve really come to appreciate the artistry of my fellow singers, and of anyone who performs music of this caliber.  Puccini is just amazing.
  • You can tell music is good if you can listen to it hundreds of times and not hate it. I have pretty eclectic tastes when it comes to music, everything from classical of all sorts, alternative, jazz, heavy metal, folk, and more.  But it is only the absolute best of music that I can listen to over and over again and still love.  One can only listen to “I Wanna Talk About Me” a few times before you’re sick of it.  I like it, but it has it’s limits.  But great music just gets better the more you experience it.
  • High school students, and young people in general, are capable of far more than we ever given them credit for. I really wish that all my readers could come to this performance.  The artistry and professionalism of these young people is nothing short of astonishing.  My wife really seems to have a knack for bringing the best out of people, and she has done that in this performance.  Anyone who loves great music and drama would love this program.
  • If you sing mediocre music, you get mediocre singers. While I do enjoy the genre of the musical, a part of the problem with it as a genre is that it really instills bad habits in singers.  It forces singers to push their voices and generally use bad technique.  Good technique is universal, and good music will teach it.  Why don’t more of our high schools use great music, instead of poorly written music that is here today and gone tomorrow.  Will anyone be singing Rent in twenty-five years?
  • Opera taps into some of the deep emotions of humanity. We had the chorus master for Florentine Opera come and do a masterclass, and one of his comments was that Act II of La Boheme is a portrait or snapshot of the human experience.  Does Musetta stay with the man who is safe and will give her stuff (Alcindoro) or does she go to the one whom she loves (Marcello)?  Life is full of risks, and Musetta (who is admittedly a siren), chooses love over safety.  Could there be a more universal expression of love?

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the morning.  I’m sure there will be more after the performances.

GO CAST!

-LL

The Unrighteous Steward (Trinity 09)

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(This text is the perennial boxing championship of the one year lectionary.  I fight this text every year.  Here was this year’s round.)

Todd A. Peperkorn, STM
Messiah Lutheran Church
Kenosha, Wisconsin
Trinity 9 (July 20, 2008)
Luke 16:1-13

For an audio MP3 of this sermon, CLICK HERE

TITLE: “What is the World to Me”

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.  Our text for today is the Gospel lesson just read, the parable of the unrighteous servant.  We focus on the words of Jesus: And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.

“Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight!”  (Isaiah 5:21 ESV)

In Judges we hear about how when the people of God rebelled and lost faith, that every man did that which was right in his own eyes (Judges 17:6; Judges 21:25).   King David, on the other hand, did what was right in the eyes of the Lord (1 Kings 14:8; 1 Kings 15:5).  Our parable this morning is a matter of perspective.  Jesus says that the “the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light” (Luke 16:8 ESV).  What does it mean to look at such a convoluted and unusual parable from God’s perspective, and now from our own?  And what will it teach us about the mercy of God?

So let’s get at our text.  We have front page news here.  The CFO of a major company slashes the debts of his clients in the hopes of landing himself a job when his boss finds out he is wasteful.  Our text doesn’t say how he is wasteful.  It is, however, fair to presume that he’s not giving money to charity here.  He’s not doing what he’s supposed to be doing with the possessions that his boss gave him to take care of.  He’s wasteful.  He’s not reinvesting as he ought, or he’s spending money that he shouldn’t.

What’s a bright chief financial officer to do?  He can’t start at the bottom of the rung again, and he certainly could never apply for unemployment or something so distasteful as that.  In his pride, the manager comes up with a scheme.  What if I cook the books in such a way so that all of my bosses clients will see how much money I saved them?  Then, so he thought, they would be beholden to me and perhaps I won’t end up in the poor house.

Now this scheme would never work in America.  In our culture the owner would simply have the manager arrested and his insurance would probably cover any loss.  The worst that would happen would be speculation on the evening news.  So in order for us to understand the genius of the manager and the point of the parable, we have get into the mind of first century Judaism.

It works like this.  In Jesus’ day, their culture was much more closely defined by shame than we are anymore.  How you were viewed in the eyes of those around you was everything.  This wasn’t simply a matter of worrying about what other people thing.  They were a much more community or communal minded culture.  That mean they didn’t think individually quite like we do.  They had a much stronger sense of the group, of those around them, and how each person shaped and defined everyone around them, and how they in tern were shaped and defined by everyone around them.  When we think about questions of God’s Law, for example, we can and should be talking about what is true and right.  What does God want?  They thought that as well.  But they also asked the question of how their behavior would change the community.  Would it hurt the reputation and well being of those around them?  How would it change their family, their friends, their neighbors?  We have, sadly, lost a great deal of this sense of honor and shame in our culture.

Now this is what the shrewd manager is banking on in our parable.  He is banking on the fact that the master or owner would be perfectly justified in throwing him into prison, but that he can’t do it.  Why can’t he do it?  He can’t do it because it would shame him.  If the master throws him into prison, then he has to admit that the manager swindled him, and more importantly, now he has to go and demand higher prices from all of his clients.  This would ruin his reputation as a kind and benevolent master.  He would now be seen as stingy, vindictive, and cruel.

The manager banks everything on the reputation of the master.  He is willing to risk his well-being, prison, even his own life to insure that his future is secure.  Now this manager may have been dishonest, but he knew that the master was honest and honorable to a fault.  And to be fair, in the eyes of the manager, it was no risk at all.  He knew his boss.  His boss could no more turn him in than he could change his own skin.
This is our lesson on the parable of the unjust steward or the shrewd manager, but what’s the point?  Where is Jesus and the gospel in all of this?

It is first of all a great temptation to make this into a stewardship sermon.  The Law part would be pretty clear: Nothing that we own is really ours, so we must be wise in using what God has given us to His glory.  Even the use of hymns like our sermon hymn this morning (“What is the World to Me” LSB 730) might point to this interpretation.  This is true after a fashion, but that’s not finally the point of the parable.

The point of the parable is this: The mercy of God is everything, and everything else must be seen and understood in light of it.  Jesus, the very mercy of God in the flesh, does not simply lower your debt to a manageable amount: he cancels it.  The Father does not commend your understandable but altogether wrong headed ways of living your life.  He doesn’t commend them; He forgives them.  If a worldly master can understand and commend his wayward servant for acting in His own interest, how much more will our heavenly master not merely pat us on the back for being so sneaky, but will actually forgive us our sins?  But perhaps even more than this, because the mercy of God is truly everything, this means that you, dear sinner, can bank who whole life on His mercy.  You can live freely, knowing that you do not squander God’s gifts by giving to those in need; no, you actually are emulating Him.

Finally, because God’s mercy is everything for you, trust that you know God will feed you and clothe you with the very best of food and drink.  You don’t have to dig your own grave.  And although we are all beggars, as Luther’s put it, God does not require your begging.  You are sons and daughters of the king.  He has lifted you up to His heavenly banquet table, so that you need not be ashamed to stand in His presence at the Last Day.

Trust in the mercy of God.  His wisdom is beyond all understanding, and His mercy knows no bounds.  Believe it for Jesus’ sake.  Amen.

Doxology

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This week was spent at the first part of the Doxology advanced training for pastoral care.  It’s going to take me a while to digest all of this, but I will tell you this: it was the best three days I’ve spent in pastoral training since becoming a parish pastor.  The chapels were excellent, the presentations were stellar, and the brethren were outstanding.

I hope to blog on this more next week (when i’m more conscious), but in the meantime, I would encourage you to go to the following web site and sign up for Doxology’s monthly newsletter, Pastoral Notes.

Doxology Pastoral Notes

-LL

Compassion (Trinity 07)

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Todd A. Peperkorn, STM
Messiah Lutheran Church
Kenosha, Wisconsin
Trinity 7 (July 6, 2008, revised from 2005)
Mark 8:1-9

For an audio MP3 of this sermon, CLICK HERE

TITLE: “Compassion”

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.  Our text for this morning is the Gospel lesson just read, the feeding of the 4000.

Compassion is such a great word.  Don’t you think?  Compassion means that your guts are moved to help another person.  It means that you can’t help yourself but to help the other person.  Compassion means you are so focused on the needs of the other person that you don’t even care about your own needs.  You are willing to give up whatever you need to give up in order to take care of them.  It means you care more about them than you care about yourself.  It is a great word.  It’s a Gospel word.  It is a word for you today.

Jesus had been out in the wilderness with the multitude for three days.  They had been hearing Jesus preach and teach about the kingdom of God.  Jesus said that he had compassion on them, because they had been with Him for three days and had nothing to eat.  He was going to take care of them, even if the disciples couldn’t understand how Jesus could do it.  They even ask the question, How can one satisfy these people with bread here in the wilderness?

The disciples are betraying their own sinfulness here, just as you and I do.  They looked at all of these people and their hunger, and they couldn’t get past it.  In a word, they worried.  They worried that God wasn’t God.  They worried that Jesus couldn’t take care of these people and their needs.  They were in the desert and in the wilderness, and they forgot that when God is present with His people, all things will be taken care of in their own time and just as God sees fit.  Worrying means forgetting that God is God and believing that you must control everything in your life.  That is what they forgot.

Now I don’t know about you, but you’d think that I love to worry, with the amount of time that I waste on it.  The more you look at the problems and trials in your life, the lives of your family members, and certainly in turning on the television, you can shorten your life by worrying.  If London, why not Kenosha?  If not cancer, what next?  Heart attacks, job security, even the simple act of putting bread on the table may easily become a cause for worry.  The more you look at these things apart of the God who created the world, the more likely you are to forget who you are, just like Adam and Eve.

In our Old Testament reading for this morning, we hear how God breathed into Adam, and Adam became a living being.  He had a soul.  God had breathed life into Adam.  Adam was God’s creation.  Adam and Eve were really the pinnacle of God’s creation, not just one of many, stamped out on an assembly line.  No, everything God had created in heaven and on earth was for them.  Think of that for a moment.  God’s love and care for Adam and Eve was such that He literally made the world for them and He made them for each other.  That is the level of God’s care for them.  He placed them in the Garden, and provided for everything they would ever need.

If that is God’s care and love for Adam and Eve, does He love you any less?  Of course not.  God loves you as much as He loved them, and so God’s providential care extends to the whole world, and that most certainly includes you.

So when Jesus looks upon this multitude, what He really wants to do for them is breathe into them once again, just like what happened at creation.  In fact, that is God’s continual work.  Perhaps you remember the words from the catechism.  I believe that God has made me and all creatures, that he has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them…

We often forget that little line.  God still takes care of you.  He takes care of you just like He took care of Adam and Eve in the Garden.  He provides for all our needs of body and soul.  He feeds and clothes us.  He gives us jobs and homes and families.  He gives us friends and neighbors.  He gives us all things.  But like those people in the desert so many years ago, it is easy at times to look at the drought, and to forget that God has everything under control.

In the Garden with Adam and Eve, everything was fresh and new and beautiful and obvious, but they in their sin forgot God and went their own sinful way, the way that led to death.  But on that day when Jesus fed the 4000, everything was reversed.  They were in the desert, in the wilderness, a land where it looked like God had abandoned them.  But it was not so.  For Jesus was there, in their midst.  And when Jesus is in the midst of them, all things are right.

Now it shouldn’t surprise you too much, but this isn’t finally a story about bread and fish.  It’s a story about faith in Jesus Christ.  What Jesus came to give the disciples and the multitudes was Himself, the very Kingdom of God come into their midst.  And when Jesus gave them of Himself by Word and deed, they received everything else.  The needs of their body fell right into place, because Jesus was there, taking care of them, both body and soul.  Listen again to the words of our collect for this morning:

O God, whose never-failing providence orders all things both in heaven and earth, we humbly implore You to put away from us all hurtful things and give to us those things that be profitable for us; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

Jesus comes to you today just as He did to those people in our account from Jesus’ life.  Jesus comes to you today with words of hope and comfort, and He comes to you with the very Bread of Life.  Jesus comes to you today to give you His very body and blood, hidden under bread and wine.  When Jesus gives you today is not simply food to feed your body.  No, Jesus gives you something far, far greater.  Jesus orders everything in this life, so that you will be cared for, body and soul together.  It all really comes to a focal point in the Lord’s Supper, because here we see how when Jesus feeds your body, He also feeds your soul, comforts your conscience, and orders all things for your good.

We began this sermon with the word compassion, and that is where it ends.  God has compassion on you, for the sake of His Son Jesus Christ.  He will take care of you.  Believe it for Jesus’ sake.  Amen.

The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in true faith, unto life everlasting.  Amen.