Living Words: Recent Episodes
The Rev'd William Klock
The Temple Comes to SamariaActs 8:4-25by William Klock
Remember back in Chapter 5, when Peter and John were arrested and brought before the priests and elders, and Gamaliel, one of the leading Pharisees, told his fellow council members: “Leave them alone. If what they’re doing is of human origin, it will come to ruin. But if it’s from God, you won’t be able to stop them. You might even be found to be fighting against God.” They let Peter and John go that day, but since then they haven’t been heeding Gamaliel’s advice. They stoned Stephen. And at the end of last week’s text Luke told us that Saul of Tarsus was going house to house, dragging men and women to prison and that, while the apostles remained in Jerusalem, everyone else was scattered through Jerusalem and Samaria. And it turns out Gamaliel was right. Neither Saul nor anyone else could stop what God was doing. This new temple, not made with hands, not made of bricks and mortar, but instead of people, purified by the blood of Jesus and indwelt themselves by God’s Spirit, this temple was going to fill the earth. Persecution won’t stop it. Just the opposite, in fact. Luke writes in Acts 8:4 [Page 1089 in the pew Bibles]: “Those who were scattered went all over the place announcing the word.” These were people who knew, first hand, the transforming power of the gospel. Many of them had been eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus. They had seen signs and wonders, done by Jesus and then done by the apostles. They knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that God was at work and Israel’s hopes were being fulfilled. There was no stopping them. If they had to flee Jerusalem, so much the better. Now the good news about Jesus would be proclaimed all over the place. Think back to Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin and how he’d highlighted how God works through rejection and persecution. Joseph’s brothers had sold him as a slave, but through their evil God delivered his people. Ditto with Moses. Pharaoh wanted all the baby boys of the Hebrews drowned, so Moses’ mother put him in a basket and Providence floated him down the river right to Pharaoh’s daughter. And Jesus, the supreme example: The forces of evil and death rose up to do their worst in killing Jesus, but in doing so they played right into God’s hands. They concentrated themselves all in one place, in one great act, allowing Jesus to rise from death to conquer them. So Saul of Tarsus, threatening the church? God’s going to use that to—to get the gospel out of Jerusalem, to all of Judaea—and even to Samaria. So Philip. You remember Philip? He was one of the seven in Chapter 6, whom the church chose and laid hands on to do the work that was taking the apostles away from their prayer and preaching. Stephen was another of them. When the church calls people and lays hands on them and commissions them to be servants of the gospel, there’s no telling where that may lead. So “Philip,” says Luke in verse 5, “went off to a town in Samaria and announced the Messiah to them.” I suspect no one would have thought—or wanted—to take the gospel to Samaria—at least not for a long time—even though Jesus had said that his church would take the gospel there. But in the context of Acts, I think Luke wants to stress that even more than taking the gospel to Samaria, what Philip is doing is taking the temple there. And that’s pretty significant. Samaria was the piece of land between the two Jewish territories, between Judaea in the south and Galilee in the north. The Samaritans were the people who had lived there while the Jews were off in exile in Babylon. We don’t really know for certain the origins of the Samaritans. They claimed—and they still claim, as they’re still there to this day—that they’re the descendants of what was left of the northern Israelite tribes after the nation was destroyed by the Assyrians. The Jews claimed that the Samaritans were the people resettled in the land by the Babylonians after they’d sent the Jewish people into exile. There’s probably some truth to both. Whatever the case, the Samaritans followed their own form of Judaism. They had their own version of the torah, of the first five books of the Old Testament. They rejected the Prophets and other books. They looked forward to their own version of the Messiah. They called him the Ta’eb or “The Returner”—the prophet Moses promised would come. But maybe what’s most important in the context of Acts, was that the Samaritans had their own temple on Mt. Gerizim. The Jews would never let them anywhere near the temple in Jerusalem—they weren’t real Jews and they had corrupted Israelite religion—but even if the Jews allowed them into the temple, the Samaritans would never go there. As far as they were concerned, theirs was the real temple. The Samaritans were a people utterly without God’s presence. And now Philip finds his way there and carries the for real real temple to a people who didn’t even know the old one. And when God’s temple arrives in Samaria, the people can’t help but notice. Verse 6: “The crowds, acting as one, clung to what Philip was saying, as they heard him and saw the signs he performed. For unclean spirits came out of many of them, and several who were paralyzed or lame were cured. So there was great joy in that town.” “But there was a man named Simon, who had lived in the town for some while and who practiced magic. He used to astonish the Samaritan people, giving out that he was some great personage. Everyone, small and great alike, paid attention to him, and said, “This man is the one called ‘God’s Great Power’!” [Luke might be hinting that the people thought of Simon as maybe being the Ta’eb, the Samaritan “Messiah”.] They had been under his spell for some time, since they were amazed at the magic he could perform. But when they believed Philip as he was announcing to them the message about God’s kingdom and the name of Jesus the Messiah, they were baptized, men and women alike. Simon too believed and was baptized, paying close attention to Philip. When he saw signs, and great and powerful deeds, it was his turn to be astonished.” The devil was doing one thing in Judaea in a futile attempt to quash the gospel. He was doing something else to the same end in Samaria. He’d been doing it for a long time, leading the Samaritans away from God’s torah and God’s temple. Now there’s this man, Simon, who has enchanted these Samaritans with his magic. Maybe it was just sleight of hand magic, but the way Luke, throughout Acts, contrasts magic with the power of the Holy Spirit, it seems like Simon actually did have some kind of power and if that power wasn’t from God, it was coming from demonic forces of some kind. That’s just the sort of thing the devil would do to lead people astray. But Philip, empowered by God’s Spirit, it’s obvious to everyone—even to Simon—his power was different and it was far superior. Seeing it, these people believed the good news about Jesus that Philip was proclaiming. And they did what believers do: they were baptised. Like Israel following God through the Red Sea and into the promised land, in faith these Samaritan followed Jesus through the waters of baptism and into God’s new creation. Samaritans embracing and giving their allegiance to Jesus may not seem like a big deal to us, but it was a really big deal to everyone involved. Again, Samaritans and Jews didn’t mix. Even though Jesus had said that his disciples would take the good news to Samaria, they had no plan to go there—and probably little or no desire to. But God had a plan to get them there, and when Philip does end up in Samaria, he doesn’t let that hold him back. It’s pretty clear that these early believers thought of the gospel as something for Jews, but—hey—if gentiles came to them and wanted in, if Samaritans heard and believed, that was great. They saw God at work in these people, even if these people weren’t their evangelistic priority. And yet, something odd happens. These Samaritans hear the gospel, see God at work, they believe, they’re baptised, but there’s something missing. I suspect Philip noticed it immediately and sent word back to Jerusalem—excited on one hand, but concerned on the other. Verse 14: “When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received God’s word, they sent Peter and John to them. When they arrived, they prayed for them, asking that they would receive the Holy Spirit, since up to that point the Spirit had come upon none of them; they had simply been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.” Like I said, something was missing. The Spirit was clearly at work. Faith in Jesus is a gift of the Spirit and no one comes to Jesus without the Spirit first moving in the heart. But so far in Acts, when people believed and were baptised, they all had some kind of experience of being transformed by the Spirit They were obviously different. The Spirit did a work of new creation in them. And they typically—and immediately—displayed supernatural gifts. Some prophesied, some healed, some spoke in other languages, and so on. Whenever we see God doing something new in the story of redemption, it’s usually got miracles clustered all around it and we see this no less in the early days of the church. Bringing Samaritans to Jesus was very much something new. But this time the miracles didn’t happen. I expect Philip was surprised. What was wrong? So he sent word to Jerusalem and Peter and John decided to go see for themselves. And, sure enough, something was missing. These people had believed, but the Spirit—God—hadn’t yet come to live in them They were not yet part of the new temple. I don’t know if Peter and John understood everything at this point. I suspect that they just recognised that these new believers were lacking the indwelling Spirit. It was weird and inexplicable at the time. And so Peter and John just did the only thing that made sense: they laid their hands on these people and prayed that God would give them his Spirit. And God did. Luke doesn’t say how it was obvious, but it was apparently obvious that the Spirit had filled the Samaritans. And I think as time passed, Peter and John and the others started to figure out what God was doing in withholding the very thing—I should say, the very person—who fulfils God’s promises to dwell with his people. By the time Luke wrote, it all made perfect sense. You see, there was always a danger that the Samaritans would hear the gospel and believe, but that because of the divide between them and the Jews, the Samaritans would end up with a separate church of their own. A lot of them would have been perfectly happy to have it that way and plenty of Jewish believers would no doubt be happy to have it that way. But that would undermine the very gospel itself. God doesn’t have multiple people. He has one. With all our divisions in the church today, it’s easy to forget this, but Jesus was clear: God has one people and one of the essentials of the gospel is that it heals the breaches, heals the divisions, heals the animosity between the people of the world. We saw the first dramatic sign of this healing at Pentecost as the men there heard the gospel proclaimed in their own languages. It was a dramatic reversal of the Tower of Babel episode. And now it happens with the Samaritans. God withholds his Spirit from them in order to get Peter and John to pray and lay hands on them and in that God makes it clear to everyone that they are all united in Jesus and the Spirit. The apostles and the Jewish believers can’t dismiss the Samaritan believers and neither can the Samaritans—with their long history of doing their own thing and having their own temple—neither can they act as if they have no need of or can be separate from the Jewish believers. We need to be careful we don’t mistake Luke’s point here. We often read this passage at confirmations when the bishop lays hands on us and prays for us to be strengthened by the Holy Spirit. But Luke wasn’t thinking about confirmation. Confirmation is a rite that developed centuries later. Pentecostals and Charismatics use this passage to explain their experience, arguing that this passage proves that receiving the Holy Spirit is a second work of grace apart from baptism and conversion. But that’s not Luke’s point either. In fact, his point is that what happened with the Samaritans, with God withholding the Spirit, was unique—a one-off thing—that was necessary to ensure everyone knew that there is one church, one body and that our unity in diversity is one of the gospel’s most powerful witnesses to God setting the human race to rights. The whole thing that made this episode stand out was the delay in the Samaritans receiving the Holy Spirit, because the indwelling of the Spirit it not a second blessing or a second work of grace. It’s what happens when we believe and are baptised. It’s what makes us God’s temple. Jesus purifies us so that the Spirit can fill us. And then Simon the Magician. The gospel goes to a new place, but the same old problem comes up again. In Jerusalem it was Ananias and Sapphira. The devil crept in. They let their love of money compromise the purity so essential to being God’s temple. They serve as a warning: Jesus purifies us so that we can be God’s temple, but to remain God’s temple requires continued purity. And now the Samaritan believers their own warning about this. Verse 18: “When Simon saw that the spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money. “Give me this power too,” he said, “so that anyone I lay my hands on will receive the holy spirit.” “May your silver die with you!” retorted Peter. “Did you really think that God’s gift could be bought with money? You have no part or share in this word! Your heart is not straight before God. So repent from this wickedness, and pray to the Lord. Perhaps he will forgive the scheme you had in your heart. I can see that you are still stuck in the bitter poison and chains of unrighteousness.” “Pray to the Lord for me,” said Simon in reply, “that none of what you’ve said will happen to me.” After Peter and John had finished bearing witness and speaking the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem, announcing the good news to many Samaritan villages.” Simon liked the status his magic gave him. And now he sees something really amazing, something that clearly and dramatically upstaged whatever it was that he was doing. And Simon wanted it. But it wasn’t so much the Holy Spirit that Simon wanted. Tricks were nice. He’d been doing them for a long time. But what Simon wanted was the ability to control people. He didn’t want the Holy Spirit. He wanted what he thought Peter and John had: he wanted the ability to lay hands on people and to give them the Spirit. And in that, Simon was exposed. It wasn’t about Jesus for Simon. It wasn’t about being God’s temple. It wasn’t about being purified by the cross. It wasn’t about being part of God’s new creation. Simon was still firmly part of the old. He wanted to use and control people for his own personal gain and prestige. His old magic had been upstaged. No one would be impressed by it anymore. But if he could be like Peter and John, if he could lay hands on people himself and impart the Spirit to them, well, then he’s be back on top of things. For those who read The Magician’s Nephew this month, he’s like Uncle Andrew, seeing a new world being miraculously born around him and new life sprouting from the ground, and all he can think of is bring bits of iron to plant so they can grow into factories and battleships to make him rich. He was blind. He heard the gospel. He heard the good news about Jesus. He saw the life the Spirit in these people and he saw new creation being born. But he wasn’t interested any of it. He just wanted to be in control. He saw it as a way to get rich. So he offers to buy this gift from Peter and John—as if it was theirs to sell. As if it was their power to impart the Spirit. But Peter and John had no such power. They didn’t go around laying hands on people and giving them the Spirit any more than a modern-day Anglican bishop or Pentecostal evangelist does so. This was a unique situation. God gives the Spirit, not men, not preachers, not bishops, not even apostles. This was simply a case in which it was necessary for both the Jews and the Samaritans to understand that they were one people in Jesus and the Spirit. The crazy thing is that we still see this sort of thing despite all the warnings in scripture. There are far too many people out there, preachers—people calling themselves “apostles”—offering the Spirit or his gifts for money, as if those gifts are the work of human beings and not God. I expect that when Simon asked Peter and John to sell him this gift—one they didn’t even actually have—Peter immediately remembered Ananias and then Sapphira falling dead at his feet. Because he knew, this false idea needed to die. If allowed to fester, it would corrupt the church. And so he rebuked Simon—who, by God’s mercy isn’t struck dead on the spot. “You’re no believer, Simon. You’re still stuck in the bitter poison and chains of unrighteousness.” Luke tells us that Simon asked them to pray for him so that he wouldn’t fall under God’s judgement. I have to wonder if they told him about Ananias and Sapphira and left him quaking in his boots. Luke doesn’t tell us what happened to him, whether he eventually understood and actually believed the gospel or not. What Luke wants to stress here, what we shouldn’t lose of, is that the Spirit is not under human control. The Holy Spirit isn’t magic. Magic is the human attempt to manipulate God. Humans have been trying to figure out ways to do that ever since our fall. Magic treats God like a vending machine. Push B5 to get this or push D2 to get that. Say this spell, offer this sacrifice—follow the right formula and you can control the divine. The so-called “Prosperity Gospel” is a modern version of this. But you don’t have to be into the Prosperity Gospel or the Word-Faith movement to be guilty of thinking you can control God. When we bargain with God, we’re doing the same thing. We think that if we offer God this or that, we obligate him to give us something in return. Brothers and Sisters, God’s been teaching his people from the beginning that he doesn’t work this way. He’s sovereign. He sends his Spirit as a mighty rushing wind and, as Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Those who are born of that Spirit are blown along with it.” Those who surrender themselves to Jesus and the Spirit are blown into purity, blown into holiness, blown into godliness, blown into ministry and blown into mission. That’s what Luke shows us in Acts. Jesus purifies us, the Spirit fills, and in those acts God make us his living temple. A temple through which he will make himself known and through which he will eventually fill the earth with his presence. In this morning’s Collect we asked the Lord to teach to us to ask for the things that please him. Brothers and Sisters, if we understand ourselves to be his temple, his working model of new creation in the midst of the old, I can hardly think of a better prayer. It’s a prayer very much like “on earth as in heaven”. A prayer that sets aside our own agendas and ask for God to bring us into his. I’d like to close praying that Collect again. Let your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of your humble servants; and, that we may obtain what we ask of you, teach us to ask for those things that please you, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.Amen.
Telling the Story: Part 4Acts 7:35-53by William Klock
Not very long ago I got into an online discussion with someone about evangelism. The people I was interacting with were telling me things like, “I don’t confront, I just plant seeds” and “We’re suppose to share the gospel, not tell the gospel” or “If people are getting mad at you, you’re doing it wrong” and “Jesus just loved people. He wasn’t confrontational”. I found myself wondering if these people read the same Bible I read. And I was thinking about that whole conversation off and on these last few weeks as I’ve been working through Stephen’s address—his very confrontational address—before the Sanhedrin. Because there’s nothing namby-pamby or wishy-washy—or uh, I mean, “non-confrontational”—about Stephen’s address. I expect that if you set Stephen down in our context today and let him do what he did, a lot of modern Christians would be misquoting Matthew 7:1 at him. You know, “Judge not lest ye be judged.” But, of course, being confrontational, calling people to repent, proclaiming the good news about Jesus and the truth that he is Lord as something more than just another choice on the religious smorgasbord has nothing to be with being judgemental. It has everything to do with knowing and having experienced the reality of God’s goodness in Jesus and the Spirit and it’s about having a vision, a hope of this broken creation—and of humanity—set to rights and God coming to dwell with us forever. We’ve made our way through Stephen’s address over the last three Sundays. They accused him of blaspheming the torah and the temple and Moses and instead of defending himself, Stephen instead told the story they all knew so well. But going back to Abraham and working through it all the way to their present day, he showed how the law and the prophets, the torah and the temple had been signposts pointing the people to Jesus the Messiah. And so it wasn’t Stephen who was blaspheming torah and temple—it was them—because they’d rejected Jesus. The Christians were the true followers of the law and the prophets, the true children of Abraham and Moses, because they recognised that that’s what the story was working toward all this time. But that wasn’t what they wanted to hear. But if we’ve heard the story that Stephen told, we ought to be prepared. Rejection is how God often works. Joseph had been rejected, but God worked something amazing from it. Moses was rejected, but God worked something amazing from it. Jesus was rejected, but God worked something amazing from it. So if Stephen is rejected, we can be confident God will work something amazing from it. I think they understood, which made them all the more angry, because they understand: if they reject Stephen, they’re actually playing right into his narrative. But they do it anyway. We’ll pick up with Acts 7:54. [Page 1088 in the pew Bibles.] Luke tells us: “What Stephen said was a blow right to the heart. When they heard it, they gnashed their teeth against him.” Picture them, sitting in their dignified counsel, the priests and leaders of Israel. But there’s no response they can give that won’t condemn them, so they just sit there glaring at him as they gnash their teeth. To us that’s probably just a picture of rage, but Luke is pulling this image of gnashing teeth from the Old Testament—particularly from the Psalms—where it’s always the wicked who gnash their teeth at the righteous or the wicked who gnash their teeth in frustration, aguish, and rage at God after finding themselves on the wrong end of his judgement. Luke wants to make it clear that these are the leaders of Israel—the men who were supposed to know and to represent God—but instead they’ve rejected his Messiah and are revealing their wickedness. Think of Jesus in John 8, addressing a crowd of angry scribes and Pharisees. “We’ve got one father and that’s God,” they yelled at him. And he said back, “If God were really your father, you would love me, because I come from God…No, you are from your father, but your father is the devil.” And then, in stark contrast, Luke describes Stephen in verse 55: “He, however, was filled with the holy spirit, and looked steadily up into heaven. There he saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at God’s right hand. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘I can see heaven opened, and the son of man standing at God’s right hand!’ They’ve rejected Jesus. They sit there, almost demonically gnashing their teeth at him—the posture of the wicked who stand condemned before God. And Stephen stands before them full of the Spirit and with the very vision of heaven those men had longed for. Luke said at the beginning of all this that as they looked at Stephen his face was like the face of an angel. And Stephen shouts out to them, “Look!” I can imagine them looking around, wondering what he’s insisting they look at, because of course, no one else is seeing what he sees. But the fact that his own face had been transformed—or even transfigured—says that he must have been seeing something and they knew it. And he goes on, “I can see heaven opened and the son of man standing at God’s right hand!” I think that whenever I’ve read this, I’ve tended to picture Stephen looking up, pointing past the ceiling of the room they were in, as if he’s been given a glimpse into—you know—heaven—up there. But the more I think about the imagery and context here, I don’t think that’s it. I think we should be thinking back to episodes like the one in 2 Kings 6. Israel was under attack by the Arameans. The Prophet Elisha and his servant, Gehazi, were staying in the city of Dothan when it was surrounded by the Aramean army. They woke up in the morning to see the huge army surrounding the city and Gehazi began to worry. “What shall we do?” he asked Elisha. And Elisha calmly told him, “Don’t be afraid, for those who are with us are great than those who are with them.” I picture Gehazi standing there wringing his hands. And so Elisha prays, and as he prays, Gehazi’s eyes are opened and on the hills all around he sees horses and chariots of fire surrounded the Aramean army. And that heavenly army didn’t arrive when Elisha prayed, like heaven, it was there all along. The miracle was simply God’s gracious allowance to open the eyes of Elisha’s servant to see it. It’s a reminder that heaven isn’t up there, some far away place. Heaven is here. God created earth and heaven to overlap, for us to live in his presence. Our sin has driven a wedge between the two. But God and his realm are never far away. As Gehazi was reassured that day as he saw a glimpse of heaven, so Stephen was reassured as the stood before the Sanhedrin. As the highest court of the Jew was about to render a judgement against him and condemn him to death, I think we should understand what he saw as a sudden revelation of the heavenly court. And there stood Jesus, the son of man. The son of man was the character in Daniel’s vision who rose to take his throne at God’s right hand and from there to quelled the angry kings and nations that raged against God. And now Stephen sees the ascended Jesus, not now sitting on his throne as Lord, but standing at the right hand of God, the great judge, to act as his advocate and witness. The court of Israel was condemning him to death, but the heavenly court, the heavenly judge was ruling in his favour. What’s interesting about this comparison between the chariots of fire and Stephen’s vision of the heavenly court, is the result, the aftermath, the response of God’s man. Because the chariots of fire didn’t swoop down to crush the Aramean army. Instead, Elisha prayed again and God blinded the Arameans. And Elisha then went out and convinced the blinded Arameans to follow him to Samaria, where Elisha prayed again and the Lord opened their eyes. The king wanted to slaughter Elisha’s “prisoners”, but Elisha warned the king. It wasn’t the king who defeated and captured them, God had done that. So instead the king prepared a feast for them and then sent them on their way home. This was Israel in one of her finer moments, obeying God, being light to nations, making known the grace and glory of God. And I’ll come back to it shortly. I think Luke’s main point in telling us about this heavenly vision of Stephen’s ties in closely with the theme of Jesus and the church being the new temple—something that comes up over and over through Acts. Remember that for the Jews the temple was the supposed to be the place, not just where heaven and earth overlapped, but the thin place between them where God’s people could meet him. Not fully, of course. His presence was in the holy of holies where no one could go. But if they offered the sacrifices that would purify them from the stain of sin and death, they could draw near. The irony was that God’s presence had been gone from the temple for hundreds of years. They’d rebuilt it when they returned from their exile in Babylon, but God’s presence had never come back. As if God was hinting to them there was something new and better to come. And Stephen’s been preaching on that theme. The old temple was a signpost pointing to Jesus and to a new temple, not this time made with hands, but established by God himself and filled with is Spirit. And in as much as I expect this miracle vision of the heavenly court was a gift to Stephen to encourage him—even though he doesn’t seem to have needed much of that kind of encouragement—the gospel was enough—it highlighted to everyone present that day the thing that Isreal so longed for in the temple—the convergence of heaven and earth—was now happening in Jesus and his people. And while Stephen’s vision seems to be unique in Christian history, we see saint after saint, martyr after martyr going to their deaths with the same sort of calm and composure that we see in Stephen. I have to wonder if God has given others similar visions to which, for obvious reasons, we simply aren’t privy. Polycarp, Perpetua and Felicity, Ignatius, Thomas Cranmer, Nichols Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Maximillian Kolbe—all died with the gospel and prayers for those who killed them on their lips. Brothers and Sisters, that’s the witness of men and women who are confident in the gospel, in the lordship of Jesus, and in the hope of resurrection and new creation. These are men and women who understood what the gospel is—not good advice, not another option to try on the religious smorgasbord, not something you should give a try; they knew it to be true and they knew it to be truly good news—the way, the truth, and the life. They knew the grace of God so powerfully, that they went to their deaths praying that those who killed them would one day know it. So Luke goes on in verse 57: “But they yelled at him at the tops of their voices, blocked their ears, and made a concerted dash at him. They bundled him out of the city and stoned him. The witnesses laid down their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul. So they stoned Stephen. “Lord Jesus,” he cried out, “receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and shouted at the top of his voice, “Lord, don’t let this sin stand against them.” Once he had said this, he fell asleep. “Now Saul was giving his consent to Stephen’s death.That very day a great persecution was started against the church in Jerusalem. Everyone except the apostles was scattered through the lands of Judaea and Samaria. Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. 3 But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.” It’s not just that Stephen stood firm on the gospel before the Sanhedrin and it’s not just that he had a vision of heaven in which he was vindicated and could go to his death with calm and confidence. His prayer for his enemies speaks volumes—it’s a powerful witness—to the gospel itself. I can’t image what it was like for Stephen. In high school I was hit in the throat by a softball trying to catch someone’s pop fly. It hurt. Apparently I was lucky it didn’t crush my trachea. And that was a softball. Stephen stood there—and I expect pretty quickly knelt and then lay there—as people threw rocks at him. The biggest rocks they could find and still throw with force. It was an absolutely brutal way to die and I can’t imagine what kind of sadistic person would take joy in doing it to someone. I guess that’s yet more testimony to the influence the gospel has had on our culture. And there, at a little distance stood Saul of Tarsus, having given the green light to the angry mob, supervising them as they threw their stones. Keeping guard over their coats. But as the rocks were hitting Stephen—imagine a rock breaking your jaw, crushing your nose, breaking your skull—Stephen cried out to God. He cried out for mercy on those who were killing him. And that stands out as another witness to the gospel. Because the whole going to a martyr’s death, calmly and confidently and stoically, that’s admirable, but other people had done that before Stephen. About two centuries before, in the days when the Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanes, ruled Judaea, there had been a lot of Jewish martyrs. Antiochus wanted to break the Jews, get them to forsake their “law”. Get them to become more Greek, and they’d be an easier people to rule. And so he desecrated their temple. He made it illegal for them to circumcise their sons. And his soldiers would round up the openly rebellious and force them to eat pork on pain of death. 2 Maccabees 7 tells the story of one family of Jewish heroes. Seven brothers are tortured and, one by one, martyred as they stand firm in their faith, as they refuse the soldiers’ order to eat pork. They bore witness to their faith in God, to their hope in the future resurrection of the dead, but they also call down horrible curses on those pagan soldiers as they died. With their last breath, they called down God’s judgement on their enemies. But Stephen: Like those Jewish martyrs, he stood firm in faith. He warned his accusers and his killers of God’s coming judgement. But he didn’t lay it down as a curse. He laid it down as a warning, a call to repentance—and with his last breath, a prayer for grace. One of those Maccabean martyrs had yelled out, “This mighty power will torture you and your descendants!” And Stephen, raised on those same stories of the martyrs, he saw that same divine persistence, but in light of Jesus he saw it very differently. Stephen knew there is no escaping the Hound of Heaven. But instead of divine judgment pursuing his enemies, he saw divine grace hounding them, the redeeming love of God pursing them—and if they would not be caught by it—it would pursue and catch and enfold and transform their descendants. Somehow, someday the grace of God in Jesus, the renewing power of the gospel would catch them, because—Stephen was absolutely certain—that power will one day change the entire world. That was the point of his powerful speech before them, after all. From Abraham to Joseph, from Jospeh to Moses, from Moses to Jesus. That’s what the story is about: the grace and glory of the God of Israel to save his creation—not just Abraham’s family—but all of creation. It’s about God, in love, giving himself to purify us from the stain of our rebellion, so that he can come home to live with us. To restore heaven and earth. And that gospel knowledge, that good news changed everything for Stephen. Brothers and Sisters, think about this. Imagine people knew nothing of Jesus or the gospel or Christianity other than the astounding fact that Christian martyrs go to their deaths, not hurling curses, but calling down blessing and forgiveness from heaven on the very people torturing and killing them. That, in itself, says something powerful about Jesus and the gospel and Christianity. That in itself, would, I think, make a lot of people constructively curious. That this is what we see from Christian martyrs down through history is witness to the gospel and to the very nature of our faith in the God of love who shed his blood to reconcile his enemies to himself. A witness to the Jesus who, as he died on the cross, prayed that those who killed him would know God’s forgiveness. Would that we, Brothers and Sisters, would be captivated by this same gospel of grace and the same sure and certain hope of reconciliation and resurrection and new creation. Because our generation of Christians seems to be losing it. We no longer think of the gospel as good news to proclaim, but as good advice to share, because Jesus is no longer the way, the truth, and the life, but now a way, a truth, a life. We no longer have a clear hope and vision of creation set to rights by Jesus, maybe because we twisted this idea of “heaven” into a distant, ethereal, disembodied realm, instead of God’s realm, present, but unseeable because of our sin. And so we’re afraid to speak of sin as that great evil that keeps us from God and we’re afraid to call people to repentance and we’re afraid to speak of that day when God will, once and for all, wipe the last traces of sin and evil from the world, to heal the breach between heaven and earth, to pull out the wedge we’ve so firmly driven between them. And, in the same way, having consigned Jesus’ lordship to a distant heaven, we fear to proclaim that most basic Christian creed—the one carved on our lychgate: “Jesus is Lord”. Lord, not just in a far away heaven, not just someday in a far away future, but here and now. Brothers and Sisters, we need Stephen’s witness just as much as the Sanhedrin did that day. I pray that we would take it to heart. And if we lack his confidence, if we lack his hope, if we lack his vision, or if—in contrast to Stephen—we find ourselves gritting our teeth in anger and calling down curses on our enemies, that the Lord would give us a clear vision of his grace, of his kingdom, of his glory. Amen.
Telling the Story: Part 3Acts 7:35-53by William Klock
“Made by hand.” When we see that, it usually means something good, doesn’t it? Someone careful hand crafted this thing. Carefully stitched it together. Put care into baking it. You can probably trust it, because it was well made. And, of course, it was made with love. But if we went all the way back to ancient Israel, “Made by hand” had a very different meaning and connotation. For us it (usually) signals something good; for them it signalled idolatry. “Made by hand” said that this thing was not made by God or that God had not commanded it to be made, but wicked humans made it anyway. And when it came to things involved in worship, it meant idolatry. This idea has come into our language too. You’ll sometimes hear Christians—usually on the Puritan end of the spectrum—talk about this or that thing in worship or this or that doctrine being “man-made”. The Puritans called it the “Regulative Principle” and the idea was that everything Christians do in worship should either be something God explicitly commanded (like reading the Bible or singing or preaching) or something that good and necessary consequence demands. We Anglicans follow what’s called the “Normative Principle”, which means that we have freedom in our worship, as long as what we do is not forbidden by scripture or goes against biblical principles. But you’ll often hear folks who follow the Regulative Principle say things like, “Your liturgy or your hymns are ‘man-made’” or “Your traditions of using musical instruments or observing Easter, Christmas, and other holy days are ‘man-made’” and by that they mean that they’re unbiblical and wrong. Some would go so far as to call these things “idolatry”. The “RP” isn’t our tradition, I think more than anything else in Protestantism it has led to sinful, ungodly, and unwarranted schisms, but I do respect the fact that it grew out of a commitment to take worship very seriously. People who follow it understand that how we worship God is serious business, not something frivolous. I think most Christians today err in taking zero care in how they worship God. But you can’t read the New Testament and you certainly can’t read the Old Testament without realising that how we worship is serious business. God takes it seriously and so should we. I’ll come back to this, but keep it in the back of your mind as we work through the end of Stephen’s speech. I want to pick up where we left off in Acts 7. We’ve been making our way through Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin—the body of Jewish elders. He’s been accused of blasphemy and of speaking against torah and the temple and Moses. And instead of defending himself, what he’s done is to tell the story of Israel and Israel’s God. He’s telling it in a such way that they should—hopefully—see that he’s not speaking against any of those things that defined them as Jews. He’s telling the story in such a way that they’ll see—hopefully—that the gospel is not a departure from Israel’s story, but rather the very culmination of it—the very thing that torah and temple and Moses were pointing toward all along. And so he began with Abraham and the call of Israel, and then Joseph, and then Moses. And as he’s telling not just the story, but their story, he’s highlighting its themes of forgiveness and grace and also that when God acts, when God does new things, it’s almost never what anyone expected—but afterward you can always see that, in fact, the signposts had always been pointing to that new thing. Like I said last week, the figure of Moses towers over the story of Israel and Stephen knew that. But he also knew, as Moses towered over the story, he did so like a signpost, with his arm outstretched, pointing the people straight to Jesus. He knew, you can’t use Moses to argue against the gospel. So let’s pick up at Acts 7:35 where we left off. [Page 1087 in the pew Bibles, way down in the very bottom right corner of the page.] “So,” Stephen continued, “this same Moses—the one they rejected, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler or judge?’—this is the man God sent as ruler and redeemer, by the hand of the angel who had appeared to him in the bush. He did signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and led them out, through the Red Sea and for forty years in the wilderness. This is the Moses who said to the sons of Israel, ‘God will raise up a prophet like me from among your brothers.’ And this is the one who was in the assembly in the desert with the angel who had spoken to him on Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living words to give to us.” Stephen’s continuing the story of Moses he began in last week’s text. Moses was rejected by his own people—at least at first. And there was nothing controversial in telling this part of the story. And there’s nothing controversial in his reminding the Sanhedrin that despite that early rejection, Moses was indeed the ruler and redeemer the Lord had sent to his people. Moses did signs and wonders in both Egypt and in the wilderness. He’s the one who parted the Red Sea. He’s the one who met God on the mountain and came down with God’s living words, with the torah and with the instructions for the tabernacle. And—Stephen makes a really important point here—Moses was also the one who told the Israelites that he was not the end-all-be-all of rulers, redeemers, or messiahs, because one day the Lord would raise up a “prophet” from amongst them—a prophet in comparison to whom Moses would pale. The Sanhedrin knew he was talking about Jesus. The people had already suspect that Jesus was this greater prophet whom Moses had prophesied. More than once he was asked, “Are you the prophet who is to come?” So Stephen’s making it clear, just as Moses had been rejected by the Israelites of his day, so Jesus was rejected by the Israelites of his. We’ve touched on this last week. But now Stephen takes it a step further. Look at verse 39. It’s not just that Moses was rejected by his people in the days before he was actually called by God. The more embarrassing thing for Israel was that they’d rejected Moses after he’d been called, after they’d been through the Red Sea, after they’d seen the signs and wonders and had the torah and the tabernacle. Stephen goes on: “This is the one whom our fathers had not wanted to obey, but instead rejected him and turned back in their hearts to Egypt, by saying to Aaron, ‘Make us gods who will go before us; for this Moses, who brought us out of the land of Egypt—we don’t know what has become of him!’ They made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice to an idol. They celebrated things their own hands had made.” Remember what happened in Exodus? Moses went up the mountain to meet God. And he was up there for forty days and nights receiving the law. And the people became afraid. They thought that Moses surely must have died on the mountain, so they gave Aaron their gold and implored him to make a golden calf, an idol, so that they could have a god who would protect them. It was a shameful moment for Israel. They’d just received the Ten Commandments. They’d just been told by God: You shall have no other gods. You shall not make a carved image. And Moses had asked them, “Will you do all these things? Will you give yourself to the worship and service of the God of your fathers, the God who has saved you from Egypt? The God who has decalared, ‘I will be your God and you will be my people?” And the people had enthusiastically declared, “We will! All this we will do!” And just days later, they didn’t. As eating the forbidden fruit was the primal sin of the human race, idolatry was the primal sin of Israel: worshipping something as if it were God when it wasn’t. Aaron had tried to explain to Moses that he’d merely thrown the gold into the fire and that the calf had formed and jumped out of its own accord, but everyone knew that’s not how it works. Idols are made by human hands and the prophets drove that point home over and over down through Israel’s history. To worship an idol was absurd. The pagans were fools for doing so. First, you create a god with your own hands and then you worship it. “How stupid is that?” the prophets asked. And yet the golden calf wasn’t the last time Israel would worship an idol. That primal sin came back over and over and over. When Jeroboam rebelled and led ten of the tribes of Israel to form their own nation, he set up two golden calves, one at Bethel and one at Dan to discourage his people from going to the temple in Jerusalem. No matter how devoutly Israel worshipped the Lord, idolatry was never far off. Look at verse 42: “Then God turned and handed them over to worship the host of heaven, as it stands written in the book of the prophets: ‘Did you bring sacrifices and offerings to me in those forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? You took up the tent of Moloch, and the star of your god Rhephan, the carved images you made to worship! I will remove you beyond Babylon!’” Stephen quotes Amos 5. Even during Israel’s honeymoon period with the Lord, Amos condemned them. Even then, while they brought their sacrifices to the Lord, they were worshiping pagan gods like Moloch and Rhephan and all the “host of heaven”. So the Jewish priests and rulers have charged Stephen with blasphemy and now he turns the tables. He never actually defends himself. Instead, he retells the story of Israel from the beginning and shows how it leads straight to Jesus and now, again, he turns the tables on them. He accuses them of the very thing they’ve charged him with. Just as Israel had rejected Moses, so Israel’s priests and rulers have rejected Jesus. And—since their most significant charge seems to have been that he was speaking against the temple—and that was precisely the same charge on which Jesus was arrested and crucified—Stephen makes his second point or his second charge against them. Verse 44: “Our ancestors had the ‘tent of meeting’ in the desert. [That’s another name for the tabernacle.] God had commanded Moses to make it according to the pattern which he had seen. Our ancestors in their turn brought it in when, with Joshua, [meaning they brought it with them into Canaan, the promised land] they dispossessed the nations whom God drove out before our ancestors, and it was there until the time of David. David found favour with God, and requested permission to establish a Tabernacle for the house of Jacob. But it was Solomon who built him a house. [Stephen is referring to the permanent temple in Jerusalem.] Now his key point: “The Most High, however, does not live in shrines made by human hands. The prophet put it like this: ‘Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool! What sort of house will you build me, says the Lord,Or what place will you give me to rest in? My own hand made all these, did it not?’ Yes, David planned the temple. Solomon built it with the Lord’s blessing. But Stephen quotes Isaiah 66. The Prophet Isaiah had rebuked the people using the very words that Solomon had prayed at the dedication of the temple. It is God who has made all things. The idea that human beings can make anything—even the temple—that can contain God, well, that’s the real blasphemy. Solomon knew that with this glorious temple on the mountain top, that with God’s presence manifest in a cloud of glory, that Israel—always prone to idolatry—would start to think that they had God in a box—to put as we might put it. Solomon warned them. Isaiah warned them. And now Stephen is pointing his finger at the Sanhedrin and is saying, “When Jesus said he’d tear this building down and rebuild it in three days, he wasn’t blaspheming it. When I said that this is precisely what Jesus has done and when I say that Jesus has, indeed, built a new temple by purifying a new people and filling them with God’s own Spirit, I’m not the one blaspheming the temple. No! You’re the one’s blaspheming God! You think you’ve got God in a box. You’re thinking like the pagans. You’ve gone back to our people’s primal sin! Heaven is God’s throne and earth his footstool. The entire cosmos he’s made cannot contain him. What fools you are to think your puny temple can contain him! The temple was the signpost pointing the way to what God’s done in Jesus and the Spirit. It was the signpost telling us all along that God’s plan was one day to enter this world as one of us, as the Righteous One, so that he could rescue us—from sin, from death, from the idolatry that has plagued us from the beginning—by filling us with his Spirit and turning our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. By filling his people, not so we can guard it a box of stone, but so we can carry his presence to the ends of the earth. But just like our ancestors, you refused God’s redeemer because you couldn’t let go of your building, your box made by hands.” You can almost imagine Stephen standing there in front of the Sanhedrin and with him stand Moses and Isaiah and Amos and all the other prophets nodding at his words. He closes his speech in verses 51-53: “You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are uncircumcised! You always resist the holy spirit, just as your ancestors did before you! Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? And you killed those who announced in advance the coming of the Righteous One—and now you have betrayed him and murdered him. You received the law at the command of angels, but you didn’t keep it!” They were the people God had chosen to steward his glory. They were the keepers of the great story of God and his redemptive plan. They, of all people, should have known better, but when the story came to its climax, they refused to listen. They’d stried to slam the book shut. It’s not just that they rejected the Messiah and handed him over to the pagan Romans to be crucified. Stephen’s point is that they were doing what idolatrous Isreal had always done. Even though the kind of obvious idolatry that had got them exiled to Babylon had been rooted out since their return to Judaea, they were still at heart idolators. As Stephen recounts the story of Israel, what we find is that it’s not just a story of redemption. It’s also a story of rebellion that reminds us how desperately humanity needs God’s redemption. Even the people with the law and the temple, even the people with Moses and the Prophets suffered from the same rebellious attitude that infects the human race. As Calvin once put it, the rebellious human heart is a factory of idols. We can take even the good things of God and turn them into idols as the Jews had done. Stephen takes the high ground. He stands with Abraham and Moses, with Solomon and David, with Isaiah and Amos. The Sanhedrin, for all their moral posturing and charges of blasphemy, Stephen opens the book they’d slammed shut and shows that in reality they stand with Joseph’s wicked brothers, with the Israelites who rejected Moses, with the Israelites who had given their gold to Aaron to cast a golden calf, with Jeroboam and all the others who had set up idols throughout the land. The temple was good, but it was made with hands. God had promised through the Prophets that one day he would make another, a better temple—and it would be better precisely because it wasn’t made by human hands. Brothers and Sisters, that’s us. And as I was thinking and meditating on this over the last few weeks, I was wondering what this means for us. I think the biggest takeaway from Stephen’s speech—at least this part of it—is simply to hear him proclaim the glory of the God who has become present with us in Jesus, the Righteous One. Jesus has, like a greater Moses, delivered us from our bondage to sin and death. I don’t think it’s likely that we’re going to end up like the Sanhedrin, rejecting Jesus and the Spirit in favour of the temple and the torah. But, I do think there’s a warning here, even if it’s a little oblique. Brothers and Sisters, it can be very easy for us to make idols out of otherwise good—and even essential—things. In an age of apostasy—and especially for those of us who came out of the battles for orthodoxy within Anglicanism, it can be very easy to make an idol of our theology and of our orthodoxy. We can make idols of the traditional Prayer Book, of the old hymnals, of our classical Protestant worship. Good things. Orthodoxy—right doctrine, right theology, right understanding of God and of ourselves—is absolutely essential. But Brothers and Sisters, none of these things stand in place of Jesus; none of them stands in the place of the Spirit; none of them stands in place of the Triune God. None of them ought to undermine the unity that Jesus and the Spirit have given us with other believers. Bp. Cummins understood this and it’s why the Reformed Episcopal Church exists: because Bp. Cummins knew that Christian unity is rooted not in bishops or in sacraments, but in Jesus the Messiah. It’s good to be right in our doctrine and practise. We should take theology and worship seriously, but we should also be humble about them. We should acknowledge that despite our best efforts, none of us will ever—at least not this side of eternity—have a perfect theology or perfect worship. And we ought always to guard against pride, because being proud in our imperfect theologies and imperfect worship inevitably causes us to treat them as idols. We lose our focus on Jesus. And no matter how right we may be, we lose our witness and cease to give glory to God. So let Stephen be a reminder to us to keep Jesus at the centre of our being and of our life together, at the centre of our church. Let our good doctrine and our good worship be the things that keep him there. But let him always be our God, let him always be the one we worship and glorify. And, I think, if are faithful in that, we will be faithful in giving glory, not to ourselves, not to our theology, not to our Prayer Book, not to anything made with hands, but to the God of glory. Let’s pray: God of glory, as we hear your word, as we learn the story of redemption, teach us to see and to keep Jesus, the Righteous One, always at its centre. Give us the grace and wisdom necessary for sound doctrine and worship, not that we be “right”, but that we might always keep Jesus at the centre of our life together, that we might worship you and faithfully make your glory known to the ends of the earth. Amen.
Telling the Story: Part 2Acts 7:1-16by William Klock
When I was an American school kid in the 70s and 80s I learned that the defining events in the history of the United States were was the founding of Jamestown in 1607; the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620; and, of course, the Revolutionary War that began in 1775 and the signing of the Declaration of Independence—well—almost exactly 250 years ago. There were plenty of other events that shaped the story, but those were the events that set the United States on its trajectory: a heritage from Britain with a good dose of religious freedom and Protestant work ethic coming together in a grand expression of the rights of man shaped by the Enlightenment. Were there flaws? Yep. Slavery was a big one. But the way I learned the story, the British mainland colonies of North America were on the fringe of the slave trade. We received a tiny fraction of it. The real slavery problem was in the Caribbean and Latin America. Plus, we dealt with it. The whole Civil War thing—a tragedy. But it was a story to be proud of. But in 2019, the New York Times began a new publishing project. They called it The 1619 Project. It was subtitled, “A New Origin Story”. Why 1619? That was the year the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. Before the Pilgrims. Before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It was a deliberate attempt to reframe the story of the United States. Instead of a story rooted in a proud English heritage and religious liberty and Enlightenment ideals of freedom and liberty, the 1619 Project told the story of the United States as one rooted in racism and slavery and oppression. Instead of a story that makes you stand proud, it’s a story meant to instil shame and guilt. The 1619 Project didn’t come out of nowhere. It made public a story that many people had already been telling, especially to younger generations. And, as you would expect, this resulted in a great cultural clash. Both sides shouting at the other, basically saying, “How dare you tell our story wrong!” It wasn’t so much a matter of the events themselves. Both versions of the story involved the same events, the same people, and all of that. But it highlights how much how you frame a story, how much you stress certain events and people and ideas over others, that you can end up with stories that are essentially the same, while dramatically different. One instils national pride; the other instils national shame. That doesn’t mean there’s no right or wrong. Framing the American story as if slavery and racism are its fundamental core is dishonest. But at the same time, telling a story that glosses over those evils for the sake of instilling pride, well, that’s a problem too. And as much as this Postmodern metanarrative dilemma was nowhere on the radar of First Century Jews, I think it’s a good way to understand what was going with Jews in those days and it’s a good illustration of what Stephen is doing in his speech before the Sanhedrin in Ats 7. [It’s page 1087 in the Pew Bibles.] There were different “parties” competing for influence and control in First Century Judaea and as much as they all told the same story of Israel, reaching back to Abraham and Moses and David, to the law and the Prophets, all rooted in the same exodus and exile and the same promises, how they told the story produced very different results, different feelings about Israel’s present situation, different ideas about the future and how to get there—just as how I learned American history makes you smile when you see the Stars and Stripes, but others, having learned The 1619 Project story, feel shame. For Pharisees, unfaithfulness to the law resulted in exile—one that was still effectively ongoing—and only national faithfulness to the law would get them out of it. For the Sadducees, that was all in the past. God had restored them from their exile, and the temple and its priests were the proof. All was well. For the Zealots, the story said that armed revolution was the only way out of their oppression. For the Essenes, the group responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, the story said that the everyone and everything had been defiled by unfaithfulness, even the temple itself. God would wage holy war on the unfaithful, so they—the only truly righteous ones—retreated to the desert to wait and to keep pure. And there was the historian Josephus. A generation later, he told the story—after the disaster had happened—to say that the Jewish revolutionaries had brought God’s wrath on themselves and that God had raised up the Romans to act as his instrument of judgement. Same story, but the different ways they told it, the different parts they emphasised, the way they interpreted certain events like the Babylonian Exile, landed them in very different places. Like I said last week, the story got them to the airport, but they were all waiting at different gates—and none of them the right gate for the God’s real homecoming. That said, all of them held the same markers of Jewish identity dear: the torah, the temple, the promised land, their circumcision. They disagreed on a lot, but attack any of those things and they’d all join in stoning you after charging you with blasphemy. So what Stephen is doing before the Sanhedrin, backing up all the way to Abraham and telling the story yet again, was in good keeping with what was going on in First Century Judaea. So—in case you missed last week or have forgotten—in the first sixteen verses, Stephen began telling the story of Jesus and the Spirit by going back to Abraham. This was the moment when the God of glory—Stephen wants to stress that he’s here to glorify the God of Israel, not blaspheme him or his holy things—Abraham was the moment when God stepped into the darkness and misery of his broken, fallen, corrupted creation and called to Abraham. In Abraham, God was launching his project to restore rebellious humanity to himself and to set to rights the creation that we broke. Now, there was more to it than this—it’s online if you missed or forgot it—but Stephen’s main point is that the gospel is not a departure from the story of Israel. It’s not something new that has no roots in what happened before. He’s saying to the Jewish elders: When the God of glory, the God of Israel called Abraham out of Ur and settled him in the promised land and established his covenant with him to make him a nation, that was the beginning of the story that brings us to Jesus, to the cross and the empty tomb, to the ascension and to Pentecost. The story of Abraham is the story of the gospel and vice versa. Remember, they accused him of blaspheming torah and temple and Stephen’s saying, “No way! Torah and temple are good. They’re glorious. They’re how God prepared us and brought us to Jesus.” Like I said last week, when you leave your car and board the ferry, you are in no way saying your car was bad. It got you to the ferry. But you can’t drive on water. Now it’s time do something new—to do the very thing your car brought you to do. And then from Abraham to Joseph. Stephen tells Isreal’s story in such a way to highlight that when the God of Israel acts to bless and to save his people, it’s often in unexpected ways. Abraham was promised the land of Canaan, but never had any more of it than a little burial plot. And Jacob and his sons were forced to flee the land of Canaan in order to survive a famine. And Jacob’s sons were wicked men who sold their brother, Joseph into slavery after nearly choosing to murder him. And Joseph went from slavery to prison. How was God going to work anything good from any of that? But he did. The sovereign God was at work all along. Slavery and prison led Joseph to the premiership of Egypt just in time deliver his family when they arrived. None of them had ever expected any of that. But God delivered them. And Stephen’s telling of the Joseph story also highlights that gracious forgiveness has always been at the heart of the story of God and his people. There was Joseph, hated, abused, sold into slavery by his brothers, but instead of taking revenge, he welcomes them and throw a party. This is what Jesus had been doing as the lost sheep of Israel, the tax collectors and sinners, came to him in repentance and faith. And this is the sort of rejoicing that would take place in heaven were the Sanhedrin to see how the story leads to Jesus and repent. God was waiting for them with open arms and a promise of blessing, and they should know that, because that’s how God’s great story has always worked. It’s the key in which this great symphony is written. So now, Moses. As important as Abraham and Joseph were, Moses stands like a colossus over the story of Israel. Moses was the deliverer who led Israel out of Egypt and parted the sea. It was Moses who went up Mt. Sinai and saw God for himself. It was Moses who came down and delivered the torah to Israel. It was under Moses that God made a nation out of Abraham’s family. And this is where they’ve accused Stephen of blasphemy. They’ve accused him of speaking against the torah and temple and Moses. So look at Acts 7, beginning at verse 17. Stephen highlights three things about Moses. The first thing he stresses is how Moses was raised up by God to be the right man at the right place at the right time—even though no one would have guessed at the beginning that Moses was God’s man for the hour. Stephen says: “God had sworn an oath to Abraham. [Remember the promise to make him a great nation and to give his descendants the land of Canaan?] When the time drew near for this promise to be fulfilled, the people had increased and multiplied in Egypt, until another king arose over Egypt, one who had not known Joseph. He got the better of our people, and ill-treated our fathers, forcing them to abandon their newborn children so that they would die. It was at that time that Moses was born, and he was pleasing to God. He was nursed for three months in his father’s house. But, when they abandoned him, Pharaoh’s daughter claimed him and brought him up as her own son. So Moses was educated in the full teaching of Egyptian wisdom, and he was powerful in what he said and did.” Already, in the life of Joseph, Stephen has stressed that God works human evil for good. Nothing escapes his sovereign hand. And just so with Moses. First, this new Pharoah decides to make slaves of the Hebrews. Not good. And then, when their numbers increase so prolifically that Pharaoh fears being able to control them, he hatches a plan to murder all the baby boys. And so Moses ends up in a basket in the river, where Pharaoh’s daughter finds him and decides to raise him as her own. God turns Pharaoh’s hate, prejudice, and injustice against him, sovereignly placing one of those Hebrew boys right in Pharaoh’s own home, raised at Pharaoh’s expense, and tutored by Pharaoh’s own tutors in the famed wisdom of the Egyptians. God ensure the story is full of irony. Pharaoh unwittingly nurtures and educates the very man who will be his downfall. And Moses, himself, receives the training needed one day to oversee, to govern the people of Israel. Again, at the time, none of this made any sense. No one could see any significance to the story as it was unfolding. But God has a plan and one of the things the Jewish people learned from Moses’ story—and so many others—is to trust God. In the famous words of William Cowper, God moves in a mysterious way. It’s another motif in the divine symphony—one that comes back over and over and that God’s people out to recognise when they hear the music. Second, Stephen stresses the rejection of Moses by his own people. Look at verse 23: “When he had grown to forty years old, it came into his heart to see how his brothers, the sons of Israel, were doing. He saw someone being wronged, and came to the man’s defence; he took revenge on behalf of the man who was being oppressed, by striking down the Egyptian. He thought his kinsfolk would grasp the fact that God was sending him to their rescue, but they didn’t. “The next day he showed up as two Hebrews were fighting, and he tried to bring them back together again. ‘Now then, you two,’ he said, ‘you are brothers! Why are you wronging each other?’ But the man who was wronging the other wasn’t having it. ‘Who made you a ruler or judge over us?’ he retorted, pushing him away. ‘Do you want to kill me in the same way you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ At that word, Moses ran away, and lived as a guest in the land of Midian, where he had two sons.” Yet another motif in the symphony, another recurring theme in the story. Jesus wasn’t the first of God’s deliverers to be rejected by his own people. The story highlights that this is sometimes how God works. Now, there’s no one-to-one equivalence between Moses and Jesus. Moses was rejected because he wasn’t ready yet. He had a desire to see his people freed, but he hadn’t yet been called by God to that mission, nor had he received instruction on how to do it God’s way. This way of telling the story, this way of looking back to the Old Testament is something we see all through the New Testament. I think of the way Matthew regularly explains how something in the Jesus story “fulfils” this or that thing from the Old Testament. And often we’re left wondering how the connection works. Thanks largely to the Church Fathers, we’ve been taught to see these connections as literal prophecies or as “types”, as spiritual shadows that prefigure Jesus and various events in his life. That’s kind of close, but it’s not quite what Stephen (or Matthew) do. When Matthew, for example says that in the birth of Jesus Isaiah’s words about the virgin conceiving and bearing a child are fulfilled, we wonder how that works. Isaiah was talking about a young woman in his own day bearing a child…and she wasn’t a virgin. What Matthew was doing was pointing back to an event in Israel’s past, in Israel’s story, where the birth of a child to a young woman—maybe a princess, maybe the Prophet’s wife…it’s not clear—but where the birth of this child signalled that God was about to act to deliver his people. Matthew latched onto that. This is how God works, but this time—in the birth of Jesus—it’s not just a young woman, it’s an actual virgin, and this time God’s not just delivering his people from a foreign king; this time it’s deliverance from sin and death. Matthew recognised the motif in the music. It was there in Isaiah’s day, a lone violin telling a story that most people missed, but in the birth of Jesus that motif returned, and this time the whole symphony was playing it. Stephen’s drawing on the story of Moses the same way. Moses was rejected by his own people. A repeating theme in the story that the Sanhedrin—people who know this story, know this symphony so well already—a theme they ought now to see plain as day in what happened to Jesus. It should be obvious. They were the ones playing the instruments this time, after all. And then, third, Stephen stresses how through Moses, the God of glory, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God Israel had known for two thousand years, had revealed himself in a new way that no one had expected. Look at verse 30: “After another forty years, an angel appeared to him in the desert at Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning bush. When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the vision. But, as he came closer to see, there came the voice of the Lord: ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.’ Moses was very frightened, and didn’t dare to look. But the Lord said to him, ‘Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have looked long and hard at the trouble my people are having in Egypt. I have heard their groaning, and I have come down to rescue them. So, come on now: I’m going to send you to Egypt.’” Stephen wants to be clear—and we see this all through early Christian preaching—the God revealed in Jesus the Messiah is not new. He is the same God who has been directing this story, this symphony from the beginning. This is the God of their fathers, the God who has been rescuing his people according to his promises for two thousand years. The God they know. The God whose character and ways they ought to have recognised in Jesus. Yes, Stephen’s saying, Jesus was not what we expected. In Jesus—and now in the Spirit—God is doing something amazing, something astounding, something new. And that’s why you rejected him. But knowing the story, knowing the music, we should have expected God would do precisely this: something new, something wild, something we didn’t expect. Because the story is already full of episodes where God does just that. No one, least of all Moses, exiled to the wilderness, tending his father-in-law’s sheep—expected the burning bush. And yet in that moment, heaven and earth came back together, God spoke, a man was called, and the world was never the same again. And Stephen’s point is this: You can’t predict the unexpected thing that God will do; but you can be sure—because the story is full of such moments—that God does act unexpectedly to do the things he’s promised and that we expect, the very things in which we hope. Holy ground, for example, was something Stephen and his fellow Jews understood. The temple was holy ground. It was where heaven and earth met. But it wasn’t the end-all-be-all of holy grounds. It began at Mt. Sinai—not in Isreal, but in the wilderness—where God met Moses in the burning bush, where the plan to rescue Isreal from her bondage began. When the Israelites built the tabernacle and the cloud of God’s glory descended to fill it, God upstaged what he’d done at the burning bush. And then again, with the temple. As if it were the strings playing the motif at the burning bush, and in Exodus 40 as God’s glory fills the holy of holies, the woodwinds join them. And the music was good and it was beautiful, but the Sanhedrin should now be hearing that same motif as, in Jesus and the Spirit the whole symphony comes together to play. Stephen isn’t disparaging Moses. He’s not blaspheming the law or the temple. He’s saying, “Can’t you hear it? Their beautiful theme is now being woven into something far grander and played by the whole symphony. The motifs have been there all along, the story has always been told this way. Don’t plug your ears to this new thing. Listen. And hear how it’s taken up all the old themes into something that is nothing short of glorifying to the conductor, to the God of glory. That’s as far as we have time to go this morning. Like I said, Acts 7 is long and there’s a lot to unpack. But I think the great take-away for us from this part—in addition to learning to hear the great story of God and his people—I think the most important thing here is to know that God really does do new and unexpected things. As we get to know the story, we ought to expect for God to do the unexpected, for God to do new things that upstage what he’s done in the past. And yet, the story also emphatically tells us that as much as God does new things and upstages the things he’s done before, those new things are always in keeping with what he’s done before. The past always points to the future and the future never undermines the past. As the writer of Hebrews tells us, “God is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.” We live in an age where too many people are ready to do something new themselves—something that breaks from what or how God has already revealed himself, something that breaks from or that disparages or that blasphemes God’s past actions or his past instructions—they take this new human thing and declared that God is doing a new thing. Andy Stanley saying we need to unhitch from the Old Testament so that God can do something new. No! Churches embracing sexual immorality and post-modern notions of identity and sexuality and family and marriage and then saying, “See, God is doing a new thing!” A thousand times, no! Brothers and Sisters, the theme of the story, the key of the symphony doesn’t change. God does new things, but those new things follow from what God’s already done. On the other hand—and I think it’s mostly in response to all the proclamation of “new things” that aren’t godly at all—on the other hand, we can become too fearful, too conservative and we can end up where the Pharisees and Sadducees and the Essenes were: locked down, afraid of the new, and turning away from burning bushes, and unwilling to go where God is actually leading. This why we need to steep ourselves in the story. This why we need to immerse ourselves in the great symphony and to let the music wash over and through us. Brothers and Sisters, we need to know the themes and the motifs, to learn the key in which God is playing, to be intimately familiar with how they interact, weaving around and through each other, so that as the story continues to unfold, as the symphony bursts into new movements, we can hear God bringing those old familiar themes to new heights, while also being able to recognise when a different story is being told, or a different symphony is being played. I’ve said over and over, Brothers and Sisters: God’s word is life. Know, meditate on it, let it mould you, and then let it pour forth from you to give life to others. Let’s pray: Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Telling the Story: Part 1Acts 7:1-16by William Klock
Last Sunday, in Acts 6, we saw Stephen confronted as he preached in the synagogue. We don’t know exactly what he was preaching, but from the accusations that were made against him, he was—of course—preaching that Jesus is the Messiah, but must also have been talking about the way in which Jesus and the Spirit fulfil God’s promises to Israel, the law and the prophets, the torah and the temple. We can surmise that, because what they accuse him of is saying blasphemous things against God in general and specifically against Moses. They accuse him of saying that Jesus will destroy the temple and change the customs that Moses had handed down to them. We can surmise this, too, because this is what we’ve been hearing Peter preach in the earlier parts of Acts. Never in the early church do we see the apostles or anyone else just launching into a sermon about Jesus. They always and consistently preach Jesus as part of the story of the God of Israel and his people. That’s important. In fact, it’s critical; it’s essential. Leave out the story that leads to Jesus and you just may lose Jesus himself. That’s what happened with Marcion of Sinope back in the Second Century. His was one of the very first heresies the church had to confront. He threw away the Old Testament. He believed the God of the Old Testament was an evil, sadistic god and not the same God we see in the New. So he just unhitched the Old Testament and left it behind. And that heresy has been cropping up throughout church history in one form or another ever since. A few years ago, ex-evangelical pastor, Andy Stanley, caused a big stir when he preached that the church has to unhitch itself from the Old Testament. Even if we don’t cut out the Old Testament from our Bibles, even if we cherish the Old Testament, if we lose the story it contains, we’re going to get ourselves into trouble. Men like Tertullian and Justin Martyr addressed Marcion and he was eventually excommunicated. The church would always hold tenaciously to the Old Testament. But it wasn’t even a hundred and fifty year later that we started to undermine its story-telling. As the church became increasingly dominated by gentiles, we started to read the Old Testament (and the New), not as the story of the God of Isreal and his people, but as a book of moral allegories and of types that pointed to Jesus. We flattened it out and made it abstract. We “spiritualised” it. We knew the story of the God of Isreal and his people was there, but we denigrated it. That was the simplest, the least important, the least “spiritual” way to read the Bible. And by the grace of God we didn’t lose the gospel, but gradually we started putting the em-PHA-sis in the wrong places. What we see in the Bible, in the Gospels, in the teaching of Jesus, and in the teaching of the apostles in their epistles, and in the examples we see through Acts, is that the good news about Jesus is deeply rooted in the Old Testament and in Israel’s story. You cannot separate the old and the new. The story tells us the problem of human sin and rebellion and of the corruption of Gods’ good creation. The story shows us how God has stepped into the world to set it to rights. The story shows—long before we ever get to Jesus—the goodness and faithfulness of God. The story shows why the Israelites could and should trust the God who spoke through Moses and the Prophets—and eventually through Jesus and the apostles. The story prepared them—and it prepares us—for Jesus, for his death and his resurrection and his ascension and his kingdom and it prepares us to know the Spirit and to be the temple, purified by the blood of Jesus and made a dwelling place for God, to be a the truly heaven-on-earth people God had promised to make Israel; to be the beginnings, the firstfruits of his new creation, his new age, his kingdom. That’s what Stephen was getting at when he reminded his fellow Jews about the day when Jesus had said that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. It wasn’t about the end of Moses or torah or temple; it was about fulfilling them. They were signposts point into God’s future—a future in which God would live with his people, not in a building, but actually in them, and a future in which the law would no longer be carved on stone tablets, but written on human hearts. But they refused to hear. They drummed up false witnesses and they dragged Stephen before the Sanhedrin, the governing body of the Jews. Look at Acts 7. [Page 1086 in the pew Bibles.] Having been dragged before the Sanhedrin, “The high priest addressed Stephen. ‘Are these things true?’ he said. ‘Brothers and fathers, hear me,’ replied Stephen. ‘The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he moved to live in Haran.’” Let me pause there. Notice how Stephen is going all the way back to the beginning. He speaks first of the God of glory, which might not seem very important to us, but it’s noteworthy that “God of glory” is not a common way to speak of God in the Old Testament. In fact, Psalm 29:3 is the only place this title is used. On the one hand, I suspect Stephen uses it to make the point that he has no interest in denigrating or blaspheming the God of Irael. Stephen is invested in proclaiming the glory of God, and that’s exactly what he’s about to do by reminding them of their own story—and, most importantly, how it ends with Jesus and the Spirit. But Stephen is also invoking Psalm 29 as it ascribes glory to the God of creation, the God who is enthroned, sovereign over the seas and over the forests, sovereign over the nations, the God who blesses his people as they cry out in his temple, “Glory!”. This is the God of creation. And then to mention Abraham in the next breath is to set the opening scene. God created the heavens and earth. God created human beings to serve as his stewards and his priests in this creation. And we rebelled. We broke it. We corrupted it. We introduced darkness where there was supposed to be light. We drove a great wedge between heaven and earth, between God and man as we claimed his creation for ourselves, to do with as we pleased, to try to rule it as if we are gods ourselves. To write our own stories instead of living in the one he’s given us. And it was into that darkness, into that void in which men and women had lost all knowledge of their creator and had turned to idols, God spoke. And he called to Abraham. That call was the beginning of a new story—a story to set creation and to set humanity to rights. A story that would, one day, culminate in God returning to dwell with his people. It’s the story that everyone in Israel new, inside-out, backwards and forwards, top to bottom. And yet something had gone wrong in the telling. Because when God returned, Israel had rejected him. Because when Stephen proclaimed Jesus and the Spirit, the people accused him of blasphemy. Because as faithful as they were to the story, they hadn’t got it quite right. Remember last week I talked about how you might take a trip to the other side of the country. You drive your car to Nanaimo, then you leave it there and take a ferry to Horseshoe Bay, then you get off the ferry and take a bus downtown, and then you get off the bus to get on Skytrain to the airport, and then fly in airplane to your final destination. That journey might break down at any number of points. We might really, really like to drive our car and we can’t bear to think of leaving it parked at the ferry terminal and taking a ferry instead. And so we refuse to stop driving. When our friend tells us you can’t drive on water, we get angry. We accuse him of being a car-hater. We accuse him of saying that cars are bad and evil and no good. And we wait for the ferry to leave and then we drive full-speed down the ramp and crash into the water and drown. Not because cars are bad, but because cars were simply never designed to drive across water. That’s what’s going on with Stephen’s accusers. Stephen never said that torah or temple were bad things. They were good things. They were wonderful, spectacular, glorious gifts of God’s great grace. They were signposts leading Israel to Jesus. It’s just that in this new age, God’s given something even better. There’s a new law and a new temple. Those things were the promise, but now the fulfilment of the promise is here. But they don’t want to hear that. But let’s image you managed to transition from car to ferry to bus to Skytrain and you get to the airport, but instead of looking at the departures board to find your gate, you just walked down the concourse. And you looked for the gate you liked best. You stopped at one and you looked out the window and on the horizon, across the Strait, you could see Vancouver Island. And it was comforting and you decided this was the right gate. You could sit and wait for your plane to Montreal and never lose sight of the Island. And you waited and waited, but no plane came. And eventually you asked a gate agent, and she said, “Oh, you’re at the wrong gate. Your flight’s leaving from such-and-such gate.” But you didn’t listen. You liked this gate with the view of home. And a while later they announced your flight—and the gate—but you ignored it. Eventually you even heard them page you: “Passenger So-and-so, this is your last call for boarding at gate such-and-such.” But you just sat there. This gate was nice. Everyone else was wrong. Eventually the plane will come. And that’s what most of Isreal did. The Messiah came to fulfil the law and the prophets, but people already had their ideas of who and what the Messiah was be and to do. Because they’d got the story wrong. Not all wrong. They’d got to the airport after all, but wrong enough that they were convinced it was this gate, not that one. So Stephen’s going to do what Jesus had done and what he’d heard Peter do. He’s going back to the very beginning of the story and he’s going to tell it again. He’s going to tell it so they can understand that leaving the car and getting on the ferry doesn’t mean you hate cars or think they’re evil—and that the same goes for Moses and the Prophets and torah and temple. And he’s going to tell it so that when they do get to the airport, they be willing to trust the departure board and the gate agents and the pages about the right gate—so that they’ll see how the story was, all along, leading them to Jesus. The real key here is to pay attention to the bits of the story that Stephen—inspired by the Holy Spirit—decides to emphasise. There are a thousand parts to this story, but—Stephen is saying—look at it this way and you can’t help but recognise that in Jesus, the Messiah has come. So, again, picking up at verse 2: “The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he moved to live in Haran. ‘Leave your land and your family,’ he said to him, ‘and go to the land which I will show you.’ So he left the land of the Chaldeans and went to live in Haran. Then, from there, after his father’s death, God moved him on to this land in which you now live. God didn’t give him an inheritance here, not even a place to stand up in. Instead, he promised (when Abraham still had no child) that he would give it as a possession to his seed after him. This is what God said to him: that his seed would be strangers in a foreign land, that they would serve there as slaves, and that they would be afflicted for four hundred years. But God said that he would judge the nation that had enslaved them, and that they would then come out and worship him ‘on this mountain’. And he gave them the covenant of circumcision. So Abraham became the father of Isaac, and he circumcised him on the eighth day. Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of the twelve patriarchs.” You can’t understand Judaism or Christianity without understanding Abraham. This is where the story of God’s rescue begins. With this call, God’s plan to set the world to rights begins to unfold. Israel wasn’t just some random nation in history. God’s calling Abraham out of the darkness of ignorance and sin and idolatry is what sets the story on its trajectory to Jesus, it’s what establishes that this is the story of how God will rescue human beings and fix his creation that we broke. It’s like Stephen is answering the charge of blasphemy by affirming that, no, he is actually affirming the story they knew; he’s affirming God’s call; he’s affirming the special status of Israel. Just because we also had to take a ferry, doesn’t mean the car was a bad thing or that it didn’t have a good and useful purpose. And Stephen makes a point of zeroing in on Genesis 15. That’s the part of Genesis where Abraham has been faithful to God and followed him to the holy land, and God responds by establishing his covenant with him. We see this, too, over and over in the New Testament, especially with Paul in Galatians 3 and Romans 4. This is a vitally important part of the story that leads us to Jesus. And so Stephen stresses: God promised the land to Abraham’s descendants. The most Abraham would ever have it was a burial plot that he had purchase. But after his descendants had been strangers in a foreign land for four hundred years—he’s talking about Israel living as slaves in Egypt—he would judge that land and its people, and he would bring Abraham’s children out of Egypt to worship him “on this mountain”. Why was that important? Because it shows how God works. He makes promises and he keeps them, but he does so in his own good time. If Abraham hadn’t know better, he might have thought God had failed. Moses might have said, “I don’t think this is what was promised.” But instead, Abraham trusted. Instead, Moses believed and followed God as he did a new thing. And I think that’s why Stephen phrases this bit about “on this mountain”—that was originally God’s promise to Moses that he would bring the Israelites back to the place where God had met him in the burning bush and they would worship there, but Stephen connects that with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Already—long before Jesus—God was fulfilling his promises in ways that were unexpected. Mount Sinai points to Mount Zion. For Jews in the First Century, the temple had become a symbol of the land of Israel and of God’s promise to Abraham. That’s why they were so angry at Stephen when they thought he was blaspheming the temple and saying it was no good or that it would be destroyed. You might as well say—in their thinking—that God was going to abandon his promise to Abraham. So Stephen connects this all together. He affirms the promise; he affirms the covenant; he affirms God’s promise of the land; and most of all he affirms the temple. Most importantly, what he’s doing is affirming that God has called this people and given them a purpose. Through them he’s going to save the world. They knew that, but they’d muddled the story just enough that they’d got the “how” part of it wrong. Stephen’s on his way to Moses now. We’ll look at that part of what he says next week. There’s too much to his speech to cover it all in one sermon. But on the way to Moses, Stephen pauses. He needs to remind them of the part of the story about Joseph. Look at verses 9-16: “Now the patriarchs became angry with Joseph, and were jealous of him. They sold him into Egypt. But God was with him, and rescued him from all his troubles an gave him grace and wisdom before Pharaoh, king of Egypt, making him ruler over Egypt and over all his household. But then there was a famine over the whole of Egypt and Canaan, which resulted in great hardship. Our ancestors couldn’t find food to eat. Jacob, however, heard that there was grain in Egypt, and sent our ancestors there on an initial visit. On their second trip, Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and revealed to Pharaoh what family he was from. So Joseph sent and summoned Jacob his father and all his family, seventy-five people in all. Jacob came to Egypt and he and our ancestors died there. They were brought back to Shechem and buried in the tomb which Abraham had bought with silver, at a named price, from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.” Before Stephen gets to Moses, there’s Joseph and Joseph’s story. Abraham (and Moses as we’ll see next week) point to Jesus through their calling and the promises God made to them. Joseph points to Jesus another way and he’s particularly relevant to the current situation. Joseph was rejected by his brothers, but it was precisely in that rejection that God was work. It was through his rejection and through Joseph’s unjust suffering that God raised him to govern the whole land of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh. When famine came to Canaan and Egypt, it was Joseph whom his brothers came to for food—the man they’d been jealous of, the man they’d abused, the man they nearly murdered, the man they sold into slavery. And yet, what happened when they came to Joseph. Instead of being angry, instead of retaliating, instead of getting revenge, Joseph was gracious. He wept for joy to see his brothers again and invited them to come and live with him in a land of plenty. I hope that sounds familiar. I hope you can hear echoes of Jesus there. I can’t help but think of the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son and the rejoicing that Jesus says happens in heaven when sinners repent. I hope you can see in Joseph’s story, particularly as Stephen tells it, how God was preparing his people for his son. This is how God works: through humility, through rejection, through letting sin and evil and human rebellion do their worst, and then rising triumphant. This is how God works, Stephen declares: He is loving and gracious and merciful toward those he has created. One day, when he finally finishes the work of setting creation to rights, it’ll mean wiping from its face all those who persist in their rebellion, who persist in sin and evil. God does not rejoice in the destruction of those he loves. And so he rejoices—just as Joseph did—to welcome the repentant, to welcome those who want to be part of God’s new world, to welcome those who come to be washed clean in the blood of Jesus and to be filled with his Spirit, to become new creations themselves, to become part of his new temple. Stephen’s pointing back to Joseph to tell the Sanhedrin: There is grace, there is forgiveness for you too—even for those who cried out “Crucify him!” I suspect there were some men there in that meeting of the Sanhedrin that day who saw where Stephen was going with this. Like I said, this is as far as we’ll go with Chapter 7 today. It’s too much for one sermon. But the real takeaway from these first sixteen verses is, I think, simply to understand what Stephen, inspired by the Spirit and steeped in the scriptures, is doing here. This is—or it should be, because it sadly usually isn’t—this is the great art of Christian apologetic and Christian preaching and the proclamation of the good news about Jesus. It’s to tell the story of God and his people, to have the wisdom to know which of the thousand and one details is relevant to the immediately situation or immediate audience, and then to tell that story as the story that leads to Jesus as its fulfilment and its climax on the one hand, but that also proclaims God’s glory by showing his goodness and faithfulness in the story that brings us to Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, the Old Testament is not just a collection of useful stories for teaching morals nor is it a collection of allegories that foreshadow Jesus. It is, first and foremost, the story of how God has been at work to save us and to save his creation from sin and death. And we need to learn it. We need to learn it well. So that we can tell the story in a way that doesn’t leave us behind as the ferry sails away or that leads people stranded at the wrong gate at the airport. We need to tell the story in way that honours the old covenant, torah and temple, but we also need to tell it in a way that reveals Jesus as the fulfilment of them, a story that faithfully follows the signposts as they lead us to Jesus and to the Spirit, to the cross and to the empty tomb, to the ascension and to the creation of this new temple, not made of stones, but made of people washed clean by Jesus and filled with God’s own Spirit. We need to learn to tell the story so it gives glory to God for his goodness and faithfulness, for his grace and mercy, not just when we get to the part about Jesus, but at every step of the way: from Abraham to Joseph to Moses to David to Jesus—and then to you and to me, and to those who are lost and whom God so longs to rejoice over. Let’s pray: Father, in the Collect we acknowledged your goodness and your promises that exceed all we can desire. Remind us always that we know your goodness, because we know your story. Capture our hearts and minds, we pray, by the glory of that story, that we might immerse ourselves in it, that we might meditate on it, that we might in habit it, and that we might tell it over and over and over until the whole world knows your glory. Through Jesus our Lord, through the one who embodies your glory in all its fullness, we pray. Amen.
The Face of an AngelActs 6by William Klock
I hate doing administration stuff. I’m really glad that John handles our finances so well and makes sure all our bills get paid. I don’t like filling out annual parish reports and get annoyed when I have fill out one for ACNA and another for the REC. Why can’t they just ask the same questions and share the information? Our church register is stuffed with Post-It notes going back five or six years so I know what to enter in it whenever I eventually get around to sitting down to make all the entries for baptisms, deaths, weddings, membership, and all of that. And I wonder if Peter had his own First Century Post-It note system for dealing with the dreaded admin work that was perpetually threatening to cut in on his preaching and praying. Because that’s what we come to in Acts 6. The church has been growing quickly. There’s something like 5,000 Christians in Jerusalem. We don’t know how they were organised. We know that the apostles and presumable some others regularly spent time in the temple. But they met together in their homes. Were they divided into what we might think of as “churches” or “parishes” with an apostle or two overseeing each—or maybe each apostle overseeing two or three groups? We don’t know. But what we do know is that the twelve apostles were overseeing everything. They were preaching, they were teaching, they were praying, they were pastoring, they were making sure everyone’s needs were met. And it got to be too much, even for twelve of them. I get that. I have a friend who pastors a Baptist church of about 950. They figured out thirty years ago that they need one elder to every hundred people or so in order to pastor well. In Acts we’re talking at least 500 church members per apostle. People started falling through the cracks and complaining. Look at Acts 6. [Page 1086 in the pew Bibles.] “Now, in those days when the disciples were increasing in number, the ‘Hellenists’ raised a dispute with the ‘Hebrews’ because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food.” As we’ve seen in Chapters 2 and 4, these first Christians were very aware that they belonged to a new family and they lived accordingly. They were the beginnings of Gods new Israel. The Spirit had filled them with love for each other—the kind of love that torah had always envisioned for the people of Israel—and so they began to live it out. They fellowshipped with each other. They shared meals together as Jesus’ family and they shared with their brothers and sisters who were in need. They weren’t just overflowing with the love and mercy of Jesus; despite most of them having little, as a people they were overflowing with generosity and abundance. And there were plenty who were truly in need. Widows would normally be looked after by their own family, but when people joined the church—just as in some parts of the world today—it meant being cut off from their families and the support they once had. The church suddenly found itself providing for a large number of widows. Maybe it was a language barrier or maybe it has something to do with social connections, but the Hellenists—the Greek-speaking widows—the ones who had come to Jerusalem from the great Jewish diaspora—they were falling through the cracks. It surely wasn’t deliberate. It was growing pains. The sheer scope of the church’s charity work had become too much for the twelve to handle efficiently. So the Greek-speaking members of the church take up their cause with the apostles. The fact that their fellow “Hellenist’ believers take up their cause with the apostles, suggests it was a language problem. Maybe these widows didn’t know how or when to ask for food or where to get it and there were simply so church members, that the apostles were no longer able to know the personal needs of everyone. Whatever the case, the apostles realise they have to do something. Luke goes on: “So the twelve called the full number of disciples together. ‘Listen,’ they said, ‘It wouldn’t be right for us to leave the word of God to serve tables. So Brothers, choose seven men from amongst yourselves who are well spoken of and filled with the Spirit and wisdom. We will put them in charge of what needs to be done in this matter. We will continue to pay attention to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” The apostles knew what their primary calling was. It was to study and to teach and to preach the word and to pray. Sure, they could do some other things. But when those other things became so big that it meant taking significant time away from their ministry of the word and their time in prayer, well, it was time for the church as a whole to pick up the slack. To sort of quote Paul: God gave some to be apostles and other to—well—to fill the other multitude of roles that need filling in the church. Some are eyes and ears and mouths, others are hands and feet and finger and toes. The body needs them all. And this was common sense. But it also—and I think Luke deliberately frames it this way—it had precedent in Israel’s own story. Think of Israel in the beginning, in the wilderness, just delivered from Egypt, and Moses trying to rule over a thousand and thousands of people and feeling totally overwhelmed. Luke wants us to see the fledgling church as the new Israel and so he shows us the apostles in the position of Moses. It’s time to choose some well-respected men from amongst the people to help. Verse 5: “The whole gathering was pleased with what they said. They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, and Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus (a proselyte from Antioch). They presented them before the apostles, and having prayed, they laid their hands on them.” It’s worth noting: the seven names are Greek names. One of these men was even a proselyte, meaning he was a gentile who had converted to Judaism and was now a Christian. Presumably the seven were meant to serve the whole church, but the church chose seven men who were especially able to help with the problem at hand: the Greek-speaking widows. So the church elects these men, brings them before the apostles for their approval, prays for them, and then it’s the church that lays hands on them. Now, almost every English translation says that it was the apostles that laid hands on these seven, but the Greek text doesn’t really bear that out. It says they, the church, elected the men and brought them to the apostles and there’s absolutely nothing in the text that indicates a change of subject before Luke says that “they” laid hands on the men. The church—probably a representative few—laid hands on the seven, not the apostles. And when we look at what was involved, it suggests even more that it was the church doing the laying on of hands. There are several words in Hebrew that, in English, all get sort of generically translated as “to lay hands”, but the Hebrew behind the idea here, has the sense of pressing down on something—as if you’re sharing or transferring something of yourself to another: your sins to a the scape goat, or the people of Irael “pressing down on” the Levites who will represent them and fill in for their firstborn sons, or Moses pressing his hands down on Joshua and making him his representative and successor. Remember, the whole point of this is that the apostles knew “serving tables” wasn’t their job. Their job was word and prayer. It was the job of the wider church to look after the welfare of each other and so it’s appropriate that the church not only elects these seven men, but also “ordains” them, if you will. And what were the seven? Traditionally we’ve called them deacons. Deacon comes from the Greek word to serve—in this case to serve (διακονεῖν) tables, which is symbolic of making sure the widows get their charity. But otherwise, what we see these men doing doesn’t look all that much like what we see deacons doing later in the New Testament. In fact, when the apostles talk about “serving tables”, there’s a probably a word play there—“tables” is a banking or accounting term, not just a word for a literal table—that suggests that what these men were really doing was overseeing, administering the distribution of food and, more broadly, the resources of the church. And if that was the case, they look a lot more like bishops. I could be wrong, but what I would tentatively suggest, is that these seven men were the first men to be appointed to pastoral office in the church, before that role had split into bishops on the one hand and deacons on the other. I think these guys were, more or less, both proto-deacons and proto-bishops. And while their primary duty was to oversee the church’s charity, the church chose them because they were full of the Spirit. And in Acts, what that means is that they were bold and unafraid proclaimers of the good news about Jesus. So, writes Luke in verse 7, because of the apostles could now be devoted to the word to prayer and because these seven men were now ordained to ensure the church was being what the church is supposed to be, “The word of God increased and the number of disciples in Jerusalem multiplied greatly. This included a large crowd of priests who became obedient to the faith.” Brothers and Sisters, when the church—the people and the leaders—are boldly proclaiming the word of God and are diligent in prayer, God will multiply it. We might miss it, but Luke makes the point: It’s not us. We don’t grow the church. It’s God. The power lies with him. We need to trust his word and we need to proclaim it. We need to pray and entrust our ministry to him. Not gimmicks, not money, not all the other things churches often do to try to make themselves effective. Just preach God’s word and pray. He’ll bring fruit from it. And be patient, because God works on his own schedule, not ours. And, we might miss it: Luke makes a point of telling us a significant new step in the church’s growth: now it’s attracted a crowd of priests. And that would not have gone unnoticed by the leaders of the temple. Luke doesn’t say anything here, but this means the Jewish leaders are getting more concerned, getting more angry, becoming more inclined to violent action. But, first, Stephen’s story. Look at verse 8: “Stephen was filled with grace and power and performed great signs and wonders amongst the people. But some from the Freemen’s Synagogue, as it was named, and from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia, and Asia stood up and disputed with Stephen. They could not, however resist the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke.” Stephen preached in the gospel in the synagogues. And here’s the thing. Luke makes a point of saying that Stephen wasn’t just full of power; he was also full of grace. We’ve all heard people speak who are full of power, but are short on grace. They can be jerks. Maybe they’re right, but just the way they speak makes people angry. But that’s not Stephen. He’s speaking with great grace. But the folks listening still aren’t having any of it. Not that Palestinian Jews were any more receptive, but Luke kind of gives the sense that maybe these folks—they’re all hellenised, diaspora Jews like Stephen—maybe they’re overly defensive of their Jewish heritage because they feel deficient in some way for not being Palestinian Jews. Whatever their motivation, they’re angry with what he says and they get even angrier because they couldn’t resist him. And then they get even angrier—we’ve all seent his happen—they’re even angrier, because he’s not angry in response. He’s full of grace They couldn’t refute what he was saying. But rather than concede, they dig in and at that point there’s only one thing left to do: they make false accusation of blasphemy. Verse 11: “Then they put up men to say, ‘We heard this man speaking blasphemous words against Moses and against God.’ They aroused the people, the elders, and the scribes. They set upon him, seized him, and took him in front of the assembly. They set up false witnesses to say, ‘This man never stops speaking words against this holy place and the law. We heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs which Moses handed down to us.’ Everyone who was sitting in the assembly looked hard at Stephen. They all saw that his face was like the face of an angel.” It sounds a lot like the accusations against Jesus, when he was accused of saying he would destroy the temple and rebuilt it in three day. Of course, yes, he said that, but his point was that God was doing something new, that God was about to fulfil his promises, and that God would establish a new temple in which he would come to dwell with his people. But the Jewish elders didn’t hear it that way, not because Jesus wasn’t clear, but because they couldn’t accept that God was fulfilling his promises through Jesus. If Jesus was the Messiah, he was doing it all wrong, at least so far as they were concerned. He couldn’t be the one. And now exactly the same thing is happening to Stephen. We don’t have his words, but based on the false accusations against him as well as his defence that will follow in Chapter 7, we have a pretty good idea what he was saying and it was closely related to what Jesus had said. Just like Jesus, just like Peter, just like the preaching we see through Acts, Stephen told the story of God and his people and how it leads to Jesus. There were four things that were all-important for the Jews and that marked out their identity. There was the temple; the torah or law; the land of Israel itself and especially Jerusalem, where the temple was; and there was their ethnic identity as Jews—the sons and daughters of Abraham, delivered by God from Egypt when Moses led them through the Red Sea to Mt. Sinai. Those things marked them out as God’s people. Those things marked them out as separated, as different from the pagan peoples and nations around them. Compromise those things, and you’d be sliding down a slippery slope into the same idolatry that had got their ancestors exiled to Babylon. So when Stephen spoke, as any of the Christians would have, about God establishing a new temple or about Jesus fulfilling torah, out came the angry charges of blasphemy. But those first Christians—just like Jesus—were never attacking the temple or the law. The problem was that Israel—despite knowing her own story so well and so thoroughly—had forgotten where it was going and then failed to recognise how Jesus was bringing it to its climax. When Jesus or when Peter or when Stephen said that God was doing a new thing, what people like the priests and the scribes, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, people like Saul of Tarsus heard was that these Jesus people were saying was the law and the temple were bad. What Stephen (like Jesus and Peter before him) was trying to say is that the word of God tells a story and that this story was moving forward and, as it moved forward, new things would happen. This didn’t mean that the old things that had happened were bad. Just the opposite! They were good. They were necessary to get the story to the point it’s at now. Imagine you take a trip to Montreal. First you drive your car to Nanaimo to get to the ferry, then you take the ferry to Horseshoe Bay, then you get off the ferry and get on a bus that takes you downtown, where you take SkyTrain to the airport, where you finally board an airplane that flies you across the country. The fact that you left your car parked in Nanaimo to get on a ferry or that you left Skytrain to get on an airplane or even that you stopped travelling once you arrived in Montreal, none of that means that the car or the ferry or the bus or the airplane or even the trip itself was bad. You couldn’t get where you are without them! And, just so, God gave Israel the law. God gave Israel the temple. And they were good things. They were necessary things. They were gracious things. They were things that prepared the people for and brought them to the part of the story where Jesus became a part of it. But they tuned this part out. Some modern Christians do the same. I’m not sure where it comes from. Maybe it comes from listening to Luther with only one ear. But we get the idea that the old covenant was a bad thing. People will get the wrong idea that the old covenant was about being saved by works and that’s why Israel refused Jesus, who came to offer salvation by grace. A thousand time, no. If that’s what Stephen had been saying, the Jews would have been right to be angry with him, because he would have been wrong. The status of God’s people has never been because of works; it has always been because of grace. That’s part of how the old covenant prepared people and led them to the part of the story where Jesus enters. Other times we just ignore God’s story altogether and try to write our own. But what’s often even more dangerous is when we know God’s story to a point, but then we lock it down and refuse to let him take it in a new direction. We do that. And that’s what these folks mad at Stephen are doing. Jesus just couldn’t be where the story they knew was heading; instead, Jesus became a threat to their version of the story. And yet Stephen persisted. Even as they dragged him before the Sanhedrin with a slate of false witnesses against him. And think about that. They’re convinced they’re in the right. They’re convinced that they represent God and everything that is good and right and true. They think they’re the heaven on earth people. And yet what do that they do in response to his preaching? They lie. By their actions they condemn themselves. And in contrast stands Stephen. For all his speaking with power, he’s full of grace. And as he stands before the Sanhedrim, as false witness after false witness testified against him, the Spirit, God, transforms—almost transfigures him—to the point that the whole assembly is left staring at him. Luke says his face became like the face of an angel. As far as literal appearance, I don’t know what that means. But the important thing is that everyone recognised what was happening and in that moment, the Spirit revealed Stephen—and along with him the church—for what he, what they, what we really are: In that moment Stephen was revealed as the face of Jesus’ heaven on earth people. He was actively part of the church living out heaven on earth. He was preaching the good news about Jesus and he is the fulfilment of God’s promise to bring heaven and earth back together. And in the middle of this controversy, in the middle of the false accusations, in the middle of these men who, despite all the evidence, were digging in their heels and refusing to accept the message about Jesus, refusing to let God lead the story they new so well in a new direction, God himself vindicated Stephen and made him a manifestation of heaven on earth. Stephen was full of the Spirit, a little temple in miniature full of God’s presence. As if the shekinah—the cloud of glory visibly representing God’s presence that had been missing from the temple ever since Israel’s exile—suddenly became present with Stephen. God announcing: “In this man, in this people, through my son, in this gospel I am fulfilling my promises. Listen to him.” Brothers and Sisters, this should be a picture of us. The bit where Stephen was transfigured and looked like an angel—whatever that means—that was unique. But the rest of it, that ought to be us. A people committed to be a covenant family, not just overflowing with talk of love and grace and mercy, but a family of people where love and grace and mercy are abundant in real, practical ways. A family where we make a point of doing what needs doing to make sure that nothing gets in the way of that love and grace and mercy. We ought to be a people of word and of prayer who are bold for the gospel, because we know that the power lies not with us, but with God. His word, not ours, brings life. His Spirit has the power to renew minds and regenerate hearts. And so we pray, entrusting ourselves and our ministry to him and we proclaim not our word, but his. We tell the story that leads the world to Jesus. And if we’re doing all these things, that word, that story will have power, but our telling of it will also be full of grace. The world, the flesh, and the devil will do their worst. People will dig in their heels. People will tell lies about us and about the story and the good news we proclaim. People may even violently persecute us one day. But remember: It’s all of grace. The story that leads us through the law and the prophets, through torah and temple, is all about the grace of God towards rebellious sinners, and so is the story that leads to forgiveness and life with God, the story that leads us to Jesus and the Spirit and eventually to the New Jerusalem. Brothers and Sisters, it’s all of grace. Live the story of God’s grace and the light of heaven will permeate the church. Proclaim the story of God’s grace, and that light will being to permeate the world. Let’s pray: Lord, fill us with your grace. And don’t just fill us with it; ensure that we’re ever and always overwhelmed by the knowledge and understanding of your grace, so that we will live it out in practical terms as your church and so that we will go out with boldness to proclaim your good news, not to win arguments, but make your grace known. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.
But if it’s from God…Acts 5by William Klock
There was a package slip from Canada Post below the mail slot when I got here last Friday. I was kind of annoyed, because not only did I have no idea where the package was from, for some reason I had to go all the way over to the post office in Comox to pick it up. And when they handed it to me I was perplexed. The sender was just some distribution company. The box was large and heavy. A mystery. And when I got it home and opened it up, it was still a mystery. A boxed set of about fifteen books from a ministry called Be United in Christ. Nice looking hardcovers. The set looks expensive. A few of them were reprints of books by Jonathan Edwards, Jeremiah Burroughs, and Charles Spurgeon, but frustratingly none of the others say a word about their authors and I couldn’t find much online about the ministry itself or who’s behind it. The books are a generous gift. But do I just put them out for you all to take home and read? Edwards, Burroughs, Spurgeon are okay. Puritans, not Anglicans, but still part of the same general theological tradition—for the most part. But are they there just to get me to trust the other anonymous books? I don’t know. This is the shepherd’s dilemma. I don’t have time to read them or really even to meaningfully skim them. The problem would be solved if I knew something about who sent them. And I think that illustrates well what St. Luke is getting at in our text today. We’ll be looking at Acts 5. [Page 1084 in the pew Bibles.] And at first Acts 5 might seem like a series stories or events that are related only because they happened in the order Luke presents them, but are kind of otherwise “random”. But the more I thought about the Chapter, the more a common theme started to take shape. So far, Luke has shown us the birth of the church through the preaching of Peter and the work of the Spirit. And then he’s shown us the church taking shape, not just as some new religion—which I think is how we’re often (wrongly!) prone to seeing it—but as the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel. Luke shows us the church as the new temple. God has returned to his people as he promised, but not to the bricks-and-mortar temple on the mountaintop above Jerusalem. Instead, he’s come to indwell the people whom Jesus has purified with his blood. This is a human temple meant to one day fill the whole earth and with it God’s presence. And Luke has shown us the church not just as a family, but as the family that Israel was always supposed to be, but failed to be; the family in which God is fulfilling his promises through Jesus and the Spirit; the family in which his kingdom, his new creation, his renewed humanity is being born. It’s a community meant to take up the vocation of Jesus and to be prophets, priests and kings, proclaiming the good news about the lordship of Jesus to Jerusalem and Judah—and eventually to the whole world. But as we’ve seen, it’s not just the proclamation. It’s not just the preaching. That’s absolutely necessary. But it’s the lived community—the “family-ness”—of the church that backs up the message and says that this is the real deal. Because Israel had been talking the talk for a thousand years. But Israel ended up in exile in Babylon because she failed over and over to walk the walk. You can’t preach light while living in darkness. You can’t claim to be God’s people while you worship idols. You can’t proclaim new creation while living like the old. That’s why, at the end of Chapter 4, which we saw last week, Luke talked for a second time about the way the church in Jerusalem became a family and took care of those in need. They were actively living out the bounty and generosity of God and his new creation. As the new Israel, they were a little land of milk and honey. And Luke held up Jospeh the Levite as particularly exemplary, because he unselfishly sold some land and brought the proceeds to the apostles to help their ministry. It wasn’t a requirement for church membership. It sounds like Joseph was wealthy and so he used his wealth to build up the church and it was his way of living out new creation. And it was obviously unique—not something everyone did—because they nicknamed him Barnabas, which means “son of encouragement”. And that leads straight into Acts 5 and the story of Ananias and Sapphira. This couple wanted the same sort of attention Barnabas was getting. Luke writes, “There was, however, a man named Ananias with his wife, Sapphira. He sold some property and, with his wife’s knowledge, kept back part of the price. He brought the rest and laid it at the apostle’s feet. ‘Ananias!’ said Peter. ‘Why did the Satan fill your heart to make you tell a lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the price of the land? While it was still yours, it belonged to you, didn’t it? And, when you sold it, it was still in your power. Why did you get such an idea in your heart? It isn’t men that you’ve lied to; it’s God!’ When Ananias heard these words he fell down and died. Everyone who heard about it was scared out of their wits. The young men got up, took him away, wrapped up his body and buried him. After an interval of about three hours, his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter spoke to her. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did you sell the land for this much?’ ‘Yes,” she replied, ‘that was the price.’ ‘So why,’ Peter answered, ‘did you agree together to put the Holy Spirit to the test? Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door and they will carry you out too!’ At once she fell down at his feet and died. The young men were just coming in and they found her dead, so they took her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear came upon the whole gathering and on all who heard about these things.” Great fear! No kidding. Now, growing up—and for years afterward—I thought this was a story about “tithing”. In Sunday school we would sing a song about how Ananias and Sapphira got together to conspire a plot to cheat the church and get ahead. They knew God’s power but did not fear it, tried to cheat the Holy Spirit. Peter prophesied it and they both dropped dead. Uh! (That “Uh!” was the good part—one of the few times you could be rowdy in church.) And the chorus of the song went on to sing about how God loves a cheerful giver, give him all you’ve got. It had me terrified as a kid. I didn’t have any income, but I knew that someday when I did, I’d better give God his due or I might drop dead. No one ever talked about the part where they lied about what they were giving. And no one ever paid attention to the context of the story. It is a terrifying story. Even the people in the church who saw it and heard about, Luke writes, were pretty terrified. But the way we usually hear about Ananias and Sapphira, I think, gets us worried about the wrong thing. Because, Brothers and Sisters, this is isn’t a story about tithing; it’s a story about the need for holiness. It’s a story that reminds us that if we’re going to be God’s temple, if we’re going to be the place where he dwells in the person of his Spirit, if we’re going to be the place where the world meets God, we need to take holiness seriously. The first thing that ought to tip us off here is the way these first chapters of Acts are all centred on the temple. More specifically, they’re focused on how the church has become the new temple and how it—particularly through Peter and John spending their days in the old temple—how the church is confronting and challenging the old: the old temple, the old Israel, and the priests and elders associated with both. The second thing that ought to tip us off is the nature of the story. It’s not a common thing, even in the Bible, for God to just suddenly strike someone dead. But the few times we do see that happen, what’s it associated with? Think Nadab and Abihu, Aaron’s sons, playing around with the holy things of God and offering “strange fire” on the altar. Zap. Dead. Instantly. And poor Uzzah when David’s men were rescuing the ark of the covenant from the Philistines. They didn’t carry it the way God had told them to. Instead, they put it on a cart. And the cart started to tip and Uzzah—well meaning, but horribly wrong—reached out to steady it. And zap! Uzzah was struck dead on the spot. I can think of a few other slightly less dramatic. There was Achan who, in the ruins of Jericho, stole some of the treasure that belonged to the Lord. His sin had consequences for the whole community of Israel in their next battle, but maybe most importantly, it was the Lord who revealed the guilty to Joshua. And Achan and his family died. Or King Uzziah who arrogantly entered the temple to burn incense and was immediately struck with leprosy. The point is this, Brothers and Sisters, if you’re going to walk with God, holiness is not an option. The wages of sin is death. For the vast majority of us, living and then dying is just so normal that sometimes we need a reminder that life is God’s gift, that sin separates us from God, and that we die because of that separation. Sometimes the reminders are instantaneous, dramatic, and terrifying. Other times they play out over generations. Like Israel herself: generation after generation of faithlessness and idolatry that eventually led, for the northern kingdom, to annihilation—national death—and for the southern kingdom exile. St. Paul warns the Corinthians that some of them are sick and dying because they’ve abused the Lord’s Supper. In John’s revelation, Jesus warns the churches that if they aren’t faithful, if they fail to properly represent him and his kingdom, he will take away their lampstands. They will, as churches, die. God requires holiness of his people and holiness is serious business. The church is God’s means of making the good news of Jesus known. The church is God’s means of making his new creation visible and real in the world. And if we undermine the credibility of the gospel through unholiness—well, God is patient—most of the time—but if we refuse to repent, he will make us witnesses to his power and sovereignty through his discipline rather than his blessing. Ananias and Sapphira lied because they wanted a reputation they hadn’t earned. How do we misrepresent the gospel and the kingdom and Jesus? In what way do we or does the church compromise our witness? What idols have we set up alongside the cross? What things do we do that bring public shame on Jesus and the Spirit? What compromises our holiness? And do our compromises and our idolatries and our hypocrisies run so deep or are they so common that maybe we no longer even see them. But people out there do. And God does. Brothers and Sisters, that’s what the story of Ananias and Sapphira is about. But Acts 5 is more than a terrifying warning to holiness. It’s also an exhortation. Look at verse 12: “Many signs and wonders were performed by the apostles amongst the people. They were all together in Solomon’s Porch, while none of the others dared join them, though the people spoke highly of them. But more people, a crowd both of men and women, believed in the Lord and were added to their number. They used to bring the sick into the streets and place them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on them as he went by. Crowds gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing people who were sick or infested with unclean spirits. All of them were cured.” God struck down the people who were compromising the church’s gospel witness, but he blessed the ministry of Peter. As Luke notes, after the confrontation with the Jewish authorities, no one dared to join him, but when Peter went out with boldness to proclaim the good news, God made him a walking pocket of new creation. It makes me think of the dead temporarily raised on Good Friday, as if the shockwave of life was so powerful it had an almost undiscriminating effect as it went out from the cross. The same sort of thing happens with Peter. I think when we read this, our modern democratic mindset has us wondering why we don’t see this happening today. Why doesn’t this happen when my shadow falls on people when I’m walking around. And again, I have to come back to the biblical witness itself. The point of miracles is that they don’t happen every day. And when they do happen, even in the Bible, they cluster around those times and places where God is doing something new. They clustered around Jesus and now we see them clustering around the apostles, validating them in the same way they validated Jesus. And they’re happening right at the gate of the temple—God’s not so subtle way to announce that, yes, he’s come back to dwell with his people just as he promised, but he’s not dwelling in the holy of holies in the bricks-and-mortal temple; he’s come to dwell in this people purified and made even holier than the holy of holies by the blood of Jesus. Think of it like a rocket launch. There’s a blast of almost uncomprehensible power that launches a rocket off the ground and into orbit. Once it’s up there, it just needs a little nudge from time to time to keep it there. This was God’s way of launching the gospel. Now, verse 17: “Then the high priest got up and all who were with him, namely the group called the Sadducees. They were filled with zeal [think “righteous indignation”] and seized the apostles and put them in the public jail. But an angel of the Lord came in the night, opened the prison doors, and brought them out. ‘Go and take your stand in the temple,’ he said, ‘and speak all the words of this life to the people.’ When they heard this, they went in at early morning and began to teach. When the high priest arrived with his entourage, they called the official assembly and all the elders of the sons of Israel, and they sent to the prison to have the apostles brought in. But when the attendants went they didn’t find them in the prison. So they came and reported back. ‘We found the jail shut up with maximum security,’ they said, ‘and the guards were standing in front of the doors. But when we opened up we found no one inside.’ When they heard these words, the commander of the temple police and the chief priests were at a loss about them, with no idea what had happened. But then someone came with a message for them. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘The men you put in prison are standing in the temple and teaching the people.’ Then the commander went with his attendants and brought them. They didn’t use force, though, because they were afraid that the people might stone them.” Luke has a sense of humour. So does God. The high priest is full of zeal. This idea of “zeal” characterised what the Jews of those days thought of as faithfulness. Their heroes were men like Phinehas, who speared a law-breaking idolater to the ground; like Judas Maccabbeus, who led a revolt against the pagan Geek rulers of Israel. They were zealous for God and for his law and they burned with anger at anyone who compromised it. And that’s how they felt about the apostles. Peter and John, just like Jesus, were challenging the temple. The temple leaders wanted them dead, but they also feared the people. Everyone else could see new creation and the power of God—life—bursting into the world, but all these guys could see was a threat to the status quo. And so they throw the apostles into jail. And God sends an angel to set them free and not just that, but to send them straight back to the temple, to the place where they were arrested. And there’s an urgency to the angel’s words. “Go back the temple. Take your stand. Speak the words of this life to the people.” The miracles were wonderful. The miracles said that God was doing something, that new creation life was breaking in. That there was something about the apostles. But Brothers and Sisters, miracles without preaching lead to superstition. Good works without preaching leave people applauding the people doing the good works. It’s our proclamation, our preaching, our announcement of the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen and lord, that makes sense of the miracles and the good works. It’s the preaching that points people to Jesus—not just in a generic sense to “God”, but specifically to Jesus. It’s the preaching that makes clear that in the Messiah, God has provided a sacrifice that purifies us from the stain of sin to make us fit to be his temple, filled with his own Spirit, to bring his grace and his mercy and his love and his holiness and his new creation to the world. It’s our life as God’s working model of new creation that attracts people, but it’s our preaching that calls them specifically to Jesus in repentance and faith. This whole chapter is a reminder that preaching alone without holiness and without living out new creation is not enough, but that it’s also not enough to live out that new creation, to be a heaven on earth people, even to work miracles. It has to be accompanied by the proclamation of the good news about Jesus. Otherwise we’re like the mystery box of books. Who’s this from? Should I trust it? So the angel sends them back to preach. And there they are preaching in the temple just as the priests assemble to hold court. And they send for the accused and no one can find them, until someone runs in and shouts: “They’re back preaching right under your noses!” “So,” Luke goes on in verse 27, “they brough them and stood them in the assembly. The high priest questioned them. ‘We gave you strict orders, didn’t we?’ he demanded. ‘We told you not to teach in this name, but look what you’re doing. You have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you’re trying to bring this man’s blood on us.’ ‘We must obey God, not men!’ responded Peter and the apostles. ‘The God of our fathers raised Jesus after you had laid violent hands on him and hanged him on a tree. God exalted him to his right hand as leader and saviour, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. We are witnesses of these things and so is the Holy Spirit, which God gave to those who obey him.’ When they heard this, they were infuriated and wanted to kill them. But then a Pharisee by the name of Gamaliel stood up in the assembly. He was a law-teacher, highly respected by all the people. He ordered the men to be put outside for a short while. ‘Men of Israel,’ he said to the gathering, ‘be careful what you do to these men. Before these times Theudas rose up, claiming to be someone special and about four hundred men went off to join him. But he was killed and all the people who trusted him were dispersed. The movement came to nothing. After that Judas the Galilean arose in the days of the census and drew a crowd after himself. But he was killed and all those who trusted him were scattered. So my advice to you now is this. Leave off from these men; let them be. You see, if this plan or work is merely human in origin, it will come to ruin. But if it’s from God—well, you won’t be able to stop them. You might even be found to be fighting against God.’ They were persuaded by him and called the apostles back in. They beat them and told them not to speak in the name of Jesus. Then they let them go. They, however, went out from the presence of the assembly celebrating, because they had been reckoned worthy to suffer disgrace for the name. And all day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not stop teaching and proclaiming the Messiah.” The assembly has the apostles beaten, but they know the scriptures. They’ve seen how Jesus suffered and died as part of his ministry to fulfil those scriptures. So Peter and John and the others take this opposition as confirmation. And Luke goes into these details here, because this is going to be a pattern throughout the book of Acts. Suffering for the name of Jesus is a privilege. But he also highlights the importance of the church’s integrity to its—to our—witness. Again, we are God’s temple. He’s returned as he promised, not to the stone building that once sat over Jerusalem, but by filling us—the people purified and made holy by the blood of Jesus. The beauty of a human temple is that it can grow and grow and grow until it fills the earth with God’s presence, with his wisdom, with his gospel life. But it’s also important that the temple remain pure. Jesus has purified it. The Holy Spirit has sanctified it. But we’re still human. We’re not perfect—not yet. Brothers and Sisters, this is why, as Paul puts it, we need to put on the Messiah. To put off the old, corrupt, sinful and selfish way of being human and put on Jesus and the new life of the gospel, the new life of the Spirit. To be the holy people Jesus and the Spirit have made us. To walk in integrity: in our personal affairs, in our relationships, in our marriages, in our business, in our politics, in our finances, in our life together as the church, as the temple. We really do need to be the new humanity and God’s new creation. We need to be—so much as Jesus and the Spirit make it possible—to be God’s future right here in the present. And we need to take our stand and proclaim the name of Jesus so that when people notice our holiness and our integrity, they’ll also know that it’s not just us, but that it’s all about this Jesus who died and rose again—for us, for them, for the sake of all creation—to forgive, to purify, to heal, and to set to rights. I can’t say exactly what it’s supposed to look like. Acts was unique. The rocket ship was launching. Now it’s in orbit. Our shadows are highly unlikely to heal anyone, and yet Peter’s shadow and Peter’s preaching really do represent the ministry of the faithful church to bring healing to the world, to wipe away tears, to announce what Jesus has done and what Jesus is doing and what Jesus will, finally, one day finish as we bring hope to the world. Do it with integrity, Brothers and Sisters. And do it in holiness. Let us pray: O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not our hold on things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
They Boldly Spoke the Word of GodActs 4by William Klock
Chapter and verse breaks in the Bible are not part of the original text. Chapter breaks were added about eight hundred years ago and verses about five hundred. There’s an old biblical studies urban legend that Robert Estienne, the French printer who published one of the early New Testaments with verse division, marked them out while riding on horseback from Paris to Lyon, explaining the often frustrating way they cut through thoughts and sentences. Chapter breaks can be just as annoying. I say this because last week we left off our study of Acts at the end of Chapter 3, but the end of Chapter 3 isn’t where this story ends. You’ll remember that this story about Peter and John and the lame man followed right on the heels of Pentecost. Peter and John were on their way to the temple to pray when they met a lame man begging at the temple gate. “Silver and gold have I none,” said Peter, “but such as I have I give. In the name of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, get up and walk!” And he lifted up the man the man began to jump up and down and to praise God. And as everyone began to gather around, Peter began to preach. He reminded them of their own story, of God’s promises going all the way back to Abraham, and how all those promises were fulfilled and how the story was brought to its climax in the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus. I won’t repeat everything I said last Sunday, but needless to say—and even if you aren’t familiar with the story—you probably knew that trouble was coming. But that pesky chapter break. It saved you from an hour-long sermon, but it also cut the story in half. So we’ll pick up after the break, with Chapter 4, now. [It’s page 1083 in the pew Bibles.] Luke continues: “As they were speaking to the people, along came the priests, the chief of the temple guard, and the Sadducees. They were greatly annoyed that they were teaching the people and proclaiming that the resurrection of the dead had begun to happen in Jesus. They seized them and put them under guard until the next day, since it was already evening. But a large number of the people who had heard the message believed it and the number of men grew to five thousand.” The idea of the resurrection of the dead was a big deal for the Jews and you’d think that announcing that it had somehow begun in Jesus would be good news. And obviously it was for the thousands who believed. Not so much for the Sadducees. They were sad, you see, because they didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead. Okay, not really. Their name goes back to Zadok, the high priest in the days of David and Solomon. That name, Zadok, is also related to the Hebrew word for righteousness. So the Sadducees thought of themselves not only as the sons of Zadok, but also as the righteous ones. And in the First Century, they controlled the priesthood. They were aristocratic and they were in power and people like that don’t usually like revolutionary ideas, and if there was there was a great revolutionary idea alive in Judah, it was the idea of the resurrection of the dead. Resurrection means that things are broken and that God will, one day, come to set things to rights—and that implied that the Sadducees were part of the problem needing to be set right. So they’re upset at Peter’s preaching. The Pharisees didn’t like this talk either. As far as they—and everyone else who hoped for resurrection—were concerned, all God’s people would be raised from the dead at the end of the age. The idea that Jesus was raised all by himself was like heresy. And, of course, if Jesus had been raised, it meant he was the Messiah and they refused to accept that idea. So no matter how many eyewitnesses there were to the risen Jesus, it had never happened, so far as they were concerned. But back to the Sadducees. They controlled the priesthood and the priests were the gatekeepers of Israel. And this talk about Jesus as Messiah and his being resurrected, which means he’d initiated the age to come already, that was the sort of talk that might spark a revolution. And, of course, a revolution was what was already happening as the gospel and the Spirit were beginning to do their work. But just as they hadn’t recognised it in Jesus, the leaders of Israel refuse to recognise it now and they have Peter and John locked up for the night. Even still, Luke goes to the trouble to make the point that thousands believed anyway. The gospel cannot and will not be stopped! Verse 5: “On the next day their rulers, the elders, and the scribes gathered in Jerusalem, along with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, Alexander, and all the members of the high-priestly family. When they’d stood them in the midst, they asked, ‘How did you do this? What power did you use? What name did you invoke?’ Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit. ‘Rulers of the people and elders,’ he said, ‘if the question we’re being asked today is about a good deed done for a sick man, and whose power it was that rescued him, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel, that this man stands before you fit and well because of the name of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead. He is the stone which you builders rejected, but which has become the head cornerstone. Rescue won’t come from anyone else. There is no other name given under heaven and among men by which we must be rescued.’” Do you remember that scene in Luke 11 where Jesus is confronted after casting out a demon? “You can only cast them out, because you’re one of them,” they accused him. The same thing is happening again. I think Luke wants to highlight that what’s happening here might be an “act” happening through the apostles, but it’s still ultimately Jesus acting. Or the Spirit, which amounts to the same thing. Luke makes a point of saying that Peter was full of the Spirit when he answered the accusation. So just like Jesus, when the council asks them in whose name they healed the lame man, not only is Peter bold to announce that it’s Jesus of Nazareth, they boldly assert that he is the Messiah—the one they crucified, but whom God raised from the dead. So Peter is reasserting everything: It’s Jesus. Yes the one they crucified. And this isn’t just about a lame man walking again, this is about the resurrection of the dead. It’s about the fact that Jesus is Lord and that the revolution has begun. The age to come, new creation, the kingdom of God is here. In fact, they quote Psalm 118 at the council to explain it all. Psalm 118 is a psalm of the temple. It’s about people going up to the temple to celebrate God’s new day to claim his rescue, his salvation. It’s a psalm about God’s life-giving power and it’s about God bringing his people through trouble and rescuing them from danger. It’s a psalm about trusting in God’s mercy and it’s a psalm about God’s victory over the powers of the world. “It is better trust in the Lord, than to put confidence in man…than to put confidence in princes,” says the Psalmist (vv. 8-9). So they’re saying, “It’s Jesus. He really is the Messiah and he really has inaugurated God's new age. But then it’s like they’re deliberately poking a stick in these folks’ eye. The Sadducees (and the Pharisees, too, and most people) were all about the temple. It was the embodiment of Israel’s hopes for God’s rescue and for the fulfilment of his promises to one day come again to dwell with his people. And so this whole episode started with a man who’d been sitting in the temple gate for years, hoping for a rescue, yet never healed, and now suddenly healed by Peter and John—in the power of Jesus. So that’s the first thing. It says that God has, in fact, returned to dwell with is people, but instead of being in the holy of holies, he’s indwelling the disciples of Jesus. And then, in case they hadn’t made the connection, Peter, inspired by the Spirit, quotes Psalm 118 at them. Yes, the hope of God’s return is happening—in Jesus. Yes, God is now present in his temple—but that temple isn’t made of stone, it’s these Jesus people. And yes, God has come to rescue us just as he promised, to set this broken world to rights, to wipe away the tears—through Jesus. And at the same time, it would be hard for the council to miss the hint that the mortal princes, the people from whom God’s people need to be rescued are not the pagan nations, but the Sadducees and elders and scribes who are rejecting Jesus. (Yes, the pagan nations, too, but first, God’s got to deal with the corrupt leaders of his own people.) It’s the same thing Peter has been preaching, first on Pentecost, then to the crowd who gathered around the lame man when they saw him jumping up and down. Every time, Peter grounds God’s salvation in Jesus as the fulfilment of his promises and of Israel’s story. Every time, it’s the announcement that Jesus is Lord; that he’s come to rescue his people; and every time, it’s a call to repentance and faith. This sort of situational astuteness and gospel boldness is what it looks like to be full of God’s Spirit. And the council recognised this, even if they didn’t want to admit what (or who) it was. Verse 13: “When they saw how boldly Peter and John were speaking and realised that they were untrained, ordinary men, they were astonished and they recognised them as men who had been with Jesus. And when they saw the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in reply. They ordered them to be put out of the assembly while they conferred amongst themselves. ‘What can we do to these men?’ they said. ‘This is a spectacular sign that has happened through them. All Jerusalem knows it, and we can’t deny it. But we certainly don’t want it to spread any further amongst the people. So let’s threaten them with awful consequences if they speak anymore in this name to anyone.’ So they called them in and gave them orders not to speak at all or to teach in the name of Jesus.” It’s comical and I think that’s what Luke intended. It’s like they’ve completely missed the significance of what Peter and John have seen. They’ve seen Jesus risen from the grave. They saw him ascend to his throne. They heard everything he said. They saw everything he did. And now they’re doing the same sorts of things themselves in his name. They know, without a doubt, that in Jesus God has come, that Jesus is Lord, that the kingdom is now, and that the days of the principalities and powers, the old temple, and its priests are numbered. Peter and John know which is the winning side…without a doubt. Threatening them isn’t going to change that. Brothers and Sisters, we really need to think on that. Don’t just read Acts and let it go in one ear and out the other. Stick a finger in one ear if you have to, but let this sink in. Because you and I have just as much reason to be as confident as Peter and John. No, we aren’t eyewitnesses to the resurrection or the ascension, but we have every reason to believe the accounts of them. Someone a while ago asked me about difficulties with the creation accounts in Genesis and with the history of the Exodus. There are difficulties in the Bible. There are hard philosophical questions for which I haven’t yet found the perfect answer. But I do know that Jesus rose from the dead. I’ve heard all the arguments against it. And they don’t hold up. I don’t want to get into those details here, because that’s not what our text today is about. My point is simply that we have every reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead and just like St. Paul, confronted by that inescapable reality, we have to accept that Jesus is the Messiah and that the rest of it all is true—even we have to wait til the New Jerusalem to understand the ins and outs of exactly how some of it is true. It’s true. As Matt reminded us last week: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. And not only do those three facts change everything, they ought to give us confidence and boldness to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord, that God has come to our rescue, and that his kingdom is now. I’m not terribly concerned, for example, about Bill C-9. But even if I were, I’m not going to let it stop me proclaiming the good news. Because Jesus is King and in him the resurrection of the dead has begun. And that truth ought to be as revolutionary for us as it was for Peter and John and the King and his Parliament and his Prime Minister ought to be just as afraid of this resurrection revolution as the Sadducees, the elders, and the scribes were. So Luke goes on in verse 19: “But Peter and John gave them this reply: ‘You judge,’ they said, ‘whether it’s right before God to listen to you rather than to God. As far as we’re concerned, we can’t stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.’ Then they [the council] threatened them some more, and let them go. They couldn’t find any way to punish them because of the people, since everyone was glorifying God for what had happened. After all, the man to whom the sign of healing had happened was over forty years old. Brothers and Sisters, don’t stop talking about what you have seen and heard. Peter and John were witnesses to the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. You know what you’re a witness to? You’re witness to the transforming power of those events. Somehow most Christians seem totally unaware of this witness. Maybe it’s because we’re so oblivious to our own history. Maybe we need to read up on history so that we’ll be aware of the power of the gospel. The very thing that Peter and John looked forward to is now—at least partially—in our past. Luke says there were five thousand believers in those days just after Pentecost. Brothers and Sisters, today there are 2.6 billion. They lived in a world in which no one outside Judaea had ever heard of Jesus. We live in a world where Jesus is known the world over. They lived in a little Jewish pocket surrounded by pagan nations so mired in moral filth it’s hard for us to image the depth of depravity, because even as bad as might think the world is today, it has been so dramatically transformed by the gospel. Our world, even the secular parts of it, value things like mercy and compassion, because of the transforming power of the gospel. Brothers and Sisters, we live in a world that has been radically transformed by the power of the gospel. If Peter and John had reason to be confident, you and I have even more. But notice, too, what they do when faced with opposition. Verse 23: “When they had been released, they went back to their own people and told them everything that the chief priests and the elders had said. When they heard it, they all together lifted up their voices to God. ‘Sovereign Lord,’ they said, ‘you made heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them. And you said through the Holy Spirit, by the mouth of our father David, your servant, “Why did the nations fly into a rage, and why did the peoples think empty thoughts? The kings of the earth arose and rulers gathered themselves together against the Lord and against his anointed Messiah.” It’s true, Herod and Pontius Pilate, together with the nations and the peoples of Israel, gathered themselves together in this very city against your holy servant Jesus, the one you anointed, to do whatever your hands and your plan had foreordained to take place. So now, Lord, look on their threats and grant that we, your servants, may speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand for healing, so that signs and wonders may come about through the name of your holy servant Jesus.’” It would do us well—and it would do the kingdom well—if we responded to opposition the way the disciples did. We need to pray more and fret less. There is a battle raging in the world. Jesus has won the decisive victory, but that doesn’t mean that the powers of this old age aren’t trying to maintain their grip. They’re like the bad guys in the movies, hanging on to the edge of the cliff with their fingers—doomed, but unwilling to give up. To pray is to stomp on their fingers and to send them falling. Pray. Pray the psalms. Pray Psalm 2 the way they do here. This was Israel’s prayer, but Jesus and the events surrounding those first Christians reoriented it. They cry out with the Psalmist: Why do the nations rage? Why do the peoples think with empty thoughts? The kings of the earth have huddled together against the Lord. Except this time Israel herself had become one of the nations, her priests huddled together with Pontius Pilate. They’d crucified Jesus. And yet the disciples, in their prayer, also acknowledge that God is sovereign. Remember that for Jews to quote a line from a Psalm was to call to mind the whole thing. And in Psalm 2, yes the nations raged and their kings gathered together against his anointed, but then—do you remember Psalm 2?—God laughs at them, because they’re fools. And God establishes his king on Mount Zion. The once raging nations become his inheritance. And Peter and John and the rest knew that in Jesus this psalm was being fulfilled. The Psalm concludes addressing those kings, “Now therefore, O Kings, be wise” and just so the disciples pray, “Now therefore, Lord, look on their threats and grant that we, your servants, may speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand for healing, so that signs and wonders may come about through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” Brothers and Sisters, pray the Spirit-inspired scriptures back to God and things will happen. Luke writes in verse 31: “When they had prayed the place where they were gathered was shaken. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and they boldly spoke the word of God.” We should learn this prayer. When the principalities and powers of the old age push back, pray this prayer. When the local council or the legislature or Parliament or the King or the courts push back, pray this prayer. When the gospel gets you in trouble with your family or at school or in your work, pray this prayer. When you become discouraged, if you’re struggling to keep the faith, if you’re wrestling with sin, if you feel cornered by the world, the flesh, and the devil, pray this prayer. Remember that you are a witness to the power of the gospel in the world. And pray this prayer. And immediately Luke shows us the church—not just boldly proclaiming the good news—but also living it out as a community. Luke shows us the church as the working model of God’s new creation in the midst of the old. Luke shows us the church being the new temple: the place of God’s presence and the fulfilment of his promises of abundance and generosity. Look at verses 32-37. I was tempted to save these for next week as they lead us into Chapter 5. I actually think they could warrant their own sermon. But look at them now: “The company of those who believed had one heart and one soul.” Remember Paul telling the Philippians to “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Messiah Jesus”? Be of one Jesus-like mind. That plays out in all sorts of ways and Luke shows us one here: “Nobody said that they owned their property; instead they had everything in common. The apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with great power and great grace was upon all of them. For there was no needy person among them, since any who possessed lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sale, and placed it at the feet of the apostles, who then gave to each according to their need. Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, to whom the apostles gave the surname Barnabas, which means ‘son of encouragement’, sold some land which belonged to him, brought the money, and laid it at the apostle’s feet.” As I said a few weeks ago when we looked at Chapter 2, this doesn’t mean they became a bunch of proto-Marxists. Luke’s point is that they became a family that live out the generosity and abundance of God’s new creation. We know from what we read later, that they had their own homes in which to meet. And the focus of their charity was on the truly indigent, especially widows—on people notably with no family to take care of them. And Paul will warn in his own letters that the able-bodied should get jobs instead of mooching off the community. Again, the point here is that they very visible became the community in which torah itself was being fulfilled. They’ve become the land of overflowing with milk and honey. They’ve become the people who truly love their neighbours. They’ve become the new temple in which God has returned to dwell with his people. And they’re doing and being this community right in Jerusalem: showing up the old Israel, exposing the priest and the council, showing that the old temple and its sacrifices are done. God has fulfilled his promises and he’s done so in Jesus and in the people who gathered around him in faith. And, Brothers and Sisters, we ought to be the same sort of new creation, heaven-on-earth community here. As in Peter and John’s day, the powers that be will tell us to go away and concentrate on heaven while they run the earth. They’ll warn us not to shove our religion down anyone’s throat, while they, of course, will do their best to shove their materialism, their commercialism, their hedonism down our throats. They’ll get frustrated with us when we refuse to worship in their temples to money and power and sex and politics and war. And when that happens, Brothers and Sisters, pray. And remember that Jesus has died, Jesus has risen, and that Jesus will come again. Be shaped by that story. Be confident, knowing that God has and is and will fulfil his promises. Be bold knowing that the gospel has power and that we live in a world transformed by that power, even if everyone ignores it or denies it. Pray. Remember. Be bold. And then remember that we are the family of the Messiah, marked out by his powerful name in our baptism and that in those baptismal waters, he’s plunged us in to his Spirit. He has made us new and we’re not the family meant be and to bring and to live out his new creation, to live out heaven on earth in anticipation of the day when Jesus finally sets it all to rights. We are the family that refuses to stop singing his praises and proclaiming his glory. That’s what we were created to do in the first place. That’s what Jesus has rescued us to do right now. And it’s what all creation will one day, by his grace, do again. Let’s pray: O Lord, hear us in your mercy, we pray, and grant that we, to whom you have given the desire to pray, may be defended and comforted by your mighty aid, and strengthened in all dangers and adversities, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Excuses, excuses: The Parable of the BanquetSt. Luke 14:16-24 & Deuteronomy 20:1-9by The Rev'd Dr. Matthew ColvinI am often asked about “application” in sermons. “I enjoy a good sermon,” someone will say, “but I need to have application so I know what to do with it.” Well, you will notice that neither Fr. Bill nor I, his understudy, do very much with “application.” The pulpit is not the place to give you “ten steps to a better marriage” or “key principles of childrearing” or “the blueprints to build a Christian business.” Rather, we are concerned with the Biblical story, and we want to apply you to it, so that you read the Bible as your story. When Paul says, “These things happened as examples for us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come,” he means that to follow Jesus, we need to understand ourselves as being part of the story of the people of God. That is why Hebrews 11 gives us the “hall of faith”; it is why Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7 sums up the entire history of Israel; it is why, when Peter is telling Christian wives to respect their husbands, he calls them “daughters of Sarah.” We are consistently told to inscribe ourselves into the story of God’s people Israel. There is nothing more practical. Indeed, if we do not get this right, no amount of “application” will work.
Our lectionary for this morning pairs Deuteronomy’s laws about exemption from military service with Jesus’ parable of the banquet and the excuses made by those who were invited. It is, if we think about it, a very odd transposition, rather as though military language had found its way into a wedding or some similar occasion:
“WILT thou have this Woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”
“Yes, sir, corporal, SIR. Hoo-ah!”
So what is going on here? To understand the parable, we need to think about the nature of banquets and the nature of the excuses. Let’s start with the excuses.
Verse 20’s excuse, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come” is an allusion to Deuteronomy 24:5. That passage gives the grounds for the exemption of any newly married bridegroom from military service for a year: “that he may bring happiness to his wife whom he has taken.” There is here something of the logic of the law against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk: in both cases, one must not mix up life and death, joy and sorrow.
In verse 18, we should understand “I have bought a field and must go out and see it” to mean that the transaction needs to be complete. It is the “closing” of a real estate purchase, not an inspection at leisure that could just as easily be postponed for another day. Legally, socially, this is a very good excuse.
Verse 19’s excuse about needing to test “five yoke of oxen” recalls the calling of Elisha by Elijah in 1 Kings 19:19. There, Elisha is actually in the middle of plowing when Elijah throws his mantle over him: “Tag, you’re it!” This is an act of sudden investiture. Elisha responds to it with alacrity: “he left the oxen and ran after Elijah” and said, “Please let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.”
The excuses are such powerful ones that they actually have statutory warrant in Biblical law. Legally, socially, by all the etiquette of ancient Israel, these excuses are golden, unimpeachable, valid. But in the parable, they are not good excuses in the eyes of the host. Who is he? He is introduced as ἄνθρωπός τις, “a certain man.” Immediately, we recall other parables:
“A certain man planted a vineyard, leased it to vinedressers, and went in a far country for a long time.” (Mt 21:33)
“A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it, and found none.” (Lk. 13:6)
“A certain man had two sons.” (Lk. 15:11)
“A certain rich man had a steward, and an accusation was brought to him that this man was wasting his goods.” (Lk. 16:1)
There are other instances where “a certain man” is someone else, but this is a pretty good sample of instances where “a certain man” is instantly known to stand for God. The parable, then, shows us God’s response to the excuse-makers. Note that the “certain man” operates through servants. God is frequently depicted this way, sending his angels and human prophets to do his bidding and deliver his messages.
God’s reaction to the refusal of his invitations is anger (ὀργισθείς). This requires some explanation. In Matthew’s gospel, the banquet is a wedding feast for a king’s son, and the invited guests behave much like the wicked vinedressers: they “lay hold of his servants and treat them violently and kill them.” But Luke’s version has a different emphasis. It is less allegorized and is designed rather to highlight the reversal of fortune and the approaching deadline. “Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the city and bring here the poor and crippled and blind and lame.” — all of them likely to be beggars, likely to smell bad, likely to be shabbily dressed. Precisely the sort of unsightly people one does not want at a banquet, any sort of banquet.
They would never have been invited had not the originally invited guests refused. Just as Esau rejected his birthright and Jacob received it; just as the majority of the Jews rejected the Messiah so that the gospel might be preached to the gentiles, so here, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 1:28,
“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no flesh might boast in the presence of God.”
This is someting God did in history. Unlike every other religion on earth, the Bible makes public claims about events that took place at particular times:
“In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against the fortified cities of Judah and took them.”
“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
Or even in our Nicene Creed, where week after week, we make mention of the name of a corrupt Roman official named Pontius Pilate.
Contrast the claims of other religions: that Mohammad was out there in the desert and an angel appeared to him and dictated the Quran. That Joseph Smith was guided by an angel named Moroni and found gold plates inscribed with “Reformed Hieroglyphics” which he translated into King James English. That Siddartha Gautama was meditating under a fig tree and became enlightened. The Mary Baker Eddy or L. Ron Hubbard or some other guru has discovered the secrets of the universe. Even in antiquity, the Stoic sage or Epicurus or the philosopher in Plato’s Republic is never about history. It is always private revelation or special understanding of timeless truths or the realm of forms or deep insight into nature.
By contrast, the assumption of Jesus’ parables is that God deals with Israel in time. The invitation to the banquet and the host’s angry reaction to the invited guests refusal, and the verdict at the end of the story that “none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet” — all presuppose that Israel is facing a decisive crisis in its history. The invitation to the banquet is the gospel summons to follow the Messiah — and this is appropriate, since Jesus is so frequently shown feasting during his earthly ministry. He feasts so much that he incurs the charge of being a glutton and a winebibber. Everywhere he goes, he feasts. He feasts in the house of the Pharisee named Simon; in the house of a tax collector named Zacchaeus; at a wedding at Cana; in company with immoral women, and with “tax collectors and sinners.” This was unusual even by Jewish standards, so that some come to Jesus and ask him, “The Pharisees and the disciples of John fast a lot, but your disciples do not fast.” Jesus explains that the disciples of Jesus do not fast because the bridegroom is with them.
What is the appropriate response to the invitation? What do etiquette and emotional rightness and social expectation dictate? Jesus’ words about John’s ministry and the Jews’ reaction to it, in Luke 7:32, are couched in similar terms:
“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
We mourned to you, and you did not weep.”
The refusal to recognize Jesus as the one Israel has been waiting for is like the refusal of the invitation to the feast. It is a rejection of the good ending of the story, a refusal to take part in the consummation. It is as if all the actors walked off the stage of a Shakespeare play after act 4.
There are times when we want to describe a process has failed to produce its intended fulfillment and consummation — say, when I am talking to my Greek students who are struggling with Greek grammar and vocabulary. If they never go on to actually read Greek literature, I say it is like “a courtship without a marriage.” This is not about timeless truths or Buddhist spiritual enlightenment. A marriage is a historical event. That is the language that God uses about his relationship with his people. The coming of Jesus is the climax of Israel’s story. And to everyone, the invitation poses the stark alternative: either enter into the banquet, or be excluded. Remember the older brother of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:
Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in•. (Luke 15:25–28, ESV)
Or we may recall the words of Jesus after he has healed the centurion’s servant in Matthew 8:11:
I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. (Matthew 8:11–12, ESV)
Or there is the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in Matthew 25:
And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut.
11 “Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us!’ 12 But he answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ (Matthew 25:10–12)
Or we may remember what C.S. Lewis calls the “unforgettable words” in John’s gospel’s account of the Last Supper, once Jesus has handed the sop to Judas and told him, “What you are going to do, do quickly”:
So, after receiving the morsel of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night. (John 13:30, ESV)
It was night. Judas is literally in the outer darkness. To be excluded from the banquet, to be shut out in the darkness, away from the light and joy of the wedding or the feast or the Passover meal, is all the more tragic in light of the fact that those who are excluded are the very ones who had been invited. Jesus “came to his own, and his own did not receive him.”
The result is a crucial difference between Judaism and Christianity over the place of Jesus in the story of the people of God. Can you be a Jew and believe in Jesus? It is a silly question. All the original disciples were Jews. As Peter says, “The promise is to you and to your children” and “You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ (Acts 3:25, ESV) But can you follow Rabbinic Judaism and believe that Jesus is the Messiah? That is a different question.
The Church places Jesus at the hinge of history, dating our years with the words “Anno Domini” from his first coming and looking forward to his second coming, when he will judge the quick and the dead. Judaism, by contrast, denies that Jesus is the Messiah, and insists that all the passages of Scripture that point to him — the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, Joseph and his brothers, the suffering servant in Isaiah, “behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel”, Zechariah’s “behold your king comes to you, meek and having compassion, lowly and riding on a donkey,” David’s beloved son Absalom suspended from a tree and pierced by a spear, and all the rest — are really not about him.
Christians say, with Paul, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; therefore, let us keep the feast.” In saying this, we are saying that Christ is the climax of the story. It is the natural function of feasting to mark consummations. Weddings, coronations, graduation, retirements, anniversaries, birthdays — all are marked by parties, cakes, feasting, toasts, ceremony. And that is the difference between Christianity and Judaism: Has the story of Israel reached its climax? Has the bridegroom come? Does history now stand revealed as His story? Or are we, with the Rabbis, in the position of insisting that the messiah has not come, and that the Passover does not point to him. God had promised Moses that
“I will raise up for them a Prophet like you from among their brethren, and will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I command Him. And it shall be that whoever will not hear My words, which He speaks in My name, I will require it of him.” (Deuteronomy 18:18–19, NKJV)
And the rabbis say, “Jesus is certainly not the prophet like Moses, but unfortunately he is so much like Moses that we had better delete Moses from the Passover liturgy, lest Christians start using the haggadah to persuade Jews to follow Jesus.” And that is what they have done. David Daube says,
“…[T]he figure of Moses, dominating the Biblical narrative of the exodus from Egypt and, naturally, at one time prominent, too, in the celebration of the deliverance on Passover eve, is radically eliminated: in the Passover eve liturgy as it stands, his name is not mentioned once in any of the prayers and recitals woven around the Biblical record, and, more than that, no Biblical passage mentioning it is quoted. It is a fantastic tour de force. Think what it means. It is as if one were to spend annually a night commemorating Britain’s rescue in the Second World War, rehearsing the main course of events as well as telling elaborate stories about them — without once mentioning Churchill. A fantastic tour de force: but there must be no human Mediator.
We are left with a religion full of pointers that were designed to lead us to Jesus as the climax of the covenant, but the rabbis insist that they do not; a religion of tabernacle and temple that are all about God dwelling with His people, but now that Jesus has come, and ascended and sent the Holy Spirit, complete with the sound of “a mighty rushing wind that filled the whole house where they sat” just like God moving into the temple of Solomon and the tabernacle of Moses — now, no, the rabbis say, it is not about Jesus. But then, Judaism no longer has a temple, and the entire system that God gave in the Torah does not work without the Temple. The emperor Constantine’s grandson, Julian the Apostate, hated Christianity and decided he wanted to prove it false, and the way he decided to do it was by rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, in fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecies on the Mount of Olives. Julian died before he could do it.
Again, Judaism is a religion whose Scriptures promised the forgiveness of sins, so that God’s people could live with him, and that demonstrated, as though by a gigantic show and tell of continual slaughter of animals for centuries, of daily splashing of blood against the altar, of red heifers sacrificed every year on the day of atonement, that the forgiveness of sins would happen through blood. But now, the rabbis tell us, the death of Christ was not the fulfillment of the sacrificial system — and oh, by the way, you can’t offer sacrifice anymore, anyway. There are still people named “Cohen” or “Cohn” — my mother in law’s family, for instance — but they are more likely to be making movies than sacrificing animals. They continue to set out a cup for Elijah, that forerunner of the Messiah promised in Malachi. And Jesus says, “But I say to you that Elijah has come already, and they did not know him but did to him whatever they wished. (Matthew 17:12, NKJV)
The church father, Athanasius of Alexandria puts it this way in his On the Incarnation:
So the Jews are telling fables, and putting off the time which is actually now… They are suffering like one, maimed in mind, who might see the earth illumined by the sun, but denies the sun which illumines it. For what more has he who is expected by them to do when he comes? Call the Gentiles? But they have already been called. To make prophet and king and vision to cease? This has already happened. To refute the godlessness of idols? It has already been refuted and condemned. To destroy death? It is already destroyed. What then must christ do, which has not been done? Or what is left unfulfilled, that the Jews now rejoice and disbelieve? For if, as we see, they have neither king, nor prophet, nor Jerusalem, nor sacrifice, nor vision, but the whole world is filled with the knowledge of God, and those from the Gentiles are abandoning godlessness, and henceforth taking refuge in the God of Abraham through the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, it should be clear even to those who are exceedingly obstinate that Christ has come, and that he illumines absolutely all with his light and teaches the true and divine teaching concerning his Father.
We are about to partake of Holy Communion, which is rightly understood as a continuation of Jesus’ meals with his disciples, and an anticipation of the great wedding feast of the Lamb at which “many will come from east and west and recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” The Holy Communion is thus truly the consummation of the story of people of God. By partaking in it, we share in Christ our Passover. We have been crucified with Him, so that we may also share in his resurrection. We locate ourselves in the story of Israel, which is the story of the Messiah. And we recite the shape of the story and inscribe ourselves in it when we say, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
In the Name of the MessiahActs 3by William Klock
So what happens after Pentecost? In the church’s calendar we spend the first half of the year walking through the life of Jesus—maybe we think of that as the “gospel story”—and that closes with Pentecost. And in the second half of the year we focus on the life of the church as it lives out Pentecost. But the way the lectionary does that tends to present the life of the church in the abstract. That’s not necessarily bad. But the book of Acts gives us an opportunity to see it in real life, in history. And Acts is important because it makes sure we understand that the life of the church isn’t some application of abstract theological principles. Acts shows us the life of the church as very much the continuation of the story of Jesus, of that gospel narrative. It doesn’t end with the Ascension. It doesn’t end with Pentecost. Pentecost simply begins a new chapter. As Luke said at the beginning, in the gospel he wrote he laid out what Jesus began to do and to teach. In Acts we see Jesus continuing to do and to teach, but now it’s through his church, through his people. So last week we saw this amazing move of the Spirit. That’s how I think we mostly think of it: a move of the Spirit. But if we’ve been following the story through Easter and the ascension it ought to be clear that Pentecost is, first and foremost, a move of Jesus the Messiah. Having taken his heavenly throne to reign as king until he has put all his enemies under his feet, Jesus has sent the Spirit to enact, to make real the truth of his reign through the church. The spirit enables the apostles, the rest of the disciples, enables us to put off the old, lie-based, rebellious way of being human and to put on the new humanity brought by Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The Spirit makes us the working model of God’s new creation in the midst of the old. The Spirit, living within us, make us God’s new temple: full of his presence, his wisdom, his gospel. And as we fulfil his original command to are fruitful and multiply, we grow and spread that temple until God’s glory fills the earth. So Pentecost doesn’t stand alone. It’s not just a stage in our personal spiritual growth. It’s not even for our own benefit. It’s to carry the reign of Jesus as Lord to the world. So, again, what happens after Pentecost? Look at Acts, Chapter 3. [Page 1082 in the pew Bibles.] Luke tells us, “Peter and John were going up to the temple at three o’clock in the afternoon, the time for prayer.” I think it’s worth a pause there. Peter and John and the rest of the church had become the new temple. The very thing that was missing from old, bricks-and-mortar temple, the presence of God, had come to dwell in them. But they still went to the old bricks-and-mortar temple. It highlights the fact that they didn’t think of Jesus, the Spirit, the new covenant, being the new Israel as being some kind of new religion. This new thing was simply how to be a faithful Jew in light of God’s promises to Israel being fulfilled in Jesus. And so these first Christians continued to observe torah, they worshipped with their fellow Jews in the synagogues, and they went with their fellow Jews to pray in the temple. They didn’t leave Judaism for something called Christianity. But here’s the thing: You and I don’t do any of those things. We don’t live according to torah, we’re not circumcised, we don’t observe the Jewish feasts, we don’t go the temple—we can’t, because God judged and destroyed it long ago—but we are part of that same family of Jesus people, that same new Israel, that same church. Because the new Israel isn’t about torah, or circumcision, or diet, or Sabbath, or biological descent from Abraham. It’s about faith in, allegiance to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, and his kingdom, and the law of love written in our hearts by his Spirit. What marks us out is our baptism into Jesus and the law of the Spirit that overflows from within us. Now, Luke goes on: “There was a man being carried in who had been lame from his mother’s womb. People used to bring him every day to the temple gate called “Beautiful”, so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he saw Peter and John going into the temple, he asked them to give him some money. So every day, probably for many years, this man’s friends would carry him to the gate of the main temple court and leave him there to beg. He was a fixture of the temple. Few people probably “knew” him, but everyone was familiar with him. Peter and John weren’t from Jerusalem, but they’d probably seen the man when they visited the temple. Maybe they’d given him money before. But this time they have no money. They’d left their jobs as fisherman in Galilee. The church in Jerusalem has been surviving by living as family, pooling their resources. Luke goes on: “Peter, with John, looked hard at him. ‘Look at us,’ he said. The man stared at them, expecting to get something from them. ‘I haven’t got any silver or gold,’ Peter said, ‘but I’ll give you what I have got. In the name of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, get up and walk!’ He grabbed the man by his right hand and lifted him up. At once his feet and ankles became strong, and he leaped to his feet and began to walk. He went in with them into the temple, walking and jumping up and down and praising God. All the people saw him walking and praising God, and they recognised him as the man who had been sitting begging for alms by the Beautiful Gate of the temple. They were filled with amazement and astonishment at what had happened to him.” He got more than he bargained for and what Peter and John give this man is right in keeping with what we read at the end of Chapter 2. Money had ceased to have any importance for the disciples. Something far better had come along. Money is one of those things you need to get along in the old age where things are scarce and people are greedy. The kingdom of God is about his new creation generosity and abundance. This is why they lived like a family and shared what God gave with each other. It was a practical way to live out new creation in way that confronted the scarcity and greed of the old age. They knew there was something more important, a new power, a new kind of life—something far more important than silver and gold and so they gave it to this man. The man didn’t even ask to be healed. He’d probably given up on that idea years and years ago. But Peter gave this man new creation in the name of Jesus. Maybe this is why Peter insisted that the man look at them. Picture Peter looking hard into the lame man’s eyes and the lame man staring back. Maybe Peter had seen Jesus do that: looking intently into the eyes of hurting people, seeing desperation, seeing hopelessness in some and faith in others. Making a connection. Sharing the compassion of God for the victims of the corrupt principalities and powers of the present age. It seems like Peter saw something there. Maybe hope. Maybe faith. Maybe the man knew who Peter was. Maybe he’d heard about what happened at Pentecost. Peter saw something. And he didn’t just tell the man to get up and walk. That’s what Jesus would have done and Peter wasn’t Jesus. Peter had no power of his own to do anything. Instead, Peter made it clear where the power lies: “In the name of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, get up and walk.” The name is as good as the person. Peter and John were acting as Jesus’ representatives and in that capacity—so long as they were faithful to Jesus’ will, his desire, his agenda, his rule and kingdom—they could act with power and authority and faith on his behalf—in his name. And so can we. Sometimes we forget that. On the one hand, we pray and we add something like “through Jesus our Lord” or “in the name of Jesus” at the end of our prayers without even thinking about what it means or, on the other hand, we use Jesus’ name as if it were a talisman to give our prayers legitimacy or as if just mentioning the name of Jesus will bring our will into reality. I once prayed and when I was done, a guy came up to me afterward and said, “You didn’t say ‘in Jesus’ name’ so your prayer won’t come true.” No. Brothers and Sisters, saying a prayer isn’t like making a wish and adding Jesus’ name doesn’t validate our prayers. Whether we mention him or not, every true Christian prayer is offered to the Father through the mediation of Jesus the son. It is through him that we have access to God. And God answers our prayer not because we add a name, but because our whole prayer is a cry for his new creation to become reality, for it to be on earth as it is heaven. Too often our prayers are veiled appeals to our old idols, appeals to the principalities and powers, appeals still subject to the fears and anxieties of the present evil age, outgrowths of the flesh rather than the Spirit. And to those prayers, God answers “No”. Brothers and Sisters, to pray in Jesus’ name is to submit ourselves to the goodness and faithfulness of God; it is to pray with faithfulness and single-hearted loyalty to him as Lord, and to ask not for our will to be done, but his; to ask not for the fulfilment of our vision of the good, but his; to ask not for our kingdom to be made real, but his kingdom. It is to understand that heaven is the storehouse of the goodness of God’s kingdom, like the turkey in the refrigerator and the presents stored up under Mom and Dad’s bed, all to be brought out when Christmas comes. God’s kingdom will come in all its fulness when the church, when we have made God’s gospel known throughout the earth and when the knowledge of his glory covers creation as the sea. Prayer is to ask God to give us glimpse of that final day when the presents are under the tree, ready to be opened, and the turkey is on the table and the great feast is ready. Prayer is, to quote Karl Barth, “the beginning of an uprising against the disorder the world.” It is to ask in hope for God’s justice, God’s righteousness, God’s goodness, God’s faithfulness, God’s future to be known—even if only in a small way—right here and right now. And that’s what Peter did. And suddenly the man was jumping and dancing his way into the temple full of heaven on earth. And everyone noticed. Verse 11: “All the people ran together in astonishment towards Peter and John and the man was clinging to them. They were in the part of the temple known as ‘Solomon’s Porch’. Peter saw them all and began to speak. ‘Men of Israel,’ he said, ‘why are you amazed at this? Why are you staring at us as though it was our own power or piety that made this man walk? “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob—the God of our fathers”—he has glorified his servant Jesus, the one you handed over and denied in the presence of Pilate, although he had decided to let him go.’” Let’s pause there. When Peter says “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob—the God of our fathers” he’s taking a line from Exodus 3. This is how the God of Israel introduced himself to Moses at the burning bush before sending him back to Egypt to demand that Pharoah let the Israelites go. Jesus had just done this in his dispute with the Sadducees and now Peter does the same and his point is to highlight that just as with Moses and the Exodus from Egypt, the God of Israel is at work here and not just as work, but at work to bring his promises to Israel to pass. Peter’s announcing that it’s happening again. In Jesus and the Spirit; in Good Friday and Easter and Ascension and Pentecost, the God of Israel was acting once again to deliver his people from bondage, to lead them in a new exodus, to renew his covenant. We’ll see this throughout Acts. Confronted by Jesus and his mighty deeds, those early believers would go back to Exodus. That was when God fulfilled his promises to deliver his people. That was when they sacrificed the Passover lambs. That was when he led them through the sea and gave them his law. That was when he led them into the promised land and gave them an inheritance. And when those first Christians saw Jesus and the Spirit at work it was like Moses at the burning bush seeing something amazing that he couldn’t explain, and with that scene in mind, we ought to be expecting that God is still keeping his promises and is doing something extraordinary again. Peter goes on: “You denied the holy one, the just one, and requested instead to have a murderer given to you; and so you killed the Prince of Life. But God raised him from the dead, and we are witnesses to the fact. And it is his name, working through faith in his name, that has given strength to this man, whom you see and know. It is faith which comes through him that has given him this new complete wholeness in front of all of you.” So Peter starts explaining Jesus by pulling images from the Jewish scriptures. We might miss it because we don’t know the Bible as well as we should; the people there that day definitely would not have. First, Peter calls Jesus the servant of God. Second, he stresses the innocence of Jesus. He wasn’t deserving of death, but the people of Jerusalem handed him over to Pilate. Even Pilate, Peter says, knew Jesus was innocent. But they demanded Pilate release Barabbas and that Jesus be crucified. These images together draw on Isaiah’s prophecy, especially Isaiah 53, the passage about the suffering servant, an innocent, who would one day, go to the slaughter like a lamb for the sins of the people. When Peter calls him the holy one, this too brings up images of the suffering servant and of the spotless lamb. If the people want to understand what’s happened to the lame man, how he’s been healed, Peter is saying that they need to think about the Exodus and they need to be thinking about Isaiah’s suffering servant and understand that Jesus is standing at the centre of both of these images from Israel’s story and God’s promises. And this is why he calls Jesus the “Prince of Life”. The archegos, not just prince, but also the author, the origin, the source of life. Jesus is the sovereign one, the Lord, who brings life. It fits with John’s image of the word, who was in the beginning and through whom, as God spoke him out, was the source of everything. Through him all things were created and now, through the word, God speaks life into the world again. He came into the midst of corruption and sickness and death and has brought life. And wherever he goes be brings life and in that life he announces his lordship, his sovereignty, his kingdom. Wherever he brings life he announces his victory over sin and death, over the present evil age. Wherever he brings life, he announces the hope of God’s promises fulfilled and a world set to rights: no more death, no more sorrow, no more tears. Ironically, his own people rejected and killed him, but God raised him from the dead to prove that Jesus is the life of the world and because of that we know, we have confidence that his life will continue to go out into the world. Peter does here what he did at Pentecost. God did something mighty and amazing, and Peter—steeped in scripture and full of the Spirit—explains what’s going on in light of the story of Israel and her God and, most importantly, showing how what’s now happening is the fulfilment of what God had promised to his people. That’s the biggest thing here. This is no faith healer, doing theatrics and putting the spotlight on himself. Peter has absolutely no interest in that. He makes it clear: this is all about Jesus. The prophets had said that the world would be set to rights when the knowledge of the glory of God has covered it as the sea. Not the knowledge of Peter. Not the knowledge of celebrity apostles. The knowledge of the glory of God. And so Peter’s Spirit-filled purpose is to proclaim the glory of God—to make sure everyone knows not just that God is mighty and powerful, but that God is above all faithful to his promises and worthy of our trust, worthy of our allegiance, worthy of our faith. And that’s the next thing. After announcing how this is healing is evidence of God’s faithfulness, Peter issues a call to faith. Look at verse 17: “Now, Brothers,” Peter continued, “I know that you acted in ignorance, just as your rulers did. But this is how God has fulfilled what he promised through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. So now repent, and turn back, so that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshment may come from the presence of the Lord, and so that he will send you Jesus, the one he chose and appointed to be his Messiah. He must be received in heaven, you see, until the time which God spoke about through the mouth of the holy prophets from ancient days, the time when God will restore all things. Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me, one from among your own brothers; whatever he says to you, you must pay attention to him. And everyone who does not listen to that prophet will be cut off from the people.’ All the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and his successors, spoke about these days too. You are the children of the prophets, the children of the covenant which God established with your ancestors when he said to Abraham, ‘In your seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ When God raised up his servant he sent him to you first, to bless you by turning each of you away from your wicked deeds.” Over and over Peter stresses that what the people are seeing is the fulfilment of God’s promises going all the way back to Abraham: His promise to renew fallen Israel, his promise to reach out to the nations with this glory through this renewed people. Peter points forward to this hope of creation set to rights that we see from this point on throughout Acts and the New Testament, said in various ways. God will “sum up all things in the Messiah,” as we heard Paul say in Ephesians 1:10. Through the Messiah he will “reconcile all things to himself, making peace by his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:20). He will make “new heavens and new earth, in which justice will dwell” (Revelation 21:1). He will overcome every power which destroys and corrupts his good creation, so that eventually God will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). The whole creation will be “set free from its slavery to decay, to share the liberty of the glory of God’s children” (Romans 8:21). Brothers and Sisters, it began at the cross and the empty tomb, the ascension was a sign it was all true, and Pentecost show us that we’re not only a part of how these promises will be fulfilled, but we can watch as heaven invades earth with the glory of God. We don’t have to wait for some distant day to see God revealed. We see his glory at work each day: in ourselves as his word and Spirt renew us and in the world as we live and proclaim the good news about Jesus and see faith born in others and their hearts and minds renewed by Jesus and the Spirit. We see God’s glory revealed as the weight of sin and guilt is lifted. Notice that’s part of Peter’s message. It’s not just a call to repent. It’s also assurance of forgiveness. God, through the blood of Jesus, was ready to forgive even the rejection, the hardness of heart, the rebellion of Israel when they crucified Jesus. That’s the whole point of all of this: God’s great final restoration of all things is for us, for sinners, for rebels, for God-haters, right here and right now. The gospel brings God’s future into the present, because God longs to show his mercy and his grace to sinners. As God longs for his good world that we’ve corrupted with our sin to be set to rights, even more he longs to set us to rights that we might once again be the stewards, the priests of his temple that he created us to be. God will, as Peter says echoing Isaiah 43:25, God will blot out the sins of those who repent. And if his grace was big enough and Jesus’ blood strong enough to blot out the sins of those who crucified him, and his Spirit powerful enough to renew their hearts and to fill them with love, Brothers and Sisters, the blood of Jesus and the renewing power of his Spirit is enough to bring God’s new creation to us. Repent and believe in the name of Jesus. Be forgiven. Be made whole. Be made new. Be refreshed. Be God’s future here and now. Be made a witness to your family, to your friends, to everyone around you of the saving power of Jesus the Messiah. Let’s pray: O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after TrinityEphesians 4:1-6by William Klock
The world is not as it should be. We know it in our bones. Broken relationships, frail health, wars abroad, pandemics, and the simply daily struggle to get by—we all know the pain and the sorrow and the tears. The Israelites knew this as well as anyone ever has. They were slaves in Egypt. They suffered under the bondage and tyranny of Pharaoh. They knew pain and suffering and tears the likes of which you I can only imagine. And, the biblical story tells us, they cried out to the living God and he heard their cries. And because he is also the loving God, he delivered them from Egypt. He dramatically defeated the God’s of Pharaoh and then he defeated Pharoah himself and drowned the world’s greatest army in the Red Sea. And the Lord promised to set things to rights for his people. He promised to lead them to a land of milk and honey and he promised to live in their midst. It was—in a limited and imperfect way—a restoration of humanity’s original state: of Adam and Eve in the garden, living in the presence of God. It gave the people hope that, despite the pains and troubles of life, God has a plan to set right what our sin and rebellion has broken. But what was there to keep Israel from becoming just like the Egyptians? If we’re honest, we all know that problem too. The world is in the mess it’s in not only because others sin against us, but because we sin against them. That’s where Israel’s sojourn in wilderness enters the great story. In today’s reading from his letter to the Christians at Ephesus, St. Paul quotes a bit of Psalm 68. “When he went up on high, he led bondage itself into bondage, and he gave gifts to the people.” It's a reference to the Lord meeting his people at Mt. Sinai in the wilderness. He called Moses up the mountain, and then sent him back down to the people with the torah, with his law. On that day the Lord made a covenant with his people: I will be your God and you will be my people and his law set them apart from the peoples and nations of the earth. The Lord gave them the law to ensure that they wouldn’t end up another Egypt—a land of oppression and idolatry—and in doing that he made Israel a community, a family, a covenant people so that, in them, the world would have a foretaste of the day when God restores sinful humanity to himself, sets his broken creation to rights, and wipes away our tears. This is the background, this is the story that gives shape to what St. Paul writes in today’s Epistle. What the Lord had once done for Israel when he rescued the people from slavery and made them his own, he has done again—but on even grander scale, through the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus the Messiah. This time he didn’t just rescue a people from Pharoah’s bondage. In Jesus, he’s rescued us all from our greatest enemies, from sin and death themselves. In the church he’s made a new people, a new humanity, a new temple in which he dwells—a people meant to lift the veil on God’s new creation, a people who live God’s future here in the present—to show the nations his glory and his grace. Brothers and Sisters, the church is the continuation of Jesus’ healing and reconciling ministry. We’re a people filled with God’s Spirit and entrusted with his gospel, with his good news. We don’t just pray those words of Jesus, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We’re called by God and enabled by Jesus and the Spirit to live that prayer out—to bring God’s reconciling message (the gospel) and his presence (the Holy Spirit) to a broken world in desperate need of forgiveness and grace and healing. But what happens when the church stumbles, when the church falters in this calling and mission? Most of Paul’s letters to those first churches were written because they were doing just that. They were a people rescued from sin and death to be heaven-on-earth people, but they were failing. Paul wrote to the Ephesians because their unity was in danger. Earlier in the letter he addressed the division that was happening between Jewish and Gentile Christians. Jesus had given his people a new law—the law of the Spirit, but the old law of Moses, the law given at Sinai had so defined what it meant to be God’s people for so long, that it threatened to create this chasm between the Jewish and Gentile believers. And so Paul stresses, as he does so often, that it is faith in Jesus, faith in his forgiving and reconciling death and faith in his life-giving resurrection, faith in the gospel, that unites them. But that wasn’t all. Because even when the gospel bridges the divide between Jew and Gentile, even when it makes us one, there’s still an endless list of things that threaten to drive wedges between us. The same things that have made such a mess of the world, the same things that destroy our relationships—they’re still with us. Any time you bring a group of people together, there’s going to be friction. We don’t all see things the same way. Toes get stepped on—sometimes inadvertently, but sometimes on purpose. We’re prone to jealousy and selfishness and competition. We’re often set in our ways and don’t like change. We often hold too tightly to things and don’t want to give them up. We too often think of our wants and needs without thinking of the wants and needs of others. It’s the way of the world and it shouldn’t be the way of the church, but the fact is that sanctification, the process of God making us holy, it’s just that: a process. The work of God’s word and God’s Spirit takes time—sometimes it seems, a dreadfully long time—and so none of us is perfect. Jesus has made us new, he’s given us the life of heaven, but if Israel could end up just like Egypt, so we can end up just like the broken world from which we’ve been delivered. The blinding light of the gospel, of Jesus crucified and risen for us, of God’s great loving and gracious generosity outshines everything else, but we let our guard down and pride creeps in and, Brothers and Sisters, pride is the great cloud that blots out the sun of God’s generosity. And this is what was happening in Ephesus. So Paul writes to them, if you’re following along, in Chapter 4 of Ephesians: “So then, this is my appeal to you…” And then Paul pauses to say, “I, a prisoner of the Lord.” He reminds them that he’s writing to them from prison. He's been imprisoned for the sake of the good news about Jesus. And he reminds them at this point to stress just how important all this is. They’ve been called to be a gospel people, not just for their own sake, but for the sake of the world, but they’re not taking it seriously. So Paul’s saying, “This is serious business—so serious that I’m in prison because of it—because Caesar and the powers of the present evil age can’t stand to be challenged by the good news that it’s Jesus who is the world’s true Lord and because they can’t stand to be challenged by the good news that a new order, that his kingdom is breaking in.” Brothers and Sisters, think on that, because we often don’t take this seriously enough either. Our Saturday breakfast group has been reading through Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies this year. It tells the stories of Christians who knew what serious business the gospel is and who faced the wrath of the Soviet authorities for standing firm for the gospel—men and women who were imprisoned and many who were martyred for their faith. Because they knew what serious business the gospel is—that the world depends on it if it’s ever to be set to rights. You and I live in a place of such ease that we too easily take the gospel for granted. We need to be reminded what serious business it is—that Jesus gave his life for this. So Paul goes on and writes, “You’ve got to live up to the calling you received.” It’s imperative. If they fail to live up to their calling, they fail to be the church. He says, “Bear with one another in love; be humble, meek, and patient in every way with one another. Make every effort to guard the unity the Spirit gives, with your lives bound together in peace.” Bear with one another. Again, there are going to be points of friction. We’re human and we’re not perfect…not yet, anyway. That’s especially true with a community like the church. Most communities draw together people who are similar, but the church is for everyone. Jesus is our centre and he calls and draws in people from every tribe and tongue, rich and poor, slave and free, Liberal and Conservative, Ford and Chevy, Canucks and…well, I don’t know because I don’t follow hockey…but Jesus unites us all together into one people, because we’ve all known the redeeming love of God in Jesus. Because the sun of God’s gospel grace outshines all the differences that would otherwise make us rivals and drive us apart. We’ve rebelled against our Creator. We’ve sinned. We’ve broken his good creation. We’ve worshiped other gods and we’ve worshiped ourselves. And yet God has never ceased to be patient with us. And he still loves us so much, he still so desires to reconcile us to himself, that he—the Creator of the cosmos—humbled himself to take on our flesh in Jesus, to be born one of us, and then to die an excruciating and humiliating death he didn’t deserve, in order to set us and his creation to rights. And if we have grasped even a bit of the patient and humble and gracious lovingkindness of God made manifest in Jesus and the cross, Brothers and Sisters, we ought to be overcome by that same love, humility, and patience. We ought to see each other—not to mention everyone still lost in the world’s darkness—we ought to see them through that same loving, humble, and patient lens and desire for them to know the reconciling love of God as we have. If God can love us, who have made such a mess of his creation and who worship idols, if he can love us so much that he will die to heal the breach between us, how can we ever let the frictions between us destroy the unity he’s given? In light of the sun of his love, every one of our differences—Jew or Gentile, man or woman, slave or free, Ford or Chevy—ought to pale in comparison. His love doesn’t just save us from our bondage to sin and death, it makes—or it ought to make—us his new creation: a people who are light in the darkness, life in the midst of death, a people of love and grace, of mercy and peace, of humility and patience in the midst of hate and strife and selfishness and division. A people who—even if imperfectly—lifts the veil and gives the world a glimpse of God’s future for the world. In verse 7 Paul goes on. He writes, “There is one body and one Spirit. You were, after all, called to one hope which goes with your call. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all.” Let’s walk through that. There is one body. Jesus didn’t create a bunch of different churches. He didn’t create an Anglican church and a Baptist church and a Roman church and a Pentecostal church. He created the church. We’ve fractured and divide because of our failings and these fractures have become so common and so entrenched that we take them for granted, we think they’re the norm—we even sometimes think they’re good and right. In some cases, we’ve grown so far apart and developed our own ecclesiastical cultures and languages that it can be hard to even recognise the gospel when others preach it. I was listening to a sermon by an Orthodox priest in Croatia this week. And on the one hand the gospel was so obvious and clear, but at on the other hand, I had to stop several times and re-listen to what he's said, because his way of talking about it is so dramatically different than ours. And, at this point, there isn’t really anything the average Christian can do to restore the unity. But we can as individuals and we can as the local church do everything in our power to maintain fellowship with those who proclaim the same gospel that we do: Jesus the Messiah, crucified, risen, ascended, and Lord. That’s what Paul’s getting at here. There’s one body. There’s one Holy Spirit whom God has poured out on all of us. There is one Lord Jesus. There is one faith. There is one baptism. There is ultimately one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all. And that is our one, unifying hope. The hope of every believer is the hope proclaimed by the prophets: that one day the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea; that the reconciling love of Jesus at the cross, that the power of his life-giving resurrection will bring us back to the Father and open the world’s eyes to his glory. And note: we don’t create this unity. Jesus and the Spirit have created it already. Paul’s point is that it is our duty—so far as we are able—to maintain it. And at the most fundamental level, we do that as we bear with each other. As we forgive the sins of others just as we have been forgiven. As we love each other, just as we have been loved. As he live humbly with each other and seek reconciliation with each other, just as God has humbled himself to die in order to reconcile us to himself. Being overwhelmed by the brightness of the sun of God’s love—you’d think—would be enough to drive away the pettiness and the selfishness and the pride, but still we need God’s help. And so Paul goes on in verse 7—I want to go a few verses past the end of our Epistle so we can let Paul finish his thought. He writes: “But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the Messiah’s gift.” God has poured out his grace—his unmerited favour—on us, and not just poured it out, but poured it out in abundance so that it overflows, so that we can’t help but give, share, and pour out that grace on everyone around us. It’s that grace that builds us up and that binds us together. Specifically, in the next paragraph, Paul’s going to go on to talk about how, through the Spirit, God has given the people of his church a diversity of gifts, not just to build each other up, but to accomplish the gospel mission we’ve been given, but I think here we can understand God’s grace more generally. This is where Paul quotes Psalm 68:18: “When he went up on high, he led bondage itself into bondage, and he gave gifts to his people.” Again, the Psalm is about Moses going up on Mt. Sinai and coming down shining with the glory of God and with the torah—with a new way of life that would set this people apart and make them a witness to his light and life in the midst of a dark and pagan world. And Paul quotes this to say that Jesus has now done this, but on a larger and grander scale. Look at verse 9: “When it says here that ‘he went up,’ what this means is that he also came down into the lower places—that is, the earth. The one who came down is the one who also ‘went up’ far above the heavens, so that he might fill all things.” As Moses went up Mt. Sinai to meet the Lord, Jesus has ascended to heaven to take his throne, but he hasn’t left us to fend for ourselves. As God sent Moses down the mountain with the law, so Jesus has sent God’s Spirit to indwell and to transform and to empower his people—to fill all things. Brothers and Sisters, that’s temple language. Moses came down the mountain with a plan for the tabernacle—for a temple where God’s presence would be enthroned in the midst of his people. But in the Holy Spirit, God has come down and made his people themselves—he’s made us—his temple. Jesus has washed us clean from sin by his blood shed at the cross, he’s made us holy, and God’s own Spirit has come to live in us. And that takes us back—or it ought to—to the very beginning of the story: to Adam and Eve, to humanity, placed by God in his garden temple to be its stewards, to live in his presence, to be fruitful and to multiply, and in so doing to spread his temple and his presence to the ends of the earth. Brothers and Sisters, in Jesus and the Spirit, God has begun the work of restoring us to that original vocation. He has made us his temple, he has made us stewards of his good news, he has empowered us with his grace—he has not left us alone to be and to do this in our own strength. He has entrusted us with his good news, he has shown us what his new creation is like, he has empowered us with his Spirit, and he has filled us with his grace. And now he sends us out not just to proclaim the good news of Jesus and his new creation, but to actually be that new creation for the sake of the world. To live and especially to live together in such a way that the world around us will see the bright light of Jesus in us; to make them constructively curious, wanting to know that light for themselves; so that one day the whole earth will give glory to our Father in heaven. Let’s pray again our Collect: Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after TrinityEphesians 3:13-21 & St. Luke 7:11-17by William Klock
“The next day,” says St. Luke in our Gospel lesson, “Jesus went to a town called Nain.” No doubt to preach the good news that, in him, the God of Israel had finally come to his people to fulfil his promises to them. No doubt to heal the sick or the blind or the deaf or whoever else came to him to be healed. No doubt to cast our demons. Not just to tell them that God’s kingdom was breaking into darkness of the world, but to show them. To make the sad things untrue, as Sam Gamgee put it so eloquently. But I expect that Jesus was frustrated. Sure, crowds were following him wherever he went, but they didn’t get it. They wanted their own personal miracle worker and, like the people in Nazareth, they got angry with him when he wouldn’t stay. They knew—because it was impossible to miss—that in Jesus light had come into the darkness. They knew hope for the first time. But their vision of God’s light and life was just so, so, so small. And then there were people like the scribes and Pharisees who were angry because, if he was the Messiah, he was doing it all wrong. They couldn’t see past their rules and boundaries. They had no grasp of the great height and width and length and depth of the love of God. They were thrilled to have Jesus wipe away their tears and make the sad things of their lives untrue, but they were still committed to, still doing the very things that made the sadness in the first place. Luke says here, in 7:11, that this happened on the “next day”. It was the day before that Jesus had been met by the friends of a Roman centurion with a sick slave. He got word that Jesus was on his way to his house to heal his slave and sent words to say, “No, don’t come to my house.” He knew that as a gentile he wasn’t part of Jesus’ mission. “No, Jesus, just say the word and my slave will be healed. I know you’ve got authority to do it.” And Jesus stopped and marvelled. He healed the centurion’s slave, but he also turned and rebuked the crowd that was following him: “How is it that I’ve found more faith in this gentile than in you lot, in God’s own people?” And now, it’s the next day, and he’s on his way to Nain and the crowd has followed him from Capernaum. It’s about five miles. And all the way he’s been teaching his disciples and anyone else within earshot who will listen. I expect Jesus was trying to broaden their vision of the kingdom and what it all meant. And then they arrived at the city gate. Luke writes, “As he got near the gate of the city, a young man was being carried out dead. He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. There was a substantial crowd of townspeople with her.” From a distance Jesus noticed that the town gate was unusually quiet and now he sees why. Or maybe he heard it before he could see it, because as they got to Nain they met a burial procession coming through the gate. There was the stretcher being carried by pallbearers and on it was the body of a young man. Following behind was his mother, crying her eyes out and wailing loudly. I wonder if Jesus knew them. Nain wasn’t far from Capernaum or from Nazareth, so it’s entirely possible that Jesus knew these people or, at least, knew who they were. Luke knew enough about them to report that the woman was a widow and that the young man was her only son. Her husband was dead and now so was her only son and that meant that she was destitute. That meant that she was without hope. The whole town was gathered and they wept and they wailed loudly so that she could weep without embarrassment. They were on their way to the burial plot outside town. There would have been a little cave. Sort of a family plot, with the bones of her husband’s ancestors. Some time before she’d made this trip with her son by her side as the mourners carried her husband to that little cave and laid him to rest. Eventually, she had gone and put his bare bones in a box, leaving the burial shelf empty. And today she would put her son there. And then what? Come harvest time, she’d have to join the poor, gleaning in the fields and the vineyards, collecting whatever was left behind by the harvesters. And she prayed no one would come to seize her house and turn her out into the street. And seeing her, Jesus knew her grief. He knew her hopelessness. And I wonder what went through his head. Did he recognise an opportunity here to make a point about the bigger, deeper, wider meaning of the kingdom for the crowd following him? I suspect it occurred to him. But I think, more than anything, Jesus saw in this woman the pain and the sorrow and the tears of this fallen and broken world and he was overcome with love—because that’s who he was. The widow and the orphan have always had a special place in God’s heart. How they were treated was always—and still is—emblematic of whether or not the people had the heart of God themselves. And so I think it was simply the most natural thing in the world for the heart of Jesus to be overwhelmed with love and pity for this woman and he simply did what came naturally to him. Luke writes, “And when the Lord saw her, he was very sorry for her. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said to her. Then he went up and touched the stretcher and the people carrying it stood still.” That would have been bad form for anyone else, but not for Jesus. I still expect people were shocked. You didn’t get in the way of a funeral procession then any more than you do now. But to touch the stretcher—that would render him unclean. So the crowd watched in surprise or shock as Jesus stopped the procession. And they heard him say to the woman, “Don’t cry.” And I can only imagine what they were thinking when he then went to the dead boy and said, “Young man, I say to you, ‘Get up!’” They’d seen Jesus do some amazing things. They’d seen him heal the sick and the blind and the lame, but could he actually raise the dead? That was kind of over the top, even for Jesus. And yet…there were stories from the old days. Could the things in those old stories happen again? These people were deeply steeped in the scriptures and some of them must have recognised that what Jesus was doing had echoes of the stories they knew so well. I say that because Luke recognised the parallels and makes a point of reporting this story very deliberately so that it echoes the stories of the prophets Elijah and Elisha—particularly Elijah in 1 Kings 17. Nine hundred years before, King Ahab had ruled Israel. He was the latest in a line of wicked kings who did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. Ahab built an altar to the Canaanite fertility god Baal in the Lord’s temple and he led the people into idolatry and all sorts of unspeakable evils. First Kings says that Ahab did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel before him. And so the Lord visited his people with a drought and the drought brought with it a famine. And the Lord announced that drought and famine through the Prophet Elijah, whom he sent to the king. Of course, that made Elijah rather unpopular with the king, so the Lord first led him to a hiding place in the wilderness, where he sent ravens to bring him bread and meat each morning and evening and where he could drink from a creek. But when the creek dried up, the Lord sent him to the home of a widow and her only son. The widow had nothing left but enough flour and oil to make a small loaf of bread. When Elijah met her, she was planning to bake the bread for herself and for her son as a last meal. Then they would die. But the Prophet told her to bake the bread for him in faith. If she did that, he said, the Lord would keep her jars of flour and oil full as long as the famine lasted. And so, in faith, she did as he told her and, in response, the Lord provided. All through the famine the Lord took care of her. Neither the flour nor the oil ran out. And then one day that poor widow’s son became ill and died. And she forgot all that the Lord had done through Elijah to keep her and her son alive and she berated the Prophet for bringing this on her. And so Elijah took the boy and laid him on his bed, and stretching himself over the boy three times, he pleaded with the Lord to restore his life. And the Lord heard and the boy rose up and Elijah took him to his mother. When she saw her boy alive, she declared, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” That, of course, wasn’t the end of the story. This was all to spare Elijah from the wrath of King Ahab and eventually the Lord would send the Prophet back to the King to announce an end to the drought. But it wasn’t quite that simple. The Lord told Elijah to challenge Ahab’s pagan priests to a showdown. Elijah would give them a chance to build and alter, offer a sacrifice, and to pray to Baal to end the drought, before building his own altar, offering a sacrifice, and praying to the Lord. On the mountain, Baal’s priests proved their god’s impotence, while the Lord visited his people: sending down fire to consume Elijah’s offering and then causing it finally to rain, while his priests slaughtered the priests of Baal who had led the people of Israel into idolatry. The story of Elijah and the widow of Zeraphath, situated in that bigger story of the God of Israel and the defeat of Ahab and his false god, it was a story about the Lord’s love. About the Lord’s love for his people—a love so great that he would not let an evil king lead them off forever into idolatry and evil. It was about the Lord’s love for the poor and destitute. And it was a story of hope. The Lord will not let his people languish forever in sin and darkness and hopelessness. When the time is right, he will visit his people, he will deal with sin and death, he will wipe away the tears, and he will set the world to rights. And it was that vision of the love of God that the people around Jesus—most of them, at any rate—it was that great vision of the love of God and the restoration of all things that they lacked. When the Messiah came, they struggled to see him as anything more than their personal miracle-worker. When it came to setting things to rights, they had trouble seeing any further than their desire for the Messiah to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and their pagan allies. There were all these interest groups in Israel, from the Pharisees to the Sadducees, from the Essenes to the Zealots (well, the Zealots would come a few decades later, but their spiritual fathers were there in Jesus’ day). And they all had their own vision of what the Messiah would be and what he would do and what it would look like when the Lord finally came to visit his people. And their visions of all of that were just so incredibly small and self-centred and lacking in grace and with no real grasp of how truly deep and wide the love of God is. The crude idolatry that Israel had known in Elijah’s day was long gone from Israel, but a more subtle idolatry had taken its place and it blinded people to who Jesus really was and what God was doing through him. But this day the God of those old “fairy tales” was going to burst into the present—like King Arthur returned to rescue Britain in its darkest hour. That day at the gate of Nain, Jesus—like Elijah and like Elisha (that’s another story Luke echoes, but we don’t have time for this morning)—Jesus stopped the pallbearers, put his hands on the stretcher, and said to the dead boy, “Get up!”. And instead of uncleanness passing from the dead boy to Jesus, the life of the living God passed from Jesus to the dead boy and, Luke tells us, “The dead boy sat up and began to speak, and he gave him to his mother.” And her tears of sorrow turned in tears of joy. Jesus not only raised her son, but he also gave the womam back her own life. But the bigger thing, at least for Luke, was the response of the crowd. “Fear”—or maybe better great awe—“came over all of them. They praised God. ‘A great prophet has risen amongst us!’ they said. ‘God has visited his people!’ And this report went out about him in the whole of Judaea and the surrounding countryside.” Many wondered if the God of those old stories was real. They hadn’t heard a prophet speak in centuries. The same went for the raising of the dead. And the glory cloud, God’s presence in the temple, had been gone for five hundred years—if it had ever been there at all. But now they knew. The God of Israel was real and alive and he was working through Jesus. But did they really get it now? Yes and no, I think. Even the disciples wouldn’t really and fully get it until after they’d encountered Jesus risen from death. And even then, they wouldn’t really, really get it until Pentecost and the sending of the Spirit. But Luke does seem to be saying that the people “got it” more than they had before. They stood in awe because they knew they were somehow and in some way either in the presence of the God of Israel or in the presence of this representative and one who had his power and authority. They knew they had seen God at work and so they praised him. And when they proclaimed that a great prophet had risen up amongst them and that God has visited his people, they were exuberantly proclaiming that they now knew that God had once again come into the darkness to set things to rights like he had done back in the days of Elijah, because only the living God has such power over death. And so they cheered even if they didn’t understand or even if they still had messed up ideas about what it all meant or how it would play out. They knew that in Jesus God had come to fulfil his promises: to right the wrongs, to wipe away the tears, and I think with this latest miracle, the hope dawned in some—maybe even many—that Jesus had come to defeat even death itself. It's important that in telling the story, Luke doesn’t just look backward to Elijah. The story echoes back into Israel’s past, but it also looks forward. Because Luke also deliberate tells this story in a way that anticipates the story we know so well, the story to which all of this is leading. We meet Jesus at the cross, where sin and death did their worst, where Mary wept as he died. And then, three days later as Jesus burst from the tomb alive again, having conquered both sin and death; as he wipes away the tears of another Mary, who mistook him for the groundskeeper because he was there tending the garden, like Adam restored to Eden. Brothers and Sisters, it’s the final story, the climax of the Gospels, the story to which all these others lead us, it’s there that we’re confronted once and for all by the love of God made manifest in Jesus. God gives his son to die in order to set the world to rights, in order to defeat sin and death, and he does it for the very people who broke his creation and brought sin and death into it when they rebelled against him. That’s love—and grace and mercy and patience and so much more—but above all it’s love. And Brothers and Sisters, it’s love that overwhelms absolutely everything it encounters. It’s the love that finally opened the eyes of Jesus’ disciples to understand that the Messiah wasn’t their personal miracle worker or that he belonged to Israel alone—to set them on the top of the heap while raining down fire and brimstone on the gentiles. No, the love of God made manifest in the crucified and risen Jesus is the love that reveals a plan to redeem not only Israel, but the nations and even creation itself. And a love that will spare nothing to do so. It was that love, encountered in the risen Jesus, that opened the eyes of Paul and turned him from being a persecutor of Jesus’ people to being an evangelist, an apostle, a gospeller of the gospel—proclaiming the good news of this love made manifest in the death and resurrection of Jesus to the nations. Paul knew that this love that is already in the process of setting the world to rights, is the same love that will—if we can only begin to grasp its depths—this love will set us to rights. This love will realign our affections and purge us of our idolatries and our sins. This love will reveal the values and systems and plans and things of this old evil age to be the worthless garbage they are and will set our hearts and minds on God and on his kingdom. But for that to happen we have to truly encounter God’s love in Jesus. This is why Paul, in our Epistle today from Ephesians, wrote to struggling Christians to say, “This is my prayer: that [God] will lay out all the riches of his glory to give you strength and power, through his Spirit, in your inner being; that the Messiah may make his home in your hearts, through faith; that love may be your root, your firm foundation; and that you may be strong enough (with all God’s saints) to grasp the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the Messiah’s love—though actually it’s so deep that nobody can really know it! So may God will you with all his fullness.” Brothers and Sisters, if we are still invested in sin, if we are still invested in ourselves, if we are still invested in the things of this age, if we are still looking for philosophy or science or politics or economics to set this broken world to rights, we need instead to focus all the more on Jesus and the cross and to plumb the depths of God’s love revealed there until our hearts are aligned with him and with his new creation. We need to steep ourselves in the love of God that we might know the riches of his glory—riches so great, a vision of new creation so glorious, of all the sad things of this world made untrue—that we fall in love with it and let go all our idols. A pearl of great price so beautiful that we give up everything to have it. But Brother and Sisters, instead we too often lose sight of that vision as we’re overcome by the sadness and the pain and the darkness around us. Our faith stumbles and we stop being the on-earth-as-in-heaven people that Jesus and the Spirit have made us. We let the idols creep back in, and we start looking to them—to the things of this fallen world—as the way out and as our hope. And we align ourselves with the very things that have corrupted God’s creation, with the very things that hurt our relationships, and that keep us and the people around us from flourishing in God’s goodness. In the face of greater evils, we accept the lesser and we do it over and over and over until we’ve embraced idolatry, lost our vision of God’s new creation, and forgotten the true power of the good news of God’s love in Jesus. The solution, Brothers and Sisters, as St. Paul says so often, is to keep our eyes on Jesus and on his kingdom. To daily plumb the depths of the love of God made manifest in Jesus, crucified and risen. If you struggle with sin, if you struggle with selfishness, if you struggle with idolatry, if you struggle to keep God’s new creation at the centre of your vision, if your hope is not in Jesus and Jesus alone, hear Paul’s words today: let the love of God in Jesus be your root and your firm foundation. Let’s pray: O Lord, let your continual pity cleanse and defend your church; and because it cannot continue in safety without your aid, protect it by your help and goodness for ever, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Feast of St. MatthewSt. Matthew 9:9-13 and 2 Corinthians 4:1-6by William Klock
“As Jesus was leaving that place, he saw a man called Matthew sitting in the toll booth.” I expect that Matthew was just itching to get to this part of the story as he wrote his gospel account. It’s nine chapters in, roughly a third of the way. But he knew that the Gospel is about Jesus, not Matthew. Still, he was excited to tell people how he had met Jesus. Up to this point, Matthew’s been telling us about walking around Galilee preaching good news and doing all the Messiah things that made the good news real and tangible to people. He’s been across the Sea of Galilee where he cast a multitude of demons out of a man and now he’s back and on his way home to Capernaum. And that’s how he meets Matthew. Matthew’s a tax- or a toll-collector and here he is, sitting in his tollbooth next to the road. I suppose there must have been some kind of gate. Matthew would get up from his stool, go out to the road, and collect the toll from everyone going from Point A to Point B and from Point B to Point A. And everyone who went by grudgingly handed over their money. And they grumbled. And probably not a few people had some choice words for Matthew. Because everybody hated tax collectors. I was racking my brain this week trying to think of an example from our world that would explain just how much people hated tax-collectors and why and it’s hard to think of a modern equivalent. That was a different world. No one likes a tax-collector, because no one likes paying taxes. But in First Century Judaea there was way more to it than just people not liking paying taxes. The local Roman government decided how much they would need to run things and then they’d farm the collection of taxes out to the highest bidder. And, of course, the tax collectors had to make a living themselves, so they’d pad their collection. But they weren’t just getting by. Tax collectors were notorious for using their position to enrich themselves. And the local council or governor didn’t care just so long as they got their cut of the revenue. It was bad enough and common enough that when the rabbis wrote about tax collectors, they typically lumped them together with thieves. And it only made it worse when the tax collectors were working for the Romans. We don’t know if Matthew was working directly for the Romans or for some local Galilean authority, but at the end of the day it didn’t really matter. At some level the Romans were in charge of it all and tax collectors were thieves doing their dirty work. But there’s more to it than that. We think of Matthew, padding his toll collecting and getting rich by stealing from people whom he's got over a barrel and we think he’s a pretty rotten guy. That’s an awful thing to do. That’s a scummy way to make your money. But for the Jews there was another layer, something deeper to what made it so horrible, what made them hate someone like Matthew so much. Let me try to explain. So, if you or I hear about a thief—or maybe a crooked tax collector skimming off the top—we just think, “That’s a bad person”. If we found out that this thief had been baptised and grew up going to church and Sunday school, we’d think something like, “I guess he forgot everything he was taught as a kid.” Maybe if it came out he was an active warden or elder or deacon in his church, then we might start to think about what he’d done as a betrayal not just of his faith, but of us all. Here’s a guy who professed faith in Jesus, but betrayed that faith by doing something really sinful. And maybe that gets us closer to how Matthew’s fellow Jews would have thought about him. Because Matthew was circumcised. Matthew was part of the covenant community. Matthew was marked out as one of the Lord’s people. And Matthew knew their story. Matthew knew all about the Lord and how he had delivered his ancestors from Egypt. Matthew knew all the great things the Lord had done in the centuries that followed. We can kind of excuse some people today. We all know people who were baptised, but they were never really taught the faith, their parents never really took them to church, now they’re grown up and say they’re an atheist, and the sinful lifestyle they live kind of makes sense in light of all that. But that wasn’t Matthew. That wasn’t anyone in Israel. Everyone knew what it meant to be God’s people. There were no atheists. They all knew that God hates sin. They knew what it meant to be the people who lived with God in their midst. They knew that you had not only to be holy to enter God’s temple, but that you also had to be pure. That’s what set them apart from the pagans. Matthew knew all of this. Even if he he’d had rotten parenting, everything and everyone around him would have reinforced all of this. And he rejected it. Maybe he chose this life on his own. Maybe he inherited the job from his father who inherited it from his father. That probably would have made it easier. But whatever the case Matthew chose to live a life in apposition to everything his family, his people, and his nation stood for and he chose to do it right in the midst of them. Imagine an Amish boy who decides he doesn’t want to be Amish anymore. Usually they leave and go to live in the outside world, but imagine this Amish kid decided to stay in his close-knit Amish town, but he struts around in fancy clothes, whips around town in his Porsche, and throws wild parties with loud music at his house on the weekends. And everyone would be horrified at him. That’s Matthew, a tax-collector in Israel. But it gets worse. Or at least I think it does. Not everyone would agree with me on this part. Mark and Luke, in their Gospels, refer to Matthew by the name of “Levi”. Christian tradition has mostly understood Matthew and Levi to be the same person, but to make this connection is not without its difficulties. One of those difficulties is that it was pretty rare for a Jewish person to have two Aramaic names. A Jewish name and Greek name? Like Saul of Tarsus who is also known as Paul: that’s common. But usually if someone with an Aramaic name has a second Aramaic name, it’s because their given name is common, like John or Judas or Joshua, and the second name—maybe the name of his father—distinguishes him from other guys with the same name. But neither Matthew nor Levi were common names. No one was likely to confuse this Matthew with another Matthew. But the one instance in which we see men with two Aramaic names is when they come from prominent families. It wasn’t uncommon for these men to be known by their family names. And I think that’s what has happened with Matthew. Mark and Luke remember him as “Levi”—his family name—but Matthew went by his given name. Because the family name Levi mean that they were a Levitical family. And this made things all the worse for Matthew. The tribe of Levi were the priestly family. They were the ones who served in the temple. They were the ones who acted as mediators between the Lord and his people. Israel was a holy people, but the Levites were a holy tribe within that holy people. Consider that one of the duties of the Levites was the collection of taxes. They collected the tithes of Israel. Those tithes were their livelihood. And they collected the temple tax, to pay for the upkeep of the Lord’s house. But Matthew had become a tax collector of another kind, not one dependent on the Lord and the faithfulness of his people, but a man who fleeced God’s people in collusion with the pagans. Brothers and Sisters, that was Matthew sitting in his toll-booth. A wealthy traitor not only to the Lord, but to his people and to his family and to his calling and despised by everyone. I fully expect there were days when Matthew longed to get out of the mess he was in. In theory he could have made everything right and returned to the Lord, but to do that he’d have had to make restitution. I don’t think Matthew would have even known where to begin. And so he stayed in his toll-booth, he kept his riches, and he threw parties for other tax collectors and sinners—because they were the only people who would associate with him. And every day he became a little bit more dead inside. And then, this day, along came Jesus. Matthew knew perfectly well who Jesus was. Everyone in Galilee was talking about Jesus. If nothing else, Matthew would have heard about his miracles, but I expect he’d heard about his preaching, too. Maybe Matthew had even stood at a distance a time or two in Capernaum to hear Jesus preach. Matthew knew that in Jesus the God of Israel was doing something. But Matthew stayed at a distance. Because Matthew knew he was a traitor to his God and to his people and to his covenant. As attractive as Jesus and his message were, it was not for someone like Matthew. Brothers and Sisters, how many people around us feel just like that? They’re sinners. They feel the weight of it and would love for it to be gone. They’ve got some vague knowledge of Jesus. But they’d never come to church. A coworker once said to me, “Church is for holy people, not for people like me.” They see no way out. And now Matthew sees Jesus approaching his gate. Maybe he thought, “This might be the Messiah. I should really cut him a break instead of ripping him off like I do everyone else.” And that’s when, he writes in verse 9, Jesus “said to him, ‘Follow me.’” And he just says, “And he rose up and follow him.” I have to think there was at least a little bit more to it than that. But those words, “Follow me” were ultimately what did it for Matthew. No Pharisee, no scribe, no lawyer had ever come to Matthew and said, “Follow me, Brother. Let me help you get out of your sins.” They paid his extortionate toll, dropping their coin in the toll-box and being extra careful not to touch it or anything else that Matthew had touched. They sneered at him—if they looked at him at all—called him “traitor”, and went on their way. But this Jesus, this man in whom the God his fathers was so clearly at work doing something new, Jesus smiled and invited him to join in what he was doing. Brothers and Sisters, sometimes that’s all it takes. Matthew had seen God’s glory on display in Jesus, but he didn’t think it was for him. He just needed to hear that, yes, in fact it was for him—for everyone, but especially for people like him. That was actually part of the new thing Jesus was doing. Without Jesus, reconciliation with is people was hopeless. He was a toll-collector. How could he ever make things right with everyone he’d ever stolen from? How could he even make a good faith effort? But in those words, “Follow me,” Jesus offered Matthew forgiveness. Jesus bypassed the temple, because he is the new temple himself; he bypassed the priests, because he is our new priest; and he bypassed the sacrifices and the law of restitution, because he is the full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of Israel and the whole world. Jesus simply held out forgiveness and reconciliation to Matthew. All Matthew had to do was leave his tollbooth behind—that’s repentance—and follow Jesus. And, Matthew says, that’s just what he did. “He rose up and followed him.” He “rose up”. I think Matthew chose that language deliberately. It’s resurrection language. When he decided to trust Jesus—and that’s just what it was: trust and loyalty and allegiance—he was raised up out of his sin, he was raised up out of his alienation from God and from his people, and he was given his life back. And not just given back his old life, Jesus gave him something even better. He lifted Matthew up out of the life this evil age of sin and death and gave him a taste and a promise of the age to come, of new creation, of the Holy Spirit, and of the fellowship with God that his people had been so longing for. And, too, Jesus restores to Matthew his birthright as a Levite. As the Levites mediated the Lord to his people, so Matthew now brings the good news about Jesus to his people. In verse 10 he immediately takes us to his house. “When he was at home,” he writes, “sitting down to a meal, there were lots of tax-collectors and sinners there who had come to have dinner with Jesus and his disciples.” Other tax collectors and sinners were the only people who hang around with Matthew. Matthew knew that some of them felt the same way he did. They were traitors to the Lord and traitors to his people. They were hopelessly lost sheep. There was no way out. But Matthew had found it—or, rather, the way out had found him. And so he invites his friends to meet Jesus. They’d heard and seen him doing amazing things. Like Matthew, they’d been on the fringe. If the priest and Levites—not to mention everyone else in Israel—condemned them and kept apart from them, the Messiah certainly wasn’t for them. But here he was and Jesus was saying the same thing to them that he’d said to Matthew: “Follow me.” And, I expect, at least some of them did. And Jesus and the disciples rejoiced with those people because they knew that heaven itself was rejoicing too. But there were always the Pharisees. Matthew writes that when they “saw it, they said to Jesus’ disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’ But Jesus heard them. ‘It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor,’ he said, ‘it’s the sick. Go and learn what this saying means: “It’s mercy I want, not sacrifice.” I haven’t come to call upright people, but sinners.’” Like Paul says in our Epistle today, there was a veil over their eyes. The Pharisees were sick in their own ways, and Jesus exposed their sickness by going to the tax-collectors and sinners. When they complain about it, he quotes the words the Lord had spoken to Isaiah. We heard those words last week when our Gospel was the parable of the good Samaritan—Hosea 6 turned into a story. The problem was that the people lacked the heart of God. The sinners devoted to their sinning, the greedy tax-collectors ripping everyone off, and the Pharisees too—almost everyone in Israel—was far from God. His absence from the temple all those years was a metaphor for Israel’s problem. Even those who were devoted to the law and who were “religious” about their tithing and their sabbaths and their diet and their sacrifices, were no closer to God than the prostitute or the tax-collector. And so Jesus came to the sinners with God’s mercy—because they so desperately needed it—and he gave it to them in front of the watching scribes and Pharisees and all the “upright” people in Israel so that they could see that they needed to learn that same mercy and know it themselves. It was that mercy that reached Matthew. It was that mercy that reached Paul and lifted the veil from his eyes. And it was that mercy, made manifest in Jesus, that both Paul and Matthew proclaimed. It was this mercy that’s at the centre of the Gospel that Matthew wrote to his people. And it’s this same mercy that Paul preached. In today’s Epistle from 2 Corinthians 4, he writes that it’s this mercy that drives him forward despite all the obstacles. “The ‘god’ of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they won’t see the light of the gospel of the glory of the Messiah, who is God’s image.” So what’s the solution? Paul writes, “We don’t proclaim ourselves, you see, but Jesus the Messiah as Lord…because the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts, to produce the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.” Brothers and Sisters, Paul—and Matthew, for that matter—knew that it wouldn’t be gimmicks or tricks or fancy speaking or trying to make God’s word palatable to sinners that would lift the veil from the eyes of unbelievers. It would be the proclamation of the good news about Jesus. That light—the glory of God in the face of the Messiah as Paul describes it—that light met Matthew in the darkness of his tollbooth. That light met Paul on the road to Damascus. And it lifted the veil. It dispelled the darkness. It cast out the ‘god’ of this world who enslaves us to sin and death and makes us to think there’s no hope of escape. The light of the glory of God revealed in the good news of Jesus the Messiah is the answer and the only answer. It’s our hope and our only hope. We too often try those other things. We water down God’s word to try to make it less offensives. We try gimmicks or we try programmes. But Brothers and Sisters, we should know better. The Lord has promised that one day the knowledge of his glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea and that will happen because and only because his people have been faithful to proclaim his glory revealed in Jesus the Messiah who died and rose again. Brothers and Sisters, don’t be afraid. Don’t question whether it’ll work or not. If the light of the gospel could tear down the veil that once had you blinded, if it could break the chains of sin that once bound you, it will tear down the veils that blind and it will break the chains that bind the rest of the world. Just proclaim it. Jesus has died and Jesus has risen, not just for you or for me or for holy people, but for sinners—for everyone. He holds out his hand to us wherever we are and invites us to leave it all behind, to follow him, and to rise to new life. Let’s pray: O almighty God, whose beloved Son called Matthew from his tollbooth to be an apostle and evangelist: Set us free from the chains of our sins to follow and to proclaim your Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after TrinitySt. Luke 10:23-37 & Hosea 6:1-11by William Klock
“A lawyer got up and put Jesus on the spot,” writes St. Luke in today’s Gospel. If you’re following along, this is Luke 10:25. “A lawyer got up and put Jesus on the spot.” An expert on torah. If you had a question about whether or not to do such-and-such or how you were to do this or not do that and it wasn’t spelled out in black and white in the Bible, this was the guy you asked. He knew how to parse it and extrapolate it all out. And he’s angry. He's been hanging out on the edge of the crowd as Jesus addressed his disciples, but enough is enough. He pushes forward. He’s going to put Jesus on the spot and expose him for the fraud he is. And so he calls out, “Teacher,” and he gets Jesus’ attention. And then he asks, “What should I do to inherit the life of the age to come.” I can imagine him leaning back on his heels, arms crossed. Jesus is going to hang himself with his answer and everyone’s going to walk away and never listen to Jesus again. But we before we get to Jesus’ answer, we need to ask what the lawyer was actually asking. “What must I do to inherit…zoen aionion?” Zoe aionios to say it in Greek. Zoe means “life” and we’ve traditionally translated aionios as “eternal”. That’s not wrong, but “eternal” doesn’t fully capture the significance of aionios as it was used by Judeans of Jesus’ day. In English “eternal” just means “eternal”…“forever”. And we think the lawyer is asking, “What must I do to live forever?” For a lot of people that translates into “What must I do to go to heaven when I die?” But it’s really a lot deeper than that. At the root of this word aionios is the word—and it might sound a little familiar—aion. It’s where we get our word “aeon” and it’s basic meaning is “age” and it became shorthand for “the age to come”—meaning the messianic age everyone was hoping and longing for. And the lawyer asks this question about the age to come, because he’s been listening to Jesus address his disciples as they returned from the mission he’d sent them on. He sent out seventy to proclaim the good news—to gospel the gospel in the cities and towns of Israel and they came back excited because of the things they’d seen. At the name of Jesus, even demons obeyed them. And Jesus said to them: This is what the prophets foretold. Isaiah and Ezekiel told of their visions of the satan falling like lightening and you’re seeing it happen. God’s kingdom is breaking in. God’s light is driving away the darkness and toppling the rulers of the present evil age—and you’re part of it. And this is where he says to them, “Don’t rejoice that spirits are subject to you, but rejoice [about what it means:] that your names are written in heaven.” God’s got a book—metaphorically speaking—and in it he records the names of everyone who belongs to him, of everyone whom he will one day resurrect from death and lead into the age to come. The Jews knew their names were written in that book. God had chosen them and so long as they didn’t wilfully reject him—which is what the tax collectors and sinners did—their names were written in that book and, when the Messiah came, he would set the world to rights and lead them into the age to come. But what’s got this lawyer worked up is that Jesus is implying that they may not all have their names written in the book after all. The lawyer—like pretty much everyone in Israel—knew his name was written in the book because God had made a covenant with them and because they kept their end of the covenant—the torah. Circumcision, sabbath, diet, all these things marked them out and demonstrated their commitment and love for God. But Jesus has just said to his disciples, “A blessing on the eyes which see what you see! Let me tell you, many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see, and they didn’t see it; and to hear what you hear, and they didn’t hear it!” In other words, the renewal of Israel that God had promised through the prophets had come—in Jesus—and being written in God’s book is about more than just being born a Jew or even the outward observance of torah. And it’s that last bit that Jesus is getting at in his answer. Look at verse 26. Jesus responds to the lawyer’s question and asks, “Well, what is written in the law? What’s your interpretation of it?” And the lawyer gives the answer that every kid in Judaea could have given: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your understanding; and your neighbour as yourself.” And Jesus replied—I’m sure to the frustration of the lawyer—“Well said! Do that and you will live.” Picture the lawyer gritting his teeth. No, no, no. If that’s true, then we’re all on the same page! But he knew they weren’t, because if Jesus’ disciples were “in”, then everyone else was, by implication, “out”. So, Luke writes, “to justify himself” the lawyer asks Jesus, “But who is my neighbour?” It’s his second attempt at a gotcha question. And Jesus responds with a story, a parable: “Once upon a time,” he said, “a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and was set upon by robbers. They stripped him and beat him and ran off leaving him half-dead.” Everybody knew that road. Very soon Jesus would be travelling it himself, going the other direction, up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover—and to become the new Passover himself. That road was steep and windy and notorious for the robbers hiding in wait for unwary travellers. The wise travelled in groups or well-armed. Travelling it alone, like this man did, was foolish. This lawyer, listening to Jesus, would be shaking his head and thinking to himself that anyone dumb enough to travel that road alone was a candidate for a Darwin Award. But Jesus goes on. “A priest happened to be going down that road, and when he saw him he went past on the opposite side.’” Now, you and I shake our heads and think, “What a horrible priest! How could he not stop to help the man.” But we only think that way because we’ve been shaped by the gospel and by Jesus and the Spirit. The cross of Jesus has taught us mercy. That God would not only humble himself, but would shed his blood on behalf of his rebellious children has taught us mercy in a way never understood before the gospel. But that lawyer—and the crowd and maybe even Jesus’ disciples—they lived in the dark world on the other side of the good news of the cross. They saw nothing wrong with this priest passing by the man. The priests kept themselves ritually pure. They had to in order to enter the temple. Even though this priest is going in the opposite direction—probably on his way home from serving his rotation in the temple—he still kept himself pure. He couldn’t tell if the man was dead or alive and if went over, rolled him over, and found him dead, well, then he'd be impure. That was okay for normal people, but not for a priest. And everyone knew this. And, again, no one had a problem with it. And, of course, this is the very problem with Israel that Jesus wants to highlight for the lawyer. “Then,” said Jesus, “a Levite came by the place. He saw him too and went past on the opposite side.” He might not be a priest, but being a Levite, he too served in the temple. Again, he’s going the opposite way—like the priest, he’s probably on his way home from serving in the temple. But, still, being a Levite, he can’t chance becoming impure. And, again, this was all normal and good and right as far as most people were concerned. “But then,” said Jesus, “a travelling Samaritan came to where he was.” Everyone frowned at this. Samaritans were filth. They were descendants of the Jews who intermarried with the native Canaanite peoples when the people of Judah were in exile. They worshiped at their own illicit temple at Shechem and they compromised torah with pagan practises and pagan philosophy. They were traitors of the worst kind. Just being on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho meant he was fouling the promised land with his impure Samaritan feet. And yet, Jesus said, “He came over to the man and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put him on his own beast, took him to an inn, and looked after him. The next morning, as he was going on his way, he gave the inn-keeper two dinars. ‘Take care of him,’ he said, ‘and on my way back I’ll pay you whatever else you need to spend on him.’” “Where’s Jesus going with this?” Everyone was thinking. “What’s his point?” There’s no way this would happen in real life. But that’s kind of the point. Jesus looks the lawyer in the eye and asks, “Which of these three do you think turned out to be the neighbour of the man who was set upon by the brigands?” Jesus is going make the lawyer come out and say it. And the lawyer does, because there’s no escape for him. “The one who showed mercy on him,” he said. “Well,” Jesus said to him, “you go and do the same.” I fully expect that as the lawyer answered the question and said, “The one who showed him…mercy.” The lights suddenly went on for him for everyone else. That word “mercy” is the key. Jesus had just turned Hosea 6:1-11 into a parable. Here’s what the Lord had said through the Prophet Hosea some eight centuries before: Come, let us return to the Lord;for he has torn us, that he may heal us;he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.After two days he will revive us;on the third day he will raise us up,that we may live before him.Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord;his going out is sure as the dawn;he will come to us as the showers,as the spring rains that water the earth.”What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?What shall I do with you, O Judah?Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away.Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets;I have slain them by the words of my mouth,and my judgment goes forth as the light.For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me.Gilead is a city of evildoers,tracked with blood.As robbers lie in wait for a man, so the priests band together;they murder on the way to Shechem; they commit villainy.In the house of Israel I have seen a horrible thing;Ephraim’s whoredom is there; Israel is defiled.For you also, O Judah, a harvest is appointed,When I restore the fortunes of my people. This the Lord’s rebuke of the northern kingdom of Israel—also known as “Samaria”. Hint, hint. There’s a reason Jesus puts a Samaritan at the centre of the story. The people of Israel went through the motions of obedience, but the Lord accused them. Their love for him was “like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away.” Their nation was a nation of evil-doers with blood on their hands. They offered their sacrifices, but there was no love in their hearts. The priests were lying in wait for their people like robbers. Again, this was a rebuke of Israel eight hundred years before, but now Jesus brings the same rebuke to Judah. And yet, there’s still the promise. The long-awaited age to come is breaking in. As the Lord promised through Hosea, he will come to heal his people, to bind up their wounds, to revive them after two days, and to raise them up on the third day. But whom will he heal and revive and raise up? The lawyer gave the answer “The one who showed his neighbour mercy.” There was no mercy in the heart of the priest and no mercy in the heart of the Levite—and there was no mercy in the hearts of the people of Judah who saw nothing wrong with the priest and the Levite leaving the man to die. For that matter there was no mercy in the hearts of people who saw the Samaritans as unredeemable, reprobate scum. And that was the heart of the problem. And this heart problem was precisely what Jesus came to fix. Because the only people who will have a share in the age to come—in the kingdom of God—are the people who have the heart of God. The people who are poor in spirit, who mourn the state of the world, the meek, the people who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the pure in heart, the peacemakers—and the merciful.This is why I think it’s so important to pay attention to how we translate those words in the lawyer’s question—zoe aionios. Because it’s not just “eternal life” Jesus offers; it’s eternal life in the age to come—in God’s world set to rights and eternal life in his presence. Brothers and Sisters, “salvation” isn’t just fire insurance. It's not just rescue from death so that we can live forever, so that we can see our loved ones again, so that we can experience bliss forever and ever. That’s all a very self-centred, a very worldly, a very therapeutic understanding of salvation. What Jesus offers us is the life we were meant for, the life we see Adam and Eve living in the garden at the very beginning of the story, a life of perfect fellowship with God, a life serving as the priests of his temple, a life stewarding his heart for the sake of the world. And ever since he called Abraham, but especially since he rescued Israel and made them his people, God’s purpose for his people has been to reveal himself to the nations through them so that the world might know his goodness, his faithfulness, his love, his mercy, his grace—and on and on. God’s purpose for his people has always been to make his heart known to the nations. Our lives and our collective life together is meant to lift the veil on God’s future, on his new creation. It’s not about us or about our glory; it’s about God and it’s about God’s glory. When he delivered Israel from Egypt, God came down and dwelt in their midst. He fellowshipped with them. It wasn’t the perfect fellowship of the garden that Adam and Even had known, but it was a fellowship that made know his desire for humanity and a fellowship that pointed forward to the day when, through Jesus, he delivered us from sin—and even further to that day when sin (and death) are gone forever. He gave Israel a law that set her apart and that taught her his heart so that they would know justice and mercy, love and grace, and put his heart on display for the world. Theirs was to be a little microcosm of his new creation—however imperfectly—where reconciling love was on full display. Israel failed. They kept the law outwardly, but they lost the heart of God. They offered sacrifices, but their was no mercy in their hearts. But in Jesus and the Spirit the renewal that the Lord had promised has come. In forgiving our sins, Jesus has taught us the true depth of God’s lovingkindess, of his grace and his faithfulness. And in the Spirit he’s turned our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. He’s written his law of love on them so that we really can love him with all of our being and so that we really can love our neighbours as ourselves. But I don’t think we reflect often enough on why God’s done that—in part because we too often think of salvation in selfish, or at least self-centred, terms. Our salvation is not an end in itself. God has called and created a people to witness his heart to the world. Brothers and Sisters, in us God is leading a redeemed people—a people he’s already beginning to set right through the work of his indwelling Spirit—he’s leading us to bring hope and good news to the nations. He’s using us to carry the good news about Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord, to every part of the world and with it the kingdom, with it the message of new creation, with it the hope of a world set to rights, in which Jesus has finished once and for all the work he began when he died and rose again. In the witness of Jesus and the power of the Spirit he’s given us his heart. And that’s what it’s all about: bearing witness to his heart. And the people who do that, they’re the ones who will one day know him eternally in the age to come. I like to think of it like a symphony. Jesus and the Spirit have made us the players. We each have our instrument and we look forward to the day when we all come together in the great concert hall to play our parts in harmony and to finally hear that glorious and beautiful piece of music under the hand of the divine conductor. It’s not about us. It’s about the music and the one who leads us in it. But in the meantime, he’s given us the sheet music for our parts and he’s sent us home to practise. And we have the privilege of being able to meet in our little sections to practise some of those parts together. And in our practising we get a foretaste of the great symphony to come. But, Brothers and Sisters, do we actually practise? Are we investing our practise time in the fruit of the Spirit? Are we practising the reconciling love of God that we’ve known in Jesus? Are we practising the justice and mercy we’ve met in God? And along the way, are we drawing in the nations as they hear the beauty that’s present even in our little bits and pieces of the symphony? Or are we wasting the time God has given us on sin? Instead of practising the gospel life, are we investing in the fear and wrath and scrambling and grasping of the present evil age? Like Gilead, the world around us is filled with evil and tracked with blood. It’s always been that way, but it seems we see it getting closer and closer to home. We’ve seen worsening in the last months and weeks and days in the US and there’s no reason to think we’re somehow safe in Canada. Because this is what happens to a people without the gospel—and to a people who have lost the gospel. And Brothers and Sisters, the worse it gets, the more the world needs the heart of God that Jesus and the Spirit have given us. The more the world needs God’s promise to heal and to bind up our wounds. The world needs Jesus and the gospel and you and I are the stewards of that good news. Don’t be tempted to jump into the violent fray. Don’t throw gas on the fire. Instead, be the wine and the oil that God has made us to anoint the world’s wounds. Show the world what godly justice and godly mercy are and minister the healing power of the gospel—of the good news that Jesus the Messiah has died for us, that he has risen for us, and that he is creation’s true Lord. Let’s pray: Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift alone your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity2 Corinthians 3:4-9by William Klock
Imagine you’re an Israelite at the time of the Exodus. Moses shows up and announces that the God of your ancestors—a God no one’s heard from in four hundred years—is going to deliver you from Pharoah’s slavery. Sounds pretty sketchy. But then God begins to act. He sends ten plagues on the Egyptians. He turns the Nile to blood. Wow! But then Pharoah’s magicians do the same thing. Okay…maybe not as impressive as it seemed at first. But as the plagues go on, they get more and more impressive and Pharaoh’s magicians can’t keep up. By the tenth plague you know without a doubt that this God of your fathers is something. He’s even more powerful than Pharoah and his gods. And then the Red Sea. Pharaoh chased you down. Your people are stuck between the sea and Pharaoh’s army. All is lost. And then the God of your fathers parts the sea itself in an amazing display of power and authority. Imagine what it was like to walk through the sea on dry ground. And then to watch as, just as miraculously, the God of your fathers causes the waters to come crashing back into place just at the right time to drown Pharaoh’s army. And you join with your people as, for the first time, you sing praise to this God of your fathers—a God whom you’re now starting to think of as your God. But God isn’t finished. He appears as a magnificent pillar of cloud in the day and a pillar of fire at night and he leads your people into the wilderness. When there’s nothing to drink, he causes water to pour forth from a rock. When there’s nothing to eat, he miraculously provides an abundance of manna and quail. At Mount Sinai he meets your people in cloud and lightning on the mountaintop. He establishes a covenant with you. He will be your God and you will be his people. He sends Moses down the mountain with the torah and with instructions for the tabernacle. And having been in God’s presence, Moses’ face shines so brightly with God’s glory that he has to wear a veil. And when your people have finished assembling the tabernacle, you see God’s glory—like a cloud—descend to fill it. It's stounding. It’s the sort of thing the Egyptians could only dream about their gods doing and the God of Israel does it for real. And, eventually, just as he promised, God leads your people into Canaan—the promised land—and he conquers the people for you and gives you their cities. And you know it’s him, not you. There’s no doubting it. He had you march on Jericho, not with swords, but carrying his ark and blowing trumpets as you marched in circles around the city. Not to attack it. Not to put siege to it. But simply to announce that the Lord, the God of Israel had come. And when that announcement was clear and when everyone could see that you and your people had done nothing but announce the Lord’s presence, he caused the walls to come crashing down. He defeated the city. And neither you nor anyone else could possibly think of taking credit for it. Neither you nor anyone else took the Lord for granted. Neither you nor anyone else could dream of giving your faith, your loyalty, your allegiance to any other god. Because you had seen with your own eyes the glory of the Lord. Even as the generations passed, the people remembered the Lord. They lived in those cities, they drew from those well, they harvested crops from those fields that the Lord had taken from the Canaanites and given to their fathers and grandfathers. They bore in their flesh the sign of God’s covenant—that statement, “I will be your God and you will be my people”—they bore that sign in their circumcision. And every year they celebrated the Passover and not only recalled the events of the Exodus in which the Lord had saved their fathers; they participated, themselves, in those events—they owned them as if they’d happened to them. And the covenant was renewed. And if you read the Old Testament no further you might think it would be like that forever. How could a people who had so experienced the glory of God ever take him for granted, let alone turn their backs on him? How could a people who had so experienced the glory of God ever look for confidence and hope in anyone or anything else? But it happened. They took their status as his people for granted. They began to take those cities and wells and vineyards and fields he’d given them for granted. They stopped celebrating the Passover and remembering what he’d done for them. They started worshiping other gods. They lost faith in the Lord and started putting their trust in kings and in armies and in politics. And when the prophets came to rebuke the people and to call them back to faithfulness, they refused to listen and abused those prophets. Eventually, because they took it all for granted, because they were unfaithful, the Lord took away the land and the cities and fields and vineyards—and finally even his presence—and sent the people into exile in a foreign land. But not before he promised them renewal. One day he would restore them and make them new and fill them with his own Spirit, he would turn their hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, so that they would be forever faithful. And, in Jesus, the Lord fulfilled that promise to his people. In Jesus he was born as one of them, but rejected and crucified as a false Messiah. God raised Jesus from death and overturned the verdict against him, declaring that he really was the Messiah and creation’s true Lord. In rising from the grave Jesus conquered death. And then, to those who were baptised and received the sign of God’s new covenant, he gave God’s Spirit. The old Israel had a temple. This new Israel is the temple. And as we read in last week’s Epistle, Paul stressed that the risen Jesus appeared to the twelve, and to the other disciples, and even at one point to five hundred, and lastly to him. And Jesus changed everything for them. In his death and resurrection he led his people in a new exodus, not this time from physical bondage under Pharaoh, but from bondage to sin and death themselves. And in baptism, Jesus leads his people like Moses through the waters of redemption to meet the Lord on the far side. And the Spirit leads us, not as a pillar of cloud or fire, but as God’s very presence within us, as we embark on a world- and humanity-saving trek through the wilderness of the old evil age into the age to come, towards the New Jerusalem, to that day when gospel and Spirit have done their work and Jesus does away with sin and death and evil once and for all and forever, and creation is set to rights and we enjoy the presence of our God eternally. Those first eyewitnesses took this astounding gospel story to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the world and amazing things happened. It was more than just a story of the glory of God. The story of the old exodus was that, but this was more. The story of the Messiah and this new exodus has power unlike any story that has been told before or since. This is a story backed by the life-giving and life-changing power of Jesus and the Spirit and the people who heard it and believed it and came to trust in the death and, most importantly, the resurrection of Jesus, they were changed. Forgiven by the redeeming death of Jesus and then given a foretaste of the life of God’s new world by the Spirit whom he poured into them. It was a change that no one could ignore. Some were captivated by it and came to hear and to believe the gospel story for themselves and they shared in this new life too. And others got angry as the gospel story and God’s new world challenged the gods and the kings and the systems in which they were already invested. But to those who believed, the gospel, the good news about Jesus was life itself. And they gathered together as often as they could and when they did, they not only shared the community the gospel had given them, they shared in the meal Jesus had given them. In the Lord’s Supper they ate bread and drank wine—and just as in the Passover—they didn’t just remember what Jesus had done to deliver them from sin and death, they appropriated that death and resurrection, they participated in that saving event themselves. They owned this new exodus just as the Israelites owned the events of the first exodus. And each time it was as if the Lord was renewing his covenant with them: through Jesus and the Spirit, I will be your God and you will be my people. And you might think that their faithfulness to the Lord would be unending. You would think that their trust and loyalty—their confidence—would always and only be in Jesus the Messiah. But it wasn’t. If we’re honest about our struggles, we know that it’s easy to become distracted by other things. There’s a reason we gather every Sunday to hear the good news again and to come to the Lord’s Table to be reminded and to renew the covenant. There’s a reason why wendaily immerse ourselves in the scriptures and in the story there of God and his people. Because when we don’t, even as glorious as that story is, even as it once captivated us so thoroughly, somehow—and to our shame—we forget. And Jesus is still there, but we start focusing on other things and we start looking for other things and we start putting our confidence and our hope in other things. It even happened in the early church with that first generation of believers. Paul had arrived in Corinth in about a.d. 50 or 51. He proclaimed the good news about Jesus and both Jews and gentiles there were captivated by the story. They believed. They were baptised. And Paul stayed with them for about a year and half, helping them to set up a church. And everyone knew that it wasn’t Paul who had done. He was just an unassuming little man. Funny looking, maybe with a speech impediment. (Remember in last week’s Epistle he owned that insult about being a monster, prematurely born.) What happened in Corinth wasn’t about Paul. Brothers and Sisters, it was about the power of the gospel and the Spirit. And yet just a few years later, it all started to fall apart. The amazing story about the death and resurrection of Jesus that had once so spoken to them about the glory of God started to fade, and with it their motivation to holiness. Sin—gross, truly wicked sin—started to creep into the church and they found ways to justify it. Their worship became chaotic as people began using the gifts the Spirit had given to bring attention to themselves instead of to build up the body. They abused the Lord’s Supper and twisted and undermined its covenant meaning. And when Paul, their brother, the one who had not only brought the gospel to them, but who could speak with authority about it because he, himself, had met the risen Jesus, when he wrote to them they brushed him off. They told him they didn’t want to hear from him anymore. He’d been displaced by other preachers who were flashier, who were more handsome, who were better spoken then he was. And so, at the end of 2 Corinthians 2 he appeals to them. He talks about himself as “we” instead of “I” and I think he does that to emphasise that he stand with the other apostles whose authority came from being eyewitness of the risen Messiah. The same could not be said of others who have come to them and led them astray. He writes to them, saying, “We aren’t mere peddlers of God’s word, as so many preachers are. We speak with sincerity. We speak from God. We speak in God’s presence. We speak in the Messiah.” The Messiah: that’s who this is really about. Paul has no authority of his own. He simply speaks what he heard from Jesus himself. And his point here is that they had once been captivated by that gospel of the Messiah that Paul had proclaimed to them, but now they’ve been captivated by the words of mere men. “Do you want a letter of recommendation before you’ll listen to me?” Paul asks. “Do I need to give you a sheaf of reference letters so you’ll know I’m legit?” “No,” says Paul, going on in 3:2: “You are our official reference! It’s written on our hearts. Everyone can know and read it. It’s plain that you are a letter from the Messiah, with us the messengers. A letter not written with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. Not on tablets of stone, but on the tablets of fleshly hearts.” In other words, despite all their problems, despite their backsliding into worldly ways, they are not the people they once were. Paul had proclaimed the good new—the story about Jesus and his death and resurrection and ascension—and through that preaching the Spirit had captivated them and filled their hearts with faith. They believed. They gave their trust, their loyalty, their allegiance, their obedience to Jesus and they were transformed. And Paul could see it even through all their problems. No, Paul doesn’t need to give them references. “You are my reference,” he says to them. I know you’ve kicked me to the curb, but it was the message I received from Jesus that I preached to you that transformed you—not the merely human words of the other preachers who came along. It was the word of God that did it. And they really, really need to hear this. Because in the years since Paul left, as they’ve listened to teachers who led them astray, as the glory of the pure gospel has faded from their vision, they’ve begun to put their confidence in other things. They no longer associate Paul with the gospel. They’re thinking of him as that funny-looking little man with the speech impediment. And following someone like that in Greek culture, well, that wasn’t going to get you anywhere. And so they associated with the handsome preachers with eloquent rhetoric who could impress the Greeks. They’ve forgotten that the gifts the Spirit gave them were gifts of grace to build up the body, and now they’re abusing them and putting their confidence in them. They’ve forgotten that the gospel puts them all on an equal footing before the throne of grace, and they’re letting their old class and cultural divisions divide them up. They were growing their church—as we’d say it today—but they weren’t growing it on the gospel. We do the same thing today. We may do it even more than the Corinthians, because commercialism is the cultural water we swim in and we don’t even realise how much it impacts how we think about church and we don’t realise how it so easily displaces the gospel and gospel growth and gospel ministry. We build our churches around personalities. We build our churches around programmes. We build our churches around demographics. We build our churches by advertising that we’re better than or that we’re not like our neighbouring churches. We treat the church as if it’s a business or a social club instead of a family—the covenant people of God, transformed and shaped by the gospel and the Spirit. The Spirit has transformed our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh through the power of the gospel, but we forget the centrality of the gospel and allow our hearts to calcify back into stone. It might not seem like that’s what’s happening at first. Our churches may even have the appearance of success, but it’s because we’re appealing to stony hearts of worldly people with what they value, not with the power of the transforming gospel they need.It's that simple gospel that needs to be at the centre of everything. The risen Jesus always before us. The risen Jesus at the centre of every decision we make. The risen Jesus at the heart of everything we do. Just Jesus, crucified and risen. The simple gospel. So Paul goes on in verse 4: “That is the kind of confidence we have toward God, through the Messiah.” Stop putting your confidence in other things. Just put it in Jesus. He and only he can bring us before God. So Paul says, “It isn’t as though we are qualified in ourselves to reckon that we have anything to offer on our own account. Our qualification comes from God: God has qualified us to be stewards of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. The letter kills, you see, but the Spirit gives life.” The gospel was his only qualification and the only one that mattered. The same goes for us. Now, think again of the glory that God put on display in the Exodus and in the story of Israel that followed. That’s what Paul gets at in verse 7 when he writes: “But just think about it: when death was being ministered, carved in letter of stone,”—he’s talking about Mt. Sinai and the giving of the law”—“it was a glorious thing, so glorious in fact that the children of Israel couldn’t look at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory that was to be abolished.” The glory God displayed in those days was astounding. It moved the people to faith and trust and worship. But now Paul’s talking about the new covenant and what God has done in Jesus and the Spirit. “Will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?” he asks them. “If ministering condemnation is glorious, you see, how much more glorious is the ministry of vindication—of righteousness, of justice? In fact, what used to be glorious has come, by comparison, to have no glory at all, because of the new glory which goes so far beyond it! O, Brothers and Sisters, would that we would also be so captivated by the glory of the simple gospel of Jesus the Messiah. There is no other glory that can compare and if we will keep it always before us—this good new of Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord—if we would keep our eyes always focused on it, if we let it shape our lives, if we let it shape our decision, if we let it be the basis for everything we do as the church. If the glory of the gospel were our sole source of confidence and hope, it would transform our churches and make us the people God intends for us to be. God’s promise is that one day the knowledge of his glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, but, Brothers and Sisters, remember that he has made us the stewards of that glory. He has entrusted his gospel of life to us and he’s filled us with his Spirit. It is our calling to make his glory known by taking the good news of Jesus to Courtenay and Comox, to Vancouver Island, to Canada, and even to the ends of the earth. You may have placed a veil over God’s glory. This morning let the scriptures lift that veil. Let the bread and the wine here at his Table lift that veil. Look on the glory of the Lord revealed in Jesus the Messiah and be refreshed and renewed for the gospel ministry to which you have been called. Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Saviour; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity1 Corinthians 15:1-11 & St. Luke 18:9-14by William Klock
“Two men went up to the temple to pray,” Jesus said. The temple was the place where heaven and earth met. The place where men and women could go to be in the presence of God. Twice a day the priests would lead the people in prayers, at nine in the morning and at three in the afternoon, but people could go any time to pray. On this day, two men climbed the steps to the temple courts to pray. “One,” Jesus said, “was a Pharisee.” A Jew could pray anywhere—at home, wherever. But if anyone was going to go out of their way to pray at the temple, it was going to be a Pharisee. The temple was everything to them. They weren’t priests, but they lived their lives as if they were. So it was natural for a Pharisee to go to the temple to pray. But there were two men this day, Jesus said, who went up to the temple. “The other was a tax collector.” If there was a polar opposite of the Pharisee, it was the tax collector. The Pharisees were devoted to God’s covenant and to his law. They kept every last jot and tittle of it. But the tax collectors. When Jesus mentioned a tax collector, his whole audience recoiled. They were the worst of the worst. There were “sinners”—that means Jews who made lifestyle that rejected God’s covenant with them—but then there were tax collectors. They were a special kind of sinner. The scum of the earth. They got rich sucking up to the gentile dogs while swindling their own people. I expect that as Jesus described these two men, everyone had a similar mental picture. The Pharisee, dignified, wearing his fine clothes, making his way confidently up the steps to the temple complex, and striding just as confidently through the outer courts. Everyone knew him, everyone he passed greeted him respectfully as he made his way through the various gates and colonnades, further and further into the temple complex. But then the tax collector. Maybe it took him three times to make it up those steps, because twice he turned around, overwhelmed by guilt and shame. And on the far side of the court of the Gentiles, the soreg, the low wall that marked the boundary between the pure and impure, made him pause. He didn’t belong on the other side. But he’d already spent weeks tracking down the people he’d fleeced and making restitution to them. There was no going back. So he steeled himself and passed through, head down, trying to look unobtrusive, because he knew—he just knew—that everyone recognised him. And he went to one of the men selling lambs. And he picked one out, paid for it, took it in his arms—he wasn’t used to handling animals—and he got in line in the courtyard outside the sanctuary, waiting for a priest as the lamb struggled. And finally, a priest motioned him toward the altar. He presented the lamb, his sin offering, and as the priest held it, the tax collector laid his hands on it and slit its throat. And the priest collected the blood and poured it out at the base of the altar, then butchered the little lamb and burned its fat. Now he was pure. But there was still more to do. The tax collector went back out to the outer court and this time he bought a ram for a guilt offering. And a servant helped him with the ram as he, again, went back to stand in line for a priest. And, again, he placed his hands on the ram as the priest held it. And he killed it, and as with the lamb, the blood was poured out and the fat was burned. And his guilt was expiated. And now he could go and pray. And there he saw the Pharisee. The Pharisee had seen him, too. The Pharisee had seen him all along. As he’d chatted with a friend, the Pharisee had seen the tax collector buy his lamb. And he’d seem him again as he bought his ram. As he stood there praying, he’d seen the sacrifice. God may have forgiven the tax collector, but the Pharisee sure didn’t see him that way. He took a smug look back at the tax collector and, Jesus says, “he prayed in this way to himself, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: greedy, unjust, immoral, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get.’” And the tax collector. Jesus says he “stood a long way off, not even wanting to lift his eyes to heaven. He beat his breast and said, ‘God, be merciful to me, sinner that I am.’” He’d gone through the formal actions of forgiveness, but he knew that mere formalism would never see him reconciled to God. And so, after offering his sacrifices, he knelt humbly and prayed the words of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God—the psalm goes on—according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.” He knew. God isn’t a vending machine. Offering a lamb isn’t like pushing B4 and absolution drops into the slot for you to take. He knew the words of the psalm. David went on to sing, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” And so the tax collector knelt—and without any presumption—threw himself on the grace of God. And, as Jesus has said elsewhere, all of heaven rejoiced over this repentant sinner—even as the Pharisee scowled at him. And Jesus said to the people, “Let me tell you, he—the tax collector—was the one who went back to his home vindicated by God, not the other.” That had to make some people angry. It was one thing to grant—even if a little grudgingly—that there was something good about a repentant tax collector. Okay, he offered his lamb and his ram and his contrition was obviously real. But dissing the Pharisee? That was too much. But you see, this is exactly why Jesus told this story. Luke introduces this episode saying, “Jesus told this next parable against those who trusted in their own righteous standing and despised others.” And so Jesus explains: “Don’t you see? People who exalt themselves will be humbled, and people who humble themselves will be exalted.” Going to the temple, standing before the Lord, and singing out a litany of your own pious greatness—that’s not pleasing to the Lord. That’s a good way to find yourself humbled on the last day. And having this in mind that makes this bigger than the Pharisees. Maybe they were the worst offenders, but Jesus gets to the heart of Israel’s problem and exposes it. They knew they were “in”. They knew that when the Day of the Lord came, judgement would fall on everyone else and that they would be vindicated and go on to live in his presence in the age to come, they knew this because they faithfully bore all the markers of God’s covenant. They were circumcised, they kept the sabbath, and they ate the right foods—they kept God’s law. That meant they were righteous…or so they thought. But Jesus sort of asks here: “Where is your heart?” This is what the prophets had been asking Israel—and warning her about—for centuries. Reminding the people that formalism doesn’t cut it. Yes, God required sacrifices. He’d given them a law. But obedience was supposed flow from a humble heart overflowing with gratitude for God’s grace. It was supposed to be rooted in faith—faith in a God who had called a childless pagan named Abram and blessed him beyond anything he deserved; faith in a God who called a sorry and miserable group of slaves out of Egypt and blessed them beyond anything they deserved. But Israel got complacent, and comfortable, and forgot the source of her blessings. Instead of trusting God, she trusted in horses and chariots and kings—and even foreign gods. She thought mere formalism would satisfy God’s requirement for holiness. And her heart became hard, idolatrous, and self-righteous. So for all their love of torah, the hearts of the Pharisees were far from God—and in that, they represented most of the people in Israel. They exalted themselves and presumed upon God, when they should have been humble before him, thanking him for his grace. When judgement day came, they were ready to sing that litany of their righteousness: We’re not like other people. We fast and we tithe. We’re circumcised and we keep the sabbath. And God would high-five them and the invite them along to go smite the sinners and tax collectors and gentiles. Their hearts will filled with pride, not faith. Habakkuk was one of those prophets that had warned Israel in the days before the exile. “Look at the proud!” he said, “His spirit is presumptuous and is not right, but the righteous shall live by faith.” Pride and faith, Brothers and Sisters, are polar opposites. Habakkuk looked around him lamented to the Lord: O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,and you will not hear?Or cry to you “Violence!”and you will not save?Why do you make me see iniquity,and why do you idly look at wrong?Destruction and violence are before me;strife and contention arise.So the law is paralyzed,and justice never goes forth.For the wicked surround the righteous;so justice goes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1:1-4) Wickedness, idolatry, injustice—pride. Judah no longer trusted in the Lord and it showed. The heart of the people was far from God and those who were humble, who did lean on his grace were trampled under foot. And Habakkuk knew it couldn’t go on like this forever. He knew the Lord’s judgement on a wicked and faithless and proud people had to come soon. And so he cried out to the Lord and the Lord assured him: “The righteous shall live by faith.” In other words, the righteous will live the way they always do, regardless of circumstances: by faith in the grace and mercy and goodness of God—not in pride, but by faith.Pride is insidious. It can take any form in order to push out faith. The Pharisees were, in most ways, so close—but in them pride twisted faith itself. I wonder what Habakkuk would think of our world. We now have a whole season devoted to pride. At first it was a month, but now it just seems to go on and on: Pridetide, the unholy parody of Trinitytide. At least the Pharisees were prideful for their good works. Today, the wicked and perverted announce their sins with pride and their “ally” lackies signal their virtue as loudly as possible. And the wealthy and the powerful, governments and corporation and businesses big and small join in the litany of pride and woe to anyone who dares to dissent and on whom the scorn and wrath of the Pride Pharisees falls. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The proud are always convinced of their own righteousness and standing before God. And yet Jesus told so many stories in which the proud—so sure of their righteous standing—ended up finding themselves in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing their teeth, while the tax collectors and sinners—having discovered the mercy and grace of God, having repented in faith—found themselves welcomed into the feast. Again, pride and faith are polar opposites, mutually exclusive. And I think this is why the church, for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, has coupled this Gospel about the Pharisee and the tax collector with St. Paul’s affirmation of faith at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 15. He begins with the gospel, with the good news about Jesus. He writes: “Let me remind you, Brother [and Sisters], about the good news which I announced to you.” I love the way it works in Greek. Paul talks about the gospel that he gospelled to them. The gospel is the best news ever. It’s the news that changes everything. It’s the news that dispels—or, at any rate, it should dispel—any ideas we have about being proud of ourselves. Because Paul goes on and says, “You received this good news, and you’re standing firm on it, and you are saved through it, if you hold fast the message I announced—I gospelled—to you. Unless it was for nothing that you believed.” These were men and women who had stood on all sorts of things. Some of them were Jews and once they had stood on that: on their circumcision, on their sabbath keeping, on their general keeping of torah. Some of them were Gentiles. They’d stood on their pagan gods, or on the emperor, or on their philosophies. But then Paul came and he gospelled the gospel. He announced the good news and it changed everything. Or, at least it did for a time. And then pride started creeping back in. It’s insidious. And as pride crept in, it pushed faith in the good news out. And Paul says of that good news: “What I handed on to you at the beginning, you see, was what I received, namely this: The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, he was buried, he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, he was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve, then he was seen by over five hundred brothers and sisters all at once, most of whom are still with us, though some fell asleep, then he was seen by James, then by all the apostles.” The good news is that Jesus died and Jesus was raised and that it happened just as God had promised in the scriptures. Jesus led his people in a new exodus and in that exodus he revealed God’s mercy and grace and God’s power and might and glory. He revealed God’s faithfulness to his promises. In Jesus’ death sins are forgiven and in his resurrection the life of God, his new creation began. If the exodus from Egypt and all it revealed about God and its annual remembrance every year in the Passover could dispel Israel’s pride and fill the people with faith in their God, how much more should this new exodus from sin and death dispel our pride and bring us humbly in faith to God through Jesus? If we will only believe and trust. That was Paul’s problem. He was filled with pride. He refused and refused and refused. He persecuted the church. But as a testimony to the patient grace of God, Paul goes on. He writes, “And last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared even to me.” It’s hard to say exactly what he means here when he says “untimely born”. The word in question is only used this one time in the New Testament, but it refers to a premature birth. It could be a miscarriage or premature birth where the baby lives, but it could also refer to a child monstrously deformed by having been born premature. It may be that some people in Corinth who didn’t like Paul called him a monster because of his appearance and Paul is humble owning the accusation. But the key thing, what Paul’s getting at is the risen Jesus—not just a vision of Jesus but the real, live living Jesus—appeared to him last of all and Paul wants to stress that he didn’t deserve it. “I’m the least of the apostles,” he writes. “In fact, I don’t really deserve to be called ‘apostle’ at all, because I persecuted God’s church. But I am what I am because of God’s grace, and his grace to me wasn’t wasted.” Paul has been the epitome of the proud Pharisee. And then he met Jesus on the road to Damascus and every last bit of his pride came crashing down around him. Seeing Jesus alive was the proof that the gospel was true and if the gospel was true, none of the things in which Paul had prided himself mattered any more. The only thing that mattered was faith—faith in Jesus the Messiah who died and rose again. Paul knew he didn’t deserve that vision of Jesus. He didn’t deserve the grace of God. But there it was. God had given his son to die, so that Paul, the proud Pharisee could live. And ditto for everyone in the church in Corinth. God gave his son to die so that those other Jews there could live. He gave his son to die so that soldier proud of his devotion to Caesar or the prostitute proud of her devotion Aphrodite or the witch proud of her magic or the philosopher proud of his philosophy could live. Each one of them, confronted with the gospel had their pride dispelled and that same gospel filled them with faith in the living God and his son who died and rose again. And forever after they came to him in humility to fall on his grace and to praise him for his merciful lovingkindness. Even Paul, after all he accomplished as a missionary apostle, writes to them: “I am what I am because of the grace of God, and his grace to me wasn’t wasted. On the contrary, I worked harder than all of them—though it wasn’t me, but God’s grace which was within me. So whether it was me or them, that was the way we announced it, and that was the way you believed.” Paul won’t even take credit for what had happened in Corinth as a result of the gospel being preached. It wasn’t Paul’s skill or his reasoning or his apologetics. It was the grace of God. Brothers and Sisters, be captivated by the grace of God on display at the cross. There God displayed his glory and that glory ought to dispel every last bit of pride we have—whatever it is we take pride in. The gospel shines so brightly, it exposes the things in which we take pride as filthy rags in comparison. And when pride is gone, then the gospel—this good news of God’s saving grace, this good news about the God who humbled himself to take our form and to die for us so that we, his enemies can be his friends again, good news of the god who gave his own life to forgive our sins, that good news ought to fill us with faith overflowing. So Brothers and Sisters, hear the good news about Jesus this morning. How he died and rose again for you. Not because you are so great, but because he loves you—his precious creation so much—hear that good news in the scriptures and in the liturgy and when you come to his Table. Let it dispel all pride; be humbled by the gospel, and be filled instead with faith. In the midst of a broken word, faith in the living God will begin to set things to rights, not pride in ourselves. Faith in the living God, not pride in ourselves, is our real and lasting source of hope. Let’s pray: Lord God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for St. Bartholomew’s DayActs 5:12-16by William Klock
St. Bartholomew the Apostle. He’s pretty much a mystery. As far as the New Testament goes, Matthew, Mark, and Luke list him as one of the twelve. Beyond that, we have nothing. His name, Bar tholomais probably means “son of Tolomai”, but it may actually be his given name since when Matthew, Mark, and Luke want to refer to someone as “son of So-and-so” they use the Greek way of doing it not the Aramaic “bar So-and-so”. Since John never mentions Bartholomew, but does mention Nathanael, some think that the two are the same. I don’t find the argument very convincing. Various stories and legends describe him going off to evangelise India or Pontus or Armenia, amongst other places. When I consider sources and dates, I think the story of him taking the gospel to India is probably the most likely. Almost without a doubt he was martyred for proclaiming Jesus the Messiah—probably flayed and maybe then beheaded. He was an apostle—one of Jesus’ hand-picked messengers sent to herald the good news—so what we can confidently say is that that’s exactly what he did and that he probably died, very painfully, for the sake of his Lord. But since there are no scripture passages that tell us about him, our Epistle and Gospel today are simply passages that tell us about the apostles in general. So with that, I’d like to look at our Epistle—Acts 5:12-16. Here's, again, what Luke writes: Many signs and wonders were done by the hands of the apostles amongst the people. They were all together in Solomon’s Porch. None of the others dared to join them, though the people spoke highly of them. But more people, a crowd of both men and women, believed the Lord and were added to their number. They used to bring the sick into the streets and place them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on them as he went by. Crowds gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing people who were sick or troubled by unclean spirits. All of them were healed.One Saturday morning back in my computer tech days I found a woman sitting in her car outside the door when I showed up to open the store. She was from out of town and afraid that if she waited to call until we were open, there wouldn’t be time to fix her computer the same day. So she just showed up. And she had a box of doughnuts by way of apology—or bribe—really a little of both. So I got to work on the computer and the doughnuts while she watched and talked to me. They were really good doughnuts and I told her and she told me she’d made them herself. In fact, she owned a little doughnut shop in a tourist town an hour away. And she told me how she got started. There was only one place in town that sold doughnuts, but they didn’t make them. Their doughnuts were delivered from the city and were a day old—at least—by the time they were served. She opened up a little place in a converted camping trailer selling doughnuts and coffee to the tourists, but the coffee shop that had been there forever had a corner on the coffee and doughnut market, plus a primo location to catch the tourists. She was about to call it quits, when the owner of the garden shop across the street from the coffee shop came to see her. The garden shop and the coffee shop were in some kind of spat and the owner of the garden shop decided to invite this woman to park her trailer in their parking lot. See, the tourist industry there was all about tulips. People would come to see the tulips and the reason that old coffee shop was in such a good location was because the place across the street—the garden shop—sold tulip bulbs from the local growers. People came to see the tulips, then they went to the garden shop to buy bulbs, and finally ended up across the street for coffee and doughnuts. But coffee and doughnuts in the parking lot of the garden shop was more convenient than coffee and doughnuts across the street. It helped that her doughnuts were better and that they were fresh. So pretty soon all the people were crowding around her trailer for doughnuts instead of going to the old mainstay across the street. And, of course, the coffee shop owner wasn’t happy. He went to the town council and tried to have “mobile restaurants” banned from town—an early version of today’s restauranteurs trying to ban competition from food trucks. It didn’t work and this woman who’d brought her computer in eventually won the doughnut war. That’s a bit like what’s going on in Acts 5. Pay attention to the fact that this is Acts 5. This is right at the beginning of the story. These are the days and weeks just after Pentecost. And if Peter and James and John had gone back home to Galilee and done these signs and wonders, they would have drawn crowds just like Jesus had done there, but being so far away from Jerusalem, they probably wouldn’t have drawn the ire of the Jewish religious authorities. The Pharisees, of course, were always there scowling and scolding, but the Pharisees weren’t the gatekeepers. They were just a popular interest group. But Peter and the other apostles didn’t go back to Galilee. They stayed right in Jerusalem. Not only that, but Luke writes that they were meeting together in Solomon’s Porch. Solomon’s Porch was a great colonnade on the eastern side of the outer court of the temple. So the apostles would go to the temple to worship, but they would also spend their days gathered together, preaching, and doing signs and wonders in the outer court. This was where all the people were coming and going and it was probably near the house where the serving priests lived. It was a busy place. The temple wasn’t a church, but what the apostles were doing would be a bit like coming to church and then hanging out afterward on the front porch or in the rectory garden. And the crowds would gather. Some of them stopped to listen or to be healed on their way to or from the temple proper, but many people were coming just to hear the teaching of the apostles. Many people were coming, just like they’d come to Jesus, because they’d heard that Peter and the others were casting out demons, giving sight to the blind, and healing the lame. And I fully expect that Peter was repeating several times a day the same thing he preached on Pentecost—about Jesus fulfilling the promises of the old covenant and making a new and better one. They’d set up a doughnut stand right in front of the established coffee shop that had been there forever. And they were selling delicious, fresh doughnuts while the coffee shop was still trying to sell day-olds delivered yesterday. So you can understand that this raised the ire of the Jewish authorities. The apostles weren’t just tweaking the noses of some Pharisees in backwater villages. They were—you might say—stealing customers from the religious authorities and doing so right on their front porch. And let’s talk about the healings that were happening, because I’ve noticed that we’re very, very, very, very prone to taking passages like this out of context. It’s not just that the apostles were working a multitude of healing miracles. It gets pretty weird. Luke says that people would even lay out their sick loved ones just so Peter’s shadow would fall on them and they’d be healed. Every last one of them, Luke seems to be saying, was healed. The part about Peter’s shadow seems kind of over-the-top. I can’t help but think of various medieval stories of people being healed by the relics of saints or people stealing Baby Jesus’ diapers off Mary’s washline and being healed by them. And yet Peter’s shadow isn’t the only weird thing like this in Acts that we might be tempted to doubt. Luke also tells us later in Acts that people would take Paul’s handkerchiefs and use them to heal the sick. And there are people today who think that stuff like this should be the norm always and everywhere. There are scammers sending out vials of holy water or oil as a cure-all and televangelists who will wave their jackets at a line-up of people and claim they’ve been healed. And if you don’t experience miracles like this in your own life or in your own church, well, they’ll shame you and tell you that you lack faith. A few weeks ago someone sent me some commentary about a new “worship” song that came out of one of those sorts of places. The song calls for revival and courage and strength and faith, which are all good things and all things the church today often lacks, but then the heart of the song is a prayer for a new Pentecost. They don’t see the sort of miraculous happenings today that we see in Acts 5 and they think that what we need is another Pentecost. What they’re saying is that the modern church—or at least mainstream churches that don’t do the things they claim to do—lack the Holy Spirit. And I cringed. That’s no different than saying that because some Christians still walk in sin, we need Jesus to die again. No. A thousand times, no! Just like Jesus death and resurrection, Pentecost has already happened. It was a one-time event. We don’t need another one. What we need is to live as the people, as the community, as the church born that day when God poured out his Spirit. And, in some cases, we need to read scripture better so that we don’t set unrealistic expectations. Remember, Brothers and Sisters, miracles are acts of God, not acts of men and women. If God wants us to see miracles, nothing is going to stop him. If he could act through a pagan prophet like Balaam, he can act through even the most lukewarm Christian. Maybe the problem is that we’ve misunderstood what God was doing through the apostles in the book of Acts. Remember that context is everything, so let’s look at this story about the apostles in context. When Jesus had risen from the grave a few week earlier, he inaugurated God’s new creation. He was the firstborn of the resurrection. God’s new life went out like a shockwave from the empty tomb on Easter. And that new life, that new creation met the disciples of Jesus on Pentecost. And God wanted it be clear, he wanted the world to see that in Jesus and in this new covenant people who identified with Jesus, his kingdom, his new creation was being born. And so, first with Jesus and then with the apostles and those first believers, God did amazing things so that no one would or could mistake what was happening. Remember the people in the gospels, people like Nicodemus who said to Jesus, “No one can do the things you do unless he’s from God.” Jesus’ signs and wonders validated his messiahship. And now, as we get into Acts, we see that God wanted to make sure that when those first Christians started telling people the good news that Jesus had risen from the dead and that new creation had begun, they had his witness, they had these signs and wonders to go along with their preaching and their actions. But it’s wouldn’t be like that forever. Miracles would stop being noteworthy if they happened all the time. We really need to pay attention to the big biblical story here. Miracles aren’t a common thing in that story. They cluster around the times when God does something new. Think of the exodus from Egypt. The biggest cluster of miracles in the Old Testament is found in the Exodus: from the burning bush, to the plagues sent on Egypt, to the parting of the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army, to the water from the rock and the manna in the wilderness. But it doesn’t stop there. That generation knew miracles like no other. They saw the Lord in the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire, leading them to the promised land. They knew the bronze serpent Moses raised up. They knew the miraculous battles won for them by the Lord. And when they marched into Canaan, the Lord dried up the Jordan. He won their battles and toppled cities like Jericho. And it happened so that Israel would powerfully know his goodness and his glory and then pass that knowledge to future generations. And, too, the Lord did these thing so that the nations would take note. The God of Israel is powerful and glorious and cares for his people. He’s unlike any other god. But then take note: those future generations were expected to know the goodness and the faithfulness and glory of God, not through ongoing daily miracles, but through the witness of their fathers and through the scriptures. And, too, each new generation bore in its flesh the sign of circumcision, the sign of God’s covenant with them and of his faithfulness. And every year the families of Israel gathered together and ate the Passover and participated themselves in the glorious events of the Exodus. The Lord took his people from the witness of miracles to the witness of what we might call the common means of grace. Miracles convinced a people who didn’t know the Lord to trust and obey him. But the covenant people who then knew him, who lived with him in their midst, who had his word, who bore his covenant sign and ate his covenant meal—they didn’t need miracles to know the Lord was worthy of their trust and obedience. And, Brothers and Sisters, the Lord followed exactly this pattern in the new exodus. Jesus’ ministry and then the ministry of the apostles were full of the miraculous. Jesus himself and then the Spirit are the evidence of God’s goodness and faithfulness and glory, but as Jesus led his people—not this time into Canaan, but into his new creation—he made that new creation manifestly real as he made all the sad things of this world become untrue, as he undid the real-world consequences of sin and death and as he showed how he had defeated the devils at the cross. In the book of Acts God shows the world very dramatically what the church is—that it is the beachhead of his kingdom, his new creation in the world. His church is the new covenant community, the temple in which he now dwells, the steward of both his Spirit and his gospel who will spread his new creation wherever it—wherever they—wherever we—go. Acts is about God’s formation of his new people. Consider that the passage just before our Epistle today is the story of Ananias and Sapphira. It’s telling that people will think miraculous healings should be everyday occurrences, but I’ve never heard anyone suggest that God striking down people who lie to the church should be just as ordinary. If it were, we’d have a lot of dead faith-healers. But we shouldn’t expect that to happen. The Lord only needed to strike down a couple like Ananias and Sapphira once. The point isn’t that this is what happens to people who lie to the church. The point is that this one frightening miracle should—and I think it has—reverberated down through the generations with the message that God expects holiness of his people. Acts 5 begins with that call to holiness and it makes it very plain that a church that lacks holiness, even if it isn’t literally struck dead, will die. Jesus will take away its lampstand. We’ve seen that through history and we see it today. So, after establishing that holiness is an essential characteristic of the people of God (and not, that’s what much of Exodus is about as well), Chapter 5 then continues with these signs and wonders done by the apostles to back up their proclamation that in Jesus new creation has begun. Again, the church doesn’t ordinarily need miracles to show God’s new creation. We show the world God’s new creation as we live the fruit of the Spirit, as we bring the reconciling power of the gospel to broken people and broken relationships, and as we work to bring things like mercy and justice and life to a sin-broken world. But in those early days, the Jewish authorities could say that’s just what they were already doing. So God gave better doughnuts to the apostles. And that’s then followed by the arrest of the apostles by the temple authorities. They were angry because they’d set up a doughnut shop on their front porch and were stealing their customers. Just as they’d crucified Jesus to say, “He’s not really the Messiah,” they have Peter and the others arrested to send the message, “Despite their miracles, these men are frauds. Don’t believe them when they claim to be a new temple. That’s blasphemy!” But do you remember what happened? That night as the apostles sat in their jail cells an angel appeared, set them free, and sent them back to the temple court to keep preaching the gospel. The next day the priests met to decide what to do with the apostles. They sent for them to be brought from the jail and that’s when the guards reported they were gone. And that’s when someone came running into the council chamber saying, “Look! The guys you arrested and put in prison are right now in the temple preaching.” It's God, again, backing up his newly established church with miracles. When he raised Jesus from the dead, he overturned the false verdict of Pilate and the Jews and this time he overturned the false verdict of the priests and validates the good news Peter was preaching. And the apostles took it to heart. They kept preaching and preaching and preaching—in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and eventually to the world—and all but John were martyred. They were killed for their faithful proclamation of Jesus. But they knew the same God who had raised Jesus from the dead would one day raise them. Death had no more power over them than the demons or sickness or prison doors. And their story was told through the generations of Christians to come: to Christians in Rome, to Christians in pagan nations, to Christians living under Communism, to Christian missionaries who gave their lives to proclaim to the good news to hostile people. They didn’t need to experience miracles first hand. Just as Isreal knew the stories of the first exodus from Egypt, these Christian brothers and sisters knew the stories of the second exodus from sin and death. And as Israel bore God’s covenant sign of circumcision and celebrated the Passover and remembered God’s goodness and faithfulness and glory, so those Christians bore themselves the sign of baptism and celebrated the Lord’s Supper and not only knew the goodness and faithfulness and glory of God, but they also knew—as we should too—that we are the embodiment of God’s new creation, we are the stewards of his Spirit and his gospel, we are the beachhead of God’s new creation. Miracles or not, what we need to remember is that the power to defeat the enemies of God is the power of his gospel and the power of his Spirit. It always has been and it always will be. Let’s pray: O almighty and eternal God, who gave your apostle Saint Bartholomew grace truly to believe and to preach your Word: Grant that your Church may love that Word, and both preach and receive it; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after TrinitySt. Luke 15:11-32by William Klock
All the tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to listen to Jesus, writes St. Luke at the beginning of Chapter 15.But the Pharisees and the scribes—the legal experts—were grumbling. “This fellow welcomes sinners!” they said. “He even eats with them!” (Luke 15:1-2) You can just picture these angry Pharisees, their faces red, veins popping in their foreheads, grumbling with each other. They’d heard troubling things about Jesus, but then he’d come to town and they listened while he preached in the synagogue and they were pleasantly surprised. They nodded along with him. And they watched as he healed sick people and cast out demons. People were saying Jesus was the Messiah. Maybe he really was. Maybe the bad things people were saying about him weren’t true after all. But then the party last night. Matthew, the guy who collected taxes for the Romans, the traitor to his people, they’d heard rumours that he’d taken up with Jesus and last night he threw a big party and invited all his scummy, sinner friends. A bunch of JINOs—you know, Jews-in-name-only. Not a single one of them kept the law: tax collectors, prostitutes, greedy businessmen who supplied the Roman army. Rumour had it they were eating bacon-wrapped prawns! And Jesus was there. They raged. How could a guy seem so holy, preach such great things, know the scriptures so well, and even work miracles that only God could do, and then go and party with sinners? I mean, yeah, there were also rumours that Jesus was telling his kingdom stories at the party and someone even said that some of those sinners had decided to repent and sin no more. But that just made these Pharisees angrier. If Jesus were really the Messiah, if he'd really come to usher in God’s kingdom, he should be calling down fire and brimstone on those tax collectors and their sinner friends. No, they grumbled to each other, this won’t do. This won’t do at all. So Jesus answered their angry grumbles with three stories. The first story is about a shepherd who loses one of his hundred sheep. He secures the ninety-nine in the fold and sets off into the night to find the lost one. When he finds that lost sheep, he carries it home on his shoulders, and rejoices with the other shepherds. What was precious had been lost, but was now found. In the second story Jesus tells of a poor old woman who loses one of ten silver coins. They were probably her dowry. She can’t find the coin anywhere. She turns her whole house upside-down in her frantic search for the precious coin. Eventually she sweeps the house and finds it. In her great joy she runs to tell her friends so that they can rejoice with her. And Jesus likens the joy of the shepherd who found the lost sheep and the joy of the woman who found the lost coin to the joy in heaven when a lost sinner repents. Jesus’ knew exactly how to poke the Pharisees. It’s that last bit about the rejoicing in heaven that really drove the point home. The Pharisees—like everyone else in Israel—knew that the world is not as it should be. They knew the story of how the Lord had created the world and then created Adam and Eve to live in his presence and to steward his temple. Heaven and earth were supposed to overlap. God and humans were supposed to live together. But sin had ruined everything. Sin drove a wedge between heaven and earth and God and man and now everything is broken. But then God had called and created this special people—Israel—to be his people and to live in his presence. When they were lost in Egypt, like the shepherd in the story, he sought them out and rescued them. And in the middle of their community stood the temple. And in the most holy place in the temple was the ark. It represented God’s covenant with them. And it was his footstool. And on it rested his presence in a cloud of glory. Or that’s how it was before the exile. But the temple was the one place on earth where heaven and earth still overlapped, the one place where sinful people—purified from their sins—could enter God’s presence. That’s why the Pharisees lived like they did. They weren’t priests, but they lived as if they were—aways ritually pure, always ready to be in God’s presence. They were the original on-earth-as-in-heaven people. They loved what God loved. They rejoiced when heaven rejoiced. Or so they thought. Because that’s what Jesus is getting at here when he talks about heaven rejoicing over a single sinner who repents. In Jesus, the God of Israel was searching out and finding his lost sheep, his lost coins and all of heaven was rejoicing. So this is a very pointed rebuke. They’re angry because they think Jesus is doing it wrong and Jesus flips it all around: No, actually, they’re the ones who have got it all wrong. They think they have the heart of God, but they don’t. And now Jesus has their attention. Their faces are angry and red. They’re about to blow their tops. So Jesus seizes the moment to really drive his point home with a third story. Once there was a man who had two sons. The younger son said to the father, “Father, give me my share of the property.” So he divided up his livelihood between them. Not many days later the younger son turned his share into cash, and set off for a far-off country, where he spent his share in having a riotous good time.Jesus describes this younger son as a truly despicable character. A father could give his sons their inheritance early, but only a truly despicable son would demand it. And when a father did give his sons their inheritance early, it was expected that they would continue to give their father the proceeds of the land. Dutiful fathers take care of their sons and then dutiful sons take care of their fathers. But there’s nothing dutiful about this kid. He not only demands his inheritance early, but then he sells the land, takes the cash, and goes to a far-off country. He cares nothing for his family, for his brother, or for his father. And then, on top of that, he abandons his people. He’s leaving Israel—the place where God’s people live in his presence—to go to a pagan gentile land where they’ve never heard of the torah or the sabbath. He’ll never set foot in the temple again. And here’s Jesus’ point. This kid is the epitome of a “sinner”. Everyone trips up from time to time, everyone sins, but when the Pharisees talked about “sinners” they were talking about people who chose sin over faithfulness—people who made a choice abandon God’s law, God’s covenant, and God’s people. They lived lives that were incompatible with being a faithful Jew. But it gets worse. Jesus goes on: When he had spent it all—everyone saw that coming!—a severe famine came on that country and he found himself destitute. So he went and attached himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into the fields to feed his pigs. He longed to satisfy his hunger with the pods the pigs were eating, and no one would give him anything.The boy abandoned God and now, to all appearances, God has abandoned him. He squandered his inheritance on prostitutes and loose living and now he finds himself feeding pigs. For a Jew to have anything to do with pigs—the epitome of uncleanness—that was bad enough, but to actually be hungry enough to eat their food—well—Jesus has conjured up an image of complete moral and physical degradation. This is rock bottom. Some of the Pharisees were thinking, “Serves him right! That’s justice.” I wonder, though, if others weren’t starting to clue into where Jesus was going with this. Remember that these were people who had concluded they were still living in exile. Their ancestors had worshipped idols and forsaken God’s law. Israel was God’s son, but they were a son who had taken advantage of his father’s patience and mercy and goodness. And so they had found themselves in exile, in Babylon, in a pagan land, with nothing and far from God. I suspect that at least some of the scribes and Pharisees were beginning to hear their own story being told by Jesus. So finally, Jesus says, the son smartened up: He came to his senses. “Just think,” he said to himself, “There are all my father’s hands with plenty to eat and here I am, starving to death. I’ll get up and go to my father and I’ll say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I don’t deserve to be called your son and longer. Make me like one of your hired hands.’” And he got up and went to his father. I trust that, again, at least some of the scribes and Pharisees saw themselves in this, because this is what their ancestors had done. Sitting by the waters of Babylon, first they wept for all they’d lost, and then they wept in repentance for all their unfaithfulness. And this is what the Pharisees were still doing: trying to be faithful to the law, urging everyone else to be faithful to the law, in the hopes that the Father would take them back. This is why they were so angry at the tax collectors and sinners. They were calling everyone to national repentance in the hopes that the Lord would return to them and set the world to rights, but the tax collectors and sinners refused to get with the programme—they were holding everything back. But, too, Jesus’ last two stories about the lost sheep and the lost coin were still echoing in their ears. The tax collectors and sinners were the lost sheep of Israel and Jesus had been sent by the Lord to find them. I see one of the Pharisees putting his hands to his heas in frustration and thinking, “It’s like Jesus is saying we’re all lost sheep, we’re all lost coins, we’re all lost sons of the Father!” They weren’t ready to accept that. And then the father in the story. Jesus says: While still a long way off, his father saw him and his heart was stirred with love and pity. He ran to him, hugged him tight, and kissed him. Everything in the image goes against the image of the ancient near eastern patriarch. The father should be dignified, stern, disciplined, ready to carry out justice, but instead Jesus gives us a picture of this father—so incredibly undignified—running to meet his son, his robes blowing behind him, his sandals slap-slap-slapping as he ran. And instead of running to his son to give him a kick in the pants and beating for being such a lout, he loves him. The son tries to begin the spiel he’s been rehearsing the whole of his long journey: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I don’t deserve to be called your son any longer.” But his father cuts him off and calls for his servants: “Hurry! Bring the best clothes and put them on him! Put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet! And bring the calf that we’ve fattened and kill it. Let’s eat and have a party! This son of mine was dead and is alive again! He was lost and now he’s found!” And they began to celebrate.Jesus has this brilliant way of telling stories. First, it’s so obviously about the tax collectors and sinners but then somehow he manages to carry on with the story so that it becomes about both the tax collectors and sinners and the whole people of Israel longing for the return of their heavenly Father. And then he reminds everyone that their Father is full of love and mercy and grace, ready to pour out his blessings and to throw a party for anyone who repents. It’s hard to imagine that at least some of the scribes and Pharisees didn’t get it. “Oh man. He’s talking about all of us,” they were thinking. But still, some were obstinate. They didn’t get it. “What a stupid father,” they were thinking. “He should beat his lout of a son, disown him, and tell him he never wants to see him again.” And that’s why there’s a place for everyone in Jesus’ story. He says, The older son was out in the fields. When he came home and got near to the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the servants and asked what was going on. “Your brother’s come home!” he said. “And your father has thrown a great party. He’s killed the fattened calf. Because he’s got him back safe and well!” Well, the older son flew into a range and refused to go in.Sound familiar? I expect that as he said this, Jesus was looking straight at those Pharisees who were still boiling with rage. Then his father came out and pleaded with him. “Look here,” he said to his father, “I’ve been slaving for you all these years. I’ve never disobeyed a single commandment of yours. And you never even gave me a young goat so I could have a party with my friends. But when this son of yours comes home, once he’s finished gobbling up your livelihood with whores, you kill the fattened calf for him.”Jesus has a way with words and here he puts the words of the Pharisees into the mouth of this angry older brother who won’t let go of his grudge. They’ve been slaving away for the Lord all these years. They’ve never disobeyed a single one of his commandments. And when the Messiah comes—assuming Jesus really is the Messiah—he goes and throws a party with the tax collectors and sinners instead of with them! And so Jesus says to them in the words of the father to the older son: “My son, you’re always with me. Everything I have belongs to you. But we had to celebrate and be happy. This brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and now he’s found.” Jesus gets at their hypocrisy. Notice how the older brother refuses to own his brother. He yells at his father about “this son of yours”, but the father reminds him here at the end, “this brother of yours was dead and is alive again…this brother of yours. This is the funny thing with the Pharisees—and they weren’t the only ones in Israel who thought this way: on the one hand they were angry with the tax collectors and sinners. They knew that these people belonged to God. They knew they were lost. Their sins were, they thought holding back the rest of Israel from experiencing the Lord’s return and an end to their long exile. But on the other hand, they disowned the tax collectors and sinners. They longed and prayed for God’s judgement to fall on them, right along with the gentiles. They refused to acknowledge them as lost brothers. And now they’re mad because Jesus has come to bring them back to the sheepfold. They should be rejoicing. Your brother who was dead is alive again! You’re brother! I’m sure that resonated with the Pharisees. Think of Ezekiel and his vision of the valley of dry bones. Those dry bones represented Israel. She had forsaken the covenant and the Lord had disciplined her by sending her into exile. But the Lord promised that one day his word would come and restore his wayward and faithless people to life. What was dead would be made alive again. And not just in some figurative sense. One of the central doctrines of the Pharisees was the dearly held belief that one day the Lord would literally raise the dead of Israel to life in his presence. One day he would set everything to rights, beginning with his people. One day he would take what was dead and make it live again. And by way of the parable, Jesus is now saying to the Pharisees that he’s the one who’s come to do it. But he hasn’t just come to reward them with the life of the age to come, he’s come to offer that life even to the prodigals of Israel. Prostitute and Pharisees, both are part of the people of God, both are the Lord’s children, both belong equally to him. The Lord had rescued the ancestors of the prostitute from Egypt just as he’d rescued the ancestors of the Pharisees. He desires life for the prostitute just as much as he does for the Pharisee. That’s what they need to wrap their heads around, because no amount of law keeping will get them into the kingdom if they don’t share God’s heart. You see, judgement was coming for Israel, but not quite like the Pharisees thought. They thought that in the end, the Lord would recognise his people by their faithfulness to the law—to circumcision and sabbath and diet. That meant the tax collectors and sinners were out. But the fact was—and this is the point of Jesus’ parables—that when judgement came on Jerusalem and on Judah, what would mark out the people of God was not faithfulness to the law, but faithfulness to Jesus the Messiah. Jesus had taken on Israel’s identity, he had picked up her failed mission, he died the death that she deserved, and when he rose from the grave and sent God’s Spirit, he formed a new family, a new covenant people not centred this time on law, but on himself. As St. John wrote, “To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). And, Brothers and Sisters, at the heart of Jesus’ ministry was mercy—and God the Father rejoiced in heaven to see that mercy at work amongst his people, as his lost sons and daughters were found, as what had been dead became alive again. Brothers and Sisters, do want to share God’s heart? Then hear Jesus’ story. It’s about the loving and merciful faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus as he fulfils his promises to his people. It was that faithfulness, revealed in Jesus and proclaimed by those first Jewish believers, that brought the first gentiles into the Church. And that, itself, was a fulfilment of the Lord’s promises. This new people of God, this new Israel centred on faith in Jesus, brought the nations to the Lord, to the God of Israel, in awe, in reverence, and in faith. Because membership in this new family was based not on law but on faith in Jesus made it possible for the nations—for you and I—to become children of God and fellow heirs with the natural brothers and sisters of Jesus. And this opens that category of “the lost” to encompass an entire world. In the parable Jesus was talking about the lost of Israel, but through Jesus the sort of restoration that the Lord sought with the lost of Israel has been opened to all of humanity. You and I ought to see the lost of our own world, people created to bear the image of God, but lost to him because of their sin, you and I ought to see those people and desire for them the same mercy and restoration that God has shown to us through Jesus. We ought not only to rejoice when we see that mercy at work, the joy of our own experience of God’s mercy ought to be sending us out to the lost. But all too often we become blasé about what God has done for us. We lose the joy we once found in our salvation. Or, for those of us who have never known life apart from God’s covenantal mercy—like so many in Israel—we take his mercy for granted. Brothers and Sisters, take time to think on what the Lord has done for us in Jesus and rejoice. Make a point of it. As you read scripture. When you come to the Lord’s Table. Make a point of it. Rejoice and stand in awe at the mercy of God. And, I think, if we do that, we will avoid the stance of the Pharisees who had forgotten the nature of God’s mercy, who chafed at Jesus offering the mercy of God to sinners while they worked so hard to be faithful. We’re prone to the same sort of thing. We forget the mercy of God. We forget his forgiveness. We forget that as much as God is pleased with us when we are faithful and pleased with our good works, we too are only part of this family because of his mercy and his forgiveness. And then we start looking at the lost, not as people to be found, but as people who deserve their comeuppance, who need God’s judgement rather than his mercy. And, in that, we forget what the kingdom of God is all about. Brothers and Sisters, think on the mercy of God and rejoice. Come to his Table this morning and be reminded that he sent his Son at great cost to seek out the lost and to restore us to the fold. Here we see the faithfulness of God, a witness that has now brought you and I who were not even of that flock. A witness that has brought us in awe and wonder and in faith to Jesus the Messiah—a faith by which the Father has welcomed us, too, into the sheepfold. Rejoice in the mercies of God and carry that rejoicing to the lost that they, like us, might see and know themselves the mercies of God at work in Jesus. Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, we pray, to know your mercy and never to take your salvation for granted. Make us faithful stewards of your mercies that we might rejoice as you do at the restoration of the lost; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after TrinityMatthew 7:15-21by William Klock
In 597 b.c. the Babylonians conquered Judah. The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, ordered the deportation of the ruling elite of Jerusalem. That meant King Jehoiachin, most of the royal family, and thousands of others including many of the priests. That included Ezekiel. He had been born into one of the important priestly families. He was twenty-five years old. Had everything gone as expected, had everything gone to plan, he would have been ordained a priest at the age of thirty and gone on to serve before the presence of the Lord in the temple. Instead, with the rest of those Jewish exiles, he sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept as he remembered Zion—as one of the psalmists put it. And he wondered how he and his people could ever sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. And then, on Ezekiel’s thirtieth birthday, he had a vision. He saw the Lord enthroned in glory and the Lord commissioned him. Instead of being a priest, the Lord ordained Ezekiel a prophet—a prophet to the exiles and to the people of Judah. Ezekiel was to announce to his people why they had been defeated and carried off into exile. He was to accuse his people of their idolatry and of their unfaithfulness to the Lord’s covenant. And he was also to announce that the Lord’s judgement on Judah had only just begun. And so Ezekiel’s ministry began with a series of acted out prophecies. He acted out the coming destruction of Jerusalem with miniatures. He lay on his side for a year, acting the part of the scapegoat, while eating food cooked over human waste. He cut off his hair with a sword. Again, to announce the coming judgement on Jerusalem. And all for nought. The Lord told him that no one would listen and they didn’t—because Israel’s heart was hardened against the Lord. But just because the people wouldn’t listen didn’t mean Ezekiel’s job as a prophet was done. The Lord gave him another vision, this time of the temple in Jerusalem. He saw his people worshipping idols in the temple court and then he saw the Lord’s glory—the cloud that rested on the ark of the covenant in the holy of holies—he saw that cloud of glory depart from the temple. And the Lord announced to him that the temple would be destroyed. Again, because of Israel’s idolatry and lack of covenant faithfulness. Ezekiel accused his people of being like a rebellious wife and like a rampaging lion. He described Israel and Judah as two shameless and reprobate prostitute sisters. And he dragged his people into the divine courtroom and put them on trial before the Lord. They could beg for mercy all they wanted, but the time for mercy had passed. God’s goodness and faithfulness demanded that he judge his people. For centuries he had shown them his patient mercy, but now is was time for justice. And that’s when word reached Ezekiel that Jerusalem had fallen, the temple had been destroyed, and that the Lord’s judgement had come on Judah. But that wasn’t the end of Ezekiel’s ministry. The Lord would not leave his people in judgement forever. If being faithful to his word meant judgement on their unfaithfulness, it also meant restoring them and making them faithful. And so Ezekiel’s prophetic messaged shifted from judgement to hope. Through him the Lord promised the restoration of his people under a new king, under a David-like messiah. And the Lord promised to breathe his Spirit into his people to take away their heart of stone and to give them a heart of flesh. He gave Ezekiel a vision of a valley of dry bones and commanded the prophet to speak his word over those bones. And the word of the Lord brought them back to life. It was a promise of new creation. But the wicked pagan nations still stood in the way of that new creation. And so the Lord also gave Ezekiel a series of visions in which he defeated the nations. And then, finally, Ezekiel had a vision of creation set to rights. That vision begins with a temple. Not the old temple, but a new one. A new one infinitely grander and more beautiful than even Solomon’s temple. And after being given a tour of this temple, Ezekiel has a vision of the Lord’s glory descending to fill it. It’s the Lord’s way of saying that he will not abandon his people forever. He will be with them again. And out of this temple’s gate flows a stream and as it flows down the mountain from the temple the stream turns into a great river. Wherever it flows trees and lush vegetation spring up. And eventually the river flow down into the desert and there it causes a lush garden to grow—Eden restored—a garden named “the Lord is there”. Now, everyone likes that last part. Everyone wants to hear and to claim for themselves the messages of hope. No one wants to hear the call to repentance and the warning of coming judgement. No one would listen to Ezekiel’s warnings. It’s not that they didn’t hear them—or see them. It was hard to miss the weird guy playing with action figures or hacking his hair off with a sword or laying on his side and cooking food over poop. They saw it all. But they refused to take it to heart. They were convinced their exile to Babylon was an accident of history, not the Lord’s judgement on their idolatry. But once Ezekiel’s prophecies of doom came true, I expect the people were hanging on his every last word of hope. That’s the test of a prophet, after all: does his word come to pass. Ezekiel’s did. And for that reason the people were still hanging onto his words when Jesus came, still looking for and longing for those divine promises to finally be fulfilled. Because judgement had happened as the prophet foretold, that restoration of the people, that new creation, that new life with God would happen just as surely too. It was just a matter of time. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that as Jesus preached he drew on the words of the old prophets like Ezekiel. But it was the same old thing all over again. The people gathered to hear Jesus preach good news. They flocked to him for healing and deliverance and miracles that showed the kingdom of God was breaking in. But they didn’t want to hear the warnings. They gasped when he told them that to see that coming kingdom, to know that garden called “the Lord is there”, they needed righteousness, they needed covenant faithfulness far beyond that of the scribes and Pharisees. Judgement was coming on Judah again and Jesus was there to create a new people, a new community that would have that righteousness, that would be salt and light, that would be a city on a hill, that would come out the other side of God’s judgement to see his kingdom. The people in Ezekiel’s day didn’t want to hear that part of the message and neither did the people in Jesus’ day. Ed Stetzer likes to say, “If you want everyone to like you don’t be a pastor, go sell ice cream.” I think Ezekiel (and Jesus) would say the same thing about being a prophet. Our Gospel today is taken from the closing words of Jesus’ sermon on the mount. Jesus has spoken hard words—just as Ezekiel had. But there was reason to hope. In him the Lord was finally doing that new thing everyone had been waiting for since the prophets, but Jesus was also condemning their covenant faithlessness and announcing coming judgement. And so he warns the people—this is Matthew 7:13—“Go in by the narrow gate. The gate that leads to destruction, you see, is nice and wide and the road going there has plenty of room. Lots of people go that way. But the gate leading to life is narrow, and the road going there is a tight squeeze. Not many people find their way through.”In other words, “Yes, I know what I’ve been saying is hard. Yes, I know it means repentance and turning away from sin and pursuing covenant faithfulness with everything you’ve got and even then you’re going to need God’s help, but that’s the way to life. Listen to me, because judgement is coming again and it’s coming soon. (He later told the disciples: before this generation passes away!) And if you refuse to listen and if you keep going down the wide and easy path you’re on, you’re as sure to meet that judgement as the people of Ezekiel’s day did. “Watch out for false prophets!” Jesus says. There are people invested in the ways and the ideas and the systems of the present evil age. They don’t want to see you repent and turn back to the Lord. They know everyone loves ice cream and they’re going to show up with a cart full of it and everyone’s going to listen to them—because ice cream is a lot more fun than calls to repentance. “They will come to you dressed like sheep, but inside they are hungry wolves.” Jesus draws on Ezekiel’s condemnation of the leaders of Israel and Judah. They were like wolves in the midst of the flock, tearing apart the sheep, shedding blood, all for their own gain. It’s always the way of false prophets. They proclaim what people want to hear. When the Lord desires repentance, the false prophets proclaim the status quo. When the Lord desires sacrifice, the false prophets proclaim health and wealth. When the Lord warns of judgement, the prophets proclaim “Peace! Peace!” And so Jesus warns in verse 16, “You’ll be able to tell them by the fruit they bear: you don’t find grapes growing on thorn-bushes, do you, or figs on thistles? Well, in the same way, good trees produce good fruit and bad trees produce bad fruit. Actually, good trees can’t produce bad fruit, nor can bad ones produce good fruit. Every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit is cut down and thrown on the fire. So you must recognise them by their fruits.”There’s never been any shortage of false prophets in the world. In the Old Testament the test of a prophet was whether or not what he said came to pass. The punishment for false prophecy was death. Brothers and Sisters, claiming to speak the very word of the Lord is serious business. His words are life. When people claim to speak for the Lord, but speak falsely, it gives people reason to doubt his actual word. But people took it lightly in Ezekiel’s day, people took it lightly in Jesus’ day, and far too many people take it lightly today. The Old Testament test of a prophet still stands: Do his words come to pass? But when Jesus warned the people, there wasn’t time for that. Judgement was coming soon. So Jesus gives another way: look at the fruit. It was a good test then and it’s a good test now. When someone says, “Thus says the Lord,” look at that person’s life. Does their life show the fruit of the Spirit? Do you see things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and self-control? Or are they just selling ice cream and getting rich? It’s always amazing to me how many people flock to men and women who claim to work miracles and who claim to speak for God, but the miracles are false, the words are heresy, and the things they say never come to pass. But it is a testimony to just how much we like ice cream, how much we’d rather hear “Peace, peace!” than a message about repentance. Look at the fruit. If the fruit is bad, the tree is bad and there’s only one destination for bad trees: the fire—judgement. Don’t end up in the same place. Look for the fruit. I know the language of the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit is something that developed later with Paul, but I think it’s worth noting that Jesus talks here about fruit. Too many people look for signs—what Paul would call “gifts” of the Spirit. But even Paul warns these things can be faked. Signs and wonders aren’t necessarily evidence of a true prophet. Fruit is the evidence. And Jesus goes on, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven; only people who do the will of my Father in heaven. On that day lots of people will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name, didn’t we? We cast out demons in your name. We performed lots of powerful deeds in your name.’ Then I will have to say to them, ‘I never knew you. You’re a bunch of evildoers. Go away from me.’”“On that day.” That’s language right out of the Old Testament prophets about the coming day of the Lord, about the day of judgement when the Lord will punish evil and vindicate the righteous. A lot of people thought that just being an Israelite and having the Lord as their God gave them a place in the coming kingdom, but Jesus says that, no, that’s not enough. In fact, he narrows it down even further: a lot of people will think that because they’ve thought of Jesus as their Lord and done amazing things in his name, that they’ll have a place in the kingdom—and not even that will cut it. It's important, I think, to remember here that Jesus isn’t talking directly to us. He was talking to First Century Jews and the judgement he was warning about was the judgement that would come forty years later when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. Those who would survive, those who would see the birth of the kingdom, would be those who truly identified themselves with Jesus in faith. The people who followed him in the new exodus through baptism and into whom God would pour his Spirit. They’re the ones—not the ones who merely had an appreciation for what Jesus was teaching or thought of him as a great prophet—but the ones who truly recognised the God of Israel at work in Jesus the Messiah and who became part of his family, this new Israel redeemed by his death and given a new heart of flesh by the Holy Spirit. They would be the dry bones that lived again. They would be the ones whom God would deliver from the coming judgement. They’re the ones who would live to testify to the nations of the glory of the God of Israel revealed in the cross. They’re the ones who would live to proclaim the good news to the nations. And so Jesus concludes his sermon with a final allusion to Ezekiel. In verse 24 he says, “So, then, everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. Heavy rain fell; floods rose up; the winds blew and beat on that house. It didn’t fall, because it was founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t do them—they will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. Heavy rain fell; floods rose up; the winds blew and battered the house—and down it fell. It fell with a great crash.”Ezekiel warned the false prophets about the wall they’d built. It’s a pretty clear reference to the temple just as Jesus’ “house” here is, too. The false prophets had built a wall and they’d whitewashed it and it looked great. It looked like a wall for the ages. But when the Lord’s judgement came, when he sent the rains and the floods and the winds, that wall came crashing down and exposed its builders as the unfaithful and idolatrous false prophets they really were. The same thing would happen again. The people of Jerusalem and Judea looked up to the temple as their hope, but Jesus condemns them. Not this time as whitewashed walls, but as whitewashed tombs. They went through the motions of faithfulness, they maintained their ritual purity, they proclaimed their love for and their loyalty to God, but their hearts were far from him. Because God’s heart was in Jesus. Jesus had to come to fulfil the prophecies of hope and life. He’d come to build God’s new temple. Not one whitewashed with false piety, but one washed with his own blood. Listen to Peter’s call in his first epistle: “Come to him, to that living stone. Men rejected him, but God chose him and values him very highly! Like living stones yourselves, you are being built up into a spiritual house—a new temple!—to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices that will be pleasing to God through Jesus the Messiah. That’s why it stands in scripture: ‘Look! I am setting up in Zion a chosen, precious cornerstone. Believe in him! You will not be ashamed.’”The false prophets, the wolves in sheep’s clothing, the grifters selling spiritual ice cream, they whitewash false piety, they whitewash selfishness, they whitewash heresies—they whitewash the ugly things of the world. They proclaim “Peace, peace” in the face of coming judgement. Brothers and Sisters, don’t be duped. Listen to Jesus. Stay focused on Jesus. Think of Peter’s confession later in Matthew’s Gospel: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God!” This is the rock on which Jesus has built his church—his people, his new temple—and not even the gates of hell will overpower it. Never forget that this is the temple in which his Spirit dwells. Never forget that this the temple from which God’s new life flows to the world. Never forget that this temple is the source of God’s new creation. And it’s built on the rock and nothing but the rock that is Jesus. Come to the Lord’s Table this morning and be reminded that in Jesus, God has given his own life for you—for us. Come to the Lord’s Table and be reminded that in Jesus, God has breathed his life into our dry bones and made us live again. Come to the Lord’s Table and be reminded that he’s made us the precious stones of his temple. Then be that Spirit-filled and life-giving water that Ezekiel saw flowing out from the temple into the world carrying God’s life, carrying his new creation. Let’s pray: Gracious Father, in Jesus you have washed us clean from sin and by your Spirit you have renewed our hearts and made the priests of your new temple. Guard our hearts from the temptations of false prophets and false gods that our desires might always be for you and your kingdom, through Jesus our Lord. Amen.
A Sermon for Trinity SundaySt. John 3:1-17by William Klock
Everywhere Jesus went the crowds followed him. Everyone had a problem. Some were deaf, some blind; some were sick, some dying; some were demon-possessed, some were weighed down by sin. They knew that this is not how the world is supposed to be. Everyone knew it then. Everyone knows it now. And that’s why everyone longs for the day when the world is set to rights and the tears are wiped away. And that’s why the people flocked to Jesus. Wherever he went, there was a little bubble of the world as it should be. Wherever Jesus went, there was a little bubble of God’s future in the present. Wherever Jesus went, there was a little bubble where the tears were wiped away. And this man named Nicodemus—John says he was a prominent Pharisee and ruler of the Jews—Nicodemus watched from a distance—in the streets, in the temple court. And as he watched, he saw the hopes of Isreal being fulfilled. He saw that little bubble of God’s future wherever Jesus went. And he believed. It’s just that he wasn’t quite sure exactly what he was believing. Have you ever felt that way? You see God at work. There’s no question about it. But it’s not something you ever expected. And so you believe, but you don’t really understand. That’s where Nicodemus was at. He wasn’t one of the simple people who just needed some physical manifestation of the kingdom like the blind and the deaf and the demon-possessed. He knew the scriptures. He knew how the God of Israel was supposed to fulfil his prophecies. And Nicodemus could see that Jesus was fulfilling them. But Jesus wasn’t doing it the way people expected. So Nicodemus went to Jesus in the night, after the crowds were gone, when Jesus was alone with his disciples. Knock! Knock! Knock! And Peter—or John or James or whoever—opened the door and was totally surprised to see him there. Everyone knew who Nicodemus was and he was the last person the disciples expected to be knocking at the door. But here he was, probably with at least a servant or two. You didn’t close the door on someone like Nicodemus, so pretty soon he was inside and seated with Jesus and the questions began. Nicodemus wanted to understand. “Rabbi,” he said to Jesus, “we know that you’re a teacher who has come from God. Nobody can do these signs that you’re doing, unless God is with him.”If you listen carefully, you can hear the unspoken question in Nicodemus’ affirmation. It’s the theologian’s equivalent of “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” It was like this for everyone. The disciples saw, they heard, they believed, but when Jesus pressed them with questions, they still gave the wrong answers. Peter knew with absolute certainty that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God. But when push came to shove, he drew his sword and was ready to usher in the kingdom with violence. Despite three years with Jesus, the disciples were still full of all the wrong ideas the Jews had about the Messiah and his kingdom. Nicodemus was no different. It’s just that he knew he was missing something and he was here to sort it out with Jesus. But Jesus doesn’t give him the answer he wanted—because Jesus knew that no matter how clearly he connected the dots for Nicodemus, that wouldn’t solve the problem. Nicodemus needed something more. And so Jesus answers Nicodemus’ question with those words so familiar to us, but so perplexing to him: “Let me tell you the solemn truth. Unless someone has been born from above, he won’t be able to see God’s kingdom.”This is John 3. The beginning. Jesus gives the answer to all the questions. And consider how the disciples had three years to mull it over. And as we’ve heard in our Gospels all through Easter- and Ascensiontide they still couldn’t wrap their heads around it. Jesus told them he had to leave so that something better could come and they were confused and upset and afraid. Jesus was a walking manifestation, a walking bubble of the kingdom. How could anything possibly be better than that?—apart from the kingdom filling the whole world—but how’s that going to happen if Jesus is gone? They had to be born from above, too. But that’s just it. In being born from above, they themselves would become walking bubbles of God’s future in the present. That’s what we celebrated last Sunday at Pentecost. The God of Israel sent his Spirit to indwell his people. They were born from above—and suddenly, when that happened, it all made sense. Peter preached that great Pentecost sermon—something that would have been impossible the day before—and from there the disciples went out to make God’s kingdom known to the world. Incidentally, this is why the story of Nicodemus’ visit to Jesus is our Gospel today. Long before there was a Trinity Sunday, this was the Sunday after Pentecost and today’s Gospel was chosen to explain the events we read about last Sunday. When Trinity Sunday came along there was no reason to change the lesson, because here we see the Trinity revealed: the Son reveals that the Father must send the Spirit to give life to and to renew his people. But back to Jesus and Nicodemus: “The central truth you’re missing is that you’ve got to be born from above,” Jesus says to the Pharisee. Nicodemus understood so much. He knew the world is not as it should be. He knew that the Lord had chosen and called his people to be a light to the world. And he knew that his people had failed—over and over and over. That’s why the Pharisees were so zealous for God’s law. If everyone in Israel would just shape up. If they’d just remember all the wonderful things God had graciously and mercifully done for them and love him return by keeping his law. If they would be faithful. Then God would return and set everything right. The Pharisees were an “on earth as in heaven” people. And Nicodemus saw God at work in Jesus, but he was struggling to reconcile what he saw in Jesus with what he expected of God. Jesus knew this and so he says that what’s missing—not just what Nicodemus is missing, but what all Israel is missing—is this new birth. And, Brothers and Sisters, it’s really important that we understand that as much as Jesus is saying, “You, Nicodemus, must be born again—which is how the ears of modern Christians have been trained to hear this in individualistic terms—Jesus’ stress is on Israel, on the whole people: “All y’all must be born again,” as they might say in Texas. In verse 7 he says, “Do not be surprised that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’” Israel as a people had been born the first time when they passed through the waters of the Red Sea and Jesus is saying that now Israel has to be born a second time. This is why John was out in the wilderness calling people to repentance and baptising them in the Jordan, but still stressing that water wasn’t enough. Israel had been baptised with water before. What Israel needed now was water and the Spirit. Jesus walking around a little bubble of God’s future in the present—that’s what Israel was always supposed to be—so that the nations could see them and know the goodness of God. And what Jesus is saying is that it’s the Spirit who will finally make the people what God had intended them to be all along. As Jesus has said over and over in various ways: he, Jesus, was sent by the Father, but that it would be the Spirit—the “Helper”—who would come after, who would testify to them about this truth, and then that through them this Spirit would testify to the rest of Israel and even to the nations. This would fulfil what the prophets had spoken: a new people, a new Israel through whom the Lord would fulfil the mission he’d begun with Abraham—a mission to fill the world with knowledge of his glory as the waters cover the sea. This new Israel, full of God’s Spirit, would finally be that bubble of the kingdom, the manifestation of God’s new creation here in the midst of the old, so that the nations will flock to the God of Israel to give him glory. But Nicodemus just sat there looking puzzled. Ditto for the disciples. Because the Spirit hadn’t yet come to testify about Jesus. So Nicodemus asks, “How can someone possibly be born when he’s old? You’re not telling me he can go back a second time into his mother’s womb and be born, are you?” And as Jesus answers him, this is where he switches from saying things like “Unless one is born again” to “Unless all y’all are born again”. Because it’s not such much about one person being born again or even about a whole bunch of individuals being born again. It’s about Israel as a people being born again so that she could be put back on track to fulfil her mission to reveal God to the nations. Now, this idea of new birth would have resonated with Nicodemus, because to be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham’s family. Other things like circumcision and sabbath and diet were really important—especially to a Pharisee—but those things were important because they were the markers of Abraham’s family. They drew a clear line between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles who were most definitely not—the one’s people like Nicodemus expected God to destroy with fire and brimstone when he came to set the world to rights. And what Jesus is now saying is that being born into Abraham’s family the way the Jews thought of it wasn’t enough. In fact—and this really comes out in Paul’s letters—it never had been enough. And Nicodemus should have known this. For two thousand years people were born into Abraham’s family and the kingdom still hadn’t come. For two thousand years people were born into Abraham’s family and still the gentiles hadn’t experienced the Lord’s blessing through them on the huge scale envisioned by the scriptures. Just the opposite, in fact. The Prophet Zechariah spoke of a day when the gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their coattails and pleading with them, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!” But because of the way most of Abraham’s children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where’s your God?” It takes more than bring born of the flesh of Abraham. It even takes more than being born of water, as Isreal had been in the Red Sea. As a Pharisee devoted to exhorting his fellow Jews to be better keepers of the law, Nicodemus should have known that it wasn’t working—that the people needed something more. He, of all people, should have been looking forward to the day when the law would no longer be written on tablets of stone, but engraved on the very hearts of the people by the Holy Spirit. So Jesus says to Nicodemus, “I’m telling you the solemn truth. Unless someone is born from water and the Spirit, he can’t enter the kingdom of God. Flesh is born from flesh, but spirit is born from Spirit.” This is what John the Baptist was getting at out in the desert. God was about to lead his people in a new exodus. As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant. They all needed a baptism of repentance. They need to turn aside, not just from their disobedience, but from their misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah. But remember what John promised. When people asked him if he was the Messiah, he said that he was only the forerunner. “I baptise you with water,” he said, “but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.” And that’s just what Jesus does. As we remembered last Sunday at Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false god and from every false king and from every false “ism”, he takes those who have instead grabbed hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism, and he plunges them—us—into the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit transforms and renews and regenerates us. He takes our old, dead wood and grafts us into Jesus the vine and new life courses into us to bear fruit. The Spirit makes us those walking bubbles of God’s new creation—what God’s people were always supposed to be. That’s what it means to be born again or born from above. Brothers and Sisters, think of your baptism as something like Israel at the Red Sea. There was the parted water and God calling Israel to pass through to freedom and new life on the other side. There was no receiving the law in Egypt; they had to cross to the other side of the sea to find covenant, to find relationship with the Lord. And so we stand at the waters of baptism today. In them Jesus gives his promise: Repent, turn aside from every false way, trust me, follow me in faith and you will find forgiveness of sins and new life through the Spirit. To pass through the waters of baptism is to take hold of Jesus’ promise and to be born again of water and the Spirit—and to be made part of this new covenant people ready and equipped to live and to proclaim his kingdom. But, again, this didn’t fit what Nicodemus knew. “How can this be so?” he asks. And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this? You’re one of the teachers of Israel!” Nicodemus knew the story. He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission. As a Pharisee he was abundantly aware of this problem. Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard your cries and is visiting his people and he’s doing it in me. I’m the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago. I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I’m the one who has come down from heaven. Nicodemus is pretty incredulous. He came wanting to know, but he’s not liking what he’s hearing and so Jesus is basically telling him, “You have to trust me.” That’s what it’s all about. Sometimes this faith stuff doesn’t make sense, but keep trust Jesus and the Spirit will eventually make sense of it. And in keeping with that Jesus reminds him of the time the Israelites grumbled against Moses—which was really just veiled grumbling against the Lord. And so the Lord sent poisonous snakes into the camp. The snakes bit people and many of those who were bit died. But the Lord also gave Moses the remedy. He told Moses to cast a snake out of bronze and to mount it on a pole. Anyone who would look up to the bronze snake would be healed. It didn’t make sense. How would a bronze snake on a pole heal anyone? But it did—by faith. So Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, in the same way the son of man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may share in the life of God’s new age.” Jesus is pointing to his own crucifixion. As the snake was the affliction of the people lifted up for them to look at, so Jesus would take the affliction of Israel on himself—he would suffer the punishment for their sins—and be lifted up on the cross. He would be lifted up for everyone to look upon—to see the horror and the gravity of their sin, to see that the wages of sin is death. But they would also see Jesus taking it all on himself and in that, the horror and ugliness of his being raised up would become an act by which he is ultimately glorified. In the cross we see the love of God made manifest in Jesus. And Jesus says in the familiar words we all know, *“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” Jesus corrects the central error in the thinking of Israel in his day. They were hoping and praying for the day when the Lord would come, not just to vindicate his people, but to judge their enemies—to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and all the other gentiles. But instead Jesus tells Nicodemus that he’s come not to condemn, but to save all who will look to him. All*. The Jews thought the Lord, when he came, would vindicate them for their faithfulness, but Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Even the most righteous of you need this new birth, this salvation if you want to know God’s vindication. And it’s not just for you.” The Jews looked forward to the condemnation he would bring, but Jesus says he’s come not to condemn, but to save. And this is where the part about being born again of water and the Spirit comes into play. Being born of water and the Spirit supersedes biology and genealogy. In Jesus God opens his arms to welcome Jew and Gentile alike. It was the Jews first, because if the Lord is faithful—and he is—he had to first fulfil his promises to his own people, but most importantly, in that act of faithfulness, the nations would take note of the God of Israel. In Jesus, the nations would see that the God of Israel is not like the puny, selfish, fickle, and powerless gods they have known, and they would then flock to this God who is truly good and faithful. This is what God’s future looks like, not just Israel set to rights and everyone else set on fire. God’s future is for everyone who sees Jesus and his people wiping away the tears and forgiving sin, who believes, and who becomes part of it—whether born of Abraham by the flesh or born of Abraham by faith—all born in God’s Spirit. Abraham’s family is integral to the story and the plan, but Jesus reminds us that genes and DNA were never really what made anyone part of Abraham’s family; it was about faith. It was faith for Abraham himself and it was faith in God’s promises for all who followed after: for Isaac and Jacob, for Joseph and Moses and Joshua, for gentiles like Rahab and Ruth, and even for the great kings like David and Solomon. And God’s promise was that through his covenant people, through these people who knew him in faith and were reconciled to him by faith, he would bless the nations. It happened here and there in the Old Testament. Rahab and Ruth are two of many small-scale testimonies to that, but here we finally see the Lord’s promise coming to full fruit. It’s what we celebrated last week on Pentecost as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on these men of Israel gathered from around the world. They had heard Peter preach about Jesus and what he’d come to do. They rallied to Jesus in faith and in response Jesus poured his Spirit into them. Finally, through Jesus, Israel became the source of blessing she was intended to be—not by flesh, but by the Spirit—as these men and women took the good news to the nations: Jesus is Lord. He has conquered sin and death. In him is the forgiveness of sin, in him is life, in him God has returned to his creation as King. And in him—the incarnate Word—God makes himself known. In Jesus, God incarnate, we have the restoration and fellowship with our Creator that he has been working towards ever since the day we rebelled and were cast out of his presence. In Jesus, God’s kingdom—his new creation—has been inaugurated, in us and through us in the world. Brothers and Sisters, we are that people the God of Israel was working to create and to make new all those millennia. Jesus and the Spirit have finally made us that bubble of God’s future in the present, the bubble where the world is set to rights and where the tears are wiped away, the bubble that shows the world the faithfulness and goodness of God. May we be that people—God’s future in the present, the heralds of his new creation—may we be faithful in being this Spirit-renewed gospel people who make known God’s glory to the world. Let us pray: Almighty God we praise you this morning for the grace you have shown us. Even as we rebelled against you, our good Creator, you were setting in motion our redemption: Father sending, calling, electing; Son speaking, coming, dying, rising; and Spirit uniting, renewing, regenerating, empowering. In the redemption of the world we see the glory of the Trinity and the majesty of the Unity and in gratitude we fall before you with the angels to sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty.” By your grace, keep us strong in faith, O Lord, but keep us also faithful in our witness and our ministry to make your redeeming love known to the world. We ask this through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for WhitsundayActs 2:1-11by William Klock
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And so the great story began. Six day. God speaks. And creation takes shape. On the first day…on the second day…on the third day…and so on…like a liturgy. In fact, there’s a theory that Genesis 1 was written to be used at the dedication of the second temple. Because it describes God creating the heavens and the earth as his own temple. In Genesis 2 we even see that this temple has a holy of holies: a garden called Eden. There he carefully crafts a man from the dust of the earth, breathes his own life into him, and places him in the garden, in that holy of holies, to act as his priest, to care for his temple, and to live in his presence. And then we humans sinned and it all went wrong. But Genesis stands as a reminder of what the Lord intended and how it’s supposed to be. The pagans tried to get it back. They built temples for their gods and in them, to represent the gods’ rule, they placed idols carved of wood or stone. And attempt to recover Eden, to re-enter that fellowship with God, but on our terms, not his. But Genesis reminds us that God has built his own temple by the power of his creative word and that he created us to be his image, to tend and to keep his temple, and to steward his rule on earth. And Genesis…and the whole story that follows…reminds us that the Lord will not leave us forever cast out. Into the midst of the darkness God spoke again and called forth Abraham and with Abraham and his family, God launched a new heaven-and-earth project. Over and over he showed his faithfulness to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, and to the whole people of Israel. When they were slaves in Egypt he heard their cry and he rescued them. He defeated Pharaoh and the Egyptians and led his beloved people through the Red Sea and into the wilderness. At Mount Sinai the Lord gave the gift of the torah, the law, to Moses and the people. And with the torah he gave them instructions, think of them as blueprints, for the tabernacle. The Lord promised: I will be your God and you will be my people. Once again, the Lord would take up his dwelling in their midst. The tabernacle was a portable temple full of the symbols of the garden of Eden. Wherever the people stopped to camp, they set up the tabernacle, and the glory cloud, the shekinah representing the Lord’s presence, would descend to fill the holy of holies. And the torah set the people apart from the nations and taught them how to be holy so that they might be the people who lived with the Lord in their midst. Israel, camped around the tabernacle and the Lord’s glory cloud, were a sort of new creation in miniature—heaven and earth, God and human beings back together, even if imperfectly. It gave the people hope. A hope that one day the Lord would truly and fully set this broken world to rights—to make things the way they’re supposed to be. And it wasn’t just hope for Israel. The Lord intended the watching nations to see his people and take note. That’s the climax of the Exodus. Not the Passover or the Red Sea. Those are important—vitally important—parts of the story. But it’s Exodus 40, the last chapter of the book, where the Lord’s glory clouds descends to dwell in the tabernacle—that’s the climax. The Lord once again dwelling with his people. We see it happen again when the Israelites are settled in the land of Canaan. King Solomon builds a permanent temple for the Lord and, once again, at its dedication the glory cloud descends to fill the holy of holies. It was all there as part of the story to point the people in hope to God’s restoration of heaven and earth—to the day when the Lord’s promises would be fulfilled. Because the Lord didn’t just come to Israel and manifest himself in a cloud of glory; he spoke. Israel’s prophetic tradition was full of promises looking forward to that day. King David knew the Lord’s promises and sang out in prophetic hope of that future day in Psalm 72: May he have dominion from sea to sea…May all kings fall down before him, all nations serve him…Blessed by the Lord, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things. Blessed be his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory! Isaiah sang of the coming Messiah who would set creation to rights: There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. And when God has done his work through the Messiah, Isaiah sings, the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Habakkuk similarly would sing out in hope: For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.When the Lord’s cloud of glory descended to fill the temple, it pointed forward to that day when he would—when he will—fill all of creation with his glorious presence. Think about this hope that Israel had and how great it was and I think it helps give a sense of just how tragic it then was when Israel failed to keep her end of the covenant and the Lord allowed the Babylonian army to capture Jerusalem and to destroy the temple—his temple. Israel sinned, Israel showed disregard for the law the Lord had given to keep her holy. And worst of all—over and over and over—Israel prostituted herself to the gods of the pagans. It was a deep, deep tragedy. As the Psalmist laments in Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept. Not just for what was lost, but like Adam and Eve, cast out and weeping over their own disobedience. But even then, in those dark, dark days of exile the Lord still spoke. Through Isaiah and Ezekiel, through Zechariah and Malachi the Lord promised that he would come back to dwell with his people. And yet, as the Gospels begin, hundreds of years had passed and the Lord had yet to return. Israel had returned from her exile. The temple had been rebuilt. The people and the priests went through all the motions. The smoke went up from the great altar. But the cloud of glory had never come down and returned to the temple. And pagan kings still ruled with Israel under their heels. Again, this is where the Gospels begin. St. John describes the darkness, the hopelessness, the absence and then he says that the word became flesh and lived among us…The light shone in the darkness. Brothers and Sisters, the Gospels are about the return of God to his people in fulfilment of his promises. The word—the embodiment of God’s creative power—the word took on our flesh and was born of Mary. In Jesus God not only returned to his people, he brought heaven and earth, God and humanity back together in his person. Jesus is the manifestation of the hope of creation set to rights, of the breach between us and God healed. Matthew puts it in terms of Isaiah’s prophecy: Jesus is the promised Immanuel: God with us. And as the church has led us through the story of Jesus these last months, we’ve followed him to the cross where he took on himself the role of the Passover lamb. He died for the sins of his people. And just when sin and death thought they’d done their worst and defeated God once and for all, God raised Jesus from death. It was like the Passover and the Red Sea all over again, only this time it wasn’t an Egyptian king and his army that were defeated, it was evil itself. And then, last week, we stood with the disciples and watched as Jesus ascended to take his throne in heaven. And if you know the story of Israel, if you know the Old Testament like Luke’s readers did, you can’t help but draw the connection. If Jesus’ death was a new Passover, then his ascension isn’t just his going to heaven to take his throne as king. It’s definitely very much that and that’s significant, but it also parallels Moses going up Mount Sinai to meet with the Lord. And when Moses came down, he had the gift of the torah, the law, with him. And so now, in today’s Gospel, from Acts 2 Luke writes: When the day of Pentecost had finally arrived, they were all together in the same place.I’m sure Jesus’ disciples were expecting something. I don’t think they knew exactly what. As we heard in last week’s Gospel, Jesus said that he had to leave, to take his throne—and the disciples would be sorry to see him go—but that it had to be that way, because Jesus would send the Holy Spirit to empower them. At the last supper he’d said that with his blood he was making a new covenant. They knew that a new covenant would need a new law—a new torah—because the law was what taught the people how to live out their end of the covenant, how to live as the people in whose midst the Lord dwelled. But what that would like was anyone’s guess. But when Jesus told them to go and wait in Jerusalem and that he would send the Spirit in a few days, I fully expect they made the connection with Pentecost, because Pentecost—which is just Greek for “fiftieth” because it’s fifty days after Passover—because Pentecost was the great feast when Israel remembered and celebrate the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. I think that by this time, the disciples were finally putting things together. They were waiting those ten days with baited breath. Jesus was alive. Jesus was king. Everything was happening just as he promised. So they knew the Spirit would come. But how? And what would happen when he did? And how would the Spirit be a new torah for this new covenant. And so they obeyed Jesus. They waited all together in Jerusalem—probably in that same “upper room” where they’d eaten the Passover. And Luke goes on: Suddenly there came from heaven a noise like the sound of a mighty, rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.So many parts of the story come together here. It helps to understand that wind and breath are the same word in both Hebrew and Greek. And so this divine wind sweeps in to the room to breathe the breath of God into the disciples, reminding them of the way God gave life to Adam in the beginning—taking that lifeless lump of moulded clay and animating it, making it as we say, a soul—a living being. But this time it’s God breathing life into his new Israel. There’s a reason that the one thing the disciples made sure they did during those days of waiting was to appoint Matthias as a successor to Judas. If they were to be the new Israel, they had to be twelve. And now the Spirit comes and breathes the life of God into this new people. But, too, the imagery of the wind filling the house. It doesn’t just recall God breathing life into Adam. It also recalls God’s presence filling the tabernacle in Exodus 40 and the temple in 1 Kings 8. The way God gives his Spirit is a reminder that Jesus people aren’t just a people full of the Spirit. Brothers and Sisters, being full of the Spirit makes us God’s temple. Jesus and us—together we’re the beginning of God’s new creation, the beginning of his restoration of heaven and earth. Jesus has ascended to heaven bearing our human flesh. And in the Spirit, God has come to earth to dwell with us. In us, in Jesus’ people, the restoration of Eden has begun. That’s why at the head of Jesus’ prayer are is that powerful petition: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. I think this is why all through the rest of Acts, stuff keeps happening at temples, whether it’s the next couple of chapters as we follow the events of Pentecost and Peter preaching and thousands being baptised or later as Paul confronts the pagans in their temples in Athens and Ephesus. All because in Jesus and his people God’s real temple is being built—brick by brick, stone by stone, with each baptism…all laid on the foundation of the death and resurrection of Jesus. So the disciples already knew when Jesus rose from death that new creation had begun. Jesus was the first part of it. And they were so excited to go out and tell everyone that Jesus had to calm them down and tell them to wait. Enthusiasm is never enough. They needed to be made part of that new creation too. And that’s what the Spirit does here. One day, when the church’s work is done and Jesus returns to finally cast death itself into the lake of fire, God will raise us as he raised Jesus and we will know fully the life he intends for us. But the time for that hasn’t yet come. The gift of the Spirit is the downpayment on that life—or to use an Old Testament term for it: the Spirit is the firstfruits of God’s new creation. And that’s the other part of the feast of Pentecost that comes into this. Pentecost wasn’t just the celebration of God’s giving of the law to Israel. It was also the festival where the people brought their firstfruits to God. They brought the first of their crops—like a sheaf of wheat—not just to give thanks for the harvest, but in expectant hope of his provision—trusting him for a plentiful harvest. From now on, for Jesus’ people, Pentecost is just that: a reminder that the harvest has begun and that the Spirit is sure to make it a plentiful one. But it wasn’t just the wind. Luke goes on in verse 3: Then tongues, seemingly of fire, appeared to them, moving apart and coming to rest on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them the words to say.The wind from heaven fills them and the Spirit manifests himself as flame and then they start to speak in other languages. Again, the big story tells us why the Spirit came this way. Genesis explains the origin of different languages and people groups with the story of Babel. It’s the low point in human history. Adam and Eve sin in Chapter 3, Cain murders his brother in Chapter 4, and humanity goes downhill from there until, in Chapter11, we’ve lost all knowledge of God. In their hubris, the men of Babel built a tower to reach heaven and in response, the Lord confused their languages and scattered them. It’s a bit like Psalm 2 and Daniel 7 that I mentioned last week. The nations rage, but God laughs. But all the while he has a plan to set us to rights. In Psalm 2 it’s the son of David who will reign as king. In Daniel 7 it’s the son of man who will be enthroned by the Ancient of Days. And here at Pentecost, the son of David who is also the son of man takes his throne and sends the Spirit who creates a people ready to undo Babel. Luke goes on in verse 5: There were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem at that time. [Remember, because it was Pentecost.] When they heard this noise they came together in a crowd. They were deeply puzzled, because every single one of them could hear them speaking in his or her own native language. They were astonished and amazed. “These men who are doing the speaking are all Galileans, aren’t they?” they said. “So how is it that each of us can hear them in our own mother tongues?Luke goes on to list people from countries across the whole Roman empire and some from even beyond that. And the men hearing this go on with the most important detail, “We can hear them telling us about the mighty things God has done—in our own languages.”What does it mean? Brothers and Sisters, this gift of tongues to the disciples was a sign. It was a sign that Jesus truly had ascended to his throne and he now rules over a global dominion. And it means that through his people, through his church, Jesus has inaugurated God’s new creation and has begun the work of setting everything to rights—starting with the confusion of Babel. And that’s where today’s Epistle ends, which is a bit disappointing. I wish we had a Pentecost season where we could at least work through the next couple of chapters. “What does all this mean?” they ask, and in response Peter begins to preach and he explains to the gathered men how this was all in fulfilment of God’s promises. These first eleven verses will have to be enough for today. Brothers and Sisters, Pentecost reminds us who we are. Again, think of Israel, rescued from Egypt and then formed as a people in the wilderness—a people defined by the law and by God dwelling in their midst. Pentecost is a reminder to us that in Jesus, God has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death and that he has made us a people defined by his new law: the life of the Spirit. And we don’t just have God in our midst; we are indwelt by God himself in the Spirit. Pentecost is a reminder that in making us this Spirit-filled people, God has made us his temple. We are the place where the world meets God. But our calling isn’t simply to sit here like the temple on Mount Zion and wait for people to come. Our calling is to be a temple on the move and a temple dispersed—a temple that goes out and meets the world with God and with the gospel—with the good news that Jesus, crucified and risen, is the world’s true Lord. You and I have been entrusted with the story. Go out and proclaim the mighty deeds of God and the Spirit will use that proclamation to change hearts and to grow the kingdom. And, finally, Pentecost is a reminder that as God’s temple, we are also the firstfruits of God’s new creation. We as a people are called to live out the life of God—not just to steward his word and to proclaim his gospel, but to truly be light in the darkness: living out and working for mercy and love and justice, showing the world the value of goodness, truth, and beauty, teaching reconciliation, bringing healing. In other words, Brothers and Sisters, pulling God’s future into the present. Not just praying “on earth as in heaven”, but living out that prayer so that all the world will see and doing so in trusting hope that God’s promise is true. One day, when the church has done her job declaring the mighty deeds of God, the earth will be filled with the knowledge of his glory as the waters cover the sea. That is what it means to be a “Pentecostal” people. Let’s pray: O GOD, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for Ascension SundayActs 1:1-11by William Klock
The King came to Canada this week and I can help but reflect on how providential this event has been—the King of Canada coming to take his throne in the Senate chamber in Ottawa—in the same week that we remember and celebrate the ascension of Jesus. I might be tempted to title my sermon: A Tale of Two Kings. So a new Parliament needed to be opened. A throne speech had to be read. That’s normally done by the Governor General, but these are not normal times. The new President next door, in what has always been Canada’s best friend and ally, is now making economic war and daily challenging the country’s sovereignty. It was time for the Sovereign to come and save the day. And so the King came, and he ascended to his throne in Parliament, and he read a speech. The last time the Sovereign did this was almost fifty years ago, so this is no small thing. And yet the King was here for all of about twenty-four hours. The speech he read was written by government speech-writers, not by the King. And even then, it’s vitally important in our constitutional monarchy that the King avoid any openly political speech—and so the big concern of the day, the big thing that threatens the nation’s economic well-being and sovereignty—was only hinted at obliquely. And everyone applauded. And then the King got back into his jet and flew home. And maybe it’s just because I’m an American, but it doesn’t seem to me that all the pomp and circumstance and expense really accomplished anything. The King didn’t go to Washington to negotiate peace with the belligerent bully or to rough him up a bit or even to give him a good talking to. Instead, he came here, he sat in the Senate chamber, and recited back to the government the talking points it gave him. Again, I mean no disrespect to the King or to Canada’s constitutional monarchy, but watching and listening to this week’s events as an American—although I suspect even the staunches of Christian monarchists can’t help but notice it too—that there’s a big—an enormous—difference between the ascension of King Charles III in Ottawa this week and the ascension of Jesus that we read about today in both our Epistle and Gospel. I listened to the throne speech and even though I know that the King can’t actually do anything, when it was over I still felt like: What now? The King flies all this way, he ascends to his throne with great pomp and circumstance, he reads a speech intended to stir patriotic feelings—and even as an American, watching and listening I felt pride for Canada—but then he got back into his airplane and went home. He didn’t do anything about the current crisis. The enemy is still there. In fact, the King’s talk of Canadian sovereignty just seemed to provoke a new round of fifty-first state talk. It’s kind of a let down. I don’t know what I expect the King should do, but he’s a king after all and I sort of have a mental image of him taking off his pinstripe jacket, putting on a shining suit of armour, going to Washington, and popping the President in the nose. In real life that probably wouldn’t solve anything. It’s just that kings are supposed to deliver their subjects in times of trouble and cast down their enemies. Right? That’s what kings are for. This is why the disciples were so discouraged when Jesus was crucified. They thought he was the Messiah, the anointed king, and then he got himself killed—and that’s not what was supposed to happen to the king. He was supposed to defeat his enemies and take his throne. And then Jesus rose from death and he met them and they were so excited to go declare the good news to Jerusalem that Jesus actually had to calm them down and tell them to wait. Enthusiasm isn’t enough. They also needed the power of God’s Spirit—but that’s for next week. But for forty days Jesus has been teaching them. He’s been walking them through the scriptures and showing them how it was there along: the Messiah had to die in order to defeat his enemies and take his throne. Like I said a couple of weeks ago, those forty days must have been the most thrilling days in all of history as Jesus taught them and as it all came together. And yet, even then, the disciples were still stuck on the wrong things. But now I’m getting ahead of myself for today. Keep this all in mind and let’s look at our Epistle again. The first chapter of Acts. Luke writes: Dear Theophilus, the previous book which I wrote had to do with everything Jesus began to do and teach. I took the story as far as the day when he was taken up, once he had given instructions through the Holy Spirit to his apostles.Luke is talking about his Gospel. He goes on in verse 3: He showed himself to them alive, after his suffering, by many proofs. He was seen by them for forty days, during which he spoke about God’s kingdom. As they were having a meal together, he told them not to go away from Jerusalem, but to wait, as he put it, “for the Father’s promise, which I was telling you about earlier. John baptised with water, you see, but in a few days from now you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit.”So good so far. Forty days of Bible teaching with Jesus. All about the kingdom. He thinks they’re ready to do the proclamation part of their new ministry, they just need to wait a minute so he can ascend to this throne and send the Spirit who will empower that proclamation. Jesus thinks their ready to be set loose on the world. But have you ever taught something to someone, explaining it to them, and they’re nodding and you think they understand. You’re ready to turn them loose. And then they ask you a question and you realise that they still don’t understand the central point of what you’ve been trying to teach them? I took calculus as a freshman in college. Twice. The only class I ever failed. I understood the instructions. But no matter how hard I tried and no matter how long the professor explained it to me—I had the benefit of sitting next to him in the church choir—I never understood what it was all about. I didn’t get it. I thought that at least I could just follow the instructions to solve the equations. I found that usually worked pretty well with math. But it didn’t with calculus. So he—or my friends who understood calculus—would explain it to me and I’d say, “Right. I do this, then this, then this, and so on.” And they’d smile and say, “Yes!” Like it was finally sinking in for me. And then I’d do what I thought were the steps and it wouldn’t work and they’d ask me to explain it, and I couldn’t, because I never could wrap my head around the concept at the heart of it all. Brothers and Sisters, the kingdom was the heart of everything Jesus was teaching and doing. And the disciples knew this. That’s, again, why they were so discouraged when he died. Dead kings don’t establish kingdoms. But now Jesus is alive again and they’re excited and especially so because for forty days Jesus has been teaching them even more about the kingdom. And then they ask, “Master, is this the time when you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel.”I remember the look on my calculus professor’s face when he through I’d finally got it through my thick skull and how his smile faded away when he realised I didn’t get it at all and I can picture the same look on Jesus’ face. Disappointment and exasperation. I don’t know. Maybe Jesus knew that no amount of talk would get them straight on this and that it would only fall into place once they saw him ascend and once they’d received the Spirit. But it’s clear: despite all the teaching, the disciples still didn’t get it. See, this idea of the “kingdom of God”, for the Jews it had become shorthand for the idea that one day the Lord would fulfil his promises, come back to Israel, take up his throne. He’d defeat Isreal’s enemies and he’d set Israel to rights—and then they’d all live happily ever after with God as their king and the pagans under their feet. They sang songs, like Psalm 2, about the nations raging and the kings of the earth getting together to plot against the Lord and his people. And in the middle of the song the Lord bursts out in laughter, mocking the nations and their feeble kings. And then the Lord lets loose his wrath and announces, “I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.” And then the king speaks: “The Lord said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” And then the Psalmist can announce to the nations: “Now, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.” It’s the king in shining armour come to crush his enemies and set his people to rights. They sang songs like the one in Isaiah 52 about the beautiful feet of the one who brings good news and who announces to Zion, “Your God reigns.” “The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of God.” This was the same song in which they sang about the suffering servant who would be exalted only after he had borne their griefs and sorrows, only after he’d been stricken and afflicted.” This was the hope of Israel and this is why the disciples had followed Jesus. They believed he was the Messiah, the king who would rescue his people and defeat their enemies. Again, for those three days he was in the tomb it looked like they’d been wrong, but now Jesus was alive again. They knew with absolute certainty that he really is the Messiah. And so now they’re asking him: “Your resurrection put the story back on track, Jesus. So when are you going to fulfil those old promises, defeat the nations and their kings, and set Isreal on the top of the heap?” And Jesus says to them in verse 7: “It’s not your business to know about times and dates. The Father has placed all that under his own direct authority. What will happen, though, is that you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. Then you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judaea and Samaria, and to the very ends of the earth.”I’ve noticed a lot of people read this and think that Jesus is saying something like, “No. It’s not time to restore the kingdom. I’ll do that sometime in the future and only the Father knows the date.” But that’s not what Jesus is saying at all. Think of the pair Jesus met on the road to Emmaus. They were saying that they’d hoped Jesus was the one who would redeem Israel, but well, he’d been crucified so scratch that idea. And that’s the point when Jesus explains to them that it was actually through his crucifixion that he would accomplish God’s long-promised redemption. Even though it was there all along in songs like Isaiah 52, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that the Messiah would usher in God’s kingdom by his suffering and death. And yet when Jesus says this, suddenly a lot of other things he said and did finally make sense. Think of the stories—the parables—he told. Over and over: The kingdom is coming—yes!—but it’s not coming like you think. Instead, the kingdom is coming like seed planted in the ground. The kingdom is coming like leaven in a lump of dough. The kingdom is like a man who had two sons. Or when Jesus and the disciples were approaching Jerusalem and they asked this same question: Is the kingdom finally coming now?And Jesus said that the kingdom is like a nobleman coming back to see if his servants have been faithful with their stewardship. Over and over Jesus has been saying, “Yes, the kingdom is coming right now, but you keep missing it because it doesn’t look like what you expected. At that last Passover meal Jesus ate with his friends, he told them that he would not drink with them again until the kingdom had arrived. And here they are, these forty days after the resurrection eating and drinking with Jesus as he teaches them. The kingdom has come, Brothers and Sisters. Too many Christians live as if the mission of the church is to prepare for Jesus to become king, when the church’s mission is, in fact, really all about announcing and living out the reality that Jesus is the king even if his kingdom isn’t quite what a lot of people expected. And then, just to make all of this absolutely clear, Luke says in verse 9: As Jesus said this, he was lifted up while they were watching and a cloud took him out of their sight.We’re prone to missing the significance of this image because we’re not steeped in the Old Testament the way they were. The disciples, however, understood exactly what was happening: Jesus was acting out the prophecy of Daniel 7. That’s the chapter were Daniel has this nightmare full of beasts coming up out of the ocean. It’s a vision of the nations and their kings raging against God’s people. But then “one like a son of man” is taken up and exalted on the clouds to sit beside the Ancient of Days. He’s given a kingdom, power, and authority so that all people, nations, and languages should serve and obey him. It’s a vision of the kingdom being restored to Israel. And now, all through Jesus’ ministry, we’ve heard him talking about himself as this son of man, as Israel’s representative, and now—in answer to the disciples’ question about the coming of the kingdom—Jesus literally acts out Daniel’s vision. He fulfils it. In fact, in Matthew’s telling of the ascension, Jesus even says—echoing the words of the Ancient of Days in Daniel—“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. So you must go and make all the nations into disciples.” The ascension proclaims: Jesus is king and his kingdom is here. One day Jesus will return to finish what he’s begun, but never forget that it has begun. As Paul says in Romans 15, “He has to go on ruling until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” So the disciples were thinking that Jesus was going to lead a revolution—like Judas Maccabeus or Simon bar Kochba—except this time it wouldn’t fizzle out. This time it would be successful and it would be forever. And Jesus is saying (and acting out) that no, the kingdom has been inaugurated and it’s going to take shape and grow—the nations will be put under Jesus’ feet—not as the disciples take up arms, but as they go out into the world as witnesses of Jesus: as they go out and proclaim the good news that Jesus crucified and risen, is the world’s true Lord and as they live out the reality of his kingdom. Like Jesus did, the disciples would work miracles—miracles that underscored that in the kingdom all the sad thing are beginning to become untrue; and they would live lives transformed by the Spirit’s fruit, but maybe more than anything else, they would confront the kings of the present evil age with the reality of Jesus’ lordship. And through their witness, the world would begin to change. It's not a linear, always progressing, always upward change. That was the idea of theological liberalism a century ago, but two world wars and nuclear bombs and fascism and Communism blew that idea up. But through the witness of the church, the world is changing. I’ve mentioned before Tom Holland’s remarkable book Dominion and how, in that book, he writes about the profound changes that the gospel brought to Western Civilisation. Each generation lives in its own brief age and so, if we don’t know anything about history, we’re prone to not even noticing the changes that have happened, but happen they have. Christians began taking in the unwanted girl babies of the Greeks and Romans, left to die of exposure, and we taught the world the value of life. The influence of the gospel put an end to gladiatorial games and slavery. The gospel has taught the world mercy and grace, the value of life, the dignity of each person. And on and on. The church, when we are faithful witnesses of Jesus and living the new creation life the Spirit gives, builds and spreads the kingdom and someday, when the work is done, Jesus will return—not to take us away, but to restore heaven and earth, God and human beings, and to put an end to death and sin once and for all. To consummate his new creation. But there’s work to do in the meantime. He created us in the beginning to be his stewards—to cultivate his garden. That’s why, when it came time to set us back on that track, God called and created a special people for himself: to be his representative, to be his stewards, to be his living kingdom in the midst of the old. And so Luke says, They were gazing into heaven as he disappeared. Then, lo and behold, two men appeared, dressed in white, standing beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why are you standing here staring into heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken away from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you saw him go into heaven.”Brothers and Sisters, there’s work to do. Like Jesus said, they needed to wait a few days before going out, so that when they did go out, they would go out in the power of the Spirit. The kingdom doesn’t happen in our power. But it does happen as we go out to faithfully fulfil the mission we’ve been given to witness Jesus. Our task is to go out in faith, to till the soil, to steward the garden. It's an overwhelming task. That’s why it takes faith to go out and do it. But we go out in faith knowing that God has given us his Spirit who infuses what we do with divine power. We go out in faith knowing that in Jesus—at the cross and in the resurrection—God has already done the impossible part. Now, as Paul wrote, all he has to do is go on ruling until all his enemies have been put under his feet. There’s no “if”. It’s just “until”. It’s a sure thing. And so is the witness of his church. It doesn’t always seem that way. Sometimes it seems like we’re going backwards and things are getting worse. People won’t listen or won’t take us seriously. Sometimes we’re tempted to give up. Sometimes we act like all Jesus did was come to earth to give us a rousing pep talk, then he went back home to heaven. But read the Gospels and that’s not it at all. He hasn’t just gone back to heaven and left us alone. He’s ascended to his throne, where he rules and reigns over his kingdom, which—remember—is like seed planted in the soil and like leaven in a lump of dough and like a man who had two sons. And one day, through his people—through us—the work of his word and the work of his Spirit will be done. The world will know his death and resurrection, it will know the forgiveness of sins, it will know the end of death, it will know mercy and grace. The knowledge of his glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea and every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord. Because Jesus died and rose again, because the Lord’s word does not return void, and because he does not give his Spirit in vain. Let’s pray: O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus the Messiah with great triumph to your right hand in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us for the task you have given, and that we might look forward in hope to the day when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. Amen.
A Sermon for Rogation SundaySt. James 1:22-27by William Klock
I was out on my gravel bike this week, riding the trails through Merville and Black Creek and down to Williams Beach. At one point I had to stop to take a picture. I was riding down this narrow corridor with walls of little yellow flowers on both sides. It was really beautiful. But just a short way down the trail I ran into a big group of people cutting it all down. I had a stop and wait for a minute so they could get their cart off the trail. One of the women asked how my ride was going. I said I was having a great ride. It was a beautiful day. I pulled out my phone and showed her the picture I’d just taken of the trail. I thought it was beautiful, but she scowled at it. “We’ll get there tomorrow morning,” she said, “Ugh! Vile stuff, but we’ll get it!” (And, sure enough, when I rode through again a few days later the walls of scotch broom were gone.) I was kind of disappointed, but I’m sure the “broom busters” were happy, because they really, really, really hate scotch broom. The funny thing is—I notice this most places they cut it down—is that when they’re done, there’s usually still scotch broom as far as the eye can see—on the other side of a fence. It’s like that where I was riding my bike. They cut it all down on Regional District property, but they can’t touch the private property on the other side of the fence. And later in the summer, I’ll be riding my bike down the trail and in the heat of the day I’ll hear the seed pods popping open and scattering their seed on both sides of the fence. And next year the scotch broom will be back. To me the whole thing seems pointless, but these folks envision an island scoured clean of scotch broom and so they come back year after year after year to cut it down wherever they can get to it. Even though that island scoured clean of broom will never be. As I rode later in the week and saw the trailsides devoid of broom, but acres and acres of yellow flowers on the other side of the fence it got me thinking about the theme of our Eastertide scripture readings. (I know, you think I’m just out there riding my bike, but I’m out there praying and meditating on scripture and putting sermons together in my head.) We began Easter with the theme of hope. Jesus’ resurrection meant something to the disciples. It wasn’t just a miracle. It was the evidence, the proof that God’s new creation had begun and that Jesus is king. That’s what lit a fire under them to go out and announce the good news to Jerusalem, to Judaea, Samaria, and to the whole world—even though it eventually got them all killed. This theme of resurrection life carries all through Eastertide and we meet it here again today. We could run with either the Gospel or the Epistle, but I’m going to go with the Epistle—this lesson from St. James that begins with those familiar words: Be people who do the word, not merely people who heart it and deceive themselves.Brothers and Sisters, the good news of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead ought to give us a vision of the world set to rights—of sin and death defeated and cast forever into hell, of no more trials and no more tears, and of new life with nothing to separate us from the presence of God. When we look at the mess and the darkness around us that hope might sound crazy—like an island scoured clean of scotch broom—but the fact is that God has done the hard part already. He gave his son to take up our flesh, to die, and to rise to life again. The rest is just his people—us—going out to preach and to do that good news and to let his word and his Spirit spread and grow his new creation. So don’t just hear the word. Go out and do it. Don’t just long for God’s kingdom, go out and be it. It also helps to understand that for the Jews, speaking Hebrew, to hear and to obey were inextricably linked together. The Hebrew word for “hear” is a call not just to the ears, but to the heart, and to hear is to respond, whether it’s for the Lord to hear the cries of his people in their bondage and to come to their deliverance or for Israel to hear the word of the Lord and to take it to heart and do it. When Moses and the Prophets announced, “Hear the word of the Lord!” it wasn’t just a call to listen, but to obey—to do. We have a word in English that we don’t use anymore that is very similar: hearken. Don’t just hear, but take note, take what you hear to heart. Do it. Brothers and Sisters, words are important—and the word of God especially so. As I’ve said so many times, God’s word brings life. By his word he created life in the beginning and when we were mired in sin and in slavery to death, he heard our cries for deliverance and sent his word again, this time in human flesh, in Jesus, to die and to rise from death so that we might know life again. This is at the core of Easter and so, these last two Sundays of Eastertide we read from St. James’ epistle about the power of God’s word to bring us life and to transform us. But first he contrasts God’s word with our words, which are so often spoken in anger or spoken, not to heal or to give life, but to hurt. This is in the first chapter of James. Our Epistle begins at verse 22, but I want to back up a bit into last week’s Epistle, to verse 19. Here’s what James writes: So, my dear brothers [and sisters], get this straight. Every person should be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. Human anger, you see, doesn’t produce God’s justice. (James 1:19-20) “Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” How many times would that have saved you a world of hurt if you’d only heard and obeyed? Now, there can be a place for anger. So often we get angry because the world isn’t what we know it should be. Sometimes—a lot of the time—that’s just our pride being hurt or our selfishness being tweaked, but when we see real wrongs being done, when we see real injustice in the world, there is a place for just and righteous anger. Godly anger over sin and injustice is often precisely what we need to get us up and out into the world to help the needy or the hurt, to stand up for the defenceless, or otherwise to speak out and to work for wrongs to be righted. St. Paul writes in Ephesians 4:26, “Be angry” but then there’s an “and”, a big “and”: “and do not sin.” Deal with what needs dealing with and “do not let the sun go down on your anger,” because that “gives opportunity to the devil”. If you’re angry because your pride has been hurt, put a stop to it right there. Swallow your pride and move on. If you’re angry because something is truly wrong, use that anger productively to set things right, but do not sin in the process. Two wrongs won’t make things right. And righteous or not, don’t let your anger fester. Deal with it one way or another, because simmering anger is fodder for the devil and for all sorts of sin. We all know that from experience. Let your anger simmer and before too long you’re thinking about payback and revenge and neither of those things have any place in the Christian life. That was our lesson two Sunday’s ago: As he has vindicated Jesus, so the Father will one day vindicate us. We don’t need to vindicate ourselves. In short, James says, “Human anger doesn’t produce God’s justice.” In other words, your anger is not what will set this broken world to rights. I know it always seems like it will at the time, but it won’t. Just consider: You think your anger will set things right so you lash out at that other person. And now what are they thinking? They’re thinking the same thing: All the situation needs is a little bit of their anger to fix it so they lash out at you. And all it all does is make everything worse. Brother and Sisters, James reminds us to instead be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger. God is the one who will bring justice to the world and right the wrongs. If we have been wronged, God will vindicate us. The best thing we can do is to respond with the gospel and the Spirit. Where the world is broken, where relationships are broken, we should be asking ourselves how we can bring to bear the things that God’s Spirit gives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Our anger won’t help God make things right. And so James warns: So put away everything that is sordid, all that overflowing malice, and humbly receive the word which has been planted within you and which has the power to save your lives.Do you see what he did there? More often than not, when we get angry, it’s because our pride has been hurt and that kind of anger tempts us to lash out—it tempts us to respond to a hurt or a wrong with some kind of sin. Insults, brawling, that sort of thing. In contrast, James says that when our pride is threatening to take control of us, we need instead to meekly receive—to hearken to—the word that God has implanted in us. If this were St. Paul, he’d be reminding us to put off the old man and to put on the new. The pride and anger are the old man talking, but in Jesus and the Spirit God has made us new. James puts it in terms of the word by which God has forgiven us and made us a new creation. I think James had Isaiah 55:10-11 in mind when he was writing this. That’s where the Lord, through the Prophet, says: For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth,making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty,but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.This is one of my favourite passages in all of Scripture. When I get frustrated with my own sin and my own shortcomings and my own failures to be faithful to God, I remember what he says about his word here. And as a pastor, when I’m discouraged with ministry and when it seems like nothing is happening or people aren’t maturing or when I see sin and shortcomings and failures to be faithful in the church, again, I come back to what the Lord says about his word here and I go back to the word, because God’s word is the source of life. Nothing I can do will bring the life of God to myself or to other people—only his word can do that—and he promises through Isaiah that his word always accomplishes what he purposes and it always succeeds in that for which he sends it forth. So I preach his word to myself and I preach his word to you and trust him to cause it to bear fruit in me and in you, because he says that that is what he will do. God’s word is life. So, Brothers and Sisters, don’t let God’s word go in one ear and out the other. James writes, “Be people who do the word, not merely people who hear it and deceive themselves.” Don’t just listen to the word. Don’t just read it. Hear it, Brothers and Sisters. Hearken to it. Do it. If it helps, read your Bible with your finger in your ear to remind you not to let it go in one ear and out the other. These are God’s words and they are life! Too often we come to church and hear the word or we sit down at home and read the word, but we don’t actually hear it, we don’t let it sink in, we don’t let it take root like a seed, and so we don’t become doers of the word, letting it make a difference and transform us. If we just let the word go in one ear and out the other we’re in danger of deceiving ourselves. We think, “I’ve read the Bible or I’ve listened to it in church and I’ve done my duty,” but Friends, if the word doesn’t take root in our hearts and minds, if it doesn’t make a difference, we miss out on the life of God. He promises that his word will accomplish what he purposes—that it will make a difference, that it will bring new life—but first we have to hear it, not just listen, but hear it, take it in, obey it, and let it change us. James uses an illustration here. Look at verses 23-25: Someone who hears the word but does not do it, you see, is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror. He notices himself, but then he goes away and quickly forgets what he looked like. But the person who looks into the perfect law of freedom, and goes on with it, not being a hearer who forgets but a doer who does the deed—such a person is blessed in their doing.You walk past a mirror, have a look, then walk away and forget. In one ear and out the other. That’s not how we should approach God’s word. And how do we know if we’re really letting God’s word take root and grow in us? We know it’s growing in us when we go from being mere hearers to being actual doers of that word. When we don’t just know in our heads that truth is important, but when we stop telling lies, when we stop misrepresenting people, and speak the truth. When “love your enemies and do good to them” goes from being something in your head to something you actually live out. When love your wife or submit to your husband translates into loving your wife or submitting to your husband in real and practical ways. When the Lord’s Supper goes from being something you eat to something you live out in your interactions with your brothers and sisters in the Lord, showing love and living in the unity Jesus has given us. When we confront the injustices of the world, not with anger, but with the gospel and the life of the Spirit. And notice how James makes this point. He takes us back to his own roots. He was a Jew. He was circumcised into the Lord’s covenant people when he was eight days old. He grew up living torah, because he was one of the covenant people and that’s what covenant people did. That’s how they were faithful to the Lord in return for his faithfulness to them. And they learned the torah, the law, by reading and studying God’s word. And as much as Jesus changed everything, he didn’t change the fact that the Lord continues to live in covenant with his people. Jesus established a new covenant, but it’s still a covenant. And the Spirit has given a new law, but it’s still a law. God’s people are still called to be different from the world. As he marked out the Jews with circumcision and called them to live according to the torah, so he marks out the people of Jesus with baptism and calls us to live the law of the Spirit—what James calls the “perfect law, the law of liberty”. Faithful Jews were doers—keeping the sabbath, eating clean foods and not eating unclean foods, all of that. Some people think that Jesus has freed us from all of the doing, but it’s really just the opposite. Jesus calls us to even more and better doing, the difference is that instead of pointing to a list of laws written on stone and saying “Do that”, he fills us with God’s own Spirit, gives us his own example of love at the cross, rises from the dead and gives us a foretaste of his new creation and says “Do that in the power of the Spirit”. And this new law, instead of burdening us, actually ends up freeing us from all those things that used to weigh us down: anger and filthiness and wickedness and replaces it all with the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control as the Spirit and the word work in us to redirect the affections of our hearts from sin and from self to love for God and love for each other. And so James sums it up in verses 26 and 27, writing: If anyone supposes that he is devout, and does not control his tongue, but rather deceives his heart—such a person’s religion is futile. As far as God the Father is concerned, pure, unsullied religion works like this: you should visit orphans and widows in their sorrow, and prevent the world leaving its dirty smudge on you.God’s word and God’s Spirit will transform us. It doesn’t happen in an instant, so we have to be careful here. Our expectations for a new Christian aren’t the same as they are for a mature Christian, but still, a Christian will show the transforming work of God’s life-giving word in his life. And so James says that if you think you’re religious—note that “religion” isn’t the bad word some people make it out to be today. Religion is our service to God. There’s good religion and there’s bad religion as we’ll see in a bit. So if you think you’re serving God but you don’t have a bridle on your tongue—that’s not the only thing that might show this, but since James has been talking about anger and sinful words, this is the example he uses here—if you speak hateful and hurtful and untrue things, you’ve deceived yourself. You’ve been letting God’s word go in one ear and out the other. You haven’t actually heard it and so it hasn’t taken root and it’s not growing in your heart. It calls into question your profession of faith and your place in the covenant. We enter the covenant through faith in Jesus. And we show our membership in the covenant by doing the word, by living the law of the Spirit. And if you aren’t living the law of the Spirit, well, it begs the question: Are you really a member of the covenant? Is your faith in Jesus real? Because a Christian without the fruit of the Spirit, a Christian who is worldly and doesn’t bridle his tongue, well he’s like a Jew who isn’t circumcised and who labours on the sabbath. He’s a contradiction. In contrast, true religion, real service to God looks like this: visiting orphans and widows and keeping yourself unstained by the filthiness of the world. James could have listed any number of things here, but he’s certainly practical and these are things that stood out in the First Century and made people take note of Christians and the Church. It was a dog-eat-dog world, but the Christians took care of each other and they took care of the poor and vulnerable, because that’s what love in action looks like and because that’s what new creation looks like. And in a world of filth, where culture was crude and vulgar and religion often involved ritual drug use and prostitution, God’s people stood apart—much as the Jews of the old covenant had stood apart. Jesus’ people, transformed by word and Spirit, should stand as beacons of his new creation, by our lives and by our proclamation, lifting the veil on what God has in store for this broken world. So Brother and Sisters, be Easter people. If you have believed that Jesus died and rose from the dead to forgive our sins and to make us part of his new creation, prove it. Really be Easter people. Immerse yourselves in God’s word and hear what he has to say. Don’t let it go in one ear and out the other. Let it sink in and take root and grow. And then be the new creation that God’s word will make us if we give it the chance. As he promised, he will make us the firstfruits of his new creation—and that, Brothers and Sisters, is how he is setting the wrongs of this world to right. Not by our anger, but by his word and by his Spirit. Let’s pray: O Lord, from whom all good things come: Grant to us, your humble servants, that by your holy inspiration we may think those things that are good, and by your merciful guidance put them into practice; through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after EasterPsalm 82, St. James 1:17-21, St. John 16:5-15by William Klock How’d your week go? Several times—actually, a bunch of times—I found myself thinking about what I preached last Sunday—thinking about the hope that lies before us. Thinking about how Jesus, risen from the dead, is the beginning of God’s new creation and how he—and his gift of the Holy Spirit—give me assurance that what God began that first Easter morning he will one day complete. Thinking that because I am by faith in Jesus the Messiah, I will one day know that new creation in all its fullness. And I was thinking about that because—a bunch of times this week—I was looking forward to that day when God will set everything to rights. Because I hope that in God’s new world there will be no broken spokes or being chased by dogs on the River Trail, no need to change timing belts or ball joints, and maybe the best part: no arguments started by random strangers on the Internet and no relationships with old friends strained by current events. Because all those things did happen to me this week. None of them were earth-shatteringly horrible—and I’m glad of that—but they remind me that the world is not as it should be. And then I read the news and I learned about a man stuck in bureaucratic immigration limbo with seemingly no hope of getting out of it. Having been through that process, his story resonated with me. And I read about a farmer in Vermont stuck with a bill for thousands of dollars assessed on his cattle feed from Canada because of tariffs. His business profits for the year gone. And there’s absolutely nothing he can do. And reading about people stuck in the middle of wars. And a friend shared an article about the persecuted church in China. And all I can do is pray, which feels like it’s not enough and some people say it’s a waste of time. But I know it’s not, because Jesus has risen and I know that means that God’s new world has begun and one day he’ll set everything to rights. And so I hope and I pray that it may be “on earth as it is in heaven”. And then I started looking at this week’s scripture lessons. And there’s the Old Testament lesson from Job and that verse we read in the procession at funerals: I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another. Brothers and Sisters, there’s that same hope. Job had faith that the Lord would vindicate him. And the Psalm. Psalm 82 has been with me, running around in my head all week. God has stood up in the council of heaven: in the midst of the gods he gives judgement.How long will you judge unjustly: and favour the cause of the wicked?Judge for the poor and needy: and save them from the hands of the wicked.They do not know, they do not understand, they walk about in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are shaken.Therefore I say, “Though you are gods: and all of you sons of the Most High,Nevertheless you shall die like man: and fall like one of the princes.”Arise, O God, and judge the earth: for you shall take all the nations as your possession.Psalm 82 is from a group of psalms written by Asaph. Asaph was Samuel’s grandson and he and his sons were commissioned by King David to worship the Lord. That was their job. They were court worshippers. And in Psalm 82, Asaph cries out with the whole people of Israel at the injustices of the world. The gods of this age favour the wicked. They will not come to the aid of the poor and needy. In other words, Asaph knew that the world is not as it should be. And yet Asaph knew what the Lord had done for Israel and he knew his promises and so he could sing out about the Lord, the God of Isreal, as the great judge in heaven. Asaph had hope that the Lord would hold the powers of this present age accountable. Asaph closes with that confident prayer: Arise, O God, and judge the earth: For you shall take the nations as your possession. This was how Israel prayed “on earth as in heaven”.Things were going well for Israel under King David, but even then, Asaph, with the people of Israel, still had a profound sense of the brokenness and the fallenness of the world. It was the Lord’s plan, as he called and created a people for himself, that this people would know the crushing weight of sin and death. He allowed them to become slaves in Egypt. And he delivered them that they might know his grace and his faithfulness—so that they might know that he is the God who keeps his promises and that he is the judge who will vindicate the cause of the poor and the oppressed. And this became Israel’s story and Israel’s identity. Over and over she would find herself being crushed under the heel of this or that pagan king, and she would cry out to the Lord, and he would come as the great judge to vindicate Israel and to defeat her enemies and to rescue her. And as this was the identity and story of Israel, so it would be the identity and story of the Messiah, and then the story and identity of the Messiah’s people, of the church. But the disciples weren’t expecting this. No one—or almost no one—in Israel was expecting this. The Messiah was supposed to come and break this cycle. In him God’s new world would come, they would all be raised, and they would reign forever in a world set to rights—once and for all. And they were sort of right, but they got the timeline wrong. And that’s because they’d forgotten the promises and the part of the story where God calls and sets apart this special people for himself in order to bring the nations to him in faith. Only a people who knows suffering, who knows the crushing weight of sin and injustice, can carry God’s forgiveness and justice to the world. That’s why the Messiah had to die. Sin and death had to do their worst, so that Jesus could rise triumphant over them. Deliverance comes through suffering. Forgiveness and new life require sacrifice. But they’d forgotten this and this is what Jesus has been trying to explain to the disciples through the lessons we’ve had from John’s gospel these past weeks. And so he says in John 16:1: I’ve said these things to you to stop you from being tripped up. They will put you out of the synagogues. In fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will suppose that they are in that way offering worship to God. They will do these things because they haven’t known the Father or me. But I have been talking to you about these things so that, when their time comes, you will remember that I told you about them.Jesus by this point has already explained to them that very soon he’s going to be leaving them. That was bad news enough. But now he tells them that after he’s gone, persecution is coming. Their unbelieving Jewish brethren will throw them out of the synagogues—which means cutting them off from the Jewish community, from family, friends. They will become outsiders in their own community. Some of them, Jesus warns, will even die for their faith in him. And when that happens, Jesus knew, it will be really tempting to give up. They thought that the Messiah was going to put an end to all the suffering and tears, but now Jesus is warning: you’re going to know suffering and tears the likes of which you’ve never known before—and all for my sake. I didn’t say these things to you from the start, Jesus goes on, because I was with you. In other words, as long as Jesus was with them they were still pretty sure of how all this Messiah stuff was going to work out. Again, the Messiah would usher in God’s new world and everything would be great. And then, with Jesus gone, they’re going to be tempted to give up—just like we saw them hiding behind locked doors. If Jesus goes away without setting everything to rights, well, he must not have been the Messiah after all. That would be the logical conclusion. And they’d do their best to go back to their old pre-Jesus lives. So now Jesus is getting them ready. He goes on: But now I’m going to the one who sent me. None of you asks me, “Where are you going?” But because I’ve said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart.Well, yes. If Jesus is leaving, how’s he ever going to accomplish his messianic mission? But this is what Jesus wants to stress to them—even though they won’t understand right away. This is his messianic mission: Truly, truly I say to you: It’s better for you that I should go away. If I don’t go away, you see, the Helper won’t come to you. But if I go away, I will send him to you.Just in case it isn’t clear, what Jesus is talking about here is his ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit. The risen Jesus couldn’t stay here forever. When his own people cried out for Jesus’ crucifixion they declared, “We have no king but Caesar.” It was the ultimate rejection of both their God and their Messiah. It was blasphemy and until that moment, if you’d asked anyone in Jerusalem if they considered Caesar their king, they’d have laughed at you. The Lord was their king. But they became so outraged by Jesus’ messianic claims, so outrage with the things he said about the temple, that they shouted the unthinkable to Pilate: “Crucify him! We have no king but Caesar.” And then to spite them, Pilate posted those mocking words on the cross: “This is the King of the Jews”. But when God raised Jesus from the dead, he vindicated him. It was a divine declaration that Jesus really is the Messiah and that he really is Israel’s (and the whole world’s) king. And kings have to take their thrones. And since God’s work of new creation has only just begun and Jesus’ throne is in heaven, that’s where he had to go to begin his rule. The king couldn’t stay here forever. But—the second thing Jesus is saying here—if he goes, he will send the Helper—God’s own Spirit—and God’s Spirit will make the reality of Jesus resurrection and of God’s new creation real to us. The end goal is for heaven and earth and God and human beings to be reunited. Jesus, the God man, is the embodiment of that hope. But consider, Brothers and Sisters, that the gift of the Holy Spirit is too. The title John uses is parakletos. In Greek it literally means “called alongside”, which is a powerful image of who and what the Spirit is for us. He comes alongside as our helper, our intercessor, and our advocate. And this is essential. Like I stressed last week, as the disciples began to realise the significance of Jesus’ resurrection, they got excited. They were ready to go out and shout it from the rooftops of Jerusalem. But Jesus stressed to them: “Wait. Wait until I send the Helper.” Because enthusiasm will only get us so far. Jesus has given his people a mission, but enthusiasm and excitement alone won’t fulfil it. We need the help of the Holy Spirit. So Jesus goes on here in verse 8: When he comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong on three counts: sin, justice, and judgement. In relation to sin, because they don’t believe in me. In relation to justice—because I’m going to the Father, and you won’t see me anymore. In relation to judgement, because the ruler of this world is judged.God’s people had longed for their day in court and for the Lord to vindicate them—just like we read in Psalm 82. And Jesus’ point here is that it’s finally going to happen. Except it’s going to be his people—this new Israel—who will finally get their day before the judge. And as Jesus’ people bring their case before the great Judge, the Spirit will be there to help them—to be their advocate. The Spirit will present the evidence for the world’s sin. But there’s no reason for the Spirit to bring exhibit after exhibit showing the world’s—and that’s not just the pagan nations, but also unbelieving Israel—it’s not necessary for the Spirit to put every last sin on display to prove the world’s rebellion against God. All the Spirit has to do is present as evidence the world’s rejection of Jesus. Either you stand with Jesus and on the side of God’s new creation and are part of the world set right, or you stand in solidarity with sin. And, second, Jesus says, the Spirit will convict the world in relation to justice. If you’re following along, some of your translations might say “righteousness”. These are the same word in Greek. “Justice” fits the context better here. Jesus’ point is that the world thinks it has justice on its side. Like he told them earlier: They will kill you and in doing so they’ll think that they’re offering true worship to God. But Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and his ascension to his throne are the evidence of his vindication by the Father. At the cross the world issued its verdict against Jesus, but when he raised Jesus from the dead and enthroned him in heaven, God overturned the false verdict of the world and declared his son to be the Messiah and the world’s true lord. If you want justice, look to Jesus, because everyone who trusts in Jesus and gives him their allegiance as king shares in that verdict. And, third, Jesus says that the Spirit will give evidence that the world is wrong in relation to judgement. The world was about to pass judgement on Jesus and condemn him to death as a false messiah, but his resurrection and ascension would prove the world wrong. And not long after that the world would pass the same judgement on Jesus’ people, on the church, but Jesus promises that the Spirit will stand with them and continue to prove the world’s judgement wrong. The Spirit will continue to present the evidence of Jesus resurrection and ascension as proof that the devil has been defeated and that death itself no longer has the final say. Brothers and Sisters, the Holy Spirit isn’t just our advocate before the judge, he is our comforter amidst the trials Jesus promised we will face as we take up our crosses to follow him. Jesus promised his disciples and he promises us that we will face hatred and even persecution—sometimes martyrdom—for the sake of his name. But because we know he is faithful, because he has vindicated Jesus, we can trust that the judge of all the earth will do what is right. Even as we face death itself, we know that death has been defeated. As the Father raised Jesus from death, so he will raise us if we are in him. And the Spirit comes alongside us not so we can hunker down inside our churches like the disciples hunkered down and hiding in the dark that first Easter weekend. The Spirit comes alongside us to empower us as we go out. As we take our message of hope and forgiveness, of the world set to rights and tears wiped away, as we take that good news of Jesus, crucified and risen and Lord to the world. This is the point of our Epistle today from St. James. Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes down from above, from the Father of lights. His steady light doesn’t vary. It doesn’t change and produce shadows.I have to think that when James talks about the good and perfect gift coming down from the Father of lights he’s talking about the Holy Spirit. Yes, everything good we have is a gift from him, but the Spirit is the gift above all others. For Jesus in John’s gospel, the Spirit was the one who would come alongside to help and advocate for us. For James, the Spirit shows us the constancy and faithfulness of the Father. The gift of the Spirit is proof for James that God keeps his promises, because the life of the Spirit is the thing he’d been promising to his people all along: his own presence with them to give them a new heart and set them to rights. James goes on in 1:19. So, my dear brothers [and sisters], get this straight. Every person should be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. Human anger, you see, doesn’t produce God’s justice. So put away everything that is sordid, all that overflowing malice, and humbly receive the word which has been planted within you and which has the power to save our lives.In other words, let the Spirit transform you. Let the Spirit make you—or maybe better to align you with—God’s new creation. The example James uses is anger. Anger is what wells up from the fallen human heart in response to injustice, but responding to injustice with anger—and James isn’t talking about righteous or just anger, but about malice and pride—responding with anger just compounds the problem. Sin can never make another sin right. Instead, God’s word has been planted within you. Let the Spirit cause that world to take root and grow. That gospel word is what has saved your life. But if you let the Spirit grow that word in you, if you let God’s word shape you, if you let the Spirt make you a truly gospel person, that life-saving combination of word and Spirit will overflow from you and you will be a gospel light in the darkness of the world, you will be a beacon of God’s new creation in the midst of the old. Word and Spirit working through us will make us a people ready to endure suffering and persecution so that we can, even if it’s just in small ways, so that we can bring God’s justice into the world, so that we can wipe away the tears and proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord. Brothers and Sisters, this is how God’s new creation comes. This is how he wipes away the tears and set things to rights. Jesus started it when he rose from the grave, but God’s word and God’s Spirit, working through the church—through us—as we go out into the world, not only bring God’s salvation to individuals, but as we are transformed one by one, the gospel, the word, the Spirit create a whole new culture with Jesus and the gospel at its core. One day Jesus will come back for the final act, to cast down death and to fully bring heaven and earth back together once and for all. But that day will come because his people, empowered by his word and by his Spirit have been faithful in being his new creation right here in the midst of the old. So, Brothers and Sisters, go out in peace to love and serve the Lord. Alleluia! Let’s pray: Father, as we asked in the Collect we ask again: fix our hearts on the good things you have promised. Keep the hope of your salvation and of your justice ever before us, that we might go out full of your Spirit, to live and to proclaim the good news of Jesus and his kingdom. Through him we pray. Amen.
A Sermon for the Third Sunday after EasterSt. John 16:16-22by William Klock
On Easter morning we heard St. John’s account of the empty tomb. How Mary Magdalene had come running to the house where he and Peter and the others were hiding. How she sobbed out that someone had taken Jesus’ body. How he and Peter ran to the tomb as dawn was breaking and how they found it empty, with the linen graveclothes lying there neatly. And we heard John say that “he believed”. Somehow…inexplicably…Jesus had risen from the dead. John believed in the resurrection of the dead. They all did. It was their hope. But it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was confusion, maybe he just wanted to be more certain, but he didn’t say anything. They went back to the house where the other disciples were. They went back into hiding. Doors locked, windows shuttered, no lights, no fire. When things blew over, they could sneak out of Jerusalem, slink back to Galilee. Maybe they could go back to their old lives and everyone would forget that they’d been followers of Jesus. But then the next week we read from John’s first epistle. We read those words: Everything that is fathered by God conquers the world. This is the victory that conquers the world: our faith! That doesn’t sound like the same John afraid to even tell his friends that he believed Jesus had been raised from death. And last week we read from Peter’s first epistle and he exhorted us to bear patiently with suffering. Peter went from hiding behind locked doors on Easter to boldly preaching the risen Jesus in the temple court just fifty days later. He would eventually find himself proclaiming that gospel in Rome itself, where he would be martyred for that holy boldness. What happened? Brothers and Sisters, hope happened. Jesus, the risen Messiah, appeared to them in that locked room. They saw him, resurrected and renewed and yet still the same Jesus with the scars of the cross in his hands and feet. They saw Jesus risen from the dead. Not a ghost, not a spirt, but Jesus bodily raised. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. It was supposed to be everybody all at once, not just one person even if he was the Messiah. But there he was, proving the old doctrine of the Pharisees and the Prophets and their fathers true—just not the way they expected. But even that’s not so much what motivated them to leave their hiding places and to proclaim the risen Jesus to the world. It’s what Jesus’ resurrection meant. Because Jesus’ resurrection was more than just an astounding miracle. Jesus’ resurrection was the proof that God’s new world had been born, that new creation had begun, that the promises he made through the prophets and the hopes of God’s people were being fulfilled. Jesus’ resurrection meant that the hopes of God’s people were finally becoming reality. Jesus had kindled God’s light in the midst of the darkness and they knew the darkness would never overcome it. But as they worked this out, they also realised that while Jesus had inaugurated this new creation, it would be they—Peter, John, Mary, the others, you and I—who would carry and announce God’s new creation to the world. Again, this hope, made real, made manifest in the resurrection of Jesus, is what sent the disciples out, not just to announce that God had performed a miracle in raising Jesus, but to announce the God’s new creation had been born and that Jesus is its king—and if that proclamation cost them everything, even if it got them killed—they knew that God would raise them and that he would vindicate them, just as he had Jesus. Nothing else changed. They were hiding in that locked and darkened house because—usually—when the authorities crucified a rebel or a revolutionary, they would also round up and crucify his followers. As it turned out, it doesn’t seem that anyone was seriously interested in doing that to Jesus’ disciples. But they didn’t know that. The real danger came when they went out and began proclaiming the good news about Jesus—as they challenged the false gods and the pretend kings of the darkness with the light of the Lord Jesus, as they confronted this fallen world and its systems with God’s new creation. That’s when they were mocked, beaten, arrested, and martyred. Think of Paul. He was one of the one’s breathing threats against Jesus’ disciples. He was there looking on while Stephen was stoned, holding coats so people could better throw stones at him. And then as Paul was on his way to round up Christians to bring them before the Jewish authorities, he was met by the risen Jesus. And, again, it wasn’t just an amazing miracle that inspired Paul to take up his own cross and to follow Jesus—to follow Jesus and to be beaten, stoned, imprisoned, and eventually murdered for the sake of the gospel. It was hope. It was what the resurrection of Jesus meant. Jesus, risen from the dead, was proof of God’s faithfulness and proof that his promises of forgiveness and new life and new creation and of humanity and creation set to rights—everything the Jews (and Paul!) had hoped and longed for—it was proof that it was all true and that it was coming true in Jesus. The light has come into the darkness and the darkness has not and never will overcome it. It was proof that if we are in Jesus the Messiah, we have a share in God’s new creation and that no amount of suffering and not even death can take that away. People aren’t going to risk their lives to report a miracle. What drove Peter, John, Paul—and all our brothers and sisters since—what drove them to risk everything to proclaim the good news was the knowledge, the assurance, the hope that through that proclamation God’s promised new creation would overcome the darkness, the sadness, the tears—that it would make all the sad things of this broken world come untrue—for them and eventually for everyone who believes. The kingdom would spread and grow until heaven and earth, God and humanity are at one again. All of this is what Jesus is getting at in our Gospel today from John 16. It’s from the middle of the long teaching that Jesus gave to his disciples when they were in the Garden of Gethsemane, after they ate that last Passover meal with Jesus. Over and over Jesus exhorts them saying things like, Don’t let your hearts be troubled…trust God and trust me, too. And: I chose you, and I appointed you to go and bear fruit that will last…If the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were from the world, the world would be fond of its own. But the world hates you because you’re not from the world. No, I chose you out of the world. And at the beginning of Chapter 16 he says to them: I’ve said these things to you to stop you from being tripped up. They will put you out of the synagogues. In fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will suppose that they are in that way offering worship to God…I have told you these things so that when their time comes, you will remember that I told you about them.I expect the disciples were remembering that part of what Jesus said very well when they were hiding. “Jesus said they’d come to kill us,” they whispered in the dark. What they didn’t remember—or at least what they didn’t understand were the words we read today. In verse 16 Jesus says: “Not long from now, you won’t see me anymore. Then again, not long after that, you will see me.”They expected—like pretty much everyone else—that the Messiah would bring some kind of revolt or revolution. He would overthrow the pagans and take the throne of Israel and, ruling over Israel, he would restore God’s people to their rightful place and status in the world. So it’s no wonder that when they heard this, they started murmuring amongst themselves. John goes on: “What’s he talking about?” some of his disciples asked each other. “What’s this business about ‘not long from now, you won’t see me, and again not long after that you will see me’? And what’s this about ‘going to the Father’?”Maybe Jesus was going to finally do what the Messiah was supposed to do. Maybe he was going to go gather his army and come back to battle the Romans. John writes: They kept on saying it. “What is this ‘not long’?” “What’s it all about?” “We don’t know what he means!” Jesus was doing that thing again where he would say cryptic things or tell a confusing story. It got their interest and then he could fill them in. Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, John says. “You’re discussing with each other what I meant, aren’t you?” he said. “You want to know what I meant by saying, ‘Not long from now, you won’t see me; and then again, not long after that you will see me.’ That’s it, isn’t it? Well, I’m going to tell you the solemn truth.”I can see them all stopping the whispers and leaning forward. “Yes, Teacher. Tell us what you mean!” So Jesus goes on in the silence: “You will weep and wail, but the world will celebrate. You will be overcome with sorrow, but your sorrow will turn into joy.” I can picture the confused looks coming back to their faces. The Messiah was supposed to make everything all better. He was supposed to set everything to rights and to wipe away all the tears. The Messiah was supposed to bring an end to weeping and wailing! So Jesus gives them an illustration they could understand: “When a woman is giving birth she is in anguish, because her moment has come. But when the child is born, she no longer remembers the suffering, because of the joy that a human being has been born into the world.” And then he adds in verse 22: In the same way, you have sorrow now. But I shall see you again, and your hearts will celebrate, and nobody will take your joy from you.”Even with the childbirth illustration, it was still pretty cryptic. Even with what follows—which we’ll come to in our Gospel for Rogation Sunday in two more weeks—even with that, the disciples really didn’t understand—yet. It was all there in the Prophets and it was all there in the things Jesus had been teaching. The son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, and the chief priests, and the legal experts. He must be killed and raised up on the third day,” Jesus had said at one point. It doesn’t get much clearer than that. And yet the events of that first Good Friday and Easter Day came as a complete surprise to them. But then when they met the risen Jesus it all started to come back to them and it started to fall into place. The wheels started turning. Mental light bulbs started turning on. The one thing left that they needed was the Holy Spirit—but I don’t want to get ahead of the story. We’re still in that fifty days between Easter and Pentecost. And I think those fifty days must have been some of the most exciting days in the history of the world. The disciples sat with Jesus—risen and glorified, the first bit of God’s new creation real and tangible and true right there with them—and he taught them. He went back over the scriptures—no doubt saying things he’d said a hundred times before—but now, in light of the resurrection, it all started to make sense. And I can imagine their excitement growing between being there with Jesus in all his resurrected glory and as they connected the scriptural dots and as they saw how the story they had grown up with, the story they lived every year at Passover, the story that defined who they were, the story they knew so, so, so well began to unfold in a new way. They’d always known it was a great story about the mighty and saving deeds of the Lord, but over those forty days in the presence of Jesus and hearing him teach and explain the story turned into something more glorious than they ever could have imagined. The God they’d known became so much bigger and more glorious than they ever thought he could be. And then it was time for Jesus to ascend and he had to tell them, “Wait.” They were ready and eager and excited to go out into Jerusalem and Judea to start telling everyone the story—the story everyone knew, but now seen in a new and glorious light through the lens of Jesus’ resurrection—and about this new hope they knew. God’s new creation had finally come and they’d spent the last forty days living in his presence. But Jesus said, “Wait. Your excitement about what God has done is only part of what you need. Wait. Just a little bit—ten more days—so I can send God’s Spirit. Couple this good news with the power of the Spirit and not even the gates of hell will stop you!” And, Lord knows, the gates of hell have tried, but the gates of hell had already done their worst at the cross, and Jesus rose victorious. And that’s how and that’s why those first disciples took up their crosses and followed Jesus. Peter was crucified at Rome, Andrew was crucified in Greece, Thomas was speared by soldiers in India, Philip was martyred at Carthage, Matthew was martyred in Ethiopia, Bartholomew in Armenia, James was stoned to death in Jerusalem, Simon was martyred in Persia, and Matthias in Syria. Only John survived, after being exiled to Patmos. You see, in the risen Jesus they saw the proof that sin and death have been decisively defeated, that the false gods and kings of the old evil age have been exposed, and most of all they saw that God’s promised and long-hoped for new creation has been born. The resurrection gave them hope and that hope sent them out to proclaim the good news even though it meant following in the suffering of Jesus. And their stories have been the stories of countless Christians through the ages—of the Christians who died in the Roman persecutions, who died at the hands of the Sassanids, the Goths, the Vikings, the Caliphs, the Turks, the Kahns, the French revolutionaries, the Communists, the Islamists. It’s been the stories of countless missionaries who marched into hostile territory for the sake of the gospel, knowing they very well might die for it, but also knowing that the way of the cross is the path into God’s new creation. Brothers and Sisters, too often these days we’ve lost sight of this. Maybe it’s the prosperity gospel, maybe it’s that we haven’t known any meaningful persecution for so long, but we Christians in the modern west seem to have forgotten this. There’s no room for suffering and the way of the cross in our theology. We gloss over what look like “failures” in church history. I was listening to a sermon this past week. The preacher was telling the story of a missionary named Peter Milne. Milne was a Scottish minister and part of a group that called themselves “one-way” missionaries. When they shipped out to far off lands to proclaim the gospel, they packed their worldly goods in a coffin. It was symbolic. They were going out as missionaries with no expectation of ever returning home. They would die—one way or another—in the land they went to evangelise. Peter Milne went to the New Hebrides in the South Pacific. It was a land of head-hunting cannibals. Milne wasn’t the first to go. Others had gone before and were killed by the natives. Milne was the first to go and to survive and to have a thriving gospel ministry. When he died fifty-some years later in 1924, he was buried in his coffin with the epitaph: “When he came, there was no light. When he left, there was no darkness.” When he’d arrived there wasn’t a single Christian on the island. When he died, there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t a Christian. But here’s the thing—and the preacher I was listening to completely missed it: Following Jesus means first taking up a cross. It’s not about the glory of “successful” ministry. It’s about dying to self, and living for the hope of God’s glory and the spread of his kingdom. The preacher I listened to said nothing of the others who had gone before Milne to the New Hebrides and been martyred. They don’t fit in with our prosperity and business model theology. We admire their willingness to give their lives for the sake of the gospel, but they sort of get chalked up as failures. But to do that is to miss what it means to follow Jesus, to know the pangs of childbirth, but to also experience the joy that makes the pain and the sorrow pale in comparison. As Tertullian said, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, but so are all the other good-faith “failures”. There was a week when we were church-planting in Portland that I found myself all alone. Veronica’s mom was sick and she and Alexandra had travelled up to Kelowna. The other family that was helping us to get things off the ground had to be away that weekend. It was just me. But The Oregonian newspaper had just run a story on us. I’d had several contacts that week. The show had to go on. We were meeting at a Lutheran Church on Sunday evenings, so I asked the pastor there if one of their organists could come and play that evening. She came and she and I sat there waiting. And 7pm came and went. And 7:05, and 7:15 and we knew no one was coming. I was discouraged and it was obvious. She and I said Evening Prayer together and then she told me her story. She and her husband, a pastor, had been Lutheran church planters in Jamaica for almost ten years. They had a very small group that had asked them to come to help them plant a church and for ten years they tried and nothing ever happened. When they finally decided to quit there were no more people than when they started. She said that she and her husband found the whole thing utterly discouraging. They had made significant sacrifices to be there and nothing had happened. It was tempting to be angry with God. They returned home thinking they were failures and wondering why. They’d been faithful in proclaiming Jesus. They’d spent hours every week in prayer with that little group of people. And then several years later they received a letter. It was from a pastor in Kingston. Not long after they’d left, he’d arrived to plant a church. His group moved into the building left behind by the Lutherans and quickly began to grow and thrive. And he wrote to thank them. “You soaked this place in prayer and you cast gospel seed all through the neighbourhood,” he wrote. He didn’t know why it never grew for them, but he knew they’d been faithful and he was now reaping a harvest he hadn’t planted and he wanted to thank them for their faithfulness. That elderly Lutheran organist told me that story with tears in her eyes and said, “Be faithful and don’t be discouraged. Whatever happens, if you are faithful, the Lord is at work. Some of us plant, some of us water, some of us reap, but it’s all the Lord’s work.” She reminded me of the hope that lies before me—and that lies before all of us—and that Jesus doesn’t just call us to follow him; he first calls us to take up our crosses. Just it was necessary for Jesus to give his life that he might be raised from death, so must we die to ourselves that we might live. Brothers and Sisters, fix your eyes on Jesus. He knew the joy that was set before him and so he endured the cross. He scorned its shame. And because of that the Father raised him from the dead and has seated him at his right hand. His kingdom has been born. Now the joy of the kingdom, of new creation, of God’s life is before us. May it be the reason that we take up our crosses and follow our Lord. Let’s pray: Gracious Father, as we come to your Table this morning, give us a taste of your great kingdom feast; let us see Jesus, risen from the dead; and make us especially aware of your indwelling Spirit that we might be filled with the joy of your salvation and the joy of your new creation. Strengthen us with joy, so that we will not fear to take up our crosses and follow Jesus. Amen.
A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Easter1 St. Peter 2:18-25 & St. John 10:11-16by William Klock
Let slaves obey their masters with all respect, not only the good and kind ones but also the unkind ones.Those are jarring words, aren’t they? They have been abused at times in history, shouted by masters at their slaves: “God says you’re supposed to obey me and you don’t want to disobey God, do you?” True words, but showing that sometimes true words, when spoken by the wrong person and in the wrong context, turn everything upside-down. Jarring words written by St. Peter in his First Epistle—chapter 2, verse 18. The verse that leads into today’s Epistle. Originally the Epistle started a few verses later. At the Reformation Archbishop Cranmer extended the Epistle to verse 19, but to really understand what Peter’s saying we need to go back at least to verse 18 to those words about slaves obeying their masters. It also helps to know that slaves were what made the Greco-Roman world go round. Ten to twenty per cent of the Roman population was slaves and without them life in Rome Empire would have ground to a halt. When we think about slavery, we probably think about race-based slavery in the United States or maybe in Latin America in the colonial era. Slavery in Rome wasn’t quite the same. It wasn’t based on race. Slaves were often prisoners of war or debtors or, of course, the children of slaves. They did have certain rights. They could own property and even buy their own freedom. But at its core all slavery is rooted in the idea that you are not your own; you belong to someone else. You’re not a person; you’re property. That slavery exists, whether in Rome or in the Americas or in other parts of the world today, that slavery exists is a stark and profound reminder that the world is not as it should be. Slaves, as much if not more than anyone else, know the pain and the tears of the present evil age. And I think that’s why Peter singles them out here. But what does slavery have to do with Easter? Well, think back. On Easter Day the Epistle, from Paul, reminded us to look up and keep our eyes fixed on the age to come, on the new creation inaugurated by Jesus. Last Sunday we heard St. John exhorting us to overcome the world—to be stewards and heralds of God’s new creation. This is all what it means to let the reality of Easter—of Jesus’ resurrection—work out practically in our lives—to be Easter people. And today it’s St. Peter who speaks to us on this same theme. All through Chapter 2 of his letter Peter has been writing about who and what Jesus and the Spirit have made us: living stones, a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. And he writes that God’s purpose in all this is that we will “announce the virtuous deed of the one who called [us] out of darkness into his amazing light”. That’s our duty, Brothers and Sisters, to proclaim the mighty and saving deeds of God in Jesus. To make the good news known to the world. But, Peter warns, don’t undermine that Easter proclamation with worldly living. Here’s what he writes beginning at 2:11: My beloved ones, I beg you—strangers and aliens as you are…Remember that when we are born again in Jesus and the Spirit, we’re reborn as part of God’s new creation and, even though we still await its consummation, that makes us in a very real sense strangers and aliens in the world we once knew. The old evil age has been defeated, but it still trundles on even as the new age is breaking in, but that old age no longer has a claim on us. We belong to Jesus. We belong to God’s new world. And it is this new world and it’s king, Jesus that we proclaim. But we also need to live this new world too and that’s what Peter’s getting at. So he goes on: I beg you to hold back from the fleshly desires that wage war against your true lives. Keep up good conduct amongst the pagans, so that when they speak against you as evildoers they will observe your good deeds and praise God on the day of his royal arrival. (1 Peter 2:11-12) Brothers and Sisters, our walk needs to match our talk. We have been delivered from sin’s slavery, but the old temptations are still there. That’s why we vowed in our baptism to fight the world, the flesh, and the devil. You and I belong to a royal priesthood and a holy nation. We ought to live holy lives, putting our sinful desires to death. And we do that not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it is part of our Gospel witness. This is what it means to be light in the darkness. Peter knew the world needed gospel light. As bad as we think our world might be, the ancient world was worse. Unspeakable sin was everywhere. The sexual immorality of our world doesn’t hold a candle to the sexual immorality of ancient Greece and Rome. And idolatry was woven through every bit of life. To become a Christians meant withdrawing from all of that, which meant the pagans looked on Christians as impious traitors. The pagans called Christians atheists, because to worship only one god was pretty much as good as atheism. They accused Christians of being unpatriotic, because Christians refused to worship the emperor. If disaster befell a city, the pagans would blame the Christians for angering the gods. And yet Peter reminds these brothers and sisters that the pagans would also notice how different they were. In a dog-eat-dog word, these Christians treated each other as equals and they loved each other. They even pooled their resources to care for widows and orphans—the cast-offs of Greco-Roman society. In a world of sexual filth, the Christians lived lives of purity. The Christians became known for adopting the infants—especially the newborn girls—left to die of exposure by the pagans. The Christians treated women and slaves as equals of free men. In other words, the Christians were living out as best they could God’s new creation in the midst of the old. They were lifting the veil on God’s future, on the day when everything is set to rights, and giving the pagans a glimpse of it. And the pagans couldn’t help but take note, even as they threw all their accusations at the Christians. Some of the pagans—especially those deeply invested in the evils of this world—they lashed out, they fought back and Christians were thrown into prison and martyred. But even then, their witness had an impact and a few at first, but then more and more and more were drawn to Jesus through their holy witness—not just the proclamation, but by the lives of these Christians—by faith in Jesus put into practice. And the world began to change. New creation spread. So Peter goes on in verses 13-17: Be subject to every human institution, for the sake of the Lord: whether to the emperor as supreme, or to the governors as sent by him to punish evildoers and praise those who do good. This, you see, is the will of God. He wants you to behave well and so to silence foolish and ignorant people. Live as free people (though don’t use your freedom as a veil to hide evil!), but as slaves of God. Do honour to all people; love the family; reverence God; honour the emperor.So, Brothers and Sisters, so much as we are able—without compromising our gospel principles—we are to keep the peace. Peter knew that God is sovereign and that he establishes human rulers in this world to keep the peace, to punish evil, and to promote the good. He knew that those rulers are often far from perfect. Peter even knew that those rulers are often evil. However much you may have thought that Justin Trudeau was the worst Prime Minister ever, however much you may think Donald Trump is totally unworthy of the Presidency, the Roman Emperors were worse—far, far, far worse. Our governments in the West, for all their flaws and even as they forsake the gospel, have been profoundly shaped by that gospel. That could not be said of Caesar. And yet even as Nero would light up his garden parties by setting Christians on fire, Peter acknowledged that—generally speaking—God has appointed such men—as we pray—to administer justice, restrain wickedness and vice, and uphold integrity and truth. So Peter warns Christians to be subject to our earthly rulers. Jesus has not called us to be violent revolutionaries bent on overthrowing Caesar so that we can impose a theocracy. Instead, God wants us to “behave well” and in that to silence the accusations of the pagans. Show honour to all, love our family (he means the church), and honour the emperor. You don’t have to get into idolatry or offer incense to Caesar to be submissive to his God-given authority. You can see how this actually did work if you look at the history of the early church. Those early Christians lived peaceably. They refused to comprise. They refused to participate in idolatry and in sexual immorality and it cost them, but they lived as truly gospel people. Many of them were martyred for doing so. And you might think that killing people would put an end to a movement. But this quiet, peaceful, holy living worked. It gradually silenced the accusations of the pagans, who gradually and increasing numbers were drawn to the good news and to Jesus. Here’s the thing. We know that the world is not as it should be. In our anger we often want to lash out ourselves, if not to make it right, at least to make it right for ourselves or to get some kind of revenge. And that only makes things worse. But as those first Christians lived peaceable and godly lives, as the pagans came to Jesus in faith, the world began to change through their influence. Gradually the gross sexual immorality disappeared, infanticide and abortion stopped, the brutality of the gladiatorial games ended, the status of women and children rose, and slavery came to an end. Brothers and Sisters, the gospel changes the world through humble, peaceable, and holy Christians as it quietly works its way through a nation until that people or nation itself becomes a witness to Jesus and gospel. We really need to hear this lesson today. Those first Christians had no other choice. They were a minority. They had no political power. We, however, living in a world that was once Christian and where Christianity is now in decline and out of fashion, we keep trying to regain it all through political power—forgetting, I think, that the gospel doesn’t work that way. It rises up from below, from the ranks of peaceable, humble, and godly people who proclaim and live it. We will never overcome the accusations and rejection of the pagans by trying to force the gospel on them. Rather, they will be drawn to the gospel through our gospel proclamation backed up by our gospel living. And this is where Peter says those startling words: Let slaves obey their masters with all respect, not only the good and kind ones but also the unkind ones.Did Peter know that one day the influence of the gospel would put an end to slavery? I don’t know. Slavery was a given in his world. But Peter knew that slavery was not God’s plan for human beings. He knew that it had no place in God’s new creation. And yet he tells slaves—and it’s not like he was just writing this to slaves he didn’t know in far away churches, there were surely slaves in Peter’s home church, brothers and sisters he loved dearly to whom he said the same thing face to face—Peter tells slaves to obey their masters—even the evil ones. And I think that’s hard for us to hear, because in our world, this sounds like Peter is colluding with injustice. One of the slogans of our post-modern age is “Silence is violence”. You have to speak out against evil and injustice. But Peter was perfectly aware that slavery was an injustice, so let’s bear with him. Consider that Peter lived the gospel story very literally. He was one of the fist Jesus called. He spent three years being discipled by Jesus. He was there when Jesus was arrested. Remember, he was the one who lashed out, drawing his sword, cutting of one of the soldier’s ears, putting up a fight for Jesus. He heard Jesus telling him to put his sword away and he saw Jesus heal that soldier. And he was there when Jesus was on trial and he was the one who denied knowing Jesus three times. He was there when they crucified him. And he was there with John on Easter morning to see the empty tomb and later that day to meet the risen Jesus. Peter knew that story. It was as much his story as it was Jesus’s story, even if Jesus was the centre of it. Peter knew what it looked like to bear with injustice and suffering. He’d seen Jesus do it. And because Jesus bore with it, because Jesus refused to respond with violence, because Jesus had submitted to death on a cross, everything had changed. If Jesus hadn’t submitted to death, he never would have risen victorious over it and God’s new creation would never have been born. Brothers and Sisters, that’s how God’s new creation, how his redemption works: Sin and death did their worst, and Jesus and the gospel rose triumphant. And what Peter is saying is that we, as Jesus’ people, need to inhabit that same story, make it our own, be willing to suffer and even to die if it comes to that, so that the world can know the power of the gospel—of the good new of Jesus crucified and risen. That’s why Peter goes on like he does in verse 21, where he says: This, after all, is what came with the terms of your call.In other words, this is what you’re going to be called to do, this is the life you’re going to be called to live when you take up with Jesus in faith. You’re going to have to inhabit his story. And to make sure we understand what that story is Peter writes what was probably a hymn sung in those early churches. The Messiah, too, suffered on your behalf, leaving behind a pattern for you so that you should follow the way he walked. He committed no sin, nor was there deceit in his mouth. When he was insulted, he did not insult in return, when he suffered, he did not threaten, but he gave himself up to the one who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might be free from sins and live for righteousness. It is by his wounds that you are healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your true lives. (1 Peter 2:21-25) The crucifixion of Jesus was the most evil and unjust act in history. Jesus was the one man who deserved nothing but praise and honour and glory, but his own people rejected him, mocked him, beat him, and crucified him. In Jesus, Peter saw the fulfilment of God’s promises through the Prophet Isaiah. God’s royal servant would fulfil his purposes to save the world, but he would do so by submitting to injustice. The servant would be insulted, without responding with insults of his own. He would suffer without casting curses on his torturers. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross” and “we were going astray like sheep” writes Peter, drawing from Isaiah 53. Jesus took on himself the punishment his people deserved. Because he was Israel’s Messiah, the king and the world’s true Lord, he could represent Israel and the rest of us in a way no one else ever could. So with that in mind—with this idea that each of us is called to inhabit the gospel story of the cross and the resurrection—I think we can understand what Peter is getting at when he tells slaves to submit to their masters and for everyone to be subject to earthly rulers. He’s not just saying that we should passively accept suffering and violence and injustice. What he’s saying is that when you and I suffer for the sake of gospel, for the sake of goodness, truth, and beauty, that Jesus’ suffering is somehow extended through us, and the saving and life-giving power of his death and resurrection meets this present evil age and its people with transforming power. It’s not an easy thing to do. Knowing Peter and how impetuous he was, I expect he struggled with this, but he knew. The flesh cries out “No!”. The flesh wants to push back—to return insult for insult, to get revenge on those who wrong us. The flesh doesn’t want to wait for the gospel to act like yeast in a lump of dough—slowly working its way through. We want justice now! We dismiss the way of suffering, saying that it fails to confront evil, insisting that only power, force, and violence can right the world’s wrongs—or at least the wrongs perpetrated against us personally. And this is precisely why we need to keep our eyes on Jesus and his cross, remembering that his death and resurrection are at the centre of everything. Remembering that the unjust suffering of God’s people is caught up in the suffering of Jesus his son and all part of the same redeeming story. Brothers and Sisters, this is how the world is set to rights. We think revolution comes by taking up arms and by fighting back, but all that does is replace one evil with another. The real revolution took place at the cross and it spreads as you and I take up our crosses and follow Jesus. It’s hard. We want vindication. We want justice. We want the world set to rights. But there is no better way to remember that God has promised us all these things than to live out that future in the here and now. Let’s pray: Almighty God, who gave your only Son to be for us both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always receive with thankfulness the immeasurable benefit of his sacrifice, and daily endeavour to follow in the blessed steps of his most holy life, who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, for evermore. Amen.
A Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter1 St. John 5:4-12 & St. John 20:19-23by William Klock
In the ancient church this was the Sunday when the men and women baptised on Easter would take off their white baptismal robes after a long week of celebrating their baptism. Now it was time for the church to go out into the world to be the new people Jesus and the Spirit had made them. At Rome, in those ancient days, the newly baptised would do this at the church of St. Pancras—a church named after a young Roman martyr. Because of his faithfulness he would become a patron of oaths and vows. Now it was time to live out their baptismal vows, like that young martyr. They’d given their allegiance in faith to Jesus. Now it was time to march out into the world, to proclaim him as the crucified and risen king, and to fight the world, the flesh, and the devil—not matter the cost. Brothers and Sisters, as the Easter story continues, we’re reminded that Jesus didn’t die and rise from death just to zap us to heaven the moment we believe. He didn’t die and rise again to create an escape hatch out of the world or even out of persecution and martyrdom. He died and rose again so that we might live for him and carry the good news—like royal heralds of the king—out to the far reaches of God’s creation. This has been the mission of the people of God all along, going all the way back to Abraham. He and then his family were called and set apart by the Lord to be a light in the darkness. They were the people who lived with the living God in their midst. Through them, God revealed himself to the nations. Or, at any rate, that’s how the plan had started. Abraham’s family, Israel, largely failed in her mission. That was part of the plan too. It showed that it would take more than calling and creating and sending a special people to be light in the darkness. The human race has a heart problem. Instead of desiring God, we desire everything else. Instead of worshipping him, we make idols. And Israel had that same heart problem. And so that story of calling and sending and failure leads us to Jesus. It was meant to from the very beginning. He came to set his people to rights—at least those who would follow him, who would trust him, who would give their allegiance to him as messiah—as God’s king. And in his death and resurrection Jesus defeated the powers of the old age and inaugurated God’s new creation. But John stresses, this time something was different. This new people isn’t just called and sent. This time they’re also transformed and equipped. And that’s really the theme of this Sunday after Easter. Every week we’re sent out with those words: “Go forth in pace to love and serve the Lord.” Friends, that dismissal is a call to go out and swim in our baptism, to go our and to proclaim the risen Lord, to go out and do battle with the world, the flesh, and the devil. I suspect that a lot of the time we respond, “Thanks be to God” without even thinking about any of that. But those times when we do think about what those words mean, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed—especially when the scriptures or the liturgy or the sermon has really spoken to us that day and we have a clear sense of why God has called us and saved us—it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. So Brothers and Sisters, as we stand overwhelmed by the task before us, John assures us that if we are in Jesus by faith, there are two vitally important new realities for us. The first is that we have been made part of his new creation. We have a share in Jesus’ resurrection from death. Yes, there’s more to come. We haven’t been resurrected yet. That will come some day at the end of the age when the gospel, through the Church, has accomplished its purpose and brought the world to Jesus. But in the meantime, Jesus’ resurrection has freed us from our bondage to sin and death and given us new life. And, second, that if we are in Jesus, he has given us God’s own Spirit. He’s made us his temple, the place where he dwells. The Spirit’s not something to be earned when we’ve become holy enough. He’s not some later experience or second blessing, as if we can be in Jesus, but not have a share in the Spirit. Jesus’ gift of the Spirit is the very thing that fulfils God’s promise through the prophets and that defines us as his new covenant people. And as Jesus forgives and frees us by his death and resurrection, the indwelling Spirit empowers and equips us to live the new life Jesus has given. The Spirit’s life in us is a foretaste and a down payment on the resurrection and the life of the age to come—and most importantly in light of today’s theme, the indwelling Spirit is the one who makes the task set before us by Jesus possible. He’s the one who equips us to fulfil those impossible vows we made in our baptism. In our Gospel, again John 20 beginning at verse 19, John tells us: On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Judeans. Jesus came and stood in the middle of them. “Peace be with you,” he said.We shouldn’t pass over these words too quickly. It’s the first day of the week. It’s still the same day that Mary went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body and found it empty. It’s the same day she went running to tell Peter and John. The same day they went running to the tomb to see for themselves. The same day when John says none of them—except, it seems, for him—understood what had happed. John says he “believed” and I think that means he believed Jesus had risen, but that was crazy and he was still working it through so he hadn’t said anything to the others yet. This is that same day. Now it’s evening. And the disciples have locked themselves into someone’s house. The doors are locked. I expect the windows tightly shuttered. There was no cooking fire. Nothing that might make the house look occupied—nothing to give them away. Maybe one little lamp, just so they could barely see each other in the darkness. They were afraid. Four days before, the Jewish authorities had arrested Jesus. Three days before he’s been crucified as a dangerous revolutionary. Soon, they figured, the authorities would come for the rest of them. Best to lay low until things blew over. Maybe in a few days they could sneak out of the city. And so they sat there in the darkness, some silently pondering what all this meant, some still weeping for their dead friend, maybe a couple of them arguing in low tones about what had happened to Jesus’ body and what they’d do next. But whatever they were doing, a palpable sense of fear filled that dark room. John’s telling of the story of new creation reverberates with echoes of the story of the first creation: Darkness was over the face of the deep. And then Jesus is suddenly there. John wrote about the Incarnation back in his prologue saying that in Jesus the light had come into the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it. That was an echo of Genesis. The first day of the week God called light into being, driving away the darkness. And now the Light Incarnate appears in that dark, fear-filled house and I have to think that somehow and in some way it was filled with light—a light that drove away every last vestige of darkness. And to these frightened men, Jesus announces, “Peace be with you!” Imagine their surprise. And there must have been some disbelief or some doubts. Or maybe, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they simply didn’t recognise him. Something about his resurrection had brought a transformation. Same Jesus, same body, but in some way just different enough in appearance that they didn’t recognise him. Of course, it wouldn’t have helped that they simply didn’t expect to see him again either. So Jesus holds out his hands for them to see. One at a time he lifts a foot out so that they can see. There were the marks left by the nails. And he lifted his tunic to show them the wound left by the spear that had been plunged into his side, the wound that had gushed forth blood and water, evidence to the soldiers that he was genuinely dead. And here he stood alive. They were shocked. How could it be? I’ve said before, the reason resurrection wasn’t on anyone’s mind was because this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. This wasn’t a story Jews would have made up, because all the Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead knew how it would work—and it wasn’t supposed to work this way. At the end of the age the Lord would raise all the faithful at once. There was plenty of disagreement about some of the specifics, but they all knew one thing for sure: It would be everybody all at once, not just one person, even if that one person was the Messiah. This just wasn’t on their radar. Not at all. But now it is and they’re confused and, it seems, even though John says they were glad, they were still more than a little afraid. And so Jesus says to them again, “Peace be with you!” And Jesus doesn’t waste any time as John tells it. “Peace be with you,” he says, calming their fears. Jesus is alive. And immediately he gets down to the very practical aspects, the real-world implications of his resurrection. Jesus doesn’t waste any time. He says in verse 21: “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”Think about that. Here they are, hunkered down for fear of being rounded up and executed. Here they are, afraid to even show their faces in Jerusalem. Here they are, giving it a few days before they try to sneak out of town without being noticed. And Jesus says to them, “I’m sending you. As the Father sent me to you, I’m now sending you: to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria…to the ends of the earth.” In other words, “You’re not going to go slinking out of the city under cover of darkness. No, you’re going out into Jerusalem with boldness—the same way I went out into Galilee, through Judea, and eventually to Jerusalem at the head of a parade, hailed by the people. You’re going to go with the same boldness out into this city and you are going to declare what God has done. Everyone is going to know who you are. You’re going to declare to Jerusalem that this Jesus whom they crucified died and has been raised from the dead, that he really is the Messiah, God’s King, and that his kingdom, God’s new creation has come.” Think again of John, just beginning to wrap his head around the idea that Jesus had been raised from death—but still hunkered down with the others, afraid. John couldn’t even tell his friends what he thought had happened. The last thing on his mind was telling it to Jerusalem—and Jesus isn’t talking about mere “telling”—you know, whispering it to a few people who might be safe to tell. No, he’s talking about proclaiming this news—to everybody. Brothers and Sisters, think about that for a minute. Most of us are hesitant to proclaim the good news about Jesus. We have no reason to fear for our lives like Jesus’ disciples did. The worst thing that happens to us is we offend someone, make them think we’re weird. They faced martyrdom—and all but John were, indeed, martyred for their proclamation. We have so little to fear, but we’re afraid anyway. We’ve even stopped speaking in terms of proclamation—the Bible’s way of speaking about evangelism. Instead we talk about “sharing” our faith—watering it down, as if it’s just another option on the religious smorgasbord that someone might want to try out for themselves. We’ve lost our confidence in the good news and in the God who raised Jesus from the dead who stands behind it. No, Jesus calls us to declare the good news like royal heralds, sent out into the world to declare the mighty deeds of God, that he has raised Jesus from the dead, and made him Lord of all. But, again, consider John. Confused, afraid, just beginning to understand. And then consider the confidence of his words, written decades later in our Epistle: Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah has been fathered by God…because everything that has been fathered by God conquers the world. This is the victory that conquers the world: our faith. Who is the one who conquers the world? Surely the one who believes that Jesus is the son of God! (1 John 5:1, 4-5) Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah—God’s king—has been reborn as part of the people of God. And that belief changes everything. That belief transforms the fearful John hesitant to even tell his friends about the dawning realization that Jesus had been raised from death, it turns him into the courageous apostle, exiled for his proclamation of that truth, and writing boldly to the churches to stand firm in that same faith even though great tribulation was about to hit them like a storm. There is everything to be feared out in the world: rejection, mockery, persecution, even martyrdom, but by faith the people of God overcome and stand firm in our witness. It’s not because faith changes reality. It’s because this faith recognizes the new reality born that first Easter when Jesus rose from the grave, the new reality that he is victor over sin and death, the new reality that new creation has begun in him, and the new reality that he is Lord of that creation. By faith we are united with him. By faith we share in his inheritance. And by faith we share in his calling and ministry—his Church, taking up the mantle of prophet, priest, and king. Like John, we are called to boldly testify about Jesus. It was he who came by means of water and blood, Jesus the Messiah, not by water only but by the water and the blood. The Spirit is the one who bears witness, because the Spirit is truth. There are three that bear witness—the Spirit, the water, and the blood—and these three agree together. If we have received the witness of men, God’s witness is greater. This is the witness of God, the testimony he has borne concerning his son. (1 John 5:6-9)John points back to Jesus’ ministry. He came by water. That was the start of it. He went to John and was baptised in the Jordan and as he walked up out of the river, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and his Father spoke, “This is my Son in whom I am well-pleased.” That was Jesus’ initiation into his messianic ministry. And that ministry—at least in its earthly phase—ended in blood, at the cross, where he died to conquer death and to provide forgiveness of sins. Jesus’ baptism testifies to his being the Messiah. Jesus’ blood, shed on the cross, testifies to his being the Messiah. And, too, John writes, so does the Spirit. And, he says, consider all the things we believe, in which we trust, based on the testimony of mere men. How much more, Brothers and Sisters, ought we to trust this testimony about Jesus backed up by God himself? And not so much just receiving and believing ourselves, but in light of the fact that this is the truth, this is the good news that literally changes the world, that is changing the world, oughtn’t we to be proclaiming it to that world? Through Jesus and the Spirit God has given us the light. The light that will transform the darkness that sin and death have cast on the world. The light that the darkness cannot and will not ever overcome. Dear Friends, don’t hide it under a basket. Hold it high. Proclaim it. Show it to everyone. Don’t be afraid. God has spoken: “Let there be light!” And as John wrote in his Gospel: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has no overcome it.” He goes on in verse 10: All those who believe in the son of God have the witness in themselves.But that’s not where John leaves us in the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t just send his disciples out into the world. That would be an impossible task. Jesus also equips them. Look at verses 22-23 of John 20: With that, he breathed on them. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he said. “If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven. If you retain anyone’s sins, they are retained.”As the Lord breathed life into Adam in the original creation, Jesus now breathes on his disciples. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says. Was the Spirit literally imparted by Jesus’ breath? Luke tells this part differently in his Gospel and in Acts—that whole event with the dramatic coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as they gathered at the temple to hear Peter preach and to be baptised. But notice there, too, that the Spirit comes with a wind—in both Hebrew and Greek, wind, breath, and spirit are all the same word. Jesus was good at acted-out prophecy and I think that’s what he's doing in this case in John’s Gospel. He is—or he soon will be—imparting God’s Spirit to this new people of God, to those who believe, and he illustrates just what this gift is by an act that they couldn’t help but connect to God’s giving life to Adam. But this is new life. And this is what will equip them to go out, despite the threat of death, to proclaim with boldness the good news. Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit does a lot for us, but here Jesus makes sure we know what his primary purpose is. It’s not to give us radical experiences, although that certainly might happen. It’s not to make us holy, although he certainly does that as he turns our hearts and our affections away from self and sin and points them towards God. But, the primary purpose of the Spirit is to equip us to do the impossible: to do for the world, what Jesus did for Israel. To go out in the world in his name and to proclaim what God has done through him. “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” And then those words that have so often been misunderstood and abused: “If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven. If you retain anyone’s sins, they are retained.” Remember I said that by faith we have a share in Jesus’ inheritance and ministry. By faith the Father adopts us and makes us his sons and daughters, so we share in what belongs to Jesus. And that means that as he is King and Prophet and Priest, so are we as his Church, his people. And Jesus gets here at two of those things. Here he reminds his friends and he reminds us that when we go out into the world to proclaim his Lordship, to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection, to proclaim that new creation has come, we do so as both prophets and as priests. Our message is two-fold. I think the priestly role comes most naturally to us. This is the part of our proclamation where we announce the forgiveness of sins. Think of the priests of the Old Testament, offering sacrifices. That was one of their main duties: to facilitate and to mediate God’s forgiveness to the people. Think of Jesus. He is both priest and sacrificial lamb. He offers and presents himself to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins. And, as priests, we proclaim to the world the forgiveness he offers through that sacrifice. But that is not our only role. We also share in Jesus’ prophetic office—and that’s the part that doesn’t come as naturally to us, at least not as things currently are. But consider what the prophets did. Consider what Jesus did in his role as a prophet. He called out the sins of his people, he summoned them to repentance, and he announced the judgement to come on those who remained unrepentant in their sin, unbelief, and faithlessness. In contrast, much of the Church today is afraid to take on this prophetic role, to name sin, to even use the word. Some parts of the Church have given up altogether and have embraced sin and called it virtue—leaving folks nothing to repent of and with nothing for which they need forgiveness. They’ve gutted the gospel. But these two things, the priestly and the prophetic go hand in hand. Our prophetic office, announcing judgement, is without hope if we do not also fulfil our priestly role of announcing forgiveness. But our priestly office, our message of forgiveness lacks any real meaning if it is not also accompanied by the prophetic announcement that sin is sin and that God will judge it. Brothers and Sisters, this is the good news: that we are sinners, that our holy God judges sin and that the penalty is death, but also that Jesus has died as a perfect sacrifice for sins, and has risen, victor over death, inaugurating God’s new creation and giving a sure and certain hope that what he has begun he will finish. One day all things will be made new, every bit of sin and evil will be swept from creation, and all will be set to rights. And by faith in Jesus we have a share in that new world. Brothers and Sisters, do we believe that? I trust that we do. We affirm this belief every week as we come to the Lord’s Table. We recall the story. We confess our sins in repentance. And we come to the Table in renewed faith to participate again in those events that set us free from sin and death, in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But maybe we’ve forgotten the real power behind what we confess here at the Table. Friends, think this morning on what the cross and the empty tomb mean. Think on what the blood of Jesus means. Think on what his gift of the Spirit to you means. And then take seriously those words of dismissal: “Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.” Consider that in those words Jesus is saying to us, to you and to me, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” Let’s pray: Almighty Father, you gave your only Son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification: Grant that we may put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, and always serve you in purity and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for Easter DayColossians 2:20-3:4 & St. John 20:1-10by William Klock
Sometimes there’s a way that seems right, you try to follow it, and you just get yourself into trouble. I parked at the Big Qualicum fish hatchery and went for a ride on my gravel bike on the Horne Lake-Cook Creek Forest Service Road loop. It’s a beautiful ride, but it’s not the easiest. There’s a hill at one point that’s so steep the logging trucks actually have to be towed to the top by one of those giant trucks with eight-foot tall wheels. It’s too steep to ride and even walking it while pushing your bike is hard, because your shoes just slip out from under you in the dry sand and gravel. I saw that 20% grade in my mapping app and thought I’d be smart. There’s another logging road on the map that bypasses that big hill. It would also cut the loop down from 90km to about 75km. So off I went down the mountain on that other logging road. I should have known better. My mapping app shows how heavily travelled various routes are. I could see that everyone took the main road and went up the giant hill. I could see that no one went the way I was going. I thought I was smart and had found a secret no one knew about. And then that shortcut suddenly ended at ravine. There was a cliff on both sides and Nile Creek babbling away sixty feet below. The logging company had decommissioned the road and removed the bridge. I climbed about thirty feet down the cliff with my bike over my shoulder, sure I’d find a way. I didn’t. And I had to climb back up and then ride back up the mountain, back to the main road with scraped knees and elbows to show for my folly. I got to climb two big hills that day. We’re always looking for the easy way, no one wants to take the hard and difficult way even if it’s the right way to go. Jesus’ words were looping in my head as I rode back up that hill to the main road: The gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. I was picturing myself barreling down that road, happy I found the easy way, not paying attention, and riding right off that cliff.This is what St. Paul’s getting at in our Epistle today from Colossians when he writes, Think about the things that are above, not the things of earth.Here’s what was happening in Colossae—or, at any rate, what Paul feared would happen if the church there didn’t get on the right track. Just as in Galatia, the Christians were being tempted to fall back into a form of Judaism—to start finding their identity in things like circumcision, sabbath-keeping, and diet. They were facing the same sort of persecution the Galatians were and it was very tempting to avoid it by backing away from their identity in Jesus and to instead identify themselves as Jews. Jews were exempt from all the requirements of Roman religion. But that wasn’t the only thing that made Judaism tempting. Even before Jesus came on the scene, there had been gentiles who were attracted to Judaism for its ethics and morality. The ancient pagan world was grossly immoral and barbaric in ways that we—living in a world shaped for two thousand years by the gospel—it was filthy in ways we struggle to imagine. And some of the pagans got sick of it. Yes, the torah made heavy demands, but it also offered a way of life along very clearly delineated lines of holiness and purity. That was attractive to some people. This is what Paul is getting at, at the end of Colossians 2—which I think really needs to be part of today’s Epistle if we’re going to get a sense of the context. Staring in Colossians 2:20 Paul writes: If you died with the Messiah, coming out from the rule of the worldly elements, what’s the point of laying down laws as though your life was still merely worldly? “Don’t handle! Don’t taste! Don’t touch!” Rules like that all have to do with things that disappear as you use them. They are the sort of regulations and teaching that mere humans invent. They may give an appearance of wisdom, since they promote a do-it-yourself religion, a kind of humility, and severe treatment of the body. But they are of no use when it comes to dealing with the indulgence of the flesh.Paul had in mind these gentiles who were thinking that the laws and regulations of the torah would give them a sense of wisdom and religion and humility, but it’s not hard to see our own culture in his warning. Everyone it seems is looking for some way to feel better about themselves. Sometimes it’s just a sort of generic do-gooderism. Some people get this way with life-style and fitness routines, disciplining themselves in ways that become a sort of religion. Some people pursue conservation and environmentalism with the fervency of religion. Things like recycling or cutting down Scotch broom or driving an EV become almost sacramental. These things atone—or at least begin to atone—for our sins and the sins of our ancestors. And then there’s the full-on Post-moderns who have bought into various critical theories and the whole dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. In that system, if you find yourself in the oppressor category—usually because you’re white or male or heterosexual or—God forbid—all three—there is no atonement, there is no forgiveness. You must simply spend the rest of your life genuflecting at the woke altar and confessing your sins and those of your ancestors. There is no forgiveness, but at least you can feel better for constantly signaling your virtue and for being an “ally”. You can even feel holier-than-thou and look down your nose—a Post-modern Pharisee—when you see your fellow oppressors who aren’t kowtowing at the woke altar. These are all just modern expressions of Paul’s “do-it-yourself religion”. They may make us feel better or feel like we’re doing something or even that we’re working to heal creation and make the world a better place, but to put it in his words, They are of no use when it comes to dealing with the indulgence of the flesh. None of these things address our real problem. None of these things will make us genuinely holy. In the end, they turn out to be indulgences of the flesh themselves. They’re shortcuts. Instead, we need to take that hard and narrow way. We need to take the road that climbs that giant hill, even though it means pushing the bike while your feet slip out from under you in the sand and gravel. Because the hard way is the only way that will get us to the end goal. Every other way will eventually turn into a dead end—with the emphasis on dead. There is only one way that leads to life. Brothers and Sisters, we have to die and be raised back to life. That’s the only way to get out of this worldly sphere and to escape the “worldly elements”—the powers and gods of the present evil age, the powers and gods that keep us perpetuating our sins and our rebellion against God. Because no matter what we do, no matter how many good works we think we’ve done, as long as we’re enslaved to those false gods and systems, we’re just feeding, we’re just perpetuating the fallenness of the world and this present evil age. Something has to change. We have to leave behind the present age—it’s days are numbered anyway and as Christians we should know that—and we need to take our place in the age to come, in God’s new creation. We all know that the world is not as it should be. God didn’t create us for pain and tears and it’s good that we instinctively want to fix that. But we can’t. Not on our own. Our sin and rebellion have broken God’s creation and there’s no fixing it with the broken tools it offers. To get back to where we should be—to get back to that place of fellowship with God, of living in his presence, of being the stewards of his world—means leaving behind the old and joining in the new. This is what drew people to Jesus during his ministry. He was preaching good news, yes, but he was also wiping away the tears and giving people a taste of new creation. He healed the blind and the deaf and the lame. He cast out demons. He even overturned death on a few occasions. In Jesus, God’s new world, Gods’ new age was breaking in. And then there’s that first Easter morning that we read about in John’s Gospel. We see Mary standing at the tomb and weeping. Sin and death, all the powers of this evil age had risen up at once and killed Jesus. If there was a time for tears, that was it. The most evil of evil things evil has ever done. Mary represents us all as we cry in the midst of this broken and fallen world full of evil. She was so overcome with the sadness of it all that she doesn’t seem to have been moved even by the presence of the two angels. “Why are you crying?” they asked. And she just kept sobbing. “They’ve taken away my lord and I don’t know where they’ve put him!” And then Jesus walks up and asks her again, “Why are you crying?” And she turns around and asks him, “Sir, if you’ve carried him off somewhere, tell me where you’ve put him.” John says she thought he was the gardener. We pass over that little detail without much thought. At least I did for years and years. But then I started noticing how so many artists in history depict Jesus that Easter morning with a shovel or a hoe in his hands. There’s something to that bit of detail. John mentions it for a reason. Mary mistook him for the gardener because he must have been doing gardener things. So there was Mary crying at the tomb and talking to angels, while Jesus knelt nearby pulling up weeds or tending to a fallen plant. The second Adam was alive. God had raised him from the dead and rolled away the great, heavy stone from the tomb. That was the greatest event on the greatest day in the history of the world. When Jesus burst forth from the tomb, I like to say that he sent a shockwave of life through a dead world. Nothing would ever be the same. And yet what does he do? He walks out of the tomb and starts tending to the garden. My first thought is something like, “Doesn’t he have bigger and better things to do?” But it shouldn’t really be surprising. This is the same Jesus, God incarnate, who humbly took on our flesh and who humbly went to the cross for the sake of his enemies. Why shouldn’t he act the part of a humble gardener first thing after his resurrection? But, too, it shouldn’t be surprising, because this is what he came to do: to set his creation, broken by our sin and rebellion, he came to set it to rights. Why not start with those weeds just outside the tomb and then that rosebush starting to fall over. Mary keeps weeping uncontrollably. And then he says her name and suddenly she knew, suddenly she recognised him. “Rabbi!”she said. And the tears stopped—or maybe they turned into tears of joy. John doesn’t say. But the weeds, the rosebush, Mary’s tears—Jesus didn’t just burst out of the tomb to be some highfalutin and abstract doctrine of resurrection to be studied and discussed by theologians in ivory towers. No, he came out of the tomb, resurrected indeed, but immediately working out that resurrection for his beloved creation and for his beloved people. First the garden and then Mary, and pretty soon everyone. One by one Jesus has come to each of us as we’ve been confronted with the good news of the gospel. He’s spoken our names. He’s wiped away our tears. We’ve believed. We’ve been baptised. And coming out of those baptismal waters, we’ve been filled with God’s own Spirit and made new. We still wait for the day when we will be resurrected as Jesus was, but the Spirit is a down-payment, an earnest on that day. In our baptism we have died and been raised up with Jesus to a new life. Like Israel delivered from Egypt at the Red Sea, we’ve been delivered from our slavery to sin and death as we’ve passed through the waters of baptism and now Jesus sends us out. Now we’re the gardeners, sent out into the world to proclaim and to live the good news. To tend to the weeds and the falling rosebushes and the tears. To do the things we knew all along needed to be done, the things maybe we tried to do, but that we could never really accomplish on our own or with the world’s broken tools. But now they get done, because the power of the Lord goes with us in the gospel and the Spirit. We are—again—like Israel. Consider. Israel passed through the Red Sea and then the Lord sent her to conquer Canaan. And yet it wasn’t Israel who won the victory, but the Lord. Yes, Israel had to march and Israel had to fight, but it was always the Lord who won the battle. And just so with us. Jesus has brought us through the waters of baptism and now he sends us out into the world to reclaim what rightly belongs to him. And it won’t happen if we don’t go, but at the same time, it is not we, but he who wins the victory. The kingdom of God fills the earth because of the power of the gospel and the Spirit. But, again, Paul’s warning to the Colossians: We are so prone to forgetting all of this and we fall back into do-it-yourself religion. And so he says in verse 1 of Chapter 3: So if you were raised to life with the Messiah, search for the things that are above, where the Messiah is seated at God’s right hand. Think about the things that are above, not the things of earth. Don’t you see: you died, and your life has been hidden with the Messiah, in God! When the Messiah is revealed (and he is your life, remember), then you too will be revealed with him in glory.Here's the good news. Throw away all the do-it-yourself religion. Get off those dead-end trails and get back on the main road. Because if you belong to the Messiah, you’re also already part of his new creation. This is one of the greatest themes all through Paul’s epistles. Paul wants us to understand that what is true of Jesus is already true of us because we are “in him”—or as he puts it “en Christos”, “in the Messiah”. It may not always feel like it, but this is one of the fundamental things about the life of faith that Paul wanted these new believers to understand. It’s often hard, but we need to learn to believe that this is true even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Because it’s in those time when we’re not feeling it—feeling like our prayers are bouncing off the ceiling, feeling like we’re far from God, feeling like there’s no escape from sin, feeling like the world will never change—it’s in those times that we’re most prone to falling back into do-it-yourself religion. And there are two true things that Paul wants us to understand above everything else. If we can remember these two things, everything else is going to fall into place. Jesus has died and he’s been raised from death. And that means that if we are “in the Messiah”, then we have died with him. You have died with him. You are no longer a part of the old evil age. You are no longer a slave to sin and death. You don’t need any do-it-yourself religion to get close to God or to make the world a better place. You just need Jesus. You have been raised with Messiah. Even though we wait for the resurrection of the dead at the end of time, through the indwelling of God’s Spirit, we have in part—here and now—the life of the age to come. Jesus has made us part of his new creation. Our hope—and the hope of the world—lies with him as he sits at God’s right hand. In his incarnation, in his ministry, in his death, and in his resurrection, Jesus began the process of uniting heaven and earth, of bringing God and man back together. One day that task will be finished, heaven and earth will be rejoined and we will be resurrected and—as Adam and Eve once did—we’ll live in the full presence of God. But in the meantime, we—his church—have been given the task of proclaiming the good news about Jesus and by our life together, giving a dark world a taste of God’s light, of his new creation—of giving the world a taste of heaven. Brothers and Sisters, that’s how the kingdom spread. That’s how Christendom came to be. As Jesus’ people set their minds on God’s new creation and, as the church, lived it out in the midst of the darkness. And just as the God of Isreal who gave his son for their sake was unlike any god they’d ever known as pagans. This church, this community of people who identified with the Messiah and who gave their lives humbly for the sake of the world, who lived as one people regardless of whether they were rich or poor, slave or free, Jew or gentile, this people who taught the world what love and mercy and grace and justice are, this people showed the world the holiness it had been looking for, it showed the people how this broken world really can be set to rights—when we set aside our do-it-yourself ways and let the Messiah wash us clean and let his Spirit make us new. Brothers and Sisters, keep your eyes fixed on the things that are above. Keep praying with Jesus: Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, one earth as it is heaven. One day heaven and earth will be fully rejoined, but only because the church, in the power of the Spirit, has proclaimed the gospel to the whole world. In his book Surprised by Hope, Tom Wright wrote this, “People who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present.” May that be true of us. While we wait for God’s new world to come in all its fullness, let us never tire of being that new world here and now: as we, empowered by the Spirit, proclaim the good news that Jesus has died, that Jesus has risen, and that Jesus is Lord, as we pull the weeds, and as we wipe away the tears. Let’s pray: Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant us by your grace to set our minds on things above; that by your continual help our lives may be transformed; through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for Good FridaySt. John 19by William Klock
Every year, reading the passion narratives over the course of Holy Week, I always find myself at some point, at least for a little while, pondering Pontius Pilate. If we read the Jewish historians Philo and Josephus, they leave us with the impression that Pilate held the Jews and their religion in disdain and relished any opportunity they gave him to exercise his military authority. But then we read about him in the Gospels and we see a tired and exasperated government official who seems to just want to keep the peace. These people for whom he has no great love and even less patience have arrested Jesus. They can’t legally execute him themselves, so they drag him before Pilate. On the one hand Pilate has no interest in crucifying Jesus. He doesn’t like these people and he doesn’t want to do their dirty work. But he’s also finding the whole situation a pain in the neck. He was there to keep Caesar’s peace and the Jews weren’t making it easy for him. And so he had Jesus brought to him and he asked, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And Jesus responded, “Are you asking because you’re interested or because that’s what you’ve heard people say about me?” And Pilate responds, “Am I a Jew? Why should I care if you’re King of the Jews or not? It’s your skin on the line. Your own people—your own priests!—arrested you and handed you over to me. I’m giving you a chance to explain yourself. So what do you have to say?” Jesus goes on to explain in those well-known (and often misunderstood words), “My kingdom is not from this world. If it were, my disciples would have taken up arms to save me from the soldiers of the high priest.” And Pilate, confused and getting annoyed asks, “So are you a king or not?” And Jesus responded, “You’re the one calling me a king. I was born for this. I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” And we can hear the annoyance and the exasperation in Pilate’s famous answer, “What is truth?” And with that he went back out to address the Judeans. He didn’t understand what Jesus was saying, but that didn’t mean Jesus was guilty. Pilate went out and told them as much. It was usual for the governor to free a Jewish prisoner at Passover, so Pilate offered them a choice: Jesus or Barabbas. Barabbas was a monster. Surely they’d choose Jesus, because they certainly didn’t want Barabbas out of prison. For that matter, Pilate didn’t want Barabbas out of prison! But, no, to Pilates’ great surprise, they shouted out for the release of Barabbas and the crucifixion of Jesus. Pilate gave up. He symbolically washed his hands and declared to the people, this is on you, not me. And they took Jesus off to die. Just like Pilate, people have been stumbling over these words of Jesus for two thousand years. People hear him say that his kingdom is not from or not of this world and they then say to us, “Well, then leave me alone. Go worship in your church and leave the rest of us be. Enjoy your pie in the sky when you die.” Even Christians have misunderstood this to mean that we should disengage from the world. But that’s not it at all. Jesus’ kingdom may not be from this world, but it is most certainly for this world. It’s the only hope this world has. It’s what Jesus means when he tells us to pray “on earth as it is in heaven”—to look forward to, to hope for, and to pray for that day when God has set his creation to rights, when earth and heaven and God and man are back together as they—as we—should be. As he created it all and us in the beginning. This is what Jesus bore witness to and it’s what we, forgiven and washed and filled with his Spirit are called not only to pray for but to witness to the world and the people around us. It’s that kingdom that comes not by the sword—which is the only kind of kingdom Pilate could think of. Instead, it’s the kingdom that comes by the love we saw last night as Jesus shared bread and wine with his disciples and then washed their feet. It’s the kingdom that we see coming today, on Good Friday, as Jesus goes to the cross. On Good Friday, at the cross, all the great stories of the love of God come together in one place. As John tells us the story of Good Friday, he brings all these other stories together. There’s Psalm 22 and Psalm 69 and there’s Isaiah and Zechariah, and there’s the Passover lamb whose bones were not broken and it all points us to the big story of the God of Israel and his people and his love for them—a love that was meant to be, through them, for everyone and for all of creation. They were his agents for challenging the power of evil in the world, for being light in the darkness. And, of course, as we read the Old Testament, we see that their story—not very surprisingly—their story got stuck in the very problem for which it was supposed to be an answer—the great problem of rebellion and sin. And yet, Israel’s failure was God’s opportunity to announce his love once again. He would be faithful to his people. He would send his Messiah and his Messiah would fulfil his purposes for the world. Think of that bigger story. Going back almost to the beginning we’re told about the men of Babel and their tower. They’d lost all knowledge of their creator. They grasped at divinity themselves, reaching towards heaven. God confused their languages. There’s that “What is truth?” question all the way back there! And there, in the midst of deep darkness, just as the human race seems well and truly and utterly lost, God shows up to make himself known to Abraham and to announce that through Abraham and his family, he will make himself known to the world. A glimmer of light in the darkness. And then that family winds up enslaved in Egypt, so the Lord sends Moses to confront Pharaoh and to lead his people out of bondage—and Passover happens. There are centuries of ups and downs for Israel, but each time things go bad, the Lord sends a deliverer. And then finally he gives Israel a king—Saul—and the Philistines kill him. So the Lord raises up the lowly shepherd, David, who establishes a great kingdom and the Lord promises him a future heir who will be God’s own son and who will rule forever and ever. And then more centuries of ups and downs, of faithfulness and failure—mostly failure—until Babylon brings Israel down in shame and takes her off into exile. And when Israel is at her lowest, shamed and disgraced, that’s when the Lord points to her through the Prophet and declares: Behold, my servant. And he gives the Prophet Daniel, sitting in the shame of exile, a vision: the great empires rise from the sea, but over them all the Lord exalts the son of man as their judge. And, Brothers and Sisters, this story echoes all through our Good Friday Gospel today. We see Rome, another of those imperial monsters rising from the sea. And Rome does what Rome did best, brutally killing a rebel king. John shows us Pilate as he brings Jesus out to the people the day before Passover and announced, “Behold your king!” But those Sadducee priests didn’t want a Messiah any more than they wanted a resurrection. In fact, they didn’t want a Messiah so much that they shouted out the unthinkable, “We have no king but Caesar!” John shows us Babel and Egypt and Philistia and Babylon at their worst and then he shows us the seed of Abraham, the one greater than Moses, the son of David, the servant of the Lord and declares, “Behold the man! Behold your king!” And yet, for all it seems that Rome and the Sadducees are out of control, they never really are. As in Daniel’s vision, the beasts rise from the sea and they rage, but the God of Israel never ceases to be sovereign. Even in their evil, the beasts of empire serve his purpose. So, ironically, it’s Pilate the Roman governor, the man cynical of the very idea of truth, who in God’s providence, declares the truth to the people as he announces to them, “Here is your king!” Even as the priests protest his placard on the cross, Pilate again stands firm on the truth, insisting, “What I have written, I have written.” John powerfully reminds us that even this cynical, self-serving servant of Caesar will serve the Lord’s purposes. Jesus had said to Pilate, “You have no authority over me unless it is given to you from above.” So Rome does what Rome does best. It mocks and it kills and yet, in doing that, it providentially serves God’s purposes and proves the point that the God of Abraham and Moses and David does not fight the battle against evil with the weapons of the world, but with love. Everyone that day thought that Caesar had won. The devils were dancing with joy that Friday. And yet Caesar and the priests and the devils all played right into God’s hand. As evil rose to its full height, as it was concentrated all in one place, God won the victory against it on Good Friday. At the cross, God’s project to set his creation to rights is finally accomplished. This why John opens his Gospel with those powerful echoes of Genesis. In Genesis we read that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. John echoes those words as he tells us that in the beginning was the word and the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us—bringing heaven and earth back together. All through John there are these creation themes. There’s light and darkness. There’s the seed that will bear fruit and multiply. And now on Friday, the sixth day of the week, the day when God crowned his work of creation with the creation of man to rule his new world, John shows us Pilate bringing out Jesus, robed in purple and wearing a crown of thorns, and he declares to the people, “Behold the man!” Jesus is the true image of God and the world is so mired in rebellion and sin that God’s own people, confronted with the image of God in Jesus can only shout out, “Crucify him!” The people who prayed for the return of the Lord to his temple, turned their eyes away when he did return and demanded his death. They were so mired in darkness that they couldn’t bear the light. And yet the love of God marched sovereignly on—to the cross. At the end of the sixth day in Genesis, God finished his work and now on this sixth day in John’s Gospel we hear Jesus announce that “It is finished” as he takes his last breath. It was finished. His work was accomplished. Humanity was forgiven and creation was healed. Evil had risen to its full height, giving the love of God the opportunity to rise even higher on the cross. Of course, no one understood that on Friday. It would take the resurrection, in which Jesus was vindicated by his Father, in which his victory was brought out into the light for everyone to see, it would take that before they would know and understand and believe. But on the cross, as Jesus breathed his last and slumped, hanging on those nails, it was finished. Once and for all. A full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of Israel, for the sins of all of the nations—for the sins of the whole world. A sacrifice that would finally heal the breach and bring an answer to our prayer: on earth as it is in heaven. And now, Brothers and Sisters, you and I stand gathered at the foot of the cross, confronted by the very image of God and by his amazing love. Here is the man who represents what we were created to be in the beginning and what, if we will only commit ourselves to him, God will make us to be. Here is our King, who has inaugurated his kingdom—this new creation, this world set to rights, a world founded on love—and not the world’s idea of love, but the love defined by the story of God and his people and by Jesus’ sacrificed for us on the cross. Here we’re confronted by the King and his kingdom and by a vision of the world set to rights. What will we do? We are so often stuck in the kingdom of Caesar. We put our trust in Caesar’s sword and in Caesar’s coins—even in Caesar’s gods. Like those Sadducee priests who were so dead set on holding on to what they had, that they declared the unthinkable, that they declared the very thing they knew so well was false: “We have no king but Caesar.” And John reminds us today that whatever power Caesar may have, has been given to him by God and to fulfil his purposes, not Caesar’s. Brothers and Sisters, let go of Caesar and take hold of Jesus. Let go everything else and take hold of the love of God made manifest at the cross. Good Friday reminds us. We look up to the cross and we see Jesus. Behold the man. Behold the king. He is the image of God and as we look in his face we see the God who loved his people, who loved the world so much, that he gave his own son that we might be forgiven and set to rights and welcomed back into his fellowship—who sent his son not to condemn, but to save. Here is the good shepherd who lays down his own life for his sheep out of love. Here is the one who shows the greatest love we can ever know as he lays down his life for his friends. Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the uttermost. This love we see at the cross is the very love that shone so brightly out of the darkness at the very moment when we thought the light had been overcome. This is the love that redeems and renews us, but even more important than that, this is the love that glorifies the God who is love. And so, Brothers and Sisters, this Good Friday, be transformed by this love. Our brother and our king has given his life and by that love he gives us life and hope and a lens through which we should, more and more each day, see every part of our lives and every part of the world. This is the love that forgives our sins and heals our hurts. This is the love that is making creation new and that, one day, will wipe away our tears. This is the love that we, as Jesus’ people, manifest to the world. This is the truth we witness for the sake of the world and to the glory of God.
Cut!Galatians 5:2-12by William Klock
Back in 1998, just after we were married, Veronica and I travelled to Montreal for her interview with the US immigration folks. While we were there, we took a day to drive to Ottawa to do some sight-seeing. It was March and still very much winter in Montreal and as we left the island, driving over the bridge on the Trans-Canada Highway where the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers converge, we were surprised to see a Jeep speeding across the frozen river, going in the opposite direction back towards Montreal, driving on the ice. Having lived my whole life on the West Coast I’d never seen anything like that myself. I have no idea about the history of bridges to and from Montreal Island, but I would guess that at one point riding a horse or driving a wagon across the frozen river was the usual way to get across during Winter. But then Spring would come, the ice would melt, and all that would change. I expect there were ferries that carried people across the rest of the year, until the river froze again. Now, for Paul writing to the Galatians, Jesus is like that spring thaw. Ever since they’d left Egypt, the identity of the people of God had been tied up in their observance of the law. Circumcision was the beginning of it—eight days after a boy was born. That marked him out as one of God’s people, as a member of God’s covenant and an heir of his promises. But through life, that identity was lived out by keeping the law: by celebrating the Passover every year, by keeping the Sabbath, by offering sacrifices at the temple, by eating only clean foods and by avoiding unclean things and people. The law was the way to righteousness, the way to fellowship with God. But that was like driving across the river on the ice. It was all right and good—and in the case of torah it was God-given—but it was for a time. Things changed. Jesus changed them. Jesus changed everything. In Jesus Spring has sprung. God’s new creation has begun. The old world is starting to thaw. Think of the wonderful image that Lewis used in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with Narnia frozen by the witch—always winter, but never Christmas. But when Aslan arrived, the whole country began to thaw and the new life of Spring began break through the snow and the ice. Jesus has changed everything and in Jesus’ new world, the law no longer counts—it’ll no longer get you across the river, because the river’s thawed. Try to get across with the law now and you’ll just be caught up in the current and lost downstream. In Galatians 5:2 Paul puts it this way: Look here: I, Paul, am telling you that if you get circumcised, the Messiah will be of no use to you.So over the last four chapters Paul has made his argument to the Galatians and, we saw last week, he’s finished it with the command to cast out the false teachers—to cast them out the way Sarah cast out Hagar and Ishmael—because there’s only one family that has inherited God’s promises. Cast them out. They’re undermining the gospel. Don’t let their heresy fester; cast them out. But I expect Paul knew they would need more to persuade them to do that, so now he turns back to the circumcision issue. Actually, this is the first time that he mentions circumcision outright in the letter. So he sort of pulls himself up to his full height and says, “Look here! I, Paul—you know, the apostle who met Jesus personally and who told you the good news about Jesus in the first place—I want to be very clear that if you follow the advice of these circumcision folks, if you get circumcised, Jesus the Messiah will be of no use to you.” Those are some powerful words. These pagan gentiles had been completely captivated by the good news about Jesus: this man in whom God became incarnate, who died for the sake of his people, who rose from death and then ascended to his throne. They were captivated by the good news about this Lord who was unlike any lord or god they’d ever known. And they believed, they’d been baptised, and God had plunged them into his Spirit and they’d been transformed. They knew the power of the gospel. They knew the power of Jesus and the Spirit. And Paul’s saying, “If you get circumcised, all of that is gone.The good news here is that if Paul’s putting this way, it means the Galatian believers haven’t yet caved into the pressure from the circumcision agitators. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the agitators have split up the church with the ethnic Jews—the circumcised—on the inside, while the gentile believers are being forced to sort of participate or to watch from the sidelines—just as things were in the temple in Jerusalem with Jews in the inner court making their offerings and sacrifices at the altar while the gentiles were stuck in the outer court imagining what was going on inside. Maybe the agitators had got them eating kosher and observing the Jewish calendar, but none of the gentiles had actually gone all the way to circumcision yet. And Paul’s trying to get to them, to persuade them before they do. Because if they do, it’s like driving your car onto that thin, melting ice. Jesus has made a better way. So he goes on in verse 3: I testify once more, against every person who gets circumcised, that he is thereby under obligation to perform the entire law.Paul reminds them what it really means to be under the law. Even the agitators seem to have forgotten that. They wanted these gentile believers to do just enough so that they could pass for Jews with the authorities: get circumcised, stop buying pork in the market, observe the Sabbath and other Jewish holy days. They were motivated by fear. These new gentile believers were abandoning the gods and the religious customs of the Greeks and Romans and to avoid getting into trouble they were claiming the Jewish exemption—except they weren’t Jews—and if the authorities caught on, it might bring persecution on the whole Jewish community. So the agitators wanted these gentile believers to take on some of the obvious Jewish externals. And Paul reminds them of what they should have known already: that’s not how the law works. The law is all or nothing. They’ve accused Paul of only teaching part of the gospel and now Paul turns around and accuses them of teaching only part of the law. If the gentile believers go the way of circumcision, they’ll end up neither genuine Messiah people nor genuine torah-observing Jews. Back in 2:15-21 Paul said that “through the law [I] died to the law” and that “if righteousness is through the law, the Messiah died to no purpose.” Now in verse 4 he says the same thing another way: You are split off from the Messiah, you people who want to be justified by the law. You have dropped out of grace.To look for justification—which means to show you’re a member of God’s covenant people—to look for that through torah, is to reject the grace of the gospel. He’s been stressing that God’s covenant people are now those marked out by baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. That faith in Jesus—and nothing else—is what marks us out as God’s people. The moment you add to that—whether torah or anything else—you lose the gospel and when you lose the gospel you lose God’s grace. In this case, if circumcision is what marks out God’s people, then there was no reason for the Messiah to die and to take that old mark in your flesh as a means of justifying your place in the covenant is to reject Jesus and the gospel. But why? Well, Paul explains in verses 5 and 6: For we are waiting eagerly, by the Spirit and by faith, for the hope of righteousness. For in the Messiah, Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any power. What matters is faith, working through love.Do you remember last week when I was closing and talked about how seriously Paul took false gospels? We tend to dither around and make excuses when it comes to false teaching. We often struggle to know where to draw the line. It’s not always easy to tell where the line is—where something that’s just poor teaching crosses into bona fide heresy. In contrast, Paul was really clear: Cast them out. Get rid of them. Don’t let the false teachers influence the church. And the way to tell when something crossed the line was to ask if this teaching was still pointing forward into the age to come or if it was something that would drag us back into the old evil age. Paul gets at that again here when he says that we’re waiting eagerly, by the Spirit and by faith, for the hope of righteousness. In other words, true Christians will always be looking forward in hope to the day when God will vindicate our faith in Jesus, that day when he will finally judge sin and evil and wipe it all from his creation, when death will be no more, when everything will finally be set to rights, and we—his people through faith in Jesus—will live in his presence forever. Does our theology, does our practise honour the saving work of Jesus and the Spirit and does it look forward to the day when the work of Jesus and the Spirit will finally be fulfilled—or—is our theology or our practise dragging us back into the old age, into the things that once held us captive—whether the law for Jews or the powers of this evil age for the gentiles. In this case, in terms of practical outworking, does our theology and practise bring us together as one people in Jesus, or does it separate us. Again, think of the temple with Jews on the inside and gentiles on the out—and how these circumcision folks were trying to impose that kind of template on the Galatian churches all over again. In contrast, in Jesus it no longer matters whether you’re circumcised or not. That was part of the old covenant, the old way, but the ice has melted and that old way won’t get you anywhere anymore. No, someday, before the watching eyes of the whole world, God will call us his own and it won’t because of any marks we bear in our flesh or because of anything we’ve done, it will because we have been baptised into, because by faith we have put on the Messiah as our identity and because God has poured his Spirit into us. Jesus and the Spirit are the ticket that will give us passage on the ferry across the river. What matters, he says, is faith working through love. Faith is the only way to get the ticket—and here Paul hints at what he’ll have to say later in the chapter—faith is more than just a thinking thing; it’s more than just giving our intellectual assent to the propositions of the creed. Faith means trust. Faith means loyalty. Faith means allegiance. Faith means committing ourselves to God’s new creation made manifest in the risen Jesus and the gift of the Spirit—a new creation made possible by love—and so faith, true, real faith in God’s love and that returns God’s love and that manifests God’s love to the world, that kind of faith is what matters. That kind of faith is what marks out the people of God and that kind of faith is what will see us through—through hardships and opposition and persecution and maybe even martyrdom—that is the faith that will bring us through to the day when all God’s promises will finally be fulfilled. And Paul thought they knew all this, which is why he’s so shocked and frustrated with them. It’s why he wants to know how they could have gone so wrong so quickly. See how he continues in verse 7: You were running so well. Who cut in on you and stopped you being persuaded by the truth? This persuasion didn’t come from the one who called you. When Paul left them they were well on their way, running for the prize—running into God’s new creation—but now they’ve gone off course. “Who’s cut in on you?” Paul asks. It’s not the normal word we might expect him to use for someone interrupting the runners, slowing them down or setting them on the wrong course, but Paul is making a harsh accusation here and so he tempers it with some wordplay. They want to be circumcised, they want to be cut in their flesh. That was never part of the plan for this race, so he asks, “You who want to be cut, who’s cut in on you?” They were set on the truth of the gospel, but these other folks showed up and have cut in on all that with a false gospel. He reminds them that it was God who called them to this in the beginning—through the good news about Jesus—but this new persuasion, this new “truth” they’re going after, that came from somewhere else—not from God. They’re playing a dangerous game and Paul reminds them of an old Jewish proverb in verse 9: A little yeast works its way through the whole lump.I think what he’s trying to say is that once you start going astray from the gospel, it’s not long before you’ve lost the gospel entirely. We see this a lot down through church history. Add something to Jesus as a marker of covenant membership and pretty soon you’ve lost the whole gospel. Paul might also be warning them that once you start listening to one false teacher, pretty soon you start listening to anyone. That happens a lot too. And so Paul exhorts them: I am persuaded in the Lord that you won’t differ from me on this. But the one who is troubling you will bear the blame, whoever he may be.They were originally persuaded by God to pursue the truth of the gospel, but these other folks have persuaded them to pursue something else, so Paul stresses that the Lord has persuaded him. Persuaded him of what? That, in the end, they’ll come back to the gospel truth. He says literally “you will think nothing else”. When Paul says that he is “persuaded in the Lord”—something he doesn’t say often—it means that he’s been praying about something and that the Lord has given him a clear conviction. It would be dangerous for us talk this way, but Paul was in that unique position of having the authority of an apostle. The point seems to be that the Lord has revealed to Paul that the Galatians will come back to the truth, but that it will be Paul’s Spirit-inspired words that will be the means of bringing them back. By the same token, this false teacher who has been trying to lead them astray will “bear the blame”. Paul might be referring to the way that the Galatians will cast him out—as he told them to do at the end of Chapter 4 or it might even be more serious than that. He might be talking about God’s judgement and condemnation of this false teacher. Paul just calls him “whoever he may be” and I don’t think that’s because Paul didn’t know who this man was. The church in those first decades was small and everyone knew everyone. Whoever it was, Paul’s point is that they can’t dither on this false teaching. They can’t treat it as something of secondary importance. There are lots of things on which Christians can differ. Someone’s wrong and someone’s right, but there are some issues on which we can disagree while still holding tightly to the truth of the gospel. This was not one of those things. This was one of those things on which the gospel stands or falls and Paul wants them to know—it’s a bit of a threat—that this false teacher will without a doubt be held accountable—and the quiet part he doesn’t say out loud is that anyone who goes along with him will also go down with him. He’s headed out onto thin ice with his car and anyone who goes along for the ride will end up at the bottom of the river with him. Brothers and Sisters, false teaching is no joke. Then verse 11. Paul seems to be addressing an accusation against him. As for me, my dear brothers [and sisters], if I am still announcing circumcision, why are people still persecuting me? If I were, the scandal of the cross would have been neutralised.It sounds like these agitators, knowing Paul’s history as a Pharisee, back in the days before Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, it sounds like they’ve been telling the Galatians that Paul was still preaching circumcision—just not to them. Saying that Paul’s a hypocrite. And so Paul appeals to his own suffering and persecution. They knew what had happened to him. It sounds like when he first showed up in Galatia, he was beaten and bloody and weak because of persecution in some nearby town or city. Paul appeals to that. This is a strand that runs all through Galatians that I’d never noticed until I started this series of sermons, but it’s there. For Paul, suffering for the sake of the gospel was often proof of its truth. It goes back to the cross. Jesus’ crucifixion set the pattern so that to follow him wasn’t just a new way to be religious—as so many people treat it today: it’s good for me, but if you don’t like it that’s okay too. The gospel isn’t just another option on the religious smorgasbord. For Paul, the good news about Jesus is the truth that had already begun to change the world. It is the truth that Jesus has already overthrown the powers and kings of the present age and inaugurated the age to come. And, in light of that, Paul didn’t see the churches as little religious clubs, but as a network of communities where people, filled with God’s own Spirit, were living out God’s new creation in the midst of the old, declaring that Jesus is Lord right under the nose of Caesar, who made that claim for himself—for example. Living as one people in the midst of ferocious ethnic and religious divides. Living as a people of grace and mercy in the midst of a dog-eat-dog world. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, this made the gospel a scandal and a stumbling block. Even this early in his career as an apostle and mission Paul can say it. His calling is to proclaim the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen and the world’s true Lord. The Spirit works in the hearts of those who hear that good news. In some the Spirit uses that message to bring about faith, hope, and love, but for others the scandal of the crucified God causes them to cast stones at the messenger who dares announce this anti-religious, anti-social, and unpatriotic message. If all Paul had been announcing was that pagans could get circumcised and join the Jews in their synagogues in order to become exempt from pagan worship, why no one would have been persecuting him. No, if Paul had been doing that, the scandal of the cross would have been neutralised—something I think every generation finds its own way of doing as we trim the culturally offensive bits of the gospel. And so Paul says, closing off the paragraph in verse 12: I wish those who are making trouble for you would cut the whole lot off.Paul comes back to his wordplay with circumcision and cutting off. Don’t stop at circumcision, just cut the whole thing off. Of course, under torah, that sort of mutilation would have cut them off from covenant. But, too, the goddess Cybele was popular in Galatia and it wasn’t uncommon for her devotees to work themselves up in a manic ritual that ended with them castrating themselves. I suspect Paul has that in mind, because as he’s said, whether it was the Jews under the law or the gentiles under their pagan powers, humanity before Jesus was enslaved and to undermine the cross through circumcision, going back to the law, well, these gentiles might as well just go back to their old pagan gods and their old pagan worship. Either way, they’ll end up “cut off” from God and from his people. That’s as far as we’ll go this week. As much as the Galatian problem may seem distant and irrelevant to us, since circumcision and keeping the Jewish law aren’t likely to be our problem, what I hope you can see is the underlying issue. There are things in every age that we do, by which we undercut the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Galatians were motivated by fear of persecution—and that’s often the driver. We’re afraid, whether it’s that we might lose our lives or just offend friends or family, for the sake of the gospel and so we compromise, we water things down, we shave the sharp corners off the message where it confronts our culture and the powers of our day. We end up with a false gospel powerless to save and we run the risk ourselves of losing our way—of running off the race course, of trying to cross the river on the melting spring ice…and putting ourselves in a position where we have forsaken God’s grace and made the Messiah of no use to us. Paul reminds us here that suffering, that persecution for the sake of gospel truth is part of the formula, because we trust in and follow and proclaim the crucified and risen Messiah—a stumbling block to Jews and a scandal to gentiles. Brothers and Sisters, take hold of that gospel truth and run—run the course that leads straight to God’s new age, straight to his new creation and let no one cut in on you, take no short cut. There is only one way. It begins with trusting Jesus and the Spirit, but it also means continuing to trust Jesus and the Spirit along the way, trusting that God will bring us through suffering—just as he did Jesus—to that day when we ourselves will be raised from death and everything is made new. Let’s pray: O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: grant to us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Cast Out the Slave-girl and her SonGalatians 4:12-5:1by William Klock
I have a non-Christian—or it would be better to say, anti-Christian—relative who, I’ve observed, is very uncomfortable with me being a preacher. At one point she just came out and said it: As far as she’s concerned, preachers are just moralising, kill-joy demagogues who glory in lording their authority over people and pontificating to them what they can and cannot do. People like this think of God as a kill-joy in the sky and the preacher as his sour and spiteful earthly representative. She has no clue that the preacher is the intermediary between the loving God who has given his word to make himself known and his people, filled with his Spirit, who desire to hear his word that they might know him and love him in return. They have no idea that both the Bible and preaching sit at the intersection of God’s love for his people and his people’s love for him. But it’s not just non-Christians. Even people in the church forget that God speaks—and he tells us what he expects of us—out of love and they forget that the preacher preaches that word out of love, too. And so they get angry when they hear things they don’t like. Sometimes they get angry with God and leave the church entirely. Sometimes they just shoot the messenger—the preacher. And that’s where Paul is at as we come to the middle of Galatians 4. Paul knew the people in the Galatian churches well. He loved them as brothers and sisters in the Lord. And he’s deeply troubled by what he’s heard has been going on there ever since these agitators had arrived. This is why he’s writing to them. And so far he’s mostly been talking theology—explaining why these people urging them back into torah are undermining the gospel, the good news about Jesus. And he's been building this argument as he’s walked them through the biblical story, walked them through God’s covenants with his people, walked them through the significance of what Jesus did when he died and rose again. And he’s about to finally make the point he’s been working toward. He’s about to tell them what they need to do in light of all this. But in verses 11-20 he pauses and he takes a breath and he reminds them who he is. He reminds that he’s not only their friend, but that he’s their brother in the Lord who loves them—and that that’s why he’s taking the trouble to say all of this. Look at Chapter 4, beginning at verse 12. Brothers [and Sisters], become like me! Because I became like you. You did me no wrong. No, you know that it was through bodily weakness that I announced the gospel to you in the first place. You didn’t despise or scorn me, even though my condition was quite a test for you, but you welcomed me as if I were God’s angel, as if I were Messiah Jesus! What’s happened to the blessing you had then? Yes, I can testify that you would have torn out your eyes, if you’d been able to, and given them to me. So have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?Become like me, because I became like you. These Christians were mostly gentiles. Paul was a Jew. But as he would later write to the Corinthians, he has become like all things to everyone. Knowing that the gospel unified them as one in Jesus and the Spirit, Paul came and fellowshipped with them—he prayed and sang and worshipped and ate with them, despite their ethnic differences—which is something that can’t be said of these false teachers. And Paul reminds them of when he first arrived. We don’t know exactly what the problem was, but it sounds very much like he arrived in Galatia bloody and beaten after preaching the good news in some neighbouring city. This might be what he was referring to when he said the brutality of the cross had been shown to them. He’d stumbled into their fellowship having very nearly shared Jesus’ crucifixion—and they welcomed him. That would have been a dangerous thing to do. Harbouring a man who had been in trouble another town over could have brought the local authorities down on them. It sure wouldn’t have looked good to the community around them. But they welcomed Paul and took care of him as he regained his strength. In the meantime, he proclaimed Jesus and the good news in his weakness. And they received Paul and his message as if he were an angel, a messenger from God—practically as if he’d been Jesus himself. “So now,” Paul asks, “what’s happened to that welcome? Back then you knew my love for you and you would have plucked out your own eyes and given them to me if you’d thought it would help. But now I’ve told you the truth—because I love you—and you’re treating me like an enemy.” Now he goes on in verse 17: Those other folks are zealous for you, but it’s not in a good cause. False teachers are often full of zeal. Enough so that they con good Christians into thinking that they’ve got the truth. And then those conned Christians lash out when the pastor who loves them comes along to show them how the false teachers are wrong. It happens over and over and over. Paul says: They want to shut you out, so that you will then be zealous for them. Paul has the temple in mind, with its segregated courts. Jews could go into the temple court, but gentiles were stuck outside. They couldn’t go in. And these agitators, these false teachers are trying to make the Galatian churches like that. The Jewish believers can come into church, they can eat at the Lord’s Table, but the gentiles are stuck outside until they get circumcised and start living according to torah. So Paul says, Well, it’s always good to be zealous in a good cause, and not only when I’m there with you. My children, I seem to be in labour with you all over again, until the Messiah is fully formed in you. I wish I were there with you right now, and could change me tone of voice. I really am at a loss about you.Paul knew all about being zealous. He’d been zealous for torah and he’d been zealous for persecuting Christians. And then he’d met the risen Jesus and now he’s zealous for the gospel. Zeal isn’t the point. You can be zealous for anything. So don’t be taken in by the zealousness of false teachers and a false gospel. And we get a sense of how Paul loves these people and, because of that, how he’s so exasperated. He thought they knew all of this. He’d laboured over the gospel with them before, but now it feels like he’s got to labour with them over the gospel all over again, because it’s obvious they weren’t as mature in the gospel—in the Messiah—as he had thought. It happens. Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on the door and they’ve got carefully worked out arguments that fool far too many Christians. Prosperity hucksters will tell you they’ve got the “full gospel” and they’ll back it up with great zeal. In our own day we’ve got various Messianic groups or the Adventists with a false gospel rooted in the same errors Paul confronted in Galatia. They dupe Christians into their false teaching and, apart from praying for such people, all we can really do is confront false teaching with gospel truth. That’s what Paul does here. Look at verse 21: So you want to live under the law, do you? All right, tell me this: are you prepared to hear what the law says? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave-girl and one by the free woman. Now the child of the slave-girl was born according to the flesh, while the child of the free woman was born according to promise.Do you recognise the story Paul’s talking about? He’s going back to Genesis 16. This is after God’s promise to Abraham, but before the birth of Isaac. Abraham and Sarah trusted the Lord. They believed he would provide a son to inherit the promise, but from their perspective a natural heir was impossible. Sarah was an elderly woman and elderly women past their child-bearing years don’t bear children. So they followed the custom of the day. Abraham took Sarah’s slave-girl, Hagar, as his concubine and had a child by her. Because she was Sarah’s slave, the child was legally hers. But, if you know the story, you know the plan backfired. When Hagar became pregnant, she lorded it over Sarah. In their culture, for a woman to be barren was a great shame and Hagar made sure that Sarah felt that shame. Sarah, of course, wasn’t going to stand for that, so she mistreated Hagar. Hagar ran away, but in the wilderness the Lord met her and sent her back and she gave birth to Ishmael. Years later—as if the Lord was really, really wanting to make a point to Abraham and Sarah that with him anything was possible—years later, when Sarah was even more elderly, she became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac. Sarah became jealous of Ishmael and we have a cryptic text about Ishmael abusing Isaac, so Sarah banished Hagar and her son from the camp. Ishmael would become the father of the Arabian tribes and Isaac would became the father of Jacob, who became the father of the Hebrew tribes—of Israel. It’s possible Paul brings this up because the false teachers might have been telling this story in their own way, as if to say, “See…Abraham has two families. You gentiles might have believed the gospel, but since the Jews are the free children of Abraham, you’re like Ishmael and his sons. If you want to really be part of Abraham’s family, you’re going to have to get circumcised and become a Jew. Paul has heard this before and says, “No. You’ve got it backwards and here’s why. Let’s suppose that Abraham does have two families. How can you tell which one is the slave family and which one is the free family? Well, look at the story. Ishmael was born according to the flesh. He was the result of Abraham taking matters into his own hands. Isacc, on the other hand, was born miraculously and in fulfilment of the Lord’s promise. And now we see why Paul has been talking so much about covenants and inheritances and heirs all this time. This is where he’s been going with it. In verse 24 he goes on: Think of this allegorically—as picture-language. These two women stand for two covenants: one comes from Mount Sinai and gives birth to slave children—that’s Hagar. (Sinai, you see, is a mountain in Arabia, and it corresponds, in the picture, to the present Jerusalem, since she is in slavery with her children.) But the Jerusalem which is above is free—and she is our mother.All you have to do is follow the theme of promise through the story. Well, that and you have to recognise that the story is ongoing. The false teachers were telling the story as if it stopped with Abraham—or maybe with Moses—but Paul has been showing how the Abraham story, the story of a promise and a family and an inheritance that encompasses the whole world—Paul has been showing how that story is still going on. So they were right to see the promise back in the story of the birth of Isaac, but now Paul’s sort of urging them on: Yes, yes. You’ve got that part right, but keep following the promise through the rest of the story. Because Jesus changes everything. And so, sure, Isaac was the child of God’s promise and so were his children and their children and eventually the whole people of Israel. But before his little break to remind them that he’s not their enemy, Paul was also pointing out how the law, how torah was only meant to serve the promise family for a time—between Moses and the Messiah. Remember, the human race is sick. Israel had the same sickness, but the law held the sickness at bay until the promise could be fulfilled. Or, Paul used the illustration of a babysitter, keeping the promise family out of trouble until the promise to them could be fulfilled. And, that means, Paul has said, that as much as the law was a good thing given by God for a time, it kept the Israelites as slaves until the Messiah came. So the law, he’s saying here, the law if left to itself can never set people free. The law, ironically, makes Ishmael children, not Isaac children. And then Paul adds this sort of parenthetical statement: For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia. And his point is that—using this allegorical or picture language—the law of Moses, which was given on Mount Sinai, now represents the people, the family on the outside in the original picture. As much as the Lord’s promise once led his people to Mount Sinai where he gave them his law, the story has moved on in Jesus the Messiah and so Hagar—the mother of Abraham’s son according to the flesh—Hagar now corresponds to Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai represents the law, torah, that the false teachers are saying the gentile believers have to keep. So Isaac represents the promise and freedom. Ishmael represents the flesh, slavery…none of which would have been controversial, but now Paul has also shown that Ishmael also represents Mount Sinai and the law. Again, we’ve got to follow the promise all the way through the story to Jesus and then to the present. The law was part of God’s provision for his people during the present evil age, but the Messiah has inaugurated the age to come. So Paul’s now ready to bring the false teachers into this. They’ve been appealing to some authority figures in Jerusalem—maybe James, but we really don’t know—just that they’re in Jerusalem. And Paul, in verses 25 and 26 is saying, “Okay, but they’re talking about the present Jerusalem, not the heavenly Jerusalem, not the “Jerusalem above”, which is the home of all real believers and the true people of the promise. To make his point he quotes Isaiah 54:1 which is addressed to Jerusalem herself: *For it is written:Celebrate, childless one, who never gave birth!Go wild and shout, girl that never had pains!The barren woman has many more childrenThan the one who has a husband!In Isaiah’s day, Jerusalem was laid waste, but through the prophet the Lord gave hope to his people. One day Jerusalem would be restored. He put it in terms of a barren woman—like Sarah—finally knowing the joy of bearing children and having a family. By Paul’s day this had become an image of the age to come, when the Lord would return to his people and the heavenly city would come with him, heaven and earth would be rejoined, and his new age would dawn. So the Jerusalem above—the promise of God’s new age—it was barren, but now* through the Messiah it’s bearing children. The promises are being fulfilled. In contrast, the present Jerusalem—the city the false teachers are appealing to as their authority—it’s got children, yes, but they’re in slavery. In fact, the earthly Jerusalem is slated for judgement and destruction. So now Paul goes on in verse 28: Now you, my brothers [and sisters], are children of promise, in the line of Isaac. Follow the promise. It has passed from Isaac to Jesus and now to these people—even though they’re gentiles—because they have trusted in the Messiah. Jesus-believers, uncircumcised as they may be, are Sarah-children, new-Jerusalem people, Isaac-people, promise-people. But, Paul goes on: But things now are like they were then. The one who was born according to the flesh persecuted the one born according to the spirit.Genesis doesn’t elaborate on what Ishmael did to Isaac, only that he abused him in some way, and Paul’s point here is that this is how the children of the flesh are always liable to treat the children of the promise. It sounds as though the unbelieving Jews were actively persecuting the Christians in Galatia—angry at them because they claimed the “Jewish exemption” from pagan worship, but didn’t live as Jews. But Paul lumps the false teachers, these people who say they believe in Jesus the Messiah, but also insist on the gentiles being circumcised—Paul lumps that in with the abuse of the unbelieving Jewish community. The false teachers stand in sharp contrast to Paul. Even though Paul has had some sometimes harsh words for the Galatians, he loves them like a father. He’s speaking gospel truth. The false teachers, for all their zeal, don’t really love the Galatians—not if they’re trying to drag them back into slavery under the law. And with that, Paul’s ready to drive his point home, he’s ready to tell them what they have to do. Look at verse 30: But what does scripture say? “Throw out the slave-girl and her son! For the son of the slave-girl will not inherit with the son of the free.” So my brothers [and sisters], we are not children of the slave-girl, but of the free.Do what Sarah did: cast out the slave girl and her son. In other words, cast out the false teachers before they drag you away from Jesus and the promise and back into slavery. At this point there’s a chapter break, but I really think Paul meant for verse 1 of Chapter 5 to be the close of this paragraph, because it’s not easy to cast out false teachers. And so Paul continues there: The Messiah set us free so that we could enjoy freedom! So stand firm, and don’t get yourselves tied down by the chains of slavery.Stand firm and don’t let anyone take you back into slavery with a false gospel, because Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has set us free. Paul doesn’t mess around with false teachers. Jesus died and he rose again, he is Lord, and he has fulfilled all of God’s promises. Paul saw the promise fulfilled as the gentiles were forgiven, filled with the Spirit, and swept up into this great story of God and his people and he was outraged at the idea that anyone might come along and drag these people back into slavery. In contrast, how often is our tendency to be wishy-washing about false teaching. People come in the name of Jesus, but end up proclaiming false gospels—or things that undermine the gospel. They’ll say, for example, that there are other ways to God and other ways to be good and other ways to enter the age to come and in doing that they undermine the work of Jesus and the Spirit no less than the false teaching in Galatia did by trying to add torah to the gospel. Others come into the church and tell us that Jesus isn’t enough and that we’ve got to do something extra to receive the Spirit. Others these days come preaching post-modern ideas of identity that undermine our identity in the Messiah and our unity in him. And we equivocate on what to do about them. Instead of dealing with the false teachers we quibble with each other over whether or not the false teachers are truly believers or not—as if we need to treat them differently if the false teaching isn’t so bad as to rule them out as real Christians. Paul does the opposite here. The false teachers in Galatia believed in Jesus. They believed in his death and resurrection. But they added something that ultimately undermined that good news. And so Paul says to cast them out. Get them out of the church. Just as he did with the man sleeping with his step-mother in Corinth. Get them out. Maybe that will get them thinking hard about what they’ve done or what they’re teaching and they’ll repent and come back, but that’s not the first priority. Get them out, because their teaching undermines the gospel itself and if it’s allowed to fester, the church will cease to be the church. The promise will be lost. The false teaching will make us slaves again. If the Anglican Communion had cast out the false teachers a hundred years ago, our generation wouldn’t have had to face the difficulties we have. The church can’t fool around with false teachers and false gospel. But the flip side of this imperative is that we as Jesus’ people need to work hard for unity with our brothers and sisters who do believe the good news about Jesus. This was the vision of Bp. Cummins when he called together the men and women who would found the Reformed Episcopal Church. All baptised and believing Jesus-followers are, in fact, one family and we need to do our best, despite our various differences on other things, to live as the one family that Jesus has made us. I think Galatians has something to say about how we distinguish which of our differences are demand separation and which don’t. Does the message being preaching point forward to the age to come, or like the Galatian heresy, does it drag us back to the darkness of the old evil age? If it undermines or undoes what has been accomplished by God in Jesus and the Spirit, we must cast it out. Standing firm against false gospels while standing just as firm for the unity of God’s gospel people is no easy task—especially as things are today—but Brothers and Sisters it is our calling. It is what honours God, it is what honours Jesus and the Spirit, and it is what witnesses to the world the new creation that has been born in us. Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, make us mature in the Messiah so that we will be able to discern truth from error, and fill us with zeal for your gospel truth, so that we will stand firm—not afraid to cast out false teachers and false teaching, but also zealous for the unity that Jesus and the Spirit bring to your church, that we might be effective witnesses of the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen, and of his kingdom, the new Jerusalem. Through him we pray. Amen.
No Longer a SlaveGalatians 4.1-11by William Klock
We didn’t go to the theatre to see very many movies when I was a kid, so when Star Wars came out, it seemed like all my friends saw it before I did. I had Luke Skywalker and C3PO action figures before I’d even seen the movie. My best friend, Derigan, tried to fill me in and gave me a sort of point by point run-down of the plot leading up to Luke shooting his torpedo into the thermal exhaust port and blowing up the Death Star. He got all excited at that point, jumping up, throwing up his hands, and making a big explosion sound. His plot summary didn’t really do anything to get me excited—probably because he was five and it wasn’t a very good plot summary. I was just excited to see Star Wars because everyone who saw it was so excited about it. But when I finally did get to see it, oh wow! People in the theatre cheered when the Death Star blew up. Actually watching the story unfold was thrilling in a way a point-by-point plot summary never could be. The creed we just recited is—a bit—like my friend Derigan’s point by point plot summary of Star Wars. The bishops and other important people of the church got together in AD 325 and hammered out these key points. They obviously did a better job than a council of five-year-olds could ever have done and it has served the church well for seventeen hundred years as a statement of biblical faith and a bulwark against heresy. But it’s not very exciting. I’ve never heard of anyone hearing the Creed and getting so excited about it that they decided then and there to become a Christian. And that’s because the story has been filtered out of it. The really exciting part is there: The son of God became man, was crucified for our sake, rose again on the third day, and ascended into heaven. Those words “in accordance with the scriptures” hint that there’s more to the story. But boy, “I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceeds from the Father and Son…who spoke through the prophets”. As much as all the points are true, it’s not even a plot summary—they stripped the story right out. It’s all true, but it’s not like seeing the actual movie—or in this case hearing that great, ages-spanning story hinted at by those five little words “in accordance with the scriptures”. Because we’ve often left the creed to stand by itself, some people have even got the idea that these key plot points, like the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and the sending of the Holy Spirit, were all later doctrines made up by the church fathers. We’ll be looking at the first half of Galatians 4 this morning, and Brothers and Sisters, it’s all here—in the first of Paul’s letters, which makes it very likely the very earliest part of the New Testament to be written. And it’s all here: God’s son, born of Mary who died and rose again and the Holy Spirit, too. It’s stated just as clearly as it was by later men like Athanasius or Basil the Great. But here it’s part of the great story Paul is always telling, always drawing on, that’s always there underlying, supporting, and giving shape to his arguments. The story that makes sense of it all. Without it Jesus’ death and resurrection are an awesome special effect like the Death Star exploding, but we won’t know why it’s important. Without the story there’s no reason to stand up and cheer. So Paul closed Galatians 3, telling us that if we’ve been baptised into the Messiah, we’ve put him on. He’s now our identity. There’s no longer Jew or Greek or slave or free or man or woman—God, through Jesus the Messiah, has just one and only one people. And he said, “If you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham’s family. You stand to inherit the promise.” These agitators who had infiltrated the Galatian churches were saying that you basically had to first become a Jew to become a Christian and Paul’s saying, “No. Jesus has fulfilled the promises made to Abraham and to his family. If, by faith, you belong to him you are part of that family and an heir of God’s promise. There’s nothing you can add to it.” So now Paul continues in Chapter 4 running along with this metaphor of the heir and the inheritance: Let me put it like this. As long as the heir—remember how Paul’s been talking about promises and wills and inheritances—As long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave—even if, in fact, he is master of everything. He is kept under guardians and stewards until the time set by his father.“As long as the heir is a slave…” That’s the cue—especially that word “slave”—that’s the cue that Paul is telling an exodus story. We might miss it, but people in Paul’s world were shaped by Passover and the other Jewish festivals that came out of their exodus from Egypt. And hearing Paul talk of slaves, they knew he was now moving from the story of Abraham to the story of Israel’s exodus and exile and their hope of rescue. It's really important that we understand the story the Jews of Paul’s day saw themselves in. In Deuteronomy—the last book of the torah—the Lord had promise that if his people were unfaithful, that if they worshipped other gods, he would exile them—that they would find themselves slaves—as they had been in Egypt—slaves to the pagans and their gods of wood and stone. And that’s just what happened. The people were unfaithful, they were idolatrous, their kings were evil and the Lord raised up Babylon to conquer them and to carry them off into exile. Eventually the Babylonians were, in turn, conquered by the Persians and the Persians allowed the Jews to return to Judea, but nothing was ever the same as it had been. They rebuilt the temple, but the Lord’s presence never returned to it. They continued to live under the rule of foreign pagans and their gods. In Paul’s day Rome just the latest in that long line. And so, they concluded, the exile had never really ended. Israel was still living under the curses of Deuteronomy 27. But that also meant they had hope, because Deuteronomy 30—and the prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel—promised a new exodus, a return from exile—when God would set everything to rights. This is what inspired the zeal of the Pharisees. They tried to bring the holiness of the temple and priesthood into the home and into everyday life. If all Israel would keep the law in full for just a single day, one later rabbi wrote, the Lord would finally come to deliver his people. Paul puts this story of exile and exodus in terms of a child with a great promised inheritance. His father has appointed a time when his son will receive his inheritance, but until then he lives under guardians and stewards—remember the “babysitter” in Chapter 3?—which leaves him no better off than a slave—even though he is, as Paul puts it, “master of everything”. This is exactly how many of Paul’s fellow Jews saw things. It’s how the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, it’s how the Jewish philosopher Philo saw Israel’s situation in their own day. Abraham’s children had been promised the world, but they were slaves of Caesar and it was Caesar who was instead and to their great consternations “master of everything”. They awaited their inheritance. So Paul goes on in verse 3: It’s like this with us. When we were children, we were kept in “slavery” under the “elements of the world”.Paul says “we”—that means he and his fellow Jews—were promised the world, but they were still children. Paul set this up in Chapter 3 when he wrote about torah being like a babysitter given to keep Israel out of trouble until God was ready to reveal his faithfulness in the Messiah. Paul now takes that metaphor and turns it into another. Being a child under torah is like being a slave. The Jews knew what that meant all too well. Paul says, slaves “under the elements of the world”. Now this phrase “under the elements of the world” is really difficult to parse out if we aren’t familiar with how people thought in Paul’s day. I think Paul is deliberately using language that works on two levels at the same time. First, the Greek word Paul uses for “elements” usually refers to the elements that make up creation. Think of the periodic table we learned in chemistry. Everything in creation is made up, in one way or another, of those 103 elements. For the ancients it was much simpler, albeit a bit more mystical. They had four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. The Jews knew that these elements were created by God and subject to him, but the pagans worshipped them and made idols out of them and Deuteronomy had promised that if Israel were unfaithful they would be scattered amongst the people and forced to serve those gods of wood and stone. That’s exactly what had happened and it was exactly what was still happening. The covenant curses of torah had subjected them to “the elements of the world”. But I think Paul is also comparing Israel’s situation under torah—under the law—to a sort of medical diagnosis. People, too, were thought to be composed of these elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and if you were sick—and that could be physically or morally sick—it was because these elements were out of balance. You’d see a doctor, he’d determine how your elements were out of balance, and he’d give you some course of treatment. Interestingly enough, the Greek word for that treatment is the same as the word for law—nomos—and this law would then serve as a paidagogos—the “babysitter” Paul mentioned in Chapter 3—to lead you back to health. So disordered elements are treated by a law that takes on the role of a babysitter. In other words, what Paul is saying is that people—the whole human race—is sick, morally sick. These false teachers that showed up in Galatia have been acting like quack doctors, telling the people that to get themselves in order they need to follow the Jewish law and, like a babysitter it will nurse them back to health. And Paul’s saying that, no, it won’t work. It never did. We’ve been trying it for centuries and the best the law, the best that torah can do is hold the sickness at bay. Becuase, in fact, that’s all it was ever intended to do. Even then—like a virus slipping through the masks and social distancing—Israel was still sick, incurred the curses of the covenant, and found herself subject to the pagans and their gods of wood and stone. And the gentiles, those pagans, they didn’t even have the law. They openly and shamelessly worshipped the elements and in abusing the stuff of creation they threw creation out of whack. Torah promised life, but it could not bring it on its own and these false teachers were wrong to turn back to it. Paul’s been stressing: God has done what torah never could. He’s given his Son and sent his Spirit. Torah, the law, was a thing of the old evil age—a good thing given by God for that time, but still something for the old evil age—but in Jesus and the Spirit God has inaugurated the age to come. Look at verse 4: But when the fullness of time arrived, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.Paul’s been reminding us of the original exodus from Egypt, when God rescued his people from a land full of idols so that they could live with him in their midst, so that they could worship and serve him. And he’s been telling that story so that here, as he tells us about the new exodus, we hear the old one echoing behind it. When the fullness of time arrived, he writes. It’s a reminder that Jesus is part of this bigger story—as the creed reminds us when it says “in accordance with the scriptures”. God was moving history and the world and his people to this one point in time. We saw last time, this is what the law, torah, was meant to do: to bring Israel to the point where the Messiah could do his work. But now that that work is done, we have to move forward into the messianic age. There’s no going back. And so, Paul says, God sent his Son. In the Jewish thought world the king—especially the promised and long-awaited Davidic king—was the son of God. In the Wisdom of Solomon, which Paul probably would have been familiar with, King Solomon uses this kind of language to pray for God to send forth his wisdom “that she may labour at my side, and that I may learn what is pleasing to you”. The idea was that the king wasn’t just working using God’s instructions, but that the King actually embodied, in his thought and action, the personal presence and power of the creator God—like David, a man after God’s own heart. For Paul to refer to the Messiah as the Son of God is to declare him to be both the promised King—that’s what “Messiah” means—and the embodiment of God’s wisdom—sort of God’s second self through whom the world was made. In other words two things are happening in Jesus. First, he is the prophecy-fulfilling King and, second, in him the God of Israel has finally returned to rescue his people. Too, in saying that God’s sent his Son, Paul wants to underscore that Jesus is God himself. He wasn’t simply a Jew born to Mary whom God adopted and called his son. That’s a perennial heresy as old as the creed that was written to combat it. No, the Son was sent and that means he existed before he took on human flesh to be born of Mary. And God did all this so that he might redeem—deliver, rescue—his people living under the law. In other words, to give them the divine medicine for the disease the law had been holding at bay and, in doing so, to fulfil his promises and show his faithfulness and to shine forth his glory—so that—we might receive adoption as sons. Paul’s been talking about “we” and “us” so far meaning “we Jews”, but here I think he now opens it up. “We” is now the whole church, Jewish and gentiles believers united as one people in the Messiah. Here's how it works. God’s Son is born under the law, in solidarity with and as the representative of his people so that he can give his life, dying the death that they deserved, in order to fulfil the covenant promises that God had made to them. So that God’s sons can truly be God’s sons. The cross and the empty tomb are the supreme display of the faithfulness and glory of the God of Israel and it happens before the eyes of the watching gentiles who have never seen anything like it. They worship gods of wood and stone, gods who are deaf and dumb, and then in the gospel they are confronted with the living God who not only hears and speaks, but loves, and who fulfils his promises—even going so far as to take on our flesh and to die. And the gentiles hear this gospel and fall to their knees in faith before the Son, before the Messiah, and the unbelievable happens: God adopts them, and welcomes them into his presence, calls them his sons and daughters, and makes them full members of this royal priesthood. And even in that he shines forth his glory again as his promise to Abraham to make the nations his inheritance is fulfilled. But it doesn’t stop there. Look at verses 6 and 7: And because you are sons, God sent out the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, calling out “Abba, Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son! And, if you are a son, you are an heir, through God.The point of the exodus was always for God to live in the midst of his people. He did that in the tabernacle and then the temple under the old covenant, but that was just a signpost pointing to how he would fulfil his promises in the new covenant. Our being sons of God isn’t just a legal status. It’s real. Just as God sent his Son to lead us, like a new Moses, in this new exodus, he’s also sent his Spirit into our hearts and his Spirit now cries out from within us, “Abba—Papa—Father!” The church as a whole and every individual Christian is made a tabernacle, a temple in which God himself has come to dwell. Paul’s been using the plural “you” so far, but here he drives his point home switching to the singular “you”. If you are a son, if you are a daughter, you are an heir. This is the new life to which all of God’s promises to Israel and to which the whole story was working. It can be tempting to think of the Trinity as some dry and technical doctrine, but Paul shows us the Trinity here in three dimensions, in Technicolor, with THX surround sound as he tells the great story. What that thrilling explosion of the Death Star is to the Star War story when everyone in the theatre cheers, God’s sending of his Son and Spirit to make us his sons and daughters is to the great story of God and his people. It’s the climax of the story when everything finally pays off. The old evil age is finished and God’s new creation is born. We might forget all this when we recite the creed. I’m not suggesting you all cheer in the middle of the creed, but maybe in your head. The Trinity, the Incarnation, the Spirit, they’re not just dry technical doctrines, they’re the culmination of this amazing story of God’s love and of his faithfulness and they show forth his great glory. And they’re all right here in Paul’s letter, in the very earliest part of the New Testament. We’ve been set free. The Spirit, says Paul, crying out in our hearts to God as Father, is the proof that we are no longer slaves to the elements of the world. This is the medicine that he’s given to finally set us to rights. It’s the proof that we are his sons and daughters and heirs of his promise—because in Jesus and the Spirit the inheritance has been dumped right in our laps by God himself. And yet, somehow, bewilderingly, we forget all of this. That’s what was happening in Galatia. Paul goes on in verses 8-11: However, at that stage you didn’t know God, and so you were enslaved to beings that, in their proper nature, are not gods. But now that you’ve come to know God—or, better, to be known by God—how can you turn your back again to that weak and poverty-stricken line-up of elements that you want to serve all over again? You are observing days, and months, and seasons, and years! I am afraid for you. Maybe my hard work with you is going to be wasted.They’re like the Israelites in the wilderness, grumbling to Moses and complaining that they want to go back to Egypt. Well, sort of. It’s actually worse than that, because to demand the gentile believers be circumcised and start observing the old calendar of the torah—well—that’s not so much wanting to go back to Egypt, it’s like denying they’d ever been delivered from Egypt in the first place. Do that, and you’re turning away from the living God who gave his Son and sent his Spirit so that you can go back to the “elements”—to the false gods of wood and stone, back into slavery. “No,” he says, “you’ve come to know God.” And then Paul pauses and says, “No, better—more accurate—to say ‘to be known by God’.” To know God is the desire of people everywhere. To hear God cut through the silence to speak, even if it’s just to tell us what he wants of us. There’s a prayer from ancient pagan Sumer that was written on a clay tablet and survived the millennia. In it a man cried out to the gods to speak. He was miserable. Everything in his life was going wrong. And so he cried out in desperation. He didn’t know what he’d done to offend the gods. The poor man didn’t even know which god he’d offended, which god to cry out to. His pitiful prayer is the cry of every human heart. To know God and to find mercy. And so we do everything we can think of from ascetic disciplines to mystical practises. We study sacred texts and we pray long and desperate prayers. And Paul reminds us that none of this leads us to God. Instead, God has taken the initiative sending his Son and his Spirit. This is the gospel, this is the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen. In believing this good news and in knowing the presence and power of God’s Spirit, Paul is saying that they (and we) can now say for certain that God knows us and that we know God. There is no desperate cry to unknown gods. God’s own Spirit cries out within us to our loving and merciful Father. Just as the nations watched in awe as God delivered Israel from Egypt in the original exodus, so in this new exodus as God sends his Son and his Spirit, the living God has—to quote Isaiah—“bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations.” He has made himself known in all his great glory. Brothers and Sisters, trust in this good news. Don’t try to add anything to it. To add anything to it is to deny its power and to go back to the slavery of the old gods. Trust in Jesus. Know the Spirit. And know you are God’s son, you are God’s daughter, his new creation is born in you, and as we live this life he’s given by faith, we witness and proclaim his glory—the power of his holy arm—to the watching world around us. Let us pray: Almighty God, you have fulfilled your promises in knitting your people together into one communion through the death and resurrection of your Son and the gift of your Spirit. Give us grace that we might be faithful stewards of this good news, holding fast to you by faith alone and showing forth your glory as we live the life of your Spirit. Amen.
One in the MessiahGalatians 3:15-29by William Klock
When my grandmother died there was a will. It spelled out everything in black and white. Not just the financial stuff, but even her car, the furniture in her house, down to the tchotchkes on the end tables. Still, one of my twenty-one cousins decided to argue about it. He was going to take the estate to court and dispute the will. One of my uncles shut him down. Not only was he getting a fair share just like everyone else, Grandma made sure her wishes for everything were in black and white. This is Paul’s appeal as we move on to the second half of Galatians 3. Paul’s going to say, it’s all here—plain as day, in black and white. There’s nothing to argue about. But these agitators in Galatia, these “people from James” in Antioch—they’re like that cousin, unhappy with the will, and trying to get what he wants by saying, “No, no. That can’t be right. That’s not what Grandma would have wanted.” And what they want is circumcision. Remember the situation. Most of the believers in Galatia were gentiles. They had been pagans. They took part in all the pagan practices that were woven all through daily life in the Greco-Roman world. But then they heard the good news about Jesus, they believed, and that meant withdrawing from all those pagan practices. They threw out their household gods. They stopped taking part in the pagan festivals. They stopped visiting the temples and worshipping Caesar. And now their neighbours and coworkers and even the city officials think they’re irreligious and unpatriotic. If something bad happens, everyone will come after them for angering the gods. So these gentiles Christians have claimed the Jewish exemption. Jews were exempt from all those pagan aspects of daily life and since following Jesus was a new way of following the God of Israel, it was an easy out. But the local Jews got angry. If you’re not circumcised and don’t live by torah, you have no business calling yourself a Jew! And then these agitators who were preaching a false gospel of Jesus plus torah—or at least Jesus plus circumcision—they showed up and took this as an opportunity to convert the Galatian believers over to their way of thinking. The end result was that they were dividing the church. Instead of Jewish and gentile believers worshipping and praying and fellowshipping and gathering around the Lord’s Table together, they were dividing up—as if instead of one body, Jesus now had two. So Paul continues on in Galatians 3:15. Here’s what he writes: Brothers and Sisters, let me use a human illustration: When someone makes a covenanted will, nobody sets it aside or adds to it.It’s there, like Grandma’s wishes, all in black and white with her signature at the bottom. You can’t dispute it saying, “No, but Grandma wanted this instead.” Here the really important thing is who the beneficiary is. Well [Paul goes on] the promises were made “to Abraham and his seed”—that is, his family. It doesn’t say “his seeds,” as though referring to several families, but indicates a single family by saying “and to your seed,” meaning the Messiah.Remember the promise made to Abraham. Even though he was a childless old man, he would have a family with children as numerous as the stars, a family that would bless and eventually inherit the nations. And what Paul is stressing here is that there’s only one family that inherits that promise. Quoting the Greek version of Genesis 15:18, Paul uses the word “seed”. The promises were made to Abraham and his seed—to his offspring, to his descendants who were yet to be born. Don’t think of “seed” as a single seed you might plant in the ground. Think of it in terms of the family that grows from that seed. God’s promises were made to that single family, but Paul also stresses what even the circumcision people would have known: that family has come to be represented by the Messiah. Remember, too, that the king represents his people. So Jesus the Messiah and his people are the inheritors of God’s promises to Abraham. Now, Paul goes on in verse 17: This is what I mean: God made this covenanted will; torah—the law—which came four hundred and thirty years later, can’t undermine it and make the promises null and void. If the inheritance came through the law, it would no longer be by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by promise.The circumcision people have been saying that if you want to be a real Christian, you have to at least get circumcised. They probably wanted people to live by other parts of torah too, but it starts with circumcision. And Paul’s saying, “Look, God established a covenant with Abraham on the basis of faith. Circumcision came years later. And torah? The Lord gave that to Israel four hundred and thirty years later after he delivered them from Egypt. And when the Lord gave them torah, remember that they were already becoming the great family he had promised to Abraham in the beginning.” Torah was a big deal, but even something as important as torah couldn’t rewrite the covenant that the Lord had made with Abraham on the basis of faith. When the Lord appeared as a smoking pot and burning torch that night to Abraham, when he passed back and forth down the pathway Abraham had made between the halved carcasses of those sacrificial animals, the Lord had—so to speak—put it all down in black and white and signed it at the bottom. Whatever else would come later, none of it could or would—nothing on earth or in heaven—could change the terms of his covenant with Abraham and his family. So torah—the law—cannot be the thing that defines the people of the Messiah. Like Abraham, their faith is what defines them, what includes them in the covenant family and marks them out as different from the rest of the human race. But what about the law then? If Christians down through history have struggled with what to do with torah we can only imagine how those first Jewish believers would struggle with it. It’s not hard to see how Jewish believers would go down this path of Jesus plus torah. Because torah is what set apart the Jewish people from all the other peoples. Torah is why the pagans thought the Jews were weird and torah was why the Jews thought they were better than everyone else. God had given it to them and God had commanded them to live by it. He’d even promised blessing if they did and cursing if they didn’t. So Paul anticipates their question: If faith is the basis of the covenant, not torah, not the law, then where does torah fit into all of this? Is Paul saying that torah is bad? Look at verse 19: Why then the law? Why indeed? And Paul writes: It was added because of transgressions, until the family should come to whom it had been promised. It was laid down by angels, at the hand of a mediator. He, however, is not the mediator of the “one”—but God is one!God’s purpose in calling Abraham and his purpose in giving him a family was to save the world from sin. Remember that the story that comes just before the calling of Abraham is the Tower of Babel. The point of the Tower of Babel story is to show how the whole human race had lost the knowledge of God and was lost in darkness. God then speaks to Abraham, calls him out of darkness and idolatry and thus begins the long story of redemption. Through Abraham’s family, God would save the human race. But there was a problem. Abraham’s family, Israel, was infected by the same disease of sin as everyone else, so God had to do something to preserve this special family until his promises were fulfilled through them. Torah—the law—was that something. It wasn’t a bad thing at all—which is what some people might have thought Paul was saying. Instead, torah was a good thing. In fact, Paul stresses, it was laid down by angels at the hand of a mediator. The mediator is Moses and he didn’t make it up. It came to him by angels, which is Paul’s somewhat roundabout way of saying that it ultimately came from God. So torah wasn’t bad. It was wonderful and holy. Think about Moses, coming down Mt. Sinai carrying the law carved on stone and his face literally glowing with the glory of God that he’d seen. Torah was good. But neither this mediator—that means Moses—not the law he delivered could bring the “one”—that one family promised to Abraham. Moses and the torah had a different job to do—a vitally important job, but still a temporary job—until the time was right for God to fulfil his promises in that one family of the Messiah. So what was the job of torah? Paul says it was added because of transgressions. What does that mean? Well, “transgression” means to break the law. It’s more specific than “sin”. “Sin” is general. It means to fall short. So while the rest of humanity stumbled around in its rebellion against God, God gave Israel a law so that the people’s sins could be turned into trespass—so that they could see that they weren’t just stumbling around in the dark. Torah showed them that their sin was really deadly disobedience. Torah prepared the people who carried the promise for the day when the Messiah would bring that promise to fulfilment by dealing with sin on the cross. Through torah, God deliberately created a logjam in the river of blessing. Torah exposed sin for what it really is so that the Messiah could then deal with it. Think of a rocket being shot off into space. It has to have an incredible amount of force to push against earth’s gravity and that means it has to have a massive booster rocket full of fuel to create that force. That giant booster lifts the rocket into space, but once the rocket is in space, the astronauts flip a switch and they let go of the booster so it can fall back to earth. The space capsule doesn’t jettison the booster rocket because it was bad. Without it, they’d never have got into space. They jettison it because it’s no longer needed. It’s a good thing and its job is now done. Torah is like that. So, Paul asks in verse 21: Is torah—the law— against God’s promises? Of course not! No, if a law had been given that could have given life, then covenant membership really would have been by the law. But the scriptures shut up everything together under the power of sin, so that the promise—which comes by the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah—should be given to those who believe.So Paul’s saying, “Okay. If—and the stress is on if—a law had been given that could give life, if that had happened, then being part of that covenant would indeed have been by that law.” Life is the goal. God wants to set the human race to rights. But that’s not what torah did. Again, what torah did was expose sin for what it really is: deadly rebellion against God. Torah didn’t give life. Just the opposite. It showed that humanity is enslaved to sin and that apart from God’s reconciling grace we stand condemned. Life, Paul stresses, comes through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah. Paul rams the point home here: If you go back to torah, you’re going to end up back in jail. The way forward is through faith in the Messiah. If this isn’t clear enough, Paul puts it another way starting in verses 23: Before this faithfulness arrived [that’s the faithfulness of the Messiah he just mentioned] we were kept under guard by torah, in close confinement until the coming faithfulness should be revealed. Thus torah was like a babysitter for us, looking after us until the coming of the Messiah, so that we might be given covenant membership on the basis of faithfulness.Before Jesus, Israel was like a child and torah was the babysitter. In Paul’s world rich people would have slaves who looked after their children, taking them to and from school and generally keeping them out of trouble.So between Moses and Jesus, this is what torah did for Israel. But at some point kids grow up and they don’t need a babysitter anymore. The sign that Israel had grown up was “faithfulness”. Specifically, the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah. He came and did what Israel had struggled and failed to do all through their history. Jesus is finally the one faithful Israelite. That makes him the fulfilment of God’s promises to Abraham. But there are two sides to his faithfulness. Believers answer the faithfulness of Jesus with faith of our own and it is this faith—not torah—it is this faith in response to Jesus’ faithfulness, that marks out the mature family of God. Jesus plus nothing. Jesus, as the faithful Israelites, opens up Abraham’s family to everyone regardless of ethnicity or language or sex or class or anything else. He writes in verse 25: But now that the faithfulness has come, we are no longer under the rule of the babysitter. For you are all sons of God, through faith, in the Messiah, Jesus.“Sons of God”. That’s language—that’s a title—right out of the exodus story. In Exodus 4, when the Lord tells Moses to go to Pharaoh, he calls Israel his “firstborn son”. What Paul is doing here is shifting the frame of reference. He’s been talking about Israel between Moses and Jesus as a time when Israel was a child, guarded by a babysitter, and waiting for the promises of Abraham to be fulfilled. Now, when he talks about being sons of God through faith in the Messiah, what he’s saying is that that time from Moses to Jesus was really like the years that Israel spent as slaves in Egypt. In Jesus the time of rescue has come. Paul is saying to the circumcision people: Do you want to go back to being a child, when you could be a grown-up? Do you want to go back to being a slave, when you could be free? If you want to be grown-up Israel, the thing that marks you out is faith, is trust in the Messiah. But Paul doesn’t leave it there. In verses 27-29 he hammers home this point of inclusion in the Messiah. Five times he uses this word Messiah with relation to our identity. If you’re following along, most of your translations probably say “Christ”. Christos is the Greek word and for reasons I don’t fully understand, Christians have usually left it untranslated. The result is that “Christ” has lost its punch. We say it like it’s Jesus last name. Some people even think it is Jesus’ last name. In fact, “Christ” is just Greek for “Messiah”. It’s not a name; it’s Jesus’ title. He’s God’s anointed King. And so some years ago I decided that unless there was good reason to do otherwise, I was going to translate Christos as “Messiah” in my preaching. It’s vitally important we understand who Jesus is. Paul doesn’t talk about being “in Jesus”. He talks all the time about being “in the Messiah” and that’s because it’s Jesus’ messiahship that makes him able to represent us as the people of God. So here, Paul hammers it home writing: You see, every one of you who has been baptised into the Messiah has put on the Messiah. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer “male and female”. You are all one in the Messiah, Jesus. And, if you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham’s family. You stand to inherit the promise.The Messiah embodies faithful, grown-up Israel. The Messiah embodies the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham. So what’s important, Paul says, is that we are “in” the Messiah. But what does that mean? Modern people often seem to think of it as some kind of experience, but for Paul and his readers in the First Century, it meant being part of this royal family of which Jesus is the King—the Messiah. And, Paul says, as much as faith in Jesus is the thing that marks this family out as being in the Messiah, baptism is the entrance. This is another thing we might misunderstand. A lot of modern people, especially in our Protestant tradition, will say, “But isn’t baptism a ‘work’ and if we enter into the Messiah by a ‘work’, how is it by faith?” Again, like everything else, we need to see baptism in light of the story. Paul doesn’t elaborate here, because it was a given believers back then would think of it this way. Think of the exodus and think of Israel at the Red Sea as the Lord parted the waters and made a pathway through to a new life of freedom and a new life in his presence. On one side of the parted sea was a life of slavery and on the other side was a promise of life with God—the fulfilment of his promises. But to get from one side to the other meant passing through the water. Passing through meant faith, it meant trusting the Lord and his offer of rescue from slavery. Brothers and Sisters, baptism is like that. On one side we are slaves to sin and on the other is the Spirit-filled life of the Messiah’s family. The font stands between like the Red Sea. In the waters God makes his promise and leads us through to life on the other side. So to pass through the waters of baptism is take the first step of faith in the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah. To pass through the waters of baptism is to put off the old self and to put on the Messiah. And when we do that, his identity becomes ours. That’s not to say that everything about our previous identity becomes completely irrelevant, but it does mean that nothing about our old selves has to do with our standing in the Messiah’s family. Jew or gentile, slave or free, man or woman, we all stand on equal footing if we are in the Messiah’s family. We come to one Table. We eat one bread. We drink of one cup. Because, as Paul hammers home his last blow: “If you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham’s family and you stand to inherit the promise. There’s no reason to look for anything else to enhance that status, because there is nothing else that can. We are one in Jesus because God has been faithful to his promises. He put it in black and white, he affixed his signature that night when he met Abraham as the smoking pot and burning torch and he fulfilled that promise when Jesus was born of Mary, when Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Jesus rose again on the third day—and he continues to fulfil his promises in us. Every time someone is baptised into the Messiah’s family, every time God pours out his Spirit, every time he brings us together at his Table on the basis of the faithfulness of Jesus, he fulfils his promises. Brothers and Sisters, if we are passionate about Jesus and if we’re passionate about the gospel, we should be just as passionate about the unity of the family—the church. This is one of the reasons I am a Reformed Episcopalian. Bishop Cummins understood this and that’s why—unlike other Anglicans of his day who required episcopal confirmation in order to come to the Lord’s Table—we welcome everyone who is baptised into Jesus the Messiah. Because we know that all who are in the Messiah are part of the one family of Abraham. Because we know that our unity is a testimony to the faithfulness of the Father, revealed in Jesus and the Spirit. Because our being brought together in the Messiah—Jew and gentile, slave and free, men and women—is a powerful witness of the life and light of God’s new age that needs to be shined into this dark and divided world. Let’s pray: Gracious Father, through faith in the faithfulness of your Son, you have made us your people. Remind us always that faith in Jesus makes us one, so that we might be as passionate about our unity as you are and so that our unity in Jesus might be a bright gospel light in the midst of the darkness. Amen.
Children of AbrahamGalatians 3:1-14by William Klock
Have you ever heard of Charles Blondin? He was a French acrobat, daredevil, and tight-rope walker in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. He is most famous for crossing the Niagara Gorge, just above the falls, walking a tight-rope in 1859. He was the first person to do so. And it drew a crowd, so he did it again and again and again. But to keep the crowds coming back he had to keep finding new and more impressive ways to walk the tight-rope across the gorge. He crossed walking backwards. He crossed while blindfolded. He crossed pushing a loaded wheelbarrow. He crossed while walking the tight-rope on stilts. He once carried a chair with him, balanced the chair on a single leg on the rope, then stood on the chair. Another time he stopped mid-rope, cooked himself an omelet (Yes, I’m also struggling to figure out how he did that), ate the omelet, and then continued to the other side. But, I think, his most impressive feat was crossing Niagara Gorge on a tight-rope while carrying his manager. I mean, in terms of physical challenges, that was probably one of the easier things Blondin did. The impressive bit is that his manager trusted him enough to be part of the stunt. So picture Charles Blondin on a tight-rope, crossing Niagara Gorge with his manager—his name was Harry Colcord—on his back. But then imagine, Harry, halfway across, telling Blondin to stop and put him down. “This has been nice, and I know you told me not to look down, but I did. And the water is churning away way down there as it gets ready to go over the falls and, well, I think I’d feel better if I got off your back and got myself across the tight-rope alone.” Imagine what Blondin would have said to him. “You witless fool!” Well, that’s what Paul writes to the churches in Galatia, having heard that they’re talking about getting circumcised. Look at Galatians 3:1-5. You witless Galatians! Who as bewitched you? Messiah Jesus was portrayed on the cross before your very eyes! There’s just one thing I want to know from you. Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of torah, or by hearing and believing? You are so witless! You began with the Spirit, and now you’re ending with the flesh? Did you really suffer so much for nothing—if indeed it is going to be for nothing? The one who gives you the Spirit and performs powerful deeds among you—does he do this through your performance of torah, or through hearing and believing?So chapter 2 ended with Paul writing about the faithful son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. He’s reminded them of the cross and now Paul launches into his main argument with that violent image of the cross at the forefront. “Messiah Jesus was portrayed on the cross before your very eyes!” It’s hard to say exactly what Paul means by that. When he was there, did he give them a graphic description of Jesus’ crucifixion? Maybe. But everyone in the Roman world knew about crucifixion. I think it’s safe to say that pretty much everyone had seen a crucifixion at some point. They knew how awful it was. Whatever it means that the cross was displayed to them, Paul’s point is that the Galatians knew all about Jesus and the cross and they should have understood how it had changed everything. They should have understood how it turned everything Jews thought about their identity and everything about the rule of torah upside-down. Jesus’ death changed everything. Paul had taught them that. When he’d left them, they understood all of this—or so he thought. But now—they’re talking about getting circumcised. He’s utterly flabbergasted. How could this be, so he practically shouts at them, “You witless Galatians!” I thought I knew you, but now this? Has someone cast a stupid spell on you? Jesus and the Spirit got them halfway across the tightrope, but now they’re looking down at the long drop and the churning waters and thinking that maybe they should play it safe and go the rest of the way with torah instead. And Paul’s point: Torah never would have got you this far. Don’t be stupid. Let Jesus and the Spirit take you all the way. He's got one question for them, but it spills out as six. Who has bewitched you? Did you receive the Spirit through the torah or through hearing and believing the gospel? Again, are you really this dumb? Having begun in the Spirit, are you going to end in the flesh? Have you suffered so much for nothing? And, did God give you his Spirit and has he done powerful things amongst you because you obeyed torah or because you heard and believed? It all boils down to one question. Paul asks them to consider everything that’s happened to them since he first visited them and proclaimed the good news about Jesus the Messiah. He asks them: “Did all that happen because you were keeping the Jewish law?” Of course, the answer is a resounding “No!” Everything that had happened to them had happened through the power of the gospel and the giving of the Spirit as they listened and believed. And when Paul says that, he makes sure to put all the stress on the gospel and on the Spirit and none on them. The gospel was proclaimed, they believed—and then they discovered that it was actually all along the Spirit already at work amongst them. That’s the point here. Their lives had been transformed by the Spirit and the Spirit was doing amazing things in their churches, not because of anything they had done—and certainly not because they’d decided to start living according to the Jewish law. Up til now, they hadn’t even considered doing that. So, no, none of this had happened because of their works. Just the opposite, their works were actually the work of God’s Spirit in them—a gift they’d received, a new life into which they’d been plunged when they believed the good news and were baptised in the Messiah. Their new life had begun with the Spirit. So why, O why, Paul wants to know, are they now turning back to the flesh? Now, we should pause here and ask what Paul means when he writes about Spirit and flesh. The Spirit is God’s Spirit, but for Paul it sort of becomes a shorthand for new life and new creation. The Spirit is the down payment on the resurrection life of the new world that God has promised. The life of the Spirit is a preview of what life will one day be like when God finally sets his creation (and us!) fully to rights. The Spirit is a preview in the sense that we now have a taste of that life, but the Spirit, through his work in us, also gives the world a preview of what God’s new world will be like. Think about that. The Church is—or it should be—a preview of the age to come, of God’s new creation. On the other hand, the “flesh” for Paul is shorthand for the corruption, decay, and death of the old age—it’s shorthand for life without the redeeming work of Jesus and the renewing work of the Spirit. But, too, Paul also writes about the Jewish people “according to the flesh”—Abraham’s biological descendants marked out with the sign of circumcision in their flesh. To be clear, though, when Paul talks about flesh and Spirit, he is absolutely not using these works in the sense of the Greek philosophers—whose ideas persist today—who thought the physical word or the physical body (the flesh) was some bad thing and that the spirit was some good, non-material essence—the real us—that needs to be set free. For Paul, we can think of “flesh” as representing the old age dominated by sin and death and “Spirit” as representing the life of god’s new creation. So obviously the Spirit is important. The Spirit shows that the promises made to Abraham have finally come true through the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Spirit is the evidence of the gospel doing its work. This is why, for example, the Pentecostal and Charismatic idea that separated the gift of the Spirit from belief in the gospel is such a problem. (If Paul had been alive in the early Twentieth Century he would, I expect, have written an equally sternly worded epistle to them.) The Spirit is not an add-on to life in Jesus—as if you can believe in Jesus now and receive the Spirit at some later time—or even not at all. To believe the gospel is to trust in Jesus the Messiah, not just for the forgiveness of sins—as if that’s all there is to gospel. To believe in the gospel is to become part of God’s promised new creation, to be plunged into the Spirit so that the very life of God himself makes us new. To be in the Messiah is to have the Spirit in you. You cannot separate the two. Anything less than that is, as Paul would put it, “flesh” and, Brothers and Sisters, the gospel which begins with the Spirit ends in the Spirit. It will never leave us stuck in the flesh. The Lord does not deliver you from bondage in Egypt only to leave you stuck in Egypt. He leads you through the Red Sea and into the promised land. So, to sum up so far: We live the life of the Spirit not because of anything we’ve done, but because we have heard and believed the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen. Even then, the fact that we have “heard” it, is because the Spirit was already at work in us. Now, lets move on to verse 6. Paul writes: It's like Abraham. “He believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.” So you know that it’s people of faith who are children of Abraham.Remember what I talked about last week. Why was Abraham so important to Paul? Because the story of redemption begins with him. He’s the model for all of God’s people thereafter. The Lord spoke into a world completely lost in the darkness of paganism and he called Abraham: “Go to the land I will show you and I will give you a family and an inheritance.” It was a crazy promise made by a strange God, but Abraham believed—he trusted—and the Lord established a covenant with him and with his children. Through them, the Lord would, one day, drive away the darkness and set the world to rights. I said last week, that’s what “righteousness” is about for Paul. It’s about membership in this covenant family of God. For the Jews in Paul’s day the human race was divided into two groups: the Jews were the “righteous”, the “sinners” were everyone else. It began with Abraham—long before there was ever a torah or, for that matter, even before circumcision. The Lord established a covenant with Abraham because of faith and—here’s the key point for Paul here that stands like a mountain over this whole passage—it is this faith, this trust in the Lord that marks out Abraham’s family. It’s the faith people, not the circumcision people who will inherit God’s promises. Imagine Paul pointing his finger at the Galatians—most of whom were gentiles—as he says this. He’s saying, “This means you.” They—gentile believers renewd by God’s Spirit— they were the sign that God’s promises to Abraham were finally coming true. He goes on in verse 8: The scriptures foresaw that God would justify the nations by faith, so it announced the gospel to Abraham in advance, when it declared that ‘the nations will be blessed in you.’ So you see, the people of faith are blessed along with faithful Abraham.God’s promises were a lot bigger than Abraham. Again, God began a project with Abraham, through which he intended to bring the whole world—the nations—out of the darkness of sin and death. And Paul could point to these gentile believers in Galatia and say, “See! You are living proof of the faithfulness of the God of Israel. In you, the blessing promised to Abraham has begun to reach the nations. Brothers and Sisters, the same goes for us. Some of my ancestors were Jews, but most of them were pagans who worshipped oak trees. They heard the good news about Jesus, the Spirit got hold of them, they believed, and the Spirit led them out of the darkness and made them sons and daughters of Abraham and inheritors of his promise. You and I are proof that God is faithful to do what he promised. And that’s Paul’s next point. It’s God who is faithful. The promises weren’t fulfilled because Abraham’s family was faithful. Some of them were, but on the whole, Israel failed miserably. Look at verses 10-12: Because, you see, those who belong to the “works-of-the-law” camp are under a curse. For it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not stick fast by everything written in the book of the law, to perform it.” But because nobody is justified before God in the law, it’s clear that “the righteous shall live by faith.” The law, however, is not by faith; rather “the one who does them shall live by them.”We know that the “faith people” are justified—that means they’re the ones counted as “righteous”, as God’s people—because those who put their stock in doing the Jewish law, well, they’re under a curse. Paul quotes Deuteronomy 27:26, “Cursed is everyone who does not stick fast by everything written in the book of the law, to perform it.” Now, Paul’s point isn’t that it’s impossible to keep the law, so don’t bother trying. What he’s saying is that if—like the agitators in Galatia or the people from James in Antioch—if you decide to go down the road of circumcision, well, that’s just the first step. There are 612 other commandments you’ll have to follow and not even the agitators, not even these “circumcision people” were doing all of that. Torah is all or nothing. Here's where Paul is going with this. He’s telling the story again. I think we miss that because we’ve been trained to think in terms of abstract doctrinal propositions, but for Paul it was all about the story of God and his people. It began with Abraham and the family that the Lord miraculously gave him to carry forward his promises to the nations, but along the way the story shows that Abraham’s family was infected with the same sin problem as the rest of the human race—the very same problem God’s promises were meant to heal. This is the lens through which the Jews of Paul’s day saw themselves. The Essenes at Qumran—the people responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls—they’re a great example of this. They saw that Israel was broken and fallen, disloyal and incapable of carrying forward the Lord’s promises. They believed that the Lord was, secretly through them, launching his new covenant to set everything right. Their scroll on torah (4QMMT) sums it all up. First there was a time of blessing under David and Solomon, but King Jeroboam sinned and his successors down the line through Zedekiah kept sinning and that brought the curse of Deuteronomy 27 on the nation. Deuteronomy—Moses reiteration of the law before the Israelites crossed into the promised land, it promised blessing if the people trusted the Lord and a curse if they were unfaithful. So the Lord did what he promised. He caused them to be carried way into exile and, even though the people had returned from exile to the promised land, the curse continued—for another five hundred years. Being ruled over by godless gentiles like the Romans was the proof. What Israel needed was a new covenant. Now, the Qumran community was unique in thinking that they were the people of that new covenant, but most other Jews would have agreed with the basic outline of the story. The angry Pharisees who wrote the Palms of Solomon and the Maccabean martyrs would have agreed. Ezra and Nehemiah and Daniel said the same thing: God’s people, even after some of them had returned to Jerusalem, they were still sinful, still in “exile”, still “slaves in our own land”. The promises of Deuteronomy 30, the promises that would come true if Israel were faithful, they had never happened. Isaiah’s promises of everything set to rights was only a dream. Deuteronomy warned of that if Israel was unfaithful she would fall under a curse and Paul and his fellow Jews saw that curse happening in their own day. Oppression by the pagan Romans was the current iteration in a long line back to Babylon. So Paul sums up the problem in verse 11 when he says that nobody is justified before God in the law, so “the righteous shall live by faith”. He’s quoting Habakkuk there. But that was the big question for Paul and his fellow Jews. There were these big promises. Habakkuk said the righteous shall live by faith, but how were they supposed to get there? No matter what Israel did, no matter how many reform movements came along, Israel was stuck in unfaithfulness and living under the curse. Buckling down, like the Pharisees, and doing the law even harder wasn’t working. That’s why Paul quotes Leviticus 18:5: “You shall therefore keep my statues and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the Lord”. There’s a promise there, but pretty much everyone by Paul’s day had lost hope. Yes, if we keep the Lord’s statues we will live, but no matter what we do and no matter how hard we try, we fail. So Paul throws up his hands in despair and, I think, most other thoughtful Jews of his day would have thought the same way. What more can we do? But as discouraging as this story might seem, if you really believed that all of Israel’s woes were the curse promised in Deuteronomy 27, there was hope that one day, somehow the blessing of Deuteronomy 30 would happen—including God’s renewal of his people by his Spirit. And so, while his fellow Jews felt the weight of Leviticus 18:5, Paul saw the beginnings of hope there. This was the Lord’s promise and the Lord is faithful. Paul saw it pointing to a new covenant and a new way of keeping the law—one that would finally work. This—this new thing—is what Paul saw had happened—was happening—through Jesus the Messiah. He goes on in verses 13 and 14: The Messiah redeemed us from the curse of the law, by becoming a curse on our behalf, as it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” This was so that the blessing of Abraham could flow through to the nations in Messiah Jesus—and so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit, through faith. Paul saying, “It seemed hopeless, but look what God has done! The curse that Deuteronomy promised has been borne by the Messiah. Jesus can do that, because—remember—the king represents his people. That’s why I stressed last week that it’s not just the promise to Abraham that’s important, but that we also remember how David, the King, was incorporated into the promise as well. So Jesus the Messiah, the King came to the place where the pagans, agents of the curse, were oppressing his people and he took the curse on himself. And he didn’t do it in some abstract way. It was obvious. It was unmistakable. The cross was the great symbol of Roman oppression and brutality. Jesus literally took Israel’s curse on himself when he died on the cross. Israel, through her unfaithfulness, had become like a logjam in the river of God’s blessing, so Jesus the King became, himself, a literal son of Abraham and bore Israel’s curse himself, thereby becoming the conduit for God to pour out his Spirit. He cleared the logjam. This is what Paul means in verse 14 when he writes that the blessing of Abraham could flow through to the nations in Messiah Jesus”. That’s the first result of Jesus’ death on the cross. The second thing he did was to renew God’s covenant. This is what the prophets had promised. The Lord wasn’t just going to let Israel rot away as a logjam in the river or even bypass Israel. Through Jesus, God poured out his Spirit on Israel, giving them a new way to keep his law, so that they could, again and as he intended, be the river carrying his blessings to the nations. That’s why Paul says we, meaning he and his fellow Jews who believed the good news about Jesus, we “might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith”. God has dealt with the logjam created by the law and the unfaithfulness of Israel and he’s done so through Jesus’ death and through the pouring out of his Spirit. And now Paul and his fellow Jewish missionaries are like the river, freed of the logjam, rushing out to carry the light and life of God to the nations. For Paul, the mission to the gentiles and the fact that in Jesus, the gentile and Jewish believers were worshiping and eating and gathering around the Lord’s Table together as one family, this was proof that God is faithful to do what he has promised. That’s as far as we’ll go today with Chapter 3. These verses have a reputation for being notoriously difficult, but a lot of that is because for a very long time we’ve tried to read what Paul says here as abstract doctrinal propositions, when what Paul is really doing is telling the story of God and his people. Paul does it that way in part because it puts the faithfulness of God to his promises front and centre and gives us reason to believe him and to trust him, but Paul also puts this all in terms of this great story of redemption, because it shows us our place in the story. When we look at this in terms of the story, what stands out in the middle of it is that we are, by faith in the Messiah, members of Abraham’s promised family. By faith in Jesus the Messiah, not by circumcision or torah or anything else. By faith in Jesus the Messiah. Getting that right was the solution to the problems in Galatia. Think about that. When we think about Christian identity, how often do we think of in terms of being sons and daughters of Abraham? This was a really, really big deal for Paul. And as much as we sang the song about Father Abrahamwhen we were kids in Sunday School—I am one of them, and so are you—this theme is almost entirely ignored down through the history of the church. We even have a whole school of recent evangelical theology committed to the idea that only ethnic Jews are children of Abraham. But this truth, that we are children of Abraham and heirs of God’s promises to him, it’s absolutely essential to Paul. So much so, that for him the gospel stands or falls on this truth. It means that we’re part of the story and it means that as God pours his Spirit into us and makes us his temple, we see his faithfulness to his promises. Think on that as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning. We eat the bread and drink the wine as one family in fulfilment of the promises that the Lord made so long ago to Abraham. We are brothers and sisters, because Jesus has, by his grace, grafted us into this family. The simple fact that we are here together and that God has poured his Spirit into us, is proof of his faithfulness. So eat the bread and drink the wine, look around at your brothers and sisters, remember our place in this story, and have faith, believe, trust. We live in difficult days and like, Charles Blondin’s manager, sitting on his shoulders and looking down at the long drop and the churning waters, we might be tempted to get down and walk the tightrope ourselves. Brothers and Sisters, keep the faith, keep trusting in the God who has proved himself faithful. Jesus and the Spirit have brought us this far and Jesus and the Spirit will see us through to the end. Let’s pray: Gracious Father, who keep us steadfast in faith, we pray. We are fickle, but you have proved yourself faithful. Remind us always of the great story into which you have grafted us so that we live in your faithfulness, redeemed by your Son and renewed by your Spirit. Give us grace to trust and obey you and to be your river of gospel life flowing to the nations. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.
Interlude: Why was Abraham so Important to Paul?Genesis 15 & Psalm 2by William Klock
As I was preparing to preach on the central part of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, beginning with Chapter 3, it occurred to me that it would be an understatement to say that Paul spends a lot of time talking about Abraham. A lot. Not just about Abraham himself, but about a whole host of themes that go back to Abraham’s story. Themes like faith and faithfulness, seed and inheritance, and of course righteousness. And as I was thinking about that and especially about the reason why Paul spends so much time talking about Abraham, it occurred to me that today would be a good time for an interlude before we launch into Paul’s grand argument. That’s what I’d like to do this morning. So why does Paul talk so much about Abraham? The way some commentators talk, you might think that Paul was doing nothing more than proof-texting. He needed an example of faith over works from the Hebrew scriptures and, voila, there was Genesis 15. Or, it’s possible that the agitators in Galatia were appealing to Genesis 17, the passage where the Lord gave the covenantal sign of circumcision to Abraham. So, naturally, Paul goes two chapters back to show that well before circumcision was a thing, there was faith. But Paul had a greater reason than any of that. Paul never engages in shallow proof-texting. And Paul never talked about theology or doctrine in the abstract the way people often do today. Paul told a story and Abraham was important to Paul, because Paul saw the gospel as the culmination of the great story of the God of Israel and his people and of his promises and of his faithfulness and how it all comes to fulfilment in Jesus the Messiah. Everything for Paul rides on that great story and it begins with Abraham, because God’s calling of Abraham was the answer—or, at any rate, the beginning of the answer—to the mess into which the human race and the whole word have fallen. Right from the get go, Adam went wrong. Because of his rebellion against God Adam was cast out of the garden temple he’d been created to steward, and he was cut off from the life of God. And from there his descendants went from bad to worse. Even wiping out the whole human race in a flood, while saving the one righteous man left, even that didn’t fix the problem. From righteous Noah it’s only a turn of the page to the Tower of Babel. All of humanity had lost the knowledge of God. The world was lost in darkness. And then out of the darkness the Lord called Abram: “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land I will show you. And I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing…all the clans of the earth through you shall be blessed.” And, the storyteller records, “Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken.” For years Abram believed and trusted this strange God who had called him to Canaan and made him an outrageous promise. And the Lord blessed Abram with sheep and cattle and camels, he blessed him with a great reputation, he defeated king for him, but the central part of that promise—the land and especially the family never came to pass. And so, in Genesis 15, the Lord speaks to Abram again:After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great.” And Abram said, “O my Lord, God, what can you give me when I am going to my end childless, and the steward of my household is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “Look, to me you have given no seed, and here a member of my household is to be my heir.” Seed. A family. Children. At least one single son to be his heir. The promise required at least that in order to be fulfilled. But Abram was an old man. His wife was long past her child-bearing years. It looked like everything would soon pass to Abram’s servant, Eliezer, and the promise would be dead. As I read Abram’s protest here, I can’t help but think of the father of the possessed boy in Mark’s gospel. He cried out to Jesus, “I believe, but help my unbelief.” Abram knew this strange God was real. Of all the gods, this was the only who had ever spoken. And Abram had followed him to Canaan, and there this God provided And now, years later, Lord was no longer a stranger. The Lord was real, but would he prove to be truly faithful to his promise? The story goes on:And now the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “This one will not be your heir, but he who issues from your loins will be your heir.” And he took him outside and he said, “Look up to the heavens and count the stars, if you can count them.” And he said, “So shall be your seed.” And he [Abram] trusted in the Lord, and he [the Lord] reckoned it to him as righteousness.The Lord reiterated his promise to Abram: a promise of seed and a promise of an inheritance. And Abram, looking back on the Lord’s faithfulness so far…this God who had started out a stranger to him, but was now a faithful friend…Abram had faith. Some translations say he “trusted” and others he “believed”. The Hebrew word has a pretty clear sense of trusting in someone or something who has proved himself trustworthy, reliable, faithful. Despite that, I’ve noticed that we often struggle to get this part of the story right. A lot of us hear those words, “Abram believed…” or “Abram had faith…” and we think of this as something Abram did with only his brain. Knowing what he did of the Lord, he gave his intellectual assent to this promise. For a lot of us “belief” or “faith” is mainly a thinking word and in large part that’s because in our Protestant tradition we’ve tended to drive a wedge, to set up a wall between faith and works. The Reformers were right when they said that salvation is by faith alone, but that doesn’t mean that faith is just something we do in our heads. Faith is organically intertwined with trust and trust is organically intertwined with obedience. Faith in a God whom we know to be faithful naturally works itself out in how we live. Abram followed where the Lord led him, because that’s the nature of faith. It's worth taking note of how the later Jews translated this into Greek. Greek has a word group for belief that puts the emphasis on our brains and on thinking. Dokeo. It’s the dox in orthodox, which means to believe or to think the right thing. But instead, the translators of the Old Testament chose the word pisteuo. Sometimes this pistis word group can get into the brainy, the thinking aspects of belief, but most of the time it’s more like that Hebrew word. It's not just intellectual assent, it’s not just thinking the right things, it means to trust, to give yourself over to someone or something proved to be faithful. In the Greco-Roman world, pistis was the sort of loyalty, allegiance, and trust around which communities were built. This language of trust was how the Jews thought and it’s how the early Christians thought. It’s a sad part of our history that over the centuries we’ve tended more and more towards the idea of faith as primarily a thinking thing. Consider how we think of the creeds. We usually think of them as a set of theological propositions. I believe in God the Father. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son our lord. I believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. We think of these as bits of abstract doctrine that define right belief—again, that’s what “orthodoxy” means. We learn the creeds and we give them our intellectual assent. It’s something we do with our brains. And that’s good so far as it goes, but consider that the creed started out in the early church as a baptismal affirmation. People—pagans—encountered the good news about Jesus and the faithfulness of the God of Israel, they heard the story that went back all the way to Abraham—of this God who gave promises and then kept them, of a God unlike anything they knew in the pagan pantheon, of a God who reveals himself in Jesus, his incarnate son, of a God who gives his life for the sake of his people—and they believed. They put their trust in this God who made heaven and earth; in this God who revealed himself in his son, born of Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, and who rose three days later; in this God who now gives his own Spirit to quicken, to enliven his people. Like Abraham, they were leaving behind their countries and their families, and stepping out in trusting faith into a new world and into a new life in which they were risking persecution and even martyrdom. Their faith wasn’t just an intellectual exercise; they were entrusting their whole selves to this God whose story they confessed in the creed, a story that was now their story. I’ve been reading Teresa Morgan’s newish book on the language of faith in early Christianity and she very helpfully puts it this way, “The translators [of the Greek Old Testament] regularly chose pistis language at moments of change and decision-making, when the relationship between God and his people is portrayed as entering a new phase, or a covenant is made which will create or shape Israel in the future.”[1] It’s language of trust, and of loyalty, and of obedience—not just something that happens in the brain. God is doing something new, maybe even strange or bewildering, and this is the language of his people committing themselves to him in this new thing, because they know him to be faithful. And I think that now moves us from the “Abram trusted” part of Genesis 15:6 right to the “and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” part. What does that mean? Well, how we read this—probably for most of us, whether we realise it or not—has been shaped by Martin Luther and the Reformers. Luther confronted the medieval church, which was falsely teaching a theology of merit, a gospel in which our works and the works of the saints earn us a place in God’s presence—one we could even buy with money. Luther believed—actually this is a good example of that idea of trust, because this wasn’t just a thinking exercise for Luther, he put his life on the line for the gospel—but Luther believed that salvation is by grace alone through faith. He was right. And this was one of the key passages he drew on. The problem was that Luther was reading Sixteenth Century problems back into Paul’s First Century letter to the Galatians and back into Abraham’s story in Genesis. And that meant that Luther was sort of looking for the right answer in the wrong place—or maybe, better, asking the wrong question of the right text. And so, in light of the works-righteousness he was arguing against, Luther took “righteousness” to mean a moral quality—one that we sinners lack and one that Jesus has. So for Luther, when Paul cites the story of Abram and how Abram believed and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, that meant that when we put our faith in Jesus, a sort of legal transaction takes place in the heaven courtroom, and Jesus’ righteousness becomes our righteousness and we become acceptable to God. And I think if Paul were alive to hear that, he'd give us a bit of a funny look and say, “Well, if righteous did mean some kind of moral status, then I guess you’d be right, but that’s not what righteous means. Righteousness is about our God’s covenants.” Because for Paul, to be reckoned as “righteous” was first and foremost about being part of God’s covenant people—about living in his promises—because that’s what Genesis 15 is about. Let’s look back at the rest of Genesis 15, beginning at verse 7. We’ve been told that Abram trust in the Lord’s promise and that the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. The rest of the chapter tells us what that means.And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land to inherit.” And he said, “O my Lord, God, how shall I know that I shall inherit it?” And he said to him, “Take me a three-year-old heifer and a three-year-old she-goat and a three-year-old ram and a turtledove and a young pigeon.” And he took all of these and clove them through the middle, and each set his part opposite the other, but the birds he did not cleave. And carrion birds came down on the carcasses and Abram drove them off. And as the sun was about to set, a deep slumber fell upon Abram and now a great dark dread came falling upon him. And he said to Abram, “Know well that your seed shall be strangers in a land not theirs and they shall be enslaved and afflicted four hundred years. But upon the nation for whom they slave I will bring judgement, and afterward they shall come forth with great substance. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace, you shall be buried in ripe old age. And in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.” And just as the sun set, there was a thick gloom and, look, a smoking brazier with a flaming torch that passed between those parts. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your seed I have given this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.So in response to Abrams’ faith, the Lord establishes a covenant with him. In Abram’s culture this is how binding agreements were made. Two parties would work out the details of the agreement. Maybe it was two kings pledging military support to each other. It might be two rich men established a boundary between their lands. It might be a king and his vassal, the vassal pledging a tribute and the king pledging to defend his vassal with his army. They would clearly state the conditions of the covenant and then they would make a sacrifice. They might slit the throat of a bull, saying in other words, may this be done to me if I am not faithful to what I have promised. And this is what happens here in Genesis 15. In response to Abram’s faith, the Lord comes to Abram in this sombre ceremony to ratify his covenant promises. He passes through this pathway between the halved carcasses of the animals Abram has slaughtered, as if to say, “May this happen to me if I am faithless.” This is, I think, one of the most profound passages in the Bible with regard to the Lord’s faithfulness. And this is what Paul is retrieving in his argument with the Galatians. It’s why he talks about things like “seed” and “inheritance” and it’s why he talks about faith and faithfulness and righteousness. He’s saying that in the gospel, in the good news about Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, we see the ultimate example of the faithfulness of God to his promises and that through faith in Jesus we become part of this covenant community in which God has pledged himself to us. So this is why Abraham was so important for Paul. This is why he talks about Abraham’s seed and Abraham’s inheritance to the Galatians. But it might not be so obvious how he connects it to Jesus. So…there’s more to the story of God and Israel than Abraham. As the story goes on other actors walk on stage and eventually one of those will be Israel’s king. And so Paul also recalls Psalm 2, which is one of the “royal psalms”. It begins with the nations raging. The kings of the earth plot together against the God of Israel, but the Psalmist sings: He who sits in the heavens laughs; *the Lord holds them in derision.Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying,“As for me, I have set my King* on Zion, my holy hill.”*I will tell of the decree:* The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.*Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,* and the ends of the earth your possession.In Genesis the Lord promised the land as an inheritance to Abraham, and in Psalm 2 that promised inheritance is given to the coming Davidic king, but it’s expanded—from the land of Canaan to the ends of the earth. And Paul brings these two promises, these two covenants together in Galatians. It’s not just the Lord’s promise to Abraham that is fulfilled in Jesus, but his promises to the king, too. And that’s important. Remember what I said last week about the king and his people. The king represents his people. What’s true of him is true of them. And that means that the inheritance promised to Abraham now belongs to King Jesus and his people. This was vitally important to Paul, because for Paul the most important thing about the gospel is that in it God reveals, he proves his faithfulness and, in response, we give him glory. I think we often miss this. For Paul the gospel was centred on God, but we often centre the gospel on us. Brothers and Sisters, the gospel is for us, but it’s not about us. I can’t really say it any better than Tom Wright does. He makes the point that “Paul understood…[his]…mission not simply as a way of ‘getting people converted…” because that would be a human-centred gospel…“but as the symbolic as well as actual means of extending and displaying the reign of Israel’s God, and of his ‘Son,’ to the ends of the earth.”[2] In other words, the gospel—and the proclamation and spread of the gospel out into the pagan world—was the fulfilment of God’s promises, proving his faithfulness, and ultimately to bring the nations before him in glory and praise. Now, if we have any lingering doubts about this covenantal meaning of “reckoning it to him as righteousness”, I think there’s one more passage that clears it up. Psalm 106:30-31 praises Aaron’s grandson Phinehas. You might remember that I mentioned him a few weeks ago. The Psalm says: Then Phinehas stood up and intervened, *and the plague was stayed.And that was counted to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever.Phinehas intervened. Specifically, he speared one of the Israelites along with his Moabite mistress as they were, so to speak, in the act. And for that act of faithfulness, the Lord appointed Phinehas and his descendants to a special role in Israel’s priesthood. Or as the Psalmist says, his act was counted to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever. In response to Phinehas’ faith, the Lord established a covenant with him—he made a promise to him. In this case, it’s clear that “reckon as righteousness” doesn’t mean that the Lord credited Phinehas with a moral surplus and it doesn’t mean that for Abraham either. It’s about God’s covenant, which he established with Abraham and his “seed”. And this is what Paul’s picking up on in Galatians when he makes his argument that the gentiles are just as much a part of God’s family in Jesus as the Jews are—that these formerly unclean pagans are as much and as really Abraham’s descendants as he, a “Hebrew of Hebrews” is. “If you belong to the Messiah,” Paul writes in 3:29, “you are Abraham’s family (his seed) and you stand to inherit the promise.” But family and land weren’t the only things the Lord promised in his covenant to Abram. The Lord also promised that Abraham’s family would become slaves in Egypt, but that he would ultimately rescue them. This is as much a part of what Abraham’s family will be as all the other things the Lord promises. From the beginning, the Lord establishes this family as a rescued-from-slavery people. It’s in their covenantal DNA. It literally comes to pass just as the Lord said, but since this is in their DNA, it’s the lens through which the Jews would forever see themselves. That’s why in Paul’s day saw this as their ongoing story. It was a story of blessing followed by the curse of exile, but one day—because it’s who God had made them as a people—one day their God would come and rescue them again and live in their midst. So Paul shows how the gospel embodies and fulfils this promise of seed and inheritance to Abraham, he shows how it embodies and fulfils the promise of slavery and rescue, and that means that, third and finally, the gospel also embodies and fulfils the exodus promise of God to dwell in the midst of his people. The prophets sometimes explained God’s presence in the temple in terms of his Spirit and this, I think, explains how Ezekiel and Joel could promise that God would renew his people by means of his Spirit. This was the future that Israel’s story looked towards: an end of exile and God’s presence through his renewing Spirit. And this is why Paul, as part of his argument in Galatians, points to the present indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the people of God, as the earnest or the down payment, of the foretaste or firstfruits of the ultimate fulfilment of the Lord’s promised inheritance to Abraham. And that brings us back to the creed. My point has been that Paul, rather than talking about abstract theological propositions, tells a story—the story of God and his people, of his promises and their fulfilment—and our place in that story. The people from James and the agitators in Galatia, they knew that story, but they were leaving important parts out, so Paul goes back to the beginning and tells it all again, to show them the bits they missed—or maybe the bits they remembered, but hadn’t yet learned to see in light of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is kind of remarkable how, as Paul tells us the story of the one, true God, the God of Israel, what emerges is a story of the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—there all along, but finally and fully known through this new covenant, this new promise ratified by the blood of Jesus. I know my first point this morning has been to help you understand why Abraham was so important to Paul, so that as we get into his main argument we’ll understand why he says the things he does, but I also want to encourage you to think—or maybe I should say to trust—in the story. The next time you recite the creed, don’t just think of it as a set of theological propositions that need to be affirmed to be orthodox. Think of it as the great story of God and his people, the great story of his promises and his faithfulness, the great story that reveals the redeeming grace of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the great story that ultimately ends with the world finally set to rights and proclaiming his glory—the great story into which we have been baptised—the great story in which we live. Let’s pray: Almighty God, our gracious Father, who called Abraham out of the darkness and promised to make his family a light to the nations, we pray that as we recall the great story of your faithfulness, and especially how you have fulfilled your promises in Jesus and the Spirit, teach us to trust in and to find our assurance in you, not just in our heads and with our brains, but as we commit our whole selves to you and become, ourselves, part of the great story of your faithfulness. Amen.[1] Roman Faith and Christian Faith (Oxford, 2015), 188.[2] Galatians* (Eerdmans, 2021), epub edition.
In the MessiahGalatians 2:11-21by William KlockWe’re all familiar with the image of the two masks, side-by-side, representing tragedy and comedy—one face frowning and the other smiling. The image represents the theatre, whether it’s on playbills, or carved on the outside of a building, or use to mark the location of a theatre on a map. That image is something that goes all the way back to ancient Greece. Back then all the actors were men, there was no makeup, and many people sat far enough away that it was hard to see who was who. So that the audience would know who was on stage and what they were about, the actors held masks in front of their faces—a bit larger than life and with exaggerated features and expressions. The Greeks had a name for this sort of acting and it’s come straight into English: hypocrites—hypocrite, hypocrisy. By St. Paul’s day the word had evolved beyond describing actual actors in a play. It still did, but it commonly referred to someone who was playing a deceitful game of false pretences and pretending to be someone they really weren’t.As we move on in Galatians 2, Paul levels this charge at Peter. Not very long before Paul got word of what was going on in the Galatian churches and wrote this letter, Peter had travelled up to Antioch from Jerusalem. This was a church of both Jews and gentiles and hat may be why Peter visited. As we saw last week, Peter and Paul had agreed that Peter had been sent to the Jews and Paul to the gentiles, so here’s Peter going to visit the Jews in Antioch.You would think after what had happened when Paul visited Jerusalem, after he stood firm against the “circumcision party” and found that he and Peter were ultimately in agreement with each other, you would think this visit to Antioch by Peter would have gone smoothly, but it did not. Look at what Paul write in Galatians 2:11-14.But when Cephas [again, that’s Peter’s Greek name just like Paul is Saul’s Greek name] came to Antioch, I stood up to him face to face. He was in the wrong. Before certain persons came from James, Peter was eating with the gentiles. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, because he was afraid of the circumcision people. The rest of the Jews did the same, joining him in this play-acting. Even Barnabas was carried along by their sham. But when I saw that they weren’t walking straight down the line of gospel truth, I said to Cephas in front of them all: “If you’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a gentile, how can you force gentiles to become Jews?” This issue of Jews and gentiles just wouldn’t go away. Paul thought it was settled after his visit to Jerusalem, but then it happened again when Peter came to visit in Antioch, and now, like a cancer, it’s spread to the churches in Galatia. No doubt, the agitators in Galatia had already told the churches there their version of what had happened in Antioch, so now Paul tells them what really happened.Before all this, Jewish and gentile believers in Antioch—and Galatia, for that matter—gathered as one people to worship, to pray, and maybe most importantly, to eat the Lord’s Supper. It helps to remember that in those early days, the Lord’s Supper was part of or at least attached to an actual meal where the people would fellowship with each other. This gathering together, this eating together was a profound living out of the power of the gospel. When Jesus died and rose again, he dealt with sin and that put everyone, Jew and gentile alike, on an even footing. There was no longer clean and unclean, just and sinner: all in Jesus were clean and just. And this bringing together of the two peoples, it was God’s new creation made visible in the life of the early church—a powerful witness of the gospel itself.We might not think much of it, but it was a big deal. Jews had been raised, steeped in observance of the law. Gentiles were sinners and their food was unclean—even their fellowship was unclean. Think of Peter and his vision in Acts of the sheet let down from heaven full of unclean animals and the Lord telling him to eat. Revulsion had been instilled in Peter from his birth. There was a massive “ick” factor. Our culture, in contrast, has become so accepting of everything that there’s not much left we can compare it to, but maybe you can think of the current conspiracy theories about Klaus Schwab telling everyone to “Eat ze bugs”. It gets people worked up, because of the deeply ingrained revulsion we have in our culture to eating bugs. It would have been something like that for Jews to fellowship with, to eat with gentiles.On the other end of things, the gentiles knew full well about those Jewish weirdos and their over-the-top purity laws. Jews were everywhere spread through the Greco-Roman world, so the pagans encountered them regularly in daily life and in business and were well aware of the revulsion they had to eating with them. So, that the early Jesus people were not only gathering together to worship and pray, but also gathering together around the same table to share bread and wine. It was a really big deal. It got everyone’s attention.And so Peter came to visit Antioch and, Paul says, he worshipped and he prayed and he came to the Lord’s Table with his gentile brothers and sisters. Everything was fine. And then the cancer that Paul thought had been stomped out in Jerusalem, the cancer came to Antioch. Certain people from James came. Paul doesn’t elaborate on what that means, since the Galatians probably knew who those people were. Maybe they were sent by James. Probably they came and claimed authority from James that they didn’t really have. Whatever the case, they carried the cancer with them. Paul calls them “circumcision people”. They had some connection with the pseudo-family members who had been smuggled into the meeting in Jerusalem and who had insisted that Titus be circumcised. And Peter caved into their pressure. He “drew back” and “separated himself” and then when the other Jews in Antioch saw Peter do that, they followed suit. Even Barnabas. We get a sense of Paul’s shock and dismay that even his partner Barnabas whom he knew knew better, even he went along with this sham. This is where Paul uses that play-acting term. Peter and Barnabas and the other Jews acted like hypocrites. They knew better. But under pressure from these agitators they withdrew and gathered separately. They put up masks to placate the agitators and in doing that—not realising what they’d done—they become the people-pleasers so despised by their tradition. They were gospel people, but to keep the peace they held up anti-gospel masks in front of their faces.Paul knew that this wasn’t the real Peter—or the real Barnabas for that matter. They knew better. Peter had known this for years before Paul had. The real Peter behind the mask, the real Peter knew in his bones that the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection created one family in which Jews and gentiles stood on equal footing in the Messiah. This new reality wasn’t easy for Jews steeped for a lifetime in torah to adjust to. There was a massive “ick” factor to overcome. But the gospel is a powerful thing and so is God’s Spirit and adjust they had. And now, inexplicably to Paul, Peter and the others were dividing what Jesus had made one.Paul says that they weren’t walking the straight line of gospel truth. The word is orthopodeo—where we get our word “orthodpaedic”. The gospel draws a straight line and they should have been walking it, but they weren’t. So Paul says to Peter, “Look here, you’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a gentile.” He means that Peter’s been eating with gentile believers and that almost certainly also means that Peter’s been eating gentile food that was off-limits to Jews. “So then,” Paul asks, “How can you force gentiles to become Jews.”Peter probably would have answered that, no, he wasn’t trying to force anyone to be a Jew. They could each just do their own thing. But that brings up images of the temple, where Jews could enter the temple court, while gentiles were stuck outside in the Court of the Gentiles—they weren’t really members of the community, of God’s people. That’s why Paul is so insistent here. There is one people—and Peter knew this and Paul knew—there is one people in Jesus the Messiah, not two. In the Messiah. This new community is defined not by ethnicity or ethnic markers but messianically by faith in Jesus and nothing else. If we’re going to divide it up again, well, what’s the point? To do so undermines the gospel itself and we might as well just throw in the towel.So beginning at verse 15 Paul lays out the argument he gave Peter, because it’s this same gospel-killing cancer that has infected the Galatian churches. They need to hear it too. So Paul writes in verse 15:We are Jews by birth, not “gentile sinners”.For Jews there were two groups of people on this earth: the just or righteous—the Greek word carries both those meanings—and sinners. Jews were the just, the righteous, chosen by God and marked out by obedience to the torah. Everyone else was a sinner and this is why they kept themselves separate. But, Paul goes on:But we know that a person is not declared “righteous” by works of the [Jewish] law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah. So God had chosen the Jewish people and then gave them his law so that be living it, they’d be set apart. It’s what marked them out as different from gentile sinners. And they expected that one day, the Lord would send his Messiah and the Messiah would vanquish the gentile sinners and lead the righteous into God’s new age. But instead—and this was what Paul had to work through after meeting the risen Jesus—instead, the Messiah came and sinners crucified him. That wasn’t how anyone thought the whole Messiah thing would go. Ordinarily, being crucified would mean Jesus wasn’t really the Messiah. Other men claimed to be the Messiah, they were killed, and that was the end of their messianic claims. But then God raised Jesus from death. In doing that he overturned the charge of false messiah laid against him and proved that Jesus was, in fact, the real deal, the Messiah. Jesus did, in fact, inaugurate God’s new age, his new creation. So why did he have to die? That’s when Paul—and the others—realised that as much as torah provided both a righteous way of living and a means of atonement when they failed to be 100% obedient—there was more to righteousness that torah could never provide. The very fact that torah was necessary to set apart God’s people, highlights that both Jew and gentile alike are subject to the slavery of sin and death. So Jesus the Messiah let sin rise up and do its worst at the cross, then rose triumphant over it. Jesus did something that torah could never but do, but in light of Jesus Paul realised, it was something torah had been pointing to all along.Now, there’s an unspoken subtext going on here that we need to understand. Remember that Messiah mean’s God’s anointed king—the king. And for Jews, a king represented his people. So what was true of a king is also true of his people. This is why godly kings brought blessing on Israel and wicked kings brought curses and ultimately exile. A king represents his people. Paul likes to talk about being “in the Messiah” and when he says that, this is what he’s getting at. We’ll need to know this as Paul goes on.So as much as Paul and his fellow Jews had always thought that righteousness came through the law, it turns out that God had something greater in store. A greater righteousness, true righteousness comes through the faithfulness—through the faithfulness of the Messiah. Jews had been faithful to torah and to the Lord’s covenant and that faithfulness marked them out as the “righteous”, but their faithfulness to God was but a shadow of the loving, gracious, self-giving faithfulness to God that Jesus displayed on the cross. That’s the faithfulness that has created a new people of God, a new and “righteous” or “just” people defined by faith in Jesus. So Paul goes on:That is why we too believed in the Messiah, Jesus: so that we might be declared “righteous” on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, and not on the basis of works of the [Jewish] law. On that basis, you see, no creature will be declared “righteous”. Peter and now the Galatians had forgotten what it was all about. Peter seems just to have wanted to avoid conflict—which we see is a problem in other places in Peter’s story, not least at Jesus’ trial. For the Galatians it was likely fear of persecution. Remember that in the ancient word, “religion” wasn’t some nice box you opened up on Sunday, and then closed up the rest of the week. It wasn’t something you did in private. The gods were everywhere and a part of every aspect of life. The fastest growing cult of the time was the cult of Caesar and if you weren’t part of that, well, you were disloyal and unpatriotic. Jews had a special exemption from all this pagan stuff, but these gentile converts to Christianity were in a tough spot. When they became Christians they withdrew from all this paganism. They stopped going to the temples and offering incense to Caesar and doing all the other little things people did throughout daily life and that got them into trouble. So since Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and following him was sort of a new way of being Jewish, they claimed the Jewish exemption and pretty soon the “real” Jews were insisting that if they were going to call themselves Jews, they’d better at least by circumcised. But once they did that and strayed off the straight line of gospel truth, they started to forget what the gospel was all about.So Paul reminds Peter and he reminds the agitators in Galatia: this greater righteousness found in the faithfulness of the Messiah, remember, this is why we believed in him! In light of Jesus death for sins on the cross—remember?—we realised that in the end, torah won’t cut it. Righteousness is found in the faithfulness of King Jesus. He goes on in verses 17 and 18:Well, then, if in seeking to be declared righteous in the Messiah, we ourselves are found to be sinners, does that make the Messiah an agent of sin? This is the accusation of the agitators and of the “people from James”. As part of living out the life of the gospel, Paul and Peter have been eating and fellowshipping with gentiles. The agitators, stuck in the old, pre-Jesus and pre-gospel way of Jewish thinking, for them that makes Peter and Paul and all the others to be “sinners”—because they’re disregarding torah and the boundary markers that have always been there. If eating with gentile believers for the sake of the Messiah makes them sinners, then that would make the Messiah an agent of sin. Paul’s trying to show them how absurd their accusations are. No, he’s saying: Certainly not! If I build up once more the things which I tore down, I demonstrate that I am a lawbreaker.They’ve forgotten that Jesus has changed everything. Jesus’ death has dealt with sin—for both Jew and gentile. Gentile believers are no longer sinners. They’re clean. Paul’s reminding them that the boundary markers of God’s people have changed because of that. What now counts is being “in the Messiah”. They’re trying to rebuild what the old walls and in doing so they’re undermining the very saving gospel in which they’ve trusted. It’s a senseless thing to do. It’s like calling the police chief to help you bury the body of the guy you just killed. It’s not going to end well for you.So now, finally, we get to Paul’s familiar and glorious text about incorporation into Jesus the Messiah. Look at verse 19:Let me explain it like this: Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it is no longer I; it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I think the best way to see this is as Paul telling the story of the Messiah’s death and resurrection as his own story. This is what it means to be “in the Messiah”.Notice how Paul doesn’t just dismiss the law, torah. One of the first heresies—and one that pops up perennially in church history—was the teaching of Marcion who dismissed the law and the whole Old Testament as irrelevant. For Paul, though, you can’t have the new covenant without the old. Torah was building towards Jesus and the cross and the giving of the Spirit all along. So Paul doesn’t just say he died to law—which we might think means the law doesn’t matter. He says that through the law, he died to the law. In Jesus the law fulfilled its purpose and so in Jesus, Paul is now fully alive to God. How does that work. Well, Jesus was crucified and in that he dealt with sin. Remember, again, that the king represents his people. So Paul says, he has been—in Greek it’s literally—"co-crucified” with the Messiah. Through faith in Jesus, through identification with the Messiah, Paul has died to sin. And then he says, “I am—however—alive.” Of course he is. If he is in the Messiah, if he has been co-crucified with the Messiah, then he has also been co-raised with the Messiah. I am alive—but—it is no longer I; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.Brothers and Sisters, notice how Jesus has changed Paul’s identity. That’s what he’s getting at here. By faith he has been incorporated into the Messiah so that even though he still lives in the flesh—that final day when we will be made completely new still awaits us—but even though Paul still lives in the flesh, because he is in the Messiah, he now lives within the faithfulness of the Messiah—the son of God—and now Paul makes it more personal—not just that the son of God died, but that he loved me and gave himself for me. This isn’t just abstract theology. Jesus, the son of God, was faithful to fulfil torah, and gave himself not just generally for humanity (although that is true), but he gave himself for Paul—for me—for you—out of love, again for you, for me. Sometimes we need that reminder. All the theology, all the explanation, all the argumentation to bring false teaching and false gospels to heel is necessary, but in the midst of all that, never forget that Jesus died for you, for me, because he loves us—not just that he loves humanity as a whole in some general sense, but that he knows and loves each one of us. He died for you. He rose for you. And he’s baptised you into his own Holy Spirit so that you can share in his resurrection life.Paul drives home this very personal aspect of the gospel. Peter knew this. The Galatians new this. And that makes it all the more powerful when he ends his argument saying in verse 21:I don’t set aside God’s grace. If “righteousness” comes through the law, then the Messiah died for nothing.” He’s reminded them that in his grace, God sent his son to die for you. But if you start rebuilding that old wall, if you start acting like “righteousness”—he means membership in the community of God’s people—if you start acting like “righteousness” comes through the law and the old boundary markers, then what you’re really saying is that Jesus died for nothing. Whether Jews and gentile would eat together might seem like a small thing, but it wasn’t. Eat separately undercut the very foundation of the gospel. That’s not really an issue for us today—although there are some modern-day groups that do add torah to Jesus. But Paul would have the same thing to say to anyone today who would divide up the people of God or who would exclude these people or those people based on something added to the gospel. Our identity, Brothers and Sisters, whatever it was in the past or whoever the world around us tell us we are, our real identity, the identity that matters is in Jesus the Messiah and nothing else. We have died and now live in Jesus.This is especially relevant to us today in the mist of our post-modern culture. Our world is rapidly tribalizing over identity: things like race and sex and sexual orientation. The new thing is creating our own identities contrary to those that God had given us. In other cases we’ve turned our sins into identities. And we find these identities so powerfully defining that we bring them into the church and we hyphenate ourselves. We’re black-Christians or we’re white-Christians. There’s an ongoing controversy about those who call themselves gay-Christians. But Paul reminds us that if we are by faith in the Messiah, we have but one identity. We have died with the Messiah and while we still live, it is no longer we—whatever our colour or language or sex or past sin—it is the Messiah who lives in us—because he loves each of us so dearly that he gave himself for us. Brothers and Sisters, that’s the straight line of the gospel. Come to the Tablet this morning. Eat the bread and drink the wine and be reminded that Jesus died and rose again for you and that in him, you have died and been raised. His life, his faithfulness, his love and grace and mercy are now your identity. No more masks, no more play-acting, just Jesus the Messiah.Let’s pray again our Collect: Lord, give your people grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow you, the only God; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Entrusted with the GospelGalatians 1:18-2:10by William KlockI will never forget the first day I wore my letterman jacket to school. High school is full of tribes. There were the jocks and the nerds, there were the art kids and the shop kids, there were the cool girls and the stoners and the geeks. And it was obvious which tribe everyone belonged to. I was always carrying around a book by the likes of Tolkien or Asimov. And my friends and I avoided the cafeteria at all costs. Instead, we played Dungeons & Dragons in the library. I had both feet firmly planted in the nerd tribe. But I was also on the swim team. The swim team was one of those sports no one paid attention to. The only people who knew you were on the swim team were other people on the swim team. So I remember walking into school that day with my letterman jacket on and everybody stopped and looked, because there I was, one of the nerds dressed like a jock. But once the surprise wore off, everything fell into place. Suddenly people who had never been friendly to me were friendly. No questions asked. That jacket marked me out as part of a new tribe. I didn’t hang out with the jocks. I still wouldn’t go anywhere near the cafeteria. I still carried around my sci-fi novels and played D&D at lunch with the nerds, but to the other jocks it didn’t matter. I had a letterman jacket and that was all that mattered.It was something like that for Jews, except the thing that marked you out wasn’t a letterman jacket; it was circumcision. There were other things a good Jew was supposed to do that would also mark them out, because there was more to the torah than circumcision. You kept the sabbath, you ate only clean foods, you avoided contact with gentiles. Those were the big ones. But circumcision was the marker. You could fail at all those other things. You could eat shrimp, you could do business on the sabbath, you could hang out with gentiles, but as long as you were circumcised you were still a Jew. Maybe a bad Jew. Maybe a people-pleasing Jew. But still a Jew, because you bore the mark of God’s covenant.With that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine how this would present a problem for the first Christians. Remember what I said last week. They didn’t see becoming a Christian as switching religions as we might think of it. They were still Jews. Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and he was the fulfilment of everything that Judaism stood for. When gentiles believed in Jesus, they were joining up with a movement that was very much Jewish. But what did that involve? The Lord had cleared this up for Peter in Acts 10, when he sent him to the home of a Roman centurion named Cornelius. Jews didn’t visit or eat with gentiles, but in a vision the Lord made it clear to Peter that through faith in Jesus, even gentiles were made clean. And this was absolutely earth-shaking. Gentiles were unclean because they were idolaters. They were sinners. In those few instances where gentiles were attracted to Judaism, converting meant being purified and then being circumcised so that they were no longer sinful, unclean gentiles. Only then could they associate with Jews and be accepted into the community. But Paul is stressing—against these agitators in the Galatian churches and their false gospel—Paul is stressing that this new Israel, this new ekklesia or assembly of God, is marked out solely by faith in Jesus and that since Jesus dealt with sin in his death and resurrection, those who believe in him are no longer sinners, no longer unclean, and in need of nothing else in order to be part of the community. In fact, going further, Paul stresses that the implication of this—and it goes against the grain of everything in Judaism of the day—the implication is that there is only one people of God. Jew and gentile together—it doesn’t matter, because the thing that always separated the two—sin—has been dealt with by Jesus. This is why any “gospel” that adds anything to Jesus is false. We saw in the first part of Chapter 1 that Paul actually calls down a curse on such teaching. The gospel is Jesus plus nothing.So with this in mind, let’s finish our look at Chapter 1 and then carry on to the first part of Chapter 2. In the first part of Chapter 1 Paul has asserted first that his apostleship—his being called and sent—came directly from Jesus. He’s not the representative of any men. He wasn’t sent out by men—not even by other apostles. He’s been sent by Jesus. And having established that, he’s also stressed that his gospel came directly from Jesus, too. He wasn’t brought to faith in Jesus by Peter or James or anyone else. Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, risen from the dead, and that changed everything for Paul. Even then, he said, he didn’t go to Jerusalem to consult with the other apostles. Instead, like the prophet Elijah, he went to Mount Sinai to wrestle this through with the God of Israel. There he worked through the implications of Jesus risen from the dead. Only then did he go back to Antioch. Now we’ll pick up at 1:18. Paul writes:Then, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [that’s Peter’s Greek name…Cephas and Peter both mean “rock”]. I stayed with him for fifteen days. I didn’t see any of the other apostles, except James the Lord’s brother. And then Paul adds to stress his point, Look, I’m not lying! The things I’m writing to you are written in God’s presence.Paul uses this neat word here to describe his visit to Peter. This is the only place we ever see it in the New Testament: historesai. It’s related to the word historia, which means “an account” or “a personal story”. By Paul’s day it usually just had the sense of visiting someone, but it could still carry the meaning of “to hear another person’s story” and I think it’s clear that’s what Paul wants to stress here. He could have said that he went to Peter to be taught, but hewants it to be clear that he didn’t go to Peter for lessons on the gospel or on theology. He’d wrestled that out with God after his encounter with the risen Messiah. Paul’s gospel was Jesus plus nothing. Gentiles didn’t need to be circumcised or to live by torah. Paul had worked this out as the natural and inevitable implication of Jesus’ death and resurrection. So this visit was about getting to know his fellow apostle, Peter, to hear his story and to bring him up to date on Paul’s own story and apostolic ministry—and hopefully they’d be in agreement about it all. Again, Paul was sent by Jesus himself and his gospel came directly from Jesus, not from men. Paul goes on in verses 21-24:Then I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia. I remained unknown by sight to the messianic assemblies in Judaea. They simply heard that the one who had been persecuting them was now announcing the good news of the faith he once tried to destroy. And they glorified God because of me. So Paul and Peter met, they brought each other up to speed on their ministries and they got to know each other—lining this up with the book of Acts, this would have been Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem, about A.D. 36—and then Paul went back to Syria to continue preaching the good news of faith in Jesus the Messiah. The Jesus followers in Judaea knew who he was and they rejoiced that the man who had once tried to stamp them out was now one of them, but Paul’s point here is that if they’d seen him on the street, they wouldn’t have known who he was. Again, apart from being a fellow apostle of Jesus, he had no connection with the apostles in Jerusalem. He worked for Jesus, not for Peter or James. And, he stresses, no one had a problem with this. In fact, the people down in Judaea glorified God to hear of Paul’s gospel ministry. There’s an echo of Isaiah there, where the Lord says, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”There is one thing that I think needs attention here before we move on and that’s Paul’s way of describing his ministry. He describes himself as “announcing the good news of the faith”. To put it literally, he’s “gospelling the faith”. It’s an unusual way of putting things, but I think Paul does this here to stress what’s going to be his main point in the rest of the letter: This faith—faith in Jesus the crucified and risen Messiah—is the thing that binds Jesus’ people together. It’s the one thing that marks them out as his—not circumcision or anything else. Faith in Jesus makes you part of the family.So there’s about a decade of Paul’s life that passes that we know nothing about other than that he was apparently ministering in Antioch and the surrounding area. He picks up his story in 2:1, saying:After fourteen years [this would be from the time he met Jesus], I went up again to Jerusalem. I took Barnabas with me, and Titus. I went up because of a revelation. Not everyone agrees on the timeline, but this seems to align with what we read in Acts 11, where a prophet named Agabus, told the churches that there would be a great famine. This was in the middle of the 40s. The church in Antioch—and that included Paul—responded by sending help to their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. This is why Paul says he went to Jerusalem because of a revelation.Now, Paul taking money from his church to help other churches might seem incidental, but it really isn’t. In fact, it’s very much part of the theme of Galatians. I think there’s a tendency in conservative circles to ignore the way these early churches cared for each other in response to people on the left making claims that the early church was Socialist. There’s no reason for conservatives to avoid this. Karl Marx was two millennia away. There was no “socialism” in the First Century. What there was, was Christians doing their best to live out who they knew themselves to be in Jesus. They were a family. That’s why we call each other “Brother” and “Sister”. And families take care of each other. When the brothers and sisters in Damascus heard that their cousins in Jerusalem were struggling, they sent help. This was a very Jewish way of life. This was how Jewish communities worked and I think what’s really remarkable here—and something we probably miss in our reading of passages like this—it’s remarkable that the early church was living this way. The Jews were literally a family, but these new churches, they were different, especially once you got out of Judaea. There were people of different races and nationalities, there were freemen and slaves, there were men and women and they quickly realised that just like the old Israel, they were a family. So what’s going on here is them trying to live that out in their communities. I think this is something modern Christians in the West need to be thinking about, especially as the world around us becomes more hostile towards us. Our culture is all about “me” and it’s materialistic and commercialistic and we bring that thinking into the church. We make it all about what the church can offer me. When we don’t get what we want or when we have a dispute with someone, we leave and go somewhere else. We go “church shopping”, looking for the right experience or the right combination of “features”. That’s the polar opposite of what a family is.For Paul, this unity across all these differences of language, ethnicity, class, and sex, it wasn’t some secondary thing. It was central to the gospel. Jesus has one people. Gentiles who believed were no longer to be seen as “sinners” or as “unclean”, because Jesus dealt with sin on the cross. Anyone who believes becomes a full member of the one family.So Paul went up to Jerusalem carrying the money raised in Antioch. While he was there—because he was already there anyway—he met with some of the other apostles to talk about his ministry. Continuing with verse 2:I laid before them the gospel which I announce among the gentiles (I did this privately, in the presence of key people), in case somehow I might be running, or might have run, to no good effect. So did Paul do this because he thought he might have got things wrong and wanted Peter and the others to weigh in one way or the other? I don’t think that’s it at all. For ten years Paul had been proclaiming the gospel and he’d seen its power. He had no doubts that he had the gospel right. He’d got it straight from Jesus, after all. His purpose, I think, seems to have been a desire to make sure that he and the others in Jerusalem were really on the same page. Things had come up. Maybe things lost in translation between Jerusalem and Antioch, and I think Paul trusted Peter and the others and that the problems were elsewhere, but he wanted to make sure. If nothing else, we get the sense that Paul really loved Isaiah 49 and that he saw himself in the figure of Isaiah’s “servant”. He quoted from Isaiah 49:3 back in 1:24 and now he alludes to Isaiah 49:4, “I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward is with God.” Paul was worried that he might be wasting his time. If the apostles in Jerusalem were preaching something different, especially something that added torah to Jesus, well then, Paul was kind of doing all this for nothing, because that kind of teaching was going to tear the church apart. Paul saw this united messianic community representing, unveiling God’s new creation in the midst of the present evil age. The fact that this new people existed as one despite all their differences, meant that Jesus had defeated the evil powers of this age on the cross. And if the folks in Jerusalem were going to undermine that…well…why was Paul wasting his time?So Paul says:But even the Greek, Titus, who was with me, was not forced to get circumcised. Not so much because Peter and the others were on the same page with Paul, but because Paul stood firmly on the gospel he’d received from Jesus himself and refused to move from it. It turns out that not everyone at that meeting was well-meaning. He goes on:But because of some pseudo-family members who had been secretly smuggled in, who came in on the side to spy on the freedom which we have in the Messiah, Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery… I didn’t yield authority to them, not for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be maintained for you. Someone—Paul doesn’t seem to be clear who—but someone smuggled some folks into that meeting who shouldn’t have been there. He says literally “pseudo-brothers”. They pretended—even claimed—to be members of the church family, but in reality they weren’t. This highlights just how serious Paul thinks it is to mess with the content of the gospel. No doubt these pseudo-family members claimed to believe in Jesus, but when they realised that Titus, a Greek, was with Paul and uncircumcised, they insisted he be circumcised. He was unclean—or so they thought. This was no small thing. To turn the gospel into a message of Jesus plus circumcision meant that they didn’t really understand the gospel. They were gutting Jesus’ death and resurrection of their significance. They were fake family members. Paul knew that the gospel stands or falls on this. Either the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit defeated the evil powers of the present age, delivered people from their power, and made them new…or it didn’t. This was the same thing that was happening in Galatia and Paul took a stand even if Peter and the others wouldn’t. And, he says, he took his stand “so that the truth of the gospel might be maintained for” them—for his brothers and sisters in Galatia.We’ll finish with verses 6-10. Paul summarises the end result of his meeting with the other apostles:And those who seemed to be something—what sort of “thing” they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality—those of reputation added nothing extra to me. On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcision, just as Peter had been with the gospel for the circumcision (for the one who gave Peter the power to be an apostle to the circumcision gave me the power of the gospel to the gentiles). They knew, moreover, the grace that had been given to me. So James, Cephas, and John, who were reputed to be “pillars”, gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the gentiles, and they to the circumcision. The only extra thing they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor—the very thing I was eager to do. Paul went into this meeting knowing what people in Judaea thought of Peter, James, and the other original apostles. The Christians there accorded them a lot of respect. They were “something” Paul says. But what Paul didn’t know was how Peter and the others thought of themselves. Were they basking in that respect and acclaim? Or were they humble ministers of the gospel? You see, what Paul stresses here is something that every gospel minister needs to take to heart—all of us, but especially, I think, pastors. Paul talks about the “power to be an apostle”. Energeo he calls it—where we get our word “energy”. But he’s not talking about some kind of tangible energy for the task, but the divine power behind the gospel call. Paul knew that the gospel wasn’t something that belonged to him. It was a message he was entrusted with and the power in it lay not with him, but with God himself. This is why Paul was fearless in his proclamation, this is why he could stand up in a synagogue and preach to hostile Jews and this is why he could stand in the agora in Athens and preach to hostile gentiles. Because he knew that the power in gospel proclamation lies with God. If it were just him, his ministry would never have gone anywhere. But since the power was God’s, Paul could confidently proclaim the good news of the Messiah anywhere and to anyone. And to Paul’s relief, even though there were some mixed up people in the church in Jerusalem, Peter and the other apostles believed the same thing—they were, after all, all on the same page. Peter had been given the same calling as Paul. The only difference was that Peter had been sent to the Jews and Paul to the gentiles—or as he puts it in verse 7, the circumcision and the uncircumcision. Paul makes sure we don’t forget the matter in Galatia.In the middle of this, Paul’s description of Peter, James, and John as “pillars” jumps out at me, especially in light of why Paul was there. Remember, he didn’t go there to hash things out with Peter. He went to Jerusalem to take the relief money that had been raised in Antioch to help the poor in Judaea. To talk about “pillars” in this context calls up images of the temple and I think that’s exactly why Paul calls Peter and the others “pillars”. Because God was building a new temple, as Peter would later write in one of his own epistles. This time not a temple of bricks and mortar, but a temple made of people—men and women with faith in the Messiah and filled with God’s Spirit. Peter and the others had been the start of it and, as eyewitnesses to Jesus himself and having been entrusted with the powerful message of Jesus, crucified and risen, they were its pillars—holding up the roof and inviting in the world. But that temple imagery explains Paul’s concern for the relief money he’d brought from Antioch. That relief money from Antioch was a real, a tangible manifestation of this idea of new creation. The temple didn’t just stand by itself. It stood—and it stand here today right now—as a symbol of God’s intention to make the whole world new and to fill it with his glory. We see this, on the one hand, as these believers—this new family brought together in Jesus—cared for each other. But the nature of this family, it’s unity across language, ethnicity, class, and status was underscored for Paul in that these Jewish believers in Jerusalem were willing to receive a gift from the believers in Antioch. Unbelieving Jews probably would have turned it down. At least they would have asked questions about its origin. Did this money pass through the hands of unclean gentiles? Unbelieving Jews would have looked at this motley group of people in Antioch as an abomination and the Jews there as people-pleasers. But Peter and his people in Jerusalem saw the gospel, they saw Jesus and the Spirit at work in Antioch and knew the church there to be family, to be their brothers and sisters, even though many of them were gentiles. Again, all because and only because of Jesus.So that’s our text for today. We’ll pick up next week with 2:11, one of the most significant passages in the New Testament. But what’s the takeaway here? I’ve touched on a few things already, but I want to close with two points that are closely tied together. First, notice that when Paul was confronted with this problem of a mixed church of Jews and gentiles, he knew that there was one thing and nothing else that resolved this old problem. That one thing was Jesus, specifically his death and resurrection. He knew that Jesus’ death dealt with sin and that those who have faith in him have been set free from their—from our—bondage to sin. We are no longer sinners. In other places Paul will say things like “once you were” and then he’ll go into a list of a bunch of sins, but then he’ll say, “but now you are in Jesus the Messiah”. You’ve been freed from sin. It no longer defines you. What defines you now, through faith, is Jesus and this new family in which he’s given you a place. This means that there’s one family. The cross deals with the Jew-gentile divide, just as it deals with all the things that divide us today. There is one family and our life as the church should reflect that reality. It's one of the key ways we inhabit the gospel and lift the veil on God’s new creation.Now, finally, closely tied to that is Paul’s insistence on the power and authority of the gospel. People were dismissing Paul, saying that he was working for other people or that he got his gospel from other people. In response, Paul has insisted over and over that his calling and his authority lay with Jesus himself. Neither the power that was revealed in his ministry nor the authority he had came from him—that is, from Paul. It was all from Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, we’re too often afraid to proclaim the good news because we forget that the power of the gospel lies not with us, but with God. We too often get discouraged when our proclamation of the good news doesn’t produce the results we hoped for, because we forget that the power lies not with us, but with God. Paul will write in 2 Corinthians that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power that continues to work through our proclamation to change hearts, to change lives, to change whole communities, and to tear down the fortresses of the powers that once governed this evil age. Just as the gospel is about Jesus plus nothing, its power lies in Jesus himself. He sends us out to proclaim it, but when things happen, it’s not us—it’s all him. We must never forget that.So Brothers and Sisters, come to the Lord’s Table this morning and be reminded of what Jesus has done for us. Eat the bread and drink the wine together and remember that by faith in Jesus, we are one family no matter our past. The things that once separated us fade to nothing in light of our union with Jesus the Messiah. But come, too, this morning and remember that Jesus not only died, he also rose from the grave. Remember that in him God’s new creation has begun and that we are part of it. Remember that his resurrection has changed everything and that it’s now both the lens through which we, his people, see ourselves, see each other, and see the world, but it’s also the authoritative root of our gospel proclamation. Brothers and Sisters, the same God who raised Jesus from the dead now sends us out, just like Paul, to proclaim the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Never forget that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is present in our gospel proclamation and gospel witness.Let’s pray: Almighty God, who on third day raised your Son from the grave, keep us ever mindful, we pray, that you have invested your gospel with the same power. Remind us that you send us out, not to proclaim ourselves or our own message, but to proclaim with your authority the life-giving power of your gospel. Make us faithful to live out that gospel in our life together as your church and make us fearless to proclaim it to the world around us, knowing again that it’s authority and power lie not with us, but with you. Through our Lord Jesus we pray. Amen.
The Son Unveiled in MeGalatians 1:10-17by William KlockAs I was digging around in our crawlspace this week, I found my 1970s Tupperware lunchbox full of my old Star Wars action figures. Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan and Darth Vader have these neat little light sabres hidden in their arms that slide out when it’s time for them to duel. At one point I had Luke’s X-wing fighter and I was remembering putting him in the cockpit and flying around the house, looking for the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port. Luke might have been in the cockpit, but I was going to destroy the Death Star and save the galaxy. As the week went on I was thinking about our text from Galatians 1and particularly Paul’s background. I started wondering what sort of games and role-playing young Paul would have engaged in? Who were his heroes? Based on what he tells us about himself and from what we know of First Century Judaism and of the Pharisees, it isn’t too hard to imagine Paul playing with his brothers or his neighbourhood friends and taking on the part of, say, Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson. When the men of Israel were enticed into sexual sin and idolatry by the pagan women of Peor, Phinehas, in an act of holy zeal, ran the ringleader through with a spear, pinning him to the ground along with his Midianite paramour. Or maybe Elijah. Even though it seemed that everyone in Israel had turned to pagan idols, Elijah dared to confront the prophets of Baal. On them mountain top, Elijah taunted them and made fun of their god, then—again with holy zeal—called down fire from heaven. Or Mattathias, the zealous priest who sparked the Maccabean Revolt. Antiochus Epiphanes offered him the title “Friend of the King” if he would offer a sacrifice to the Greek gods. Matthias refuse, but another priest offered to make the sacrifice in his place. Matthias slaughtered that people-pleasing priest on the altar and called on everyone who was zealous for torah and the covenant to join him.These were the heroes of the Pharisees and all the other faithful in Israel in the days of Paul. In light of that, it’s ironic that the people in Galatia have accused him of being a “people pleaser”, because that’s exactly what Paul—in his old days—would have called any Jews who weren’t as zealous as him in keeping torah. Of course, it’s the false teachers in Galatia who are being the real people pleasers, but Paul won’t say that until the end of the letter.So let’s start where we left off last Sunday, with verse 10 of Galatians 1. Paul has written some pretty scathing words to the Galatians. He’s outlined the essentials of his gospel and he’s pronounced a curse on anyone who teaches anything else. And now he writes:Well now, does that sound as though I’m trying to make up to people—or to God? Or that I’m trying to curry favour with people? If I were still pleasing people, I wouldn’t be a slave of the Messiah. It’s a safe bet that when you hear someone warning about false gospels and pronouncing curses on those who teach such things, you’re not dealing with a people pleaser. Paul makes that clear. And then he turns the accusation back on them. “If I were still pleasing people,” he writes. As much as Paul the Pharisee had devoted his life to going after the people pleasers who compromised torah in order to curry the favour of the gentiles, well now, from the perspective of life in Jesus and the Spirit, that old life of his turns out—ironically—to have been a life of people pleasing. He was a slave to them even though it didn’t seem that way at the time, but now he’s a slave to the Messiah and his only interest is in faithfully proclaiming his message and pleasing the God who sent him.But Paul needs to explain himself a good bit more, so he does something that he doesn’t do very often: he tells them—and us—about himself. Whenever Paul does tell one of these before and after stories, it’s always to end with Jesus. He does this in Philippians 3 to make the point that for the sake of Jesus and the gospel he’s given up his privileges. What he says here comes to a climax later in Chapter 2 as he passionately declares that “I am crucified with the Messiah” so that “I through the law died to the law” because “the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.” In the end, none of this is about Paul. It’s about Jesus and the only reason Paul writes any of this is to defend against the charge that his gospel is of human origin and, therefore, in some way deficient. So he begins in verses 11 and 12:You see, Brothers, let me make it clear to you: the gospel announced by me is not a mere human invention. I did not receive it from a human being, not was I taught it; it came through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah. Literally, “I would have you know, Brothers”. This is important. Paul first defended his apostleship. He was commissioned directly by Jesus himself and he speaks for Jesus and no one else. Now he defends his gospel. It’s not something he cooked up himself, nor is it something he got second-hand from others.This is worth spending a little time parsing out. The gospel that you and I know and preach came to us from others. It was passed down from our parents and grandparents, from our Sunday school teachers and pastors, maybe from a preacher we watched on TV or a book we read. But somehow all of us here are believers in Jesus the Messiah because someone else proclaimed the good news about him to us and now we—I hope—proclaim it to others. Even if we first encountered the gospel through the pages of scripture, it came from some other person. Maybe from Matthew or John or even Paul, but from someone. Part of the work of the Spirit has been to see that this gospel has been preserved and passed down from one person to the next faithfully. Even if you or I get it wrong, the Spirit-inspired scriptures are there to set it right again. But Paul’s point is that he didn’t get the gospel from another human being. If he’d got his gospel from someone else—even from Peter or James—it’s always possible he got something confused or wrong in the transmission. If he’d got it from another human, then it’s possible their accusation could stick. So Paul stresses: “I didn’t get it from anyone else. It wasn’t taught to me by anyone else. The gospel came to me directly through an unveiling—he uses that word apocalypse, the same one John uses to describe his “revelation” of Jesus—the gospel came to Paul through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah. In other words, Jesus, who was raised from the dead and now enthroned in heaven, suddenly and unexpectedly became visible to Paul. God’s future was revealed to Paul in the present and it changed everything, because Paul now can’t help but see everything in light of this Jesus whom he knew to be crucified and now knows with absolute certainty, has risen from the dead. Brothers and Sisters, the reality that Jesus rose from the dead changes everything. It changed everything for Paul. It should change everything for us. It’s the lens through which we should see everything.Paul surely must have told the Galatians the story of his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. They already knew the details so he doesn’t recount them all here. It’s that they’ve forgotten why that day was so important to Paul, so in the next five verses he explains why that event was so important. He writes in verse 13:You’ve heard the way I behaved when I was still within “Judaism”. I persecuted the church of God violently and ravaged it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age and people. I was extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions. Paul’s giving them a before and after portrait of himself. This is the “before”. Think of Paul when Stephen was stoned to death for proclaiming the good news about Jesus. He held people’s coats so they could throw stones. A few years later he sought out authorisation from the Jewish officials so that he could actually hunt down these Christians and bring them in for “justice”. Paul wasn’t fooling around. It helps us understand why and it helps us understand what Saul of Tarsus was all about if we understand what he means here by “Judaism”. To us “Judaism” means a religion the same way we think of “Christianity” or “Islam” or Buddhism” as religions. But in the First Century no one thought that way. Paul certainly didn’t think of “Judaism” over against “Christianity”. Paul uses this uncommon word Judaismos that seems to have been coined by the author of 2 Maccabees. It doesn’t just refer to a set of beliefs and practises in the sense that modern people think about a “religion”. Instead, it describes the Judeans who were loyal to Jewish faith and practise, who actively promoted and advocated these traditional ways of Jewish life, and who actively defended it against the Pagans and, especially, defended it against those Jews who would compromise it for the sake of the pagans—people pleasers.As he says, he was “zealous” for those ancestral traditions. He was out to purify the Jewish people: to fend off pagan influences, to get his fellow Jews to take a stand for the covenant, and to bring compromisers and people-pleasers to heel. Paul had grown up with these values. His heroes were the men of the past who were also zealous for the Lord and for his law. There are various writings from that time period that give us a sense of how Paul would have thought. One of the best is the opening chapters of 1 Maccabees, where we read about Mattathias and his rebellion against the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes. As I said before, Mattathias was a priest, and when the Greeks tried to entice him to offer a sacrifice to their gods, he refused. When another of his fellow priests agreed to offer the sacrifice, Mattathias had had enough. He killed that priest right there on the altar, along with the Greek official. His rebellion went up not just against their pagan Greek rulers, but against any of their fellow Jews who were compromising the ancestral traditions in order to get along with the pagans. Mattathias’ speech meant to rouse his fellow Jews to action, focuses on the long line of Jewish heroes who were loyal to the Lord’s covenant, from Abraham right down to what was the present day. Mattathias emphasised especially Phinehas and Elijah. The later rabbis did the same. Phinehas had run a spear right through the compromising Zimri and his pagan paramour. Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal before he slaughtered them and called on the people of Israel to purge pagan influence from the land. The Maccabees called on that same tradition about two centuries before Jesus, when they went up against the Greeks and against their own people who would compromise with the pagans. This is what Paul is talking about when he says he was zealous for the ancestral traditions. I ran around the backyard with Luke Skywalker in his X-wing to destroy the Death Star. If Paul had grown up with action figures, he’d have had a Phinehas with “real spear action” and an Elijah playset where he could build an altar and call down fire from heaven on the prophets of Baal. He might have had a little Mattathias, a sword in one hand to take on the Greeks and a knife in the other to circumcise the Jewish people pleasers. This is the zealous background that drove him to persecute the church. Paul knew that Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah. He knew that Jesus had been crucified. And he didn’t believe the tales for one second that Jesus had been raised from the dead. As far as he was concerned, Jesus was dead and that meant he couldn’t be the Messiah and all these Jews claiming to follow a dead Messiah, well, they were going to undermine the faith and practise of God’s people.It’s also worth noting how Paul refers to the “church of God”. It’s literally “assembly of God”. Paul likes to use this phrase to distinguish the church from the Jews and from the Greeks. He borrows it from the Greek version of the Old Testament, which talks about Israel as the “assembly of Israel”, “assembly of the Lord”, or “assembly of God”. And Paul’s point in using it to refer to the church is that now this multiethnic body of Jews and gentiles—now it is the assembly of God. And not just the local assemblies, but it makes the point that they’re all part of this bigger thing, this bigger assembly.So Paul looks back to his past life and reminds the Galatians who he was. He was zealous for the traditions of his ancestors. Not just that, but he was no novice. He was a diaspora Jew, but he wasn’t like some others who knew just enough of the ancestral customs to get by. He was steeped in it all and he was utterly devoted to it—again, to the point that he actually sought out permission from the Jewish officials to hunt down Christians in Damascus. And, of course, that’s when everything changed for Paul.He goes on in verses 15-17:But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, was pleased to unveil his son in me, so that I might announce the good news about him among the nations—immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. No, I went away to Arabia, and afterward returned to Damascus. This is another point in Paul’s story where we have to be careful. As modern people we read this and we think about it in terms of Paul “converting” from Judaism to Christianity. Again, that’s a very modern understanding of “religion” that didn’t exist in Paul’s day. Paul never stopped being zealous for the God of Abraham, for the law and the prophets, and the promises of God. He was a faithful Jew and as a faithful Jew he longed for the coming of the Messiah. He prayed for the coming of the Messiah, for the Lord to come and rescue his people and set the world to rights. It’s just that when it came to Jesus—well—the idea of a crucified Messiah was blasphemous. That’s why he hated Christians and persecuted them. But then the risen Jesus met him on the road to Damascus and it changed everything. Because suddenly Paul knew that all the stories about Jesus having been raised from the dead were true. He’d been wrong. The impossible had happened. The Jews and the Romans had killed Jesus, they—just as Paul had been doing—ruled him a false Messiah, but then God raised him from the dead and, in doing that, God vindicated his son. That meant that Jesus really was the Messiah. The God of Israel proved it. And for Paul this meant that all the stories he’d grown up with, all the promises of God he’d longed to see fulfilled, all of it, all of them were fulfilled in Jesus.Again, Paul uses that word “unveiled” again. This same God who had set him apart in his mother’s womb, this same God who had called Paul by his grace—think of that as Paul personalizing what Jews thought of themselves as a people chosen and called by God’s grace to be his people—this same God of Israel had now unveiled his son.And as Paul writes this, if you know the Hebrew scriptures, it’s really obvious that he’s telling his story in a way that will make people think of the old prophets, especially Jeremiah and Isaiah. Jeremiah wrote about the Lord knowing him and calling him before he was even formed in his mother’s womb. And when Isaiah writes about the servant—the one who in some places embodies Israel and in other places stands over against the people of Israel—Isaiah writes about the Lord forming him in the womb—calling him and naming him, giving him his prophetic vocation—before he’s even born. I think Paul calls back to the calling of Jeremiah and to Isaiah’s servant, because when Jesus met him on the road to Damascus he gave him just this sort of divine calling…like the servant, the Lord “formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him”. And as the Lord said to Jeremiah, “I appoint you a prophet to the nations” and to Isaiah, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”So these people in Galatia are claiming that Paul has forsaken the faith and traditions of his people, but what Paul is saying in response is that, one, it was Jesus himself who called him to this work and, two, that he has in no way forsaken the faith and traditions of his people. To the contrary, he knows those traditions well and in light of this revelation that Jesus really is Israel’s Messiah, then this good news isn’t just for Israel…it’s for everyone. They think that Paul, in going to the gentiles—or maybe better in the way he’s going to the gentiles—they see him as a people pleaser who is disloyal to the faith and Paul’s saying that, no, it’s just the opposite. His message to the gentiles is the fulfilment of that faith—the fulfilment of Israel’s calling and of the law and the prophets. Paul had thought that being zealous for the law meant opposing Jesus, when in fact, in light of Jesus having risen from the dead, being zealous for the law means being zealous for Jesus and even taking this good news to the gentiles.This transformation in Paul and in his thinking points to another thing we might miss—or, in some cases, that’s obscured by some translations—but Paul says that God unveiled his son in me. We might expect him to say to me, but that’s not how he puts it. It’s in me and I think Paul chose his words—as always—very carefully. It’s not just that God commissioned Paul to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the nations, as if it was just about what he said. It is that, but I think Paul’s key point here is that Paul himself has become a sort of embodiment of the gospel. This Pharisee who was zealous for God, but in such a way that it made him zealous in his hatred for the gentiles and any Jews who might compromise with them, this Pharisee has been so transformed by the unveiling of God’s son in Jesus, that his zeal for God has been turned upside-down—or maybe we should say, right-side-up—and now that zeal is taking him to the nations with that good news.Now, it took Paul a good while to work this out. Meeting the risen Jesus forced him into a massive paradigm shift in his thinking and even his identity. He had questions. Big questions. But he stresses he didn’t go to “flesh and blood” to ask his questions or to get help sorting it all out. Again, people were accusing him of having a human-made gospel and Paul reiterates that it not only came directly from Jesus, but even in sorting it all out for himself, he went to the Lord, not to other people. Specifically, he says, he didn’t go up to Jerusalem. That’s what most people probably would have expected him to do. That’s what I would have done, if I were in Paul’s shoes. That’s where Peter and James were. They were the chief apostles and the leaders of the church. They’d been wrestling with all this good news stuff for a while already. They were the ones who had spent years with Jesus himself. They had the answers.But instead, Paul says he went to Arabia—in First Century geography, that meant Mount Sinai. Why did Paul do that? Because, again, he knew the prophets. This time Paul echoes the story of Elijah. If you’re a First Century man of zeal, it makes sense to follow in the footsteps of Elijah—one of the greatest heroes of zeal.Think of the story of Elijah. After the events on Mount Carmel and Elijah’s slaughter of the prophets of Baal, King Ahab was angry. Elijah was forced to run and hide, so he ran to Mount Sinai. It made sense. That was the place where the Lord had made his promises to Israel. So Elijah went there. He was tired. He was depressed. Despite all the Lord had done through him, Elijah was done. He’d lost hope. He went there to tell God as much. He’d done everything he was supposed to do and—he thought—he’d failed. He declares to the Lord, “I have been very zealous for the Lord of Hosts.” (Notice how much that sounds like Paul.) But the Lord wouldn’t let go of Elijah. He wouldn’t accept his resignation. Instead, he sent him to the wilderness of Damascus (again, sound familiar?) and there Elijah would be given the task to anoint a new king and a new prophet.So Saul of Tarsus, zealous for the Lord, on his way to Damascus, is met by the risen Jesus. It was the most natural thing in the world, for Paul, to go from there to Mount Sinai, to take his zeal to the Lord, and to wrestle with the God of Abraham—to work it out until it all made sense again in light of Jesus the Messiah. And from Mount Sinai, Paul says, the Lord sent him back to Damascus (just like Elijah) to announce the new king: Jesus the Messiah.So Paul’s point is that after he met Jesus, he didn’t go to Jerusalem—as his enemies seem to think he did. He didn’t go to work this all out with the original apostles. He went, as Bishop Wright puts it so well, “he went off to do business with God, and he came to do business for God.” And this business was to announce to the whole world that this Jesus, who was crucified and risen, Israel’s Messiah, is the world’s true Lord. Paul includes these echoes of the old prophets to show how rather than being a betrayer of Israel, he’s actually smack in the middle of God’s Israel-shaped promises. In calling back to Elijah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, he’s making the point that if anyone is being disloyal to the God of Israel or to the covenant—well—it’s definitely not him. The real betrayers are those who reject God’s calling of Paul and his commission to take the good news of Jesus to the nations.That’s as far as I’ll go today. There’s a bit more to Paul’s introduction and his telling of his own story, but we’ll look at that next week. So what does this mean for us? Brothers and Sisters, notice again how everything for Paul is about Jesus the Messiah and how Jesus’s resurrection from the dead is the lens through which he sees everything. It ought to be the same way for us. We need to be clear about what the gospel is and then we need to live in that gospel, live in this story with Jesus as its centre. The gospel is the good news that this Jesus who was crucified has been raised from the dead and that he’s the world’s true Lord. His death for sins has won the victory over sin and death and inaugurated God’s new creation. Brothers and Sisters, that’s the story, that’s the reality we need to live with and to live in. Consider how it reshaped Paul. He was zealous for the Lord, he was zealous for the covenant, he was zealous for the scriptures—for all the right things, but in the wrong way. Meeting the risen Messiah didn’t mean throwing it all away; it meant refocusing that zeal through a different lens—through Jesus. For others—I’m thinking of those who came from a zealously pagan background—inhabiting the gospel was different in that it meant throwing everything away. Or maybe it meant seeing the world, seeing life, seeing others through the new lens of Jesus rather than the lens of the old pagan gods or their old sinful ways of life or through the corrupt systems of the present evil age. Inhabiting the gospel and reorienting ourselves and our lives around Jesus isn’t an easy thing to do. Even Paul had to go to Sinai for three years to wrestle with the reality of the risen Jesus. But however hard it is and however long it may take, Brothers and Sisters, it’s essential that we do this—we personally and we the church. Part of being gospel people—of being slaves of the Messiah, as Paul puts it—means taking every thought captive to Jesus the Messiah and filtering it through this gospel lens. Every thought, every value, every priority, every act, every bit of our zeal and turning it over and turning it inside-out, deciding whether we keep it or throw it away or rethink it in light of the good news about Jesus the Messiah.Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, as you’ve unveiled your Son in Paul, you have also unveiled him in each of us. We pray now for the grace to be faithful to this gospel calling and this gospel life—that your Son, Jesus, would truly be unveiled to everyone around us by the gospel work you are working in us by the power of your Spirit. Keep Jesus, his cross, and his resurrection always before us, keep our eyes focused on him, and by your Spirit, help us to truly live in your good news. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.
People Pleasers or Slaves of the Messiah?Galatians 1:1-10by William KlockThe other day the phone rang. I answered it and a stranger on the other end asked for Veronica. I passed the phone to her. I wondered who it was, but I didn’t get much help from Veronica’s end of the conversation. It was all “Mmhmm” and “Yes” and “Okay”. I had no idea who it was or what it was about. In contrast, while walking to the church I ended up following a woman who was having a very loud conversation with someone on her cell phone. I couldn’t hear the other person, but I had a pretty good idea what he or she was saying based on the responses this woman was angrily yelling into her phone. Things like, “Oh! So I’m being dramatic?” and other things I probably shouldn’t repeat in polite company. We do this reading between the lines when we read St. Paul’s epistles. In them we have one side of a conversation and, thankfully, it’s a lot more than “Mmhmm” and “Yes” and “Okay”. In fact, it’s a lot more like “Oh! So I’m being dramatic?” And it’s not too hard, if we go slowly and think about the context, to piece most of the conversation together. And so Paul begins his letter to the churches in Galatia writing, “Paul, an apostle…” And then before he’s even begun, he breaks off right there, because he has to defend himself against their attacks on his apostleship. “My apostleship,” he writes, “doesn’t derive from human sources, nor did it come through a human being. It came through Jesus the Messiah, and God the Father who raised him from the dead.” We know at the get-go that someone in Galatia is challenging Paul’s credentials. I think we get an even better sense of what’s going on if we jump ahead to verse 10 of Galatians 1. What Paul writes there doesn’t get enough attention. We’ll come back and fill things in, but in verse 10 Paul writes to them:Well now…does that sound as though I’m trying to make up to people—or to God? Or that I’m trying to curry favour with people? If I were still pleasing people, I wouldn’t be a slave of the Messiah. Three times he says the same thing: Am I trying to make up to people. Am I trying to curry favour with people? Am I trying to please people? So we know someone in Galatian is accusing Paul of abandoning the divine message of the gospel and, instead, preaching a merely human message that will tickle people’s ears and win him friends. Anyone who knew Paul should have known better, of course, but this is how it is. Now there’s actually a text—one that would have been well-known in the Jewish word of the First Century—there’s a text that really sharpens the focus of this whole “people pleasing” accusation and that gives us some context for this whole dispute. It stands out, because this Greek phrase Paul uses for “people pleasing” is essentially the same as another word that pops up in the Greek version of Psalm 52:6 and in the fourth of the Psalms of Solomon. Psalms of Solomon is a little collection of eighteen psalms from the First Century B.C. and the First Century A.D., probably written by Pharisees or by people very much like the Pharisees. And there’s this Greek word that isn’t actually Greek—anthropareskos—that was made up by Greek-speaking Jews and outside of Paul’s writings, shows up only in those two other texts. That fourth “Psalm of Solomon” is titled “A Psalm about the People Pleasers” and it’s about people who compromised God’s law, cutting corners here and there, in order to suck up to their pagan neighbours. It speaks of men who would even enter the homes of pagans and fraternise with them. That might not seem like a problem to us, but it was something faithful Jews did not do. But once you got out into the real world, out of Judaea, a lot of Jews found it hard to get by in life while completely avoiding contact and fraternisation with gentiles. In the Psalms of Solomon, the finger seems to be pointed at the corrupt Jewish rulers—people like the Sadducees, the Hasmoneans, and the Herodians. To the faithful in Israel, these people were selling out the covenant by compromising God’s law in order to ingratiate themselves with the pagans.And, we need to be clear, people like the Pharisees weren’t angry about the compromise of the people pleasers because they were legalists who were trying to earn their way into heaven through good works. There’s been long tendency to read Galatians in that kind of light ever since Martin Luther. Luther read the works-righteousness of the medieval church into Paul’s adversaries. And Luther was doing much what St. Augustine had done, when he read his own disputes with the heretic Pelagius into Galatians. Pelagius, too, taught a sort of works righteousness. As much as Pelagius and the medieval church did pose real problems, that sort of works righteousness wasn’t at issue in these First Century disputes. The reason faithful Jews were obsessed with keeping the law was because they knew that God had chosen them, delivered them from Egypt, put them in the promised land, and called them to be holy—and that this was all for a greater purpose that would somehow involve God, one day, setting this fallen world to rights. They were trying to be, in Jesus’ way of putting it, the “on earth as in heaven” people. There was a later rabbi who said that if all Israel would keep the torah for a single day, the Messiah would come. The Pharisees had very similar ideas. They also believed very firmly—because they knew the story of the Lord and Israel—that if Israel failed to keep the torah, if Israel flirted with pagans and their idolatry the way Deuteronomy warned them not to, the Messiah would not come and God would not establish his kingdom. Not only that, but the very pagans with whom Israel compromised would destroy Israel and carry the people off into exile, just as the Babylonians had done six hundred years before. I hope that helps us to understand what’s behind this accusation made against Paul that he’s a “people pleaser”. It’s not just that he’s risking the salvation of some gentile believers in Galatia, but that he’s putting in jeopardy the whole destiny of Israel—and probably even the world.In the First Century, Jews were faced with a crisis, and it was important to know who was “in” and who was “out”. Who were your allies and who were the wicked risking another disaster. The “people pleasers” were most definitely on the side of the wicked. They pretended to be on God’s side, but their compromises proved otherwise. It’s important for us to remember, too, that this was the mindset in which Paul had been steeped as a Pharisee. This is the mindset that drove him to persecute the first Christians. And now Paul is being accused of being one of those very people pleasers.So why would anyone accuse Paul of being a people pleaser? Well, wherever Paul went, he was preaching that anyone who believed in this Jesus, who was crucified, died, and rose again…that anyone who believed that he is Israel’s Messiah and, therefore God’s King, this faith is the sign that that person is part of the people of God. It didn’t matter what their ethnic background was. That was it. Faith in Jesus the Messiah. Period. This is what Paul’s epistle to the Galatians is all about. Faith in Jesus the Messiah. If a gentile believed, he was as much a member of the family as a Jew who believed. He didn’t need to be circumcised or to have any of the other signs that marked out Jews—not diet or Sabbath, not rules about who you could or couldn’t eat with. But to a lot of people this marked Paul out as a people pleaser. He was compromising the law and the covenant. That made him a traitor.I’ve begun with this, because I think it helps us understand where the focus of Galatians lies. Ever since Luther, our tendency, at least in our Protestant circles, has been to read Galatians as a letter about how we are saved and as a warning about the dangers of legalism or of mixing works with faith. The theology in that is right, but the perspective isn’t where it should be and I think when we put Galatians back in the proper context and get a look at it from the proper angle, what we discover it's really about is community—about who the people of God are and what marks us out. And in that light, the problem isn’t just “legalism”. Paul reminds us that what marks out the people of God is faith in Jesus the Messiah and that trying to define the community by any other means is to make it about something other than Jesus—to set up a false gospel.So the accusation against Paul, in a nutshell, is that he’s got a gospel of human origin—that he got from someone else or that he made up himself—but a gospel that they think has been watered down to make it more palatable to the gentiles, that makes it too easy for the pagans to call themselves people of God. If we understand that, then we’ll understand these first verses. This is why Paul breaks off after writing, “Paul, an apostle…” Remember how be breaks off suddenly and adds:(My apostleship doesn’t derive from human sources, nor did it come through a human being; it came through Jesus the Messiah, and God the Father who raised him from the dead.) Some teachers had arrived in Galatia from Jerusalem and they’ve told the people there not to listen to Paul. He’s not a real apostle. He wasn’t there in the beginning with Jesus. He never knew Jesus. Instead, they should listen to them, because they got their gospel—at least so they claim—from the men who walked with Jesus for three years, real apostles like James and Peter. And so Paul reminds them that he, too, had an encounter with the risen Messiah. Paul would still be a Pharisee if it hadn’t been for that miraculous encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. And it was in that encounter that Jesus himself commissioned Paul to take this good news to the gentiles. In fact, it was seeing Jesus risen from the dead that convinced Paul of the truth of the gospel. So he goes on:Paul, an apostle…[verse 2]and the family who are with me; to the churches in Galatia. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Jesus the Messiah, our Lord, who gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of God our Father, to whom be glory to the ages of ages. Amen. Paul…and the family who are with me. That’s the church in Antioch. First Paul stresses that his apostleship is as from Jesus as that of any other apostle and now he stresses the relationship that he and the church in Antioch have with these churches in Galatia. They were accusing him of being a people pleaser, of being a traitor, of being a false brother and here he reaches out with verbal arms and embraces them and reminds them that in Jesus they’re all family, all brothers and sisters.“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Jesus the Messiah our Lord.” Paul has this amazing way of making everything about Jesus and the gospel. In the Greek world they greeted each other with the word chairein, which meant “to rejoice”, but in a letter basically just means “greetings” or “salutations”. This is, for example, how James opens his epistle. But Paul exchanges chairein for charis, the word for “grace”—from God the Father and from Jesus the Messiah—grace to you. He adds the Jewish greeting of shalom as well: that means “peace”. But even his word order here in his greeting sets the tone for the whole letter. It’s not grace and peace to you; it’s grace to you and then peace. Because the sum total of God’s position towards humanity is grace and this is manifest uniquely and finally in Jesus the Messiah. Everything begins with God’s grace poured out in and through Jesus. Even the peace we know and the peace we look forward to in the age to come, even that comes as a result first of God’s grace.Paul then follows this up with a four-faceted summary of the good news. First, Jesus gave himself for our sins, (second) to rescue us from the present evil age, (third) according to the will of God our Father, (four) to whom be glory to the ages of ages. Amen.Jesus has rescued us from the present evil age. What does that mean? Well, when the Jews looked at history, they divided it into two ages. There was the present evil age dominated by sin and death and full of pain and tears and then there was the age to come when God would fulfil his promises to set the world to rights and where his people would live in his presence forever. The present evil age is dominated by dark powers that enslave humanity through idolatry and sin. We worship idols, giving to them the glory we were created to give to God, and we rebel against him—that’s sin—and our sin tightens the chains those idols have on us and on creation. While we were bound up in the present evil age, Jesus came to our rescue, writes Paul. He seems to have Isaiah’s song of the suffering servant in mind as he writes this, because it’s this suffering servant who represents Israel and who gives his life to break the chains the idols have cast around God’s people. He dies for their sins and breaks sin’s power and he leads the people in a new exodus—into the age to come. I like the way Tom Wright often reminds us that Jesus’ resurrection isn’t an odd or one-off event within the old world, but rather it’s a launching and defining event of God’s new world. Paul’s gospel, his good news, is that Jesus has dealt with the sins that chained us as slaves in the dark and bloody temples of the idols, and he now leads us out into the sunlight, into the beginnings of God’s new world.Now, here’s why this is so important in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Remember that for Jews, the problem with gentiles was that they were idolaters. There was one true God, the God of Israel, but the gentiles instead worshipped idols and they lived and behaved sinfully, as idolaters do. This is what made them unclean and so offensive to the Jews. This why good Jews wouldn’t go into their homes or eat with them. There were some gentiles who saw the Jews and were attracted to their purity of life and joined up. But to do that, they had to be circumcised. It was a dramatic (and painful) sign that they were leaving behind the idolatrous pagan world and becoming part of Abraham’s family. But—and this is vital to understanding Galatians—Paul’s point is that the gospel tells us that on the cross Jesus defeated those evil powers when he dealt with the sin that put us in their chains. This is how there can now be one family. This is how the gentiles can be welcomed into this new Israel. Again, If God has defeated the idols, the dark powers of the evil age, then the gentiles, the pagans can trust in the God of Israel and become part of Jesus the Messiah’s family. And, second, because Jesus’s death has dealt with sin, then those who believe in him and who become part of his family, they are no longer “sinners” or idolaters. The thing that separated Jews and gentiles has been dealt with by Jesus at the cross, and so membership in his family is by faith in him alone and nothing else. To add anything else to that—like circumcision or any of those other things that marked out the Jews—to add anything else is to detract from Jesus and to lose the gospel itself.And then points three and four of Paul’s gospel summary: The cross wasn’t some accident of history. This was God’s plan all along. What Jesus has done reveals the faithfulness of God and that, in turn, brings the gospel back to the glorification of God. We often make the gospel about us, but for Paul the gospel is always and only about God. God has redeemed us and in that he shows his glory and this is why we give him glory and praise. The gospel begins and ends in with God.So that’s the gospel in all its magnificent glory. We can hear the shock and the disappointment as Paul goes on in verse 6 and following, rebuking the Galatians. He writes:I’m astonished that you are turning away so quickly from the one who called you by the grace of the Messiah, and going after another gospel—not that it is another gospel, it’s just that there are some people stirring up trouble for you and wanting to pervert the gospel of the Messiah. But even if we—or an angel from heaven!—should announce a gospel other than the one we announced to you, let such a person be accursed. I said it before and I now say it again, if anyone offers you a gospel other than the one you received, let that person be accursed. It’s not just that these churches have gone astray. That would be bad enough, but it’s how quickly after he left them that they’ve turned away. The language suggests that Paul might be comparing his own astonishment to the astonishment of Moses at how quickly the Israelites went from praising the Lord for his miraculous deliverance at the Red Sea to creating and worshipping a golden calf. As dumbfounding as it was to Moses to find his people dancing around an idol, Paul is dumbfounded at how quickly and how easily the Galatians have been led astray to another gospel. And Paul quickly amends that, because, really, there is no other gospel. There’s the gospel. Everything else is just is a lie.Also, the language Paul uses to write of them “turning”, that has its own shameful undertones. The word he uses is one used in the Greek Old Testament to describe desertion. In 2 Maccabees there’s the poignant story of seven brothers whom Antiochus tried to force to eat pork, killing them one after the other when they refused. When it’s down to the youngest of them, the text says that Antiochus tried to entice the boy to “turn form his ancestral ways”. (Or course, the boy refused and became a martyr.) This is the same language Paul uses here and I think just to stress his point. This probably corresponds to what we read in Acts about “certain persons from James” who arrived in Galatia not long after Paul and Barnabas had returned from their mission there. Paul had seen these people devoted to Jesus and to the gospel, he’d seen them transformed by it, and now he’s shocked that they’ve turned from the gospel—and so quickly and easily. If they’re going to accuse him of being disloyal to Israel’s traditions, he turns that accusation right back around on them. They’ve been disloyal to, they’ve deserted Jesus.He’s not into the details of their corrupted gospel yet, but he says here that they’ve turned from the one who called them by grace. They’ve turned from God himself. Paul puts the emphasis on grace as manifest in Jesus the Messiah. God’s call is an act of pure grace. His sending of Jesus is a pure act of grace. The God of Israel has finally sent his Messiah as a gift of pure grace—and Paul now points his finger at these people and says—And you’ve turned away from him!So what was their “other gospel”? We have to do more reading between the lines and it won’t be fully fleshed out until we get through the rest of the letter, but the best way to look at it may be to see these new teachers not so much preaching a different Jesus, but preaching Jesus as the culmination of a different story. Paul was preaching Jesus as the fulfilment a story in which the God of Israel defeats the powers of sin and death to rescue his people from the present evil age, but these folks seemed to be preaching Jesus as an add-on to Jewish life as it already was—maybe Jesus as the fulfilment of some Jewish nationalist hope or agenda: maybe a message that fired up zeal against the gentiles, for example, instead of announcing to them the grace made available in Jesus.And I think it’s likely that Paul had in mind what “gospel” meant in the Roman world. To the Greeks and Romans, “gospel” was the good news announced about the accession or the birthday of Caesar. Caesar’s new cult was spreading like wildfire through Asia and that included Galatia. It’s not that the Christian there were in danger of worshiping Caesar. The danger was that they would embrace torah to save themselves from persecution for not worshiping Caesar. To refuse to worship Caesar—not to mention all the other gods—would be a bit like marching the wrong way, carrying the flag upside-down, and saying unpatriotic things in the middle of a Canada Day parade. But in that culture, not only was it disloyal, if and when calamity struck the city or the country, you’d be the one to get the blame for it, because you’d angered the gods. But the Jews, they were uniquely exempt. The Jews would rather die than worship an idol, so after all the trouble they’d caused him, Caesar had granted them an exemption. And those first Christians started claiming that exemption for themselves. They were, after all, Jews. Even the gentile converts claimed it. But then to claim to be Jews, well there was pressure to start acting like Jews, too—and that became a problem.And so Paul announces: Anathema! A curse. The real gospel, the true gospel is about how, in Jesus and his death and resurrection, God has dealt with sin and inaugurated a new age. That’s why it’s good news. But these new teachers, they’re not just veering off course a little. They’re completely wrong. They’re telling a different story. They’re not announcing the good news that God’s new creation has started. No, they’re just giving advice about how to live and get along in the present evil age. There’s no good news there. As my New Testament prof, Gordon Fee, used to put it, they’d gone backwards from AD to BC—going from the bright sunlight of God’s new day, back into the darkness of the old. No, Paul says, if any—even if an angel from heaven—proclaims anything other than the good news that I’ve proclaimed, let that person be accursed.Brothers and Sisters, it’s really very simple. It’s about Jesus and Jesus alone and it’s faith in him that defines the people of God. There is an organic relationship between faith and works such that real faith will always show itself in our lives. We know good trees because they bear good fruit. But as much as good works borne of faith mark us out, the thing that makes, the thing that defines us as the people of God is faith in Jesus. That’s it. Nothing else. Whenever we add something else—whether it’s circumcision as in Galatia or some other thing or set of rules, when we establish some ethnic or cultural criteria, when we set up some kind of personal or ecstatic or emotional experience that stands alongside Jesus—we diminish Jesus and we rob God of his glory and we lose the gospel. The solution, I think, if we listen to Paul, is to keep our eyes focused on Jesus and the cross. Over and over Paul comes back to Jesus, declaring things like “who loved me and gave himself for me”. We need to do the same. Every week the Lord offers us a reset when he invites us to his Table. Here we recall and participate anew in those events by which Jesus the Messiah gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of God our Father. Here we’re reminded of grace, to go into another week with our eyes focused on Jesus that we might live to the glory of our gracious God and for the sake of his kingdom. Here we’re reminded again that it’s all about God’s grace poured out in Jesus. It’s not about us, it’s not about who we are, it’s not about what we’ve done or will do, it’s all about and only about Jesus.Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, you have poured out your amazing grace on us, giving your Son as a sacrifice for our sin and rescuing us from the bondage of the present evil age. We should be overwhelmed by your grace and by your Son, but we confess that we too often lose our focus on him. By your grace, set our eyes again and always on Jesus, that we might perpetually be amazed by your grace, so that we are never tempted to diminish your glory by adding anything else to the gospel. In his name we pray. Amen.
A Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after TrinitySt. Luke 17:11-19 & Galatians 5:16-24by William KlockJesus was on his way to Jerusalem, St. Luke tells us. Making his way there from Galilee for the last time. And along the way, he passed through the borderlands between Samaria and Galilee. Galilee was up in the north. And as much as everyone talked about going “up to Jerusalem”, that was because it was up in the mountains. Jerusalem, in the territory of Judah, was way down south. In between was Samaria. No self-respecting Jew cut through Samaria. They went around. Because the Samaritans were filth. As I said last week, they were the Jews who went wrong to begin with way back when they broke from Judah and established their own illicit temple at Shechem, on Mount Gerizim. But they’d gone from bad to worse when they intermarried with the pagans then compromised torah with various pagan influences. The Jews despised the Samaritans (and the Samaritans didn’t feel very kindly towards the Jews in return). So Jesus and his disciples skirted through the borderlands. Still, being so close, there was no telling who you might meet along the way.But, says Luke, as Jesus was going into one particular village he was met by ten men far worse than any Samaritan. Ten men with leprosy. They knew the rules. They stayed some distance away, but they approached as close as they dared. They were unclean and they were outcasts. Leprosy in the Bible could be any one of a multitude of contagious skin diseases, and according to the torah, if a priest certified you had such a disease, you were cut off from everyone: from your family, from your friends, from the community. They had to go off and live in their own little colonies on the fringes of civilisation. If they were lucky, their friends and family might bring them food and leave it at a distance. But maybe worse still, they were cut off from the covenant community—from the people of God. They were unwelcome in the synagogues. They were cut off from the temple because they were unclean. That meant they were excluded from the Lord’s presence and from the sacrificial system that provided forgiveness of sins. And they were cut off from the Passover. You had to be ritually pure to participate in that too. To put it in our terms: they were cut off from the church and the sacraments.And there wasn’t much sympathy for them. Do you remember the blind man who Jesus and the disciples encountered in John 9? The first question from the disciples was, “Who sinned? This man or his parents?” That’s the lens through which people looked at lepers and cripples and the destitute. They wouldn’t be in such a state if they hadn’t done something to offend the Lord. Leprosy was sort of a sign that God’s judgement had fallen on you early. I hope that gives you a sense of just how hopeless these men would have felt.But for the first time in a long time they had a glimmer of hope. They heard that Jesus was passing through town. The good news that Jesus was preaching, the stories about him healing the sick and even raising the dead, they’d spread far and wide—even to the leper colonies. Wherever he went, Jesus was making sad things come untrue and wiping away tears, and so they went to him. Maybe he’d make their sad things come untrue, too. And so they stood at a distance. Again, they weren’t allowed to get close. I’d bet they’d probably been taught lessons in the past about getting too close to healthy people, to good people—who had cursed at them and thrown rocks at them. Knowing how Jesus’ disciples could be sometimes, it’s not hard to imagine some of the having already picked up some nice, heavy, pointy rocks to throw—just in case. So they stand at a distance and they call out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”That got Jesus’ attention. That title “Master”, that they used. That’s usually what his disciples called him, but he didn’t hear it very often from other people. People called him “rabbi” or “teacher”, but this “Master”—it had the sense of rabbi or teacher, too, but it was something you called someone whom you knew also had authority. Again, they’d heard about the things Jesus had done. They knew that somehow and in some way he had authority over sickness, disease—even over death itself. And so they call out to him in faith: “Master! Have mercy on us! Show us compassion! Wipe away our tears. Make our sad things come untrue! We know you can, because you have mastery over sickness and death.”And in response, Jesus said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” He doesn’t heal them. Instead he sends them to the priest. But it makes sense if you understand that it was the priests who were trained according to the torah to evaluate these diseases and to determine whether someone was healed or not. Eventually, they’d have to go to see the local priest one way or another if they wanted to be admitted back into the community. So Jesus sends them to do the very thing they would have to do if they were healed.The way Luke tells the story draws a pretty unmistakable parallel with the story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5. Naaman was the commander of the Syrian army back in the days of the Prophet Elisha. Naaman was also a leper. But he had a young Jewish slave girl in his house who told of this prophet. Naaman eventually went to see Elisha, but Elisha refused to see him. Instead, the prophet sent Naaman a messenger, who told the commander to go and wash in the Jordan River. Naaman was furious. He was mad that Elisha wouldn’t see him and he was mad at being told to wash in a dirty Jewish river, as if it were somehow better than the rivers of his own country. But eventually, in faith, Naaman went and washed in the Jordan. He went down into the waters and rose up healed of his leprosy.In the same way Elisha told Naaman to take a step of faith, Jesus tells these men to do the same. Go to the local priest. It seemed like a waste of time. He’d just have them hold out their hands and feet, their arms and legs, have them uncover their heads—and there would be all the sores and the priest would tell them they were still unclean. But because of what they’d heard about Jesus, they went on off in faith to see the priest anyway.I think Luke—a gentile—frames the story this way, drawing the parallel with Naaman, for a reason. Earlier in Luke, Jesus had rebuked the people of Nazareth by reminding them of Naaman and Elisha. He said to them, “There were many lepers in Israel in the time of the Prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:27). In other words, because of their lack of faith, Israel was missing out on the Lord’s deliverance. Instead, it was the outsiders who were hearing and receiving the good news: the tax collectors and sinners, Samaritans and gentiles—even lepers. It’s as if Jesus knew how each of these men would respond.They came to Jesus in faith and in faith all ten of them go off to see the priest. And Luke writes that “as they went, they were healed.” What they asked for in faith, Jesus gives. Think of what that meant. Once the priest had given them the all clear, they could return to their families and to their community. They could go to the synagogue. Once again, they could know God’s forgiveness of sin at the temple. They could eat the Passover and know they belonged to the Lord. And yet, Luke writes, one of them—only one—seeing that he’d been healed, turned back and gave glory to God at the top of his voice. He fell on his face at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And, Luke adds, he was a Samaritan.Jesus’ miracle highlights who he is and what he’s come to do. Jesus’ miracle highlights the faithfulness of the God of Israel to his promises. The healing of the ten lepers, like all of Jesus’ miracles, proclaims the coming of the promised and long-awaited kingdom. In Jesus the Messiah, the God of Israel is doing what he promised and beginning to set the world to rights. This is astounding. And yet these nine men seem to take it for granted. We’re not privy to their motives and neither was Luke. Maybe they were just so overwhelmed by excitement and joy that they forgot. Maybe they were afraid to go back lest the miracle be undone. Maybe they planned to go back later, but then they saw the priest and he warned them. By this point Jesus was a marked man. Maybe they were afraid to be associated with him. But whatever their motive, they highlight the plight of Israel. Like the people of Nazareth, they took Jesus for granted. They wanted their own personal messiah to do tricks for them. At least these men didn’t reject Jesus, but in the end they seem to take the mighty works of God for granted. There’s no thanksgiving. They don’t glorify him for what he’s done. They just take his blessings and run. Which is ironic, because they were Jews, named after Jacob’s son, Judah, whose name in Hebrew means “praise”.And then there’s that one Samaritan in the lot. We don’t know his motives either. Samaritans weren’t particularly interested in Jewish messiahs. He went with the others to see Jesus just because he was desperate and ready to give anything a try. And this Jewish Messiah healed him—an outcast and an outsider—and he was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude. Jesus owed him nothing, but gave him everything. And so he can’t not go back. He falls at the feet of Jesus and gives him thanks. And I think this is the reason only Luke tells us this story, because he too was an outsider—not a leper, but a gentile. The God of Israel owed him nothing. The people of the God of Israel treated him like trash. But in Jesus the Messiah, the God of Israel had given him everything.We get a sense of this as Luke finishes the story. Jesus asks the man, “There were ten of you healed, weren’t there? Where are the nine? Is it really the case that the only one who had the decency to give God the glory was this foreigner?” We get the sense that Jesus wasn’t just talking to the Samaritan man, but to a larger crowd. The gratitude of this foreigner became a rebuke on Israel. The people whose name means “praise” are just standing around watching a miracle, while this Samaritan glorifies their God. Jesus had warned them before that God could raise up children for Abraham from the stones and now, here, one of those stones cries out in praise and thanksgiving.And then, turning back to the man, he said to him, “Get up and be on your way. Your faith has saved you.” All through the story, Luke describes these lepers as being cleansed. Their diseases made them unclean and now they’ve been healed, cleansed, and restored. But in those final words to the Samaritan, Jesus says, “Your faith has saved you.” Maybe the change from cleansed to saved is because he’s a Samaritan. No amount of healing would make him an Israelite or permit him into the temple, but he’s still been delivered from his disease. But I think that there’s something more to the choice of words. Maybe it’s Luke emphasising, as he records in Greek what Jesus would have said in Aramaic, maybe it’s Luke emphasising that this man had experienced the same thing he had—that through faith in Jesus, this man who was an outsider and who was despised not just for his disease, but for who he was, this man who could never be part of the old people of Israel, had nevertheless been given a place in the age to come, in the future world of the God of Israel, in that place where our tears are wiped away and everything is set to rights and where the people sing forever and always the glory of God. This no good Samaritan hated by everyone who mattered, suddenly found himself that day a child of Abraham and of the God of Israel.He was transformed. The promises made to Abraham were fulfilled, even if in a small way with just one person, the promises made to Abraham were fulfilled that day as that Samaritan man knelt as Jesus’ feet and glorified God. He went back to Samaria a different person. I fully expect he went back to Samaria proclaiming the glories of God, all because of gratitude for what Jesus had done for him. In that, he showed up Israel and, I think, he shows us up.Brothers and Sisters, you and I have been confronted with the same saving mercies of God. We have known his forgiveness and his deliverance through Jesus, who gave his life for us and then rose from the grave. We not only know his common graces every day in the air we breathe and the food we eat, but we know the life of God’s kingdom through the gift of his indwelling Spirit. Every Sunday he invites us to his Table to participate once again in this great exodus from sin and death that Jesus has led us through in our baptism. And too often we take it all for granted. He invites us to his Table, but we don’t come. He incorporates us into his family, but we neglect our brothers and sisters or we treat them poorly. He gifts us with the fruit of his Spirit, but we instead cultivate what Paul, in our Epistle from Galatians 5, calls the works of the flesh. Paul knew this is what happens when we lose our focus on Jesus and Jesus alone. The Galatians were adding to Jesus. Jesus plus torah was their gospel, but in the end it took their eyes off Jesus and they stumbled spiritually. Their problem probably isn’t our problem, but there are a thousand other things that can distract us from Jesus and from what God has done for us in him. As I said last week, sometimes we just become so focused looking at the path beneath our feet that we forget to look up. We let ourselves become consumed with the things of this old age that is passing away, with the troubles and difficulties of life, with what we should eat or what we should wear, that we stop seeking after the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And before we know it, we’ve lost our gratitude. We stop singing the glories of God. We stop living the life of the Spirit.So Paul wrote to the Galatians and exhorted them in 5:16, “Let me say this to you: live by the Spirit, and you won’t do what the flesh wants you to. For the flesh wants to go against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh. They’re opposed to each other, so that you can’t do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you’re not under the law.”Again, their problem was Jesus plus torah. We might be trying to do some other variation of Jesus plus works or Jesus plus love of money or Jesus plus worry over inflation or Jesus plus my worldly activities—again, there are a thousand things that can pull us away from Jesus. Whatever our combination is, losing sight of Jesus, compromising our loyalty to Jesus, is going to work out in losing the life of the Spirit and the warning sign is when we start living the old life of the flesh. Paul goes on and says, “Now the works of the flesh are obvious. They are such things as fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, bursts of rage, selfish ambition, factiousness, divisions, moods of envy, drunkenness, wild partying, and similar things. I told you before, and I tell you again: people who do such things will not inherit God’s kingdom.”Brothers and Sisters, the people who will inherit the kingdom are the people who already value it today—the people who have been made new already by Jesus and given the life of the Spirit, because it’s Jesus and the Spirit who will—and are presently—making us fit for God’s new world. And those people, Paul writes, are characterised by the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control….And those who belong to Jesus the Messiah, they crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” But we need to go one verse further with the Epistle. Paul writes to them, “If we live by the Spirit, let’s line up with the Spirit.” You can’t claim to have the life of the Spirit while living out the works of the flesh. And the way we do that—this is the heart of Galatians, which Lord willing we’ll start working through next Sunday—the heart of Galatians is this message of Jesus and Jesus alone. We need to set our eyes on him and as we set our eyes on him, our hearts and minds will follow. We need to be like the Samaritan leper in the Gospel, with our focus intent on the amazing things that God has done for us in Jesus. We need to have his incarnation, his cross, his shed blood and his resurrection and his ascension always before us. We need always to remember that we who had no share in his inheritance, have through Jesus been made sons and daughters of God.Brothers and Sisters, this why we immerse ourselves in his word, that we might always be reminded of his great mercy towards us. And this is why we come to his Table every Sunday. Like the Israelites celebrating the Passover every year to participate for themselves in that great saving act by which he delivered them from Pharoah’s bondage and made them his people, so we come every week and participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus, we participate in this great exodus in which, by his shed blood and his rising again, he has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death and made us his sons and daughters. Come to the Table and remember the mighty, saving works of God. Come to the Table and be refreshed by Jesus and the Spirit. Look up to Jesus and the cross, then go out in the power of the Spirit to proclaim is glories.Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and love; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after TrinitySt. Luke 10:23-37 & Galatians 3:16-22by William KlockJesus had commissioned seventy disciples to preach the good news throughout the cities and towns of Israel and when they came back to him they were excited. Wherever the good news went, amazing things happened. Above everything else, the seventy rejoiced that at the name of Jesus, even demons obeyed. And Jesus rejoiced with them. “I know,” he said. This is what the prophets foretold. Isaiah and Ezekiel told of their visions in which the Satan fell like lightning from heaven. It’s happening now. God’s kingdom is breaking in, God’s light is driving away the darkness, and it is toppling the rulers of this present evil age—and you’re a part of it. And with that in mind Jesus said to them, “Don’t rejoice that spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”Having your name written in heaven—that meant being written in God’s great book that you belong to him, that you are one of his people. And Jesus draws a connection here that I don’t think we really emphasises often enough and that’s that God’s people are marked out in the present by their kingdom priorities and their kingdom life.Jesus is hinting here—actually, I think it’s more than just a hint—that in him, the God of Israel was renewing Israel and creating a new people. Because the Jews already believed their names were written in heaven, but Jesus hints that something is changing. That it’s not just about being the biological children of Abraham or about keeping torah, but that it’s now connected with this good news and with him—with the Messiah. The long-awaited age to come, the age when the Lord would judge the wicked and set the world to rights, in Jesus the Messiah it was breaking in as the prophets had foretold. And so Jesus—and these are the first words of our Gospel today beginning at Luke 10:23—Jesus turns from the crowd to his disciples and says to them, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. Let me tell you, many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see, and they didn’t see it; and to hear what you hear, and they didn’t hear it.”But then, Luke says, a lawyer got up and put Jesus on the spot. He knew what Jesus was saying and it really bothered him. Because everyone knew that God’s people are marked out in the present by their keeping of the law: by things like circumcision, sabbath-keeping, and diet. Maybe Jesus was the Messiah, maybe God’s kingdom was breaking in, but this suggestion that Jesus’ disciples had their names written in heaven because they were somehow connected with Jesus—that they were “in”—well, that meant that others were “out”. So the lawyer stood up and shouted at Jesus, “Rabbi, what should I do to inherit the life of the age to come?” He was sure his name was written in heaven, but if Jesus was calling that into question, he wants to know what criteria Jesus thinks mark God’s people out in the present. Was Jesus really excluding good, torah-observing Jews like him?And Jesus, as is the way with rabbis, responded with another question: “What is written in the law?” And it’s easy to imagine the exasperation on the lawyer’s face as he answered the question they’d all learned the answer to as little children: “You shall love the Lord your with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your understanding; and your neighbour as yourself.”And Jesus responded, “Well said! Do that and you will live.” The lawyer frowned and grit his teeth. No, no, no. If that’s what it’s about, then we’re all on the same page, but Jesus is clearly saying that his disciples will see the age to come and that others might not. The lawyer wants to know how or where Jesus is drawing the line. Who’s in and who’s out? More than that, he knows Jesus is wrong and he wants to get his error, his heresy out into the open for everyone to see. So he throws out another question, “Ah! But who is my neighbour?”“And Jesus rose to the challenge. ‘Once upon a time,’ he said, ‘a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and was set upon by brigands. They stripped him and beat him and ran off leaving him half-dead.’”Everyone knew the road. Very soon Jesus would be travelling it himself, going the other direction, up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover—and to become the new Passover himself. That road was steep and windy and notorious for the brigands hiding in wait for unwary travellers. The wise travelled in groups or well-armed. Travelling it alone, like this man did, was foolish. This lawyer, listening to Jesus, would be shaking his head and thinking to himself that anyone dumb enough to travel that road alone was a candidate for a Darwin Award.But Jesus goes on. “‘A priest happened to be going down that road, and when he saw him he went past on the opposite side.’” Now, you and I shake our heads and think, “What a horrible priest! How could he not stop to help the man.” But we only think that way because we’ve been shaped by the gospel and by Jesus and the Spirit. The cross of Jesus has taught us mercy. That God would not only humble himself, but would shed his blood on behalf of his rebellious children has taught us mercy in a way never understood before the gospel. But that lawyer—and the crowd and maybe even Jesus’ disciples—they lived in the dark world on the other side of the good news of the cross. They saw nothing wrong with this priest passing by the man. The priests kept themselves ritually pure. They had to in order to enter the temple. Even though this priest is going in the opposite direction—probably on his way home from serving his rotation in the temple—he still kept himself pure. He couldn’t tell if the man was dead or alive and if went over, rolled him over, and found him dead, well, then he'd be impure. That was okay for normal people, but not for a priest. And everyone knew this. And, again, no one had a problem with it.“Then,” said Jesus, “a Levite came by the place. He saw him too and went past on the opposite side.” He might not be a priest, but being a Levite, he too served in the temple. Again, he’s going the opposite way—like the priest, he’s probably on his way home from serving in the temple. But, still, being a Levite, he can’t chance becoming impure. And, again, this was all normal and good and right as far as most people were concerned.“But then,” said Jesus, “a travelling Samaritan came to where he was.” Everyone frowned at this. Samaritans were filth. They were the Jews who intermarried with the native Canaanite peoples when the people of Judah were in exile. They worshiped at their own illicit temple at Shechem and they compromised torah with pagan practises and pagan philosophy. They were traitors of the worst kind. Just being on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho meant he was fouling the promised land with his impure Samaritan feet. And yet, Jesus said, “He came over to the man and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put him on his own beast, took him to an inn, and looked after him. The next morning, as he was going on his way, he gave the inn-keeper two dinars. ‘Take care of him,’ he said, ‘and on my way back I’ll pay you whatever else you need to spend on him.’”“Where’s Jesus going with this?” Everyone was thinking. “What’s his point?” There’s no way this would happen in real life. But that’s kind of the point. Jesus looks the lawyer in the eye and asks, “Which of these three do you think turned out to be the neighbour of the man who was set upon by the brigands?” Jesus is going make the lawyer come out and say it. And the lawyer does, because there’s no escape for him. “The one who showed mercy on him,” he said.“Well,” Jesus said to him, “you go and do the same.”So what just happened? Jesus brilliantly turned the prophecy of Isaiah 6:1-11 into a parable. I don’t think anyone figured that out until the lawyer answered the final question and said “The one who showed him…mercy.” And as soon as that word “mercy” was out of his mouth, I expect it sank in. Hosea 6 is where the Lord, through the Prophet, rebukes the people of Israel because their love for God is “like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away.” It’s the prophecy in which Hosea accuses the priests of acting violently against the helpless saying, “As robbers lie in wait for a man, so the priests band together; they murder on the way to Shechem; they commit villainy” (6:9). The Prophet denounces the “evil deeds of Samaria” (7.1). And that’s why Jesus puts a Samaritan in the centre of his story. It flips everything around. As Jesus tells it, it’s now the people of Judah, and especially the priests and Levites who are acting violently against the people. This is why, when Jesus cleanses the temple he condemns the priests for having made it a “den of robbers”. As the unfaithful northern kingdom of Israel had been judged by the Lord, so judgement is now barrelling towards Judah and Jerusalem and the temple and its priests. The Lord is indeed, in Jesus, preparing to judge the wicked and to set the world to rights. The long-awaiting age to come is breaking in. As the Lord promised through Hosea, he will come to heal his people, to bind up their wounds, to revive them after two days, and to raise them up on the third day (6:1-2). But whom will he heal and revive and raise up? Whom will he take with him into the age to come? The answer: Only those who share his values and his priorities and the values and priorities of the age to come. In Hoses 6:6 the Lord declares those well-known words, “I want mercy and not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than whole burnt offerings.” I want mercy. And I think those well-known words of the Prophet came crashing down on that lawyer like a metaphorical ton of bricks as he gave his answer and said, “The one who showed him mercy.”There was no mercy in the heart of the priest and no mercy in the heart of the Levite—and there was no mercy in the hearts of the people of Judah who saw nothing wrong with the priest and the Levite leaving the man to die. For that matter there was no mercy in the hearts of people who saw the Samaritans as unredeemable, reprobate scum. And that was the heart of the problem. And that was the problem that Jesus came to fix. Because the only people who will have a share in the age to come—in the kingdom of God—are the people who share the values and priorities of God. The people who are poor in spirit, who mourn the state of the world, the meek, the people who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the pure in heart, the peacemakers—and the merciful.Everyone wants to see evil judged and removed from the earth and everyone wants to be part of the age to come when God has set everything to rights, but very few want—or even recognise their need—to first be transformed by the life of that kingdom. Like so many in Judah, we want to enter the age to come as we are. We don’t want to change. As much as we want to see everything made right, we still hold tightly to the very things, the very values, the very systems, the very sins, the very gods that have made the world the mess it is. And we can be relentlessly unmerciful in our condemnation of everyone else we don’t think meets our standards. We can be relentlessly unmerciful to everyone we think is the problem. All while forgetting that we’re all the problem. We’ve all contributed to the mess the world is in and if God were to set the world to rights and then transplant us into it as we are, well, we’d just ruin it all over again—because we’re the problem—every last one of us.But when we let go of it all. When we take hold of Jesus in faith as Messiah, as the one who died and rose again triumphant over sin and death, he not only washes our sinful past away, he also plunges us into the Spirit, into the very life of God. And in doing that, Jesus makes us fit for the life of the age to come. Not instantly, of course. It’s a process. But through word and Spirit he makes us new bit by bit, just as he does the same with this world as he sends us out with his good news to spread his kingdom bit by bit until one day the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea. One day that glory will fill us to—like the blood that courses through us from head to toe—and we’ll be fit for the kingdom.And because of that, Jesus’ people should be known for having a wide view of God’s mercy. That’s what the people of the northern kingdom lacked when the Lord warned them through Hosea that he desired mercy above sacrifice. And it’s what the people of Judah lacked when Jesus told his parable about the good Samaritan. Maybe instead of calling the it the “Parable of the Good Samaritan” we should really call it the “Parable of the Unmerciful Priest and Levite”. In both cases, the people of Israel and the people of Judah, they of all people, should have had a sense of the Lord’s mercy. This is where our Epistle today, beginning at Galatians 3:16, can help us understand. St. Paul stresses God’s promise to Abraham and how it was fulfilled in the family of the Messiah—this people made up of both Jews and gentiles.Paul writes in Galatians 3:16, “The promises were made to Abraham and his seed”—that is, his family. It doesn’t say ‘his seeds,’ as though referring to several families, but indicates a single family by saying ‘and to your seed,’ meaning the Messiah.” There was a group of Jewish Christians in the Galatian churches that were pushing for Gentile believers to be circumcised and, at least superficially, to keep the torah and Paul’s letter to them is a rebuke and an exhortation. On the one hand he rebukes them for falling backwards into torah and on the other hand he exhorts them to press forward by faith in Jesus the Messiah, because it’s faith, not observance of the law that marks out the people of God. Abraham had no torah. He just had faith in the promises of God. Torah, the law, that came hundreds of years later. The law, Paul writes, was a good thing, but temporary—like a babysitter meant to keep the Jewish people out of trouble until God’s promises were fulfilled through them in Jesus. Why? Because they were the unique people, called and set apart by God—by faith, Paul stresses—to carry God’s promises to the nations. In light of that, they should have remembered all along that God’s plan was to redeem not just Israel, but all of humanity. And knowing that, they should have been a people with a heart for the lost and a people of mercy.Brothers and Sisters, it is an awful thing when people who have themselves experience and known the amazing mercy of God become unmerciful. The Lord rebuked Israel and Judah for their lack of mercy, but it’s even more awful when we who have known God’s mercy through Jesus fall into unmerciful patterns. Maybe we become self-righteous. Maybe we become jaded and cynical. But whatever form it takes, we sinners who have known the amazing mercy of God through the blood of Jesus poured out at the cross, we outsiders who have known the amazing mercy of God by being grafted into the vine of Israel, we who were dead who have been filled with God’s own Spirit, we have no business being unmerciful. To the contrary, because of the great mercy we have known ourselves, rivers of mercy ought to be flowing from us to the world.But, somehow, our eyes fall. Instead of looking up, we look down. Instead of keeping our eyes focused on Jesus, we’re distracted by the things around us. Like the guests in another of Jesus’ parables, we’re invited to his great feast, but we have excuses: I’ve bought this parcel of land and I need to go have a look at it; I’ve bought a yoke of oxen, and I need to go collect them; I’ve just got married, and well…I can’t come. The systems, the philosophies, the values, the gods of the old age that is passing away—the things we once forsook for Jesus—entice us back. Maybe it’s the troubles and trials of life that cause us to lose perspective and doubt Jesus and to doubt God’s faithfulness. Whatever it is, we take our eyes off of Jesus and we begin to stray and we begin to lose hope—like someone shuffling along a mountain trail with his eyes on his shoes, missing the glory to be seen all around. And to us Paul practically shouts, “Look up!” (That’s Colossians, not Galatians, but it doesn’t matter.) Look up! You’ve been raised with the Messiah, so set your sights on things above, where Jesus sits at the right hand of God. That’s what should mark out the people of God. And as we look up, as we find our hope in Jesus, as we find our identity in Jesus, mercy flows. The Spirit’s fruit grows. And we don’t just pray “on earth as in heaven”, but we become the “on earth as in heaven” people. That’s what the people of Israel should have been in Hosea’s day. That’s the Priest and the Levite and the lawyer and all those other people in Judah should have been in Jesus day. Thanks be to God that he gave his son to set them to rights and to make it possible for us, by faith, to be grafted into that family. And so that’s what we ought to be too. On earth as in heaven people. Brothers and Sisters, the Lord invites us to his Table this morning, once again to participate in the great exodus in which Jesus, by his blood, has led us out of our bondage to sin and death. Come to the Table and know again his mercy. Eat the bread and drink the wine and know the goodness, the graciousness, the lovingkindness, the faithfulness of our God. Then, renewed with a send of his glory, go out and take heaven, take his glory with you to the world.Let’s pray: Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift alone your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity2 Corinthians 3:1-11by William KlockOne morning back in my Macintosh technician days my boss walked up and put a resume on my bench. “Does this look suspicious or is it just me?” he asked. He pointed to the guy’s work history. Every one of his previous employers was defunct, but somehow he had the personal email address of every one of his old bosses. If that wasn’t odd enough, all of them had Yahoo and Hotmail email addresses using similar formats. It was pretty obvious. Every one of those email addresses was made up and would just go back to him and he could write his own references.Of course, the whole point of a reference is that someone—who is either known personally or known by reputation—someone else is vouching for you. They did this in Paul’s world just like we do today. Jews, especially in the diaspora, would carry letters of recommendation indicating that other Jews could trust them. In the pagan Greco-Roman world it was common for your patron to supply you with a letter of recommendation. But writing your own recommendation, well, that kind of misses the whole point. But that seems to be what the Corinthians are accusing Paul of doing in today’s Epistle. They read parts of his first epistle to them—parts like Chapter 9 where he defends himself as an apostle—and they took it as inflated self-commendation. But now, people in Corinth have been making false accusations against him too, so he’s going to have to do the same thing all over again. We can hear his frustration as he writes to them, beginning Chapter 3 of Second Corinthians: So, we’re starting to “recommend ourselves” again, are we? Or perhaps we need—as some do—official references to give to you? Or perhaps even from you? Maybe he should get one of his other churches—maybe the brothers and sisters in Ephesus—to write him a letter, vouching for him. But Paul shouldn’t have to do that. Paul had a difficult relationship with the Corinthians. When he left them in ad 50, the church was very supportive of him and his mission, but over the next several years their attitude towards him soured. The church grew, new preachers arrived, attitudes changed. Paul wrote to intervene in their struggles over leadership and to rebuke them for allowing pagan idolatry and immorality to get a foothold in the congregation. They patted themselves on the back for being free in the Messiah and Paul rebuked them saying that this isn’t what freedom in the Messiah means. Of course, they didn’t appreciate Paul’s rebukes and so he became persona non grata in Corinth. He wrote to them and they responded with a “Thanks, but no thanks, Paul.”So Paul responds sort of facetiously: “Am I going to need a recommendation before you’ll listen to me?” That would be a bit like telling our bishop that he needs a recommendation from some other church before we’ll let him visit or preach here. Others might have shaken the dust from their shoes at that point and left the ingrates in Corinth to themselves, but not Paul. He has a pastor’s heart. He cares too much for them. And he answers not to them, but to Jesus. I don’t think they actually asked for a letter of recommendation, but he offers one anyway—but not like any other—because Paul knew that the gospel commends itself. So he writes to them:You yourselves are our letter…They rejected him. They’ve told him not to come around and not to write to them anymore to give advice. They’ve disrespected and insulted him. And Paul writes: I don’t need a letter of recommendation to prove my credentials as an apostle and servant of Jesus. I don’t. Because you people yourselves are my letter of recommendation. You people, even though you’ve rejected me, you’re the proof of my gospel credentials.You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. It’s quite plain that you are a letter from the Messiah, delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of beating hearts. Brothers and Sisters, if that’s not grace I don’t know what is. Paul doesn’t need a letter written in ink on paper. These messed up, confused, infuriating people are nevertheless filled with the life of the Spirit promised in the gospel. For all their faults and for all their inability to see how they’ve been shaped by their culture in their rejection of him, their joy in the Lord and their hope in the good news is the result of Paul’s ministry to them and that says everything about Paul that needs to be said. Despite their imperfections and immaturity, their transformation by and their life in Jesus and the Spirit, make them his credentials.That’s pretty astounding and it says something about the power of the gospel and Paul’s expectation of its power to transform people, even when they looked hopeless and even when they’re still far from perfect. These were people he rebuked for putting the wisdom of the Greeks over the truth of the gospel. These were people he rebuked for tolerating a church member who was sleeping with his step-mother. These were people he rebuked for dragging each other through the courts, for divorce, for not treating each other as equals, for abusing spiritual gifts, for abusing the Lord’s Supper, for having crazy, disordered worship. The list is a long one. And yet despite their multitude of failings, he says, “You want to see my credentials as a gospel minister, as an apostle? You’re it.” Paul could see the gospel at work in them. For all their faults, they were not the people they had once been. As he had written to them in his first epistle, no one affirms that Jesus is Lord apart from the transforming work of the Spirit. Paul could see through the flaws and immaturity and knew that they believed, that they loved Jesus, that they were full of the Spirit. He had proclaimed the good news about Jesus to them and it had done its work, it was continuing to do its work, and he was confident, it would in time complete its work. This is important. Sometimes we look at other Christians or other churches and they’re a mess and we’re tempted to write them off completely. Brothers and Sisters, be careful. Is Jesus being proclaimed as Lord? If he is, that means that the gospel and the Spirit are at work there. Maybe the gospel and the Spirit have a lot of work yet to do. The Corinthians needed correction—a lot of it. But Paul didn’t write them off. They had the gospel. These aren’t the other folks Paul warns about who were preaching another, a different gospel. That’s a whole other problem. But the Corinthians received the gospel and the gospel is a powerful thing. It is the power of God to save. Now, word of caution. Their context was different from ours. This was a first-generation church living in the days when these things were still being worked out. We don’t have that excuse today. But still, no one, no church is perfect, but if the gospel is there, we should be confident that Jesus and the Spirit will be with a church to correct and to bring maturity.But how could Paul look at these messed up people in a messed up church and be so sure? He could, because he knew that God is faithful. Because he knew the story and because he knew the promises of God. And so Paul reminds the Corinthians of Jeremiah 31 and of God's promise to Israel there. In those days Israel was in exile. Israel had been unfaithful to God. She had been unfaithful to her covenant obligations. She had refused to trust in his goodness and she had prostituted herself to foreign kings and to foreign Gods. So the Lord had judged her and allowed the Babylonians to conquer her, to destroy Jerusalem, to tear the temple down to the ground, and to carry the people off into captivity, away from the land they’d been promised—and most importantly, away from his presence.But that was not the end. Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord promised the people that he would redeem them. They may be covenant-breakers—like a cheating spouse—but he was not. He would always be faithful to his promises. And so one day he would restore Israel by establishing a new covenant. There would be a new agreement between the Lord and his people. There would be a new marriage between Israel and her Lord. He had established the old covenant through Moses when he gave Israel his law, written on stone tablets. But that law carved on stone did not have the power to give the people the real life they needed and that the Lord desired for them. And so the Lord promised a new covenant that would restore Israel. The new covenant would deal fully with the sins of the people—that’s what the cross of Jesus is about. And the new covenant would give the people the new life they needed in order to truly be the renewed people the Lord wanted them to be—to remake humanity into what we were meant to be—God giving his people his own life, transforming their hearts and minds in a way that the law written on stone was never able to do. In this new covenant, the Lord promised through Jeremiah, he would write the law on their hearts—he would give his people his own Spirit.That was the story and that was the promise. And when Paul looked at the Christians in Corinth, even though they were confused and muddled and had rejected him, he could write to them and say that they were his letter, they were his credentials, because the life of God’s Spirit was evident in their life as a church. They themselves were a letter from Jesus the Messiah. The powerful work promised through Jeremiah and the other prophets was manifest in the amazing work that the Spirit had accomplished in them. Think about that. Some of them had been Jews—the same sort of Jews that Paul himself had been when he persecuted Jesus’ people. Some of them had been Greek pagans, worshipping idols, offering incense to Caesar, deeply involved in a degenerate culture. But Paul had brought them the good news that Jesus is Lord. He preached Jesus’ death and resurrection. And they had been transformed. The Spirit had moved them to repentance and given them a totally new life. The living God had written something powerful on their hearts and they would never be the same people again. And the pagan world around them could see it even if these people couldn’t see it themselves anymore. Again, think about that. Think about your own stories. Think of the way you were once met with the good news. Think of the forgiveness you have found at the cross. Think of the new life Jesus has given you. Just like the Corinthians, each of us has a long road ahead of us as we grow into a mature faithfulness to Jesus and his lordship, but Jesus has poured his Spirit into us. In our baptism he has plunged us into the Holy Spirit and we are not the people we once were—and neither were the Corinthians.And so Paul goes on, getting back to his credentials, writing in verses 4-6:That’s the kind of confidence we have towards God, through the Messiah. It’s not as though we are qualified in ourselves to reckon that we have anything to offer on our own account. Our qualification comes from God. God has qualified us to be stewards of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. The letter kills, you see, but the Spirit gives life. All the proof of Paul’s faithfulness as a minister of the gospel, as a minister of God’s new covenant is right there in the work accomplished in the Corinthians by Jesus and the Spirit. It’s not that Paul is competent himself. He merely showed up in Corinth and preached the good news as he’d been called to do by Jesus himself. But as a result of Paul preaching the good news of Jesus and the kingdom, God’s new creation had unfolded right there in a powerful and very visible way. The “letter”—the old law written on stone—brought death, but the Spirit now poured into these people had given them life. In his resurrection Jesus unleashed life into the world. All Paul did was preach that good news and where he did that the Spirit brought transformation—the Spirit brough the life promised by God all those centuries before.As frustrated as Paul was with the Corinthian Christians, the fact that they were Christians—well, Paul knew it was by the grace of God. They’d been transformed and in that Paul saw the glory of God, the glory of the cross, the glory of gospel, the glory of Jesus and the Spirit. Paul has been absolutely swept up and away by it all. God’s amazing faithfulness and his glory revealed in the cross and the empty tomb and in Jesus and the Spirit have captivated Paul. It drives him on and it’s the lens through which he sees literally everything. But the Corinthians just aren’t seeing it anymore. They’ve been distracted by worldly things and by their petty disputes. And so having declared how they themselves are the proof of God’s faithfulness and the power of the gospel, in verse 7 he now goes on, trying to get them to look up again. To forget the cheap and dingy things that have distracted them and to get them captivated again by the glory of what God has done in Jesus and the Spirit. He says to them:Think about it: If the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came in glory, so glorious in fact that the children of Israel couldn’t look at Moses because of the glory of his face—a glory that was to be abolished, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? From waxing eloquent about the glory of the new covenant, Paul takes them back to the dark days of the old. And yet, as much as we might (and they) might think of the old covenant times, the time before Jesus and the Spirit, as dark, Paul reminds them of Moses face when he came down from Mt. Sinai with the law. Moses had been in the presence of the Lord and he came down the mountain with his face radiating the Lord’s glory. It was so bright, so brilliant, so radiant of the holiness of God that the people pleaded with Moses to cover his face. As glorious as it was, it was just too much for them to look upon.And Paul’s point is this: If the law carved on stone came down from the mountain in such amazing glory, if the old covenant carried that much glory, how much more glorious is the ministry of the Spirit and God’s new covenant with his people? He goes on in verses 9-11:For if the ministry of condemnation was glorious, how much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory? In fact, what used to be glorious has come in this respect to have no glory at all, because of the new glory which goes so far beyond it. For if the thing which was to be abolished came with glory, how much more glory will there be for the thing that lasts? Like the Christians of Ephesus who, in Revelation, are described as having lost their first love, the Corinthians had lost sight of the glory of the Holy Spirit’s ministry. It wasn’t that they’d lost the Holy Spirit. That’s impossible. It’s the Spirit who binds us to Jesus, he’s the one who unites us to his life, he’s the one who renews our minds and regenerates our hearts, turning us from everything that is not Jesus and giving us the desire and the faith to take hold of Jesus with both hands. You cannot be a Christian without the Holy Spirit. But somehow they’d lost perspective. The Spirit had empowered these people remarkably, they had no shortage of gifts, but they’d lost sight of the gospel, Jesus was no longer their centre, and they misused and abused those gifts. And they’d slowly let the values of Greek culture creep in to displace a gospel-centred life. Somehow they’d lost sight of the glory of God revealed in Jesus and the Spirit. Does that sound familiar?Brothers and Sisters, we can all too easily fall prey to the same sorts of things. Our own culture infiltrates the church in many, many ways. It compromises our call to holiness and we become worldly in our living. It creeps into our churches, too. Our culture is overwhelmingly commercialistic, materialistic, and individualistic and too often, without even realizing it’s happened, we start building our churches around these things. We treat the gospel like a commodity to sell. We displace it with programs and we tailor our preaching to appeal to our culture’s self-centred individualism. Programs can be good and useful in accomplishing the work of the church, but most of the time these days they’re treated as sales tools. But God doesn’t give us programs. He gives us his word. Through the ministry of the Spirit he caused his word to be written by prophets, apostles, and evangelists so that we can know him and proclaim him to the world. And in Jesus he sent his word to become flesh—not to give us programs or gimmicks or to tickle the itching ears of sinners—but to die for our sins and to rise again to unleash life into the world. A church should never have its identity tied up with anything other than the gospel. A church is a place where the word is faithfully preached and the sacraments faithfully administered. That was the definition the Protestant reformers developed. What constitutes a church? A church is a body of believers that preaches the word and administers the sacraments. But today it seems many preach everything but the word and the sacraments are often side-lined or even sometimes considered optional. As ministers of the gospel, we—and that’s both you and I—are not called to be flashy, we’re not called to preach the pop-psychology and self-help that our culture obsesses over, we’re not called to be motivational speakers, we’re not called to preach health and wealth. We’re called to proclaim that Jesus has died and risen and that he is Lord. We’re called to summon the world to repentance before the throne of Jesus the Messiah. And we’re called to leave behind and to sacrifice everything that is not Jesus, everything that is not of his kingdom. We’re called to back-up our proclamation by living the life of the Spirit, by manifesting the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control that the Spirit bears in our lives. We’re called to live justly and to do mercy. We’re called to use the giftings of the Spirit not for our own ends, but for the sake of the gospel and for the well-being of the Church. We’re called to be gloriously counter-cultural: being poor in spirit, mourning sin, living in meekness, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being merciful, and making peace—even when it means rejection and persecution. As people filled with God’s own Spirit, we are the earnest of God’s promise and work of new creation. By our preaching and by our lives, we’re called to lift the veil on God’s new creation, to pull God’s future into the present so that the world can have a taste of it—and see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord. Brothers and Sisters, it’s this Jesus-centred and Spirit-empowered life that manifests the glory of God to the world, that makes us the light of the world and the salt of the earth—that marks us out as the people of God.Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Saviour; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity1 Corinthians 15:1-11 & St. Luke 18:9-14by William Klock“Two men went up to the temple to pray,” Jesus said. The temple was the place where heaven and earth met. The place where men and women could go to be in the presence of God. Twice a day the priests would lead the people in prayers, at nine in the morning and at three in the afternoon, but people could go any time to pray and they did. They still do. Jews today gather at the Western Wall, not technically the temple, but part of the foundation of the temple complex and all that was left after the Romans brought it all crashing down. Jews still go there to pray. Two men climbed the steps to the temple courts to pray. “One of them,” Jesus said, “was a Pharisee.” It was perfectly fine to pray at home, but if anyone was going to go and pray at the temple, it would be a Pharisee. Their “thing” was to live their lives as if they served in the temple. They weren’t Levites and they weren’t priests, but they took great pains to always remain ritually pure like the Levites did. They would have been some of the most regular men to say their prayers in the temple instead of just at home.But there were two men, Jesus said, who went up to the temple. “The other was a tax collector.” You could almost hear the boos and the hisses and “Eew, gross!”. Tax collectors didn’t belong in the temple. Jews had a whole category for people who had forsaken God’s law. They called them “sinners”. These weren’t people who slipped up and did bad things occasionally. Everyone did that—even the Pharisees—but they still loved God, they still loved his covenant and his law, and the law made provision for atonement and they availed themselves of it. “Sinners”, on the other hand, they were people who had no regard for God’s law. If they sinned, they didn’t care and they didn’t seek atonement. They were Jews—ethnically speaking, at least—but they basically rejected or, at least, had no respect for the covenant. But in those days there was one special class of “sinner” that was singled out because of just how awful they were: tax collectors. So people would talk about “sinners and tax collectors”. Tax collectors didn’t just sin—they got rich stealing from and swindling their own people. They were collaborators with the evil, unclean Romans.So Jesus went on with his story: “Standing, the Pharisee prayed to himself like this, ‘God, I give thanks to you that I am not like other men—like the greedy, like the unjust, like adulterers—or like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything I earn.” Everyone pictured the Pharisee, confidently making his way up the steps to the temple complex, confidently walking across the outer court—the place they called the Court of the Gentiles, because that’s as close to the temple as the Gentiles could go. And they pictured him confidently passing through the gate into the Court of the Women and then, still confidently, striding across that outer court and into the inner Court of Israel—the place where the great altar was, where the priests offered their sacrifices. And he boldly went and stood at the base of the steps leading up into the temple itself and he lifted up his hands and he prayed. And it was normal to pray out loud in those days, but he made a point of raising his voice so that everyone could hear his prayer, and he thanked the God of Israel that he was not like other men. His prayer of thanksgiving becomes a thinly veiled boast of his own faithfulness to God’s law—especially as he turns his head and looks back to the tax collector who just barley dared to pass through the gate and was practically hiding behind a column.In stark contrast, “The tax collector,” Jesus said, “standing far off, didn’t even want to lift his eyes to heaven. Instead, he beat his breast, saying ‘God, have mercy on me a sinner.’”While the Pharisee strode proudly into the temple, the poor tax collector kneels—or maybe he even prostrates himself on the ground—off on the fringes, hiding in the shadows or behind a column and quietly utters his humble prayer for mercy. The Pharisee—at least as far as he was concerned—he belonged there. But the tax collector. He was a sinner and he knew it. He did not belong in the presence of the holy. Other people made that clear and he probably believed it himself. But he was desperate for God’s mercy and this was the place to ask for it. What happened to the tax collector that brought him to the temple? Jesus doesn’t say. For all we know, Jesus could be telling Matthew’s story here. Maybe he was one of those people to whom Jesus had pronounced, “Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more.” And so he followed it up the only way he knew how, by turning over a new leaf, by ritually purifying himself, and by going to the temple to fall on the mercy of the Lord.“This one—the tax collector,” said Jesus, “he went down to his house justified, not the other one.” Why? “Because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”Now, there’s an interesting twist in the tale. If you were following along in Luke 18 or if you were paying careful attention when the Gospel was read earlier, you might have noticed that I left out Luke’s introduction. At the beginning, Luke introduces the parable, writing, “Jesus told this parable to some who were confident in themselves, because they were righteous and looked down on others.” In Greek, “righteous” and “just” are the same word, so Luke plays with that here. Jesus told this parable to some who were confident in themselves, because they were righteous (or just). The point is that they knew—they were certain they were “in”. Whenever the Lord came to judge the wicked and to deliver his people and to set the world to rights, they knew they’d be on God’s side. They knew they had a place in his presence in the age to come. But then in the end, who is it who goes home justified or in the right? It’s not the righteous Pharisee, but the tax collector who prayed for God’s mercy.It's not that the Pharisee—whether the one in the parable or the ones Jesus was telling the parable to—it’s not that they weren’t righteous. By all accounts they were. They were obedient to the law. They weren’t perfect, but if they made a mistake, they offered the appropriate sacrifices. That was part of being faithful to the law, too. They took part in the atonement for sins offered through the temple. They were righteous. And they were the opposite of the tax collector. The tax collector had no regard for God, for his law, or for his covenant. The Pharisee loved God’s law; the tax collector trampled all over it. And I think it’s important to add that it wasn’t just the Pharisees. When Luke says that Jesus told this to people who were confident in themselves because they were righteous, that included most of the people. The Pharisees may have set the bar higher than it needed to be, but the majority, most people who say themselves as good and upstanding Jews had this same problem. They were confident of their position before the Lord because they knew they kept his law: they were circumcised, they kept the sabbath, they ate only clean food, and they avoided gentiles.And yet, at the end of the story, Jesus says, it’s not the righteous or the just man who goes away justified—meaning declared by God to be in the right. It’s the scummy, unrighteous tax collector. Why? Well, to answer that we need to ask what Jesus meant that he went home justified. To be justified is to be found or to be declared to be “in the right”.Think of a courtroom. Plaintiff and a defendant bring their case before a judge, they explain the circumstances and present their evidence, and the judge makes a ruling. The judge declares one of them to be in the right. The judge vindicates one of them. Maybe it’s the defendant, who proves his innocence to the judge. Or maybe it’s the plaintiff, who proves to the judge that he is truly the victim. One of them goes home vindicated by the judge. He goes home declared to be in the right. He goes home justified. But what’s the judge’s basis for determining who is in the right?We really have to do is go back to the Old Testament and to the beginning of Israel’s story. Think about Abraham in Genesis 15. That’s where this got started. The Lord made a promise to Abraham—to give him a land and to give him a son and to make him a great nation. And it was absurd. Abraham went to the promised land and lived there—but he was just one man and even as rich as he was, with flocks and herds and servants, he only ever occupied the smallest corner of that land. And there he was, almost one hundred and his wife ninety—long past child-bearing years. How could he, a childless man ever become a great nation? But the Lord made a promise to him and Abraham believed. And, we’re told, the Lord counted that belief, that faith, as righteousness. Because Abraham believed that the Lord not only could, but somehow would pull off this crazy promise, he was counted as being in the right. There was no way any of it could happen, but Abraham trusted in the faithfulness of the Lord anyway. And in that, Abraham set the standard by which the Lord recognised his people: faith. Later the torah would mark out this people of faith as a special people, visibly different from everyone else, but long before the torah there was faith, and faith was ultimately what it always was and always would be that marks out the people of God—faith in the God who promises crazy things and then never fails to do them.And this theme echoes all the way through Israel’s story. It was the message of the Prophet Habakkuk who lived during the last decades of the kingdom of Judah, in the years before Jerusalem was defeated and destroyed by the Babylonians and the people taken off into exile. Habakkuk looked around him and saw the wickedness and idolatry of his own people and, very much like the psalmists, he cried out to the Lord. This is the opening of his lament.O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong?Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth.For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1:1-4)Habakkuk knew that things weren’t the way they were supposed to be and he knew the promises of the Lord to his people and he and so many others had cried out and cried out—for centuries—and things only got worse. Wickedness and idolatry multiplied and from their perspective it seemed like the Lord wasn’t listening and that he was refusing to act. Judah’s situation seemed as hopeless to Habakkuk as Abraham’s situation must have once seemed to him. But that was just it. Habakkuk knew that the Lord is faithful and so he continued to cry out. He trusted the Lord. He had faith, that one characteristic that defines the people of God above all else.But then the Lord responds. He tells Habakkuk that he has seen the state of his people and that he is going to visit them, but that he will be dealing with their problem by sending the Babylonians to defeat them. That wasn’t what Habakkuk wanted to hear. He argues with the Lord. The Babylonians are even more wicked and idolatrous than the people of Judah. How can defeat by them possibly be the Lord’s solution? And the Lord responds and assures Habakkuk that while Babylon may be his instrument of justice against Judah, Babylon herself—and all the nations—will be held accountable and will one day be judged. The cycle of violence will be broken and everything will be set to rights. One day, he says, the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. It’s another one of those impossible promises—maybe even more impossible than the promise he made to Abraham. But what do the Lord’s people do in the meantime?Here's the Lord’s answer—and Jesus’ parable points us right back to these words. The Lord says to Habakkuk in 2:4:Look at the proud! His spirit is presumptuous and is not rightBut the righteous shall live by faith. The world is falling apart. Everything is wrong. The wicked prosper and are proud and presume on the Lord’s faithfulness and the righteous are oppressed. By all human appearances it doesn’t sound like the Lord is even listening. But those who continue to live by faith in the midst of tribulation, those who remember the Lord’s promises in the midst of persecution, those who steep themselves in the story of the Lord and his people and remember his faithfulness, those who continue to trust in him, they are the ones who will be vindicated by the Lord when he does come in judgement on the wicked. They are the ones who will remain faithful to the Lord and to his covenant, even when all the proud people around them do evil and bow to idols, they will remain faithful, because they know and because they trust that the Lord is always faithful. I hope that’s an encouraging word for you already, but first we need to go back to Jesus’ story about the two men in the temple.There’s the proud Pharisee. By the standard of the law, he is in the right. And there’s the scummy tax collector. By the standard of the law, he’s in the wrong. And yet in the end, it’s the tax collector who goes home and is found to be in the right. If this were one of Jesus’ “kingdom stories” it would be the tax collector who is welcomed into the kingdom, while the Pharisee is left in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth. The tax collector would escape the coming judgement and know the life of the kingdom, while the coming judgement would fall on the Pharisee right along with all the other wicked in Israel. Why? Because below, underlying the law—it’s foundation—was faith in the Lord. A faith that humbly trusted in his promises. A faith that humbly trusted in his grace. A faith in the sufficiency of the Lord, instead of the sufficiency of self. A faith that would rejoice in the presence of the Messiah and a faith that rejoice over the repentance of sinners.Over and over Jesus was clear. He came not to the righteous, but to seek out the lost sheep of the house of Israel. At least in theory, the righteous were fine. They should have been expecting this all along. They were the ones who knew the scriptures so well, after all. But, ironically, they got angry when Jesus went to the lost sheep. And so Jesus told them stories to explain the joy in heaven over sinners who repent. The Lord is like the widow who seeks and eventually finds her lost coin. He’s like the shepherd who goes to great lengths to find his lost sheep. He’s like the father, rejoicing and throwing a party when his prodigal son returns home. But so many in Israel were like the proud and resentful older brother. They’d been doing the right thing all along. Why wasn’t Jesus throwing a party for them? And so, in their pride, they refused to enter the house and were left out in the darkness gnashing their teeth. And it would be like that, only much, much worse when judgement came. Because the law was not enough. Because in Jesus, the Lord was doing something new. In Jesus he was fulfilling his promises. In Jesus he was making a new people who would be finally and truly fit for the kingdom, a people forgiven once and for all and a people filled with God’s own Spirit, a people with his law of love written on their hearts—a people fit for God’s new creation. When Jesus told people they needed a righteousness greater than the Pharisees if they wanted to take part in the kingdom, that’s what he was getting at. The Lord was finally giving something better than the law written on stone tablets. He was about to make a people with his law of love written on their hearts. But that people was centred in Jesus. So only those who trusted in this Messiah—this Messiah who was so different from their expectations—only those humble enough to recognise the new thing the Lord was doing in Jesus and to live by faith, trusting that Jesus really is the Lord’s answer to all the problems of the world, only they will go home justified. Only they will be able to be part of the kingdom—forgiven and filled with the Spirit, because of their faith in Jesus.This is what St. Paul is getting at in our Epistle from 1 Corinthians 15. He declares once again the good news about Jesus the Messiah who died and was buried and who rose again according to the scriptures. And he talks about the twelve who saw him and believed and about the five hundred who saw him and believed. And then there was Paul. He heard the message, but he was one of those proud Pharisees, confident that he already had the right answers, confident that he knew how the Lord was going to deliver his people—and, most of all, confident that it wasn’t through Jesus. The gospel was blasphemy as far as he was concerned. And so, he writes, he persecuted the church. And yet there’s hope. Paul was stuck. He had a mountain of faith, but it wasn’t in Jesus. The torah had been preparing Israel for Jesus all those centuries, but Paul and so many others just couldn’t see it, couldn’t make the leap. But even as he persecuted the church, the Lord was at work to transform Paul. “But by the grace of God I am what I am,” he writes, “and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”Brothers and Sisters, there’s that righteousness greater than that of the Pharisees. There’s the faith that humbles the proud and brings even the greatest sinner into the kingdom. Not because the faith is so great, but because it’s in Jesus the Messiah. It’s a faith that brings forgiveness and the life of the Spirit. Habakkuk wrote that the just shall live by faith and that’s precisely what Jesus’ people do. He gives us the very life of God, because we trust in him. And that life he gives—the law of love written on our hearts, the experience of God’s love and faithfulness revealed so dramatically in our Saviour—that life fills our hearts with a faith that overflows. And that, Brothers and Sisters, is how we live in this in-between time. It’s how those first Christians lived through the devastation of Jerusalem’s destruction. It’s how the next generation lived through Rome’s persecution. It’s how the saints lived, even as they were thrown to the lions. It’s how the saints still live in many parts of the world, imprisoned because they live by faith, tortured because they live by faith, martyred because they live by faith. And it’s how the saints have lived in the midst of a world that still isn’t right, that still anticipates the final consummation of the Lord’s new creation. We live by faith as we struggle in our work.. We live by faith as we struggle with illness or frailty or cancer. We live by faith as we struggle to bring justice and mercy to a world that is so unmerciful and lacking in justice. We live by faith as we face droughts and floods and forest fires. We live by faith in the midst of difficult and broken relationships. And we live by faith as we live out our calling to proclaim the good news about Jesus in a world that thinks us fools; faithful to our calling to holiness in a world filled with idolatry and sin. It’s how we live in hope, like Habakkuk, like the Apostles, like they martyrs, looking past this broken world and the evils of our time, and knowing that the Lord is faithful to his promises, that he will set this world to rights, and that in Jesus, he will surely finish what he has begun—we know he will, because he always has.Let’s pray: Lord God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity1 Corinthians 12:1-11 & St. Luke 19:41-47by William KlockImagine being in the crowds that surrounded Jesus as he made his way through the towns and cities to Jerusalem for the last time. By now, everyone knew who he was—or, at any rate, who he claimed to be. There were sceptics. There were believers. A lot of people weren’t sure what to believe. He wasn’t what people expect of the Messiah, but he was doing Messiah things. He was healing the sick and the blind and the lame. He cast out demons. He raised the dead. He preached good news to the poor. Think of the crowds in Jericho, the last city before Jesus climbed the mountain to Jerusalem. The crowds swarmed the road to see him, he’d healed blind Bartimaeus, and that thing with Zacchaeus! That little twerp had spent his traitorous life selling out to the Romans and ripping everyone off, but since he’d met Jesus he was a new man—even paying everyone back what he’d stolen. Everywhere that Jesus went, the promises of the Prophets of old were finally being fulfilled. Despite all the questions people had about him, there was definitely something about Jesus. That, and Passover was just days away. Jesus plus Jerusalem plus Passover! Surely something big was about to happen! Maybe the day of the Lord really was just around the corner and that got everyone out and lining the road as Jesus came through town.And then, on his way out of town, Jesus stopped and looked around. The crowd went silent. He was about to say something. “There was once a nobleman,” Jesus said, “who went to a far country to be given royal authority and then return. He summoned ten of his slaves and gave them ten silver coins. ‘Do business with these,’ he said, ‘until I come back.’ His subjects, however, hated him, and sent a delegation after him to say, ‘We don’t want this man to be our king.’“So it happened that when he received the kingship and came back again, he gave orders to summon these slaves who had received the money, so that he could find out how they had got on with their business efforts. The first came forward and said, ‘Master, your money has made ten times its value!”“ ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!” he said. ‘You’ve been faithful with something small; now you can take command of ten cities.’“The second came and said, ‘Master, your money has made five times its value!’“ ‘You too—you can take charge of five cities.’“The other came and said, ‘Master, here is your money. I kept it safe, hidden away in this handkerchief. I was afraid of you, knowing that you are a hard man. You profit where you made no investment and you harvest where you did not sow.’“ ‘I’ll condemn you out of your own mouth, you wicked servant! You knew that I’m a hard man, profiting where I haven’t invested and harvesting where I haven’t sown, so why didn’t you at least put my money in the bank? Then, at least, I’d have earned some interest when I got back!”“ ‘Take the money from him,’ he said to the bystanders, ‘and give it to the man who turned my one coin into ten!’ (‘Master,’ they said to him, ‘he’s got ten coins already!’)And then paused and he looked around at the crowd and his face was sombre and the people could tell, he wasn’t just telling a story anymore. Now he was the king from the story talking directly to them“ ‘Let me be clear,” he said, “To everyone who has will be given more; but if someone has nothing, even what he has will be taken away from him. But as for these enemies of mine, who didn’t want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in front of me.”And with that, Luke says that Jesus went on his way, setting out on that winding road up to Jerusalem. No further interactions with the crowd. No further commentary. Did the people understand? I think they must have. Of course, the problem was—as so often seems to be the case—everyone was pointing fingers at everyone else. Jesus the Messiah had come to judge—to bring God’s justice—but it was the other guys who were the problem. The Pharisees looked down on everyone who wasn’t a Pharisee. The Essenes looked down on everyone who wasn’t an Essene. The am ha’artez—the regular Joes—they looked down in return on those other folks because they were always looking down on everyone else. And the Sadducees? Pfft. Judgement. It’ll never happen—just like the resurrection of the dead will never happen. But everyone understood what Jesus was saying. He was the king finally coming back to see what his servants have been up to in his absence. The crowds already saw Jesus as part of the story of Israel. If he was the Messiah, then he was the rightful king returning to Zion to take his throne—just like the king in the parable. And that—if Jesus really was the Messiah—that meant the day of the Lord—the day when God would judge the wicked and vindicate the righteous—that meant it was coming—almost here—just like in the parable.So this was the day the prophets had spoken of. The Jewish exiles had returned to Jerusalem from Babylon hundreds of years before, they’d rebuilt the city and the temple, but the Lord’s presence had never returned. The temple, as glorious as it was—especially after Solomon’s recent renovations—the temple sat empty. The priests went about their business of offerings and sacrifices, but the cloud of glory that had once rested on the ark of the covenant, the presence of the God of Israel, had never returned and, because of that, the people questioned whether their exile had really ever ended. They were back in the promised land, but the most important part of the promised land—the presence of the Lord—was still missing. The prophet Malachi had announced that the “the Lord whom you seek” would come to the temple, but that he would come in fiery judgement. Zechariah, too, spoke of the Lord, one day, finally, returning to Zion. Again, everyone would have understood Jesus’ story. He was saying that in him, the Lord was finally returning to Jerusalem as he had promised through the Prophets. And Jesus has left them with that big question: Who will stand before the Lord’s judgement.And the part of the story about the talents entrusted to the servants made perfect sense to the people. That was them. They knew that the Lord had given them a purpose. They knew that the Lord had called Abraham, that he had delivered their ancestors from Pharoah’s bondage, that he had led them to the promised land to be a light in the midst of the nations—a witness to what it looks like to be the people who live with the Creator God in their midst. They knew that their ancestors had gone off into exile in judgement for their faithlessness and idolatry. And that judgement still hung over them. The people of Israel were called to be stewards of God’s covenant, his law, his grace and when he returned he would judge them. Had they been faithful stewards? All along the way, as Jesus made his way from Galilee to Jerusalem, he was warning the people that if they did not listen to him, if they did not repent, if they continued to treat the Lord’s covenant with disdain, the Lord’s judgement would fall on them: on the nation, on Jerusalem, and especially on the temple. Jesus is saying that in him, the God of Israel is coming and on that day of judgement, you don’t want to be that faithless servant who has been a poor steward of God’s grace and hidden away his master’s treasure in a handkerchief.Jesus reminds the people that God’s kingdom was about to come and that as much as it was good news for many, it also meant horrible judgement for a lot of them. Some of the crowd cheered, some wept happy tears, but there were some—the people invested in the status quo, the people with their own firmly entrenched ideas of what the Messiah would be like and how the Lord’s return was supposed to go down—there were some who were angry. Like those in the parable, they didn’t want this man to be their king. They couldn’t bear the thought that somehow this Jesus was actually the Messiah, let alone the Lord, the God of Israel returned to Zion.And I expect that parable raced ahead of Jesus, up the long and winding road from Jericho to Jerusalem—passed from mouth to mouth down the long line of pilgrims on their way to Passover. The parable prepared the way for Jesus to enter Jerusalem. Luke leaves out the long and tiring journey up the road from Jericho—the road where we meet the Good Samaritan in another of Jesus’ stories. From Jericho Luke takes us straight to the top of the mountains, to Bethany, as Jesus sends his friends to find the prophesied donkey. (That’s the Palm Sunday Gospel we know so well.) As Jesus rode through the crowd into Jerusalem, the people cheered him and sang messianic chants. They knew what was happening. The Lord was returning to Zion. But just like at Jericho, there were those who were angry. How dare Jesus do this! And Jesus knew, despite the crowds who welcomed him, Jesus knew that judgement was inevitable. The Pharisees were sure to remind him. There he was, riding through the crowd to their messianic chants and the Pharisees pushed their way through and they said, “Rabbi, tell your disciples to cut it out.” As far as they were concerned, this was blasphemy. Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, let alone the Lord returning to his people. That, at this kingly display was probably going to cause problems with the Romans. And with their rebuke ringing in his ears, Luke says in verse 41, that as Jerusalem came into view, Jesus stopped and wept.“If only you’d known this day—even you,” Jesus said, “the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days are coming upon you, when your enemies will build up earthworks around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and bring you crashing down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone on another, because you did not know the moment when God was visiting you.” Jesus’ tears remind us what’s at the heart of the gospel. For three years, Jesus had warned the people of Galilee that judgement was coming to the nation, to Jerusalem, and to the temple. Over and over he called his people to repent. His message hadn’t gone over any better than it had for the prophets of old, like Jeremiah, who was known for the tears he wept over his people. Jerusalem would be no different than Galilee and Jesus knew it. He’d been rejected there—they even tried to stone him once. His reception in Jerusalem was going to be even worse. And as much as he knew rejection meant his own death, that’s not why he wept. He wept for their sake. “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish,” he had said a few chapters earlier. And now he looks across the valley to Jerusalem where Pilate had just recently killed a bunch of Galileans and where the tower of Siloam had fallen, crushing people alive, and it was all just a foretaste of another, greater catastrophe soon to come. A few decades later and the hills around the city would be covered with Roman crosses, bearing executed Jews and the city and the temple would be brought crumbling down.The people had heard the warning, but they would not listen and Jesus wept. Again, not for himself or for his own coming death. And not with any sense of, “I told you so!” Jesus wept, because discipline and justice do not come from the cold heart of a distant God, but from the God who loves so deeply that he was willing to give his own life to summon his beloved to repentance, from a love that is faithful and that will set things to rights, in order to bring what’s best. A love that wept over a rebellious people intent on their own agendas and their own interests, who refused to be stewards of his goodness and grace.And the temple—the temple was at the heart of it all. There’s a reason why Jesus went straight to the temple when he entered Jerusalem. That was what the Messiah was supposed to do. And so Luke goes on in verses 45-48:He went into the temple and began to throw out the traders, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.” And he was teaching daily in the temple. But the chief priests and the scribes and the leading men of the people were trying to destroy him. They couldn’t find any way to do it, because all the people were hanging on his words. If all we take away from this is that it was Jesus’ angry protest of the commercialisation of the temple, we’ll have missed the point. This is another of his acted-out prophecies. It’s a warning—in the vein of Jeremiah—that if the temple becomes the hide-out of a bunch of robbers, it will fall under the Lord’s judgement. And, of course, that’s just what had happened. But the robbers weren’t necessarily who we might at first think. The money-changers and the folks selling animals for sacrifice had to be there. Roman coinage wasn’t allowed in the temple. People needed animals for their sacrifices and not everyone could bring one from home. Maybe the exchange rates and the prices were gouging the people, but the real robbers were the priests and leaders of Israel, who were robbing God in far more important ways.The temple stood at the heart of Jewish identity. It represented the covenant between the Lord and his people. And even though the cloud of his glory had never returned to it after the exile, it was still seen as that one place on earth where heaven and earth, where God and human beings met. And so it was the symbol of the Lord’s faithfulness to Israel, of the sureness of his covenant promises. But in return the leaders of Israel used the temple to put on a show of faithfulness. The overt idolatry, the altars to Baal and Asherah that sent Israel into exile were long gone, but the leaders of Israel had found other ways to be unfaithful to the Lord. They lived as if a mere outward façade of faithfulness would bring his blessings and Jesus has been reminding them over and over and over, that the only real response to the Lord’s covenant faithfulness is faithfulness and obedience in return. Disobedience to the Lord’s covenant doesn’t just result in a lack of blessing. No, if you’re in covenant with the Lord, disobedience eventually calls down judgement. The Lord will set this world to rights and if the people he has called to be stewards of his grace for the sake of the world will not be true to their calling, he will remove them from that stewardship and give it to another—just as in the parable. The leaders of Israel had done nothing with their talent but bury it in the ground. Soon it would be time to take it and give it to another.Again, this wasn’t unexpected. Throughout his ministry Jesus had pointed—sometimes subtly and other times not-so-subtly—to the fact that the temple’s days were numbered and that, in him, the Lord was doing something new. Maybe the greatest hints were those times when he announced the forgiveness of sins, without people having to go to the trouble of offering a sacrifice. Repeatedly, Jesus bypassed the priests and the temple and offered, himself, what the temple had offered the people. Later, he would announce that he would tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days. All of this was blasphemy to the priests and to the scribes and the Pharisees. And they never did grasp what he meant when he said he would rebuild the temple in three days, but those who saw him raised from the dead did. Jesus was the new temple. Heaven and earth, God and man no longer meeting in a building on the mountaintop, but now meeting in Jesus himself. In him we meet the God of Israel. In him we know his justice, but in him we also know his grace and his mercy and his love as he weeps for those about to face God’s wrath, as he prays for the very people who crucified him. In him, most of all, we see the profound faithfulness of God and his worthiness to receive glory and praise.And then the amazing thing. As the Lord judged the old Israel for her unfaithfulness to her calling, in Jesus he creates a new people, a new Israel, and establishes a new covenant—a covenant this time ratified with his blood shed at the cross and in the pouring out of his own Spirit on his people. We go from Jesus, in whom God and man, heaven and earth intersect, to his church—to a people—in whom the Lord himself dwells. The old Israel looked to a law written on stone tablets, while the new—while we—live with the law written by the Spirit of God on our own hearts. And in the same way, the old Israel looked to a temple of bricks and mortar on the mountaintop above Jerusalem, but by his Spirit, Jesus has made us the new temple. He incorporates us into his ministry. As we saw a couple of weeks ago. We have been adopted we share in his inheritance. And so, because our Lord is prophet, priest, and king, we too as a people share in his prophetic, priestly, and ruling ministry.In our Epistle today, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, St. Paul reminded the Christians in Corinth of their calling—of the riches the Lord had entrusted to them. The Spirit had empowered them with amazing gifts, but like the old Israel, they’d forgotten their calling and were using those gifts for their own agendas—again, burying the king’s wealth in the ground—turning the Lord’s temple into a den of robbers. Paul writes:There are different types of spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are different kinds of service, but the same Lord; and there are different types of activities, but it is the same God who operates them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. (1 Corinthians 12:4-7)This leads Paul into Chapter 13, where he writes about the nature and supremacy of love. “Love never ends,” he says. These other gifts are temporary, but they’re meant to build up love. They’re meant to create a community of people who will be stewards of God’s grace—a community of people redeemed and made new by his own blood, shed at the cross, a people who, by his grace, have a share in his new creation, a priestly and prophetic people called to go out as the Messiah’s royal heralds to proclaim that he has died, that he has risen, and that he is the world’s true Lord. A people who live with the Lord in their midst and who show the world his faithfulness, to show the world that he is worthy of glory and praise.Brothers and Sisters, that’s us. Like Israel in Jesus’s day, we live in an in-between time. One day the Lord will return again to judge the earth, when the gospel has done its work, when every last one of his enemies has been put under his feet, when he comes to remove every last vestige of sin and rebellion and to set everything to rights, to wipe away every tear, and bring his new creation in all its fulness. But in anticipation of that day, we are his stewards, empowered by his Spirit and entrusted with the gospel, with the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.And as Christendom wanes—at least in our part of the world—and as the darkness creeps back in, there’s a powerful sense in which we, the church, are coming to know exile as the old Israel once did. Brothers and Sisters, that exile is a call to faithfulness, a call to remember that Jesus is king, and call to remember that his gospel and his Spirit will accomplish what he’s sent them to do. And that means that as stewards of his gospel and his Spirit, we will accomplish what he has chosen and called us to do—to be stewards of his grace, to be his royal heralds proclaiming his death and resurrection and his lordship until he comes again. No matter how dark it gets, no matter how hated and despised we may be, the Lord is always faithful to his promises. He is our hope and he never fails. May we be faithful with the treasures of the gospel and the Spirit he has entrusted to us, that one day he may say, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”Let’s pray: Let your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of your humble servants; and, that we may obtain what we ask of you, teach us to ask for those things that please you, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after TrinitySt. Luke 16:1-9by William KlockThe Pharisees and the legal experts were grumbling. They’d come to meet with Jesus, but as Luke tells us, the tax-collectors and the sinners were coming close to Jesus and listening to him. The Pharisees didn’t associate with people like that and neither should Jesus, if he really was the Messiah. You can practically hear their teeth grinding as that one Pharisee spits out with disdain and disgust, “This fellow welcomes sinners! He even eats with them!” If the kingdom of God was ever going to come, it certainly wasn’t going to come that way!But Jesus, oh so patiently, sat down in response and told them a series of three stories. We know them well. He started with a story about a shepherd hunting high and low for a lost sheep. And then he told a second story about a poor old widow hunting high and low for a precious lost coin. And he told—you could see the joy on his face as he said it—he told how the shepherd rejoiced when he found his lost sheep and how the widow rejoiced when she found her lost coin. And he looked at the Pharisees with that look that only Jesus could give and asked, “Wouldn’t you rejoice, too, if that were you? The heavenly court rejoices like that when a sinner repents? Why can’t you?” And then the third story, the one about the presumptuous ne’er-do-well son who demanded an early inheritance from his father, then went off to live like a reprobate in a foreign, pagan land and only wised up when he squandered his last penny. The lost son went home to his father, who rejoiced, just like the shepherd and the widow. What was lost had been found. But the boy’s older brother refused to join in the celebration. He got angry and raged at his father: “This son of yours squandered your livelihood with his whores, and now you’ve killed the fattened calf for him!” Like the Pharisees, he sat out in the darkness grumbling over repentant sinners. They were the longsuffering faithful ones. When the Messiah comes, he was supposed to throw a party for them!That third story, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, is supposed to be our Gospel today, but it wasn’t always. Back in the late 1920s the men who revised the Prayer Book—in the US and in Scotland—they changed it. Before that—and still in Prayer Books in other countries—the Gospel for today is the bit of Luke that comes next, right after the story of the prodigal son. It was that way for well over a thousand years. In part they changed the Gospel for today because of the rise of theological liberalism. They had a watered down doctrine of the inspiration of the Bible and they came to think that some parts of the Bible weren’t appropriate for public reading in the church. But, I think, their main reason is that the traditional Gospel for today is really, really difficult. Not necessarily difficult in the sense of being especially demanding on those of us who hear it (although it may be), but just plain difficult to understand. What did Jesus mean? It’s not easy to say. And so, when the Prayer Book was being revised, the folks in charge of the lectionary took the opportunity to take out a hard passage and to slip in an easy and familiar one. And I’ve always preached on that easy and familiar story of the prodigal son, but today—maybe despite my better judgement—I’d like to look at that other Gospel, the one Christians were reading on this day going back maybe as far as fifteen-hundred years.Like I said, Jesus was telling those stories to the grumbling Pharisees in the fifteenth chapter of Luke, but then we turn the page to the sixteenth chapter and Luke said that “Jesus also said to his disciples…” As Luke tells the story, there’s no break. Maybe we can grant that the Pharisees, offended by Jesus’ parables, are walking away and it’s now just the disciples. There’s a connection, somehow, between these two scenes. Jesus was talking to the Pharisees and now he turns to his disciples and he also says:Once there was a rich man [a tycoon] who had a steward, and charges were laid against him that he was squandering his property. So he called him in and said to him, “What’s all this I hear bout you? Present an account of your stewardship, because you cannot be my manager any longer.”He's fired—and for cause.So he [the now former manager] said to himself, “What am I going to do? My master is taking my stewardship from me! I can’t do manual labour and I’m ashamed to beg… Ha! I know what I’ll do—so that people will welcome me into their houses after I’m fired from being steward.”So he called his master’s debtors to him, one by one. “How much,” he asked the first, “do you owe my master?”“A hundred measure of olive oil,” he replied“Take your bill,” he said, “sit down quickly, and make it fifty.”“To another he said, “And how much do you owe?”“A hundred measure of wheat,” he replied“Take your bill,” he said, “and make it eighty.”And the master praised the dishonest steward because he had acted wisely. The children of this world, you see, are wiser than the children of light when it comes to dealing with their own generation.So I tell you this: use unrighteous wealth to make friends for yourselves. Then when it gives out, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings. So what’s going on and what’s Jesus getting at. The first part of that isn’t has hard as the second. This man had a very desirable job. Some men were known to sell themselves into slavery to be this kind of manger for a rich estate. Think of Joseph in Egypt managing all of Potiphar’s affairs. It was prestigious and the pay was very good, but it also obviously required a high level of trust. The manager managed while the rich man was off in the world enjoying his profits. But in this case something went wrong. When Jesus talks about this man squandering the business, he uses the same word he used to describe the prodigal son squandering his inheritance. While the cats away, the mouse gets to playing and suddenly the cheques going out to the rich man are getting smaller. So the rich man comes home to fire his manager and to find someone who will keep the profits rolling in consistently.But since they didn’t keep records the way we do, the rich man demands his manager—as his last duty—provide him with an accounting of the business that he can give to whomever he hires as his new manager. But when the manager leaves the meeting, he’s not thinking about his accounting. He’s desperately thinking how he can maintain the good life he’s become accustomed to. He’s not going to go out and dig ditches and he’s too proud to beg. But then that account. He gets a brilliant idea.He starts calling in the rich man’s debtors. In each of them comes with the receipt for his loan. The first man owes a hundred measures of oil. The second one owes a hundred measures of wheat. These are not small sums. This is sort of the First Century equivalent of a military contract for feeding the army. And he says to the first man, “Cross out one hundred and make it fifty. To the second he says, “Cross out one hundred and make it eighty.” You can imagine how happy the debtors were when they left those meetings. They had a new best friend, which was exactly what the manager was going for.But what’s he doing? Because to us, at face value, it looks like he’s taking advantage of his master not knowing the business and now he’s ripping him off to ingratiate himself with these other men. He was dishonest in his earlier management, but for what he does here, he gets praise from both the rich man and Jesus—and that doesn’t make sense if he’s just compounding his dishonestly and driving the business further into a hole. This is why preachers avoid this parable and Prayer Book revisers drop it from the lectionary.If, however, we dig up the cultural and historical background to a text like this, it clears a lot up.[1] When we do that we find that even though the torah forbade charging interest, it was still a common practise. They had ways to keep it off the books. Maybe the manager would call it his “commission” or they’d pad the receipt. You couldn’t loan someone 10 denarii and write them a receipt for 10 denarii that also demanded an additional denarii each month or a penalty for late payment. That was against the law. But what you could do is loan someone 10 denarii and write them a receipt for 20. They only borrowed ten. You knew and they knew that the other 10 denarii were interest, but since the receipt simply indicated a debt of 20 denarii there was nothing anyone could do about it.So we figure out that on top of squandering the rich man’s profits, the manager has also been charging interest or a “commission”. That’s what he writing off when he tells these men to write down their receipts. Over and over he does this with each of his master’s debtors. Imagine how happy they are to have their debts cut so dramatically.When he left the meeting with his master he was out of work and knew that no one would hire him. Word would get around about his dishonesty. But now he’s countered that. He isn’t really being honest—he’s still motivated by self-preservation—but others might think that he’s turned over a new leaf and that he’s going to start doing business honestly. Ultimately his goal is to ingratiate himself into their hospitality. In verse 4 he thinks to himself that if he does this, these people will “receive” him into their houses. In Greek he uses this same word when he tells each of his master’s debtors to “take”—literally to “receive”—their bills. He’s expecting some quid pro quo, some tit for tat. As they receive their reduced bills, with any luck he’ll receive their gratitude and hospitality.And, as we read, in verse 8, the rich man, when he hears about all this, he commends him.The master praised the dishonest steward because he had acted wisely. To be clear, Jesus isn’t calling him the “dishonest steward” because he wrote off the interest. That—even if the motive was selfish—that was actually an honest thing to do. He was dishonest in his management—and, knowing how such people are, he’s probably still dishonest—but the point now is that he has acted wisely to preserve himself in a difficult situation.That’s the parable itself. Knowing the background behind first century management and lending practises helps us sort out the difficulties of the story. But understanding what the manager was up to is only half the reason this parable is so difficult. We still have to ask what Jesus’ point was in telling it. Jesus says to his disciples:The master praised the dishonest steward because he had acted wisely. The children of this world, you see, are wiser than the children of light when it comes to dealing with their own generation.So I tell you this: use unrighteous wealth to make friends for yourselves. Then when it gives out, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings. I can’t help but think that even though Luke presents this as a parable, that it was probably a real story and that Jesus opened it saying something like, “You remember that guy—the guy who managed that huge estate over in Capernaum—the guy who got fired when he lost a whole year’s profit in a shady business scheme and then got fired—remember that guy?” Just maybe the rich man in the story was one of those grumbling Pharisees. I say that, because Jesus’ point is that people really do these kinds of things to save themselves from trouble. They lie and they cheat and then when they get caught and trouble comes, like the dishonest manager, they scramble to fix things to stave off disaster. And Jesus compares these shrewd or prudent “sons of this world” with the “sons of light”. This is where the story becomes difficult again. Who are the “sons of light”? I’ve read some pretty good commentary that argues that the sons of light are Jesus’ followers. Jesus has been preaching that judgement is coming and here he’s saying that they’d better use their worldly goods to find some way to escape it or find a way through it. The problem is that if the sons of light are Jesus’ disciples too many parts of the story don’t add up. It’s a good idea, but it comes from a common way of approaching the gospels that ignores the real historical setting in which Jesus was living and preaching and, instead, spiritualises or tries to universalise his message as if he could be preaching to anyone anywhere.But Jesus didn’t come to just anyone and he didn’t come at some random time or some random place. Jesus came at a strategic point in history and, more specifically, he came as the culmination and fulfilment of Israel’s story. Israel’s mission was to carry the Lord’s blessing to the nations, but she failed. And so Jesus came, not just as the Messiah—not just as the long-expected king in the line of David. He also came as Daniel’s “Son of Man”—he came as Israel’s representative. He took up her mission and where she had failed, he succeeded. Where the Lord’s letter of redemption and restoration of creation had stalled out in Israel’s post office, Jesus delivered it to the entire world.So at the core of Jesus’ ministry was the proclamation that in him the kingdom had arrived and that in him God is now king. And for these three years he spent proclaiming that message and travelling throughout Galilee and Judea, what he was really doing was calling Israel—the children of light—to follow him. He was picking up where she had failed, but she could still take part in his mission if she would only cast aside her wrong ideas about God and his plan and follow Jesus as he manifested his lordship to the world, by seeking out the lost and by conquering sin and death as he died on the cross and rose from the grave.Jesus is preaching to Israel here. He’s giving commentary on her history and calling her to repentance. And that means that the rich man in the story is the Lord. He is rich. He created the cosmos and he created humanity so that he could share his riches of love and grace with us. And when we rebelled and rejected him, he called Abraham to carry his message of grace to the nations. Abraham and then Israel, the nation descended from him, were called to be the Lord’s managers in this world. But just as the manager in the parable squandered his master’s riches, Israel squandered the Lord’s riches of grace. And now judgement is coming. The manager in the story saw judgement coming and had the sense to act decisively and to do something even though it meant giving up his riches. But in contrast, as Israel faced the Lord’s judgement for squandering his riches, most of the people were going about their lives as if they had nothing to worry about. The Sadducees were firm in their denial of any need to change the status quo. Of all the people in Israel, the Pharisees knew that something had to change and that the people had to turn to God. But the solution of the Pharisees was to turn the light they had been given into darkness. Instead of using the law God had given Israel as a means of carrying light into the darkness, the Pharisees kept the light to themselves and condemned everyone left in the dark. Instead of seeking out the lost, they condemned them. The law wasn’t enough; they had to add to it, making it burdensome, not unlike the dishonest manager who had padded his debtor’s bills with heavy interest loads.So in the parable, Jesus is warning Israel. It’s not just that judgement is coming, but to escape judgment, God’s people had to act and they had to act now. They had to repent and they had to repent now. And that meant letting go and potentially giving up all the things they held dear. We’ve seen Jesus pointing this direction throughout his ministry. A new age and a new kingdom were coming in which blood ties with Abraham wouldn’t matter anymore—what will matter is allegiance to Jesus the King. He is Israel himself and true Israelites, true sons and daughters of Abraham, will be those who find their identity in him. They also had to let go of the land, because this new kingdom isn’t about a place—again, it’s about Jesus himself. And they had to let go of the temple. In this new kingdom the Lord’s presence is no longer found in temples of stone, but in hearts of flesh—in the hearts of those who are in Jesus and filled with the Spirit.Jesus says, “Use unrighteous wealth to make friends for yourselves. Then when it gives out, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings.” These aren’t easy words to translate and it’s hard to say exactly what Jesus meant, but it seems that like the manager in the story, they—and we—need to be ready to give up the things of the kingdom that is passing away in order to be welcomed into the kingdom that is being inaugurated by Jesus. This was Jesus’ word of warning to his disciples, to the Pharisees, and to the people of Israel.And again, we need to remember the real history that surrounds and weaves its way through the New Testament. Jesus wasn’t warning the Jews of some far off spiritual day of reckoning; he was warning of imminent destruction coming in a very tangible and earthly way—before this generation passes away, he said. Interestingly enough, the Jerusalem Church escaped when the judgement Jesus warned about came to Jerusalem. Josephus in his Jewish War and Eusebius in his History of the Church both tell us that the Christians received a divine warning and fled to Pella, in what it now Jordan. They took the decisive action Jesus talks about in the parable, they left everything behind, and they were spared when the Romans destroyed the city and the temple.Brothers and sisters, the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise of judgement in the First Century serves as a warning to us that his promise of final judgement will also be fulfilled. And so we now need to ask if we’ve been good and honest stewards of God’s grace. Have we been good and honest stewards of the Good News? Have we lived it? Have we proclaimed it? Or have we kept it to ourselves? Have we become self-righteous and used our kingdom status to condemn the lost rather than to seek them out? Have we added heavy burdens to the Good News? The heart of the Good News is that Jesus is Lord, but like the dishonest manager, are we trying to get our cut too—lining our pockets or feeding our spiritual pride? Or are we preaching the unfettered Good News that Jesus is Lord and that at the cross and at the grave he conquered sin and death.And to what do we hold too closely? Is our priority in life the wealth that Jesus talks about in the story? Whether rich or poor, we have a powerful tendency to hold on to money and possessions for security. But brothers and sisters, money and possessions are part of the kingdom that is passing away. Even the dishonest manager understood that. All his profit would do him no good when judgement came, and so he let it go that he might find a way to survive in what was for him a new age. The same goes for us. Are we clinging to the things of this fading kingdom—to things that will not last or that will be of no value in the kingdom of God—or are we using them as tools to further God’s kingdom and God’s plans and to ensure that we have a place in his kingdom?Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, we pray, the spirit always to think and do those things that are right; that we who cannot do anything good without you, may in your strength live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.[1] See J. Duncan M. Derrett, “Fresh Light on St Luke xvi.1. The Parable of the Unjust Steward,” in New Testament Studies 7 (1960-61), pp. 198-219 and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “The Story of the Dishonest Manager (Lk 16:1-13),” in Theological Studies 25 (1964), pp. 23-42.
A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after TrinityRomans 8:12-17 & St. Matthew 7:15-21by William KlockJesus sat on the mountainside with a great crowd of people spread out all around. They hung on his every word as he announced the coming of God’s kingdom. This is what Israel had been waiting for years—for centuries. Here was the prophet like Moses, promised all the way back in Deuteronomy. Here he was, like Moses, on the mountain. But this time, instead of stone tablets with God’s law written on them, Jesus was describing a kingdom in which God’s law of love is inscribed on the hearts of its people—transforming them, setting them right from the inside out. Just as the law given by Moses described the things that separated the people of God from everyone else—who was in and who was out—Jesus described what the people of God’s new kingdom were to be like—this new people, filled with the very Spirit of God. But then, knowing how people are and knowing how Israel had fallen so many times in the past, Jesus ended his “Sermon on the Mount” with a series of warnings. First he warned against going with the flow. Repentance is hard and really changing is even harder. Jesus was at odds with the leaders of the Jews—most of all because of the things he said about the temple. Its days were coming to an end. God would build a new one—but this one would be made, not of stone, but of people—men and women indwelt by God himself. Jesus knew it would be easy for people to just stick with the old way of doing things and so he warned: “Go in by the narrow gate. It’s a tight squeeze and not many will find their way through, but that’s the way to life.” And then—this where today’s Gospel picks up—Jesus warns, “Watch out for false prophets!” Oh, they knew all about that. Everybody knew how, back in the days leading up the Exile, the real prophets had declared the word of the Lord and called Israel and her leaders to repentance, but that the kings and the priests, and most everybody else instead listened to the false prophets who assured them that, in fact, everything was fine just as it was and that they had nothing to worry about. The false prophets led the people straight into judgement. Nobody wanted a repeat of that! But, of course, the problem with false prophets is that no one ever thinks their favourite prophet could possibly be false. Jesus knew that in the coming years, spokesmen for the status quo—for the wide and easy way—would arise from amongst the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the Zealots and the Essenes and they would preach passionately that their way was the real way, the true way—God’s way. Missiologist Ed Stetzer likes to say, “If you want people to like you, don’t become a pastor; sell ice cream.” There’s an even better way: Assure people that God’s cool with them just the way they are and with the things they’re already doing. People will love you to death. That’s precisely what Jesus was warning the people about that day.Let’s look again at our Gospel, beginning with Matthew 7:15. Jesus said,Watch out for false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inside they are ravenous wolves! You’ll be able to tell them by the fruit they bear: you don’t find grapes growing on thorn bushes, do you, or figs on thistles? Well, in the same way, good trees produce good fruit, and bad trees produce bad fruit. Good trees can’t produce bad fruit, nor can bad ones produce good fruit! Every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So, you must recognise them by their fruits. And then, in verse 21, Jesus gets even sharper with his warning:Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven; only people who do the will of my Father in heaven. [That’s the fruit we should be looking for.] On that day lots of people will say to me, “Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name, didn’t we? We cast out demons in your name! We performed lots of powerful deeds in your name!” Then I will say to them, “I never knew you! You’re a bunch of evildoers. Go away from me!” Judgement was coming to Israel. We have a bad tendency to pull Jesus’ words and especially his warnings out of context, to pull them out of history, and to push them into some point far in the future and when we do that, we strip out the urgency. One day there will be a judgement that comes to the whole earth, but Jesus’ horizon was the judgement that would come on Judah and on Jerusalem and the temple in about forty years—a judgement that would put an end to all the things and ways of the past and that would vindicate him and his people and this whole “new covenant”. It would bring an end to the first act in the story and draw back the curtains on the second.In light of that, I think it’s good to recap the story. God’s creation was a disaster and it all went wrong because human beings rebelled against him. Even wiping out the entire human race and starting over with the one, last righteous man and his family didn’t solve the problem. So in that dark world the Lord called Abraham out of the nations. He made himself known to Abraham and most of all he showed Abraham his goodness and his faithfulness so that Abraham could be a witness to that goodness and faithfulness. And the Lord made Abraham into a people, a nation, and he did the same with them. Over and over he showed them his goodness and his faithfulness. He made them promises and then he did what he said. When they were slaves in Egypt, he rescued them, he cared for them in the wilderness, and he led them into the promised land and gave them wells they hadn’t dug and cities they hadn’t built. He gave them his law, he gave them a king, and most importantly he lived in their midst. The other nations had temples and in those temples were idols of wood or gold or stone that were blind, deaf, dumb, and powerless. But in the midst of Israel was the tabernacle where the glory of the Lord rested on the ark of the covenant. A real, living God who was good and who was faithful and proved it to his own people before the watching eyes of the world.Again, Israel was to be a witness to the nations. The nations were supposed to see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord reflected in the corporate life of his people. As they lived in his presence and as they trusted in him and were obedient to his law. They were also supposed to be the righteous benchmark by which the Lord would one day judge the nations when he came to put an end to their wickedness and to set his world to rights.But over and over Israel failed to be that witness and to be that benchmark. The Lord sent prophets to call his people to repentance, but they rejected his prophets. Sometimes they even killed them. Instead, they listened to false prophets who told them everything was fine. The Lord even sent his people into exile. The promised land was his. It was holy. And if they weren’t going to be holy too, then they could not live in his land or in his presence. First the northern tribes were conquered and scattered by the Assyrians and then the southern tribes were conquered by the Babylonians. Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed and the people were taken off in captivity to live in a foreign, pagan land. The Lord was faithful to his promises when he disciplined his people, and, again, he was faithful to his promises when he returned them to the land. But the people were still fickle. They still served him with divided loyalties.And so, after a long string of prophets whom the people rejected, the Lord finally sent his own son. He sent his son to proclaim his soon-to-come judgement on Israel and to call his people to repentance. But he also sent his son to be the faithful Israelite, the Israelite who would single-mindedly serve him, the Israelite who would obey the law, the Israelite who would be that holy and righteous benchmark, the Israelite who would ultimately die the death that his sinful people deserved and become a sacrifice for their sins.The key point here with regard to today’s Gospel is that Jesus came to announce that the Lord was about to judge his people and to call them to repentance. Those who refused to repent—those who listened to the false prophets, who carried on down the easy, wide way, would face death and destruction in a generation. And with that announcement came a call to repentance. There was a narrow way that would lead through that judgement to life. It wasn’t an easy way. Just as Jesus was mocked and rejected and eventually put to death, so those who repented and followed him would walk a similar path. At the beginning of this same Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said to them, “Blessed are you when people slander you and persecute you, and say all kinds of wicked things about you falsely because of me. Celebrate and rejoice: there’s a great reward for you in heaven. That’s how they persecuted the prophets who went before you.” On the other side of that rejection was life—life in a new people of God who would be filled with his own Spirit and who, because of that, would have a righteousness greater than the Pharisees. They would finally be the people who would be faithful to the Lord and, most of all, in whom the nations would see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord, so that they, in turn, would come in faith to bring him glory. The nations would see reflected in this new Israel the glory of a god unlike any of the gods they had ever known and so God’s glory would spread and his new creation would grow. And all those who found themselves in Jesus the Messiah would find this gift of the Spirit a foretaste, a down-payment on that day when the gospel has done its work, when the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, and when death itself is finally defeated. On that day God will raise them all to new life, just as he has raised Jesus, and they will live forever in his presence in a world set to rights once and for all.But that narrow way in the meantime was going to be hard. If it wasn’t slander and persecution, false prophets would try to lure them down the easy way—to go with the flow—straight into judgement. And so Jesus warned them: Look for good fruit. It’s not their zeal or even the miracles they might perform; pay attention to their fruit. Do you see God’s new creation unveiled in them? Do they show the life of the Spirit? Or are they still invested in the ways and things that are passing away? Are they still focused on a law written on stone or have their hearts been transformed by Jesus and the Spirit? The prophets reflected the state of the nation. In a few short years judgement would fall on Jerusalem and people would be crying out to the Lord for deliverance. But the Lord knows his own by their fruit and these had borne none, because they’d rejected Jesus and instead listened to fruitless prophets. In contrast, Jesus says, “Those who do the will of my Father in heaven”—those who have found their identity in me and have been filled with my Spirit—they’re the ones who will fulfil the law and, because of that, because of the fruit the Spirit causes them to bear, they’ll be known by the Father.Now, to change gears just a little bit, this is where Paul picks up in our Epistle from Romans 8. Jesus knew that his people would face rejection and opposition and persecution—even martyrdom—for the sake of following him. He knew they would be confronted by false prophets who would tell them that everything was fine and that they were foolish for following Jesus. And Paul was shepherding people in very similar situations. He saw fellow Jewish believers, even out in the gentile world, being hassled and harassed by their fellow Jews for the sake of their faith in Jesus. Sometimes their fellow Jews would even be so angry with them that they’d rat them out to the Roman authorities for being disloyal citizens of the empire. But, too, the people in these churches in places like Rome or Asia Minor faced harassment from their pagan neighbours and even from the civil and religious authorities. At the time Paul wrote this in the 50s, there wasn’t any official persecution of Christians by the Romans, but Paul could see that it was eventually going to come. People don’t like it when you expose their sin and warn of coming judgement. The Jews didn’t like it when Jesus did it. And Paul, seeing it on a small scale already, knew that the gentiles wouldn’t like it when it was their turn. Caesar definitely wouldn’t like it, because of course, to proclaim that Jesus is Lord is, at the same time, to proclaim that Caesar is not. When persecution came, it would be easy for believers to turn away from Jesus because of their fear. And there would be false prophets proclaiming to the churches that everything was fine, that compromise was okay—like the Judaisers in Galatians or the Nicolaitans in Revelation.So Paul exhorts the Christians in Rome to stand firm. The Lord has called them and made them his witnesses and they have no reason to fear. Look again at Romans 8:12-21:So then, brothers, debtors we are, but not to human flesh, to live our life in that way. If you live in accordance with the flesh, you will die; but if, by the Spirit, you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God, you see, are God’s children. You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery, did you, to go back again into a state of fear? But you received the spirit of sonship, in whom we call out “Abba, Father!” When that happens, it is the Spirit himself giving supporting witness to what our own spirit is saying: that we are God’s children. And if we are children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, and fellow heirs with the Messiah, as long as we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. “Look,” Paul is saying, “Israel was captive to the flesh. They had God’s good law to live by, but it was written on tablets of stone and their hearts were full of the same poison as the hearts of the rest of the human race. The Lord poured out his love on them and they should have loved him wholeheartedly in return, but their hearts were broken, set on sin and on self—and so they could never return the Lord’s love. Not truly. They had—and their descendants still have –reason to fear. The Lord will judge their unfaithfulness.” But, says Paul, “You are different. Not only have you been forgiven through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, but God has poured his own Spirit into you and that makes all the difference. The Spirit renews your minds and regenerates your heart. The law that was once written on stone—the law that we sum up in those words about loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbour as yourself—the Spirit writes that law on our hearts. If we are in Jesus the Messiah, the law is no longer a stone tablet we look at and say, ‘I wish I could do that.’ Now it’s written on our hearts. It’s our desire. It’s what we value, because of the Spirit.” Paul says that we still have to put to death our old ways, but it’s this gift of God’s own Spirit that makes it possible. And it’s always good to remember that the Lord does not give his gifts in vain.Brothers and Sisters, it’s good at this point to pause and let this sink in. I think we often forget that there’s a bigger purpose behind all of this. We know that sin is wrong. We know that through Jesus our sins are forgiven. We know that the Spirit turns our hearts away from sin to righteousness. We know that we’re supposed to put away the old man and put on the new and live in the Spirit. But I think we sometimes forget that forgiveness and righteousness aren’t ends in themselves. Again, remember the story. Remember why God created a people for himself in the first place. Think of Abraham in the midst of that big, dark world lost in sin and with no knowledge of the Lord. Abraham and his family were to be witnesses to the Lord—to make him known, to be light in the darkness, to show that the Lord is good and faithful, different from the gods of the pagans, and worthy of the worship of the nations. And this people, too, was to be the benchmark by which the nations were one day to be judged. The old Israel failed and so God gave Jesus and the Spirit to create a new Israel—a new people to be both a light to the nations and the righteous benchmark by which they will one day be judged. God’s people have always had this dual ministry to the world—to be both a priestly and prophetic people. As priests we mediate the presence and knowledge of God to the nations and as prophets we stand as—or we should stand—as God’s benchmark of righteousness, calling the nations to repentance and showing forth his standard—showing the world what humanity was created to be.If that seems like a lot. If it seems like an impossibly high calling, Paul goes on saying that we were once slaves to sin, but through Jesus and the Spirit we have been set free and adopted as sons of God. Brothers and Sisters, by the Spirit we are incorporated into the story of Jesus the Messiah. Because we have the Spirit, we belong to him. We are, as Paul so often likes to say, “in the Messiah”. And if we go back a few verses, Paul tells us that the God who “raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead will also give life to [our] mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in [us].” I think this part of Romans is usually read as if Paul is talking about conversion, but it’s really much deeper than that. Paul is talking about how believers are taken up into the story of Jesus and participate in his suffering and resurrection. To be filled with the Spirit is to be absolutely and completely assured that one day the Lord will raise our mortal (and in some cases martyred) bodies from the dead, just as he raised Jesus from the dead. This is the root of faith. This is what those Christians in Rome needed to remember and believe with all their hearts when persecution and tribulation came.And if they’ll do that—in the power of the Spirit—Paul says they will become “sons of God”. It’s about participation in the story and life in Jesus as adopted sons of God—it’s especially powerful when we let Paul’s words stand without changing it to sons and daughters or to children of God. He writes “sons of God” for a reason, just as he writes about crying out “Abba, Father” for a reason. Both make it clear he’s talking about our being incorporated into Jesus the Messiah and into his story. Think back to Jesus crying out to his Father in Gethsemane the night before he was crucified. Jesus’ people cry with him, “Abba, Father”. The Lord is no distant god. Brothers and Sisters, because we are in his Son by faith, we too are his sons and daughters and have the privilege to cry out to him as Father just as Jesus did. And Paul recalls that prayer in the garden for a reason. That was Jesus’ prayer to his Father, his prayer as he was about to face his own death, it was his prayer that his Father would take that horrible cup from him. But it was also a prayer of faith as he submitted himself to his Father’s plan. We know that Paul is saying to the Romans that when that same cup of persecution and maybe even martyrdom comes to them, they can cry out to their Father with the same confidence that Jesus did, they can submit in faith to his plan the same way Jesus did, and they can know that the Father holds them in his hands the same way he held Jesus. And, I think most important, they can expect that the Father will vindicate them the same way he vindicated Jesus. They can know that one day the Father will raise them from the dead to share in the life of his new creation.If they will let themselves be taken up in the story of Jesus the Messiah—something they can’t do on their own power, but they can in the power of the Spirit—if they suffer with the Messiah and walk his narrow and difficult path, they will be heirs with him—and his inheritance, his glory will be theirs.Brothers and Sisters, those first Christians, whether they were in Jerusalem and facing the wrath of their fellow Jews or whether they were in Rome facing the wrath of the pagans—in a few years facing the wrath of the Emperor Nero who would throw them to lions or burn them alive—Paul reminds them who they are in Jesus and the Spirit. They are the people of God, a people washed clean by the blood of Jesus and a people made righteous by the Spirit, a people called to be prophets and priests. Their calling was to stand before the tsunami of the world’s wrath calling sinful men and women to repentance, while mediating the loving grace of God—proclaiming the good news that Jesus has died, that he is risen, and that life, that participation in God’s new creation can be known through him.Brothers and Sisters, judgement fell on Jerusalem and the Lord proved himself faithful to his promises as he delivered the church there from destruction. And the gospel went out to the Greeks and Romans and the Lord showed himself faithful again. Through the gospel and through the faithful witness of his people, an entire empire believed. With the biblical witness itself and with that history behind us, we have every reason to trust Jesus and the Spirit ourselves. We now live on the other side of Christendom. We don’t know what will happen. The gospel marches on in other parts of the world, but in ours, darkness is creeping back in. I doubt that we will know martyrdom the way Paul and so many of those First Century believers did, but we will know in some way the wrath of the world as we stand as prophets and priests, confronting a rebellious world. Stand firm. Do not listen to the false prophets who call for compromise and for the easy way. Do not fear the wrath of the world, for we are in Jesus the Messiah and bear the life of God’s Spirit. We are sons and daughters of the Father and no matter how bad things get, we can cry out with Jesus, “Abba, Father!” and know that he hears us. He gave his Son for our sake, why would we think he would abandon us now? And because we are united with the risen Jesus, because we are sons and daughters of God, we know that on the other side of all our troubles and sorrows lies our inheritance—as we confess in the Creed, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.Let’s pray: Father, through the redeeming death and resurrection of your Son and through the regenerating work of your Spirit, you have made us your people. You have given us the task to stand as both prophets and priests, confronting this rebellious world and mediating your grace. Strengthen us, we pray, that we might stand firm in this calling no matter what trials and tribulations we may face. Make us new by your Spirit, fill us with your grace, and remind us that we share in the inheritance of your Son, who has been raised from the dead, that we might confront temptation and fear with a faith confident in your faithfulness. Through Jesus we pray. Amen
A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after TrinityHosea 14:1-9, Romans 6:19-23, & St. Mark 8:1-9by William KlockThe Prophet Hosea lived in the midst of a wicked and idolatrous people. God’s people had been split since the death of Solomon, the kingdom of Judah in the South and the Kingdom of Israel in the north. Judah had its own problems with wickedness and idolatry, but compared to Israel Judah was a downright goody-two-shoes. Hosea lived in the northern kingdom of Israel. He could walk through the cities of Israel and see it all: drunkenness and sexual impurity of all kinds. People mutilated their bodies and took their own sisters as wives. Everywhere there was a general disregard for God’s law. And the King. Those were politically turbulent days, but instead of trusting in the Lord, the King made forbidden alliances with pagan nations and played the game of international politics and intrigue. But worst of all was the idolatry. There was a temple to the Lord at Bethel and another at Dan (and that was a problem in itself), but all over Israel, whether in the towns and cities or at the “high places” out in the country, there were temples and altars to Baal and to his consort, Asherah. The Levites at Bethel and Dan went through the motions of worshipping the Lord, but as Hosea looked around him it seemed most people had devoted themselves to this pagan sky god and his fertility goddess wife. Sacred prostitutes spilled out of the temples and into the streets, enticing the Lord’s people to what should have been unthinkable. To Hosea it seemed like just about everyone in Israel, from the King down to the labourer in the market, had forgotten who they were and to whom they belonged. They were the people who lived with the Lord in their midst. They were the people chosen and called to show the nations the greatness of the God of Israel. But no one cared about that anymore. There was little difference anymore between an Israelite and an Assyrian or a Phoenician. And to those pagans, the God of Israel was a joke—powerless, jilted by his own people, no one to be feared.And then the Lord spoke to Hosea. And the Lord told him to go and find one of those prostitutes spilling out of the pagan temples and to marry her. He wasn’t just going to give Hosea a sermon to preach. He did that too. But, no, he was going to make Hosea himself a prophetic object lesson. “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom,” said the Lord, “for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (Hosea 1:2).Hosea’s life was to become a graphic reminder to the people of Israel that when the Lord had rescued them from Egypt, he had made her his people, the way a husband takes a bride. He had loved her. He had cared for her. He had lavished good gifts on her. And in return she had prostituted herself to other gods and forsaken his house. In the same way, Hosea loved his wife, Gomer. But repeatedly she abandoned him for other men and for her former life of prostitution. Repeatedly Hosea went after her, buying her out of her bondage, restoring her to his house and to his loving care. And in between he preached to Israel, reminding them of the Lord’s love and the Lord’s care and of the Lord’s faithfulness. In between he preached to Israel and called her to repentance—to turn aside from the Baals and the Asherahs and to return to her first love, to return to the Lord. To remember who she was and to whom she belonged.Through Hosea the Lord warned the people that their betrayal would be costly, but he also reminded them of his love for them and of his faithfulness. And he made them a promise. We read part of that call and promise as our Old Testament lesson this morning. Hosea 14:1-9.Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.Take with you words and return to the Lord;say to him, “Take away all iniquity;accept what is good, and we will pay with bulls the vows of our lips.Assyria shall not save us; we will not ride on horses;and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’ to the work of our hands.In you the orphan finds mercy.”I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily; he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon;his shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive, and his fragrance like Lebanon.They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow; they shall flourish like the grain;they shall blossom like the vine; their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols? It is I who answer and look after you.I am like an evergreen cypress; from me comes your fruit.Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them;for the ways of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them. The Lord called his people to repent, to turn aside from their idolatry, but he also promised that one way or another, he would heal their apostasy. He will make them the people he chose and called them to be—his witnesses to the nations.I brought home a pile of antique camp stoves this weekend along with a large box of paint cans for when I get around to restoring them. It had me thinking of the last camp stove I restored. I had trouble finding a green paint that matched the original colour. When I did find a good match, it was expensive automotive paint. It was a unique stove, so I splurged on the paint. And it started out okay. I sprayed the paint and the colour was pretty much perfect, but the colour itself was pretty thin. I thought maybe the cans had been sitting on the shelf a long time and all the pigment was settled in the bottom. They say to shake the can for one minute after the little mixing ball rattles. I warmed the can a bit and shook it for ten minutes. No change. What I managed to paint looked great, but it took a lot more paint than expected, so I ran out. I went back to the store for another expensive can, got home, shook it like crazy for ten minutes just to be sure. And I started spraying. And this can was full of colour. But the first thing I noticed was that it wasn’t quite the same colour. And then I noticed that it wasn’t laying down smoothly. No matter what I did, it left a rough and blotchy texture on the surface. And, of course, to get the colours to match, I had to spray the new paint over everything I’d already painted with the old paint.And as I sat there looking at this mess of a project, I got discouraged and frustrated. I’d invested a lot in that paint and had high hopes for what it would look like and in the end it failed me. It didn’t do what it was supposed to do. And it got me thinking about Hosea and Gomer and the Lord and Israel—and about the church and about me. I invested in some cans of paint. The Lord invested in a whole people. I expected that paint to make an antique stove look good and to show off my handiwork. The Lord expected Israel to show his goodness and glory to the nations. I thought about giving up on that paint—throwing the stove back into the electrolysis tank and stripping it back to metal and starting over. But that’s not what the Lord did with his people and it wasn’t what I was going to do with that paint. I sent photos to a friend who used to work painting cars and he said, “Clear coat covers a multitude of sins.” He was right. So I sat down with those stove parts and some water and some fine-grit sandpaper, and I spent hours wet-sanding. I sanded and sanded until the paint was smooth and my hands were stained green. And when I was done it looked awful. It was smooth, but it was cloudy and swirly and covered in fine scratches. But it was ready. All it took was one can of clear coat and a few minutes of spraying. Clear coat covers a multitude of sins. It fills in the fine scratches and imperfections and somehow it always comes out with a smooth, glossy finish. It never fails. The next evening I put everything together on the workbench and it looked great. You’d never know what a mess it had been except for all the green under my fingernails.And because I’m a preacher and the story of the God of Israel and his people is always on my brain, I thought about my friend’s joke about clear coat covering a multitude of sins and then I went for a bike ride and the whole time I was thinking about the ways that clear coat is like Jesus and the Spirit. I know on some level there’s a heresy in there, but that’s the problem with every analogy and I wasn’t taking it that deep. That expensive green automotive paint was Israel. The Lord bought her out of Egypt, delivered her from Pharoah, and displayed to her and to the rest of the world his goodness and generosity in—at least a little bit—the same way I bought those cans of paint and showed the people, or at least the cashier at Lordco, the depth of my pockets. And as the Lord set Israel to work to be a witness to his glory, I started spraying that paint to be a witness to my own handiwork—to photograph and post to the lantern and stove collectors’ forum on the Internet and on YouTube—to the great acclaim of my fellow collectors. And just like Israel, that paint failed to perform. It didn’t meet my expectations. It made me look incompetent. If I’d posted photos on the Internet without explanation, people would have mocked me for the sake of that paint that wouldn’t do what it was supposed to do. Not so unlike the nations that mocked the Lord, the God of Israel, because of the faithlessness of his people—although certainly with far greater consequences. And the sanding. The hours and hours of sanding, scuffing up, knocking down, smoothing out that paint that just would not behave. And not unlike Israel, even when I was done and everything was ready, it still looked awful—not at all what I expected. The Internet would have mocked me even more if they’d seen it and thought that was the finished project. But then the clear coat that covers a multitude of sins—at least in my own mind, so much like Jesus the Messiah, God himself, sent to be the faithful Israelite. To give his life for the sake of their sins, his shed blood—dare I say—like the clear coat, filling in all the scuffs and scratches to the point you’d never know just how unfaithful that paint—or Israel—had been to its purpose and mission. And then that gloss it leaves behind. Even if that expensive paint had done everything it was supposed to do, even if it went down flawlessly, it would never have look as perfect and as glossy as that damaged, roughed-up paint looked after it was clear-coated. Kind of like the people of God. Even if she’d kept the torah, a people with the divinely given law carved on stone tablets will never show forth the glory of the Lord the way a people filled with his own Spirit will show forth his glory.And so I took some photos and I posted them in the lantern and stove collectors’ forum and the likes and the comments with glowing praise started rolling in. Brothers and Sisters, that what’s supposed to happen with the nations, when the world sees the handiwork of the God of Israel, the work of Jesus and the Spirit, in his people. That’s why you and I are here today. Because God disciplined and renewed his people by his Son and by his Spirit and that new people became witnesses of his glory. In their story the nations saw the faithfulness of God and through their proclamation they heard how it was done through Jesus the Messiah and through God’s own Spirit. And they came and gave him glory and believed in Jesus and that divine clear coat covered them just the way it had Israel, and they became—and eventually you and I became—part of the people of God and part of that community meant to continually witness his glory.And yet somehow, despite all that the Lord has done for us, we still need to be reminded who we are, to whom we belong, and what he’s called us to do and to be. Last week we heard Paul’s words from Romans 6, reminding us of our baptism. In the waters of baptism, he writes, we have died and risen with the Messiah. We’re like Israel, passing through the Red Sea. When she went in, she belonged to Pharoah, slaves to the Egyptians, but when she came out the other side she belonged to the Lord, free to serve him in his goodness, his bride and a beloved member of his household. In today’s Epistle, Paul carries on a few verses later, again, Romans 6:19-23.For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. Remember that Paul was writing to an audience that was mostly Jewish or at least steeped in the Jewish scriptures and in the Jewish identity. When Paul wrote about slavery and freedom, the first thing that came to mind was the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from her slavery in Egypt. There had been a time when their ancestors had no choice but to obey the will of Pharaoh. But as Moses led them through the Red Sea and delivered them from that bondage, so Jesus has led us through the waters of baptism and delivered us from our bondage to sin.That doesn’t mean that the life we have in Jesus is always easy. The Lord led Israel through the wilderness before taking her into the promised land and Jesus leads us through a wilderness of our own on our way to the age to come. He promised that his disciples would be rejected—some would even die—on account of him. We live in the overlap of the ages, but the Lord has a purpose in that. We, his church, are his means of proclaiming the good news about Jesus and we are witnesses of his glory to the world so that the nations will believe and give him glory. When it was finished, I posted photos of my stove project to the Internet and everyone liked the photos and posted comments giving me praise for what I’d done. Do you ever stop to think that the Lord is, right now, doing the same sort of thing with us? He’s bought us with the blood of his Son, he’s washed away our sins, and he’s filled us with his Spirit, regenerating our hearts and renewing our minds. He’s made us new creations and he’s sent us out into the world and the world is supposed to see his new creation in us and glorify him and believe. When the world looks at the Church, it’s supposed to see, to have a foretaste, of God’s new creation and of the age to come in which all the pain and sorrow and sin and tears—even death itself—have been wiped away and everything set to rights.Before Jesus washed us clean and filled us with the Spirit we were slaves to sin and sin leads to death and we see it all around us. It’s the way of this fallen world. But in Jesus and the Spirit the Lord has set us free, in Jesus and the Spirit he is sanctifying us—that means he’s making us holy, making us into the people he intends for us to be—stripping away the old, worn paint and the rust, cleaning off the grime, sanding and prepping, painting and sanding and painting and sanding and clear-coating and all of that until his handiwork is perfect and holy and fully witnesses his glory—and causes the whole world to take note and not just to like and comment, but to come to him in faith to worship and to praise. And one day the Church will be everything he’s working to make it and one day we will have proclaimed the good news about Jesus everywhere, and then every enemy will be defeated and this in between time will finally come to an end as the age to come finally arrives in all its fullness—like Christmas when all the decorations are finally up and the tree is in the living room and the presents are ready to be opened and the turkey’s on the table.In the meantime, in this overlap of the ages, Brothers and Sisters, we need to remember who we are and to whom we belong. We need to remember the hope that lies before us. Even having been washed by Jesus and filled with the Spirit, the false gods of the world and the lusts of the flesh can be tempting. Like Gomer, leaving her loving husband and returning to her old life of prostitution. Like the Israelites in the wilderness. We grumble. And our bellies grumble and we think back with longing to the fleshpots of Egypt, forgetting that in Egypt we were slaves to sin and subject to death. Brothers and Sisters, look around—or as Paul wrote in last week’s Epistle, “consider”, “reckon”, look around you, look where you’ve come from and look at what God had done in Jesus and do the math. The presents may still be in the attic and the turkey may still be in the oven, but thanks to Jesus and the Spirit all the signs are there. The Christmas lights are up, there are ornaments on the tree, and we can smell the turkey roasting. Trust him. Everything about the story shouts at us that the Lord is faithful and fulfils his promises and so we know that Jesus will finish what he has started. And if the Gospel lesson today tells us anything, it’s that the Lord will always look after his people in the wilderness. He fed Israel with manna from heaven. He fed the multitude with seven loaves and a few small fish. Brothers and Sisters, come to his Table this morning, eat the bread and drink the wine, and remember that he will feed us too. Here he reminds us what he’s done for us through the death of his Son and the gift of his Spirit. Here he reminds us who we are, of the family to which we belong, and of our hope—where we’re headed. Here he lovingly feeds and clothes us, so that the world might see his faithfulness and give him glory.Let’s pray: Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinityby Matthew ColvinMatt. 5:20-2620 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 21 "You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.' 22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, 'You fool!' will be liable to the hell of fire. 23 So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. 25 Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. 26 Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.Have you ever stopped to think just how unusual a sermon is in our day? Where else do you sit for half an hour and listen to someone talk in person, without interruption, applause, or any dialogue? Let alone, actually believe it.You were all kind to me last week as I filled in for Pastor Bill. Well, almost all of you. Luke Galloway wasn’t having it. I don’t blame him. But it raises the question of why you should believe any of what I say here at all. What authority is at work in a sermon?We mentioned last week that the authority of experts does not challenge us too much: experts put their knowledge at our disposal; they submit it to us for our consideration. It’s true that some of what a pastor says might fall under this category: we are supposed to know the Biblical languages and to be trained in explaining the meaning of the Bible. But when I say, “The Greek word means this,” you should take that with a grain of salt unless I also show you how it fits and makes better sense of the Biblical passage. That is, when we preach the Word, we are following St. Paul’s example, who urges the Corinthians, “I speak as to reasonable men; judge for yourselves the things I say.” (1 Cor 10:15)Why, then, do we wear robes? Why, in the words of one pastor who does not wear robes, does “someone important get to dress up like Saruman”? Ultimately, that is a symbol that the Reformed Episcopal Church has given the pastor to preach the word with their authority: that the church’s bishops have examined a man and found that his doctrine is in conformity with the church’s teaching. We are not lone rangers. We take ordination vows, and that means we are not free to teach our own doctrines, but those of the church. We subscribe to the Nicene Creed, which means that we are not free to to start teaching Arianism. We follow the 39 Articles in the back of your BCP, which means that we will not suddenly come into the pulpit and start teaching that you’re going to Purgatory, or that you should bow down and worship the bread in Holy Communion. We are men under authority, and ultimately, that means we are under the authority of Jesus.Now what if I showed up on Sunday with my sermon engraved on two tablets? Not two iPads, but two actual tablets of stone. That would be sending a message about the authority of the sermon, wouldn’t it, and it would be a very different message than is communicated by robes and stoles and appeals to Greek lexicography.But in our gospel lesson this morning, that, or something equivalent to it, is what Jesus has done: he sits down on a mountain, showing that he is about to fill the role of Moses, who went up on Mt. Sinai to receive the covenant God made with Israel after He brought them out of Egypt.The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’s most comprehensive and public announcement of his teaching about the coming kingdom of God — by which we mean, the coming day when Israel’s God would be publicly acknowledged as reigning through the person of his anointed king, the Messiah. It is nothing more or less than the announcement of a new covenant, a new moment in the history of Israel as a people, right up there with the covenant with Abraham, the covenant at Mount Sinai, or the covenant with David. That is Jesus’s message throughout his earthly ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” The climactic moment in Israel’s story was about to happen.What is at stake here is what it means to be Israel, to be the people of God. The Pharisees have one way of doing this; Jesus has another. They are not compatible. And Jesus does not mince words: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”I often have to remind my high school students that the word “Pharisee” was a self-laudatory epithet: they called themselves the P’rushim, meaning “separated ones.” Separated from what? Well, to understand that, we need to go back to the time between the testaments, when the Greco-Syrian empire under Antiochus IV Epiphanes attempted to melt down Israel and amalgamate it with Greek culture. In order to make the Jews assimilate, Antiochus banned copies of the Torah, prohibited circumcision and sacrifices to the Lord, and compelled the Jews to eat pig meat and profane the Sabbath. In other words, everything that marked the Jews as separate from the Gentiles was targeted by Antiochus’s laws.In reaction to this, the Jews rebelled under the leadership of Mattathias Maccabee and his sons, especially Judah Maccabee. With the help of an alliance with Rome, they eventually succeeded in defeating Antiochus and rededicating the Temple in Jerusalem which he had defiled by sacrificing a pig on the altar. And alongside this military victory, the Maccabees also used violent force to pressure Jews to keep the law. It was a really difficult time to be a Jewish mother: if you had your baby boy circumcised, Antiochus’s officers would kill you and your baby. If you didn’t have your baby boy circumcised, the Maccabees would do it by force. If you refused to sacrifice to Zeus, Antiochus’s officers would kill you. If you did sacrifice to Zeus, the Maccabees would kill you.The operative word in the Maccabees’ resistance to the Greco-Syrian empire was “zeal.” It did not denote a mere enthusiasm. No, it was a violent upholding of the Torah covenant against those who would annihilate it, against the Jewish renegades who were ready to lose their Jewishness and become part of the Greco-Syrian melting pot. In this, the Maccabees were following an earlier template: In Numbers 25, Balaam had a similar idea, albeit with a different method. After the king of Moab, Balak, hired him to curse Israel, and Balaam couldn’t do so because God caused blessings to keep coming out of his mouth instead, Balaam decided that if he couldn’t curse Israel, he would lead them into idolatry. And the best way to do that was sex: he got foxy Midianite or Moabite women to seduce the Israelites and lead them to worship Baal of Peor. And we’re told that:…Behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Midianite woman to his family, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel, while they were weeping in the entrance of the tent of meeting. 7 When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation and took a spear in his hand 8 and went after the man of Israel into the chamber and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly. Thus the plague on the people of Israel was stopped. 9 Nevertheless, those who died by the plague were twenty-four thousand. (Num. 25:6-9)This is what is meant by “zeal.” We get a couple other instances in the NT. Saul of Tarsus, before he was stricken blind and came to believe in Jesus and became the apostle Paul, was full of zeal: he was “ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.” (Acts 8:3) And again, Saul was “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.” (9:1) This is what zeal looked like: Saul being a good Jew was very concerned that other Jews were being unfaithful to the covenant of Moses, and the way to put a stop to this was to use violence against them, because that is what the Maccabees had done. Indeed, when we find Jesus described as full of zeal, he too is violent: flipping over tables. “Zeal for your house has consumed me.”The PhariseesThe Pharisees were the spiritual heirs of the Maccabees. They looked around and saw Israel under the domination of the Romans. And they adopted the Maccabees’ recipe for what to do when Gentiles were dominating you: namely, “obey the Torah even harder.” And especially those parts of the Torah that set Jews apart from Gentiles: keeping the Sabbath, observing Kosher food laws, circumcision, sacrifices at the Temple, and following the cleanness laws that were required for entering the Temple — but following them all the time, even when you weren’t going to the Temple.These were the religious conservatives. They were the people who took the Bible seriously. They weren’t like the Sadducees, working hand in glove with the Romans. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead. They were looking for the arrival of the Messiah and the coming kingdom of God.All of which makes it all the more remarkable that Jesus says, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”Nowadays, if I were to call someone a Pharisee, it would not be a compliment. Sort of like how the popularity of the name Adolph went downhill after the 1940s. Except in this case, there is just one man who trashed the name “Pharisee” and turned it into an insult forever after: Jesus. We don’t have time today to do a thorough survey of everything Jesus said about them, but just consider how effective his techniques were. Tell me the next word: “Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, __________.” Or the unforgettable visual images: trying to do eye surgery with a railroad tie sticking out of your own eye socket; fishing around for gnats in your soup while balancing a camel on a spoon; absurdly washing only the outside of a bowl or cup and leaving the inside filthy.You have heard it saidTo combat the Pharisees’ way of being Israel, Jesus sets forth his own teaching. He introduces it with one of the most provocative rhetorical devices: the contradiction. “You have heard it said…but I say to you.” Many people misunderstand this. You have heard it said (!!!) that Jesus is quoting the Torah and then correcting its teaching. But I say to you that in this same chapter, verse 17, Jesus has already disavowed any intention of changing or altering the law and the prophets. His intention is rather to attack the Pharisees and their interpretation.So how does it work? “You have heard it said” — in Judaism, the verb to “hear” (Heb. shama’, cf. the Shema’ in Deuteronomy 6:4) is closely associated with literal, or overly literal interpretation. Shamu’a and mishma’ are both abstract nouns that mean “literal meaning” as well as “that which is heard.” Likewise, hashshome’a, “he who hears” is often used in the sense of “he who sticks to the superficial, literal meaning of Scripture.” Jesus, then, in introducing his teaching on anger, opposes it to the simplemindedly literal interpretation of the Pharisees: In other words, “You have heard it said, you shall not murder, and you think wrongly that this commandment is just concerned with murder. It is not. It is concerned with the roots and causes of murder; likewise, with the effects and consequences of those causes, other than outright murder.” Or, “You have heard it said, ‘you shall not murder, and only he who murders is liable to the judgment,’ but this is a misinterpretation, for many other offences than simple murder are liable to the judgment.”In every case where Jesus introduces some received interpretation of the Law with “You have heard it said”, he immediately juxtaposes, “But I say to you.” Here, Jesus gives his own authoritative exposition of the Torah. Note that he does not appeal to any other authority: There is no, “Rabbi Ela said that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said that Rabbi Meir used to say…” That’s an actual quotation from the Talmud, by the way.The sermon on the mount continues for three chapters, until Matthew 7:29. At at the end, we are told the crowd’s reaction: “the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.” That is, despite not having been trained by any rabbi, and despite not having authorization as a scribe to propound binding interpretations of the Torah, and without saying “Rabbi X said in the name of Rabbi Y,” Jesus was declaring, “But I say to you…” That is, on his own authority as the Son of God, not the derived authority of his doctoral dissertation supervisor.Jesus constantly warned against the Pharisees. Why? Because they represented a very real danger. It is a danger that is peculiarly powerful for people who love God and take the Bible seriously and feel culturally and morally besieged.We are in a very similar situation, brothers and sisters. You are in the REC. It confesses the Bible to be the inspired word of God; it recites the Creed on a weekly basis; it has bishops, conforming to the polity that characterized the ancient church and the vast majority of church history since then; it stands for orthodoxy and Biblical morality in the face of howling winds of cultural change and creeping sexual perversion and transhumanism, all encouraged by the false eschatology of progress and a false faith in technology. If we are not careful to obey Jesus’s teaching, it will be very easy to fall into Pharisaism, and to pray like the Pharisee in Jesus’s parable: “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like other men, leftists, weirdos with dyed hair, or those rainbow flag alphabet soup people. I attend church every week and give a tenth of everything I get.” The danger, that is, is to adopt a view of the church as the beleaguered remnant waiting for God to smite its cultural and political enemies, and to focus on performative acts of boundary-marking. In other words, to focus on being pure and separate, in the hopes that God will reward your heightened effort at boundary marking by destroying those on the other side of the boundaries and rewarding you.Jesus’s teaches something different from the Maccabees, both about how to be Israel, and about how to relate to those on the other side of the boundaries of the faith.23 - “If you are offering your gift at the altar” — even if you are in the middle of the most important performance of Israelite piety, the central act that enabled Israel’s God to dwell with His people. This is a shocking inversion of how the Pharisees thought things worked: for them, if you declared some money “qorban”, then you were excused from supporting your aged parents with it; for them, if an apparently dead body were on the side of the road, a priest or Levite on his way to the temple would be fully justified in avoiding it in order to remain in a state of cultic purity so that he could do his work in the temple. The laws of purity and religion were thus exalted over the duties toward neighbours and other human beings.Jesus has the OT on his side on this point: the opening of Isaiah rebukes the Israelites for their chutzpah in offering sacrifices and celebrating new moon feasts and other religious observances while perpetrating the worst sorts of social injustice: “Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations— I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. 14 Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. 15 When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood…Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow's cause does not come to them.”The idea that you can please God by meeting the external requirements, while simultaneously engaged in the worst sorts of injustice toward your fellow men is formalism. Think of a mafia boss who orders a hit on his enemies or pulls out a tommy gun and mows down sixteen rival mobsters on Saturday; the following morning, he shows up at Mass, dips his fingers in holy water, makes the sign of the cross, receives a wafer on his tongue and a blessing from the priest. Mobsters trust in formalism.God is not fooled.It was easy for faithful and believing Jews in Jesus’s day to fall into hating the Romans. They were polytheist Gentiles, sexually immoral, and overweening in their obnoxiousness toward the Jews. Jesus mentions “Those Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices.” The Romans had installed the wicked Idumean dynasty of the Herodians as rulers over Israel. Roman soldiers had the right to Shanghai any Jew and force him to carry his heavy soldier’s pack for a mile.Against all this, Jesus tells his disciples to “put away your sword” and to “turn the other cheek” and “go two miles”. In the face of the power and authority of the Roman governor, he answers Pilate not a word. He does not compete on the Romans’ level. He knows that their empire will be His whenever He wants. “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”The Sermon on the Mount teaches a different way of being the people of God: not the Pharisees’ way of exaggerated purity, social pressure, and violent insurrection. It is a way that manifests itself in a totally different attitude toward the Gentiles: one of compassion, not hatred. Not endorsement of the Gentiles’ sins or their idolatry or their sexual immorality or infanticide. But a willingness to lay down His life also for them.A crucified Messiah implies a crucified Israel. That, in fact, is what we are called to be: Israel for the sake of the world. And that is what we find in our Epistle lesson this morning, as St. Paul urges in Romans 6: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.Followers of the crucified Messiah are to be Israel for the sake of the world. Accordingly, we are to pray for the world — which we are about to do now.
A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinityby Matthew ColvinAs you know, our family lives in Port Alberni. When we first moved there, I met some guys on the tennis court, and when I told them I was new to town, their immediate question was, “Do you fish?” I said no. “Then what are you doing here?” — as though it were inexplicable why anyone would live in Port Alberni without catching fish.And sometimes, because the Barclay Sound is so pretty, and because I have enjoyed a cruise down the Alberni Inlet on the MV Frances Barclay, and because all my friends own boats, I say to my wife, “Maybe we could get one.” And then she reminds me that I hate doing maintenance on things, and that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into.But maybe the biggest objection, for me, comes from Psalm 107:“They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters;These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.For at his word the stormy wind ariseth, which lifeth up the waves thereof.They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep; their soul melteth away because of the trouble.” (107:23-26)That is why I am a landlubber from the fishing capital of Canada. Unlike St. Peter.We have already met Peter in chapter 4 of Luke, because Jesus has healed his mother in law from a fever. And we know, also, that Peter and Andrew his brother were looking for the coming of the Messiah.Jesus’s preaching has been in synagogues in Nazareth and in Capernaum in chapter 4. But now, he has a larger audience, and the venue is moved outdoors: the crowd first surrounds him and is “pressing in upon him” — not the last time we will see crowds behave this way: remember the reaction of his disciples when the woman with the bleeding comes up behind Jesus and touches his robe. “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’” This is the behaviour of crowds also in our own day in the presence of someone they have come to see. Jesus at first is standing by the shore of Genessaret, but he then finds a solution to the crowding problem: by getting into a boat, and putting out from the land a little bit, he is able to continue teaching, in his usual seated posture that he had taught in also in the two synagogues, but now with a boundary of water between him and the crowds. In the event, it will be those who are with him in the boats who become his followers, as though they were with him on the other side of the waters of baptism.One might wonder why there is mention of two boats, not just the one that Jesus sat in. This is what we call a narrative seed. Some of you may have heard of the term “Chekhov’s gun.” The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov said, “If you say in the first act of a play that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, then in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” In this case, the second boat will be needed in verse 8 when there are too many fish for the one boat to handle.If you’ve ever seen a stage magician, you’ll recall how they always take pains to demonstrate how difficult the trick is: they’ll cut a watermelon with the sword they’re about to use on the lovely assistant; or fan the cards to show that the deck isn’t rigged; or bring up a burly member of the audience to demonstrate how the chains the magician is going to escape from are really strong.God or Jesus isn’t a stage magician, of course. But he does like to demonstrate the difficulty of his miracles. Remember Elijah pouring water three times over the altar before the fire of God fell from heaven to burn it up in front of the prophets of Baal? Or Jesus choosing to heal, not a man who had recently become blind, but one who was more than 30 years old and had been blind from birth? Or Jesus pointedly asking the disciples to show him the five loaves and three fish first before proceeding to feed the five thousand with them?In the present story, we are told that “the fishermen had got out of the boats and were washing their nets.” This tell us that they were using trammel-nets, made of linen, which needed to be washed after use. If the linen nets were not washed and dried promptly after use they would rot from the various organic matter stuck in them after use. Further, this washing was invariably done in the morning. Why?Because until the introduction of modern nets made of transparent nylon, fishing with linen nets had to be done at night. During the daytime, the fish could see the nets and avoid being caught by them. So Jesus has found Peter and his partners at precisely the wrong time to catch fish: not only are they done for the day, not only are they already washing their nets, but the sun has now risen, which means it is not possible to catch fish with nets now.Jesus also isn’t concerned with fishermen’s timetables. When does he tell them to let down their nets? Nothing to do with with daylight or the schedule of net-cleaning. No, “When he had finished speaking.” At his convenience. Jesus appears to think he is “the main character,” as the kids say these days. Because, well, he is.Put yourself in Peter’s shoes. You’ve been working all night. Fishing is hard. You’re in a boat with probably three other men. You have to pull in heavy nets; you may have to dive into the water to wrestle them or unsnag them from something. You are drenched, weary, and have caught nothing. You have washed your nets, maybe mended them if they broke. You’re done for the day. And now this Jesus fellow tells you to start all over, and drawing on his vast knowledge of …carpentry? — he tells you to start fishing in the daytime, when you know, from years of experience on the sea, that you will catch nothing.All of which makes Peter’s address of Jesus a little more amusing. He calls him ἐπιστάτα. The ESV says, “Master,” but it is probably best translated “boss.” “Boss, we have toiled all night and caught nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.”“Boss” – the Greek means literally the one who is stationed over something, has authority over it. In this case, the something over which Peter acknowledges Jesus’s authority is Peter’s boat and indeed his entire business, his profession of fishing, a matter to which he was likely born and bred – like his business partners James and John, whose father Zebedee was with them in the boat, Peter is trained in a thousand little details of skill and technique: the behaviour of fish, the tides, the weather, the use and care and washing and repair of nets; the handling and maintenance of boats; and likely also the salesmanship required to sell his fish, if not to those who would eat them, then to fishmonger middlemen. This was his life, deeply embedded in the community of his town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Sea of Tiberias, or Lake Genessaret, depending on who you asked for its name. Indeed, we know from the Talmud that "throughout inland Palestine, Tiberias was the only place where wholesale trade in fish was conducted, and (2) that this wholesale trade in fish was in season in Tiberias probably in the months that were most suitable for the loading and export of fish." So Jesus is there at the Port Alberni of Palestine, boldly giving a command to fishermen who have grown up and make their living catching and selling fish from this lake.And the command that Jesus gives Peter is, quite frankly, absurd: to dirty the nets again after already cleaning them; to let them down in the daytime, when the fish will have no trouble seeing them, rather than at night, which every fisherman knows is the right time to catch fish; and to do it, moreover, in the same location where, as Peter explains to him, “we have laboured all night and have caught nothing.”So why does Peter obey him? Because he accepts his authority, which is not the authority of an expert. The thousand details of the fisherman’s trade are indeed matters of expertise, but Jesus does not urge Peter to cast in his nets on the basis of his expertise. The authority of expertise, if you stop and think about it for a moment, is an authority that makes no claims upon our sense of ourselves and our authority to decide things: it rather submits itself for our consideration, as having knowledge of particulars that we could have too, if we invested the effort.No, Peter’s faith is not faith in expertise. Rather, it is the same faith that we will see later, in what might well be the same boat, certainly on the same sea, in awe at Jesus’s authority: “Who is this, that even the wind and waves obey Him?” It is faith in the Messiah. It is loyalty to Israel’s God.More than any disciple, his personality shines out in the gospels: he is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, ready, out of love for Jesus, to undertake bold actions and to follow Jesus: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water”; “Even if all forsake you, yet I will not.” “Lord, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tents.” But at the same time, he is not always able to see through his bold beginnings to their end: so we will see him swearing he doesn’t know the man; weeping when the cock crows; beginning to sink in the waves.But this is not one of those moments of weakness. Here, he recognizes in Jesus the holiness of the Lord: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” Peter does not know that Jesus is Israel’s God yet. But he knows that He is at least close to Israel’s God. Here we recognize the attitude of the prophets of old, for instance, Isaiah 6:5: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"This is the moment when Peter makes a sudden break with his past life. We recall Elijah calling Elisha by throwing his cloak over him while he was plowing. There, too, the master called his pupil in the middle of his work at his job; there, too, the disciple experienced a complete upending of his life. In both cases, the disciple will see His master taken up into heaven; both Elisha and Peter will then be filled with the spirit of their teacher; and from that point, they will show complete fearlessness and boldness.Yes, Peter stumbles several times. Sometimes he is overcome by fear – of the waves, or of persecution and death. Other times, he stumbles because of his deeply ingrained respect for, and assumptions about propriety: as when he rebuked Jesus for saying that He would be rejected and killed ("Lord, this will never happen to you"); or when he objected to Jesus washing his feet; or when, in Acts, he was told to sacrifice and eat a giant picnic blanket of unclean animals and replied, "By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean." (Acts 10:14) But none of these stumbles is permanent. Why? Because Jesus tells him, “Simon, Simon. Satan has asked to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail. And when you have returned, strengthen your brothers.”Jesus has just demonstrated that if he wanted to, he could make Peter and the sons of Zebedee into fishing millionaires, the tycoons of the Lake of Genessaret. And because of this, they trust him to the end. But not, notice, in order to get rich: having received the demonstration of Jesus’s ability to provide wealth in the context of their business as fishermen, they now leave that business. Later, in the story of the rich young ruler, after that man goes away sad because he had great possessions, Peter pipes up, “Lord, we have left everything to follow you.” And they have. After they saw the demonstration, they didn’t care about getting rich as fishermen. They saw what their hearts had longed for. They wanted to be with Jesus. Peter does not treat Jesus as a way to get rich. We read in Acts 3, when Peter heals the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, that the lame man first looked at him, hoping to receive something, “But Peter said, "I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!" (Acts 3:6) No, Peter is not concerned with silver or gold or catching fish anymore. Jesus has demonstrated that to him a second time when he asked about the Temple Tax, and Peter found a coin inside a fish. Perhaps earlier than any other disciple, he understood well that he should “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” — that is, God’s faithfulness to keep his promises to His people, especially the promise to send the Messiah and to forgive their sins — “and all these things shall be added unto you.”Jesus tells Peter two things: first, “Do not be afraid.” Second, “from now on, you will be catching men.” The verb for “catching” is a little bit misleading, since we usually think of “catching” men as something that kidnappers do, or the police with a fugitive. But that’s not the connotation of the Greek word ζωγρῶν, literally, “catching alive.” It is not usually a fishing word, though it is an accurate enough description of the usual methods of catching fish: nets and hooks, that result in live fish flopping around. It’s not a word you would use for throwing dynamite in a pond or poisoning all the fish. But its usual usage is in contrast to killing: in the Iliad, it’s the word used for Diomedes or Achilles sparing an enemy warrior’s life and taking him captive for a ransom instead. But in Jesus’s usage here, in connection with the net, it is a vivid metaphor: Peter’s concern now is to seek the coming kingdom of heaven, which Jesus in Matthew 13 says, “is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad.” (I have a running joke with my daughter about how many gross and disgusting things there are in the sea. But Jesus here means the wicked.) At any rate, Peter does indeed “catch men.” He preaches more boldly than anyone in the book of Acts; and he is the means by which Gentiles are first brought into the church.Peter, thus, trusts Jesus after this demonstration of his ability to provide in a single night the catch of a week or more. He and his fellow fishermen will all be martyrs, after all; yet to them applies Jesus’s promise that they will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. In the end, Jesus will eat fish with them again, likewise on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, but this time without the crowd, after his resurrection. And then we will see him in the book of Acts boldly telling the Sanhedrin to judge whether it is right to obey them or to obey God. We will see him stretching out his hands and going where he does not want to go — to prison at the hands of a king named Herod, awaiting execution during Passover week, like his Lord Jesus. In Peter’s case, we see the truth of George MacDonald’s statement: “The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.” And no one more than Peter.In him we see the truth of Ignatius of Antioch’s words in his letter to the Philadelphians around 100 AD:“For my own part, I know and believe that He was in actual human flesh, even after His resurrection. When He appeared to Peter and his companions, He said to them, ‘Take hold of me; touch me, and see that I am no bodiless phantom’. And they touched Him then and there, and believed, for they had had contact with the flesh-and-blood reality of Him. That was how they came by their contempt for death, and proved themselves superior to it. Moreover, He ate and drank with them after He was risen, like any natural man, though even then He and the Father were spiritually one.”Have you thought about why we love Peter? It is because he is so understandable, so relatable. And he stands forth as these things because God chose him and made the gospel writers depict him for us — not as the infallible Pope, but as the fullest example and pattern of the discipleship of a follower of Jesus. In Peter we see the longing for the kingdom of God, the fierce loyalty and sense of propriety (Lord, you will never wash my feet!), the wrongness and error that beset us all, but also the gentleness of Jesus in dealing with Peter, in restoring him; and then the mature disciple in the book of Acts, who has fully comprehended Jesus’s teaching and his resurrection, and is able to do great things, including suffering for the name.Let us pray.Grant, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after TrinityRomans 8:18-23by William KlockThe world is not as it should be. We know it in our bones. Around us we see glimpses of what the world should be like: when we see the beauty of flower or the sunset or the majesty of a waterfall, when we see a newborn baby or the love shared between husband and wife or parent and child, when someone goes out of their way to do some good deed for no other reason than that it needs to be done. But the world is also filled with pain and suffering and tears. We hurt each other terribly. We lie, cheat, steal, and kill. We act selfishly. And then we all eventually die and it can seem so pointless. Everyone sees it. The gospel is God’s answer: God humbling himself in Jesus, taking on the flesh of his broken people and suffering the death that they deserved for their rebellion against him. Allowing sin and death to do their worst and rising triumphant over them. Suffering birthed God’s new world in the midst of the old. That’s God’s solution. But as our culture has gradually forgotten the gospel, we’ve come to address this problem by becoming increasingly obsessed with the therapeutic. In the midst of a broken world, everything has become about feeling good. Buy this and you’ll feel better. Do this—and this usually involves spending money on something—and you’ll feel better. We created a whole “therapy” industry to make ourselves feel better in general and better about ourselves. It shouldn’t be any wonder that the great modern heresy is the so-called Prosperity Gospel, which promises that the Christian life is all about health and wealth—feeling good. But even otherwise orthodox churches have often embraced the therapeutic, whether it’s in our preaching or our worship. Everything is increasingly focused on “me” and on me feeling good. It’s the very opposite of God’s solution to a world and a people broken by sin and death.And yet, when we go back to the New Testament, particularly if we listen to Jesus, there’s a lot—a lot—of talk about suffering. Jesus even promises that his people will suffering. “If they hate me, they will hate you—because a servant isn’t greater than his master.” “Blessed are you when people slander and persecute you and say wicked things about you on account of me. Celebrate and rejoice, because there’s a reward for you in God’s kingdom. That’s how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Jesus promised his people suffering, whether it was in the gospels or in his vision to John that we have in Revelation. You can’t go out into the world to declare that Jesus is Lord without making people angry. You can’t go out into the world to tell people and to show people that God’s new creation is breaking into and transforming the old, without upsetting the way things are. The people invested in the old age will get angry. But it’s not just persecution. Even as Jesus calls us to lift the veil on God’s new creation, to show in the present what God has in store for the future, we suffer. Because the world still is not as it should be. Jesus’ people suffer from poverty from hunger from sickness. We suffer the effects of sin in the world just like everyone else. We’re all—you and I—getting older year by year and feeling it. And one day we’ll die. Because instead of stepping into history in judgement and wiping every last vestige of sin from his creation so that it could all be set to rights, Jesus first stepped into the middle of history to offer us redemption, so that we won’t have to face his wrath on that day when he finally comes—so that we, poor sinners, can instead have a share in his new creation. Brothers and Sisters, we desperately need this gospel perspective. And this is what Paul’s getting at in our Epistle form Romans 8. He writes in verse 18:This is how I work it out. The sufferings we go through in the present time are not worth putting in the scale alongside the glory that is going to be unveiled for us. “This is how I work it out…” That doesn’t mean this is Paul’s opinion. “This is how I work it out” means that Paul, knowing the Scriptures, knowing the story of Israel and Israel’s God, knowing Jesus, working under the Spirit’s inspiration, this is the only conclusion he can reach. He’s been building this argument for eight chapters in Romans and here he reaches the inevitable conclusion: those who will be glorified will first face suffering, but that this suffering can’t begin to compare with the glory to be revealed.Think about what a powerful statement that was when Paul wrote this. When he writes that word “suffering” most of us probably read into that whatever our own trials and tribulations are. That’s fine. But what did Paul have in mind? Later in the chapter, in verses 35-36 he writes that nothing will separate us from the love of the Messiah—nothing—and then he goes on to detail the sorts of suffering that he and other Christians were facing—things people might think mean that God doesn’t love them, things they might think show a lack of faith, things that might separate them from Jesus. Here’s his list: hardship or distress, persecution or famine, nakedness or peril or sword. And he quotes from Psalm 44: “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted sheep to be slaughtered.” These things are far worse than the sorts of suffering any of us are likely to face. And as horrible as this suffering was, none of it could compare with the glory to be revealed—no amount of suffering could make the glory not worth it.But what is the glory Paul’s writing about? I like the translation that this glory is “going to be unveiled for us”, but we have to be careful. That can make it sound like we’re going to be spectators, when the sense of what Paul’s saying in Greek is that this glory will be revealed towards us or into us. It’s a sense of this glory being bestowed on us as a gift. You and I will participate in glory. And this makes perfect sense when we consider that just before this Paul said that if we are in the Messiah, then we will share in his inheritance—we will participate in his inheritance.And what’s the inheritance? Well, who is Jesus? He is Lord. His glory is revealed or it’s unveiled in his glorious and sovereign rule of Creation and Paul is saying here that the glory we wait for with eager longing, the glory that is the basis for our hope as Christians is not glory in the sense many people often think. We often think of “glory” as a place or a state of being. When a Christian dies we often hear people say that he or she has gone on or been promoted to “glory”. Brothers and Sisters, “glory” isn’t going to heaven when you die. As Jesus’ glory is his sovereign rule over Creation, so the glory to be revealed in us is our participation, our sharing in the sovereign and saving rule of Jesus—being restored to original vocation and taking part in God’s creation set to rights. And this is why he says what he does in verse 19:Yes: creation itself is on tiptoe with expectation, eagerly awaiting the moment when God’s children will be revealed. If our hope, if our glory—as it is so often wrongly portrayed—was for the destruction of this world and an eternity of disembodied existence in heaven with God, then the Creation would have no reason to eagerly long for that glory to be revealed. What Paul describes here is the opposite: God’s Creation is waiting with eager expectation for the great day when its true rulers are revealed, the sons and daughters of God, and when it will be delivered from corruption. Look at verses 20-22: Creation, you see, was subjected to pointless futility, not of its own volition, but because of the one who placed it in this subjection, in the hope that creation itself would be freed from its slavery to decay, to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified. Let me explain. We know that the entire creation is groaning together, and going through labor pains together, up until the present time.This is where we need to stand back and look at the big picture. Everything Paul’s saying here is dependent on that. It’s the big picture the Bible gives of us of God’s Creation, from beginning to end. We read in Genesis that God created and that everything was good. We even read there that when he created human beings he looked at his handiwork and declared us not just “good”, but “very good”. But we look around us now and have to wonder what happened. War is always raging somewhere, there’s violence everywhere, there’s greed and corruption everywhere. Justice is in short supply and so are the basic things that people need to survive—maybe not in our part of the world, but for billions of others. And yet even if we don’t pay attention to the big evils that play out on the international scene—or even on the local scene, for that matter—we only have to look at the struggles that we have ourselves and that we share with our family and friends to keep away from sin and to do good. Hate is easy; love is hard. Paul knew it. The Roman Christians knew it. We know it.Paul tells the story of Creation in the book of Romans, but he tells it as Israel’s story. We don’t have time to run through the whole book this morning obviously, but Paul’s point is that the whole Creation is enslaved in the same sort of way that Israel was in Egypt. And right there we get a glimmer of hope. Remember, when Israel went down to Egypt—remember the story of Jospeh being sold into slavery by his brothers and winding up in prison in Egypt?—it was all according to the Lord’s plan. The Lord arranged for Joseph to become a slave in Egypt so that through him he could rescue his people. Egypt started out good for Israel. When things turned around under a new king who enslaved Israel, it wasn’t because the Lord had ceased to be good and it wasn’t because the Lord was no longer in control. Instead, we learn later that the Lord allowed the Israelites to become slaves in Egypt so that he could then manifest his glorious sovereignty to everyone—to Israel in rescuing her and to the Egyptians by showing his power over her false gods and over her mighty horses and chariots. In the Exodus, the Lord marked Israel forever as the people he had freed from slavery, people to whom he had given a new life. That became their national identity, celebrated every year in the Passover.In all of that Paul is working up to his point here. As the Lord allowed Israel to fall into bondage to Egypt, so he has allowed his good Creation to be subjected to death and decay. We may look around and wonder if things are hopeless. Every time one war ends and we see peace break out another war begins somewhere else. We work hard to lift this group out of poverty, but then that group over there falls into it. We cure one disease only to have two new ones crop up. Isaiah wrote about a day when the lion would lie down with the lamb and we look around us and wonder if that’s ever going to happen.And Paul assures us: Yes, it’s for real. This is God’s promise. No matter how bad things are, this is still his good Creation and he has promised to put everything to rights. Even as he cast Adam and Eve from the garden he was promising them that he would one day overcome sin and restore everything to the way it should be. Genesis shows things going from bad to worse. It shows us humanity losing even the very knowledge of God and sinking into paganism and idolatry. But then it tells us how God came to Abraham and established a covenant with him. The Lord promised that through Abraham and his family he would restore not only humanity, but all of Creation and here Paul reminds us what that means, what it looks like and why the Creation itself would long for it to happen.Again, we need the big picture—we need to remember where things started. In Genesis we read that the Lord created human beings to be his image bearers. Theologians have argued for two thousand years over what exactly that means, but in the last century, as we’ve been able to read the Old Testament in light of other Jewish and Ancient Near Eastern literature we’ve realised that the language of Genesis is temple language. Israel’s pagan neighbours built great stone temples and then placed images of their gods in them. Those images represented their gods’ rule or sovereignty over the land and people. And Genesis uses the same language and imagery, except that in Genesis it’s the Lord himself who builds his own temple—the cosmos—and instead of placing an image of himself carved in stone or gold in it, he creates human beings, to live in his presence in the temple, but also to rule his creation justly and wisely—to have dominion and to subdue Creation in the Lord’s name. That’s what it meant for humanity to bear God’s image: to be his stewards, the priests of his temple. But then we chose to rebel. As Paul writes in Romans 1, we chose to worship the Creation instead of the Creator. We subjected the Lord’s good creation to corruption.Now, in light of that, it should make sense that Creation is longing for the day when our inheritance is revealed. That’s the day when Creation will be set free from the corruption we brought on it. That’s the day when we, Creation’s stewards will be restored and renewed and put back in charge, reigning with Jesus. Again, think back to Israel. He chose and called her, he rescued her, he made her his people, he made her a model for the nations to bring healing and restoration. But she rebelled and she rejected her mission. And yet the Lord didn’t give up and he didn’t change his plan to redeem his Creation through Israel. He simply sent a faithful Israelite—he sent Jesus. And Jesus not only redeemed Israel by dying in her place, he established a new Israel in his own person, a new people to be a light to the nations—this time equipped by the Holy Spirit.This is what Paul is getting at in verse 23. It’s not just the Creation that groans in eager longing:Not only so: we too, we who have the first fruits of the Spirit’s life within us, are groaning within ourselves, as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our body.The Lord hasn’t given up on his Creation any more than he gave up on Israel. Creation is eagerly waiting for its rightful stewards to be set right. On that great day the Lord will make all things new and restore his redeemed people to their rightful place as good, wise, and just rulers of Creation—as the faithful priests of his temple. This is what it means for our glory to be revealed. The big picture, the story of redemption, reminds us that this was how it was supposed to be from the beginning. And so we groan and we wait eagerly too. We live in the mess we’ve made here in the world. We live with sin and with sickness and with death, and yet we live in hope, knowing that what God has begun in Jesus he will one day complete.And we can hope because our God has given us the firstfruits of his new creation. He’s given a down payment on what he has promised. The present age and its rulers have been decisively defeated by Jesus at the cross and the empty tomb and God’s new age has been inaugurated. Jesus is Lord. He truly is God’s King. He’s given us his Spirit—Paul describes the Spirit here as the firstfruits—and that’s because we live in the overlap between these two ages, these two kingdoms. The Jews brought the firstfruits of the harvest—usually sheaves of grain harvested at the very beginning of the season—as offerings to God. They offered them in good years and even in bad years in faith that God would provide the rest of the harvest. And so the Spirit is the sign of hope for us. The life he gives to us here and now is a reminder that encourages our faith and hope in the resurrection and the new creation to come. We groan and we sigh, we wait longingly in eager expectation, but our hope is certain because God is faithful and keeps his promises. The prophet Habakkuk wrote that one day the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea. Brothers and Sisters, when that seems impossible, we only need remember the cross of Jesus, his empty tomb, and his gift of the Holy Spirit. God has already done the hard part. He is the God who is faithful. He will not abandon either his promises or his investment. We can be sure that he’ll finish what he’s started.But in the meantime our faith is not a complacent faith. We haven’t been redeemed by Jesus and given the gift of the Spirit so that we can retreat into a sort of personal holiness or private piety while we wait for Jesus to return. Not at all. Jesus has inaugurated this new age in his resurrection and somehow someday the making new that began in his resurrection will encompass all of Creation and you and I are called, in the power of the Spirit, to embody that renewing work here and now. How is Habakkuk’s prophecy going to be fulfilled? How does the knowledge of the glory of the Lord spread to cover the earth? Brothers and Sisters, that’s our mission. We’re called to proclaim to the world the Good News that Jesus is Lord and that his kingdom is here and now. Our mission is to call the world to repentance and faith. But don’t forget: We are also called to live out repentance and faith in our lives in such a way that we lift the veil on the kingdom and that we give a glimpse to the world of what heaven on earth looks like. So far as we are able to do so today, we are called to exercise the good dominion that was given to Adam—we are called to be stewards of God’s temple, of his Creation. Jesus has led the way for us here, the second Adam. In his earthly ministry he made his Father’s new creation known in practical ways to the people around him and so should we. In a word full of sin we should be visible in seeking after holiness. In a world full of war and injustice, we should be visible and at the forefront working for peace and justice. In a world full of hurting and sickness, we should be seeking to make the healing ministry of Jesus known. In a world full of anger and hate, we should be working for forgiveness and reconciliation.If you’re like me you might get discouraged thinking about the mission Jesus has given us. When I think of these things I think of things that we as Christians can do to bring Jesus and his glory to the world in “big” ways. I think of Christians working on the big international scene or I think of missionaries going to far off countries. And then I get discouraged. That’s far away. It’s bigger than me. But Friends, never forget that for every St. Paul or St. Peter, there were thousands of ordinary saints manifesting Jesus in their ordinary lives, proclaiming the good news, and building the kingdom right where they were. We fulfil Jesus’ calling to us as we raise covenant children to walk with him in faith and to live the values of his kingdom. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we work for peace and reconciliation with our neighbours, in our workplaces, and in our schools. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we forgive as we have been forgiven. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we love the hard-to-love people around us, knowing that we ourselves are hard-to-love too, but that Jesus loved us enough to die for us. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we sacrifice ourselves, our rights, our prerogatives, our time, and our treasure in order to make Jesus and his love known. In everything we do, we should be seeking to give the world signs and foretastes of God’s new creation.Let us pray: Heavenly Father, as we asked earlier in the collect we ask again for grace that to pass through the trials of this life without losing the things of eternal importance. Remind us that the suffering we experience cannot begin to compare with the glory to be revealed to us. Remind us always of the suffering that Jesus endured for our sake that in love and gratitude we might suffer too for the sake of making him known. And as we think of Jesus’ death and resurrection and as we live the life given by your Spirit, fill us with hope and faith, knowing that the glory inaugurated in us today will one day be fully accomplished in our own resurrection and the restoration of all your Creation. Amen.
A Sermon for the Third Sunday after TrinitySt. Luke 15:1-10by William KlockThe Pharisees and the scribes were angry with Jesus. Our Gospel, taken from Luke 15 if you’re following along, begins as Luke tells us:All the tax collectors and sinners were drawing new to listen to Jesus. The Pharisees and the scribes [they were the legal experts] were grumbling. “This fellow welcomes sinners!” they said. “He even eats with them!” But why would they be angry about that? You might remember the story I read with the kids a few weeks ago, the one about the “Super-Extra-Holy People”. Those were the Pharisees. And you’d think that seeing sinners repent, seeing sinners change their ways, seeing sinners welcomed back into the covenant community, you would think that the Extra-Super-Holy People would be thrilled to see that happening. But they weren’t.To understand why, we need to understand a bit about these Super-Extra-Holy Pharisees. They were an interest group. They were mostly rich people. Some of them were part of the Sanhedrin, which was the governing council of the Jews. But they weren’t really the gatekeepers of Judaism. They had their own ideas of what it meant to be a proper Jew. But they didn’t have the authority to say who was in or who was out. The priests in the temple, they were the gatekeepers—literally. It was up to them who could come into the temple and who could not. They were the ones who offered sacrifices for the people. They had the control, not the Pharisees. But the Pharisees could still make their views known. They could be spiritually ostentatious in public. They could talk—even if the priests didn’t care and even if they annoyed the common, ordinary, every-day people who went about their faith and their law-keeping in the usual way. They could look down their noses at Jesus and they could argue with him, but they couldn’t do anything to him. That’s why, as we saw last week, they lurked around, watching him in the hopes he’d do something or say something that they could report to the authorities—something arrestable and punishable—because they didn’t have that kind of authority themselves.But what were the Pharisees actually about? Well, they longed for the Lord’s return. The people had returned from their exile in Babylon, they’d rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple, but the Lord’s presence—his shekinah—had never come back to rest in the holy of holies. And God’s people were still living under the boot of foreign pagans. First it was the Persians, then the Greeks, and now the Romans. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. And so they decided to be Super-Extra-Holy. Pretty literally. They did this by taking the torah’s laws for the priests and the temple and they applied it to themselves. To enter the temple, the Lord required ritual purity. It reinforced the idea of the holiness of God and of his presence to the people, because in ordinary life you dealt pretty regularly with impurity. Impurity wasn’t a bad thing in itself. There were some sins that would leave you unclean, but mostly impurity came from ordinary things like menstruation or sex or contact with a death, whether human or animal. In most cases, you waited for a day, then bathed, and you were ritually clean again. But unless you were a priest, it wasn’t a big deal, because you only really had to be ritually pure if you wanted to go to the temple and most people only did that on the great feast days.But the Pharisees, they saw that the world is not as it should. They knew that earth and heaven were created to be one, overlapping unity. They knew that human beings were created to enjoy God’s presence, but that human sin had created a rift between earth and heaven and human beings and God. They longed to see things on earth as they are in heaven. They knew, the one place in the whole world where earth and heaven, where our realm and God’s realm overlapped was the temple. So they resolved to live their lives as if they were perpetually, every day, living in the temple. Like the priests, they kept themselves ritually pure all the time. Maybe if everyone did that—or at least tried—the Lord would finally return to his people and his presence would again fill the temple and he would defeat Israel’s enemies. But, of course, only rich people could afford to live that way, so not very many people did.So the Pharisees were well-meaning. They understood God’s grace. Contrary to popular opinion, they weren’t trying to earn their way into God’s favour. But there’s something that seems to happen whenever people start looking for ways to be holy above and beyond the ordinary or when we start making rules for ourselves that God didn’t give us in the first place. It happened with monastics in the Middle Ages, when celibacy became a sign of being Super-Extra-Holy and ordinary Christian—who were faithfully fruitful and multiplying as God commanded in the beginning—were made to feel unholy and second-class. It happened with the Methodist Holiness Movement in the Seventeenth Century, with what started out as Wesley’s desire to simply see Christians being more faithfully holy turning into a movement where Christian brothers and sisters were frowned on for putting sugar in their tea rather than drinking it black and giving the money to the poor. It eventually led to people thinking that the gift of God’s Spirit was a separate event in the life of the Christian that you had to earn by reaching a certain level of holiness—turning the Christian life completely upside-down.So wanting to be more holy is a good thing, but certain ways of doing it seem to have a powerful tendency to make us self-righteous. Even when we know that being God’s people is all about grace, we can still act very self-righteously. It happened to the Pharisees and it can happen to us. And so they rightly saw that the world is not what it should be. It’s full of sin and pain and tears and that’s all because of unholiness and sin. They knew that only God can ultimately set it to rights, but they also knew that God’s people—whether Israel in the Old Testament or the Church in the New—we’re called to live God’s law—the torah in the Old Testament and the law of the Spirit in the New—we’re called to live God’s law and through that to became pockets of God’s new creation, his future world set to rights, we’re called to be pockets of that here in the present. But some people out there are obstinate in their sin. Some people are really awful sinners and we can literally watch as they make a mess of the world around them. They do things that drag others into sin. For the Pharisees that was the tax collectors, who collaborated with the Romans and who stole from their own people. It was prostitutes, who not only sinned themselves, but who enticed others into sin. Pharisees could see the fallout as men destroyed their lives and families because of prostitution. These things were grievously wrong and sinful. They were choices people made and they were conscious rejections of God’s covenant. They weren’t just sinners, they were traitors, and they were very tangibly making the world a worse place. And so the Pharisees—and I’m sure even ordinary people in Israel—they longed for the Lord to deal with these sinners. And that’s good. And I expect they prayed: Lord, bring Matthew the tax collector, bring Mary the prostitute, to repentance—or judge them. Either way, put an end to the sin. And, again, that’s what God does with sinners. They were right to pray that way.But, again, something happens when we start making rules for ourselves that mark us out as super-extra-holy. First, we forget that even if our sins aren’t as heinous, none of us is ever perfect or sinless. We all contribute in some way to the mess this world is in and the pain and the tears of the people around us. But, maybe worse, we can start to resent when those really bad sinners don’t get their just comeuppance. Self-righteousness creeps in and grace and mercy get pushed out even though we know better, and we start longing to see God’s judgement fall on sinners and we become resentful when they do repent—like the men in Jesus’ parable who were angry when they, who had worked through the heat of the day, received the same wage as the men who had only worked an hour. The Pharisees expected the Messiah to come in judgement on the unfaithful in Israel, to smite the tax collectors and the prostitutes and all the other sinners, but instead Jesus was eating with them. The Pharisees knew that if Jesus was the Messiah, sharing a meal with him was like a promise of the great banquet that the Lord had promised the prophets, the great banquet that would take place when Israel was restored, when the world was set to rights, and when sinners were wiped from the earth for ever. That banquet was for people like the Pharisees. The tax collectors and sinners were supposed to be outside in the dark, weeping and gnashing their teeth—suffering the Lord’s wrath because they’d missed their chance for repentance. Even though they knew that being the people of God was about grace, the Pharisees had managed to become self-righteous.But there was a second thing about the Pharisees. Remember that they were all about the temple. They weren’t priests. They couldn’t live in and around the temple the way the priests did, so they had their way of bringing the temple to them by following the purity codes for the priests in their everyday lives. They wanted to see things on earth as they are in heaven. But as they followed Jesus around and watched him, one thing that we might miss, but that stood out like a sore thumb to them, was that he bypassed the temple. According to the law, for a sinner to be right again with the Lord, he had to repent of his sins, he had to make restitution for his sins, and he had to offer a sacrifice at the temple. But time after time, they watched as Jesus simply forgave sinners and sent them on their way. There’s only one time recorded in the Gospels when Jesus sent someone to see a priest, and that wasn’t a sin issue. That was the leper he healed. He sent them man to the priest—maybe to the temple or maybe just to a local priest—so that his healing could be verified and he could be readmitted to society. But when it came to sinners, Jesus bypassed the temple, the priests, and the sacrificial system entirely. That absolutely infuriated the Pharisees. The Messiah—so they thought—should have been reinforcing the importance of the temple, but instead Jesus was bypassing it. In fact, when he did go to the temple, he upset everything and brought the sacrifices to a halt while people ran around to collect all the animals he’d scattered. And then he was announcing that he would destroy and rebuild it in three days. This, I think more than anything else, made the Pharisees angry. In Jesus, the God of Israel was doing something new. In Jesus, the God of Israel had begun the process of uniting earth and heaven, when he took on human flesh. In Jesus, the God of Israel had begun the work of creating a new people for himself, a people who instead of having a temple, would themselves be the temple as he poured his own Spirit into them. That’s why Jesus was bypassing the temple and offering people forgiveness apart from the priests and sacrificial system. This is why Jesus was announcing and acting out prophecies of the temple’s destruction. But the Pharisees just couldn’t let go of the temple. They’d more or less made an idol of it—one that would become symbolic of unbelieving Israel’s continuing rejection of the Jesus as Messiah. The rabbis were the spiritual descendants of the Pharisees and to this day, rabbinic Judaism is still fixated on the temple. When the Lord sent the Romans in judgement to destroy Jerusalem and the temple and to expel the people from the land, it was not only an act of judgement for their rejection of Jesus, but a not-so-subtle way of announcing that the days of the old covenant were through. The temple had served its purpose. Its role is now fill by Jesus and his people. And yet unbelieving Israel continues to gather at the Western Wall, the last remnant of the temple’s foundation, to pray—continuing to obstinately reject the Messiah. The Pharisees, with their fixation on the temple and its holiness codes, were the embodiment of what it meant and what it looked like to refuse what God was doing in Jesus.So Jesus responded with three parables. We read the first two in our Gospel today. The third is the parable of the prodigal son. Here’s how Jesus responded to their obstinate rejection. Again, Luke 15.Jesus told them this parable. “Supposing one of you has a hundred sheep,” he said, “and you lose one of them. What will you do? Why, you’ll leave the ninety-nine out in the countryside, and you’ll go off looking for the lost one until you find it! And when you find it, you’ll be so happy—you’ll put it on your shoulders and go home, and you’ll call your friends and neighbours in. ‘Come and have a party!’ you’ll say. ‘Celebrate with me! I’ve found my lost sheep!’” Shepherds weren’t really the Pharisees kind of people, but they might have owned flocks that other people took care of. They knew the value of livestock and, being rich men, they counted their beans and knew the value of every one of them. They could understand the fear the shepherd felt for his lost sheep. Could he find it? Would he find it? And if he did, would it be too late? Would he find the corpse eaten by wolves? I don’t know a thing about shepherding, but I get it. And I can identify with the joy of the shepherd when he got home, carrying that lost sheep, and called his friends to rejoice with him. We all sympathise with the shepherd and so did the Pharisees. And notice that the parable is actually one long question that Jesus puts to them. “If this happened to you, wouldn’t you rejoice?” Of course they would.And then skipping now to verses 8 and 9 Jesus tells them a second parable. This time it’s not one of ninety-nine that’s lost; it’s one of ten. (In the third parable it’s one of two.)“Or supposing a woman has ten drachmas [those were little silver coins] and loses one of them. What will she do? Why, she’ll light a lamp, and sweep the house, and hunt carefully until she finds it! And when she finds it she’ll call her friends and neighbours in. ‘Come and have a party!’ she’ll say. ‘Celebrate with me! I’ve found my lost coin!” I get this. A couple of weeks ago I was restoring an old lantern and when I went to put it back together I was missing a small part. They haven’t made that part since the 1950s. I couldn’t find it. I looked online at the place that sells that sort of thing and they didn’t have any. I went to the collector groups online to ask if anyone had a spare. No one did. So I swept the whole garage and then I went through the dustpan with a magnet. Nothing. So I moved everything away from the walls and swept again. Again with the magnet. Nothing. This time I took everything out of the garage and swept everywhere. Finally the magnet found that little part. I went back to the Facebook group. “I found it!” And everyone rejoiced with me.But notably we’ve gone from a shepherd well enough off to have ninety-nine sheep to a woman with only ten drachmas. They were probably her bridal headdress, but that there were only ten coins says that she was poor. Headdresses with hundreds of coins were common. We can imagine this woman—an elderly widow—taking out her precious bridal headdress and putting it on to remember that day so long ago. And when she goes to put it away she notices one of the ten coins is missing. She doesn’t see it anywhere and panics. The sort of house a woman like that lived in was small and dark—hard to see anything small—so she sweeps the whole house. And finally she finds it and she’s so excited she runs to tell her friends so that they can share her joy. And, again, there’s that question. “If this happened to you, wouldn’t you rejoice?” Of course they would.Two-thousand years distant we understand the stories, we sympathise with the shepherd and with the woman. I bet that everyone who reads these stories immediately thinks of some time when something like this happened to them and the Pharisees were no different. Jesus really drives the point home: If we can rejoice over a lost sheep or a lost coin that we’ve found, how much more ought we to rejoice over a lost sinner who repents. Jesus strikes at their self-righteousness and lack of mercy. God had once rescued them when they were lost in Egypt and slaves to Pharaoh. He’d delivered Israel and claimed them as his own. He even named Israel his son. He naturally grieves over those who reject his gracious covenant and he just as naturally rejoices when they receive his grace and return. I fully expect the Pharisees understood this was what Jesus was getting at, but just to make sure he says it out loud at the end of each story:“Let me tell you: that’s how glad they will be in heaven over one sinner who repents—more than over ninety-nine righteous people who don’t need repentance…[and]…that’s how glad God’s angels feel when a single sinner repents.” Their idea of “on earth as it is in heaven” had gradually come to mean condemning sinners and consigning them to God’s judgement. But Jesus is saying, if you want to see what’s going on in heaven stop looking to the temple. That worked in the past, but in me God is doing something new. Again, this is part of the reason why Jesus was forgiving sins and declaring people clean. He was acting out and showing people how he is the new temple. In him heaven and earth have come together. In Jesus we have the firstfruits and a foretaste of God’s redemption and his new creation. So in these parables Jesus is telling the Pharisees, if you want to manifest on earth what is happening in heaven, look at what I am doing, not at the old temple. And in Jesus and in his banquets with tax collectors and sinners we see that God truly loves sinners and that he’s sent Jesus not to condemn us in our sin, but to rescue us and to lead us back to him in repentance and faith. We’re reminded here of Jesus’ words in John 3:16-17:“This is how much God loved the world: enough to give his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost, but should share in the life of God’s new age. After all, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved by him.” The restoration of sinners was so important to God, that he was doing something dramatically new—and instead of rejoicing over what Jesus was doing, the Pharisees were rejecting him. The Pharisees were partly right. They were right to look forward to a day of coming judgement when God’s Son would come to condemn sinners and to vindicate the righteous. What they got wrong was that it never occurred to them that God would send his Son, not just at the end of history, but would first send him into the middle of history, to call sinners to repentance and to offer himself as a sacrifice for their sins. To step into the middle of history to set a group of people to rights so that they would be his means of proclaiming his kingdom and his gracious forgiveness of sins—his gospel—to the world, so that when he does return at the end of history we won’t be condemned. In this we see the love of God. He didn’t cast humanity from his presence with a “Good riddance!” We sundered heaven and earth and when we did, God set in motion a gracious plan to bring us back together.Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has sought us out in our lostness, he’s forgiven us, and now invites us to his Table. He’s given himself as a sacrifice for our sins and this morning he invites us to his heavenly banquet. But how do we come? Again, this is the meal Jesus gave us to make sense of the cross. He is the Passover lamb sacrificed for our sins. By his death he frees us from our bondage to sin and death and leads us into new life and new creation. In Jesus we see grace. We don’t deserve any of this. We’re the rebels; we’re the sinners; we’re the God-haters. One day he will wipe such people from creation so that it can be finally, once and for all set to rights. We deserve nothing but death, but in his grace Jesus offers us forgiveness and restoration and life. And when we take hold of his grace in faith he tells us that the whole heavenly court rejoices. What was lost has been found. What ran away has been restored. Someone who had been an enemy of God, is now a friend—even a son or a daughter.But we’re always at risk of forgetting that we come to the banquet only by grace. It’s interesting that in the gnostic pseudo-gospel of Thomas, the parable was changed. In that telling of the story, the shepherd explains to the lost sheep that he sought it out because he loved it and he valued it more than the others.[1] We’re prone to twisting the story the same way in our own minds—thinking that we’ve been invited here to the Table because we deserved to be here. But that’s not the story Jesus tells. The one sheep that was lost was no more valuable than the other ninety-nine. The one coin lost was no different than all the others. In fact, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which follows them, the son who was lost was an utter twit and many people justly wonder why his father didn’t simply disown him. The only difference between the one and the ninety-nine and the one and the ten is that the one was lost. Brothers and sisters, we are not here because we’ve earned God’s love. We’re here by his grace. We are here because he rejoices in redeeming sinners. We’re here because it pleases him to forgive his enemies and restore them to his fellowship. In this we see his glory.Jesus upset the Pharisees because he made manifest on earth the reality of heaven that they had forgotten. He revealed that the Lord is a God who loves his enemies and desires to save them. We pray the words from Jesus’ prayer: “on earth as in heaven”. But do we live out the reality of heaven in our lives by reaching out to sinners with the love and grace and joy of heaven? It’s easy to fall into self-righteousness and it’s easy to live with an attitude of condemnation. Brothers and Sisters, remember this morning that we come to the Lord’s Table because of his love and grace. We come as sinners forgiven. When you go, don’t leave all of this at the door of the church, but take it with you so that you can encounter the world with grace and with the same love that God has shown you in Jesus.Let us pray: Loving and gracious Father, help us to grasp your deep, deep love for sinners and the profound graciousness of grace. Remind us of the joy in your courts over sinners who were lost and now found. And, Father, help us to love our fellow sinners as you have loved us and show us ways in which we can make the reality of heaven known here on earth. We ask this through Jesus the Messiah our Lord. Amen.[1] Gospel of Thomas 107.
A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity1 John 3:13-24 & St. Luke 14:16-24by William KlockIt was the Sabbath. Jesus and his disciples were in town and Jesus did all his usual things: healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, opening the ears of the deaf, casting out demons. And he’d said and preached and proclaimed all the usual things: “Repent, because God’s kingdom has come.” The poor heard God’s good news. Others were challenged. They begged Jesus to read the scripture lesson in the synagogue service, so he did, and then he said some profound and eye-opening things about it. Some of the Pharisees were intrigued by Jesus. Some of them didn’t know what to think. Some of them were angry. Some of them had already determined to trap Jesus. If they gave him enough rope, he’d eventually hang himself. He’d say or do the wrong thing and then they could all point at him and tell everyone, “See! See! We warned you from the beginning that he’s out to lunch,” and everyone would lose interest and Jesus would go back to Galilee and be forgotten—or, maybe if they were lucky, what he said or did would be bad enough they could have him arrested.One of the leading Pharisees lived in this town. He invited Jesus to his house for lunch as everyone was filing out of the synagogue. It would have looked bad if he hadn’t. But he and some of his friends had an idea. Luke, in Chapter 14 of his gospel, says that they were keeping a close eye on Jesus. In fact, we might translate Luke’s words to say that they watched him lurkingly—just waiting for him to do or say the wrong thing. They lurked on Twitter and had scoured their way through ten years of Jesus’ tweets. Nothing. (Actually, no. Jesus wasn’t on Twitter—he’s too smart for that.) So it’s no surprise then that as Jesus arrived at the Pharisees’ house for lunch, he met a man whose limbs were swollen with dropsy. The Pharisees probably hadn’t invited the man. The rabbis taught that dropsy was the Lord’s punishment for secret sexual sins. But in those days, doors were open, people came and went from banquets. The poor and needy would show up looking for handouts. On any other day, this Pharisee probably would have shooed away the man with dropsy, but not today. He wanted to see what Jesus would do. It was a given that Jesus healed the sick—but would he do it on the Sabbath?And, of course, Jesus saw right through the whole scheme. Seeing the man, he turned first to the Pharisee and to his lawyer friends—the local torah scholars and experts on the law. And Jesus put them on the spot. “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath or not?” he asked. They should have seen that coming, but they didn’t. They wanted to trap Jesus, but now he’s got them trapped. No matter what they said, they’d condemn themselves. And so while they stood there looking awkward, Jesus healed the man with dropsy and sent him away. And then he turned back to the Pharisees and to the lawyers and said, “Suppose one of you has a son—or an ox—that falls in a well. Are you going to tell me you won’t pull him out straightaway even on the sabbath say?” And, of course, they just looked at him. They had nothing to say that wouldn’t condemn them. Because, of course, if their son or their ox fell in a well, even on the sabbath, of course they’d pull him out.It was hard to hear. The Pharisees were right about a lot of things. They knew that Israel was supposed to be a pocket of God’s light in the middle of a dark world. They were the people who lived with the living God in their midst. They were his people, graciously chosen, delivered from bondage, and made holy for just this task: to be light in the darkness. The Pharisees were zealous for the law because they were grateful for God’s grace. Not all of the people in Israel were as faithful as the Pharisees. They tried to live their lives—even the little things—as if they were in the temple, in the presence of God. They saw themselves as walking manifestations of God’s light and of his kingdom—walking pockets of what the world is supposed to be like. And Jesus just exposed them, because as much as they were right on a lot of things, they’d forgotten the most important thing. The law was about more than do this and don’t to that. It was about loving God and loving neighbour. It was about showing others the same grace, the same lovingkindness that God had shown to them. They knew that deep down, but somehow, through the generations, they’d forgotten that aspect of it. Instead of being a light to lighten those lost in the dark, they were being light to shame and condemn those lost in the dark—and that’s not light at all.Jesus had already spoiled the party, so he just kept going. Luke tells us in 14:7 that Jesus noticed how each guest claimed the best seat he could, so he told them that God’s people should, instead, be humble. “If you go to a wedding and just assume you can sit in the seat of honour, the host is going to tell you to move so the real guest of honour can sit there and you’ll look like a fool in front of everyone. No. Instead, be humble. Take the lowliest seat and let your host offer you a better place.”They were starting to figure out what Jesus was getting at. He said, “Everyone who pushes himself forward will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be honoured.” They knew this wasn’t just about banquets. Jesus was saying that the way these leaders of Israel were behaving at banquets had become representative of how they thought of themselves in relation to God and to each other. They acted like God had chosen them because they were special when it was really the other way around: They were special because God had chosen them. They knew better—just like we do. They knew God chose Israel because he is gracious. But they didn’t act like it.So Jesus says: If you truly want to represent God and his kingdom, stop thinking so loftily of yourselves, stop avoiding the people who aren’t like you and who don’t share your status, and start throwing banquets for the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Rejoice when sinners repent. Rejoice when God saves the lost. That’s what God has done for you, after all—you’ve just forgotten.Some of them understood what Jesus was getting at, but not everyone. Some poor, clueless soul shouted out at that point, “A blessing on everyone who eats bread in the kingdom of God.” He totally missed the point. Blessed, indeed, is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God, but who will be there. That was Jesus’ point. These people were sure they’d be there, but in so many ways the way they acted and the way they saw themselves said otherwise. They weren’t the walking pockets of the kingdom they thought they were. For all their holiness, they were really more like walking pockets of darkness.So in response, Jesus told them another parable. This is our Gospel today.Jesus said, “Once a man made a great dinner, and invited lots of guests. When the time for the meal arrived, he sent his servants to say to the guests, ‘Come now. Everything is ready!’ But the whole lot of them began to make excuses. The first said, ‘I’ve just bought a field, and I really have to go and see it. Please accept my apologies.’ Another one said, ‘I’ve just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’ve got to go and test them out. Please accept my apologies.’ And another said, ‘I’ve just got married, so naturally I can’t come.’ So the servant went back and told his master all this.As they sat eating what was probably a simple sabbath lunch prepared the day before, Jesus brings to mind an elaborate and expensive feast—the sort of thing that took days to prepare and that cost so much that the man throwing the part would send out invitation months in advance. We only do that today for a wedding, but imagine him, like a bride and groom, sending out invitations with RSVP cards to his friends and business associates. The RSVP cards came back and everyone said they’d be there, so he made all the arrangements. So much wine and so much fruit. So much meat and so much bread. He arranged for musicians and dancers and other entertainers. He got his house ready. And then the day of, he put on his finest clothes, threw open his doors—and no one came. So he sent his servant out to find out what was up with his guests. They all had excuses. This one bought a field sight unseen and had to go have a look at it. This one bought a bunch of oxen and just had to try them out. Another just got married. Obviously his honeymoon was more important than this man’s great feast.Imagine all the effort and expense that this man invested. It was a huge deal for him. But no one else cared. No one else valued all that he had done for them. Imagine how you’d feel if no one came to your wedding banquet after they all returned their RSVP cards saying they’d be there. Jesus says the man was angry, but he wasn’t going to let all his expense and preparations go to waste.‘Go out quickly,’ he said to his servant. ‘Go into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in here the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.’ ‘Alright, Master,’ the servant said, ‘I’ve done that—but there’s still room.’ ‘Well then,’ said the master to the servant, ‘go out to the highways and the hedges and make them come in, so that my house may be full! Let me tell you this: none of those people who were invited will get to taste my dinner.’When his rich friends won’t come, he invites—even rounds up—the poor. Notice that his servant literally has to bring, to compel them to come to the banquet. Imagine what the poor people in the town thought at the invitation. Imagine what the blind beggar sleeping in a ditch thought when this rich man’s servant pulled him up and dragged him into a fancy house full of fancy food. They would have thought it was a joke, at least until they actually got there. That’s why the servant had to compel them to come, because they knew how these things worked. They didn’t belong. But the rich man brought them in. He brought them all in. And they had the time of their lives—and, I think, so did he.Now, Luke doesn’t tell us how the Pharisees responded. In the next verse he jumps to a completely different time and place. But we know. We know that this just made them angrier and more hostile to Jesus—not every last one of them, but most of them. Eventually they’d be angry enough that they’d conspire to have Jesus arrested. But why did the things that Jesus did and said at that sabbath lunch make them so angry?Well, remember that the Jews, and especially the Pharisees, were waiting for the Lord’s return. The prophets had talked about that day in terms of a great banquet and this banquet idea then became a common image of the coming Day of the Lord. Israel’s God would return to judge and to cast down the nations (and the unfaithful within Israel) and then he’d throw a great feast for his beloved people. The closest things they had to describe it was their entry into the promised land, the land of milk and honey, and the prosperous days of King David. It would be like that, only a thousand times more so. When Jesus told a story of a man preparing a great feast, everyone listening knew he was talking about the Lord and how he would come to deliver his people and set everything to rights and usher in the age to come—the age when they would feast in his presence. And now Jesus explains that he’s come to throw open the doors to God’s great banquet. This is what Israel has been waiting for all these years. And yet Jesus rebukes them. This isn’t the first time the Lord has extended his invitation. For centuries he had called to his people through the prophets, but they had refused to hear the prophets and had even killed some of them. The Pharisees knew that and they were committed to making sure they didn’t do the same thing. Except that’s exactly what they were doing. This time God has spared no expense. His people had rejected and killed the prophets. This time he’s sent his own son, who humble himself to be born in their flesh. He’s travelled through Galilee and Judea, calling everyone to the banquet, but like the people in the parable, they all have excuses.It’s worth noting the excuses given in the parable. One man says that he’s bought five yoke of oxen sight-unseen and has to check them over. Another has bought a field sight-unseen and needs to go have a look at it. The third just got married and has obligations to his new bride. All three of these excuses have echoes that go back to the law in Deuteronomy. A man who had built a new house, but hadn’t dedicated it yet; a man who had bought a field, but hadn’t enjoyed its produce; and a newly married man were all legitimate excused from going off to war. And now these guests twist those laws as excuses to reject their host’s banquet. But this is what Israel had done with the law: twisting it into something it was never meant to be. And it’s that twisting of the law that was particularly exemplified in the Pharisees. Jesus didn’t meet their expectations of the Messiah. His banquets included too many sinners, unclean people, and outsiders. Those were the people that the Pharisees had showed up with their own holiness. The Messiah was supposed to come and feast with people like them, while raining down fire and brimstone on all those unholy people. And so they frowned as Jesus forgave sins and welcomed home the prodigals. The Pharisees had gutted the torah of its loving heart and that was profoundly exemplified by their angry glares as Jesus healed a sick man on the sabbath. There could be no better way to celebrate the sabbath than to dance and sing and glorify God for his lovingkindness, but instead they tisked and frowned and gave Jesus disapproving how-dare-you scowls. The angels rejoiced in heaven to see God’s mighty works—but here on earth the people most expecting it, the people most longing for it, frowned and disapproved because God didn’t do his mighty works according to what they thought the rules were. That was their attitude towards Jesus’ entire messianic ministry. The banquet had come, but now they wanted nothing to do with it. And so Jesus warns them: I’m going to take my invitation to the unclean and to the sick and to the poor—and even to the gentiles—and having rejected me, you will have no share in God’s new creation. If I were to let you in, you’d only mess it up—because you don’t know what love is.The parable was a warning. Matthew records it too, and I expect he was thinking of his people, most of whom continued to rejected Jesus even as their judgement day was so close. But think of Luke. He was one of those gentiles. He was one of those poor men, sleeping in a ditch while the rich man prepared his banquet. Maybe he didn’t even know the banquet was going to happen. He saw the caterers coming and going, wondered what it was all about, but he never expected to be there. He’d never received an invitation, but more importantly, he wasn’t even the right sort of person. He was a gentile—uncircumcised and unclean. Jews didn’t associate with his sort. And then the rich man’s servant came, woke him up with a kick, and said, “Hey! My master’s thrown a banquet and no one came, so now he’s inviting you to know his goodness.” For Luke, that servant seems likely to have been the Apostle Paul. And Paul gave Luke a firm gospel shove into the banquet. And before he knew it Luke was dancing and singing and praising and glorify the God of Israel—the God of those weird, annoying Jews—and this God was like none of the gods he’d ever known. This God was good and loving and most of all faithful. And even though Luke, as a gentile, had no right to be at the banquet, he was welcomed in because when he heard about this Jesus, this Messiah who had died and risen from the dead, and he believed and he was caught up in God’s great redemptive act of new creation.In fact, this unexpected and undeserved invitation to the banquet so transformed Luke that before too long he joined Paul as they set sail for Europe as gospel heralds—to proclaim to the lordship of Jesus. A few years later he would join Paul on another missionary journey. And about ten years after they’d left Troas that first time, Luke would journey with Paul on his final voyage, the one that took him to Rome to appeal his case before Caesar. And not only was Luke, with Paul, singing the glories of Jesus and the God of Israel through Greece and on to Rome, he also talked to those who had met Jesus and he recorded their stories and wrote his gospel and then followed it up with the book of Acts. Luke learned profoundly what grace is. He knew profoundly the love of God. Because even though he was a foreigner, through Jesus, the God of Israel had made him a son and even poured his own Spirit into him—including Luke in promises he had no natural right to be part of.Brothers and Sisters, Luke is us. Like Paul hauling him out of the ditch and sending him into the banquet, the Lord’s servants have come to us, proclaiming the good news about Jesus, hauling each of us out of our own ditch, giving us a gospel kick in the pants, and (with the Spirit’s help) propelling us into God’s great banquet. We need a reminder of this, because we’re prone to taking our place before the Lord for granted. The Pharisees had their way of taking their family status for granted and we have our ways, but however we do it, it always seems to stem from forgetting that whether Jew or gentile, whether we were born into the family or whether we came later, we forget that it is by the gracious lovingkindness of God—who gave his son to die so that we who were his enemies can be here as his sons and daughters.Our Epistle today continues with this short course of readings from John’s first letter. John writes in Chapter 3,We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the family. Anyone who does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has the life of the coming age abiding in him. This is how we know love: [Jesus] laid down his life for us. And we too ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. Anyone who has the means of life in this world, and sees a brother or sister in need, and closes his heart against them—how can God’s love be abiding in him? Children, let us not love in word or in speech, but in deed and in truth. (1 John 3:14-18)Does God’s love abide in us? I think that all too often, we come to the banquet, to the Lord’s Table. We eat the bread and we drink the wine, but we’ve forgotten the amazing sacrifice of love in which we participate here. We take the Lord’s feast for granted. Or maybe we eat it for the wrong reasons. But we find some kind of assurance here, the Table reminds us that we belong to God and to his family, but then we go out in to the world—or maybe we even interact with our brothers and sisters here—and instead of being pockets of gospel light in the darkness, instead of being pockets of God’s future here in the present, we’re darkness. We call ourselves God’s sons and daughters, we follow the rules, but there’s no love. We eat the Lord’s bread and we drink the Lord’s wine and we should be reminded of God’s great provision for us, of his great blessings, but we ignore the needy. Here we’re reminded that in Jesus and because of his death on our behalf, we’ve been given life and have a share in God’s new creation, but too often we keep it to ourselves instead of taking it to the highways and hedges. Here we have the means of life, the gospel, the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen. We know the gracious lovingkindness of God. We don’t belong here, but he’s invited us anyway. He’s forgiven our sins and filled us with his Spirit and given us a promise of new creation. And we go out to a world in need, people suffering physically and people dying spiritually, and we close our hearts against them.So, Brothers and Sisters, come the Lord’s Table this morning and be reminded that in Jesus, God has humbled himself and given his life for our sake. This is the defining act of love. But don’t just remember. The Lord’s Supper is more than an intellectual exercise. As we eat the Lord’s bread and drink his wine, we participate in that great act of love ourselves. Be shaped, be transformed by the love of God made manifest at the cross. Every time you come to the Table and participate in God’s perfect love, let it more and more define you. Abide in God’s love and, more and more, let God’s love abide in you, that you might truly be a gospel light in the darkness.Let us pray: Father, you delight to show mercy to sinners and you graciously sent your Son to suffer the punishment we deserve. We have received your grace and have been given new life. Remind us to set aside all thoughts of self-righteousness. Give us opportunities now to share your gracious love with others—with each other and with the world, that everyone we encounter may be transformed by your gospel. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
A Sermon for the First Sunday after TrinitySt. Luke 16:19-31 & 1 St. John 4:7-21by William KlockThe crowd was settling down after that first frenzied crush when Jesus had come to town. The sick had been healed. The tears had been wiped away. In Jesus the people had had a taste, they’d seen a pocket of what the world is supposed to be, of the world set to rights. They’d had a glimpse of God’s kingdom. Now it was time to listen as Jesus spoke. There were all sorts of people there. People from town, people from the countryside, regular people, poor people—even some Pharisees looking down on the town square from the rooftop of the richest man in town. And Jesus began:“There was once a rich man. He was dressed in purple and fine linen, and feasted sumptuously every day.” Jesus was smiling at some little kids sitting in front of him as he said this, but everyone else looked at the Pharisees up on their rooftop perch. They were rich. They weren’t feast-every-day rich or even dressed-in-purple rich. Very few people were. But they did wear fine clothes and only rich people could afford to live like the Pharisees with all their scruples and rules and everyday things. Jesus continued: “A poor man named Lazarus, who was covered with sores, lay outside his gate. He longed to feed himself with the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.” Jesus paints a picture of extremes. First there’s the rich man. Super rich. Ostentatiously rich. Only kings could afford to wear purple and feast every day. And in stark contrast there’s Lazarus. He’s destitute. He’s covered in sores, which means he’s almost certainly unclean. He’s probably lame. At some point he had either dragged himself to what he thought would be a prime spot for begging or someone else had deposited him there, at the gate of the richest man in town. And the rich man and his friends would come and go. He would hear the music and laughter from the other side of the wall. He could smell the meat roasting. He would have been happy with the bread the rich people used to wipe their hands. But there was nothing for poor Lazarus. And to make his life worse, as he lay there helpless, the feral dogs of the town would come to lick his oozing sores and leave him stinging.Jesus puts a new spin on an old story the rabbis told. There was a story—it’s been preserved in the Talmud—that originated in Egypt and was brought back to Judah by Alexandrian Jews. It was a story about a rich tax collector and a poor torah scholar. They both died and everyone attended the rich man’s funeral and no one could be bothered to show up the funeral of the poor man. But a few days later, a friend of the poor man had a dream of paradise, and there in the middle of paradise was the poor torah scholar enjoying everything he’d sacrificed in life for the sake of God’s law. And not far away was the rich man, parched and in torment, struggling to reach the stream, but forever held back. When the story was told that way, everyone had sympathy for the poor torah scholar and hated the rich tax collector. But Jesus changes it up a bit. The rich man is just a rich man—maybe even a Pharisee. And the poor man’s just a poor a man. And when it’s told that way, given the thinking of the day, most people would have had their sympathies reverse. Riches—so long as they weren’t gained from collecting taxes for the Romans—riches were a sign of God’s favour. And the poor man? Well, think of the disciples’ question to Jesus about the blind man. “Who sinned? This man or his parents?” A lot of people would have chalked up the poor man’s state to his sins. He was out of favour with God and deserved his miserable lot in life.There’s another interesting change Jesus makes. In the usual version of the story, it’s the rich man who has a name. As he tells the story his way, Jesus gives a name to the poor man instead: Lazarus. Lazarus means “God helps”, but more importantly, it’s a rabbinic form of the name Eliezer. I suspect that Jesus was making a deliberate connection with Abraham’s servant, Eliezer of Damascus. If we go back to Genesis 15 we read how Abraham lamented to the Lord that he was childless and that his only heir was Eliezer of Damascus. In response, the Lord promised that he and Sarah would have a son. When Isaac was born he displaced Eliezer, a gentile and an outsider, as Abraham’s inheritor. In Jesus’ parable, the rich man is one of Abraham’s sons. Again, the Pharisees would have seen his riches as a sign of his election and a sign of God’s blessing on him. Lazarus, even though he was a Jew, was unclean because of his diseases and his poverty would have been seen as a sign of God’s disfavour. He was an outsider, like Eliezer of Damascus, and undeserving of Abraham’s inheritance.And yet look at what happens:“In due course the poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. As he was being tormented in Hades, he looked up and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.” (Luke 16:22-23)Both men die. Jesus simply says that the rich man was buried, but that simple statement unpacks into elaborate funeral rites and ceremonies and all the feasting we’d expect to take place when a rich man died in an ancient culture. Proper burial was extremely important for the Jews and this man got not only a proper burial, but it came with all the pomp and circumstance that his wealth would have demanded. In contrast, Jesus simply says that Lazarus died and we wonder if anyone even noticed. There was no burial for Lazarus. His body could very well have been dragged away by the dogs while the rich man’s servants assumed he’d found a better spot to beg.And yet Jesus says that even without recognition or proper burial, poor Lazarus was collected by the angels themselves and taken to Abraham’s “side” or Abraham’s “bosom”. The Jews described the Messianic age to come as one in which God’s people would feast and banquet in the kingdom along with Abraham. Lazarus was probably as surprised as anyone, not only to be carried by the angels into that great banquet, but to be seated at the table right next to Abraham, in the place of highest honour. That was the place reserved for someone like the rich man—not the place for a poor, sick, unclean beggar. And yet there he was.Again, with stark contrast, Jesus describes the situation of the rich man. Despite his high status in life, he wakes to find himself being tormented in the afterlife. And not just tormented. Where Lazarus finds himself feasting at Abraham’s side, the rich man finds himself on the far side of a great gulf that separates him from that banquet and from Abraham. The tables have been turned. In life the rich man feasted and a great social gulf kept Lazarus away and starving.Now it needs to be emphasised that Jesus’ parable is not meant to give us teaching about the afterlife. A lot of theologians, down through the ages, have gone to this parable assuming that Jesus’ point was to teach us about the intermediate state or about heaven and hell. That shows the danger of pulling portions of Scripture out of context. Jesus was using a well-known folk tale to make a point. We tell jokes and stories, for example, about people being met at the pearly gates by St. Peter with his list. St. Peter and his list are never the point of those stories. We don’t believe that this is what actually happens when we die—it’s a popular folk tale in our culture. The point is what happens to the people in the story or joke when they get there. Jesus is telling a story like that here. He’s using the elements of a common folk tale, not to teach about the afterlife, but to rebuke the Pharisees for their love of money and for their failure to truly live out the law and the prophets—to truly live as Abraham’s heirs. As the Lord had been generous to Israel with his grace and his provision, the people of Israel should have been generous with their grace and provisions with each other—and especially with people like Lazarus. They were supposed to be a pocket of God’s future in the present, showing the nations the generous love of God.And so here are these two men with their roles completely reversed in death. And yet the rich man still doesn’t get it. He sees Lazarus seated at the table with Abraham and he calls out in verse 24:“‘Father Abraham! Have mercy on me! Send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue! I’m in agony in this fire!’” The rich man calls out to “Father Abraham”. His entire life he had deceived himself into thinking that Abraham was his father simply because he was one of Abraham’s biological descendants. Like the Pharisees, he was convinced that his genetics, his circumcision, his diet, his sabbath observance, his separation from gentiles and from all things unclean, and all his sacrifices and offerings made at the temple guaranteed him a seat at the great banquet. And yet he feasted away his days while poor Lazarus starved at his gate. We should be reminded again of the Lord’s rebuke through the prophet Hosea:For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6)Or as Jesus puts it in Matthew 9:13, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”The rich man doesn’t grasp Lazarus’ position either. Not only is he still calling out to Abraham as if he has a claim on Abraham, but he calls out to Abraham to send Lazarus to him with some water. He sees Lazarus at Abraham’s side and misreads the situation. It never occurs to him that Lazarus is there to be honoured. He thinks that Lazarus is there as Abraham’s servant: a waterboy in hades. Abraham has to explain the situation to him. Look at verses 25-26:“My child, remember that you in your life you received good things, and in the same way Lazarus received bad things. Now he is comforted here, and you are tormented. Besides that, there is a great chasm standing between us. People who want to cross over from here to you can’t do so, nor can anyone get across from the far side to us.” Jesus is still following the folk tale at this point. Abraham puts the rich man in his place. Lazarus wasn’t taken by the angels to be Abraham’s servant—or the rich man’s for that matter. And the rich man hasn’t landed in a place of torment by mistake. The rich man realises that the way he lived his life was wrong—he’d made assumptions about his status with Abraham and with the Lord, but his assumptions were wrong. Again, Jesus’ point isn’t to teach us the geography of the afterlife. He’s warning the Pharisees—and through them he’s warning all of Israel—that the role reversal that happened in this folk story could very well happen to them and that they’d better watch out. The kingdom was at hand, judgement was coming soon, and they had little time left to repent.Now, in the last verses of the chapter, Jesus changes the story. The way people were used to hearing it, the rich man realised the error of his ways and asked for warnings to be sent to his brothers lest they suffer the same fate—and the Lord or Abraham obliged. As Jesus tells the story, just the opposite happens. The warnings have already been sent. Look at verses 27-31:“‘Please, then, Father,’ the rich man said, ‘send him to my father’s house. I have five brothers. Let Lazarus warn them, so that they don’t come into this place of torment.’ But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets. Let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone went to them from the dead, they would repent.’ ‘And if they do not hear Moses and the Prophets,’ came the reply, ‘neither would they be convinced, even if someone rose from the dead.’” Look at Abraham’s response again: “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, “neither would they be convinced, even if someone rose from the dead.” With the coming of Jesus, the kingdom of God was breaking into the world. God sent Jesus to lead his people out of their long exile. He sent his Son to conquer sin and death and to lead his people out of their bondage to both. And so with every sickness healed, with every demon cast out, with every sin forgiven Jesus was showing that the kingdom had come, that God’s new future was beginning. This is why tax collectors and sinners were celebrating. Jesus was setting them free. Imagine the joy of Lazarus as he was carried by the angels to feast at Abraham’s side. This is the reality that Jesus was making known to the poor and the outcast and to sinners.And yet the Pharisees grumbled every time they saw Jesus doing these things. The men who were sons of Abraham and who spent their lives in devotion to God’s law, they couldn’t accept what Jesus was doing. He was inviting all the wrong people to the banquet! And so Jesus is rebuking them; he’s calling them to repentance just as he called the tax collectors and sinners to repent. And here he warns them: They’re like the rich man who refused poor Lazarus even the bread thrown under his table. They’ve been entrusted with the light, but they refuse to share it with those living in darkness. They’ve been entrusted with the law and the prophets—God’s Word and the means of redemption for the nations—but they’d rather keep it to themselves and see the nations, the poor, the unclean tormented in hades. And at the end of the day, it’s just that attitude towards the poor and towards sinners and towards all those on the outside—it’s their refusal to celebrate as Jesus heals and forgives and makes new—that reveals that while they have the law and the prophets, they’ve never truly understood them and they’ve never truly lived them. They’re supposed to be little pockets of God’s future in the present, but instead they’ve been little pockets of darkness. And because of that, they may be surprised to find themselves, just like the rich man, on the receiving end of God’s judgement. If they don’t repent and recognise that in Jesus the kingdom has come, they will have forfeited their inheritance and it will be given to others. They will have no share in the kingdom.This is where Jesus’ choice of the name Lazarus or Eliezer comes back into the story. When Isaac was born, the gentile Eliezer lost his inheritance. The Pharisees—and the rest of Israel—are the nation born of Isaac. They are the inheritors of God’s promises to Abraham. But with those covenant promises come covenant obligations—not just circumcision, avoiding unclean food, and sacrifices at the temple, but a seeking after justice and mercy and truly living out the lovingkindness of God in the world. If Israel refuses to fulfil those obligations and if she refuses to acknowledge that in Jesus they are being fulfilled, she will lose those covenant promises—she will lose her inheritance and it will be given to others, to outsiders grafted into Jesus who is the true Israel and the one truly faithful son of Abraham.This has been the message of Luke’s gospel from the beginning, when Mary sang out:He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek; He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent away empty. (Luke 1:52-53)This was the message that John the Baptist was preaching back in Chapter 3: “You’d better prove your repentance by bearing the proper fruit! Don’t start saying to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; let me tell you, God can raise up children for Abraham from these stones! The axe is already standing by the roots of the tree—so every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Luke 3:8-9). This was the warning that Jesus gave when he told the people to strive to enter through the narrow door before it’s shut, before it’s too late: “He will say to you, ‘I do not know where you people are from. Be off with you, you wicked lot.’ That’s where you’ll find weeping and gnashing of teeth: when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in God’s kingdom, and you yourselves will be thrown out. People will come from east and west, from north and south, and sit down to feast in God’s kingdom.” (Luke 13:27-29).The rich man and his brothers, just like the Pharisees and just like unfaithful Israel, all had the law and the prophets. They didn’t need any more witnesses. Jesus’ rebuke that even if someone should be raised from the dead they still wouldn’t believe is a prophetic look ahead at Israel’s fate. They refused to listen to the law and the prophets. Jesus came to renew Israel, and she refused to hear him and continued to refuse even when he rose from the dead. And so others are being grafted in: unclean people, sinners, and gentiles are being grafted in and through Jesus are being given the inheritance that Israel has forfeited.What does this mean for us? Brothers and sisters, we have Moses and the prophets, but more importantly we have Jesus and the Spirit, too. We’ve been renewed. The Spirit has given to us the one thing that the old Israel lacked: he’s inscribed God’s law on our hearts. He’s made it a part of us. He’s made it such a part of us that St. John can say in our Epistle today:Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God, and all who love are born of God and know God. The one who does not love has not known God, because God is love….If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is completed in us. That is how we know that we abide in him, and he in us, because he has given us a portion of his Spirit.” (1 John 4:7-8, 12-13)Maybe this is why the Spirit appeared as tongues of fire on the heads of the disciples at Pentecost. They became light in the Spirit—very visible those little walking pockets of God’s light-filled future, God’s new creation, pulled into the present for the sake of the world. That’s the day when, through his Spirit, God made his people to truly be what he’d intended them to be all along.Brothers and Sisters, it was easy for the Pharisees to take their convent status for granted. It should not be so for us. They were the natural sons of Abraham, but we are the dead wood that was grafted into the living vine—by the Spirit, into Jesus. We’re the ones who have received an inheritance that was not naturally ours. The Table we come to this morning, the bread we eat and the wine we drink, remind us of the amazing grace and generosity of God towards us. In so many ways and for so many reasons, we do not deserve his invitation to this Table, but he has been gracious and merciful to us. He’s given his own Son to die so that we can be a part of this family. May we never take his grace or our position before him or his Table for granted. May we, redeemed by his blood and filled with his Spirit, embody his love for the sake of the world. May we always be faithful and living witnesses of God’s new creation—light in midst of darkness, love in the midst of hate; hope in the midst of fear.Let’s pray: O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for Trinity SundaySt. John 3:1-17by William KlockKnock! Knock! Knock! Someone was at the door. Peter—or maybe it was John or James—got up to see who it was. It had been a long day. Everywhere Jesus went the crowds followed. Some were full of questions, but most of all they were full of problems. And they brought them all to Jesus. The blind, the deaf, the sick, the dying, the demon-possessed. This isn’t how the world is supposed to be, full of tears. Everyone knew it then. Everyone knows it now. And everyone then and now hoped for a day when somehow it will all be set to rights. And so the people flocked to Jesus, because wherever he went, there was a little pocket of the world as it should be, the world as God had made it, the world set to rights. Wherever Jesus went, there was a little pocket of God’s future brought into the present. A little pocket of the world where the tears are wiped away.Knock! Knock! Knock! There it was again. They’d found a quiet place to spend the night away from the crowds, but someone had found it. Peter was getting himself ready to tell whoever-it-was to go away, so image his surprise when he opened the door and saw Nicodemus standing there. They’d never met, but everyone knew who Nicodemus was. He was a rich man, he was one of the leaders of the Pharisees, but more than that, he was a member of the Sanhedrin—the ruling council of the Jews. And here he was at the door of the house where Jesus was staying, standing there with a couple of his servants, politely asking to speak with the rabbi now that the crowds were gone.Nicodemus had seen what Jesus was doing. Nicodemus had heard what Jesus was preaching. Nicodemus had watched from the edge of the crowds and listened in the temple court. In Jesus he saw the hopes of Israel being fulfilled. He saw that little pocket of God’s future following wherever Jesus went. He believed—he just wasn’t sure what exactly it was that he was believing. Have you ever had that happen? You see God at work. It’s obvious. But it’s not what you expected. So you believe, but you don’t really understand. That’s where Nicodemus was. He wasn’t one of the simple people who just needed some physical manifestation of the kingdom—like the blind and the deaf and the sick. He knew the scriptures. He knew how the God of Israel was supposed to fulfil his prophecies. And Jesus was fulfilling them, but not in the ways anyone expected. So the great theologian had come, not to be healed, but to ask how all this can be. “We know that you’re a teacher who’s come from God,” Nicodemus said to Jesus, “Nobody can do the signs that you’re doing, unless God is with him.”You can hear the unspoken question implicit in Nicodemus’ affirmation. It’s the theologian’s equivalent of “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” It was like this for everyone. The disciples saw, they heard, they believed, but whenever Jesus pressed them with questions, ninety per cent of the time they gave the wrong answer. Peter knew with certainty that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God. But when push came to shove, he drew his sword and was ready to bring God’s kingdom with violence. Even the disciples were full of all the wrong ideas the Jews had about the Messiah and the coming of the kingdom. Nicodemus was in the same boat. It’s just that he knew he was missing something and here he was to get it sorted out. But Jesus doesn’t give him the answer he wanted, because even if Jesus explained it all, even if Jesus connected all the dots for Nicodemus, that’s wouldn’t solve the problem. Nicodemus would still need something more. And this is where Jesus answers his implicit question with those familiar words, “Let me tell you the solemn truth. Unless someone has been born from above, he won’t be able to see God’s kingdom.”It wasn’t just Nicodemus struggling with all this. Think of all our Gospel lessons during Easter- and Ascensiontide, those lessons where Jesus tells his disciples that as good as it is for him to be with them, he’s going to have to leave so that something better can happen. And they don’t understand. They’re confused. If Jesus leaves, that little pocket of the kingdom that follows him wherever he goes, it will be gone with him. They didn’t understand either. They, too, had to be born from above in order to see—in order to be part of—the kingdom. In order to themselves become little pockets of God’s future in the present. And, of course, that’s what we saw last Sunday as we remembered Pentecost. The God of Israel sent his Spirit to indwell his people—they were born from above—and suddenly it all made sense and Peter preached that Pentecost sermon that would have been impossible for him to preach just the day before and from there they went out to make God’s kingdom known to the world.This is, incidentally, why we have this story of Nicodemus’ visit to Jesus as our Gospel lesson today. Trinity Sunday didn’t come along until the high Middle Ages. Long before today was Trinity Sunday, it was the Sunday after Pentecost and today’s Gospel was assigned to explain the Pentecost events we read about last Sunday. When Trinity Sunday came along no one changed the lesson, because here we see the Trinity revealed in the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus as the Son reveals that the Father must send the Spirit to create, to give life to a renewed people.So Nicodemus knew the story. He knew the God of Israel. But he knew there was more to it. He knew the world is not as it should be and he knew that that the people of Israel were failing at what God had called them to be. And he knew the Lord’s promises to set the world and Israel to rights. He saw the Lord’s promises being fulfilled in Jesus and he’d heard Jesus talking about this new work, this new exodus, this new deliverance of the people—this exodus even greater than the one that defined them when the Lord delivered them from Pharaoh. And Jesus warned about a judgement soon to come on those who refused to repent of their old ways and to get in line with the Lord’s plans. It didn’t fit into the expectations of the people of Israel and especially not into what the Pharisees expected, but there had to be something to it, because the Lord was so clearly with Jesus.Again, Jesus picks up on the question implied in Nicodemus’ statement. He says, “The central truth you’re missing, Nicodemus, is that you’ve got to be born from above to see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus understood so much. If anyone wanted to see God’s will done and his kingdom come on earth as in heaven it was the Pharisees. That’s what they lived for. And Nicodemus saw it in Jesus, but he struggled to reconcile his expectations with what Jesus was saying. And Jesus says that what he’s missing—what all of Israel is missing—is this new birth, this being born from above, this being born again. And it’s important to understand that as much as Jesus is saying, “You, Nicodemus, must be born again—which is how the ears of modern Christians have been trained to hear this in individualistic terms—Jesus’ stress is on Israel, on the whole people. In verse 7 he says, “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’” When he says “You must be born again,” that’s plural, it’s “you all must be born again”. Israel as a people had been born the first time when they passed through the waters of the Red Sea and Jesus is saying that now Israel had to be born a second time. This is why John was out in the wilderness baptizing in the Jordan, but that wasn’t all. Israel had been baptised in water before and it wasn’t enough. Now they needed to be baptised in both water and the Spirit. Israel was always supposed to be a pocket of God’s future in the present—so that the nations could see and know the goodness of God. And Jesus is saying that it’s the Spirit who will finally make the people what God had called them to be. As Jesus had said over and over in various ways, he, Jesus, was sent by the Father, but that it would be the Spirit—the “Helper”—who would come after, who would testify to them about this truth and then that through them, this Spirit would testify to the rest of Israel and even to the nations…fulfilling the prophets, effectively creating a new Israel, and through this new people, fulfilling the mission the Lord had given to them from the beginning: to fill the world with the knowledge of him as the waters cover the sea and to testify to the nations in such a way that the nations would flock to the God of Israel to give him glory.But Nicodemus didn’t get it. Neither did Jesus’ disciples. Because the Spirit had not yet come to testify about Jesus. So Nicodemus asked Jesus, “How can I be born again? I know you’re not talking about returning to my mother’s womb, but what do you mean? A person is only born once.” And as he answers Nicodemus, this is where Jesus switches from saying things like “Unless one is born again” to “Unless you—all of you—are born again”. Because it’s not so much about one person being born again or even about a whole bunch of individuals being born again. It’s about Israel as a people being born again so that she could be put back on track to fulfil her mission—the one given to Abraham two thousand years before. And this idea of birth would have resonated particularly with someone like Nicodemus, because to be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham’s family. Other things like circumcision and the sabbath and what you ate (or didn’t eat) were important and especially so for the Pharisees, but those things were important because they identified you as part of Abraham’s family. They also drew a clear boundary between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles who were most definitely not.What Jesus is saying now is that being born into Abraham’s family in the way the Jews had been thinking about it all this time wasn’t enough. In fact, it never had been enough. And Nicodemus should have known this. For two millennia people were being born into Abraham’s family and God’s kingdom still hadn’t come. For two millennia people were born into Abraham’s family and still the Gentiles hadn’t experienced the Lord’s blessing through them, at least not on the large scale envisioned in the Scriptures. Just the opposite. The Prophet Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their coattails saying, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!” Instead, because of the way most of Abraham’s children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where’s your God?” It takes more than being born of the flesh of Abraham. It even takes more than being born of water, as Israel had been in the Red Sea. And as a man devoted to the law, to torah, Nicodemus should have understood this. The Pharisees were all about exhorting their fellow Jews to be better keepers of the law, but it wasn’t working. They of all people should have been looking forward to the day when the law would no longer be written on tablets of stone, but engraved on the very hearts of the people by the Holy Spirit.So Jesus says to Nicodemus, “I’m telling you the solemn truth. Unless you’re born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter God’s kingdom. Flesh is born from flesh, but spirit is born from spirit.” Israel needs something more than a biological inheritance. What does Jesus mean, though, when he talks about being born of water and the Spirit? This is was what John the Baptist was preaching about. God was about to lead his people in a new exodus. As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant. They all needed that baptism of repentance. They needed to turn aside from their own misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah and from their failures to be faithful to the Lord and his covenant. But remember what John promised. When people asked if he was the Messiah he said that he was only the forerunner. John said, “I baptise you with water, but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.” And that’s just what Jesus does. As we recalled last week on Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false lord, from every false god, from every false source of security, from every false way in order to take hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism and he plunges us into the Holy Spirit. And it’s the Spirit who does the work of transforming us. It’s the Spirit who regenerates us. It’s the Spirit who causes us to be born again as he takes our old dead wood and unites it to the life of Jesus, causing us to bear fruit—making us the pocket of God’s future in the present. Through the Spirit we’re born again, born from above.The last few months I’ve been reading Ed Sanders’ books on the relationship between the New Testament and Second Temple Judaism. Sanders was a brilliant scholar and full of deep insights. His work has had a profound impact on how we understand the New Testament. But he wasn’t a Christian. He described himself as a “secular Mainline Protestant”. And it shows. As brilliant as his insights into Jesus and Paul are, as fascinating as he is to read, it’s all spiritually dry as dust. There’s no doxology to any of it. Sanders even refused to weigh in on whether or not Christianity is superior to Judaism. And so it was like a breath of fresh air when I finished Sanders’ “Paul and Palestinian Judaism” and picked up Tom Wright’s new book of Romans and it was full of the same sorts of brilliant and deep insights—many of them ideas that started with Sanders back in the 1970s—but Bp. Wright’s work is overflowing with doxology and gospel joy. That’s the difference that Jesus and the Spirit make in us.Think of your baptism as something like Israel at the Red Sea. There was the parted water and God calling Israel to pass through to freedom and new life on the other side. There was no receiving the law in Egypt; they had to cross to the other side of the sea to find covenant, to find relationship with the Lord. And so we stand at the waters of baptism today. In them Jesus gives his promise: Repent, turn aside from every false way, trust me, follow me in faith and you will find forgiveness of sins and new life through the Spirit. To pass through the waters of baptism is to take hold of Jesus’ promise and to be born again of water and the Spirit—and to be made part of this new covenant people ready and equipped to live and to proclaim his kingdom.But, again, this didn’t fit what Nicodemus knew. “How can this be so?” he asks. And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this? You’re one of the teachers of Israel!” Nicodemus knew the story. He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission. As a Pharisee he was abundantly aware of this problem. Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard your cries and is visiting his people and he’s doing it in me. I’m the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago. I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I’m the one who has come down from heaven.At this point, I think, Nicodemus starts to connect the dots as much as anyone could in those days before the Spirit was sent. He started to understand, because now Jesus really starts to correct what was wrong with Israel’s thinking about herself, about what it meant to be God’s people, and about what it would mean for the Lord to come to deliver them. Jesus reminds Nicodemus of an event from Israel’s time in the wilderness. The Israelites grumbled against Moses—which was ultimately grumbling against the Lord—and so he sent poisonous snakes into the camp. They bit people and many of those who were bit died. But the Lord also gave Moses the remedy. He told Moses to cast a snake out of bronze and to mount it on a pole. Anyone who would look up to the bronze snake would be healed.And now Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up that snake in the wilderness, in the same way the son of man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may share in the life of God’s new age.” Jesus is pointing to his own crucifixion. As the snake was the affliction of the people lifted up for them to look at, so Jesus would take the affliction of Israel on himself—he would suffer the punishment for their sins—and be lifted up on the cross. He would be lifted up for everyone to look upon—to see the horror and the gravity of their sin, to see that the wages of sin is death. But they would also see Jesus taking it all on himself and in that, the horror and ugliness of his being raised up would become an act by which he is ultimately glorified. In the cross we see the love of God made manifest in Jesus. And Jesus says in the familiar words we all know, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”Jesus corrects the central error in the thinking of Israel in his day. They were hoping and praying for the day when the Lord would come, not just to vindicate his people, but to judge their enemies—to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and all the other gentiles. But instead Jesus tells Nicodemus that he’s come not to condemn, but to save all who will look to him. All. The Jews thought the Lord, when he came, would vindicate them for their faithfulness, but Jesus says to Nicodemus, even the most righteous of you need this new birth, this salvation if you want to know God’s vindication. And it’s not just for you. The Jews looked forward to the condemnation he would bring, but Jesus says he’s come not to condemn, but to save. And this is where the part about being born again of water and the Spirit comes into play. Being born of water and the Spirit supersedes biology and genealogy. In Jesus God opens his arms to welcome Jew and Gentile alike. It was the Jews first, because if the Lord is faithful—and he is—he had to first fulfil his promises to his own people, but most importantly, in that act of faithfulness, the nations would take note of the God of Israel. In Jesus, the nations would see that the God of Israel is not like the puny, selfish, fickle, and powerless gods they have known, and they would then flock to this God who is truly good and faithful. This is what God’s future looks like, not just Israel set to rights and everyone else set on fire. God’s future is for everyone who sees Jesus and his people wiping away the tears and forgiving sin, who believes, and who becomes part of it—whether born of Abraham by the flesh or born of Abraham by faith—all born in God’s Spirit.Abraham’s family is integral to the story and the plan, but Jesus reminds us that genes and DNA were never really what made anyone part of Abraham’s family; it was about faith. It was faith for Abraham himself and it was faith in God’s promises for all who followed after: for Isaac and Jacob, for Joseph and Moses and Joshua, for gentiles like Rahab and Ruth, and even for the great kings like David and Solomon. And God’s promise was that through his covenant people, through these people who knew him in faith and were reconciled to him by faith, he would bless the nations. It happened here and there in the Old Testament. Rahab and Ruth are two of many small-scale testimonies to that, but here we finally see the Lord’s promise coming to full fruit. It’s what we celebrated last week on Pentecost as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on these men of Israel gathered from around the world. They had heard Peter preach about Jesus and what he’d come to do. They rallied to Jesus in faith and in response Jesus poured his Spirit into them. Finally, through Jesus, Israel became the source of blessing she was intended to be—not by flesh, but by the Spirit—as these men and women took the good news to the nations: Jesus is Lord. He has conquered sin and death. In him is the forgiveness of sin, in him is life, in him God has returned to his creation as King. And in him—the Incarnate Word—God makes himself known. In Jesus, God Incarnate, we have the restoration and fellowship with our Creator that he has been working towards ever since the day we rebelled and were cast out of his presence. In Jesus, God’s kingdom—his new creation—has been inaugurated, in us and through us in the world. Brothers and Sisters, we are that people the God of Israel was working to create and to make new all those millennia. Jesus and the Spirit have finally made us that pocket of God’s future in the present, the pocket where the world is set to rights and where the tears are wiped away, the pocket shows the world the faithfulness and goodness of God. May we be that people—God’s future in the present, the heralds of his new creation—may we be faithful in being this Spirit-renewed gospel people who make known God’s glory to the world.Let us pray: Almighty God we praise you this morning for the grace you have shown us. Even as we rebelled against you, our good Creator, you were setting in motion our redemption: Father sending, calling, electing; Son speaking, coming, dying, rising; and Spirit uniting, renewing, regenerating, empowering. In the redemption of the world we see the glory of the Trinity and the majesty of the Unity and in gratitude we fall before you with the angels to sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty.” By your grace, keep us strong in faith, O Lord, but keep us also faithful in our witness and our ministry to make your redeeming love known to the world. We ask this through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for WhitsundayActs 2:1-11by William Klock“Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now…now are we there yet?” As you read the Gospels the disciples’ questions about the kingdom of God feel a bit like that. All Jesus needed was one of them kicking the back of his seat on the way to Jerusalem. “When will the kingdom come? How long? Are we there yet? Is it almost time, Jesus?” But it wasn’t just the disciples. It was First Century Judaism. Pretty much everyone was on the edge of their seat with anticipation for the kingdom. Everyone except the Sadducees, because of course, they were sitting on the top of the heap, already in control of everything. They’d already arrived and weren’t particularly interested in anything that might upset the status quo. But even then, they knew it was the Romans who were really calling the shots, so I suspect even the Sadducees were thinking “Are we there yet?” They just didn’t say it out loud. Everyone knew it was time. It had to be. And that sense was even stronger for the disciples, because they knew Jesus was the Messiah—the one come to usher in God’s kingdom and to set the world to rights. So if the Messiah had come—well—the kingdom had to be really close.And so Luke, as he opens the book of Acts with the Ascension of Jesus, he tells us of Jesus’ promise to his friends: “Don’t go back to Galilee. Stay in Jerusalem. As John baptised you with water, in a few days I will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.” But they hadn’t asked Jesus about the Holy Spirit. They wanted to know when the kingdom was coming, because it had to be soon. And so even as Jesus was leading them up the Mount of Olives and about to ascend to his throne, they were pestering him, “Is this the time? Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?” And, remember, in answer to their question Jesus ascended, up on the clouds, into heaven, to take up his throne, to rule and to reign.And as he did that, he commissioned his disciples to do something that I don’t think they expected. He commissioned them to be his royal heralds, to go out and to proclaim this good news to Jerusalem, to Judea, even to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth. Now, this wasn’t the first time Jesus had sent his disciples out to proclaim the kingdom, but when he’d sent them out before, it was to a people who were also asking those “Are we there yet?” questions. The disciples had gone out and told the people that in Jesus the Messiah had come and that the kingdom was in sight. But now Jesus is sending them out to proclaim that in his resurrection and ascension the kingdom has come and that was no small task. Because even though the disciples had seen their risen Lord and even though they saw him ascend to his throne, this wasn’t how anyone expected the kingdom to arrive. They thought everyone would be resurrected all at once. They though the Messiah would put down the enemies of God’s people and cast down their empires. They expected a king like David who would punish evil, wipe away all the problems, and make everything as it should be. Instead, the wrong people were still in control, evil people still did evil things, so much was still wrong with the world—and yet Jesus had inaugurated something, he really had risen from the dead, and they’d seen him ascend to his throne with their own eyes, so they knew he was truly Lord and that the kingdom had come. The Lord’s plan was to work through them, to spread the good news and to tell the world that Jesus is Lord, and to grow the kingdom. That wasn’t what anyone expected, but they should have, because that’s how the Lord had been working in the world ever since he called Abraham out of the land of Ur and set him apart from everyone else, and made him and his family a witness to the world—that one day, through this people, the whole earth would know the Lord and his greatness and his goodness and his faithfulness and come to give him glory.I wonder if we, too, don’t forget this sometimes. We might know better deep down, but we kind of assume that the Christian life is, more or less, a personal thing. We raise our kids in it. Maybe we talk to a few close people about it. But we act as if our duty is mostly just to be good, godly people until Jesus comes back and sets everything to rights—as if he’s the one who’s going to make it all happen by doing all the hard work. Sure, there are some people called to be missionaries who go off to faraway places where they’ve never heard of Jesus, but for most of us, it’s just a quiet, personal, individual sort of thing. Even the dominant eschatology of our day assumes that things will just get worse and worse until Jesus zaps us all out of here and rains down fire and brimstone on this awful, corrupt world. But that’s never what the story was about and that’s never where it was headed. The Lord called and created a people to make him known with the expectation that eventually that people—not in their own power, but in his—but that people would really make him known until, as the prophets Isaiah and Habakkuk both said, the knowledge of his glory would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.Maybe we forget our part in this kingdom mission because it seems so impossible. What? Us? Grow the kingdom until the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth? What? Us? Bring the nations to give him glory? That’s too big for us? We’ll just be holy over here and wait for Jesus to come back and do the impossible stuff. And at this point, Jesus’ disciples had no idea just how big and impossible the task was. Taking the gospel to the gentiles wasn’t even on their radar. They were still thinking it was a message for Jews. It would be some years before the full extent of it even sank in. And this is why Jesus told his friends to stay in Jerusalem and to wait. In his resurrection he was vindicated as the Messiah. In his ascension he took his throne and sent the clear message that the kingdom has come. But before the disciples could go on with the work of the kingdom, they needed something that God’s people had never had before—at least not in this way. They needed the power of the Holy Spirit to truly be the new Israel, to carry on the mission the Lord had given to Abraham and Isaac, and to all of Israel: to bless the nations by making him known to them. Without the Spirit, Jesus’ disciples would have the same problem God’s people had always had and after a time, when the excitement wore off, they would become fickle and faithless and their loyalties would be divided and they would fall into sin and the nations would mock them, this time jeering, “Where’s your Messiah now?” No, they needed this gift of the indwelling Spirit to set their hearts on God and to write his law of love on their hearts—truly transforming their affections. And it was this Spirit who would empower them to go out into a hostile world with the good news about Jesus and to live out his love and his grace and his justice, carrying the kingdom to the ends of the earth. That’s why they had to wait in Jerusalem.I don’t think they really had any idea what was about to happen. They didn’t even really understand the full extent of the mission he’d given them. They were just excited because of his resurrection and his ascension and Luke says that while they waited in Jerusalem that they spent their time in the temple praising and blessing God. And then comes our Epistle today. Look at Acts 2. Luke writes,When the day of Pentecost arrived… Let’s stop there. This isn’t an incidental detail. It’s integral to the story. As integral as Jesus having been born a Jew. As integral as his death and resurrection taking place at Passover. “Pentecost” means “fiftieth” in Greek. Greek-speaking Jews gave the festival this name because it fell fifty days after Passover, but its biblical name was the “feast of weeks” and it was connected with the wheat harvest. It was when the Lord commanded his people to bring him their firstfruits. That’s the very first part of the harvest. It was an offering to the Lord and it was an act of faith on their part. Other peoples brought offerings to their gods after the harvest had been brought in, once they knew what they could spare. But Israel gave in faith from the very first of the harvest, trusting the Lord to give the rest. So Pentecost was a feast of expectation and faith.But Pentecost was also the feast when Israel celebrated the giving of the law, the torah, at Mt. Sinai. That’s where the significance of “fifty” comes from. Again, it follows fifty days after Passover and you’ll remember that Passover commemorated Israel’s exodus from Egypt: their slavery, Moses and the Lord’s command to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!”, the plagues, the blood on the doorposts, the sparing of Israel’s firstborn sons, the flight from Egypt, the rescue at the Red Sea. Passover was a festival of the Lord’s deliverance of his people and it celebrated that great event in which Israel was born as a nation. And each generation participated in those events anew as they gathered year in and year out in their homes to share the Passover meal. It marked them out as the Lord’s covenant people.But that wasn’t the end of the story. From the Red Sea, the Lord led his people into the wilderness and fifty days later he gave them his law. He called Moses up to Mt. Sinai and when Moses came back down he brough the law with him, carved on stone tablets. In the Exodus the Lord had made Israel his people. At Mt. Sinai he showed them what it meant and what it looked like to be his people. So at Passover the Jews celebrated their redemption. At Pentecost they remembered that the Lord had redeemed them for a purpose: to live a new kind of life in order to fulfil his purposes and their calling.Can you see how this all fits together with the events of the Gospels? Easter is our Passover, when we remember how, through Jesus, the Lord redeemed us from our bondage to sin and death and made us his people. And now, on Pentecost—this is our Mt. Sinai. Let’s continue with Acts 2:When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. In Exodus we’re given an awesome picture of the holiness of God as his presence descended on the mountain in smoke and fire and thunder, and here the Spirit comes again like a storm, in this mighty rushing wind and fire descends upon his people. And here Luke tells this new story to parallel the old. As Moses went up on the mountain to the Lord, so Jesus has ascended into heaven. And now Luke wants us to understand that Jesus, just as he promised he would, has come back down. Moses came down with tablets of stone to tell the people how to live as the Lord’s covenant people. And now Jesus has returned, he’s come down from heaven in the person of the Holy Spirit, to write his law of love on the very hearts of his people.Don’t misunderstand. That doesn’t mean that Israel had a harsh and rigid law written on stone and that Jesus’ people just “follow their hearts” or something like that. There’s a sense in which that’s true, but definitely not in the sense that the world talks about following your heart. Following our hearts is what got us into trouble and made a mess of this world, because apart from Jesus and the Spirit our hearts are set on sin and self. That’s the point here. The law written on stone showed Israel how to live as God’s holy people, but it couldn’t change the affections of their hearts. The Spirit, on the other hand, takes away the need for those stone tablets by changing our very hearts, filling them with a love for God and a desire for holiness, and by turning us away from sin and from self.And notice how the wind and the fire come from heaven. Through the Spirit the creative and renewing power of the Lord—the very breath that he breathed into humanity to give us life in the first place—it descends on his people to accomplish his work on earth. Jesus taught his disciples to pray “on earth as it is in heaven” and Pentecost was the firstfruits of an answer to that prayer. Sometimes Christians treat the presence and gifts of the Holy Spirit as things that raise us up above the world or that make the world irrelevant, but it’s really just the opposite. The Spirit is the life-giving breath of God that gives us a foretaste of the resurrection and of the life we hope for one day in this world set to rights. As the Spirit sets our hearts on God, he makes us the “on earth as it is in heaven” people, the people who not only show the world what God’s kingdom looks like, but who actually live out his kingdom and its values of love and grace and mercy and justice in the midst of a world that values all the opposites of those things.But the first manifestation of the Spirit’s “on earth as it is in heaven” ministry is what we see here. Luke says, first, that Jesus’ people were all together when this happened—they were united—and then the first manifestation of the Spirit was this amazing speech in other languages. But what exactly was it? Let’s keep reading from verse 5:Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians—we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” Jews had spread out across the known world and festivals like Passover and Pentecost brough them back to Jerusalem. The Spirit came on Jesus’ disciples with fire and the sound of a mighty rushing wind, but what everyone else couldn’t help but notice was the ruckus they made as they began to speak in these other languages. And it got their attention. The disciples were a bunch of rubes from Galilee, way up north, or at least that’s how people in Jerusalem would have seen them. Galileans spoke Aramaic and Greek—the local languages—but they weren’t cosmopolitan enough to speak all these other languages. And yet these men visiting Jerusalem from places like Egypt and Asia and even from places like Parthia, beyond the borders of the empire, heard these Galileans speaking in their own languages. That made them stop and take note. But what they were saying caught their attention even more. Luke says they were telling of the mighty works of God. In the context here that can mean only one thing. They were proclaiming the good news about Jesus. That he had come proclaiming the kingdom and calling the people to repentance, that he had been crucified, that he had risen from the dead, and that he had ascended, and is now Lord—and maybe most of all, that he had done this in fulfilment of the Lord’s promises and to show the Lord’s faithfulness. Many of these visitors had, no doubt, heard about Jesus and how he’d been crucified just a few weeks before. Some of them had probably heard rumors that he’d risen from the dead. If they’d been spending any time around the temple, they would have heard and seen the disciples praising God for what he had done in Jesus—and they probably thought they were crazy. But now they hear these bumpkins from Galilee declaring the might works of God miraculously in their own languages and they stop. And they listen. And some of them, Luke says, sneered at the disciples thinking they were drunk. But that’s when—if we were to continue on from today’s Epistle in Chapter 2—that’s when Peter stood up addressed them, saying, “It’s nine o’clock in the morning. It's hardly the time of day for men to be drunk. No, what you’re seeing is the fulfilment of the words spoken by the prophet Joel when he told of the Lord’s promise to pour out his Spirit and to redeem his people. And Peter went on to tell the men there, again, of the mighty deeds of God: of Jesus, of his death, of his resurrection, and his ascension. And he walked the men through the scriptures they knew so well and through the promises the Lord had made to his people, and he showed how Jesus had and was fulfilling them. He finished his sermon, Luke says, proclaiming:“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (Acts 2:36)And the men who were listening were cut to the heart and cried out to Peter, “What should we do?”And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus the Messiah for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. (Acts 2:38-41)The “on earth as it is in heaven” people began to grow. The rest of the book of Acts is Luke’s testimony to the mighty deeds of God through these people, empowered by Jesus and the Spirit. We see the gospel—and with it the kingdom—going out from Jerusalem, to Judea, and then to Samaria, where it united Jews and Samaritans for the first time. And then we see it go out to the nations, to the gentiles, the book ending with Paul proclaiming the good news about Jesus in Rome, right under Caesar’s nose. And Acts shows us churches sprouting up across the world. Acts is the firstfruits of the kingdom harvest—a harvest that would, eventually include the whole Roman Empire and beyond. And, Brothers and Sisters, Pentecost reminds us how. Without it we might be tempted to give up, to retreat into the church building, and wait for Jesus to come and do it all himself. But Pentecost reminds us that going all the way back to Abraham, the Lord has been calling and creating and empowering a people to make him known to a world lost in darkness, a people to be light, a people—like the disciples that day in Jerusalem—to proclaim to the world the mighty deeds of the God of Israel. A people to proclaim the good news that in this Jesus who was crucified, who has risen from the dead, and who has ascended to his throne to rule and reign, that he is and that he will set this world to rights. But, maybe most importantly, Pentecost reminds us that Jesus has called us and made us this people, not only to go out and to tell, but to go out and live and to do and to make and to build and to show his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. We do that as we live the fruit the Spirit has given and as we show the world, in real, practical, hands-on ways what God’s new creation is like, living his love and his mercy and his grace and his justice and working for those things in the world. It is an impossible task, but Pentecost also reminds us that we are not called to do it in our own power or on our own terms, but as we are empowered and guided by Jesus and the Spirit.Let’s pray: O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for Ascension Sunday1 St. Peter 4:7-11 & St. John 15:25-16:4by William KlockToday is that Sunday in the Church Year that has us sitting with the disciples as they wait for the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise of God’s Spirit. It’s a little bit like the scene of them on Easter Day. Think of Mary, confused and distressed, running to tell Peter and John about the empty tomb and finding them, hunkered down in a dark house with the doors and shutters locked tight. Both times, the disciples sat in a house in Jerusalem waiting. On Easter Day, they were waiting out of fear. Jesus had been executed and, if they weren’t careful, they’d probably be executed too. They were waiting for the Passover festival to end, for the crowds to start leaving the city, so that maybe they could just blend into the crowds streaming out through the gates and down the roads, so they could make their way back to Galilee and hopefully just go back to their old lives and forget—and everyone else forget—that they’d been followers of Jesus. And so they waited. In the dark. Fearful. Barely talking in whispers.Today the disciples are, again, waiting in Jerusalem. But today is different. Late on Easter Day Jesus had appeared in that locked room, risen, and not just alive like, say, Lazarus was alive again after he came out of his tomb. Jesus wasn’t just alive. He’d been made new. The same Jesus they knew, even bearing the marks of his crucifixion, and yet different. This new Jesus, resurrected from the dead, was as at home in heaven as he was on earth and as at home on earth as he was in heaven. This Jesus embodied their hope of an Israel, of a whole human race, set to rights. In him they were confronted with the birth of God’s new creation. And everything the Prophets had said and everything Jesus had said about God setting the world to rights now made sense—at first, suddenly, it made sense at a gut level, but then as this risen Jesus walked them through the scriptures—probably the same scriptures he’d walked them through umpteen times before—gradually it all finally started to make sense in their heads, too. Jesus’ resurrection changed everything. But most of all, they saw the hopes of generation after generation after generation of Jews for a world set to rights, they saw that hope fulfilled in Jesus, and in that they saw the glory of God like no one had seen the glory of God since—well maybe since the Exodus.And so, for forty days, Jesus met with his disciples and with hundreds of others, and they studied the scriptures and, I expect, they worshiped and glorified the God of Israel who had done this amazing thing and, who, right before their eyes, was fulfilling his promises. And then he led them out to the Mount Olives and ascended into the clouds. Jesus had prepared them for this. He’d said before that eventually he would be leaving them. These passages have been our Gospels for the last three weeks. Remember John 16: “In a little while you won’t see, but a little while after that you will see me, because I’m going to the Father.” Or two Sundays ago, “I’m going to the one who sent me and it’s important that I do, so that I can send the one who will come along side you on my behalf, the Helper.” And last Sunday, “I’m leaving the world and going to the Father. In the world you will have tribulation, but I have overcome the world.” That last bit from John 16:33 surely underscored for them the lordship of Jesus. Now it was time for him to take his throne in the heavenlies.And so Jesus commissioned them to take this gospel, this good news, back to Jerusalem and to all of Judea, and eventually even to the Samaritans and then to the nations. And as he commissioned them he rose on the clouds to his throne. Jesus didn’t have to do it that way. It’s not like heaven is literally up there somewhere. You can’t get there with a rocket any more than the Babylonians could build a tower to get there. Jesus could have just winked out here and winked in there. But even here at the end of his ministry, he acts out a prophecy as he was so fond of doing. It was Daniel’s vision of the son of man, coming to the ancient of days and to his throne on the clouds of heaven, it was that vision happening in real life as they watched. And, too, the disciples were familiar with the iconography of Imperial Rome. When Julius Caesar died, a comet appeared in the sky. His heir, Augustus, declared that the comet was the divine Caesar ascending to heaven. At Augustus’ order, gold comets were added to the statues of Caesar and coins were stamped with the image of that comet on the back. And, of course, Augustus then took the title, “Son of God”. Everyone knew it wasn’t really true. It was political. But here was Jesus ascending to heaven for real. For all his power, Caesar was a cheap copy, a fake king playing at divinity. Jesus was the real deal, the world’s true Lord.And that was heart of the message that Jesus sent his friends out to tell. That’s the heart of the gospel: This Jesus, crucified and risen, is Lord of all. Remember what that word “gospel” means. It literally means “good news”, but it’s important to remember how it was used. Think of those familiar words from Isaiah 52: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” In those days it was an image of a royal herald, returning to Jerusalem from the battle front to announce the good news that the king had won the battle against the enemy. And in the world of the Greeks and Romans, “good news” was proclaimed by imperial heralds. Good news! A new Caesar has ascended to the imperial throne! Good news! Your city has been conquered by Rome and you are blessed to receive Caesar as your new king! And in that there’s something really important that we often miss. All too often we think of the gospel, of this good news about Jesus, more as good advice. We “share” the gospel with people, telling them about it as something they ought to try, to see if it works for them, because we’ve been better off with it, so they ought to be too. We treat this good news like another option on the religious smorgasbord. Give Jesus a try. If you don’t like him, well, okay. But, Brothers and Sisters, Jesus isn’t a new restaurant. Jesus isn’t a new brand of laundry detergent any more than Caesar was. Imagine Rome conquering your country and you telling the Romans that Caesar really isn’t your thing, so no thanks. Simon bar Kokhba tried that in 115. He declared himself prince of the Jews, raised a revolt, and was brutally crushed by the Romans.Brothers and Sisters, the good news of Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord isn’t good advice. It’s good news. It’s good news that he is the world’s true Lord and that he sits on this throne, and that this good news will conquer the world until every last one of his enemies has been put under his feet. It’s a proclamation—and we’re the royal heralds—that God’s king, his new creation, has begun and we can either be a part of it or we can face destruction when Jesus comes in glory one day to wipe every last bit of evil of sin and of death from its face.This was Jesus commission to his friends as he ascended. Go out and tell the world that it has a new king. And it’s not hard to imagine them chomping at the bit to run into Jerusalem and to start proclaiming this good news in the streets and in the synagogues and even in the temple. But Jesus knew better. Because excitement about good news will only get you so far. And so Jesus told them to go back into the city to wait—to wait for the Helper, the Holy Spirit. In fact, he talked about them being baptised with the Holy Spirit in the way that John had baptised them with water. And it was in the power of the Holy Spirit—not just the power of their excitement about Jesus’ resurrection—in the power of the Holy Spirit they would go out to proclaim this news to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and to the whole world.And so, today we sit with the disciples as they wait. But this time it’s a very different sort of waiting. On Easter they were waiting to go out, afraid for their lives, just wanting to get out of the city as quietly as possible. Today we sit with them as they wait and as they pray, having spent forty days with the risen Jesus, waiting as they’re just about bursting with this good news. They’ve been commission to be the royal heralds of the King. They’re full of excitement this time. Raring to go. Ready to proclaim this good news. Even knowing that this might mean their own deaths. And, maybe that’s what gives them patience for the fulfilment of Jesus promise of this power from God. Because excitement over something new is never enough. Excitement eventually wanes. And when we try to do the work of the kingdom in our own power, we’re sure to make a mess of it. The power lies not with us, but with God’s word and with God’s Spirit and when rely on word and Spirit we do things differently than we might do them in our own power. One of the things that strikes me from our Epistle today is the set of gospel mission priorities it lays out for us. Here are Peter’s Spirit-inspired words. This is 1 Peter 4:7-11.The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. (1 Peter 4:7)The end of all things is at hand. This doesn’t mean that end of history or of the universe or whatever is at hand. That wouldn’t make sense. From our perspective the end of space and time obviously wasn’t at hand for Peter—unless you can somehow twist “at hand” to mean “two thousand plus years”. More important, it doesn’t make sense, because that would hardly be a vindication of the God who made the world, who loves it, and who gave his son to die for it, and who has commissioned a people to carry this good news into it. What Peter means is that God, through Jesus, has begun the process of making his creation new and the sign of this renewal is the renewal of a people, the renewal of men and women who share in the death and resurrection of Jesus.And that means that we’d better show that renewal in our lives. Peter says that our work will be accomplished through self-control and being sober-minded. Peter knew that opposition and persecution were coming and that our natural inclination when that happens is to panic—to start running around waving our hands or to run away and hide, to lose focus on the mission. So he says, as people renewed by God’s Spirit, be self-controlled and sober-minded.Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit. Self-control is—or should be—a defining characteristic of people who are united to Jesus by the Holy Spirit. And being sober-minded is the fruit of our minds having been renewed by the Holy Spirit. Again, Jesus has given us work to do and it’s not going to get done if we’re in a panic. Instead of getting worked up, instead of panicking, Peter tells us: pray. When Jesus was under pressure, he undergirded his work with prayer. Our response to the pressure and weight of our calling also needs to be prayer.And as the Church we need to work together, to stick together—to be the Church. Peter goes on in verses 8-9:Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. It’s easy to drive each other away. It’s easy to be offended by what this person says or what that person does. We sadly see it all too often in the Church. Someone offends someone else and off they go. It’s especially sad when you find out that the offense was an accident or that what was said or done was misconstrued—that no offense was ever intended. Some people can be difficult and, over and over, I’ve seen Christians who treat difficult people in ways that put them at the fringe or drive them off. Some people just sometimes wander away from the Church and no one goes after them to check up on them. But Peter says that we’re to hold unfailing love for each other—unfailing. Hebrews 10:24-25 tells us something similar:Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. “The Day” is drawing near. Jesus has given us God’s own Spirit to carry his work of renewal into the world. So stir each other up to love and good works and do not neglect to meet together.If someone asked me to write a letter exhorting the Church as to what to do in light of the end of all things being at hand, I’d probably write something about getting out into the world to tell people about Jesus—and to do so with a sense of urgency. But Peter (and the writer of Hebrews) instead tells us to love each other. Brothers and Sisters, what they’re saying—and this is important—is that before we do anything else, we, the Church, need to be the Church, we need to be the body of Christ. Loving each other, supporting each other, showing hospitality to each other—even when we’re sometimes difficult to get along with or overly needy or whatever makes us difficult—and we can all be like this sometimes—loving each other despite our flaws and difficulties and allowing our love for each other to cover those difficulties and offenses and things that can sometimes be abrasive. That kind of love, the love that God has shown us in Jesus, that’s what binds us together. And being bound together two things happen. First, we function the way Jesus and the Spirit intend. The Spirit has given us all unique gifts. When we work together we complement each other as we fulfil the mission Jesus has given. But the love we’re called to show each other is also a powerful part of our witness of renewal and of God’s new creation. There is no other organization or institution in this world that brings together people of such different backgrounds and culture and age and temperament than the Church and in that we have a powerful witness to the redeeming grace of God.In last week’s Epistle, James told us to be doers of the word and not hearers only. This is what that looks like. And it’s this love and light that plays out amongst Jesus’ people—amongst us—that not only holds us together, but it draws in, it attracts outsiders. Good theology and right doctrine are important, but what witnesses our renewal and God’s new creation is the fruit of the Spirit and, as Paul writes, the greatest of these is love. When Jesus says to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” it won’t be because we’ve spent our lives parsing out the subtle philosophical nuances of the Trinity or the Incarnation. It will be because we have been faithful with the gifts he’s given through his Spirit, for how we’ve loved each other and for being faithful stewards of his good news.Peter goes on in verses 10-11:As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. The Spirit has equipped each of us and we’re called to use these gifts to serve each other. The Spirit doesn’t give us gifts to squander or to use for our own gain. They’re meant to build up the Church and to help us fulfil our mission. And Peter here calls us to be good stewards.And we’re not just accountable to God; we’re accountable to each other as stewards. How often do we think it’s just “between myself and God”? Regularly I find myself talking to people who tell me that that instead of being part of the Church, they’re opting to live their faith privately and on their own. I have to say I’m always more than a little suspicious of the genuineness of someone’s claim to be a Christians when they have no interest in the Church. You can’t claim to love Jesus and then despise his body! There’s no such thing as a loner Christian and this is in part why. Imagine if tomorrow your eyes or your feet, your heart or your mind decided they weren’t interested in being part of your body. You’d be in a world of hurt and the same goes for the Church.There are, I think, two reasons the church fails. First, we fail when we become worldly and mired in the things of this age that is passing away, instead of being witnesses to God’s new creation. There’s a fine line. The church, for example, can witness God’s new creation through involvement in politics and the state, but it’s also very easy to get carried away with the worldly and corrupt aspects of politics and the power of the state and to lose our witness. But, second, we fail when we steward the gifts of the Spirit poorly. And so Peter urges us that if God has gifted you—and he’s generously gifted all of us—don’t hold out. He’s gifted you, he’s equipped you for a reason.Think of it this way: To ignore the gifts the Spirit has given us, to squander them, to steward them badly is to live as if Jesus ascended to heaven and then left us all on our own—as if he hadn’t sent his Spirit to come alongside us and to equip us for ministry. To be poor stewards of the Spirit’s gifting is to live as if Jesus died for our sins, but did nothing more—no regenerate heart, no renewed mind. To live apart from the Church. Or to be part of the Church, but to fail to live with each other in unfailing love, Brothers and Sisters, is to live as if there is no Holy Spirit. All these things are the Spirit’s work and the Spirit’s fruit in the life of the Church. They’re not optional extras. Consider that Jesus thought it important enough we have these things that he left, he ascended, so that he could send the one who would supply and equip us with them. We could have had Jesus with us all the time, to visit our churches to teach us, to sit down with us individually to talked to us and to comfort us, but he thought it was more important for us to have the gift of the Holy Spirit and so he left that the Spirit might be sent.Think on that this week. Jesus commissioned his people and he sent the Spirit to equip us to get the job done. Someday Jesus will return when the Spirit’s work through us has been finished. In the meantime, we’ve been given a huge job. Don’t panic. Don’t freak out. Be self-controlled and sober-minded. Commit yourselves to prayer, show each other unfailing love, and work together as the body of Christ, being faithful stewards of the gifts the Spirit has given.Let us pray: Gracious Father, as we acknowledged in the Collect, Jesus has ascended to his heavenly throne, but you have not left us comfortless. You’ve graciously given us the gift of your Spirit and by your Spirit you unite us to Jesus, you transform and sanctify us, and you equip us to do the work Jesus has given. Give us grace and teach us to be faithful stewards of the Spirit’s gifts. Teach us to bear the Spirit’s fruit and let us live that fruit in practical ways and especially as we love one another and as we support one another in using the gifts the Spirit has given as we make Jesus and his kingdom known to the world. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Saviour and Lord. Amen.
At That TimeDaniel 12:1-13by William KlockDaniel 12 begins with the words, “At that time”, which means we need to remind ourselves what time Daniel’s vision was talking about. Remember that these last three chapters of the book are one long vision. It began with Daniel lamenting what he could see. Pagan kings, instead of being judged for their wickedness, were getting strong and stronger. And his own people, an awful lot of them, seemed apathetic about the end of the exile. They’d made lives for themselves in Babylon and simply weren’t interested in returning to Jerusalem. And those who did return were facing opposition at every turn as they worked to rebuild the city and the temple. Daniel was losing hope. And so an angel appeared and in the first part of the vision the angel explained that there was more to things than what Daniel could see. Unseen forces fought a battle in the heavenlies that somehow corresponded to events on earth. In fact, Daniel was told, the angel Michael fought for the people of God. Even if he couldn’t see any of it, Daniel had reason to hope.And then, in Chapter 11, the angel gave Daniel of vision of things to come, as if to show how God is sovereign even in the wars and intrigues of pagan kings. First the Persian kings and then the Greeks, as they squabbled and fought over the land of Judah. That was most of Chapter 11. Things would get worse before they would get better, but here was a chance to hope—to put into practise that truth that sometimes there’s more going on than what we can see. Even in the intrigue, the subterfuge, the assassination of those Greek kings of Egypt and Syria, even in all that, the God of Israel remained sovereign. Even as the worst of them came to power. And that was the heart of Chapter 11: this evil king who wanted to convert the Jews into pagan Greeks. Antiochus made it illegal to live by God’s law, he desecrated the Lord’s altar, and he forbade the daily offerings made in the temple. 1 and 2 Maccabees tell us how he tried to force Jewish men to eat pork, torturing them and even killing them when they refused and how women who circumcised their sons were thrown off the city walls along with their children. To remain faithful to the Lord in those days came at a great cost. Many even paid with their lives. Meanwhile, a significant segment of the Jewish people capitulated, finding ways to compromise or abandoning their faith altogether. The faithful died and the unfaithful lived. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Daniel was written for these people—to exhort them, to give them hope, and to assure them that the Lord remained sovereign and would vindicate them in the end.And that’s where Daniel’s vision gets difficult. Up to the events of about 167BC the vision maps right onto history, but then at 11:40 the angel says, “At the time of the end…” As I said last week, the natural way to read this is as a continuation of the events that took place under Antiochus Epiphanes. Verses 40-45 describes another war between Egypt and Syria. They describe tens of thousands falling, but also being delivered out of his hand. The king conquers Egypt, Libya, and Cush. There’s a vague description of him going off to another war—or something—and pitching his tent between Mount Zion and the sea, and then—suddenly—he comes to his end.The vision changes in these verses. What was very specific suddenly becomes vague. The language becomes more grandiose. And what’s described here doesn’t map onto historical events as easily as the earlier parts of the vision do. So some people think with those words “at the time of the end”, the vision is jumping to some time in the future and that the king is no longer Antiochus Epiphanes, but a future antichrist. But as I said last week, the vision itself doesn’t suggest at all that the timeframe has changed and to interpret it that way ends up undermining the purpose: to give hope to the faithful living under Antiochus. The reason for the change is twofold. First, the author of this vision, although writing it as if he were Daniel living centuries before, was really writing it at this point. Up to now, he’s been looking back at events that already happened and now he’s looking to the events of the roughly three years that will follow. Is it actually a prophecy? Or is it his Spirit-inspired insights based on what he knew of two centuries of Greek fighting coupled with what he knew from the Prophets? And I think that’s key here. Suddenly, here, the vision borrows language and images from Isaiah and Ezekiel and the Psalms. He was using those passages to interpret current events and that explains why the language becomes grandiose and why the historical one-to-one’s fall apart at this point. The key truth here isn’t so much the exact historical events that would happen, but that in them the God of Israel would act to judge the wicked, and to deliver and vindicate the faithful. As modern people who tend to think of prophecy mainly as foretelling future events, we forget that prophecy in Israel was always far more interested in telling us about the God behind world events. And as I said last week, I think that’s where the solution to our problems with Daniel lies. Throughout the Old Testament Prophets we see foretellings of judgement and vindication in history, and we can look back at the historical record and see that they really did happen, but most of the time there’s still an eschatological element that we don’t see fully fulfilled in the historical events. As Daniel speaks here of the end, there’s the end, the historical end of Antiochus Epiphanes, an end to his blasphemies, an end to his persecution of the faithful, but there’s also a sense of this big, this final End with a capital “E”—something that will bring history to a close with a once and for all judgement that ends wickedness forever and sees the faithful, the just fully restored and given justice. God’s judgements in history always point us to a day when all will be set to rights once and forever.So when the angel says to Daniel “at the time of the end”, he is talking about historical events in the near future, but there’s an element or an aspect of these events—at least in the way they’re described here—that looks forward to and anticipates a future End with a capital “E”.Look at Daniel 12:1-4.“At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” Things are bad, but they’re going to get worse, so the angel reminds Daniel of the beginning of the vision. There’s more to what’s going on than what Daniel—or the faithful in Judah—can see, so don’t despair. Again, scripture doesn’t fill us in on all the details about these battles in the heavenlies. Is it angel wresting with angel or is it armies of angels fighting with each other? How does it work? How are these battles in the heavenlies connected with what’s happening here? We don’t know and it’s not important. The key point is that God’s people are not alone in our struggles. Not only do angels fight for us, but Michael, who is apparently the greatest of them, stands on the side of the people of God. As he fought the angelic powers behind Persia and behind the Greeks, so—I think it’s safe to assume—he fights whatever angelic powers lie behind those who persecute the Church today.The angel describes a time of trouble like never before. These are the words of Jeremiah 30:7 and they call back to the Lord’s promise to restore his people at the end of their exile:“Thus says the Lord:We have heard a cry of panic, of terror, and no peace….Alas! That day is so great there is none like it;it is a time of distress for Jacob; yet he shall be saved out of it. “And it shall come to pass in that day, declares the Lord of hosts, that I will break his yoke from off your neck, and I will burst your bonds, and foreigners shall no more make a servant of him. But they shall serve the Lord their God and David their king, whom I will raise up for them. (Jeremiah 30:5, 7-9)The Lord will once again hear the cries of his people in their distress and as they stand firm in faith against a wicked king, so Michael will fight for them in the heavenlies. There is a book, the angel reminds Daniel, and the Lord will deliver everyone whose name is written in it. This book pops up throughout the Old Testament—Exodus, Isaiah, Malachi, and Psalm 69. It’s a census of the covenant faithful. The book itself is a reminder that the Lord is not only sovereign, but that he’s paying attention—that he knows the names of those who kept the faith.To know that the Lord is paying that kind of attention is itself encouraging. Think back to 11:33, where we read about the “wise” during these dark days:And the wise among the people shall make many understand, though for some day they shall stumble by sword and flame, by captivity and plunder. The world is not as it should be. The people who deserve life receive death. But the Lord keeps the books and he will set everything right in the end. The angel tells Daniel about the many who sleep in the dust of the earth. Think of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. An image of death, hopelessness, and injustice. The people who should know the life of God are dead and all but forgotten. But there’s a promise. The Lord will restore them to share in his life. The angel, speaking to Daniel, draws on the language of Isaiah 26:19:Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.The angel here in Daniel takes these old prophetic images of resurrection that were originally illustrating Israel’s return from exile, here the angel gives those images a literal fulfilment and the return from exile becomes an image or an earnest, a down-payment, on this even better thing that the Lord will do for his people. They were longing for a restoration to the promised land where they could once against live with his presence in their midst in the temple, but now through the angel the Lord promises that he will raise his people from death and share his life with them. Those who were dead will sing for joy. And the wise, the faithful who put their own lives on the line to exhort the rest of the people to faithfulness, the angel says, they will shine like the stars. He draws on the image of the suffering servant from Isaiah 52:Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.As many were astonished at you— his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind—so shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him,for that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard they understand.The angels speaks of hayyim olam, everlasting life. It’s is the only place this phrase is used in the Old Testament, but it seems to draw on the Lord’s promise to the king in Psalm 21. And it suggests that the Lord is sharing something of himself with the faithful, because everlasting life is something that belongs only to God. It’s what he shared with human beings in the garden by means of the tree of life. It also calls back to Daniel 2:44 where Daniel is told:The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever. The faithful dead will sin for joy forever. But giving life to the just only balances one side of the ledger. The angel says, too, that the wicked—the apostate Jews who conspired with Antiochus—they will be raised as well, but instead of being raised to know the life of God, they will be raised to face judgement and death. The description of them is taken from Isaiah 66:24:“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” The wicked, the apostates, and the collaborators who sided with the pagans and forsook the Lord’s covenant, who died—presumable natural, peaceful deaths—thinking they’d done the right thing, they are raised briefly so that they can know the Lord’s justice, so the books can be set straight, and then we have this image of their corpses being cast in the Valley of Hinnom to rot, a testimony to everyone of the Lord’s justice—that regardless of how things may look now, he will in the end give life to the just and destruction to the wicked. The important thing in all this is the Lord’s vindication of his faithful people and, in that, his vindication of himself. The Lord will make known his faithfulness and, seeing it, the peoples will give him glory. In reading a stack of commentaries on Daniel, I’ve noticed that this gets lost. Everyone puts their attention on when this will happen or they get side-tracked with discussion about what all this means for our concept of the afterlife. That’s not the point. I love the way the Jewish Bible scholar Jon Levenson puts. He writes,“The main point…is not afterlife; it is vindication, the vindication of the just and their God against the rebels or defectors who had of late triumphed over them and disgraced them. In short, in these texts the resurrection of the dead is best conceived as a reversal, not so much of death as of condition and status. God intervenes to make the downtrodden and the triumphant change places, in the process vindicating his own honor and sovereignty….In stark contrast to recent experience, the faithful traditionalists will live (and the ‘wise’ among them will shine radiantly), but the desecrators of the covenant will either die or endure an unending ignominy.”[1]The central part of Chapter 12 comes to a close in verse 4, where the angel tells Daniel to seal all of this up until the “time of the end”. I think that, again, stresses that the time the author of Daniel was writing about was the days of Antiochus Epiphanes and Judas Maccabeus. If the book was sealed, no one could read it, so the idea here is that those who read the book would know that this was their time. And, again, that was meant to give them hope in the midst of very dark days as they watched their own people being killed for their faith.The final paragraph of the book, I think, stresses this pretty clearly. Look at verse 5 and following:Then I, Daniel, looked, and behold, two others stood, one on this bank of the stream and one on that bank of the stream. And someone said to the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the stream, “How long shall it be till the end of these wonders?” And I heard the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the stream; he raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven and swore by him who lives forever that it would be for a time, times, and half a time, and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be finished. I heard, but I did not understand. Then I said, “O my lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?” He said, “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end. Many shall purify themselves and make themselves white and be refined, but the wicked shall act wickedly. And none of the wicked shall understand, but those who are wise shall understand. And from the time that the regular burnt offering is taken away and the abomination that makes desolate is set up, there shall be 1,290 days. Blessed is he who waits and arrives at the 1,335 days. But go your way till the end. And you shall rest and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days.” So we’re now back where we started at the Tigris River with this majestic man clothed in linen and gold. There are now two others who seem to be angels and “someone” asks the man how long it will be to the end of all this”. And the man swears to heaven as he tells Daniel that it will be a times, times, and a half time. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this figure in Daniel and as before, it’s sort of a cryptic way of saying three-and-a-half years. That’s the emphasis of this whole paragraph. Daniel says that he doesn’t understand, and the man more or less says the same thing again in two different ways. From the time the regular offering is taken away and the altar is desecrated—and that points again to this being about those days when Antiochus did that, not some far future—from that time it’ll be 1290 days. And then the man, and without any other cue I think we have to assume he’s referring to the same time period, he says 1335 days. Both numbers work out to a little more than three-and-a-half years. Bible scholars debate the reason for the two additional numbers that differ a little from each other and from the first. Some think each is calculating the time using a different calendar: one lunar, one solar. Others point out that the numbers are symbolic and that you can work out various sums with them that have their own symbolic meaning. It’s a complex discussion with no certain solution. The simple point seems to be that all of this was supposed to happen in roughly three-and-a-half years. So it’s worth noting that, indeed, Judas Maccabeus and his forces captured the temple in December of 164 BC. (Jews celebrate that victory every year at Hannukah.) And Antiochus Epiphanes also died in December of 164 BC. That was three years from the desecration of the altar. It probably took some time for the news to get to Jerusalem. We know the morning and evening burnt offerings were stopped sometime before the desecration of the altar, but not precisely when, so the three-and-a-half years as a rough number with some symbolic significance fits.And yet, even though Antiochus died and the altar and sacrifices were restored, the wicked were punished and the faithful vindicated, no one was literally raised from the dead. And this is why so many interpreters have insisted that this all must be about something in the future, not the days of Antiochus Epiphanes and Judas Maccabeus. To see this as describing future events has been the majority opinion for both Christians and Jews, but it isn’t the only opinion. As I’ve been studying Daniel, one of commentaries I’ve been reading is on the history of its interpretation and I’ve found it interesting that some of the earliest Christian readers of Daniel understood this to be fulfilled allegorically in the victory of the Maccabees and the death of Antiochus. I think they were on the right track. Again, as I said last week, it’s typical of the Old Testament prophets to write about judgement and vindication, whether of Israel or the nations, in a way that we see fulfilled in historical events, but that also points to a future day—to the great and final End with a capital “E”—that has yet to happen. And I think that’s what’s happening in Daniel’s vision. He wrote his book to encourage the faithful living through the dark days of the 160s BC and the people to whom it was written obviously found encouragement in it, because they made sure that the book made it into the Bible as scripture. They recognised the Spirit of God speaking through this man and his stories and visions. I can’t see them, with so much here that grounds Daniel’s vision in the events in which they were living, I can’t see them projecting this into some distant future. They knew that no one was resurrection from death in 164 BC but instead of throwing the book out as a failed prophecy, they were encouraged and exhorted by it, it made sense of the events through which they were living, they understood it to be fulfilled in some way in the events they experienced, and so they identified it as God’s word. This is, again, part of the nature of prophecy in the Bible. It speaks to the original people and rebukes or exhorts them in their historical circumstances, while also pointing to the future.Brothers and Sisters, life is not easy. Maybe this is why Daniel is grouped with the wisdom books in the Hebrew Bible. Because Daniel reminds us that to walk in faith with the Lord doesn’t mean an escape from the trials and tears of the world; it doesn’t mean an escape from wicked rulers or, for that matter, wicked neighbours; it doesn’t give us a get-out-of-persecution-free card. What it does mean is that the Lord holds us in his hands through the trials and tribulations of life. Daniel reminds us that our names are written in his book. Daniel reminds us that no matter how bad things that we can see may look, God fights for us in the heavenlies. But, I think most important, to walk in faith with God is to know that his acts of faithfulness in the past—and even today—give us a sure and certain hope of vindication and of life everlasting in the age to come. Daniel and his people gathered year in and year out to eat the Passover meal and in doing that they remembered and participated in the events by which the Lord had rescued their ancestors from Egypt, made them his people, given them his law, dwelt in their midst, and made them a promise of life. They sat down at that table, recalled the past, and looked forward in hope because the past told them who the Lord is and that he is good and faithful. And if that was true for Daniel and for the faithful Jews living in the days of Antiochus and for Jesus and his disciples sitting down to eat the Passover in the upper room, how much truer is it for us? Like I said last week, Jesus did with Daniel what Daniel had done with the Prophets. Jesus saw himself fulfilling that future element of Daniel’s vision. He saw himself finally inaugurating that big and final End with a capital “E”. Jesus died and rose from death, as Paul would later write, the firstfruits of that promised and long-hoped for resurrection of the dead—the day when the Lord will set his creation to rights, vindicate his people who have suffered disgrace for their faith, and will reveal his glory as he deals once and for all with evil and sin and with death.Brothers and Sisters, think on that as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning. As we eat the bread and drink the wine we remember the events of that first Easter Sunday when the false verdict on Jesus and his disgraceful crucifixion were overturned and he was vindicated by his Father: restored to life and declared the King. We remember those events by which he has delivered us from death. As you pass the font, dip your fingers in the water and remember that Jesus has led us through these waters in an exodus from sin and death. Brothers and Sisters, we remember the goodness and faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus, revealed in the giving of his Spirit, revealed in the new life he has given. He has made us his people. Our names are written in his book. And so we know—we have hope—for the day when he will bring to completion what began the day Jesus rose from the grave. One day he will wipe away ever tear and we will sing with joy and shine like the brightness of the sky.Let’s pray: Gracious Father, fill us with faith. As we look back on your mighty and saving deeds, remind us of your goodness and your faithfulness and grow our faith that we might remain faithful to you. Grow our faith that we might stand firmly for you no matter the circumstances. Knowing that you have given the life of your own Son because you love us, fill us with your grace and teach us to love you in return with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength as we look forward in hope to day when you bring completion this work of new creation begun in Jesus. Amen.[1] Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven: Yale, 2006), 190-191.
“Rhabarberbarbara”Daniel 11:2-45by William KlockOn Wednesday a friend at the pool stopped me and asked if I’d watch a video on her phone and tell her what it was about. It was in German and she didn’t understand. So she hit “play” and two men started singing and I laughed. I said, “It’s ‘Rhabarberbarbara’ and they’ve set it to music. “Rhabarberbarbara” is a German tongue twister poem. Imagine “She sell seashells down by the seashore”, but it’s all ba…ba…ba sounds, and with each stanza the tongue twisting part gets longer. Barabara opens a bar to sell her rhubarb cake: Barbaras rhabarberbar”. But pretty soon bald, bearded barbarians in need of a barber show up. It’s a funny poem and it’s hard to say, but these two guys set it to music and sang the whole thing perfectly. My friend said she liked how catchy it was, but had no idea what it meant. I laughed, because this is how the Greeks came up with the word “barbarian” for foreigners. Their languages just sounded like “Bar…bar…bar”. If you don’t know the language, your ear hears the repetitive sounds, but you have no idea what any of it means. Imagine hearing “She sells seashells down by the sea shore” if you didn’t speak English. It’s just rhyming repetitive gibberish.As I was walking away I started thinking how this is a metaphor for how a lot of people might hear Daniel 11, which is what we come to today. It’s the longest chapter in the book and most of it describes a long conflict between the King of the North and the King of the South. The actual kings are never named. The places involved aren’t named. It goes on and on, back and forth between north and south. In this case the language is history, not German, but if you don’t know the language it’s not that different than my friend listening to that German tongue twister that’s all bar…bar…bar. It’s just repetitive gibberish.But if you know the history, Chapter 11 describes the historical events that were whirling around Judah from the time of Daniel in the Sixth Century up to the 160s BC. If you know the history a story emerges from the Rhubarberbarbara. That said, knowing all the historical details isn’t the important thing you need to take away. I’ll give you the big picture and skip the nitty-gritty. If you want to know all the details, the actual historical events are well documented and you can look them up in a history book or Wikipedia. If you’ve got an ESV Study Bible, it’s all there with nifty maps and genealogies and historical outlines.But before we get into that, remember the lesson from Chapter 10. That was the first part of this vision. The lesson from that first part is that there’s more going on than what we can see. Daniel was frustrated and discouraged by earthly circumstances and—as we’ll see—things weren’t going to get any better. It’s easy to lose hope. But the angel explained to him that the battles he saw being fought by kings on earth corresponded to battles being fought in the heavenlies. The point of knowing this isn’t to burden us with some new responsibility—as if there’s something we can do to win those battles in the heavenlies. Just the opposite. Those battles in the heavenlies are not our responsibility. Apart maybe from praying, there’s nothing we can do to assist the angels. God has given us things to do and battles to wage in our sphere and he and his heavenly forces will do battle in their sphere. And the point is that we should find hope in that. The battle here may feel hopeless. But knowing that God fights a battle in the heavenlies that somehow corresponds to the one we fight here and that the outcome in the heavenlies corresponds to the outcome here—that should inspire hope to stand firm, to keep the faith, and to fight the good fight.Knowing that, the vision now continues with a summary of historical events. Let’s start with verses 2-4.“And now I will show you the truth. Behold, three more kings shall arise in Persia, and a fourth shall be far richer than all of them. And when he has become strong through his riches, he shall stir up all against the kingdom of Greece. Then a mighty king shall arise, who shall rule with great dominion and do as he wills. And as soon as he has arisen, his kingdom shall be broken and divided toward the four winds of heaven, but not to his posterity, nor according to the authority with which he ruled, for his kingdom shall be plucked up and go to others besides these. There were more than four Persian kings following the time of Daniel. This “three and a fourth” is a Hebrew way of talking about all the things. We see it in Proverbs: “There are six things the Lord hates and a seventh is an abomination to him.” The Lord hates more than seven things, but these seven are representative of all the things the Lord hates. Just so with these four Persian kings. The point is that the Persian empire will get bigger and bigger, richer and richer, more power and more powerful and eventually—and this is what happened historically—it will go up against Greece and be defeated. Xerxes I invaded Greek territory. He was defeated and that started a century of conflict that ended with the defeat of Persia by Alexander the Great. And mighty Alexander, who like the beasts of earlier chapters rampaged and did what he willed—or so he thought—he fell almost as soon as he arose. Alexander conquered the known world in fifteen years and suddenly died of a fever at the age of 32. His generals fought over his empire and eventually divided it up four ways. Two of those successor kingdoms would have a profound influence on the land of Judah: the Seleucid kingdom based in Syria—the King of the North—and the Ptolemaic kingdom based in Egypt—the King of the South. That’s the setup for the rest of the chapter, which rushes through about 160 years of the history that follows. The Seleucid kings were Seleucus I-IV followed by Antiochus I-IV. The Egyptian kings are easy: They were all named Ptolemy—Ptolemy I-VI. (Actually there eventually thirteen Antiochuses and fifteen Ptolemies, the last being the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra VII.)Verses 5 to 20 move quickly through the first five Ptolemies, the first four Seleucuses, and the first three Antiochuses. Fifteen verses sweep us through history from about 320BC to 175BC. Here’s the text:“Then the king of the south shall be strong, but one of his princes shall be stronger than he and shall rule, and his authority shall be a great authority. After some years they shall make an alliance, and the daughter of the king of the south shall come to the king of the north to make an agreement. But she shall not retain the strength of her arm, and he and his arm shall not endure, but she shall be given up, and her attendants, he who fathered her, and he who supported her in those times. “And from a branch from her roots one shall arise in his place. He shall come against the army and enter the fortress of the king of the north, and he shall deal with them and shall prevail. He shall also carry off to Egypt their gods with their metal images and their precious vessels of silver and gold, and for some years he shall refrain from attacking the king of the north. Then the latter shall come into the realm of the king of the south but shall return to his own land. “His sons shall wage war and assemble a multitude of great forces, which shall keep coming and overflow and pass through, and again shall carry the war as far as his fortress. Then the king of the south, moved with rage, shall come out and fight against the king of the north. And he shall raise a great multitude, but it shall be given into his hand. And when the multitude is taken away, his heart shall be exalted, and he shall cast down tens of thousands, but he shall not prevail. For the king of the north shall again raise a multitude, greater than the first. And after some years he shall come on with a great army and abundant supplies. “In those times many shall rise against the king of the south, and the violent among your own people shall lift themselves up in order to fulfill the vision, but they shall fail. Then the king of the north shall come and throw up siegeworks and take a well-fortified city. And the forces of the south shall not stand, or even his best troops, for there shall be no strength to stand. But he who comes against him shall do as he wills, and none shall stand before him. And he shall stand in the glorious land, with destruction in his hand. He shall set his face to come with the strength of his whole kingdom, and he shall bring terms of an agreement and perform them. He shall give him the daughter of women to destroy the kingdom, but it shall not stand or be to his advantage. Afterward he shall turn his face to the coastlands and shall capture many of them, but a commander shall put an end to his insolence. Indeed, he shall turn his insolence back upon him. Then he shall turn his face back toward the fortresses of his own land, but he shall stumble and fall, and shall not be found. “Then shall arise in his place one who shall send an exactor of tribute for the glory of the kingdom. But within a few days he shall be broken, neither in anger nor in battle. If that makes as much sense as “Rhabarberbarbara”, that’s okay. If you know the history this maps right on to it, but if you don’t, all you really need to know is that this describes about a century and a half of the kings of Egypt and Syria fighting with each other. And that’s important because of what’s right between Egypt and Syria. Picture a map in your head. What’s between Egypt and Syria? That’s right: Judah. Judah sat on the crossroads of the ancient world and so it went back and forth between Egypt and Syria and eventually many of the Jews themselves got caught up in the politics and the intrigue. Some of them thought that by siding with these pagan kings they were fulfilling God’s purpose. Again, when we see things happening in the world around us—the things we can see—it’s easy to get caught up in them, it’s easy to compromise our faith and our values and what’s right. But Daniel reminds us that there’s more going on than what we can see with our eyes. Things are never truly hopeless for God’s people, because God is ultimately in control and because his angels fight for us. We need to remember that as things get worse, and get worse they did for little Judah, caught in the middle of all this.Verse 20 describes the Syrian King, Seleucus IV Philopater. He sent a “tax collector”, a man by the name of Heliodorus, to collect the money needed to pay tribute to Rome, which was now involved in the intrigue. Heliodorus tried to plunder the temple in Jerusalem, but had a nightmare that put him off the idea. Instead, Heliodorus poisoned the king, Seleucus IV. That opened the door to the real terror. Look at verses 21-35:In his place shall arise a contemptible person to whom royal majesty has not been given. He shall come in without warning and obtain the kingdom by flatteries. Armies shall be utterly swept away before him and broken, even the prince of the covenant. And from the time that an alliance is made with him he shall act deceitfully, and he shall become strong with a small people. Without warning he shall come into the richest parts of the province, and he shall do what neither his fathers nor his fathers’ fathers have done, scattering among them plunder, spoil, and goods. He shall devise plans against strongholds, but only for a time. And he shall stir up his power and his heart against the king of the south with a great army. And the king of the south shall wage war with an exceedingly great and mighty army, but he shall not stand, for plots shall be devised against him. Even those who eat his food shall break him. His army shall be swept away, and many shall fall down slain. And as for the two kings, their hearts shall be bent on doing evil. They shall speak lies at the same table, but to no avail, for the end is yet to be at the time appointed. And he shall return to his land with great wealth, but his heart shall be set against the holy covenant. And he shall work his will and return to his own land. “At the time appointed he shall return and come into the south, but it shall not be this time as it was before. For ships of Kittim shall come against him, and he shall be afraid and withdraw, and shall turn back and be enraged and take action against the holy covenant. He shall turn back and pay attention to those who forsake the holy covenant. Forces from him shall appear and profane the temple and fortress, and shall take away the regular burnt offering. And they shall set up the abomination that makes desolate. He shall seduce with flattery those who violate the covenant, but the people who know their God shall stand firm and take action. And the wise among the people shall make many understand, though for some days they shall stumble by sword and flame, by captivity and plunder. When they stumble, they shall receive a little help. And many shall join themselves to them with flattery, and some of the wise shall stumble, so that they may be refined, purified, and made white, until the time of the end, for it still awaits the appointed time. The other kings were bad, but this new king who arises is truly contemptible. The heir of Seleucus IV was imprisoned in Rome and Antiochus IV bought and manipulated his way to the throne in his place. He took the name “Epiphanes” meaning “Manifest One”. In short, he thought he was God. And Antiochus Epiphanes did his best to turn Jerusalem into a pagan Greek city. The passage here refers to him deposing the high priest, Onias III. His action against the holy covenant refers to his making it illegal to live by torah, his manipulation of Jewish collaborators, and to his defilement of the altar in the temple. But Antiochus Epiphanes pushed too hard. It’s not that the earlier Greek kings weren’t bad or that they, too, hadn’t imposed pagan culture on Judah, but none had ever made the effort that this king did. For the most part, they’d left Judah alone, under the rule of the high priest, as long as he coughed up tribute money every year. Under the earlier kings, most people didn’t feel compelled to make a choice between the Lord and the pagan gods, but under Antiochus Epiphanes, that’s just what happened. No one could sit on the fence anymore. No one could say that this didn’t affect them. And so the vision tells of the wise in the community standing up and encouraging the people—not all (there were many who collaborated with Antiochus), but still a good many of them—these wise ones encourage them to stand firm. They prepared the faithful to pay with their lives for doing so. Those days tested the faith of the people and, in the end, revealed who was seriously committed to the Lord and who was not. Again, in all this we’re reminded that God was at work in the days of Antiochus just like he had been in the exile back in Daniel’s day.And this brings the vision up to what was the present day for the author of Daniel, about 167BC. So far the vision has been relating the history that led up to this point as if it were a prophecy given by Daniel back in the Sixth Century. With verse 36 the vision transitions. Now it looks into the future. But the style changes, too. Everything becomes more grandiose, but more importantly, the description of how this crisis will reach its climax uses imagery and language from the Prophets, especially Isaiah 10, Ezekiel 38-39, and Psalms 2, 46, 48, and 76. The Prophets spoke of the “End” and Daniel’s vision describes the present crisis as another embodiment of that great “End”.This is the point where evangelical interpreters disagree with each other. Some see the change in style, the language of the End, and the fact that Antiochus didn’t exactly meet his death the way it’s described here, some see all this as reason to think that the vision is now turning from the events of the Second Century to events much further in the future. It’s no longer talking about Antiochus IV Epiphanes, but about a future “Antichrist”. Other evangelical scholars see nothing in the text that justifies that kind of change in subject and timeframe and believe this is still talking about events in the Second Century.Either way, there are difficult problems and anyone who says otherwise simply isn’t being honest. I’ll say that Daniel 11:36-12:13 is the most difficult Bible text I’ve ever wrestled with and every time you think you’ve made progress untangling the ball of yarn, you discover that you’ve just turned one big knot into half a dozen smaller ones that are just as tenacious. If you know me, you know I think it’s best to let the text speak for itself even if that makes things difficult. I can’t see anything within the text itself that justifies projecting this part of Daniel into the far future. The text itself is pretty clear that it’s looking to the immediate future—to the three or three-and-a-half years to come, to the death of Antiochus, and to the vindication of the Jews who were faithful in that crisis. I might be wrong, but either way you end up with some problems that are hard to resolve—I just prefer going the route that lets the biblical text speak most naturally for itself. So, verses 36-45:“And the king shall do as he wills. He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak astonishing things against the God of gods. He shall prosper till the indignation is accomplished; for what is decreed shall be done. He shall pay no attention to the gods of his fathers, or to the one beloved by women. He shall not pay attention to any other god, for he shall magnify himself above all. He shall honor the god of fortresses instead of these. A god whom his fathers did not know he shall honor with gold and silver, with precious stones and costly gifts. He shall deal with the strongest fortresses with the help of a foreign god. Those who acknowledge him he shall load with honor. He shall make them rulers over many and shall divide the land for a price. Antiochus Epiphanes wasn’t unique in making claims of divinity and the description here about his idolatry is grandiose, but there’s nothing in the text that suggests at all that this is suddenly about some other king, let alone an Antichrist figure in the distant future. I think what’s going on here is that the vision captures how it felt for the faithful Jews to live under Antiochus, because he was the first of these rulers to deliberately undermine their laws, their faith, their worship and to defile their temple. We do the same thing in our political discourse all the time, turning bad politicians into over-the-top monsters, and our politicians aren’t half the monster that Antiochus was. It goes on: “At the time of the end, the king of the south shall attack him, but the king of the north shall rush upon him like a whirlwind, with chariots and horsemen, and with many ships. And he shall come into countries and shall overflow and pass through. He shall come into the glorious land. And tens of thousands shall fall, but these shall be delivered out of his hand: Edom and Moab and the main part of the Ammonites. He shall stretch out his hand against the countries, and the land of Egypt shall not escape. He shall become ruler of the treasures of gold and of silver, and all the precious things of Egypt, and the Libyans and the Cushites shall follow in his train. But news from the east and the north shall alarm him, and he shall go out with great fury to destroy and devote many to destruction. And he shall pitch his palatial tents between the sea and the glorious holy mountain. Yet he shall come to his end, with none to help him. We don’t really know how Antiochus Epiphanes died. The Greek historian Polybius and the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees give varying accounts of his being driven mad after an attempt to plunder a temple in Persia. He seems to have died not long after. 1 and 2 Maccabees suggest that there was an element of divine wrath in his affliction and death. The description here, again, seems grandiose and we know nothing of him pitching his tents between the sea and Mt. Zion. Whatever we make of the specifics, what the author saw in the Prophets—and I think, too, that he was an astute observer of how the hubris of these Greek kings and their internal intrigues worked out in history—the author understood these things and could say with certainty that the wicked Antiochus Epiphanes would get his divine comeuppance.Whether this vision was actual prophecy or whether it was the author’s attempt to exhort the faithful in Judah by working out a sort of pseudo-prophecy based on the visions of Daniel and the writings of Israel’s prophets, the Spirit stands behind the text. I’ve been wrestling with the difficulties here for months. Is it prophecy? Is it pseudo-prophecy? Was it written in the Sixth Century or the Second? Did the people who received it think it was written by Daniel hundreds of years before or did they know it was written by one of their own who was suffering under Antiochus just as they were? These are hard questions and there’s no easy solution. But what I do know and what I keep coming back to is that the Holy Spirit stands behind these words and we know that, because Jesus drew on them as scripture and so did the writers of the New Testament. I expect I’ll get into this idea more next week, Lord willing, but I think Jesus’ use of Daniel points us in the right direction, because Jesus used this last vision of Daniel to point to the future vindication and resurrection of his people. In doing that I think Jesus was doing with Daniel what Daniel had done with the earlier prophets. As I said a few minutes ago, the Prophets often pointed forward to the “End”—the End with a capital “E”—and it was usually associated with whatever historical events of judgement and vindication they were prophesying. And those prophecies were fulfilled in history, those times of judgement and vindication came as they had said, but always that great End was still out there, always pointing to a time when there would be a great and final day, at the end of history, on which the wicked will be judged and the faithful will be vindicated and I think that’s what’s going on in this final vision of Daniel. Through the judgement of the wicked and vindication of the just in his own day, the author of Daniel points even more emphatically than the prophets of old had, towards that final Day of the Lord. And this, then, is what Jesus picks up from Daniel and makes his own. In his death and resurrection, in his ascension and his judgement of faithless Jerusalem and the temple, Jesus is saying that that great eschatological End with a capital “E” is finally here. The end of history has begun. And in that he’s much like the old Prophets and he’s much like Daniel. There’s still time to go. There are still things to be done on both earth and in the heavenlies before every last enemy has been put under his feet. And in the meantime God’s people—even now empowered by the gospel and the Spirit—God’s people, like they always have, need this encouragement to stand firm, to keep the faith, and to fight he good fight—even if it means our death. Our acclamation as we come to the Lord’s Table gives us just this kind of exhortation and if you aren’t accustomed to thinking of it that way, try to think of it that way from now on: Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. Jesus has fulfilled what the Prophets spoke. He has inaugurated the End. And now we live in that in between time—between the beginning of the End and the end of the End. And that, Brothers and Sisters, is good news. It is the exhortation we need to stand firm, to keep the faith, and to fight the good fight knowing that our Lord sits enthroned in the heavenlies and has already won the battle and decisively turned the tide of this war.Let’s pray: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the many and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
We Have Not Obeyed His VoiceDaniel 9:1-27by William KlockLast week we looked at the resurrection story in John 20 as it continued into the evening that first Easter Sunday—as Jesus appeared to his disciples while they were hiding, as he breathed new life into them through the Holy Spirit, and as he commissioned them with those words, “Even as the Father sent me, I am sending you.” With those actions, with those words, with that little group of disciples hiding in Jerusalem Jesus began the renewal of Israel. That was the beginning of a new people called to be light in the darkness and sent out to boldly proclaim the good news and the coming of God’s kingdom. At its core it was the same mission that the people of God had had since Abraham: to be light in the darkness, to make the one, true God known to the nations. But now, recentred in Jesus, this people would go out—as I said—as prophets, priests, and kings. As prophets, calling first Judah, then the nations to repentance. As priests, mediating, proclaiming the good news about Jesus who has died, who has risen, and who is now the world’s true Lord—it’s King. And as kings, as we make real Jesus’ kingdom in practical ways in the world, anticipating that day when we will reign with him.And the New Testament tells us how those disciples went out into the world as prophets, priests, and kings. We read of their faithfulness. We read how they were opposed and persecuted and even killed. And yet we also see the seeds of what would come as little churches popped up all over the Roman Empire—even right under the nose of Caesar himself in Rome. And history shows us how the gospel continued to conquer and transform the world, until even mighty Caesar submitted himself and his empire to Jesus. The gospel did its work. The old gods were defeated and their temples torn down—even turned into churches. The perverted sexual ethics of the Greeks and Romans faded away. The brutal gladiatorial games were outlawed. Slavery became a thing of the past. Women and children came to be valued and abortion and infanticide were done away with. The gospel taught the world about grace and mercy. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but I think most of us really have very little grasp just how much the power of the gospel transformed Western Civilisation for the better and in ways that displayed the life of the Spirit, that honoured Jesus, and that glorified God.But what happened to all that? Christendom has fallen. The world around us is retreating back into darkness. Anti-gospel philosophies are taking over. Sexual immorality has become rampant in just a few short decades. We’re back to murdering our children before they’re born. The church has fallen out of favour. Christians are mocked. And while the gospel is still active, gone are those days when it captured whole peoples and radically transformed their societies. Instead, it’s become a regular thing to hear of prominent Christians apostatising. Whole churches forsake the gospel. Even our covenant children are turning away in troubling numbers.Again, what happened? Could it be that we can learn something from Israel’s story of discipline and exile? That’s what got me thinking about preaching through the book of Daniel. The church today in the West seems to be in a sort of exile and Daniel offers us timely wisdom—showing us how to be faithful in an alien land and how to be light in a darkness that does its best to snuff us out. And I think a part of that wisdom that Daniel offers also addresses the question of “Why?” Why did this happen? If anything is clear in Daniel, it is that God is sovereign and that even the raging beasts of empire ultimately serve his purposes. And so as we find ourselves in exile, the story of Israel’s exile helps to answer why—if we have the humility to see it. And, I think, Daniel 9 exhorts us to just that sort of humility. It exhorts us to see the hand of God at work to fulfil his purposes in even the fall of Christendom and the demise of the church. God’s people don’t just happen to experience defeat and they aren’t dragged into exile by random chance. Israel’s story reminds us that God has always had a purpose for his people—in the old covenant and in the new—and that he will do whatever it takes to make us the holy people, the light-in-the-darkness people he needs us to be. And that includes refining us to remove the dross, like gold in a crucible, when we’ve failed. There’s no Old Testament prophecy foretelling our current situation, but I think Israel’s story should prompt us to ask with great humility how we have failed in our prophetic, priestly, and kingly roles. It should prompt us to confess our sins, and to pray for the Lord’s gracious and merciful renewal. So let’s look at Daniel 9, starting with verses 1 and 2:In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, by descent a Mede, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans—in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years. We’re back in the space between Chapters 5 and 6. Babylon has fallen to the Persians. Israel’s great enemy is gone. But Israel is still in exile. When will it end? When will the people return to Jerusalem? What does Daniel do? He turns to scripture. Daniel would not have had the Bible or even the Old Testament as we know it, but he did have both the Law and the Prophets in some form. And so Daniel goes to the Prophets and specifically to the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah had spoken of the exile lasting seventy years and as Daniel calculates it that seventy years is nearly up.Before we go on, this is the first hint we get here that even if context allows us to line up Daniel’s chronology with historical events, the numbers are first and foremost symbolic. What comes later in this chapter has been the basis for countless eschatological speculations, some reasonable and some completely crazy.Our modern brains see numbers like this and want to think in terms of literal chronology. Seventy years means seventy years. And yet no matter how we try to line up the numbers of Daniel 9 with historical events, nothing is ever an exact fit. And that’s because the numbers are symbolic—because that’s how their brains worked—and what we have is more of a chronography than a chronology. It’s a symbolic or stylised sketch meant to make sense of historical events. So the first vital thing to see with these numbers is the connection with the idea of the jubilee. Just as every seventh day was a sabbath, so every seventh year was a jubilee—a sort of year-long sabbath. The land was to have rest from planting and harvesting, debts were forgiven, land was returned to its owners, slaves were set free. It was very impractical from a human standpoint, but like the sabbath it showed the people’s trust in the Lord to provide. It reminded them that it was his land and he had given it to them. They had not dug the wells or planted the vineyards. Both they and the land belonged to him. You can image that if people struggled to keep the sabbath, they’d really struggle to keep the jubilee. And they didn’t. At best, only very, very rarely was the jubilee observed. And this became symbolic of Israel’s failure to keep God’s law. And so the Prophets spoke of Israel’s exile in terms of the land finally having its rest—but one jubilee wasn’t enough, so Jeremiah spoke of the exile as seventy years—ten jubilee cycles—to make up for Israel’s long history of unfaithfulness. But, too, and this is the second part of the symbolism, seventy years is roughly a lifetime and the idea is that the exile would remove a full generation from the land—kind of like the forty years in the wilderness of Sinai. A full generation of exile gave time for a new generation to grow up, a generation that would be repentant, would return to the land, and would live in faithfulness. A new generation that would appreciate the Lord’s presence and provision. So that’s the idea behind this figure of seventy years. Keep that in the back of your mind for when we come to the final verses of the chapter and remember that the numbers here in Chapter 9 aren’t the important thing, what Daniel does in response to Jeremiah’s prophecy is what’s really important.So Daniel sees that things are changing around him. The Babylonians that took his people into exile have been defeated—just as the Prophets had said they would. A generation has passed. He’s now an old man. When will the Lord fulfil his promise to return his people to Jerusalem? When will he fulfil his promise to return to the temple? Again: Daniel goes to the scriptures, to God’s words. Brothers and Sisters, if you want to hear from God, go to his word. Don’t look for special revelation. Don’t try to divine his will. Go to his word. And go to his word responsibly. Daniel knew that Jeremiah had prophesied the exile and so that’s where he went. Because Jeremiah didn’t just say that the exile would happen, through him the Lord explained why. It was because of the unfaithfulness of the people. It was because of his covenant with them. He would be their God and they would be his people. And he committed himself to them and, back at Sinai, they had committed themselves to him. He’d given them his law. That was their end of the covenant. Now, to be clear. They didn’t earn their special place as God’s people. That was grace. That was mercy. And they didn’t earn anything by keeping the law. They kept the law because it was what identified them as God’s people and made them different, made them light in the darkness. They kept the law because they loved him. Being faithful to God’s law was their response to his loving-kindness.But in the covenant, the Lord had also warned that if they were unfaithful—like a cheating spouse—they would be exiled from the land, they’d no longer be permitted to live in his presence. And Jeremiah, on the eve of the exile, had enumerated the many sins of the people. That was the reason for the exile. And through Jeremiah, the Lord had also promised that when the exile was over, he would restore his people to the land and to himself and they would be faithful again.And so Daniel goes to God’s word and he reads all of this and he’s moved to confession—not just for himself, because everything we’ve read so far would indicate that Daniel has been personally faithful—Daniel confesses on behalf of his people. This is the main section of Chapter 9. Let’s read through the whole thing from verse 3 to 19:Then I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and pleas for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession, saying, “O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, we have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us open shame, as at this day, to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, those who are near and those who are far away, in all the lands to which you have driven them, because of the treachery that they have committed against you. To us, O Lord, belongs open shame, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against you. To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by walking in his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice. And the curse and oath that are written in the Law of Moses the servant of God have been poured out upon us, because we have sinned against him. He has confirmed his words, which he spoke against us and against our rulers who ruled us, by bringing upon us a great calamity. For under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what has been done against Jerusalem. As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this calamity has come upon us; yet we have not entreated the favor of the Lord our God, turning from our iniquities and gaining insight by your truth. Therefore the Lord has kept ready the calamity and has brought it upon us, for the Lord our God is righteous in all the works that he has done, and we have not obeyed his voice. And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and have made a name for yourself, as at this day, we have sinned, we have done wickedly. “O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy hill, because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among all who are around us. Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy, and for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.”Daniels confession is a long one, but at the heart of it is the recognition that his people were in a covenant relationship with the Lord and that they had broken it. In chapter after chapter, Jeremiah enumerates the plethora of ways that Israel had sinned, that she’s failed to keep the covenant, and that she’s failed to trust in and to be faithful to the Lord. He had called and redeemed this people so that they could make him known to the nations, to be light in the darkness, but instead Israel had brought shame on the Lord. Because of Israel, the nations mocked the Lord rather than giving him glory. Jeremiah recognised that the exile was his discipline. The Lord was not merely casting his people away in anger. Through Isaiah the Lord had said to his people, “you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you…Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you…bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” No, the exile wasn’t a casting away. It was an act of loving discipline and when the time was right—Jeremiah’s seventy years—the Lord would restore his people to Jerusalem and return to his temple.And so knowing that, Daniel fell to his knees and confessed. And notice how he confesses the sins of his people. Occasionally, someone will say something to me about the confession in our liturgy. “I don’t feel like I need to pray that this week.” “Why do we repeat it. Why do we confess ours sins, hear the absolution, and yet again confess our unworthiness when we come to the Table and then when we leave?” Brothers and Sisters, it’s not just about you or me as individuals. We are a people united in a covenant with the Lord and with each other. We’re responsible as individuals, but we’re also responsible as a community. When one of us sins, it affects all of us. Think about Israel. The righteous were carried away with the wicked in the exile. The righteous suffered with and because of the wicked. And yet we don’t hear them crying out, “Why me? I didn’t do anything wrong! This isn’t fair!” Just the opposite, like Daniel, they threw ashes on their heads, put on sackcloth, knelt before the Lord, and confessed the sins of the people, and prayed for the Lord’s mercy and grace.I think we can learn something from that. The church today is in a mess. It’s divided. Parts are preaching heresy. Parts are sold out to the world and its ways. Parts are consumed with materialism and greed and selfishness. Some have shallow and man-centred preaching and some have shallow and man-centred worship. Some have no concern for holiness. Some trust in Caesar or Mammon or horses and chariots more than they trust in the Lord. And some of us can be very prideful, look down our noses, and as much as our criticisms may be good and right and true—and even needed—we become very self-righteous. We’re blind to our own sins and shortcomings. And it never occurs to us that perhaps we’re all in this together and this current “exile” in which the church finds herself and this collapse of Christendom is because we have failed in our collective witness—because instead of being kings and priests and prophets proclaiming and displaying the glories of the Lord, we have like Israel, brought shame on his name. Maybe others bear more guilt than we do, but notice that that was never Daniel’s concern. Instead, he got down on his knees and repented and prayed “we” and “us” and begged for the Lord’s mercy on the whole people. We have all in our own ways sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.In response to Daniel’s prayer, we read in verses 20-23, that the Lord sent his angel, Gabriel, to show Daniel a vision—to give him insight and understanding, because the Lord had heard him and because the Lord greatly loved him. We’ll finish with verses 24-27:“Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place. Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.” Sadly, this is the part of Daniel 9 that often gets all the attention—and then not even for the right reasons. People want to know the future and an unbelievable number of bizarre and downright silly explanations have been given to explain what’s really a very simple passage. This is usually because people try to apply this to events in their future, while overlooking the context. Chapter 8 is clear in pointing to the years around the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean Revolt and so is the vision of Chapters 10-12. That’s what Gabriel is pointing towards here. Instead of Israel’s time of discipline ending completely after seventy years, the end of the exile will be more like the beginning of the end. Instead of seventy years, it will be seventy sevens—seventy being symbolic of a lifetime multiplied by the sevenfold chastisement of Leviticus 26. God’s people will return to Jerusalem, they will rebuild the temple, but that won’t be the end of their trials and tribulations. The first “week” of years will lead into sixty-two weeks of years, which will bring them to the reign of Antiochus, and that final week of years represents his reign over Judea, beginning with the murder of the high priest, leading in the middle to his desecration of the temple, and finally to his death and the deliverance of Judah.This is a reminder, once again, of the sovereignty and faithfulness of the God of Israel. That’s one of Daniel’s major themes. When everything is wrong with the world and God’s people are suffering, Daniel reminds us that all these things are serving God’s purposes, that he is sovereign, and that he is faithful. He hasn’t cast us aside in anger and left us to be. Instead, our trials, his discipline, refine us as gold in the crucible, so that when these days are over, we will give him glory before the eyes of the watching world.Again, there’s no Old Testament prophecy (or New Testament prophecy, for that matter) that points to our current situation and tells us precisely what is happening the way Jeremiah pointed to Daniel’s day. In a sense we have to do what the author of Daniel did in those days of the Second Century as his people experienced the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes. We have to go back to the story of God and his people. We need to remember that he has brought us into covenant with himself—in our case, through Jesus and the Spirit—and that he has made us prophets, priests, and kings for the sake of the kingdom of his son, for the sake of making him known, for the sake of transforming this world with the power of the gospel. He has made us to be light in the darkness. And, just as he did with Israel, he will take that light away if instead of bringing glory to his name, we bring shame.And lest we think that is some old covenant thing that doesn’t apply to us, we have Jesus’ words to those seven churches under John’s care, the one’s John writes to in Revelation. Again, those words were written to them about their situation, about the trials and tribulations they were about to face, but their calling to be light in the darkness is our calling too. And Jesus warned them that if they would not repent of their sins and failures, if they refused to be faithful in their duties as prophets, priests, and kings, that the Lord would take away their lamps.I had planned to preach on Daniel 9 to close out the season of Lent, but our Sunday snowpocalypse back in March pushed it forward. It’s a somber theme for Eastertide, but I don’t think it’s entirely inappropriate. Brother and Sisters, we are called to be a people shaped by the events and the message of Easter, but the things happening around us practically shout at us of our failure to do that. Maybe you and I aren’t the worst offenders. Maybe our church isn’t the worst offender. And so many of the failures of the church and of Christendom happened before any of us were even born and, like Daniel, we’re experiencing exile largely because of the failure of previous generations. But you and I are reminded that we are joined in a covenant with all of our brothers and sisters. And so being Easter people right now means humbling ourselves, examining ourselves and our church and our churches in light of the scriptures, repenting, confessing, and praying for the church and for the kingdom as a whole and asking the Lord to show us his mercy and grace. And if those Jewish saints living through those dark days two centuries before Jesus could trust that the Lord would deliver them, you and I can hope and trust in the Lord even more. That, too, is part of Easter. As we proclaim in the Lord’s Supper: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. He will come again, someday, and he will come when his church has fulfilled the mission he has given. And that is reason to trust that he will never abandon us and it is reason to hope for that day when he has made his bride spotlessly perfect.Let us pray: Almighty God, who gave your only Son to be for us both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always receive with thankfulness the immesasurable benefit of his sacrifice, and daily endeavour to follow in the blessed steps of his most holy life, who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, for evermore. Amen.
Prophets and Priests1 St. John 5:4-12 & St. John 20:19-23by William KlockJesus’ disciples were afraid. They were huddled together in the dark, doors locked, talking—it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there was some arguing going on—all in quiet whispers lest the authorities find them and crucify them just like they’d crucified Jesus. That’s what St. John writes in his Gospel.On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews… This was the evening of that first Easter Sunday when Mary went to the tomb at dawn and found it empty. She ran as fast as she could through the empty streets of Jerusalem to find Peter and John. She beat on their door and when the door was opened the frantic words spilled out with her sobs, “They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb and I don’t know where they’ve laid him!” So Peter and John ran and they saw for themselves the empty tomb with the linens used to wrap Jesus’ body lying there undisturbed. It made no sense. There was nothing they could do about it. And the authorities were probably looking for them now that the sabbath was over, so they went back to their hiding place.But, John says, Mary stayed behind at the tomb, weeping—ugly crying—sobbing her heart out. And that’s when two angels appeared to her, sitting right where Jesus body had been laid…sitting right there with the linen wrappings and they asked, “Why are you weeping?” And, still holding her bottle of oil in one hand and a box with those precious spices in the other, Mary sobbed out her story to them. “They’ve taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they’ve laid him.” The oil and spices were useless unless she could find where he was, but still she held on to them. But then, as John tells the story, another man approaches to ask, again, why she’s crying and who she’s looking for. Mary thought he was the gardener and she blubbered it out all over again, “Sir, if it was you, tell me where you’ve laid him.” And then the man simply spoke her name, “Mary,” and she knew him. It was Jesus. And now she was crying for joy, because he was alive. It didn’t make any sense, but he was alive and she gasped out, “Rabbi!” And she jumped up to hug him, but instead he said, “No. Now is not the time to cling to me. You’ve got to go to my brothers—to the disciples—and tell them the good news.” And so she ran—again!—to the house where they were hiding to tell them, “I have seen the Lord!”But what did it mean? John writes that when he saw the empty tomb and the linens lying there he believed. But believed what? Because he says immediately after that the disciples did not yet understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead. And so even though John believed and even with Mary’s report that she had seen Jesus, there they sat, hunkered down behind shuttered windows and a locked door, talking in whispers. There was no cooking fire lest the smoke give them away. Maybe they had a small oil lamp lit so they could just see each other. John tells his story so that it echoes the book of Genesis and the scene he give us of that evening of the first Easter day echoes Genesis: “Darkness was over the face of the deep.”Brothers and Sisters, is that not a picture of too much of the Church today. Jesus is risen. We even proclaim it with joy on Easter, we’re reminded that his resurrection has changed everything, but we sit hunkered down at home afraid to go out and proclaim it? We hide our light under a basket. And then John writes that suddenly,Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” John wrote about the Incarnation back in his prologue saying that in Jesus the light had come into the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it. That was an echo of Genesis. The first day of the week God called light into being, driving away the darkness. And now the Light Incarnate appears in that dark, fear-filled house and I have to think that somehow and in some way it was filled with light—a light that drove away every last vestige of darkness. And to these frightened men, Jesus announces, “Peace be with you!”Imagine their surprise. And there must have been some disbelief or some doubts. Or maybe, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they simply didn’t recognise him. Something about his resurrection had brought a transformation. Same Jesus, same body, but in some way just different enough in appearance that they didn’t recognise him. Of course, it wouldn’t have helped that they simply didn’t expect to see him again either. So Jesus holds out his hands for them to see. One at a time he lifts a foot out so that they can see. There were the marks left by the nails. And he lifted his tunic to show them the wound left by the spear that had been plunged into his side, the wound that had gushed forth blood and water, evidence to the soldiers that he was genuinely dead. And here he stood alive—more alive, in fact, than ever before. They were shocked. How could it be? As I said last Sunday, the reason resurrection wasn’t on anyone’s mind was because this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. This wasn’t a story Jews would have made up, because all the Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead knew how it would work—and it wasn’t supposed to work this way. At the end of the age the Lord would raise all the faithful at once. There was plenty of disagreement about some of the specifics, but they all knew one thing for sure: It would be everybody all at once, not just one person, even if that one person was the Messiah. This just wasn’t on their radar. Not at all. But now it is and they’re confused and, it seems, even though John says they were glad, they were still more than a little afraid. And so Jesus says to them again, “Peace be with you!”And Jesus doesn’t waste any time as John tells it. “Peace be with you,” he says, calming their fears. Jesus is alive. And immediately he gets down to the very practical aspects, the real-world implications of his resurrection. He says in verse 21:“As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”Here they are, hunkered down for fear of being rounded up and executed themselves. Here they are, afraid to even show their faces in Jerusalem. Here they are, giving it a few days before they try to sneak out of town without being noticed. And Jesus says to them, “I’m sending you. As the Father sent me to you, I’m now sending you: to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria…to the ends of the earth.” In other words, “You’re not going to go slinking out of the city under cover of darkness. No, you’re going out in Jerusalem with boldness—the same way I went out into Galilee, through Judea, and eventually to Jerusalem at the head of a parade, hailed by the people. You’re going to go with the same boldness out into this city and you are going to declare what God has done. Everyone is going to know who you are. You’re going to declare to Jerusalem that this Jesus whom they crucified, died and has been raised from the dead, that he really is the Messiah, God’s King, that his kingdom has come, and God’s new creation is breaking in.”Think again of John, just beginning to wrap his head around the idea that Jesus had been raised from death—but still hiding with the others, still afraid. John couldn’t even tell his friends what he thought had happened. The last thing on his mind was telling it to Jerusalem—and Jesus isn’t talking about mere “telling”—you know, whispering it to a few people who might be safe to tell. No, he’s talking about proclaiming this news—to everybody. Preaching from the hillsides and in the temple—to crowds—just like he’d done. Brothers and Sisters, think about that for a minute. Think about how most of us are so afraid or at least hesitant to proclaim the good news about Jesus. We have no reason to fear for our lives like Jesus’ disciples did. The worst thing that happens to us is we offend someone, make them think we’re weird. They faced martyrdom—and all but John were, indeed, martyred for their proclamation. We have so little to fear, but we’re afraid anyway. We’ve even stopped speaking in terms of proclamation—the Bible’s way of speaking about evangelism. Instead, these days we talk about “sharing” our faith—as if Jesus is something people might want to try—see if he works for you, but if not... We’ve lost our confidence in the good news and in the God who raised Jesus from the dead who stands behind it. No, Jesus calls us to declare the good news like royal heralds, sent out into the world to declare the mighty deeds of God, that he has raised Jesus from the dead, and made him Lord of all. The proclamation of the gospel is meant to bring glory to God. It’s an announcement that Jesus, who was dead is now alive, that he’s won the war, and that the world is being made new. That the old powers are being crushed by the great wheels of the gospel as it goes out and that hope is being born, that tears are being wiped away. That’s not something to be timidly whispered when we think it’s safe.But, again, consider John. Confused, afraid, just beginning to understand. And then consider the confidence of his words, written decades later in our Epistle:Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God…. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 St. John 5:1, 4-5)Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ—that he is the Messiah—has been reborn as part of the people of God. And that belief changes everything. That belief transforms the fearful John, hesitant to even tell his friends about the dawning realization that Jesus had been raised from death, it turns him into the courageous apostle, exiled for his proclamation of that truth, and writing boldly to the churches to stand firm in that same faith even though great tribulation was about to hit them like a storm. There is everything to be feared out in the world: rejection, mockery, persecution, even martyrdom, but by faith the people of God overcome and stand firm in our witness. It’s not because faith changes reality. It’s because this faith recognizes the new reality born that first Easter when Jesus rose from the grave, the new reality that he is victor over sin and death, the new reality that new creation has begun in him, and the new reality that he is Lord of that creation. By faith we are united with him. By faith we share in his inheritance. And by faith we share in his calling and ministry—his Church, taking up the mantle of prophet, priest, and king.Like John, we are called to boldly testify about Jesus:This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus the Messiah; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree. If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. John points back to Jesus’ ministry. He came by water. That was the start of it. He went to John and was baptised in the Jordan and as he walked up out of the river, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and his Father spoke, “This is my Son in whom I am well-pleased.” That was Jesus’ initiation into his messianic ministry. And that ministry—at least in its earthly phase—ended in blood, at the cross, where he died to conquer death and to provide forgiveness of sins. Jesus’ baptism testifies to his being the Messiah. Jesus’ blood, shed on the cross, testifies to his being the Messiah. And, too, John writes, so does the Spirit. And, he says, consider all the things we believe, in which we trust, based on the testimony of mere men. How much more, Brothers and Sisters, ought we to trust this testimony about Jesus backed up by God himself? And not so much just receiving and believing ourselves, but in light of the fact that this is the truth, this is the good news that literally changes the world, is changing the world, oughtn’t we to be proclaiming it to that world? Through Jesus and the Spirit God has given us the light. The light that will transform the darkness that sin and death have cast on the world. The light that the darkness cannot and will not ever overcome. Dear Friends, don’t hide it under a basket. Hold it high. Proclaim it. Show it to everyone. Do not be afraid. John says:Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. (1 St. John 5:10)But that’s not where John leaves us in the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t just send his disciples out into the world. That would be an impossible task. Even the joy of knowing that Jesus has risen from the grave isn’t enough in itself to get this good news to the ends of the earth. Jesus knew that we also need to be equipped to go out and do it. Look at verses 22-23 of John 20:And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” As the Lord breathed life into Adam in the original creation, Jesus now breathes on his disciples. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says. Was the Spirit literally imparted by Jesus’ breath? Luke tells this part differently in his Gospel and in Acts—that whole event with the dramatic coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as they gathered at the temple to hear Peter preach and to be baptised. But notice there, too, that the Spirit comes with a wind—in both Hebrew and Greek, wind, breath, and spirit are all the same word. Jesus was good at acted-out prophecy and I think that’s what he's doing in this case in John’s Gospel. He is—or he soon will be—imparting God’s Spirit to this new people of God, to those who believe, and he illustrates just what this gift is by an act that they couldn’t help but connect to God’s giving life to Adam—another echo of Genesis. But this is new life. And this is what will equip them to go out, despite the threat of death, to proclaim with boldness the good news. Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit does a lot for us, but here Jesus makes sure we know what his primary purpose is. It’s not to give us radical experiences, although that certainly might happen. It’s not to make us holy, although he certainly does that as he turns our hearts and our affections away from self and sin and points them towards God. No, the primary purpose of the Spirit is to equip us to do the impossible: to do for the world, what Jesus did for Israel. To go out in the world in his name and to proclaim what God has done through him. “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” Think of our study of Revelation and those seven churches John shows us in the beginning—small, poor, facing all sorts of challenges and opposition and soon to face great tribulation, but called by Jesus to stand firm in faith for the gospel—and not just that, but to take that gospel to the world. How is that possible? It starts with the joy of knowing Jesus risen from the dead, but continues through the life of the Spirit who equips us to do what we can never do on our own strength.And then Jesus speaks those words that have so often been misunderstood and abused: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” Remember I said that by faith we have a share in Jesus’ inheritance and ministry. By faith the Father adopts us and makes us his sons and daughters, so we share in what belongs to Jesus. And that means that as he is King and Prophet and Priest, so are we as his Church, his people. And Jesus here gets at two of those things. Here he reminds his friends and he reminds us that when we go out into the world to proclaim his Lordship, to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection, to proclaim that new creation has come, we do so as both prophets and as priests.Our message is two-fold. I think the priestly role comes most naturally to us. This is the part of our proclamation where we announce the forgiveness of sins. Think of the priests of the Old Testament, offering sacrifices. That was one of their primary duties: to facilitate and to mediate God’s forgiveness to the people. Think of Jesus. He is both priest and sacrificial lamb. He offers and presents himself to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins. And, as priests, we proclaim to the world the forgiveness he offers through that sacrifice. But that is not our only role. We also share in Jesus’ prophetic office—and that’s the part that doesn’t come as naturally to us, at least not as things currently are. But consider what the prophets did. Consider what Jesus did in his role as a prophet. He called out the sins of his people, he summoned them to repentance, and he announced the judgement to come on those who remained unrepentant in their sin, unbelief, and faithlessness. In contrast, much of the Church today is afraid to take on this prophetic role, to name sin, to even use the word. Some parts of the Church have given up altogether and have embraced sin and called it virtue—leaving people nothing to repent of and with nothing for which they need forgiveness. They’ve gutted the gospel. But these two things, the priestly and the prophetic go hand in hand. Our prophetic office, announcing judgement, is without hope if we do not also fulfil our priestly role of announcing forgiveness. But our priestly office, our message of forgiveness lacks any real meaning if it is not also accompanied by the prophetic announcement that sin is sin and that God will judge it. Brothers and Sisters, this is the good news: that we are sinners, that our holy God judges sin and that the penalty is death, but also that Jesus has died as a perfect sacrifice for sins, and has risen, victor over death, inaugurating God’s new creation and giving a sure and certain hope that what he has begun he will finish. One day all things will be made new, every bit of sin and evil will be swept from creation, and all will be set to rights. And by faith in Jesus we have a share in that new world.Brothers and Sisters, do we believe that? I trust that we do. We affirm this belief every week as we come to the Lord’s Table. We recall the story. We confess our sins in repentance. And we come to the Table in renewed faith to participate again in those events that set us free from sin and death, in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But maybe we’ve forgotten the real power behind what we confess here at the Table. Friends, think this morning on what the cross and the empty tomb mean. Think on what the blood of Jesus means. Think on what his gift of the Spirit means. And then take seriously those words of dismissal we’ll hear later: “Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.” Consider that in those words Jesus is saying to us, to you and to me, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”Let’s pray: Almighty Father, you gave your only Son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification: Grant that we may put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, and always serve you in purity and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
New CreationSt. John 20:1-10 & Colossians 3:1-11by William Klock“On the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark.” If we’ve been paying attention to John’s Gospel—it helps if we’ve recently been reading it from start to finish, but even if what’s fresh in our minds are these chapters we’ve read as our Gospels these last few days—if we’ve been paying close attention, this bit about it being the first day of the week ought to jump out at us. In our reading on Friday we heard John’s echoes of the old story of creation in our Gospel. When Pilate presented Jesus to the people, robed in purple with his bloody crown of thorns, and declared, “Behold, the man!”; when they took him off to be crucified, John reminds us that it was the sixth day of the week—echoing the sixth day on which the Lord completed his work of creation by calling forth human beings to govern his good creation. John strategically quotes Pilate at that point, as he presents Jesus to the people, “Behold, the man!” Then, too, there’s darkness and the light—John echoes Creation there as well.John’s telling us a great story of re-creation—of God, through Jesus, is fixing this world, broken and filled with tears because of our sin. God’s new creation burst into the world that first Easter morning. A new week had begun—a week in which we’re still living.But within that bigger and all-encompassing story of creation and re-creation, there’s a narrower story that John tells. It’s the story of the temple. Remember that in Israel, the temple was the place of God’s presence. Think back to Israel’s life in the wilderness, after the Exodus, when they built the tabernacle and then camped around it, each tribe with its spot. All arranged around that glorious tent where the Lord’s presence rested on the ark. God in the midst of his people. The temple, on the mountaintop in Jerusalem was the same. God, again, dwelling in the midst of his people. That’s the key thing that made Israel different from the nations: she was the people who lived with the one, true God in her midst. Living according to torah made Israel different in lots of other ways, but all of that was because she was the people who lived in the presence of God. The temple was the place where God and man met. It was the place where heaven and earth—which once, long ago and before or sin overlapped—the temple was the one place where heaven and earth intersected. The temple embodied our prayer: on earth as in heaven. And yet the temple was temporary—even though the Jews would have thought that sort of statement was blasphemy. The story of the temple is the story inside the story in John’s Gospel. Have you ever noticed that in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus goes right from his Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem straight to the temple to chase out the moneychangers and the merchants and all of that, but John places that cleansing of the temple at the beginning of his Gospel. John tells the story that way so that Jesus’ ministry can begin with his declaration that if the temple is destroyed, he will rebuild it in three days. Right there at the start of Jesus’ ministry, John points us to the resurrection of Jesus and to Easter.As John writes in our Gospel, the disciples didn’t know what to do about the empty tomb. Sometimes neither do we. John says that he saw and believed. But he also says that he didn’t understand. It would take seeing the risen Jesus. Even then it would still take Jesus walking his friends through the scriptures before they would really get it. But now, years later, John sort of hands us a pair of glasses so that we can believe and understand. Through the lenses of the glasses John shows us Jesus as the culmination of the story of creation and re-creation. But then John says, “There’s more.” We need to see that story within the story, and so he holds up a telescope to our glasses and when we look through the telescope, the story of creation and re-creation zooms in on the story of the temple. Again, the place where our world and God’s world intersect. It’s the place where God meets us with grace and mercy. And John shows us that at Easter something amazing has happened. This Jesus, who is God in our flesh—bringing our sphere and God’s sphere together by his incarnation—this Jesus has inaugurated a new temple. I encourage you to think about that every Sunday this Eastertide when we open our services with that acclamation: “Alleluia! Christ is risen!” That’s not just an acclamation that Jesus’ resurrection brings a happy ending to the sad story of Good Friday. Brothers and Sisters, when we say, “Allelluia! Christ is risen!” that’s an announcement that the dwelling of God is with us. It’s the acclamation that in Jesus, God has made us his people. It’s an acclamation of hope, that he will set the world to rights, that he will make all the sad things untrue, that he will wipe away every tear. In fact, if we go on reading where our Gospel today ends, Jesus begins all of this with Mary, coming to her as she stood weeping outside the tomb. Mary was the first one to experience the new reality that, in Jesus, God is with us as he never has been before. That Jesus has built a new and better temple.But that’s looking ahead. The bit of John 20 we read today, it’s all about the disciples running around. It begins with Mary running to the disciples to tell them about the empty tomb and then Peter runs to the tomb to see for himself. And then John tells us how he outran Peter to get there first. And then Peter, breathless, catches up and pushes his way past John to crawl inside the empty tomb. John, finally then, managed to get a look, too. That’s the point, he writes, when he believed.But why does John have to tell us all about the running and his race with Peter. There’s a famous painting by Eugene Burnand of John and Peter on their way to the tomb. A few years ago someone turned it into a meme, adding some comic book-style dialogue bubbles. Peter asks John, “Why’d you have to beat me to the tomb? It’s not like anyone will ever know you got here first.” And John responds, “Oh, they’ll know. I’ll make sure they know.” Someone did that, because it’s such an odd little bit of the story for John to include, but I think he included this weird bit of the story as a way of letting another bit of the Old Testament story echo into his. In 2 Samuel 18 we read about the victory of David’s forces over the rebel forces of Absalom. Two men ran back from the battle line to tell David the news. The first one announced the victory. The second one announced to David that his son, Absalom, the rebel leader was dead. On one hand, this was good news for David. The rebellion was over. But on the other hand, it was devastating. That victory meant his son was dead. David wept, “O my son, Absalom! Would I had died instead of you.”But now, as John announces the good news with John and Peter running and John getting there first and Peter following, it’s great David’s greater son who has given his life for the sake of his rebellious people. David’s Lord, the only son of the father, has defeated our great enemy. In rising from the grave, he has cast down sin and death. The Messiah has been victorious over all those rebel forces—sin, death, chaos, destruction—that have ranged themselves against God and creation and humanity. And that’s the big story of creation and re-creation in John’s Gospel. Again, remember how John shows us Pilate presenting Jesus to the people on the sixth day of the week, robed in purples and crowned with thorns, and declares, “Behold, the man!” And on that sixth day, Jesus is crucified and with his last breath declares, “It is finished!” It’s accomplished. It’s complete. Just as the Lord did on the final day of creation. Jesus has finished his great work of re-creation and he rests.I love the way Tom Wright’s libretto for Spicer’s Easter Oratorio describe the sabbath rest of Holy Saturday:O sabbath rest by Calvary,O calm of tomb below,Where the grave-clothes and the spicesCradle him we did not know.Rest you well, beloved Jesus,Caesar’s Lord and Israel’s King,In the brooding of the SpiritIn the darkness of the spring.A day of waiting that seemed like an eternity for the disciples who had lost all hope. A day of celebration for devils who though they’d won and that creation was theirs forever to twist and corrupt. And then the first day of the new week breaks in—or as the early Christians called it: the eighth day, to highlight that Easter is the dawning of God’s new world. Our Gospel lesson describes the early-morning darkness. John’s been working towards this very moment from Chapter 1 where he wrote about Jesus saying, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” And in the paragraph that follows our Gospel John tells the story of Mary’s encounter with Jesus to echo creation. She mistakes him for the gardener. I have to think that there was Jesus, freshly risen from death, having burst from the tomb, and there he is, kneeling on the earth and wrestling with weeds, pulling out some big dandelion taproot or yanking nettles from the ground. Here’s the new Adam, tending the garden the way the old Adam had failed to do, and with every weed pulled, anticipating that day when everything will be set to rights. I wonder if that’s why Mary and Peter and John didn’t see Jesus at first. There he was, tending the garden, and they missed him. Just the gardener working over there in the bushes in the early dawn light. It’s only on Mary’s return that she approaches him to ask if he’d seen who had taken Jesus’ body from the tomb. And then he speaks her name and her eyes are opened and that glorious light overcomes the darkness. And then Jesus sends her to the disciples to tell them what’s happened. New creation has begun and Mary’s the very first person swept up in and made a part of it, but pretty soon they’ll all be invited.And that, Brothers and Sisters, that’s what Easter is all about. Jesus has risen from the grave and his new body—the body we get a handful of glimpses of in the Gospels, the body that’s as at home on earth as in heaven and in heaven as on earth—his new body is the prototype of God’s new creation. And this good news, this light blasts into the darkness. Like when you pick up your iPhone in the middle of the night and accidentally trigger the flashlight right into your eyes, this light blasts into the darkness right when no one expected it. But it’s here and it confronts us and we can’t ignore it. Just as happened with Paul when he was confronted by the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, this light demands that we rethink everything as it illuminates the world and drives away all the shadows. The light demands we rethink how we see the world and ourselves and the things we hold dear and the stories we tell ourselves. This is the great truth that challenges every other truth and that exposes so many of them as lies. God’s new creation has burst into the world: on earth as it is in heaven and, not only that, but like Mary, Jesus invites us to be part of it. Like Moses beckoning the Israelites into the Red Sea as the raging wind held back the water, Jesus calls us to pass through the waters of baptism. It can be frightening. We’re not sure what it will mean because we’ve only just begun to rethink everything in light of his resurrection, in light of new creation, in light of…well…the Light with a capital ell. But then we pass through those waters and as we do Jesus plunges us into God’s own Spirit and then he welcomes us to his Table to eat the bread and to drink the wine and in them we have a foretaste of that great banquet that awaits when God’s new creation is complete, and we worship him and we glorify him and—like Mary and like the other disciples and like those thousands who were baptised into Jesus and the Spirit on Pentecost and like the millions since, Jesus story, this story of new creation becomes our story and, in the power of God’s Spirit, we live his new creation in the world today, we become part of Jesus’ light shining into the darkness. He’s made us the people who proclaim his truth in a world caught up in lies. He's made the people of light who drive away the shadows from evey last corner of creation.That’s the call of Easter. Too often we’ve reduced the good news to just the idea that we’ve been “saved”. We turn our faith in to something that’s little more than an escape hatch from this sin-broken world. But Easter reminds us that whether it was Israel in the Old Testament or us in the New, God has never created a people for himself to just be a holiness club while we wait for an escape to heaven. When we announce those words, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!” we’re announcing that Jesus has begun God’s work of new creation and that he’s made us a part of it. That means, Brothers and Sisters, that we take our Bibles in one hand—because that’s where God speaks and that’s where he tells what he loves and what he values and the good he wants to see for this world—and we take hold of Jesus with our other hand, we take a deep breath of the Holy Spirit, and we go out to live—to be— God’s new creation in the world, to be light in the darkness. We go out to work for justice and for mercy and for peace in whatever ways we can. We go out and we work to mend relationships, to fix things that are broken, to comfort and to wipe away tears, and to make things of beauty. We show the world the same servant love that Jesus has shown to us in whatever ways we can to the people whom God has placed around us. We’re now the temple in the midst of the world. And we do it all while proclaiming the good news that in dying and rising from death, Jesus has made all this possible. He forgives our sins, be breaks the chains of death, he gives us the very life of God, he renews our minds and regenerates our hearts—he makes us new in anticipation of and so that we can be agents of his new creation.Our Easter Gospel sends us out. But then we have today’s Epistle. These first verses of Colossians 3 challenge us to live out Easter in our own selves. It’s hard to be Easter people in the world if we aren’t first Easter people in our own hearts and minds. When we pray “on earth as in heaven”, we need to remember we’re not just praying for the world and for others; we’re also pray for God’s kingdom to transform us. And so Paul tells us:If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Seek the things that are above. Again, not with the idea that Christianity is an escape hatch from the world, but knowing that the work of new creation begun by Jesus is the work of restoring earth and heaven, of healing the breach that separates human beings from God. One day, through the work of the word and the Spirit, that breach will be healed and heaven and earth will be one, just like they were before we sinned. But in the meantime, we—the church—are God’s temple. We’re the holy people, set apart and indwelt by God’s Spirit. Being united with Jesus and filled with the Spirit makes us the place where earth and heaven meet. So we’d better have our minds set on the things of heaven that this earth so desperately needs and longs for.And Paul gets specific as he goes on:Put to death therefore, he writes, what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. Paul makes a list of things (some of) the things that have made such a mess of God’s creation. Five different sort of sexual immorality. Five different sorts of angry and divisive talking and behaviour. These are the things that hurt others, that hurt us, and that destroy relationships. They’re all things that stand opposed to the love we see on display at the cross. They undermine the goodness, the truth, and the beauty that characterize God and his new creation. Put these things to death, Paul writes. And then he uses the imagery of baptism as he talks about putting off the old self that was once enslaved to sin and putting on the new. Live the reality that God has already created in you when he rose victorious over sin and plunged you into his Spirit and filled you with his own life. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, it can be easy to fall back into old ways—to long for the fleshpots of Egypt as we struggle with Jesus through the wilderness. Following him isn’t always easy. There’s a reason why he tells us to take up our crosses if we’re going to follow him. But remember, the old is passing away. The new is breaking in and the new is the future. The new is our hope. So put to death the works of the flesh and put on the life of Easter, the life of the Spirit. Cultivate the fruit of God’s kingdom: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Brothers and Sisters, Easter is good news for the whole world, but it has to start in each of our hearts.And that’s a good reminder to us that Easter isn’t the end of the story. It can be easy to think that way, can’t it? The story of Jesus begins at Christmas and works its way through Epiphany and Lent and it culminates in Holy Week and with Good Friday and then comes Easter and Jesus is alive again and we think of his words on the cross as he died, “It is finished!” And I’ll tell you that after the whirlwind of Holy Week that’s the favourite Bible verse of pastors everwhere. It is finished…unless you’ve still got services on Easter Monday and Easter Tuesday, then it’s not finished until Wednesday. But it’s easy to think that Easter is the end of it. Go home, eat some ham and candied sweet potatoes and take a nap and return to life as usual. But Easter isn’t the end. The Gospel writers all remind us in their own ways that while Easter may be the end of the old story, it’s the beginning of the new one. They all make it clear that Easter means that in Jesus, God has won the great battle against sin and death, but it also means that God has created a new people for himself, a people united with Jesus and filled with his Spirit, a people he has called and equipped to go out and be light in the darkness, to make his new creation known to the world as we proclaim this good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection.Think again of Jesus, the new Adam, in the garden that first Easter Day. Pulling up weeds, maybe borrowing the gardener’s tools and hacking down a thornbush. Tending the garden was Adam’s job in the beginning and when Adam failed he was cast out and weeds and thorns took over creation. And now here’s Jesus, he’s defeated sin and death, and he set straight to work undoing the rotten fruit of our rebellion, setting the garden to rights, making all the sad things untrue. This is the work of the kingdom: bringing God’s life to the world. And Jesus hands one of us a shovel and another a rake, he points to those thorns over there and those weeds over here. Jesus points one person to a broken relationship that needs mending. He points another to go to those folks over there to help them root out some awful sin that’s dominated them. He points to another patch of weeds—a mess of injustice—and tells some of us to get to work setting it right and points to another patch—a place desperately in need of mercy—and sends us to get to work with the tools of compassion. Take this good news to the world he says. Proclaim it in word and deed and set what is broken to rights. Jesus invites—he gives us the amazing privilege—of working beside him to bring God’s new creation into being. That may be one of the most amazing things that came to me as I preached through Revelation: That this life-giving, world-renewing gospel work is God’s, but that he fills us with his Spirit and invites us into it and that in the end, when the work has been finished and the kingdom has come in all its fullness, we even have the privilege to sit with him as judges.There is a wonderful, ancient Easter hymn that was written by John of Damascus thirteen-hundred years ago. It was translated and set to music by John Mason Neale, so it’s always bewildered me that it’s in none of our hymnals, but regardless of that, it captures this Easter commissioning. The first verse goes like this:Now let the heavens by joyful,And earth her songs begin;The round world keep high triumph,And all that is therein.Heaven rejoices. If heaven rejoices over a single repentant sinner, imagine how heaven rejoices at the resurrection of Jesus and his victory over sin and death. Imagine how heaven rejoices to see God’s work of new creation. It’s our job now to get the earth joining in that song of praise and we do that as we, ourselves, are transformed by Easter and then carry its good news out from here and into the world, to make new creation known where we work and where we live and everywhere we go. Brothers and Sisters, we live in hope that one day the whole round world will keep high triumph, but the day will come because Jesus’ people, because we, have been faithful with this Easter message of life. Alleluia! Christ is risen. (He is risen indeed. Alleluia!) Now, let’s get to work.Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant us by your grace to set our minds on things above; that by your continual help our lives may be transformed; through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Behold, the Man!St. John 19by William KlockThe more things change, the more they stay the same. At the end of John 18 there’s that familiar scene of Jesus before Pilate. On the one hand Pilate has no interest in crucifying Jesus, but he’s also finding the whole situation a pain in the neck. Pilate’s only real interest was in keeping the peace in Judea and these Jews weren’t making it easy for him. And so he had Jesus brought to him and he asked, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And Jesus responded, “Are you asking because you’re interested or because that’s what you’ve heard people say about me?” And Pilate responds, “Am I Jew? Why should I care if you’re King of the Jews or not? It’s your skin on the line. Your own people—your own priests!—arrested you and handed you over to me. I’m giving you a chance to explain yourself. So what do you have to say?”Jesus goes on to explain in those well-known (and often misunderstood words), “My kingdom is not from this world. If it were, my disciples would have taken up arms to save me from the soldiers of the high priest.” And Pilate, confused and getting annoyed asks, “So are you a king or not?” And Jesus responded, “You’re the one calling me a king. I was born for this. I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” And we can hear the annoyance and the exasperation in Pilate’s famous answer, “What is truth?” And with that he went back out to address the Judeans. He didn’t understand what Jesus was saying, but that didn’t mean Jesus was guilty. Pilate went out and told them as much. It was usual for the governor to free a Jewish prisoner at Passover, so Pilate offered them a choice: Jesus or Barabbas. Barabbas was a monster. Surely they’d choose Jesus, because they certainly didn’t want Barabbas out of prison. But, no, to Pilates’ great surprise, they shouted out for the release of Barabbas and the crucifixion of Jesus. Pilate gave up. He symbolically washed his hands and declared to the people, this is on you, not me. And they took Jesus off to die.Just like Pilate, people have been stumbling over these words of Jesus for two thousand years. People hear him say that his kingdom is not from or not of this world and they then say to us, “Well, then leave me alone. Go worship in your church and leave the rest of us be. Enjoy your pie in the sky when you die.” Even Christians have misunderstood this to mean that we should disengage from the world. But that’s not it at all. Jesus’ kingdom may not be from this world, but it is most certainly for this world. It’s the only hope this world has. It’s what Jesus means when he tells us to pray “on earth as it is in heaven”—to look forward to, to hope for, and to pray for that day when God has set his creation to rights, when earth and heaven and God and man are back together as they—as we—should be. As he created it all and us in the beginning. This is what Jesus bore witness to and it’s what we, forgiven and washed and filled with his Spirit are called not only to pray for but to witness to the world and the people around us. It’s that kingdom that comes not by the sword—which is the only kind of kingdom Pilate could think of. Instead, it’s the kingdom that comes by the love we saw last night as Jesus shared bread and wine with his disciples and then washed their feet. It’s the kingdom that we see coming today, on Good Friday, as Jesus goes to the cross.On Good Friday, at the cross, all the great stories of the love of God come together in one place. As John tells us the story of Good Friday, he brings all these other stories together. There’s Psalm 22 and Psalm 69 and there’s Isaiah and Zechariah, and there’s the Passover lamb whose bones were not broken and it all points us to the big story of the God of Israel and his people and his love for them—a love that was meant to be, through them, for everyone and for all of creation. They were his agents for challenging the power of evil in the world, for being light in the darkness. And, of course, as we read the Old Testament, we see that their story—not very surprisingly—their story got stuck in the very problem for which it was supposed to be an answer—the great problem of rebellion and sin. And yet, Israel’s failure was God’s opportunity to announce his love once again. He would be faithful to his people. He would send his Messiah and his Messiah would fulfil his purposes for the world.Think of that bigger story. Going back to the beginning we’re told about the men of Babel and their tower. They’d lost all knowledge of their creator. They grasped at divinity themselves, reaching towards heaven. God confused their languages. There’s that “What is truth?” question all the way back there! And there, in the midst of deep darkness, just as the human race seems well and truly and utterly lost, God shows up to make himself known to Abraham and to announce that through Abraham and his family, he will make himself known to the world. A glimmer of light in the darkness. And then that family winds up enslaved in Egypt, so the Lord sends Moses to confront Pharaoh and to lead his people out of bondage—and Passover happens. There are centuries of ups and downs for Israel, but each time things go bad, the Lord sends a deliverer. And then finally he gives Israel a king—Saul—and the Philistines kill him. So the Lord raises up the lowly shepherd, David, who establishes a great kingdom and the Lord promises him a future heir who will be God’s own son and who will rule forever and ever. And then more centuries of ups and downs, of faithfulness and failure—mostly failure—until Babylon brings Israel down in shame and takes her off into exile. And when Israel is at her lowest, shamed and disgraced, that’s when the Lord points to her through the Prophet and declares: Behold, my servant. And then, as we’ve seen in Daniel, the great empires rose from the sea and over them all the Lord exalts the son of man as their judge.And, Brothers and Sisters, this story echoes all through our Good Friday Gospel today. We see Rome, another of those imperial monsters rising from the sea. And Rome does what Rome did best, brutally killing a rebel king. John shows us Pilate as he brings Jesus out to the people the day before Passover and announced, “Behold your king!” But those Sadducees priests didn’t want a Messiah any more than they wanted a resurrection. In fact, they didn’t want a Messiah so much that they shouted out the unthinkable, “We have no king but Caesar!” John shows us Babel and Egypt and Philistia and Babylon at their worst and then he shows us the seed of Abraham, the one greater than Moses, the son of David, the servant of the Lord and declares, “Behold the man! Behold your king!”And yet, for all it seems that Rome and the Sadducees are out of control, they never really are. As we’ve seen in Daniel, the beasts rise from the sea and they rage, but the God of Israel never ceases to be sovereign. Even in their evil, the beasts of empire serve his purpose. So, ironically, it’s Pilate the Roman governor, the man cynical of the very idea of truth, who in God’s providence, declares the truth to the people as he announces to them, “Here is your king!” Even as the priests protest his placard on the cross, Pilate again stand firm on the truth, insisting, “What I have written, I have written.” John powerfully reminds us that even this cynical, self-serving servant of Caesar will serve the Lord’s purposes. Jesus had said to him, “You have no authority over me unless it is given to you from above.” So Rome does what Rome does best. It mocks and it kills and yet, in doing that, it providentially serves God’s purposes and proves the point that the God of Abraham and Moses and David does not fight the battle against evil with the weapons of the world, but with love. Everyone that day thought that Caesar had won. The devils were dancing with joy that Friday. And yet Caesar and the priests and the devils all played right into God’s hand. As evil rose to its full height, as it was concentrated all in one place, God won the victory against it on Good Friday.At the cross, God’s project to set his creation to rights is finally accomplished. This why John opens his Gospel with those powerful echoes of Genesis. In Genesis we read that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. John echoes those words as he tells us that in the beginning was the word and the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us—bringing heaven and earth back together. All through John there are these creation themes. There’s light and darkness. There’s the seed that will bear fruit and multiply. And now on Friday, the sixth day of the week, the day when God crowned his work of creation with the creation of man to rule his new world, John shows us Pilate bringing out Jesus, robed in purple and wearing a crown of thorns, and he declares to the people, “Behold the man!” Jesus is the true image of God and the world is so mired in rebellion and sin that God’s own people, confronted with the image of God in Jesus can only shout out, “Crucify him!” The people who prayed for the return of the Lord to his temple, turned their eyes away when he did return and demanded his death. They were so mired I darkness that they couldn’t bear the light.And yet the love of God marched sovereignly on—to the cross. At the end of the sixth day in Genesis, God finished his work and now on this sixth day in John’s Gospel we hear Jesus announce that “It is finished” as he takes his last breath. It was finished. His work was accomplished. Humanity was forgiven and creation was healed. Evil had risen to its full height, giving the love of God the opportunity to rise even higher on the cross. Of course, no one understood that on Friday. It would take the resurrection, in which Jesus was vindicated by his Father, in which is victory was brought out into the light for everyone to see, it would take that before they would know and understand and believe. But on the cross, as Jesus breathed his last and slumped, hanging on those nails, it was finished. Once and for all. A full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of Israel, for the sins of all of the nations—for the sins of the whole world. A sacrifice that would finally heal the breach and bring an answer to our prayer: on earth as it is in heaven.And now, Brothers and Sisters, you and I stand gathered at the foot of the cross, confronted by the very image of God and by his amazing love. Here is the man who represents what we were created to be in the beginning and what, if we will only commit ourselves to him, God will make us to be. Here is our King, who has inaugurated his kingdom—this new creation, this world set to rights, a world founded on love—and not the world’s idea of love, but the love defined by the story of God and his people and by Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross. Here we’re confronted by the King and his kingdom and by a vision of the world set to rights. What will we do? We are so often stuck in the kingdom of Caesar. We put our trust in Caesar’s sword and in Caesar’s coins—even in Caesar’s gods. Like those Sadducee priests who were so dead set on holding on to what they had, that they declared the unthinkable, that they declared the very thing they knew so well was false: We have no king but Caesar. And John reminds us today that whatever power Caesar may have, has been given to him by God and to fulfil his purposes, not Caesar’s. Brothers and Sisters, let go of Caesar and take hold of Jesus. Let go everything else and take hold of the love of God made manifest at the cross.Good Friday reminds us. We look up to the cross and we see Jesus. Behold the man. Behold the king. He is the image of God and as we look in his face we see the God who loved his people, who loved the world so much, that he gave his own son that we might be forgiven and set to rights and welcomed back into his fellowship—who sent his son not to condemn, but to save. Here is the good shepherd who lays down his own life for his sheep out of love. Here is the one who shows the greatest love we can ever know as he lays down his life for his friends. Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the uttermost. This love we see at the cross is the very love that shone so brightly out of the darkness at the very moment when we thought the light had been overcome. This is the love that redeems and renews us, but even more important than that, this is the love that glorifies the God who is love.And so, Brothers and Sisters, this Good Friday, be transformed by this love. Our brother and our king has given his life and by that love he give us life and hope and a lens through which we should, more and more each day, see every part of our lives and of the world. This is the love that forgives our sins and heals our hurts. This is the love that is making creation new and that, one day, will wipe away our tears. This is the love that we, as Jesus’ people, manifest to the world. This is the truth we witness for the sake of the world and to the glory of God.
Bread, Wine, and Clean FeetSt. John 13by William KlockOur world needs more than ever the story of Holy Week. The whole story of Jesus, just like the big story of Israel and her God, is a story about love. But on Tuesday, as I was mixing concentrated floor wax remover into a bucket of water and trying to figure out the right ratio to get the old wax off the floor, I was also thinking about how Holy Week takes this grand biblical theme of love and super-concentrates it for us so that we can’t miss a single bit of it. From Jesus humbling himself on Palm Sunday and weeping over unrepentant Jerusalem, to this last Passover meal he shared with his disciples and his washing of their feet, to his death on the cross on Friday, the love of God is profoundly manifest in Jesus. And here, in the middle of Holy Week, after Jesus has shared this Passover meal with his friends and washed their feet, Jesus says to them, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” But Jesus doesn’t leave it there. He finishes saying, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34). People will know we are Christians, not because we have fish stickers on our cars, not even so much because we go to church or because we read our Bibles or because we pray or because we do all sorts of good things. Those are good things that help our witness along. But more than anything else, it is our Jesus-like love for each other that witnesses to the world that we belong to him. Why? Because our love for him and our love for each other is what, above all else, shows that God has filled us with his Spirit, united us with his Son, and has begun his work of new creation in us—transforming us from the inside out. Love.It's a funny thing that while we do read part of John 13 for our Gospel today, we don’t read that part. It’s that word “commandment”, referring to the new commandment that Jesus gave his disciples, the word mandatum in Latin, that’s where we get the name Maundy Thursday. But here Jesus prepares us for the events of tomorrow and here he shows us what real gospel love looks like. The world reduces love to good feelings and that love is following those feelings—doing what you want or even putting love for yourself first—sometimes even to the exclusion of others—especially people whom the world says aren’t worthy of your love. But, Brothers and Sisters, Jesus shows us that love—real love—is just the opposite. Real love is vulnerable and real love is sacrificial—you can’t have one without the other. We see this as Jesus washes his friends’ feet, but then, too, in that scene at dinner as Jesus shares bread and wine with them. Imagine the shock on his friends’ faces as Jesus said, as he does in verse 21, “Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” One of you who has followed me these three years, one of you whose feet I have just so lovingly washed, one of you will betray me. John doesn’t say as much, but I would think there would be a lot of objections from his friends reclining around that table. John tells us that he was there, reclining next to Jesus and that Peter—maybe Peter was just morbidly curious, but I expect it was more that he was afraid it might be him and he wanted to know that it wouldn’t be—but Peter leaned over to John and said, “Ask Jesus who he’s talking about.” John, I’m sure, was curious himself. Why would any of them betray Jesus? And so he asks, “Who is it, Lord?”The room went deathly silent as Jesus took a bit of bread in his hand, looked around at them, and said, “It is he to whom I give this morsel of bread when I have dipped it.” And they all watched as Jesus dipped the bread and reached out to give it to Judas. It seems pretty clear what Jesus meant, but maybe that’s our hindsight. The disciples, John says, didn’t understand. John, writing years later, says that it was at that moment that the satan entered Judas. Jesus sent him off to do what he had to do and to do it quickly. The disciples thought Jesus was sending him off to buy more bread or to give alms to the poor—since Judas was the treasurer for the group. So Judas left. The wheels were in motion. It was only a matter of time before the soldiers of the high priest would come to arrest Jesus. And knowing that, this is when Jesus announces, “Now is the son of man glorified and now God is glorfied in him.” God is about to be glorified in the betrayal and death of his son. God will be glorified in the cross of Jesus for so many reasons. I would say, first and foremost, because in it God reveals his faithfulness to his promises. But for Jesus, God was glorified in the cross first and foremost because the cross revealed his love—the same love that would then pour out of them, in the power of the Spirit, to each other and eventually to the whole world and, in that, would show that they belonged to Jesus.And at the cross we see that godly love looks, again, very different from worldly love. Godly love is vulnerable and sacrificial. We see that prefigured in the upper room. We know the story already. Even the name, Judas, stands out. If someone was going to be betray Jesus, obviously it would be the guy named Judas. But, of course, that’s because Judas ruined the name. But before Judas ruined it, his was a royal name. We might miss it because of so many things going from Hebrew to Greek to English, But Judas is the Greek form of Judah—ancestor of Israel’s royal tribe. It was the name of the great hero who led the Maccabean revolt two hundred years before. It was the name of Jesus’ brother—the one we know (because of Hebrew to Greek to English and a little bit of wanting to distinguish him from Judas) as Jude. Judas was a royal name—even a hero’s name. So the rest of the twelve were shocked and surprised when Judas betrayed Jesus, but Jesus knew all along what was in his heart. But that didn’t stop Jesus from washing Judas’ feet and sharing that Passover meal with him. It didn’t stop Jesus from loving Judas and there we see what godly love is like.So this last supper, as we call it, and Judas and his betrayal point towards the cross where we’ll see the love of God on full display. And to explain to his disciples, consider what Jesus did. The last supper wasn’t a theological symposium. Jesus could have done that. As much as we theologise and philosophise about the Lord’s Supper you might think that’s what happened that night—that Jesus sat down with his friends to talk theology and philosophy—not that those things are bad! But, no, when he needed to prepare his friends for the cross, when he needed to explain what it was going to mean, Jesus offered not a word of theology of philosophy. Instead, he gave them a meal and washed their feet—even the feet of the one who would betray him.It was a meal. You can know lots of people, but there’s something about sharing a meal that means you really know someone. You’ve been in that person’s house. They’ve given you food. There’s something intimate in that, something you don’t get in most other settings. And there’s something celebratory about a meal. The Prophets had spoken of the Messiah’s kingdom in terms of plenty and bounty and in terms of a great feast and here, on the night before Jesus made that great act of sacrificial love through which God would begin his work of new creation, Jesus shared a foretaste of that great feast with his friends.But it wasn’t just any meal; it was the Passover. It was that meal in which the Jews, eating the lamb and the unleavened bread, participated in the events of the exodus from Egypt, of the parting of the Red Sea, of the defeat of Pharaoh, of their meeting God at Mt. Sinai where he gave them his law, established his covenant with them, and made them his people. So this wasn’t just a meal, it was the Passover and in that Jesus made the Passover the lens through which his friends—and now through which we—see his death on the cross and resurrection to life. In the events of Good Friday and Easter we see a new Passover and a new Exodus. Jesus becomes the new Passover lamb, who dies in our place. We pass through the Red Sea of sin and death and on the other side, in a new land, Jesus leads us to his Father, who pours out his Spirit on us and makes us the firstfruits, his advance guard of his new creation.And finally, just in case any of us might think that we can be anonymous guests at the Lord’s Table, there’s the foot washing. As we hear John tell us about Jesus washing his friends’ feet, we should have a sense of Jesus washing our own feet. There’s something intimate in washing someone’s feet. Try it for yourself in just a few minutes. There’s something about it that leaves us more vulnerable while drawing us closer into relationship than even sharing a meal. It’s awkward and uncomfortable and humbling and in light of that the cross becomes more than just a general symbol. In the foot washing, Jesus carries his cross to each one of us. In the foot washing Jesus says, “I did this for you. If you let me, I will wash you clean of every sin and every hurt, of everything that separates you from God and of everything that has broken you. I will heal your heart and I’ll fill you with my own Spirit. Let me wash you and I will make you new. Come to my table. Eat my bread. Drink my wine. And let me wash you. Brothers and Sisters, that’s what the cross is about.And, again, there was Judas. Eating the bread. Drinking the wine. Jesus washing his feet even though he knew that Judas would betray him. That’s love. That’s the cross. And that’s why, as Judas left the upper room that night to fetch the soldiers, that’s why Jesus announced that he was about to be glorified and, in that, the Father too would be glorified.Brothers and Sisters, think on that as we wash each other’s feet and as we come to the Lord’s Table. Here we know love like we have never known it before and like we can know it nowhere else. Here we know the love of God who gave his own life for the sake of those who had betrayed him. And as we come to know and manifest this love ourselves, we give glory to the one who first loved us. And that, my friends, is the vision of love that our world so desperately needs.Let’s pray: Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Hosanna to the Son of DavidSt. Matthew 21:1-43by William KlockThat first Palm Sunday, Jesus made his last trip to Jerusalem for the Passover. In the little town on the hill opposite the city he made arrangement for a donkey, then he rode down into the valley, back up to the city, and fulfilling the ancient prophecy of Zechariah about a humble king who would come to deliver his people. You and I know where this story is headed. Just in case we might have forgotten, the long Palm Sunday Gospel gives us an opportunity not just to remember but to put ourselves in the story of Jesus’ arrest, his trial, and his crucifixion. But the people on that first Palm Sunday had no idea that the story was headed in that direction. Jesus had put two and two together—or maybe we should say that he’d put Moses and Isaiah or the law and the prophets together—and he knew that somehow he was headed to his death, despite the acclaim of the crowd. I have to think that there were a few others amongst his people, wise people steeped in Scripture and who had heard Jesus preach, who might have suspected what was coming. But that Good Friday, that the Cross, were just a few days away, would have been a complete surprise to most. They had heard Jesus preaching good news to the poor; they had seen him heal the sick, the blind, and the lame; they had seen him cast out demons and raise the dead. These were “Messiah things”. And even if Jesus didn’t always make a lot of sense, even if he was doing other things that didn’t fit the narrative they had in their heads, the Lord, the God of Israel, was clearly with him. And now, here he was riding into Jerusalem on a donkey just as Zechariah had prophesied. He had to be the long-awaited King.Jesus’ timing was perfect. There couldn’t have been a better time for the King to arrive in Jerusalem. This was Passover. This was the annual festival where the Jews not only remembered how the Lord had delivered them from their bondage in Egypt, but it was also the time when they looked forward with hope to the day when the Lord would deliver them again. The people travelling the road with Jesus were on their way to gather with friends and family to tell the story of Moses and Pharaoh, of the ten plagues, of the angel of death and the Passover lambs, the crossing of the Red Sea, and of the Lord meeting them at last in the wilderness. They were rehearsing a story over a thousand years old, but it was their story. This was how they became the Lord’s people and how he became their God. It was a story of deliverance in the past and as they retold it each year they expressed their longing for and their faith in God’s deliverance in the future. And now, in Jesus, they see the King finally arriving, and that meant that the covenant renewal and the Lord’s visitation and vindication of his people had to be just around the corner.There were a lot of other stories of deliverance in Israel’s history, but as they waved their palm branches that first Palm Sunday, the people had to have in mind the story of Judas Maccabaeus. Two hundred years earlier, he and his army had marched on Jerusalem. They defeated their Greek overlords and retook the city. And after retaking the city, Judas cleansed the temple, which Antiochus, the Greek king, had desecrated. The people of Jerusalem had greeted Judas Maccabeus with palm branches too. For about a century the Jews lived in freedom under the Maccabees and many in Jesus’ day were looking for a King to come like Judas, to once again drive out the oppressors—and this time the Lord would truly be with and stay with his people. Finally, he would set the world to rights.But Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem wasn’t the only one. Pontius Pilate had his own procession into the city. He lived in Caesarea, down on the Mediterranean coast, but to keep the peace during the Passover as the city was packed with people, Pilate, the Roman governor marched up to Jerusalem with his soldiers. Pilate would have arrived from the opposite direction as Jesus. He might have arrived the day before or later that same day, but it’s entirely possible that he and Jesus arrived at the same time, King Jesus representing the Lord, the God of Israel, and Pilate representing the great Caesar. The people caught on. They were expecting a showdown. They saw Jesus on the donkey and they remembered Zechariah’s prophecy of the coming King. And in thinking of the King they would certainly also have remembered other prophecies about the King. They sang psalms on the road to Jerusalem and may have been singing some of the royal psalms about the King coming to conquer the nations, breaking them like a rod of iron and smashing them like pottery. Jesus looked pretty humble and peaceful now, but many of the people expected him to throw off the humble itinerant preacher disguise to rise up like another Judas Maccabeus. He would drive out the Romans, the corrupt Herodian sell-outs, and the corrupt priests who governed the temple. And then he would rule like David and Solomon.So we can imagine the excitement of the people when Jesus headed straight for the temple. Our lesson from Matthew 21 in the Liturgy of the Palms stops just short of that bit of the story. Jesus marched into the temple and promptly set about upsetting everything. He drove out the very people who sold animals and made the sacrificial system possible. Jesus’ problem wasn’t so much with the buying and selling. Sacrifices required pure animals. Carrying animals all the way from places like Galilee was impractical. They could escape, get injured, or die on the journey. The people selling animals were offering a needed service and there was nothing wrong with making a profit—they had to feed their families like everyone else. The money changers were necessary too, because the temple had its own currency. No, quoting Jeremiah 7:11, Jesus shouted out that they had turned the temple, God’s house, into a house of robbers. When Jeremiah said these words, he was rebuking people who thought that they could find comfort in God’s house while continuing unrepentant in their sin. By Jesus’ time the word for “robber” had taken on added meaning. The Jews had borrowed the word from Greek and used to refer to violent revolutionaries, like the Zealots, who wanted to overthrow the Romans. The temple was supposed to be the place where the people came to the Lord in prayer and submitted to his will and his agenda, but instead the people had made it the focal point of their hopes and dreams for violent revolution—of another Maccabean revolt and a violent Messiah like Judas. And so Jesus did something that disrupted the temple and that stopped the sacrifices. It was an acted-out prophecy declaring that the temple’s days were over and with it the old order. God was about to do something new. Jesus had been teaching this all along—and acting it out as well. Whenever Jesus healed and forgave and declared people clean and bypassed the temple and the system of ritual and purity, he was sending the message that the temple’s days were coming to an end and with it the days of the priesthood and the sacrifices. The Lord, in Jesus, was about to do something new, to offer a better sacrifice, to build a better temple, to make a better priesthood—all centred in him. So Jesus does it again here in Matthew 21. Jesus brought the sacrifices in the temple to a halt and then, Matthew says, the blind and the lame came to him and were healed.What kind of King were the people looking for? Again, they were looking for a warrior like Judas Maccabaeus, but Jesus arrived on a donkey and wept over the city because it did not know the way of peace. They were looking for a king to come and restore the temple and to once again make it the centre of the world, but Jesus, instead, acted out a prophecy of its destruction and declared that he would tear it down. They looked for another king like David who would vanquish Israel’s enemies, but Jesus instead taught of a king whom the people would reject and murder.Jesus went back to the temple the next day to teach. Matthew says that the chief priests and elders confronted him to ask by what authority he said and did these things and Jesus threw their question back at them. They were afraid to answer. If they admitted that the Lord truly was behind Jesus they’d have to answer for rejecting him. If they denied it they would lose the respect and obedience of the common people who loved Jesus and, even if they didn’t understand him very well, they could see the obvious: God was at work through him. So the priests and elders simply refused to answer. They were more concerned with their position of authority than with the truth.Jesus responded with a parable. This is what he said:“Once upon a time there was a householder who planted a vineyard, built a wall for it, dug out a winepress in it, and built a tower. Then he rented it out to tenant farmers and went away on a journey. When harvest time arrived, he sent his slaves to the farmers to collect his produce. The farmers seized his slaves; they beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than before, and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them. “They’ll respect my son,” he said. But the farmers saw the son. “This fellow’s the heir!’ they said among themselves. ‘Come on, let’s kill him, and then we can take over the property!’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now then: when the vineyard-owner returns, what will he do to those farmers?” “He’ll kill them brutally, the wretches!” they said. “And he’ll lease the vineyard to other farmers who’ll give him the produce at the right time.” “Did you never read what the Bible says?” said Jesus to them: “‘The stone the builders threw awayIs now atop the corner;It’s from the Lord, all this, they sayAnd we looked on in wonder.’” “So then let me tell you this: God’s kingdom is going to be taken away from you and given to a nation that will produce the goods. Anyone who falls on this stone will be smashed to pieces, and anyone it falls on will be crushed.” (Matthew 21:33-44 KNT)This time the priests and elders understood. We know they understood because Matthew goes on to say that they were angry because they knew the parable was about them. They would have arrested him then and there if it hadn’t been for the crowds. You see, they knew a similar story that Isaiah had told long before. In Isaiah 5 the story is about a man who lovingly planted a vineyard, but no matter how well he cared for it, it produced only worthless wild grapes. In the end the man was forced to tear down the wall protecting the vineyard and to let the wild retake it. Isaiah himself had said that the man was the Lord and the vineyard was Israel. But, now, in Jesus’ version of the story he makes it plain that the problem isn’t just the vines producing bad fruit. It’s the tenant farmers refusing to acknowledge the vineyard’s real owner: the Lord.Jesus stresses that they’ve had warning after warning. The Lord sent his prophets, but they rejected and murdered them. Now he’s sent his own Son whom they’re about to reject and murder too. This is one of the most explicit statements Jesus makes about both his relation to the Lord and about his mission, his vocation to bear himself the hatred and violence of the very people to whom he was sent. And here Jesus reminds us of the problem. Again, the people were looking for a David or a Judas Maccabaeus. They were looking for a king who could overpower Caesar. But the King who came will, instead, allow the violence of his own people and of Caesar to crush him. Somehow, Jesus is saying, God’s plan will be worked out by everything going terribly wrong in order to make everything perfectly right. The King will let evil—will let sin and death—do their absolute worst to him. He will be rejected and scorned. But the stone that the builders rejected will somehow end up becoming the cornerstone of a new and better temple. This is where Holy Week is headed. It’s not until Easter, when we find the empty tomb and meet the risen Jesus, that it all makes sense.In the meantime, we need to ask which King we are following. The world is a mess. Violence is everywhere. Strife is everywhere. Poverty is everywhere. And the very moment it seems one situation is improving, things fall apart somewhere else. The things the world looks to for hope never seem to pan out—often they just make things worse. Brothers and Sisters, we need to ask: In what or in whom do we place our hope for peace and a better world? Caesar has failed over and over and over. Many of us place our hope in mammon, but mammon’s track record is no better. We need to declare with Solomon, “Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son! May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice!” (Psalm 72:1-2).But then we need to ask a more personal question. The Palm Sunday crowd was fickle, hailing Jesus as King on Sunday and crying out for his crucifixion on Friday, but they weren’t wrong in their hope for the Lord’s deliverance of his people. They longed to see God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. They hoped for the justice and peace of God to set his Creation to rights. Where they were wrong was in missing, in failing to see the means by which Jesus would usher in God’s kingdom, not by violence, but by giving himself. Brothers and Sisters, Jesus calls us to follow him on the road through Holy Week—this road of rejection, and of suffering, and even death. He demands our all. That’s what it means to repent—to turn aside from everything that is not him, to turn aside from every source of security that is not him, and to turn aside from every plan that is not his and to give our lives to the task of proclaiming this King, who gave his life for the sake of his enemies. It means that we give our whole selves in faith and in hope to make his kingdom known on earth as it is in heaven in practical and tangible ways, that through us, no matter the cost, the world may see his justice and his peace, his mercy and his grace.Let us pray: Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
About the King’s BusinessDaniel 8:1-27by William KlockThe books of 1 and 2 Maccabees in the Apocrypha detail the persecution of the Jews in the mid-160s BC, during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. 2 Maccabees 6, for example, tells how “the king sent an Athenian senator to compel the Jews to forsake the laws of their ancestors and no longer to live by the laws of God; also to pollute the temple in Jerusalem and to call it the temple of Olympian Zeus” (6:1-2). The gentiles used the temple of God for their orgies and drunken banquets. Antiochus desecrated the alter with the sacrifice of a pig. On holidays the king’s men would round up Jews and force them to participate in his parades and sacrifices. Those who refused to participate or who were caught living by torah were killed. Two women, for example, were caught having circumcised their baby boys. Their babies were tied around their necks as the women were paraded through the streets to the wall of the city and then thrown down it to their deaths. Faithful Jews who were caught secretly observing the sabbath in a nearby network of caves were burned alive. 2 Maccabees 7 tells the story of seven brothers and their mother, who were threatened with torture to eat pork. Despite being beaten, they refused.The king fell into a rage, and gave orders to have pans and caldrons heated. These were heated immediately, and he commanded that the tongue of their spokesman be cut out and that they scalp him and cut off his hands and feet, while the rest of the brothers and the mother looked on. When he was utterly helpless, the king ordered them to take him to the fire, still breathing, and to fry him in a pan. The smoke from the pan spread widely, but the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die nobly, saying, “The Lord God is watching over us and in truth has compassion on us, as Moses declared in his song that bore witness against the people to their faces, when he said, ‘And he will have compassion on his servants.’” (2 Maccabees 7:3-6)The king went on to do the same to the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh brothers who all refused. We read that:The mother was especially admirable and worthy of honorable memory. Although she saw her seven sons perish within a single day, she bore it with good courage because of her hope in the Lord. She encouraged each of them in the language of their ancestors. Filled with a noble spirit, she reinforced her woman’s reasoning with a man’s courage, and said to them, “I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws.” (2 Maccabees s7:20-23)She stood firm—and so did her sons—because they hoped in the Lord. They knew that he is the Lord of history. They knew his goodness. They knew his faithfulness. They knew their story and how it was interwoven with the story of the faithfulness of the God of Israel, and so even as they were brutally murdered by a mad king, they trusted in him. Daniel was written for these people. The stories in the first half of the book show Daniel and his friends standing firm for the Lord during the Babylonian exile, but the dreams and visions in the second are situated right in the middle of those days of violent persecution four centuries later. That’s what we see now as we come to Chapter 8 and to Daniel’s second vision. Let’s start with verse 1 and read through to the end.In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar a vision appeared to me, Daniel, after that which appeared to me at the first. And I saw in the vision; and when I saw, I was in Susa the citadel, which is in the province of Elam. And I saw in the vision, and I was at the Ulai canal. I raised my eyes and saw, and behold, a ram standing on the bank of the canal. It had two horns, and both horns were high, but one was higher than the other, and the higher one came up last. I saw the ram charging westward and northward and southward. No beast could stand before him, and there was no one who could rescue from his power. He did as he pleased and became great. As I was considering, behold, a male goat came from the west across the face of the whole earth, without touching the ground. And the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes. He came to the ram with the two horns, which I had seen standing on the bank of the canal, and he ran at him in his powerful wrath. I saw him come close to the ram, and he was enraged against him and struck the ram and broke his two horns. And the ram had no power to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground and trampled on him. And there was no one who could rescue the ram from his power. Then the goat became exceedingly great, but when he was strong, the great horn was broken, and instead of it there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven. Out of one of them came a little horn, which grew exceedingly great toward the south, toward the east, and toward the glorious land. It grew great, even to the host of heaven. And some of the host and some of the stars it threw down to the ground and trampled on them. It became great, even as great as the Prince of the host. And the regular burnt offering was taken away from him, and the place of his sanctuary was overthrown. And a host will be given over to it together with the regular burnt offering because of transgression, and it will throw truth to the ground, and it will act and prosper. Then I heard a holy one speaking, and another holy one said to the one who spoke, “For how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate, and the giving over of the sanctuary and host to be trampled underfoot?” And he said to me, “For 2,300 evenings and mornings. Then the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful state.” When I, Daniel, had seen the vision, I sought to understand it. And behold, there stood before me one having the appearance of a man. And I heard a man’s voice between the banks of the Ulai, and it called, “Gabriel, make this man understand the vision.” So he came near where I stood. And when he came, I was frightened and fell on my face. But he said to me, “Understand, O son of man, that the vision is for the time of the end.” And when he had spoken to me, I fell into a deep sleep with my face to the ground. But he touched me and made me stand up. He said, “Behold, I will make known to you what shall be at the latter end of the indignation, for it refers to the appointed time of the end. As for the ram that you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia. And the goat is the king of Greece. And the great horn between his eyes is the first king. As for the horn that was broken, in place of which four others arose, four kingdoms shall arise from his nation, but not with his power. And at the latter end of their kingdom, when the transgressors have reached their limit, a king of bold face, one who understands riddles, shall arise. His power shall be great—but not by his own power; and he shall cause fearful destruction and shall succeed in what he does, and destroy mighty men and the people who are the saints. By his cunning he shall make deceit prosper under his hand, and in his own mind he shall become great. Without warning he shall destroy many. And he shall even rise up against the Prince of princes, and he shall be broken—but by no human hand. The vision of the evenings and the mornings that has been told is true, but seal up the vision, for it refers to many days from now.” And I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days. Then I rose and went about the king’s business, but I was appalled by the vision and did not understand it. Another vision during the reign of the blasphemous king Belshazzar. In his ways, he foreshadows the evils of Antiochus Epiphanes. But as the first vision revealed, the days of Babylon were soon to be over, so this vision whisks Daniel hundreds of kilometres to the east, to Susa, which would become the capital of the Persian empire. And there he sees another animal, this time a ram. This is another clue as to when the book was written. The ram as a sign of the zodiac was associated with Persia—not in Daniel’s day, but in the time of the Greeks.The symbolism of Daniel 7 was difficult and there’s a fair bit of disagreement about what it all means, but not so much with Daniel 8. This vision is simpler and the explanation pretty straightforward. Most everyone agrees on the major points. So it begins with a ram representing the combined empire of the Medes and the Persians—those are the two horns, one bigger than the other. Horns, in ancient imagery, represent strength. The Medes were strong, but the Persians eventually become stronger and gobbled them up and so Daniel sees the ram, lowering its head, and charging from the east into the north and into the south and into the west—which is exactly what the Persian empire did, until it controlled the known world, even as far as Greece. Daniel writes that the ram did as it pleased and became strong. It’s the way of human empires.But as the ram reaches the peak of its power, Daniel sees a goat appear in the west. It helps to know that in the biblical mind, the goat was stronger and more powerful than the ram. This goat had a single horn and it made its way across the land so fast it might have been flying for all it seemed to touch the earth. It put its head down and charged the mighty ram and shattered both its powerful horns. In case the symbolism wasn’t already obvious, the angel explains that the goat is Greece. The jutting horn is Alexander the Great.Alexander was the son of Philip II, King of Macedon. He was tutored by Aristotle and assumed the throne when his father died in 336 BC. He was only twenty years old. By the age of thirty he had conquered the known world, from Greece in the west to India in the East, from Central Asia in the north to Egypt in the south. And then, in 323 BC, still a young man, Alexander died of a fever in Babylon. For twenty years his generals fought over his empire, eventually carving it up into four kingdoms, which Daniel sees as four horns. The two relevant ones for the Jews were that of Seleucus who controlled Syria and the east, and Ptolemy, who controlled Egypt and Palestine.But this is all the background to the most important part of the vision. Out of those Greek successor kingdoms arises another horn. He isn’t named, but as the details of the first horn obviously point to Alexander, the details of this new horn point very obviously to Antiochus IV Epiphanes. In the great sweep of history, Antiochus was hardly the greatest of the Greek kings, but when he defeated the Egyptian Ptolemies and took control of Judah he became very important to the Jews. The Ptolemies had treated the Jews well and allowed them to govern themselves as a sort of religous state as long as the high priest coughed up the annual taxes. Antiochus, however, wanted to make good Greeks of the Jews and to get his hands on the temple treasury. Under his rule the priesthood was bought and sold and eventually observance of torah was outlawed and torah scrolls burned. God’s worship in the temple was ended and it was turned into a temple to Olympian Zeus. And Antiochus murdered faithful Jews by the tens of thousands.In Daniel’s vision, Antiochus takes the form of this great horn that rises up against heaven itself. These verses, especially 12-13, are difficult. Just when I was glad to leave the Aramaic of chapters 2-7 behind, here come these verses that I can only describe as a Hebrew word salad. The Hebrew of Daniel is something else that points to it having been written in the Second Century, because it’s not written in the great literary Hebrew of Daniel’s day, but in a sort of clunky Hebrew that looks a lot like it was written by someone who probably spoke Aramaic as a first language. But that’s okay. The gist of Daniel’s vision is that Antiochus, in going up against the temple and the priesthood, was really shaking his fist at the God of Israel. This little earthly king who called himself “Epiphanies”—the manifestation of God—was pitting himself against the living God, the Lord of history, the one the Babylonian kings had had the good sense to acknowledge as God Most High. That never ends well.And yet, for a time, the mad king seems to have won. Israel’s identity was centred on the temple. That was the place where heaven and earth, where God and man met. They were the holy people who lived with God in their midst. And not only did Antiochus do his best to make sure they broke their end of the covenant with God by preventing them from keeping his law, but he suspended the very sacrifices that acknowledged God’s presence in the temple. He wanted the Jews to live like good Greeks and when they insisted on living like Jews, he banished their God from his temple and set up an altar to Zeus. Judah was now his land. Their God was gone, so they had no reason to obey his law. Of course, the Jews knew better. Like that mother and her seven sons in 2 Maccabees, they knew the faithfulness of the God of the Israel and they knew that no puny human king could blaspheme against him forever. But, for a time, he would seem to have won the day. According to Daniel’s vision, for 2300 evenings and mornings the temple would be desolate. That’s a reference to the morning and evening sacrifices that were—or were supposed to be—made every day. The sacrifices that Antiochus suspended. Depending on how you parse this detail out, it’s either about three years and three months or it’s about six years and six months. Most people tend to go with the three years, which corresponds closely to the time when Antiochus had suspended the worship of the Lord in the temple. But the six-and-a-half years works too, if you count back to when the high priest was deposed. Either way, we know what the vision represents. And either way and for whatever reason, it’s not an exact number, which means it may also be symbolic—we just can’t be sure exactly how. However we parse out the number, the important point is that the Lord has numbered these evil days.And that’s the point I want to close on. Too often we get fixated on numbers and on fixing dates and end up missing the point. We do it with books like Daniel. We do it with books like Revelation. We do it with the prophets and with the apocalyptic discourses of Jesus. It’s nothing new. Christians have been setting dates for over a thousand years and whenever we do, we seem to end up distracted from the gospel mission we’ve been given. Often it ends with the creation of schismatic sects and cults. William Miller, for example, worked out from these 2300 evening and mornings that Jesus would return in 1843. His argument convinced a lot of people (and it helped that he threw in plenty of “God has told mes”). Of course, it didn’t happen so he adjusted his formula, admitted a small error, and corrected the date to 1844. That didn’t happen either. But his followers had given up everything and then many of them walked away and became jaded. They called it the “Great Disappointment”. But, still, to this day Miller has his ardent followers. They’re the Seventh Day Adventists and believe that it really did happen in 1843, and that it wasn’t about Jesus returning to the earth, but that Jesus on that date entered the heavenly temple to begin is work of judging souls in anticipation of his return.And many of us remember Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth that became a sensation in the 1970s. Lindsey made a point of not setting an exact date, but he wasn’t shy about saying things like the 1980’s would probably be the earth’s last decade. It motivated some people to become missionaries, but it motivated lots of other people to abandon their jobs, their families, and to run up massive credit card debt because they were convinced that in a year or two none of it would matter. In more recent years we’ve had similar predictions made about “blood moons” and the like. Christian bookstores were filled books about the imminent return of Jesus and end of the world. People were, once again, all worked up about the end of the world and, once again, nothing happened.Again, we too often forget the point of passages like this one in Daniel 8. Even if we could estimate or even set a date by it, the point is that God is in control and, because of that, we have every reason to stand firm in the midst of trials and persecution, knowing that God will vindicate us in the same way that he has vindicated his people in the past and, especially for us as Christians, in the same way that he vindicated his son when he raised him from death. Daniel 8—and so many other passages—remind us first and foremost that God is sovereign. No matter how it seems, history is not random. No matter how much they may shake their fists at the heavens, no king is outside the sovereign will of God. No matter how much we may abuse our God-given liberty, every one of us will be held to account. Sin and evil will not go on forever. God is judge, one day he will deal with sin and death once and for all, and eventually all of creation will be to rights—including us. And we know that this will happen, we believe, we have hope, because of the death and resurrection of Jesus. At the cross God did the hard part needed to set the world to rights. At the cross Jesus won the decisive battle and one day the war will be over when we, the church, his people, have accomplished the work he has given. He has equipped us with his own Spirit and sends us out to proclaim the life giving and renewing good news of his death and resurrection. And for two thousand years, that good news has driven away the false gods of the pagans and brought kings and their people to their knees before Jesus and to give glory to the God of Israel. Brothers and Sisters, date-setting, goofy predictions, and eschatological paranoia do nothing to witness the sovereignty of the Lord of history. They do just the opposite and they undermine our witness. They make Christians look foolish and the scriptures untrustworthy. Our mission is to proclaim the gospel, because in Jesus and in his death and resurrection, that is where the world meets the living God and knows his faithfulness.And that brings me to the final point. Look again at verse 27 and Daniel’s response. The vision left him troubled. He even lay sick in his bed for “some days”. He was in some sense dismayed because he didn’t fully understand it. But what did he do? He says that he arose and went about the king’s business. Brothers and Sisters, the prophecies and apocalypses that the Spirit has given us in the scripture were never meant to send us out in a panic or a frenzy, they weren’t given to have us abandon our earthly responsibilities because the world is coming to an end. They were given to us to remind us that God is sovereign, that he will judge the wicked, and that he will vindicate his people for their faithfulness. So be faithful. The Lord had placed Daniel in a position of authority in the court of the king of Babylon. That pagan court was soon to fall. That pagan king was soon to die. But the Lord had put Daniel in that position for a reason and so he went faithfully back to his work. The same goes for each of us. The Lord has put us where we are for a reason. Be a faithful husband and father or a faithful wife and mother knowing that the Lord is sovereign. Be faithful in your vocation, whatever it may be, however mundane it may seem. Be faithful to your earthly obligations: to your family, to your business, to your school, to your church, to your club, to your friends, to your debts, to your country knowing that the Lord has placed you where you are. That is, after all, the King’s business. This witness to our trust in the sovereignty of God is the foundation that undergirds our greater witness to Jesus and the gospel. It is what prepares us to stand firm should the day come when we find ourselves forced to choose between obedience to an earthly king and obedience to our heavenly King. May we stand firm like the saints of old and declare with the mother of those seven martyred sons, “The Lord God is watching over us and in truth has compassion on us.”Let’s pray: Almighty God, look with mercy on your people; that by your great goodness we may be always governed and preserved both in body and soul, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
With the Clouds of HeavenDaniel 7:1-28by William KlockThe seventh chapter of Daniel begins this way:In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel saw a dream and visions of his head as he lay in his bed. Then he wrote down the dream and told the sum of the matter. It’s finally Daniel’s turn to dream. The storyteller rolls back the clock about a decade to the first year of Belshazzar, which would have been about 550 BC. The implied audience, remember, is the faithful Jews living in Judah in the early 160s BC, during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. The purpose of the book of Daniel was to encourage them and to exhort them to stand firm for the Lord, to stand firm for his law, even as this pagan king was making it illegal for them to live according to the law and to worship the Lord, even as many of their fellow Jews were caving in to the pressure and apostatizing. The book of Daniel points them back to their ancestors who lived during the Babylonian exile and had their own struggles to remain faithful to the Lord. The story is told through their eyes to encourage the current generation.We also need to understand that the book of Daniel now shifts its genre from tales about Daniel and his friends in the Babylonian court to apocalyptic visions. There are four visions. This first one in Chapter 7, a second in Chapter 8, a third in Chapter 9, and a fourth spanning Chapters 10-12. In Greek, an apokalypsis is a revelation, an unveiling, of something. It’s related to prophecy, but it usually has—at least in the Bible—it usually has to do with current events and is God’s way of pulling the curtain back to show that current events aren’t just random or haphazard, but that he’s at work behind them. Biblical apocalyptic encourages the faithful to stand firm and to trust in the Lord knowing that even as evil seems like it’s out of control, it’s not. God is sovereign and he—and his faithful people—will win the day. It reminds us that God is king and that he will vindicate his people for their faith.And, as we saw with Revelation, one of the defining characteristics of apocalyptic literature is that it communicates through symbols. And that can make it difficult for us. The symbolism would have been obvious to the original hearers, but because it’s very context dependent—things like culture and history, worldview and mythology and things like that—it can be very hard for us to understand. One of the hard things for us, one of the things that gets lost in translation is the visceral reaction this symbolism would have created in the original audience. For us it’s just something to decode: this means that. For them, the imagery would stir up emotions. This wasn’t about events thousands of years ago. This was about what they were experiencing. It was about their world, their not-too-distant past, and their not-too-distant future. It was about the present affliction, the present persecution, the present pressures that confronted them. Think of the feelings you might have as you watch the evening news: fear, dread, sadness, elation. Those sorts of feelings were connected with this imagery. The timing of this vision, at the beginning of Belshazzar’s co-regency, means that Daniel’s vision would coincide with big news. For millennia the Assyrian empire had dominated the Near East. The Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus and Belshazzar was the last incarnation of Assyria. To the north was the Median Empire and to the east the Persian. Cyrus the Great, the Persian emperor was on the move, gobbling up parts of Media and Babylon. In 550 BC the Medes fell to the Persians. Now Babylon was in Cyrus’ sights. Here were Daniel and his people, bystanders in the middle of turbulent times. We can imagine Daniel hearing the most recent news of the fall of the Medes, going to bed, tossing and turning, finally falling into restless sleep, and dreaming. Let’s continue with verse 2:Daniel declared, “I saw in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. And four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings. Then as I looked its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man, and the mind of a man was given to it. And behold, another beast, a second one, like a bear. It was raised up on one side. It had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth; and it was told, ‘Arise, devour much flesh.’ After this I looked, and behold, another, like a leopard, with four wings of a bird on its back. And the beast had four heads, and dominion was given to it. After this I saw in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces and stamped what was left with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns. I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another horn, a little one, before which three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots. And behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things. (Daniel 7:2-8)In his vision, Daniel stands by the great sea. In the Old Testament the “great sea” always means the Mediterranean. It was the centre of the ancient world. Imagine Daniel standing in a place jutting out into the sea, a place the Rock of Andromeda at Joppa. The waters rage and the winds blow. It’s not an ordinary wind. The winds rage from north and south, east and west all at the same time and the sea churns violently around him. For all the ancient Near Eastern peoples, the sea represented chaos. Genesis opens with the sea—formless and void—representing the chaos of the uncreated world into which the Lord speaks, separating the waters, raising dry land, bringing the order needed for humans to live and to flourish. Now, in his dream, Daniel sees the sea raging. Chaos threatens the order of God’s good creation. As we look at our own current events, it’s not very hard to image what Daniel felt. Turn on the news or look on the Web and so often it seems like chaos and evil are tearing the world apart. In so many places humans languish when they should be flourishing, all because of war and corruption, because of poverty and greed and sickness. Sometimes it seems like chaos has won the day.And who’s at the heart of the chaos? Daniel sees four ferocious beasts emerge from the sea. The beasts are symbolic and it’s hard to be certain exactly how all the symbolism here works. A lot of it seems to come from the Old Testament prophets, but it could also be coming from the mythology and the symbols of the various peoples and empires that are symbolized. Some of it is eerily similar to the symbolism of the Babylonian books Daniel would have studied in learning about divination and the symbolism of dreams. What we do know—because Daniel is told in verse 17—is that these beasts represent four empires. We know from what has preceded and what follows in Daniel that the sequence of empires begins with Assyria, of which Babylon was the last incarnation. So a regal lion with the wings of an eagle emerges from the sea representing the greatness of Babylon. Its wings are plucked off and it is set on two feet, which reminds us of Nebuchadnezzar in Chapter 4, ranging in the wilderness like a wild animal, but eventually restored to humanity and kingship by the Lord.From this point there’s disagreement on how to interpret the symbolism and that’s because of our distance from the original context. We just can’t be sure what the symbolism means and it then becomes very easy to look through history and cherry pick things that match the symbolism and squeeze it into our modern interpretations. I’ll just note that the rabbis and Christians for most of our history interpreted these four empires as Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. That was mostly because in the days of the rabbis and early Christians, Rome was the great global power and because Rome so often stood opposed to both the Jews and Christians. Rome fell, but Byzantium—the eastern Roman empire—remained until the 15th Century. And there were successors to Rome in the West. In 800 Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans and it wasn’t until 1806 that the Holy Roman Empire finally came to an end. But as the years went by, connecting Daniel’s fourth beast to Rome became more difficult, and since the early 19th Century folks have had to work especially hard to hold on to that interpretation, whether identifying the beast with the papacy or with the European Union—and those schemes have consistently ended up falling apart.History gives us a better basis for interpreting Daniel’s beasts. We know now that at the time Daniel was written there was a common scheme across the Ancient Near East for describing the succession of empires. The four great empires were Assyria, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greek Macedonians. In fact, as the Romans replaced the Greeks in the centuries that followed, they were added to the scheme as a fifth empire.So following this common pattern, the bear represents the Medes. As in Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, it was clearly inferior to the Babylonians. The three ribs in its mouth may be a reference to Jeremiah 51:27-29, which describes the three nations that joined with the Medes in their attack on Babylon. And the four-winged, four-headed leopard then represents the Persians. The swiftness with which the Persians conquered the four corners of the earth contrasts with the ponderous bear imagery of the Medes. But Daniel’s vision really isn’t very interested in the second and third kingdoms. The focus of his dream is on the fourth. This is the kingdom that raged and threatened the people of God at the time the book was written.And the fourth kingdom is different. As we’ll see in a bit, the first three beasts, despite appearances, were all under control. But this fourth beast, it does what it wants to do—or at least, that’s how it thinks of itself. The imagery of the great beast, exceedingly strong, and stamping into oblivion what was left after breaking things apart with its iron teeth or tusks, suggests an elephant—a good image of Alexander’s unstoppable army that conquered the territory of the other three empires. The ten horns are fitting symbols of the ten kingdoms that arose from Alexander’s empire after his death.[1] But out of those horns there came up one king in particular, who was a menace to the people of God. The little horn is, again, a fitting image of Antiochus Epiphanes. He tried to abolish the law and the worship of the God of Israel. He was the one who claimed divinity for himself. He was the cause of all their woes.But then, in the midst of the chaos, as the sea churns and these ferocious beasts rage across the earth, a new image appears—a bit like Dad coming home to find his unruly children tearing apart the house. Look at verses 9 and 10:“As I looked,thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat;his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool;his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire.A stream of fire issued and came out from before him;a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him;the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. The beasts are brought to heel as the God of Israel takes his seat as judge. The one who tamed chaos in the first place established earthly kings to preserve his order and to promote human flourishing. These kings have done the opposite and now what at first seemed like wild and ferocious beasts stand pitifully before the judgement seat of the Most High God, his fiery throne, and before the heavenly hosts. Then verses 11 and 12:“I looked then because of the sound of the great words that the horn was speaking. And as I looked, the beast was killed, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. As for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away, but their lives were prolonged for a season and a time. Even as he stands before the Most High, that blasphemous little horn continues to speak. The other beasts, for all their raging, served the Living God—as we’ve seen in the first six chapters. They all, in some way and in the end, acknowledged him. The Lord of history raised them up to serve his purposes. But this horn on the fourth beast rages against the sovereign God and is judged: killed, destroyed, and burned to oblivion. The vision gave hope to the faithful living under his reign of terror.But that’s not all there is to it. Daniel has a second vision and this one’s not just about the bringing down of wicked rulers; this one is about the raising up of a righteous one. As St. Paul writes in Romans, creation waits with eager longing for the sons of God to be revealed. It’s not enough to judge the wicked. Creation longs for its rightful stewards. Look at verses 13 and 14:“I saw in the night visions,and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man,and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom,that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him;his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away,and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. History will not continue as a reign of terror and blasphemy, nor will it merely end in judgement. In place of the raging kings represented by ferocious beasts, Daniel now sees one “like a son of man”. In the beginning the Lord created human beings to rule his creation with goodness and wisdom as his stewards and that’s what this new figure like a son of man represents. After the Lord has judged the wicked empires of the world, this son of man arrives riding on the clouds—that’s a dramatic image of the Lord’s war chariot. He is presented before the Ancient of Day, before the Most High God, and to him is given glory and an everlasting dominion—ultimately a kingdom that will not be destroyed.But what does this all mean? The dream continues as one of the heavenly host explains the symbolism to Daniel in verses 15-27:“As for me, Daniel, my spirit within me was anxious, and the visions of my head alarmed me. I approached one of those who stood there and asked him the truth concerning all this. So he told me and made known to me the interpretation of the things. ‘These four great beasts are four kings who shall arise out of the earth. But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, forever and ever.’ “Then I desired to know the truth about the fourth beast, which was different from all the rest, exceedingly terrifying, with its teeth of iron and claws of bronze, and which devoured and broke in pieces and stamped what was left with its feet, and about the ten horns that were on its head, and the other horn that came up and before which three of them fell, the horn that had eyes and a mouth that spoke great things, and that seemed greater than its companions. As I looked, this horn made war with the saints and prevailed over them, until the Ancient of Days came, and judgment was given for the saints of the Most High, and the time came when the saints possessed the kingdom. “Thus he said: ‘As for the fourth beast,there shall be a fourth kingdom on earth, which shall be different from all the kingdoms,and it shall devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces.As for the ten horns,out of this kingdom ten kings shall arise, and another shall arise after them;he shall be different from the former ones, and shall put down three kings.He shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and shall think to change the times and the law;and they shall be given into his hand for a time, times, and half a time.But the court shall sit in judgment, and his dominion shall be taken away, to be consumed and destroyed to the end.And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High;his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.’This is the hope of the saints. The blasphemous little monster will put himself in the place of God. He will torment the faithful. He will have power and authority and, to all appearances, it will seem like his reign will last forever—or longer than those other kingdoms, at any rate. A time, times—and that would go in sequence: four times and eight times and sixteen times and so on. But no. It’s a time and times and suddenly a half. That might be a reference to the roughly three-and-a-half years Antiochus Epiphanes terrorized Judah, but it’s more likely the idea that his power is cut short at its height. The Lord will give him enough rope to hang himself. And his kingdom will be given to the saints, to the holy ones of the Most High—and his dominion, his kingdom will go on forever and ever.It’s an image of the world set to rights. Chaos is finally, once and for all given order in by the Lord, and human beings are restored to their rightful place, to serve before the Lord as his stewards—as priests and kings. This is why the Jews saw the son of man here as a symbolic representative of Israel. They were the people elect and set apart by the Lord, a people made holy to be a light to the nations—a people who, in living with the Lord in their midst—gave the world a glimpse of what creation was supposed to be like and who pointed forward to the day when it really would be set to rights and men and women would finally serve the Lord as the stewards and rulers of his creation.The chapter ends in verse 28:“Here is the end of the matter. As for me, Daniel, my thoughts greatly alarmed me, and my color changed, but I kept the matter in my heart.”This is the end of the first vision, but there’s more to come. This vision sets the scene and gives us the setting and timeframe for the visions that will follow. But then—and I guess I’m jumping ahead to the end of Daniel—we realise as Christians that even as Daniel’s visions end, it’s not really the end of the matter. The Lord did indeed bring down the evil Antiochus IV. The Lord did indeed vindicate his people. A new king would take the throne in Judah. But as is so often the case with Old Testament prophecy, even though we see it obviously fulfilled in the events of those days, it’s fulfilled in a way that leaves things open to a final and greater fulfilment. Judah was only free for a century and then Pompey came, conquered Jerusalem for Rome, and deposed the Hasmonean dynasty. And the people would wait again for the Lord to deliver them.It was in those dark days that Jesus was born and began his ministry and it shouldn’t surprise us in the least that he took for himself this title from Daniel, son of man. He was the embodiment of the humanity we forsook in the garden and the embodiment of the Israel that Israel could never manage to be. In him, God became the first man to be what we were created to be. And as our representative, he broke the bonds of sin by letting evil do its worst. The chaos and the vicious beasts of fallen, sinful, rebellious humanity rose up around him and did their worst, they killed him, and they buried him in the earth, and for three days evil thought it had triumphed. But on the third day, God vindicated his son, raising him from death. And as Jesus rose from his grave, so Jesus also rose to take his throne. The son of man has been given dominion and glory and his kingdom and as the good news of his death and resurrection goes out, the peoples, nations, and languages are being brought to him in faith, to serve him and to give him glory. And in that, we see the people of God, the new Israel, the church empowered by word and Spirit, coming on the clouds—riding the Lord’s war chariot, equipped with the gospel—the good news of Jesus, crucified, risen, and enthroned in glory. And there, Brothers and Sisters, we ought to find hope and inspiration to stand firm in faith even as the seas rage today, as new beasts emerge from the dark waters, even as they speak vain and blasphemous things. Jesus has won the decisive battle. He now sends out: Onward! Christian soldiers. And on we go, taking up our crosses into the world, knowing that the one who humbled himself on the cross and who conquered by his blood not only stands with us, but has filled us with his own Spirit and now goes on before us.Let’s pray again our Collect: Almighty God, consider the heartfelt desires of your servants, we pray, and stretch out the right hand of your majesty to defend us against all our enemies, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. [1] Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucia, Macedon, Pergamum, Pontus, Bithynia, Cappadocia, Armenia, Parthia, and Bactria.
He is the Living GodDaniel 6:1-28by William KlockLast Sunday we read those closing words of the fifth chapter of Daniel that tell us Belshazzar, the very night of his feast, was killed and that Darius the Mede received the kingdom. Daniel 6 picks right up from there. Let’s look at Daniel 6:1-9.It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom 120 satraps, to be throughout the whole kingdom; and over them three high officials, of whom Daniel was one, to whom these satraps should give account, so that the king might suffer no loss. Then this Daniel became distinguished above all the other high officials and satraps, because an excellent spirit was in him. And the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom. Then the high officials and the satraps sought to find a ground for complaint against Daniel with regard to the kingdom, but they could find no ground for complaint or any fault, because he was faithful, and no error or fault was found in him. Then these men said, “We shall not find any ground for complaint against this Daniel unless we find it in connection with the law of his God.” Then these high officials and satraps came by agreement to the king and said to him, “O King Darius, live forever! All the high officials of the kingdom, the prefects and the satraps, the counselors and the governors are agreed that the king should establish an ordinance and enforce an injunction, that whoever makes petition to any god or man for thirty days, except to you, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions. Now, O king, establish the injunction and sign the document, so that it cannot be changed, according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, which cannot be revoked.” Therefore King Darius signed the document and injunction. (Daniel 6:1-9)Darius the Mede. You might remember that last week I said he’s a bit of a mysterious character. I think the author of Daniel does something very deliberate here that would, to the original hearers, have signalled a change in the sort of story being told. Unless you’ve studied Ancient Near Eastern history, this won’t seem important. If you have studied Ancient Near Eastern history, when you hear “Darius the Mede” it’s going to catch your attention. It’s not right. Darius wasn’t a Mede; he was a Persian. And he didn’t rule before Cyrus; he ruled almost twenty years after these events, after the exile was over, and after Daniel had died. Jews would have noticed the same thing. Darius figures heavily in the historical books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the prophetic books of Haggai and Zechariah. So I think that a Jew hearing this—especially as the story continues—would see it as a signal that the genre, that the type of storytelling has changed. And there’s good reason for the storyteller to make this change. Chapters 6 and 7 are transitions in the book of Daniel from those earlier stories that were a type of wisdom literature, to Daniel’s apocalyptic vision. We’re moving from the historical to the prophetic and apocalyptic and the book does that with one last story about Daniel in exile, but this time it’s—well—the best thing I can think to call it is a “prophetic parable”. It’s a story that serves a different purpose than the other stories. As we move from the historical to the apocalyptic, this story of Daniel in the lions’ den makes us pause as it reminds us of the big picture, the big story about the God of Israel and his people, it reminds us that he’s got a plan and is directing history towards an end goal, and it reminds his people of their place in that big story.So it begins with Darius. On the one hand, in the previous verse he’s called “the Mede”, but here he’s the Darius who organised his empire into satrapies. That’s exactly what Darius the Great—who followed twenty years later and was a Persian—that’s what he did. I don’t think this isn’t a mistake or a historical error. This character is a sort of a composite of pagan kings who represents, who stands for something in the story. Again, we’re moving from history to parable here. Think of the parables Jesus told. This character represents the faithful in Israel. That character represents the unfaithful. And that character represents the gentiles. Here the king and his satraps represent the rulers of the gentiles. And Daniel represents Israel. Like Daniel, Israel had the Lord’s favour. She was his favourite amongst the nations and the nations became jealous. And that’s exactly what happens to Daniel in this story. When they see how he’s been elevated and has been given authority over them, the satraps chafe. He was one of the exiles. He wasn’t one of them. He didn’t deserve his special status or his high rank or his favour with the king. So they get together and conspire against him.There are echoes of Psalm 2 here. In fact, I think if you wanted to turn Psalm 2—which is one of those big picture psalms that ends up pointing us to Jesus—if you wanted to turn Psalm 2 into a parable, I think it would end up looking a lot like Daniel 6. The psalm begins:Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,“Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” (Psalm 2:1-3)Notice where they attack Daniel? It was “the law of his God”. He was blameless in everything so they go after his faith. And in that they’re not just attacking Daniel. Through Daniel, this is an attack on God himself. It echoes what it meant in the Old Testament to stand against Israel and, looking forward to Jesus and then to the church, to attack Jesus was to attack God himself. Think of Jesus’ confrontation with Paul on the road to Damascus: “Why are you persecuting me?” he asked Paul. To attack the church was to attack Jesus himself. To attack the Lord’s anointed is to attack the Lord himself.So these men go to the king—all of them. The satraps, who were viceroys over the provinces; Daniel’s two fellow triumvirs; and all the other counsellors and officials. It’s quite the gang. Everybody hates Daniel. But they know that Daniel has favour with the king, so in order to take Daniel down, they’re going to have to deceive and manipulate the king. So they hatch this scheme to recommend a law. This injunction will ban everyone in the empire from petitioning any god for thirty days. For that time period, everyone will be required to petition the king and only the king. And the penalty—you know the story—the penalty for anyone who breaks this injunction will be the lions’ den.Again, the details signal that this isn’t the same kind of story we’ve had before in Daniel. It’s a parable. As the nations rage against the Lord and his anointed in Psalm 2, all the king’s governors and counsellors rage against Daniel and, through him, his God. The decree is not something that a Persian king would have signed—or a Babylonian or any other Ancient Near Eastern king, for that matter. The Jews who read this would have known that. The Persians were known for their religious and cultural tolerance—and especially their friendliness to the Jews. Not only were they tolerant, but the Persian kings were Zoroastrians and would never put themselves in the position of the gods. But even all that aside, to ban prayer to the gods was religious and political suicide. Nabonidus got into trouble for downgrading Marduk and elevating Sin. You can imagine the sort of trouble a king would get into if he made it illegal to pray to anyone but himself. And, of course, why for only thirty days? If you’re going put yourself in the place of the gods, why not do it permanently?The absurdity of the law is meant to highlight the unhinged rage these men had against Daniel and his God and reflects the real-life experience of Israel, beginning with Pharaoh and running all the way through their story down to Antiochus Epiphanes. Men who so hate the Lord and his anointed that they’ll cut their own noses off to spite their faces. Even the punishment seems to be deliberately over the top. As far as we know, no one in Babylon or Persia kept lions around in a den. Kings might catch and release lions for hunting, but they didn’t keep them as pets or to execute prisoners. But this threat hanging over Daniel represents the very real threat hanging over the faithful in Israel.And looking to pagan kings for help was hopeless. As much as he favoured Daniel, Darius, this great emperor, is a pathetic dupe, conned and fooled by his advisors and hobbled by his own laws. In contrast to the perfect law of the God of Israel, the great law of the Medes and Persians—like so many other human laws—is arbitrary, short-sighted, and self-defeating. What was Daniel to do? Look at verse 10:When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously. What was Daniel going to do? We’ve seen in the earlier stories that sometimes the wise thing for God’s people to do is to keep their heads down and pursue a quiet faithfulness. Being faithful doesn’t always mean sticking your head off so that it can be cut off. But Daniel knew these guys were watching him. He could have closed his shutters. He could have gone somewhere out of sight to pray. But to do that in this case would be to betray the Lord. So he continues to pray as he always had: morning, noon, and evening. And as he prays he does so in the direction of the temple in Jerusalem. That was a tradition begun by Solomon at the dedication of the temple and Daniel continued it and in that he declared his hope. For all his status and privilege in this foreign land and with a foreign king, he made it clear that his ultimate hope lay in the promises of the God of Israel to deliver his people from their exile and to return them to the promised land. Daniel knew that God is faithful and because of that he trusted him—not only that, but he made that trust public.And, of course, the inevitable happens. Verse 11:Then these men came by agreement and found Daniel making petition and plea before his God. Then they came near and said before the king, concerning the injunction, “O king! Did you not sign an injunction, that anyone who makes petition to any god or man within thirty days except to you, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions?” The king answered and said, “The thing stands fast, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which cannot be revoked.” Then they answered and said before the king, “Daniel, who is one of the exiles from Judah, pays no attention to you, O king, or the injunction you have signed, but makes his petition three times a day.” (Daniel 6:11-13)So they go back to their spying on Daniel to confirm what they were already sure he would do. And then they take their evidence to the king. Their smarminess if palpable. “O King! Did you not sign an injunction that anyone who petitions anyone but you shall be cast into the den of lions?” Like the king wouldn’t remember if he’d signed such a petition. Again, we get a sense of just how pathetic earthly kings are and how foolish it is to put our hope in them. “Oh yes,” he says, “Of course I remember. It’s now the unchangeable law of the Medes and the Persians.” We’re left wondering how busy the king has been, because surely, if everyone had taken this law seriously, Darius would have been swamped with petitions—but we don’t get the impression at all that anything like that has happened. If these guys had been bringing their petitions to the king, they hardly needed to ask him if he remembered signing the injunction. So either these guys have been ignoring it and praying to their gods anyway or—and this is the implication—they’re a bunch of impious louts who don’t pray at all. They stand in stark contrast to Daniel, who prayed three times a day and, no doubt, used that time to lift up the king and his empire to the Lord. These other guys show that they don’t care about the king; they only care about themselves and their own power and status. Verses 14 to 18:Then the king, when he heard these words, was much distressed and set his mind to deliver Daniel. And he labored till the sun went down to rescue him. Then these men came by agreement to the king and said to the king, “Know, O king, that it is a law of the Medes and Persians that no injunction or ordinance that the king establishes can be changed.” Then the king commanded, and Daniel was brought and cast into the den of lions. The king declared to Daniel, “May your God, whom you serve continually, deliver you!” And a stone was brought and laid on the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet and with the signet of his lords, that nothing might be changed concerning Daniel. Then the king went to his palace and spent the night fasting; no diversions were brought to him, and sleep fled from him. The king now regrets his decision, but there’s nothing he can do. The greatest king, the most powerful man in the world stands useless and powerless to save Daniel or to intervene on his behalf. Even as he exhorts Daniel to pray to his God for deliverance, the king is commanding Daniel to be thrown into this pit of lions and sealing the opening with his own signet. But now, what the satraps and counsellors intended as a punishment and execution, the king unwittingly turns into a contest, a trial. Will Daniel’s God deliver him? The den is sealed. No one can intervene. The Most High God has, in his sovereignty, used the wickedness of evil men and the foolishness of the king to orchestrate a situation that will reveal his glory. In that, the lion’s den points prophetically to the tomb in which Jesus lay. What will the king find when the stone is rolled away? Has evil won the day or has the living God?And, not unlike Jesus’ friends, the king goes home and, too anxious to eat or sleep, he paced and prayed. And in the next verse we can almost see the king’s robes flying behind him and hear his sandals slapping as he runs—in a very unkingly fashion—to the lions’ den at sunrise.Then, at break of day, the king arose and went in haste to the den of lions. As he came near to the den where Daniel was, he cried out in a tone of anguish. The king declared to Daniel, “O Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the lions?” Then Daniel said to the king, “O king, live forever! My God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not harmed me, because I was found blameless before him; and also before you, O king, I have done no harm.” Then the king was exceedingly glad, and commanded that Daniel be taken up out of the den. So Daniel was taken up out of the den, and no kind of harm was found on him, because he had trusted in his God. (Daniel 6:19-23)Unable to move the heavy stone himself, the king calls out to Daniel: “O servant of the living God, are you still there? Has the God whom you so faithfully serve delivered you from the lions?” That the king speaks of the living God is a powerful witness. Living God doesn’t just mean that God isn’t dead. It means that God is active and powerful, that he is awesome and mighty, that he brings judgement and blessing. Again, the satraps and counsellors expected an execution, but Darius has turned this into a contest. Will the God of Daniel act? Will he vindicate himself by delivering his servant? And, of course, God has done just that. The king hears Daniel’s voice echoing up through the stone. “O king, live forever! Yes, my God has delivered me!” In an echo of the fiery furnace episode, God sent his angel to shut the lions’ mouths and Daniel is alive and well. There’s not so much as a scratch on him. The king’s men roll the stone away and Daniel emerges unharmed, because he trusted in God. The God of Israel has won the contest.The satraps and triumvirs, and counsellors of the king have lost. So the king turns the tables. Verse 24:And the king commanded, and those men who had maliciously accused Daniel were brought and cast into the den of lions—they, their children, and their wives. And before they reached the bottom of the den, the lions overpowered them and broke all their bones in pieces. Presumably this means that all 120 satraps with their families are thrown to the lions. Again, the scene isn’t realistic and trying to figure out how this could possibly be done is to miss the point of the parable. This scene calls back to the Lord’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12: “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.” And to passages like Isaiah 41:11: “Behold, all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish.” And, again, I think this what Psalm 2 looks like as a parable.He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying,“As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill.”I will tell of the decree:The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.Blessed are all who take refuge in him. (Psalm 2:4-12)The psalm is a declaration of the Lord’s intent to be glorified. He has made a people for himself and even given them a king and through them he will be glorified. He will be glorified in the nations and kings who see him at work in his people and give him glory and he will be glorified as he vindicates his people and judges their oppressors. And that’s just what we see as the satraps are thrown to the lions and as Darius’ glorifies the Lord in the closing verses of the story:Then King Darius wrote to all the peoples, nations, and languages that dwell in all the earth: “Peace be multiplied to you. I make a decree, that in all my royal dominion people are to tremble and fear before the God of Daniel,for he is the living God, enduring forever;his kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion shall be to the end.He delivers and rescues; he works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth,he who has saved Daniel from the power of the lions.” So this Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian. (Daniel 6:25-28)The historical Darius was what we might call an evangelical Zoroastrian. History—not to mention lots and lots of his own inscriptions—show that he was single-mindedly devoted to Ahura Mazda. But this is a parable and the king here is a composite. He represents the gentile kings of the earth. While the satraps represent the gentiles who will persist in their unbelief and eventually be judged, the king here represents those kings—like the ones we see in Revelation—who see the God of Israel as he vindicates his son and as he vindicates his church, and who end up believing and coming to the New Jerusalem to glorify this living God. Darius’ decree is echoed by the songs we hear in the heavenly throne room in John’s vision as they acknowledge the saving power and everlasting dominion of the God of Israel. In that I think we see the prophetic side of this parable that transitions us into Daniel’s apocalyptic vision.In that, it points us powerfully to Jesus in the same way that Psalm 2 does. The psalm is about Israel and about King David, but it points forward to Jesus who would embody Israel and Israel’s king to accomplish the saving work of God and the establishment of his everlasting dominion. Daniel’s dilemma points to Jesus. When Daniel went home to pray, he knew he would fall afoul of the king’s new law. He knew he would end up in the lions’ den. He didn’t know if he would live or die. He had the example of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, but would the Lord send his angel again to deliver his faithful servant? Miracles don’t happen every day—that’s why they’re miracles. What were the chances that it would happen twice? But Daniel knew that he didn’t have a choice. He could dishonour God by hiding his prayer or he could give glory to God by showing his unwavering faithfulness to him. Daniel chose to remain faithful and to glorify God and in that he points to Jesus. Daniel knew with certainty that the living God vindicates his anointed. And Jesus knew that too. We don’t always know what form that vindication may take or when it may happen. Daniel escaped without a scratch. Jesus was scourged, beaten, and killed. But in the end the Lord vindicated both and revealed his glory to the watching world.And in that there’s the reminder—and I think maybe the main purpose of this prophetic parable: Brothers and Sisters, the Lord does not merely glorify himself. He has, to use the imagery of Psalm 2, anointed a people for himself and that people—first a small ethnic group in the Old Testament, but now a worldwide family of people united to Jesus and filled with God’s own Spirit—the living God has anointed a people for himself, a people full of his own life, that we might reveal and proclaim his glory to the world and that he might reveal his own glory as he vindicates us before the watching world. There’s a reason why God’s people are called to a life of humility, sacrifice, and even martyrdom. There’s a reason Jesus calls us to take up our crosses if we are to follow him. Because the Lord reveals his glory in our deliverance. He slays the dragon and rescues his bride and becomes the hero as the world watches. To quote the Roman scholar and priest, David Burrell, who died a few months ago, “We are never enjoined in the Scriptures to accomplish anything. The recurring theme of the psalmist, who summarizes as only poets can the sweep of God's covenanting with his people, is that we are to recount—often and loudly—God's accomplishments, his great deeds on our behalf.” Brothers and Sisters, if we have really and truly believed the good news about Jesus and all the long history of the Lord’s faithfulness to his people, if we really believe that good news, it ought to work out in our lives as we recount—often and loudly—what he has done. Because we want to proclaim his greatness, his goodness, and his faithfulness for the sake of his glory and because we desire for the whole world know him as we have—so that one day the knowledge of his glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. Hebrews famously speaks of the great cloud of witness around us, witness who ought to inspire us to faithfulness. But, Brothers and Sisters, remember that you and I are, ourselves, are part of that cloud. As those witnesses exhort us, we exhort each other and those who will come after us. So let us be faithful in running the race that is set before us, knowing the mighty deeds of our God, knowing his faithfulness, and above all looking to Jesus who has perfect our faith by enduring the cross, despising the shame, and because of that, is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God.Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, as we confessed in today’s collect, we have no power to help ourselves. You are the living God who, through the death and resurrection of your son, has gracious restored us to life. Keep the cross ever before us that we might always remember our helplessness and your great grace and might and often and loudly proclaim your glory. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.
The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity: Led by the SpiritGalatians 5:16-25by William KlockIf the COVID pandemic proved anything, it was that people don’t like to be told what to do. We value our liberty and we rankle when we realise there may be limits to it. We should value our liberty. The problem is that liberty doesn’t work when it’s not exercised in the context of love. Think of our Gospel last week and the lawyer’s summary of the law: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and your neighbour as yourself. The law restrains, whether we’re talking about the torah or the law of the Spirit. It limits liberty. The torah taught Israel what it means to love God and to love neighbour. And it was necessary because this love is what’s missing from fallen human hearts. And yet even with the law Israel struggled. The law was external. It was carved on stone. It could reveal what is wrong with the fallen human heart, it could restrain the wickedness of the fallen human heart, but it could not of itself fix the fallen human heart. Something greater was needed. And so the new covenant, instead of giving us another law carved on stone, gives us God’s own Spirit who indwells us and writes his law of love on our hearts—love for God and love for neighbour. And in doing that, the Spirit sets us free from the law to live a liberty shaped by love.Let me read the first words of our lesson from Galatians again. This is Galatians 3:16. St. Paul writes:But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. How does that work? I think it’ll help if we back up a few verses to get some context. Look at verses 13-15:For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. You were called to freedom. Think back to the Exodus, when the Lord delivered Israel from Egypt. He liberated the people from Pharaoh’s slavery, he set them free—but he did that because in reality they belonged to him. They were his people. They didn’t belong to Pharaoh. And so in setting them free from Pharaoh, the Lord claimed them as his own—“Israel is my firstborn son”, remember that?—and he took them into the wilderness to worship, to serve him. And he gave Israel the law to set them apart from the nations, to mark his people out as holy. While it the law may seem constraining to us, for Israel the law was actually a symbol of freedom. It represented their deliverance from Pharaoh and it marked them out as the people of God. The law was a beautiful thing and the Jews loved it dearly.And so it’s no surprise that we see some of the problems we do in the New Testament. As gentiles heard the good news about Jesus, as they saw in the gospel the faithfulness of the God of Israel, they came to the Messiah just as the old prophets had said they would. Here was a god completely unlike the gods they knew as Greeks and Romans. But what was to be done with them? Remember that those first Jewish believers in Jesus didn’t think of believing in Jesus as having changed religions. At that point there really wasn’t any Judaism versus Christianity thing. Being a Christian was simply a new way of being Jewish. And so as gentiles began entering the church it posed a problem. Some of these Jewish believers didn’t want them at all. They were unclean. The Lord solved that problem for Peter. The gentiles were to be welcomed. But then the assumption was that, well, they first had to become Jews. They had to be circumcised. They had to start observing the law. The first church council was called to address this and they settled the matter, largely thanks to Paul. Gentiles were gentiles and they had no obligation to the torah. But this was still difficult for many. The problem didn’t go away. There were Jews who believed in Jesus but were still putting their confidence “in the flesh” as Paul puts it—in these outward signs that had historically marked out God’s people. And there were gentiles who were being taught that they had to do the same. This was happening in the churches of Galatia, so Paul wrote these words to them: You were called to freedom.This new exodus in which Jesus had led his people carried the old exodus even further. In the Messiah, the Lord had accomplished something even greater than he had in Moses.And Paul’s first point here is that in Jesus we have been freed to love. He reminds us of the law, summarized in those familiar words: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbour as yourself. In pouring out God’s Spirit on his people, Jesus has set us free from the law written on stone and inscribed this law of love on our hearts. Israel struggled. The law written on stone told her what she was supposed to love, but the fallen human heart has other ideas. But for the Christian, God’s own Spirit indwells the heart, making it new, and turning its desires towards God and then towards neighbour. Here Paul only mentions the love-your-neighbour-as-yourself part, because the specific problem in these churches was what he refers to as biting and devouring each other. We don’t know specifically what he means by that, but it seems to have involved some kind of squabbling and fighting. Whatever the specifics, this biting and devouring, instead of witnessing the renewing work of the Spirit, revealed that these folks still had a serious heart problem. It raised the question: Were they really free? Or were they still enslaved to sin? And it also risked the church. If church members are biting and devouring each other, will the church even survive? Some of us have seen the results of this sort of thing first hand as churches implode or split.In this case, Paul’s diagnosis of the problem is that these men and women have forgotten that what really marks out—and has always marked out—the people of God is faith, and specifically for God’s new covenant people, faith in Jesus. Clearly they’d known this at some point in the past, but they’d allowed these “Judaisers”, these false teachers to lead them astray and they were back to emphasizing the marks they once bore in their flesh—things like what they ate or observing the Sabbath and, especially, being circumcised. And so Paul rebukes them: Is it any wonder you’re devouring each other? After all, you’ve been putting your confidence in the flesh when you should have been putting it in God’s Spirit.Look at verses 16-22. Here’s what Paul writes:But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. The flesh—that’s the human heart that hasn’t been renewed by God’s Spirit—the flesh is all about self. The flesh needs the law to remind it constantly what its values and loves and desires are supposed to be. The flesh needs the restraint provided by the law. Even then, as Israel illustrates so dramatically over her long history, the law isn’t enough. But the Spirit changes everything. Jesus pours God’s Spirit into his people and the desires of our hearts are transformed. The Spirit sets us free from the burden of the law. And yet, what do Spirit-filled people do? They do the law anyway. They love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. And they love their neighbours as themselves. That transformation is what takes place when we place our confidence in Jesus.If you place your confidence in the flesh, well you’ll get what a fleshly heart desires—even if you do have the law, because it’s just not enough. You get the biting and devouring that was taking place in these churches. Paul lists a string of truly awful sins and I don’t think he intends to say that all these things were actually happening in the Galatian churches. He’s trying to get their attention. After all, they were mostly Jewish people who knew the law and many of the things Paul lists here are things that would have appalled an observant Jew. But he works that biting and devouring into the list of really bad stuff: things like rivalry, dissensions, jealousy, enmity—the more mundane sins that often break up Christian fellowship and churches—right along with sorcery and orgies. His point is that even these more mundane sins come from the same place as sorcery and orgies and they’re what you get when you put your confidence in the flesh instead of Jesus and the Spirit.It’s a remarkable thing that Paul gets at here. It’s important to think about what we believe marks us out as God’s people. Get this wrong and the whole thing falls apart. God’s law was a good thing. Circumcision and Sabbath were good things. But if that’s where you put your confidence you’re going to be in a world of hurt. And it isn’t just a matter of Judaising as it was in Galatia. Christians today can put their confidence in all sorts of good things as well: our charity or our church attendance, our Bible reading and prayer, and even our holiness and our spiritual giftings. But none of those things is Jesus any more than circumcision or Sabbath is. What marks out the people of God is faith in Jesus. And if you remember from our study of Romans, Paul stresses there that even in the old covenant, even though the law and things like circumcision did mark out the people as belonging to the Lord, what was really important was the faith behind them—even in the days of the law, faith was the real mark of God’s people. It always has been and always will be.In contrast to the works of the flesh, Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit. I think it’s worth noting that he describes these characteristics as fruit. You can’t force fruit to happen. You can’t just glue apples on a tree or grapes on a vine. Fruit is cultivated and it comes naturally when a plant is healthy. And just so these are the things that grow naturally out of a true and living faith in Jesus and a heart indwelt by God’s Spirit. Look at verses 22 to 24:But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Not only is love there at the head of the list, but the rest of the list: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are all things that flow from and reinforce love. The works of the flesh destroy, but in the fruit of the Spirit we see the life of the God at work in his people. And here’s what’s really interesting. Remember that Paul was dealing with Jewish people who were stuck on the law. Not only did they insist that they had to obey it, but they were insisting that gentile believers had to as well. And Paul writes here that against these things there is no law. In other words, if your life—and if the collective life of the Church—is characterized by the fruit of the Spirit, we will have fulfilled the law. It will have no condemnation for us. Because the fruit of the Spirit is the epitome of love for God and love for neighbour.In verse 24 Paul stresses this transformation. Those who belong to Jesus the Messiah, those who are part of his family, part of the renewed people of God, he writes, they have crucified the flesh and everything that goes along with it. Our broken, selfish, sin-filled hearts have been put to death with Jesus. Like the Israelites leaving behind Pharaoh’s slavery as they passed through the waters of the Red Sea to new life with the Lord on the other side, so we have left our fallen hearts—sometimes Paul writes about our “old man”—we’ve left that behind when we passed through the waters of baptism. As we rise from our baptism, we are raised to a new kind of life with Jesus and the gift of the Spirit is the earnest, the down payment on his promise of resurrection, that day when Jesus finally makes everything new and evil and death are finally wiped from creation completely. Until then the Spirit keeps our hearts focused on God and grows his fruit.Of course, we all know—and it’s why Paul had to write this to the Galatians—we all know that none of this just happens. There will come a day when sin and temptation and selfishness are gone forever, but until then the flesh wars with the Spirit and so he writes in verse 25:If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. It’s not good enough to just say that we live by the Spirit. Every Christian is indwelt by the Spirit. You can’t be a Christians without him. But we need to actively “keep in step” with the Spirit, as the ESV puts it. It’s sort of a military image of soldiers marching in step with their drill sergeant or their commander. The battle with the flesh will never be won if we aren’t diligent in pursuing the life that Jesus has given us. Put things into neutral, do what comes naturally and the flesh inevitably reasserts itself. And it’s important to remember that the battle won’t be won by our own moral effort. That’s just putting our confidence in the flesh. We’ve got to keep our eyes on Jesus, we’ve got to put our faith in him, and we’ve got to put our confidence in the Spirit who breathes life into our hearts and causes us to bear fruit.And, again, Paul’s point here within the context of Galatians, is that if they would do this—if they would maintain this gospel-centred, this Jesus-centred life rather than putting their confidence in things like circumcision, they wouldn’t have to worry about the law anymore, because love for God and love for neighbour come naturally from such a life centred on Jesus and in step with the Spirit.Now, the Galatians’ problem isn’t really our problem—although there are parts of the modern church where something very similar crops up—but we need to hear this as much as they did. Paul steers us down this path—the way of Jesus and the Spirit—and we have our own tendency to fall into the ditches on the side of the road. There are a lot of Christians who stress the fruit of the Spirit, who emphasise love and peace and kindness, but who end up neglecting the Jesus part of the equation. Often they’re troubled by the exclusivity of the gospel. Sometimes it’s the gospel’s call to a kind of holiness that is increasingly at odds with the world around us. Brothers and Sisters, without faith in Jesus and an uncompromising commitment to the gospel, the fruit of the Spirit part of the equation will fall apart. And once we compromise Jesus and the gospel, not only does the fruit of the Spirit part fall apart, but we end up losing the church as well. That sort of Christianty degrades into do-gooderism and since it’s ultimately rooted in the flesh, you eventually lose even the do-gooderism.If we don’t fall into that ditch, we can easily fall into the ditch on the other side of the road. That’s the ditch where we stress the importance of Jesus and the gospel, remembering just how vital they are and knowing we can never compromise them, but we fail to keep in step with the Spirit. We have truth, but the fruit of the Spirit has withered on the vine and we end up trying to defend the truth of Jesus and the gospel with the very fits of anger Paul lists amongst the works of the flesh. We defend Jesus and the gospel in ways that cause strife and division within our own ranks, with other real Christians.Brothers and Sisters, it’s vital to maintain a balance. The truth of Jesus and the gospel is just as vital as the fruit of the Spirit. And, vice versa, the fruit of the Spirit are just as vital as the truth of Jesus and the Gospel. I think this is how Paul could write those words we read a couple of weeks ago to the Corinthians. Remember that? He was writing to a church that had rejected him, that told him not to come around or to write anymore. They were worldly, there was serious sin being tolerated in their church. Their worship was messed up and they were abusing the Lord’s Supper. And yet when they demanded his credentials, he pointed back at them. Those messed up, infuriating people were his credentials, because despite their failures and shortcomings, despite their failure to fully live into the gospel and walk in step with the Spirit, they did have Jesus and the Spirit and that was because Paul had brought the gospel to them. And so he could write to them and stress the truth of Jesus and the gospel without compromise, he could rebuke them of their sins, but he could do it all out of a loving heart that throughout displayed the fruit of the Spirit. Brothers and Sisters, let us walk by the Spirit. Let us find our confidence in Jesus rather than the flesh, so that the fruit of the Spirit will grow in abundance, so that our love for God and love for neighbour are on full display. Let us live in such a way that the law cannot condemn us.Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and love; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity: A Priest, a Levite, and a SamaritanSt. Luke 10:23-37by William Klock“Behold,” St. Luke writes in Chapter 10, verse 25 of his Gospel. “Behold, a lawyer stood up and put Jesus on the spot.” That sort of thing happened a lot to Jesus and it was no surprise. Even when he didn’t say it outright, it was obvious to everyone because of the things Jesus said and did, that he was making himself out to be the Messiah. That made a lot of people angry. Some, like the Sadducees, weren’t particularly keen on the whole Messiah thing, because if it was true, it probably meant that when and if the Messiah came, they’d lose their status as kings of the Jewish mountain. The Pharisees—like most people in Israel—were hoping and praying for the Messiah. Their problem with Jesus was that in some ways they could see that the Lord was clearly behind him. No one else could do or say the things he was doing and saying, but then he was also doing things they thought the Messiah should not or would never do. So people were always challenging Jesus. And if they paid as much attention to the things he said in response to those challenges, people like this lawyer might have thought twice about challenging him themselves. But this smarty-pants challenges Jesus anyway. And he asks, “Rabbi, what am I to do if I want to inherit eternal life.”Now, we need to pause there for a minute. Because when this lawyer asked about inheriting “eternal life” he wasn’t asking, “How do I go to heaven when I die?” The Jews expected the Messiah bring an end to the present evil age and to inaugurate the age to come—that age when all would be set to rights and the Lord would return to his temple and the people would live forever in his presence. “Eternal life” wasn’t about the Lord taking his people away to heaven, but about bringing heaven to earth. It was about the restoration of all things and the world set to rights like it had been before human beings rebelled and brought sin and death into the world. And most people expected that God’s people—at least the good and faithful ones—would be part of it, while the nations, the gentiles, would be destroyed in a hail of the Lord’s judgement, fire and brimstone, or at least they’d be left in the outer darkness, wailing and gnashing their teeth. Everyone knew that the Messiah would bring this kingdom so the lawyer is asking, “If you’re Messiah, Jesus, what do I need to do to have a share in your kingdom?” And, again, he’s asking because Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners and that seems to be setting an awfully low bar for who is in and who is out—and, probably most important, it seems like Jesus doesn’t care about obedience to torah.And Jesus, knows this is really about what torah means, so he dumps the question back on the lawyer. And the lawyer responds with those words that even we know by heart, if for no other reason than that we recite them every Sunday as part of our liturgy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.”And, much to the lawyer’s consternation, Jesus says, “Yes! You answered correctly. Do this and you will live.” In other words, “Do this and when the Lord comes in judgement, you will live to see his kingdom the other side of it.” To love God and to love one’s neighbour, the whole law boils down to that. All the details and commandments are just the practical outworking of these two basic principles. They’re both right there in the law itself: Deuteronomy 6:5: love God; and Leviticus 19:19: love your neighbour. This love is what marks out and has always marked out God’s people. It’s how he knows them—an abiding love for him and for neighbour borne out of faith in him and in his promises.That should have been the end of it, but the lawyer can’t let it go. He’s frustrated with the answer, because if obedience to torah is the way into the kingdom, what is Jesus doing hanging out and eating dinner with all the torah-breakers? He knows that there’s something wrong with Jesus and he wants all the people gathered there to know it, so he pulls at this thread. “Ah! But who is my neighbour?” he asks—I expect with more than a little bit of smugness. Because this is where everyone will see that what Jesus means when he talks about loving your neighbour isn’t what the scribes and Pharisees mean—and that Jesus’ is interpreting torah all wrong.And “Who is my neighbour?” may seem like a dumb question to us, but that’s because we’ve all been raised on the story that Jesus tells here. The lawyer, however, was raised on the teaching of the rabbis. Jews only saw other Jews as their neighbours. Pharisees, for the most part, really only saw other Pharisees as their neighbours. One rabbinical saying ruled that “heretics, informers, and renegades should be pushed (into the ditch) and not pulled out”.[1] Tax collectors and sinners, well, most people wouldn’t consider them neighbours and there was no question about were gentiles stood.It’s the perfect opportunity for Jesus to tell another story and that’s just what he does. “Once upon a time,” Jesus says, “a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and was set upon by robbers. They stripped him bare and beat him and ran off leaving him for dead.”Everyone could picture this. They all knew the winding road that went down the mountain for Jerusalem to Jericho. They knew it was dangerous. They knew that it wasn’t wise to travel it alone. In their day, the Roman army was having constantly to deal with the robbers that camped out along it. A thousand years later it was still a problem and the Crusaders built a fort half-way up the mountain to protect pilgrims.“A priest,” Jesus said, “happened to be going down the road.” Oh, that’s good. A priest will surely stop to help the man. But Jesus goes on, saying, “When the priest saw the man, he went past on the opposite side of the road.”A lot of people will say that this was expected, after all, the priest didn’t know if the man was dead or alive, whether he was Jew or gentile, and he couldn’t risk defiling himself and becoming unclean. That would keep him from his priestly duties. But the longer I think about this story as Jesus tells it, it’s pretty clear that Jesus’ story hinges on the expectation that the priest—a man who should be setting an example for Israel of love for God and love for neighbour—the story hinges on the expectation that he, of all people, would stop to help. If anyone should care for the lost sheep of Israel, it’s Israel’s religious leaders. But instead of stopping the priest goes out of his way to avoid this poor man.“Next, came a Levite,” Jesus goes on. “He saw the man too and went past on the opposite side.” A Levite was a member of the priestly tribe, he just wasn’t an actual priest. They took care of the temple and supported the ministry of the priests. Again, this man wasn’t necessarily a leader of Israel, but we might still think of him as a holy man, so you’d expect this second man to stop and help. But he doesn’t stop either.The tension is building as Jesus tells the story. On the one hand, even the lawyer knew that the priest and the Levite should have stopped. But he—and probably most of the other people listening—were thinking of all the good justifications the priest and Levite would have for not stopping. Leviticus 19:17-18, for example, equates one’s brother and a “son of your own people” with one’s neighbour. The man was naked. The priest and Levite couldn’t tell from his clothing if he was a Jew or not, so maybe they were justified in not helping. And then there was Jesus ben Sira, the great teacher of wisdom. The Pharisees stood very much in his tradition. He had this to say on the subject:Do good to a godly man, and you will be repaid…Give to the godly man, but do not help the sinner. Do good to the humble, but do not give to the ungodly…For the Most High also hates sinners and will inflict punishment on the ungodly. Give to the good man, but do not help the sinner. (Sirach 12:2, 4, 6-7)So, again, as much as the lawyer knew the priest and Levite should have stopped to help, the fact that he could think of any number of justifications for why they wouldn’t stop is starting to expose his hypocrisy—and that’s the brilliance of Jesus’ storytelling.Jesus goes on and now he really gets everyone’s attention. There was a formula to this kind of story. We have the same kind of formula. If I start telling a joke by saying that three men walked into a bar and that the first two were a priest and a minister, you all know before I even say it that the third will be a rabbi. Well, in Jesus’ day there was a formula for story-telling that also included three men. If the first two were a priest and a Levite, the third was supposed to be an ordinary Jewish layman. So Jesus goes on:“But then,” he says, “a travelling Samaritan came to where he was.”That would have startled everyone. “Wait…what? A Samaritan? No, Jesus, that not how the story’s supposed to go.” But that’s the point. “When the Samaritan saw him he was filled with pity. He came over to him and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine. Then he put him on his own beast, took him to an inn, and looked after him. The next morning, as he was going on his way, he gave the innkeeper two dinars. ‘Take care of him,’ he said, ‘and on my way back I’ll pay you whatever else you need to spend on him.’”I think everyone understood what Jesus was getting at now. They were all squirming after the priest and Levite parts, because they knew that both men should have stopped to help, but they could think of all sorts of good reasons to justify why they didn’t—and they all knew that if it weren’t for the way Jesus was telling the story, they probably would have been totally sympathetic with the uncaring priest and Levite—and that didn’t sit well. It was convicting. But now the person who does help the man turns out to be a Samaritan? Everybody hated the Samaritans and you could say bad things about them—you could even do bad things to them if one happened to show his face in Judah—and it wasn’t like today where some politically correct do-gooder would call you out on it. Samaritans were the worst of the worst. The Jews could sort of excuse gentiles for being gentiles, because they didn’t have the torah. But the Samaritans, they had the torah. They had been Jews once, but then they intermarried with the pagan Canaanites. And they adulterated the scriptures. And they had their own rival temple so that they didn’t have to go to Jerusalem. And in Jesus’ day, most of them had become thoroughly hellenised, compromising their philosophy and religion with the Greeks. They had no excuse. They were scum. Again, to quote Jesus ben Sira: “There are two nations that my soul detests, the third is not a nation at all: the inhabitants of Mount Seir, the Philistines, and the stupid people living at Shechem” (Sirach 50:25-26 NJB). Those stupid people at Shechem, those are the Samaritans.But it’s one of those stupid people who does the right thing. Not the priest, not the Levite, but the stupid Samaritan—someone who did everything else wrong. He had compassion, Jesus says. And that compassion put everything else: the law, defilement, race hatred, fear of robbers—it put everything else in perspective. He treated them man’s wounds with wine and oil and bound them up, then he put the man on his own animal and took him to an inn. He risked the return of the robbers. He risked the Jews of Jericho or whatever town he took the man to. If anyone figured out the man on his horse was Jewish, they would have come after the Samaritan. The Samaritan risked being ripped off by the innkeeper—which was apparently a very common thing. But without the innkeeper having been paid, the dying man would have been stuck with no way to pay and likely sold into slavery as a debtor. And in conclusion Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these three do you think turned out to be the neighbour of the man who was set upon by brigands?”And as the lawyer answers Jesus, I think you can hear that he’s been convicted by the story. “The one who showed him mercy,” the lawyer said—I think, probably, fairly sheepishly.And then back to his question: “What do I need to do to have a share in your kingdom, Jesus?” Jesus says to him, “You go and do the same.” This is what it looks like to love God and to love your neighbour. This is what it looks like to be faithful to torah and to the Lord’s covenant. This is what it looks like to be one of his people. Do this, and when the Lord comes to judge Israel, you can be sure to escape his judgement and to have a share in the age to come.The lawyer wanted to expose Jesus. To show everyone how Jesus was misinterpreting torah, but Jesus’ uses the story to turn the tables and to show how the lawyer and those like him were the ones who had got torah the wrong way around. They, the most righteous people in Israel, are here exposed for their unfaithfulness. I think this is obvious even if we don’t dig any deeper. Just on its face the story exposes the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of Judah in Jesus’ day. But there is more to the story. The imagery that Jesus draws on comes from the sixth chapter of the prophet Hosea. Roughly seven-and-a-half centuries earlier, Hosea had spoken words of warning to the king and people of the northern kingdom of Israel—otherwise known as Samaria. Samaria had been unfaithful to the Lord and imminent judgement was coming if something didn’t change. Hosea writes:“Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn;he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.”What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? (That’s the northern kingdom) What shall I do with you, O Judah? (That’s the southern)Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away.Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light.For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me.Gilead (a prominent city in Samaria) is a city of evildoers, tracked with blood.As robbers lie in wait for a man, so the priests band together;they murder on the way to Shechem (the place of Samaria’s rival and unsanctioned temple); they commit villainy.In the house of Israel I have seen a horrible thing; Ephraim’s whoredom is there; Israel is defiled. In the end, Israel (or as it’s called here, Samaria) was defeated by the Assyrians and the people scattered and lost forever to the nations. In telling his parable, Jesus shifts the story of the northern kingdom’s judgement and destruction into his own day. This time, instead of Israel being under imminent judgement for her sins and faithlessness, it’s Judah. And instead of the Assyrian armies hovering threateningly, it’s the armies of Rome.Hosea’s all here in Jesus’ story. The lawyer talks about loving God, but Hosea condemns him when he says that the love of Israel and Judah for God is “like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away”. Hosea condemns the priests of Israel for lying in wait like robbers on the road to Shechem, ready to murder the very sheep they were supposed to shepherd. There’s a reason Jesus sets his story on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem. In his day the priests preyed on the people of Judah when they went up to Jerusalem to visit the temple.And the Samaritan who stops to help. He’s a reminder to the people of Judah of the Lord’s judgement on his people. The Samaritan—or at least his ancestors—knew that judgement. Just a few verses back Jesus had warned that on the day of the Lord’s judgement, it would be better for the gentile cities of Tyre and Sidon than for Jewish Capernaum (Luke 10:13-15). Would Judah take the lesson of Samaria to heart? Or would she continue to cling to her hypocrisy and face judgement as the Samarians had?And then there’s another contrast between the priest and the Levite and the Samaritan that Hosea brings out. The priest and the Levite were on their way home from the temple having taken part in the sacrifices offered there, but they weren’t the ones who showed mercy”. I don’t think anyone could have helped but hear Hosea’s words as Jesus spoke, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than whole burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6). It echoes what Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13). Think of his other parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. Jesus came for the sick in Israel, while people like the Pharisees passed them by on the other side of the road.That’s the point of the story. Jesus isn’t in the story, he’s the prophet, like Hosea, telling the story to rebuke the shepherds of Israel—the priests and Levites and people like the lawyer—for their lack of mercy and compassion. They’ve condemned the lost sheep, when they should have been out looking for them. They couldn’t be bothered to search for the lost coin. And they’ve mocked the father of the prodigal son as they saw him waiting day in and day out for his son to return and then rebuked him for receiving him back. This is why they were so hostile to Jesus, who came not to condemn, but to redeem. They just couldn’t wrap their heads around that. And so Jesus does everything, from pleading to rebuking to rampaging through the temple with a whip to make his point and to call his people to repentance—that they might understand both the coming judgement and the mercy the Lord is ready to pour out on those who believe.Now, two thousand years later and on the other side of the judgement that Jesus was warning the people of Judah about, what do we take away from this? As a people who live with the law of the Spirit written on our hearts rather than with the torah carved on stone tablets, what does this mean? On one hand, Jesus’ warning to people who thought they were being faithful to the Lord, while treating others without mercy and compassion is always going to be applicable. If anything, we—people who have known the redeeming love of God made manifest in Jesus and his death and resurrection—we ought to understand and value mercy and compassion more than any other people on earth. If that lawyer stood there convicted for loving the law, but failing to show mercy and compassion, how much more ought we to feel convicted if we fail to show mercy and compassion. There’s that.But I think, too, much as Jesus brought Hosea’s denunciation of Samaria into his present to convict the people and leaders of Judah, we need to bring Jesus’ parable and denunciation of Judah into our present to convict the church where we have failed to be faithful. A lack of mercy and compassion is certainly one way that we’ve sometimes failed, but we compromise the scriptures and the gospel and the life of the Spirit in other ways. What the parable highlights so well is that we’re so often blind to our compromises, either because everyone else is making the same compromises or because the compromises come from the cultural air we breathe and the cultural water we swim in—things like materialism, commercialism, individualism. And so we put ourselves first, we act selfishly without even realising it. We treat the gospel or the church like a commodity without even realising it. We squander our time and talent and treasure on the things of this world without even realising it. And because everyone—or most everyone—is doing the same things and because it’s in the cultural air and water, we just keep on doing it without giving it any thought. Brothers and Sisters, this is where we need to let the scriptures and the gospel and the Spirit speak to us—to expose our idols and our points of unfaithfulness to the Lord—and to let them drown out the voices and values of the world that we might see our hypocrisies and repent and follow Jesus and love God and love our neighbours all the more thoroughly. We need to want, to desire to follow Jesus and the Spirit more closely—to pray for that renewal of our minds and regeneration of our hearts—and then to let the scriptures and the gospel and the church and the Spirit do their work to make us the people God has called us to be in Jesus the Messiah.Let’s pray: Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift alone your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.[1] Joachim Jeremias The Parables of Jesus (New York: Scribners, 1972), 202.
A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity: Of the Spirit2 Corinthians 3:1-11by William KlockIn our Epistle, Paul writes to the Corinthians: Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? Letters of commendation from one church to another are quickly becoming a thing of the past—particularly in Canada. But for most of the church’s history they were common. The Didache, a document from the late First Century describes churches writing letters of recommendation for people so that when they went from one church to another claiming to be teachers or servants of Jesus, the people in the new church knew they were legit, not troublemakers. Paul had a difficult relationship with the Corinthians. Even though he’d started the church and had spent a lot of time with them, the Corinthians didn’t have much respect for Paul. The Christians in Corinth, in particular, were especially prone to getting carried away with the values of their Greco-Roman culture and Paul didn’t meet all their cultural standards. It would be a bit like the way some churches today expect their pastors to meet certain standards, whether it be that they’re stylish and attractive, with the times, or meet some standard for rhetoric or emotiveness in their preaching. Paul didn’t meet their expectations. So when he heard about their problems and wrote to them giving advice, they wrote back and told him “Thanks, but no thanks. We’d rather take advice from So-and-so.So Paul responds sort of facetiously: Am I going to need a recommendation before you’ll listen to me? That would be a bit like telling our bishop that he needs a recommendation from some other church before we’ll let him visit or preach here. Others might have shaken the dust from their shoes at that point and left the ingrates in Corinth to themselves, but not Paul. I don’t think they actually asked for a letter of recommendation, but he offers one anyway—but not like any other—because Paul knew that the gospel commends itself. So he writes to them:You yourselves are our letter…They rejected him. They’ve told him not to come around and not to write to them anymore to give advice. They’ve disrespected and insulted him. And Paul writes: I don’t need a letter of recommendation to prove my credentials as an apostle and servant of Jesus. No. You people yourselves are my letter of recommendation. You people, even though you’ve rejected me, you’re the proof of my credentials.You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. If that’s not grace I don’t know what is. Paul doesn’t need a letter written in ink on paper. These messed up, confused, infuriating people are still loved by Paul, because despite being muddled and confused, they’re filled with the joy of the Lord and the hope of his kingdom. For all their faults and for all their inability to see how they’ve been shaped by their culture in their rejection of him, their joy in the Lord and their hope in the Good News is the result of Paul’s ministry to them and that says everything about Paul that needs to be said. Despite their imperfections, they’re his credentials.That’s pretty astounding and it says something about the power of the gospel and Paul’s expectation of its power to transform people, even when they looked hopeless. These were people he rebuked for putting the wisdom of the Greeks over the truth of the gospel. These were people he rebuked for tolerating a church member who was sleeping with his step-mother. These were people he rebuked for dragging each other through the courts, for divorce, for not treating each other as equals, for abusing spiritual gifts, for abusing the Lord’s Supper, for having crazy, disordered worship. The list is a long one. And yet despite their multitude of failings, he says, “You want to see my credentials as a gospel minister, as an apostle? You’re it.” Paul could see the gospel at work in them. For all their faults, they were not the people they had once been. As he had written to them in his first epistle, no one affirms that Jesus is Lord apart from the transforming work of the Spirit. Paul could see through the flaws and knew that they believed, that they loved Jesus, that they were full of the Spirit. He had proclaimed the good news about Jesus to them and it had done its work, it was continuing to do its work, and he was confident, it would in time complete its work. This is important. Sometimes we look at other Christians or other churches and they’re a mess and we’re tempted to write them off completely. Brothers and Sisters, be careful. Is Jesus being proclaimed as Lord? If he is, that means that the gospel and the Spirit are at work there. Maybe the gospel and the Spirit have a lot of work yet to do. The Corinthians needed correction—a lot of it. But Paul didn’t write them off. They had the gospel. These aren’t the other folks Paul warns about who preaching another, a different gospel. That’s a whole other problem. No, the Corinthians received the gospel and the gospel is a powerful thing. It is the power of God to save. Now, don’t misunderstand. Their context was different from ours. This was a first-generation church living in the days when these things were being worked out. We don’t have that excuse today. But still, no one, no church is perfect, but if the gospel is there, we should be confident that Jesus and the Spirit will be with a church to correct and to bring maturity.Now, to make his point Paul takes the Corinthians back to the idea of “covenant”. Covenant is critical to who we are in Jesus, but it’s something we often forget. We’ve been shaped more than a little by our own culture’s way of thinking. For about the last century we’ve largely exchanged the biblical language of “covenant” for the language of “relationship” when we talk about how we relate to God. Describing our relation to God in terms of “relationship” or talking about Jesus as our “personal Saviour” isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s not the language of the Bible and it doesn’t carry anywhere near the depth or the significance of the biblical language and it often tends to miss the bigger picture. The Bible never speaks of “relationship”—that’s squishy modern language; it’s also very individualistic language. God himself, speaks in the Bible of covenant and adoption. There’s more to salvation than me and Jesus. God works with families, with peoples—this is why we baptise our infants. The Church, like Old Testament Israel, is a covenant family. And that’s what Paul goes back to: this idea of being in covenant with God. We aren’t just in a “relationship” with him. We are his people. We are his sons and daughters. And we’re in it together—all of us—as the Church, the Body of Christ with all its many parts and members. Paul takes the Corinthians back to Jeremiah 31. Israel was in exile at that time. God had judged her and allowed the Babylonians to conquer her, to destroy Jerusalem, to tear the temple down to the ground, and to carry the people off into captivity, away from the land they’d been promised. His judgement came on Israel because she was in covenant with him and had failed and refused to live up to that covenant. Relationship may or may not involve responsibility and commitment, but at the core of the idea of covenant are the ideas of mutual commitment and responsibility. Being boyfriend and girlfriend or “living together” is a relationship. There are no real commitments or obligations. You can walk away whenever you want. Marriage, on the other hand, is a covenant in which a man and woman commit and obligate themselves to each other. Israel had failed to live according to the covenant the Lord had established with her, she’d refused to trust in his goodness and his care, she’d worshipped foreign pagan gods, she’d failed to obey him. Ultimately, she had failed to love him as he loved her and she was unrepentant in her rejection of him.Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord promised the people that he would redeem them. They may be covenant-breakers—like a cheating spouse—but he was not. And so one day he would restore Israel by establishing a new covenant. There would be a new agreement between the Lord and his people. There would be a new marriage between Israel and her Lord. He had established the old covenant through Moses when he gave Israel his law, written on stone tablets. But that law carved on stone did not have the power to give the people the real life they needed and that the Lord desired for them. And so the Lord promised a new covenant that would restore Israel. The new covenant would deal with the sins of the people—that’s what the cross of Jesus is about. And the new covenant would give the people the new life they needed in order to truly be the renewed people the Lord wanted them to be—to remake humanity into what we were meant to be—God giving his people his own life, transforming their hearts and minds in a way that the law written on stone was never able to do. In this new covenant, the Lord promised through Jeremiah, he would carve the law on their hearts—he would give his people his own Spirit.And despite how muddled and confused and wrong the Corinthians were on so many things, despite their rejection of Paul, he could write to them and say that they were his letter, they were his credentials, because the life of the Holy Spirit was evident in their life as a church. They themselves are a letter from Jesus the Messiah. The powerful work promised through Jeremiah and the other prophets is manifest in the amazing work that the Spirit has accomplished in them. Think about that. Some of them had been Jews—the same sort of Jews that Paul himself had been when he persecuted Jesus’ people. Some of them had been Greek pagans, worshipping idols, offering incense to Caesar, deeply involved in a degenerate culture. But Paul had brought them the good news that Jesus is Lord. He preached Jesus’ death and resurrection. And they had been transformed. The Spirit had moved them to repentance and given them a totally new life. The living God had written something powerful on their hearts and they would never be the same people again. And the pagan world around them could see it even if these people couldn’t see it themselves anymore. Again, think about that. Think about your own stories. Think of the way you were once met with the good news. Think of the forgiveness you have found at the cross. Think of the new life Jesus has given you. Just like the Corinthians, each of us has a long road ahead of us as we grow into a mature faithfulness to Jesus and his lordship, but Jesus has poured his Spirit into us. In our baptism he has plunged us into the Holy Spirit and we are not the people we once were.And so Paul goes on, getting back to his credentials, writing in verses 4-6:Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. All the proof of Paul’s faithfulness as a minister of the gospel, as a minister of God’s new covenant is right there in the work accomplished in the Corinthians by Jesus and the Spirit. It’s not that Paul is competent himself. He merely showed up in Corinth and preached the Word as he’d been called to do by Jesus himself. But as a result of Paul preaching the good news of Jesus and the kingdom the new covenant has unfolded right there in a powerful and very visible way. The “letter”—the old law written on stone—brought death, but the Spirit now poured into them has given them life. In his resurrection Jesus unleashed life into the world. All Paul has done is preach that Good News and where he’s done that the Spirit has brought transformation.At this point Paul changes tack a bit. The reason the Corinthians rejected him and the reason he’s had to explain all this about the new covenant to them is that they’ve lost sight of what’s important. Again, they’d been captivated by teachers who met superficial criteria of Greek culture as to what a wise teacher was supposed to be like. Again, the parallel today would be the way people are attracted to programs and high production values and slick talkers in stylish clothes, who pander to the consumerism, the materialism, the individualism of our culture. And so in verses 7 and 8 Paul starts trying to stress the glory of the new covenant that the Corinthians seem to have forgotten.Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? Paul takes them back to the Exodus as he does so often. They all knew the story. For those who were Jews this was part of their national and cultural identity. In Exodus 34 we read how the Israelites became afraid after Moses had been up on Mt. Sinai for a long time. They saw the thunder and lightning and they thought God was angry. Ironically, Moses was up on the mountain being given instructions on how the tabernacle was to be built, how all the furnishing and vestments were to made, and how the people were to worship the Lord. But down at the base of the mountain the people were convincing Aaron, Moses’ brother, to take their gold and make them an idol in the shape of a calf. Here they were on their honeymoon, prostituting themselves to an idol. Moses came down from the mountain and the first words he was given by the Lord to speak to the people amounted to a death sentence for their idolatry. Moses pleaded with the Lord to spare the people despite their guilt and as a result of his pleading prayer the Lord revealed his nature and character even further. Even though the Lord insisted that Israel’s wickedness had to be addressed and dealt with, he was still a god of abundant mercy. As a result of that revelation, Moses went down the mountain and his face was shining. The radiance of the Lord, reflected from Moses’ face was so great that the Israelites were afraid—they knew their sin and cowered in the presence of the holy, even though it was only the reflection of the Lord’s holiness. Moses had to veil his face. The only time he unveiled it was when he went into the Lord’s presence in the tabernacle, to speak with him face to face. Now, scripture doesn’t explain the mechanics of it. I know I can’t quite picture how Moses’ face radiated the glory of God, but somehow it did. And it was absolutely magnificent and utterly overwhelming.And Paul’s point is this: If the law carved on stone came down from the mountain in such amazing glory, and if the judgement of the Lord on Israel’s idolatry was manifested in such glory, how much more glorious is the ministry of the Spirit? He goes on in verses 9-11:For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory! Indeed, what once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory; for if what was set aside came through glory, much more has the permanent come in glory! Like the Christians of Ephesus who, in Revelation, are described as having lost their first love, the Corinthians had lost sight of the glory of the Holy Spirit’s ministry. It wasn’t that they’d lost the Holy Spirit. That’s impossible. It’s the Spirit who binds us to Jesus, he’s the one who unites us to his life, he’s the one who renews our minds and regenerates our hearts, turning us from everything that is not Jesus and giving us the desire and the faith to take hold of Jesus with both hands. You cannot be a Christian without the Holy Spirit. But somehow they’d lost perspective. The Spirit had empowered them remarkably, they had no shortage of gifts, but they’d lost sight of the gospel, Jesus was no longer their centre, and they misused and abused those gifts. And they let the values of Greek culture displace a gospel-centred life.Brothers and Sisters, we can all too easily fall prey to the same sorts of things. Our own culture infiltrates the church in many, many ways. Our culture is overwhelmingly commercialistic, materialistic, and individualistic and too often, without even realizing it’s happened, we start building our churches around these things. We treat the gospel like a commodity to sell. We displace it with programs and we tailor our preaching to appeal to our culture’s self-centred individualism. Programs can be good and useful in accomplishing the work of the Church, but most of the time these days they’re treated as sales tools. But God doesn’t give us programs. He gives us his Word. Through the ministry of the Spirit he caused his Word to be written by prophets, apostles, and evangelists so that we can know him and proclaim him to the world. And in Jesus he sent his Word to become flesh—not to give us programs or gimmicks or to tickle the itching ears of sinners—but to die for our sins and to rise again to unleash life into the world. A Church should never have its identity tied up with anything other than the gospel. A Church is a place where the Word is faithfully preached and the Sacraments faithfully administered. That was the definition the Protestant Reformers developed. What constitutes a Church? A Church is a body that preaches the Word and administers the Sacraments. But today it seems many preach everything but the Word and the Sacraments are often side-lined or even sometimes considered optional. As ministers of the Gospel, we—and that’s both you and I—are not called to be flashy, we’re not called to preach the pop-psychology and self-help that our culture obsesses over, we’re not called to be motivational speakers, we’re not called to preach health and wealth. We’re called to proclaim that Jesus has died and risen and that he is Lord. And we’re called to back-up that proclamation by living the life of the Spirit, by manifesting the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control that the Spirit bears in our lives. We’re called to live justly and to do mercy. We’re called to use the giftings of the Spirit not for our own ends, but for the sake of the gospel and for the well-being of the Church. We’re called to be gloriously counter-cultural: being poor in spirit, mourning sin, living in meekness, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being merciful, and making peace—even when it means rejection and persecution. Brothers and Sisters, it’s this Jesus-centred and Spirit-empowered life that manifests the glory of God to the world, that makes us the light of the world and the salt of the earth—that marks us out as the covenant people of God.Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Saviour; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity: The righteous shall live by faith1 Corinthians 15:1-11 & St. Luke 18:9-14by William Klock“Two men went up to the temple to pray,” Jesus said. Picture the temple up on the mountaintop above Jerusalem. Jews, still to this day, go to pray at the temple. Of course, the temple has been gone for almost two thousand years. These days they gather down below and pray at the base of its foundations. But this is what Jews have done ever since there was a temple. The pious and devout prayed three times a day and if you could go and pray at the temple at least some of the time—that place where heaven and earth, where God and man met—that was all the better. Two men climbed the steps to the temple courts to pray. “One,” Jesus said, “was a Pharisee.” If anyone was going to pray three times a day, while also making a point of doing it in the temple, it would be a Pharisee. Maybe he lived nearby and went to pray at the temple daily—maybe he even did his best to go there two or even three times a day. Some of the people in the crowd around Jesus were this man. They were Pharisees. When they were in Jerusalem, they made a point of going to the temple to say their prayers. To be close to God—and some of them to make the point that there was nothing casual about their piety. They didn’t just say their prayers anywhere; they went out of their way to say them in the temple courts.But there were two men who went up to the temple. “The other,” says Jesus, “was a tax collector.” You can almost hear the booing and the hissing. Tax collectors were scum. They were unclean, because of their contact and association with gentiles. And they were traitors, betraying their own people by collaborating with the Romans. But there were some in the crowd who had been paying attention to Jesus. Some of them had seen or heard of the things he'd said and done. They knew how Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. “Here he goes again with the tax collectors!” they were thinking. “Jesus just loves those tax collectors!” And, of course, that’s why they just couldn’t get behind him. For all the Messiah-like things he said and did, the Messiah was supposed to have dinner with the scribes and Pharisees, not tax collectors and sinners. God’s kingdom would never come that way!“Standing, the Pharisee prayed to himself like this,” said Jesus. “God, I give thanks to you that I am not like other men—like the greedy, like the unjust, like adulterers—or like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything I earn.” You can imagine him going on and on, standing tall, his hands raised to heaven, everyone watching and thinking to themselves, “I wish I was more like him.” But then Jesus turns out attention to the tax collector.“The tax collector,” Jesus said, “standing far off, didn’t even want to life his eyes to heaven. Instead, he beat his breast, saying, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”We can imagine the Pharisee, standing proudly where everyone could see him and praying loudly so that everyone could hear him. And then the poor tax collector, the complete and utter opposite. He kneels—or maybe he even prostrates himself on the ground—off on the fringes, hiding in the shadows or behind a column and quietly utters his humble prayer for mercy. The Pharisee—at least as far as he was concerned—he belonged there. But the tax collector. He was a sinner and he knew it. He did not belong in the presence of the holy. Other people made that clear and he probably believed it himself. But he desired God’s mercy and this was the place to ask for it. What happened to the tax collector that brought him to the temple. Jesus doesn’t say. It is just a story. But maybe he was one of those tax collectors and sinners who had met Jesus and, through him, had encountered the grace of God. Maybe he was one of those people to whom Jesus had pronounced, “Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more.” And so he followed it up the only way he knew how, by turning over a new leaf, by ritually purifying himself, and by going to the temple to fall on the mercy of the Lord.“This one—the tax collector,” said Jesus, “he went down to his house justified, not the other one.” Why? “Because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”Now, there’s an interesting twist in the tale. If you were following along in Luke 18 or if you were paying careful attention when the Gospel was read earlier (and you have a good memory), you might have noticed that I left out Luke’s introduction. At the beginning, Luke introduces the parable, writing, “Jesus told this parable to some who were confident in themselves, because they were righteous and looked down on others.” In Greek, “righteous” and “just” are the same word, so Luke plays with that here. Jesus told this parable to some who were confident in themselves, because they were righteous (or just). The point is that they expected to be amongst those justified or vindicated by the Lord for their faithfulness when he finally came to deliver his people and set the world to rights. But then in the end, who is it who go homes justified or in the right? It’s not the righteous Pharisee, but the tax collector who prayed for God’s mercy.It's not that the Pharisee—whether the one in the parable or the ones Jesus was telling the parable to—it’s not that they weren’t righteous. By all accounts they were. They were obedient to the law. They weren’t perfect, but if they made a mistake, they offered the appropriate sacrifices. That was part of being faithful to the law, too. They took part in the atonement for sins offered through the temple. They were righteous. And they were the opposite of the tax collector. He was sort of a Jew in name only. He was unclean because of his job and his association with gentiles. And if he observed torah at all, it probably didn’t amount to much. This was probably the first time he’d been to the temple in a long time. But most of all, tax collectors were simply corrupt and they collaborated with the Romans. An honest tax collector was pretty much an oxymoron. His job was to steal from the Jews and give to the Romans. Again, he was the polar opposite of the Pharisee. The Pharisee loved God’s law; the tax collector trampled all over it.And yet, at the end of the story, Jesus says, it’s not the righteous or the just man who goes away justified—declared by God to be in the right. It’s the scummy, unrighteous tax collector. Why? Well, to answer that we need to ask what Jesus meant that he went home justified. To be justified is to be found or to be declared to be “in the right”.Think of a courtroom. Plaintiff and a defendant bring their case before a judge, they explain the circumstances and present their evidence, and the judge makes a ruling. The judge declares one of them to be in the right. The judge vindicates one of them. Maybe it’s the defendant, who proves his innocence to the judge. Or maybe it’s the plaintiff, who proves to the judge that he is truly the victim. One of them goes home vindicated by the judge. He goes home declared to be in the right. He goes home justified.But when Jesus talks about “justification” what we really have to do is go back to the Old Testament. Think about Abraham in Genesis 15. That’s where this got started. The Lord made a promise to Abraham—to give him a land and to give him a son and to make him a great nation. And it was nonsense. Abraham went to the promised land and lived there—but he was just one man and even as rich as he was, with flocks and herds and servants, he only ever occupied the smallest corner of that land. And there he was, almost one hundred and his wife ninety—long past child-bearing years. How could he, a childless man ever become a great nation? But the Lord made a promise to him and Abraham believed. And, we’re told, the Lord counted that belief, that faith, as righteousness. Because Abraham believed that the Lord not only could, but somehow would pull off this crazy promise, he was counted as being in the right. There was no way any of it could happen, but Abraham trust in the faithfulness of the Lord. And in that, Abraham set the standard by which the Lord recognised his people: faith. Later the torah would mark them out as a special people, visibly different from everyone else, but long before the torah there was faith, and faith was ultimately what it always was and always would be that marks out the people of God—faith in the God who promises crazy things and then never fails to do them.And this theme echoes all the way through Israel’s story. It was the message of the Prophet Habakkuk who lived during the last decades of the kingdom of Judah, in the years before Jerusalem was defeated and destroyed by the Babylonians and the people taken off into exile. Habakkuk looked around him and saw the wickedness and idolatry of his own people and, very much like the psalmists, he cried out to the Lord. This is the opening of his lament.O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong?Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth.For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1:1-4)Habakkuk knew that things weren’t the way they were supposed to be and he knew the promises of the Lord to his people and he and so many others had cried out and cried out—for centuries—and things only got worse. Wickedness and idolatry multiplied and from their perspective it seemed like the Lord wasn’t listening and that he was refusing to act. Judah’s situation seemed as hopeless to Habakkuk as Abraham’s situation must have once seemed to him. But that was just it. Habakkuk knew that the Lord is faithful and so he continued to cry out. He trusted the Lord. He had faith.But then the Lord responds. He tells Habakkuk that he has seen the state of his people and that he is going to visit them, but that he will be dealing with their problem by sending the Babylonians to defeat them. That wasn’t what Habakkuk wanted to hear. He argues with the Lord. The Babylonians are even more wicked and idolatrous than the people of Judah. How can defeat by them possibly be the Lord’s solution? And the Lord responds and assures Habakkuk that while Babylon may be his instrument of justice against Judah, Babylon herself—and all the nations—will be held accountable and will one day be judged. The cycle of violence will be broken and everything will be set to rights. One day, he says, the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. It’s another one of those impossible promises—even more impossible than the promise he made to Abraham. But what do the Lord’s people do in the meantime?Here's the Lord’s answer—and Jesus’ parable points us right back to these words. The Lord says to Habakkuk in 2:4:Look at the proud! His spirit is presumptuous and is not rightBut the righteous shall live by faith. The world is falling apart. Everything is wrong. The wicked prosper and are proud and presume on the Lord’s faithfulness and the righteous are oppressed. By all human appearances it doesn’t sound like the Lord is even listening. But those who continue to live by faith in the midst of tribulation, those who remember the Lord’s promises in the midst of persecution, those who steep themselves in the story of the Lord and his people and remember his faithfulness, those who continue to trust in him, they are the ones that will be vindicated by the Lord when he does come in judgement on the wicked. They are the ones who will remain faithful to the Lord and to his covenant, even when all the proud people around them do evil and bow to idols, they will remain faithful, because they know and because they trust that the Lord is always faithful. I hope that’s an encouraging word for you already, but first we need to go back to Jesus’ story about the two men in the temple.There’s the proud Pharisee. By the standard of the law, he is in the right. And there’s the scummy tax collector. By the standard of the law, he’s in the wrong. And yet in the end, it’s the tax collector who goes home and is found to be in the right. If this were one of Jesus’ “kingdom stories” it would be the tax collector who is welcomed into the kingdom, while the Pharisee is left in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth. The tax collector would escape the coming judgement and know the life of the kingdom, while the coming judgement would fall on the Pharisee right along with all the other wicked in Israel. Why? Because the tax collector humbled himself, while the Pharisee was proud and was confident in his righteousness. But what does that mean?Well, Jesus has told this story before. Over and over. Jesus was clear. He came not to the righteous, but to seek out the lost sheep of the house of Israel. At least in theory, the righteous were fine. They should have been expecting this all along. They were the ones who knew the scriptures so well, after all. But, ironically, they got angry when Jesus went to the lost sheep. And so Jesus told them stories to explain the joy in heaven over sinners who repent. The Lord is like the widow who seeks and eventually finds her lost coin. He’s like the shepherd who goes to great lengths to find his lost sheep. He’s like the father, rejoicing and throwing a party when his prodigal son returns home. And the Pharisees—or a lot of them, at any rate—the Pharisees are like the proud and resentful older brother. They’d been doing the right thing all along. Why wasn’t Jesus throwing a party for them? And so, in their pride, they refused to enter the house and were left out in the dark gnashing their teeth. The older brother out in the darkness. And it would be like that, only much, much worse when judgement came. Not because they weren’t righteous, but because righteousness wasn’t enough. Because in Jesus, the Lord was doing something new—he was making a new people who would be finally and truly fit for the kingdom, a people forgiven once and for all and a people filled with God’s own Spirit, a people with his law of love written on their hearts—a people fit for God’s new creation. When Jesus told people they needed a righteousness greater than the Pharisees if they wanted to take part in the kingdom, that’s what he was getting at. The Lord was finally giving something better than the law written on stone tablets. He was about to make a people with his law of love written on their hearts. But that people was centred in Jesus. So only those who trusted in this Messiah—this Messiah who was so different from their expectations—on those humble enough to recognise the new thing the Lord was doing in Jesus and to live by faith, trusting that Jesus really is the Lord’s answer to all the problems of the world, only they will go home justified. Only they will be able to be part of the kingdom—forgiven and filled with the Spirit, because of their faith in Jesus.This is what St. Paul is getting at in our Epistle from 1 Corinthians 15. He declares once again the good news about Jesus the Messiah who died and was buried and who rose again according to the scriptures. And he talks about the twelve who saw him and believed and about the five hundred who saw him and believed. And then there was Paul. He heard the message, but he was one of those proud Pharisees, confident that he already had the right answers, confident that he knew how the Lord was going to deliver his people—and, most of all, confident that it wasn’t through Jesus. The gospel was blasphemy as far as he was concerned. And so, he writes, he persecuted the church. And yet there’s hope. Paul was stuck. He had a mountain of faith, but it wasn’t in Jesus. The torah had been preparing Israel for Jesus all those centuries, but Paul and so many others just couldn’t see it, couldn’t make the leap. But even as he persecuted the church, the Lord was at work to transform Paul. “But by the grace of God I am what I am,” he writes, “and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”Brothers and Sisters, there’s that righteousness greater than that of the Pharisees. There’s the faith that humbles the proud and brings even the greatest sinner into the kingdom. Not because the faith is so great, but because it’s in Jesus the Messiah. It’s a faith that brings forgiveness and the life of the Spirit. Habakkuk wrote that the just shall live by faith and that’s precisely what Jesus’ people do. He gives us the very life of God, because we trust in him. And that life he gives—the law of love written on our hearts, the experience of God’s love and faithfulness revealed so dramatically in our Saviour—that life fills our hearts with a faith that overflows. And that, Brothers and Sisters, is how we live in this in-between time. It’s how those first Christians lived through the devastation of Jerusalem’s destruction. It’s how the next generation lived through Rome’s persecution. It’s how the saints lived, even as they were thrown to the lions. It’s how the saints still live in many parts of the world, imprisoned because they live by faith, tortured because they live by faith, martyred because they live by faith. And it’s how the saints have lived in the midst of a world that still isn’t right, that still anticipates the final consummation of the Lord’s new creation. We live by faith as we struggle in our work—maybe because of broken supply chains, or bad economies, or because Facebook throws a wrench in our marketing. We live by faith as we struggle with illness or frailty or cancer. We live by faith as we struggle to bring justice and mercy to a world that is so unmerciful and lacking in justice. We live by faith as we face droughts and floods and forest fires. And we live by faith as we live out our calling to proclaim the good news about Jesus in a world that thinks us fools; faithful to our calling to holiness in a world filled with idolatry and sin. It’s how we live in hope, like Habakkuk, like the Apostles, like they martyrs, looking past this broken world and the evils of our time, and knowing that the Lord is faithful to his promises, that he will set this world to rights, and that in Jesus, he will surely finish what he has begun—we know he will, because he always has.Let’s pray: Lord God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Ten Sunday after Trinity: The Time of Your Visitation1 Corinthians 12:1-11 & St. Luke 19:41-47by William KlockIt is providential that we celebrated the Transfiguration of Jesus last Sunday, because last Sunday’s gospel prepares us for today’s. The Transfiguration was the turning point in Jesus’ ministry: he’d finished his work in Galilee; it was time to turn south for that final journey to Jerusalem. And Peter’s confession, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God”, it was that confession that pointed him to Jerusalem. The Messiah couldn’t stay in the provinces forever. Eventually he had to go to Jerusalem: to deal with the Romans, to cleanse the temple, and ultimately to take his throne. Of course, Jesus’ understanding of what that meant was very different from what pretty much everyone else expected. But, still, it was time to go to Jerusalem.And now today’s Gospel, beginning at Luke 19:41, see’s Jesus arriving—on the Mount of Olives, looking across the valley at the city with its great temple perched on the mountain peak above. But before we get there, I want to back up to the middle of Luke 19. Jesus’ last stop before he made his way up that long, winding, and sometimes dangerous road to Jerusalem was in Jericho. That’s where he healed blind Bartimaeus. That’s where he met Zacchaeus, the wee little tax collector who climbed a tree to get a glimpse of the Messiah. People were excited. The crowds grew bigger in every city they passed through. Everyone knew about Jesus. Everyone knew something big was afoot. And everyone knew that because everyone was saying that Jesus was the Messiah and because he was so obviously heading to Jerusalem—and the fact that it was almost Passover just added to the suspense. Whether they believed all the Messiah talk, Jesus had been doing and saying Messiah-like things and the most Messiah-like thing of all that he could do is to march into Jerusalem to confront the priests and the rulers and to set things straight—and to do it at Passover. Some people in the crowd were excited. They believed. The Day of the Lord was finally just around the corner and Jesus was going to go to Jerusalem and would set everything to rights—whatever they thought that might look like or how it might happen. Others were following it all out of curiosity—probably more than a few out of morbid curiosity. They knew Jesus was going to go to Jerusalem and that he’d just get himself into trouble. He would die and that would be the end of yet another failed messiah movement. Anyhow, Luke says in 16:11, that Jesus saw the perfect opportunity for another one of his stories. The crowd was listening and he was so close to Jerusalem and everyone knew that Messiah plus Jerusalem equals kingdom of God. And they were right. But they were also—most of them anyway—they were so wrong. So many of them thought they could know God’s blessing and have a share in his kingdom without being faithful stewards and without repentance.So to the gathered crowd, Jesus said, “There was once a nobleman, who went to a far country to be given royal authority and then return. He summoned ten of his slaves and gave them ten silver coins. ‘Do business with these,’ he said, ‘until I come back.’ His subjects, though, hated him, and sent a delegation after him to say, ‘We don’t want this man to be our king.’“So it happened that when he received the kingship and came back again, he gave orders to summon these slaves who had received the money, so that he could find out how they had got on with their business efforts. The first came forward and said, ‘Master, your money has made ten times its value!”“ ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!” he said. ‘You’ve been faithful with something small; now you can take command of ten cities.’“The second came and said, ‘Master, your money has made five times its value!’“ ‘You too—you can take charge of five cities.’“The other came and said, ‘Master, here is your money. I kept it safe, hidden away in this handkerchief. I was afraid of you, knowing that you are a hard man. You profit where you made no investment and you harvest where you did not sow.’“ ‘I’ll condemn you out of your own mouth, you wicked servant! You knew that I’m a hard man, profiting where I haven’t invested and harvesting where I haven’t sown, so why didn’t you at least put my money in the bank? Then, at least, I’d have earned some interest when I got back!”“ ‘Take the money from him,’ he said to the bystanders, ‘and give it to the man who turned my one coin into ten!’ (‘Master,’ they said to him, ‘he’s got ten coins already!’)And then. And it’s not quite clear. Is this the king in the story talking or is this Jesus talking? And, of course, that’s the point—because Jesus is the king returning to his people. He says:“ ‘Let me be clear: To everyone who has will be given more; but if someone has nothing, even what he has will be taken away from him. But as for these enemies of mine, who didn’t want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in front of me.”And with that, Luke says that Jesus went on his way, setting out on that winding road up to Jerusalem. No further interactions with the crowd. No further commentary. I don’t think any was necessary. It’s remarkable to me how many goofy interpretations there are of this parable. One quick search with Google and I had a link to a Prosperity Gospel website where they linked this to a bunch of nonsense about sowing seeds—which just means sending them money—and getting rich in return. Another link was to some Marxist who was reading it as a condemnation of an evil king who rewarded the rich and condemned the poor. You have to work pretty hard to pull this out of context and then squint at it pretty sideways to go that far off the rails—but it happens all the time. But leave it in context and it’s really very simple. The story about a king who returns after a long time away to see what his servants have been up to in his absence is simply Jesus explaining what he’s doing himself. The crowds already saw Jesus as part of the story of Israel, if he was the Messiah, then he was the rightful king returning to Zion to take his throne—just like the king in the parable. But Jesus wanted to get them thinking about what that meant. It meant judgement, but hardly anyone was thinking of it in that sense.This was the day the prophets had spoken of. The Jewish exiles had returned to Jerusalem from Babylon hundreds of years before, they’d rebuilt the city and the temple, but the Lord’s presence had never returned. The temple, as glorious as it was—especially after Solomon’s recent renovations—the temple sat empty. The priests went about their business of offerings and sacrifices, but the cloud of glory that had once rested on the ark of the covenant had never returned and, because of that, the people questioned whether their exile had really ever ended. They were back in the promised land, but the most important part of the promised land—the presence of the Lord—was still missing. The prophet Malachi had announced that the “the Lord whom you seek” would come to the temple, but that he would come in fiery judgement. Zechariah, too, spoke of the Lord, one day, finally, returning to Zion. Again, everyone would have understood Jesus’ story. He was saying that in him, the Lord was finally returning to Jerusalem as he had promised through the Prophets. And Jesus has left them with that big question: Who will stand before the Lord’s judgement.They knew that the Lord had given them a purpose. They knew that the Lord had called Abraham, that he had delivered their ancestors from Pharoah’s bondage, that he had led them to the promised land to be a light in the midst of the nations—a witness to what it looks like to be the people who live with the Creator God in their midst. They knew that their ancestors had gone off into exile in judgement for their faithlessness and idolatry. And that judgement still hung over them. The people of Israel were called to be stewards of God’s covenant, his law, his grace and when he returned he would judge them. Had they been faithful stewards? All along the way, as Jesus made his way from Galilee to Jerusalem, he was warning the people that if they did not listen to him, if they did not repent, if they continued to treat the Lord’s covenant with disdain, the Lord’s judgement would fall on them: on the nation, on Jerusalem, and especially on the temple. Jesus is saying that in him, the God of Israel is coming and on that day of judgement, you don’t want to be that faithless servant who has been a poor steward of God’s grace and hidden away his master’s treasure in a handkerchief.Jesus reminds the people that God’s kingdom was about to come and that as much as it was good news for many, it also meant horrible judgement for a lot of them. Some of the crowd cheered, some wept happy tears, but there were some—the people invested in the status quo, the people with their own firmly entrenched ideas of what the Messiah would be like and how the Lord’s return was supposed to go down—there were some who were angry. Like those in the parable, they didn’t want this man to be their king. They couldn’t bear the thought that somehow this Jesus was actually the Messiah, let alone the Lord, the God of Israel returned to Zion.The parable prepares the way for Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Luke leaves out the long and tiring journey up the road from Jericho—the road where we meet the Good Samaritan in another of Jesus stories. From Jericho Luke takes us straight to the top of the road, to Bethany, as Jesus sends his friends to find the prophesied donkey. (That’s the Palm Sunday Gospel we know so well.) As Jesus rode through the crowd into Jerusalem, the people cheered him and sang messianic chants. They knew what was happening. The Lord had returned to Zion. But just like at Jericho, there were those who were angry. How dare Jesus do this! And Jesus knew, despite the crowds who welcomed him, Jesus knew that judgement was inevitable. The Pharisees were sure to remind him. There he was, riding through the crowd to their messianic chants and the Pharisees pushed their way through and the said, “Rabbi, tell your disciples to cut it out.” As far as they were concerned, this was blasphemy. Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, let alone the Lord returning to his people. And with their rebuke ringing in his ears, Luke says in verse 41, that as Jerusalem came into view, Jesus stopped and wept.“Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! [Jesus said,] But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” Jesus’ tears remind us what’s at the heart of the gospel. For three years, Jesus had warned the people of Galilee that judgement was coming to the nation, to Jerusalem, and to the temple. Over and over he called his people to repent. His message hadn’t gone over any better than had for the prophets of old, like Jeremiah, who was known for the tears he wept over his people. Jerusalem would be no different than Galilee and Jesus knew it. He’d been rejected there and he would be rejected here. And as much as he knew rejection meant his own death, that’s not why he wept. He wept for their sake. “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish,” he had said a few chapters earlier. And now he looks across the valley to Jerusalem where Pilate had just recently killed a bunch of Galileans and where the tower of Siloam had fallen, crushing people alive, and it was all just a foretaste of another, greater catastrophe soon to come. A few decades later and the hills around the city would be covered with Roman crosses, bearing executed Jews and the city and the temple would be brought crashing down.The people had heard the warning, but they would not listen and Jesus wept. Again, not for himself or for his own coming death. And not with any sense of, “I told you so!” Jesus wept, because discipline and justice do not come from the cold heart of a distant God, but from the God who loves so deeply that he was willing to give his own life in order to summon his beloved to repentance, from a love that is faithful and that will set things to rights, in order to bring what’s best. A love that wept over a rebellious people intent on their own agendas and their own interests, who refused to be stewards of his goodness and grace.And the temple—the temple was at the heart of it all. There’s a reason why Jesus went straight to the temple when he entered Jerusalem. That was what the Messiah was supposed to do. And so Luke goes on in verses 45-48:And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.” And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words. If all we take away from this is that it was Jesus’ angry protest of the commercialisation of the temple, we’ll have missed the point entirely. This is another of his acted out prophecies. It’s a warning—in the vein of Jeremiah—that if the temple becomes the hide-out of a bunch of robbers, it will fall under the Lord’s judgement. And, of course, that’s just what had happened. The money-changers and the folks selling animals for sacrifice had to be there. Roman coinage wasn’t allowed in the temple. People needed animals for their sacrifices and not everyone could bring one from home. Maybe the exchange rates and the prices were gouging the people, but the real robbers were the priests and leaders of Israel, who were robbing God in far more important way.The temple stood at the heart of Jewish identity. It represented the covenant between the Lord and his people. And even though the cloud of his glory had never returned to it after the exile, it was still seen as that one place on earth where heaven and earth, where God and human beings met. And so it was the symbol of the Lord’s faithfulness to Israel, of the sureness of his covenant promises. But the people took the Lord’s faithfulness and his covenant promises for granted. They lived as if a mere outward façade of faithfulness to the Lord’s covenant would bring his blessings and Jesus has been reminded them over and over and over, that the only real response to the Lord’s covenant faithfulness is faithfulness and obedience in return. Disobedience to the Lord’s covenant doesn’t just result in a lack of blessing. No, if you’re in covenant with the Lord, disobedience eventually calls down judgement. The Lord will set this world to rights and if the people he has called to be stewards of his grace for the sake of the world will not be true to their calling, he will send judgement.Again, this wasn’t unexpected. Throughout his ministry Jesus had pointed—sometimes subtly and other times not-so-subtly—to the fact that the temple’s days were numbered and that, in him, the Lord was doing something new. Maybe the greatest hints were those times when he announced the forgiveness of sins, without people having to go to the trouble of offering a sacrifice. Repeatedly, Jesus bypassed the priests and the temple and offered, himself, what the temple had offered the people. Later, he would announce that he would tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days. All of this was blasphemy to the priests. And they never did grasp what he meant when he said he would rebuild the temple in three days, but those who saw him raised from the dead did. Jesus was the new temple. Heaven and earth, God and man no longer meeting in a building on the mountaintop, but in Jesus himself. In him we meet the God of Israel. In him we know his justice, but in him we also know his grace and his mercy and his love as he weeps for those about to face God’s wrath, as he prays for the very people who crucified him. In him, most of all, we see the profound faithfulness of God and his worthiness to receive glory and praise.And then the amazing thing. As the Lord judged the old Israel for her unfaithfulness to her calling, in Jesus he creates a new people, a new Israel, and establishes a new covenant—a covenant this time ratified with his blood shed at the cross and in the pouring out of his own Spirit on his people. We go from Jesus, in whom God and man, heaven and earth intersect, to his church—to a people—in whom the Lord himself dwells. The old Israel looked to a law written on stone tablets, while the new—while we—live with the law written by the Spirit of God on our own hearts. And in the same way, the old Israel looked to a temple of bricks and mortar on the mountaintop above Jerusalem, but by his Spirit, Jesus has made us the new temple. He incorporates us into his ministry. As we saw a couple of weeks ago. We have been adopted we share in his inheritance. And so, because our Lord is prophet, priest, and king, we too as a people share in his prophetic, priestly, and ruling ministry.In our Epistle today, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, St. Paul reminded the Christians in Corinth of their calling. The Spirit had empowered them with amazing gifts, but like the old Israel, they’d forgotten their calling and were using those gifts for their own agendas.Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. (1 Corinthians 12:4-7)This leads Paul into Chapter 13, where he writes about the nature and supremacy of love. “Love never ends,” he says. These other gifts are temporary, but they’re meant to build up love. They’re meant to create a community of people who will be stewards of God’s grace—a community of people redeemed and made new by his own blood, shed at the cross, a people who, by his grace, have a share in his new creation, a priestly and prophetic people called to go out as the Messiah’s royal heralds to proclaim that he has died, that he has risen, and that he is the world’s true Lord. A people who live with the Lord in their midst and who show the world his faithfulness, to show the world that he is worthy of glory and praise.Brothers and Sisters, that’s us. Like Israel in Jesus’s day, we live in an in-between time. One day the Lord will return again to judge the earth, when the gospel has done its work, when every last one of his enemies has been put under his feet, when he comes to remove every last vestige of sin and rebellion and to set everything to rights, to wipe away every tear, and bring his new creation in all its fulness. But in anticipation of that day, we are his stewards, empowered by his Spirit and entrusted with the gospel, with the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.And as Christendom wanes—at least in our part of the world—and as the darkness creeps back in, there’s powerful sense in which we, the church, are coming to know exile as the old Israel once did. Brothers and Sisters, that exile is a call to faithfulness, a call to remember that Jesus is king, and call to remember that his gospel and his Spirit will accomplish what he’s sent them to do. And that means that as stewards of his gospel and his Spirit, we will accomplish what he has chosen and called us to do—to be stewards of his grace, to be his royal heralds proclaiming his death and resurrection and his lordship until he comes again. No matter how dark it gets, no matter how hated and despised we may be, the Lord is always faithful to his promises. He is our hope and he never fails. May we be faithful with the treasures of the gospel and the Spirit he has entrusted to us, that one day he may say, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”Let’s pray: Let your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of your humble servants; and, that we may obtain what we ask of you, teach us to ask for those things that please you, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Transfiguration: Who do you say that I am? St. Matthew 17:1-9 by William Klock
“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Jesus asked his disciples. If you want to follow along with the story this morning, I’m going to begin at Matthew 16:13. In both Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels Jesus asks the same question at the same point. It’s the turning point in the gospel story. Jesus is about to set out on his final journey to Jerusalem. For three years he has travelled around Galilee and the surrounding region preaching, teaching, healing, casting out demons, and calling God’s people to repent. His friends have followed him. They’ve seen and they’ve heard the response of the people. Most recently they’ve been in Caesarea Philippi, way to the north, a couple day’s journey beyond Galilee. And Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” I suspect he chose the location because he knew the answer to that question was exactly the sort of thing that would have made King Herod angry, exactly the sort of thing that would get him killed. And so he waited—he’s staged it this way, because he does that sort of thing a lot, he stages it to make a point—so he’s waited until they’re way up north, out of Herod’s territory and out of Herod’s grasp. The question itself turns the story in the new direction it inevitably has to go, from Galilee to Jerusalem, and ultimately to the cross. “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
“They say you’re John the Baptist, or Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” That, right there, is worth stopping to take note of, because it tells us how the people perceived Jesus. They didn’t think of Jesus as a nice guy or a do-gooder. He wasn’t “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild”. Yes, Jesus did good. Yes he was gentle—when that was appropriate—but the people saw him, first and foremost, as a firebrand, like the old prophets. They saw him as someone who wasn’t afraid to speak the word of the Lord—someone like the prophets who showed no fear as he confronted a godless king or an idolatrous high priest.
But then Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter, always a little bit of a keener, yells out, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God!”
That needs some unpacking. First off, Jesus asks what people think of the “son of man”. That’s what he often called himself and in that he’s drawing on the imagery of Daniel 7. The son of man in Daniel represented Israel and was finally glorified and given a throne by the Ancient of Days. Even though he showed himself to be Messiah in nearly everything he did and said, in calling himself the “son of man” he was identifying himself as the Messiah and as Israel’s representative and one-day king. But then Peter’s response: “You’re the Messiah”. Everyone in Israel was longing and praying for the Lord’s Messiah. No one knew exactly what he would be like or what he would do—well—that’s not really true. Most people knew, most people were pretty certain what the Messiah would be like and what he would do, it’s just that different groups of people had different expectations. Some people expected a great king like David, whom the Lord would send to defeat the pagan nations and to restore Israel to her rightful place on top of the heap. Other people expected a priest or prophet who would cleanse the temple and purge the priesthood and restore right worship of the Lord. Others saw a man like Moses who would reestablish torah amongst the people. But whoever and whatever they expected of the Messiah, one thing everyone agreed on was that he would fulfil the Lord’s promises, that he would fulfil the scriptures, and usher in his kingdom; that he would set the world to rights; that he would make everything on earth as it is in heaven.
Peter had a clearer and sharper idea of Jesus than the general public. Peter and the disciples had been with Jesus for three years. They’d heard him preaching day after day. They’d seen all the things he had done. Consider. They had seen Jesus preaching on the mountain like Moses. And they’d been there when he was criticised for ministering on the sabbath and answered his critics like King David. They were the twelve whom he called by name, as if he were Jacob calling forth twelve new patriarchs. And as he confronted the world with the word of the Lord and healed the sick and raised the dead, they’d watched and couldn’t help but see him in light of the prophets of old, like Elijah and Elisha. And in light of all of that, they couldn’t help but see the Messiah—in many ways, everyone’s expectations all rolled into one: prophet, priest, and most of all: the king. God’s anointed king. Their word for that was “Messiah”.
But Peter doesn’t just say “You’re the Messiah”. He adds that the Messiah is the “son of the living God”. That needs some unpacking too. This title, “son of God”, didn’t mean quite the same thing to First Century Jews that it means to Twenty-First Century Christians. When Peter said that Jesus was the son of God, he was thinking of Old Testament passages like 2 Samuel 7, where the Lord made a promise to David about his offspring:
When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.
Peter also would have been thinking of the words of Psalm 2:
As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”
I will tell of the decree:
The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you. (Psalm 2:6-7)
For Peter and the others, “son of God” was a reference to the king. And not just that, but it said something about the king’s relation to the Lord—he was the Lord’s “son” and his chosen representative. This, I think, is why Jesus asked this question when and where he did. They were a long way from Herod and an even longer way away from Caesar, but the fact that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God, meant that the days of Herod and Caesar were numbered. That was a dangerous claim to make out loud. It also meant that Peter and the others, if they continued to follow Jesus, were signing up to be part of a prophetic movement that would challenge the authority of the rulers of the world. Jesus was giving them royal authority and making them royal heralds. This is the point of Jesus’ next words to them that are so often misunderstood:
And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:18-19)
On this rock. They thought back to Jesus, preaching from the mountain like Moses, and telling the story about the wise man who built his house on the rock versus the foolish man who built on sand. We might miss the allusion there, but the Jews knew immediately that Jesus was talking about the temple, up on the rock of Mount Zion—the place where heaven and earth met and where, some people thought, the gates of sheol, the grave, stood. And Jesus’ point is that he is building a new and better temple, this time not with brick and mortar. This time the Lord’s temple will be a people made up of everyone who gives their allegiance to the Lord’s king—everyone who, with Peter, declares that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God.
If there was ever good news, this is it. I imagine some of the disciples sitting there and thinking that now that this is in the open, maybe they ought to get busy raising an army so they can march on Jerusalem and set Jesus on the throne. But instead, Jesus warns them in verse 20: “Don’t tell anyone that I’m the Messiah.” It’s a strange juxtaposition. And, at least from the disciples’ perspective, it gets stranger. Matthew writes that:
From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. (Matthew 16:21)
This is the part where Peter pulls Jesus aside and rebukes him, “Jesus! That isn’t Messiah talk! This will never happen to you!”
Do you remember the part of the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where the children finally meet Aslan. Everyone is thrilled. For centuries the people of Narnia hoped and prayed for their king to return to defeat the White Witch. Now he’s finally landed in Narnia, he’s gathered his army—and the prophesied sons of Adam and Daughters of eve have even arrived. The prophecies are fulfilled, it’s the eve of the great battle, and everyone knows that the King will defeat the Witch and set everything to rights. Celebration is in the air, because though there’s a battle coming, they know that with Aslan they will win. But everyone also notices that something’s wrong with Aslan and, in the middle of the night, Susan and Lucy follow him as he walks off by himself. They watch as he’s met by the Witch and her minions at the stone table. And at first they think he’s going to win the battle early and single-handedly. But, instead, he just stands there and lets the witch bind him, and shave off his mane, and humiliate him, and then kill him. And when everyone’s left, Susan and Lucy sit next to Aslan’s body and they weep for hours, thinking it’s over and that everything’s been lost. I suspect Peter felt a bit like that. Jesus was the Messiah. Peter said it and Jesus agreed. Jesus congratulates him on his insight and claps him on the back and announces that it’s time to go to Jerusalem. And everyone knew that meant it was time for Jesus to defeat his enemies and take his throne. Imagine the smiles and the excitement. But then Jesus says that he’s going to Jerusalem to die. That part about dying rang so powerfully in Peter’s ears that he missed the rest about rising from the dead. “No, Jesus! Don’t talk like that! Don’t betray your own cause! I know a lot—even most—people have rejected you, but you’re the Messiah. We’re on a mission from God. We’ll win. We can’t lose.”
And Jesus stops Peter and rebukes him. In fact, he rebukes him with the same powerful words he rebuked the satan with in the wilderness:
“Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” (Matthew 16:23)
They had the Messiah bit right. They’d seen Jesus as Moses and as King David and as Jacob and as the prophets, but having seen that, they should have seen further. Jesus was embodying his people and ultimately, to make them right with the Lord, it also meant dying the death they deserved for their unfaithfulness. Jesus had to follow the story of Israel through all the way to the bitter end. In a short time they would see Jesus as Israel’s atoning lamb. Moses, Jacob, David, Elijah…they were all part of the story Jesus came to embody, but it couldn’t be fulfilled without the lamb at the very end.
And this has implications not only for Jesus, but for his people. He goes on in verses 24-28 with the words we know so well.
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?
Again, Jesus knew that he was likely to die on a Roman cross. He knew that, because it’s what the Romans did to rebellious Jews and Jesus knew that as Israel’s Messiah, he would not only embody their father, their law-giver, their king, and their prophets, but also their death if they did not repent. And here he reminds the disciples that the vocation of the Messiah is also the vocation of his people. We can feel the darkness hanging over the conversation, but then the light breaks through the clouds again as Jesus goes on:
For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
Jesus switches from “son of God” back to “son of man”, that Israel character in Daniel—the one who would ascend on the clouds, from earth to heaven, to be presented before the Ancient of Days—to be “given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed” (Daniel 7:14).
This whole thing is a bewildering back and forth: victory, defeat, and victory again. Imagine poor Peter, praised one day for his faith and for affirming Jesus as Messiah and then next rebuked with those words, “Get behind me, satan!” And Jesus making it clear in no uncertain terms that he must die. And if that wasn’t enough, that the disciples should take up their crosses and follow him to their own deaths. But now Jesus says, “Don’t worry. I’m not only the Messiah, but I’m also Daniel’s son of man—remember him? I told you that even though I must die, I will rise on the third day, and you will live to see me ascend on the clouds to my heavenly throne. I will be vindicated by my Father. And that means that you will be vindicated too for my sake. My kingdom is coming and it really will be on earth as in heaven.
This was all a lot to take in and I expect their heads were spinning with it all. They’d got pretty good at putting two and two together as they watched Jesus, but now he was heaping things on. No one thought of the Messiah this way, but they were seeing that all the pieces were there in the scriptures. In 17:1 Matthew tells us that six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a high mountain. Six days. Processing time. Time to think all of this through. If they were anything like us, I suspect they’d been thinking a lot on what Jesus had said about his death and even more about them taking up their own crosses and following him. I suspect they were thinking on those things a lot more than the bit about Jesus rising from the grave and ascending to his throne. I think those were six grim days of dreary reflection. Bu then Jesus took them up a mountain. They could see Galilee spread out below them, the place where they had been ministering with Jesus for three years. It was a reminder that it was time to move on, time to make that last journey to Jerusalem with Jesus. And they started to think about all the things he’d been saying a week before. How much had they managed to sort out in their heads? And then something amazing happened and whatever dark clouds had been hanging over their hearts were burned away by the glory of the Lord. In 17:2-3 Matthew says:
[Jesus] was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.
As they watched, Jesus changed. His clothes, travel-stained and worn, shone like white light and his face shone like the sun. And it wasn’t just Jesus blazing with light. Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus and, in his account, Luke says that they too blazed with the same glory. And seeing this, Peter blurts out:
“Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.”
Whatever doubts they had about Jesus as Messiah in light of all of his talk about rejection and death, all those doubts were driven away by this image of glory. But Peter still doesn’t want to go to Jerusalem. He still doesn’t want Jesus to die. And here’s the answer. They can build three tents for Jesus and Moses and Elijah and they can all stay right here. Jesus can rule from here and all Israel can make a pilgrimage up the mountain to see that he’s really the Messiah. And here are Moses and Elijah to prove it. But that’s not the answer. That was never Israel’s vocation and it’s not Jesus’. And this mount way up north was never meant to be the Messiah’s throne. And before Peter can get all the words out the Lord himself speaks:
[Peter] was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.” And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only. (Matthew 17:5-8)
This is my son. We’re back to the Messiah, the Lord’s king. In the midst of the disciples’ confusion and questions and doubt, the Lord assures them that no matter what happens, no matter where this story takes Jesus and no matter where this story will take them, Jesus is his son, the anointed king, and everything will turn out all right in the end. The kingdom will come—on earth as in heaven. Jesus will be vindicated and so will they. “Just listen to him,” says the Lord. Trust him. He knows what he’s doing and I am with him. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid for him. And don’t be afraid to take up your own crosses and to follow where he leads, don’t be afraid to take up your crosses and to follow where the gospel will lead you.
And the cloud lifted and they looked up, and there was Jesus. No Moses. No Elijah. No more blazing glory. Just Jesus. But after that they were ready to take up their crosses and to follow him to Jerusalem. Moses, the lawgiver, and Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet had stood there with Jesus, uniting him with Israel’s story, connecting him with their ministry. Here was Jesus, prophet and priest and then the Lord’s announcement: This is my son. Jesus is the anointed king as well. Prophet, priest, and king. And in the dark days ahead, they disciples had that vision of Jesus glorified. Some say that the Transfiguration was a revelation of the divinity of Jesus, but since Moses and Elijah shone with the same light, I don’t think that really fits. A few chapters earlier, quoting Daniel, Jesus said that the Lord’s people would shine like stars in his kingdom. What the Transfiguration reveals is the glory of Jesus’ perfect humanity as he sets his face towards the cross—a glory he will one day share with those who take up their crosses and follow him. The Transfiguration prefigures the cross—two mountains and two very different scenes, but when the disciples were tempted to despair over the scene on Mount Calvary, Matthew (and Mark and Luke) remind us of the scene on the Mount of Transfiguration. On Mount Calvary Jesus is revealed in shame, but on the Mount of Transfiguration he is revealed in glory. On Mount Calvary we see Jesus stripped naked, soldiers throwing dice for his clothes and on the Mount of Transfiguration we see him clothed in brilliant white. On Mount Calvary we see him between two violent revolutionaries, symbols of Israel’s faithlessness and on the Mount of Transfiguration we see him between Moses and Elijah, between the embodiment of the law and the prophets, symbols of faithfulness. On Mount Calvary dark clouds blot out the sun and on the Mount of Transfiguration the bright clouds of heaven shine their light. On Mount Calvary a Roman soldier solemnly declares that surely this was God’s son, confirming what was echoed from the clouds as the Lord spoke on the Mount of Transfiguration, “This is my son”.
Brothers and Sisters, on the Mount of Transfiguration it’s as if we’re given a glimpse of heaven’s view of Mount Calvary. What looked from a human perspective like the worst day in the world, when it looked as though sin and death had done their worst and won, Jesus was, in fact, on that cross revealed in all his glory and was never loved so much by his Father. “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asked. And people have all sorts of answers: good teacher, reformer, revolutionary, prophet, myth. But the gospel story reveals him as the Messiah, the son of the living God. He is prophet, priest, and king who fulfils the story of his people as the lamb who died for their sins. More than anything else, we see in the lamb just what kind of king Jesus is. In him we see the faithfulness, the goodness, the loving-kindness of God, whose glory shines brightest when he gives himself for the sake of his people, when he turns death into life. Think on that, Brothers and Sisters, as you come to his Table this morning to eat the bread and drink the wine, remembering his body broken and his blood shed. Here we see his glory in all its fulness. Here we see his faithfulness, that we might go out from this place, taking up our own crosses and following him—our faithfulness inspired by his. Come to the Table and hear the Father’s words: “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.”
Let’s pray: O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your only-begotten Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may be permitted to behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Eighth Sunday after Trinity: Heirs with the Messiah Romans 8:12-17 & St. Matthew 7:15-21 by William Klock
“Beware false prophets!” Jesus warns his disciples in our Gospel today. This got me thinking about my first year here at Living Word. The Foursquare church put on a big event and brought in a speaker from out of town and he opened the event with what people called a “prophetic word” and what lots of people soon after were calling “The Comox Valley Prophecy”. A lot of people got really excited about it and so I found it on the Internet and watched an hour of complete and utter nonsense. This man claimed to be speaking words that were given to him directly by God, but it was all Word-Faith, Prosperity gospel heresy. Taking Isaiah 61 completely out of context, he proclaimed that the coming year would be the year of the Lord’s favour and that the churches would suddenly be bursting at the seams, that all the businesses in town would prosper and be rolling in profits, and that no one would die for the next year. It got people in a lot of local churches really excited, but what was troubling was that they weren’t excited about the gospel or about Jesus. It didn’t get them fired up to go out and to proclaim the good news that he was crucified, is risen, and is Lord. It didn’t get anyone on their knees in repentance, let alone going out and calling others to repent. Instead, it got groups of people going out to local business to “declare” that they would prosper that year. False prophecy and false teaching spilled over into more false prophecy and false teaching.
Now, this was all a new phenomenon to me. I’d never been exposed to that kind of thing and I struggled to find the appeal in it and then I struggled even more to understand why people continued to find it appealing. It was troubling enough to me that a lot of people didn’t recognise the false teaching and the false gospel, but once the prophecies about prosperity and, especially, about no one dying failed to pan out… People died. People in that very church died. And some of those businesses didn’t just struggle that year, some of them failed. And the churches weren’t bursting at the seams. And as much as this guy opened by saying this was a special message God had given him for the Comox Valley, a little searching with Google showed that he gave exactly the same “special” message almost everywhere he was asked to speak, from California to South Africa. But none of this seemed to phase most people. They got charged up about it for a couple of months and then forgot about it as they moved onto the next exciting thing to catch their attention and the next “prophet” who said things they wanted to hear. And that’s just it. That’s the danger of false prophets. They tell people what they want to hear. As Jeremiah warned, they declare “Peace! Peace! When there is no peace.” While the true prophet is warning of coming judgement and calling people to repentance, the false prophets are tickling itching ears and telling everyone that everything is fine and that they’re on the right track. Judgement is coming, but the false prophets instead proclaim riches and health and all sorts of warm fuzzies. The true prophet calls people to follow him through the narrow gate and to follow the difficult and narrow path that leads to life, while the false prophet leads people down the wide and easy way that leads to complacency and eventually to destruction. False prophets tell people what they want to hear. Ed Stetzer, a prominent missiologist, says, “If you want people to like you, don’t become a pastor; sell ice cream.” There’s an even better way to get people to like you—and to get rich to boot: Become a false prophet.
Again, look at Matthew 7, beginning at verse 15:
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
Remember the context in which Jesus was speaking to these people. It’s good that we want to understand how to apply Jesus’ words to our own situation, but we often have a bad habit of short-circuiting the process by ignoring the original context. We miss things—and sometimes we get things wrong—when we do that. So remember that Jesus was saying these things to fellow Jews. And Jesus has a very specific place and part in the story of the God of Israel and his people.
Remember Israel’s calling and mission. God’s creation was a disaster and it all went wrong because human beings rebelled against him. Even wiping out the entire human race and starting over with the one, last righteous man and his family didn’t solve the problem. So in that dark world the Lord called Abraham out of the nations. And he made himself known to Abraham and most of all he showed Abraham his goodness and his faithfulness so that Abraham could be a witness to that goodness and faithfulness. And the Lord made Abraham into a people, a nation, and he did the same with them. Over and over he showed them his goodness and his faithfulness. He made them promises and then he did what he said. When they were slaves in Egypt, he rescued them, he cared for them in the wilderness, and he led them into the promised land and gave them wells they hadn’t dug and cities they hadn’t built. He gave them his law, he gave them a king, and most importantly he lived in their midst. The other nations had temples and in those temples were idols of wood or gold or stone that were blind, deaf, dumb, and powerless. But in the midst of Israel was the tabernacle where the glory of the Lord rested on the ark of the covenant. A real, living God who was good and who was faithful and proved it to his own people before the watching eyes of the world.
And that’s just it. Israel was to be a witness to the nations. The nations were supposed to see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord reflected in the corporate life of his people. As they lived in his presence and as they trusted in him. And Israel, to whom the Lord had given his law, they were supposed to be the righteous benchmark by which he would one day judge the nations when he came to put an end to their wickedness and to set his world to rights.
But over and over Israel failed to be that witness and to be that benchmark. The Lord sent prophets to call his people to repentance, but they rejected his prophets. Sometimes they even killed them. Instead, they listened to false prophets who told them everything was fine. The Lord even sent his people into exile. The promised land was his. It was holy. And if they weren’t going to be holy too, then they could not live in his land or in his presence. First the northern tribes were conquered and scattered by the Assyrians and then the southern tribes were conquered by the Babylonians. Jerusalem and the temple were utterly destroyed and the people were taken off in captivity to live in a foreign, pagan land. The Lord was faithful to his promises when he disciplined his people, and, again, he was faithful to his promises when he returned them to the land. But the people were still fickle. They still served him with divided loyalties.
And so, after a long string of prophets whom the people rejected, the Lord finally sent his own son. He sent his son to proclaim his soon-to-come judgement on Israel and to call his people to repentance. But he also sent his son to be the faithful Israelite, the Israelite who would single-mindedly serve the him, the Israelite who would obey the law, the Israelite who would be that holy and righteous benchmark, the Israelite who would ultimately die the death that his sinful people deserved and become a sacrifice for their sins.
The key point here with regard to today’s Gospel is that Jesus came to announce that the Lord was about to judge his people and to call them to repentance. Those who refused to repent—those who listened to the false prophets, who carried on down the easy, wide way, would face death and destruction in a generation. And with that announcement came a call to repentance. There was a narrow way that would lead through that judgement to life. It wasn’t an easy way. Just as Jesus was mocked and rejected and eventually put to death, so those who repented and followed him would walk a similar path. At the beginning of this same Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said to them, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” On the other side of that rejection was life—life in a new people of God who would be filled with his own Spirit and who, because of that, would have a righteousness greater than the Pharisees. They would finally be the people who would be faithful to the Lord and, most of all, in whom the nations would see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord, so that they would come in faith to bring him glory. The nations would see reflected in this new Israel the glory of a god unlike any of the gods they had ever known and so God’s glory would spread and his new creation would grow. And all those who found themselves in Jesus the Messiah would find this gift of the Spirit a foretaste, a down-payment on that day when the gospel has done its work, when the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, and when death itself is finally defeated. On that day God will raise them all to new life, just as he had raised Jesus, and they will live forever in his presence in a world set to rights once and for all.
But that narrow way in the meantime was going to be hard. It wasn’t just the rejection of their friends and families. False prophets would call them away from it. And so Jesus warned them: Look for good fruit. That’s just what Jesus was calling his people to bear. Pay attention, he’s saying, to the ones you listen to. If they’re not bearing good fruit themselves, how do you think they’ll encourage you to bear good fruit? The prophets reflected the state of the nation. In a few short years judgement would fall on Jerusalem and people would be crying out to the Lord for deliverance. But the Lord knows his own by their fruit and these had borne none, because they’d rejected Jesus and instead listened to fruitless prophets. In contrast, Jesus says, “Those who do the will of my Father in heaven”—those who have found their identity in me and have been filled with the Spirit—they’re the ones who will fulfil the law and, because of that, because of the fruit the Spirit causes them to bear, they’ll be known by the Father.
This is where Paul picks up in our Epistle from Romans 8. Jesus knew that his people would face rejection and opposition and persecution—even martyrdom—for the sake of following him. He knew they would be confronted by false prophets who would tell them that everything was fine and that they were foolish for following Jesus. And Paul was shepherding people in very similar situations. He saw fellow Jewish believers, even out in the gentile world, being hassled and harassed by their fellow Jews for the sake of their faith in Jesus. Sometimes their fellow Jews would even be so angry with them that they’d rat them out to the Roman authorities for being disloyal citizens of the empire. But, too, the people in these churches in places like Rome or Asia Minor faced harassment from their pagan neighbours and even from the civil and religious authorities—and in their world those were often the same people. At the time Paul wrote this in the 50s, there wasn’t any official persecution of Christians by the Romans, but Paul could see that it was eventually going to come. People don’t like it when you expose their sin and warn of coming judgement. The Jews didn’t like it went Jesus did it. The Jews didn’t like it when their fellow Jewish Christians did it. And Paul, seeing it on a small scale already, knew that the gentiles wouldn’t like it when it was their turn. Caesar definitely wouldn’t like it. When persecution came, it would be easy for believers to turn away from Jesus because of their fear. And there would be false prophets proclaiming to the churches that everything was fine, that compromise was okay—like the Judaisers in Galatians or the Nicolaitans in Revelation.
So Paul exhorts the Christians in Rome to stand firm. The Lord has called them and made them his witnesses and they have no reason to fear. Look again at verses 17-21:
So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with the Messiah, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
“Look,” Paul is saying, “Israel was captive to the flesh. They had God’s good law to live by, but it was written on tablets of stone and their hearts were full of the same poison as the hearts of the rest of the human race. The Lord had poured out his love on them and they should have loved him wholeheartedly in return, but their hearts were set on sin and on self—and so they could never return the Lord’s love. Not truly. They had—and their descendants still have –reason to fear. The Lord will judge their unfaithfulness.” But, says Paul, “You are different. Not only have you been forgiven through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, but God has poured his own Spirit into you and that makes all the difference. The Spirit renews your minds and regenerates your heart. The law that was once written on stone—the law that we sum up in those words about loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbour as yourself—the Spirit writes that law on our hearts. If we are in Jesus the Messiah, the law is no longer a stone tablet we look at and say, ‘I wish I could do that.’ Now it’s written on our hearts. It’s our desire. It’s what we value, because of the Spirit.” Paul says that we still have to put to death our old ways, but it’s this gift of God’s own Spirit that makes it possible. And it’s always good to remember that the Lord does not give his gifts in vain.
Brothers and Sisters, it’s good at this point to pause and let this sink in. I think we often forget that there’s a bigger purpose behind all of this. We know that sin is wrong. We know that through Jesus our sins are forgiven. We know that the Spirit turns our hearts away from sin to righteousness. We know that we’re supposed to put away the old man and put on the new and live in the Spirit. But I think we sometimes forget that righteousness isn’t an end in itself. Remember the story. Remember why God created a people for himself in the first place. Think of Abraham in the midst of that big, dark world lost in sin and with no knowledge of the Lord. Abraham and his family were to be witnesses to the Lord—to make him known, to be light in the darkness, to show that the Lord is good and faithful, different from the gods of the pagans, and worthy of the worship of the nations. And this people, too, was to be the benchmark by which the nations were one day to be judged. The old Israel failed and so God gave Jesus and the Spirit to create a new Israel—a new people to be both a light to the nations and the righteous benchmark by which they will one day be judged. God’s people have always had this dual ministry to the word—to be both a priestly and prophetic people. As priests we mediate the presence and knowledge of God to the nations and as prophets we stand as—or we should stand—as God’s benchmark of righteousness, calling the nations to repentance and showing forth his standard—showing the world what humanity was created to be.
If that seems like a lot. If it seems like an impossibly high calling, Paul goes on saying that we were once slaves to sin, but through Jesus and the Spirit we have been set free and adopted as sons of God. Brothers and Sisters, by the Spirit we are incorporated into the story of Jesus the Messiah. Because we have the Spirit, we belong to him. The Messiah is in us. And if we go back a few verses, Paul tells us that the God who “raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead will also give life to [our] mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in [us].” I think this part of Romans is usually read as if Paul is talking about conversion, but it’s really much deeper than that. Paul is talking about how believers are taken up into the story of Jesus and participate in his suffering and resurrection. To be filled with the Spirit is to be absolutely and completely assured that one day the Lord will raise our mortal (and in some cases martyred) bodies from the dead, just as he raised Jesus from the dead. This is the root of faith. This is what those Christians in Rome needed to remember and believe with all their hearts when persecution and tribulation came.
And if they’ll do that—in the power of the Spirit—Paul says they will become “sons of God”. It’s about participation in the story and life of Jesus as adopted sons of God—it’s especially powerful when we let Paul’s words stand without changing it to sons and daughters or to children of God. He writes “sons of God” for a reason, just as he writes about crying out “Abba, Father” for a reason. Both make it clear he’s talking about our being incorporated into Jesus the Messiah and into his story. Think back to Jesus crying out to his Father in Gethsemane the night before he was crucified. Jesus’ people cry with him, “Abba, Father”. The Lord is no distant god. Brothers and Sisters, because we are in his Son by faith, we too are his sons and daughters and have the privilege to cry out to him as Father just as Jesus did. And Paul recalls that prayer in the garden for a reason. That was Jesus’ prayer to the Father, his prayer as he was about to face his own death, it was his prayer that his Father would take that horrible cup from him. But it was also a prayer of faith as he submitted himself to his Father’s plan. We know that Paul is saying to the Romans that when that same cup of persecution and maybe even martyrdom comes to them, they can cry out to the Father with the same confidence that Jesus did, they can submit in faith to his plan the same way Jesus did, and they can know that the Father holds them in his hands the same way he held Jesus. And, I think most important, they can expect that the Father will vindicate them the same way he vindicated Jesus. They can know that one day the Father will raise them from the dead.
If they will let themselves be taken up in the story of Jesus the Messiah—something they can’t do on their own power, but they can in the power of the Spirit—if they suffering with the Messiah and walk his narrow and difficult path, they will be heirs with him—his inheritance, his glory will be theirs.
Brothers and Sisters, those first Christians, whether they were in Jerusalem and facing the wrath of their fellow Jews or whether they were in Rome facing the wrath of the pagans—in a few years facing the wrath of the Emperor Nero who would throw them to lions or burn them alive—Paul reminds them who they are in Jesus and the Spirit. They are the people of God, a people washed clean by the blood of Jesus and a people made righteous by the Spirit, a people called to be prophets and priests. Their calling was to stand before the tsunami of the world’s wrath calling sinful men and women to repentance, while mediating the loving grace of God—proclaiming the good news that Jesus has died, that he is risen, and that life, that participation in God’s new creation can be known through him.
Brothers and Sisters, judgement fell on Jerusalem and the Lord proved himself faithful to his promises as he delivered the church there from destruction. And the gospel went out to the Greeks and Romans and the Lord showed himself faithful again. Through the gospel and through the faithful witness of his people, an entire empire believed. With the biblical witness itself and with that history behind us, we have every reason to trust Jesus and the Spirit ourselves. We now live on the other side of Christendom. We don’t know what will happen. The gospel marches on in other parts of the world, but in ours, darkness is creeping back in. I doubt that we will know martyrdom the way Paul and so many of those First Century believers did, but we will know in some way the wrath of the world as we stand as prophets and priests, confronting a rebellious world. Stand firm. Do not listen to the false prophets who call for compromise and for the easy way. Do not fear the wrath of the world, for we are in Jesus the Messiah and the Spirit has united us with him. We are sons and daughters of the Father and no matter how bad things get, we can cry out with Jesus, “Abba, Father!” and know that he hears us. He gave his Son for our sake, why would we think he would abandon us now? And because we are united with the risen Jesus, because we are sons and daughters of God, we know that on the other side of all our troubles and sorrows lies our inheritance—as we confess in the Creed, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Let’s pray: Father, through the redeeming death and resurrection of your Son and through the regenerating work of your Spirit, you have made us your people. You have given us the task to stand as both prophets and priests, confronting this rebellious world and mediating your grace. Strengthen us, we pray, that we might stand firm in this calling no matter what trials and tribulations we may face. Make us new by your Spirit, fill us with your grace, and remind us that we share in the inheritance of your Son, who has been raised from the dead, that we might confront temptation and fear with a faith confident in your faithfulness. Through Jesus we pray. Amen
The Seventh Sunday after Trinity: Life in Jesus the Messiah Hosea 14:1-9, Romans 6:19-23, & St. Mark 8:1-9 by William Klock
Hosea—these days we call him the Prophet Hosea, but then he was just Hosea, although not for long—Hosea lived in the midst of a wicked and idolatrous people. God’s people had been split since the death of Solomon, the kingdom of Judah in the South and the Kingdom of Israel in the north. Judah had its own problems with wickedness and idolatry, but compared to Israel Judah was a downright goody-two-shoes. Hosea could walk through the city and see it all: drunkenness and sexual impurity of all kinds. People mutilated their bodies and took their own sisters as wives. Everywhere there was a general disregard for torah. And the King. Those were politically turbulent days, but instead of trusting in the Lord, the King made forbidden alliances with pagan nations and played the game of international politics and intrigue. But worst of all was the idolatry. There was a temple to the Lord at Bethel and another at Dan (and that was a problem in itself), but all over Israel, whether in the towns and cities or at the “high places” out in the country, there were temples and altars to Baal and to his consort, Asherah. The Levites at Bethel and Dan went through the motions of worshipping the Lord, but as Hosea looked around him it seemed most people had devoted themselves to this pagan sky god and his fertility goddess wife. Sacred prostitutes spilled out of the temples and into the street, enticing the Lord’s people to what should have been unthinkable. To Hosea it seemed like just about everyone in Israel, from the King down to the labourer in the market, had forgotten who they were and to whom they belonged. They were the people who lived with the Lord in their midst. They were the people chosen and called to show the nations the greatness of the God of Israel. But no one cared about that anymore. There was little difference anymore between an Israelite and an Assyrian or a Phoenician. And to those pagans, the God of Israel was a joke—powerless, jilted by his own people, no one to be feared.
And then the Lord spoke to Hosea. And the Lord told him to go and find one of those prostitutes spilling out of the pagan temples, to take her, and to marry her. He wasn’t just going to give Hosea a sermon to preach; he was going to make Hosea himself an object lesson. “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (Hosea 1:2).
Hosea’s life was to become a graphic reminder to the people of Israel that when the Lord had rescued them from Egypt, he had made her his people, the way a husband takes a bride. He had loved her. He had cared for her. He had lavished good gifts on her. And in return she had prostituted herself to other gods and forsaken his house. In the same way, Hosea loved his wife, Gomer. But repeatedly she abandoned him for other men and for her former life of prostitution. Repeatedly Hosea went after her, buying her out of her bondage, restoring her to his house and to his loving care. And in between he preached to Israel, reminding them of the Lord’s love and the Lord’s care and of the Lord’s faithfulness. In between he preached to Israel and called her to repentance—to turn aside from the Baals and the Asherahs and to return to her first love, to return to the Lord. To remember who she was and to whom she belonged.
Through Hosea the Lord warned the people that their betrayal would be costly, but he also reminded them of his love for them and of his faithfulness. And he made them a promise. We read part of that call and promise as our Old Testament lesson this morning. Hosea 14:1-9.
Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,
for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.
Take with you words
and return to the Lord;
say to him,
“Take away all iniquity;
accept what is good,
and we will pay with bulls
the vows of our lips.
Assyria shall not save us;
we will not ride on horses;
and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’
to the work of our hands.
In you the orphan finds mercy.”
I will heal their apostasy;
I will love them freely,
for my anger has turned from them.
I will be like the dew to Israel;
he shall blossom like the lily;
he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon;
his shoots shall spread out;
his beauty shall be like the olive,
and his fragrance like Lebanon.
They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow;
they shall flourish like the grain;
they shall blossom like the vine;
their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.
O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?
It is I who answer and look after you.
I am like an evergreen cypress;
from me comes your fruit.
Whoever is wise, let him understand these things;
whoever is discerning, let him know them;
for the ways of the Lord are right,
and the upright walk in them,
but transgressors stumble in them.
The Lord called his people to repent, to turn aside from their idolatry, but he also promised that one way or another, he would heal their apostasy. He will make them the people he chose and called them to be—his witnesses to the nations.
This week I’ve been working on restoring an antique camp stove I’ve had around for a while. It’s not a run-of-the-mill stove and I’d been delaying because I was having trouble finding a paint that matched the original colour. But last weekend I found a perfect match at the auto parts store. It was expensive automotive paint—not the cheap stuff they sell at Home Depot or Canadian Tire—but since it’s kind of a special project I decided to go for it. And it started out okay. I sprayed the paint and the colour was pretty much perfect, but the colour itself was pretty thin. They say to shake the can for one minute after the little mixing ball rattles. I warmed the can a bit and shook it for ten minutes, thinking that maybe they’d been on the shelf for a while and the pigment had really settled in the bottom. No change. I started wondering if the cans were short on pigment or something. What I managed to paint looked great, but it took a lot more paint than expected, so I ran out. I went back to the store for another expensive can, got home, shook it like crazy for ten minutes just to be sure. And I started spraying. And this can was full of colour. But the first thing I noticed was that it wasn’t quite the same colour. And then I noticed that it wasn’t laying down smooth. No matter what I did, it left a rough and blotchy texture on the surface. And, of course, to get the colours to match, I had to spray the new paint over everything I’d already painted with the old paint.
And as I sat there looking at this mess of a project, I got discouraged and frustrated. I’d invested a lot in that paint and had high hopes for what it would look like and in the end it failed me. It didn’t do what it was supposed to do. And it got me thinking about Hosea and Gomer and the Lord and Israel. I invested in some cans of paint. The Lord invested in a whole people. I expected that paint to make an antique stove look good and to show off my handiwork. The Lord expected Israel to show his goodness and glory to the nations. I thought about giving up on that paint—throwing the stove back into the electrolysis tank and stripping it back to metal and starting over. But that’s not what the Lord did with his people and it wasn’t what I was going to do with that paint. A sent photos to a friend who used to work painting cars and he said, “Clear coat covers a multitude of sins.” He’s right. So I sat down with those stove parts and some water and some fine-grit sandpaper, and I spent hours wet-sanding. I sanded and sanded until the paint was smooth and my hands were stained green. And when I was done it looked awful. It was smooth, but it cloudy and swirly and covered in fine scratches. But it was ready. All it took was one can of clear coat and a few minutes of spraying. Clear coat covers a multitude of sins. It fills in the fine scratches and imperfections and somehow it always comes out with a smooth, glossy finish. It never fails. The next evening I put everything together on the workbench and it looked great. You’d never know what a mess it had been except for all the green under my fingernails.
And because I’m a preacher and the story of the God of Israel and his people is always on my brain, I thought about my friend’s joke about clear coat covering a multitude of sins (He’s not a Christian and had no idea the source of the phrase, but I hope maybe he’ll hear this and good things will come of it!) and then I went for a bike ride and the whole time I was thinking about how similar clear coat is to Jesus and the Spirit. I know on some level there’s a heresy in there, but that’s the problem with every analogy and I wasn’t taking it that deep. That expensive green automotive paint was Israel. The Lord bought her out of Egypt, delivered her from Pharoah, and displayed to her and to the rest of the world his goodness and generosity in—at least a little bit—the same way I bought those cans of paint and showed the people, or at least the cashier at Lordco, the depth of my pockets. And as the Lord set Israel to work to be a witness to his glory, I started spraying that paint to be a witness to my own handiwork—to photograph and post to the lantern and stove collectors’ forum on the Internet and on YouTube—to the great acclaim of my fellow collectors. And just like Israel, that paint failed to perform. It didn’t meet my expectations. It made me look incompetent. If I’d posted photos on the Internet without explanation, people would have mocked me for the sake of that paint that wouldn’t do what it was supposed to do. Not so unlike the nations that mocked the Lord, the God of Israel, because of the faithlessness of his people—although certainly with far greater consequences. And the sanding. The hours and hours of sanding, scuffing up, knocking down, smoothing out that paint that just would not behave. And not unlike Israel, even when I was done and everything was ready, it still looked awful—not at all what I expected. The Internet would have mocked me even more if they’d seen it and thought that was the finished project. But then the clear coat that covers a multitude of sins—at least in my own mind, so much like Jesus the Messiah, God himself, sent to be the faithful Israelite. To give his life for the sake of their sins, his shed blood—dare I say—like the clear coat, filling in all the scuffs and scratches to the point you’d never know just how unfaithful that paint—or Israel—had been to its purpose and mission. And then that gloss it leaves behind. Even if that expensive paint had done everything it was supposed to do, even it went down flawlessly, it would never have look as perfect and as glossy as that damaged, roughed-up paint looked after it was clear-coated. Kind of like the people of God. Even if she’d kept the torah, a people with the divinely given law carved on stone tablets will never show forth the glory of the Lord the way a people filled with his own Spirit will show forth his glory.
And so I took some photos and I posted them in the lantern and stove collectors’ forum and the likes and the comments with glowing praise started rolling in. Brothers and Sisters, that what’s supposed to happen with the nations, when the world see the handiwork of the God of Israel, the work of Jesus and the Spirit, in his people. That’s why you and I are here today. Because God disciplined and renewed his people by his Son and by his Spirit and that new people became witnesses of his glory. In their story the nations saw the faithfulness of God and through their proclamation they heard how it was done through Jesus the Messiah and God’s own Spirit. And they came and gave him glory and believed in Jesus and that divine clear coat covered them just the way it had Israel, and they became—and eventually you and I became—part of the people of God and part of that community meant to continually witness his glory.
And yet somehow, despite all that the Lord has done for us, we still need to be reminded who we are, to whom we belong, and what he’s called us to do and to be. Last week we heard Paul’s words from Romans 6, reminding us of our baptism. In the waters of baptism, he writes, we have died and risen with the Messiah. We’re like Israel, passing through the Red Sea. When she went in, she belonged to Pharoah, slaves to the Egyptians, but when she came out the other side she belonged to the Lord, free to serve him in his goodness, his bride and a beloved member of his household. In today’s Epistle, Paul carries on a few verses later, again, Romans 6:19-23.
For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.
For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
Remember that Paul was writing to an audience that was mostly Jewish or at least steeped in the Jewish scriptures and in the Jewish identity. When Paul wrote about slavery and freedom, the first thing that came to mind was the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from her slavery in Egypt. There had been a time when their ancestors had no choice but to obey the will of Pharaoh. But as Moses led them through the Red Sea delivered them from that bondage, so Jesus has led us through the waters of baptism and delivered us from our bondage to sin.
That doesn’t mean that the life we have in Jesus is always easy. The Lord led Israel through the wilderness before taking her into the promised land and Jesus leads us through a wilderness of our own on our way to the age to come. He promised that his disciples would be rejected—some would even die—on account of him. We live in the overlap of the ages, but the Lord has a purpose in that. We, his church, are his means of proclaiming the good news about Jesus and we are witnesses of his glory to the world so that the nations will believe and give him glory. When it’s finished, I’ll post my finished stove project to the Internet and everyone will like the photos and post comments giving me praise for what I’ve done. Do you ever stop to think that the Lord is, right now, doing the same sort of thing with us? He’s bought us with the blood of his Son, he’s washed away our sins, and he’s filled us with his Spirit, regenerating our hearts and renewing our minds. He’s made us new creations and he’s sent us out into the world and the world is supposed to see his new creation in us and glorify him and believe. When the world looks at the Church, it’s supposed to see, to have a foretaste, of God’s new creation and of the age to come in which all the pain and sorrow and sin and tears—even death itself—have been wiped away and everything set to rights.
Before Jesus washed us clean and filled us with the Spirit we were slaves to sin and sin leads to death and we see it all around us. It’s the way of this fallen world. But in Jesus and the Spirit the Lord has set us free, in Jesus and the Spirit he is sanctifying us—that means he’s making us holy, making us into the people he intends for us to be—stripping away the old, worn paint and the rust, cleaning off the grime, sanding and prepping, painting and sanding and painting and sanding and clear-coating and all of that until his handiwork is perfect and holy and fully witnesses his glory—and causes the whole world to take note and not just to like and comment, but to come to him in faith to worship and to praise. And one day the Church will be everything he’s working to make it and one day we will have proclaimed the good news about Jesus everywhere, and then every enemy will be defeated and this in between time will finally come to an end as the age to come finally arrives in all its fullness—like Christmas when all the decorations are finally up and the tree is in the living room and the presents are ready to be opened and the turkey’s on the table.
In the meantime, in this overlap of the ages, Brothers and Sisters, we need to remember who we are and to whom we belong. We need to remember the hope that lies before us. Even having been washed by Jesus and filled with the Spirit, the false gods of the world and the lusts of the flesh can be tempting. Like Gomer, leaving her loving husband and returning to her old life of prostitution. Like the Israelites in the wilderness. We grumble. And our bellies grumble and we think back with longing on the fleshpots of Egypt, forgetting that in Egypt we were slaves to sin and subject to death. Brothers and Sisters, look around—or as Paul wrote in last week’s Epistle, “consider”, “reckon”, look around you, look where you’ve come from and do the math. The presents may still be in the attic and the turkey may still be in the oven, but thanks to Jesus and the Spirit all the signs are there. The Christmas lights are up, there are ornaments on the tree, and we can smell the turkey roasting. Trust him. Everything about the story shouts at us that the Lord is faithful and fulfils his promises and so we know that Jesus will finish what he has started. And if the Gospel lesson today tells us anything, it’s that the Lord will always look after his people in the wilderness. He fed Israel with manna from heaven. He fed the multitude with seven loaves and a few small fish. Brothers and Sisters, come to his Tablet his morning, eat the bread and drink the wine, and remember that he will feed us too. Here he reminds us what he’s done for us through the death of his Son and the gift of his Spirit. Here he reminds us who we are, of the family to which we belong, and of our hope—where we’re headed. Here he lovingly feeds and clothes us, so that the world might see his faithfulness and give him glory.
Let’s pray: Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Sixth Sunday after Trinity: More Righteous than the Pharisees Romans 6:3-11 & St. Matthew 5:20-26 by William Klock
What does it mean to follow Jesus? To believe the gospel? To repent and to believe? What does it mean for us? Who does it make us? What’s our mission? What do we do and where are we headed? What does Jesus expect of us? Last Sunday we read Jesus’ calling of Peter, James, and John. “Follow me and from now on you’ll be catching people,” he told them. But how? From what? And why? Do you ever feel like that? I know I do. Jesus and the Spirit have incorporated us into this community of people called the Church, a people chosen and called to be salt and light, to proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus, to announce to the world that he is Lord. He is in the process of setting this broken, sad, and messed up world to rights and one day he will wipe away every last bit of sin and even death itself in a great act of redeeming judgement. He will make all things new in the same way he was made new in his resurrection and in some way for which our new birth in the power of God’s own Spirit is a foretaste. We’re called to prepare the world for that great day. But how? What do we say? What do we do? And when do we say it and when do we do it? How do we do it? Some days it’s overwhelming. Some days you just want to retreat into your private devotional life or into the church and just be a good person, read your Bible and say your prayers and wait for Jesus to come back and sort it all out. And that’s what a lot of people do. But think of Peter, James, and John and think of the rest of the disciples, not just the twelve, but the seventy and all those others who were there on Pentecost and the thousands—tens of thousands—more who lived through those days of trial and tribulation in Jerusalem and Antioch and Ephesus and Rome—many of whom were martyred for their witness to Jesus his kingdom. What does it mean, what does it look like to be this new Israel, this new people of God centred in Jesus the Messiah?
Peter, James, John and the rest of them wanted to know, so it makes perfect sense that as St. Matthew tells us Jesus’ story, the very next episode after Jesus calls his disciples is Jesus taking them up a mountain to teach them. They’ve believed his message that the kingdom is soon to come. They’ve believed that it will come with this great act of the Lord’s judgement on his faithless people even if they don’t quite understand what that’s going to look like. But what do they do in the meantime? And so Jesus sits them down and teaches them all those things that have almost sort of become Christian cliches. Jesus begins with those announcements of blessing on the humble and the mourners and the seekers after righteousness, because they will be the ones who will inherit this new thing that the Lord, through Jesus, is inaugurating, they will be the ones to inherit that new state of affairs that would be on the other side of the judgement coming at the end of their generation. And Jesus wraps up this long teaching with a series of warnings. Many within Israel are following an easy and broad road to destruction. They are like a fruitless tree that the Lord will cut down and cast into the fire. Israel—or many of its people at any rate—have built their house on sand and when the stormwaters rage, it will all come crashing down around them. And in the aftermath of that judgement on faithless Israel, Jesus will be vindicated as Messiah before the eyes of the watching world—and so will his people, this new Israel transformed and empowered by the very Spirit of God. And finally, through this people and their Messiah, the gentiles, the nations will see the God of Israel and come to give him glory—finally!
But in the meantime, in the middle of all that, as they proclaim the kingdom, what does life following Jesus look like? This is where our Gospel lesson today picks up. Look at Matthew 5:20. Jesus said to his disciples:
Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
I wonder how this fell on the ears of Peter and the others. Was it exciting or discouraging or overwhelming? Maybe all those things. Because the Pharisees were the most righteous people around. If you want to understand the Pharisees, understand that they purposed to live their lives—from the little things to the big things—everything, as if they were living in the temple itself, that place where heaven and earth intersected, that place where God dwelt in their midst—or at least where his presence had dwelt at one time in the past. That was the problem. Since the exile, the Lord’s presence had been gone from the temple. But if everyone in Israel would do the same as the Pharisees, they thought, then the Lord would bless his people. He would hear their cries, he would return to the temple, he would judge their enemies, and he would set everything to rights. And now what Jesus is saying is that the Pharisees were on the right track. If Israel wants the Lord’s blessing and the Lord’s deliverance, and all of that, then righteousness—living in the presence of God—that’s the key. That’s what Israel had always been called to do, ever since the Lord had called Abraham and especially since he’d delivered them from Egypt and given them his law. They were to be a people who truly lived that way, a people would truly honour God. And a people like that would bring the nations to give him glory. But instead, Israel had been unfaithful and the nations mocked her and mocked her God. Even the Pharisees weren’t righteous enough. And so Jesus goes on in verse 21:
You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the fire of Gehenna.
The righteousness of the Pharisees, Jesus has warned, is not enough. When judgement fell on Israel, it would fall on the Pharisees along with all the rest of the faithless. And that’s because the letter of the law simply isn’t enough. Do you remember the summary of the law? Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbour as yourself. That’s the heart of the law. If you love your neighbour, you certainly won’t murder him, but neither will you nurse hatred for him in your heart. Jesus sets a higher standard. The Pharisees were right in thinking that Israel needed to live mindful of being in the Lord’s presence. But they were hypocritical—thinking they could fulfil the law by keeping the externals while ignoring the internals, by honouring the lord in their actions, even if they didn’t in their hearts. Jesus raises the bar. But he’s really just reminding them of where the bar always was for the people of God. The Pharisees will be swept up in the judgement to come, in the war with Rome, along with all the rest of the unfaithful in Israel. That’s what Jesus is getting at when he talks about the “fire of Gehenna”—or as the ESV puts it the “hell of fire”. I wish our modern translations would just use the word Jesus’ uses—Gehenna—instead of translating it as hell, because the translation masks over the way that Jesus is pointing the disciples back to the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah used the image of the Valley of Hinnom, a place where human sacrifice to the god Molech had once taken place. Jeremiah warned that when the Babylonians defeated Jerusalem there would be so many dead that the bodies would be heaped up in that valley. Jesus’ point is that it’s going to happen all over again, this time with defeat at the hands of Rome. Josephus describes the city so filled with the dead that the bodies were dumped into that same valley by the thousands. If you draw line from Jeremiah to Josephus is runs straight through Jesus’ warning here. The Sadducees, the Zealots, and even the Pharisees will find themselves under the Lord’s judgement on that awful day—and Jesus’ point to his disciples is that so will they, so will everyone, who continues to live out the law by the low standard that had become the norm in Israel. So will everyone who fails to truly live as the people with the Lord in their midst. Why? Because the Lord had called and chosen this people to be his witnesses to the world, to be salt, to be light, to show the world what it looked like to be the people who lived in the presence of God—so that the nations would see and be drawn to his goodness and give him glory. Instead, again, the nations mocked the God of Israel because of the unfaithfulness of his people. And God will deal with them soon. His faithfulness and his glory will be manifest one way or the other: if not in blessing, then in his discipline.
So Jesus gives his disciples the alternative. If you love your brother, go and reconcile with him.
So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. (Matthew 5:23-26)
What’s the point here? Brothers and Sisters, always remember the story and remember why the Lord called and chose a people to represent him in the world. He called Abraham and his family in order to make himself know through them to a world that had forgotten him. Through his people, the Lord was working to reconcile this lost and sinful world to himself. And so Israel was called to live out in her daily life the reconciling love of God for the sake of the world. For the most part Israel failed. And so the Lord came himself in Jesus to show his people what that reconciling love looks like in real life—even to the point of giving his own life for their sake—and Jesus called a new people from within Israel to live that reconciling love themselves. And even though this new people of God, just like Jesus, would be mocked and hated and even martyred, in the end the Lord would vindicate them just as he vindicated his Son. And in that, the world would finally stand up and take note of the living God and return to him. This is what it looks like to be God’s people. This is what it meant for Peter and John and James to follow Jesus and to fish for men and women and to prepare Israel for that coming day of judgment.
But how could they do it? I expect the disciples were sitting there listening to Jesus and thinking that this is all well and good, but if the Pharisees can’t meet the bar—and if Israel had been failing to meet it all along—how are we going to meet it? For that we turn to St. Paul and to our Epistle from Romans 6.
Somehow Israel—and then the rest of the human race—needed a change of heart, a transformation from within. Hearts set on sin and on self had to be turned to back to the Lord and filled with love. This is what Paul gets at in our Epistle. Because of Jesus, we are not the same people we once were. Look at Romans 6:3-4.
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
Baptism changes everything. Again, just as we need to imagine ourselves as First Century Galileans when we hear Jesus preaching we need to remember that Paul, too, was writing to mostly Jewish Christians only a few decades later. When we do that what we realise is that in Romans Paul is retelling Israel’s story and in Romans 6, as he writes about Baptism and what it means and does, he’s simultaneously telling the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt.
Israel cried out to the Lord from the misery of her slavery and oppression. The Lord heard and he sent Moses. Moses led the people out of their bondage and into the Promised Land and that journey began at the Red Sea. They entered the sea as slaves and the came out the other side a free people, their captors crushed and drowned under the waves. And yet they had to pass through the wilderness. It took longer than the people expected. They grumbled a lot and even got angry with the Lord and with Moses and talked about going back to Egypt. But the Lord led his people—a cloud by day and fire by night—and eventually they entered the Promised Land.
Again, the Israelites entered the Sea slaves and they came out the other side a free people. And Paul uses this to illustrate what happens in baptism. We go into the water dead and we come out alive. We go into the water slaves to sin and death and we come out free people. And that’s what makes Jesus’ impossible calling possible. It’s what makes possible a righteousness greater even than the righteousness of the Pharisees. Paul says that in our baptism we are united with Jesus in his death and resurrection. God called Israel to be salt and light, he gave her his law, but it wasn’t written on her heart. Israel had the same wicked, self-centred heart that all humanity shares. But Jesus came as the true Israelite. His life and ministry embodied Israel’s calling. He even followed Israel’s pattern symbolically in his own baptism and his own forty days in the wilderness. And then he took on himself the crucifixion that Israel deserved. His enemies killed him, but instead of returning judgement and violence on them, instead of cursing them, he responded by praying to his Father: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Sin and death, anger and hate did their worst to Jesus at the cross and Jesus overcame them with love and with sacrifice. Impossible? For human beings who have only their own sinful wills to rely on, yes. But not for Jesus and not for those who have been baptised into the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are not who we once were. Earlier in Romans Paul describes what we used to be as being “in Adam”. By birth we are part of the old humanity, fallen and enslaved to sin. By virtue of our baptism we are born again. We are now “in Christ”—in Jesus the Messiah.
This is what Paul means when he writes in verses 6 and 7:
We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin.
Sometimes sin comes knocking at the door and it seems impossible to say no. Sometimes that certain person who irritates us comes around and we know we should forgive and love them but it seems impossible. It feels like we’re still slaves to sin. All sin has to do is show up and we cave in to it. But Paul says, No! That old self is dead. It was crucified with Jesus. We are no longer slaves. We have been set free from bondage to sin. Like Israel wanting to go back to Egypt, it’s easy to be tempted to go back to that bondage. The wilderness isn’t an easy place to be, but the Lord is with us anyway. And Paul stresses that we need to remember that sin no longer has any hold on us. We’re new and free people in the Messiah.
Paul goes on:
Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:8-11)
Jesus burst alive from the tomb that first Easter. Other people, like Lazarus, had come back from the dead too, but Jesus’ resurrection is different. Lazarus had to die again, but Jesus has gone through death and come out the other side into a kind of life that death can never touch and, Paul says, if we are in Jesus the Messiah then we have a share in this new life.
We’re not there yet. We too still have to face death, but we live in hope knowing that like Jesus we will come out the other side of death alive in a way we never have been before—alive in the way that God truly intended us to be when he created us. But what about today? Sin and death can’t touch our future, but what about our present? Jesus’ calling still seems impossible so much of the time. And this is why Paul makes this point. Our baptism pulls our future hope into the present. It takes the life of Jesus and his victory over sin and death and applies it to us today. There’s a change whether we feel it or not. The Israelites didn’t necessarily feel any different on one side of the Red Sea than they had on the other, but everything was still different for them. They had been slaves; now they were free. And just so for us. We are no longer in Adam; we are in Jesus. And Jesus has poured the God’s Spirit into us and the Spirit is at work to renew our minds and regenerate our hearts as we live in this in-between time.
In verse 11 Paul says that we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus the Messiah. That word “consider” is the same one we saw in the Epistle from Romans 8 two weeks ago. It’s an accounting term that Paul uses. And here’s his point. When you send your books to your accountant he adds everything up and gives you the bottom line. His reckoning doesn’t change your financial situation. Nothing about your situation has actually changed by the fact that your accountant has added up your profit and loss columns. But that bottom line he reckons for you shows you in fact where you stand. It might mean you’ve got money you need to invest or creditors you need to pay or it might mean you need to economise and tighten your belt. Adding up your profits and losses doesn’t itself have an impact on the health of your business, but it does make you aware of it and it tells you what you need to do.
And so Paul looks at the cross and he looks at the empty tomb and he looks at the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost and everything else and he says: I’ve done the math. You are in the Messiah. You are dead to sin and alive to God. Now start living that way!
Is it a challenge? Of course. Jesus was baptised, the heavens opened up, the Spirit descended on him and the Father spoke, “This is my Son. With him I am pleased”. And then Jesus went straight into the wilderness to battle the devil. The Lord led Israel out of Egypt through the miraculous parting of the sea, he was present with her, giving the law and leading as cloud and as fire and yet he led her straight into the wilderness. And we too. We’re baptised and the Lord sends us straight from the Font into the world. If there’s anything Jesus (and John and Paul and Peter) are clear about in the scriptures, it’s that his people will face opposition and trials and tribulation at the hands of a wicked and doubting world. And there’s a reason why, in our baptism, we’re called on to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil. All three will come after us. They’ll tell us that nothing has changed. They’ll tell us that following after Jesus is impossible. They’ll tempt us to give up or at least to compromise. When others sin against us, when they hurt us, when they wrong us the temptation comes saying: “It’s okay, be angry or be bitter. Get that person out of your life—you don’t need them. Hey, look how well you’re doing! You didn’t kill them!” Brothers and Sisters, that’s sin calling. Jesus calls us to seek to reconcile. Jesus calls us to embrace the wrongs that others do to us and to return those wrong with grace. Jesus calls us to break the cycle of anger and hate and violence. And when it seems impossible, remember your baptism. We are a new creation. You have died and risen again with Jesus and he has poured his Spirit into you—into us. Brothers and Sisters, in that the Lord had made us witnesses of the transformation from the old creation, full of death and decay and sin and sadness, into the new world in which he is reconciling everything and everyone to himself, in which his law of love reigns, and in which he will wipe away every tear. Live as the men and women that God has made you through Jesus and the Spirit and not only will you see the kingdom of God, but all the people around you will have a glimpse of it to. Make them constructively curious by your life and you’ll have the opportunity to explain the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen, that they too might know God’s new creation.
Let us pray: Gracious Father, you have poured your love into us poor sinners by giving your own Son as a sacrifice. Teach us to pour that love back out to the world. When it seems impossible to break the cycle of sin and anger and hate, remind us of our baptism and that, through Jesus, you have brought us into your new creation. Remind us that we have died with him and risen with him and that sin and death no longer hold us captive. Teach us to live for righteousness that the world might see Jesus and his kingdom through us. Amen.
The Fifth Sunday after Trinity: Fishing for People St. Luke 5:1-11 by William Klock
Jesus had a big message, he was alone. He knew the amazing and miraculous circumstance of his birth. He knew the words that had been spoken over him as a baby, when he was too small to understand, blessings given by old saints like Simeon and Anna when Mary and Joseph had taken him to be dedicated in the temple. Most of all, he knew the scriptures. He’d pieced it all together and he knew who he was and why his Father—not Joseph, but his Father father had sent him. Jesus knew what the God of Israel was doing through him. Jesus knew what he had to do. If he’d had any doubts about it, his baptism by John in the Jordan had driven them all away. John knew who he was. And then the heavens had opened, the Spirit had descended on him, and his Father had spoken: “You are my son.” And he had proved himself in the desert as he was tempted by the devil—each time that knowledge of who he was, what he was here for, and all those scriptures he’d memorised and meditated on came flooding back. He resisted the devil and the devil had fled. And his Father had vindicated him, sending his angels to minister to him. Walking out of the desert, Jesus was ready to take that big message to his people. And he began, literally, with his people. He went back to his home town of Nazareth and on the sabbath, in the synagogue, the rabbi gave him the Isaiah scroll to read.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, [Jesus read out]
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus said. Today it begins. Israel had been crying out to the Lord for deliverance for centuries. He has heard your cries and he has sent me to proclaim the good news. Deliverance and judgement are coming. Judgement always comes with deliverance, because the faithful cannot be delivered unless the unfaithful and the wicked are judged and cast down. So repent and believe for the kingdom of God is near.
At first the people—many his friends and family—were amazed, but all they wanted was their own personal Messiah to work miracles for them. By the time Jesus had finished rebuking them, they’d formed a mob and chased him to the edge of a cliff. They were ready to throw him down, to kill him. By some miracle he escaped. He fled to Capernaum. There, people listened. He cast out a demon. Word about him quickly spread. One sabbath, after preaching his message in the synagogue, that message about the coming kingdom, about deliverance and judgment and the need for Israel to repent, he was invited to the home of a man named Simon. Simon’s mother-in-law was sick and had a fever. Jesus healed her. Pretty soon everyone in town with a problem was crowding Simon’s house to be healed by Jesus. In him they were getting a glimpse of the age to come, of the world finally set to rights. They didn’t want him to leave, but he had to go, he had to take the good news about the coming of the kingdom to the rest of God’s people, to the rest of Judea. Judgement was coming for Israel, and the people—everyone in Israel—needed to hear Jesus’ call to repentance.
So many villages and town and cities. So many people. So many heard and were enthusiastic. Many even believed. But so many didn’t. Some just saw the miracles and their only thought was for today and they missed what the good news really was. Some got it, they heard Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom, but they misunderstood or they got angry. The Messiah was supposed to announce judgement on Israel’s enemies, not on Israel! No matter how Jesus looked at it, his mission was so big and he was just one man. It weighed heavily on him. A big message and even bigger task for just one person.
But one day not long after, St. Luke tells us in today’s Gospel, Jesus was standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee near Capernaum. He was preaching. It was a good spot for that. There are coves that amplify the sound. He was using one of them like a natural amphitheatre. But the crowd of people just kept getting bigger and bigger. People wanted to see the miracle-worker, but more than that, they wanted to hear the good news he was proclaiming—that in him the Lord had heard the cries of his people and had come to deliver and to judge. Some—the hurting and the poor—needed to hear that message of consolation. Some wanted to know just who it was that would be judged—because they’d heard Jesus calling people to repentance. And the crowd got bigger and bigger and people were struggling to hear what he was saying.
And Luke writes that there were a couple of boats on the beach. Fishing boats. The fisherman had come in from their night’s labour, had emptied the boats, and were on the beach looking after their nets while Jesus preached. Jesus recognised one of the fishermen. It was Simon. A few days before he’d been invited to his house and he’d healed his mother-in-law. And so he called to Simon and asked him to row him out onto the water so that he could preach from his boat and let the water and walls of the cove amplify his voice. Simon did as Jesus asked.
And Jesus preached about the Lord’s kingdom that was so soon to come. Luke doesn’t give us Jesus’ specific words on this occasion, but we know he preached there what he preached everywhere else. He preached about coming judgement, he preached about repentance, and he preached about the life of the age to come that awaited the repentant on the other side of that judgement. In Jesus the Lord had come to set things to rights, but to be part of that new world and that new and restored people, the people of Israel needed to be right with the Lord. For those who refused to repent, war with Rome waited and the death and utter destruction it would bring. To make his point Jesus spoke of outer darkness and gnashing teeth—just the sort of judgement language the old prophets had used—Gehenna and unquenchable fire. Jesus reminded the people of familiar passages from the prophets, from Isaiah and from Ezekiel and from Jeremiah, passages about judgement and deliverance and national repentance, and about the faithfulness of the Lord.
And in the middle of all that, inspiration struck Jesus. He had an idea. The good news wasn’t going to proclaim itself to Israel and there were only so many places and people Jesus could reach with the message in the short time he had. He needed helpers. He needed disciples. And I can’t help but think that a little bit of Jeremiah was running around his head—I’ll come back to Jeremiah in a bit. He may have just preached this little bit of Jeremiah to crowd, and as the great crowd finally dispersed and he was alone in the boat with the fishermen, he asked Simon to row out into deeper water and to cast his nets for a catch. Jeremiah echoing in his mind the whole time.
Simon liked Jesus. After hearing his preaching, he’d invited him to his home. But you can hear the annoyance in his voice when he responds to Jesus, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” If the fish weren’t there in the dark, they certainly wouldn’t be there in the day. And they’d just cleaned the nets. And they were tired. What was the point? But Simon knew. If it was anyone else, he’d have pushed him overboard, but this was Jesus. He’d seen Jesus do things. And, anyway, he owed him one. So Simon and his friends rowed out into the deep water and cast their net. And to their surprise, they caught something. They caught a lot of somethings—and it wasn’t old boots and hubcaps! Simon started yelling to haul in the nets before they broke from all the fish teeming inside. But the nets started tearing anyway. Sooo many fish! Simon was calling to James and John in the other boat, “Get over here! Quick! Help, before the nets are destroyed and all these fish get away.” And pretty soon they were hauling and scooping fish into both boats. But now it was the boats that were in danger. There were so many fish that the boats were riding dangerously low. The waves were washing over the sides and the boats were sitting lower and lower in the water by the minute. The fishermen started bailing frantically.
But not Simon. Luke tells us that Simon Peter—yes, that Simon—he tells us that Simon Peter fell down on his knees in the middle of the sinking boat and wriggling fish and cried out to Jesus, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Simon Peter had an encounter with the holy. He was no great theologian. He knew nothing of homoousioses or hypostatic unions. He simply knew Israel’s scriptures and in Jesus he saw the faithfulness of the God of Israel revealed brighter than the sun at noon. He knew that in Jesus the Lord had come to his people and Simon Peter did what everyone who has ever had an encounter with the God of Israel has done: He fell to his knees, confessed his sinfulness, and pled for that holiness that felt like it was burning into his sinful heart like a red hot poker, he pled for it to go away and leave him be. Luke makes a point of telling us this detail of the story, because it points back so obviously to Isaiah’s encounter with the Lord. Do you remember Isaiah’s response to the presence of the holiness of God? Isaiah cried out:
“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5)
Isaiah couldn’t bear the presence of the holy either. And that’s when an angel flew down to Isaiah bearing a burning coal from the altar. He touched Isaiah’s unclean lips with the coal and proclaimed that his guilt had departed and his sin blotted out. And then, when the Lord called out, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us? Who will proclaim my message to Israel?” Isaiah responded with those familiar words, “Here I am! Send me!”
And it’s that scene all over again in that sinking fishing boat between Simon Peter and Jesus. As Simon Peter knelt, shaking in the presence of the holy, Jesus announced to him, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” In Matthew and Mark, Jesus says to Simon Peter and his friends, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” These were the men Jesus needed to help him to proclaim the coming kingdom and to call the nation to repentance in anticipation of it.
But what, exactly, was Jesus calling Simon Peter to do? On the one hand it’s obvious. We’ve all been singing the song since we were in Sunday School. I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men. I will make you fishers of men if you follow me. And if you’re like me, of course you think of evangelism. And we forget that Simon Peter and his friends fished with nets and we imagine ourselves doing evangelism as if we’re fishermen casting out a line with a worm on the hook and sitting and waiting for a bite. And that last little bit about “if you follow me”—if. There was no “if” in that sinking boat. Jesus just told Simon Peter, “From now on you’ll be catching men.” When the Lord calls you, Brothers and Sisters, there’s no if. Not for Abraham, not for Moses, not for Isaiah, not for Simon Peter—not for us. They all cowered in fear and then they squirmed and they even argued “I’m not worthy”, “I don’t know how”, “I can’t”, but the Lord purified them, absolved them, equipped them, and sent them and they went. Every one of them. Not just Simon Peter that day, but James and John. But, again, what was Jesus calling them to do? What was he calling them for?
Remember I said that I think Jesus had a bit of Jeremiah running around his head when he told Simon Peter to row out into the deep water and to cast his nets. And I think that was the case because, first, Jesus was always preaching the prophets, and second, because of the context—he was in a fishing boat with fisherman.
In Jeremiah 16 we read the Lord’s words of warning to Israel. The prophet was to announce the Lord’s coming judgement on the nation and people of Israel. Here’s what he says in Jeremiah 16:10-13. This is the indictment.
“And when you tell this people all these words, and they say to you, ‘Why has the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? What is our iniquity? What is the sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?’ then you shall say to them: ‘Because your fathers have forsaken me, declares the Lord, and have gone after other gods and have served and worshiped them, and have forsaken me and have not kept my law, and because you have done worse than your fathers, for behold, every one of you follows his stubborn, evil will, refusing to listen to me. Therefore I will hurl you out of this land into a land that neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you shall serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor.’
Some of the specifics of the sins had changed since the days of Jeremiah, but Israel in Jesus’ day was just as unfaithful to the Lord. This was a perfect passage for Jesus to draw on in order to explain his ministry and why the Lord had sent him. The Lord had judged Israel then and he was about to do it again and for the same reason. Jump down a few verses to 16-18. Because they have not been faithful to his covenant, the Lord is going to remove his people from the promised land and send them into exile. And he’s going to be thorough about it. He uses the imagery of fishing and hunting.
“Behold, I am sending for many fishers, declares the Lord, and they shall catch them. And afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks. For my eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from me, nor is their iniquity concealed from my eyes. But first I will doubly repay their iniquity and their sin, because they have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable idols, and have filled my inheritance with their abominations.”
Jeremiah’s point was that none would escape the coming judgement. When Babylon fell on Judea like a ton of bricks, many would flee, but none would escape the Lord’s judgement. Like fishers casting their nets across the rivers and catching everything, the Babylonians would let no one escape. Everyone would be carried off into exile.
And this wasn’t some bit of Old Testament prophetic imagery that the Jewish people had forgotten. It’s used in the Thanksgiving Psalms found at Qumran, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The singer of the psalm sees himself as a fisherman with his net spread over Israel, ready to catch the children of injustice and to bring them to judgement.[1] That’s why I expect Jesus would have preached on this passage from Jeremiah, if not this day, then on some other. But what better passage to be preaching as he stood in Simon’s fishing boat.
And something clicks in Jesus’ head. This time there’s a way to escape the coming judgement. That’s why Jesus was sent. Not just to announce that judgement was coming soon, but to call the people to repentance—and even to give his life as a sacrifice for their sins. To make a new people, forgiven and full of God’s own Spirit, who would be ready to live the life of the age to come, who would be ready to live in God’s world set to rights, to live his law of love, and to take up their original vocation, to be his stewards and the priests of his temple. As Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “God did not send his Son to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” What Israel needs is fisherman, just like in Jeremiah’s day, but not fisherman to catch the fish for judgement. Israel needs a corps of gospel fishermen who will catch people that they might live. The word Jesus uses for catch means to capture something alive. In the Old Testament it was used to describe capturing an enemy, while sparing his life instead of putting him to death. It’s the perfect image for the mission of Jesus and his disciples. In the face of coming judgement, these gospel fishermen will catch men and women so that their lives will be spared.
I doubt Simon Peter or James or John had any idea that day the full extent of what they were in for, but they had heard the good news, they had chosen their side, and Luke writes that when they’d got their boats and nets and the fish to shore, they left it all and followed Jesus. Like Isaiah, Simon Peter had heard the call, had been absolved and equipped by the Lord, and was ready to stand and say, “Here I am. Send me!” These disciples were the labourers sent out in to the harvest. Jesus gave them authority to preach and to heal and to cast out demons. They went out in the name of Jesus to prepare Israel for the judgement to come. Like Jesus, they announced the Lord’s coming judgement on Israel for her unfaithfulness, and they called the people to repentance. There was life in a renewed people of God on the other side of the coming disaster, a life full of the Spirit, a life as the people Israel had always been called to be—the people who lived with God in their midst. And that ministry drew a line down the middle of Israel. There were those who heard this good news and believed. There were those who rejected the message. The disciples were to leave such people—to symbolically shake the dust from their feet and to move on and to carry the message to those who would receive it.
This is why Jesus told them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 10:6). Judgement would one day come to the gentiles, too, but before the Lord could judge the gentile nations, he had to judge and to renew his own people—to set his own house in order. Seeing the Lord do that, seeing the Lord come in judgement on his own rebellious people, and seeing him, through Jesus, establishing a new people, that’s what would pique the interest of the gentiles. Seeing the faithfulness of the God of Israel—something they’d never seen in their own gods—that is what ultimately prompt the gentile nations to come and glorify this God who was unlike any other. This was the good news that would eventually conquer the world of the Greeks and Romans for Jesus the Messiah.
Now, Brothers and Sisters, it’s our turn. We’re here this morning reading Luke’s Gospel because the Lord has kept his promises. Because he kept his promise to discipline his own children and, through Jesus, to put his own house in order. Because he kept his promise to pour out his Spirit on that new people who found their identity in Jesus. Because he kept his promise to Simon Peter, that he would, from them on, be catching people instead of fish. Because the Lord was faithful and may in Israel believed. Because the Lord was faithful, the gentiles saw and believed. This God and his crucified and risen Son, and this Spirit-filled people were unlike anything the world had ever seen or heard of and so the world came, a trickle at first, but then nations and eventually an entire empire, to kneel before him and to give him glory. And the amazing thing is that through their faith in Jesus, they became part of this new Israel, this people of God, forgiven by his Son and filled with his Spirit. And ever since, this good news about Jesus and about his cross and about his resurrection from the dead and about his ascension to his heavenly throne and about the faithfulness of the God of Israel has been spreading—gospel fishermen casting their nets and catching fish—catching them that they might hear and believe and repent and know the life of the age to come. Because the Lord will one day judge all the earth, just as he judged Israel, and just as he judged the Greek and Romans. When Jesus has put every last enemy under his feet—and if the Lord’s past record is worth anything, we know Jesus surely will put every last enemy under his feet—when the gospel and the church and the Spirit have done their work—and if the story of Simon Peter and this Spirit-filled church is worth anything, we know it will one day do the work Jesus equipped it to do—then the Lord will finally wipe every last bit of rebellion and sin and wickedness from his creation. There will be outer darkness and weeping and gnashing of teeth, but there will also be life in this world set to rights. Brothers and Sisters, Jesus sends us out to proclaim this good news, to prepare the world for what lies ahead, to preach the death and resurrection of Jesus, to proclaim like royal heralds that he is Lord, and that forgiveness and healing and life with God are his gift, that all who repent and believe can be part of this amazing, life-filled people he has created in Jesus, but that to receive that gift of his grace, we must repent and believe that we might be transformed—aligned with the values of his kingdom, that we might be prepared for the age to come and life with him. Today we’re the gospel fishermen sent out to cast our nets, to proclaim the good news for the glory of God.
Let’s pray: Father, you have called us and made us your people. You send us out, like Simon Peter, to fish for people that they might know the life of your kingdom. When we’re tempted to protest, thinking that we are unworthy of the task, that we are too sinful, that we aren’t up to it, remind us that in Jesus you have forgiven us, that you have made us holy, that you have filled us with your Spirit, and that you have given us this remarkable and irresistible story to tell the world, this story of your goodness, your love, your grace, your mercy, and your faithfulness. Give us the grace to do the work of your kingdom as we trust in your faithfulness to us and to all who hear it. Through the Lord Jesus we pray. Amen.
[1] 1QHa 13:7-11
The Fourth Sunday after Trinity: Suffering and Glory Romans 8:17-23 by William Klock
On Monday I rode by gravel bike up Horne Lake Forest Service Road, up from the lake towards Port Alberni. It’s a big loop through the forests and mountains—basically the middle of nowhere. Before I left I created route using an app on my phone and then I made sure the map was loaded. And by the time I got to Horne Lake there was no cell service, somehow the map “unloaded” itself, and all I had was a blank map with a blurry red line for the road and my little blue GPS dot telling me where I was on it. None of the sideroads or trails were showing, none of the topographical lines were showing. I didn’t know how far I was from the top or where to turn, all I could do after every junction was to check to make sure the little blue dot was still on the blurry red line and if, it wasn’t, turn around and go the other way and check again. And then on my way down cell service returned, the map loaded, and right when I needed my GPS the most, it stopped working. The map showed the road crossing Nile Creek, but when I got there I found a ravine about sixty feet deep and the bridge missing. I couldn’t tell if I was on the right road or how far off course I might end up when I went bushwhacking down a deer trail to see if I could find a place to cross. The whole time I was thinking how much more reliable it was in the old days with a topographic map and a compass. Having that little “You are here” dot isn’t much good if you don’t have a map for reference. And having a map isn’t very helpful if you don’t know where you are on it. That—and some conversations I’ve had the last few weeks with other pastors—got me thinking about how we read the Bible and do theology and all of that. It reminded me why I like what’s called narrative theology and why I think it’s important to always be telling the big biblical story. The biblical story is the map. Narrative theology shows us where we are on the map. Both keep us firmly grounded in the story of God and his people.
We need that. We grow up learning all the stories, but the Bible story book we read as kids—or read to our kids—often leave us with the stories disconnected. We end up knowing Adam and Abraham and Moses and Jesus, but we struggle to know how their stories are related and part of the bigger story. And that often continues on as adults. And we struggle to know where we fit in to it.
I say this because our Epistle from Romans 8 this morning is one those wonderful, short passages that puts a map in front of us. It shows us the big picture of the good news, of God’s redemption and renewal of humanity and of his entire Creation. And it says, “You are here”. Our Epistle this morning is St. Paul leading us right to the climax of his letter to the Romans and here he shows us the map: where we’ve come from, where we’re going, how it all fits together.
In the first half of Romans, Paul works his way through the story of Israel and all her ups and downs—and for Israel things were mostly “down”. And now in Chapter 8 he begins talking about life in the flesh versus life in the Spirit and the law of sin and death versus the law of the Spirit. This is where, in verse 11, he famously writes that if the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us, the One who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies—if we are in Jesus the Messiah we live in hope of the same resurrection he has experienced. But even more than that, Paul goes on to write, through our union with Jesus we are children and heirs of God, fellow heirs with Christ—that means sharing in Jesus’ inheritance. But what is that? Paul writes in verse 17 that it means to suffer with him so that we can be glorified with him. The Christian life—life with Jesus—for Paul means two things: suffering and glory. Suffering is a given as we long for glory.
Most Christians living through the last two thousand years have understood that suffering is part of our calling as we follow Jesus. Jesus promised it. The New Testament writers talk about it often—and most of them faced it themselves and were martyred for proclaiming the lordship of Jesus. Many of our brothers and sisters today are persecuted for their faith in various parts of the world. And yet in the West—probably in part because we haven’t faced persecution for such a long time—many Christians have no place for suffering in their theology. Some even go so far as to say that if you’re experiencing suffering—sickness, poverty, rejection or anything else negative—it’s due to a lack of faith. But that’s just the opposite of what Jesus taught and it’s just the opposite of what Paul teaches here. The inheritance we share with Jesus is one of suffering that leads to glory. What this means is at the centre of our Epistle and Paul goes on in verse 18:
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
Are you suffering? Paul shows the little blue you-are-here GPS dot on the map. This is us. Here’s where we’re at in the big picture, the big story. And Paul says, “For I consider…” That doesn’t mean this is his opinion. He’s put his compass on the map and lined everything up and here’s where it points to and here’s where we are. Knowing the Scriptures, knowing Jesus, working under the Spirit’s inspiration, this is the only conclusion he can reach. He’s been building this argument for eight chapters in Romans and here he reaches the inevitable conclusion: those who will be glorified will first face suffering, but that this suffering can’t begin to compare with the glory to be revealed.
Think about what a powerful statement this was when Paul wrote it. When he writes that word “suffering” most of us probably read into it whatever our own trials and tribulations are. That’s fine. But what did Paul have in mind? Later in the chapter, in verses 35-36 he writes that nothing will separate us from the love of Christ—nothing—and then he goes on to detail the sorts of suffering that he and other Christians were facing—things people might think mean that God doesn’t love them, things they might think show a lack of faith, things that might separate them from Jesus. Here’s his list: hardship or distress, persecution or famine, nakedness or peril or sword. And he quotes from Psalm 44: “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted sheep to be slaughtered.” These things are far worse than the sorts of suffering most of us are likely to face. And as horrible as this suffering was, none of it could compare with the glory to be revealed—no amount of suffering could make the glory not worth it.
But what is the glory Paul’s writing about? Our translation says that this glory is to be revealed “to us”. By that he doesn’t mean that it’s God’s show-and-tell, that we’ll be spectators to this glory. It means that we have a share in it. Think of this glory as a gift given to us by God. Remember what Paul said before: that if we are in Christ, then we will share in his inheritance—we will participate in his inheritance.
And what’s the inheritance? Well, who is Jesus? He is Lord. His glory is revealed or it’s unveiled in his glorious and sovereign rule of Creation and Paul is saying here that the glory we wait for with eager longing, the glory that is the basis for our hope as Christians is not glory in the sense many people often think. We often think of “glory” as a place or a state of being. When a Christian dies we often hear people say that he or she has gone on or been promoted to “glory”. Brothers and Sisters, “glory” is more than just going to heaven when you die. As Jesus’ glory is his sovereign rule over Creation, so the glory to be revealed in us is our participation, our sharing in the sovereign and saving rule of Jesus. Glory is about the resurrection of the dead and all of creation one day set to rights. And this is why he says what he does in verse 19:
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.
Brothers and Sisters, God’s Creation is waiting for the great day when its true rulers will be revealed, the sons of God, and when it will be delivered from corruption. Look at verses 20-22:
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
This is where we need to stand back and look at the big picture. Everything Paul’s saying here is dependent on that. It’s the big picture the Bible gives of us of God’s Creation, from beginning to end. We read in Genesis that God created and that everything was good. We even read there that when he created human beings he looked at his handiwork and declared us not just “good”, but “very good”. But we look around us now and have to wonder what happened. War is always raging somewhere, there’s violence everywhere, there’s greed and corruption everywhere. Justice is in short supply and so are the basic things that people need to survive. And yet even if we don’t pay attention to the big evils that play out on the international scene—or even on the local scene, for that matter—we only have to look at the struggles that we have ourselves and that we share with our family and friends to keep away from sin and to do good. Hate is easy; love is hard. Paul knew it. The Roman Christians knew it. We know it.
Paul tells the story of Creation in the book of Romans, but he tells it as Israel’s story. We don’t have time to run through the whole book this morning, but Paul’s point is that the whole Creation is enslaved in the same sort of way that Israel was in Egypt. And right there we get a glimmer of hope. Because God was involved in that Egyptian exile from beginning to end. He had a purpose. Remember, when Israel went down to Egypt—we read about that in the story of Jacob and Joseph—the Lord arranged for Joseph to become a slave in Egypt so that through him he could rescue his people. Egypt started out good for Israel. When things turned around under a new king who enslaved Israel, it wasn’t because the Lord had ceased to be good and it wasn’t because the Lord was no longer in control. No. We learn later that the Lord allowed the Israelites to become slaves in Egypt so that he could then manifest his glorious sovereignty to everyone—to Israel in rescuing her and to the Egyptians by showing his power over her false gods and over her mighty horses and chariots. In the Exodus, the Lord marked Israel forever as the people he had freed from slavery, people to whom he had given a new life. That became their national identity, celebrated every year in the Passover.
In all of that Paul is working up to his point here. As the Lord allowed Israel to fall into bondage to Egypt, so he has allowed his good Creation to be subjected to death and decay. We may look around and wonder if things are hopeless. Every time one war ends and we see peace break out another war begins somewhere else. We work hard to lift this group out of poverty, but then that group over there falls into it. We cure one disease only to have two new ones crop up. Isaiah wrote about a day when the lion will lie down with the lamb and we look around us and wonder if that’s ever going to happen.
And Paul assures us: Yes, it’s for real. This is God’s promise. No matter how bad things are, this is still his good Creation and he has promised to put everything to rights. Even as he cast Adam and Eve from the garden he was promising them that he would one day overcome sin and restore everything to the way it should be. Genesis shows things going from bad to worse. It shows us humanity losing even the very knowledge of God and sinking into paganism and idolatry. But then it tells us how God came to Abraham and established a covenant with him. The Lord promised that through Abraham and his family he would restore not only humanity, but all of Creation and here Paul reminds us what that means, what it looks like and why the Creation itself would long for it to happen.
Again, we need the big picture—we need to remember where things started. In Genesis we read that the Lord created human beings to be his image bearers. What does it mean to bear God’s image. Well, consider that Israel’s pagan neighbours built great stone temples and then placed images of their gods in them. Those images represented the gods’ rule or sovereignty over the land and people. Genesis uses the same languages and imagery, except that in Genesis it’s the Lord himself who builds his own temple—the cosmos—and instead of placing an image of himself carved in stone or gold in it, he creates human beings, to live in his presence in the temple, but also to rule his creation justly and wisely—to have dominion and to subdue Creation in his name. That’s what it meant for humanity to bear God’s image: to be his stewards, the priests of his temple. But then we chose to rebel. As Paul writes in Romans 1, we chose to worship the Creation instead of the Creator. We subjected the Lord’s good creation to corruption.
Now, in light of that, it should make sense when Paul writes that Creation is longing for the day when our inheritance is revealed. That’s the day when Creation will be set free from the corruption we brought on it. That’s the day when we, Creation’s stewards will be restored and renewed and put back in charge, reigning with Jesus. Again, think back to Israel. He chose and called her, he rescued her, he made her his people, he sent her to the nations to bring healing and restoration. But she rebelled and she rejected her mission. And yet the Lord didn’t give up and he didn’t change his plan to redeem his Creation through Israel. He simply sent a faithful Israelite—he sent Jesus. And Jesus not only redeemed Israel by dying in her place, he established a new Israel in his own person, a new people to be a light to the nations—this time equipped by the Holy Spirit.
This is what Paul is getting at in verse 23. It’s not just the Creation that groans in eager longing:
And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
The Lord hasn’t given up on his Creation any more than he gave up on Israel. Creation is eagerly waiting for its rightful stewards to be set right. On that great day the Lord will make all things new and restore his redeemed people to their—to our—rightful place as good, wise, and just rulers of Creation—as the faithful priests of his temple. This is what it means for our glory to be revealed. The big picture, the story of redemption, reminds us that this was how it was supposed to be from the beginning. And so we groan and we wait eagerly too. We live in the mess we’ve made here in the world. We live with sin and with sickness and with death, and yet we live in hope, knowing that what God has begun in Jesus he will one day complete and on that day his glory will be revealed to an extent we can’t even imagine.
And, Paul writes, we can hope because our God has given us the firstfruits of his new creation. He’s given a down payment on what he has promised. The present age and its rulers have been decisively defeated by Jesus at the cross and at the empty tomb and God’s new age has been inaugurated. Jesus is ascended to his throne. He is Lord. He truly is God’s King. He’s given us his Spirit—Paul describes the Spirit here as the firstfruits—and that’s because we live in the overlap between these two ages, these two kingdoms. The Jews brought the firstfruits of the harvest—usually sheaves of grain harvested at the very beginning of the season—as offerings to God. They offered them in good years and even in bad years in faith that God would provide the rest of the harvest. And so the Spirit is the sign of hope for us. The life he gives to us here and now is a reminder that encourages our faith and hope in the resurrection and the new creation to come. We groan and we sigh, we wait longingly in eager expectation, but our hope is certain because God is faithful and keeps his promises. The prophet Habakkuk wrote that one day the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea. Brothers and Sisters, when that seems impossible, we only need remember the cross of Jesus, his empty tomb, and his gift of the Holy Spirit.
But our faith is not a complacent faith. We haven’t been redeemed by Jesus and given the gift of the Spirit so that we can retreat into a sort of personal holiness or private piety while we wait for Jesus to return. Not at all. Jesus has inaugurated this new age in his resurrection and somehow someday the making new that began in his resurrection will encompass all of Creation and you and I are called, in the power of the Spirit, to embody that renewing work here and now. How is Habakkuk’s prophecy going to be fulfilled? How does the knowledge of the glory of the Lord spread to cover the earth? Brothers and Sisters, that’s our mission. We’re called to proclaim to the world the Good News that Jesus is Lord and that his kingdom is here and now. Our mission is to call the world to repentance and faith. But don’t forget: We are also called to live out repentance and faith in our lives in such a way that we lift the veil on the kingdom and that we give a glimpse to the world of what heaven on earth looks like. So far as we are able to do so today, we are called to exercise the good dominion that was given to Adam—we are called to be stewards of God’s temple, of his Creation. Jesus, the second Adam, has led the way for us here. In his earthly ministry he made his Father’s new creation known in practical ways to the people around him and so should we. In a word full of sin we should be visible in seeking after holiness. In a world full of war and injustice, we should visible and at the forefront working for peace and justice. In a world full of hurting and sickness, we should be seeking to make the healing ministry of Jesus known. In a world full of anger and hate, we should be working for forgiveness and reconciliation.
If you’re like me you might get discouraged thinking about the mission Jesus has given us. It seems overwhelming. The word is so broken and so dark. It doesn’t seem like anyone is watching and no one wants to listen. Sometimes it seems like you have to be a Peter or a Paul—someone important or high profile—to make a difference for the kingdom. But Friends, never forget that for every St. Paul or St. Peter, there were thousands of ordinary saints manifesting Jesus in their ordinary lives, proclaiming the Good News, and building the kingdom right where they were. We fulfil Jesus’ calling to us as we raise covenant children to walk with him in faith and to live the values of his kingdom. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we work for peace and reconciliation with our neighbours, in our workplaces, and in our schools. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we forgive as we have been forgiven. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we love the hard-to-love people around us, knowing that we ourselves are hard-to-love too, but that Jesus loved us enough to die for us. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we sacrifice ourselves, our rights, our prerogatives, our time, and our treasure in order to make Jesus and his love known. In everything we do, we should be seeking to give to this groaning and suffering world foretastes of God’s glory, of God’s new creation.
Let us pray: Heavenly Father, as we asked earlier in the collect we ask again for grace that to pass through the trials of this life without losing the things of eternal importance. Remind us that the suffering we experience cannot begin to compare with the glory to be revealed to us. Remind us always of the suffering that Jesus endured for our sake that in love and gratitude we might suffer too for the sake of making him known. And as we think of Jesus’ death and resurrection and as we live the life given by your Spirit, fill us with hope and faith, knowing that the glory inaugurated in us today will one day be fully accomplished in our own resurrection and the restoration of all your Creation. Amen.
The Third Sunday after Trinity: Pride and Humility 1 St. Peter 5:5-11 & St. Luke 15:1-10 by William Klock
St. Peter wrote his first epistle to the churches scattered and dispersed across Asia Minor, what we call Turkey today. We don’t know exactly when he wrote it, but there are some clues. He writes to them from “Babylon”, which almost certainly means Rome, and that narrows the date down to around 62 to 63—during the reign of Nero, but before Nero declared “open season” on Christians. Rome was still a hard place to be as a Christian, but Peter was writing to his brothers and sisters in Asia Minor because it was particularly hard for them there. If you think back to our study of Revelation, the situation of those seven churches to which St. John wrote just a few years later wasn’t very different from the situation these churches were in. It wasn’t so much that the government was actively persecuting Christians, but that these Christians lived in the midst of a culture that was just generally hostile towards them. The Church stood apart from the Greco-Roman culture and its way of life and its values and that meant that standing firm for Jesus and the gospel and the kingdom of God was a challenge. On a good day your neighbours thought you were weird and on a bad day you might be cut off by your family, or lose your job because you refused to be part of a guild meeting that involved pagan worship, or you might catch the ire of some government official who suspected you of being disloyal because you refused to offer a pinch of incense to Caesar. Most of the people in these churches were gentiles. They had come out of that wicked and perverted and idolatrous Greco-Roman culture, so they knew what it would cost to follow Jesus. They had heard the good news about Jesus and how, in him, the God of Israel had shown his goodness and faithfulness, and they had believed. The gospel told a better story than any they’d ever heard. The God of Israel revealed himself to be unlike any god they’d ever known or worshiped. And the resurrection of Jesus pointed to a greater and more certain hope than any they had ever dreamed of.
But to most of the people around them, this good news was foolishness. They hated it. They despised the people who believed it. Because if it was true, it meant everything they valued, the gods they believed in, and everything they hoped for was a lie. And so the pagans around them opposed them and made life difficult for them. And that’s why Peter wrote: to exhort them to stand firm in the truth they had learned and believed about Jesus. He reminds them of the gospel. He reminds them who they are: the new Israel and the temple of God’s own Spirit. And Peter also reminds them that as they face opposition and persecution, Jesus and his own response to suffering and death is to be their model. Why? Because his triumphant resurrection is the root and source of their hope. Jesus and the gospel will win the final victory, because Jesus and the gospel have already won the decisive victory.
And then Peter wraps up his epistle with an exhortation to humility, which we read a few minutes ago.
Brothers and Sisters, I don’t think I’ve ever preached on this passage when the Third Sunday after Trinity has come around. I’ve always preached on the Gospel—on Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. I’ll come back to those in closing. But it strikes me that this Spirit-inspired exhortation to humility is more important than ever as the pagan culture of our day spends this month celebrating an orgy of the very opposite—of pride.
For the month of June the secular, pagan culture around us has been shaking its fist at God. Like Pharaoh, his world falling apart around him as the God of Israel revealed his might and his power, but refusing to give up his claims of divinity, refusing to let go of the belief that he was in control of reality and of his own destiny, our Postmodern culture devotes an entire month to the denial of sin and of shame; it devotes an entire month to celebrating its defiance of the very first command given by the Creator to the human race: “Be fruitful and multiply”. Our culture devotes a month to celebrating sinful unions that go against the God-given nature of our bodies, unions that can never produce children, unions that deliberately undermine the institutions that God established as the root of healthy, flourishing human life: marriage and the family. This is why St. Paul, in the first chapter of Romans, singles out homosexuality as the sin that marks out a society’s decline to the bottom of the moral sewer, because in embracing this sin, a society has given up on and rejected the very purpose for which we have been created, given up on and rejected the first of God’s instructions, and given up on and rejected the reality of the natural order of creation. It marks out a culture that has embraced self-annihilation.
But somehow, these last few years, our culture has sunk even lower than Paul could envision a culture sinking. We’ve gone so far as to deny the very reality of our sex, denying the blatantly obvious, denying our biology, denying the chromosomes that make us who we are, denying who God has made us, and claiming that men can be women and that women can be men. It begins with a rejection of the Messiah and the gospel. And then we reject the great story. Postmodern culture hates these metanarratives, because they undermine who we think we are, they undermine our individualism, and because they show us our place in God’s great story when we’d rather be writing our own stories—as if we know better than God. Our culture insists that everyone has the right to be whoever he or she wants to be, and so we finally reject reality itself. A man can be a woman. Or a woman can be a cat. And the rest of us must bow to the will and beliefs of the individual and play along, denying reality ourselves. In Orwell’s 1984, dissidents were threatened with whatever they feared the most until they finally broke down and confessed the lie that 2+2=5. Today we’re boycotted or cancelled or accused of oppression. Families are emotionally blackmailed into cooperation with threats of suicide. “Would you rather have a dead son or a live, albeit pretend, daughter?” they ask to shame us into playing along with the lie.
It’s an orgy of pride. And our culture has revamped its institutions to accommodate it: government, education, medicine, business. What we used to call “counselling” has been almost entirely replaced with what’s now call “therapy”. Because the last thing any prideful person wants to hear is that they are wrong. Prideful people want to feel good about themselves and their choices, and so we now have armies of “therapists” who listen and nod and affirm and repeat the dishonest and death-dealing mantra, “You are enough”, instead of correcting or discipling or simply reminding us of our place in the great story and pulling us back to reality. It’s the serpent in the garden all over again, assuring us that we can be our own gods, creating and defining our own realities and defining right and wrong for ourselves. And the armies of therapists keep growing, because reality and the God it makes known will not go away, no matter how hard we try. Depression has reached epidemic levels, especially in youth who have been indoctrinated into this way of thinking. It’s what happens when we’re told to be ourselves, whoever that may be, but reality dictates otherwise. You can have sex with people of the same sex forever, but such a union will never produce children and will never be a family and will never fulfil the purpose for which you were created. You can dress in the clothes of the opposite sex, you can take the hormones of the opposite sex, you can even mutilate your body to make it look superficially like the opposite sex, but you can never really be the opposite sex. And you can’t always just go off and be whatever you want to be. Only a few people are cut out to be astronauts or literary geniuses or great artists. And reality dictates that we have obligations to others—to mothers and fathers and to children—that outweigh our “dreams”. And so rather than embracing the reality that God has given to us, we become resentful and depressed. All because of pride.
But there is nothing new under the sun. Julius Firmicus Maternus wrote against the pagan practises of the Fourth Century. This is what he wrote about the priest of Cybele:
“In their very temples can be seen deplorable mockery before a moaning crowd, men taking the part of women, revealing with boastful ostentation this ignominy of impure and unchaste bodies. They broadcast their crimes and confess with superlative delight the stain of their polluted bodies….They wear effeminately nursed hair and dress in soft clothes…having made themselves alien to masculinity.” A century later St. Augustine wrote about the same priests, “Even till yesterday, with dripping hair and painted faces, with flowing limbs and feminine walk, they pass through the streets and alleys of Carthage, exacting from merchants that by which they might shamefully live.”[1]
Everything old is new again. Today such people visit the local merchants and threaten to boycott them if they don’t display their rainbow in the window. There is nothing new under the sun. And rather than acknowledge reality, our culture comes after those of us who dare to speak the truth. Our post-Christians age isn’t very different from the world in St. Peter lived and wrote his epistle. The false gods have different names, but are still pretty much the same. As the gospel has waned, pride reigns again and will brook no opposition.
But, Brothers and Sisters, gospel people aren’t immune from this cultural infection. Pride creeps into our hearts and it creeps into our churches. And we’re especially susceptible when it has become the water in which our culture swims, the air our culture breathes. It becomes so normal, we become so acclimate to it that it gets by us—gets into us—unnoticed. And so Peter, in chapter five of his epistle, begins by exhorting the shepherds of the flock to shepherd with humility, but then, in verse 5, he writes to the rest of the people in the churches:
Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
Clothes yourselves with humility. Of all the virtues Peter could had told them to put on, he chooses humility. Why? Well, what does humility look like? Back in Chapter 2 Peter points us to Jesus. He is always our example when it comes to virtue. In this case Peter wrote those familiar words in 2:21-23:
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.
Pride puts self first—even sometimes to the absurd point of denying reality itself as we see around us today. Pride demands that everyone around us bow to our delusions lest they be exposed. Pride demands everyone affirm us, lest we be reminded of our shame. But humility. Humility puts others first. Humility gives. Humility sacrifices. Brothers and Sisters, if you want to see, if you want to understand humility, look to the cross. Look to Jesus, scourged and beaten and bloody, dying the worst death imaginable, and doing so willingly and for the sake of the very people who had put him there. That’s humility. He was sinless, but died the death of the worst of sinners. Harsh words were spoken to him, but he did not respond in kind. He was beaten and scourged—God himself beaten and scourged, who could have called a legion of angels to rescue him or fire and brimstone to rain down on his enemies—but he chose not to threaten. He could have vindicated himself, but instead he entrusted himself to his Father, who judges justly. He died for us, sacrificing everything, that we might live. That is humility.
And Peter writes to the churches saying that this humility is what should characterize us. It’s what should set us apart from the world around us. The world is full of pride. The church should be full of humility. Through the epistle Peter has addressed all sorts of relationships: masters and slaves, children and parents, husbands and wives, shepherds and their flocks—pastors and churches—and now he just addresses everyone. Clothe yourselves with the same humility that you see every time you look to the cross, the same humility you see every time you come to the Lord’s Table and eat the bread and drink the wine remembering what Jesus has done for you. That is the character of the Christian, because it is the character of Christ. Humility is the polar opposite of how the words lives, but humility is what it looks like to live out the gospel ourselves and in community as the people of God—and we do this for the sake of the pride-filled world that hates us—just as Jesus did.
And, Brothers and Sisters, if we don’t clothe ourselves with humility there are consequences. I was thinking about this as I reflected on Peter’s quote here from Proverbs 3:34. “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Let me read a bit more of the context of that passage from Proverbs.
The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked,
but he blesses the dwelling of the righteous.
Toward the scorners he is scornful,
but to the humble he gives favor.
The wise will inherit honor,
but fools get disgrace. (Proverbs 3:33-35)
“The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the dwelling of the righteous.” For the last couple of hundred years our culture has become increasingly focused and centred on the individual. That hasn’t been all bad, but it hasn’t been all good either. It’s part of how we got where we are today with every man doing what is right in his own eyes. But it means that when we think about how we relate to God, we do so almost always on individual terms. We think of salvation in individualistic terms. We think of judgement and blessing in individualistic terms. Increasingly we think that we can be Christians in individualistic terms—forget church, I’ll just read my Bible and pray at home. This is individualism gone to seed. It means we hardly ever—or maybe we don’t at all—think about how our choices impact the Church. It’s what leads us to hop from church to church, never really committing, always looking for some new experience or looking to have our needs met. And it’s what leads us to think that what we do in our personal lives, or as families, or when no one else is watching, it’s what leads us to think that these things have no repercussions for the larger church. But if we read the Bible carefully, we see that this isn’t how God works. He works with people and he calls us into community. We can’t be in covenant with him without also being in covenant with each other. Israel as a nation was repeatedly punished for the sins and unfaithfulness of her leaders. Or there’s that one particularly dramatic and troubling case of Achan in the book of Joshua. He secretly stole some treasure from the ruins of Jericho, treasure that the Lord had claimed for himself, treasure that was forbidden to the people. Achan, just one man, stole it and hid it in his tent and because of that, in the next battle, the Lord was not with his people. They were defeated. People died. And when Achan was discovered, he was executed—and his whole family with him. It’s a sobering reminder that, up until a hundred or two hundred years ago, most people understood. We balk at it. We’re perplexed by it. Because we’re so focused—often unhealthily so—on the individual. But this is what Proverbs is getting at. The Lord will curse and the Lord will bless individuals, yes, but he will also curse and bless households—the household of Israel, or even the household of the church. What we do and how we live isn’t just a personal matter, it has consequences for good or ill for the whole church.
Our witness is both individual and corporate. There were faithful men and women in Israel, men and women who held their light high, who lived passionately and faithfully as people who lived in the presence of the Lord. But they weren’t the ones the world was watching. The world was watching the hypocritical kings and priests who lived sinful lives, who set up altars to false gods in the temple, who trusted in horses and chariots. Those kings and priests destroyed the witness of the nation and the nation as a whole was punished so that the gentile nations could see that the God of Israel took seriously the covenant he had with his people.
This is why, in Revelation, Jesus warns the churches that if they are not faithful—if they are lukewarm, if they do not recover their love for him, if they do not repent of the sin they’ve been tolerating in their midst, if they keep tolerating false prophets and teachers—he will take away their lampstands. The Lord will discipline his church. The good news is that it’s not about our perfection, but about where our hearts are. No church is perfect. And Peter’s telling us that if we will clothe ourselves with Jesus-like humility, the Lord will bless our faithfulness. Humility sacrifices self for the sake of our brothers and sisters, for the sake of Jesus, and for the sake of the gospel. Humility puts an end to those sins committed in secret and to sins that we justify for selfish reasons, and to open sins that undermine our witness before the world. As the humility of Jesus has brought us together in one body, as we clothe ourselves with humility we commit ourselves to one another in love and grace.
It's not easy, but Peter reminds us that we do this in light of the hope that Jesus gives and knowing that whatever hard things we face, they are not unique to us. Let’s look again at the rest of the Epistle:
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.
It's hard. And Peter knew that it was only going to get harder. But he reminds them of the story and the story reminds us of our hope. When the world comes after us, our problem is that we want to vindicate ourselves and that usually ends up with us lashing out in kind. But our pride will never defeat the world’s pride. Instead, Peter urges us to remember that as God, the just judge, vindicated Jesus when he raised him from the dead, so he will vindicate us. We just need to stand firm in humility as Jesus did. Our hope lies not in our present circumstances, but in Jesus. By his death and resurrection he has defeated sin and death. That was the hard part. And so we look forward in hope—standing firm in faith (and in humility)—knowing that he will one day finish what he started. And we remember that he tarries so that we, his church, can do the work of the kingdom in the meantime—seeking out the lost, proclaiming the good news, that the Lord might bring them back to the sheepfold.
Our Gospel today gives us those vivid and dramatic pictures of the shepherd out looking for his lost sheep. Ninety-nine were safe, but he cared even for that one—cared enough to go out in the danger of the night to find it and to carry it back home. And the story of the woman, searching high and low for her lost coin, finally moving everything and sweeping the whole house in order to find it. And both rejoiced—almost excessively. I always wondered if the other shepherds were annoyed when he woke them. “It’s just one sheep. Let us sleep!” And I wonder how much of that silver coin it cost the woman to throw her party to celebrate that it was found. But that’s the point. The Lord cares more than we can fathom for those who are lost. As much as we celebrate baptisms in the church here, I think the celebrations in heaven over those baptisms must be a thousand times greater. But the more we clothe ourselves with humility, Brothers and Sisters, the more I think we’ll gain that heavenly perspective. The more we clothe ourselves with humility, the more driven we’ll be to do the work of the kingdom—to make Jesus and his good news known, to shine our lights brightly into the darkness, even as we face opposition, mockery, and even persecution. And, too, as we clothe ourselves with Jesus-like humility, we will come to understand better and better the story we’ve been called to tell—the story about humanity and the God of Israel, about Jesus and the cross, about this great exodus from sin and death and the hope of this world set to rights—the story that is not only the antidote to pride, but the story that ultimately returns and reconciles all the lost sheep, all the lost coins, and all the prodigal sons and daughters to the God who gave his life for us. Brothers and Sisters, stand firm in faith, clothe yourselves with humility. The Christians to whom Peter and John wrote did just that and because of their witness the prideful and perverted culture of the Greeks and Romans was conquered by the gospel. That’s what the gospel does. That’s what the gospel will do again, conquering our prideful and perverted culture, if we will only stand firm in faith, living and proclaiming the good news about Jesus.
Let’s pray: O Lord, hear us in your mercy, we pray, and grant that we, to whom you have given the desire to pray, may be defended and comforted by your mighty aid, and strengthened in all dangers and adversities, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] Quoted in Will Roscoe, “Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion”, History of Religions, Vol. 35, No. 3 (February 1996), 195-196.
The Second Sunday after Trinity: Love in Deed and Truth 1 John 3:13-24 & St. Luke 14:16-24 by William Klock
We read a portion of St. John’s first epistle this morning. He writes to the churches saying, “Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18). “Little children”. Not just “children”, but “little children”. The Greek word for children is tekna. But then there’s teknia, John’s choice of words. They add an “i” to make the usual word diminutive—cutesy, tender, and endearing. I think you’re probably all familiar with that often abused Aramaic word that Jesus used: abba. It means “father”, but it’s warmer, closer, more personal, which is why sometimes people try to get that sense with “papa” or even “daddy”. It’s what a child would call his own father. “Little children” isn’t quite like that, but I think it’s close. John was a very old man by the time he wrote the words of today’s Epistle. He had become a spiritual father to these people, and so he calls them “little children” to convey something of that relationship. But it also fits the context, because he’s got some hard words for them—something they desperately need to hear, but that won’t be easy—so John addresses them as a father lovingly speaking to his little children. Teaching little children about love isn’t easy. It’s easy to tell children about love. But getting them to understand, that’s the hard part. And getting them to love and to love consistently, that’s even harder. I can remember being very young and singing songs about loving Jesus and praying prayers that expressed my love for him. And I would pray for Daddy and Mommy and my sister, Jackie, and then five minutes later Jackie would do something that made me angry—or maybe she didn’t do anything at all—and I would do something mean and unloving to her. And I would get spanked and Dad or Mom would send me out to apologise and to give her a hug and to saying, “I love you.” But then a few days later it would happen all over again. And as adults, sometimes we aren’t all that different. We can still act like “little children”. Only now it’s our brother or our sister at church or our husband or wife or our children or someone at work. Talking about love is easy and cheap; actual loving in deed and in truth can be difficult and costly.
We profess love for God. We come to church and sing songs about our love for him. We recite the summary of the law every Sunday—reminding ourselves of our duty to love God and to love each other. But something happens—maybe even on the way home—and we so quickly become selfish, spiteful, and even vengeful. About twenty-five years ago, back when cable internet service was a new thing and whole neighbourhoods shared a single cable line, one DSL provider aired a serious of hilarious commercials that took place on a fictional street where everyone shared the same cable internet line. The bandwidth shortages turned friends and neighbours into enemies. One man was whacking his weeds and, when the neighbour turned his back, reached over the fence, and ran his weed-whacker through his flowers. Another neighbour returned the favour, shooting a stream of water from his hose through the open sunroof of the car in the next driveway. Another neighbour woke to find “Web Hog” spraypainted across his garage door and his cable line cut. Eventually, as the commercials progressed, the neighbourhood looked more and more like a war zone, all because of this escalating tit-for-tat over limited internet bandwidth.
It was funny. But it also tapped into the reality of human nature. It’s amazing how mean and unloving we human beings can be even over petty things—and it only escalates from there. As I said back in Eastertide when we were looking at St. James’ epistle, our first response when things go wrong is all too often to think that adding a good helping of our own anger to the mix is what will fix things—and then things spiral out of control. But Jesus shows us a better way. At the cross our sin and evil, the power of the devil, all of it rose up to its full height and did its worst, we struck down the very man who was God incarnate come to set this broken world to rights, and instead of striking down his enemies, instead of raining down fire and brimstone on them, he took every last bit of their hate and returned it with love and he broke the cycle. He shed his blood for the very men and women who rejected him as Messiah and who demanded his crucifixion. As we heard Jesus say in our Gospel last week, “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Brothers and Sisters, that’s love. That’s the better way—to return hate with love. And it’s hard, because it’s going to cost us, but it’s the way—the only way—into God’s kingdom, because this kind of love is the defining way of God’s kingdom. That’s why God has called his people from the beginning to love him and to love our neighbours—whether that was by hearing and obeying the law of Moses in the days of the old covenant or hearing and obeying the law of the Spirit in the days of the new. We are God’s means of bringing light into the darkness of the world, and so he calls us to be the people who exemplify what it means to live with God in our midst. We are witnesses of his love and his goodness and his faithfulness and it is in our midst that the world should have a foretaste of what it will one day look like when God finally defeats every last enemy and sets it all to rights.
But, like little children, we too often forget what it’s all about. We forget that we’re part of God’s kingdom by grace. We forget the costliness of love. We forget that we are stewards of God’s light, we forget that we’ve been given this good news about Jesus, so that we might proclaim it to the world, bringing others into the light. And instead we become proud of ourselves for having the light and we keep it to ourselves instead of holding it high, we condemn the people out in the dark as if we weren’t once out in that same darkness ourselves. God’s people have always struggled with this.
At the beginning of Chapter 14 of his Gospel, Luke tells us that one Sabbath Jesus was invited to have dinner at the house of a prominent Pharisee and that there was a man there who had dropsy or oedema. The whole thing looks like a setup. Looking at the man and then turning to these authorities on the law, Jesus asks them if it’s legal to heal on the Sabbath. Luke says that they were silent. Jesus then healed the man and sent him on his way and we can gather that the lawyers and Pharisees all looked very offended and scandalised—even though they had to have known that this is exactly what Jesus would do. Jesus then asked them, “Which of you who, if your son or your ox fell into a well on the Sabbath wouldn’t immediately pull him out?” And despite the answer being obvious—of course they’d pull out him out!—they didn’t know what to say. They knew whatever they might say would condemn them.
But what’s that all about? Well, remember that for the Jews of Jesus’ day and especially for the Pharisees, there were three main things that set them apart from everyone else in the world: circumcision, the Sabbath, and their diet. At least one of those things comes into play here. The Pharisees were zealous to keep the Sabbath holy and that meant absolutely no kind of work. The Lord had given them this commandment to keep the sabbath as part of that whole matrix of laws meant to set them apart and to distinguish them from the nations. Everyone else lived in darkness, but Israel—they were the people who lived with the Lord in their midst. But these men has forgotten that at the heart of the law, the driving force behind it, was love. Every part of it in some way was meant to exhibit a love for God or a love for neighbour—or both at the same time. And keeping the sabbath showed a love for God, but it was never meant to show love for God to the exclusion of love for neighbour. The law itself—and this is what Jesus is getting at—had provisions. If your child fell in a well on the sabbath, the Lord granted permission to do the work necessary to get him out—because the law also taught the people about the Lord’s love for them. The Pharisees knew this, but like little children they’d become petty. Jesus had broken the law. How dare he show God’s love to a crippled man on the sabbath when he could have asked the man to come back on Monday! Well, that, and if he was crippled, he must have done something awful to deserve such punishment from God. Who was Jesus to overturn such a verdict? This is what they’d made of the law, but this was not how it was supposed to be. As Jesus warned in the Sermon on the Mount, they’d been given the light, but they’d turned it into darkness. How would the nations ever see the God of Israel at work in such a people? How would the nations ever be so amazed that they’d come to give him glory?
I suspect this was a setup meant to trap Jesus. The man was most likely a beggar who showed up at the door for scraps. Beggars did that all the time when rich people were having banquets. But to see what Jesus would do, the host allowed this man to actually slip into the banquet. And instead of throwing him some scraps and sending him on his way, Jesus welcomed the man into the banquet and healed him. And they acted shocked and appalled. But they knew from the beginning that this is what he would do, because it's what he’d been doing throughout his ministry. It’s what he was known for. But Jesus, wise as always, turned the tables back on them.
The Pharisees didn’t know what to say, but Jesus launches in to two parables. The first addresses all the social posturing that went on at these banquets. Everyone was invited for a reason and ultimately in order for the host to show off the status he had in the world and, hopefully, to elevate himself even higher. The second parable is today’s Gospel reading and it begins at verses 12-14:
He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”
Jesus strikes at the Pharisees’ source of security. The resurrection of the dead was one of the key doctrines of the Pharisees. They knew that when the Messiah came, he would judge the wicked and resurrect the righteous. And, of course, they were the righteous who would be resurrected. And here Jesus tells them: “The resurrection you’re sure of—you’re going to miss it if you don’t change—if you don’t repent. You’re convinced the Lord will reward you for your righteousness, but until you start showing mercy and grace to the poor, to the unclean, and to the outsider, you will never understand true righteousness. If you want to take part in the coming resurrection of the dead, you need to start bearing fruit that reflects grace. You need to get your head around the fact that for all your righteousness and law-keeping, you too are sinners. You won’t be saved from the coming judgement because of your family or your intellect, your law-keeping or your spirituality. Only those who can humbly acknowledge their sinfulness and who are ready to trust in God’s grace—and are humble and gracious enough to share it with sinners even worse than themselves—only they will be resurrected when the Lord comes.
But Jesus’ fellow dinner guests still don’t get it. One clueless soul chimes in, cheerfully declaring: “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” He doesn’t understand that Jesus is telling him that if he doesn’t repent of his self-righteousness, if he doesn’t humble himself before God, he won’t eat bread in the kingdom of God. And so Jesus tells a second parable that’s even more vivid and that strikes even harder at the Jews’ source of security. Look at verses 15-20:
But he said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. And at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them. Please have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’
Remember, again, how important an event like this was in the First Century. This wasn’t just a matter of putting a roast in the oven and inviting friends to eat and play cards after dinner. If they call at the last minute to say they can’t make it, you might be disappointed, but you can do it again next week. A banquet like the one Jesus describes was a major social event. The guest list was carefully made to everyone’s mutual social advantage. To top it off, a big banquet was an expensive affair—you couldn’t just postpone it because your guests backed out at the last minute. And for that matter, as a guest to a banquet like this, backing out was a huge social snub. For all their excuses, what these guests are really doing is orchestrating a rejection of their host.
What’s interesting is that the man hosting the banquet simply decides to throw all social propriety and the whole hierarchical system of their world out the window. If the people of his own social class will have nothing to do with him, he’ll have nothing to do with them. Look at how he responds:
So the servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’” (Luke 14:21-24)
When the rich won’t come, he rounds up the poor. Notice that his servant literally has to bring them or even compel them to come to the banquet. The poor and crippled and blind and lame knew that they didn’t belong. When they heard the invitation from the servant, they would have thought it was a joke. Banquets were all about quid pro quo and tit for tat. They had nothing to offer this rich man who invited them. In Israel it should not have been like that, but Israel had become very worldly. The Pharisees kept the law—at least outwardly—but they’d forgotten it’s heart of love. And so the rich man sends his servants out to round up these outsiders and to bring them to the banquet to enjoy his gracious hospitality. The rich man rejects the whole system of patronage and debts and reciprocal favours—none of those who rejected his invitation will ever sit at his table. Instead, he’s going to share his hospitality with the people who haven’t earned it and can never repay it.
Luke doesn’t tell us how the Pharisees responded or if they even understood, but it’s hard to think that it didn’t sink in on some level. Everyone in the Jewish world, and especially the Pharisees, were waiting for the Lord’s return. The prophets had talked about that great day in terms of a great banquet and this banquet idea then became a common image of the coming Day of the Lord. Israel’s God would return to judge and to cast down the nations (and the unfaithful within Israel) and then would throw a great feast for his beloved people. The closest things they had to describe it was their entry into the promised land, the land of milk and honey, and the prosperous days of King David. It would be like that, only a thousand times more so. And now Jesus explains that he’s come to open the door to that great banquet. This is what Israel has been waiting for all these years. And yet Jesus rebukes them. This isn’t the first time the Lord has extended his invitation. For centuries he had called to his people through the prophets, but they had refused to hear the prophets and had even killed some of them. And now Jesus has come and he’s travelled through Galilee and Judea, inviting everyone to the banquet, but like the people in the parable, they all have excuses.
It’s worth noting the excuses given in the parable. One man says that he’s bought five yoke of oxen sight-unseen and has to check them over. Another has bought a field sight-unseen and needs to go have a look at it. The third just got married and has obligations to his new bride. The first two excuses peg these men as very wealthy. Five yoke of oxen would only be needed to plough a very large tract of land. A wealthy absentee landlord was the sort of person who would buy a field without first seeing it. But all three of these excuses go back to the law given in Deuteronomy. A man who had built a new house, but hadn’t dedicated it yet, a man who had bought a field, but hadn’t enjoyed its produce, and a newly married man were all excused from going off to war. And now these guests twist those laws as excuses to reject their host’s banquet. But this is what Israel had done with the law: twisting it into something it was never meant to be. And it’s that twisting of the law that was particularly exemplified in the Pharisees. Jesus didn’t meet their expectations of the Messiah. His banquet included too many sinners, unclean people, and outsiders. They had gutted the torah of its loving heart. And so they rejected the invitation. And in response Jesus issues a warning here: If you continue to reject my invitation I will turn from you and take my invitation to the unclean and to the sick and to the poor—and even to the gentiles—and having rejected me, you will never taste of my goodness or of the salvation I’ve brought to the world.
But the parable, I think, has another level of meaning. Imagine Luke writing a generation later. Even if greater Israel had rejected Jesus’ invitation, thousands of Jews had accepted it. The first Christians were all Jews, and then an amazing thing happened: the Good News went out to the hated Samaritans—and many of them accepted the invitation. And then it went out to the Gentiles—and thousands of them accepted it too. And suddenly those first Jewish Christians were in a situation very much like the Pharisees had been. They were Jews. They were the chosen. They were the clean people. They were the righteous and holy people. Even an apostle like Peter struggled to go and pray with a gentile convert. It’s a reminder that even we who have received the grace of God, are still prone to forgetting that we come to his Table not because of our own merit, but only because of Jesus and only because of grace. We need to remember that grace when we’re tempted to think that there are people who don’t belong here. Brothers and sisters, none of us belongs here. We’re only here because God is gracious and sent his Son to die and rise from the dead for our sake. Through Jesus, the God of Israel reaches out to everyone with his promise of forgiveness and redemption and the life of the age to come if we will only repent and believe and take up his way of love and light.
But this now takes us back to Jesus’ call in verses 12-14: “When you give a dinner…do not invite your friends…lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” Dear friends—St. John would say, “Little children”—as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning, think on the fact that he has invited us here from the highways and hedges. We didn’t belong here, but Jesus has washed us clean and grafted us into his family as adopted sons and daughters. Because of him, because of his loving sacrifice for us, we do belong. But having been invited, he now calls us to be hosts ourselves. Lest we forget. Lest we think that we’ve earned our place here at the Table. Lest we ever think that others don’t belong, Jesus now calls us to go out to the highways and the hedges—to go to the place we may have forgotten where he once found us. He calls us to look for the poor, the unclean, and sinners, not to condemn them, but to invite them to the Lord’s banquet—to invite them to receive the grace of God just as we have. To invite them to come and be forgiven, healed, set free, and washed clean by Jesus. Here he shows us what true love looks like, the love that he has shown us in giving his own life on the cross, and now he sends us out to live and to share and to show that same love in the power of his Spirit.
Let us pray: Father, you delight to show mercy to sinners and you graciously sent your Son to suffer the punishment we deserve. We have received your grace and have been given new life. Remind us to set aside all thoughts of self-righteousness. Give us opportunities now to share your mercy and grace with others, give us eyes to see those opportunities, and a love for sinners that we might never let those opportunities pass us by. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Feast of St. Barnabas: You Are My Friends Acts 11:22-30 & St. John 15:12-16 by William Klock
Today the usual scripture lessons for the Second Sunday after Trinity gets bumped as the Church commemorates St. Barnabas. Most of what we know about St. Barnabas is found in the book of Acts, although Paul mentions him in some of his epistles. We know that his given name was Joseph, that he was a Levite, and that his family came from the island of Cyprus. For centuries Jews had been scattered all over the known world—we call that the Jewish Diaspora—and Barnabas was part of that. “Barnabas” was what the other apostles called him and it means something like “son of exhortation” or “son of consolation”. The word can refer to encouragement and exhortation, but it can also refer to comfort and consolation and in some way Barnabas was characterised by this—obviously enough that that’s what the others named him. I take that to mean he was a great preacher and that he was probably also very caring in the way he ministered the gospel and the grace of God to others.
And, I guess it should be obvious from the fact that the feast refers to him as St. Barnabas the Apostle that he was an apostle. I don’t think I’ve ever preached on what it means to be an apostle. But since there are plenty of folks running around today claiming to be apostles, I think it’s worth taking a minute to define what makes an apostle. It’s a little difficult, because the New Testament uses the word and title in quite a few different ways. The word itself simply refers to someone who is sent by another. The Church Father, Origin, gives the basic definition: “Everyone who is sent by someone is an apostle of the one who sent him.”[1] In the civil sphere it could refer to all sorts of representatives: envoys, ambassadors, and people like that. And in the Bible, an apostle is a messenger—it could be a human being or it could be an angel—sent by God—and that includes Jesus—to deliver a message or to proclaim the gospel. In the very broadest biblical sense of the word, we are all apostles. But the New Testament also uses “apostle” in a narrower sense, which is usually how we think of it. The problem of false apostles goes all the way back to the days of the early church, so we see the actual apostles, the ones who had lived with and been sent by Jesus himself, hammering out a definition in Acts. In Acts 1:21-22 they defined an apostle as “one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us.” They especially emphasized that the apostles were witnesses of the resurrected Jesus. In 2 Corinthians, Paul adds that the real apostles were known by “the signs of an apostles”, which meant “signs and miracles and wondrous deeds”. And Peter stresses that the duty of the apostles was to teach the words of the prophets and of Jesus to the churches. That first part is why Paul, at least at first, was seen as an outsider by the other apostles—and, of course, it didn’t help that he’d been one of their greatest enemies before he met Jesus. Paul hadn’t walked with Jesus during his ministry, but because of his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, he was an eyewitness to the resurrection and he was commissioned and sent by the Lord just as the others were. But that was a unique situation for Paul. Barnabas was not one of the twelve, but Jesus had many other disciples. Tradition says that Barnabas was one of the seventy that Jesus sent out earlier in his ministry and that made him a bona fide apostle. So if you meet someone and he (or she) tells you that he’s an apostle, you can say, “Awesome! So am I!” And if he tries to tell you that it’s something else, that he’s got special authority that other Christians don’t have, or if he says that he speaks for the Lord in a way other Christians don’t, well, I’d probably run away—because no one alive today is going to have those credentials. My observation is that most folks making this claim today, make it because they’re preaching false gospels and false doctrines. If you’re preaching the Bible, that’s all the authority you need, but these folks are preaching something else and so they claim to be apostles teaching new revelations from God. Run away from anyone who does that.
So our Epistle today, from Acts 11, tells us that Barnabas was a member of the Jerusalem church. And Luke writes that after the martyrdom of Stephen, a number of people from the church there were in fear of their lives and ran off—some as far away as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch in Syria—where they began proclaiming the gospel amongst the Jews of those places. Some of those who heard and believed in Antioch were what Luke calls “Hellenists”—Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora, people like Barnabas. When the apostles in Jerusalem heard this, they naturally sent Barnabas to Antioch to be their representative and to give leadership to the churches that were starting to form there. And verses 23-24 say:
When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord.
It fits right in with his nickname, “son of exhortation”. He came to a group of new believers, many of them believing but struggling as new believers often do, and he exhorted them. Luke says he was a good man, but first and foremost, Barnabas ministered to these brothers and sisters in the power of the Spirit and, empowered by the Spirit, the gospel did what it always does: it brought many to the Lord.
And it would seem that many of those people were Gentiles. That posed a problem for the early church. They were Jews. Jesus was their Messiah. He’d come to announce coming judgement on faithless Israel, to deliver those who would follow him, and to create a new Israel. So Jesus and the gospel were very much part of their story. Jesus changed everything. But there was still a lot that was the same. Even though this new people gathered to worship on Sundays, they continued to gather with the synagogues and to visit the temple. They kept the torah: they circumcised their children, they observed the Sabbath, they watched what they ate. And if there were any Gentiles—and there were some, but not very many, and most of them were pretty keen on the torah already—they expected those Gentiles to be converts to Judaism if they were going to follow Jesus. But as more and more Gentiles heard the message, as those first Jewish believers saw the promises spoken by the prophets beginning to come true—as Gentiles saw that God was with them, took hold of them, and followed them back to their meeting places to give glory to the God of Israel—well, it started raising questions. Did Gentiles really need to be good Jews to be good followers of Jesus? Did they have to be circumcised? Did they have to keep the Sabbath and watch the things they ate? These kinds of questions confronted that growing community in Syrian Antioch—and they confronted Barnabas. And then, Luke says, Barnabas thought of his old friend Saul, who was in Tarsus. Tarsus was just around the northeast corner of the Mediterranean from Antioch. It wasn’t an easy journey overland, but it was a quick trip by ship. Luke doesn’t give us all the details, but I suspect that when the two of them had been together in the past, Barnabas had listened as Saul spoke out loud, working through this very problem of the inclusion of Gentiles in the covenant community.
You see, if we go back to Acts 9, we read about Saul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and his coming to faith. At first the Christians were afraid of him, because they’d heard how he had persecuted the church in Jerusalem, wreaking havoc amongst those who invoked the name of Jesus. But then he began preaching there and the Christians loved him, but he was preaching the good news about Jesus in the synagogues and, Luke says, giving proof that Jesus really was the Messiah, so then the non-believing Jews became afraid of him and hatched a plot to kill him. But the secret got out, Saul’s friends heard about it, and lowered him over the wall in a basket at night. At that point, Saul decided to go to Jerusalem to join the disciples—the Twelve. But they wanted nothing to do with Saul and didn’t believe his story. This was the man that stood by supervising the stoning of Stephen. This was the man who arrested their brothers and sisters and had them dragged before the Jewish authorities to be put to death. But Barnabas believed. It sounds as though Barnabas had heard confirming reports of what Saul had been doing in Damascus. And so after the other disciples had driven Saul away, Barnabas went after him, brought him back to the others, and pleaded his case, telling them how Saul had met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and telling them of the reports of his powerful preaching of the gospel there. And the others believed, they received Saul, and pretty soon he was boldly preaching Jesus in Jerusalem.
So Barnabas travelled to Tarsus and set out to look for Saul, and when he found him, he took him back to Antioch. And for a whole year, Luke says, Barnabas and Saul met with the church there and taught the people. And Luke gives an interesting little side note, that this is when and where Jesus’ disciples were first called Christians—or you could say, “Messianists”, since Christ isn’t Jesus’ name, it’s his title, the Greek way of saying “Messiah”. It shows that the good news was getting around, and whether people really believed or not that Jesus was actually the Messiah, they knew that that’s what these “Christians” believed, and that’s what they called them: followers of the Messiah.
Saul—whom we usually refer to by his Greek name, but we don’t see that in Acts until he and Barnabas are sent off on their first joint missionary journey—but Saul or Paul gets all of our attention. That’s for good reason. But without Barnabas acting as his advocate, we may never have heard anything about Paul. He wasn’t just the “son of exhortation” to the saints at Jerusalem, but he was the “son of exhortation” for Paul when he was rejected by the other apostles, and he was the “son of exhortation” when he went to Tarsus to find the very man whom he knew would have the solution to this problem of the Gentiles. And he was surely the “son of exhortation” when, with Paul, he took up a generous collection from amongst the saints in Antioch, so that the two of them could deliver it to Jerusalem for the relief of the church there, when they were hit by the prophesied famine.
Now let’s look at our Gospel today. I cam across something interesting when I was researching why our lectionary gives us our Epistle and Gospel today. The Gospel is about love and I thought that was interesting. We often talk about St. John as the apostle of love, because he’s the one who so stressed Jesus’ theme of love in his Gospel and in the epistles he wrote. Today’s Gospel might seem more appropriate for his feast day. But our Gospel today, John 15:12-16, was originally, back in the middle ages, what’s called a “common Gospel”. In this case, it was a common Gospel lesson appointed to be read on the feast of any apostle for which there wasn’t some other Gospel lesson appointed. And while, gradually and through the years, various other Gospels were appointed to be read on the feasts of the other apostles, this common Gospel about love stuck to St. Barnabas and his feast day. And while we don’t know very much about him, it fits. It fits with what we know of his defense of Paul, it fits with what we know of his care for his poor and struggling brothers and sisters, and it fits with the nickname the other apostles gave him: “son of exhortation”.
Let’s look at that short Gospel again. It’s John 15:12-16, part of the long discourse that Jesus spoke to his friends after the Last Supper, before he was arrested and taken off to be crucified. Here’s what Jesus said to them:
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.
I have to think that these words—and so many others like them—that Jesus spoke to his disciples were running around the head of Barnabas all the time. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” You and I might just hear in that that Jesus is give us something to do—another commandment that we didn’t have before. But “commandment” said something very clear to anyone who was Jewish. “Commandment” pointed them straight to torah, to the law. The torah was full of commandments. Thou shalts and thou shalt nots, over and over and over. And you’ll remember that that law was about showing the people of Israel how to live as the Lord’s covenant people. He had called them, he had delivered them from Pharoah’s bondage, he had brought them through the Red Sea, and at Mt. Sinai he gave them his law. The law was the covenant charter. The Lord promised to be their God and he promised to give them the promised land and to be with them and to make them fruitful and to multiply them in that land. And, for their part, they promised to be his people, to worship him and him alone, and to be a light to the nations—to show everyone what it was to live in the presence of our Creator. And the law was what set them apart from everyone else in the world: initiating them into the covenant by circumcision, reminding them of the covenant in the Passover, showing them how to be holy, and giving them instructions for making things right with their God after those times they would break his commandments. The law was their way of life as the Lord’s people. And Jesus’ disciples were all steeped in it. It defined them as a people.
And now, as he’s about to give his life for theirs, he says to them, “This is my commandment…” He’s repeating what he told them two chapters earlier at the start of his discourse, those words that we read every year on Maundy Thursday, “I give you a new commandment—that you love one another.” Those words, “I give you a new commandment” would have got the attention of Jesus’ disciples. If anyone else had spoken those words, it would have been tantamount to blasphemy. A “new” commandment? Impossible. The Lord had given his law through Moses and he gave it carved on stone to make a point that it was to stand unchanged, unchanging, and forever. For Jesus to say that he was giving them a new commandment was like saying that he was giving them a new law—as if I stood here and announced that I’m giving you a new book to add to your Bibles.
But then what Jesus said: “love one another as I have loved you”—that, without the “as I have loved you” part, that was already in the law. “You shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord,” said Leviticus. So, on the one hand, this was just kind of reiterating what they already knew to be in the law, but the way Jesus said it—the part of about giving a new commandment—that sounds like Jesus was giving a new law. And that’s just what he was doing. It’s where the torah was pointing all along, but now that love becomes the great theme. As William Cowper wrote in that great hymn we sometimes sing: “Redeeming love has been my theme and shall be ’til I die”. The law is, at the same time, the same and profoundly different and new and all because of Jesus. It’s that “as I have loved you” part. The disciples wouldn’t have understood quite yet, but they would soon. Jesus hints at it. “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” We have often taken this verse out of context. There are times when giving your life for the sake of your friends—or your enemies—is the ultimate demonstration of love, but Jesus wasn’t talking here about just anyone giving his life for his friends. He was talking very specifically about the sacrifice that he was about to make, the sacrifice that would literally change everything and the sacrifice that would become the cornerstone of this new commandment.
Think about the old law. We sum it up every Sunday in the words of Jesus: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbour as yourself. And there are parts of the law, torah, that are easy to understand in light of that. If you love your neighbour, you don’t steal his stuff, you don’t tell lies about him, you don’t kill him, you don’t move the boundary markers of his property, you don’t speak harshly to him. But there are a lot of things in the law that don’t translate nearly so easily. There were some things in the law that God’s people just had to do in obedience, trusting that it made sense—that somehow it equated to either “Love God” or “Love your neighbour”. Under the old covenant, Jesus says, these men were like servants. They did what their Lord told them to do, even when they didn’t understand or it didn’t make sense. But Jesus says that those days are over. He calls them his friends, not his servants, and he tells them that—well, first, because he’s going to die for them as a demonstration of just how much he loves them as friends, but also because his death and resurrection will establish a new covenant and it will be like the sun has risen and driven away every shadow like the light of the sun at noon, because of that everything about this new covenant will make perfect sense in light of what Jesus has done. If someone just tells you to love your neighbour, that leaves all sorts of questions. What about this situation or that situation? What if your neighbour is annoying? What if your neighbour does something to offend you? What if your neighbour sins against you? What if loving your neighbour means you come up short-handed or hurt? And, of course that ever-present question: Who am I obligated to consider or to treat as a neighbour? But Brothers and Sisters, when the cross of Jesus stands before us at the centre of this new covenant, every one of those questions fades away and the answer stands out clear and bright as day. At the cross Jesus has shown us what love looks like. If we love like Jesus, it doesn’t matter if your neighbour is annoying, if he sins against you, or even if loving him means coming up short yourself. Jesus gave his life. That’s love. Period. And that Jesus-like love is the law of the new covenant. It’s what shapes the life of us, this new covenant people. It’s the fruit we bear.
Of course, this new law of love is overwhelming. The disciples didn’t yet understand. Today’s Gospel tells us what the new law is and that the cross of Jesus is the lens through which we understand it, and it’s his cross—his death for us—that motivates our love for him and for each other. But if this is all we have from Jesus, the new covenant people will fail at this new law as miserably as the old covenant people failed at keeping the old law. So it’s providential that we remember St. Barnabas and celebrate his feast day so close to Pentecost. Our Gospel today comes from the same discourse we’ve been reading throughout Easter and Ascensiontide in preparation for Pentecost and so we can’t read today’s Gospel without also remembering Jesus’ promise and gift of God’s own Spirit to indwell his people. When we hear his commandment to love each other unconditionally and to the uttermost end it sounds impossible. And then we see his own sacrifice for us at the cross and our hearts well up with gratitude and we know that what he deserves from us in return is that same kind of love—for him and for each other. And we want to love that way. But on our own—even as our hearts well up with gratitude for what he’s done for us—we can only get so far, because the cost is too great or because that person or this person is just too much or too hard. Brothers and Sisters, that’s when the Spirit does his work. He transforms our affections so that our hearts well up not only with our own gratitude for what Jesus has done for us, but our hearts also well up and overflow with the very love of God. We see that love in Barnbas. He risked everything for the sake of his Lord, Jesus, and to proclaim the good news of the cross and the resurrection. He new that it might cost him everything to come to the defense of Saul, whom his friends had unanimously rejected. And we see the love of Jesus, implanted in him by the Spirit, as he worked for the relief of his brother and sister saints when they were starving. It was an act of love that demonstrated the unity of God’s people, the gentiles and the hellenised Jews, giving generously from what they had, to provide for the Jewish believers in Jerusalem. And we also see that love—love for Jesus and love for neighbour, as he set off, first with Paul and later with John Mark—those are wonderful stories in themselves, but they’ll have to wait for another time—but in them we see again a love that only the cross of Jesus can motivate and that only the Spirit can keep alive, a love that risks everything for the sake of Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, that the same love we know ourselves, the same love we’re reminded of when we come to the Lord’s Table to participate in the great events of our salvation, the same love that the Spirit has poured into our hearts just as he did Barnabas. So go forth to love and serve the Lord, my friends, and as you do so, let St. Barnabas the Apostle be a reminder of just what that looks like.
Let’s pray: O Lord God Almighty, who endowed your holy apostle Saint Barnabas with special gifts of the Holy Spirit: Do not leave us destitute of your many gifts, nor of grace always to use them to your honour and glory, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] Jo. 32.17, ed. Preuschen 1903: 453, 17
Trinity Sunday: Born of Water and the SpiritSt. John 3:1-17by William KlockYears ago in my life as a computer tech, I made a house-call to the home of an elderly couple whose children had signed them up for Internet service as a Christmas present. I went out to get this couple set up with a modem and all the software they’d need to get online and to communicate with their family. I quickly set everything up and then had the woman sit down next to me so that I could show her how everything worked. I clicked on the “Connect” button and we listened as the modem made those familiar touch-tone dialling sounds, connecting to the Internet service provider. But then the modem on the other end picked up and this woman, startled, jumped out of her seat when loud noises started emitting from the modem. You remember those noises. Static and beeps and bwongs and more static and more beeps and bwongs until the connection was made. It was so normal to me that it didn’t occur to me to warn her that the modem was about to make some funny noises. She thought something was broken or that the modem or the computer was about to catch on fire.So I had to explain the concept of network “handshaking”. When your modem connects to another modem over the phone lines, they send signals back and forth until they find something that works for them—something that’s sort of mutually intelligible and reliable. Sometimes you might have an old, slow modem. Sometimes—maybe if you dial up at a busy time of day—instead of getting one of the ISP’s fancy new modems, you get one of the old, slow, back-up ones. And sometimes—especially back in those days—it could be hard to get a good line with a clear signal. So the two modems send packets of data back and forth and check with each other to make sure that what’s received on one end matches what was sent on the other. And when ideal, it happens quickly and the data might go back and forth at high speed, and other times—those times when the static and the beeps and the bwongs go on and on and on—the line might not be so good and the data’s getting corrupted or your modem is slower than the one on the other end and it keeps having to negotiate downward to a slower speed until it finally finds one that your modem and the line can handle.She sat there for a minutes and then turned to me and said, “That sounds like God trying to talk to me. He tries to tell me something and I’m too slow or too thick to understand or too stuck in my own way to obey. Sometimes he calls back later. Sometimes he just keeps telling me until he’s dumbed it down to the point that I can finally understand it. But he doesn’t give. Everything he has to say is important and he always makes sure I get the message, even if it takes a long time.” I kind of laughed and said, “Yes, something like that.” What I was thinking was, “You and me both, Lady. You and me both.” Do you ever feel like that? I know the Lord does. He’s been feeling like that since he created the human race. But it must be especially frustrating when your own people are blind or dumb or confused or just plain obstinate and don’t get the message. Thankfully our God is patient—and we see that too, all the way through the story of God and humanity.In today’s Gospel we read about the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus. It’s an interesting scripture lesson to have on Trinity Sunday and that’s because long before Trinity Sunday was Trinity Sunday, it was simply the Sunday after Pentecost. Usually our major feast days like Christmas and Easter, Ascension and Pentecost have lessons that focus on the events we’re remembering, but there’s usually a Sunday before or after where the lessons then explain the significance of those events. So our lessons today originally did that for the feast of Pentecost. But when Trinity Sunday came along no one changed the lessons, because here we see the Trinity revealed in the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, we see the Trinity revealed as Israel’s story reaches its climax in Jesus and as the Spirit is poured out on God’s people. Really, our readings from John’s Gospel through Easter and Ascensiontide keep pointing us to this. Over and over we hear Jesus explaining to his disciples that the Father has sent him to set his people to rights, but that that’s not all there is to it. Jesus also tells them that he can’t stay with them forever. First, the Father has sent him to give his life to make his people new, but even after he’s been raised from the dead, second, he still has to go—to return to the Father, so that the very Spirit of the Father, of the God of Israel can be sent to make real in his people the new life, the new covenant that has been established by the death and resurrection of Jesus, his Son.And, of course, as we read in the lessons from John, everyone was confused by the things Jesus said. Which, of course, highlights just how much they needed the Spirit and that highlights why it was so important that Jesus leave them so that he could send the Spirit. In Jesus the new Israel was born and our Gospel today sort of bridges the gap between the old Israel at Mt. Sinai and the new Israel at Pentecost. Everyone kind of had a sense that the Lord was working through Jesus, even if they didn’t really understand it completely. At the very least, everyone could see as they watched the things Jesus did and listened to the things he said, that he had come from and was acting on behalf of the God of Israel. There was no question about it. Some people were thrilled. Some even believed. Others got angry. And that was true even of the leaders of Israel. And so, we read, Nicodemus came to Jesus.John says that Nicodemus was both a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews and since elsewhere John distinguishes between these two terms, we can conclude that Nicodemus was a member of the part of the Pharisees and that he was also probably a member of the Sanhedrin, the governing council of the Jews. He was a very important person. And John says he came to Jesus at night. I used to think this was probably because Nicodemus, as a leading figure amongst the Jews, was afraid to be seen visiting Jesus by day, but as the years have gone by and I’ve read John’s Gospel over and over and over, I’ve noticed that John otherwise portrays Nicodemus as a very brave character. In Chapter 7 we see him standing up to the chief priests and Pharisees when they wanted to arrest Jesus. He reminded them that the law required them to give Jesus a fair hearing and in return he was accused of having become one of Jesus’ disciples. Nicodemus very bravely exposed the irony of the leaders of Israel. They were zealous for the law, but they failed to follow it—or at least they were happy to ignore it—when it wasn’t inconvenient. And then in Chapter 19, in contrast to the disciples who had fled and gone into hiding out of fear that the authorities would come for them next, Nicodemus made a point of bringing a large quantity of expensive spices for the anointing of Jesus’ body. These aren’t the actions of someone who was afraid of being seen with or associated with Jesus. I think it’s more likely he came to see Jesus as night, because it was the only chance he had to visit Jesus when he wasn’t being overwhelmed by the crowds. Nicodemus had some important questions to ask and he wanted to hear the answers—and as a leader of the people, he had the privilege of coming to Jesus “after hours” so to speak, of having a private audience.So John says that he came to see Jesus that night. He’d been watching and listening to Jesus. He saw that the God of Israel was clearly at work in and through Jesus, it was just that—like most everyone else in Israel—he struggled to reconcile what Jesus was doing and saying with the expectations they all had of the Messiah. So he asks Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you’re a teacher who’s come from God. No one could do these signs you’re doing unless God is with him.”Nicodemus knew the story. He knew the God of Israel. But he knew there was more to it. As he’d watched and listened to Jesus he’d figured that out. Jesus was talking about the Lord doing another great work, of the Lord leading his people in another exodus, this time more significant than the last one from Egypt. And he warned about a judgement soon to come on those who refused to repent of their old ways and to get in line with the Lord’s plans. It didn’t fit into the expectations of the people of Israel and especially not into what the Pharisees expected, but there had to be something to it, because the Lord was so clearly with Jesus.And Jesus picks up on the question implied in Nicodemus’ statement. He says, “The central truth you’re missing, Nicodemus, is that you’ve got to be born again to see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus understood so much. If anyone wanted to see God’s will done and his kingdom come on earth as in heaven it was the Pharisees. That’s what they lived for. And Nicodemus saw it in Jesus, but Jesus wasn’t preaching what the Pharisees were preaching. Nicodemus didn’t understand. Like one modem trying over and over to talk to another modem and just not making the connection, he struggled to reconcile his expectations with what Jesus was saying. And Jesus says that what he’s missing, what he needs to make the connection is this new birth, this being born again. And it’s important to understand that as much as Jesus is saying, “You, Nicodemus, must be born again—which is how the ears of modern Christians have been trained to hear this in individualistic terms—Jesus’ stress is on Israel, on the whole people. In verse 7 he says, “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’” When he says “You must be born again,” that’s plural, it’s “you all must be born again”. Israel as a people had been born the first time when they passed through the waters of the Red Sea and Jesus is saying that now Israel had to be born a second time. This is why John was out in the wilderness baptizing in the Jordan, but that wasn’t all. Israel had been baptised in water before and it wasn’t enough. Now they needed to be baptised in both water and the Spirit. The Spirit would finally make the connection. As Jesus had said over and over in various ways, he, Jesus, was sent by the Father, but that it would be the Spirit—the “Helper”—who would come after, who would testify to them about this truth and then that through them, this Spirit would testify to the rest of Israel and even to the nations…fulfilling the prophets, effectively creating a new Israel, and through this new people, fulfilling the mission the Lord had given to them from the beginning: to fill the world with the knowledge of him as the waters cover the sea and to testify to the nations in such a way that the nations would flock to the God of Israel to give him glory.But Nicodemus didn’t get it. And part of that was because the Spirit had not yet come to testify about Jesus. So he asked Jesus, “How can I be born again? I know you’re not talking about returning to my mother’s womb, but what do you mean? A person is only born once.” And as he answers Nicodemus, this is where Jesus switches from saying things like “Unless one is born again” to “Unless you—all of you—are born again”. Because it’s not so much about one person being born again or even about a whole bunch of individuals being born again. It’s about Israel as a people being born again so that she could be put back on track to fulfil her mission—the one given to Abraham almost two thousand years before. And this idea of birth would have resonated particularly with someone like Nicodemus, because to be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham’s family. Other things like circumcision and what you ate (or didn’t eat) were important and especially so for the Pharisees, but those things were important because they identified you as part of Abraham’s family. They also drew a clear boundary between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles were most definitely not.What Jesus is saying now is that being born into Abraham’s family in the way the Jews had been thinking about it all this time wasn’t enough. In fact, it never had been enough. And Nicodemus should have known this. For two millennia people were being born into Abraham’s family and God’s kingdom still hadn’t come. For two millennia people were born into Abraham’s family and still the Gentiles hadn’t experienced the Lord’s blessing through them, at least not on the large scale envisioned in the Scriptures. Just the opposite. Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their coattails saying, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!” Instead, because of the way most of Abraham’s children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where’s your God now?” It takes more than being born of the flesh of Abraham. It even takes more than being born of water, as Israel had been in the Red Sea. And as a man devoted to the law, to torah, Nicodemus should have understood this. The Pharisees were all about exhorting their fellow Jews to be better keepers of the law, but it wasn’t working. They of all people should have been looking forward to the day when the law would no longer be written on tablets of stone, but engraved on the very hearts of the people by the Holy Spirit.So Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, unless you’re born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter God’s kingdom. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” Israel needs something more than a biological inheritance. What does Jesus mean, though, when he talks about being born of water and the Spirit? This is was what John the Baptist was preaching about. God was about to lead his people in a new exodus. As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant. They all needed that baptism of repentance. They needed to turn aside from their own misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah and from their failures to be faithful to the Lord and his covenant. But remember what John promised. When people asked if he was the Messiah he said that he was only the forerunner. John said, “I baptise you with water, but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.” And that’s just what Jesus does. As we recalled last week on Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false lord, from every false god, from every false source of security in order to take hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism and he plunges us into the Holy Spirit. And it’s the Spirit who does the work of transforming us. It’s the Spirit who regenerates us. It’s the Spirit who causes us to be born again as he takes our old dead wood and unites it to the life of Jesus, causing us to bear fruit. And it’s the Spirit who finally makes that connection between God and us. Without the Spirit we’re sort of like modems perpetually beeping and bwonging and never quite connecting, but then the Spirit comes to us and testifies about Jesus and the Father and it clicks, it comes into focus, it connects.In our baptism we’re back at the Red Sea. There was the parted sea and God calling Israel to pass through to freedom and new life on the other side. There was no receiving of the law in Egypt; they had to cross to the other side of the sea to find covenant with the Lord. And so we stand at the waters of baptism today. In them Jesus gives his promise: Repent, turn aside from every false way, trust me, follow me in faith and you will find forgiveness of sins and new life through the Spirit. To pass through the waters of baptism is to take hold of Jesus’ promise and to be born again of water and the Spirit—and to made part of this new covenant people ready and equipped to live and to proclaim his kingdom.But, again, this didn’t fit what Nicodemus knew. “How can this be so?” he asks. And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this? You’re one of the teachers of Israel!” Nicodemus knew the story. He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission. As a Pharisee he was abundantly aware of this problem. Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard your cries and is visiting his people and he’s doing it in me. I’m the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago. I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I’m the one who has come down from heaven.At this point, I think, all this started to connect with Nicodemus. He started to understand, because now Jesus really starts to correct what was wrong with Israel’s thinking about herself, about what it meant to be God’s people, and about what it would mean for the Lord to come to deliver them. Jesus reminds Nicodemus of an event from Israel’s time in the wilderness. The Israelites grumbled against Moses—which was ultimately grumbling against the Lord—and so he sent poisonous snakes into the camp. They bit people and many of those who were bit died. But the Lord also gave Moses the remedy. He told Moses to cast a snake out of bronze and to mount it on a pole. Anyone who would look up to the bronze snake would be healed.And now Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up that snake in the wilderness, so the son of man must be lifted up so that all who believe in him may have eternal life.” Jesus is pointing to his own crucifixion. As the snake was the affliction of the people lifted up for them to look at, so Jesus would take the affliction of Israel on himself—he would suffer the punishment for their sins—and be lifted up on the cross. He would be lifted up for all to look upon—to see the horror and the gravity of their sin, to see that the wages of sin is death. But they would also see Jesus taking it all on himself and in that, the horror and ugliness of his being raised up would become an act by which he is ultimately glorified. In the cross we see the love of God made manifest in Jesus. And Jesus says in the familiar words we all know, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”Jesus corrects the central error in the thinking of Israel in his day. They were hoping and praying for the day when the Lord would come, not just to vindicate his people, but to judge their enemies—to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and all the other gentiles. But instead Jesus tells Nicodemus that he’s come not to condemn, but to save all who will look to him. All. The Jews thought the Lord, when he came, would vindicate them for their faithfulness, but Jesus says to Nicodemus, even the most righteous of you need this new birth, this salvation if you want to know God’s vindication. And it’s not just for you. The Jews looked forward to the condemnation he would bring, but Jesus says he’s come not to condemn, but to save. And this is where the part about being born again of water and the Spirit comes into play. Being born of water and the Spirit supersedes biology and genealogy. In Jesus God opens his arms to welcome Jew and Gentile alike. It was the Jews first, because if the Lord is faithful—and he is—he had to first fulfil his promises to his own people, but most importantly, in that act of faithfulness, the nations would take note of the God of Israel. In Jesus, the nations would see that the God of Israel is not like the puny, selfish, fickle, and powerless gods they have known, and they would then flock to this God who is truly good and faithful. Abraham’s family is integral to the story and the plan, but Jesus reminds us that genes and DNA were never really what made anyone part of Abraham’s family; it was about faith. It was faith for Abraham himself and it was faith in God’s promises for all who followed after: for Isaac and Jacob, for Joseph and Moses and Joshua, for gentiles like Rahab and Ruth, and even for the great kings like David and Solomon. And God’s promise was that through his covenant people, through these people who knew him in faith and were reconciled to him by faith, he would bless the nations. It happened here and there in the Old Testament. Rahab and Ruth are two of many small-scale testimonies to that, but here we finally see the Lord’s promise coming to full fruit. It’s what we celebrated last week on Pentecost as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on these men of Israel gathered from around the world. They had heard Peter preach about Jesus and what he’d come to do. They rallied to Jesus in faith and in response Jesus poured his Spirit into them. Finally, through Jesus, Israel became the source of blessing she was intended to be—not by flesh, but by the Spirit—as these men and women took the good news to the nations: Jesus is Lord. He has conquered sin and death. In him is the forgiveness of sin, in him is life, in him God has returned to his creation as King. And in him—the Incarnate Word—God makes himself known. In Jesus, God Incarnate, we have the restoration and fellowship with our Creator that he has been working towards ever since the day we rebelled and were cast out of his presence. In Jesus, God’s kingdom—his new creation—has been inaugurated, in us and through us in the world. Brothers and Sisters, we are that people the God of Israel was working to create, to forge, to make new all those millenia. In Jesus and in us, his people, the promises made to Abraham are being fulfilled and we see that the blessing of God to the nations is for them to know him and to be reconciled to him in Jesus and the power of the Spirit.Let us pray: Almighty God we praise you this morning for the grace you have shown us. Even as we rebelled against you, our good Creator, you were setting in motion our redemption: Father sending, calling, electing; Son speaking, coming, dying, rising; and Spirit uniting, renewing, regenerating, empowering. In the redemption of the world we see the glory of the Trinity and the majesty of the Unity and in gratitude we fall before you with the angels to sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty.” By your grace, keep us strong in faith, O Lord, but keep us also faithful in our witness and our ministry to make your redeeming love known to the world. We ask this through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.
Whitsunday: The On-Earth-As-In-Heaven PeopleActs 2:1-11by William KlockLast week as we remembered Jesus’ ascension we read Luke’s account of the risen Jesus and his final days with the disciples. He writes in Acts 1:And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. (Acts 1:4-5)That was all just fine, but what they really wanted to know was when the kingdom was coming. For years they’d been asking it in one way or another: When will you bring the kingdom? When will you take your throne? When will you set the world to rights? Are we there yet? How much further? And, remember, in answer to their question Jesus ascended, up on the clouds, into heaven, to take up his throne, to rule and to reign.And as he did that, he commissioned his disciples to do something that I don’t think they expected. He commissioned them to be his royal heralds, to go out and to proclaim this good news to Jerusalem, to Judea, even to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth. Now, this wasn’t the first time Jesus had sent his disciples out to proclaim the kingdom, but when he’d sent them out before, it was to a people who were also asking those “Are we there yet?” questions: When will the Messiah come? When will the kingdom come? When will the God of Israel set this broken world to rights?. And the disciples went out and told the people that in Jesus the Messiah had come and that the kingdom was in sight. But now Jesus is sending them out to proclaim that in his resurrection and ascension the kingdom has come and that was no small task. Because even though the disciples had seen their risen Lord and even though they saw him ascend, things weren’t what they or anyone else had expected. They thought everyone would be resurrected all at once. They though the Messiah would put down the enemies of God’s people and cast down their empires. They expected a king like David who would punish evil, wipe away all the problems, and make everything as it should be. Instead, the wrong people were still in control, evil people still did evil things, so much was still wrong with the world—and yet Jesus had inaugurated something, he really had risen from the dead, and they’d seen him ascend to his throne with their own eyes, so they knew he was truly Lord and that the kingdom had come. The Lord’s plan was to work through them, to spread the good news and to tell the world that Jesus is Lord, and to grow the kingdom. That wasn’t what anyone expected, but they should have, because that’s how the Lord had been working in the world ever since he called Abraham out of the land of Ur and set him apart from everyone else, and made him and his family a witness to the world—that one day, through this people, the whole earth would know the Lord and his greatness and his goodness and his faithfulness and come to give him glory.I wonder if we, too, don’t forget this sometimes. We might know better deep down, but we kind of assume that the Christian life is, more or less, a personal thing. We raise our kids in it. Maybe we talk to a few close people about it. But we act as if our duty is mostly just to be good, godly people until Jesus comes back and sets everything to rights—as if he’s the one who’s going to make it all happen by doing all the hard work. Sure, there are some people called to be missionaries who go off to faraway places where they’ve never heard of Jesus, but for most of us, it’s just a personal, individual sort of thing. Even the dominant eschatology of our day assumes that things will just get worse and worse until Jesus zaps us all out of here and rains down fire and brimstone on this awful, corrupt world. But that’s never what the story was about and that’s never where it was headed. The Lord called and created a people to make him known with the expectation that eventually that people—not in their own power, but in his—but that people would really make him known until, as the prophets Isaiah and Habakkuk both said, the knowledge of his glory would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.Maybe we forget our part in this kingdom mission because it seems so impossible. What? Us? Grow the kingdom until the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth? What? Us? Bring the nations to give him glory? That’s too big for us? We’ll just be holy over here and wait for Jesus to come back and do the impossible stuff. And at this point, Jesus’ disciples had no idea just how big and impossible the task was. Taking the gospel to the gentiles wasn’t even on their radar. They were still thinking it was a message for Jews. It would be a few years before the full extent of it even sank in. And this is why Jesus told his friends to stay in Jerusalem and to wait. In his resurrection he was vindicated as the Messiah. In his ascension he took his throne and sent the clear message that the kingdom has come. But before the disciples could go on with the work of the kingdom, they needed something that God’s people had never had before—at least not in this way. They needed the power of the Holy Spirit to truly be the new Israel, to carry on the mission the Lord had given to Abraham and Isaac, and to all of Israel: to bless the nations by making him known to them. Without the Spirit, Jesus’ disciples would have the same problem God’s people had always had and after a time, when the excitement wore off, they would become fickle and faithless and their loyalties would be divided and they would fall into sin and the nations would mock them, this time jeering, “Where’s your Jesus now?” No, they needed this gift of the indwelling Spirit to set their hearts on God and to write his law of love on their hearts—truly transforming their affections. And it was this Spirit who would empower them to go out into a hostile world with the good news about Jesus and to live out his love and his grace and his justice, carrying the kingdom to the ends of the earth. That’s why they had to wait in Jerusalem.I don’t think they really had any idea what was about to happen. They didn’t even really understand the full extent of the mission he’d given them. They were just excited because of his resurrection and his ascension and Luke says that while they waited in Jerusalem that they spent their time in the temple praising and blessing God. And then comes our Epistle today. Look at Acts 2. Luke writes,When the day of Pentecost arrived… Let’s stop there. This isn’t an incidental detail. It’s integral to the story. As integral as Jesus having been born a Jew. As integral as his death and resurrection taking place at Passover. “Pentecost” just means “fiftieth” in Greek. Greek-speaking Jews gave the festival this name because it fell fifty days after Passover, but its biblical name was the “feast of weeks” and it was connected with the wheat harvest. It was when the Lord commanded his people to bring him their firstfruits. That’s the very first part of the harvest. It was an offering to the Lord and it was an act of faith on their part. Other peoples brought offerings to their gods after the harvest had been brought in, once they knew what they could spare. But Israel gave in faith from the very first of the harvest, trusting the Lord to give the rest. So Pentecost was a feast of expectation and faith.But Pentecost was also the feast when Israel celebrated the giving of the law, the torah, at Mt. Sinai. That’s where the significance of “fifty” comes from. Again, it follows fifty days after Passover and you’ll remember that Passover commemorated Israel’s exodus from Egypt: their slavery, Moses and the Lord’s command to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!”, the plagues, the blood on the doorposts, the sparing of Israel’s firstborn sons, the flight from Egypt, the rescue at the Red Sea. Passover was a festival of the Lord’s deliverance of his people and it celebrated that great even in which Israel was born as a nation. And each generation participated in those events anew as they gathered year in and year out in their homes to share the Passover meal. It marked them out as the Lord’s covenant people.But that wasn’t the end of the story. From the Red Sea, the Lord led his people into the wilderness and fifty days later he gave them his law. He called Moses up to Mt. Sinai and when Moses came back down he brough the law with him, carved on stone tablets. In the Exodus the Lord had made Israel his people. At Mt. Sinai he showed them what it meant and what it looked like to be his people. So at Passover the Jews celebrated their redemption. At Pentecost they remembered that the Lord had redeemed them for a purpose: to live a new kind of life in order to fulfil his purposes and their calling.Can you see how this all fits together with the events of the Gospels? Easter is our Passover, when we remember how, through Jesus, the Lord redeemed us from our bondage to sin and death and made us his people. And now, on Pentecost—this is our Mt. Sinai. Let’s continue with Acts 2:When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. In Exodus we’re given an awesome picture of the holiness of God as his presence descended on the mountain in smoke and fire and thunder, and here the Spirit comes again like a storm, in this mighty rushing wind and fire descends upon his people. And here Luke tells this new story to parallel the old. As Moses went up on the mountain to the Lord, so Jesus has ascended into heaven. And now Luke wants us to understand that Jesus, just as he promised he would, has come back down. Moses came down with tablets of stone to tell the people how to live as the Lord’s covenant people. And now Jesus has returned, he’s come down from heaven in the person of the Holy Spirit, to write his law of love on the very hearts of his people.Don’t misunderstand. That doesn’t mean that Israel had a harsh and rigid law written on stone and that Jesus’ people just “follow their hearts” or something like that. There’s a sense in which that’s true, but definitely not in the sense that the world talks about following your heart. Following our hearts is what has got us into trouble and made a mess of this world, because apart from Jesus and the Spirit our hearts are set on sin and self. That’s the point here. The law written on stone showed Israel how to live as God’s holy people, but it couldn’t change the affections of their hearts. The Spirit, on the other hand, takes away the need for those stone tablets by changing our very hearts, filling them with a love for God and a desire for holiness, and by turning us away from sin and from self.And notice how the wind and the fire come from heaven. Through the Spirit the creative and renewing power of the Lord—the very breath that he breathed into humanity to give us life in the first place—it descends on his people to accomplish his work on earth. Jesus taught his disciples to pray “on earth as it is in heaven” and Pentecost was the firstfruits of an answer to that prayer. Sometimes Christians treat the presence and gifts of the Holy Spirit as things that raise us up above the world or that make the world irrelevant, but it’s really just the opposite. The Spirit is the life-giving breath of God that gives us a foretaste of the resurrection and of the life we hope for one day in this world set to rights. As the Spirit sets our hearts on God, he makes us the “on earth as it is in heaven” people, the people who not only show the world what God’s kingdom looks like, but who actually live out his kingdom and its values of love and grace and mercy and justice in the midst of a world that values all the opposites of those things.But the first manifestation of the Spirit’s “on earth as it is in heaven” ministry is what we see here. Luke says, first, that Jesus’ people were all together when this happened—they were united—and then the first manifestation of the Spirit was this amazing speech in other languages. But what exactly was it? Let’s keep reading from verse 5:Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians—we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” Jews had spread out across the known world and festivals like Passover and Pentecost brough them back to Jerusalem. The Spirit came on Jesus’ disciples with fire and the sound of a mighty rushing wind, but what everyone else couldn’t help but notice was the ruckus they made as they began to speak in these other languages. And it got their attention. The disciples were a bunch of rubes from Galilee, way up north, or at least that’s how people in Jerusalem would have seen them. Galileans spoke Aramaic and Greek—the local languages—but they weren’t cosmopolitan enough to speak all these other languages. And yet these men visiting Jerusalem from places like Egypt and Asia and even from places like Parthia, beyond the borders of the empire, heard these Galileans speaking in their own languages. That made them stop and take note. But what they were saying caught their attention even more. Luke says they were telling of the mighty works of God. In the context here that can mean only one thing. They were proclaiming the good news about Jesus. That he had come proclaiming the kingdom and calling the people to repentance, that he had been crucified, that he had risen from the dead, and that he had ascended, and is now Lord—and maybe most of all, that he had done this in fulfilment of the Lord’s promises and to show the Lord’s faithfulness. Many of these visitors had, no doubt, heard about Jesus and how he’d been crucified just a few weeks before. Some of them had probably heard rumors that he’d risen from the dead. If they’d been spending any time around the temple, they would have heard and seen the disciples praising God for what he had done in Jesus—and they probably thought they were crazy. But now they hear these bumpkins from Galilee declaring the might works of God miraculously in their own languages and they stop. And they listen. And some of them, Luke says, sneered at the disciples thinking they were drunk. But that’s when—if we were to continue on from today’s Epistle in Chapter 2—that’s when Peter stood up addressed them, saying, “It’s nine o’clock in the morning. It's hardly the time of day for men to be drunk. No, what you’re seeing is the fulfilment of the words spoken by the prophet Joel when he spoke of the Lord’s promise to pour out his Spirit and to redeem his people. And Peter went on to tell the men there, again, of the might y deed of God: of Jesus, of his death, of his resurrection, and his ascension. And he walked the men through the scriptures they knew so well and through the promises the Lord had made to his people, and he showed how Jesus had and was fulfilling them. He finished his sermon, Luke says, proclaiming:“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (Acts 2:36)And the men who were listening were cut to the heart and cried out to Peter, “What should we do?”And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. (Acts 2:38-41)The “on earth as it is in heaven” people began to grow. The rest of the book of Acts is Luke’s testimony to the mighty deeds of God through these people, empowered by Jesus and the Spirit. We see the gospel—and with it the kingdom—going out from Jerusalem, to Judea, and then to Samaria, where it united Jews and Samaritans for the first time. And then see it go out to the nations, to the gentiles, the book ending with Paul proclaiming the good news about Jesus in Rome, right under Caesar’s nose. And Acts shows us churches sprouting up across the world. Acts is the firstfruits of the kingdom harvest—a harvest that would, eventually include the whole Roman Empire and beyond. And, Brothers and Sisters, Pentecost reminds us how. Without it we might be tempted to give up, to retreat into the church building, and wait for Jesus to come and do it all himself. But Pentecost reminds us that going all the way back to Abraham, the Lord has been calling and creating and empowering a people to make him known to a world lost in darkness, a people to be light, a people—like the disciples that day in Jerusalem—to proclaim to the world the mighty deeds of the God of Israel. A people to proclaim the good news that in this Jesus who was crucified, who has risen from the dead, and who has ascended to his throne to rule and reign, that he is and that he will set this world to rights. But, maybe most importantly, Pentecost reminds us that Jesus has called us and made us this people, not only to go out and to tell, but to go out and live and to do and to make and to build and to show his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. We do that as we live the fruit the Spirit has given and as we show the world, in real, practical, hands-on ways what God’s new creation is like, living his love and his mercy and his grace and his justice and working for those things in the world. It is an impossible task, but Pentecost also reminds us that we are not called to do it in our own power or on our own terms, but as we are empowered and guided by Jesus and the Spirit.Let’s pray: O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for Ascension Sunday: Jesus is LordActs 1:1-11 & St. Luke 24:49-53by William Klock“Are we there yet?” We pestered my dad with that question over and over and over. And, of course, when he said, “No!” We always followed it up with, “How much longer?” When I was in elementary school we moved to Oregon and it meant a ten-hour drive to visit my grandparents in Sacramento or eighteen hours to visit my grandmother in Santa Barbara. And all those pestering questions came back on my head when I became a parent. Alexandra was a good traveller, but kids are kids, and so on those eight-hour trips to visit her grandparents in Kelowna we got it, “Are we there yet?”And the people of Israel asked the same question of the Lord. Not in those words, but still the same sort of question: “When will your kingdom come?” “When will you deliver us?” “When will you set this messed-up world to rights?” “Are we there yet?” “How much further?” Just like I knew our destination on those family road trips, Israel new her destination. She had the Lord’s promises. And she’d made this trip before. The Lord had delivered her from Egypt and taken her to the promised land. And he'd delivered her from Babylon. And from the wicked rule of the Greeks. He would do it again. But “How much further?” Every year Passover reminded them, of what the Lord had done and of his promises for the future. “Are we there yet?” And when Jesus came, the people asked him the same questions. If he was the Messiah—and his friends really believed he was—how much longer would it be? If there were any doubts, Easter confirmed it. The Jews, with the help of the Romans, had crucified Jesus. They rejected his messianic claims and killed him to make sure no one else would believe. But then God raised him from the dead. In that act God overturned their verdict on Jesus. The Resurrection was and is the great announcement from heaven that Jesus is the Messiah and the world’s true Lord. And so his friends believed, but the world around them looked no different. The wrong people were still in charge. And so I have to think they asked all the more urgently during those forty days after Easter: “Are we there yet?”When we asked my dad, “Are we there yet?” and “How much longer?” he pointed us to the milage signs along the highway and taught us how to estimate the time. The sign says that Santa Barbara is 300 miles away, we’re going 55 miles per hour, divide 300 by 55 and you get something not quite five-and-a-half. That’s how many hours it will take. I did the same thing when Alexandra would ask. How many kilometres away does the sign say Kelowna is? We’re driving about 100 km/hr. That means every 100 km is about an hour more of driving. And during those forty days, as the disciples ask “Are we there yet?” and “How much further?” Luke says that Jesus opened the scriptures and explained it all to them so that they would understand the story, his place in it, and theirs too. And in him they had a foretaste of what was to come, of the resurrection of the dead and of new creation. Jesus had changed. It was still him, but he was something more. He was hungry and ate fish on the beach with them like he always had, but somehow he appeared and disappeared like they’d never seen anyone do. The new Jesus was at home on earth as he was in heave, but he was also as at home in heaven as he was on earth.In our Epistle we read those first eleven verses of the book of Acts and then in the Gospel we read the last verses from St. Luke. Luke says that forty days after the resurrection, Jesus led his disciples out of Jerusalem and up to the Mount of Olives. He promised them that John the Baptist’s prophecy would soon be fulfilled. He was going to send his Spirit to baptise them with fire. They didn’t know what that meant. In fact, it didn’t even seem very important to them at the time. They wanted to know about the kingdom! “Are we there yet?” That’s what the Messiah was about—he was supposed to come and restore the kingdom of Israel. When he rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday they were thinking that maybe now he would finally throw off the poor rabbi disguise and restore the kingdom, throwing out the Romans and taking up David’s throne. But instead Jesus allowed himself to be arrested, beaten, and killed. They were despondent. But then on Sunday he rose from the dead. Maybe this was finally it. But through the next forty days Jesus simply taught them the Scriptures. The disciples were excited to have Jesus back with them. They were excited about his resurrection, although they didn’t fully understand what it meant at this point. And so there on the Mount of Olives they asked again: Jesus, it’s great you’re alive again. We appreciate all the Bible teaching. But when are you going to bring the kingdom? And in response Jesus once again promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower their witness and then told them that it wasn’t their place to know the times and seasons fixed by the Father. But then Jesus did something amazing: he ascended into the clouds. There were the disciples staring into the sky, probably with their mouths agape, as Jesus disappeared from their sight. And they just stood there, staring and staring until the two men, the two angels, broke into their wonder and amazement saying, “Hey, you men of Galilee! Are you going to stand there forever staring into space? Jesus went up to heaven and he’s coming back. Didn’t he give you something important to do in the meantime?”Why were the disciples standing there agape? You and I would too if we saw our friend ascend into the clouds. That’s not something that people do. But for the disciples it was more significant than we might think. It’s tied to Jesus’ last words and it’s tied to both the Old Testament and the symbolism of imperial Rome. First, that great messianic passage in Daniel 7:13-14 that gives a dramatic visual of the son of man rising to his heavenly throne to rule:I saw in the night visions,and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man,and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom,that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him;his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away,and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. But, as I said, this symbolism was important to the Romans, too. Julius Caesar took on the trappings of divinity when he became emperor of Rome. After his death the senate declared him divine. The later emperors of Rome followed suit. On their deaths the Senate declared that they had ascended to heaven as gods and they were depicted in imperial imagery ascending into the clouds. If you go today to the ruins of the Forum in Rome and stand under the Arch of Titus, you can look straight up and see the emperor depicted, ascending into the heavens.That was the imagery that surrounded Jesus at his ascension. He didn’t have to ascend into the clouds the way he did. Heaven isn’t literally up there somewhere above the clouds. Even the Romans understood that heaven was simply the realm of the gods in contrast to the earth, which is the realm of human beings. And so Jesus didn’t have to fly up into the clouds to leave the realm of human beings for the realm of God. He simply could have vanished from the disciples’ sight. But instead he chose to leave in a way that drew on this imagery familiar to both the Jews and the Gentiles. Everyone knew that Caesar didn’t actually fly up to heaven. The comet commemorating his divinity on Roman coins was just a symbol. But Jesus did it for real. Why? Because it sent the message that Jesus is the Messiah, confirming the prophecies of Israel’s scriptures, and at the same time declaring that Jesus is Lord. “Caesar is Lord” was the creed of imperial Rome. But Caesar was just a pretender. He brought peace to the world, but it was a temporary peace forged by violence and intimidation. Jesus, on the other hand, really is Lord. In contrast to Caesar who conquered his enemies with the sword, Jesus conquered his enemies by humbling himself and dying on a cross. And in return, God exalted Jesus and seated him at his right hand—in the place of heavenly honour. Caesar pretends at being Lord, but Jesus really is. That’s the first take-away from the Ascension story as St. Luke tells it.But the other take-away is the one that upsets much of the popular theology of today, and that’s that the kingdom is here and the kingdom is now. The kingdom is not coming in the future. It’s not coming after a rapture of believers. It’s not coming before or after or in the middle of a Great Tribulation. And it’s not something we have to go to heaven to experience. The disciples asked Jesus when the kingdom was coming and Jesus responded by telling them that it was not for them to know. I suspect he may have said that with a smile and a wink, because the next thing we see is Jesus ascending. Just as the Ascension sends the message loudly and clearly that Jesus is Lord, it also sends the message loudly and clearly that his kingdom is here and now. They asked him when the kingdom was coming and in response he gave them a dramatic visual that they’d never forget: They saw the King ascend to his throne. Brothers and Sisters, the Ascension of Jesus tells us very dramatically and unmistakably that the kingdom is here and now. King’s don’t sit on thrones to rule over nothing. Why is the Ascension important? Again, it tells us dramatically and unmistakably that the King is on his throne and that his kingdom has already been inaugurated.All of this is important, but what does it mean that Jesus is reigning and that the kingdom is here and now? For that we need to look at the big picture. In the beginning God created the Cosmos to give him glory. At the centre of it was a garden and in that garden the Lord placed human beings to tend and to keep it. Everything about the garden points to its being the Lord’s temple. When the Israelites built the tabernacle, the design was meant to mimic the garden. It was in the garden that human beings lived in the presence of the Lord. And later it was in the tabernacle and then the temple that the Lord manifested his presence in the holy of holies. The temple was the place where heaven and earth met and where the people went to meet with, to worship, and to fellowship with the Lord. The temple pointed back to the garden. When humanity sinned, the garden was lost. Adam and Eve were cast out and an angel placed at the entrance to guard it. And from there the story of humanity goes from bad to worse. And yet the Lord never abandoned his Creation. The creation was meant to give God glory and when it turned on him, instead of destroying it, God chose to manifest his glory by renewing it—by making a new creation. And as humanity lost all knowledge of the Lord, he called Abraham to himself and through Abraham created a new humanity in the family of Abraham. Through Abraham, the Lord began the work of restoring the garden. “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” God promised (Genesis 12:3).And yet think about a garden. You can’t plant a garden in the wilderness and expect it to flourish on its own. Enemies and wild animals will raid the garden and steal the fruit. Without cultivation and protection the wild will quickly overcome the garden. And so the Lord provided for the protection of his new garden. He sent Jacob and his family to Egypt, where the king looked on them with favour, provided for them, cared for them, and protected them. When the king of Egypt became hostile, the Lord himself rescued his new creation—Israel—and led her into the wilderness and to the promised land. He fed her in the wilderness and he drove out her enemies from the land. Eventually the Lord gave her a human king to protect his new creation from the wilderness—from the hostile enemies—that surrounded her. But through it all, it was ultimately the Lord who was King and who protected his people. Isaiah declared that “the Lord reigns” when Israel was faced with conquest by the Babylonian empire. The Babylonian king and the Babylonian gods had no power over Israel no matter how bad things got. In Daniel’s vision ferocious beasts represent the kingdoms of the earth that had conquered and dominated Israel, but in that vision the Lord takes the kingdom away from those monsters and delivers it to the saints and ultimately to the Son of Man—to Jesus. Even when the Lord uses earthly kings to discipline his people, he continues to care for them. That’s the purpose of his kingship and his kingdom: the care and cultivation of his new creation.And all this comes to full fruit in Jesus. He has come as the Son of Man, the representative of Israel. He has come as the Messiah—the true and eternal king in the line of David. He has come to bring the Lord’s new creation to full fruit—to suffer for his people and to give them his Holy Spirit that they might truly be the new creation that Israel was supposed to be—that they might be the true sons and daughters of Abraham. But not only that, he has also come to establish a kingdom over which he will rule himself—a kingdom to protect and to safeguard the new creation—the Lord’s garden as it grows and flourishes and spreads throughout the world. This is the story of the book of Acts. We read the beginning this morning: Jesus ascended into the clouds to take his heavenly throne. Jesus is Lord; Caesar is not. Jesus’ kingdom is the real deal, the one that will last; Caesar’s is the cheap imitation. The rest of Acts is the story of the church, of the new creation, of the kingdom spreading throughout the world: from Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and to the whole world. And Acts ends dramatically with Paul in Rome, in chains, proclaiming the lordship of Jesus right under Caesar’s nose. Through the suffering, persecution, and martyrdom of the saints, the kingdom of Jesus has triumphed and will continue to triumph. The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper summed it up well in that famous line of his: “There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” Others, like Caesar may make their claims, but the reality is that Jesus is Lord of all.Brothers and Sisters, we are God’s new creation. The wilderness has surrounded the Lord’s garden. Earthly empires and kings have tried to steal its fruit, they’ve tried to stamp it out and burn it down, but King Jesus has preserved it. Because of his preservation, past generations have carried the good news that Jesus is Lord from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria and to all the world. Because King Jesus has preserved it we know and believe that good news here in Canada, half a world away from that mount from which Jesus ascended to his throne two thousand years ago. Because King Jesus continues to preserve his new creation, we can have confidence to go out in faith, to charge into the darkness with the light of Christ—think of that vision of John’s in Revelation, the saints riding out with Jesus, a gospel calvary carrying the good news that Jesus is Lord to the whole world—and we know that no matter what happens, the kingdom of God is here and know and growing and that nothing will stop it until fills the whole earth—just as Daniel saw it would. As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, this new creation of which we are a part is protected by the one who has been given all authority and who will reign until every last enemy is put under his feet, even death itself.Brothers and Sisters, our hope as Christians is in that day. Death is the last enemy to separate earth and heaven and on that day, when Jesus finally defeats it, he’ll return from his throne on the clouds as the angels told the disciples. As the joyful people of Rome went out to join their triumphant Caesar as he marched into the city as the conquering hero, St. Paul says that the people of Jesus will meet him in the air to accompany him as returns to earth the conquering hero—as he comes accompanied by heaven itself and restores heaven and earth, God and man.In the Old Testament the temple was the one place on earth where heaven and earth met and where the Lord could be known. When Jesus came he became the temple for us. The amazing thing is that Jesus didn’t leave it at that. He sent his Holy Spirit to fill and indwell us. We, his Church, are now the temple. We are now the place where heaven and earth connect and where the Lord is made known. And that’s our mission. Carved on our lychgate are those familiar words: “Jesus is Lord”. We pass beneath them as we come to the church to meet and to worship, but have you ever thought about what they really mean? The next time you walk under those words remember the Ascension. Remember that Jesus is seated on his throne, that his kingdom is here and now, and that he has made us his people. Jesus has restored us to the vocation for which we were created. He has restored God’s image in us. He has made us the people in whom heaven and earth meet. He’s given us the gospel message: the King who died and has risen from the grave is Lord. And he sends us out like Adam and Eve with that good news, to be fruitful and to multiply—to carry the royal summons to our friends, our families, and eventually to every corner of creation, spreading his kingdom. We’ve seen the Conqueror mount in triumph and now we go out as his army. But not an army like those of Rome sent out to conquer barbarians with the sword. Jesus calls us to charge into the darkness bearing his light, to suffer and even to die for the sake of the lost, as we seek to make known his love, his peace, his justice, his mercy, and especially his grace.Let us pray: Grant, we pray, Almighty God, that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend, and with him continually dwell; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Fifth Sunday after Easter: Doers of the WordSt. James 1:22-27by William KlockSocial media is a funny thing. You hear about people saying something to their husband or wife about some product or some thing they might buy and minutes later Facebook and Amazon and Google are showing you adverts for exactly that product or thing even though you’ve never looked it up online. I think that happened to me, but instead of books or bike parts or swim suits or lanterns—which is what I’d have expected—YouTube and Facebook for the last couple of months have been flooding me with short videos on the theme of “Ask a rabbi…” or “Ask an orthodox Jew” and so I’ve been seeing all these videos on Judaism and some are interesting and others are exasperating and others just make you scratch your head and a lot of them make me thankful that Jesus came. But one of things that comes up a lot in these videos is doctrine. “What do Jews believe about heaven and hell?” or “What do Jews believe about sin…or forgiveness…or salvation?” All sorts of doctrinal questions. And it’s striking just how often these rabbis—and it doesn’t matter if they’re liberal or conservative—it’s striking how often they’ll answer these doctrinal questions, but they’ll start out by saying something like, “Judaism doesn’t really care what you believe. It cares about what you do.” “Salvation”, for example, just isn’t a concern in Judaism as it is in Christianity. For them, if you’re Jewish that means you’re part of the covenant people and your life is about obeying the torah, because obedience to torah—the things you do—are what mark you out as different from everyone else and confirm your membership in the covenant. Judaism is a religion of works, but Christians often misunderstand that, thinking Jews are trying to earn their way into heaven. That’s not it at all. They’d say something like, “We’re already God’s people; now we’re proving it by what we do.” You can believe whatever you want, just so long as it doesn’t interfere with living according to torah. Of course, that’s not what the Lord intended for his people. Good works grow out of a heart tuned to God and this is why Jesus came: to forgive his people, to fill their hearts with God’s own Spirit, and to set their affections on him. But even as Christians it’s all too easy to fall into the ditch on the opposite of the road. We become very concerned about right belief, and downplay the doing part of our faith. There are Christians who take our affirmation that we are saved by faith and not by works to such extremes that they get angry with anyone who says that real faith is proved by good works. Other times, it’s not that we forget the sinfulness of sin and the need for good works to give evidence of our faith, but that we become selective about the sins we condemn and the good works we do.The last month or two I’ve been following a certain discussion forum online where a group of folks—some of them clergymen, I’m sad to say—have been discussing theology. And things quickly went from “discussion” to all out verbal brawling—anger, name calling, all sorts of nasty stuff—and all of it for the most part over disagreements about, of all things, the Lord’s Supper—one of the central things Jesus gave us as a sign of our unity in him, of his love for us, and our love for him and for each other. This is the sort of thing I see as a clergyman, but this disconnect between what we believe and what we do happens in all sorts of ways. We know Christians who wholeheartedly believe that their sins have been forgiven by the death of Jesus, but they hold grudges and refuse to forgive others. We know Christians who have known and affirm the generosity of God, but they are greedy and miserly towards others. We know Christians who come to church on Sunday and glorify God with their mouths, but go out into the world and use the same mouth to tell lies and to cheat or to say filthy things. This week I was reading the introduction to a new book on Genesis, where the author went to great lengths to stress the truthfulness of God’s word, but then wrote things that were hurtful and untrue about people who disagree with his interpretation, because doing that, I guess, is easier than engaging with people who differ from you and has the benefit of scaring people way from even considering those different points of view. But if we value truth as a doctrine, that value for truth ought to work its way out in our lives and in our speech—even if it’s sometimes inconvenient.This is what St. James is getting at in our Epistle, when he writes:But be doers of the word, and not hearers only… Don’t just hear it. Don’t just believe it. Do it! It helps to understand that for the Jews, speaking Hebrew, to hear and to obey were inextricably linked together. The Hebrew word for “hear” is a call not just to the ears, but to the heart, and to hear is to respond, whether it’s for the Lord to hear the cries of his people in their bondage and to come to their deliverance or for Israel to hear the word of the Lord and to take it to heart and do it. We have a word in English that we don’t use anymore that is very similar: hearken. Don’t just hear, but take note, take what you hear to heart. Do it.Brothers and Sisters, words are important—and the word of God especially so. As I’ve said so many times, God’s word brings life. By his word he created life in the beginning and when we were mired in sin and in slavery to death, he heard out cries for deliverance and sent his word again, this time in human flesh, in Jesus, to die and to rise from death that we might know life again. This is at the core of Easter and so, these last two Sundays of Eastertide we read from St. James’ epistle about the power of God’s word to bring us life and to transform us. But first he contrasts God’s word with our words, which are so often spoken in anger or spoken, not to heal or to give life, but to hurt. This is in the first chapter of James. Our Epistle begins at verse 22, but I want to back up a bit into last week’s Epistle, to verse 19. Here’s what James writes:Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. (James 1:19-21)“Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” How many times would that have saved you a world of hurt if you’d only heard and obeyed? On the Internet. In an argument with your wife or your husband? At work? With your kids? But no. We get angry, because the kids broke something, because your wife bought something or your husband forgot to say where he was going or because a co-worker did something stupid or because someone is wrong on the Internet. Here’s what happens. When things go wrong, it’s all too easy to suddenly get stupid. We get this dumb idea in our heads that what the word needs to set it straight or what the situation needs to get it back on track is a taste of our anger. Maybe that’s why angry words seem to prompt angry words in return and then the angry words spiral out of control. But that’s what happens all too often.Now, there can be a place for anger. So often we get angry because the world isn’t what we know it should be. Sometimes—a lot of the time—that’s just our pride being hurt or our selfishness being tweaked, but when we see real wrongs being done, when we see real injustice in the world, there is a place for just and righteous anger. Godly anger over sin and injustice is often precisely what we need to get us up and out into the world to help the needy or the hurt, to stand up for the defenceless, or otherwise to speak out and to work for wrongs to be righted. St. Paul writes in Ephesians 4:26, “Be angry” but then there’s an “and”, a big “and”: “and do not sin.” Deal with what needs dealing with and “do not let the sun go down on your anger,” because that “gives opportunity to the devil”. If you’re angry because your pride has been hurt, put a stop to it right there. Swallow your pride and move on. If you’re angry because something is truly wrong, use that anger productively to set things right, but do not sin in the process. Two wrongs won’t make thing right. And righteous or not, don’t let your anger fester. Deal with it one way or another, because simmering anger is fodder for the devil and for all sorts of sin. We all know that from experience. Let your anger simmer and before too long you’re thinking about payback and revenge and neither of those things have any place in the Christian life. That was our lesson two Sunday’s ago: As he has vindicated Jesus, so the Father will one day vindicate us. We don’t need to vindicate ourselves.In short, James says, “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness—or, maybe better here—the justice of God. In other words, your anger is not what will set this broken world to rights. I know it always seems like it will at the time, but it won’t. Just consider: You think your anger will set things right so you lash out at that other person. And now what are they thinking? They’re thinking the same thing: All the situation needs is a little bit of their anger to fix it so they lash out at you. And all it all does is make everything worse. Brother and Sisters, James reminds us to instead be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger. God is the one who will bring justice to the world and right the wrongs. If we have been wronged, God will vindicate us. The best thing we can do is to respond with the fruit of the Spirit. Where the world is broken, where relationships are broken, we should be asking ourselves how we can bring to bear the things that God’s Spirit gives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Our anger won’t help God make things right. And so James warns:Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. Do you see what he did there? More often than not, when we get angry, it’s because our pride has been hurt and that kind of anger tempts us to lash out—it tempts us to respond to a hurt or a wrong with some kind of sin. Filthy words, brawling, that sort of thing. In contrast, James says that when our pride is threatening to take control of us, we need instead to meekly receive—to hearken to—the word that God has implanted in us. If this were St. Paul, he’d be reminding us to put off the old man and to put on the new. The pride and anger are the old man talking, but in Jesus and the Spirit God has made us new. James puts it in terms of the word by which God has forgiven us and made us a new creation. I think James had Isaiah 55:10-11 in mind when he was writing this. That’s where the Lord, through the Prophet, says:For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth,making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty,but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. This is one of my favourite passages in all of Scripture. When I look at myself and get frustrated with my own sin and my own shortcomings and my own failures to be faithful to God, I remember what he says about his word here. And as a pastor, when I’m discouraged with ministry and when it seems like nothing is happening or people aren’t maturing or when I see sin and shortcomings and failures to be faithful in the church, again, I come back to what the Lord says about his word here and I go back to the word, because God’s word is the source of life. When I’m frustrated or disappointed with myself, I read and meditate on Gods’ word. When I’m frustrated with ministry, I preach God’s word. Because nothing else I can do will bring the life of God to myself or to other people—only his word can do that—and he promises through Isaiah that his word always accomplishes what he purposes and it always succeeds in that for which he sends it forth. So I preach his word to myself and I preach his word to you and trust him to cause it to bear fruit in me and in you, because he says that that is what he will do. God’s word is life.Brothers and Sisters, do me a favour. Hold up your right hand. Okay, now stick out your right index finger. Good. Now stick that finger in your ear. Because I don’t want what I’m about to say to go in one ear and out the other. And what I want to say is this: Don’t let God’s word go in one ear and out the other. James writes, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” Don’t just listen to the word. Don’t just read it. Hear it, Brothers and Sisters. Hearken to it. If it helps, read your Bible with your finger in your ear to remind you to pay attention. These are God’s words and they are life! Too often we come to church and hear the word or we sit down at home and read the word, but we don’t actually hear it, we don’t let it sink in, we don’t let it take root like a seed, and so we don’t become doers of the word, letting it make a difference and transform us. If we just let the word go in one ear and out the other we’re in danger of deceiving ourselves. We think, “I’ve read the Bible or I’ve listened to it in church and I’ve done my duty,” but Friends, if the word doesn’t take root in our hearts and minds, if it doesn’t make a difference, we miss out on the life of God. He promises that his word will accomplish what he purposes—that it will make a difference, that it will bring new life—but first we have to hear it, not just listen, but hear it, take it in, obey it, and let it change us.James uses an illustration here. Look at verses 23-25:For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. You walk past a mirror, have a look, then walk away and forget. In one ear and out the other. That’s not how we should approach God’s word. And how do we know if we’re really letting God’s word take root and grow in us? We know it’s growing in us when we go from being mere hearers to being actual doers of that word. When we don’t just know in our heads that truth is important, but when we stop telling lies, when we stop misrepresenting people, and speak the truth. When “love your enemies and do good to them” goes from being something in your head to something you actually live out. When love your wife or submit to your husband translates into loving your wife or submitting to your husband in real and practical ways. When the Lord’s Supper goes from being something you eat to something you live out in your interactions with your brothers and sisters in the Lord, showing love and living in the unity Jesus has given us.And notice how James makes this point. He takes us back to his own roots. He was a Jew. He was circumcised into the Lord’s covenant people when he was eight days old. He grew up living torah, because he was one of the covenant people and that’s what covenant people did. That’s how they were faithful to the Lord in return for his faithfulness to them. And they learned the torah, the law, by reading and studying God’s word. And as much as Jesus changed everything, he didn’t change the fact that the Lord continues to live in covenant with his people. Jesus established a new covenant, but it’s still a covenant. And the Spirit has given a new law, but it’s still a law. God’s people are still called to be different from the world. As he marked out the Jews with circumcision and called them to live according to the torah, so he marks out the people of Jesus with baptism and calls us to live the law of the Spirit—what James calls the “perfect law, the law of liberty”. Faithful Jews were doers—keeping the sabbath, eating clean foods and not eating unclean foods, all of that. Some people think that Jesus has freed us from all of the doing, but it’s really just the opposite. Jesus calls us to even more and better doing, the difference is that instead of pointing to a list of laws written on stone and saying “Do that”, he fills us with God’s own Spirit, gives us his own example of love at the cross, rises from the dead and gives us a foretaste of his new creation and says “Do that in the power of the Spirit”. And this new law, instead of burdening us, actually ends up freeing us from all those things that used to weigh us down: anger and filthiness and wickedness and replaces it all with the fruit of the Spirit—again— love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control as the Spirit and the word work in us to redirect the affections of our hearts from sin and from self to love for God and love for each other.And so James sums it up in verses 26 and 27, writing:If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. God’s word and God’s Spirit will transform us. It doesn’t happen in an instant, so we have to be careful here. Our expectations for a new Christian aren’t the same as they are for a mature Christian, but still, a Christian will show the transforming work of God’s life-giving word in his life. And so James says that if you think you’re religious—note that “religion” isn’t the bad word some people make it out to be today. Religion is our service to God. There’s good religion and there’s bad religion as we’ll see in a bit. So if you think you’re serving God but you don’t have a bridle on your tongue—that’s not the only thing that might show this, but since James has been talking about anger and sinful words, this is the example he uses here—if you speak hateful and hurtful and untrue things, you’ve deceived yourself. You’ve been letting God’s word go in one ear and out the other. You haven’t actually heard it and so it hasn’t taken root and it’s not growing in your heart. It calls into question your profession of faith and your place in the covenant. We enter the covenant through faith in Jesus. And we show our membership in the covenant by doing the word, by living the law of the Spirit. And if you aren’t living the law of the Spirit, well, it begs the question: Are you really a member of the covenant? Is your faith in Jesus real? Because a Christian without the fruit of the Spirit, a Christian who is worldly and doesn’t bridle his tongue, well he’s like a Jew who labours on the sabbath or loves eating pork. He’s a contradiction.In contrast, true religion, real service to God looks like this: visiting orphans and widows and keeping yourself unstained by the filthiness of the world. James could have listed any number of things here, but he’s certainly practical and these are things that stood out in the First Century and made people take note of Christians and the Church. It was a dog-eat-dog world, but the Christians took care of each other and they took care of the poor and vulnerable, because that’s what love in action looks like and because that’s what new creation looks like. And in a world of filth, where culture was crude and vulgar and religion often involved ritual drug use and prostitution, God’s people stood apart—much as the Jews of the old covenant had stood apart. Jesus’ people, transformed by word and Spirit, should stand as beacons of his new creation, by our lives and by our proclamation, lifting the veil on what God has in store for this broken world.So Brother and Sisters, be Easter people. If you have believed that Jesus died and rose from the dead to forgiven our sins and to make us part of his new creation, prove it. Really be Easter people. Immerse yourselves in God’s word and hear what he has to say. Don’t let it go in one ear and out the other. Let it sink in and take root and grow. And then be the new creation that God’s word will make us if we give it the chance and as God’s word transform. He will make us, as he promised, the firstfruits of his new creation—a and that, Brothers and Sisters, is how he is setting the wrongs of this world to right. Not by our anger, but by his word and by his Spirit.Let’s pray: O Lord, from whom all good things come: Grant to us, your humble servants, that by your holy inspiration we may think those things that are good, and by your merciful guidance put them into practice; through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Fourth Sunday after Easter: Justice and JudgementSt. James 1:17-25 & St. John 16:5-15by William KlockI don’t like the news. Watching it or reading it. I don’t like it. I try to pay attention to the top headlines via the Internet so that people don’t think I live under a rock, but otherwise I don’t like the news. Occasionally I tune the Apple TV to Global when I’m making dinner and it seems that it’s just one injustice after another. And in the mornings while I eat breakfast I go online and my custom homepage lists headlines for me—and even when I prioritise the subjects that really interest me, there too, it’s one evil after another and injustice piled on injustice. If there’s a bright side, at least the injustices that makes the headlines make the injustices I experience seem fairly insignificant. People getting scammed, people being hurt and taken advantage of, maybe the worst are the people trampled by the government—the very institutions that are pledged to protect them. And so often there’s nothing they can do. I remember the story of a Pakistani elder from a few years ago. Somehow he mistakenly ended up on a US government “kill list”. He’d repeatedly been the subject of drone attacks that endangered not only him, but his friends and family around him. And there was nothing he could do. He even managed to travel to Britain where he hoped he could get a hearing and somehow find justice. The world is filled with this sort of thing.And then you turn to the Psalms. At Morning Prayer this past Friday Psalm 26 was appointed, a psalm where David cries out to the Lord for justice and for vindication:Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity, and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering. Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and my mind.For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in your faithfulness. (Psalm 26:1-2)Or consider Psalm 43, which opens with very similar words:Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people,from the deceitful and unjust man deliver me!David was feeling crushed by the weight of injustice, but he knew he was in the right and so he cried out in desperation to the Lord to hear his case and to vindicate him. Like the man who mistakenly ended up on the kill list of a superpower too big to care. Like the man who gets injustice from the very police charged with seeing justice done. Like the man seeking justice, but forever finding himself tied up in red tape and surrounded by uncaring bureaucrats. They know they’re in the right. If only there were a righteous judge to hear my case, they think, then I would receive justice.This was the national theme of Israel. It started in Egypt when the Israelites were slaves. They cried out to the Lord, he heard them, and he sent Moses to deliver them and then Joshua to lead them as they defeated the Canaanites and took possession of the promised land. There’s even an entire book of the Old Testament called “Judges”. It’s the history of the time between Joshua and Saul, the time between Israel’s conquest of Canaan and Israel’s demand that God give her a king like the other nations. Over and over during the period of the Judges this or that Israelite tribe as overrun and oppressed by their enemies—often the very people the Lord had told them to destroy when they entered Canaan, but whom the Israelites had not destroyed. Judges has a pattern: Foreigners oppress the Lord’s people, the Lord’s people cry out for deliverance, and the Lord sends a judge to deliver the people from their enemies. In the Old Testament that’s what judges do—they act on the Lord’s behalf to vindicate his people and to deliver them.But it didn’t end when Saul was made king. Nearly the entire history of Israel from the Judges to the time of Jesus shows this same pattern. Whether it was the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Persians or the Greeks or the Romans, Israel kept finding herself overrun by foreign empires and armies and living under their oppressive rule. Some of the psalms that cry out to God the Judge came out of just this kind of oppression. The Israelites knew that their God was good and that he was just. He had vindicated their faithfulness in the past and they had faith he would vindicate it again.When the Israelites envisioned justice they often described it in terms of the law court, where the plaintiff and defendant would go before a judge, each would make his case, and the judge would decide between them. To “go home justified”—do you remember that’s how Jesus puts it in the parable of the Pharisees and the tax collector?—to go home justified was to have the judge decide in your favour and to confirm your righteousness—to vindicate you before the face of your enemy. And so the Israelites envisioned themselves bringing the Babylonians or the Greeks or the Romans or the Herodians to court for oppressing them. The Israelites had never done anything to deserve this, they thought, and so they expected the Lord, the just Judge, to vindicate them and to rule against their enemies. One day the Judge would deliver them again just as he had so many times in the past.But, of course we know if we’ve Israel’s story, that she often wasn’t as innocent as she thought. The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel turned this court scene back on Israel. Israel had it backwards. It wasn’t Israel that should be bringing her case against the pagan empires before the Lord, but that the Lord should be bringing his own case against rebellious and unfaithful Israel. The Babylonians or the Assyrians were actually the Lord trying to get his people to wake up to their sins and to repent and to be faithful to him. Needless to say, the prophets weren’t very popular when they said these things.But there was hope too. Those same prophets rebuked Israel on the one hand, but they also gave the people hope. Someday the Lord would rule in favour of his people and against the pagan nations that oppressed them. God would vindicate his people and rule that the nations were in the wrong.This is how the Jews thought about themselves and about the world and it’s the narrative that makes sense of our Gospel this morning about Jesus sending the Holy Spirit. Today’s Gospel, like last week’s, is a small portion of what’s often called Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse” from John’s Gospel. It’s a long discourse that Jesus gave to his disciples between the end of the Last Supper and his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane and it’s full of this back and forth between promises of persecution for his sake and exhortation to keep the faith. Our passage today comes immediately before last week’s. Today’s passage begins at John 16:5, but if we go back to verse 1, Jesus says to his disciples:“I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you.” (John 16:1-4a)Jesus by this point has already explained to them that fairly soon he’s going to be leaving them. That was bad news enough. But now he tells them that after he’s gone, persecution is coming. The unbelieving Jews will throw them out of the synagogues. Some of Jesus’ people will even be martyred for their faith. And they’ll be tempted to throw in the towel and give up on Jesus. In verse 6 Jesus says, “Because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart.”But in truth, Jesus’ leaving isn’t actually a bad thing. They shouldn’t be too quick to mourn. He goes on in verse 7:Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. The Helper Jesus promises to send is the Holy Spirit. John uses the Greek title parakletos and you’ll see it translated in different ways: helper, comforter, advocate. The Greek word literally means one who is “called alongside”. Jesus uses it in the legal sense of one who will act as an advocate in court. And here Jesus takes his disciples back to this heavenly court scene that was such a major theme in Israel’s history and self-identity. But this time it’s the disciples, Jesus’ followers, the new Israel in the place of the plaintiff and the world—the Gentiles and unbelieving Israel—pitted against the Church. Jesus is leaving. The disciples don’t like that idea, but it’s actually a good thing, Jesus says. Once he’s taken his heavenly throne, Jesus can send the Holy Spirit to come and plead his people’s case before the Lord and when he does so he will vindicate his people, he will see that they are sent home justified by proving that it’s the world in the wrong.Jesus says that the Spirit will prove the world in the wrong on three counts. Look at verses 8-11:And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. So first, the Spirit will convict the world concerning sin. Sin at its heart is rebellion against God. It’s a refusal to trust in God’s goodness. Adam and Eve sinned when they believed the serpent’s lie that God was holding out on them and ate the fruit God had told them not to eat. You and I were never created to determine good and evil for ourselves. We’re finite beings. We can only see so far and know so much. God intended for us to trust in his perfect goodness and to obey him. The Father sent his Son, Jesus, to provide forgiveness and reconciliation and get us back on track walking in trust, but again the world chooses to rebel. The “world” rejected Jesus and murdered him and the world continues to reject him even today. And the Holy Spirit will expose all of this in the heavenly court.Second, Jesus says the Spirit will convict the world concerning righteousness. Some translations read “justice” instead of “righteousness”, which fits the law court scene better. In biblical terms to be declared righteous or justified is to have the court decide in your favour. Jesus says that the world is convinced that it is in the right. The world sits in the courtroom sure it will win the case. The Jews believed they were in the right to kill Jesus and then to persecute his followers. Caesar truly believed that he was lord and so he persecuted those who insisted instead that Jesus is Lord. Even today people and governments persecute and kill Christians because they see us as a threat to their security or to their values. And even if it’s not out-and-out persecuting Christians, the world often sits smugly in its sins. Today we see the world declaring various sins to be virtuous and condemning Christians and anyone else who says otherwise as being intolerant, bigoted, or judgemental.But Jesus says that again the Spirit will convict the world. And the Spirit will do this by pointing to Jesus—the same Jesus rejected and murdered by the world, but now risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of his Father. The world was convinced it was in the right when it passed sentence on Jesus, but in the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus God himself has overruled the world’s unjust judgement and vindicated his Son. And if God has vindicated Jesus, he will also vindicate all those who follow Jesus in faith.Finally, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will convict the world concerning judgement. In its rebellious spirit, the world thought it could condemn Jesus and it continues to think that it can condemn us. Again, the world is convinced of its own righteousness. But in his death and resurrection Jesus has proved the world to be in the wrong. Not only has God overruled the world’s false judgement on Jesus (and not only will God overrule the world’s false judgement on us), but by his death Jesus has defeated the power of sin and in his resurrection Jesus has defeated death itself. Sin and death are the powers the devil has used since the beginning to enslave humanity, but Jesus has broken the power of both. The devil has been defeated by Jesus.Brothers and Sisters, because we have the Holy Spirit as our advocate we can face suffering, we can face the rejection and hate of the world for the sake of Jesus and continue to live in faith that the Judge of all the earth will do what is just. Again, in Jesus’ resurrection the unjust verdict of the world was overturned and Jesus was vindicated as the one in the right. And as he was vindicated in his resurrection so shall we one day be vindicated in ours.But as I’ve said before, the point of all this isn’t for us to simply hunker down inside the church and wait for Jesus to come back. He’s given us work to do in the meantime. God’s people have always had work to do. The Lord came into the darkness of the world when it was utterly lost in paganism and he chose Abraham to be his representative to be a light in that darkness. He blessed Abraham so that Abraham could be a blessing to the world—so that the world could once again know God’s goodness, repent, and return to him. That mission became the mission of Israel and, since by faith you and I are grafted into Israel, Abraham’s mission has become our mission. And Jesus doesn’t stop with the Holy Spirit vindicating us in the heavenly court. The Holy Spirit, Jesus says, will speak to us.When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16:13-15)Jesus is the Word and the Spirit will make him known to us. In our baptism Jesus pours the Holy Spirit into us and it’s the Spirit who then unites us with Jesus, who regenerates our hearts and renews our minds, changing our affections and giving us understanding. The Spirit makes the Word known to us. He unites us with Jesus, the Word Incarnate. He breathes out the Word written—Holy Scripture—through the Prophets and Apostles and through Jesus. Through the Spirit the Father makes himself known to us, calls us back into his fellowship, and sends us out to do the work of his kingdom. But that’s just it. If we are in Christ we have the Spirit and all of this should transform us. This is why in our Epistle St. James exhorts us:Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. (James 1:22)And he goes on a few verses later to say:Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (James 1:27)Brothers and Sisters, the world is a mess. It’s a mess because of sin. We’ve all contributed to it. Jesus has set in motion the process through which he will make all things new, through which he will redeem his Creation and he calls us to be part of that. But notice—and this is vitally important for us to realise: Jesus doesn’t redeem us to remove us from the mess. Just the opposite, in fact. Jesus redeems us so that we can go right back into the mess and start cleaning things up. The Word isn’t something we merely hear; it’s something we’re called to do. Jesus came to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and sight to the blind. To bring justice and righteousness to those most desperately in need of it. To make all the sad things come untrue. He ate with tax collectors and sinners—with people who weren’t just suffering from the mess others made, but the very people at the heart of a lot of the mess-making. James warns us not to get back into mess-making ourselves, but he also tells us that like Jesus we need to be in the thick of it working to make things right and working to point the world to the one who is making all things right. The world will hate us. Jesus promises it. We will probably suffer for being light in the darkness, but Jesus calls us to walk in faith, trusting that the God who raised him from the dead will act justly and righteously with us too. Being justified ourselves we are to go into the world, as the Lord said through the prophet Micah: “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” We’ve all heard the good news. Brothers and Sisters, we need to ask ourselves what we’re doing to be faithful stewards of the good news and the grace of God? What are you doing with it? The Spirit has equipped and empowered each of us. What can you do to make Jesus known in practical ways, to proclaim good news, to be light in the darkness, to help others who are still mired in the mess made by human sin?Let us pray: Heavenly Father, we live in a world that often hates us. Let us never be afraid to be doers of your Word. We have been justified by Jesus. Remind us that we have no reason to fear the world’s accusations. We live in hope of life. Give us courage to stand up to the darkness and to be ministers of your light and your grace and your mercy. As we have been rescued from our bondage to sin and death, give us courage to go into the world with the good news that others might be freed to know your grace. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. Amen.
The Third Sunday after Easter: Easter in Between1 Peter 2:11-17 & St. John 16:16-22by William KlockThe disciples were confused. John captures it well in our Gospel. After the Last Supper, while the disciples were with him in the upper room, Jesus began taught them and that discourse runs from John 13 to John 17. These chapters are full of hard saying—and they were particularly hard for the disciples for whom the events of Jesus betrayal and death and resurrection and ascension were still in the future. Jesus talks about loss and sadness and he talks about joy and he talks about perseverance in the face of opposition. But they sat there confused. Every time they though Jesus was starting to make sense, he’d say something and they’d be lost again.In that part of his discourse we read this morning, he says things like, “I’m going to my Father”, “Soon you will see me no more, but soon after that you’ll see me again”, and “Truly, truly you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices, but then we’ll see each other again and the tables will be turned and you’ll be the ones rejoicing.”And, of course, the disciples are left shaking their heads in confusion and asking each other what all this means: “Where’s Jesus going? Did he tell you he was going somewhere?” “What does he mean he’s going to his Father?” They didn’t understand because none of this had happened yet. They didn’t understand because they were still thinking of the Messiah in the terms that most of the Jews were thinking of him—sure Jesus looked humble and meek now, but pretty soon he was going to throw off the poor, itinerant rabbi disguise and take care of business.They also didn’t understand because Jesus is weaving two and probably three promises together here. As the discourse unfolds, John will separate each of them out. But Jesus makes his point with a lot more punch by simplifying everything. This is Easter and this is what it means to be Easter people. Jesus is going to be arrested, mocked, beaten, and crucified. He’ll be dead for three days. His friends will mourn, they’ll be afraid, Sunday will find them hiding behind locked doors, fearing that the authorities will come for them next. But on Sunday Jesus will rise from death and his new creation will dawn. While they’re weeping and afraid, Jesus will be setting lose the power that will begin making all things new.Jesus’ promise to send the Holy Spirit is tied in here too. Jesus will die—he’ll be away—and then he’ll rise from the grave—he’ll be back and they’ll see him again. But then again, Jesus will only be with them a short while. After forty days he’ll ascend to his Father, he’ll take up his throne to rule his kingdom, but they’ll see him again in the person of the Holy Spirit, whom he will send so that they’ll not only understand all of this, but so that they’ll be empowered to live the new life he’s promised.But there seems to a third promise packed in here too and that’s the promise of Jesus’ final royal return at the end of the age, when all his enemies have been put under his feet and he comes back with his heavenly entourage to take up his eternal throne.At each level, Jesus’ promise is a promise of difficulty, whether it it’s the fear and grief they felt during those three days after his death, whether it’s the time of prayer and waiting between his ascension and Pentecost, or whether it’s the time in which we live today, ambassadors living in hostile territory, proclaiming that Jesus is Lord, while we wait for his royal return. The new creation is born out of the pain of the old the way a baby is born out of the pain of labour and childbirth. The Christian life makes a lot more sense when we look at it through this promise of Jesus—when we remember that he didn’t promise that life would be easy, that all of our prayers would be answered the way we want, or that life would be full of health and wealth once we choose to follow him. No. Over and over Jesus promises just the opposite. Being a disciple is like living through childbirth. Jesus promised that the world would hate us. No unregenerate person wants to admit that Jesus is the true Lord, because doing so means being confronted by the reality of their own sin and rebellion, doing so demands repentance as the only logical response and most people don’t want to repent, they don’t want to give up everything to embrace Jesus. And on top of that, every one of us still has to live with the consequences of human sin—with sickness and poverty and with death. The old has to die in order to be reborn. But we face these things in hope. The baby will be born, the labour will be over, and when we see the baby all the pain and all the tears will be overcome and driven away by the joy of that new life. Brothers and Sisters, the resurrection of Jesus is the evidence that Jesus’ promises are coming true and that God’s new world is being born.And all of this has implications for how we live in this in-between time. It has implications for how we face the world and how we face all the sad and awful and difficult things that crop up in life because of our fall and humanity’s separation from God. This is what St. Peter gets at in today’s Epistle. Peter begins his first letter writing to his fellow Christians as exiles living in a great dispersion in hostile and foreign territory. It’s an image he picked up from Judaism. The Jews were scattered all over the world, but no matter where they lived, they identified themselves as Jews and they showed it by the way they lived. And Peter begins with that imagery as he addresses fellow believers in Jesus. Times are hard, life is hard—and a lot of that trouble is the direct result of choosing to follow Jesus—but right from the get-go Peter writes a joyful, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Because through his mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope.” Death and decay are all around, but through Jesus God has given us the hope of life and, Peter goes on, “He’s given us that hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Each of us faces death—it might be from sickness, it might be from accident, it might be in the arena at the command of Caesar—but in Jesus we have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for us.” It’s the life we had in the garden when we lived in God’s presence and had access to the tree of life. It’s the opposite of most everything we see around us. And we live in hope of that great day when it’s no longer kept safe for us in heaven, but when Jesus returns to rule, when heaven and earth are brought back together as they were in the garden, when we can live in the presence of God having been fully purified and made new. In the meantime, Peter writes, we live for a little while suffering trials—but through these trials the dross is burned away and our faith is strengthened and purified like gold in the crucible.This is what St. Peter’s first letter is about: hope in the midst of suffering and living in this world and this age full of hope and knowing that Jesus is in the process of making all things new. It’s about being Easter people who live in light of the resurrection, charging into the darkness with the light of the gospel.In the first part of Chapter 2, the part immediately before today’s Epistle, Peter urges his fellow Christians to set aside sin. He draws on a whole bunch of images from the Old Testament that point to the Church as the new Israel. He describes each of us as a living stone, precious to God, and being gathered together and built up as the Lord’s new temple—this time not a temple of bricks and mortar, but a living temple filled with the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the cornerstone and just as he was rejected by the world, so will we be, but again, that’s all the more reason to have hope in the promises of Jesus. We are following where he has already gone. And so, Peter says, like Israel of old, we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people called to proclaim the mighty acts of Jesus, who has called us out of darkness and into light.Peter understood what it meant to live in this in-between time. He understood what Jesus meant when he described our life with him as a woman in the middle of labour, but labouring with hope of the joy that is to come: pain and suffering and tears today, but joy tomorrow. But that’s just it. Our hope for tomorrow is expressed—it becomes a witness to the world—in how we respond to the pain and suffering and tears we have today. We don’t just proclaim that Jesus is Lord with our mouths. Brothers and Sisters, we are called to live out his lordship in our lives—we’re called to make it practical in ways that the world around us—so that the very people often causing the pain and suffering will see our faith and so that our lives will be to them a witness to Jesus’ lordship. Look at 2:11-12:Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. When I was in high school I competed in a state-wide vocational skills contest. I was in the architectural drafting competition. I won first place in my county and then went to Seattle for the state competition. There were close to a thousand kids there and we pretty much took over a large hotel. At breakfast the first morning the person in charge of organizing the competition took the stage and reamed us out. Some of us—not me!— had been so noisy and rowdy during the night that several dozen people had actually checked out of the hotel and the hotel manager was threatening to bill our group for what they lost. The man who took the stage reminded us that we represented a highly respected national vocational educational association and that we’d tarnished its image with our bad behaviour.Peter’s giving a similar warning. When he says that we are sojourners and exiles he’s reminding us that we belong to Jesus. We’re citizens of his kingdom. We represent him to the world around us. Think again of the good news that we proclaim: Jesus is Lord. He has conquered sin and death. He is God’s true King. For the Christians of the First Century this was a profoundly political and subversive thing to say. Everyone knew that Caesar was lord. To say that Jesus is Lord was to say that Caesar was not. Caesar didn’t like that. The people who really did see Caesar as their lord didn’t like that either. And they threw all sorts of accusations at those first Christians. Christians might as well be atheists, people said, seeing as they worshiped only one God. Christians were disloyal, refusing to profess the empire’s creed. And while the specifics may have changed over the last two thousand years, you and I face the same sort of hostility. We’re considered narrow and intolerant because we believe in only one God and because we believe Jesus is the way and the only way to life. We’re narrow and bigoted for calling certain things “sin” and for holding a biblical worldview. And we’re upsetting to people who trust in themselves or trust in their money or who trust in their government when we proclaim that only Jesus is worthy of our trust and worship.And so Peter warns us: Be good ambassadors. Yes, sin is a real temptation, but walk in the Spirit and keep your conduct honourable. Don’t give unbelievers, don’t give non-Christians reason to speak evil against you. If they hate you and if they persecute you, let it be for your unfaltering faith in Jesus, not for your hypocrisy, not for the sin you commit while pointing out their sins. Let them hate you for standing for the truth, not for being sinful in the ways that you defend it. In other words, live as befits a holy people; no matter how bad it gets, don’t respond to the world in worldly ways. Live your lives in a such a way that by your response, your persecutors will see the light of Jesus and his kingdom in you.In verses 13-15 Peter focuses specifically on what all this means for how we interact with our civil authorities and rulers.Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. The creed or the pledge of allegiance of the Roman empire was “Caesar is Lord”. To proclaim that Jesus is Lord is to also proclaim that Caesar is not. That didn’t go over well in the First Century. Many Christians were martyred for their witness to the lordship of Jesus. Plenty of Christians were tempted to treat the civil authorities with disrespect. After all, they represented Caesar who was just a pretender at the true lordship and divinity of Jesus. Many Christians would have been tempted to mock Caesar and his rule. And many, seeing their brothers and sisters taken off in chains, crucified, or fed to lions, might have wondered if it wasn’t then time to take up arms against the local authorities. That was the direction many of the Jews were headed in and it would have been easy for Christians to follow them.But Peter says “No”. As part of our witness that Jesus is Lord, we Christians must submit ourselves to earthly rulers—even the evil ones who cart us off to prison or to the arena because of our faith in Jesus. If the consequence of following Jesus is persecution, or imprisonment, or even death, so be it. If that’s hard to swallow, just remember that by submitting ourselves to the injustices of earthly rulers we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. I’m pretty well convinced that this is what Jesus was referring to when he told the disciples to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”. As the Father vindicated Jesus, so the Father will vindicate us. We are not called to vindicate ourselves. As the Father vindicated Jesus, so he will one day vindicate us.It’s true that Scripture gives us a sustained rebuke of corrupt and wicked earthly rulers. They are contrary to God’s will, contrary to his plan. But it’s also true, right from the beginning in Genesis 2, that God created us human beings to rule his Creation. Humans were meant to rule Creation. What that would have looked like had Adam not sinned, whether God would have established some sort of righteous monarchy or some sort of holy anarchy, is hard to say, but it is clear that God has established human rulers. It’s just that human rulers are sinful and have done a bad job of ruling. Nevertheless, order is better than chaos and if history shows us anything, the violent overthrow of one ruler usually just results in more violence and more overthrows and a spiral into chaos. Earthly rulers are God’s plan; it’s their sin that’s not. But even sinful rulers are instruments of God’s common grace, bringing order and restraining at least some sin.Jesus calls us to follow his example of submission, even in the face of persecution and death. Yes, refuse to participate in or to support the evil of our earthly rulers, refuse to remain silent when confronted with evil, speak out against it—that’s part of following Jesus—and never treat them like the gods they so often act like they are—but be prepared to suffer for it just as Jesus did. Again, our Father will vindicate us just as he vindicated Jesus in his resurrection. Our calling is not to be revolutionaries of the sort who respond to violence with violence. Jesus shows us a better way. By our peaceful and humble witness we shame those who would criticise us or who wish us ill.Jesus shows us a better way. Jesus broke the cycle of violence begetting violence. He submitted to his death at Caesar’s hands. When he was reviled he did not revile in return. When he suffered he did not threaten. No, instead he entrusted himself to his Father who judges justly. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where following Jesus is so hard, but it’s precisely what Peter has in mind in our Epistle. When we suffer violence, our natural instinct is to respond with violence. When someone infringes on our rights, our natural response is to fight back. But that’s what human beings have been doing from the beginning and all we see is sin begetting more sin, violence begetting more violence, and vengeance begetting more vengeance. Again, Jesus has made possible a better way. Jesus suffered violence and gave back forgiveness. He broke the cycle and made a way for peace and reconciliation and he calls us to do the same in our public life—with each other, with the people around us, and even with our rulers—even the evil and corrupt ones. By his suffering Jesus brought forgiveness of sin to us, and now Jesus works through us. We forgiven sinners are now called to suffer as he did and to return sin and violence with forgiveness. Forgiveness spreads, the cycle of sin is broken, and Jesus makes new.And so Peter sums up:Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. Through his death and resurrection Jesus has freed us from our bondage to sin and that changes everything—and not just us; it changes the whole world even if the world doesn’t realise it yet. And that’s just it. This is why we who have experienced the power of the cross and the empty tomb, this is why those of us who know Jesus is Lord and who know the true King are called to proclaim his death and resurrection and his lordship to the world. This is why our humble witness is so important. And so Peter warns us: our freedom can never be an excuse or cover for sin. Just the opposite: we’ve been freed from sin to serve the Lord and that’s what the world needs to see us doing. And in serving the Lord we show honour to everyone. Let the world see us loving each other as Christians. Let the world see us fearing the Lord. And let the world see us honouring the emperor—and anyone else who would do us harm. Of course we refuse to collaborate with evil. Of course we proclaim that Jesus is Lord, not Caesar. But one of the most powerful witnesses to Jesus we can have is to suffer unjustly for the sake of righteousness and to respond to violence and injustice with forgiveness. That is what the cross is all about and we can face it in faithful hope knowing that Jesus not only died, but also rose from death and has promised the same to us. Again, he says in the Gospel: “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”Let us pray: Heavenly Father, in the collect we asked for grace to live in a way that accords with our profession of faith in Jesus. We ask again, as we live with Jesus, as we steep ourselves in your word, as we receive your grace in our Baptism and at your Table, as we live our common life together, teach us what it looks like to live as people who have been transformed by the death and resurrection of Jesus, give us grace and courage to witness this life to the world, and help us to keep our witness consistent, loving each other, serving you, showing honour to all those around us—even our persecutors—and especially give us the grace to return evil with forgiveness as Jesus has done for us. We ask all this through him, our Lord and Saviour. Amen.
The Second Sunday after Easter: The Good Shepherd1 St. Peter 2:19-25 & St. John 10:11-16by William KlockOur Gospel lesson today is taken from St. John’s Gospel, the tenth chapter, verses 11-16. But for the sake of context, I want to begin a few verses later and then read our way backwards. In verse 22 of Chapter 10, John tells us that it was the time of the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem and that it was winter and that Jesus was walking around in the temple—and specifically that he was walking around the colonnade or portico of Solomon.All of that might sound unimportant to us, but for First Century Jews every detail there was loaded with significance. First, it was the Feast of Dedication. Do you know what that is? That’s not the name we usually hear for it? That John says it was in the winter, which might help us a bit. This is was the Feast of Hanukkah. And do you remember what Hanukkah is about? It’s not one of the biblical feasts that the Lord gave to Israel as part of the torah. This was a new feast—or relatively new—in Jesus’ day. Hanukkah is the feast commemorating the Maccabean Revolt. About a hundred and fifty years before Jesus was born, Judea was ruled by Greeks and those Greek overlords were wicked men and they got worse with each generation, until things came to head under Antiochus Epiphanes IV, who defiled the temple and the altar. Judas Maccabeus led a successful revolt against the Greeks and every year the Jews celebrated the Feast of Hannukah to commemorate that revolt and their national independence and the renewal of worship in the temple. Their independence under the Maccabees was short lived. Pretty soon the Romans conquered Judea and the Jews found themselves in a situation not all that different than their ancestors had when they were ruled by the Greeks.In Jesus’ day Hannukah had special significance. As long as the people remembered what had happened under the leadership of the Maccabees, they had hope. Their enemies had been defeated before and that meant that they could be defeated again. And it’s on this feast that John says Jesus was walking in the temple. And not just walking in the temple, but in the portico of Solomon. You remember who Solomon was, don’t you? Solomon was the son of David. Again, the son of David. Does that sound familiar? People call Jesus “son of David” throughout the Gospels. David himself was the great king, but Solomon, his son, was the one who built on his father’s victories, enlarging the nation and bringing peace and prosperity to his people. This is why that title, “son of David”, was wrapped up with the idea of the Messiah. The people were looking for someone like both David and his son, Solomon, who would come and retore the kingdom of Israel. So, again, here’s Jesus: at Hannukah, walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon, getting ready to teach. People were gathering and they couldn’t miss the symbolism. Jesus did these things on purpose. What he did and how he staged things was often just as important as what he said in these situations. John tells us that Jesus had the full attention of the crowd. They said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus was perpetually teasing them…or at least that’s how it seemed to a lot of the people. Jesus would set up a scene just like this, full of messianic symbolism, and he would say and do things that were also full of messianic symbolism. And it was obvious to everyone that he was saying and doing very messianic things, but then there were other things he did—like associating with the wrong people or doing things on the sabbath that you weren’t supposed to do on the sabbath—and he kept not doing things—like leading a revolt against the Romans—that everyone expected of the Messiah. So they didn’t know what to think.This was one of those instances. Jesus set everything up here—the time and the place and all that—full of messianic political significance. All he needed to do was give a rousing speech and he could have sparked the revolution so many were waiting for. “How long are you going to keep us in suspense, Jesus? Are you the Messiah or not?” they cried out. But instead, in verse 25 he answers their question and says, “I told you already, but you refuse to believe me!” He’s referring to our Gospel lesson, the paragraph immediately before in John 10, where he said, “I am the good shepherd.”That was full of messianic significance, too. And it would have been just as clear and obvious to them as everything else, because when Jesus said he was the good shepherd, that was a statement deeply rooted in the prophecies of Ezekiel and especially Ezekiel 34 and because of that, also deeply rooted in the messianic expectations of Israel. Through the prophet the Lord had rebuked the leaders of Israel.Prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord God: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them. (Ezekiel 34:2-6)The very people whom the Lord had charged with caring for the sheep were taking advantage of them, abusing them, and allowing them to be scattered. But the Lord also promised to the sheep:I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them. I am the Lord; I have spoken. (Ezekiel 34:23-24)Think about that promise as I read Jesus words from our Gospel.I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. (John 10:11-16) It was all so clear. You and I have to connect all these dots and it takes some work…and without help we might miss them…but connecting these dots was easy and natural for them. They knew the scriptures and they knew the Lord’s promises and they knew them inside-and-out. And yet they’re frustrated. Jesus sets the scene with messianic imagery. He says things that identify himself with the Lord’s promises through the prophets. But it’s not direct enough for the people. He keeps talking in parables and figurative language. “Come on, Jesus! If you are the Messiah, just come out and say it!” But Jesus won’t do that. Instead, in verses 25-30, Jesus reminds them of all the things he’s done:Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” “You’ve heard what I have said and you’ve seen what I have done.” Think of the things John has shown us Jesus doing: healing the blind…feeding that enormous crowd. And so many other things. He’s been healing and feeding the sheep, which is exactly what the Lord had promised the good shepherd would do for his sheep. In fact, he says, this time no one will snatch my sheep from my hand, because they belong to my Father and my Father has given them to me. I’m not the hireling who runs away in the face of danger. I’m not the hireling who takes advantage of the flock for my own person gain. Nor am I like the wicked rulers of Israel who have scattered the flock. I will gather them—I’ll even gather in sheep that aren’t of this fold—and I will heal then and I will feed them and I will never let them go. And then that amazing statement that no one expected. Here they are asking Jesus to tell them, yes or no, in clear language, if he is the Messiah or not and instead he goes even further: “I and the Father are one.”Have you ever noticed that Jesus never points the people to himself? He always points the people to the Father. Everything Jesus does is aimed at revealing the faithfulness and the glory of the Father. The people were obsessed with the Messiah, but Jesus is always pointing them beyond the Messiah to the one who sent him. Jesus says that his sheep will be safe forever in his hand, but the only way he can make that promise is if he and the Father are one. Everyone knew that no one can snatch the sheep of the God of Israel from his hand. The Egyptians had tried, the Babylonians had tried, the Greeks had tried, and the Lord always heard the cries of his sheep and came and delivered them. Jesus can make the same promise as the Father, because he and the Father are one. And, again, what he says here would have taken the people back to Ezekiel 34, this time to verses 15 and 16. Yes, the Lord promised that David—or a son of David—would one day feed and care for the sheep, but somehow this was also the God of Israel himself at work. The Lord promised:I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice. The people keep asking, “Are you the Messiah?” And Jesus takes them a step further. He’s sort of saying, “I’ve told you already and you weren’t listening, I’ve shown you and you wouldn’t see and just maybe that’s because you first need to ask yourselves who the Messiah is.” Jesus is here promising to the people that he will redeem the sheep—and he hints at the fact that this redemption is not only for the sheep of Israel, but in redeeming them, he will also gather in sheep from outside the fold, from the nations. And he can do this because he’s not just the Messiah, but because as the Messiah, he is the very embodiment of the God of Israel who has heard the bleating of his sheep and has come to deliver them, to heal them, to feed them, and to give them justice—just as he promised. And he will do all of this by laying down his own life for the sake of the sheep.Brothers and Sisters, at the cross Jesus revealed the faithfulness of God to his promises and his love for his sheep.Now, what do we do with that? Throughout the season of Eastertide our scripture lessons point us to the practical application of Jesus’ death and resurrection—what it means for us in practical terms, what it means for the life of the Christian, that Jesus died and rose again and, in that, reveals the faithfulness of God. And so today the Gospel shows us God’s love revealed in Jesus and his faithfulness revealed in Jesus and we’re reminded that Jesus is the one who has laid down his life for the sheep, and then we turn over to St. Peter’s first epistle and he says to us in 2:19:For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. What is Peter talking about? I think he saw that persecution was coming to the church—the sort of thing Jesus promised and that we see the churches in John’s care facing in the beginning of his Revelation—but Peter’s concern was much broader than that. He opens this part of his epistle with those familiar words, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God in the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:11-12).Peter’s concern was simply Christians living in the midst of a fallen and pagan world in which the gospel was advancing, but that has not yet been fully transformed and made new by Jesus. Someday it will, but until that day, it will always be imperfect and full of trials and tears and pain and opposition and we need to think on how to be good stewards of the grace of God and of the good news about Jesus as we live with the pressures of the world around us. Jesus is Lord, but corrupt, power-hungry, and unjust civil governments and rulers still govern us. In Peter’s day slavery was still common—in fact the Roman Empire ran on the labour of slaves and it was amongst these slaves that Christianity quickly spread. Our world is different in many ways, but in many ways it really hasn’t changed. How are we to live in light of the problems of the world? If the Christian slave is to endure the beating of an unjust master, this sets a pattern for the unhappy marriage, living under a pagan ruler, and a host of other difficult and seemingly impossible situations.When we face hard things, our first inclination is to express outrage, to protest injustice, to assert our rights, and to fight back. It’s not that there isn’t a place for the Christian to take a stand for his rights or the rights of others, but Peter saw that in many situations the Christian has an even higher calling. As Jesus reminds us in the Sermon on the Mount, manifesting the kingdom to the world is a higher priority than defending or asserting our own rights. It’s worth noting that the specific situations given in these verses are things over which most people in the First Century had no control. Peter saw such injustice through the lens of the cross, the greatest injustice ever perpetrated by human beings. He goes back to Isaiah 53 and the song of the suffering servant. Jesus accomplished God’s saving purposes for his people by being reviled, yet without reviling in return, by suffering, yet not threatening. Rather, as he faced the false judgement of unjust men, he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. He who knew no sin bore on his body our sins. Why? Because his suffering and death were the only means by which we can die to sin and live to righteousness. Sin did its worst to Jesus in his crucifixion, but he came out the other side alive again, bringing the firstfruits of resurrection into the world and inaugurating the age to come.Jesus’ death and resurrection have become the central point of human history, the events on which everything hinges—the moment in time when everything changed. That means we need to see our own lives, the joys, the sorrows, and the suffering in light of those events. In allowing evil to do its worst to him at the cross, Jesus has caught up in his suffering every last bit of human suffering, including the suffering afflicted upon us and the suffering we afflict upon others, and he has turned it into the means by which he has brought redemption to the world. And here Peter recalls today’s Gospel: through his suffering and death, the shepherd has rescued the lost and straying sheep. He is our shepherd and overseer—our bishop, our chief pastor—and no hireling. He who has laid down his life for our sake, and in doing so suffered the penalty of our sins, will hold us close as we suffer the injustices of the world. In turn, the faith we exhibit in entrusting ourselves to him and holiness and grace that should characterise our lives become a profound witness to the world. We can face injustice knowing that as the Judge who judges justly has vindicated Jesus, he will also vindicate us for our faith. Brothers and Sisters, the world is a hard place, but we live for Jesus in the midst of it all precisely because he has died for us. And we live in hope, because Jesus not only died, but rose again, has promised that we will follow him into the life of the age to come, and that as his sheep, no one will ever snatch us out of his hand.Let’s pray: Almighty God, who gave your only Son to be for us both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always receive with thankfulness the immeasurable benefit of his sacrifice, and daily endeavour to follow in the blessed steps of his most holy life, who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, for evermore. Amen.
The First Sunday after Easter: Prophets and Priests1 St. John 5:4-12 & St. John 20:19-23by William KlockJesus’ disciple were afraid. They were huddled together in the dark, doors locked, talking—it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there was some arguing going on—all in quiet whispers lest the authorities find them and crucify them just like they’d crucified Jesus. That’s what St. John writes in his Gospel.On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews… This was the evening of that Sunday when Mary went to the tomb at first light and found it empty. She ran as fast as she could through the empty streets of Jerusalem to find Peter and John. She beat on their door and when the door was opened the frantic words spilled out with her sobs, “They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb and I don’t know where they’ve laid him!” So Peter and John ran and they saw for themselves the empty tomb with the linens used to wrap Jesus’ body lying there undisturbed. It made no sense. There was nothing they could do about it. And the authorities were probably looking for them now that the sabbath was over, so they went back to their hiding place.But, John says, Mary stayed behind at the tomb, weeping. I expect it’s what they call an “ugly cry”—sobbing her heart out. And that’s when two angels appeared to her, sitting right where Jesus body had been laid…sitting right there with the linen wrappings and they asked, “Why are you weeping?” And, still holding her bottle of oil in one hand and a box with those precious spices in the other, Mary sobbed out her story to them. “They’ve taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they’ve laid him.” The oil and spices were useless unless she could find where he was, but still she held on to them. But then, as John tells the story, another man approaches to ask, again, why she’s crying and who she’s looking for. Mary thought he was a gardener and she blubbered it out all over again, “Sir, if it was you, tell me where you’ve laid him.” And then the man simply spoke her name, “Mary,” and she knew him. It was Jesus. And now she was crying for joy, because he was alive. It didn’t make any sense, but he was alive and she gasped out, “Rabbi!” And she jump up to hug him, but instead he said, “No. Now is not the time to cling to me. You’ve got to go to my brothers—to the disciples—and tell them the good news.” And so she ran to the house where they were hiding to tell them, “I have seen the Lord!”But what did it mean? John writes that when he saw the empty tomb and the linens lying there he believed. But believed what? Because he says immediately after that the disciples did not yet understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead. And so even though John believed and even with Mary’s report that she had seen Jesus, there they sat, hunkered down behind shuttered windows and a locked door, talking in whispers. There was no cooking fire lest the smoke give them away. Maybe they had a small oil lamp lit so they could just see each other. John tells his story so that it echoes the book of Genesis and the scene he give us of that evening of the first Easter day echoes Genesis: “Darkness was over the face of the deep.”Brothers and Sisters, is that not a picture of too much of the Church today. Jesus is risen. We even proclaim it with joy on Easter, we’re reminded that his resurrection has changed everything, but we sit hunkered down at home afraid to go out and proclaim it? We hide out light under a basket. And then John writes that suddenly,Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” John wrote about the Incarnation back in his prologue saying that in Jesus the light had come into the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it. That was an echo of Genesis. The first day of the week God called light into being, driving away the darkness. And now the Light Incarnate appears in that dark, fear-filled house and I have to think that somehow and in some way it was filled with light—a light that drove away every last vestige of darkness. And to these frightened men, Jesus announces, “Peace be with you!”Imagine their surprise. And there must have been some disbelief or some doubts. Or maybe, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they simply didn’t recognise him. Something about his resurrection had brought a transformation. Same Jesus, same body, but in some way just different enough in appearance that they didn’t recognise him. Of course, it wouldn’t have helped that they simply didn’t expect to see him again either. So Jesus holds out his hands for them to see. One at a time he lifts a foot out so that they can see. There were the marks left by the nails. And he lifted his tunic to show them the wound left by the spear that had been plunged into his side, the wound that had gushed forth blood and water, evidence to the soldiers that he was genuinely dead. And here he stood alive. They were shocked. How could it be? As I said last Sunday, the reason resurrection wasn’t on anyone’s mind was because this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. This wasn’t a story Jews would have made up, because all the Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead knew how it would work—and it wasn’t supposed to work this way. At the end of the age the Lord would raise all the faithful at once. There was plenty of disagreement about some of the specifics, but they all knew one thing for sure: It would be everybody all at once, not just one person, even if that one person was the Messiah. This just wasn’t on their radar. Not at all. But now it is and they’re confused and, it seems, even though John says they were glad, they were still more than a little afraid. And so Jesus says to them again, “Peace be with you!”And Jesus doesn’t waste any time as John tells it. “Peace be with you,” he says, calming their fears. Jesus is alive. And immediately he gets down to the very practical aspects, the real-world implications of his resurrection. He says in verse 21:“As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”Last Sunday we read the Easter story from Mark’s Gospel, where we’re left with that sudden ending that leaves us hanging. The resurrection of Jesus changes everything, but Mark leaves us to read the rest of the New Testament to understand what that means. But John shows us right here. “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”Here they are, hunkered down for fear of being rounded up and executed themselves. Here they are, afraid to even show their faces in Jerusalem. Here they are, giving it a few days before they try to sneak out of town without being noticed. And Jesus says to them, “I’m sending you. As the Father sent me to you, I’m now sending you: to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria…to the ends of the earth.” In other words, “You’re not going to go slinking out of the city under cover of darkness. No, you’re going out in Jerusalem with boldness—the same way I went out into Galilee, through Judea, and eventually to Jerusalem at the head of a parade, hailed by the people. You’re going to go with the same boldness out into this city and you are going to declare what God has done. Everyone is going to know who you are. You’re going to declare to Jerusalem that this Jesus whom they crucified died and has been raised from the dead, that he really is the Messiah, God’s King, that his kingdom has come, and God’s new creation is breaking in.”Think again of John, just beginning to wrap his head around the idea that Jesus had been raised from death—but still hiding with the others, still afraid. John couldn’t even tell his friends what he thought had happened. The last thing on his mind was telling it to Jerusalem—and Jesus isn’t talking about mere “telling”—you know, whispering it to a few people who might be safe to tell. No, he’s talking about proclaiming this news—to everybody. Brothers and Sisters, think about that for a minute. Think about how most of us are so afraid or at least hesitant to proclaim the good news about Jesus. We have no reason to fear for our lives like Jesus’ disciples did. The worst thing that happens to us is we offend someone, make them think we’re weird. They faced martyrdom—and all but John were, indeed, martyred for their proclamation. We have so little to fear, but we’re afraid anyway. We’ve even stopped speaking in terms of proclamation—the Bible’s way of speaking about evangelism. Instead, these days we talk about “sharing” our faith—as if Jesus is something people might want to try—see if he works for you, but if not... We’ve lost our confidence in the good news and in the God who raised Jesus from the dead who stands behind it. No, Jesus calls us to declare the good news like royal heralds, sent out into the world to declare the mighty deeds of God, that he has raised Jesus from the dead, and made him Lord of all.But, again, consider John. Confused, afraid, just beginning to understand. And then consider the confidence of his words, written decades later in our Epistle:Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God…. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 St. John 5:1, 4-5)Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ—that he is the Messiah—has been reborn as part of the people of God. And that belief changes everything. That belief transforms the fearful John hesitant to even tell his friends about the dawning realization that Jesus had been raised from death, it turns him into the courageous apostle, exiled for his proclamation of that truth, and writing boldly to the churches to stand firm in that same faith even though great tribulation was about to hit them like a storm. There is everything to be feared out in the world: rejection, mockery, persecution, even martyrdom, but by faith the people of God overcome and stand firm in our witness. It’s not because faith changes reality. It’s because this faith recognizes the new reality born that first Easter when Jesus rose from the grave, the new reality that he is victor over sin and death, the new reality that new creation has begun in him, and the new reality that he is Lord of that creation. By faith we are united with him. By faith we share in his inheritance. And by faith we share in his calling and ministry—his Church, taking up the mantle of prophet, priest, and king.Like John, we are called to boldly testify about Jesus:This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus the Messiah; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree. If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. John points back to Jesus’ ministry. He came by water. That was the start of it. He went to John and was baptised in the Jordan and as he walked up out of the river, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and his Father spoke, “This is my Son in whom I am well-pleased.” That was Jesus’ initiation into his messianic ministry. And that ministry—at least in its earthly phase—ended in blood, at the cross, where he died to conquer death and to provide forgiveness of sins. Jesus’ baptism testifies to his being the Messiah. Jesus’ blood, shed on the cross, testifies to his being the Messiah. And, too, John writes, so does the Spirit. And, he says, consider all the things we believe, in which we trust, based on the testimony of mere men. How much more, Brothers and Sisters, ought we to trust this testimony about Jesus backed up by God himself? And not so much just receiving and believing ourselves, but in light of the fact that this is the truth, this is the good news that literally changes the world, is changing the world, oughtn’t we to be proclaiming it to that world? Through Jesus and the Spirit God has given us the light. The light that will transform the darkness that sin and death have cast on the world. The light that the darkness cannot and will not ever overcome. Dear Friends, don’t hide it under a basket. Hold it high. Proclaim it. Show it to everyone. Do not be afraid. John says:Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. (1 St. John 5:10)But that’s not where John leaves us in the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t just send his disciples out into the world. That would be an impossible task. Even the joy of knowing that Jesus has risen from the dead isn’t enough in itself to get this good news to the ends of the earth. Jesus knew that we also need to be equipped to go out and do it. Look at verses 22-23 of John 20:And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” As the Lord breathed life into Adam in the original creation, Jesus now breathes on his disciples. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says. Was the Spirit literally imparted by Jesus’ breath? Luke tells this part differently in his Gospel and in Acts—that whole event with the dramatic coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as they gathered at the temple to hear Peter preach and to be baptised. But notice there, too, that the Spirit comes with a wind—in both Hebrew and Greek, wind, breath, and spirit are all the same word. Jesus was good at acted-out prophecy and I think that’s what he's doing in this case in John’s Gospel. He is—or he soon will be—imparting God’s Spirit to this new people of God, to those who believe, and he illustrates just what this gift is by an act that they couldn’t help but connect to God’s giving life to Adam—another echo of Genesis. But this is new life. And this is what will equip them to go out, despite the threat of death, to proclaim with boldness the good news. Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit does a lot for us, but here Jesus makes sure we know what his primary purpose is. It’s not to give us radical experiences, although that certainly might happen. It’s not to make us holy, although he certainly does that as he turns our hearts and our affections away from self and sin and points them towards God. No, the primary purpose of the Spirit is to equip us to do the impossible: to do for the world, what Jesus did for Israel. To go out in the world in his name and to proclaim what God has done through him. “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” Think of our study of Revelation and those seven churches John shows us in the beginning—small, poor, facing all sorts of challenges and opposition and soon to face great tribulation, but called by Jesus to stand firm in faith for the gospel—and not just that, but to take that gospel to the world. How is that possible? It starts with the joy of knowing Jesus risen from the dead, but continues through the life of the Spirit who equips us to do what we can never do on our own strength.And then Jesus speaks those words that have so often been misunderstood and abused: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” Remember I said that by faith we have a share in Jesus’ inheritance and ministry. By faith the Father adopts us and makes us his sons and daughters, so we share in what belongs to Jesus. And that means that as he is King and Prophet and Priest, so are we as his Church, his people. And Jesus here gets at two of those things. Here he reminds his friends and he reminds us that when we go out into the world to proclaim his Lordship, to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection, to proclaim that new creation has come, we do so as both prophets and as priests.Our message is two-fold. I think the priestly role comes most naturally to us. This is the part of our proclamation where we announce the forgiveness of sins. Think of the priests of the Old Testament, offering sacrifices. That was one of their primary duties: to facilitate and to mediate God’s forgiveness to the people. Think of Jesus. He is both priest and sacrificial lamb. He offers and presents himself to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins. And, as priests, we proclaim to the world the forgiveness he offers through that sacrifice. But that is not our only role. We also share in Jesus’ prophetic office—and that’s the part that doesn’t come as naturally to us, at least not as things currently are. But consider what the prophets did. Consider what Jesus did in his role as a prophet. He called out the sins of his people, he summoned them to repentance, and he announced the judgement to come on those who remained unrepentant in their sin, unbelief, and faithlessness. In contrast, much of the Church today is afraid to take on this prophetic role, to name sin, to even use the word. Some parts of the Church have given up altogether and have embraced sin and called it virtue—leaving people nothing to repent of and with nothing for which they need forgiveness. They’ve gutted the gospel. But these two things, the priestly and the prophetic go hand in hand. Our prophetic office, announcing judgement, is without hope if we do not also fulfil our priestly role of announcing forgiveness. But our priestly office, our message of forgiveness lacks any real meaning if it is not also accompanied by the prophetic announcement that sin is sin and that God will judge it. Brothers and Sisters, this is the good news: that we are sinners, that our holy God judges sin and that the penalty is death, but also that Jesus has died as a perfect sacrifice for sins, and has risen, victor over death, inaugurating God’s new creation and giving a sure and certain hope that what he has begun he will finish. One day all things will be made new, every bit of sin and evil will be swept from creation, and all will be set to rights. And by faith in Jesus we have a share in that new world.Brothers and Sisters, do we believe that? I trust that we do. We affirm this belief every week as we come to the Lord’s Table. We recall the story. We confess our sins in repentance. And we come to the Table in renewed faith to participate again in those events that set us free from sin and death, in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But maybe we’ve forgotten the real power behind what we confess here at the Table. Friends, think this morning on what the cross and the empty tomb mean. Think on what the blood of Jesus means. Think on what his gift of the Spirit means. And then take seriously those words of dismissal we’ll hear later: “Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.” Consider that in those words Jesus is saying to us, to you and to me, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”Let’s pray: Almighty Father, you gave your only Son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification: Grant that we may put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, and always serve you in purity and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Easter: Let us Keep the Feast1 Corinthians 5:6b-8 & St. Mark 16:1-8by William KlockMary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome stood at the foot of the cross on Friday. They stood there in shock and in grief as Jesus was crucified, as the soldiers and the priests mocked him, as he cried out, “It is finished” and breathed his last. They were there when the clouds blotted out the sun and the earth shook and when the soldier pierced Jesus’ side and blood poured out—like a Passover lamb, slaughtered on the altar…as the wind scattered his blood and sprinkled it on them as if they were being purified. And the two Marys, along with Joseph of Arimathea, were in that party that took down Jesus from the cross, wrapped his body in linen, placed him in a tomb, and rolled a great stone in place to seal it up.That Sabbath was the longest Sabbath any of them had ever known. They went to ground, hiding in the dark with doors locked and the shutters closed. Who knew if the authorities might come for them next. They sat in the dark and wept and were angry and then wept again. They knew Jesus was from God. They knew he was the Messiah. No one could do the things he did, no one could say the things he said if he were not from God. But then how could he be dead? How could they have been wrong? Or had they been wrong? They couldn’t have been wrong, but Jesus was dead so they must have been wrong. All that long Sabbath day they wept and they gnashed their teeth and they wondered and they wept some more. And when the Sabbath ended at sunset on Saturday, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome ventured out into the city to buy oil and spices to anoint Jesus’ body and in the grey light of early morning they made their way back to the tomb. I expect they were bundles of mixed emotions: angry and frustrated with Jesus that he’d let them down, but they were also grieving for their beloved friend and master. Because the Passover was coming, they’d had to bury him without the usual signs of care and respect. Now was their chance to make sure he was buried properly. Hopefully the soldiers or maybe a gardener would help them roll the stone away so that they could get into the tomb.But when they got there, the tomb was already open. Had someone else had the same idea and got there first? Had the Romans or the priests decided to take Jesus’ body and to bury it somewhere else? Or what if the crucifixion wasn’t enough and they’d decided to add insult to injury by desecrating Jesus’ body. But no one was around and so they hurried to the open tomb and, to their surprise, sitting inside they found a young man dressed all in white. They were afraid. Everyone’s always afraid when they meet an angel. And then those famous first words of every angel ever: “Don’t be afraid.” He calmed them. “I know. You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.” And then the real shock, “He has been raised. He is not here. Look…right over there is the place they—that you—laid him.”What went through their heads as the angel spoke? I suspect that those words “He has been raised,” probably went in one ear and out the other…at least at first. All their attention was on those words “He is not here”—because they could see that for themselves. I expect the conversation between the women and the angel was a bit more frantic and that there was a good bit more back and forth. Mark has given us the condensed version. “Of course he’s not here! We can see that for ourselves! Where is he?” I can just hear them asking. And the angel responds, “I told you, he's been raised!” And they said, “What do you mean ‘raised’?” Because, just like our word, their word could refer to someone, for example, rising from sleep. But they knew Jesus hadn’t been sleeping. They saw him breath his last. They saw the solider pierce his side. They held him as they took him down from the cross and wrapped him in linen. And he said, “As in ‘raised from the dead’!” And then it began to sink in.Because no one expected that. Jesus had warned his friends that he was going to be killed. And he even told them he would be raised on the third day. But none of them had really understood. And the women were confused now, because even though most Jews not only believed in the resurrection of the dead and even looked forward in eager longing to the day when the dead would be raised, this was not how anyone thought it would happen. They didn’t all agree on how it would happen, but one thing they did agree on was that it wouldn’t be just one person—not even if that one person was the Messiah. And the Messiah wasn’t supposed to die anyway! No, they thought, when the time came the Lord would raise everybody…all at once and usher in the age to come, the kingdom, or however you wanted to describe it—his new world in which everything would finally be set to rights—it would come in all its fullness and God would be king and the wicked would be judged and the righteous would be rewarded and justice would finally reign. No one thought it would happen this way—just one person, even if he was the Messiah, and with the Romans still in charge and, well, everything else that was wrong with the world still seemingly wrong with it. No one expected that. And that’s one of the reasons we can know that Jesus’ disciples didn’t make all this up. If they’d made it up they would have told a very different story.But it did happen this way and the women stood there in wonder and in fear as the angel told them—again, I suspect, probably more than once: He has been raised. Yes, from the dead. No, not like Lazarus who will get sick and die again. Jesus has been raised-raised, really raised. Death no longer has a hold on him. (Okay, that was actually St. Paul who wrote that last bit, but you get the point.) Because none of this would have computed easily for them. And so I think they finally took in the message that Jesus had been raised—that the resurrection of the dead that the Jews had hoped for had happened—or was beginning to happen—or something like that--just not, really not in the way anyone had expected. That was as good as the angel was going to get from them at that point and so, with that, he sends them off. “Go! Go tell Jesus’ disciples that he has been raised and that he’s already off on his way to Galilee and that he’ll meet you all there. And don’t forget to tell Peter, because he denied Jesus three times and he’s feeling the absolute worst of all and thinks Jesus will never want to see him again. Tell Peter and the others that Jesus will meet them in Galilee and you’ll see him just as he said you would. Just as he promised.”And with that, Mary, Mary, and Salome ran. Mark says they were filled with trembling and astonishment. Matthew says they were filled with fear and great joy. They were thrilled that Jesus was alive and that they would see him again; they were in shock because no one—no one—had expected this. (Except, of course, Jesus.) And they were afraid, because they didn’t know what this meant. It was a game changer, but how? And so they ran and, Mark says, they told no one—meaning they didn’t stop to tell anyone along the way. They went running straight to Peter and the others to do what the angel had said and to tell them.And, very suddenly, that’s the end of the story as Mark tells it. Or, at least, it’s the end of what we have of Mark. I suspect that there was a little more to Mark’s gospel originally. I think that, because over and over Mark tells us about the great lengths that Jesus took to help his disciples understand that he would be rejected, would suffer, would be killed, and would finally be raised from death. They never did really understand. They thought Jesus was talking in riddles…or they just didn’t understand at all. But Mark tells the story so that we do understand and so that when he gets to the end of it, we’re not surprised. Mark shows us Jesus as a real, bona fide prophet and over the course of the previous two chapters he’s shown us how what Jesus said about his rejection and suffering and death really did happen, so I don’t think Mark would leave off as he does—or as what we have left of his gospel does—without showing how in greater detail how Jesus was also speaking the truth about his resurrection. I think this is why people later tried to fill the gap, composing several different endings for Mark to wrap things up. Maybe the women and the angel at the empty tomb were enough for Mark. It is possible and I might be wrong. Maybe Mark expected that, in those first churches where his story was read out loud, the reader would get to the end, and then one of the people in the church—maybe even one of the disciples—would finish the story and recall what he’d seen on that first Easter and in the days that followed before Jesus’ ascension.But I think Mark probably wrote a bit more. It wouldn’t have had to be much. Just another column on the scroll that, at some point, was accidentally torn off as the scroll was passed around and became worn. But a column where he told the story of how the disciples saw the empty tomb for themselves and then went on to meet Jesus in Galilee to see that he really was alive, but alive in a way no one had ever seen or experienced before—not all that different from what Matthew and Luke wrote. Because Mark’s Gospel as it now stands is a bit like the book of Exodus with everything up through the Passover and the Israelites packing their things to leave Egypt and then…that’s it. We’d hear the Lord’s promises and his instructions for the Passover and we’d see the Passover actually take place, and we’d know…or have a pretty clear sense…that, okay, Israel is now free…but we’d never really have the Exodus itself: the Red Sea, the manna in the wilderness, the law given at Sinai and the tabernacle and the Lord’s presence in it. Because Mark makes sure we know the Lord’s promises to set his people and his creation to rights and he makes sure we know that Jesus will be the Passover lamb, and he makes sure we know that Jesus will be raised and that it will change everything—a new exodus, this time from sin and death. And then we see Jesus die, the Passover lamb, and we see here, so briefly, the empty tomb and hear the angel’s announcement that he was raised…but the women go off, happy yes, but confused, perplexed, and not really understanding. Has everything changed or not? And if everything has changed, what’s it look like for Jesus’ friends and for Israel and for the world?If there was more to Mark, it may be entirely providential that it has been lost, because Mark’s rather abrupt ending forces us to ask, “What happened next?” What does the resurrection of Jesus mean for the disciples, and for the world, and for us. And so there’s a sense in which the rest of the New Testament is the missing ending of Mark’s gospel—these writings that tell us about the life of the early church and how they worked out the implications of Jesus resurrection from the scriptures and for themselves. The rest of the New Testament shows us the rest of the story of this new exodus—and it shows us what it means to live as the people of God in this new covenant.We could turn from here to anywhere in the New Testament, but today the Church turns the page for us and puts 1Corinthians 5 in front of us and says, “This is what it means that the resurrection of Jesus changes everything.” So let’s look again at what Paul writes there in verses 6-13:Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the [feast], not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Notice how you can never get very far away from this Passover theme. The Christians in Corinth were struggling to live in light of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus changed everything and they knew it, but in many ways they weren’t living it. They were sinful and selfish—and even prided themselves on some of it. And so Paul takes them back to the Exodus with this imagery. That’s what the leaven is about.I ran across a short documentary this week. It was made in a bakery where Hasidic Jews bake unleavened bread for Passover. It was interesting, but one of the things they stressed was how quickly the bakers have to work. They have eighteen minutes to make each batch of bread. At some point someone determined that eighteen minutes is the shortest possible time it might take for ground grains to begin to ferment. And if the flour ferments the tiniest bit, then they can’t consider the bread unleavened anymore. So every batch has to be made in under eighteen minutes. And this evolved from, it goes back to the Passover, when the Lord told the Hebrews to bake bread without yeast, because they were going to have to leave Egypt in a hurry. And so leaven, in Jewish thought, became a metaphor for things that would corrupt or that would make something impure…even if it was small, it would work its way through and corrupt the whole. And Paul uses this imagery of leaven for the Christian life, because right from the start the first Christians saw that in Jesus a new Passover and a new exodus had happened. It wasn’t a coincidence that Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead at Passover. He’d made the point himself at that last Passover meal he shared with his disciples when he held up the bread and the wine of that meal, the meal that was all about the Lord’s deliverance and creation of Israel as his people, that Jesus took the elements of that meal and said, “This is me. The bread is my body, which will be broken for you. The wine is my blood, which will be poured out for you.” As the Passover lambs were sacrificed in the temple and their blood painted on the doorposts of the Hebrews to identify them as the Lord’s redeemed people, Jesus was crucified and his blood poured out to redeem in a way almost no one had ever imagined and to create a new people of God marked out now by his blood.Think about what that means, Brothers and Sisters. Our entire life as Christians is one great Passover. As Paul says, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast.” There are some liturgies for the Lord’s Supper that incorporate this verse, but it then becomes misleading, because Paul isn’t just talking about the Lord’s Supper. Again, our whole life in Christ, in Jesus the Messiah, is a Passover. What we do here in the Lord’s Supper is emblematic of our whole life in him. By his death and resurrection, by his broken body and shed blood, Jesus has led us out of our old life, a life in slavery to sin and to death, and into a new life as his people—forgiven, purified, made holy, and filled with God’s own Spirit. And that makes every part of life, every thing we do an act of service and of worship to the God who has delivered us and made us his own, who through our baptism, has become our God and has made us his people.And so Paul draws on that imagery of the original Passover and the way the Israelites purged their homes of leaven in preparation for the feast. For us, the problem isn’t literal leavening. Again, for Jewish people the association of leaven with the Passover meant that leaven became a metaphor for things that are impure and especially for impure thing that have a corrupting influence. Paul’s calling us to purge our lives of our old ways—the things we did and the way we lived when we were in bondage to sin, the way we lived in those days before Jesus marked us out with his blood and delivered us from that slavery.What we need instead of the leaven of malice and wickedness, says Paul, is the unleavened bread of real life in Jesus. Now it’s interesting how he describes that, because we might think that in contrast to malice and wickedness, Paul might tell us we need things like goodness and holiness, but instead he tells us to celebrate our Passover with sincerity and truth. What does that mean? It would be easy for us to misunderstand what he means by sincerity, because so many people around us talk about that sort of thing, but they mean something different. People today talk about sincerity as if it doesn’t matter so much what you believe or what you do, so long as you’re sincere. Or people today like to talk about being “authentic” and they often mean something very similar. That’s not what Paul means. The Greek word he uses has the sense of being pure in our motives and that purity is what the Spirit gives us as he regenerates our hearts and renews our minds—as he fills our hearts with love for God and tunes our affections on what is good and holy. The other side of our unleavened bread is truth. Brothers and Sisters, we became enslaved to sin because we believed a lie. Jesus, who is himself the truth, has set us free from that lie.Paul brings us back to the fact that by his death and resurrection, Jesus has changed everything. This is the great truth that would dawn on the disciples as they met the risen Jesus in Galilee, this is the great truth that would dawn on the two who walked with Jesus on the Road to Emmaus that first Easter day as Jesus walked them through the scriptures in light of his resurrection, this is the great truth that dawned on Paul when he was met by the risen Jesus on his way to Damascus. Jesus, risen from the dead, changed everything.Again, for them and for Paul, it was all seen in light of the Passover and the covenant the Lord had made with his people. That first Passover and the exodus from Egypt changed everything for them. He gave them his torah—the way for them to be his people in return for his pledge to be their God, so that they could live in his presence and be a light to the nations. And the result was that literally every aspect of life—the little things, even the tiny things, up to the great big things, everything—like baking bread in eighteen minutes or less, lest leaven creep into it—was done with their relation with the Lord in mind; everything, big and small, done to honour him and to show that they belonged to him, and to show their commitment to him.And now, Paul’s saying that something very much like that has happened in Jesus. Even as Jesus has freed his people from the old ways of the torah, the law of love and freedom and grace that the torah and the old Passover pointed to, that new law has been written in our hearts by God’s own Spirit. It marks us out as Jesus’ people and ought to shape every aspect of our lives in much the same way that torah shaped every aspect of life for the Hebrews. Paul will go on to describe that life to the Corinthians. It’s shaped and defined, not this time by diet or Sabbath or circumcision, but by our faith in Jesus and by a life full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control. Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has purified us and marked us out as his own with his blood, and now the Father has poured out his Spirit on us that we might know his promise: He is our God, and that we might be his people.So come to the Table this morning and recall this great Passover in which Jesus the Messiah has given himself for us. Take part in this covenant renewal as we eat the bread and drink the wine, then go out knowing that Jesus’ resurrection has changed everything. Let your whole life be lived in light of this Passover, let it be full of sincerity and truth—filled and shaped by love for the God who gave his life for us and empowered and made new by the gift of his own Spirit.Let’s pray: O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Good Friday: It is FinishedHebrews 10:1-25 & St. John 19:1-37by William KlockThere is something remarkable in the scene we remembered last night, that scene in the Upper Room as Jesus and his disciples gathered to celebrate the Passover. Someone had to wash the dust from their feet, and as the disciples bickered over who would do it, Jesus—unquestionably the one man there who deserved to have his feet washed by someone else—he took up the towel and the pitcher of water, knelt on the floor, and washed the dust, the mud, the dirt from their feet. He even washed from the feet of Judas the dust accumulated from his trip to the high priest to betray him. Here was truly the Messiah, the suffering servant who came to wash his people clean from their sins. Peter drew back. “No Lord! You can’t wash my feet! If anything, I should be washing yours.” But Jesus insisted. This is what he’d come to do.Jesus turned everything upside-down. After washing the disciples’ feet—something totally inappropriate for a teacher to do to his disciples—he took the bread and the wine of the Passover meal and started talking about them as a new sacrifice. These men knew all about sacrifices. They knew all about bulls and goats and lambs sacrificed for sin, their bodies broken and their blood poured out before the altar. And yet Jesus took the bread and wine and said that it was his body broken and his blood poured out—that they were all on the verge of a new exodus, but this time he would be the Passover lamb, his body and blood would be broken to free them from the slavery of sin and death. From what the Gospels tell us, the disciples didn’t understand. Not at this point. They really did want to follow Jesus, they wanted what he had to offer, but they didn’t understand yet what it was he was offering. When Jesus had tried to wash Peter’s feet, Peter had indignantly refused, but Jesus explained that he needed it—that if we wanted any part in his master, this washing was essential—then Peter wanted it—even wanted more of it (“Wash all of me, not just my feet, Lord!”)—but he still didn’t understand what it meant. He just trusted Jesus and wanted what he was offering.After supper Jesus took his friends to the garden of Gethsemane to pray. Even after the foot washing and that last supper and all Jesus’ talk about servants and sacrifices, they still didn’t understand. They had no idea what was going to happen. They knelt among the olive trees as Jesus went off a little way away to pray by himself. And as Jesus prayed like he’d never prayed before, the disciples drifted off to sleep. They had no idea what was happening. Jesus woke them up in time for Judas to return, leading a pack of Jewish soldiers who had come to take him away. Peter drew out his sword, ready for the attack, and cut off the ear of one of the soldiers. Maybe he thought that now was the time Jesus, the conquering Messiah, was going to throw off his clever disguise of humility and start the revolution that everyone expected. Now was his chance! But it didn’t happen. In fact, Jesus actually healed the soldier and told Peter: “I can appeal to my Father and he’ll send twelve legions of angels. But if I did that, how would the Scriptures be fulfilled?”The disciples ran away as the chief priest’s soldiers took Jesus away in chains. They figured it was over. Chalk Jesus up as yet another failed Messiah. But Peter wasn’t ready to give up on his friend, so he followed along to the high priest’s house to see what would happen. He watched the sham trial they put Jesus through. They condemned Jesus, and as the priests and soldiers spit on him and struck him, Peter gave up just like the other disciples had done a few hours before. Three bystanders noticed Peter in the crowd and recognised him: “Hey, you! You were with him. You’re one of his friends. You’re one of his followers.” And each time Peter denied knowing Jesus: “I don’t know what you’re talking about! You must be blind! I’ve never seen this man before!” Jesus was betrayed by even his closest friends.When it was morning, the Jews dragged Jesus to the court of the Roman governor. The Jews weren’t allowed to execute anyone; the Romans had to do it. And so Jesus went through another sham trial before Pilate who caved in to pressure from the Jews. He didn’t want a riot on his hands and the Jews were crying for blood—and not just blood—they were crying out for a Roman crucifixion. Pilate asked them, “But this man is King of the Jews?” And they shouted back, “No he’s not! We have no king but Caesar!” We can only imagine how surprised Pilate and his soldiers were at that acclamation. Or how saddened Jesus was by it. The Lord was Israel’s king, not Caesar, but they were so angry with him, they were so set on their rejection of Jesus the Messiah that they would do the unthinkable and give their allegiance to Caesar. On Sunday the crowd outside the city had hailed him as King, but now their voices were drowned out by this great hoard calling for his blood. Not wanting trouble, Pilate gave them what they wanted.His soldiers, the whole battalion, took Jesus to be scourged. They spit on him, they put a reed in his hand and a crown plaited of thorns on his head and mocked him as king, and then they beat him senseless. They led him away with two violent thugs, revolutionaries, very possibly from Barabbas’ gang. On a hilltop just outside the city, the soldiers held Jesus down on a cross while they nailed him to it with spikes through his wrists and through his feet. Then they raised the cross up and dropped it heavily into the ground. His mother and his friends watched as his blood poured and as he struggled for breath. For three long hours he hung there. Roman crucifixion was known for its agony. The shoulders were dislocated. Hanging, you couldn’t breath. So you pushed yourself up, putting all your weight on the spike through your feet to gasp for air—alternating between the agony of asphyxiation and the agony of being nailed to a piece of timbre. After three hours Jesus cried out in anguish to his Father, “It is finished.” And just to make sure he was dead, John says the soldiers pierced his side with a spear. Blood and water gushed out from the wound. Not what anyone would normally expect, but a detailed noted by John. Maybe to stress the reality of Jesus’ body, because there were those at the time John wrote who claimed that Jesus’ body had only been an illusion. I expect that as John saw blood pour from Jesus’ side, he couldn’t help but remember the blood pouring from the animals sacrificed in the temple, and as the wind sprinkled Jesus blood on the group gathered at the foot of the cross, John remembered standing in the temple as the priests sprinkled the blood of bulls and goats on him and the gathered people.The clouds darkened the sky. The earth shook. The curtain in the temple that closed off the holy of holies, the place of the Lord’s presence, was violently torn in two. The graves gave up their dead, who went walking through the streets of Jerusalem. Something remarkable had happened and everyone noticed, but no one understood—except maybe that centurion who confessed, “Surely this man is the son of God!” The city was shorty back to its business. Jesus’ friends wept in sadness or in anger, and they went home to lay low lest the authorities come after them next.That evening Joseph of Arimathea went to Pilate to claim the body of Jesus. They took it down from the cross, wrapped it in linen, placed it in a tomb, and sealed it up.Maybe now the disciples started to ponder what Jesus was talking about last night when he had talked about his body and blood being given as a new—as a perfect—sacrifice. In our epistle lesson from the tenth chapter of Hebrews, we read some more about the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice. The Law and the old sacrifices were but a shadow of the good things to come. “It can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1-4).The blood of bulls and goats, sacrificed over and over, could only convict the people of sin as it pointed to the perfect sacrifice of Christ that had not yet been made. And so Hebrews 10 says that Jesus came to do “away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that…we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”(Hebrews 10:9-10). The writer of Hebrews goes on to give us a vivid picture contrasting the old and the new: “Every priest [and he’s talking about the priests of the old covenant] stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sin. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God…for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:11-14).Jeremiah wrote, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds…I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.” And Hebrews reminds us, “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:16-18).When Jesus breathed his last and cried out, “It is finished,” it was finished. Whereas in the old covenant the priest laid the sins of the people on the bulls and goats sacrificed repeatedly on the altar, Jesus, our great High Priest, took our sins upon himself and died the death that we deserved. The old sacrifices were imperfect. They were just dumb animals, but consider too that those animals didn’t offer their lives willingly. That’s the difference between the old sacrifices and the once-for-all new sacrifice made by Jesus. In the shed blood of Jesus we find perfection—God Incarnate shed his own blood and he did so of his own free will. For that reason, there’s no longer any need for more sacrifices. Again, Jesus did it once and for all. The old covenant called for the sinner to humbly lay his sins on that animal sacrifice, but that bull or that goat on the altar of the Temple was a sign given by the Lord—it was his finger pointing to Jesus the Messiah—pointing to the cross. Brothers and Sisters, because God has been faithful to his promises, no more do we bring an annual sacrifice to the temple. Now the humble sinner need only trust in the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.When Jesus breathed his last and gave himself up to his Father, the temple served its last function in redemptive history. Under the old covenant the holy of holies—the most holy place—was where the presence of the Lord resided visibly for the people, resting on the ark of the covenant. And yet the people weren’t allowed into that place—into the direct presence of the Lord. Only the high priest was allowed there and then only once a year. No sinful human being could enter the presence of the Lord and the priest only did it to make an annual sacrifice for sins—and he did so only after a series of purification rituals for himself. Nobody went there, because sinners can never enter the presence of a holy, just, and righteous God.But when Jesus made his perfect sacrifice on the cross that day—as he breathed his last and pronounced, “It is finished”—the heavy veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the people was torn in two. By his death, Jesus opened the way into the presence of the Father. Through Jesus sinners now find perfect forgiveness and are welcomed into the presence of his Father.On the cross Jesus stretched out his hands; he stretched out one hand to all those who had trusted in him, seeing the future and coming Messiah as they made their sacrifices at the Temple. And with his other hand Jesus reached out to us, reaches out to the Gentiles, to the nations who had never heard of the Messiah. On the cross he reaches out with both hands, uniting both peoples to himself, establishing his body by giving new life to dead and paralysed limbs through his shed body and blood. Jesus said, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). That’s exactly what he did. In fact, it’s exactly what he still does. He stretches out his hands to draw us in, to unite us to himself. Through his perfect sacrifice he offers perfect forgiveness of sin. Through his body and his blood he offers new and eternal life. Through his Holy Spirit he renews and regenerates hearts and minds and leads us on the path of holiness. And through his cross, he leads us through the torn veil and into the holy of holies—into the very presence of God.
Maundy Thursday: The Meal Jesus Gave Us2 Samuel 9:1-13 & St. John 13:1-15by William KlockOn Good Friday we recall the death of Jesus, but every year, on the night before—on this day we call Maundy Thursday—the lessons we read from the scriptures prepare us by telling us why Jesus died. In our Epistle from 1 Corinthians 11, St. Paul recalls Jesus words at that last Passover meal he celebrated with his disciples and, specifically, how Jesus identified himself with the Passover bread and the Passover wine. They didn’t understand at the time, but he was saying to them that a new exodus was about to take place, this time not from the bondage of Pharaoh, but from the bondage of sin and death. And then our Gospel, where St. John tells us about the events after that Last Supper, when Jesus knelt to wash the feet of his disciples, the master, the Lord, becoming the servant of his disciples, once again preparing them for those events that would happen in the coming hours. There is no proper Old Testament lesson appointed for Maundy Thursday, but at Morning and Evening Prayer we the Lord’s promise through Jeremiah that will establish a new covenant with his people, and we read about the manna from heaven in Exodus 16. Those are certainly appropriate Old Testament lessons for today, but every year when Maundy Thursday comes around and we recall how Jesus instituted this meal that we share with him every Sunday, I can’t help but think of the story in 2 Samuel 9 about the young man with the hard-to-pronounce name: Mephibosheth. And you know that, because I always find it hard not to mention him whenever I preach about the Lord’s Supper.Mephibosheth was the grandson of King Saul and the son of Jonathan and that put him in a difficult spot. As much as David had the utmost respect for Saul and would not raise his hand against the Lord’s anointed king, Saul saw David as a rival and sought to kill him on more than one occasion. David, himself, could have killed Saul more than once, but he refused to do so. Again, for all his faults, Saul had been anointed King by the Lord—and his son, Jonathan, the father of Mephibosheth, was David’s best friend. And so David grieved at the fall of Saul and the death of Jonathan. We read a few chapters earlier about the defeat of Saul by the Philistines. And that’s where we’re first introduced to Mephibosheth, in a brief note. When Saul’s capital, Gibeah, fell to the Philistines, one of the palace servants fled, carrying little Mephibosheth. As she ran, she tripped, fell, and dropped the little boy. We’re not told exactly how he was injured, but whatever happened, he was left “lame in both legs”.Years later, after David had defeated his rivals and enemies and cemented his kingship over Israel, he summoned a man named Ziba, one of Saul’s former servants. And David asked him, “Is there anyone remaining of the house of Saul to whom I may show kindness for Jonathan’s sake?” (2 Samuel 9:1). Saul’s family was gone. Jonathan was dead. It was common in the Ancient Near East that when a king was defeated, the victor hunted down any claimants to the throne and had them murdered. Israel was supposed to be different, but even in Israel we see Baasha doing just this, murdering the family of King Jeroboam after he took the throne. This is probably why the servant woman fled with Mephibosheth, hoping to save his life. This is why, after all these years, David has heard nothing of any survivors. He has to summon one of Saul’s servants. And this servant tells him, “There remains a son of Jonathan; he is crippled in his feet” (2 Samuel 9:3).David sent for Mephibosheth. Every indication is that David only wanted to show kindness to his best friend’s son. But Mephibosheth trembled in fear as he came before the King. “Mephibosheth son of Jonathan son of Saul came to David, and fell on his face and did obeisance” (2 Samuel 9:6). Imagine his fear. It’s not hard to imagine that he’d been raised to fear David. He’d been raised in hiding. He knew the common practises of the day. He may have had no aspiration to the throne, but David wouldn’t have known that. And so he came before the King. This was it. He was going to die. And David roars out, “Mephibosheth!” And I imagine this young crippled man trembling all the more. His voice shook as he lowered his head to the floor and pleaded as humbly as he could, “I am your servant.” But then the unexpected happened. Suddenly he realises that David’s roar, was not a roar of victory over the last of his enemies, over this poor, lame man who posed no threat, but a roar of happiness as he met, for the first time, this son of his long-dead best friend. Imagine a grin spreading over David’s face. “Do not be afraid,” he said to Mephibosheth, “for I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan; I will restore to you all the land of your grandfather Saul, and you yourself shall eat at my table always” (2 Samuel 9:7).Imagine Mephibosheth’s shock. Even he couldn’t quite believe it. It didn’t make any sense. He responds, “What is your servant, that you should look upon a dead dog such as I?” (2 Samuel 9:8) But David proceeds to instruct his people to return everything that belonged to Saul: his estates, their produce, his wealth—all of it—to be restored to Mephibosheth. And we’re told, “Mephibosheth ate at David’s table, like one of the king’s sons….[he] lived in Jerusalem, for he always ate at the king’s table” (2 Samuel 9:11, 13).What is it about being invited to someone else’s table. What is it about sharing a meal? David didn’t have to do that. He wanted to show kindness to Mephibosheth. He could have restored Saul’s estates and their revenues to him and sent him on his way. But that wasn’t enough. Mephibosheth was a prince and David honoured him by welcoming him into the royal household and to the royal table.On Sunday, as we read about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, we were also reminded that our King is not like the world’s kings. Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar…their kingdoms came by violence and the sword. They came riding into town on great war horses or in chariots with armies of armed men at their backs. They put their enemies to the sword. But Jesus rides into Jerusalem, humbly on the back of a donkey and surrounded by women, children, and the common folk. He is the king who became one of his own that he might die for the sake of his people. This Lord is just the opposite of every other lord the world has known.And now on this last night before his arrest, he does two things to help his friends understand just what was going to happen at the Cross and why it had to happen. He washed their feet and he gave them a meal. It’s fascinating to me. As someone who loves a good theology book, it’s amazing to me that when Jesus wanted to explain what the Cross meant, he didn’t give a sermon; he didn’t give a lecture on theology and theories of atonement. He just washed their feet. And he gave them a meal. And now he’s given us that same meal.Brothers and Sisters, if you want to understand the Cross, come to the Table. Jesus is the Son of David. David summoned to his Table the son of his enemy and a man who could easily have been a rival and a thorn in his side. David made himself vulnerable. And he did so to show kindness to the man. In fact, if you go back and look at 2 Samuel 9, when he asked his court who might know if any of Saul’s family lived, he said that he wanted to show kindness on behalf of Jonathan. But when he asked Ziba, Saul’s servant, he said—more specifically—that it was because he wanted to show God’s kindness. God had made David king and David wanted that kindness to exemplify his reign. The Hebrew word is one you might have heard before. It’s the word chesed. The King James translated it as “lovingkindness”. Chesed is a deep kindness, like that between a parent and child, that shows love and loyalty and grace. It never fails. And now the Son of David summons us to his Table. Tomorrow we remember his death and on Maundy Thursday we remember that meal in which the King shows us his humility and his servant character. Today we remember the meal that explains his death.The Son of David invites us to share in his meal. As the lamb, the bread, and the wine of the Passover reminded the Israelites of their deliverance from Egypt, and as the Israelites down through the centuries participated in that Exodus as they ate that meal, so the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper remind us of this great exodus from sin and death in which Jesus had led us, and as gather at his Table we participate in those events ourselves. Each time we come to the Table, each time we eat the bread and drink the wine, the Lord renews his covenant with us, each time he reminds us: I am your God and you are my people. But we come, too, like Mephibosheth. He knew he was the enemy of the king. He knew he was unworthy of the meal. We pray, “We do not presume to come to your Table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table. But you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy.” The Lord’s Table reminds us of the death of God for sinners, the death of God for his enemies. And so we come, both like and unlike Mephibosheth. He cowered in fear. He knew nothing of David’s mercy. But we come to the Lord’s Table in light of the Cross. We know the Lord’s mercy and his lovingkindness. As we read on Sunday from Philippians: He did not grasp at his divinity. He did not exploit his position as God for his own gain. Instead, he emptied himself, took the form of slave, was born in our likeness, and became obedient to the point of death on a cross. If we will come, resting on his mercy and trusting in his death, we can also pray, “Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.”Let us pray: Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Palm Sunday: Hope and Hard ThingsZechariah 9:9-12, Philippians 2:5-11, & St. Matthew 21:1-17by William KlockWere you paying attention to the Collect this morning? Let’s pray that again. “Almighty and ever-living God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.In the Collect we recalled that it was because of his tender love for mankind that the almighty and ever-living God of Creation sent his Son, Jesus, to humbly take our nature upon himself and to suffer death on a cross. And with that in mind, notice, we also asked of God that in his mercy, we might walk in the way of Jesus’ suffering so that we might also share in his resurrection.We don’t pray for suffering very often, do we? I’m not sure if the author of the Collect was actually asking for suffering—it’s entirely possible, considering the purifying nature of suffering that we modern people have all but forgotten—or if he was just acknowledging that to live is to suffer. This Collect goes all the way back to the time of Gregory the Great, back in the 6th Century. Human beings had no illusions back then about being in control of things. Poverty and famine and disease and war were realities of daily life and the most that most people could do was to ride out the storm and trust in the good promises of God, knowing that our hope lies not in this age, but in the age to come. As Christians have always done, they looked back to the cross, they saw there that the Lord is faithful to his promises and they saw there that Jesus defeated sin and death and began the work of setting this word to rights. We may suffer, but we live in hope, knowing that what God had promised, he will surely do; knowing that what Jesus has begun, he will surely finish; knowing that as Jesus has been raised from the dead, we will be too on that last great day when he has put every enemy under his feet. In Gregory the Great’s day the darkness of what we call the “Dark Ages” was falling, Rome was losing her greatness, barbarians threatened the empire and heretics threatened Christendom. The times were bad and the world lived in shadow. Do you know what Gregory the Great did in those days of suffering? He didn’t sit there wringing his hands. He didn’t sit there sighing, “Woe is me.” He didn’t worry about the future. No. Knowing that Jesus has risen from the dead and that God will one day finish what he started, he sent out missionaries to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord to the barbarian tribes of Germany and Britain.It’s helpful to be reminded of times like Gregory’s and the way that Christians responded to them. In the early days of the pandemic a friend of mine wrote an article about a man named Martin Rinckart. He was a German pastor during the Thirty Years War. His village was sacked three times. But, even worse, his part of the country was ravaged by a horrible plague. Every other pastor in the area died and he was left doing sometimes as many as fifty funerals a day. This man who lived through more sorrow and grief than we can imagine wrote the hymn “Now thank we all our God”.Now thank we all our God, with heart, and hands, and voices,Who wondrous things hath done, in whom the world rejoices;Who from our mother’s arms hath blessed us on our wayWith countless gifts of love, and still is ours today. O may this bounteous God thro’ all our life be near us!With ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;And keep us in his grace, and guide us when perplext,And free us from all ills in this world and the next. All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given,The Son, and him who reigns with them in highest heaven,Eternal, Triune God, whom earth and heav’n adore;For thus it was, is now, and shall be, evermore. Whatever difficult days and hard things we have faced pale in comparison to the griefs and sorrows of Martin Rinckart. What could have inspired such faith and such hope? It was this God, made manifest to us in Jesus and in the cross and in the empty tomb, this Jesus who knew the deepest anguish that any human being has ever known and borne for the sake of his enemies. It was faith in this Jesus who reveals the great faithfulness of God. It was this Jesus who is making all things news. Brothers and Sisters, we have known the same God that Martin Rinckart knew. We confess the same faith and the same Saviour that Martin Rinckart confessed. We look for the same hope that Martin Rinckart looked for. And it’s a faith and a hope that, because it is in Jesus, knows the depth of suffering in the present age, but looks forward just as Jesus did as he hung on the cross, it looks forward to the age to come, to that day when Jesus has put every enemy under his feet, that day when he has finally, once-and-for-all made everything new—wiped away every tear our faces and wiped from the face of creation everything that has ever, could ever, and will ever bring us grief and sorrow and suffering. And it is a faith and a hope that drive us to follow Jesus himself and to throw ourselves into the work of his kingdom—because we have known suffering and pain ourselves and know that Jesus is bringing an age in which those things will be gone. Because we see in Jesus that the way to his throne was through and only through the suffering of the cross, we his people know that—and have hope because we know—that our path to the life of the age to come is also through suffering. We are no greater than our master. And so we go out, even as we grieve and even as we suffer and even as we face so many hard things, and we proclaim the good news about Jesus and as we live the life his Spirit has given we lift the veil to give the world a glimpse of the age to come, so that the other people around us—the other people facing their grief and sorrows and hard things can share our faith and our hope in God’s world one day set to rights. This is what it means to be light in the darkness. This is what it means to take up our crosses daily and to follow our Lord—to follow him in his suffering, that we might know his grace and lead the world with us into the age to come.Brothers and Sisters, God’s people have always known hard times and hard things. Our Old Testament lessons is taken from the prophecy of Zechariah, roughly five hundred years before the birth of Jesus. Whereas our Old Testament lessons the last couple of weeks have come from the time of Israel’s exile, this one comes from the time of Israel’s return from Babylon, but the theme is similar. The people had returned to the ruins of Jerusalem. They had an enormous rebuilding project ahead of them that was made worse by hostile neighbours. They were bad times. But through the prophet the Lord exhorted his peopleRejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! (Zechariah 9:9a)Zion had little to rejoice about, but the Lord calls his people to rejoice anyway. Why?Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he… (Zechariah 9:9b)Rejoice, because your king is coming and he will bring righteousness and salvation. This king, says the Lord, will bring peace to the nations and his rule shall be from seas to sea and to the ends of the earth. In verse 11 the Lord says that he will do this because of the blood of his covenant. The Lord reminds the people of his faithfulness. What he has promised he will surely do.And yet this wasn’t a promise that any of the people of Zechariah’s day would see fulfilled. They would rebuild Jerusalem. They would rebuild the temple. But they would do it through great hardship. And even when the temple was rebuilt, it wouldn’t be the same. The ark, the Lord’s throne was long gone. The shekinah, the cloud of glory that represented the Lord’s presence with his people would remain absent from the new temple. But the Lord called his people to rejoice anyway. They were to live in hope knowing that the Lord will do what he says even if it’s not today or tomorrow or even in our lifetime. It wasn’t a call to blind faith. It was a call to look back to the history of their people and to know the Lord’s past goodness and faithfulness. Every generation has its part to play in the Lord’s story of redemption and the part assigned to Zechariah’s generation was to rejoice in hope of the Lord’s coming even while facing very difficult days. In doing so they brought glory to the Lord’s name in the sight of the watching nations. It’s should be a reminder to us that for God’s people there’s more to life than just today or tomorrow or even next year. We’re part of a story bigger than ourselves. Our ministry is built on the ministry of the generations of believers who have come before and what we build today will serve as a foundation for the believers who will come after us.And, of course, the Lord proved his faithfulness as we see in our Gospel. Matthew makes a point of just that. Look at Matthew 21:Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. (Matthew 21:1-2)Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem one last time. The Lord is coming to his people, just as he had promised in the days of the prophets. And Matthew goes out of his way to highlight this. Jesus doesn’t just send his disciples to go into the village to round up a donkey. Jesus sends them into the village to round up a donkey, but does so using the word of Zechariah. Matthew says in verses 4-5:This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,“Say to the daughter of Zion,‘Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’” We should feel a powerful sense of the sovereignty of God here. Not only is Jesus coming to his people to fulfil what the Lord had promised, but he’s doing it just as the Lord had promised through Zechariah. But it goes a step further. The Palm Sunday story is familiar. We all know what’s about to happen. It’s not just that in Jesus the Lord is finally coming to his people. Jesus is also going to his death as he rides into the city. All hell will break lose in just a few days. Jesus will be crucified. The disciples will run off in fear to hide. It’s as if the Lord knew that all this would happen and so, at the outset of that first Holy Week, on Palm Sunday, he uses these events to remind the disciples that he is in control. The God who has brought Jesus to Jerusalem to fulfil his promises will remain in full control as the events of his arrest and crucifixion unfold.Of course, the disciples didn’t grasp this at all. We all know that living in faith in the midst of disaster isn’t easy. It’s all too easy to lose our focus, to be swept up in the crises and difficulties of the day, and to forget God’s promises and God’s sovereignty. This is why we need to be steeped in the story of the Lord and his people. This is why we need to centre ourselves on Jesus and on his death and resurrection. Because there we see supremely the goodness and faithfulness of God. There was no darker day than that first Good Friday. It looked like a disaster to Jesus’ friends. But the reality was that even on that worst of all days in the most horrific of all events, God was in control and working through them to bring the most glorious day ever.The rest of the story reminds us of God’s sovereignty as well. Matthew goes on:Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?” And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.” (Matthew 21:8-11)“Hosanna!” It was a cry to God for help that, over time, became a cry of praise to the Lord. During the Feast of Tabernacles, the priests would process around the altar waving branches and shouting “Hosanna!”—a cry to the Lord for help, but also a cry of praise and faith knowing that the Lord hears the cries of his people. But on this day, as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the people waved their branches at him and cried “Hosanna!” The Lord had finally come. The Messiah was here.But then Palm Sunday stands in stark contrast to Good Friday. Today we hear the praises of the people as Jesus arrives, but in just a few days the praises turn to jeers and to cries of “Crucify him!”. But, again, the story reminds us that God was never out of control. Jesus knew he was going to his death and he knew that death was part of the plan. To save his people he had to die the death that they deserved. Even as sin and death rose up to their full height and did their worst, God remained sovereign and turned the death of Jesus back on his enemies on Easter morning.St. Paul looked back on those events as he wrote to the Philippians:God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)The devil for one brief moment thought that he was bringing Jesus down, but then we discover when it’s over, that God was using the cross to exalt his Son, to defeat his enemies, and to bring salvation from sin and death. The crowds were angry with Jesus for getting their hopes up. They had thought he was the Messiah, but when he stood before them in chains, they lost faith and they lost hope. The Messiah was supposed to conquer Herod and the Romans, not let himself be arrested and beaten by them. But the resurrection changed everything and one day, after the gospel message has gone out to all the world, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.Brothers and Sisters, Easter is coming, but we only get there through the sad events of Holy Week and through the death of Jesus on the cross. It’s a timely reminder for us that Jesus has called us to follow where he has gone before.We have been sold a lie. Modernity has promised us life without hardship and suffering and as much as in the common grace of God, the institutions of our world have brought us prosperity the likes of which Gregory the Great or Martin Rinckart could never have imagined, no earthly government, no scientist, no doctor, no economist, no philosopher, and no social worker will ever bring the new age that the Lord has promised us and that he has inaugurated through the resurrection of Jesus. Politicians make promises to solve all of our problems. Scientists and doctors hold out false hopes of eternal life…or at least life in this age without suffering. Even prosperity gospel hucksters are in on the game, promising a life without suffering, a life without hard things if we will only have enough faith. Brothers and Sisters, it’s not true. None of it. These are false gods with false gospels and false hopes. The scriptures we have read today, the story we will walk through with Jesus over the next week, remind us where our faith and our hope really lie: In the God who has joined us in our hard things, who walks with us in our hard things, who has borne our hard things, and who has himself come through the other side and has promised to take us with him in the fulness of time. In the meantime he calls us to walk with each other as he walks with us by means of his Spirit, that we might proclaim the good news about him to the world, and that we might live in such a way that our hope in God’s new world is manifest, is obvious to everyone around us…so that they might know it, know him, too.Let us pray: Almighty and ever-living God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Fourth Sunday in Lent: Bread in the WildernessGalatians 4:21-31 & St. John 6:1-14by William KlockI expect Jesus often got tired of arguing with people. Not because he didn’t expect it, but because it was just so discouraging. Think of the arguments you’ve got into on the Internet—or if you’re wiser than most of us and know better than to get into arguments on the Internet, think of those arguments you’ve found yourself in, maybe with people at work or even with family. We all know that there are certain topics that we won’t agree on. There are certain things you know before you even say them, will get people’s hackles up. But we say them anyway and before long everyone’s piling on. And it’s frustrating because—we know—they’re wrong. And they won’t be convinced. But the fact is you knew better. You stepped on the rake. You can’t really blame it when it hits you in the face. And you just have to walk away, maybe with your pride hurt a little bit. But it’s a whole other thing when the argument comes from people you didn’t expect it to come from—from people you thought knew better. That’s discouraging—especially when you have to walk away knowing that you haven’t convinced them of something they should have been convinced of already. I suspect Jesus felt like that a lot. It would have been one thing to get into arguments with Canaanites or Greeks or Romans who laughed at the idea he was the Messiah—who laughed at the very idea of the Messiah. They didn’t know better. But to be rejected by your own people—even the people, many of them your relatives, in the very synagogue you grew up in—people who knew the scriptures so well, people who longed for the promised Messiah. To be rejected by them was something different. That was discouraging. And it’s not like Jesus didn’t know it was coming—at least to some degree—because he knew those same scriptures and he knew the Messiah had to be rejected by his own, but still—it revealed just how lost his own people were. Not only that, but just how obstinate they were in their lostness. They didn’t even want to be found. At the end of John 5, Jesus had to walk away saying, “If you’d believed Moses, you’d be believing me now. I know you think you believe Moses, but you don’t, and that’s why you don’t believe what I’m telling you.” Jesus never doubted his mission or who he was, but that didn’t mean these encounters weren’t frustrating and discouraging. He trusted what his Father was doing, but I expect that just as he would weep over Jerusalem later in his ministry, he wept over his people pretty regularly too. This might have been one of those times. And so he left and John says, as our Gospel today from Chapter 6 begins, Jesus went with his friends to the other side of the Sea of Galilee—away from the towns and into the wilderness.But not everyone was so dismissive of Jesus. Matthew writes that Jesus and the disciples took a boat to the other side of the sea, but when they got there a crowd had already gathered on the shore. People had seen the signs he was doing: giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, showing his power over the devils, preaching good news to the poor. As I said last week, it was all more than a little confusing, because he wasn’t at all like the Messiah they expected, and yet he was. He was doing so many Messiah things and the Lord was so obviously with him. So seeing Jesus sailing off across the sea, people followed along the shore and as they travelled, others came out from the towns and villages and turned into a crowd and the crowd got bigger and bigger. These people weren’t there to argue with him. They came full of faith, ready to believe, and pretty soon Jesus was doing all those Messiah things in their midst: healing the sick, casting out devils, and preaching good news. And then he looked out from the hill he was sitting on and saw just how big the crowd had become. He’d healed and preached and still they were there. They wouldn’t go home. And Jesus just then realised how hungry he was; surely all the people were hungry too. Many of them were far from home and there was no way the little farms and villages nearby could provide food for all these people. And that’s when Jesus decided to do another of his acted-out prophecies—one of those things he did so often to remind the people of the story of the God of Israel and his people, and to show the people their place in the story and his place in the story. So John says it was the Passover. That’s not just an incidental detail. Jesus knew it was the Passover. So did all the people. In fact, this is the context for all of John 6: the Passover. It was the Passover and Jesus decides to do a Passover thing right there on the hillside overlooking the sea.He starts by leaning over to Philip. “We’re hungry. These people are hungry. We need to feed them. Where can we buy bread for everyone?” Philip looked at Jesus like he was crazy. Not only was there no place to buy bread to feed the crowd, even if they had a pile of money—which they didn’t—they could never afford to buy enough bread to give everyone a crumb. That was the wrong answer, but Jesus wasn’t surprised. He only asked the question to make a point—to set the stage for what he was going to do. Again, it was Passover and what was Passover? It was that annual feast where Jewish families would join together to share in a meal that recalled their Exodus from Egypt and their deliverance from Pharoah and his bondage. That meal reminded them that they belonged to the Lord, that he had made a covenant with them. That he was their God and they were his people and that he was with them and they with him. It recalled his promises and his faithfulness and it gave them—or it should have given them—renewed and stronger faith in him.And when we think about that we should realise that Jesus didn’t lead the people out into the wilderness on the other side of the sea, into a place with no food, accidentally. This was all to make a point. Again, it was the Passover. Jesus was in the place of Moses, leading a crowd of hungry people who had nothing to eat. Philip should have known better. He knew the stories about hungry people and the Lord’s provision of manna in the wilderness. He should have put two and two together, but in his defence, it seems like it took everyone there a bit to realise what was happening. Andrew brought a boy to Jesus who’d had the sense to bring a lunch. But five loaves of bread and two fish, “What are they for so many?” Andrew asked. I’ve wondered what Andrew was thinking. Did he think Jesus might find a way to make do with the boy’s lunch? I suspect Andrew was really just highlighting how hopeless the idea was that they could feed the crowd. But Jesus knew this is how Philip and Andrew would react and, again, he had a point. He wanted the realisation of just how hopeless the situation was to really sink in. So that’s when he had everyone sit down. John say there were about five thousand men. That’s just the men. Who knows how many women and children were with those men. And they all sat down to eat.Now imagine showing up at your favourite restaurant only to find it closed. You knock on the door. The manager eventually shows up and explains that the truck delivering the day’s food broke down and never showed up. There’s no food. But you insist on going inside and you sit down at your favourite table ready to eat anyway. That’s about what’s happening here with these people. You’d be silly to sit in that restaurant waiting for someone to bring you food, but remember that these people were there, because they’d seen what the God of Israel was doing through Jesus. And they’d seen it for themselves. That man over there had been blind just this morning and now he can see. That little girl over there was crippled this morning, but now she can walk. And that woman over there had seizures her whole life, but now they’re gone. They were ready to see what Jesus would do. I expect at least of a few of them were starting to think of the manna in the wilderness. And so they watched as Jesus took those loaves of barley bread and those fish, lifted them up to the Lord in thanksgiving, then started breaking them into pieces and his disciples put them in baskets and started carrying them out to the crowd. Jesus just kept breaking off pieces and breaking off pieces and somehow the bread and the fish never ran out. It went on for minutes and then minutes turned into hours and his disciples kept going back with empty baskets and he kept filling them up so that everyone could eat. And it was no stingy meal. It may have been simple—just bread and fish—but it made people think of their ancestors in the wilderness and the simple manna that the Lord had provided without fail day after day and year after year—just like Jesus kept breaking off pieces of bread and fish and the food kept going out to the crowd.But there was one big difference between the Lord’s provision in the wilderness of Sinai and his provision on this Passover. The manna the Lord provided back during the Exodus was always just enough for the day. It wouldn’t keep. People tried and it stank and bred maggots overnight. But it taught the people to trust in the Lord’s provision, especially when it somehow kept from Friday to Saturday so they wouldn’t have to gather on the Sabbath. But this bread from heaven is different. Everyone had more than enough and there were twelve baskets of bread left over. And Jesus made a point of telling the disciples to gather it up so it wouldn’t be lost. Not only was there more than enough for the day, this was bread that would last. This was Passover all over again, but the people realised that day, it was a better Passover than Israel had ever known. The manna in the wilderness was about to become the great kingdom feast everyone expected the Messiah to bring—the feast celebrating the Lord finally setting this world to rights.And so, John says, they cried out, “This is the prophet who is to come into the world.” This is a reference to Deuteronomy 18 and the promise that another would come, like Moses, to set Israel to rights, to lead the people from slavery to freedom. The people recognised that in Jesus, the Lord was acting to fulfil his promises.Now, the appointed Gospel ends a little unexpectedly right at that point. I think it does that specifically to highlight the messianic part of the story. But the story goes on for one more verse. Jesus, John says, suddenly withdrew up the mountain—again, looking an awful lot like Moses. But why? Because he realised that if he didn’t the people would take him by force to make him king. They believed. They had faith. They were full of faith that day after seeing and hearing everything Jesus had done. Clearly he was the Messiah, even though he wasn’t doing the things everybody expected, namely riding into Jerusalem like King David to bust Roman heads and to take his throne. But now they were ready to make that part happen themselves. But, Brothers and Sisters, that’s not how Jesus was to become king. Jesus was never meant to become king by being carried into Jerusalem on the shoulders of the crowd or with an armed insurrection or even by a peaceful people’s revolution. The people never would, they never could never make Jesus king. Friends, Jesus is king because the crowd rejected and crucified him and because the Lord raised him from the dead. The devil had tempted him to take the easy way to his throne and here the crowd was ready to take him straight to the throne again. But that wasn’t the way. The way to the throne lay through and only through the cross. Jesus knew that, he knew it would not be easy, but left the crowd behind and trusted in his Father, the very God who has shown over and over that if his people will trust him, he will provide in abundance. If we will pass through the water in faith, he will care for us in the wilderness and finally see us to the promised land. And Jesus knew that better than anyone.But life in the wilderness isn’t easy. Even with God in our midst, even as he provides for our needs, we are so easily dissatisfied. As the Israelites got bored of his miraculous manna, we too easily become bored of the means of grace: of word and sacrament and prayer and being daily faithful in small and ordinary things. We look back to Egypt and forget that those weren’t really the good old days. And we stop looking forward to the promised land in which we once so eagerly hoped and our vision (and our affections) fall from the things of heaven to the things of earth. And troubles come and instead of trusting in the one who has so many times proved himself faithful, we trust in other things and cease to be obedient. This was the problem in Galatia when Paul wrote to the Christians there. The pressure was on. Many there had eagerly put their faith in Jesus when they heard the gospel, but then things got difficult. For a time they forgot that Jesus had led them into the wilderness, but now the reality was sinking in. They were rejected by friends and family. Even though most of them seem to have been gentiles, they were still—at first—closely connected with the synagogue and now they were being kicked out. Even the pagans thought they were crazy. Think back to our study of the seven churches in the first chapters of Revelation and the persecution they faced. Galatia wasn’t that bad, at least not yet, but it still wasn’t easy to be a Christian.And then some missionaries from Jerusalem showed up and told them that what Paul had taught them was all wrong. Paul had taught them that through faith in Jesus, they’d become children of Abraham and heirs of God’s promises to Israel. But that, these new folks said, wasn’t enough. Paul hadn’t given them the full gospel. (Brothers and Sisters, always beware the folks to claim to have the “full gospel” in contrast to everyone else.) No, they said, faith in Jesus is great, but you can’t just call yourselves children of Abraham so easily. Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and so you’ve got to become Jews—you’ve got live by torah, most importantly, you’ve got to be circumcised. Faith, they said, wasn’t enough, you’ve got to have torah too. These “full gospels” always and inevitably end up preaching that faith itself isn’t enough. So Paul writes to them in Galatians 4:21 and says, “Tell me, you who desire to be under torah, haven’t you listened to the torah?” And then he goes on to tell them a story they surely knew. It’s the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac. In Genesis 15 the Lord had promised a son to Abraham, a son through whom he’d fulfil his promises to make him a great nation. The problem was that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, was barren and ninety years old. So—and it may seem weird to us, but it was the custom of the day—she sent her maid, Hagar, in to Abraham. Hagar’s son would legally be Sarah’s. And it worked, or so they thought. Hagar bore Ishmael to Abraham, but it all backfired and fell apart. That was not how the Lord had intended to fulfil his promise to Abraham. Hagar and Ismael were cast out. (But don’t worry, the Lord took care of them, too.) And eventually Sarah bore her son, Isaac, the heir the Lord had promised.So since the Galatians had become all about who was and who was not Abraham’s child and how one claimed that status, Paul reminds them that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free. More importantly, the “son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through the promise”…or we might say “by faith”. And whereas these Judaising missionaries were trying to say something like that these gentile converts were like Ishmael, born outside the covenant, Paul uses the story allegorically to illustrate the old covenant and the new—in effect, to shift the story from the old exodus to the new.You see, in light of Jesus, Hagar and Ishmael, her son born of the flesh, is like Mount Sinai—like the torah. Paul says, like “the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.” The present Jerusalem had become representative of unbelieving Israel—of the Jews who had continued to obstinately reject Jesus. They couldn’t wrap their heads around being the people of God by faith in Jesus. For them, being God’s people was tied to observing torah: being circumcised, keeping Sabbath, eating the right foods, and all that. But, Paul’s reminding them, Jesus has set his people free from that. What had once meant deliverance from Egypt’s slavery, now, apart from Jesus, has become a new form of bondage.In contrast, he writes in verse 26, “The Jerusalem above”—the kingdom Jesus has inaugurated—“it’s free, and she is our mother.” Why, he’s asking, would you go back into bondage? For people of the new covenant to return to the old is like the Israelites wanting to return to Egypt. For the Israelites to return to Egypt was to forsake what the Lord had done for them in the first exodus and now, for new covenant people to return to torah, to the law, was to forsake what the Lord had done for them through Jesus and this second exodus. Why would you do that? No, he says, rejoice in the freedom Jesus has given you. He quotes a song from Isaiah 54:“Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor!For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband.”No, again, Paul stresses to them: “You, Brothers,” because you are in Jesus the Messiah, “you are like Isaac, children of the promise.” And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You are children of Abraham and through him children of God by faith, not by works of the flesh. That’s how it is and that’s how it always has been. And so he tells them, don’t let these folks enslaved by the works of the flesh persecute you the way Hagar persecuted Sarah and Ishmael persecuted Isaac. "What does the scripture say?” he asks. “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman. So, Brothers, we are not children of the slave, but of the free woman.”Cast them out! They preach a false gospel that will take you back to Egypt and put you in bondage. Cast them out of your church! Remove their influence form your midst. But even more importantly: Remember that in Jesus and by faith in him, you are free, heirs of Abraham, and children of the living God. He has filled you with his Spirit and the Spirit will accomplish in you what the torah was powerless to accomplish in Israel.Again, life in the wilderness, life between the Red Sea and the promised land is difficult. For those Christians in the Galatian churches, being circumcised and submitting to torah—effectively become Jews—was attractive. It meant the other Jews would accept them. And when it meant that they could fly under the radar of Roman persecution, because Jews were a tolerated sect. If they did this, it could mean keeping their family and friends or their jobs or their position in the guild…or later it could mean escaping death in the arena. But it also meant compromise. It meant a return Egypt and to bondage. Ultimately, it meant forsaking Jesus himself, because no matter how much you talk about faith in Jesus, so long as you mix that faith with the flesh, so long as you hedge your bets with the false gods and kings and systems of the world, you’re not really trusting in Jesus. And how often are we just like that? We claim to trust Jesus, but we let the challenges of the wilderness drag us away. We trust in Jesus, but we’re often distracted by other things. We trust in Jesus, but we become very quiet about him when to do otherwise might mean trouble. We trust in Jesus, but when life throws us a curve, we go scrambling to fix it, we become anxious, we worry, like Philip in the Gospel, we look to Jesus and say, “We can’t afford to feed all these people and even if we could, there’s nowhere to buy that much bread. We can’t do it, Jesus!”—I’ve been convicted of that these past few weeks. Instead, we need to trust in him—trust in the one who provided manna in the wilderness and who fed the five thousand and who died and rose again for us. I don’t know how, after all that, we so often stop trusting, but we do and we shouldn’t. I don’t know how we get bored and blasé about this good news, but somehow we do. This season of Lent is a time every year to set aside all those other things and distractions that compete for our attention and our loyalties and that draw us away from trust and devotion to Jesus. Lent brings us into the wilderness so that we can fast from everything that distracts us just be fed by Jesus with the manna of his word, and to be reminded of the faithfulness of God and the glories of the gospel, so that when Easter comes and we see the cross and then the empty tomb, we’re again ready to glory in Jesus and Jesus alone, to remember the commitment—the covenant he has made with us with his own flesh and blood—and to give him our all in return.Let’s pray: Almighty God who has made a covenant of unspeakable grace and mercy with us in Christ Jesus, and conveyed unto us therein an heavenly inheritance upon sincere obedience to his commands, which is our reasonable service; grant that we may evermore rejoice in you, and walk worthy of our holy calling, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Third Sunday in Lent: The Finger of GodSt. Luke 11:14-28by William KlockImagine being one of Pharaoh’s court magicians when Moses came with that message from the Lord, the God of Israel, demanding, “Let my people go!” Pharaoh laughed. This Lord, this God of Israel was no match for him or for his gods. Powerful gods did not let their people become slaves. And everyone knew that the gods of Egypt were the greatest and most powerful in the world. This Lord, this Yahweh, this god of a poor and subjugated people, this god hiding, unknown in the desert for hundred of years, who was he to be sending a prophet to mighty Pharaoh making demands? Pharoah laughed. And the whole court, including the magicians laughed with him. Stupid Moses. He could have had everything. He was born of the Hebrews, but chosen by a daughter of Pharaoh and raised in the royal courts. The gods of Egypt had shown him great favour. But what a fool. He gave it all up. Hiding in the desert like an outlaw, he’d met the pathetic god of his own people and chosen him over the gods who had shown him such favour, over the most powerful gods on earth. And then to come to Pharaoh, making demands and promising disasters and calamities. They laughed at him. Oh, look! He could turn his brother’s staff into a snake. Neat trick. But so could they. Pharaoh had sent Moses packing. And then that first plague. The Nile turned to blood as Moses had promised. They hadn’t expected that. But they could do it to. Of course the real trick was turning it back into water. Maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t. But thankfully Pharaoh hadn’t asked them to do that. And then the frogs. Everywhere. In the streets and in their houses, in their beds, in their ovens, in their toilets. This God of Israel had power, but it was nothing they couldn’t do themselves and do it they did. Pharaoh nodded smugly at them as they caused frogs to come up from the Nile just as Moses had. They nodded back, they smiled, but they had to admit they were feeling a bit nervous about all this.And then the third plague. Aaron struck the dust of the earth with his staff and it turned into gnats and gnats and more gnats and they covered everything. And Pharaoh looked to his magicians, and nervously they struck the ground with their staves. And nothing happened. They knew. He knew. Whatever Pharoah might claim about being lord of the earth, his power and the power of his magicians and his gods was limited. The Nile was the source of Egypt’s life and over the Nile the gods of Egypt had power. But no more than that. Ever since Moses had turned the river to blood, the magicians—and surely Pharaoh—had been troubled. This was their territory. This was the domain of their gods. That puny god of the Israelites whom Moses had met out in the desert, he should not have had power over the Nile. And while Pharaoh put on a show of defiance and self-assurance, the magicians worried. This God of Israel was more powerful than they thought.Brothers and Sisters, I think we forget that the world was a very different place before Jesus was raised from the dead on that first Easter morning, before the gospel went out like a shockwave across the world. Whatever they were, demons or something else, the gods of the pagans—or at least some of them—were real. Jesus and the gospel stripped them of their power. Everyone noticed it. The Greek philosopher Plutarch wrote a treatise, trying to explain why the gods of the Greeks suddenly went silent in the First Century—their oracles ceased to speak anymore. Athanasius wrote about the same phenomenon in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word of God—but, of course, he knew the answer. It was Jesus. The power of the devil to deceive the nations was broken—for good—and his kingdom was taken from him. The true light had come into the world and the darkness was driven away and the world has never been the same since.Over a thousand years before, Pharaoh and his magicians got a foretaste of what was to come in Jesus. That day, as they struck the dust with their staves, over and over again in frustration, trying to call forth gnats as Moses had, but I think knowing all along that they had met their match, that day those Egyptian magicians were forced to acknowledge the greatness of the God of Israel. “This is the finger of god!” they said to Pharaoh. This is no trick. This is real and this god has more power than we do, then you do, than our gods have. They warned Pharoah, but his heart was hard and it would take seven more plagues, each showing the power of the Lord over the earth—and most importantly over Pharoah and his gods—before Pharaoh was finally broken. Even then, after letting the Hebrews go, he changed his mind and sent his army after them. In another display of his might, the Lord parted the sea to deliver his people and then to drown Pharoah’s army. But rather than acknowledge the Lord and give him glory, the proud Egyptians simply wrote those events out of their history. The gods of Egypt survived. They survived conquest by the Greeks and they survived conquest by the Romans. But then Jesus rose from the grave and robbed their master of his power and his kingdom, bound him and cast him into the pit, and finally the gospel—tradition says it went to Egypt with St. Mark in the lead—the gospel marched into Egypt where no one worships Isis or Osiris anymore, but where Christians continue to gather each Sunday to praise Jesus and to give glory to the God of Israel. To quote those ancient pagan magicians: “This is the finger of God!”Now, think about our Gospel today and imagine being the descendant of those Hebrews who saw their God in all his glory defeat Pharoah and the gods of Egypt. Imagine being the descendant of those people who passed through the waters of the Red Sea with unmoistened foot. Imagine being the descendant of the people who had met the Lord in the cloud and lightning on Mount Sinai and who had followed the Lord into the promised land as he defeated the gods of Canaan just as he had the gods of the Egyptians. Imagine being the descendant of those people, being raised on those stories, your identity integrally tied up in the narrative of the Exodus, in which you took part every year at Passover. Imagine then being unable—or obstinately unwilling—to recognise the God of Israel at work again over the powers of evil. It seems like it should have been unthinkable, but that’s exactly what we read in the Gospel today from Luke 11. Here’s what Luke writes in verses 14-16: Now [Jesus] was casting out a demon that was mute. When the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke, and the people marveled. But some of them said, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons,” while others, to test him, kept seeking from him a sign from heaven. Lots of people saw the God of their fathers, the God of the Passover and the Exodus, they saw him at work through Jesus and they gave him glory and believed. A lot of them believed even though so many things about Jesus didn’t make sense to them or didn’t meet the expectations that people had for the Messiah. What they did know was that in the Messiah, the Lord would visit his people and set the world to rights. In a world broken by sin, he would set things to rights—and that’s just what Jesus was doing. They thought the Messiah would come in a chariot like King David. Some thought he would lead a violent revolution. Most people thought he would overthrow the Romans and set up his throne in Jerusalem to rule the nations. And Jesus, at least so far, hadn’t lived up to that. But he was causing the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak. He was casting out devils. He was preaching good news to the poor. All the things the prophets had said the Messiah would do. And so they believed, despite their questions. But not everyone. Some were so dead-set on their preconceived ideas about the Messiah that they couldn’t believe the obvious. Luke says some of them demanded signs—as if what Jesus was doing wasn’t enough. And then there were others that would rather blaspheme the work of the Lord than admit they might be wrong about the Messiah. “He casts out demon by Beelzebul,” they said to dismiss him. In other words, “He’s in cahoots with them.” Beelzebul was a pagan Philistine god. So here’s Jesus, in the synagogue every Sabbath, performing signs just as the prophets had said and giving all the credit and glory to the Lord. But now he casts out demons and these folks accuse him of witchcraft.Back in Chapter 12, Jesus referred to this kind of thing as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and his point was that it put a person in very dangerous territory. The Messiah was the Lord’s provision for the salvation of his people from the coming judgement. His only provision. So to attribute his power and works to devils, well that’s pretty much the ultimate statement of disbelief, the ultimate rejection. It’s not that people who made this foolish accusation couldn’t change their mind in the future and believe, but Jesus warns them, because such obstinate unbelief, such unbelief that insists on such stupid and outlandish explanations for what Jesus was doing, such blasphemy, has at its root a heart that has been hardened against the Lord. A heart his people had seen before in Pharoah. And we all know how that went for him. No matter what great thing the Lord did, Pharaoh’s heart was unmoved. When the day of the Lord came to Israel, those people—even though they thought they were the faithful ones, defending the Lord and his people from false messiahs—they would be swept up in judgement and wind up like the Egyptians had.Brothers and Sisters, be cautious yourselves not to fall into similar traps. Last month the Internet was abuzz—to put it mildly—about events happening at a college in Indiana. Some people called it a revival and other people loudly denounced it as, at best, man-made and, at worst, demonic. It highlights the need for us to be more circumspect about those kinds of accusations. Jesus, himself, warned his disciples. They saw someone casting out demons in his name, but this guy didn’t have an apostolic franchise. They tried to stop him and Jesus warned them, “If he’s acting in my name and if he’s not against us, then he’s with us. Let him alone. He’s doing our work.” The Spirit works in the Church and in Christians, usually in ordinary ways, but every once in a while in extraordinary ways. And if the Spirit could only work through churches and Christians that are perfect, he’d never be able to work at all, because we’ve all got problems. No one’s doctrine is perfect. None of us is as holy as we ought to be. When God moves through his church, it will always be through imperfect people and imperfect movements. Even as his Spirit breathes new life into his people, they remain imperfect Christians in imperfect churches. If we see something happen and it’s promoting heresy or unholiness, if there’s false prophecy involved or if it directs people away from God’s word or from the Jesus we know through Scripture, we can know that that is not a move of God. But when a movement, however imperfect, points people to Jesus and to the word, and causes people to pursue holiness and makes them better stewards of God’s grace and of the gospel, Brothers and Sisters, give it the benefit of the doubt, praise God, and pray that it will bring reformation.Back to Luke now. Knowing how silly this accusation of witchcraft is, Jesus responds. Look at Luke 11:17-23.But he, knowing their thoughts, said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and a divided household falls. And if Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? For you say that I cast out demons by Beelzebul. And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are safe; but when one stronger than he attacks him and overcomes him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and divides his spoil. Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. They’re so opposed to Jesus that they haven’t thought through their accusations. Why would the satan be shooting his own forces in the back? In Jesus, the battle with evil was coming to its climax and the devil knew it. In fact, he was already losing. As Jesus says, like someone breaking into a strong man’s house, tying him up, and stealing his stuff, Jesus had already broken into the devil’s house and robbed him of his power. He was preparing to take back his kingdom and he was showing everyone by bossing around the satan’s minions—and the satan was powerless to do anything about it.And Jesus also says, “You’ve got exorcists amongst your own people. You don’t question accuse them of being in cahoots with the devil. Why would you would you accuse me?Then Jesus makes a very deliberate point of recalling the Exodus and the magicians of Pharoah with that statement, “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” They knew the Old Testament and they knew their own story, so they couldn’t have missed the allusion. So much of what Jesus was doing—and before him what John had done—pointed the people back to the events of the Exodus and Jesus (and John) did this to make the point that the Lord was on the verge of acting again to deliver his people. A new exodus was about to happen. And so this bit about the finger of God is a rebuke. Jesus is reminding them that even Pharaoh’s magicians were able to recognise the God of Israel at work—and their knees quaked in fear to think of what was to come. If pagan magicians could recognise the Lord at work, shouldn’t the Lord’s own people be able to recognise him all the easier? What does it say about the state of Israel when the Messiah comes and is so obviously doing all the thing the prophets had said he would, but his own people reject him and even dismiss his power as demonic? That’s what the next few verses are getting at. Look at 24-26: “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there. And the last state of that person is worse than the first.” This isn’t a method or a theology of exorcism. It’s Jesus commentary on the state of Israel and a rebuke of his people. For a thousand years they’d known reform movement after reform movement. In the days of the judges, the people would stray from the Lord, he would allow someone to oppress them, and then they would repent and cry out to him and he would deliver them—over and over and over. Repeatedly kings had tried to reform the nation. And in more recent years they had known reforms and times of national repentance—the days of Ezra and the Maccabees. This is what the Pharisees were all about—another reform movement to get the Lord’s people back to being faithful to torah. And all of those movements for reform were good, but none of them ever solved the real problem. Jesus compares Israel to a man with a demon. The demon is cast out, it goes wandering for a while, but finds nowhere to rest, so eventually it returns to the man. And while the demon’s been gone, someone’s cleaned house. So the demon goes and gets a bunch of its friends and they return to the man and now he’s worse off than before. Just so with Israel. The prophets put it in terms of the need for a heart transplant. Israel needed her heart of stone replaced with a heart of flesh. She needed the law written on her heart by the Spirit, because the law written on stone tablets was never enough. She needed love for God inscribed on her heart. She needed to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And here, in light of the accusations being made against him, Jesus puts it in terms of demonic possession, but however it’s made, the point is that Israel desperately needed a work of the Lord in her midst if anything were to truly change for good. And here’s Jesus doing just that and they’re chalking his power up to the devil. So this is a statement of grief over the state of his people, it’s a call to repentance and faith, and it’s warning against the judgement to come.But then a woman speaks up from the crowd and highlights the discouraging fact that even the people who believe, even the people who see the Lord at work in Jesus and are excited about it—even they don’t really get it. Even they need a work of God done in them. Look at verses 27 and 28: As he said these things, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!” But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” She’d been rooting for Jesus from the beginning and that gotcha with the people who accused him of being in cahoots with Beelzebul, just wow! Jesus was amazing. He knew his Bible—that bit about comparing those guys to Pharaoh’s magicians was genius—and he was smart and he was witty and he could do miracles. Maybe she had a son who had turned out to be kind of a disappointment. And so she cries out, “What a boy! Your mama is truly blessed to have you for a son!” And it was true. Gabriel had announced to Mary, “Blessed are you among women!” But that’s not the point. The Egyptian magicians recognized the power of God at work in Moses, but they still stood with Pharaoh. This woman—and many others—went a step further. They saw God at work in Jesus and praised him for what they saw. But, Brothers and Sisters, it’s not enough to see God at work and clap our hands and say, “Oh, isn’t this great!” or “Isn’t this wonderful and exciting!” or even “Praise the Lord!” Remember when people came to Jesus and said, “Your mother and your brothers are outside looking for you.” And he took the occasion to make a vital point about the gospel. He said, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” In other words, the Kingdom is not made up of those who merely praise the Messiah, but of those who give up everything to follow him in faith. The way to the kingdom is obedience—to drop everything, to set aside one’s own agendas and false ideas of the Messiah and the kingdom, and to follow Jesus. Think on that as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning. Here we recall what the Lord has done for us—for the world—in Jesus. And here we not only recall, but we participate ourselves in that great exodus in which Jesus has led us out of our bondage to sin and death, through the water of baptism, and into the kingdom and into the Spirit. We have seen the finger of God at work through the Messiah. Now respond in faith, not just as an enthusiastic spectators, but by truly following Jesus in faith, in repentance as we set aside every distraction, every idol, and walk with him in obedience. Be a people immersed in his word. Be a people who stick close to our Lord in prayer. Be a holy people, be light in the darkness, and stand firm in faith amidst the storm, knowing that Jesus has already won the victory.Let’s pray: Almighty God, consider the heartfelt desires of your servants, we pray, and stretch out the right hand of your majesty to defend us against all our enemies; purify our disordered affections, so that we may behold your eternal glory and walk in obedience to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Second Sunday in Lent: From Dogs to Sons and DaughtersSt. Matthew 15:21-28by William KlockIn today’s Gospel, St. Matthew tells us about a Canaanite mother. Her daughter was sick. “Oppressed by a demon,” Matthew says, which could mean that she actually was suffering from some kind of demonic activity, but it could also mean something like epilepsy or seizures—the Greek term literally means “moonstruck”—and it was often attributed to demons. Whatever was wrong with this girl, it was clearly something awful and her mother was desperate for her to be healed. I expect she had exhausted every option. She’d been to doctors and witchdoctors and priests. In Sidon there was a temple dedicated to the Phoenician god Eshmun, a god of healing. Interestingly enough in light of the exchange that takes place between this woman and Jesus, modern archaeologists—some at least—think that dogs had a sacred place in the ceremonial and rituals of Eshmun. I expect that this Canaanite woman would have taken her daughter to that pagan temple devoted to healing. That would have been the normal—not to mention expected—thing for her to do. Her hopes were high. Surely this god of healing could do something for her daughter. But nothing. And so the seizures—or whatever it was—continued and this mother grieved for her daughter. I think as parents most of us can identify with that. When our children are sick, we grieve for them, we pray for them, we want them to get better and it’s frustrating and tiring and discouraging when, no matter what we do, no matter who we take them to, no one seems to be able to do anything. Sometimes we may even feel as though God has let us down. We heap guilt on ourselves, thinking that maybe our faith is lacking. I expect that’s exactly how this woman felt. The doctors couldn’t do anything. The priests couldn’t do anything. She prayed and her gods were silent. She was utterly discouraged.But then, one day, she hears about a Jewish rabbi travelling through the neighbourhood. Jesus. She’s heard of him time and time again the last couple of years. The Jewish people she knew had been talking about him. He’d been travelling around Galilee restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, healing the sick, and—most importantly—casting out demons. People said he was the Messiah—a prophet, maybe even the God of Israel himself. People called him the “son of David”, the king who would come to sort out all of Israel’s problems. Living in such close proximity to Jews, she knew a bit of their story. She knew a little about their God. And as far as she could tell, he wasn’t much better than her gods. His people hadn’t heard him speak in hundreds of years. He didn’t seem to care about his people any more than her gods cared about theirs; they were all living under the boot of Rome, after all, and their gods didn’t seem to care. But now the God of Israel was waking up, now he was speaking and acting through this “son of David,” this “Messiah”, this “Jesus”. The God of Israel had—so the Jews claimed—made promises to his people through prophets a thousand years ago. But nothing had come of them and, like everybody else, she had mocked them: “Where’s your God?” The Jewish God was no better than theirs and they had no reason to be so uppity. But now those old prophecies were suddenly being fulfilled. Something was happening. Something she couldn’t say of her own gods. And so she followed the talk and the rumours until she found this Jesus. If her gods wouldn’t help her, maybe the God of Israel would.Look at Matthew 15, beginning at verse 21.And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” Imagine her excitement when she found him. Jesus and his disciples had a little camp in the country, away from everyone. That made perfect sense. Jews and gentiles didn’t mix. From a distance she could see that he was teaching his disciples—talking about something. But she didn’t care. She called out to get his attention. His disciples looked, but it was like he hadn’t heard her. He kept on with his teaching. So she called out again and again. She knew he heard, but he ignored her. Finally, she was right there and she cried out. Matthew puts special stress on the urgency of her cries. “O Lord, have mercy on me. Son of David, deliver my daughter.” She knew that as a Canaanite, a gentile, she didn’t belong there, even though it was Jesus who had come to her country. If he really was the Messiah of the God of Israel, if he really was the son of David, this Jewish king, he had no more obligation to her than her gods had to Jewish people. But she was desperate. Her gods were silent. Her gods were impotent to help her. What reason did she have to be loyal to them? So she cries out to this man come from the God of Israel. But Matthew says: But he did not answer her a word. It’s actually Jesus’s disciples who acknowledge her presence. And, as she expected, they’re annoyed. She should know better. A gentile and a woman. She had no business bothering them. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” They didn’t care about her. They were only interested in hearing Jesus. “Come on, Jesus. Give her what she wants so she’ll go away and leave us alone. We want to hear what you have to say.” (There’s another whole sermon right there, isn’t there?) She didn’t want to hear that, but I doubt she was surprised. But she expected more of Jesus after all the things she’d heard. She’d even heard how he healed the child or the servant—depending on whom you’d heard it from—of a Roman Centurion. And women were coming to him all the time. Surely Jesus would rebuke his disciples and have compassion on her. But that’s not how Matthew says Jesus responded. Finally he speaks, but even then, he speaks to his friends, not to her. Look at verse 24. He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” And he answered, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Ouch. That doesn’t sound right to our ears. Did Jesus really ignore her? And then, when he was forced to talk to her, did he really say “No” and call her a dog? There’s a reason why this is often said to be one of the “hard sayings” of the New Testament. There is a good explanation and we’ll get to it in a bit. Matthew tells us just how persistent she was. She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” I think that’s when Jesus finally smiled at her. He wasn’t really a jerk. There was a reason for the way he acted. You could say he was testing her. Or, I think more importantly, you could say that this was another of his acted-out prophecies that said more than words ever could about the nature of his ministry and just who he was as the Lord’s Messiah. So Jesus, again, finally smiled at her and, Matthew says: Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly. So what’s going on here? Some people say that Jesus was tired and overwhelmed with the scope of his ministry. He’d been polite and accommodating with the Centurion—and it’s interesting how Matthew tells the two stories in almost exactly the same way and with almost exactly the same words and phrases—but back then Jesus was fresh and enthusiastic, but now he’s had two years to realise how hard and hopeless this whole thing was. The harvest was ripe, but the labourers were few. He’d never make it to everyone in Israel in the time he had. So this time he ignored the woman. His mission was Israel and Israel alone. This gets part of it right, but I think there’s a better explanation. And, of course, there’s the easy explanation of some people today: Jesus was a racist! But that’s definitely not the answer.No. Matthew wrote his Gospel to a Jewish audience and a big part of his purpose was to show that Jesus really was their Messiah and that he’d come in fulfilment of their prophecies. In doing that, Matthew reminds us that Jesus didn’t parachute into history to save humanity and the world at any old random time and place. There’s been a tendency in the Church to abstract Jesus’ ministry, to separate theology and story, doctrine and history. He is the Saviour of the world after all, and so we start thinking that if he’d wanted to he could have come at any time and any place and people to do his saving work, but in doing that we forget that—no—he came and he had to come where and when he did because Jesus is part of a bigger story.This is why I say that this was sort of a sort of acted-out prophecy. I expect Jesus planned to help this woman from the start, but what he says and does here stresses a point that will be vital to his own people and that, ultimately, will be vital as the gospel goes out from Judea to the whole world. That point is that Jesus reveals or puts on display or proves the faithfulness of the God of Israel. He does that by first ignoring this gentile woman, then he refuses her request and calls her a dog. But maybe the most remarkable thing—and it highlights that he really was a prophet—is that his refusal of her request ends up prompting her to speak that vital truth when she says, “But even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” Take note: The dogs don’t eat until the master’s children have eaten. And just so with the gospel. The gentiles can’t eat until the children of Israel have first been fed. The Lord must fulfil his promises to his people before those gospel crumbs can fall to the gentiles. The amazing thing—and what this Canaanite woman probably didn’t realise at the time—was that those crumbs that fell under the table would, in time, become a great feast for the nations. But what has drawn the nations to the table was seeing the faithfulness of the Lord to feed his own children, just as the household dogs only came to the table, because they saw the master feeding his children and hoped to eat what was dropped.We too often forget this. “For God so loved the world,” we say. But we’ve forgotten the bigger story of which this is just one part. Not this short story and not even just the story of the gospels, but the big story, the story of Israel, the story of the people of God that runs from Genesis to Revelation. We tend to lift Jesus out of his historical and Jewish context, out of his First Century context, which means lifting him out of the story of Israel—which again means lifting him out of the Genesis to Revelation story. What our Gospel today shows us is Jesus right in the middle of the big story.So it’s true what Jesus says to the woman here: He did not come to the gentiles. Yes, a few gentiles came to him, but Jesus did not come to the gentiles. Jesus came to Israel. Jesus is Israel’s Messiah. “But again,” we protest, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…” Jesus said it. Yes. Jesus brings salvation for all, but we need to first understand that he does so as Israel’s Messiah. Jesus stresses it right here: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And in saying that he is not saying that he came to some of the house of Israel who were lost, but that he came to Israel because Israel—the whole people—was lost. They were sheep without a shepherd.Jesus came to bring the kingdom that had been promised to Israel through Abraham and through David and he did it to fulfil the Lord’s promises—to show his faithfulness. There were aspects of that kingdom that were new and different, but Jesus’ kingdom is built firmly and immovably on the covenant and the promises the Lord had made with Israel down through the ages from Abraham’s time. He had called Israel to be his people. He had promised to be their God. He had rescued Israel and set her apart that he might show her his blessings and give her his word and he did it all so that she could then share that blessing and share that word with the gentile nations. So that the world would see God in the midst of his people and be moved to come and give him glory. He fully expected crumbs to fall from the table. Remember that Jesus stressed in the Sermon on the Mount that he had come not to abolish the law—not to abolish anything God had promised or covenanted or established with Israel—but to fulfil it. Jesus didn’t come to do away with Israel. Many Christians down through history have said that because of Israel’s faithlessness God cast her aside to start over with the gentiles and the Church. Absolutely not! On the other extreme you’ve got folks who think Jesus’ coming put Israel on hold while the Lord saves the gentiles and builds a Church. Some even like to say that Jesus is not Israel’s Messiah. Eventually, they say, God will be finished with the gentiles, the Church will be completed and then “raptured” out of the world, and the Lord will then pick-up where he left off with Israel. Again, no. Jesus didn’t come to abolish the idea of God electing a special people, nor did he come to divide the people of God with Israel on the one hand and the Church on the other. From day one with Abraham God had made clear that his restoration of the world and his restoration of humanity was going to happen through Israel. Israel may have made a lot of mistakes, fallen into idolatry, failed to live the law, failed to be a light to the nations, but the Lord wasn’t giving up. The Church isn’t “Plan B” implemented when “Plan A”, Israel, failed.The gentiles did (and still do!) need deliverance from sin and death as much as Israel ever did. But again, God’s plan was always to work through Israel and so the ministry of the Messiah had first to be for Israel. Israel had misinterpreted the message she’d been given long before. Some in Israel had even abandoned it almost entirely. And so if Israel was going to be the Lord’s means of bringing life to the world, Jesus had first to call her back to the Lord. Not to do so would be for Jesus to deny the Lord’s promises and to make a liar out of him. And if the Lord was unfaithful to the promises he made to his own people, what reason would the gentiles ever have to notice him? He’d be no different than their own gods—than Zeus or Isis or Odin or Vishnu or the Great Spirit.In fact, what we see Jesus doing—and especially so in the middle portion of the Gospels between his birth and his death and resurrection—is taking on the role of Israel himself. In Daniel the Son of Man character represented the people of God, but in Jesus’ ministry we see him taking that role on, embodying it himself. In his birth and ministry we see him taking on the role of the great Davidic King. And as his ministry unfolds into rejection, suffering, and death we see him taking on the role of Isaiah’s suffering servant. Again, these are roles the prophets ascribed to Israel, but one by one Jesus takes each of them up himself. Brothers and Sisters, understand this key point: Jesus is Israel. He embodies her inheritance and her mission. Where Israel had failed to be faithful, Jesus is faithful without fail. Even as he dies, he faces the very same death that the Jewish revolutionaries faced a generation later and for the very same reason: he challenged Rome as King of the Jews. Jesus came as the embodiment of Israel. And he came as Israel to show God’s people a new way of being Israel—a new way in which the people would fulfil everything the Lord had ever promised and everything the Lord had ever called Israel to be. This is why Jesus came preaching repentance. The people had to let go of all their misconceptions of what it meant to be God’s people, whether that was their hope for violent revolution or their hope that if they were obedient enough the Lord would finally send the Messiah to rain down fire and brimstone on the gentiles and usher in the kingdom. As the promises were fulfilled in Jesus it did not nullify God’s plan to bring life to the world through Israel. What it did was reorient Israel around Jesus himself—it forged a new Israel, not based on blood and genealogy, not based on circumcision or sabbath-keeping, but on faith—specifically faith in Jesus the Messiah. Israel had been born as a people when they followed the Lord in faith through the waters of the Red Sea and were rescued from Egypt. In Jesus Israel is born again. But this new Israel is born of all those who follow Jesus in faith through the waters of baptism. Jesus offered a choice. As he fulfilled the covenant those who repented and reoriented their lives in and around him—those who found their lives in him—became part of the new way of being Israel, centred in Jesus. But, Jesus warned, those who rejected him and refused him would be cut off—and when he said that he was speaking to the biological children of Abraham. The axe was set to the root of the tree. The branches that refused to bear good fruit would be cut off. Jerusalem, embodying and representing faithless Israel, would be and was judged, torn stone from stone, and scattered—again, the Lord revealing his faithfulness to his promises, even in judgement.But through Jesus, Israel would continue in a new way—with the law no longer on tablets of stone, but written on her heart, with the Spirit of God no longer residing in a stone temple behind a curtain they could never pass, but actually living inside them—making them the temple themselves. And as the Spirit changed and renewed and brought to life the law of love now written on their hearts, this new Israel would not only fulfil the Lord’s promises through the prophets, but it would also finally fulfil the Lord’s mission for his people—reaching out to the nations and bringing his life to the world. So, yes, Jesus came to bring life to the world—to Jew and gentile alike—but to fulfil the Lord’s plan he brought this life by first bringing it to the old Israel, to Abraham’s children. To do anything else would have been to bypass the Lord’s plan and to make a liar of him. To make him no better than the pagan gods.This faithfulness of God to his promises—what we call the “righteousness of God”—is the theme of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. Through that letter Paul explains how God has been faithful to and how he has fulfilled his covenant promises to Israel and at the end, in Romans 15 he sums it all up, writing:For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised [that means Israel—Abraham’s biological children] to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name.” (Romans 15:8-9)Jesus fulfilled God’s promises to Israel so that when the story of Israel and the Lord’s faithfulness to her—especially his faithfulness in Jesus the Messiah—was proclaimed to the gentiles they would—we would—fall before God in worship of his great mercy. This is the story the first Jewish Christians proclaimed to the gentiles. This story of the faithfulness of God was the story St. Paul proclaimed as he travelled the Roman empire. It’s the story—ultimately proved true at the cross and the empty tomb and in the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost—it’s the story that reveals the faithfulness of the God of Israel. It’s the story that reveals the gods of this world to be cheap and impotent imitations of the one true God and it’s the story that reveals all the kings of the earth to be but cheap imitations of Jesus, the one true Lord. And as the gentiles heard this story, they put their faith in Jesus, they were baptised into his body, and as they found their life in him—the true embodiment of Israel and the fulfilment of God’s promises to her—as they found their life in Jesus the gentiles were grafted into this new Israel.It’s often a contentious point today in some circles, but the story we’ve inherited, the story told from Genesis to Revelation makes it clear that Israel is the Church and the Church is Israel and Jesus stands at the centre-point, at the bridge between them. The Jewish root that was Israel, even has it was cut down for failing to bear fruit, it gave birth to Jesus the Messiah who is now the trunk of a tree that branches out to the entire world. Anyone who may—Jew or gentile—can take part in the life of Jesus. All any of us needs to do is take hold of him in faith, trusting that in his death he has forgiven our sins and in his resurrection has given us life. Both literally and metaphorically, Jesus provides the blood to make us Israel. All we need is faith.Faith like we see in the Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel. How much did she know about Israel and Israel’s God and Israel’s Messiah? Probably very little. I suspect she had no idea just how profound her response to Jesus about crumbs falling to the dogs was or just how much it revealed about Israel’s calling—and through that Jesus’ calling. I suspect it was all providence. And we don’t know what happened to her after her daughter was healed and she went home. But I have to think that when the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection spread throughout Palestine, everything about that conversation with Jesus came into razor-sharp focus and she believed—not just in a travelling miracle-worker, a travelling prophet, but in Jesus the Messiah who brought life to the world and who changed everything, because the God of Israel so loved everyone. She believed, because in Jesus she had met the one true God and he exposed everything, every god she’d ever believed in to be but a poor mockery of the God who is faithful. And, in that, she was no longer a dog. She began by eating the crumbs, but was—I expect—suddenly surprised to find herself feasting at the Lord’s table, a beloved daughter of the King, now part of that great story herself.And just so with each of us, Brothers and Sisters. We have heard the good news about Jesus. The cross and the empty tomb have shown us the faithfulness of God and we have believed. He welcomes us to his Table this morning, we who once were not worthy so much as to gather the crumbs his children dropped, we who were once dogs, he now invites to feast as his children. Here at the Table we see the faithfulness of the God of Israel revealed in Jesus. Here we see that he and he alone is worthy of our glory and praise. Here we’re reminded, if we have been tempted to flirt with the false gods and false kings and false ideologies and systems of the world, to put them aside as the gospel once again shows them up as worthless in the light of the one true God. And here again, we are exhorted to go out and to proclaim the cross and the lordship of Jesus, the good news to the world so that one day the knowledge of his glory will fill it as the waters cover the sea.Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of faith by which we have been grafted into your Son, Jesus, and in him grafted into your people, Israel. We were stones, but by the gift of faith you have made us children of Abraham. We were dead wood, but by faith you have grafted us into the living vine and caused us to bear fruit. We were mangy, unclean dogs, but now you have made us your sons and daughters. Strengthen that gift of faith in us we ask, that as we live in hope of your future we would live in such a way, bearing the fruit of the Holy Spirit and using the gifts you have given us, to proclaim your glory. Strengthen our faith and enrich our ministry that we might be the blessing to the nations you have called us to be, holding high the light of Christ and proclaiming boldly that Jesus is Lord. Amen.
First Sunday in Lent: Through Death to LifeSt. Matthew 4:1-11by William KlockIn our Gospel from Matthew 4, the Evangelist tells us:Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. It was hot and dry and dusty as Jesus made his way from that fertile strip of land along the Jordan up into the Judean wilderness, into that place that the Old Testament calls Yeshimon, which means “devastation”. It’s a land of sand and broken limestone and shingle. The geological activity of the ages has raised up the strata into ridges that twist here and turn there. Everything in between them is filled with dust and jagged rocks, and broken stone shingles that can easily slide out from under foot. Into that hot and desolate wilderness Jesus walked at the Spirit’s prompting. I expect that when he first set out he found beauty in the desert. There was beauty in the layers of rock in that ridge over there. And look at that boulder over there. I wonder how long it’s been balancing like that. And that first night, the sky was absolutely amazing as the sun set over the rocks and the mountains in the distance. But if you’ve ever gone hiking in the desert you know that novelty wears off. Last week I was watching a video made by a bikepacker I follow. He was bicycling the southern California desert and I watched as he made his way through a canyon in the Anza-Borrego desert. He started out in wonder and admiring everything. Everything was beautiful. And it was only twenty miles to the paved road on other side. He’d be there in no time. But almost immediately he bogged down in deep sand for mile after mile and what he thought might take a few hours turned into all day and into the evening. And it was hot and it was dry and he was covered in sweat. And the novelty was gone. And I knew, because we’ve hiked in that same desert and on the way in it’s all beautiful and you stop to admire everything, but on the way out you’re hot and sweat and dusty, your feet hurt from walking over rocks, and you’re tired and hungry and you just want to get back to the car. And I’m sure Jesus felt something like that the further he walked into that wilderness of devastation. But as he put one foot in front of another, as he wiped the sweat from his face, he thought about his forefathers and their wilderness trek from the Red Sea to the promised land. The Lord, the God of Israel, was about to do something very much like that again. A new exodus. And Jesus was at the centre of it. And so he put himself in the place of his people who so badly needed and who so longed for deliverance. Even if no one saw him in the wilderness, he was acting out a prophecy, repeating the life and story of his people and putting himself in their place.And he found some spot in the middle of that wasteland, maybe where he found a little spring of water in the shade of one of those twisting ridges, maybe there were a few bushes or even a palm tree for a bit of shade. He arranged some rocks and scrub to make a (reasonably) comfortable place to sit or lie or to kneel in prayer. And he communed with God, meditated on the scriptures, pondered the nature of his ministry which was just beginning, and prayed for wisdom to follow the path his Father had set before him and for the strength and grace to follow it to its end. He was preparing to take the role of Israel up himself, to be and to embody the people of God. Where they had failed to be what the Lord had called them to be, Jesus would be faithful. For years he had meditated on his own miraculous birth, he’d heard how people like Simeon and Anna, even is own mother, had seen in him the fulfilment of the Lord’s promises. He meditated on the Scriptures and there he found his messianic calling and worked out what he was to do and even how it would end—and how that end would really be the beginning. And if there was any doubt in his mind, it was driven away in his baptism. Even though he had no need of repentance, he identified himself with his people as he waded into the Jordan to be baptised by John, and when he came up out of the river heaven had opened, the Spirit had descended upon him, and the Lord had spoken, “You are my beloved Son.” Again, that was Israel’s title, given by the Lord in the exodus, after her baptism in the Red Sea. So, now, like Moses, Jesus seeks the solitude of the wilderness for forty days and nights, waiting for the Lord to speak again. But instead, the devil comes to him. I doubt Jesus was surprised by this, after all, if Israel was tempted in the wilderness, he must also be tempted in the wilderness. Matthew writes:And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” (St. Matthew 4:2-3)Again, this is how we should expect the story to develop if Jesus is prophetically re-enacting the story of his people. They were tempted in the wilderness and so is he. The devil leverages his hunger. “The Lord has declared you to be his Son. If you believe that’s who you really are, satisfy yourself and turn these stones into bread.” No doubt, Jesus had spent much of those forty days and nights contemplating what it meant to be the Son of God—and probably also pondering why the Spirit wanted the Son of God to be so hungry. But Jesus was obedient. To embody his people and to follow in their footsteps, being faithful at every step where they had failed, that was the Lord’s plan for him. That was the means by which he would redeem his people.The devil’s temptation here is subtle. He doesn’t tempt Jesus to disobey the Spirit overtly by leaving the desert. He tempts Jesus to turn the rocks into bread—to remake the wilderness itself. And yet Jesus knew that the Spirit had brought him to the wilderness for a reason and to undermine that, however it was done, was to be unfaithful, to be disobedient. It was to reject his Father’s plan. He rebukes the devil with the words of Deuteronomy 8:3.But he answered, “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”Jesus appeals to the sermon that Moses preached to the Israelites as they were preparing to march into Canaan:And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 8:2-3)There was a reason why the Lord allowed the Israelites to be hungry: it demonstrated their faith in his provision. Were they willing to trust him even when it meant hardship? The Lord taught them that there’s more to life than bread. What good is living today if you miss out on the life of the age to come? The Israelites had failed that test, grumbling against Moses and wanting to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt. Now, where Israel failed, Jesus passes the test. He trusts his Father to provide where he has led and shows that he knows that obedience to God’s call is more important than physical comforts and even life itself. If he can’t endure fasting, how will he endure the cross? And Brothers and Sisters, if we can’t endure fasting, how can we expect to live sacrificially as Jesus calls us to live, giving up everything that is not him in faith as we look forward ourselves to the age to come? Back to Matthew: The devil tries again, taking a different tack.Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, “‘He will command his angels concerning you,’and “‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” (Matthew 4:5-6)Now the devil tempts him to jump from the highest point in Jerusalem, to force God’s hand. Angels would deliver him and all of Israel would recognise him as Messiah. What a temptation this must have been. During those forty days of fasting and prayer, Jesus contemplated that rejection was going to be a significant factor in his ministry. A few would follow, but Jesus would largely be rejected by Israel—and eventually that rejection would culminate in his death. But what if he could prove to all of Israel that he was the Messiah? What if he could side-step the rejection and go straight to the throne? But Jesus knew that this was not his Father’s plan. If he became King that way, he’d be no better than David. There would be no means of redemption for his people. There would be no Spirit poured out on them to renew their hearts. He would be King, but the Lord’s promises to Abraham, to Moses, to the Prophets would go unfulfilled. The nations would know that Israel had a king who worked miracles, but that was never the means by which the gentiles were to be drawn to Israel’s God. They were to be drawn by the display of his faithfulness to his promises.The devil throws two bits of Psalm 91 at Jesus. It’s a psalm about the Lord’s protection. It sounds good, but it’s not the whole psalm. Other parts of the psalm qualify God’s provision for his people. The first two verses read:He who dwells in the shelter of the Most Highwill abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,my God, in whom I trust.”The shelter of the Most High is a wonderful place to find oneself, but to live under his protection requires that we first abide in his shadow. He is our “refuge and fortress”, but we put ourselves in his care as we trust in him. In verse 14 the Lord says,Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him;I will protect him, because he knows my name.The devil loves to plucked portions of Scripture out of context in order to twist their meaning, reminding us of God’s promises of blessing and care, while neglecting to remind us of the need for faith, for holiness, and for obedience. God’s people show their love for him through obedience. Jesus later said, “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). The same goes for Jesus’ relationship with his Father. The Lord’s blessings would come only as Jesus walked in faithful obedience.Jesus rebukes the devil with the words of Deuteronomy 6:16.Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Where Israel had failed, Jesus is again obedient. Israel had tested the Lord. Jesus, instead, expresses his trust in the Lord’s plan, knowing that only through his rejection will the Lord’s promises be fulfilled.Now, the devil makes one last attempt at dragging Jesus away from the path to the cross. Look at verses 8 and 9:Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”Israel, too, was tempted to idolatry in the wilderness and failed—and failed and failed and failed throughout her history. Jesus is tempted as his people were. “All kingdoms of the world will be yours,” the devil says, “just submit to me.” Jesus and the devil both knew that if the Lord’s promises through the prophets were true, Jesus’ lordship would extend beyond Israel to all of Creation. Gabriel had announced to Mary: “He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:33). When the Father had spoken at Jesus’ baptism, he had spoken words from Psalm 2 where we also read of the great King:Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,and the ends of the earth your possessions. (Psalm 2:8)The devil again offers Jesus a shortcut to his throne—a shortcut that would bypass the heart of his messianic ministry. Again, Jesus knew that what would bring the nations to his throne was the redemption of Israel through his death and resurrection and the display of the Spirit’s power in the hearts of his people. In these events the nations would see the greatness and the faithfulness of the God of Israel and they would be drawn to give him glory and to submit themselves in faith to the Lord Jesus. That was to be God’s means of welcoming the gentiles into his presence and into his kingdom. And yet, if Jesus followed the devil’s shortcut, there would be no kingdom—at least not the sort of eternal kingdom in which all was set to rights, in which God himself was king, the sort of kingdom that Israel had always looked forward to as the “age to come”.No, the Lord had charged his people in the wilderness, saying:Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might…. It is the Lord your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear. You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you—for the Lord your God in your midst is a jealous God. (Deuteronomy 4-5, 13-15a)Israel had failed. Even in the wilderness, while Moses was on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments, Aaron had led the people as they made and worshiped a golden calf. Most of Israel’s history was marked by the worship of foreign gods. But Jesus responds to the devil’s temptation with the command God had given through Moses:“Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” (Matthew 4:10)Where Israel failed, Jesus is faithful. He chooses the hard path of obedience that will bring not only kingship, but also redemption. Jesus was destined not only to be King of the Jews, but Lord of all Creation and conqueror of sin and death. For that to happen, evil had to be concentrated all in one place, to rise up to its full height, to do its worst to Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah—so that God could raise him from death, overturn the false verdict the people had announced, and vindicate his Son. Jesus knew that to restore the life of God to his people, the way to inaugurate the age to come in which all would be set to rights, he must first let evil do its worst—he had to walk the path of rejection, suffering, and death. By his faithfulness, Jesus redeemed those in Israel who were faithful to him. By his faithfulness, Jesus created a new people of God in whom God poured out his Spirit. By his faithfulness, Jesus was declared Lord with power and authority. And because of his faithfulness, the nations have seen the faithfulness of Israel’s God and now give him glory as they—as we—submit ourselves to him in faith.And now we, you and I, walk in faithfulness to the glory of God. As Lent puts before us the suffering of Jesus and reminds us that God’s life for us came through his submission to death, it reminds us that we, too, must die to self and embrace the narrow path, the way that leads to suffering and rejection, in order to know the life of God and of the age to come. We take our first steps down that narrow path as we repent and turn aside from everything that is not Jesus, as we open our hands and let go of everything that is not Jesus, and then take hold of him with both hands in faith, trusting in him for the forgiveness of sins, for the life of the Spirit, and for life in God’s world set to rights. Lent calls us to set aside our distractions so that we might fix our gaze on Jesus, taking up our crosses and following him.St. Paul warned the Corinthians in our Epistle “not to receive the grace of God in vain”. What a splash of cold water that must have been. They thought they were doing so well, but Paul rebukes them for tolerating sins that horrified even the pagans; for abusing spiritual gifts, using them selfishly rather than to edify the church; for allowing the values of pagan culture to twist their understanding of the gospel; for abusing the Lord’s Supper—the list is long and troubling. Brothers and Sisters, fast and pray these next forty days that the gospel might permeate ever deeper into our hearts and minds, and let us submit ourselves to the renewing and regenerating work of the Spirit. Let us not receive the gospel in vain. Instead, may we each day die to self that we might emerge the other side of death into the life of God and know his glory.Let’s pray: Lord Jesus Christ, for our sake you fasted forty days and forty nights: give us grace so to discipline ourselves that our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may always obey your will in righteousness and true holiness, to the honour and glory of your name; for you live and reign with the Father and Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Ash Wednesday: When You FastJoel 2:12-17 & St. Matthew 6:16-21by William KlockOur Epistle today from Joel gives us a unique opportunity to view not only the day’s Gospel, but the entire season of Lent from the perspective of Israel’s story. Joel’s ministry as a prophet probably took place at some point after the exile and the contents of his book call Judah to repentance at a time when the nation faced the devastation of a horrible plague of locusts. We get a sense of the severity of the plague in the first chapter, where we read that the locusts have consumed even the vines and stripped the fig trees of their bark. These are not normal locust food. They’re what locusts would turn to once everything else had been consumed. The vine and the fig tree were symbols of peace and prosperity and their consumption by locusts speaks to the desperate situation of the nation. As 1:13 notes, the priests lamented before the altar for there was neither grain nor drink left in the land to offer to the Lord.Repeatedly the prophet speaks of the Day of the Lord, a day to which Israel looked with eager anticipation. One day the Lord would arise from his throne, he who had tamed chaos to create an ordered cosmos, and he would do the same again. The Lord would arise to bring justice to his people and to set all to rights. Israel’s perennial problem was that she always saw herself as the innocent victim. On the Day of the Lord her enemies would be vanquished and she would be vindicated. It occurred to few in Israel that the Day of the Lord might turn out to be a judgement on Israel’s own sins. This gets at the heart of Joel’s prophecy. The Day of Lord has come and his own people have found themselves the focus of his judgement.The book is a call to repentance. Judah stands condemned for having offered the outward sacrifices of grain, wine, and oil, while the people had not truly dedicated their hearts to the Lord. But Joel reminds the people that this is not the end. The purpose of the Lord’s discipline is to bring repentance and with repentance will come restoration. “Even now,” declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart…Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster” (vv. 12-13).Now, this does not mean that the outward trapping of religion and of repentance are unnecessary. Through the prophet the Lord summons his people to fast, to weep, to mourn—but to do so from the heart and as evidence of true repentance. Lest they are tempted to make a show of rending their garments, the Lord declares it is more important that they first rend their hearts.The need for corporate repentance is highlighted too. The priests are to take their place “between the vestibule and the altar” to weep and cry out for mercy while the entire nation joins them: the elders and the children—even the bride and bridegroom are to suspend their honeymoon so that the whole nation can take part in this corporate act of repentance.In response to the honest repentance of the nation, the Lord promises restoration—even that one day he will solve Israel’s heart problem by pouring out his Spirit. In that day he will establish his people forever and put an end to their enemies. Here our Epistle, even as we enter our Lenten fast, sets our eyes on Easter and on the age to come that burst forth from the empty tomb. Even as we’re reminded by the old Israel of the importance of penitence, both as individuals and corporately as the Church, we’re also reminded that we are not the old Israel; we are the new Israel, we are the people who live on the other side of the Lord’s promise to pour out his Spirit.And if we turn over to today’s Gospel we see Jesus addressing the same old problem. Many in Israel continued to put on a show of outward piety, while their hearts were far from the Lord. Jesus warns that those who put on a show for others have received all they will ever receive for their efforts. They may receive respect and honour from those around them, but it has not moved God. Think again of the Day of the Lord, that day when the people of Israel anticipated the Lord coming to defeat their enemies, to set all to rights, and to reign forever. Many people fasted and made public acts of repentance in anticipation of that day. Jesus’ warning in light of that should have been frightening. As the Messiah, he was setting in motion the events that would culminate in the Day of the Lord and here he warns that those who have made an insincere show of repentance will have no share in that day—or, to be more specific, they will, but they will have a share in the Lord’s judgement, not his deliverance. Instead, it’s be those who, to use the language of Joel, have rent their hearts rather than their garments, whom the Father will see and reward—they are the ones who will know the age to come.Let your investment be in the age to come, Jesus exhorts the people. Investment in the things of this age will not last. Moth and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal. More importantly, our investments in the values and systems of the present evil age are foolish in light of the inauguration of the age to come by Jesus. We’re reminded of the this past Sunday’s Epistle from 1 Corinthians 13. If even the good, God-given gifts of tongues and prophecy will one day cease to have a purpose when the age to come as been consummated, how much more ought we to hold lightly to the praises of others and to investment in the values, systems, and institutions of the age that is passing away. Instead, Jesus encourages his people to lay up treasures in heaven. As we listen to Jesus here, it’s important to remember that Jews did not understand “heaven” the way many Christians often do, as referring to “up there” or “the next life”. In Jewish thought—as it should be in Christian thought—heaven is God’s realm as earth is ours and Jesus has accomplished the work to heal the breach between them caused by human sin and rebellion. One day heaven and earth will be rejoined. One day, as the Jews had always hoped, all will be set to rights and evil wiped from the face of the earth. Redeemed humanity will live in the presence of God. It is that dawning age into which we ought to be investing, knowing that what we do out of love for God and love for each other in this age is what will last into the age to come.Israel struggled with repentance and so did the people surrounding Jesus. They lived in anticipation of the fulfilment of the Lord’s promise to pour out his Spirit and to set right the hearts of his people. There is, then, a definite and distinct difference between our season of penitence and theirs. We live on the fulfilment side of the Lord’s promise. We are the people redeemed by Jesus at the cross and in whom the Spirit of God dwells—and that has changed everything. Nevertheless, we too live in anticipation of the day when all will finally be set to rights and so it is just as important for us to set our eyes on Jesus and to commit ourselves to investing in the thing of his kingdom.Brothers and Sisters, this is the purpose of our Lenten fast. Each year the Church calls us to slow down, to take a break, and to fast so that we can, for at least these few weeks, invest some time that we wouldn’t normally invest in considering God’s word, in considering the gospel, in considering what Jesus has done for us by his death and resurrection, to think on God’s love for us revealed in Jesus, and to make a point of being deliberate about our love for each other and, especially for the poor and needy, so that as we approach Easter, we will have our eyes more firmly set on Jesus and the new life and the new creation that lie before us.Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing that you have made, and you forgive the sins of all who are penitent: create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Quinquagesima: Love1 Corinthians 13:1-13by William KlockHave you ever thought of the Bible as a symphony? A symphony is made up of many different instruments. Not only do they all make different sounds, but they also play different parts—different bits of music. And it’s often that cast that all on their own, those individual bits of music don’t sound very nice. Veronica plays piano for the symphony and the pieces I listen to her practising are sometimes, well, not terribly pleasant, but then I go to the concert and hear her playing with the other musicians and the parts she’s been practising suddenly make sense and all those parts come together into something truly beautiful. The Bible is very much like that. There are all sorts of themes and sometimes we put all our attention on just one and it ruins the music. But the better we know and understand the Bible and the big story of God and his people, the better able we are to hear all of those themes, each playing at the right time, each balanced with the others, so that we’re able to hear the grand music that God has—not only for us to hear, but for us to participate in.And if I were telling parable the way Jesus did, I might say, “The kingdom of God is like…a symphony.” When Jesus came he introduced a new piece of music to his people. The thing was that it wasn’t really new; it’s that everyone had forgotten it. The Lord had taught it long before to Adam and to Eve. When their children lost the tune the Lord came and taught it again to Abraham and then to Moses and to the Israelites. It wasn’t an easy tune—mostly because sinful human beings lacked the full ability to play it. And so the tune God taught Abraham and Moses was a bit like a simple melody line played on the piano with one hand. But it was still true to the original. But even as simple as it was, Israel struggled to play it. And then when Jesus came he amazed everyone by sitting down at the piano and playing the full harmony with both hands. The music took on new life. It was fuller and richer and more beautiful than anything anyone had heard since Adam’s day. Some people didn’t like it. Some people flat-out refused to learn it or even listen to it. But Jesus taught it to a few and each of them taught it to a few and each of those to a few and pretty soon thousands were playing and the music was spreading all over the world. At some point someone taught it to each of us and now you and I are playing it.And yet, even still, we know—or at least we should know—that there’s more yet to come. What Jesus has taught us to play isn’t the full piece of music. It’s like the piano solo leading into the great orchestral piece. It gives a taste of what’s to come, but to hear the full symphony we have to wait for Jesus to return—for Jesus to come back from heaven, bringing the kingdom with him in all its majesty and eternal glory. In the meantime, we play the piece he’s taught us, the piece he’s specially equipped us to play. And as we see in our Epistle this morning from First Corinthians, at the heart of this music Jesus has taught us—the melody of it that holds it all together and that will lead into something so much greater one day—the heart, the theme of that music is love.We’ll be looking this morning at 1 Corinthians 13. It’s a passage of Scripture that we’re very prone to understanding out of context, because we so often hear it out of context. We hear it read it at weddings as if what it’s talking about is romantic love between husband and wife. Or we see little bits of it painted or stitched on home decor. The result is that we miss the point of the passage. What Paul says here about love comes in the middle of a discussion about the Church, about living together as the body of Christ, about spiritual gifts, and about worship. So, yes, what he describes here is about the love of husband and wife, but only because it is first and foremost about love amongst Christian brothers and sisters, love in the Church, that spills over into every aspect of life and into every relationship in light of Jesus and what he’s accomplished.During Epiphanytide we were reading in Romans where Paul describes the Church as being like a body, everyone gifted and equipped for a certain task, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the whole Church and our kingdom mission. And at the beginning of the season, we were reading about the Church as a temple, each of us a stone, shaped and carved and cut very carefully by the Lord and all purposefully fitted together as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. Last Sunday we read Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. They were boasting to each other about their gifts and achievements and they’d started following teachers who boasted in their achievements—boasting as Greeks and Romans typically boasted. It was how people climbed to the top of the heap and demanded respect and honour. But in contrast Paul describes his own accomplishments: he’d been arrested, beaten, whipped, scourged, shipwrecked, cold, hungry, naked, shamed and run out of town in dishonour—all for the sake of his brothers and sisters, the very ones, in fact, who rejected him. And we think: How is this all possible? How do we live for the sake of others? How do we die to self for the sake of others? How do we sacrifice for the sake of others? The last two Sundays pointed us toward discipline and humility. Today the lessons point us to love. Love is the theme that ties the whole symphony of the kingdom together. And so after describing the way the Church acts as a body with each using his or her gifts for the sake of others and, ultimately, for the sake of Jesus and his kingdom Paul writes:I will show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. (1 Corinthians 12:31b-13:4)It’s not just about having and using gifts or about doing things in the Church. The Corinthian Church had no lack of gifts. It had no lack of activity. It had no lack of people wanting to contribute money to this cause or that cause. (One of the reasons Paul wrote to them was to raise money to support the struggling Christians in Jerusalem.) The problem in Corinth was a lack of love. Without love all the amazing things they were doing might as well have been nothing.Back in Chapter 3 Paul used the illustration of building a temple. Like the temple in Jerusalem, it was built of carefully hewn wood, cut stones, gold, and precious jewels. Jesus is the foundation and others, like Paul and the Corinthians, were building on that foundation, but not everyone was building with stone or with gems and precious metals. Some were building with hay and straw. At the end, he says, it’ll all be tested with fire. The hay and straw will go up in smoke. This is an image here that gives us a sense of what lies in store. Other passages talk of the old heaven and earth passing away and a new world being ushered in. I’m sure much of the language is figurative—the reality is at this point beyond our understanding. However it happens, though, that which is unworthy, that which is the product of sinfulness and selfishness, that which does not honour God will be consumed and will pass away, leaving a new world in which the holy and the God-honouring remains. Only the work in which people truly invested—the stone, the gold, the silver, the precious jewels—will remain. Some will make a good show of building, but if love is not their motive, it’s not going to last—it will be exposed and consumed by God’s judgement. If love isn’t the motive, when Jesus comes and draws our music into his own great symphony, those who have been playing their own tune will have nothing to contribute.Paul goes on in verses 5-7:Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. This is what will be left. This is the melody that Jesus will take up into his great symphony. And it stands in stark contrast with the ways and values of the present age, but it stands in contrast, too, with the ways and values of many people in the Church. What Paul does is to hold up Jesus as our model for love.Jesus is patient and kind. Remember, he came to condemned sinners, not to heap up more condemnation, but to redeem. We have dishonoured God and made a mess of this creation he so lovingly created. He would be within his rights to simply hit control+alt+smite and reboot everything—to wipe us out and start over from the beginning. God has every right to leave us dead in our sins, but because he loves us, he is patient and has given himself—the life of his Son—to restore us to life and to his presence. To make us his people once again. Again, love is patient and kind.And, Paul writes, love is not envious or boastful. Think again of Jesus. He who is God humbled himself in the incarnation—again, for our sake—becoming one of us. And he came not as a great king or warrior, but as the son of a humble girl and her very ordinary husband, raised in a poor backwater, and finally dying—for our sake—the humiliating and painful death of a criminal—a death we deserve, but that he did not. He had more right to boast than anyone who has ever lived, but as they pressed the crown of thorns on his head and beat him, mocking his sovereignty, he chose not to revile them in return. Instead, as he was dying he prayed for the very men who were standing there gloating and jeering at him.Love is not irritable or resentful. Again, God is patient and long-suffering. Rather than resenting us for our sins, the Lord has given himself to redeem us from them. Love does not rejoice at wrongs. Just the opposite. The angels in heaven rejoice with the Lord whenever a sinner repents. Again, think of Jesus: Love bears all things…believes all things…hopes all things…endures all things. Has anyone borne more or endured more than Jesus?And with that image in our heads we need to think of ourselves. Are we patient and kind? And we need to be honest. It’s easy to be patient and kind some of the time and with the people we like, but what about the people we don’t like? What about those difficult situations we find ourselves in? Are we really patient and kind? Are we envious and boastful or, like Jesus, are we humble and willing to give up our honour for the sake of others—even for the sake of people who hurt us and wrong us. Are we willing to admit when we are wrong and when we have sinned? Are we irritable and resentful? These are sins that Christians can be very tolerant of. Sometimes we even turn irritability and resentment into virtues when the right people and situations come our way. What’s my reaction when Mormon missionaries knock on my door or when a telemarketer calls? I can be pretty irritable and most people would say that that’s just fine when it comes to telemarketers and cult members. I was convicted myself this week. Somehow I remained calm and polite when bit by a dog, but Telus called three times in a row with their auto-dialler and I was pretty irritable to the woman on the other end. And Christians can often be downright curmudgeonly when it comes to sinners and to non-Christians—and many times we even see it as a virtue. People of Jesus’ day were often like that when it came to tax collectors and prostitutes and gentiles, but Jesus instead forgave these people, made them new, and welcomed them into his family.Again, where and how do we fall short of Jesus’ model of love? In our families? In our workplaces? In our schools? In our church? And imagine the difference it would make around us if love were the driving force, the motive behind everything we do. Imagine what it would be like if we gave of ourselves, our rights, our honour, our glory the way that Jesus did.And it sounds good, but I know it also sounds impossible. How can we ever give of ourselves the way Jesus did? Sometimes it’s hard enough giving this way to people we love. What about people who aren’t close to us, people who have hurt us, people who are our enemies? This is why we need to have the example of Jesus always before us. We need to remember that we were his enemies. We need to remember that he owed us nothing but judgement, and yet he became incarnate and died for us. We need to think and meditate on the depth of love that God manifested towards us in Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, the love of God in Jesus should motivate and transform us.But that’s not all. Love is impossible, but Jesus has done more than give us an example. He’s washed us of our sin and he’s given us God’s own Spirit. Think back to John the Baptist. He told the people, “I’ve plunged you into the water, but one is coming who will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.” Jesus doesn’t forgive our sins and leave us in some kind of neutral state. He forgives our sins and then pours his own life into us. Remember: The Lord didn’t rescue the Israelites from slavery in Egypt just to leave them wandering in the wilderness. No. He freed them from Egypt, he made them his people, and he took up his dwelling in their midst as he led them into a new home and new way of life. And just so with Jesus, but on an even grander scale. Jesus rescues us and frees us from sin and death, he makes us his people—more specifically, Paul talks about Jesus making us his own body—and he comes and dwells, not just in our midst, but actually inside us. He makes us his temple as he pours his Spirit into us. But his ultimate plan isn’t just to save us, but to redeem his entire creation—to set us back on the track that Adam and Eve abandoned when they sinned, to make us his stewards, his priests. And so as Israel’s destination was the promised land, our destination is the New Jerusalem, the kingdom that Jesus has promised to bring in all its fullness. That’s the future, but in Jesus that future has burst into our present. In the Holy Spirit Jesus gives us a foretaste of what is to come. He invites us to play the music of the kingdom and the music of the kingdom is love.Again: If it’s not driven by love, it won’t last. And Paul drives this point home in the rest of the passage. It’s not just that the things we do without love will go up in smoke when the kingdom finally comes in all its fullness, but even many of the good things Jesus calls us to do will be overwhelmed by the great theme of love. Look at verses 8-13:Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. First Corinthians gives us the distinct sense that the church in that city was fixated on certain miraculous gifts, especially prophecy and tongues, not only elevating those who had these gifts above others, but emphasizing to everyone that these gifts were sort of the end-all-be-all of Christianity. Forget everything else—put it all aside—and pursue prophecy and tongues! But Paul is warning them and saying, “No. These gifts are great and they’re useful, but there’s something far more important: cultivate love. Real love. The kind of love manifest by Jesus at the cross. If you want to build the kingdom, don’t pursue gifts. If you’ve got them, use them—lovingly—but pursue love above all else. When the kingdom is here and we’re all living in God’s presence, there will no longer be any need of prophecy, but there will be a need for love. The same goes for tongues. Who needs tongues when the curse of Babel is done away with? But we’ll still need love.Paul describes it in terms of growing from a child into an adult. I had a Big Wheel when I was a little kid, but now I ride a real bicycle. The Big Wheel taught me how to pedal and steer and not run people over. At one point I had training wheels on my bike that kept me from falling over. But they did their work and now I’m a grown-up and I don’t need those childish things. In the present age our view of God is dim. Paul describes it in terms of an ancient mirror made of polished metal. The reflection was imperfect and dark. And so is our view of God. Even as redeemed men and women, there’s a veil, a gulf between us and God. Our sin has split apart heaven and earth, but Jesus has begun the work of bringing us back together. One day we will stand before God face to face. We’ll know him not only through the mediating words of Scripture or through the mediating work of the Holy Spirit, but we’ll stand before him and know him face-to-face.And it’s on that day that our music will be taken up into God’s great symphony and all that will remain is love. Faith, hope, and love remain, he says—they’re essential to our life as the Church, as the people of God today—but above all we need to learn to love. It’s not that faith and hope aren’t important. They’re vital, but without love they’ll be out of tune with God’s symphony. We live by faith. We take hold of Jesus, the forgiveness of sin and the promise of life, and we take hold of him by faith as we trust in him. We submit to his lordship by faith. And we live in hope—living for a kingdom and a world for which we have only a down payment. But on the great day when Jesus returns and the kingdom is consummated, faith will vanish into sight, hope will be fulfilled, but love will only intensify, growing greater and more profound as we see our Lord face to face and the weight of sin and death is finally and fully lifted from us—as the blurry image of the mirror is replaced by the real thing—as our simple one-handed song of love on the piano is taken up as part of the Lord’s grand symphony of love.Brothers and Sisters, think of the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We pray these words so often and know them so well that we easily forget what they really mean. This is a prayer that looks forward in faith and hope to the day when we will see him face to face; this is a prayer that looks forward to the day when we have grown from little children into adults; this is a prayer that looks forward to that day when love becomes Creation’s all-consuming theme. The Lord’s Prayer looks forward to that day in hope and faith, but what it asks for is that this theme of love be manifested here today. It asks in faith for love to be made known today in the midst of sin and of fear and of hate and of death. And, Brothers and Sisters, that means that it’s a prayer for our own hearts and minds to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, because if anyone is to manifest love in this present age, it is us, the only people in this world who know first-hand the love of Jesus. So pray, “thy will be done, on earth as in heaven” and pray those words in hope of the coming kingdom and pray those words in faith, trusting and seeking for the Lord to give you his loving heart so that you can show his love in your church, in your family, in your workplace, in your school, in your community, and in your world.Let us pray: O Lord, you have taught us that whatever we do without love is worth nothing: send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love, the true bond of peace and of all virtues; without which whoever lives is counted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Septuagesima: Boasting in Weakness1 Corinthians 11:19-31 & St. Luke 8:4-15by William Klock Last week we read from Matthew. Speaking to his disciples, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” and then he told them a story about men working hard under the hot sun harvesting grapes. Last Sunday’s lessons reminded us of the grace of God, but they also reminded us that to follow Jesus—to be his disciples—is to actively and purposefully pursue the discipline of grace. The Lord pours out his grace freely on his people, but we must put our hands out to receive it. He graciously provides the manna for today, but we must gather it. He offers us his grace at his Table, but we must put out our hands and take the bread, we must open our mouths and drink the wine. And of course, there’s a mystery there, too, because even the discipline we put into pursuing God’s grace is itself a gift of grace.Now today, as we continue to prepare for the season of Lent, we hear Jesus tell another story. “The kingdom of heaven is like…” Except today we’re listening to St. Luke and that’s not how he introduces Jesus’ parables. That’s St. Matthew’s “thing”. But Jesus could very well have launched into his story that way. Like last week’s parable, today’s parable is a story about Israel. And so Luke says that a great crowd had gathered, people coming from all the surrounding towns and villages, and Jesus spoke. “A sower went out to sow his seed.” And immediately these people, who knew the Old Testament inside and out, backwards and forwards, so much better than us, they knew right away what this was about. The “seed” is the remnant, the faithful and true Israel. As Jesus began his story people would have been thinking about passages from the Prophets like Isaiah 55:10-13.“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth,making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty,but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.“For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace;the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;and it shall make a name for the Lord, an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.” The Lord would sow his word and instead of thorns and briers, cypress and myrtles would sprout and thrive and his people would rejoice. Even the mountains and the hills would sing his praises. This is a song of God’s new creation breaking into the dark sadness of the world, breaking into its sin and idolatry. And, most importantly, all of this, Isaiah wrote, “shall make a name for the Lord.” People will hear and see and know the faithfulness of the God of Israel and believe. So everyone listening to Jesus knew all about sin and idolatry and darkness and sadness. They lived it every day. Their ancestors had been unfaithful to the Lord, so he disciplined them and let them be taken into exile. And even though the exile was technically over, it wasn’t, not really. They’d rebuilt the temple five centuries before, but the Lord’s presence had never returned. And the Lord’s voice had been silent all that time, too. And they were ruled by pagan Gentiles, first Greeks and then Romans. Theirs was a world of thorns and briers and they cried out to the Lord to hear and to deliver them as their ancestors had done from their slavery in Egypt. That’s what Jesus’ story is about. A sower—the Sower—went out to sow his seed. “And,” Jesus says, “as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air devoured it. And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it.”It's Israel’s story in a nutshell—or a basket of seed. But Israel’s story was never meant to end in exile. Everyone knew—and Isaiah had proclaimed—that the Lord’s word does not return empty, that it accomplishes what he means for it to accomplish. One day the knowledge of the glory of the Lord would fill the earth. So there has to be more than his word being eaten by birds or burning up under the hot sun. The Lord would surely set things—including his own people—to rights just as he had always promised. Someday the thorns and briers and the sad darkness had to come to an end. And so Jesus’ story goes on. He said, “But some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.” And, Luke says, Jesus called out to the people, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”So much of the story made sense to them. They knew the players and the imagery. They heard the hope in the story. The Lord would do what he said and fix this broken world and fix his broken people. But how was Jesus saying anything that Isaiah hadn’t said already? How did this relate to him. Even the disciples had to ask what it meant. And so Jesus explained, beginning at verse 11:“Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.” I think they all knew this. They knew the prophets too well to miss it. The seed is the word of God, but the seed is also the people of God and the two were always inextricably linked, because they knew that God’s word creates God’s people.Jesus went on, “The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away. And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature.”Think of Israel’s history. The Lord spoke, he called his people to repentance and faith. In many cases his word fell on deaf ears. Some people, despite all the past faithfulness of the Lord, simply had no interest in him. Some heard the word of the Lord, repented, and believed, but when hard times came, their faith shrivelled up like rootless seedlings on a hot day. Instead of trusting in the Lord, they put their trust in horses and chariots, in foreign kings, and in false gods. Others heard, but were simply too concerned with the concerns of today to care about tomorrow. There were rich people so intent on holding onto their wealth and powerful people so intent on holding onto their power, that they simply couldn’t be bothered with the Lord. And there were others who had fought their way to the top all on their own, life was good, they didn’t care about anyone else, and they heard the Lord speak and thought, “Oh, that’s nice,” but saw no need to take it to heart. Many were just too invested in the systems of the present age to have any interest in the age to come. In fact, some were downright frightened by the thought. It was as source of hope to many, but to everyone sitting on the top of the world in the present age, it meant upset and loss and judgement. King Herod was willing to murder the infants of Bethlehem to keep it from happening. The Sadducees were willing to hand Jesus over to the Romans if it meant stopping this revolution of the word.And that points to another of Jesus’ tellings of this story. This wasn’t the only time Jesus told this story and this wasn’t the only way he told it. If we turn over to Luke 20:9-18 we read another version of the same story.And he began to tell the people this parable: “A man planted a vineyard and let it out to tenants and went into another country for a long while. When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants, so that they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. And he sent another servant. But they also beat and treated him shamefully, and sent him away empty-handed. And he sent yet a third. This one also they wounded and cast out. Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.’ But when the tenants saw him, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Let us kill him, so that the inheritance may be ours.’ And they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” When they heard this, they said, “Surely not!” But he looked directly at them and said, “What then is this that is written:“‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’? Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.” Notice that three times the man sent a servant to claim what belonged to him and three times he was rejected—like the hard-packed path, the rocks, and the thorny ground on which the seed was sown. But the word of the Lord does not return void. And so the man sent his own son. And even though the wicked tenants threw him out and killed him, this is how the Lord finally accomplishes his purpose, this is the key to those words “The Kingdom of heaven is like…” The son will be rejected, and here Jesus quotes Psalm 118, which everyone would have known just as well as they knew Isaiah 55, the rejected son is that stone rejected by the builders that ends up becoming the cornerstone—that ends up becoming the centre, the basis, the foundation of everything—of God’s new age and God’s new creation. And that imagery from Daniel. That stone will remake everyone who falls on it—will give them new life—but will crush—will fall in judgement on those who reject it.The word of the Lord will not return void. And so, back to today’s Gospel, Jesus says in verse 15, “As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.”This is the remnant, the faithful and true Israel. These are they who fell on the stone rather than the stone falling on them. These are they who embraced the son when others killed him. And remember what Jesus said about them in the parable itself, back in verse 8: “And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.”When the disciples finally understood this, it had to have been an immense source of comfort. As in Israel’s past, so in their own day they saw Jesus—the word himself come to set Israel to rights—they saw him preaching and ministering the kingdom and the word fell on hard-packed earth where the birds snatched it away; and they saw it fall on rocky soil where it took root for a little while, but died once push came to shove; and they saw people like the rich young ruler eagerly coming to Jesus, but going away empty-handed because they just couldn’t bring themselves to let go of their wealth or their power. How could the kingdom of God possibly amount to anything in this world, in the midst of all the sad darkness and the thorns and briers, when hardly anyone would listen and even fewer would actually take Jesus to heart? Even they lost faith and hope when Jesus was crucified. They spent that first Good Friday and Holy Saturday holed up in fear that the authorities would come for them next. That was it. Hope crushed. And then the empty tomb and then Jesus, risen and made new himself, appeared to them and hope came flooding back. The word took root in them. They were surely the seed, even though they were so few. How it would happen, they didn’t know. And so after Jesus’ ascension they went back to Jerusalem and they waited and they prayed and on Pentecost the Lord poured his Spirit into them and it all made sense. The stone that the builders rejected really was the cornerstone of this new creation and its new temple. And it made sense now that God’s word would not return void, because the word himself had come, not only to proclaim the kingdom, but to die and rise again to defeat the old powers of sin and death, and then he sent God’s own Spirit to indwell this new people, to give them this gift of faith, to fill them with love, and to turn their hearts to God. This is how God’s word would accomplish what he purposed. In fulfilment of his promises, he backed it up with his own power. And on Pentecost that little group of disciples saw the seed take root. Luke writes in Acts 2 that about three thousand were added to their number that day and that the trend continued day by day. As Jesus said in another parable: The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. The smallest of seeds, but it grows into a great tree and the birds make their nests in it. God’s grace at work through the humility of his son and the humility of his people.Brothers and Sisters, that’s the lesson the Church reminds us of with today’s lessons. Last Sunday we were reminded that grace is a discipline. Today we’re reminded to stand humbly before the grace of God. And not just to stand humbly, but to stand in hope-filled faith. The Epistle gives us St. Paul’s example. He was one of the greatest of the Pharisees and a member of Sanhedrin, but when he was met by the risen Jesus on the Road to Damascus, he gave up everything to be part of this renewed people of God—something he thought was the height of foolishness—and blasphemous—only the day before.And things, at least by worldly terms, did not go well for Paul. He poured himself into kingdom ministry with the hope of God’s future before him. Paul’s ministry was to the gentiles, to the pagan world of the Greek and Romans and if the disciples were overwhelmed by their seeming smallness and insignificance in Judea, imagine how overwhelmed Paul must have felt as he went off for the first time as a missionary to the wide world, to declare the glories and the faithfulness of the God of Israel made manifest in Jesus to people and nations who had never heard of Jesus and who would question how the god of a conquered people could possible be worth anything. But off he went. One tiny, tiny point of light into the great darkness and wherever he went he preached the word and the Spirit worked and little churches full of new believers began popping up to challenge the darkness. Brothers and Sisters, take note: That’s how it works.Paul knew that it wasn’t he who made this happen. It was the grace of God working through the word and the Spirit. He was merely the messenger, the royal herald, called to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord. The Lord himself would do the rest. When Paul wrote today’s Epistle to the Church at Corinth, they had forgotten this fundamental truth. They heard the good news about Jesus first from Paul, but since then he’d become persona non grata in their church. Other preachers had come to them who were better rhetoricians and better looking and who preached a different gospel. They became tolerant of sin. They became less disciplined about grace. They abused the Spirit’s gifts and used them for selfish purposes. And they’d forgotten that the gospel is empowered not by human means or power, not by gimmicks or flash, but by God’s word and Gods’ Spirit. And so Paul wrote to them. This is 2 Corinthians 11:18 and following:Plenty of people are boasting in human terms, after all, so why shouldn’t I boast as well? After all, you put up with fools readily enough, since you are so wise yourselves. You put up with it if someone makes you their slave, or if they eat up your property, or overpower you, or give themselves airs, or slap you in the face. Whatever anyone else dares to boast about (I’m talking nonsense, remember), I’ll boast as well. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of the Messiah?—I’m talking like a raving madman—I’m a better one. I’ve worked harder, been in prison more often, been beaten more times than I can count, and I’ve often been close to death. Five times I’ve had the Jewish beating, forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods; once I was stoned; three times I was shipwrecked; I was adrift in the sea for a night and a day. I’ve been constantly traveling, facing dangers from rivers, dangers from brigands, dangers from my own people, dangers from foreigners, dangers in the town, dangers in the countryside, dangers at sea, dangers from false believers. I’ve toiled and labored; I’ve burned the candle at both ends; I’ve been hungry and thirsty; I’ve often gone without food altogether; I’ve been cold and naked. Quite apart from all that, I have this daily pressure on me, my care for all the churches. (2 Corinthians 11:18-28)Paul begins with everything he once had—the sorts of things the Corinthians valued. But then he reminds them that he’s given it all up for the sake of Jesus and the gospel, because the gospel is not empowered by those sorts of things. And the gospel went forth, not because of how great Paul was, but because he was simply faithful to preach it no matter how much it cost him, and because God’s word and Spirit empowered it and transformed the hearts and minds of the people who heard it and believed. And so he asks in verse 29, “Who is weak and I am not weak?” But that’s just it. This is just the point they needed to get through their heads. They’ve allowed the values of the present age—love of money, love of status, love of power, love of things—they’ve allowed all this to shape their hearts and minds. They’ve forgotten the power of the cross. They’ve forgotten that the Lord reveals his strength when his people are weak, because it’s only then that the watching world will see things happen, not by our might and power, but by his. Brothers and Sisters, this is the God who revealed himself in all his glory by raising Jesus, his Messiah, from the dead. It’s never us. Everything we do should point to and reveal the glory and power of God. Even Jesus, in all he did, manifested not his own glory, but the glory of his Father. And so Paul declares:If I must boast, I will boast of my weaknesses. Brothers and Sisters, do you boast in your weaknesses? Paul wrote earlier in 2 Corinthians:For the sake of Christ…I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:10)It’s so easy to be swept up with the values of the world around us and to think, on the one hand, that when things go well for the Church, when our numbers are up, when people are believing and coming for baptism, when the church is sending out missionaries and accomplishing great things in our community, that we’re the ones responsible for it and to become prideful. To say to the world, “Look what we’ve done!” And, on the other hand, when things don’t seem to go well, when our numbers are small and we seem to be accomplishing little for the kingdom, it’s easy to become discouraged, even to give up, or to stop trusting in the power of the word and the Spirit and to turn to worldly means to grow the Church. Brothers and Sisters, Paul reminds us to be humble and to find strength in our weakness, because it is only in our weakness that we encounter the grace of God and that we learn to trust in him to bring gospel fruit. And when God does act, no one will point to us and say, “Look what they did?” No, the world will see our smallness, our powerlessness, our weakness and say, “God did that!” If the Church grows and many trust in Jesus as happened at Pentecost, we will have been privileged to have been used by the Lord, but ultimately we cannot take the credit, because it is his word and Spirit that accomplished the work. And, on the other hand, if we have been faithful to proclaim his word and to live the life the Spirit has given, and yet we can see little fruit and the Church remains small, we must continue to trust in him, knowing that his word does not return void and, even if we never see the fruit, he will without doubt bring fruit from his word that we proclaim as he did with the prophets, even though they were rejected in their own day. Brothers and Sisters, whatever happens, whatever fruit we see or do not see, whether our numbers are big or small, we can—we must—trust in him and live in hope and know that our work is not in vain so long as we are faithful stewards of his word and his grace. As he promised, he will send his word out into the world, it will not return void, he will make a name for himself amongst the nations. He will be glorified in all the earth. May we never lose our faith and hope because of weakness, but rather trust all the more in him.Let’s pray: O Lord God, you know that we cannot put our trust in any thing that we do: Mercifully defend us by your power, we pray, against every adversity; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Septuagesima: The Discipline of Grace1 Corinthians 9:24-27 & St. Matthew 20:1-16by William Klock Jesus said to his disciples that the kingdom of heaven is like…this. And then he told a story. “It’s like,” he said, “a vineyard owner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.” Jesus draws this imagery straight from the prophets, so he doesn’t have to explain very much. The vineyard owner is always the Lord. The vineyard or the people working in it were always Israel. So as Jesus tells his story, Matthew and John and Peter and the rest can easily imagine themselves getting up that morning, leaving their wives and children, and going to the town square in the hopes someone will have work for them. Day labourers were pretty much at the bottom of society. Slaves were often better off than they were, because at least a slave’s owner was obliged to clothe and feed him and his family. A day labourer lived a meagre hand to mouth existence. If there was no work, he didn’t eat. If there was work, he did it, earned just enough to buy food for his family, and got up the next morning already tired, but ready to do it all over again. If there wasn’t work, he either begged or he and his wife and children went hungry. So Matthew and John and the others imagine themselves arriving at the town square just before sunrise with their tools in hand and are glad to see this man who offers them a denarius and sends them down the road to harvest his grapes. A denarius was the going rate for a day’s common labour. Again, it wasn’t much, but their families would eat tonight and then tomorrow it’d start all over again.They’d been working hard for a good three hours when mid-morning came. They saw the vineyard owner talking with his friend who had just returned from the mountains. “Rain’s on the way,” he said. “Maybe tonight, definitely tomorrow.” The harvest had to come in before the rain, so the vineyard owner went back to town. There were still plenty of men waiting to be hired for the day, so he tapped as many as he thought he needed, promised, “I’ll pay you what’s right,” and sent them to harvest his grapes.At noon the clouds started rolling in over the mountains. Rain was coming sooner than expected so off he went to town again. The sun was hot now. Matthew and the others could imagine themselves working hard in the vineyard. Maybe the day Jesus told them the story was a hot one and they could feel the heat pressing in on them. Thank goodness they were sitting in the shade of a tree, not carrying heavy baskets of grapes out under the hot sun, kicking up dust as they shuffled under heavy loads. But they could imagine. They were in the story on that sweltering day. They were certainly earning their denarius! Even those men who started at noon would be exhausted when the day was done. And in the backs of their minds they were thinking, “Okay…the men working so hard, they’re Israel, they’re us. Where is this going?”By mid-afternoon the wind had picked up and the clouds were closing in. They were dark. It was going to rain tonight. The man hurried back to town. Still there were men waiting for work. They were probably expecting to go home empty-handed, going to bed hungry. Their children would cry. But if they left the town square they’d miss out on even that small chance that someone might come late in the day with a job. “Get to my vineyard and pick like the wind,” the man said, “and I’ll pay you what’s right.” So off they ran, not wasting a moment. And the work wasn’t so bad now that the clouds had rolled in and a cool wind was blowing.And a couple of hours later the workers were almost done…but not quite. It was starting to sprinkle, it was still an hour til sunset, but it was dark. The man ran back to town and rounded up the last few men left…the ones just about ready to go home empty-handed or maybe ready to beg some bread from someone. An hour’s pay was better than no pay at all, so off they went to help the others finish.And finish they did. And here’s where Jesus gets to the heart of that bit about “The kingdom of God is like…” As the thunder began and the rain started pouring, the foreman gathered the men in the barn and the man, pulling him aside, said to him, “Pay them their wages, but start with those men who came last and end with the guys who have been here all day.” Imagine being one of those men who worked only an hour, who, even if they could buy a little food, would still go to bed hungry. Imagine their reaction as the foreman put a whole denarius in each of their hands. Again, it wasn’t much, but it was a whole day’s wage. And imagine the men who had been working since sun-up and mid-morning. Maybe they’d heard wrong. They looked at each other. Some of them said, “No. A denarius for the day. That was the deal. That’s always the deal.” But if he was paying these guys who’d only worked an hour a whole denarius, maybe they’d get twelve! Or at least more than one. But their excitement faded as the foremen went down the line and gave a denarius to everyone: to the men who had worked since mid-afternoon, to the men who’d worked since noon, to the men who’d worked since mid-morning, and even to the men who had been there all day.They grumbled. I can just hear impetuous Peter interrupting Jesus: “What a jerk! That’s not fair! Jesus, I think you meant to say, ‘The kingdom is not like…’” So first they men grumbled to each other and finally one of them got worked enough to grumble directly to the vineyard owner. “What gives, Boss? Those guys over there only worked an hour and you’ve paid them exactly the same thing that you paid us. We’ve worn ourselves out working all day…and, man, it was a scorcher today. You’ve done us wrong!”The men were angry, but the vineyard owner responded gently. “Friend, I’ve done you no wrong. I offered to pay you a denarius for a day’s work and you agreed. That’s the going rate after all. I’ve given you exactly what we agreed on. Take your pay and go home to your family. Be happy that you can feed them tonight. And be happy for these other men. They can go home and feed their families tonight too. You know what it’s like to go home empty-handed. How can you be angry that their children will eat tonight? Don’t be angry at my generosity.” And then, no longer telling a parable, Jesus says to his disciples, “So the last will be first, and the first last.”And with that Matthew and John and Peter and all the rest of the twelve scratched their heads and look at Jesus, more than a little confused. “The last will be first and the first will be last?” Just four verses later we read that James and John got their mother to put in a good word for them with Jesus. “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand one at your left, in your kingdom.” And, of course, when the others heard about this they were angry with James and John, because…of course…they all wanted to sit in those places of honour. But that was most decidedly not what the kingdom of God is like. Hardly anyone understood and that’s because almost everyone had forgotten about grace. James and John were afraid that one of the other disciples might do something extra special and earn greater favour from Jesus. Imagine the jealousy they had when Peter confessed to Jesus, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God” and Jesus said, “Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah…on this rock I will build my church.” Uh oh. Just when John, who could smugly tell people that he was Jesus’ best friend, just when he thought that Jesus was going to make him Pope! They’re all vying for a special place in the kingdom. They’re all worried that Jesus is going to give something special to one of the other disciples and not to them.No one…or almost no one…understood, because almost everyone had forgotten about grace. The Jewish people, of all people, should have understood the grace of God. They lived it every day and they had for more than a thousand years. God’s grace was exemplified by the manna in the wilderness. It was new every morning. There was always just enough for the day. God even miraculously provided a little extra for those days—the sabbaths—when you couldn’t go out and gather it. But otherwise, if you tried to store it up, if you tried to take more than you needed, if you tried to outdo your neighbours, do you remember what happened to the manna? It rotted and stank and grew worms. Brothers and Sisters, God’s grace is always just enough to meet our needs and to see us through today. I think that’s why Jesus chose to tell his parable about those poor day-labourers. A denarius was just enough for the day. After you fed your family there was nothing left to save. You went back to the town square in the morning and hoped someone would hire you for another day and another denarius. The only difference being that God’s grace is not a wage that we earn. It’s not a reward for good service. It’s not a sign of special status. It’s simply life in his presence, sustained by his goodness. And it comes not by negotiating with him. It comes as we enter into his covenant. He promises his all for us and in return we promise our all to him. In his gracious love he has given his Son for us and made us his covenant people. In loving gratitude we give our all to him and to his kingdom. We believed in the first place because we saw his goodness and his faithfulness manifest in Jesus and in his death and resurrection, and we continue to believe because, every day we put out our hands and he pours his grace into them, always just what we need for today. Always what we need to accomplish the work he has set before us.I think that, too, is a key to the parable. The men were summoned to work in the vineyard. The Lord called Abraham for a reason. He and his children were to be light in the darkness, they were to make the Lord known to a world that had forgotten him. Israel was to be the people who lived with the living God in her midst that the nations would see and know him. When she failed in that mission, the Lord gave his Son to die on the cross and to rise from the grave in order to set his people to rights and to establish a new covenant and a new people. And so we carry on the mission. We proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord and we live the life of the Spirit before the eyes of the watching world and they see the faithfulness of God on full display—a faithfulness that none of the gods or kings of this age can compare with—and they come, and they believe, and the Lord pours his grace into their hands just as he has ours and the mission goes on until the earth is filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be given to you.” That wasn’t a promise of wealth or of power or of a position of privilege at his right hand over and above everyone else. Brothers and Sisters, it was a promise of his grace—like the manna in the wilderness. Always enough for today, for life and for work and for ministry and for whatever struggles we face and always enough to share with the people around us. Always enough to do the kingdom work he has given us to do today.And that’s where our Epistle today dovetails into the Gospel. The Gospel speaks of grace, but because we are so prone to forgetting that grace requires discipline, the lectionary today give us this passage from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Let’s look at those four verses again. 1 Corinthians 9:24-27.Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.If you haven’t read 1 Corinthians in a while, it’s helpful to recall the context. Paul knew the people there were believers. They’d stretched out their hands and God had poured out his grace into them. But they weren’t putting that grace to work for the sake of the kingdom. They were using their Spirit-given gifts to build themselves up rather than each other and they were abusing God’s grace to justify sins that, Paul writes, even made the pagans blush. They weren’t seeking first the kingdom.Brothers and Sisters, the Christian life isn’t aimless. In calling us to himself, the Lord has given us a mission and a future hope. St. Paul likens the Christian life to running a race and boxing in a match. Serious athletes train. Recently we had a guy join our swim club. He’s training to be a professional triathlete. And he’s wearing us out. Serious athletes discipline themselves. Paul first uses the illustration of a runner in a footrace. If he’s willing to discipline himself and put in that effort for a laurel wreath, how much more ought we to discipline ourselves to run this race that ends with the resurrection of the dead and new creation and life in the presence of God? But how often do we dink around instead? How much do we invest in things that don’t ultimately matter instead of pursuing Jesus and his kingdom with everything we’ve got? Paul compares this to a poorly trained boxer throwing punches at the air instead of his opponent. Aimlessly throwing punches won’t win the prize. Instead, it’ll probably end with your opponent landing a knockout punch on you. So Paul stresses the need to discipline ourselves—especially reigning in our sinful appetites. He even talks about being disqualified in the end because of failure. What’s that about? If we’re saved by grace, how can we fail?Think of the grand biblical narrative of God and his people. Too often we reduce things like God’s salvation and his grace to abstract theological terms, but it’s important we remember their place in the big story of God and his people. Think again of Israel, delivered from Egypt by the Lord. I mentioned this before, but let’s expand on it.The people of Israel were slaves to Pharaoh. They cried out to the Lord and he rescued them. And yet he didn’t just strike down Pharaoh and his army and set the Israelites free to go do whatever they wanted. “Love you guys. I’ll see you in heaven someday. Now go have fun.” No, Israel was his people. He’d called and claimed this people for himself in Abraham. In delivering Israel from Pharaoh the Lord was claiming back what was rightly his. And so he declared to Israel: You are my firstborn son. I will be your God and you will be my people. He led Israel through the Red Sea and through the wilderness, met them at Mt. Sinai, and there he entered into a covenant with them. He gave them the law. For his part, he would be their God with all that entailed. Their part of the covenant—their obligation—was to fulfil the calling he gave them, to be the people who lived with him in their midst and, in doing that, to be a light in the midst of the nations. The Lord had work to do. He’s going to set his fallen creation to rights and his plan all along has been to do that work through his people. Adam was created to be the high priest and steward of his temple, of Creation. And when the Lord called Abraham, when he saved Abraham’s children from Egypt, it was to create a holy nation, a nation of priests, a people to once again be his stewards on earth—as Adam once had been. So the law was the means by which they maintained the holiness necessary to in the Lord’s presence and to be his witnesses. So notice that the Lord’s calling of Israel and his deliverance of her from Egypt were all of grace, and yet to live as his people meant devotion and discipline. They had a job to do. And important one. God made them stewards of his grace.And as we read through the Old Testament, Israel repeatedly failed in her disciplined devotion to the Lord and to the covenant he had established with them. As the Prophets said, it was a heart problem. And to fix that heart problem, Jesus brought forgiveness to his people—to those who put their faith in him and became part of the renewed people of God, and he gave them God’s own Spirit to fix that heart problem, to turn their hearts towards the Lord. Brothers and Sisters, we are part of that new covenant community, the people who belong to God through Jesus, the people whom he has redeemed from sin’s bondage that we might be bound to him and to the service of his kingdom. Jesus does not set us free so that we can go do whatever we want, so that we can serve the Lord half-heartedly, so that we can live with divided loyalties anymore than the Lord delivered Israel from Egypt so that they could worship other gods or serve foreign kings. Through Jesus, we have been redeemed so that we can be faithful stewards of the Lord in this world, to do what we were created to do in the first place, to be the people who live with the Lord himself in our midst and in that, to be light in the darkness, to be witnesses of God’s grace and goodness and love and to declare the royal summons: Jesus is Lord. To lift the veil on God’s future, on his new creation so that the people around us can have a taste of what’s to come.And it’s hard work. Jesus has given us God’s own Spirit to turn our hearts towards him. But the world, the flesh, and the devil still compete for our loyalties. The gods and kings of the present age fight back and oppose us. Too often we try to live with one foot in the age to come and one still in the present age. Our loyalties are still often divided between Jesus and the gods of the present age. And even in the Church, we often put too much of our energy into things that don’t ultimately matter. Some of us might as well be sitting on the sidelines of the race. Others of us are like the boxer wildly throwing punches, working up a sweat, but none of them ever landing where they’ll do any good. Brothers and Sisters, we owe the Lord our all in return for the grace he has poured out on us.The season of Lent is a time for us to focus on the grace that the Lord has poured out on us in Jesus. But these three Sunday with the funny Latin names: Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima…that means seventieth, sixtieth, and fiftieth as we count down to Easter…these three Sundays of preparation remind us that grace in action must be coupled with discipline, with humility, and with love. If we are to be faithful stewards of the Lord’s grace, we first need to dedicate ourselves to it. We have to know it ourselves, before we can share it with others. Brothers and Sisters, commit yourself to the Lord. Give him your full allegiance as King. Get up each morning and renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil, then go out to collect the manna for today. Steep yourselves in the means of grace that he has given. Be disciplined in immersing yourself in his word and in prayer and do not neglect to meet together, but exhort one another to love and to good works. And receive the Lord’s invitation to his Supper. Here at his Table he reminds us of the sacrifice he made at the cross, giving his all…even his life…for our sake, to forgive our sins and to defeat even death itself, to make his enemies his friends. Don’t decline his invitation. Put out hour hands and take the bread, open your mouth and drink the wine, God’s grace poured out for you in Jesus. Be strengthened to work in the Lord’s vineyard and remember that no matter how hard the work, his grace is always enough. Let us pray: Father, in today’s Collect we acknowledge that we who ought to be justly punished for offences have been mercifully delivered by your goodness and for the glory of your name. We pray that we never forget the reason that you have delivered us and that our priority in all things will be the glory of your name as we share your grace with others and proclaim the good news about your kingdom and about the Lord Jesus. Teach us to be faithful steward of your grace, O Lord. Amen.
The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany: His Ministry ManifestSt. Matthew 8:1-13by William Klock In pre-modern days the most dreaded disease of all was leprosy. It began with the loss of feeling in your extremities and nodules that would turn into ulcers. The loss of feeling spread. The ulcers never healed, they only spread. Your hair would fall out and your eyes would go blind. Ulcers would form on your vocal cords, leaving your voice hoarse and rasping. Gangrene would set in. Eventually you would lose fingers and toes and sometimes even whole limbs. Sometimes it led to madness. Eventually it would lead to death, but not quickly. Some forms of leprosy would take a decade to run their course and others twenty or thirty years.But as bad, if not worse than the physical misery was the fact that it was contagious. That made lepers outcasts. The Jewish historian Josephus tells us that lepers were treated “as if they were, in effect, dead men”. When a person was diagnosed with leprosy, they were immediately banished from family and community. In Leviticus 13:46 the Lord had commanded, “He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.” People didn’t get better from leprosy. If a leper ceased to be unclean—and that had to be verified by a priest—it most likely meant that he’d been misdiagnosed in the first place. In medieval Europe, before he was cast out, a leper was brought to the church one last time so the priest could read the burial service over him. To be a leper was, for all intents and purposes to be dead. Not, of course, to yourself, but dead to your family, your friends, and your community. In Israel lepers were barred from Jerusalem and from any walled town or city. The law described over sixty types of contact that would render a person unclean and contact with a leper was second only to contact with a dead body. If a leper so much as poked his head through the door of your house, your house would be rendered unclean. On rabbi boasted that he threw stones at lepers to keep them at a distance. Keep that in mind as we look again at today’s Gospel. Look with me at Matthew 8:1-4.When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” When Jesus came down from the mountain. That’s a reference to the last three chapters, that part of Matthew’s Gospel we call “The Sermon on the Mount”—the sermon in which Jesus preached about the nature of his kingdom and the people who will be a part of it. It’s a lot of talk, but what does it look like in practice? A preacher might preach a lot of good and challenging things, but does he live them out himself? Or does he just tell other people to do them? Maybe even more important, it’s easy to hear the sorts of things Jesus said, but what does it actually look like to put them into practice. Last Sunday we heard St. Paul’s exhortation, “Do not return evil with evil, but overcome evil with good.” What does that look like? Do we hear that and then, like the man who asked Jesus, “But who is my neighbour?” do we go off and find excuses not to do what he’s said? Imagine the crowd that had been listening to him preach, now following Jesus into town and this leper approaches Jesus. It’s not hard to imagine the crowd—or a lot of people in it—horrified. “Stupid leper! Doesn’t he know he shouldn’t be here! How dare he come so close to a rabbi!” They’ve just heard Jesus preaching at length about the kingdom, but I expect at least some of them saw the leper and were thinking to themselves that if Jesus were a good rabbi, he would tell this man to take a hike—to obey torah and get out of town—maybe even throw rocks at him.Imagine their surprise when instead of quoting Leviticus at the man and telling him to get lost, he stops as the man prostrates himself before Jesus. That says something right there. When this leper saw Jesus he saw the Messiah. Jews didn’t prostrate themselves before any old person. This posture was reserved for the Lord. In some way, shape, or form he saw in Jesus the God of Israel. And with his hoarse and damaged voice he rasps out, “Lord, if you desire it, you can make me clean. Please make me clean.” And to their horror, Jesus reaches out and touches the man. The law said that a leper could come no closer to a healthy person than a cubit and Matthew makes a point describing Jesus reaching out, stretching out his arm to its full length across that distance to bridge the gap between himself and the leper, so that he could make contact with him, to touch the untouchable, to draw in the outcast. And Jesus says to him, “I desire just that. Be clean.”Uncleanness should have passed from the leper to Jesus. That’s not something you could see, but everyone knew that that was the law, ever since the Lord had spoken it through Moses. Touch a leper and you become unclean. So imagine their surprise when they did see something happen. But it wasn’t what they expected. They saw cleanness pass from Jesus to the leper. As they watched the man was healed. His sores healed and disappeared. His sight cleared. His voice became whole again. Maybe fingers and toes even grew back before the watching eyes of the crowd. The leprosy was gone. The man was restored. His death sentence was lifted.Now, the sermon on the mount wasn’t just an abstract ethical manifesto that Jesus delivered to a group of people who could have been from anywhere or any time. It was a declaration that the kingdom of God had come in fulfilment of the prophets, a declaration that the Messiah had finally come to set God’s people to rights. Ever since they had been called in Abraham, ever since they had, as a nation, been adopted by the Lord as his covenant people, they had in one way or another failed him and failed to be the people he had called and delivered them to be. They gave their hearts to idols. They gave their hearts to kings. They put their trust in horses and chariots. They oppressed the widow and the orphan and took advantage of the poor and the stranger. Their rabbis threw stones at lepers who dared get too close. The nation had repeatedly known the Lord’s discipline. The faithful remnant amongst the people had cried out for centuries to the Lord for help and through the prophets he had promised that he would come, that he would deliver, that he would forgive, that he would put his own Spirit in the hearts of his people and turn them away from sin and self and fill them with love for him and for their neighbours.And now, here it is. There’s a reason we read this Gospel during this season in which we recall and celebrate Jesus’ epiphany, his manifestation. Jesus has just preached about the restoration of fallen Israel, the adulterous bride, to her Lord and the first person he meets as he heads down the mountain and into town is this poor man, cut off from his people, for all intents and purposes dead. He has lost his covenant status. He has lost his family—not just his biological family, but his covenant family. He hasn’t known the temple or the Passover for who knows how many years. In the Lord’s providence this man is symbolic of Israel. Israel had not heard the Lord’s voice or known his presence in the temple for almost six hundred years. She was governed and oppressed by pagans—the same sorts of pagans whose gods and kings she had once cavorted with. But as he has humbled himself so far as to take on human flesh, to be born of a Jewish woman, to become one of his own rebellious people, to reach out to them, just so Jesus stretches out his hand across the distance between himself and this believing leper and makes him whole. This lost son who was dead is alive again.And Jesus doesn’t leave it at that. He sends this man—in accordance with the law—to see the priest so that the priest can see that he has been healed and so that he can restore him to the covenant family, to the people of God. There are other times in the Gospels that Jesus bypassed the temple and the priests to make a point, but early here in his ministry he instead sends this man to the priests. It backs up the message he had just preached when he said that he had come not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them. And, too, it sent a message to the priests of Israel. Like I said, people didn’t recover form leprosy. If they got better and the diagnosis was lifted by a priest, it was probably because it wasn’t leprosy in the first place. It’s likely the priests had never seen a bona fide healing from real leprosy. They might talk about Naaman the Syrian, but no one had ever seen such a healing for themselves. And now this man shows up at the home of the local priest—maybe even the priest who had diagnosed him and declared him unclean—and he served as a message from Jesus: the kingdom is at hand. Israel was about to be set to rights and restored. And it was all centred in Jesus the Messiah. The people—and their priests—had a choice before them: Repent and believe in Jesus or find yourself weeping and gnashing your teeth in the darkness when judgement comes—on the outside of the covenant family as this leper had been for so many years. Repent and believe that in Jesus the Lord was finally here to visit his people, to answer their prayer, and these lost sons and daughters would be invited into their Father’s great banquet. Jesus had come to set Israel to rights.Many of the people in the crowd watched this with joy. The Messiah really had come. That great banquet Israel had been waiting for was being prepared. According to one Jewish apocalyptic tradition the main courses at that meal would be Behemoth, the great mythical land monster, and Leviathan, the great sea monster. Some in the crowd, having heard Jesus preach and having seen the leper healed could already smell the great beasts roasting in the oven like Thanksgiving turkeys. And then as they reach Capernaum a Roman centurion approaches Jesus. If the Lord’s great banquet was being prepared, this man certainly didn’t belong there!Centurions were the backbone of the Roman army. There were 6,000 men in a legion and a legion was divided into sixty centuries of a hundred men each. Each century was commanded by a centurion. They were Rome’s best—at least militarily speaking. Matthew doesn’t tell us if this centurion was a kind man or a cruel one or how he used his authority. None of that really matters. He could have been the kindest man in the world, but he was still a local representative of Rome and a gentile. He didn’t belong in that joyful messianic throng. But down the main street of the town he came, maybe meeting Jesus and his entourage at the city gate. Look at Matthew 8:5-9.When he had entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, appealing to him, “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.” And he said to him, “I will come and heal him.” But the centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” The centurion appeals to Jesus. Matthew’s word choices stress the man’s desperation. He addresses Jesus as “Lord”. He’d surely heard the talk about Jesus being the Jewish Messiah—the Lord—but being a Roman he didn’t care about that. He simply knew that Jesus could heal, that he could fix his desperate situation. He’d heard the stories. Maybe he’d even seen the leper, running into town to show himself to the priest. Exactly who or what Jesus was, that wasn’t really his concern. He simply saw in Jesus a man with power and authority. A man who could, as Tolkien once put it, make the sad things of this world come untrue, and such a man, Jewish or not, Messiah or not, was worthy of respect. “Lord, my…pais…is at home, paralysed, sick, and suffering.” Pais, that’s the Greek word Matthew uses. The ESV translates it “servant”, but it can also refer to one’s child, especially a young one, and I think that’s far more likely what Matthew means in this case. It explains the urgency and the desperation of the Centurion. As Luke and John tell this story, the young boy was near death. But if Jesus could heal others, he could heal this man’s son.And Jesus said, “I will come and heal him.” At this point everyone—the Centurion, the Jewish crowd following Jesus, everyone—they stopped and gasped. They shouldn’t have, but I’m sure they did, because that would have been the natural response of anyone when an upright and godly Jews—a rabbi no less—went to the house of a gentile. The Mishnah declared in no uncertain terms, “The dwelling places of gentiles are unclean,” and even though it came centuries later, we know the Jews of Jesus day thought no differently. Gentiles were ritually unclean, but everyone present should have known that this wasn’t a problem for Jesus. Jesus touched the leper and instead of contracting his impurity, passed purity to the leper, restoring him to the community of the people of God. Jesus could enter the home of a gentile and do pretty much the same thing.I expect the Centurion was shocked by Jesus’ offer to come to his house. He refuses with those words so often misused in celebrations of the Lord’s Supper: “No. Don’t come to my house. I’m not worthy that you should come under my roof.” It’s not that the Centurion thought he was personally unworthy, but that he knew the Jewish customs. His job was to maintain order and the last thing he wanted was a ruckus resulting from a popular rabbi entering his house. People would probably think he’d forced Jesus and then people would get angry and stuff would happen and…well…that was the last thing he wanted. And so he says to Jesus, “You don’t need to come to my house. You and I are alike. We both have authority. I know how it works. I have authority over the men in my command. I send orders for this man to come and he comes. I send orders for this man to go and he goes. If you truly have the authority over sickness and demons that I think you have, then you can do the same. If you order this disease to go, it will go. If you order that demon to come, it will come. Give the orders and my little boy will be healed.”Now it was Jesus’ turn to be surprised. Matthew says he marvelled. He was amazed by what he’d just heard. Look at verse 10:When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And to the centurion Jesus said, “Go; let it be done for you as you have believed.” And the servant was healed at that very moment. Notice how Jesus turns to the crowd, to his fellow Jews. Here they are, following Jesus down the mountain, ready for him to lead them into the age to come when everything is set to rights, ready to sit in his presence at that great banquet and feast on behemoth and leviathan. And the parade is stopped by this dog of a gentile who has no place in that feast. When the day comes, they’re thinking, the Lord will take care of men like him. He may strut around Capernaum, in charge of the place today, but one day he would be out in the darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth. Some probably thought—maybe even expected—Jesus to give him a little foretaste of that right now. But instead, Jesus turns and commends the man’s faith to everyone. (This is why people didn’t like Jesus!) He contrasts the faith of this gentile—of a man they thought of as the enemy—Jesus uses it to expose the lack of faith he has seen in Israel. And he quotes from the Old Testament. Psalm 107:3 and Isaiah 43:5 (and Baruch 4:37) all speak of the Lord’s promises to restore scattered Israel, bringing her lost sons and daughters from east and west. But here Jesus puts a twist on those prophecies and promises. “When Israel is restored,” he’s saying, “When you sit at the Lord’s great feast with your fathers, with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and feast on behemoth and leviathan and celebrate your restoration and the great faithfulness of the Lord, your brothers and sisters from east and west will be there, and this man represents them. Yes, the Lord will bring Jews from east and west, but he will bring others and they, too, will have a share in the Lord’s new covenant and in the age to come. And many of those who think that by birth alone they have a right to be in that banquet…well…they will find themselves out in the dark, weeping and gnashing their teeth.”Jesus knew that it wasn’t yet the time for gentiles to come flooding into the kingdom, taking hold of the robes of Jews, as Zechariah had prophesied, and saying, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” But in this centurion he saw a foretaste of that day not so far off. It was a promise most of his fellow Jews had forgotten—or deliberately ignored—in favour of the promises of the great banquet, the setting things to rights, the restoration of Israel. But this was the reason for Israel’s existence as a people, even if few remembered it. Simeon was one of those who remembered and having met the infant Jesus at his presentation in the temple he sang those familiar words:Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word.For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.Which thou has prepared before the face of all people;To be a light to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of thy people Israel. (Luke 2:29-32)Jesus would be the glory of Israel in that he would fulfil their mission to be a light to the nations—bringing them to the God of Israel. In that he would fulfil the law and the prophets and manifest the faithfulness of God. Again that great theme of epiphany.Jesus commended the centurion’s faith and sent him home to his healed little boy, the firstfruits—after a fashion at any rate—of the nations who would see the faithfulness of the God of Israel manifest in Jesus, come to him in faith to give him glory, and would themselves not only be healed and set to rights, but incorporated into this covenant family as sons and daughters of God, seated at the great banquet to feast on behemoth and leviathan.So, Brothers and Sisters, come to the Lord’s Table this morning. In the bread and wine we recall and participate in the great exodus that Jesus wrought at the cross, here we remember and are assured that we belong to him. Here we take hold of his blood-stained robe and say, “Take us with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” And here the veil is lifted on the age to come as Jesus gives us a foretaste of the great banquet that awaits us on the day when he will, finally and once and for all, set us and all of his creation to rights. In the meantime, Friends, take the grace you have found at his Table out into the world and live it for all to see. Take the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen, with you and proclaim it to all. As sons and daughters of God, you are stewards of the gospel. Let every day be Epiphany. Make the Gospel, make the life of Jesus and the Spirit manifest in what you do and what you say so that the people around you will say, “Take us with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”Let’s pray: O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: grant to us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Third Sunday after Epiphany: Overcome Evil with GoodRomans 12:16-21by William Klock The theme of the Epiphany season is “manifestation”. In the Gospel lessons we read of Jesus the Messiah, made manifest to those gentile magi from the East; made manifest as the son of God, the representative of Israel, at his baptism; his mission made manifest in miracles: turning water into wine, calming the storm, casting out demons, healing the sick. Sunday after Sunday we see Jesus manifest as Lord and as Saviour and we see his kingdom, the kingdom he came to inaugurate, new creation, we see it manifest too: God’s new world breaking into the present age. But we can’t forget the Epistles we read on these Sundays, all taken from Paul’s letter to the Romans, from the twelfth and thirteenth chapters. They’ve been part of the lectionary for a millennium and a half and they, too, carry this theme of manifestation. But here it’s the Church, the people of God, who manifest Jesus and his kingdom as we live the life of the Spirit and of God’s kingdom in this overlap of the ages.Think on that. In his death and resurrection, Jesus has inaugurated a new age, a new world, and he’s given his people and the world hope. He will make all things new. But making all things new and setting God’s Creation to rights also means that one day there will be a judgement and everything that opposes God and his new world will be wiped away. We see his graciousness and his patience on display in the fact that he sent his Son, not to bring an end to the story by destroying and wiping away ungodliness, but by sending him into the middle of the story, to die for the sake of his enemies, in order to make a means of redemption. That judgement, that cleansing, that final annihilation of evil and rebellion, it will one day come. But Jesus first offers a way into his new world and a way out of the coming judgement. We saw a foretaste of it in our study of Revelation as judgement fell on Jerusalem. One day the same will happen on a cosmic scale. But in the meantime Jesus graciously offers an opportunity to be part of his new creation. We need only kneel in faith before him in acknowledgement that he is Creation’s true Lord. In return, he makes us his people and, in that, he forgives us and he makes us new. In our baptism he plunges us into his own Spirit and his Spirit then converts ungodly hearts set on rebellion, and places in them a love for God and a love for each other. He makes us heralds of his new creation and sends us out with his royal summons, to call men and women to repentance and to faith so that they, too, can have a share in his new world.But the people and the powers and the institutions invested in the old age don’t like that. Jesus warned his friends: “A disciple is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” Persecution is bound to happen whenever and wherever the old age and the new age meet. Paul knew this from personal experience. In fact, Paul had found himself on both sides of the clash. He knew what it was to be the persecutor and he knew what it was to be the persecuted. He knew that it was in this meeting of the ages, this place where the world and the kingdom come up against each other, that Jesus’ people find one of our greatest opportunities to be the people the Spirit has made us. This clash is the place where Christians have profound opportunity to live the gospel and to be and to manifest God’s new creation here and now.As Western Christians we don’t know much about persecution. Not first-hand. We’ve read stories of brothers and sisters martyred in the days of the early Church or in modern times in China or the Soviet Union or the Middle East or of missionaries like Jim Elliot, but we haven’t experienced real persecution ourselves. We sometimes face opposition and hostility. The older I get the more I think that an awful lot of the “opposition” we face here in North America isn’t so much for being Christians; it’s for being jerks, which is just the opposite of what God’s grace should be making us. But that highlights what Paul is getting at in our Epistle today, in Romans 12:16-21. We’re continuing in this passage that began with Paul telling us to present ourselves as living sacrifices to God. To do that, he writes, is to worship the one who has saved us. He went on to explain what that looks like in practical terms. It begins with love and last Sunday we looked at his description of love at work in the Church. How we live with and treat each other is a profound witness to the world. In the Third Century, Tertullian wrote about the influence the Church had on the pagans around it. The pagans didn’t comment so much on what the Church taught or said, but on how the Church lived. In a world where mercy and grace were almost unheard of, the pagans saw Christians and were astounded, saying, “Look how they love each other!” Here in the Church we are a microcosm of God’s new creation. But Jesus doesn’t intend for us to keep it to ourselves. Just as God’s love spills out of us to each other, it then spills out of the Church to the world—and it often has its most profound impact when it comes up against opposition, hostility, and persecution. In these verses, Paul now carries this theme of love as he leads us out of the doors of the church and back to our neighbourhoods, workplaces, governments, and communities.Paul knew first-hand the impact the love of Jesus can have when it comes up against the world. What he writes here is not what he grew up with. What he writes here is the opposite of what characterised the Jewish world he knew. The Seventh Chapter of 2 Maccabees gives us an idea of the mindset that Paul was raised with. We don’t have time to read the whole thing this morning, but the story takes place about 160 years before Jesus was born. A group of Jews under the leadership of Mattathias Maccabeus and his son, Judas, rose up against their Greek rulers. The Greeks tried to supress the faith of the Jews. In 2 Maccabees 7 we read about a woman and her seven sons who were threatened with torture in an effort to force them to eat pork. They refused and, one by one, the sons were brutally tortured and killed for their refusal to compromise. Each, in turn, as he was tortured called down curses on those Greek soldiers and on Antiochus Epiphanes, the Greek king. They became national heroes, not just for refusing to compromise and eat pork, but mostly for having the courage to curse the soldiers as they were dying. The men who rose up to violently overthrow the Greeks in the revolt that came were national heroes and still are to this day. The Maccabees were the spiritual fathers of the Pharisees. They were heroes to Paul and Paul saw his opposition to the Church as being faithful to that heritage.But something changed. It might have begun as Paul stood by while Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned. Stephen preached Jesus and the Jews killed him for it. Paul held coats so that those throwing stones wouldn’t be encumbered. And he heard Stephen with his dying breath cry out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60). Just like Jesus, who was crucified, but did not curse or revile in return, but prayed, “Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing,” Stephen prayed for his enemies. This was unheard of. But, years later, here’s what Paul wrote in Romans 12—the end of our Epistle last week:Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Someone reviles you for your faith in Jesus. Bless them. Someone has your church’s tax-exempt status revoked because of your witness for Jesus. Bless them. You’re fined for refusing to compromise your faith as it relates to your business practices. Bless them. You’re arrested and put in jail for proclaiming the good news about Jesus. Bless them. Bless them. Bless them. Bless them. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Is that a hard thing to do? Of course it is. But do it anyway. Stephen knew that it was only by the grace of God he was different from those who killed him. He knew they needed that grace as much as he did. If Stephen used his last breath to pray for the people who were stoning him, so can you. And Stephen’s story reminds us of the key here. Stephen had his sight fixed on Jesus and the Cross. Brothers and Sisters, you can’t revile, curse, and fight back when you have your eyes fixed on the one who gave himself up as a sacrifice for the sins of his enemies and who preached, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Epiphany reminds us of the manifestation of Jesus as Messiah, as Lord, as Saviour. You and I have experienced that manifestation and it changes everything.And it’s not just blessing the people who would persecute us for our faith. We’re going to face hostility everywhere we turn in the world. The old age is filled with sin and corruption. Our interactions are tainted with it every day. But instead of seeing this as an opportunity to get back or get even, as people of God’s new creation, we should look at our life in the midst of the world as a means of lifting the veil on the new creation that is our hope—and that Jesus and the Spirit have made us a part of already. Look at verses 15-16:Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. That means: Don’t be a crank. When something good happens to your pagan neighbour, be happy for him. When he throws a party to celebrate something, go and celebrate with him. When Veronica’s brother got married it was by a druid priestess with a druid-Wiccan ceremony. We could have been grumps—and we weren’t happy about the pagan stuff—but the fact is that marriage was instituted by God. Marriage is a good thing—even when the pagans do it. It’s what men and women are supposed to do. It’s a joyful time. We went. We politely declined the smudging and stood outside the “sacred circle” drawn by the priestess and didn’t take part in the pagan rituals, but we could still rejoice with them in their marriage.The flip side of this is that we ought to weep with our neighbours or with the world when it weeps. Some Christians are really, really good at Schadenfreude. They sit and smirk every time something bad happens to unbelievers. Brothers and Sisters, don’t be like that. It’s self-righteous to be like that. Bad things happen because we—all of us, every human being who has ever lived—have sinned and contributed to the corruption of our world. Sometimes we suffer as the consequence of our own personal sins. Much of the time we suffer the cumulative consequences of thousands and thousands of years of sins committed corporately by the entire human race. The problems of this world can be laid at our feet as much as anyone else’s. We’ve all contributed and none of us has any business gloating at the misfortune of a fellow human being. But remember, too, that you and I are privileged to be stewards of the answer to human suffering. In Jesus and the Spirit, we’ve caught a glimpse of the world set to rights. God, in his grace and mercy, saw fit to reach each of us with the good news about Jesus. We ought to show that same grace and mercy to others who suffer. Instead of gloating, we ought to take the good news about Jesus to them.In fact, even though the world around us is hostile to the good news, Paul says “live in harmony with one another.” The Greek literally says, “thinking the same thing towards one another”. The sense is that Paul is calling us to live alongside our neighbours, sharing life with them. We Christians are prone to withdrawing from our neighbours. We may not go off and form literal ghettos where we all live in the same place apart from everyone else, although there have been some groups who have done that. Our failure is that we tend to minimize our association with non-Christians. That’s particularly true of those of us who have been raised in the Church. We tend to form all of our close relationship with fellow Christians. And then we wonder where all the opportunities for evangelism have gone! It’s good to ask yourself—particularly if you’ve been a Christian for a long time—if you’ve isolated yourself from non-Christians.And Paul goes on and says not to be snobs, but to associate with the lowly. We see this lived out very dramatically in the Church of Paul’s day as slaves and free people lived alongside each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. Paul, no doubt, had in mind the tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians in the Roman churches. Those may not be the sorts of division we’re prone to being snobbish about today, but they make the point that the love of Jesus that has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit crosses boundaries of every kind.Now look at verses 17 and 18:Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Responding in kind is the way of the fallen human heart. It’s our most natural response. But the Christian is different. Again, the Spirit has removed our hearts of stone and in their places filled us with love for God and love for our neighbours. This is the most basic and fundamental characteristic of the Christian, which is why Paul beats this drum so often—he says almost exactly the same thing in 1Thessalonians 5. Love does not seek revenge. Love seeks the best, even for our enemies. If you struggle with this—and we all do—remember, again, the cross. We rejected God. We sinned. We sundered heaven and earth. We corrupted God’s creation. But instead of repaying our evil with more evil, God sent his Son to forgive, to reconcile, and to restore. Why? Because he loves us. Think on the cross. Meditate on the cross. Keep the cross always at the centre of your vision and love will become easier and more natural.And because of love and our desire to live out the good news and to manifest God’s new age in the midst of the world, we’ll always be thinking about how to do good. Paul knew that sometimes doing good and manifesting the kingdom will bring the scorn of the world. It took Jesus to the cross. But he also knew that it’s possible to live at peace with our neighbours. There are times when our integrity and refusal to compromise may lose us friends or get us fired from our jobs, but we can still rejoice with our joyful neighbours and weep with our weeping neighbours.What comes to my mind as I read these words is that Paul understands that we will face the opposition of the world, but we should respond to that by being squeaky-clean. We should be living in such a way that when we do face opposition or persecution, it should truly be for the sake of Jesus and only for the sake of Jesus. I think this is something we modern Christians need desperately to hear. We can be self-righteous jerks sometimes, all in the name of Jesus. We can be horrible snobs in the name of Jesus. We can be terrible cranks in the name of Jesus. We often gloat at the sufferings of unbelievers—particularly those who actively oppose us—and we gloat in the name of Jesus. We can be horrible, self-righteous hypocrites in the name of Jesus. And we too often seek our own welfare—often doing so in the name of Jesus—through associations with ungodliness and ungodly people. Politics, materialism, and consumerism have corrupted our gospel perspective and compromised our witness. We grasp for power. We grasp for things. We live for ourselves, forgetting our Lord, as Paul writes in Philippians, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”People call us haters and bigots because we refuse to bow to the sinful sexual ethics of the day and the identity politics of Postmodernism. Brothers and Sisters, our refusal to compromise will bring opposition, but we need to be sure that the opposition is truly for the sake of our commitment to Jesus and to the real love that Paul describes here. If the world is going to call us haters, we need to be squeaky-clean. We need to be the most loving people on the planet—as we should be—even if the world doesn’t fully understand true love. The people who are going to call us bigots for forsaking their false gods, need to see us rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep. They should never see us thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought. To the contrary, they should see us seeking out the lowly. They should know, even if they’ve suppressed it in the backs of their minds and seared their own consciences, that their accusations are utterly false. This was the witness of the first Christians, many of whom were martyred for standing up to the gods and kings of the age, but who, by their loving, giving, and humble witness turned the Roman empire to Jesus.Brothers and Sisters, Paul gives us a sombre warning in verse 19:Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” This isn’t always an easy thing to do, but, again, look to the cross. God’s people are loved by him. That God would give his Son for our sake is the proof. We’re Christians because we trust in God—in his goodness and his wisdom seen first and foremost in his provision for forgiveness and renewal through Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, we know that God is good. We know that God takes care of us. We know that God will set all things to rights in the end and that his justice will prevail. We don’t need to take justice into our own hands by seeking vengeance. To do that is to perpetuate the very cycle of evil that Jesus died to end. Have you ever considered that your faith is witnessed to others when you choose to trust in God to deal with your enemies? Think on that the next time you’re tempted to repay evil with evil.Then in verses 20-21 Paul writes, To the contrary, “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. Instead of cursing our enemies, we need to devote ourselves, as Jesus said, to praying for them and seeking out ways to do good to those who persecute us. Paul quotes Proverbs 25:21-22. Don’t just leave it at not taking vengeance on your enemy. Look for ways to actively do good to him or to her. This goes along with being squeaky-clean. Manifest the love of God to your enemy. There’s some disagreement about exactly what Paul means by heaping coals on his head, but Paul’s point seems to be this: First, doing good to your enemies is the right thing to do, because it models the gracious love that God has shown us in Jesus. Never forget that we were once God’s enemies. Second, vengeance is God’s prerogative and we need to trust in him in these situations. And, finally third, Paul’s thinking that—even if it’s a long-shot—loving our enemies may bring them to repentance. That may seem a stretch, but Paul knew this first-hand. Remember Stephen. Paul stood there holding coats for the stone-throwers. He heard Stephen’s prayers for his enemies. Paul didn’t change his mind about Jesus that day, but Stephen’s witness stayed with him and was part of a long sequence of events that would eventually bring Paul to Jesus.Paul really knew how evil is overcome, not with more evil, but with good. He’d seen it in his own experience. But he understood it, first and foremost, because of the cross of Jesus. Paul understood the way in which violence compounds violence and evil compounds evil, just as we do. Someone hits you so you hit back harder and the violence spirals. It’s in our fallen nature and has been from the beginning. In Genesis 4 we’re told of Lamech who boasted that a man hit him, so he retaliated by murdering the man. The world has been spiralling into greater violence ever since. Evil only begets more evil.Brothers and Sisters, Jesus stepped into history to break that cycle. Evil concentrated itself in one place, rose up to its full height, and did its worst at the cross. Peter drew his sword, but Jesus knew that evil begets evil, that those who live by the sword die by the sword. Jesus told Peter to put his sword away and then allowed himself to be led to the cross. Jesus let evil do its worst and in doing so, he broke the cycle. He returned death with life and evil with love. And now he’s filled us with that same love and calls us to break the cycle wherever we find ourselves in it. It’s not a question of if, but when. The spiral of evil and violence finds us every day, even if only in small ways. How do we respond? Brothers and Sisters, think on that. Focus your eyes on Jesus and his cross and meditate on his love.Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities; and in all our dangers and necessities stretch out your right hand to help and defend us, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Second Sunday after EpiphanyRomans 12:6-16 & St. Mark 1:1-11by William KlockThe beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That’s how Mark’s launches into the story of Jesus. He uses that word “gospel” that we use so often that we sometimes forget what it really means. “Gospel” means “good news”. In the Jewish mind it was the word that described the news that the runners brought back from the battlefield when the king’s army had defeated the enemy: “Good News! We’ve been victorious!” In the Roman mind it described the “good news” that was sent out across the empire by official heralds that a new Caesar, a new emperor, had ascended to the throne, also usually having vanquished his foes.And Mark says that this good news is about Jesus, the Son of God. Again, sometimes we miss the intended significance of this. When we hear “Son of God” we tend to think of the virgin birth and Jesus as the incarnate Word of God, born of Mary in human flesh. And we’re not wrong in that, but long before Jesus was ever born this title “son of God” was what the Lord had called his people when he’d met them on Mount Sinai. Eventually it took on messianic significance. The Messiah would, when he came, take up the identity of his people and through him the Lord would set his people and the whole world to rights.And so here at the beginning of the story, Mark sets out that what he’s going to tell us in this book he’s written is the good news that in Jesus the long-promised and long-awaited Messiah of Israel has come, that he has won a great victory over his enemies, and that he has inaugurated a new kingdom—and that Jesus is Lord. What Mark’s going to tell us about Jesus and what we’ll hear Jesus telling us himself isn’t just good advice—as if we might want to try on Jesus for size and see if he fits or that he’s introduced a new way of doing things and we might give it a try and see if we like it or if it works for us. No. This is a proclamation that Jesus is King. It’s not good advice; it’s good news—and that means we have no choice but to do something about it.Mark then launches into the story by telling us about Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist. The prophets Malachi and Isaiah had prophesied as we read in verses 2 and 3 that the Lord would send a messenger to prepare the way for the Messiah—to prepare Israel to receive him. He described his work in terms of paving a highway in the wilderness, which brings up images of the Exodus and God leading his people to the promised land. And then Mark tells us about John calling the people out into the wilderness and baptizing them with a baptism of repentance.In Luke’s Gospel we’re told that John’s message was “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand”. In the Messiah the Lord was coming to visit and to rescue his people, but if the Lord was coming—the Holy one of Israel—that meant that people needed to prepare themselves. Think of all the ways the Law—the torah—had taught the people to keep themselves ritually pure and how to purify themselves should they become unclean, all so that they could live as part of the community of God’s people. They were to be a holy people. And now the Lord himself was coming in the Messiah—they really needed to prepare themselves; they really needed to purify themselves. And this is what John invited them to do in his baptism. He called them to turn aside, not just from sin in a general sense, although that was certainly part of it, but also to call them to set aside every form of hypocrisy and corruption, to get back to the business of holiness and of righteousness and of justice in every area of life.And when John did this, when he called people out into the wilderness to baptise them in the Jordan River, what they understood him to be saying was that another Exodus was going to take place. Just as the Lord had rescued Israel from Egypt, he was going to rescue her again. But John makes it clear that this time is going to be different. In the old Exodus, God had certainly heard and visited his people. He came and lived in their midst in a pillar of cloud in the tabernacle. But John says that his baptism isn’t all there is. Israel had gone through water before and, while it saved her from Egypt, it didn’t save her from sin and death. No, John says that he’s only preparing the way for another—for the one Mark calls the Son of God—who will baptise them with the Holy Spirit.I like the way The Kingdom New Testament paraphrases John’s words here: “I’ve plunged you in the water,” John says, “he’s going to plunge you in the Holy Spirit.” That, Brothers and Sisters, changes everything. Instead of God living in our midst, but living over there in the tabernacle—and, more particularly, in the holy of holies where none of us can actually go because, no matter how many sacrifices we make and how often we purify ourselves, we’re still unholy sinners—instead of that, God is now coming to live not just in our midst, but inside us. As we read on The Epiphany, he’s building a new temple for himself and we ourselves are the blocks of stone he’s carefully cut and carefully fitted together. In the first Exodus, the Lord took his people through the water, he gave them a law written on stone tablets, and he gave them priests to tell them to do it. And most of the time they weren’t particularly good at living out that law. But in this new exodus, Jesus leads us not only through the water, but in doing so he plunges us into his own Holy Spirit. Instead of giving us the law on tablets of stone the Spirit writes Jesus’ law on our hearts so that it’s not only internal, but that we’ll actually be in love with it and motivated by it and seek to do it—that’s the significance of it being written on our hearts. And so we don’t anymore need priests urging us to do it, because we’ll have the Lord’s Spirit himself in us, making his desires our desires as we feed ourselves on his Word.Mark then goes on to tell us about Jesus’ baptism by John. In verse 9 Jesus steps into the story. Mark doesn’t tell us about his birth; he starts with his baptism. As much as Jesus was the one for whom the people were being prepared by John, he doesn’t hesitate to identify himself with them in baptism. But Jesus’ experience is unique—of course, because he is the Messiah. As he comes out of the river, Mark says in verse 10-11:Immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” For Jesus this was divine confirmation of his identity. He grew up being told about the amazing circumstances of his birth, the things the angels had said to Zechariah and to Mary and to Joseph, about the way he was greeted as a baby by Simeon and Anna. His family had those precious and kingly gifts from the wise men. Last week’s Gospel told of that time he’d stayed behind in the temple when he was twelve, because he knew that he had to be about his Father’s—his real Father’s—business. And yet we’re still given a pretty clear sense that Jesus had to sort out his calling and his ministry himself as he studied the Scriptures and saw himself in them. His baptism by John, and specifically the Spirit appearing and the Father speaking, were confirmation that he’d got it right. He really was the Messiah. He really was the one who had been sent to represent Israel and to set her to rights.Mark says that the heavens were torn open. Jesus had a glimpse into heaven. And that doesn’t mean that he was looking up and seeing a baroque painting: flying little fat babies in the clouds with harps. The sense is that he was given a glimpse into the realm of God much as St. John saw in Revelation. He was given a glimpse of the kingdom that is to come—the kingdom he was sent to inaugurate. It was either confirmation of what he’d already come to understand of God’s kingdom and its ways or it gave him, in that glimpse, an understanding of what he was to proclaim. Jesus grew up surrounded by the darkness of the world, but as the heavens were opened for that short time, he had a glimpse into the new reality that God has been preparing—like a child getting a glimpse of all the presents being hidden away in the closet in anticipation of Christmas.This ties in with our Epistle from Romans in the sense that each of us, in our baptism, have been given a similar glimpse of the kingdom. We’ve trusted in Jesus because someone else at some point, whether our parents or a friend or our minister—someone has given a glimpse into the kingdom that Jesus has inaugurated, has given us a glimpse of a life of forgiveness and grace, and a glimpse of resurrection and recreation and we’ve taken hold of it in faith. And now we—you and I—are called to continue giving the world glimpses of that kingdom. We’re called to proclaim the good news. And, along with that proclamation, we’re also called to live by the ways and values of the kingdom, so that the world can see Jesus and can see what the future has in store as it looks at us, as it looks at the Church. Our calling is to show the world what it looks like to have been plunged into the Holy Spirit.Last Sunday we read the lessons for the Epiphany, but if we’d read the the lessons for the Sunday after the Epiphany, we would have heard that familiar part of Romans where Paul exhorts us to present our bodies as living sacrifices. To give ourselves is the only reasonable response to Jesus having giving himself as a sacrifice for us. It’s the only response that makes sense when we think on the Incarnation, on the cross, and on the empty tomb. Jesus gave everything for us; in gratitude we should give our everything back to him. And Paul contrasts this mindset with the mindset that’s all around us in the world. He warns in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this present age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Yes, the world, the flesh, and the devil tempt us. It’s hard to follow Jesus and sometimes we fail, but Paul reminds us that in our baptism we’ve been transformed. John plunged people into the water. Jesus does more. He plunges us into the water and as he does so he plunges us into the Holy Spirit. In doing that he’s transformed our hearts and he’s renewed our minds. Because of the Holy Spirit the desires of our hearts are different now. Because of the Holy Spirit the fog that once clouded our thinking has been lifted. What used to seem foolish when we heard about Jesus and about sacrifice and about dying in order to live now makes perfect sense. The Spirit has taken the things and the thinking and the values and the priorities of the age to come and brought them into our hearts and minds. The world—this present evil age—competes for our loyalty, so we must never forget what the Spirit has done in us.Paul stresses that we need to live this life of sacrifice by showing humility to each other. This in itself runs contrary to the grain of the world’s thinking of every man for himself. In last week’s lesson, in Romans 12:4-5, Paul gives us the image of a body.For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. And with this he switches gears a bit. In last week’s Epistle Paul was focused on the idea of sacrifice and of humility. In this week’s Epistle, which begins at the next verse, Romans 12:6, Paul shows us how this works out in practise. Keep Paul’s image of a body in mind—a body made up of all sorts of different organs and limbs—as we go on. He writes:Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. (Romans 12:6-8)The Holy Spirit doesn’t just change our hearts and minds, he also equips us to serve the kingdom. In some cases he gives us gifts that we don’t have by nature, some more mundane and some spectacular. In some cases the Spirit simply transforms the personality traits and the natural gifts we already have so that we can use them for the kingdom. The New Testament is full of lists of gifts and each list is a little different, which ought to tell us that there’s no exhaustive list. People sometimes get hung up thinking that they have to have one of the gifts specifically mentioned in these lists and when they can’t find it they become discouraged. Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit works with and gifts each person differently and according to the place in the body he has for us. People, times, and places differ and the Spirit will equip us for who we are, where we are, and when we are. Think again of Paul’s analogy of the temple being built by Jesus, each of us is a stone carefully and specifically cut to fit a certain place. Don’t ever think that the Spirit hasn’t equipped you in some way just because nothing in these lists is an exact fit. Jesus has work for everyone and he’s plunged us all into his transforming Spirit. What Paul does here is give some examples so that we can see how we’re called to work together and to serve the kingdom so that the world will see Jesus in his Church.He begins with prophecy. Prophecy is the gift whereby the Spirit equips us to apply the Word of God to life and to specific situations. Pauls says that if that’s how you’ve graciously been equipped, then get on with prophesying. If you’ve been equipped especially to serve, then get on with serving. If you’ve been equipped to teach, get on with teaching. And so it goes for those equipped to exhort and to give and to lead and to show acts of mercy. If you’ve been gifted in these ways, get on with using those gifts. Don’t short-change the Church by squandering them. And Paul starts out, in mentioning prophecy, saying that, as the ESV puts it, we do this “in proportion to our faith”.What does that mean? Well, it helps to go back to verse 3, where Paul warns us to think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith God has assigned. He is not saying that we are given different measures of faith. That would mean, in verse 3, that some would think less soberly than others and that some are called to be more humble than others. No, what Paul is saying is that we do all these things in accordance with the faith, referring to the content of what we believe: that Jesus is Lord, that he has died, and that he has risen from the dead. We treat each other humbly because that is what we see in Jesus, who humbly gave his life for us. So with our gifts: we use them not for ourselves and we use them not willy-nilly for whatever reason might seem good at the time. No, we use them in accordance with the faith, with the Good News we’ve been given.The one who prophesies has not been equipped so that he can spout off anything that pops into his head. No, he must speak in accordance with the faith we have been given—what he says must be in harmony with the message of the cross and the empty tomb, it must be in harmony with the rest of Scripture, and it must work to build up the body, not the speaker. And this principle applies across the board with all the gifts and all the ways we serve. Does the one who teaches teach in accordance with the faith and with the Scriptures? Does he teach to build up the body, or is he tearing it apart or building up himself? Does the one who exhorts or the one who shows mercy do so in a way that reinforces the Good News, or is there no thought for that?A few years ago I was reading an article written by a woman who gave up Christianity for paganism and considers herself a witch. She and some of her fellow witches visited a healing ministry run by a wildly popular church in northern California. One of the things she wrote about were the prophecies and exhortations spoken over them while they were there. Everything that was said affirmed them in their pursuit of paganism and told them that God was pleased with them and that they were on the right spiritual path. They were given words of peace, despite being on a path away from and at odds with the Prince of Peace. The people working in that church were obviously well-meaning and I’m skeptical about the legitimacy of the gifts they claim to have, but the reason I bring them up is that they’re misusing the gifts of prophecy and exhortation and mercy. They’re proclaiming “Peace! Peace!” where there is no peace. God’s gifts must be used in accordance with the faith he has given us. They’ve been given to us to give the world a glimpse of the kingdom and to declare, “Repent, for the kingdom God has come!” If, instead, we’re using our gifts to affirm people in their unrepentance and in their rejection of the kingdom, then we’re abusing those gifts. We need to use the Spirit’s gifts with discernment and with discipline. I think it’s also worth noting that Paul stresses at the end that the one who “does acts of mercy” do so with cheerfulness. As the discernment and discipline he connects with prophecy apply all the way down the list, this cheerfulness applies all the way back up. We may not always feel like doing these things, but we need to remember that in God’s economy, in biblical thinking, love is not so much about feeling as it is about doing. The world tells us that you should do what feels right, but God tells us to do what we know is right and that right feelings will follow. Again, we too often allow ourselves to be conformed to the present age rather than surrendering to the transforming work of the Spirit in us.After giving these specifics in terms of gifts, Paul then goes on to write in more general terms about the gospel principles at work here. Look at verses 9-16. There’s a long list here. I noticed that my Bible happens to give this section the heading, “Marks of the True Christian”. Think about that and notice that it starts with love at the top.Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. We don’t have time to cover each of these in detail, but think of them in terms of giving the world a glimpse of Jesus and the kingdom. We’ve seen real love in Jesus. In him we’ve seen what it looks like to abhor evil and hold fast to good. In him we get a sense of what it looks like to show honour to others rather than grabbing it all for ourselves. We see in him what humility and lowliness toward others looks like. We—especially Gentile believers—have seen what Jesus’ hospitality looks like as he welcomes us in to Abraham’s family. In Jesus we’ve seen the greatest example ever of what it looks like to bless those who persecute us. And Paul ends this list in verse 21, writing, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”Brothers and Sisters, this is what it looks like to be faithful stewards of the grace of God. This is what it looks like to live the life Jesus has given us. This is what it looks like to be people who have been plunged into the Holy Spirit. This is what it looks like to be the new Israel, rescued from our bondage to sin and death and given hope for a new life. We love each other as Jesus has loved us and as he specially equipped us to love, and as we do so we show our love for him, because in loving each other we are loving the people whom Jesus loves. But it’s not just the Church we love. Jesus was sent to redeem because “God so loved the world”. We witness what love looks like as we love each other, but we also witness the love of God as we give ourselves for the sake of the world, as we give ourselves to be light in the darkness—even when the darkness is hostile and seeks to snuff us out. In Jesus, God overcame evil with good and we are called to be his witnesses by doing the same. And so let us proclaim the message of John and Jesus: Repent, for the kingdom of God has come. But let us also live in such a way that in our lives and the life of the Church, the heavens are opened to give all those around us a glimpse of the life and the kingdom that await all those who will trust in Jesus.Let us pray: Heavenly Father, in the baptism of Jesus you revealed him to be your Son and you anointed him with the Holy Spirit. May we who are born again of that same water and Spirit, we ask, be faithful to our calling as your children by grace, living and manifesting in our lives the love and mercy you have shown to us as we proclaim your kingdom. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epiphany: Manifest to the GentilesEphesians 3:1-12 & St. Matthew 2:1-12by William Klock“Epiphany” is a Greek word that means “manifestation”. In the earliest days the observance of Epiphany was centred on Jesus’ baptism, because it was in his baptism that the Spirit descended upon Jesus and the voice from heaven announced, “You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased.” In the Eastern Church this celebration is known as Theophania, the day on which God revealed himself in Jesus. The feast celebrated not only Jesus’ baptism, but his birth, the visitation of the magi, and his first miracle at Cana. All of these events were epiphanies or manifestations, of our Lord, his divinity, and his ministry. As the Church calendar developed, the feast of the Epiphany was decompressed and Jesus’ baptism and his manifestation at Cana were assigned to the Sundays that followed and the Epiphany itself became a commemoration specifically of the visitation of the magi and, thus as the Prayer Book calls it, “the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles”.And so we hear Paul in our Epistle, this passage we read a few minutes ago from Ephesians 3, we hear Paul say—or we hear his pen scratch on parchment as he writes to his brothers and sisters in Ephesus: For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles… Ephesus was a predominantly gentile church that Paul had started when he visited the city on his second missionary journey. He was imprisoned for his proclamation of the good news about Jesus and it’s from his imprisonment that he writes them. He goes on: —assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. This was, as we say, Pauls “thing”. This was for him the great mystery—not “mystery” like Sherlock Holmes or Scooby-doo, but mystery in the sense of a great, earth-shattering revelation that changes everything. We might say an “epiphany”. For Paul the great mystery was first the revelation that Jesus really was the Messiah, but then when he’d had the chance to work through all the implications of that great truth he was confronted with this one: “that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Jesus the Messiah through the gospel.” Most people would have thought this was a thoroughly un-Jewish thing to say. Even that it was blasphemy that gentiles—unclean dogs!—were coheirs with the people of God. A few of them, sure, but only after they’d been purified and circumcised and committed to observing torah. And then they weren’t really gentiles anymore. But Paul’s realised that, in fact, once you get the story of God and Israel straight, it would be hard to come up with anything more Jewish than this conclusion that the gentiles are, in Jesus, fellow heirs, members of the same body, and part of Abraham’s family. This is what the story was working towards all along, even though hardly anyone realised it anymore. As he says as he continues, ministering this truth was his calling: Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. The Jews of Paul’s day had got their own story wrong and no longer had any sense that “salvation is for the Gentiles”. As far as they were concerned, they were God’s people, God cared about them, God would deliver them from their oppressors and put them on top, and one day he would rain down destruction on all the unclean people of the word. Salvation was for the Jews, the might have said. Even those first Jewish Christians were still thinking in this vein. Jesus was their Messiah. There were a few gentiles who believed, but they had to first become Jews. And there were the Samaritans who believed. That was a challenge to this kind of thinking, but until Paul, no one seemed to have this vision of the deliverance, of the salvation of the Gentiles—at least not on a large scale.The irony is that today we’ve made the opposite mistake. We’ve so dehistoricised, flattened out, and universalised the story that we’ve all but forgotten that “Salvation is of the Jews.” I’ve been reviewing the first-year Greek course I took almost thirty years ago and in the “homework” last week this phrase jumped out at me from the page. “Salvation is from the Jews.” Jesus spoke these words to the Samaritan woman and they ought to be a rebuke for so much of the Church today that has forgotten our own story. St. Paul writes in today’s Epistle to explain his unique apostolic ministry to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles. It has been my experience that many Christians have never stopped to consider just how odd Paul’s ministry would have seemed at the time. They’ve never stop to think, because we have largely removed the gospel from its narrative and historical context and unnecessarily flattened it to communicate its universal nature. Occasionally we need to recall that, even though “God so loved the world,” it is also true that “salvation is of the Jews”. Out of a world that had lost all knowledge of him, the Lord chose and called Abraham and from him created a people whom he made holy and in whose midst he lived. He gave this people his law and his presence and made them unique amongst the nations. Jesus was born a Jew. He was the Jewish Messiah. He fulfilled the Jewish law and the words of the Jewish prophets. He proclaimed good news about a coming kingdom and a coming judgement to Jews and for Jews. While gentiles were welcomed when they came to him, he made it clear that his ministry was to his own people. The evangelists lay the blame for Jesus’ death with Jews. Even in his death by crucifixion, Jesus foreshadows the means of execution that the unrepentant Jewish rebels would face when judgement came a generation later. Jesus literally took the death of his people on himself in that sense. It cannot be stressed enough that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, lived and died for the sake of the Jews and to bring their story to its climax.We can’t jump over this to get to John’s announcement that God so loved the world that he gave his Son, because when we do that, we short-circuit the story, we leave out most or all of the bits that show us how God, in Jesus, has been faithful to his promises made under the old covenant. And in that, we cast a veil over his glory. It was necessary for Jesus to fulfil the story of his own people, because only then would the Gentiles see the faithfulness of Israel’s God, be drawn to what they saw, give him glory, and in the process be incorporated into the new people of God by faith. In this, too, we see that the means by which the Gentiles are incorporated into the new Israel fulfils the message of Israel’s prophets and glorifies the Lord. While it is certainly true that a dehistoricised and flattened gospel has brought millions to the Lord Jesus, it is also true that communicating the gospel within its context communicates the faithfulness of God as the basis for our own faith with far greater depth and builds upon a firm foundation whereas so much that passes today for evangelism and Christian faith is merely subjective. Again, Christians today need to understand just how weird Paul’s ministry would have seemed in his day—even, at first, to the other apostles. Again, most believed that the good news about the Jewish Messiah was for other Jews, and of little interest (or even relevance) to Gentiles. Jesus radically changed what it meant to be the people of God, but in many respects, it was not until St. Paul emerged from his wilderness sojourn that this dramatic change was really grasped by the fledgling Church.Of course, Israel’s ministry to the Gentiles was there all along. The Lord set Israel apart before the watching nations. She was to be his witness. Through her he would restore and reconcile humanity to himself. But as Paul points out in our Epistle, this “mystery” was largely lost on Israel—on previous generations. And yet there it was from the beginning, all the way back in Abraham’s day—if anyone was paying really close attention—that the Lord’s intent was to one day bring the Gentiles into his family and to make them fellow heirs with those who were children by birth rather than adoption. This truth had been revealed by the Spirit to the prophets of old and, in the same way, had been revealed to the apostles—who took some time to parse it out—and to Paul it was a personal commission: to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles. Paul adds here that this mission is not simply to ordinary people, nor is it a matter of personal piety. As Gentile believers come into their inheritance in the Messiah, the Church becomes both a witness and a challenge to the rulers of the Gentile world. This diverse body of Jews and Gentiles of every sort, living in unity the inheritance given them by Jesus, announces that he is Lord and that a new age is breaking in. Just as was the case with Israel, the lords of the earth can submit in faith to the lordship of Jesus or face the judgement to come.Now we turn over to today’s Gospel, Matthew 2:1-12, which dovetails with what Paul has written in the Epistle. Here’s the truth that Paul writes, manifest in the story of Jesus. Matthew writes: Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet: “‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’” Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way. While St. Luke recalls the events of the night Jesus was born and shows us the shepherds visiting one of their own, one who will follow in the footsteps of David as both king and shepherd, St. Matthew tells of Jesus’ birth in passing and puts all the emphasis on Jesus as King. Magi, astrologers from an eastern land, most likely Persia, have seen a heavenly sign that heralds the birth of a king in Israel. They desire to pay him homage and to give him gifts. This in itself would seem to indicate that even these foreigners understood that this was no ordinary king. There had been no star heralding Herod’s birth.Naturally, they look for the King of Israel in Jerusalem. Herod knows nothing of the birth of a king, but was politically astute enough to recognise the political nature of the magi’s claim and paranoid enough to take action. Matthew makes it clear that if Jesus is indeed the King, then Herod is not. Again, Matthew emphasises the kingship of Jesus in the report of the priests to Herod. Citing Micah 5:2—and it’s not clear if this is their paraphrase or Matthew’s—they point Herod to Bethlehem. And yet, in the paraphrase we see again an important bit of narrative-historical context that cannot be passed over too quickly. Micah speaks, not of a universal king per se, but of one who will be king over Israel. This king will shepherd the Lord’s flock—a bit from verse 4 that the priests add to their paraphrase of verse 2. The Messiah is the King of Israel. It is only once Micah has established that the Messiah will be King over Israel that he goes on to tell us that this King “shall be great to the ends of the earth” (5:4). Both the Magi and the priests highlight Jesus’ kingship specifically over Israel. Again, “salvation is of the Jews”. It is because Jesus is King of Israel, in fulfilment of the Lord’s promises through the prophets, that the good news about him goes out to the Gentiles. The magi are the first, who foreshadow the future. Matthew bookends his Gospel with Gentiles. Here the magi come at Jesus’ birth, Gentiles come to worship a very uniquely Jewish king and to give him glory. And at the end of the Gospel, Matthew records the commissioning of the disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations”. The good news is only good news to the Gentiles because it reveals that the God of Israel is unlike the gods of the nations: he does what he says he will do and he fulfils his promises to his own. Think to our study of Revelation and how the nations there, the nations that worshiped the beast and frolicked with the great prostitute, discovered in the downfall of the beast that the kings and gods of this world can’t hold a candle to the God of Israel revealed in Jesus, to his power and might, and most importantly, to his faithfulness. Specifically, he fulfils his promises to his people in Jesus. It is this faithfulness just as much as the amazing report of Jesus risen from the dead and the defeat of his enemies that draws the Gentiles to give glory to the God of Israel and to submit in faith to Jesus, the King of the Jews. Of course, this carries the same ramifications for Caesar and the other rulers and gods of this age as it did for Herod. This is what Paul stresses in the final verses of our Epistle. Their days are numbered, for as the royal summons to the King goes out, Jesus “shall be great to the ends of the earth”.Brothers and Sisters, the gospel about Jesus is good news, because it reveals the faithfulness of God. He does what he says he will do. He fulfils his promises. He does so like no other. And that’s reason for us to trust him, to give him our allegiance, to worship him and to give him glory. And to proclaim his good news to the world.I want to close with the Collect for today, because it offers a wonderful comparison between the magi and ourselves. They were drawn to Jesus by sight and we by faith, and so we look forward in hope to the day on which we, too, will see his majesty on full display. It’s the prayer of Gentiles who have seen the glory of the God of Israel revealed in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. It is a thanksgiving for what God has done in Jesus, creating a new Israel in which the Gentiles are fellow heirs, and it looks forward in hope to the day in which Jesus will set the cosmos to rights and be revealed in all his glory as both King and God. Let’s pray: O GOD, who by the leading of a star manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: mercifully grant that we, who know you now by faith, may at last behold your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Christmas Day: The King has ComeTitus 2:11-15 & St. Luke 2:1-14by William KlockThe Gospel this morning tells the familiar Christmas Story: Joseph and Mary, Bethlehem, an inn and a manger, angels and shepherds. And yet if St. Luke saw our creche, I wonder what he would make of it. And I wonder what he would make of the way we’ve come to tell the story and to preach it. A friend this week shared a sermon he’d heard. It was a whole sermon about the innkeeper. (I saw, myself, someone else I know preached a whole sermon last week on the innkeeper’s son.) I never meant to start an argument; I just casually commented that there is no innkeeper in Luke’s account (let alone an innkeeper’s son). It started a discussion about various—I’m not sure what to call them other than—Christmas urban legends. Fictional historical information about mangers or swaddling, shepherds and stables that somehow end up the focal point of sermons. I got piled on by a couple of women who accused me of not believing the Bible, despite none of this being in the Bible. Sometimes we really just need to get back to the text of Scripture. We need to ask what was important to Luke in telling this story? And then we need to focus our attention on that.So, first, the setting. Caesar Augustus had decreed a census. The lord of the world, the lord who had brought the Pax Romana, wanted to know just how many people he ruled—and to ensure they knew it was he who ruled them. This would have stuck in the craw of every devout Jew. They belonged to the Lord. They no more belonged to Caesar than they had once belonged to Pharaoh. And so they waited in hopeful expectation of a deliverer: a prophet like Elijah, who would call down fire from heaven on their enemies; a prophet like Moses, who would lead them into freedom; a king like David, who would crush their enemies. A king like David. That’s the first key to Luke’s story here. That Mary and Joseph were headed to Bethlehem, the city of David, on the orders of Caesar Augustus, that’s a hint to his readers of who Jesus is and what he’s eventually going to do.And so, off to Bethlehem. And our popular telling has Joseph and Mary arriving in Bethlehem at a First Century Holiday Inn with no vacancy. The innkeeper graciously—or perhaps ungraciously—points them to the barn. In solitude, except for the animals, Mary gives birth to a baby who—at least according to one of our most popular carols—does not cry and places him in a manger.Now, how much of that is actually in Luke’s story and how does it square with what he does tell us? Well, there was no inn—not in the sense we think of an inn. There’s a Greek word for such a place and Luke uses it elsewhere—the Good Samaritan takes his charge to that kind of inn. But here Luke uses a word that more commonly means a guest room. (It’s the same word translated “upper room”, where Jesus shared his last Passover with the disciples.) Travellers like Joseph and Mary stayed with relatives when going to their hometown. Because of the census many members of the extended family would have taken advantage of family hospitality and this house would have been bursting at the seams with cousins and aunts and uncles. Important members of the family—a grandfather and grandmother, maybe—would have been given the guest room. And so Mary and Joseph wound up spending the night in the lower part of the house where the animals were stabled at night. And they were certainly not alone. A proper nativity set should have a few dozen figurines representing all those extended family members. And all the women would have been gathered around Mary as she gave birth, because that’s what happened before hospitals and maternity wards. The feeding trough, while highlighting the humbleness of Jesus in his Incarnation, is only mentioned by Luke because it is the sign by which the shepherds will find the family. And those shepherds would have arrived at a house full of people and bursting with excitement over a newborn baby. The whole neighbourhood would have been abuzz with the news. If Joseph’s family was anything like Mary’s, that excitement would have been all the greater in light of the knowledge of who this baby was.And the shepherds. There couldn’t have been a more fitting group of men to come and worship the Messiah at his birth. Somehow we got the idea that the shepherds were social outcasts—maybe from later rabbinic literature—but when we read the Bible we see that shepherds have an overwhelmingly positive position in the Old Testament. The Patriarchs were noble shepherds. David himself was a shepherd before he was King. The Lord, particularly in the Psalms, is repeatedly addressed as the good and loving shepherd who watches over the flock of Israel. The prophets repeatedly speak of the Lord sending a shepherd to rescue Israel from her trouble. Through Ezekiel the Lord promised, “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God…And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd” (Ezekiel 34:15, 23). As St. John writes of Jesus as the word made flesh to announce that God has come to his people, Luke associates the newborn Jesus with the long tradition of faithful shepherds, of shepherd kings, and of the Lord as shepherd and it’s appropriate. Jesus is worshipped for the first time by his own, the Shepherd King worshipped by shepherds.Heavenly messengers appeared to the shepherds and sent them into town, not unlike young David summoned to his anointing. By all accounts Mary and Joseph knew who the baby was, but imagine their surprise when a group of shepherds comes to town looking for him. Again, I doubt the shepherds had any trouble finding him. People would have been talking about a newborn baby no matter who he was. But image Mary and Joseph’s surprise when they’re told, “Angels came to us in the field and told us that the Messiah has come!” The shepherds knew. Like everyone in Israel, they knew the messianic hopes of the nation and they could recognise in the angels’ announcement the messianic language of the prophets. So Luke highlights Jesus identity for us. Right at the moment when Caesar, the most powerful man in the world, was flexing his muscles and everyone in Israel was grudgingly on the move to obey, the real King was born. Everything, from the timing to the place to the message of the angels to the visit by the shepherds hails Jesus as the fulfilment of God’s promises to his people. Here is the King, born of David’s line, born in David’s city…even like David, associated with shepherds. And yet different at the same time. His humble birth to humble parents and a visit by humble shepherds just as mighty Caesar flexes his muscles. God’s kingdom is at hand, the kingdom that will displace Caesar’s kingdom, but here Luke reminds us: It’s not going to happen the way most people thought.And then we have to ask ourselves: What does it mean? What are we to do in light of the coming of this humble King? To answer that we have St. Paul’s words to Titus. I’ll read them again. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you. (Titus 2:11-15) Martin Luther is famously to have said, “Jesus is coming, plant a tree!”—or something roughly like that, at any rate. The point is that since God’s new creation has been inaugurated by Jesus, Christians ought to live their lives in light of the knowledge that we are already part of that new creation. St. Paul makes the same point in our Epistle.This is the Epistle appointed for the Epiphany in the Eastern churches. Verse 11 says that the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation and verse 13 speaks of our blessed hope, which is the appearing of our great God and Saviour Jesus the Messiah. In both cases the Greek word used is literally “epiphany”. Jesus’ first advent has brought salvation as Luke has told us in the Gospel. Now we wait in hopeful expectation of Jesus’ second advent when he will complete what he has inaugurated. Jesus, in other words, is King and has begun to set the world to rights already. The rider on the white horse, the gospel proceeding from his mouth like a sword, and with his church with him, he’s riding out into the world, the light charging into the darkness. And the good news is doing its work. The life of the Spirit is infiltrating the world through the lives and actions and proclamation of Jesus’ people. In the Church we catch a glimpse of what the world set to rights will one day look like. Paul contrasts the ungodliness and worldly lusts of the old age that is passing away and exhorts us to live as people who have a sure and certain hope of the age to come: live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives. It’s not always easy to do that, but Paul reminds us of the great cost at which we have been saved. The Messiah himself gave his own life to redeem us from lawlessness and to purify for himself a people zealous for good works. Brothers and Sisters, the greatest motivation to committing ourselves to the King and his Kingdom is to reflect on just what it cost him and on his great love for us revealed in his humiliation. For our sake and out of love, he humbled himself and took on our flesh and then he allowed that flesh to be nailed to the cross. New Creation has come and to live in light of that truth, to live in light of the love it reveals, to live in hope of its future consummation, that is to be a truly Christmas people.Let’s pray: O God, you make us glad by the yearly remembrance of the birth of your only Son Jesus Christ: Grant that we, who joyfully receive him as our Redeemer, may with sure confidence behold him when he comes to be our Judge; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Christmas Eve: The Glory of GodHebrew 1:1-12by William KlockIn our Gospel St. John writes those familiar words about the light who came into the darkness. There’s something about Advent, with the days growing shorter and the nights growing longer, the sombre tone—and yet the anticipation of coming joy—Advent reminds us of the darkness the world was in, humanity in bondage to sin and to death, evil powers in control of everything, but Advent has also reminded us of the promises of God. He will not leave this world broken and in darkness forever. And then those words:The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. (John 1:9) Now we respond, singing, “Joy to the world, the Lord is come.” But as the Advent lessons have shown us, most of the people in Israel knew nothing of that joy. Jesus was not the Messiah they were expecting. They wanted a warrior like David, but he rode into Jerusalem on a humble donkey. They wanted someone who would make Israel great again, but instead he walked into the temple, the very centre of Jewish identity, and disrupted the sacrifices, announcing its days were numbered. They wanted a king who would crush the Romans and put Israel at the top of the heap, but Jesus instead allowed himself to be crucified. As John writes in the next verses:He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. (John 1:10-11)Saul of Tarsus was one of those who did not receive him. Two days after Christmas the Church commemorates the martyrdom of St. Stephen. He preached the good news about Jesus and was stoned to death for it. Saul—or as we more commonly know him, St. Paul—stood by and held their coats. Paul hated Jesus and everything to do with him. He hated Jesus’ people and did his part to round them up and to make sure they were put on trial before the Jewish elders, the Sanhedrin. He was on his way to do just that, travelling to Damascus, when he met the risen Jesus. The light very literally burst into Paul’s world, knocked him off his horse, and left him temporarily blind. And as Jesus changed everything when he came into the world, he changed everything for Paul when he came into Paul’s world. Paul thought he had it all figured out. He was a rabbi and a scholar of the Hebrew Scriptures. But being confronted by the light, by Jesus, he was forced to admit the stories told about the resurrection were true. The Lord had raised him from death and overturned the verdict of the people that he was a false messiah. Jesus really was the Messiah everyone had been waiting for. And so Paul left Damascus and retreated into Arabia, he says in Galatians, for three years. He needed time to work this revelation through.Arabia, he writes. That didn’t mean then quite what it means today. But if we read between the lines a little, it’s not hard too hard to figure out that Arabia meant Mt. Sinai. Mt. Sinai was where it had all started, where Israel was born as God’s son, where the law was given, where the covenant was established. And just as Elijah had gone back to the beginning to sort through his calling and ministry, so did Paul. And from the beginning he worked through the history of Israel, he worked through the law, he worked through the promises of God in light of Jesus. And then he came back, ready to preach to his fellow Jews in Damascus and ready to travel to Jerusalem to meet the other apostles. And I say all this because our lesson from Hebrews makes me think of Paul, emerging from the desert, coming back from Sinai. The book of Hebrews is anonymous. We don’t really know who wrote it. But long-standing tradition attributes it to Paul. If he didn’t write it, he could have. But Hebrews, to me, looks very much like the sort of thing Paul would have written to his fellow Jews on his return from those years of thinking on the old covenant, on the torah, on the promises of the God of Israel now fulfilled in Jesus. It’s the sort of thing he would have written to those people St. John writes about in the Gospel: those people, Jesus’ people, who refused to receive him. Imagine Paul at Mt. Sinai, at the place where it all started, working through the story of Israel in light of the risen Jesus. And now he writes:Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.For to which of the angels did God ever say,“You are my Son, today I have begotten you”? Or again,“I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son”? (Hebrews 1:1-5)Long ago, in the wilderness, God created a people for himself—a people to carry his light into the darkness. And at many times and in many ways God spoke to them. But they refused to listen. Jesus told a parable about the owner of a vineyard who had to travel to a far country. He left the vineyard in the care of tenants, who claimed it for their own. He sent messenger after messenger to set them straight, but they only harassed, abused, and beat those messengers. They would not listen. So the man finally sent his own son. Surely they would listen to him. But this time they killed the messenger, the man’s beloved son. And yet, through that death, the vineyard owner reclaimed and renewed what was his in a way no one had ever expected. Certainly not Paul, not until he met that son, alive again on the road to Damascus.At Christmas we remember that Jesus came into the word in fulfilment of the message and the promise of all those prophets, rejected, harassed, and abused by God’s own people. Jesus, says our Epistle, is the radiance of God’s glory. As St. John writes, “We have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” He is the exact imprint. That’s the language of striking coins—the carefully carved imprint of the king stamped on precious metal. He is the word, who was there in the beginning, through whom all things were made. And now he’s come into the world to make all things new again—to fix what we’ve broken and corrupted. And he’s done it through his death. The owner of the vineyard knew when he sent his son to the wicked tenants that they would kill him, but he also knew that this was the way to reclaim his precious vineyard. On the cross, Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of his rebellious people, for the very people who refused and rejected him. Even for people like Paul, who viciously went after his followers. He died the death they deserved and was raised from death and seated on his throne at the right hand of God. The people declared him a false king, but God has enthroned him to rule over all and has received him as his own Son.Brothers and Sisters, Jesus is the one who fulfils the promises of God. He is the light who has come to drive away the darkness that lies over the world. Because of that he is the one—as our Advent wreath reminds us—who brings us hope for a world set to rights, he gives us peace with the God whom we have wronged, he restores our joy even as we walk through a broken and fallen world, and he is himself the great manifestation of the love of God. In him the vineyard owner has sent his own Son to set everything to rights—including us—even though he knew it would mean his death. Dear Friends, let go everything else, and trust in this one who humbled himself for our sake and, in doing so, has revealed the absolute faithfulness of God. No one and no thing is more worthy of our faith than this God who, to fulfil his promises, has humbled himself to take on our flesh, to die in our place, and has given us a promise of joy and peace in the age to come.Let’s pray: Almighty God, you have given your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born of a pure virgin: Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with you and the same Spirit be honour and glory, now and for ever. Amen.
The Fourth Sunday in Advent:The Voice Crying in the WildernessPhilippians 4:4-7 & St. John 1:19-28by William KlockThe days have been getting shorter and shorter. I walk home from the church in the dark most days. Just before the snow fell I rode my bike up the Mountain on the logging roads to Lost Lake and found myself riding back down in the dark, which came more quickly than I anticipated. I was glad I took my headlight with me. The short days can be very dreary. It occurs to me that this is why Christmas lights are so popular, bringing some light and cheer into the darkness. Whether people realise it or not, in Jesus the light has come into the darkness and even people who wouldn’t know the gospel from a hole in the ground live in that light. Jesus has changed everything—even for people who think Christmas is just about Santa and Rudolph and Frosty. The light has come into the world and the world has not overcome it.But think about Israel in the time of the Gospels. In the time of Mary and Joseph, of Elizabeth and Zechariah, of John the Baptist and of Jesus, of Herod. The world was dark…oh so dark. The nation was enslaved to false gods and to wicked kings who, themselves, claimed divinity. St. Paul writes of demonic forces that enslaved the nations—forces broken and defeated by the gospel—but that victory was decades away. The world was dark. Even little Israel, called to be the light of the world, lay in spiritual darkness. The candlestick in the temple was kept lit, but the cloud of glory that had once filled the holy of holies, the very presence of God, had been absent for five-hundred years. God’s people were ruled by pagans and pretenders. And apart from a faithful remnant, the nation had been consumed by the darkness, a holy people in little other than their calling. But the people knew the words of the prophets, the promises of their God. It would not be this way forever. That’s the setting for today’s Gospel, which begins at John 1:19. Here’s what John writes:And this is the testimony of John [this is John the Baptist, not John the Evangelist who writes these words], when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.” (John 1:19-28)The Pharisees sent Levitical and priestly inquirers to interrogate John, to find out who he was—or who he thought he was. If someone showed up with a message from God, the Pharisees were sure to show up and to ask questions to see if it was legit. The Jews really were expecting someone. John anticipates this in his answers. They ask who he thinks he is and the first thing he says is, “I am not the Christ.” “Christ” is the Greek word for Messiah. “I am not the Messiah.” That’s the one everyone was really anxious to see. The Messiah would lift the darkness. The Messiah would fix everything that was wrong with the world. The Messiah would deliver his people and reign as David once had. There had been others in recent memory who had claimed to be the Messiah and things hadn’t gone well for them. I expect the Pharisees expected the same was true of John, but hey, you never know. Eventually the real Messiah really would come, so they might as well ask some questions.“Well, then,” they ask, “who are you?” John first denies that he’s Elijah and then he denies that he’s “the prophet”. What’s that about. Well, first, Malachi had prophesied that Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet—after Moses, that is—would return one day. This is what he wrote:Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. (Malachi 4:5)We have a pretty good sense, based on the literature of the time, that a lot of people interpreted this to mean that Elijah himself would literally return in the flesh. Sort of like a King Arthur to return to rescue Britain at its darkest hour. Some people connected this Elijah Redivivus with the coming of the Messiah. Considering that Elijah, rather than dying like everyone else, was swept up by a fiery chariot into heaven, it’s not surprising that people would take Malachi this way. I suspect this sort of literal fulfilment of the prophecy is why John denied that he was Elijah. In contrast, in last week’s Gospel, we saw Jesus affirm that John was indeed the one to come in fulfilment of Malachi’s prophecy. Maybe John was just exceedingly humble, maybe it never occurred to him that he was, indeed, fulfilling Malachi’s prophecy, but it may have been that he knew he wasn’t literally Elijah returned as many expected.He denies, too, that he’s “the prophet”. This is a reference to a passage in Deuteronomy 18 in which the Lord promises that he will one day raise up a prophet like Moses, who will declare the Lord’s own words. Like the Elijah who was to come, many associated the prophet with the Messiah. “Nope,” John says, “that’s not me either.” But here’s the point. Even if they were wrong about who the Messiah would be and when and how he would come, the Jews were living in hopeful expectation of the Messiah. They were in their own Advent. The days were dark. They were supposed to be the people who lived with the Lord in their midst, but his presence had been gone for five hundred years. They’d returned from exile, but without the Lord’s presence and with foreign pagans ruling over them, they might as well have still been in exile. They longed for the light to dawn in the darkness and they trusted it would happen, because they knew their story. They knew that the Lord is faithful to fulfil his promises. They belonged to him. Just as he’d once rescued them from Pharaoh, he would rescue them from Caesar.John was sure of all this, too. He may have denied that he was the one prophesied to come like Elijah or Moses—and it’s worth noting that in Matthew and Mark, Jesus actually did affirm that John had come in fulfilment of the Elijah prophecy—but John knew the story, too, and he knew his place in it. When the Pharisees finally let John speak for himself, he told them: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’” He quotes straight from Isaiah 40:3. I think this gets at the reason John answered “No” to the questions about Elijah and the Prophet, but given the chance to identify himself, he looks back to this prophecy of Isaiah. This passage from Isaiah is just as Messianic, but John saw the heart of his role and his ministry here. And while there were people who confused the one coming like Elijah or Moses with the Messiah, this voice crying in the wilderness is clearly the Messiah’s forerunner—or at least that’s how John saw it. He was not the Messiah. He was the one sent ahead to prepare Israel to receive the Messiah.And then the question they pose about baptism gives him a chance to expand on this. Baptism was an act of cleansing that fit well with what the Messiah might be and do when he came. But John has just denied that he is the Messiah. “So,” the Pharisees wonder, “why is John baptising people if he’s not the Messiah?” Look at 25-27:They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.”Again, baptism did have place in Jewish life. Think back to our study of Exodus and the passages about purity and cleansing—washing with water, and all that. Baptism was a symbol of cleansing, of ritual purity. At this point the other gospel-writers are helpful as they expand on John’s answer. Mark tells us that his was a baptism of repentance—it was a preparatory act in light of the coming judgement the Messiah would bring. And Matthew and Luke also report John continuing about this one who will come, this one greater than John: “He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Matthew 3:11, Luke 3:16). In other words, John is calling Israel to repentance in anticipation of the Messiah, who will fulfil the Lord’s promises to set Israel to rights by filling his people with his own Spirit. The law written on stone tablets would finally be inscribed on the hearts of God’s people that they might fulfil his law of love. But the Messiah was also coming in judgement. He would baptise the repentant with God’s own Spirit, but he would baptise unrepentant Israel with fire.These are the two sides of the gospel coin: Jesus’ advent brought mercy to the repentant, but it also brought judgement on the unrepentant within Israel. What’s significant for us here, Brothers and Sisters, is that this exchange between John and the Pharisees reminds us of the Messiah’s place in Israel’s story and of the faithfulness of God to his promises. It is this manifestation of the Lord’s faithfulness (and of his goodness, mercy, grace, and wisdom) to Israel—something we see brought to its climax in the coming, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus, that has drawn us to the God of Israel and that, by faith, has incorporated us into the people of God. Through our incorporation into this people, through our being made adopted sons and daughters of Abraham, we’ve come to know God’s mercy and the life of the Spirit, too. Because of the faithfulness of God, revealed in Jesus and in power of the gospel, the darkness that Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, John the Baptist and Jesus knew, that deep, deep darkness full of false gods and wicked kings and demonic power is but a shadow of its former self. The light has come into the darkness, his gospel has thrown those powers down and lit up the world. And you and I live in the glory of that light. And this is where our Epistle today takes off. There are practical implications of our being incorporated into the story of the people of God.Paul writes those wonderful and challenging words in Philippians 4:4:Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.What specifically prompted Paul to write this? Well, just two verses earlier, Paul exhorted two women, Euodia and Syntyche, to agree with each other. They had once been fellow labourers with Paul, but had apparently had some kind of dispute or falling out. In response, he calls the Philippian Christian to rejoice in the Lord. Instead of a public display of disunity or resentment or anger—whatever it was that was going on between these two women, the Church was to put joy on display, to celebrate the life of God. They were people of the light, but they were living in the dark. It was imperative that they come back into the light. Paul then writes:Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. (Philippians 4:5a)The King James says, “Let your moderation be known unto all men.” “Moderation” or “reasonableness” aren’t really very helpful translations. Paul uses the same word in 2 Corinthians 10 to describe the meekness of Jesus as a model for Christians. What Paul’s getting at there is that Jesus is the King. The gospel reveals and proclaims him in all his divine majesty. And yet it also reveals his gentleness. And it’s not just gentleness. It’s the sort of gentleness that only the one who is truly the Lord of the cosmos can show. This is the gentleness we see revealed as Jesus, the one to whom heaven and earth belong, humbles himself to be born one of us, to die on the cross, and to show mercy to his enemies. This kind of meekness or gentleness is unique to Jesus, and yet Paul stresses that as his people, as stewards of the gospel, we’re called to witness this same gentleness ourselves. As it should be the resolution to so many disputes in the Church, it was the resolution to whatever had driven Euodia and Syntyche apart.Brothers and Sisters, when we demand our rights, when we grasp for power, when we nurse grudges, we undermine our witness to the world—we exhibit the very darkness from which we’ve been delivered by the one who is light. In contrast Paul calls us to rejoice in the Lord and to manifest Christlike gentleness in our relationships. Remember, as people whom God has graciously and mercifully restored to himself, we ought to witness that in our own joyful unity in Jesus. Consider that every time we hold a grudge, allow a relationship to break down, or follow the world’s advice to cut those problem or negative people out of our lives, we undermine the Church’s witness to the world. But that’s not all. Paul goes on:The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.There’s that Advent theme again: Jesus has given us a job to do. He’s given us treasure to steward in his absence. In the meantime, rather than being anxious, we should take our needs to God. Jesus made the same point in the Sermon on the Mount. The pagans worry about what they’ll eat, what they’ll wear, and where they’ll sleep. God’s people should know better than to worry unduly about these things. God will provide just as he always has. He is faithful to his promises and the story of his dealings with Israel is the proof. So go to the Lord with your needs and ask. And while you’re at it, give thanks, because you know his faithfulness and his love.This is part of the witness of the people of God—it’s how we are light in the darkness—and it ties back into rejoicing. When Paul talks about rejoicing, at least part of what he’s got in mind is a public display or a public witness. The pagan Greeks in Philippi regularly held public celebrations to honour their gods. In the decades before Paul wrote, new rites to honour and to celebrate—to rejoice in—Caesar had been introduced and embraced by the people. And yet the pagans, as Jesus said, were always anxious. Why? Because their gods never delivered. Pagan religion was a non-stop game of trial and error, trying to guess what the gods wanted, trying to guess what you may have done wrong to offend them, and then guessing at what you might offer to appease their anger or to ingratiate them to you in order to get what you needed or wanted. The pagan gods were silent and they were notoriously capricious and unreliable. And in this context Paul exhorts the Philippian Christians: Rejoice yourselves. Let the pagans see you celebrating the fact that the Creator of the universe has, through Jesus, made you his own and lives in your midst by his own Holy Spirit. Let the pagans, who know only mean and capricious gods and who live in a dog-eat-dog world, let them see the gentleness of God in you. Live in such a way that they see in you the God who humbles himself to die for the sake of his enemies. And let the pagans see you living in faith, praying in confident thankfulness to the God whose story reveals an unfailing pattern of promise and fulfilment. Shine the light of Jesus into the darkness of the world. And the result of all this? Look at verse 7:And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.I think we tend to look at Paul’s exhortation here as something we should do in order to experience the peace of God ourselves, but given the context in Philippians, I think Paul’s point is actually more about our witness. If we truly live as stewards of the good news about Jesus, if we truly live as people who know the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus and particularly in his death and resurrection, the peace of God—rather than the strife and anxiety of the world—will guard our hearts and minds in a way that will astound the pagans around us.I said last Sunday that we are called both to proclaim and to live the gospel. This is that living it, right here. And coupled with our proclamation, to truly live in light of Jesus and what he reveals about God, should cause the world to stand up and take note. It will result in many giving glory to God for his faithfulness and then coming to him in faith as we have. And it will threaten many who are invested in the pagan and fallen systems of the world. Like John the Baptist, we are a voice in the wilderness. The difference is that Jesus has now been enthroned as Lord.But we need to ask: Does the world see our joy? Are we the voice crying in the wilderness? Are we the royal heralds the Lord has called us to be, summoning the word to let go of its false gods and to come to the Lord Jesus? Two years ago the government barred us from meeting as it tried to slow the spread of COVID. A lot of people were shouting about persecution. Brothers and Sisters, I really think we were dealing with something worse than persecution. Here’s what I mean. Persecution happens when people fear the Church and fear our witness. Last week I mentioned Rod Dreher’s new book, Live Not by Lies. In that book he talks about his conversations with people who lived under Communism in Eastern Europe. The Soviets clamped down on Christians because they understood that the gospel, that the message that Jesus is Lord was a threat to their atheistic philosophy. And it wasn’t theoretical. It was often Christians who took a stand against the Communists and they did so in light of the gospel. And they were persecuted horribly for their stand for Jesus.Brothers and Sisters, that’s not what we saw here. When the health threat passed, the orders banning public gatherings were lifted. You can agree or disagree with the wisdom or rightness of those health orders, but it wasn’t persecution. It was something worse. It was indifference to the Church. The government isn’t afraid of us or our message. It’s not afraid we’ll undermine its often godless and immoral dictates and agendas. They aren’t hostile to us. They’re simply indifferent. As far as the Health Minister or Provincial Health Officer were concerned, churches (and synagogues, mosques, temples, and gurdwaras) are just hobbies and social clubs and if that’s all we are, well, we can suspend our gatherings or take them online. Leaders in previous generations, in the midst of national crises, called the Church to prayer. They understood the value of God’s people gathered together to pray for the community, the nation, and the world. But not anymore. I’m not aware of any time when our Prime Minister, Premier, or Provincial Health Officer ever asked Christians (or anyone else, for that matter) to pray for the province or the nation. It didn’t occur to them that prayer is important or makes a difference—or, for that matter, that God is in control. And we really have ourselves to blame. Why? Because we have not been the witnesses God calls us to be. We have been mealy-mouthed and, quite often, just plain silent in our proclamation and because we have been half-hearted and unfaithful in our gospel living. Like old Israel, we pray to God, but we’ve failed to tear down the old altars to Mammon and Aphrodite and Caesar. We name Jesus, but we deal dishonestly in business, we sell our souls to the commercialism that surrounds us, we look to politics or to science as our saviours, and we dabble in the sexual immorality of the age. We’ve failed to proclaim the gospel and we justify it, saying that we’ll preach it with our lives. But if we stop to ask what the world sees in our lives, is it really very different? Does the world see us rejoicing in the Lord? Does the world see us manifesting the merciful gentleness of Jesus? Does the world see us living in faithful prayer and trusting in God, or does it see people just as anxious as everyone else? Does the world see the peace of God ruling our hearts and minds? Does the world see us, holding high the gospel, as a challenge to its gods and kings? It should. But sadly, I think that for the Church at large, the answer more often than not is “no”.And, all too often, when we do proclaim the gospel, we do so without power or authority. We hold the gospel out as good advice, rather than as the good news that it is. Friends, the gospel is the royal summons to submit in faith to Jesus, the world’s true Lord—the Lord who has come with mercy so that the repentant will escape when he comes one day in judgement. This was the power behind John the Baptist’ preaching. But all too often we present the gospel as just another option on the religious smorgasbord—something you might want to try. See if you like it. See if it works for you. If not…oh well. Brothers and Sisters, that’s not the gospel. The gospel is good news to the people living in the midst of darkness: the king who will set the world to rights has come. And that means the gospel, when preached as it should be, will challenge and upset the Herods and Caesars of our age and all those invested in the false gods of the world.Brothers and Sisters, the Church today has so failed at being stewards of the gospel that we’re provoking neither response: neither hostility and persecution on the one hand, or a harvest of new believers attracted to our faithful preaching and living. The Advent message is to be prepared. Jesus has given us a gospel mission to take the good news of his death, his resurrection, and his lordship into the world. Brothers and Sisters, pray that we will be faithful to our mission—faithful enough to provoke persecution, because that’s the kind of faithfulness that also reaps a harvest people for the kingdom. Pray for the holy boldness of John the Baptist. Pray that we will be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Pray that the joy of the Lord will overcome us. Brothers and Sisters, Rejoice! Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice.Let’s pray: O Lord, come among us, we pray, with your power and strengthen us with your great might; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness we are grievously hindered in running the race that is set before us, your bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, to whom with you and the Holy Spirit, be honour and glory, now and for ever. Amen.
The Third Sunday in Advent: Faithful Stewards1 Corinthians 4:1-5 & St. Matthew 11:2-10by William KlockShort of pulling vegetables out of the ground or carving up an animal, bread is one of the simplest of all the foods humans eat. At its most basic, it’s simple and easy to make. You mix flour and water and put it in an oven. It can get more complicated. You can add leavening and other things. But there’s a reason why nearly every human culture has not only developed some kind of bread, but also eats it as a staple. I’m not a baker, but even I can make bread—at least the simple kind and with the help of a bread machine. Just follow the simple instructions. But from time to time I’ve failed at the task. There was the time I was in too much of a hurry to follow the bread machine instructions to use room temperature milk and eggs. The mixture was too cold and the yeast didn’t rise. Or there was the time I decided to get fancy—to bake something beyond my abilities, a Gugelhupf cake for extra credit in my German class. I don’t know where I went wrong, but trying to get fancy ended up with a brick coming out of the oven. I say all of this because the Bible talks quite a lot about bread. Jesus said of himself that he is the bread of life. And the Church’s ministry is a lot like bread in the same way. We minister the good news to the world. We share the bread of life. Our message and our calling are simple. Just do what Jesus told us to do. Proclaim the simple message. But we often get it wrong. We try to get fancy, thinking we can improve on it. Or we look at some part of it and think, “Oh…they won’t like that,” so we leave it out, as if we know better than Jesus. The end result—like my failed cake or loaf of bread—doesn’t do anyone any good.This is where our lessons today point us. If the over-arching theme of advent is to be prepared, we’re reminded today, we’re exhorted today to be faithful in doing what the Lord has called us to do. To follow the simple instructions. God’s people have always had a very specific calling, whether we’re talking about his people in the Old Testament or his people in the New. Jesus has established his church to carry on what has always been Israel’s mission, ever since Abraham, but now to carry it out in light of Jesus the Messiah. To be light in the darkness. To reveal and to proclaim the glory of God and to draw the world to him. To make the good news of Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord known. Now, there’s a lot of room for creativity in how we fulfil our mission, but Jesus also gave us very, very clear instructions and if we throw out the core of our mission in the name of creativity or flexibility or pragmatism, we’re going to fail.Our men’s breakfast group has just begun reading Rod Dreher’s book Live Not by Lies. The last few years, Dreher has been writing about what the Church, particularly in North America, needs to be doing as we enter a new dark age. His concern is that Christians are woefully unprepared to live as a minority community, let alone to live in an environment that is becoming increasingly hostile to us. For the last couple of generations we’ve been failing to instil lasting faith in our children and have lost them to the culture. In the last decade, our people, our leaders, and our churches have been falling like dominos to Postmodern apostasy. And there’s a reason for this. We’re trying to bake bread our way, instead of following the recipe God gave us. We’ve sidelined what Jesus told us to do and have put other things at the centre of what we are. We’ve changed and watered down the message. We’ve muddled the truth to the point that many Christians can no longer distinguish between God’s truth and the world’s lies. And, all too often, we’ve stopped trusting in the Holy Spirit to do the work of converting hearts and minds and have been trying to do it ourselves.Our lessons today focus our attention on the faithfulness of God’s ministers. The Epistle focuses on St. Paul and the Gospel on John the Baptist. The choice of lessons is linked to the Ember Days that fall later this week. The Embers Days come around four times a year and, at least historically, were the traditional times for ordinations. With that in mind, our advent lessons today call the clergy to faithfulness to our mission and remind the Church of the importance of faithful ministers. But even though today’s focus is on what we might call “professional” ministers, there’s a broader application for all of us, because every Christian is a steward and minister of the gospel.Let’s begin with our Epistle, 1 Corinthians 11:1-5. And we’ll want a little background to understand it. The Church at Corinth had a lot of problems and a big part of it was that many were having trouble setting aside their old, pagan ways. They had compromised much. There were some serious sins in the church that needed to be dealt with, but weren’t. People were justifying them by appealing to Christian liberty. There were also divisions within the congregation. Paul had founded this church, but the people didn’t want to listen to him anymore. They’d become enamoured of other preachers. There’s nothing to indicate these other preachers were preaching anything apart from the gospel. The problem in Corinth wasn’t their fault. The problem was that Paul was about the least flashy person you could imagine and when other preachers came along who were more attractive and who were better speakers than Paul—that was something the Greeks valued very highly—they kicked Paul to the curb. Not only would they not listen to him, he wasn’t even welcome anymore. They judged him a loser. That’s what’s behind our Epistle today. Let’s read:This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful. But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God. I’ve always wondered how hard it was for Paul to write this, especially the bit about “This is how you need to regard me: I’m a servant of Christ and a steward of God’s mysteries.” Good clergymen tend to err on the side of humility, even to a fault. The only guys I’ve ever known to say things like this have been egotists who never should have been in ministry in the first place. But Paul had one advantage that only the apostles had and that was that they had known Jesus in the flesh and had been commissioned by him personally. I can’t say that and neither can anyone else alive today. That said, there is a place for God’s stewards to assert their calling in the face of unjust judgement. Most of us, when faced with unjust criticism nod humbly, say nothing, and take it to God, but Paul reminds us that there is a time to speak up against these kinds of judgements. I think that goes for every Christian, too. We’re all ministers of the gospel, but we live in an age that is becoming increasingly hostile to the gospel and to gospel people. Sometimes there’s some legitimacy to the criticism and hostility. Sometimes Christians and sometimes churches have failed and done awful things. But those are the outliers. Most of the criticism we face is simply the result of people who hate Jesus and the message of the cross and anyone who proclaims it. As Dreher points out, most of us are not prepared for this. Here we are, ministers of the gospel and stewards of the mysteries of God and increasingly we’re just letting the false judgements and accusations of pagans back us out of the room. We go silently and sit facing the corner like disciplined children—and I think a lot of the time we actually feel guilty when we hear these accusations, even though we know better.Brothers and Sisters, Paul stresses that ministers are to be found faithful. That goes for apostles and for pastors and for all of us. Yes, we need to weigh criticism. We need to ask if there’s anything to it. Sometimes there may be. Maybe we’re not being faithful to Jesus’ instructions and we need to hear it. But Jesus’ instructions aren’t hard to understand or discern. As a minister, I’m called to preach the word, especially the gospel about Jesus, and to administer the sacraments. It’s not quite that simple, but that is the core. And for all of us, we’re called to proclaim the gospel about Jesus to the world around us and to live in a way that accords with being the people of God. We proclaim Jesus and we live the life of the Spirit.We need to reflect on our lives in light of that and ask if we’re being faithful. This is one of the reasons we need to steep ourselves in God’s word. If we don’t know what God expects, how will we be faithful? Think again of the bread recipe. Are we following it? Sometimes we’re not. It’s not that we’re not well-intentioned. We want to see things happen, but sometime we get impatient. We take shortcuts. Or we think we can make better bread by changing the recipe. People out there don’t like to hear about sin, so we’ll tone that part of our preaching down. People out there don’t like commitment, so we’ll make church commitment-free. People out there don’t like liturgy and sermons, so we’ll have a rock concert and preach pop-psychology instead. People don’t feel like getting up on Sunday mornings and driving to church, so we’ll broadcast it to their TVs and computers instead. We’re not confident in the power of the gospel and the Spirit to change hearts and to bring them to Jesus, so we instead build churches around programmes and activities that people do want or we use manipulative techniques to get them to believe. We make the gospel about them and not so much about Jesus and the glory of God. These things can bring short-term gains, but in the long-term they’ve been a disaster. We wonder why people won’t commit, why they’re still worldly, why we’re losing our children, and why we’re seen as increasingly irrelevant. It’s like we’ve tried to bake bread by replacing the flour with glitter. The end product might look exciting, but in the end it’s not only unable to nourish, it’s slowly poisoning us. In contrast, the real work of the gospel is rarely flashy. Sometimes it brings persecution and even martyrdom. It means relying on God, not ourselves. And it means being in it for the long-haul. Consider Israel. God called Abraham and it was two thousand years before Israel’s story culminated with Jesus. And the in-between was as full of hardship, slavery, judgement, and exile as it was prosperity and growth. And that was God working with a single, small people. Brothers and Sisters, our mission is the world.So be faithful to the gospel, build churches around word and sacrament, pray and fellowship together, raise covenant children who know Jesus. Proclaim the good news and call your friends and family and neighbours to take up their crosses daily and to follow Jesus. And let them see you do it—when it’s a joy to follow Jesus and when you struggle to bear that cross. And as we do that, remember that the judgement that matters is not the judgement of other people or the world, but of God. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have an ear to the ground. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to the world’s judgements. Sometimes we need to know how the world sees us—even if it’s false—so that we can better know what we’re up against. So that we can better respond with the gospel. And, sometimes, the world’s rebukes may have some truth to them. Jesus promised that his people would be persecuted for his sake, but we need to make sure that we’re actually being persecuted for his sake and for our faithfulness to his word. I know some Christians who claim they’re being persecuted, but when you get down to it, it’s just that people don’t like them because they’re jerks, not because they’re preaching Jesus. People will still hate us for preaching Jesus, but Friends, we do need to be sure that as we preach Jesus and as we stand firmly on the Scriptures that the world rejects, we are squeaky clean. There’s a balance. We need to live the gospel as much as we preach the gospel. We’re to announce God’s judgement on sin, yes, but we’re also to announce God’s mercy to repentant sinners.This was John the Baptist’s struggle. Let’s turn over to today’s Gospel in Matthew 11. John has gone from announcing the coming kingdom and baptising people in the Jordan to being locked up in prison. He got there by way of criticizing Herod. It wasn’t just some off-the-wall criticism. Tied up with his announcement of the kingdom was John’s denouncement of Herod for marrying his former sister-in-law. Herod couldn’t help but draw a connection between John’s fiery preaching and himself. If John was saying that the King was soon to come, it meant John was saying that Herod wasn’t really the king. So poor John is now in Herod’s dungeon and he’s frustrated and confused. He’d been faithful in his divine calling to herald the coming Messiah—his cousin, Jesus—and he’s landed in prison. No big surprise there. He wasn’t the first prophet to offend a king and end up in prison. But Jesus—the Messiah—was on the outside, preaching, teaching, healing, forgiving, having dinner with tax collectors and sinners, and leaving John to rot. Something was wrong with Jesus’ priorities, or so John was beginning to think. We’ll pick up from there:Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (St. Matthew 11:2-10)I don’t think John was really doubting whether Jesus was the Messiah. I think this was his way of saying, “Um…Jesus. Shouldn’t the Messiah be getting his faithful herald out prison?” Of course, that also meant all the other things to go along with it. A simple jailbreak wouldn’t do. The jailbreak would have to be part of a wholesale overthrow of Herod and the Romans—which, of course, is what most people expected the Messiah to do. Here’s what Jesus says to John’s men in return: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” (Matthew 11:5-6)You see, John expected the Messiah to be like Elijah, confronting the prophets of Baal and calling down fire from heaven. John wanted to see fire and brimstone. There’s a place for that. In a sense John wasn’t wrong. Jesus is the Judge and, you can be sure, he will judge the world and everyone in it. We studied Revelation this year and saw that there will be a time for fire and brimstone and judgement. I suspect that being a fire-and-brimstone sort of prophet—and that is what John was called to be so there’s nothing wrong with that—I suspect that being that kind of guy means that you get fixated on judgement. When your tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Anyway, Jesus’ sort of responds by saying something like, “You expected Elijah…and you’ve got Elijah…but before I come in judgement, there are a lot of people…people like the widow of Zeraphath…people who need to know God’s mercy.” As Jesus says in John’s Gospel: I came not to condemn, but to redeem. Brothers and Sisters, remember: Sinners already stand condemned. Judgement is coming. Announcing that judgement was John’s mission. But before the judgement comes, what Israel needed most was to know God’s mercy, to know his salvation. This is why Jesus’ road to the throne had to be by way of the cross.So Jesus corrects John. He sets him straight about the Messiah. But he then turns to the crowd and praises John:As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is he of whom it is written,“‘Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you.’ (Matthew 11:7-10)Even though Jesus’ mission was one of humility and of mercy, Jesus praises the faithfulness of John to his ministry as the fiery herald of judgement. Again, John was expecting the Messiah to come like Elijah, bringing confrontation and fire from heaven, but what Jesus says—albeit a little obliquely for reasons that get beyond our lesson today—what Jesus says here is that John is the prophet like Elijah. John is the fire-and-brimstone preacher. John is the herald announcing judgement and calling the people to repentance. Jesus quotes from Malachi 3 and confirms two things: John is truly the one sent to herald the Messiah and, two, that means that Jesus truly is the Messiah—the one whom Malachi said would come both to refine Israel and to make her offerings pleasing to the Lord and to judge the unrepentant.Now, in the short-term this was bad news for John. It was bad news for Jesus, too. Both the Messiah and his herald would be put to death. But death was not the end. As it turns out, it was by the death of Jesus that deliverance was bought and in his resurrection, he was vindicated and the unjust verdict on him overturned. In his resurrection and his ascension, Jesus was confirmed as the Messiah, as Lord. In that we see the faithfulness of God to his promises and knowing God’s faithfulness, we have hope. As St. Paul wrote to the Romans: “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall surely be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). This is one of those parts of the gospel that we often prefer to ignore or to leave out of our preaching, because it offends. We’ve sort of got the opposite problem John had. John was fixated on judgement and on fire from heaven. Like so many Jews, he wanted to see God vanquish Israel’s enemies and he nearly forgot about God’s mercy. Our problem is the opposite. We’ve become so afraid of preaching about sin and about judgement, that we can’t even preach mercy and grace anymore—because mercy isn’t mercy and grace isn’t grace if we’re not guilty of anything. And if we gut our preaching of mercy and grace, we can talk all day about the love of God, but there will be no depth to it. We will make the cross of Jesus pointless. Why? Because we can only begin to plumb the great depths of God’s love when we see that he gave his Son to die for our sake—for the sake of sinners who would otherwise stand condemned to destruction.That brings us back to the recipe for bread. Brothers and Sisters, bread is often kind of boring. But made properly, it nourishes. It keeps us alive. There’s a reason why Jesus used it as a metaphor for himself: I am the bread of life. There’s a reason why it’s a symbol over and over in the story of God’s people for his faithful care and sustenance. And it points to the way God works and the way his gospel and his word work in the world. It’s rarely flashy. And you have to be patient, because it takes time to rise and it takes time to bake. But like the Messiah, who humble himself to take on lowly human flesh, who humbled himself to be born of a lowly virgin, and who humbly went to death on a cross, the simple bread of the gospel, the good news that Jesus died, that he rose, and that he is Lord, brings life to the world. To preach it faithfully means to preach it whole and to preach it pure. Friends, be faithful stewards. Stick to the recipe. Preach the Lord Jesus, crucified and risen to give forgiveness and life to sinners. Build churches centred on the faithful preaching of God’s word and the administration of the sacraments, where, knowing God’s faithfulness, God’s people sing and pray together, where they raise covenant, gospel children, where we live as people who know the hope of God’s life in the age to come.Let’s pray: O Lord Jesus Christ, who at your first coming sent your messenger to prepare your way before you: grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready your way by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at your second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in your sight; who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Sunday Next Before Advent: The Faithfulness of God Jeremiah 23:5-8 & St. John 6:5-14 by William Klock
How much do you know about the Prophet Jeremiah? We read the books attributed to the prophets, but we don’t often enough take the time to look at who wrote them, and when and why? But we can’t understand the book unless we know these things. Jeremiah is often called “the Weeping Prophet”. His was a ministry of woe. The Lord called him to his office during the reign of King Josiah, in about 626 b.c., and his ministry continued for about forty years, up to the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the beginning of the Exile. And Jeremiah was not called to preach sunshine and rainbows. Other prophets (false prophets) of the time were condemned for preaching “Peace! Peace! When there was no peace.” Jeremiah was called to preach the Lord’s coming judgment on Judah in the midst of a long string of wicked kings and national apostasy.
Jeremiah, again, began his ministry during Josiah’s reign. In contrast to those who came before and after, Josiah was a good king. He introduced reforms and called the nation to repentance and to faith. He renovated the temple in Jerusalem and purged pagan worship from the nation. He had altars to Baal torn down and pagan priests executed. He even dug up the bones of pagan priests and burned them on their pagan altars as an act of desecration. He restored the regular observance of the Passover. And as much as the Lord, through Jeremiah, acknowledge the goodness of what Josiah had done, the corruption, the idolatry, the apostasy of the nation was deeply rooted and none of it would be enough. Even as the King was doing all these good things, the message of the Prophet was still one of looming judgement. Josiah’s reforms would not last. He died fighting the Egyptians and was followed by a fairly brief series of kings who did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. The same went largely for the people of Judah. Josiah desired reform, but his people did not share his desire. Jeremiah’s prophecy announced the Lord’s coming judgement, which would culminate in a final curse of exile from the promised land. Jeremiah rebuked the kings and people of Judah for their idolatry, for their pride, for their failure to keep the Sabbath, but above all, he rebuked Judah’s unjust social, political, and economic structures. Jerusalem, announced Jeremiah in 5:1-9, had become worse than Sodom. There wasn’t a just person to be found to give the Lord a reason to spare the city from judgement.
Our Old Testament lesson begins at Jeremiah 23:5, but we get a sense of the problem if we look at the first four verses of the chapter:
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people: “You have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds, declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:1-2)
The kings of Israel should have been faithful shepherds looking after the flock of Israel. Jeremiah calls to mind David, the shepherd-king. The king after God’s own heart, who, despite his great failures, still sought the Lord and his will for his people. In contrast, the leaders of Judah in Jeremiah’s day did the opposite. They abused the sheep and led them into idolatry. “Thus says the Lord,” prophesies Jeremiah ominously, “You have not attended to the sheep, so I will attend to you.” The failure of Judah’s kings would result in the scattering, the exile of the people. Israel was called to be the people who lived with the Lord in their midst, but to live in the Lord’s presence meant living according to his way and his law. Israel, from the king down, had failed. They were called to be a light to the nations, but instead, the nations mocked her saying, “Where is your God?” Judah would be judged. But it won’t end there. Look at verses 3-4:
Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord.
The Lord will restore the faithful remnant of the flock and will provide faithful shepherds to care for them. Specifically, Jeremiah goes on beginning at verse 5:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’ (Jeremiah 23:5-6)
The Lord will not leave his people without a just and righteous king forever. He will “raise up for David a righteous branch”. What does that mean? It’s the same imagery we recall at Christmas from Isaiah’s prophecy:
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. (Isaiah 11:1)
The line of David, the kings who had descended from him were like a tree. It had rotted and withered and the Lord was forced to cut it down, but from that stump, to all appearance was dead, the Lord would raise up a fresh, healthy, new shoot, a branch. He would not only be a faithful shepherd of the Lord’s flock, but like David, he would rule with wisdom, justice, and righteousness. In him the people of God would be saved. And the Lord sets this king in stark contrast with Zedekiah, the last, sorry king of Judah. The name Zedekiah means “the Lord is our righteousness”. Zedekiah made a mockery of his own name. Zedekiah was a puppet king setup by the Babylonians. He was an evil and faithless man. The Lord had called his people to trust in him and never to compromise. Zedekiah represented the utter failure of Judah and her kings to trust in the Lord. They trusted in horses, they trusted in chariots, they trusted in espionage and forbidden alliances with foreign nations, and, yes, they prayed to the Lord, but they hedged their bets with sacrifices to pagan gods. But this branch of David’s line whom the Lord promised to raise up, he would truly be what the kings of Israel were called to be. He would be the one who would exemplify that statement of faith, that proclamation that “the Lord is our righteousness”. He will deliver the people of God, he will restore them to the Lord’s presence, and he will set everything to rights. In fact, what this new king will do will be so dramatic, it will become the defining event in the life of the people of God. Look at verses 7-8:
“Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when they shall no longer say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but ‘As the Lord lives who brought up and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ Then they shall dwell in their own land.”
The coming king will deliver the Lord’s people. Where the old kings led them into judgement, in the coming king the faithful remnant will be vindicated and declared to be in the right. The coming king will gather the scattered people of God from the nations and restore them to his presence. And we see here that this is more than a homecoming. The deliverance and restoration brought by the coming king will redefine the people of God. Think about the significance of that. Whereas the exodus from Egypt had been, for the better part of a millennium the event that defined Israel, the event in which she was formed as a nation and gained her identity, in which she was declared to be God’s beloved, firstborn son, this new exodus will come to define this restored people in the same way. No longer will the people of God be defined by the exodus from Egypt. In future they will be defined by this new exodus by which the great shepherd-king will establish a new people gathered from the nations.
Brothers and Sisters, our Old Testament lesson today reminds us of Israel’s calling and Israel’s failure. And in the midst of Israel’s faithlessness, it reminds us of the Lord’s faithfulness. Nothing will stop his plan to set his fallen creation and fallen people to rights. When his people fail, he will send a king to set them right.
In the Old Testament we hear the promise. In the New we see the fulfilment. In today’s Gospel we read the familiar story of the feeding of the five thousand. Let’s read it again. John 6:5-14.
Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?” Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number. Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted. And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!”
The lectionary omits the first four verses of the chapter. Because of that we miss two important details. The first is the time and the second is the place. John tells us in verse 4 that “the Passover was at hand”. Remember what the Passover was all about. Passover was the annual festival in which the Jews recalled the events of the Exodus—those events that Jeremiah points to as defining the very identity of Israel as the people of God. In the Exodus the Lord had delivered them from their Egyptian slavery, he had defeated Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt, he had given them his law and the tabernacle and had taken up his dwelling in their midst, and he had led them through the wilderness. Each new generation of Jews, as they took part in the Passover meal, became participants in the events of the Exodus, in the establishing of the Lord’s covenant. This is one of three places in his Gospel, where John identifies events in the ministry of Jesus with the timing of the Passover. The other two are his cleansing of the temple and his death and resurrection. These are the events in which the Lord fulfilled his promise through Jeremiah of a new exodus and the formation of a new Israel, a new people.
The other important detail in those first verses is the place. This took place on the far side of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus has led the people into the wilderness and he’s taken up his seat on a mountain. Again, John stages the story using the imagery of the Exodus. We have a great crowd of people in the wilderness. They’re hungry for supper, but there’s no food to be had. The only thing missing is the grumbling, but these people were simply hungry to hear Jesus. This time it’s Jesus who realises the people’s need, apparently before they realise it themselves.
Jesus turns to Philip and asks what’s to be done to feed all these people. Now, Philip—a good Jew whom I’m sure knew his people’s story—should have recalled the manna in the wilderness, but he wasn’t thinking of Jesus on that level just yet. Andrew, on the other hand, shows a bit more faith. He’s met a young boy who happens to have brought a little lunch: a few fish and a little bread. It might as well be nothing in light of the size of the crowd. But I don’t think Andrew would have bothered telling Jesus about this boy if he hadn’t thought that Jesus could make use of it somehow. What could Jesus possibly do with so little? The situation seemed totally impossible, and yet the Lord had provided for his hungry people in the wilderness all those centuries before. Why not again? And so Andrew gives us a hopeful sign.
Brothers and Sisters, this is how the people of God are called to respond in hopeless situations, not like the faithless kings of Jeremiah’s day, who were disobedient and put their faith in horses, chariots, foreign kings, and pagan gods. As I read of Andrew bringing that little lunch of fish and bread to Jesus, surrounded by that huge crowd and as I’m thinking of our earlier lesson from Jeremiah about the wicked kings of Judah, I’m reminded of one of Judah’s faithful kings, Hezekiah.
Hezekiah found himself in another hopeless situation. The Assyrians had besieged Jerusalem. The messenger of the Assyrian king called up to Hezekiah’s men on the walls of the city that he would destroy them and that it would be because Hezekiah had purged Judah of its altars and shrines to the Assyrian gods. The Assyrian king sent a message to Hezekiah, warning him that the Lord would not be able to deliver him. Hezekiah no doubt had advisers who saw the situation as hopeless. Some would have advised him to surrender to the Assyrians and to bow before their gods. Others would have urged him to form an alliance with the Egyptians, which would have involved their gods as well. To many, it would have seemed that Hezekiah was out of options. He knew better. The King took the message from the Assyrian king and went to the temple. There he prayed. And the Lord sent Isaiah to Hezekiah with a message of reassurance: The king of Assyria will not enter Jerusalem. “I will defend this city to save it for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David” (Isaiah 19:34). And that very night an angel struck down 185,000 men in the camp of the Assyrians.
Andrew now, like Hezekiah taking Sennacherib’s letter to the temple and not knowing what to do, only that the Lord would do something, Andrew now brings the boy and his lunch to Jesus. The Lord will provide. Somehow. In some way. And Jesus does just that. He took the bread, gave thanks to God, and started breaking it into pieces and somehow there was still bread in his hands as the baskets began to fill. And the same with the fish. And everyone had their fill. Just like they did in the wilderness after they’d left Egypt. And yet there’s an element of the story here that points to this new exodus that’s taking shape being even greater than the first. In the first exodus, there was no manna left over. There was always enough to satisfy the needs of the people, but if you tried to gather extra and to keep it, it rotted away and produced worms. Jesus feeds these people in the wilderness and there are twelve basketfuls left over—presumably food the people took home with them to eat and to be reminded the next day of what the Lord had done.
Now, Hezekiah’s faith came to mind as I read about Andrew, but as Jesus divided up the bread and fish, what I think would have come to the minds of the people was a different Old Testament character. John, I think, tells the story to deliberately recall the prophet Elisha and, in particular, the events of 2 Kings 4. There was a famine in the land and Isaiah had a band of followers to provide for. A man brought them twenty loaves of bread and a sack of grain, but it wasn’t nearly enough to feed Elisha’s men. That didn’t concern Elisha. He gave the sack of bread to his servant and commanded him to give to the men so that they could eat. His servant balked at that. “How can I can set this before a hundred men?” he asked. Elisha commanded him again to take it to the men and said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’” And, somehow, the men ate their fill and, just as the Lord had promised, there were leftovers remaining (2 King 4:42-44).
Now, back to our Gospel: The people on that mountain with Jesus put the pieces together: Passover, wilderness, bread from heaven, baskets of leftover bread. And they declare that Jesus is “the prophet who is to come into the world.” Jeremiah’s new exodus is somehow underway, with Jesus at its head. Their acclamation is taken straight from the Lord’s promise to Moses in Deuteronomy 18: “I will raise up a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I commanded him” (Deuteronomy 18:18-19). The new exodus has begun. Jesus is the prophet who was promised, a prophet like Moses, a prophet like Elisha—and yet a prophet even greater. Verse 15 says:
Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.
“King” means “messiah”. Now, did the people really understand who and what the messiah was to be? No, not really. Almost no one fully understood that until after the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection. But that doesn’t mean the people that day, filled miraculously with bread and fish, didn’t recognise the messiah in Jesus. All the pieces were there. Here was the good shepherd who cared for the sheep when no one else would. Here was the prophet who would lead the people like Moses in the long-awaited exodus. If Jesus was those two things, then he also had to be the long-awaited branch that Jeremiah had prophesied would come from the root of David. Jesus saw the recognition dawn in their eyes and he withdrew. The time wasn’t right. This wasn’t how the Messiah was to come into his crown or to take his throne. Nevertheless, as we draw the lines that connect the promises of God in Jeremiah to their fulfilment in John’s Gospel, we should be overwhelmed by the faithfulness of God. He does what he promises.
Brothers and Sisters, the Lord invites us to his table this morning and here we again recall his faithfulness. Here, like the Jews participating in each new generation in the events of the Exodus and finding their place in the people of God, we find our manna in the wilderness, we recall and participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and are reminded that we are his people and that, just as was promised so long ago, he has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death. The sheep that were scattered, have been drawn together by the God of Israel. You and I have heard the story of God’s faithfulness. We have come to Israel’s king and submitted ourselves in faith. And now, here at his Table, we experience his faithfulness ourselves as we eat the bread and drink the wine. Here is our manna in the wilderness. Finally, having known the faithfulness of God, we’re summoned ourselves to walk in faith, trusting that the Lord will finish what he has begun, that he will do what he has promised.
In our Collect we asked the Lord to “stir up our wills”. We may have come to the end of another Church Year, but the story is hardly over. Advent is almost here and with it the reminder that Jesus is coming and that as we wait for him, he’s given his Church a mission and his own Spirit to ensure that mission is fulfilled. He has made us stewards of the good news that he is this world’s true Lord. We have our own parts to play in this story. And so we petition the Lord in faith, knowing that he is faithful to fulfil his promises. Whether it takes a hundred years or a hundred thousand years for the world to answer the king’s royal summons to faithful allegiance, he will be with us and he will equip us for every good work.
Let’s pray: Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people; that we may produce abundantly the fruit of good works, and receive your abundant reward, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Mark Nine: Biblical Discipleship by William Klock I grew up where white oaks grew everywhere, but here they’re relatively uncommon. The Comox Valley is right on the northern edge of their native growth zone. Apparently, in the latter half of the 19th Century the climate here was more ideal for them. Acorns that fell to good soil had a pretty good chance of becoming trees. Now the climate’s changed and getting those acorns to turn into trees is much more complicated. Every year—except this year!—the oaks around the church here drop their acorns and time and again I’ve tried to grow trees from them. I’ve never had any success. But trying to grow acorns into trees has a lot in common with the subject of discipleship and that’s the last mark of a healthy church to be covered. Brothers and Sisters, a healthy church will have a concern for discipleship, for its members to grow in the faith. But back to my attempts to grow oak trees. The first year I was here I gathered several handfuls of acorns on a Sunday morning. I left them on my desk, figuring I’d do something with them later. I was gone for a few days and came back to discover little worms crawling all over the place, building little cocoon-like webs around my lamp and between my books. I tossed them all in the garbage. The next year I did a little research—emphasis, I suppose, on little—and put the acorns I’d collected in damp potting soil in the refrigerator. I took them out in the spring only to find the potting soil full of little dead worms and rotten acorns. A few years later I researched how to collect acorns and how to sort out the good ones that the worms hadn’t got to yet. I put them in the refrigerator over the winter and in the spring I planted them in little plastic cups to sprout. And sprout they did. But they were outside, there was a late freeze, and they all died. I had better luck the next year. They sprouted in the little cups, then I transferred them into gallon pots. They grew for a while, then stopped. I did more research and found it was because the little cups and then the gallon pots had caused the roots to curl up into a ball. Oak trees need to start with a long, straight tap root. Instead of using small cups and then gallon pots, I should have planted them in 2’ lengths of PVC pipe and then transplanted them into the ground when the roots emerged from the bottom. I did transplant several, but none survived the winter. At that point I decided it was too complicated. But that was, I think, the most success I’d ever had with growing anything from seeds. Usually, I plant seeds at the wrong time of year, or I forget to water them, or I water them too much, or the rabbits come and nibble away the stalks when they emerge. It takes the right conditions for plants to grow. They need sunlight and water and oxygen. They need to be given the proper space to grow. They need the right temperature. And they need to be protected from the critters that eat them. But given those things, they grow, because that’s what God made them to do.
God’s people aren’t all that different. Listen to the first three verses of Psalm 1:
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
This was written in the context of the old covenant so we might change it a little bit here and there, but it’s basically true for the Christian. Plant yourself in God’s word—which is itself an act of faith and obedience—and steer clear of wickedness, sin, and the ungodly, and the Spirit will cause you to grow. God gives us means of grace: his word, his Spirit, his sacraments, his Church, and they are to us what sunlight and water are plants.
We’re like plants in other ways, too. Things that are alive grow. We were once dead, but God has grafted us into his Son, he’s filled us with his Spirit, and we grow. Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches.” Live vines grow, don’t they? So should Jesus’ people—and not just individually. Together we’re this vine called the Church. We grow together, rooted in Jesus, and supporting each other. St. Paul, in Romans 8, describes the growth that God gives his people as being “conformed to the image of his Son”. Or, as he writes in 1 Corinthians 3:18:
We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
God has made us alive and living things grow. And growth is essential. Think of our study of Revelation and Jesus’ repeated exhortations to his people there to persevere in faith and holiness in the face of persecution and even martyrdom. Brothers and Sisters, that kind of perseverance not only requires life, but it also requires growth. Think of a salmon. It spends its life in the ocean, growing and building strength so that it can return to the river where it was born, wage a vigorous battle upstream, fighting the current all the way, so that it can spawn and reproduce itself, creating the next generation. God’s people aren’t all that different. The salmon remind me of the well-known quote from Nikolaus von Zinzendorf: “Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.” We grow strong over time on God’s grace by word, by sacrament, by prayer, by fellowship and we persevere, fighting against the currents of the world. We raise our own children to do the same and we proclaim the good news about Jesus, we witness his kingdom, and by that the Spirit raises up the next generation to continue the battle. If we have produced a new generation of disciples, Brothers and Sisters, we have done well. But take away the means of grace, and we die before the mission is ever accomplished. Some years ago I went to an ecumenical clergy breakfast at the hospital. They had a morning prayer service led by some liberal Presbyterians. Another pastor said to me afterward, “What was that?” They prayed and they sang, but it all felt utterly dead and completely disconnected from God. The feeling was palpable to many of us there and it made sense. It was sad, but it made sense. These were folks who had given up on the authority of God’s word and, like dead salmon, were floating downstream—floating with the world’s currents, wherever they might lead.
And that highlights the importance of discipleship. Our growth as disciples, our growth into Christ’s likeness, our growth in the fruit of the Spirit and in holiness is essential—and a healthy church will have a healthy concern for it. Living things grow. Living things fight the current. Dead things don’t. And so Paul writes to the Ephesians:
Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:15-16)
If we will lean on God and immerse ourselves in the means of grace he has given, he will grow us. To quote Paul again, this time as he wrote to the Colossians: Jesus is “the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God” (Colossians 2:19).
Notice: Jesus is the head. We don’t cause the growth. The best preacher or the best Bible study leader in the world cannot grow Christians. Only God’s word and Spirit can do that. Paul again to the Corinthians, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthian 3:6-7). Even when Paul congratulates the Thessalonian Christians on their growth, he gives the thanks to God for it. Look at 2 Thessalonians 1:3:
We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing.
And knowing that it is God who grows his people, Paul prayed for them to grow. For the Thessalonians he prayed:
May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else….May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones. (1 Thessalonians 3:11-13)
He prays similarly for the Colossian Christians:
And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God. (Colossians 1:10)
Or let’s flip over to 2 Peter and hear what he has to say. Here’s 2 Peter 1:5-8:
For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And if we flip back to Peter’s first epistle, in 2:2-5, he writes this:
Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Brothers and Sisters, our growth in the Lord, our growth in faith, our growth in holiness ought to be a priority—for each of us individually, but also collectively as the Church. As the writer of Hebrews tells us, “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works” (Hebrews 10:24). Christian growth, discipleship, whatever we want to call it, will always be a priority for a healthy church.
Now, in case I haven’t been clear, Christian growth—and, again, by that I mean discipleship or Christian maturity—that is not the same thing as Church growth, by which I mean the numerical growth of the Church in general or of the local church. Our age has developed an obsession with the latter, and while we don’t usually outright ignore discipleship, we often inadvertently sacrifice it for the sake of church growth. We put the cart before the horse. And, sometimes as I’ve said before, we confuse the things that are our responsibility with the things that are God’s. Discipleship—the growth and maturing of God’s people—needs to come first. That doesn’t mean we sideline missions and evangelism until we’re all mature. It just means that we trust God to do his part while we do ours. When we prioritise evangelism and mission, we usually end up compromising the very things that are needed to grow God’s people—like tree-planters who want a huge forest and plant a ton of trees, but don’t properly prepare the soil, or neglect to water them. When we put evangelism or missions first, we often downplay things like expositional preaching, a biblical understanding of the gospel and of conversion, we downplay the need for commitment and discipline—because we want to see bigger numbers and these other things have a tendency to scare people away. If you plant oak trees, they will make more oak trees if you plant them and care for them properly in the first place. If you just poke a ton of acorns into the ground—at least around here—you’ll end up with very few full-grown trees capable of reproducing themselves. But that’s often how Christians do things these days. Friends, real Christians who truly know the love, the grace, the mercy of God revealed in Jesus will enthusiastically proclaim that good news and, with the help of the Spirit, make new Christians—but we’ll do it God’s way and trusting him to bring the fruit. It’s relatively easy to fill a church with people; it’s a lot more work to fill it with actual disciples, but that’s what we’ve got to do, because only true disciples will go out and make more disciples. This is why understanding these marks of a healthy church is important.
And all these other marks we’ve looked at over the last two months will grow disciples. To briefly recap:
A healthy church will have a commitment to expositional preaching, whether that’s preaching the lectionary or preaching through whole books or parts of books. The point is that such a church’s preaching will be rooted in God’s word. The preacher’s agenda will be God’s agenda. The words and ideas preached will not be the preacher’s, but God’s. There will always be parts of the Bible that Christians would rather avoid, but expositional preaching challenges the preacher and the church to hear those hard things, to wrestle with them, and to be obedient to them. Brothers and Sisters, my thoughts will not give you life. Only God’s word can do that. And that’s what we must preach.
An expositional ministry in the pulpit also establishes where our values lie. A people who value Bible-centred preaching is more likely to be a people who are themselves Bible-centred—who invest time in reading and study and praying the scriptures themselves and who gather together to read, and study, and pray them. And we do this knowing that God’s word give life. It’s the raw material the Spirit works with to grow us in faith, in obedience, and in holiness.
Preaching grounded in the Bible will give a church biblical theology. It will bring us closer to the God who has saved us, because it ever more reveals who he is. Biblical theology also reveals who we are and what God wants for us. Biblical theology tells us the story into which God has called us. Biblical theology causes us to grow in our love for God, our love for each other, it causes us to grow in holiness, and it gives us our mission—to proclaim the good news about Jesus and to make disciples.
Biblical preaching and biblical theology will lead us to a right and biblical understanding of the gospel—of the good news about Jesus, crucified, risen, and ascended. A biblical understanding of the gospel reminds us that human being stand before God as rebellious sinners condemned to death, but it also reveals God’s loving faithfulness at the cross, and as we look on the risen Messiah we are reminded that by faith, that God has redeemed us and made us his own sons and daughters. A biblical understanding of the gospel reveals the sinfulness of sin and the amazing graciousness of grace, it teaches our hearts and minds to love the one who sacrificed himself for our sake, and it drives us out those doors in to the world to proclaim what he has done.
A biblical understanding of the gospel, like these other things, lies at the root of discipleship. Getting the gospel wrong undermines everything else. If, for example, we confuse the gospel with messages of prosperity, we will never understand the meaning of sacrifice. We will never understand God’s discipline. When life is difficult or persecution comes to the Church, the prosperity gospel will turn out to be rocky soil and those planted in it will wither and die, while those who have put roots deep into the soil of the biblical gospel will thrive in the midst of trials. There are many false gospels. Many confuse good works for the gospel, many today are preaching self-love or self-esteem or self-actualisation as the gospel. None of those messages will save and none will make disciples of Jesus who will persevere hardship and make new disciples of Jesus who will carry on the mission Jesus has given us.
A biblical understanding of the gospel will ensure that we have a biblical understanding of conversion and as we understand conversion, we’ll understand that to be a Christian is to be transformed by God’s word and Spirit. It’s to understand that the change that takes place in our lives is the fruit of God’s grace at work in us. A biblical understand of conversion will make us a humble people, not proud of our works, but a people ever more reliant on the grace of God. And the more we rest in his grace, the more he will continue to grow us.
A biblical understanding of evangelism ensures we know what a Christian actually is. Mark Dever makes this observation, “The lack of spiritual growth in people who call themselves Christians is often an evidence that they have been wrongly evangelized. We have taught people who are not Christians to think of themselves as though they are…The church is not finally a booster organization. We’re telling people a serious message about their condition before God, and about the tremendous news of the new life God is offering them in Christ. And we’re inviting them to enter into that life by dire and desperate means—repentance and faith.”[1] Too often we throw acorns on the ground and call them trees. We not only ignore the hard work needed to make them grow, but we’re too ready to call them trees when there’s no evidence of transformation and growth. Filling pews isn’t the same as making disciples, but it’s a lot easier to do the former than the latter. In a culture obsessed with numbers-based success, it’s easy to just count noses and pat ourselves on the back. But a biblical understanding of the gospel, of conversion, and of evangelism will ensure we’re actually making disciples. It also ought to prompt us to be growing as disciples ourselves, because you can’t make disciples if you aren’t one yourself.
A biblical understanding of church membership, which is rooted in God’s sacraments is also essential to discipleship. The sacraments remind us that we are God’s people. We have taken hold of his promise by faith in our baptism and we come each Sunday to the Lord’s Table, where we participate again in the death and resurrection of Jesus. God renews his covenant with us. That not only strengthens our faith and renews our hope, but in reminding us that we are his covenant people, it reminds us of God’s faithfulness to us and of the obligations covenant membership has for us. Biblical church membership reminds us of our commitment to God—just as it reminds us of his commitment to us. And it commits us to one another, to walk with each other, to exhort and rebuke each other, to experience joy and sorrow with each other, to love and to forgive each other.
Biblical church membership leads to biblical church discipline, without which we have little accountability to grow as disciples of Jesus. God has made us his people that we might give him glory and cause the nations to give him glory as they see our witness. Church discipline holds us accountable to that mission and keeps us faithful witnesses.
And, finally, biblical worship that is centred in word and sacrament brings all these things together as it gathers the people of God together to hear him speak, to be reminded of his covenant grace, and ultimately to give him glory in response. All of these marks send us out into the world to be the people God has called us to be, to do the work he’s given us, to be salt and light and to proclaim the good news about Jesus, but all these marks also draw us back together in corporate worship so that we can be refreshed and refilled, so that we can be reminded once again of what God has done for us in Jesus, and—most of all—so that together we can give him glory and have our faith and hope renewed. And then we go back into the world again to do and to be the people Jesus has made us.
And that’s the note I want to end on. A healthy church tells the story of God and his people, draws us in, and makes each of us integral parts of it. A healthy church binds us closely to Jesus and to each other so that we can accomplish the mission he has given us. Let me close with a quote from Tom Wright’s little book, Simply Christian.
“According to the early Christians, the church doesn’t exist in order to provide a place where people can pursue their private spiritual agendas and develop their own spiritual potential. Nor does it exist in order to provide a safe haven in which people can hide from the wicked world and ensure that they themselves arrive safely at an otherworldly destination. Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproducts of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us. This purpose is clearly stated in various places in the New Testament: that through the church God will announce to the wider world that he is indeed its wise, loving, and just creator; that through Jesus he has defeated the powers that corrupt and enslave it; and that by his Spirit he is at work to heal and renew it.
The church exists, in other words, for what we sometimes call ‘mission’: to announce to the world that Jesus is its Lord. This is the ‘good news,’ and when it’s announced it transforms people and societies. Mission, in its widest as well as its more focused senses, is what the church is there for. God intends to put the world to rights; he has dramatically launched this project through Jesus. Those who belong to Jesus are called, here and now, in the power of the Spirit, to be agents of that putting-to-rights purpose. The word ‘mission’ comes from the Latin for ‘send’: ‘As the father sent me,’ said Jesus after his resurrection, ‘so I am sending you’ ( John 20:21).”[2]
Let’s pray: Almighty Father, when we rebelled against you and corrupted your creation, you could have destroyed us and wiped us from its face, but instead you set forth to make yourself known to a people who had forgotten you and to restore us to your presence. You established a people to be your light in the midst of the darkness, and you gave your own Son to humble himself as he became one of us and lived and died and lived again to give life to this people—to us, to your Church. Keep us faithful to you, to what you have made us, and to the mission you have given us, we pray. Grow us by your word and fill us with your Spirit. Give us the grace to persevere and courage to proclaim your good news. Make us good stewards of your grace and cause our labours to bear fruit and your kingdom to grow so that you are glorified. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.
[1] Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2004), 209.
[2] Simply Christian (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), epub edition.
A Sermon for All Saints’ Sunday St. Matthew 5:1-16 by William Klock What does it mean to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” “Thy will be done” is pretty straightforward—at least it should be. It’s not an anxious prayer, as if God’s will were in danger of not being done if we don’t pray hard enough. No, it’s a prayer for something we know is going to happen. God is sovereign. His will—all the good things he intends for the world in his faithfulness—will be done. Our prayers aren’t going to make that true, but in our prayers we express our faith in his sovereignty and our longing to see his will and his plans for this world come to pass. But “Thy kingdom come”? What is God’s kingdom? Is it now or is it future or is it both now and future? Is it heavenly? Is it earthly? We ask in the Lord’s Prayer that as it is in heaven so may it be on earth. What does that mean? The Gospels are all about the kingdom. Mark and Luke talk about the Kingdom of God. Matthew talks about the Kingdom of Heaven, which doesn’t mean the kingdom is “up there” somewhere. It’s just a Hebraic way of speaking of the kingdom of God. Earth is our sphere and heaven is God’s. They’re supposed to be united, to overlap, to be together. That’s what we see symbolised by the Garden in the beginning of Genesis. But sin—our sin—divided and separated them. But God will not leave heaven and earth sundered. He will not leave us cut off from his presence. He gave Israel the temple. The temple was the one place where earth and heaven once again met. It was the one place on earth where human beings could go to be in the presence of God. This is why it was so remarkable that at Jesus’ baptism, heaven was opened. For just a moment there at the Jordan, earth and heaven were brought back together. It showed dramatically that Jesus was the one who would bring back together what our sins had broken apart. In Jesus—the god-man, the man of both earth and heaven—the King had come. In Jesus the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven was breaking in and God was beginning the work of restoring his Creation. This is what we anticipate, this is what we long for in faith and hope when we pray: “Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.”
This is what lies behind our Gospel lesson, the Beatitudes, the first part of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”. In fact, the Lord’s Prayer is something Jesus gives us later on in this sermon. But he begins his sermon with this list of people who are “blessed”. But who are they? Well, as much as Israel had failed in her mission to be the light of the world, there were still some people in Israel who really did have a sense of what God had called them to do. There was always a faithful remnant. We see them in people like John’s father, Zechariah, in Mary and in Joseph, in Simeon and in Anna. But the thing was that none of these people were the sort most people expected to be exemplifying the kingdom of God. Sure, they were faithful in their simple ways, but they weren’t important, they weren’t rich, they weren’t powerful—they were nobodies. They were the people being ground up in the gears turned by the bigshots, whether that was the Romans or the Herodians or the corrupt Sadducees who controlled the temple and the priesthood. And yet it says something that it’s with these people that the Good News begins. And it’s with these people—and the people like them to whom Jesus had been ministering in Galilee—it’s with them that he begins his most important sermon on the kingdom. Jesus says:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)
I think we have a tendency to read this and think that what Jesus is saying is that if we behave a certain way—in this case, if we’re poor in spirit—then we will somehow earn or be worthy of God’s blessing. But that’s not it. It helps if we go back to Abraham. In Genesis 12 God calls Abraham and he says to him, “I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great.” The Lord reiterated and renewed this promise to the generations that came after Abraham. This was his promise to Israel, “I will bless you” and this was at the core of Jewish identity. To be blessed was to be part of the covenant people of God. When Jesus talks about people who are blessed, he’s answering the question of who belongs to the people of God. But here’s where he turns things upside-down—at least that’s how it seemed to so many of the people who heard him. Most people just assumed that because they were descendants of Abraham, were circumcised, ate the right food, observed the Sabbath, and stayed away from Gentiles that they were “blessed” because they were God’s people. But here’s the thing: the Lord’s blessing wasn’t blessing for the sake of blessing. There was more to the promise. He said to Abraham, “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing.” A blessing to whom? The Lord says to all the families of the earth. Israel was to be like salt, preserving the earth. Israel was to be a light, shining in the darkness and leading the nations back to the knowledge of God. In fact, after these Beatitudes, that’s the next thing Jesus goes on to preach about: salt and light. If you’re not being salt and light, you’re not blessing and are not blessed—you’re not part of the kingdom. As we’ve seen in our study of Exodus, Israel was the people who lived in the presence of God and who witnessed him to the nations.
This is what blessing is about. The people Jesus describes here are the people through whom God makes his kingdom known. They’re the people who already understand and are already living the life of the kingdom. Jesus’ ministry was a prophetic one announcing the coming judgement on Israel and calling forth the faithful, the repentant, the kingdom folks who would be the nucleus of a new covenant, a kingdom people on the other side of that judgement. So he starts with the poor in spirit. I can’t help but think of Mary. When she finds out that she’s going to be pregnant with the Lord’s Messiah she doesn’t get full of herself. There were plenty of people who would have. Instead, she bursts out into a song of praise and the first things she sings is, “My soul doth magnify the Lord…for he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.”
Most people expected God to usher in his kingdom by coming to the important people, the wealthy people, the powerful and politically connected people. Most people expected the Messiah to ride into Jerusalem like King David, in a chariot with a sword and with an army. Instead he came to a poor young girl. And it was people like Mary, people who were poor in spirit who came flocking to Jesus and in and through them the kingdom of God burst into the world. The humble came to Jesus in faith and he opened their blind eyes, he healed their paralysed legs, he healed their diseases, he cast out their demons, he even raised their children from death. Meanwhile the powerful people, like the Sadducees, fumed that Jesus was offering forgiveness of sins without sending these people to the temple to offer sacrifices. Meanwhile the Pharisees, people who thought of themselves as righteous, were fuming because Jesus was welcoming the unclean and the sinful. But Jesus says that the kingdom won’t be found with the powerful or the self-righteous, but with those humble enough to follow the king born in a stable.
The rest of the Beatitudes go the same way. Jesus says:
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:4-9)
Israel was in exile and the people longed for consolation, but most wanted that consolation to come in the form of a Messiah who would put their enemies to the sword. Jesus says that, no, those who will be comforted, those who will show the kingdom, are those who mourn the sins of Israel and who are ready to repent and turn back to God. Israel wanted to inherit the earth, but Jesus reminds them that their inheritance will come not through those who are full of pride, not through those who think they’re better than everyone else because of their descent from Abraham or their circumcision or their diet, but it will instead come through those who are meek. Israel longed for justice—which is probably a better translation than “righteousness” in this case, but the justice Israel wanted had more to do with vengeance on her enemies and Jesus is saying, again: No. Your hunger for justice will only be satisfied when you are willing to set aside your rights in favour of humility and gentleness. Israel longed for mercy. She longed for deliverance. But Jesus warns that mercy is only for the merciful, not the vengeful. Israel longed to see God, but Jesus warns: You will never see God so long as your outward acts of piety are a cover for oppressing the poor, the widow, and the orphan. The kingdom is manifest by those who aren’t just outwardly pure, but who are pure of heart. And, of course, Israel saw herself as God’s son. The people longed for God to vindicate them by establishing them once again as a nation over their enemies, but Jesus warns: If you want to be God’s sons you need to show the peacemaking character of your Father. You’re out for vengeance, you’re calling for the blood of your enemies, if you had the chance you’d kill them in their beds and then tell the world that you were acting out the justice of God on the enemies of his people. But people like that will never be sons of the God who seeks not vengeance on his enemies, but offers them mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation. The violent will never be sons of the God who seeks to make peace, even offering his own life for the sake of their treason.
Everything Jesus describes here was aimed at Israel’s failures to be God’s people, to be salt and light. God had blessed Israel to be a blessing, but they wanted to keep his blessing to themselves, which is why he’d taken it away and sent them into exile. And most still hadn’t learned. But there was this remnant: again, people like Mary and Zechariah and Simeon who were already showing the world what the kingdom was like, people who were already living out the character of God. People whom the world saw as nobodies, but who were in reality already sharing the Lord’s blessing to the world. This is what John the Baptist had been about: calling the people of Israel to repentance, calling them to turn aside from their sin, their folly, from their false views of the kingdom so that they would be prepared for the Messiah.
But, Jesus warns, if you are faithful in being the sorts of people who carry God’s blessing to the word, be prepared for trouble. In verses 10-12 he goes on:
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
I expect Jesus was anticipating where his own ministry was headed when he preached these words. He’d already experienced the anger of his own people. When he preached in his hometown of Nazareth the people tried to throw him off a cliff. He knew that most people were not going to receive what he’s saying here and he knew that he was going to be rejected and that he would suffer and be killed. And he knew that the people who chose to follow him would be persecuted too. At the Cross the present evil age was dealt a death blow. In rising from the grave Jesus inaugurated the age to come. The present age is passing away and the age to come is breaking in, but Jesus knew that his people would live in the overlap. God brought salvation and renewal this way for a reason. The people of Jesus’ day wanted it to come all at once, but God chose to bring it slowly. People today have the same sort of expectation. They ask how a good God can allow so much evil in the world. But in asking that question, in asking why God doesn’t come and deal with evil we’re showing the same sort of self-righteous mindset that dominated Israel. We’re forgetting that for God to come and deal with evil means that God will not only have to deal with our enemies and the people who cause us grief, but that he’ll also have to deal with us. Brothers and Sisters, we’re all sinners. We’re all responsible for the mess this world is in—some more, some less—but we’ve all contributed to it. And so God sent Jesus to deal with that sin and to inaugurate his kingdom, but he also delays, and in that he gives sinners a chance to repent and turn to him. It also means that those who, in this in-between time, insist on revealing the kingdom, those who insist on confronting the sinful systems of the old age through their poverty of spirit, through their meekness, through their mercy, through their peacemaking will face the same backlash that Jesus faced.
Brothers and Sisters, we are called to turn the world upside-down and the world isn’t going to like that. But the fact is that the world we confront is actually already upside-down. It’s been corrupted by sin. When we exemplify mercy and meekness and peacemaking and purity of heart what we’re doing is showing people how the world was in the beginning and how it’s really supposed to be—and how, one day, it really will be again. We’re giving the world a glimpse of creation set to rights. We’re giving the world a glimpse of God’s future. But in the meantime that world will fight back. The Jews stoned Stephen for preaching that Jesus really was the Messiah. Throughout the first centuries of the Church, many were martyred because they proclaimed that Jesus is Lord, which also sent the message loud and clear that Caesar is not—and Caesar didn’t like that. And it continues today. Even if we don’t face death, we face the pushback and the scorn and the hatred of those who are invested in the gods of money and power and sex and politics and self, those who are proud and merciless and war-making, those who represent the values of the present evil age will see us as the enemy. And yet, Jesus says, this is good. Blessed are you, for in your rejection and even in your persecution, you are manifesting the kingdom of heaven—you’re being the blessing you have been called to be and you have a share in the kingdom.
Jesus goes on in verse 13:
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:13-16)
Jesus challenges Israel. She is to be the salt of the earth. She is to be the light of the world. This was Israel’s calling, it was her vocation right from the beginning, again, going back to Abraham. God called Israel to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. She was called to serve the Lord and to show the world what faith in him looked like—a tiny nation surrounded by great empires, but living faithfully for the Lord and trusting him to take care of her: the new creation in miniature. She was to be like a city set on a hill. Jesus was thinking about Jerusalem, up on the mountain above the countryside. The Prophets had said that Jerusalem was to be a place where the Lord was glorified by his people so that the nations would see and come flooding through the gates to come and meet the God of Israel in his temple.
But Israel had done just the opposite. She worshipped the gods of her pagan neighbours. Instead of trusting in the Lord to care for her, she forged forbidden alliances with the nations. Instead of trusting in the Lord she trusted in horses and chariots. She did everything in her power to make herself and the God to whom she bore witness a laughingstock amongst the nations. The nations knew that Israel worshipped a God who was different from all the other gods. The nations knew that Israel was called to be different. But when they saw Israel’s unfaithfulness they mocked the God they should have praised, asking “Where is her God?”
Israel was supposed to be like a lighthouse, shining God’s light to the nations, but instead she’s removed the glass and surrounded the light with mirrors. She prided herself on being a people of light and condemned the people outside for being lost in the dark. But they were in the dark because of her refusal to share the light. And eventually her light turned to darkness. She rebuilt her temple after the exile, but the Lord’s presence never returned.
Jesus now invites those who are poor in spirit, those who are meek, those who mourn, those who are merciful, those who are pure in heart, those who are peacemakers, those who are ready to face persecution to come and find out what really being Israel is all about. If they will follow him they will be the true or the new Israel. They will share the Lord’s blessing with the nations. They will be salt. They will be light, making the Lord known and fulfilling his call to Abraham.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus was issuing a challenge to Israel. But, Brothers and Sisters, it’s now a challenge to us. You and I have been incorporated into Jesus and into his new Israel. We have been made sons and daughters of Abraham. And so Abraham’s vocation has been passed on to us. We are called to proclaim the King and to make his kingdom known. And we have our own temptations today that lead us away from our mission. We are just as prone as Israel was to forgetting who our real enemies are. We are just as prone to forgetting that God’s kingdom is made manifest through mercy and grace. And the Church in every age is always tempted to put her light under a basket, to remove the glass from the lighthouse and to replace it with mirrors and then call ourselves the people of the light while the world perishes in darkness. We are tempted to seek the kingdom through pride, arrogance, bullying, and war as the people of Jesus’ day were. We’re tempted to compromise the kingdom by looking to the powerful and the connected for deliverance or by forgetting that we are a people called to sacrifice our rights and ourselves for the sake of the kingdom.
But, Brothers and Sisters, one thing has changed. Jesus has poured his life into us. He has brought the dry bones of Israel to life by the power of the Holy Spirit. In our baptism we have been freed from our bondage to sin and united to the life of Jesus. Our hearts, which were once fixed on self, have been turned to God. Our minds, which once saw the kingdom as foolishness, have been renewed and set on the kingdom of heaven. That’s not to say that we don’t still struggle, but this is why Jesus invites us to his Table. Friends, here at the Lord’s Table Jesus gives us a foretaste of the kingdom. In the bread and wine our Lord pulls God’s future into the present, in the bread and wine, for just a moment he gives us a glimpse into heaven and shows us the kingdom and he reminds us that we live in faithful hope for that day when every tear has been wiped away and God had set everything to rights. Brothers and Sisters, if you struggle to share God’s blessing with the world, if you struggle to be meek, to be merciful, to be pure in heart, to be a peacemaker; if you struggle to offer yourself as a living sacrifice, come this morning and be strengthened. Come this morning and have your eyes set once again on the kingdom. Come to the Table today and have your hope restored. Today, as we read in our Old Testament lesson, we are tested like gold in the furnace (Wisdom 3:6), “But lo”—as we sang—"There breaks a yet more glorious day; The saints triumphant rise in bright array; The King of glory passes on his way. Alleluia, alleluia.”
Let us pray: Gracious Father, let us never forget that you have blessed us to be a blessing. You have called us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. You have called us to live in such a way that the nations, seeing us, will be drawn and come streaming into your kingdom. We confess our failures and pray for the strength and the courage and most of all the faith, not only to live in hope of your kingdom, but to offer ourselves as living sacrifices for the sake of the world. Strengthen us we pray, through our Lord Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Mark Eight: Biblical Worship by William Klock
On February12, A.D. 304 a group of men was brought before the Roman proconsul in Carthage. The charge against them read, “These men, being Christians, have held an assembly for the Eucharist, in violation of the edict of the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian.”
“What is your position?” the Proconsul asked of the first prisoner.
“I am a senator,” the man responded. His name was Dativus.
“Were you present at the assembly?”
“I am a Christian and I was present in the assembly.”
Immediately, the Proconsul ordered him to be hung on the rack, where barbed hooks tore his body. After that, Saturninus, the presbyter, was brought in and asked, “Did you, contrary to the orders of the emperors, oversee the assembly of these men?”
Saturninus responded, “Yes. We celebrated the Eucharist.”
“Why?” asked the Proconsul.
“Because the Eucharist cannot be abandoned,” said the presbyter.
Immediately he, too, was taken to join Dativus on the rack.
Next, Felix, one of Saturninus’ sons and a reader in the church, was brought before the Proconsul. “I am not asking if you are a Christian. That’s not my concern. But were you at the assembly and do you possess copies of the scriptures?”
Felix answered, “As if a Christian could exist without the Eucharist, or the Eucharist could be celebrated without Christians! Don’t you realise that a Christian is defined by the Eucharist? We cannot exist without it! And we always read the Lord’s scriptures when we assemble for the Eucharist.”
The Proconsul flew into a rage and ordered Felix beaten with clubs.
Lastly, Hilarion, another son of Saturninus, was brought before the Proconsul. “Will you follow your father and your brothers?” He was asked.
“I am a Christian,” he boldly said, “And I became one, along with my father and brothers, of my own will.”
The Proconsul bellowed out threats of torture. Little did he know that he was not going up against men, but against God himself in his holy martyrs. The Proconsul ordered the boy taken away and for his hair to be shorn and his nose and ears to be cut off.
And Hilarion simply replied, “Do what you will. I am a Christian.”
And as he was led away, the whole court heard the boy crying out with joy, “Thanks be to God.” In all, forty-nine members of the church in Abitinae were martyred on that day and in the days that followed.[1]
The story of those brothers and sisters is not unique. From the time of the Apostles until the time of Constantine, Christians gathered together to worship—to read the scriptures, to pray, to sing, to eat the Lord’s Supper—and they did so under threat of violence and sometimes even martyrdom. “Day by day we are besieged; day by day we are betrayed,” wrote Tertullian.[2] But no matter the risks involved, Christians continued to gather. They had found the treasure hidden in the field. They had found the pearl of great price. They had given their allegiance, to the exclusion of all others, to the Lord Jesus. And they lived in sure and certain hope that his kingdom was coming “on earth as in heaven”.
What brought them together? If it was just a longing for fellowship with God, they could do that at home in private. They could pray, they could sing. Those were the days before mass-produced Bibles, but they could, at home, recite passages from memory or read hand-copied portions of scripture. But they risked their lives to gather together for corporate worship. It was the Lord’s Supper that reminded them, as it does us, “that we are true members of the mystical body” of God’s Son. St. Paul uses that language of the body a lot. As we are in Jesus the Messiah, so we belong one to another. We are a family, a covenant people with a God-given mission that cannot be accomplished unless we all bring our parts together to build up the whole. And the Lord’s Supper reminded them that it was all absolutely worth it, because the Supper recalled the events—the death and resurrection of Jesus—in which God poured out his love, his grace, his mercy and revealed his faithfulness in all its—in all his—glory, while also pointing them to his future glory when he will finish what he has begun and set all things to rights. No command of Caesar could compete with the glorious calling of God.
Yes, the New Testament commands us to gather together for corporate worship. Hebrews 10:24-25 tells us:
Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
And Paul so frequently, particularly in Romans and 1 Corinthians, stresses our unity in Jesus and the nature of the Church as being like a body in which we all have our part. But even without those commands and instructions to gather together, the Lord’s Supper reminds us who we are, that we’re not loners, that Christianity isn’t just “me, my Bible, and Jesus”, but that we are a covenant people knit together in love and grace in Jesus and the Spirit. Even if all we had was the Lord’s Supper, we would still be compelled, like those early believers, to gather together to worship the God who reveals himself in and through Jesus.
So we’ve been looking at the marks of a healthy church. If we don’t gather, there is no church. The Church gathers to worship. Period. So the question is not whether or not we will gather, but what our gatherings should looks like. What does the Bible tell us about corporate worship?
Well, first, there’s no book or chapter in the New Testament that gives us specific instructions outlining liturgy or posture, how often we should observe the Lord’s Supper, how many songs we should sing, how long the sermon should be, or anything like that. The New Testament does have plenty to say about worship, but what it says is largely about our unity in worship, our serving others in worship, giving ourselves as living sacrifices in worship—and when it comes to specifics, it’s usually Paul stepping in to tell churches what not to do. The Bible gives us freedom in our worship, and so some churches use a liturgy with set prayers and others use a set order of service with extempore prayers, some churches have elaborate ceremonial—whether that involves incense, postures, vestments, and the like or fog machines, high-tech lighting, dancing, and multi-piece bands, while other churches do things very simply and without any fuss. We are free to construct our worship—within reason—so long as it glorifies God and has him at its centre and focus. In light of contemporary trends, biblical worship, it must be stressed, involves the people of God as participants. Worship is not a show or a concert.
Now, I could just end things here by pointing you to the Prayer Books in the pew racks in front of you. What does biblical worship look like? It looks like the Book of Common Prayer. It could look like something else, but the BCP is the finest example of biblical worship I can think of. Our liturgies have survived virtually unchanged for five-hundred years and continue a liturgical tradition that goes back at least a thousand years before that. It has proved itself. The only reason people started tampering with the Book of Common Prayer was because their theology changed—and not for the better. There’s a reason why Lutherans, when they needed a common service in English, borrowed heavily from the Common Prayer tradition. There’s a little book titled The Minister’s Handbook, which is popular with free-church ministers. It’s essentially a prayer book for people who don’t have the Prayer Book and need to know what to do and say at a wedding or a baptism. It’s mostly just excerpts from the Book of Common Prayer. When the United Church drafted its Book of Order, it borrowed heavily from the Book of Common Prayer. Brothers and Sisters, never take our liturgical heritage or the Prayer Book for granted. It is, arguably, the richest treasure of worship ever produced by Christendom. And virtually all of it is from the Bible, either directly quoted or paraphrased in some way.
But I don’t want to just defend the Common Prayer tradition, or liturgy in general, this morning. Why has the Book of Common Prayer stood the test of time? Because it brings together the elements of biblical worship. But what are those elements? Well, let’s look at our controlling narrative again. Good worship not only tells the story, but involves us in it. Think back to those forty-nine martyrs in Carthage. This is what compelled them to gather together even though it meant death.
So, once again, think back to the beginning. God created human beings to bear his image. That means to serve as his regents in Creation—in this temple that he built for himself. This is why St. Paul writes in Romans that Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. When we rejected our vocation, Creation lost her stewards and the Lord lost his priests. Everything fell apart. But in the midst of the darkness, the Lord called forth Abraham and created a people for himself. He delivered them from slavery in Egypt, he gave them his law, and most importantly, he took up his dwelling in their midst. And as they lived to give him glory and to witness his presence and his mighty deeds, they became a light to the nations, looking forward to a day when nations would come streaming to the temple to know the living God for themselves and to give him the glory he is due. The prophets looked forward to the day when the knowledge of the Lord’s glory would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.
Old Testament Israel gives us models for biblical worship. We see her songs of the Lord’s mighty deeds—songs like the Song of Moses or the Psalms. We see her prayers for deliverance—from her earthly enemies and from the sins and the lack of faith that so often compromised her witness—prayers for deliverance made in faith and rooted deeply in a sureness of God’s covenant faithfulness. We see her songs of hope, knowing the Lord’s past faithfulness, and looking forward to the day when he would not only save Israel, but set all of Creation to rights. But most importantly for us, we see Israel’s story reach its climax in Jesus—and in his death, his resurrection, and his ascension. This is our exodus. As Israel was delivered from her bondage to Pharoah, so the cross and the empty tomb are our deliverance from sin and death. Baptism is our Red Sea and the Lord’s Supper is our Passover, whereby we participate in God’s mighty deeds and find our place in his covenant people. And now, like Israel, we sing and we proclaim what he has done to give him glory and to make him known that others will be moved to give him glory too. Everything we do as his people is meant to give him glory—or it should! Think of Jesus’ words in John 15:8, “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.”
Now, how does that controlling narrative, how does that story shape our worship? First, it means that word and sacrament will be at the centre of our worship. The Bible never tells us directly how frequently we should observe the Lord’s Supper, but the implication of what we read in Acts and the Epistles certainly suggests that the first Christians observed it at least every Sunday. The English Reformers, particularly Thomas Cranmer, designed our liturgy around a weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper, but people were so used to only participating in the sacrament four times a year that weekly Communion didn’t take and Morning Prayer became the staple of weekly worship in most Anglican churches until the Twentieth Century. Whatever the case, biblical worship will include baptisms, whenever they are called for, and the Lord’s Supper on some sort of regular schedule. The one thing we can’t do is discard them entirely. If we fail to observe the sacraments we disobey Jesus himself and cease to be a church. I think when we realise that the Supper is as an act of covenant remembrance and renewal, it becomes more natural to observe it weekly.
Biblical worship listens to God and tells the story. That means it will include the reading of scripture. Always. Preferably at least a passage from the Old Testament and another from the New—and preferably tied together so that we see the interconnectedness of the old and new covenants and the faithfulness of God is revealed to his glory.
Brothers and Sisters, our calling as God’s people is to glorify him and to proclaim his mighty deeds and the good news about Jesus so that the world will give him glory. We can’t do that unless we know who he is and what he’s done. And that doesn’t just go for corporate worship. Scripture ought to be central to our lives in general. We ought to be steeping ourselves in God’s word on a daily basis—listening to him—so that we can know him and what he’s done. I don’t know if it’s because we’re lazy or if we think that Christian maturity comes by osmosis or just with time, but Brothers and Sisters, if you don’t feed on God’s word, you will not grow. It’s the Spirit who grows us, but he grows us with the word. Steeping ourselves in the word during the week is one of the ways we prepare ourselves to gather together on Sundays. One of the trends of contemporary worship is this idea that the service has to start by getting the worshippers in the “right” mood. That’s borne in part out of the faulty notion that good worship makes us feel a certain way, but I think the bigger reason for this is that too many of us simply aren’t preparing for worship over the six preceding days of the week. We treat worship as a Sunday thing, then we go home and unplug ourselves from God and from his word and from prayer until Sunday comes around again. That’s not the kind of life that drove Saturninus and Dativus and their congregation to risk death in order to gather at the Lord’s Table.
So the reading of the word will be central. And so will the sermon. Biblical worship will include a sermon that explains and applies the word. There’s nothing inherently holier about a longer sermon than a shorter sermon, but good biblical exposition and application takes time and it rarely happens in the ten- or twelve-minute homilies that have become commonplace today. And as much as modern people may think it’s the Anglican way, it most definitely is not. I’ve edited several volumes of sermons by popular Anglican preachers of the past and you’d be hard-pressed to read those sermons out loud in less than an hour. Let me stress that those were popular preachers. A few centuries earlier, in the decades following the Reformation, it was common for people to hear a sermon on Sunday morning, go home for lunch, and then return to the church to hear another sermon or two in the afternoon. Puritan preachers were often given hourglasses—as in they actually measure out a full hour—and were told how many turns of the glass they could preach. Because God’s people were hungry for his word. Today we’ve lost that hunger and it’s no wonder that the Church in the West is foundering and that we struggle to tell the story anymore. How can we proclaim what we don’t know?
The second focal point of our biblical corporate worship is the sacraments—particularly the Lord’s Supper. Baptism, when it is done, ought normatively to take place in the corporate gathering, because it is the rite by which we are included in the covenant people. It is our Red Sea by which we pass from bondage in Egypt into life in the presence of the Lord and his people and it’s right that those people be there to welcome each new member as he or she rises from the sea. I pray that we would have reason to do that every Sunday someday, but in the meantime we include baptism as necessary. But weekly observing the Lord’s Supper, well, it is meet and right so to do.
Word and sacrament complement each other. Different churches and different preachers will take different approaches to how we read scripture. We use a lectionary. Others may read through whole books of the Bible systematically week by week. However we do it, though, our reading of the word will range over all sort of subjects and genres and not everything we’ll read is about the gospel—at least not directly. The focus of the readings and the sermons will cover all sorts of different subjects—and that’s good. But the Lord’s Supper (and baptism, when the occasion arises) grounds us week in and week out in the death and resurrection of Jesus and reminds us what he’s done for us and who he has made us. As the annual observance of the Passover was for each generation in Israel a new participation in the events by which the Lord had made them his people, so each observance of the Lord Supper is for us a new participation in the events by which Jesus has delivered us from sin and death. And notice that there’s both a vertical and a horizontal element to that. When we come to the Table we are reminded that we belong to God through Jesus, that he has redeemed us and made us his own, but it also reminds us of the horizontal—that he has made us a part of this covenant people called the Church and that we are brothers and sisters in Jesus, and that we belong to each other, that we are one body. At the Table God’s love is poured down on us, but then it also flows out horizontally from each of us to the others.
The scripture lessons and the sermon can’t cover these fundamental truths every single Sunday, but we are reminded and confronted by them every single time we come to the Lord’s Table. Our culture today is almost entirely oriented on the individual and that his infected Christian thinking and the Church. We have no trouble remembering the vertical—me and God—but we too often downplay or forget altogether the horizontal—the fact that even as God saves us individually, in doing so he makes us part of a people who cannot be effective in our mission and who cannot ultimately be healthy if we do not live this new life together as a family. Again, this is a powerful corrective to modern error. Too much of contemporary worship is people coming together to sort of have their individual worship experiences in a group setting. Worship has become a performance. The lights are turned down so we can’t see each other—we just focus on the “leaders” at the front. The band—or in some places the choir or the organ—is so loud that you can’t hear yourself sing, let alone the person next to you. A friend of mine who advocates that kind of worship tells me that it’s an “immersive” model in contrast to a “participatory” one and that it’s just how our culture has gone. In folk cultures everyone is involved in music, but in ours, music has largely been relegated to professionals. The rest of us just sit and listen. Even at home, we put on our headphones, close our eyes, tune everything else out, and immerse ourselves in the performance. Brothers and Sisters, that may be the way our culture has gone, but the Church cannot go there. That “immersive” model of worship is incompatible with biblical worship in which we all participate. Worship is not a concert or a show for the worshiper to passively receive. Worship is the service of God’s people to him. The lights should be on so we can see each other. And the accompaniment should be just that: accompaniment. It shouldn’t drown out our voices, because the most important thing about congregational singing is that it’s just that: congregational singing—our voices raised together as one to give God the glory he is due.
I think if we get these two things right in our worship—word and sacrament—we will get the story right and that’s really what it’s all about. As we hear his word, God draws us in with the story. In Baptism and the Lord’s Supper he incorporates us into the story and gives us a place in it. And now equipped by word and Spirit, he sends us out to tell the story ourselves so that others will be drawn in. There are other essential parts to worship—we sing and we pray, we confess our sins and receive assurance of pardon, we bring our tithes and offerings—but they revolve around the word and sacrament that stand in the middle. They are our response to the story, to what God in Jesus has done for us and for the world. Each of those parts of our worship could merit a whole sermon on its own, but I just want to close with one example, again taken from our Common Prayer tradition, and that’s the Gloria.
When the Prayer Book was first written in 1549—and for a long time thereafter—there were no hymns. Much of the liturgy itself was sung. The Psalms were sung. But there was one hymn included in the liturgy for the Lord’s Supper and Thomas Cranmer made sure that it stood at the end of the service, because the hymns we sing in worship are essentially response to what God has said and done in word and sacrament. In the service we hear his word and he renews his covenant with us at the Table, and then we sing in response, “Glory to God in the highest”. This is what he created us to do. When Jesus gave his life on the cross and rose from the grave, it was to create a people, full of God’s own Spirit, who will give him glory. And, Brothers and Sisters, we give him glory—it starts here on Sunday, but ought to carry on in our whole lives the rest of the week—we give him glory that one day all the nations will give him glory too.
Let’s pray: Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden: cleans the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
[1] Adapted from the Acts of St. Saturninus in Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vol. VIII, 688ff.
[2] Apology 7.
Mark Seven: Biblical Church Discipline by William Klock
The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism famously asks, “What is the chief end of man?” And the answer, drawing on scriptures like Psalm 73, Romans 11:36, and 1 Corinthians 10:31, is that, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” God created human beings to give him glory. He created us to bear his images—to be the priests and stewards of his temple and to exercise his dominion over creation. We rejected the vocation he gave us, and ever since then, God’s great project of redemption and renewal—of new creation—has been working towards our restoration to that vocation. One day, when the project is completed, redeemed humanity will once again live to the glory of God. In the meantime he has called forth, created, redeemed, and renewed a people for himself—a people who, however imperfectly, exist to give him glory. Not only that, but this people—you and I—exist to make the living God known to the nations: his faithfulness, his love, his mercy, his mighty and saving deeds, so that one day the nations will bring him the glory he is due. One day the knowledge of his glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.
Jesus said to Israel, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). That was Israel’s mission, just as it is the mission of the new Israel. It has always been the mission of the people of God and will always be. A couple Sunday’s ago, we read that passage from Micah 4 that looked forward to the day when the nations would come streaming to the Lord saying, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths” (Micha 4:2). And this past summer we looked at John’s vision in Revelation, the fulfilment of that prophecy, where the nations that once thumbed their noses at God, are seen streaming into the New Jerusalem to give God glory.
Although we see the theme all through the New Testament, Revelation very dramatically reminds us that in the Church, God has created a people who—just like Jesus—have given up everything in order to know him, to live in his presence, and glorify him, and by their witness—even sometimes a witness that leads to death—to draw the nations to him.
Brothers and Sisters, this means that as the people of God, as the Church, we are accountable not only to God, but to each other for our witness. The Protestant Reformers understood how important this is. Over these last weeks I’ve quoted several times from the confessions and formularies of a variety of Protestant traditions: Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, and our own Articles of Religion. All of them affirm in some way that a true church is found where God’s word is faithfully preached and where the sacraments ordained by Jesus, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, are administered. But in conjunction with the administration of the sacraments, those confessions also stress the essential nature of church discipline. The Belgic Confession, after listing the preaching of the gospel and administration of the sacraments as marks of a true church, adds: “if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin.”[1] The Scots Confession puts it this way, “Lastly, Ecclesiastical discipline uprightly ministered, as God’s word prescribes, whereby vice is repressed, and virtue nourished.”[2] Article XIX of our Articles of Religion, again, puts it all this way: “The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.” “All those things that of necessity are requisite to the same” covers a range of “things” from the ordering of ministers and liturgies to, notably, church discipline. In our case, the specifics are found in the rubrics at the end of the liturgy for the Lord’s Supper—those instructions the minister is bound to follow. Here’s what we read there (this can be found on page 116 of the Book of Common Prayer if you want to follow along):
If among those who come to be partakers of the Holy Communion, the Minister shall know any to be an open and notorious evil liver, or to have done any wrong to his neighbours by word or deed, so that the congregation be thereby offended; he shall warn him, that he presume not to come to the Lord’s Table, until he have openly declared himself to have truly repented and amended his former evil life, that the congregation may thereby be satisfied; and that he has recompensed the parties to whom he has done wrong; or at least declare himself to be in full purpose so to do, as soon as he conveniently may.
The same order shall the Minister use with those, between whom he perceives malice and hatred to reign; not permitting them to be partakers of the Lord’s Table, until he know them to be reconciled. And if one of the parties, so at variance, be content to forgive from the bottom of his heart all that the other has trespassed against him, and to make amends for that wherein he himself has offended; and the other party will not be persuaded to a godly unity, but remain still in his frowardness and malice; the Minister in that case ought to admit the penitent person to the Holy Communion, and not him that is obstinate. Provided, That every Minister so repelling any, as is herein specified, shall be obliged to give an account of the same to the Ordinary, within fourteen days after, at the farthest.
Years ago another evangelical pastor started asking me questions about the Prayer Book, so I loaned him a copy. A couple of weeks later he came back with his finger on these rubrics and said—with a lot of consternation—“You don’t actually do this, do you?” I said that we do and that up to the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, so did virtually everyone else in Christendom. It’s there in our liturgies, our confessions, our formularies and books of order regardless of what tradition you’re a part of. What happened? Because today church discipline is virtually unheard of—and it’s not because Christians today are somehow more holy and less in need of it than previous generations. Gregory Wills, in his book, Democratic Religion, writes, “After the Civil War…observers began to lament that church discipline was foundering, and it was. It declined partly because it became more burdensome in larger churches….Urban churches, pressed by the need for large buildings and the desire for refined music and preaching, subordinated church discipline to the task of keeping the church solvent. Many…shared a new vision of the church, replacing the pursuit of purity with the quest for efficiency.”[3] And as the church in the West has bought into our culture’s therapeutic values, there’s little chance of any major change in course in the foreseeable future. Today’s conventional wisdom says that you grow churches by toning down talk of commitment. Forget opening the doors wider—just take away the walls. Let anyone and everyone come to the Table, whether they’re baptised or not. That used to be the position of theological liberals, but it’s now commonplace in many evangelical churches. Accountability? Maybe you’ll have small groups where people are voluntarily accountable to each other—maybe—but to the church? It’s almost unheard of. Everything is meant to make us feel good, whether it’s the preaching or the music. Historic Christian worship was always built around giving glory to God. It’s often now built around the worshipers themselves and giving them a feel-good experience. Even the gospel we often preach has become focused on the therapeutic. Paul writes that when the Spirit gets hold of us, he transforms our hearts and we confess the lordship of Jesus—we repent, we turn from sin and idols, we embrace rejection, suffering, even martyrdom for the sake of Jesus, all to give glory to God. But today’s gospel often has little if anything to do with that. It’s about God making us feel good, giving us what we want—all too often it’s a message promising material prosperity rather than what Jesus promised: that we will take up our crosses and follow him in the way of sacrifice. Today’s gospel is far too often all about “me”. God is here for us, not we for God. And so we balk at the very idea of such accountability. But there it is. And the Reformers didn’t make it up. Writing about eighty years ago, in his wonderful little book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer summed it up so well: “Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.”[4] Discipline was once the norm. And all of this is deeply biblical. So let’s look at the Bible and as we do that, keep the big biblical story in the back of your head and be thinking about the fact that our vocation is to give God glory and witness him in a such way that his kingdom is made known and the nations come to bring him glory too.
So, first, let’s turn to 1 Corinthians 5. Here’s what Paul writes:
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
It's hard to be any clearer than that. Notice that Paul doesn’t go on the hunt for sin. This sexual immorality was right there in the open. And the church tolerated it to their shame. It doesn’t sound as if they were turning a blind eye. That Paul rebukes them for their arrogance says that they were proud of themselves for their tolerance. But as he points out to them, this sin was scandalous even to the pagans. What kind of witness did they have? Maybe they thought they were witnessing the love of Jesus by being so tolerant, but that’s not the way it works. “Let him be removed from among you,” Paul insists. He goes on:
For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
Notice—this is vitally important—church discipline isn’t done to be vindictive. It’s done to purify the witness of the church, but it’s also done in the hope that it will bring the unrepentant sinner to repentance that he will be spared from God’s judgement.
Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
At the Passover the Israelites purged their homes of leaven and ate unleavened bread, remembering the new life the Lord had given them when he delivered them from Pharaoh’s bondage. Just so, as we come to the Lord’s Table, we are reminded of the new life we have in Jesus and the Spirit. This Supper is for those who have believe, who have repented, who have been baptised—who have given their full allegiance to Jesus and his kingdom. Those who have not have no place here until they do.
I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”
Paul quotes Deuteronomy, recalling Israel’s duty to holiness: “Purge the evil person from among you”. Again, Paul doesn’t tell us to go turning over rocks looking for sin. The sins he lists here as examples are sins that are flagrant and public—obvious to most if not to all, a scandal to the church, and that compromise the witness of the church to the world—even though in some cases, the world might think we should tolerate such sins.
But this is remedial discipline. This is what happens when the church has failed in discipleship and in the early stages of discipline that we often don’t even think of as discipline. So I want to back up and look at where discipline starts. Let’s look at Hebrew 12:1-14, where we see that discipline is inherently positive and part of God’s design. It’s on the long side and our time is limited, so I won’t offer any commentary. Just hear God’s word.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?
“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor be weary when reproved by him.
For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives.”
It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
Brothers and Sisters, the Lord disciplines his children because he loves them—he loves us—and he calls his church to discipline because of that same love. He desires what’s best for us and what’s best is holiness. And now one more passage. Like I said, scripture doesn’t tell us to go turning over rocks looking for the sins of our brothers and sisters. It tells us what to do when sin confronts us—either something open and scandalous as in Corinth, or when we find ourselves sinned against by a brother or sister. Look at Matthew 18:15-17. Here’s how Jesus tells us to deal with the sins of others.
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
If your brother (or your sister) sins against you, go and talk to him (or her). But before things even go that far, consider the love we ought to have for one another as brothers and sisters in Jesus. Peter writes:
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4:8)
Have you ever thought about that? If we really are loving each other as we should, I think this part probably tends to happen without us even thinking much about it. We just forgive and move on. Love covers a multitude of sins and our desire ought to be for fellowship and community with each other. People leave the church. It happens over and over and it so often happens over things that are so small in the grand scheme of things. Something is horribly wrong with our perspective. I was sitting at lunch on Tuesday with some other pastors and one was on the verge of tears talking about differences over pandemic politics decimating his church, people leaving because their views were different from those of others. Another pastor talked about his continuing struggle to hold his church together. He figured it was split 50/50 on these issues and they’ve only managed not to split over it because the pastors have made a point of avoiding those issues. And I have to wonder, would these same people leaving the church over differences of opinion on government policy relating to a temporary problem, would they abandon their biological brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers the same way? I doubt it. Because family is important. And yet consider Jesus’ words:
But he replied to the man…“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12:48-50)
Brothers and Sisters, in Jesus we have a bond with each other stronger than blood—because of his blood. And that ought to translate into a deep and profound love for each other that only overcomes out various differences—that love also ought to cover a multitude of sins. To quote from Bonhoeffer’s Life Together again, “I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me.”[5]
But back to Matthew 18, sometimes a sin or an offense has to be dealt with. Jesus says to go to your brother to talk to him about it. Communicate. Sometimes that’s all it takes. The single biggest cause of marital breakdown is a lack of communication. You’ve probably seen that meme with the couple sitting on the couch or lying in bed, their backs to each other. Both look very concerned…even upset. And the wife is thinking, “I bet he’s thinking about another woman.” And the husband is thinking, “I’ve tried everything. Why won’t my motorcycle start.” She’s getting worked up and angry, assuming that because he’s not talking, he’s thinking about another woman. No. He’s just trying to think through a problem. But these things blow up and marriages fall apart. Because people don’t talk. So go to your brother, go to your sister and talk. It often turns out that sin or offense was unintentional. It’s often the case that you’ve been like the wife in the meme, thinking it’s one thing, when in reality it was something else entirely. We’re Christians after all, people of the Spirit, manifesting his fruit. We don’t often go out of our way to deliberately offend each other. Go in Christ-like love, assuming the best of each other, and with a desire for reconciliation.
But maybe the sin was real. Still, go and talk about it. Hebrews calls us to exhort one another to love and good works. Confronted by his sin, your brother—more often than not, if he really is full of the Spirit—will realise what he’s done, he’ll be sorry, and he’ll make things right. And, Jesus says, “you have gained your bother.” Remember, our desire is to glorify God and we do that by maintaining the unity and the witness of the Church. We not only manifest the life of the Spirit when we reconcile with one another in love, but we witness the love of God for sinners—modelling to others and to the world what God, in Jesus, has done for us.
But, Jesus says, maybe your brother won’t listen. Step two is to go back to him with one or two witnesses. This means that you’ve brought the grievance to at least another brother or sister. Maybe you’re out of line with your accusation. Involving another person or two may, in itself, clear up the problem. But if they agree that you’ve been wrong and that the other person has sinned, then you all go to him. If this doesn’t resolve the situation, Jesus says, you take the matter to the assembly—in this case that means the local church. At this point the presbyters or the bishop must confront this man with his sin. And if he still refuses to listen, Jesus says he is to be treated as a gentile or a tax collector. That means he’s to be treated as someone outside the community—in Israel as someone unclean and in the Church as someone who has forsaken his baptism and is now barred from the Lord’s Table.
But, again, the point is not vindictiveness. The goal is restoration, as Paul stresses in 1 Corinthians 5. This man may well be a believer, but in refusing to repent of his sin, his life does not match his profession and so, in an effort to restore him, he is barred from the sacramental life of the Church—from the markers of membership. Especially thinking from the perspective of the new covenant, what is the church’s goal when it comes to gentiles and tax collectors? It’s not to kick them to the curb and to walk away. These are people who need to hear the gospel—the good news about Jesus. Excommunication isn’t the same as shunning. Excommunication shows us those who need to be evangelized anew and brought back to Jesus.
So to summarise: The Church is called to discipline her members for their own sake and for the sake of the larger church. It is a call to the sinner to holiness. It is a reminder to the rest of us of the need for holiness. And it is essential to the integrity of the wider church’s witness. Brothers and Sisters, if we desire to glorify God and if we desire to see the nations glorify God because of our witness, we have to deal with sin within the Church and deal with it in the way scripture tells us. Again, it’s not optional, which is why all of our confessions and formularies, canons and liturgies stress church discipline as essential to the nature of the Church. Stop practicing it, and we cease to be the church in the same way that we cease to be the church if we stop preaching God’s word or if we stop administering his sacraments.
And, I think, our abandonment of discipline lies behind the rapid decline of the Western church over the last century. Consider Jesus’ warnings to the churches in Revelation. The Laodiceans were neither hot nor cold. The Ephesians had lost their love. The Thyatirans tolerated “that woman Jezebel” who enticed the people to idolatry and sexual immorality. And Jesus warned them, “Repent…If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place” (Revelation 2:5). In the West we have lost our first love. We are all too often lukewarm. We have corrupted the gospel and centred it on ourselves instead of on God. We have turned worship into little more than a therapeutic exercise. And we tolerate nearly anything and everything in our churches. Preachers mock the very concept of repentance and are shocked by the idea of discipline. Our salt has lost its savour. Our light has grown dim. Our lives misrepresent the Lord and the kingdom we proclaim with our mouths. Will it be any wonder if that Lord removes our lampstand? Brothers and Sisters, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, you have created us, you have redeemed us, you have brought us together as your Church for the sake of your glory. You have washed us clean and filled us with your own Spirit that we might glorify you by our life together. Forgive us for our failures to be the salt and light you have created us to be. Forgive us for our failures to be the holy community you have made us. Fill us anew with a passion for your glory that we might desire, in all we do and say, to honour you and to make your glory known to the world. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.
[1] Article XXIX
[2] Article XVIII
[3] Quoted in Mark Dever, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2004), 180.
[4] Trans. Daniel W. Bloesch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 83.
[5] Ibid, 64.
Mark Six: A Biblical Understanding of Church Membership by William Klock
As we continue our look at the marks of a healthy church, we come today to something of a mid-point. For that reason I want to back up to where we started. When we set out, one of the things I explained was the way in which the Protestant Reformation changed how we think about the Church. The Roman Church, for example, claimed to be the one true church based on its having a line of bishops in succession from St. Peter. The Reformers, however, defined a true church on the basis of its fidelity to word and sacrament. And this was written into the confessions and formularies of reformed churches across Europe. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession, for example, says: “This [the Christian Church] is the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel. For it is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word.”[1] John Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, wrote: “Wherever we see the word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists.”[2] Or the Belgic Confession of the Continental Reformed churches: “The marks by which a true Church is known are these: If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ…”[3] And, jumping up north, this is what the Scots Confession says: “The Notes, therefore, of the true Kirk of God we believe, confess, and avow to be, first, The true preaching of the word of God; into the which God has revealed himself to us, as the writings of the Prophets and Apostles do declare. Secondly, The right administration of the sacraments of Christ Jesus, which must be annexed to the word and promise of God, to seal and confirm the same in our hearts. Lastly, Ecclesiastical discipline uprightly ministered, as God’s word prescribes, whereby vice is repressed, and virtue nourished.”[4] And of course our own Article XIX: “The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.”
Faithfulness to God’s word and to the sacraments ordained by Jesus are the central marks of a real church. And, I appreciate and think it’s worth noting again the words of the Augsburg Confession, which stress that these two things not only define us and establish our boundaries, but we also share them as the basis for our unity. We don’t have to agree on every theological detail. We don’t have to agree on precisely how the sacraments work. But if we faithfully preach God’s word and observe his sacraments, we can be sure that we are united in the same Messiah. Our unity does not come from bishops or a line of succession. It does not come from perfect doctrinal uniformity. It does not come from geography or culture or language. It comes from our being in this Jesus whom we know by word and sacrament.
So far, the marks—or maybe I should call them “sub-marks” we’ve been looking at all related to or are derived from the first of those two great marks of the Church: faithfulness to the word of God. We preach the word and as we do, that word informs and shapes our understanding of God, of the gospel, of conversion, and of evangelism and mission. Today I want to switch gears and begin to look at points that follow from that second great mark of the Church: the ministration of the sacraments. Now, there is a sense in which even the administration of the sacraments and everything connected with that is derivative of our preaching of the word and our submission to it. Without scripture, we would neither understand the sacraments nor know what to do with them. But I think it’s worth changing gears a bit at this point and continuing forward with the next marks of a healthy church and understanding them as derivative of or connected to the sacraments—to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
So, first, if observing these two sacraments, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, if observing them marks us out as Christians, that means they have something to say to us about who belongs to the Church—about the subject of “membership”. And membership is a subject worth talking about, because not everyone agrees on what constitutes membership in a church or in the Church. In the early Church, people believed and were baptised and then the baptised gathered regularly—weekly as far as we can tell—and celebrated the Lord’s Supper together. That was it. The churches were small and it was clear who was a member and who wasn’t, because to be baptised in Jesus the Messiah was a big deal. To gather together, often when it meant punishment or martyrdom, not to mention living daily for Jesus, well, that itself spoke of a real and serious commitment.
But jump forward several hundred years and—at least in theory—everyone in Europe became a Christian. Everyone was baptised. Everyone went to church and received the Lord’s Supper (even though it wasn’t offered to them very often). Many of those people were truly committed to Jesus and gave him their allegiance, but many did not. And so there were various reform movements down through the ages, with folks trying to reach those nominal believers. And it’s worth noting that those movements—where they were successful—whether the Franciscans or the Dominicans, the Protestant Reformers or, later, Puritans or the Baptists or the Methodists, those movements were founded on the renewed preaching of God’s word, because they knew that it is God’s word and God’s word alone that breathes life into dead bones.
But even the Reformers accepted that the sacraments are the markers of membership in the Church. They knew that there are many who are baptised and rarely thereafter darken the doorway of a church. They knew that there are many who come regularly to church and who receive the Lord’s Supper, but who fail to understand what it’s all about or who simply have other motives for coming and participating. There are many who never show the change that comes with faith in Jesus and the gospel. And so they put emphasis on the need for fathers and mothers to teach their children and to be faithful in family worship. They developed catechisms, to teach both children and adults what it means to be a Christian. The rite of Confirmation was repurposed in the Reformation churches as an opportunity to catechise children on the cusp of adulthood—to make sure they understood the faith into which they had been baptised as infants. But everyone agreed: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were the marks of the new covenant people of God.
But not quite everyone. The Anabaptists (the forerunners of the Mennonites and Amish) and later the Baptists tweaked the formula. Only those adults who could give a credible profession of faith in both word and manner of life, only they were baptised. Not infants, not children, not young adults—only grown men and women who credibly professed and lived out their commitment to Jesus. But even there, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper remained the markers of membership in the Church. A person enters this covenant people by faith by passing through the waters of Baptism and then the covenant people meet regularly to renew that covenant in the Lord’s Supper.
I didn’t set out to give a history lesson this morning, but as I was working through this matter of church membership, I realised that few people today have ever really thought about this—even a lot of pastors. Today it’s common to admit people to the Lord’s Supper whether they’re baptised or not. It’s common to admit people as members of a local church regardless of whether they’ve been baptised. Sinner’s prayers, altar calls, bowed heads and raised hands, and walking aisles have often replaced baptism as the means of entry into the covenant. And as our culture has become increasingly commitment-phobic, many churches have done away with any kind of membership altogether. In many otherwise evangelical churches, baptism has become optional. In rarer instances, so has the Lord’s Supper. And in the case of groups like the Salvation Army, both Baptism and the Lord’s Supper have been done away with entirely. In many Anglican churches, like ours, we’ve inherited a somewhat confusing practise of sort of informally adding to the role any baptised person who attends as a “baptised member” and then having a separate list of “communicant members”, who are those who have been confirmed—which means they’ve been officially received as members by the bishop.
So what, according to the Bible, constitutes membership in the Church? Well, let’s go back to the Bible and back to the big story. That’s our controlling narrative after all. Notice how the Lord has always set his people apart. There has always been a rite of initiation, a rite that marks a person out as a member of the covenant people—a rite by which the Lord marks out his own. And there has always been a rite of covenant renewal and remembrance by which later members of the covenant family recall and participate for themselves in the great historical action of the Lord to redeem and to set apart this people.
In the old covenant that first rite was circumcision. Bible scholars debate over why specifically circumcision, but this cutting of the organ of procreation was probably meant to be a reminder of the Lord’s promise to Abraham that he would make of him a great nation. But even before the law was given, this rite marked out the Lord’s people as his own. The sign was given to the adult who joined the community, but most importantly to the infant children of its members. It wasn’t optional. The uncircumcised has no part in the life of the covenant people and neglecting to include one’s children was a serious offense. Consider the story of Moses on his way back to Egypt. The Lord, we’re told sought to kill him, but the Lord’s anger was placated when Moses’ wife circumcised their son, doing herself what Moses had neglected. Is salvation by faith? Yes it is and it always has been. And circumcision was for the people of Israel, an act of faith in the Lord’s promise to Abraham—both for themselves and for their children who were to inherit that promise. The children of covenant members were to be raised as full members of the covenant people, with all the rights and obligations that came with membership. A covenant child was to be raised in faith, never to know a time apart from this people who lived with the living God in their midst. From before they could even remember, they bore his covenant sign.
And then came the Exodus, when the Lord delivered his covenant people from Egypt. And he gave them the second rite, the rite of Passover. “Rite” is really too sterile a word. Passover was a meal—a meal that gave meaning to the events of the Exodus, that reminded the covenant people of what the Lord had done for them, and a meal through which every succeeding generation participated for themselves in those saving events and came to know their own place in the people of God.
And, of course, there was the torah, the law—the covenant charter between the Lord and his people that outlined what life in this covenant people was to look like. And, if you can be included in a people, you can also be excluded, and so the torah specified what that looked like, whether it was the death penalty for certain severe offenses to temporary “exile” in cases of impurity, and everything in between.
Now, the new covenant people. I hope the parallels are already starting to come into focus. We see the same pattern in the Church, because of course, the new covenant is the fulfilment of the old and carries on the same mission that the people of God has always had: to make the living God known to the nations as he works to set his fallen creation to rights. The old makes sense of the new. We are his priestly people, mediating his presence to the world. We are his prophetic people, calling the nations to repentance and faith. We are his kingly people, announcing the royal proclamation that Jesus is Lord and preparing the nations for his dominion. The difference is that this new people is not defined by circumcision, Passover, or torah, but by Jesus and the life of the Spirit. And we enter that life in our baptism, just as the Israelites entered God’s covenant by means of circumcision. As circumcision marked out the Israelite, so baptism marks out the Christian as belonging to the Lord. And as circumcision was, so baptism is a fitting and appropriate sign in that it reminds us of the Lord’s promise in Jesus to wash us clean from sin. Specifically for those first Jewish believers, it spoke to them of forgiveness for having failed to keep the old covenant, but for each of us as we pass through the baptismal waters in faith, we are forgiven our own past unfaithfulness. And our baptism links us to the Lord’s saving acts in the past—with Israel’s exodus from Egypt. The font is our Red Sea and through these waters the Lord leads us into a new life in his presence. Peter told them men present on Pentecost to repent and to be baptised. Jesus, earlier, called his hearers to believe and be baptised. Repentance and belief are necessary, but Paul reminds us repeatedly that it is our baptism that formally unites us to Jesus. You can repent and believe all day long, but baptism is the means God has given us make us his. It is his promise to us in visible, tangible form. “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ,” he writes in Galatians 3:27. And, “In one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit,” in 2 Corinthians 12:13.
And, despite what our Anabaptism and Baptist brothers and sisters might say, just as with the sign of the old covenant, baptism rightly belongs to our children. Consider that at the very first, the new covenant people was made up entirely of old covenant people. Think of Peter’s sermon on Pentecost. He finished by announcing to his hearers, “This promise is for you and for your children” (Acts 2:39). Children were included in the old covenant. Again, not to include your children got you excluded from the old covenant. And here Peter announces a new and better covenant in Jesus. And it’s being announced to people who are already members of the old. Imagine those men who were baptised excitedly going home to their families to tell them about this new and better covenant, but then telling their children: “Sorry, you’ve been part of the Lord’s people, you’ve participated in the Passover every year you’ve been alive, but now that there’s a better covenant, you’re no longer part of it, you can’t participate in the new covenant meal—at least not until you’re an adult and can make the choice for yourself. Even then, you can’t be baptised until everyone’s reasonably certain you really believe.” That would hardly be a new and better covenant. The Lord has always fully included the children of covenant members in his people. The family is one of the primary means of grace—it always has been—for raising, first, new Israelites, and now, new Christians.
I know there is concern for children who are baptised, but for whatever reason never develop their own faith, who have no commitment, who leave the church but think, “I’m fine. I’ve been baptised.” Brothers and Sisters, God is concerned about those people too. It was as great a problem in Israel as it is in the Church. And yet he has always insisted on the inclusion of our children in the covenant. It is his gracious means and we need to trust him. Our duty is to be faithful in raising our own covenant children and—for the leadership of the Church—to do our best to ensure those who bring their children for baptism are, themselves, faithful and aware of what they’re doing. Some fall away, but we trust the Lord knows what he’s doing when he insists we include our children in the covenant.
So baptism corresponds to circumcision and initiates us into the new covenant. In the same way the Lord’s Supper corresponds to Passover. The meal itself, when Jesus instituted it the night before he died, was a Passover meal reinterpreted around what he was about to do. Again, this was the meal by which the Lord’s people in the old covenant recalled and participated themselves in the events by which he had made them his people. Consider that neither Jesus nor his disciples had been there when Israel painted the blood on their doorposts, when the angel of death passed through Egypt, when the Lord parted the sea and then drowned Pharaoh’s army. But part of the Passover meal and the liturgy associated with it, involved—and still involves—the participants talking about those events as if they themselves were part of them. And Jesus took that meal and recentred it on himself and on his saving death. The cross and the empty tomb were about to become a new exodus. And through that new exodus the Lord would create a new people. Brothers and Sisters, in the Lord’s Supper we recall—and not just recall, but participate in—those mighty, saving deeds by which the Lord has led us out of our slavery to sin and death. The Supper reminds us that by virtue of our baptism into Jesus, we are the Lord’s covenant people. And it reminds us of the life to which we have been called. The Lord led Israel through the sea and on the other side he gave them his law and took up his presence in their midst. And so with the Church, the Lord has led us through the sea of baptism, by Jesus’ death and resurrection he has delivered us from our slavery to sin and death, and he has, in a new and better way, made himself present in our midst. He has filled us with his Spirit and he has written the law of his Spirit on our hearts. He has taken our hearts of stone and replaced them with hearts of flesh, ready to be the people who will mediate his presence and proclaim his good news to the world.
Biblically speaking, these two things, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, mark us out objectively as members of the Church. We can point subjectively to the life of the Spirit. Every believer will show the fruit of the Spirit. Every believer will show a love for God and a love for others, for example. Perhaps what we need to be reminded of most in this day where everything is about the individual: Every believer who professes love for Jesus will also love his body and be eager to gather with it. But these things aren’t as easy to pin down objectively. Next week, Lord willing, I’ll address the topic of church discipline, which addresses those times when our lives fail to match up to our profession. But this change that takes place in us because of Jesus and the presence of the Spirit doesn’t happen at the same pace for everyone. It’s not usually linear. And none of us is perfect. Being immature in the faith isn’t the same as not being in the faith. And so we come back to the sacraments as the marks of the Christian. Have you been baptised into Jesus? Do you regularly receive his invitation and come to the Table to participate anew in his death and resurrection? If the answer is yes, then you belong to God. He has marked you as his own. And he will work in you day by day by his grace to conform you to the image of his son.
What about all the other membership-related things we and other churches do in addition to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper? What about Confirmation or reception by a bishop? Or membership covenants? Churches have a variety of ways for people to formally identify with the local church or with the denomination. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the biblical markers of membership in the Church. Does that make those other practises bad? Not necessarily. Just because the Bible doesn’t tell us specifically to do something doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t do it. There are good reasons to have means for people to formally identify with a local church and to commit to the people there. There are good reasons to have means for people to submit themselves to the doctrine and discipline of a local church or denomination. In a day when there are a lot of people who drift from one church to another—which is not a good thing—we need means of encouraging people to commit to a specific congregation. Speaking as your pastor, I need to know to whom I have an obligation of pastoral care and you show me that by your commitment to this congregation. When someone attends here a few weeks, then does the same at three or four or five other churches and then makes her way back here months later for another few weeks—it’s hard to care for, to exhort, to discipline people like that, or even to know if I should. Anything else we do with regard to church membership ought to reinforced Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as marks of membership. If what we do detracts from or becomes a substitute for the sacraments, then we’ve lost a biblical understanding of membership.
Finally, in closing, I want to remind you of the “why” to all of this. It can be easy to get so focused on the what that we forget the why—that we forget our mission and the reason why membership in the church matters. Brothers and Sisters, God has called us together, he has marked us out, he has given us his grace so that we can make him known. St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” We are the people redeemed by his blood and that makes us, as a people, living witnesses of God’s love and mercy and grace. Our Baptism, our participation in the Lord’s Supper, they are not merely for us. They are for the life of the world as we reveal to the people around us what it is to be part of God’s new creation and what it looks like to live in the presence of the living God. One day the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Dear Friends, that day will come, because of God’s word, because of God’s Spirit, but most importantly, because he has created a people for himself, marked by the waters of baptism and fed with his body and blood, whose faithful presence and witness in the world makes him known and reveals his glory.
Let’s pray: Father, we come this morning and give you thanks for having graciously brought us into this family we call the Church. You have washed us clean, you feed us at your Table, you call us your own sons and daughters. You have poured your own Spirit into us, that we might be conformed to the image of your true son, Jesus. May we be as committed to this family as you are. Deliver us from the consumerist mindset of our age, that we would come to give, not so much to get. We pray that by your word and Spirit you will make us ever more faithful to you and to this mission to make your good news known to world around us. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.
[1] Article VII
[2] IV.i.ix
[3] Article XXIX
[4] Article XVIII
Mark Five: A Biblical Understanding of Evangelism by William Klock
In early 2007 Bishop Dorrington reached out to me to ask if I’d be interested in coming to pastor Living Word Church. The first thing that told me this might be a healthy church was that you had started as a group of about a dozen after leaving St. Peter’s, and that you’d grown to around sixty to seventy people. Not just that, but most of those people added to your number were previously unchurched and nominally churched. That told me you were a people committed to evangelism and a commitment to evangelism is one of the marks of a healthy church. Let me be clear, it’s not about the numbers. A people can be committed to evangelism and still not see much numerical growth. And there are sadly plenty of churches with impressive numbers, that have utterly failed to truly evangelise people. Our work is to proclaim the good news. Changing hearts and turning them to God is the unique work of the Holy Spirit. Get that reversed—and it happens all too often—and you’ve got a recipe for an unhealthy church.
So, first, what is evangelism? In short, it’s the proclamation of the evangel, the good news. But, of course, it’s not quite that simple, is it? In a very real sense it should be. But we’ve got so many conflicting ideas about evangelism circulating around us that it complicates the whole thing. But at its very simplest, at its very core, evangelism is telling others the good news that we have experienced ourselves. Stefan Paas is a professor of missiology in Amsterdam. I read his recent book on evangelism in a secular age earlier this year and found he had a lot of excellent insights (and not a few problems, too), but I like the perspective he gives. Think of it this way:
“Human life is inescapably missionary. Everybody evangelizes. Whenever people become impressed by certain experiences, views, products or services, they feel the need to commend them to others. Whenever people are struck by their own success or by the failure of others, they feel the responsibility to share something of their own blessings with others. Clearly, there is nothing high and lofty about ‘mission’ as such. It is fully wedded with our social nature; we are witnessing, sharing, helping beings. ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart…’ (Rom. 10.8)”[1]
Have you ever thought about it that way? When we have a good experience somewhere, we tell our friends so that they can share our good experience. We spread the word about restaurants, mechanics, dentists, fishing holes, and hiking trails—and we make converts. Back when I first started working as an Apple technician, Apple’s marketing department was actually called “Apple Evangelism” and it wasn’t surprising to me that so many people converted from Windows to Mac with an almost religious zeal. This kind of telling is just what we do. It’s in our nature. And yet, there’s something different about actual evangelism, about the gospel—isn’t there? Nobody’s going get angry with you for telling them they should give your favourite restaurant a try. You’re not going to lose a friend by giving them the name of your dentist or your mechanic. And, of course, that’s because none of these other things calls us to a completely new kind of life. But this very basic human phenomenon really does get to what evangelism is at its core. It’s not complicated. It’s simply telling others the good news about Jesus that has been utterly good for us. Yes, the thing that makes it different is that if it’s true it doesn’t leave you any choice. You’ve got to repent, believe, and be baptised…and no restaurant or mechanic demands that kind of commitment…but it really is that simple when you boil it down. In Jesus, God has done something wonderful for us and it should be instinctive for us to want to tell the people we know. Paas goes on and writes this:
“Like all people in all times and places the first Christians were social beings; they were steeped deeply in all kinds of communicative behaviour. It would certainly amount to over-theorizing in most cases to ask about the missionary ‘methods’ that they used. They did what all people do: they bonded with friends, talked with relatives, raised their children, they ate together, played together, worked together. And of course they shared the ‘tidings of great joy’ they had heard; they ‘gossiped the gospel’.”[2]
The gospel also went out in more formal ways. Paul deliberately set out on journeys with a missionary purpose. He went to the synagogues to confront his fellow Jews and he went to the town centres to preach and to confront the Greeks and Romans. And some people are called to that kind of evangelism. But, Brothers and Sisters, have you ever considered how simple everyday evangelism really is? God, in Jesus, has done something amazing and you have experienced it. Do you gossip the gospel…as Paas puts it?
As we’ve been working through what it looks like to be a healthy church, I’ve been trying to frame these marks with the big narrative of scripture and I think that big story helps bring into focus what it means to evangelise and to be an evangelistic people. The first thing the story helps us to get right is our purpose as the people of God. Right from the beginning, when God created human beings, his purpose for us—the vocation he gave us—was to be his image in creation. Other peoples built temples for their gods and put images of wood or stone in those temples—the images of their gods—to represent their rule on earth. The point—or one of the points—of the Genesis story is to tell us that God created his own temple—and that makes him truly sovereign and better than all the other gods—and instead of putting a stone idol in it to bear his image and to represent his rule, he put human beings in that temple to be his stewards, his regents—first and foremost, his priests. We were created to serve him. Of course, part of that is serving each other. He loves us and so we love each other, as St. John writes. But it all first comes back to the fact that we exist to serve God. Even today, our calling to proclaim the good news to the world is to make him know so that others will give him glory and commit themselves to his service.
Sometimes we forget this. We are called to serve others. We are called to be a light to the nations. But sometimes we forget that these things grow out of our duty to God. In the Anglican Church in North America we have a diocese called “Churches for the Sake of Others” or locally, there was a church that used the motto, “In the Valley for the Valley”. I’m sure these folks are well-meaning, but it’s not surprising when their mission drifts and starts to be consumed by social and political agendas and, as C4SO’s bishop put it this week, “hankering after cultural acceptance”. If we aren’t anchored first in our duty to God, our duty to others can easily be swept off-course. If our churches exist “for the sake of God”, the “for the sake of others” part will come naturally. If we’re in the Valley for God, the part about being “for the Valley” will come naturally and—more importantly—will square with God’s mission for the world, not the various human agendas that are out there.
Second, the big biblical story gives us our model for evangelism. Before his ascension, Jesus commissioned his disciples:
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20)
“Go.” I think that word “go” sums up how most of us have been conditioned to think about evangelism—often so much so that we feel guilty or we feel like we’re falling short if we don’t leave everything behind to go to a far off country to proclaim the good news. Brothers and Sisters, let me suggest that scripture’s narrative tells us that when it comes to the mission of the people of God, we ought to think first not of “go” but of “presence”.
Think of Israel in the Old Testament. God chose them as a people and lived in their midst. His presence was with them, first in the tabernacle, and then in the temple in Jerusalem. As his people, he set them apart by giving them his law, and their calling was to be a light to the nations. Their witness was meant to reveal the Lord, his love for his people, and his mighty deeds to the nations, so that the nations would come to Jerusalem to give glory to the Lord and to learn his ways. We see this model throughout the prophets, but here's what we read in Micah 4:1-2.
It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and it shall be lifted up above the hills;
and peoples shall flow to it,
and many nations shall come, and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
The Lord did send some of his people out on rare occasions to the nations. He did that with Jonah. But his mission for Israel was primarily through his presence in the temple, in the midst of a priestly people who then mediated that presence—they made it known—to the nations and drew them to the Lord. This is what we see fulfilled in Revelation with the New Jerusalem and the nations streaming to it to worship God. This model of mission is what Jesus gets at in the Sermon on the Mount when he reminds the people of their calling to be salt and light and the city on a hill. He said,
In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 5:16)
Let your light so shine before others, so that they will be ultimately moved to give glory to God. That’s Israel’s mission in a nutshell right there. And, of course, it didn’t work. Israel—or most of Israel—hid her light under a basket. The Lord came in judgement. He threw the unsalty salt into the street where it was trod underfoot. But he also came himself in Jesus, died and rose from the grave, and did so to create a new people, forgiven and full of his own Holy Spirit. And here’s where Jesus’ great commission enters the story.
The old temple in Jerusalem was gone—or about to be gone at the time Jesus spoke—and a new temple was created. Instead of an earthy temple of bricks and mortar in which the Lord was present in the midst of his people, through Jesus and the Spirit he made the members of this new people, themselves, to be his temple and the place of his presence. “Living stones,” St. Peter calls us, built on Jesus, the living cornerstone. And so Jesus sent his people out—not all of them, but some of them—to establish outposts of this new, living temple, first throughout Judea, then Samaria, and throughout the Roman Empire. The Lord’s temple gradually established in every city and town, establishing his presence amongst the nations, and building the kingdom of God and declaring the Lordship of Jesus in anticipation of the Empire’s conversion.
Brothers and Sisters, Jesus shares his ministry with us. That means we are a priestly people. We mediate the presence of God to the world. We are a prophetic people, meaning that we are called to proclaim the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen, we are called to confront the world with the good news that he is Lord, and we have a duty to call the world to repentance and faith—to allegiance to him and to his kingdom. And Jesus shares his dominion with us. We are a royal people who anticipate the day when we will rule with our Lord. The church mediates God’s presence and proclaims his good news and his kingdom where we are. There will always be those called, like Paul, to “go”—to establish beachheads of the kingdom in other places, but for most of us our calling is to be gospel people right where we are, to be the church—the tabernacle of God’s Spirit—and to mediate this God who is present with us to the people and to the community around us.
But what is it that we need to communicate? When I talk about presence, it’s easy to think that all we need to do is be good Christians and people around us will become Christians by osmosis. There’s a popular saying, falsely attributed to St. Francis: “Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.” It gives people an out and reinforced this idea that we fulfil our calling and avoid offence by witnessing with our lives. Brother and Sisters, our lives should be a witness of Jesus and gospel. We are to be salt and light. We are to be the light on the hilltop. But you can’t preach the gospel without words. It’s the way God works. As I’ve stressed so many times, his word gives life. We ought to live our lives and we ought to live together as the Church in such a way that we make the people around us constructively curious. But at some point we will have to use words and explain what it’s all about. That’s the challenge. Sometimes we’re afraid of offending people or of being rejected. Sometimes we just don’t know what to say. And that last part is getting increasingly difficult. Just a few decades ago, most people in our culture had respect for Christians and had a general idea of what Christianity is about—even if some of their ideas were wrong. We largely all shared a common understanding of the nature of sin. That’s not really the case anymore and that means we need to be prepared more than in the past. We need to know our Bibles. We need to know the story. We need to understand what the gospel is. And it means that effective evangelism is going to take place in the context of long-term relationships with people—not in a short encounter while you sit next to someone on an airplane or in the doctor’s waiting room. In many ways that’s a good thing, because it’s in those relationships that we have the opportunity show the gospel and to make them curious.
But at some point we will need to tell people the story and we will need to explain to them what God has done in Jesus and what each of us needs to do in response. We need to tell them the truth and to be honest with them. They’re not joining a social club. Jesus has died to forgive sins and he has risen to give life. He has ascended and reigns as Lord. He gives his Spirit to those who repent and believe to transform them from the inside out. He is making all things new and the point of all of this is to make a new and holy people ready to be part of God’s new creation and live, once again, as his priests and stewards. When a person passes through the waters of baptism, it’s to take hold of this good news and its promise, and to cross into a new life and a new world on the other side. Repentance is costly. It means living God’s new creation now—being heaven-on-earth people—even when it’s counter to everything around us. It means letting go of our idols and our sources of security in order to trust in God and to commit to his vision for humanity and the world. But in doing so we are set free from our bondage to death to share the presence of the living God.
And not everyone will be receptive. Brothers and Sisters, remember that changing a person’s heart is not our duty. Again, evangelism goes wrong when we confuse our part with God’s part. Speaking at the Lusanne conference on evangelism back in 1974, the great evangelical Anglican preacher, John Stott, said:
“Evangelism must not be defined in terms of its results, for this is not how the word is used in the New Testament. …There is no mention whether the word which was “evangelized” was believed, or whether the inhabitants of the towns and villages “evangelized” were converted. To “evangelize” in biblical usage does not mean to win converts (as it usually does when we use the word) but simply to announce the good news, irrespective of the results.”[3]
That conference went on to give this definition of evangelism in what’s known as the Lausanne Covenant:
“To evangelize is to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that, as the reigning Lord, he now offers the forgiveness of sins and the liberating gifts of the Spirit to all who repent and believe.”[4]
Brothers and Sisters, we do the telling. The Spirit does the converting. Getting that wrong inevitably leads to all sorts of pragmatic and manipulative practises. We water down the message to make it more palatable. We use manipulation to win people over. We start acting like salesmen and all too often we end up treating the gospel as if it were a car with a bunch of flaws to be hidden from the customer. And we start treating our listeners like customers and laying high pressure sales techniques on them to produce a decision. Friends the gospel itself is powerful—more powerful than you or I can ever be. Proclaim God’s word and let the Spirit do the work.
Keeping this perspective also keeps us from feeling as though we’ve failed. Many Christians don’t evangelise because they don’t think they’re able to convince someone to choose Jesus and some have been crippled by what they see as past failures. Hear me: If someone doesn’t believe, it’s not your fault. That part’s not up to you; it’s up to God. Again, trust God’s word and God’s Spirit. And sometimes you may end up surprised at the ways the word and the Spirit work. Charles Spurgeon tells how George Whitfield,
“he great eighteenth-century evangelist, was hounded by a group of detractors who called themselves the “Hell-fire Club.” When Whitfield would stand outside preaching this little group of guys would stand off on the side and mimic him. They didn’t believe a word of it. The ring leader was called Thorpe. One day Thorpe was mimicking Whitefield to his cronies, delivering his sermon with brilliant accuracy, perfectly imitating his tone and facial expressions, when he himself was so pierced that he sat down and was converted on the spot.”[5]
Brothers and Sisters, sometimes our duty is merely to plant the seed. Sometimes it’s to water what someone else has planted. Sometimes we reap the harvest that results from decades of others planting and watering. But never forget that it is the Spirit who brought the growth.
Now, let me close with one last very important thing. Knowing that the fruit of our evangelism is not produced by us, but by the Spirit, Brothers and Sisters, pray. J. I. Packer, in his wonderful little book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, wrote this:
“In evangelism…we are impotent; we depend wholly upon God to make our witness effective; only because He is able to give men new hearts can we hope that through our preaching of the gospel sinners will be born again. These facts ought to drive us to prayer. It is God’s intention that they should drive us to prayer. God means us, in this as in other things, to recognise and confess our impotence, and to tell Him that we rely on Him alone, and to plead with Him to glorify His name. It is His way regularly to withhold His blessing until His people start to pray. ‘Ye have not, because ye ask not.’ ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.’ But if you are too proud or lazy to ask, we need not expect to receive. This is the universal rule, in evangelism as elsewhere. God will make us pray before He blesses our labours in order that we may constantly learn afresh that we depend on God for everything. And then, when God permits us to see conversions, we shall not be tempted to ascribe them to our own gifts, or skills, or wisdom, or persuasiveness, but to His work alone, and so we shall know whom we ought to thank for them.”[6]
Friends, pray. Pray you will be captivated by the glory of the gospel yourself, by love and faithfulness of God made manifest in Jesus and that your daily life will make the people around you constructively curious. Pray that God will give you a heart for the lost. Pray for opportunities to proclaim the good news. Pray for the eyes to see those opportunities. Pray for the boldness and courage to take advantage of them when they come. Pray for the words to say—but don’t let that be an excuse for not being prepared in advance! And most of all, pray for the Spirit to be at work in the hearts of those to whom you preach. Pray. Pray. Pray. And with that, Brothers and Sisters, let’s pray:
Almighty God and Father, be at work in our hearts by your Holy Spirit and fill us with passion, with enthusiasm, with gratitude, with joy for what you have done through Jesus. He died and rose again to deliver us from sin and death and he has ascended to your right hand and reigns with power and authority. You have shown us your glory and I pray that your Spirit will give us a passion to make your glory known—to be salt, to be light, to be a city on a hill—to cause the nations of the earth to come streaming to your temple to give you glory and to know your ways. Be at work in our hearts we pray. Fill us with a desire to proclaim your good news. And be at work in the hearts of the people who hear our proclamation. Make them fertile soil for the word that we plant. Cause your word to take root and grow that all the world might give you glory we pray. Amen.
[1] Pilgrims and Priests (London: SCM Press, 2019), 6.
[2] Ibid. 7
[3] https://lausanne.org/content/john-stott-biblical-basis-of-evangelism
[4] https://lausannecanada.com/lausanne-covenant
[5] Charles H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit (Pasadena, Texas: Pilgrim, 1974), 34:115, cited in Mark Dever, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004), 141-142.
[6] J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 1991), 122
Mark Four: A Biblical Understanding of Conversion by William Klock
“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” St. Paul wrote those words in his epistle to the Christians of Galatia. I can think of few statements more counter-cultural than that. Again, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” I noted three weeks ago that our current culture despises meta-narratives—those big, over-arching stories that give meaning to life. To grant legitimacy to such narratives, means surrendering yourself to the meaning they give. Our culture, instead, values the individual. We make our own truth. We define our own reality. We choose our own values. We are subject to no one. We will not be oppressed by having the meaning of someone else’s grand narrative forced on us. In contrast to Paul, the post-modern person is fully self-actualised and might say, “I live, because I know who I am and live my truth authentically and without inhibition.” Or, more simply, there’s the affirmation so popular these days: “I am enough.” Post-modernism is full of conversion stories about discovering oneself, about learning to put oneself first, about learning to reject any outside imposition on one’s identity or values. “Deconstruction” has been the method by which many former Evangelicals have too often walked this path into apostasy, creating a faith they can live while being true to themselves. But against it all stand Paul’s declaration of faith. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ [the Messiah] who lives in me.”
Last week we looked at what it means to have a biblical understanding of the gospel—of the good news about Jesus. We looked at Peter’s sermon on Pentecost, found in Acts 2, and we heard his appeal to the people there when they asked how they should respond to the good news about Jesus and his kingdom. Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus [the Messiah] for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). What does that look like in practice? Or what’s the result of repenting, of being baptised, of being forgiven, and of being indwelt by the Holy Spirit? Paul sums it up beautifully in those few short words, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” This morning I want to unpack that as we look at the fourth mark of a healthy church. I’ve struggled with what to call it. We could call it having a biblical understanding of conversion, but conversion isn’t a common biblical term. It’s really only used once in the way we use it. We could say “a biblical understanding of regeneration” or maybe “of renewal”. Those are good New Testament terms that describe what happens to us when we believe and are baptised. But all these ideas point to the fact that something changes in us when we submit ourselves to the good news. Maybe we could use a phrase Paul liked to use. We need a biblical understanding of being “in Christ”. Or we could just say that we need a biblical understanding of what it means to be or—or more specifically—to become a Christian. I’m still not sure which is best, although I’ll have to pick one so I can put a title on this sermon when it gets uploaded to the website in a couple of hours. But I think you get the idea. This morning we’re talking about what the Bible says happens—or how we should understand what happens—when we respond to the good news in repentance, belief, and baptism.
I think that’s the best place to start. Something happens. When we repent, believe, and are baptised something changes. It has to. I’ve been trying to frame these marks of a healthy church by the great narrative of the scriptures and, if it tells us nothing else, the Bible’s big story tells us that change is essential. The story begins with God creating everything—the world, people, everything—and stressing that it was all good. And then we human beings rebelled against God. We believed the serpent’s lie that we could be gods ourselves. We foolishly abandoned the life God gave us in his presence and became subject to sin and death. And we proceeded to make a mess of his good creation—of the world, of ourselves, of our relationships—everything. And the story shows us over and over and over and over that left to ourselves, we only make everything worse. We’ve tried philosophy after philosophy, government after government, god after god and keep finding ourselves in the same predicament. Something has to change if the cycle is ever to be broken.
Even when God called Abraham and from his family created a people for himself, even as he gave them his law and lived in their midst—they were a people dramatically changed and set apart from the nations—even they continued to need this change. Repeatedly the Lord promised that he would set things right. He promised that he would work through this people whom he had called and chosen. But to get from fallen creation to new creation requires a change. Human hearts must be changed. From self and from sin and from idolatry our hearts must be turned back to God and to his kingdom. And so he promised his people: the day would come when he would forgive their sins and set them to rights by means of his own Spirit. Jesus fulfilled those promises. By his death he forgives sins, by his resurrection he has defeated death, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit he has infused the life of God into his people. Jesus and the Spirit effect our needed change. And, again, the story hammers at this need as we’ve seen in our study of Revelation. When creation is finally and truly set to rights, there will be no place for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, or liars (Revelation 21:8)—in short, those who continue to live for themselves. God’s new creation has room only for those who have been created anew by his Spirit. The Lord promised through Ezekiel:
I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26)
“I am enough,” is a proclamation that no change is necessary and it will leave you for dead, Brothers and Sisters; wiped from creation along with every bit of sin and rebellion that remains on that last day. With Paul we must declare, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
So change is necessary. And we know change is possible—not on our own, of course, but through the work of Jesus and the Spirit. If God has promised that he will do it, he surely will. So what is this change? Well, first lets get some fairly common misconceptions out of the way so we know what it’s not.
This change—conversion, regeneration, renewal, however we describe it—is not mere intellectual assent, as if the gospel is a bit of theological truth and once you’ve heard it and accepted that it’s true, you’re good. There is a segment in Evangelical Christianity that has been so ardent in avoiding any hint of works-righteousness, that they’ve fallen into the opposite error. When I was a university student I received a t-shirt as a gift: the “Theology Shirt”. It listed several dozen theological positions and had check boxes you could mark with a permanent marker so that everyone could know exactly what sort of theology nerd you are. As I looked at it one of them confused me. There was a check-box for “Lordship Salvationist”. Huh? So I did some research and found that there’s a formal controversy about whether or not you must make Jesus your Lord in order to be counted as “saved”. There are a lot of folks, in an effort to avoid any hint of works-righteousness, who say all you have to do is believe that Jesus is the Saviour—you don’t actually have to assent to his lordship. Ideally you do, but it’s not a requirement—because then salvation would be by works, or so they claim. But this has given rise to all sorts of problems in contemporary evangelism. It’s a lot easier to get people to give their intellectual assent to the lordship of Jesus than it is to convince them to actually give themselves wholly over to his sovereign and sanctifying rule. When I was a kid we were involved with a children’s ministry where the goal was essentially to just get kids to pray the “sinner’s pray”, then they’d count that kid as belonging to Jesus and good forever, regardless of whether or not that child ever followed through. That’s not change. Now I’m getting into next week’s topic, but this highlights that this new life is not the work of the evangelist, but the work of the Spirit. Neither you nor I can bring about change in another person’s heart. Only the Spirit can do that. We preach—that’s our job; the Spirit’s job is to change the heart. So this change is not mere belief. And Peter’s sermon should make that clear. Belief is coupled with repentance and baptism and results in a complete change of life.
Another thing this change is not is a new moral resolve. Sin is obvious to most of us and the vast majority of people would rather be part of the solution than the problem and so they resolve to be better, more moral, less sinful—there are all sorts of ways to put. Popular culture says that bad people go to hell and good people go to heaven, so many people put some effort into being good—or at least to tilt the scale in that direction. Part of the problem with all of this is that we establish our own standards of right and wrong instead of God’s standard and, this is just another case of human beings trying to fix the world on our own and that’s something that has never worked. But even when we do accept God’s moral standard as the rule, if you try to make it on your own, you’ll eventually have to compromise and lower the standard. The change we need certainly involves a moral renovation on our part, but it’s not one we can perform on ourselves. Only the Spirit can remove our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh. Only the Spirit can fill us with a hatred for sin and a love for God that will move us to repentance and bring about the change we call new creation.
And while we’re talking about what this change is not, I think it’s worth noting a common and popular corruption of the gospel message that arose with the 19th Century Holiness or Higher Life Movement and influenced the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. This is the idea that conversion and being in Christ comes first and that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit comes later—or even that one can legitimately be in Christ and never receive the Spirit. It is the Spirit who effects the change and it is the change the Spirit effects that is the whole point of the new covenant. The law is no longer written on stone, an external source calling us to change. The law is now written on our hearts by the Spirit, who changes us from the inside out. And it’s this change, the renewed heart and the presence of the gifts of the Spirit, a hatred for sin, the confession that Jesus is Lord, these are what manifest the indwelling of the Spirit in the new believer. The Spirit is not an accessory to the faith for mature believers or a new spiritual level to unlock as we progress. The Spirit is, quite literally, the heart of the Christian life from the very beginning.
So back to my earlier question: What is this change? The story points us in the right direction. This change is a change of heart, one that undoes our rebellion against God and turns our love and our loyalty back to him. It’s a change that aligns our loyalties and values with those of his kingdom and his new creation. It’s a change that produces a longing for life in his presence. Instead of grasping after his throne for ourselves, our greatest desire is to give him the glory he is due. And it’s a change that longs for God’s new creation, for its fulfilment, and for us to be a part of it.
This is why Peter stressed repentance and baptism on our part. Repentance means to turn around. For the Jewish men there on Pentecost it meant not just turning from sin, but letting go of all the wrong ideas and expectations they’d had about the Lord and about his Messiah and about his kingdom. Everyone had something to let go of. The Zealots had to let go of their violent political ambitions that they hoped would bring the kingdom. The Pharisees had to let go of the boundaries they’d drawn. And as the good news went out to the gentiles, repentance meant turning away from their own idolatries, sins, and sources of security. Repentance is a change of loyalties. We turn aside from everything that is not Jesus so that we can give him our all. We don’t know with certainty what baptismal formula was used in those early days, but our own clearly emphasizes this repentance when the candidate is asked:
Do you renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that you will not follow, nor be led by them.
And, of course, that was Peter’s second instruction: repent and be baptised. So often the death and resurrection of Jesus are compared by the New Testament writers to Israel’s exodus from Egypt, but where that was a deliverance from bondage to Pharaoh, Jesus delivers us from bondage to sin and death. In the old exodus, the Lord led his people to the Red Sea and parted the waters. On the other side was a promise of new life in his presence. The waters of the Red Sea pointed forward to our baptism. The baptismal waters represent God’s promise of forgiveness and new life and so, like Israel passing through the Red Sea in faith, we pass through the waters of baptism and we come out the other side into a new life. Baptism is the means the Lord has given us to take this step of faith, to repent and to take hold of his promise.
And, Peter says, when we take this step of faith, our sins are forgiven—we are made right with God—and we are filled with the life of the Spirit. And it’s the Spirit who renews our minds and regenerates or hearts, who turns our desires from self to a love for God and a desire for holiness. The Spirit does a work of new creation in us that anticipates the resurrection that will take place at some point in the future.
It's a bit of an odd thing. Peter talks about repenting and being baptised and then receiving the Holy Spirit, but the scriptures tell us that it is the Spirit already working in us that moves us to repent and believe in the first place. On the one hand we’re told repeatedly that we have to act. Think of Jesus and his urgent words to Israel: “Repent, because the kingdom is here.” Or when Nicodemus came to him in the night and Jesus stressed: “You must be born again.” But we’ve have the Lord’s words through Ezekiel: “I’ve got to remove your heart of stone and I’ve got to give you a heart of flesh.” And we’ve also got Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. What brough the bones back to life? They didn’t come back to life on their own. The life came in response to hearing the word of God. The word and the Spirit work together to bring us to repentance and faith, which is why Jesus could say a few chapters later in John 6:
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.
Or as St. Paul wrote the Corinthians:
We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:18-24)
Or consider Paul’s words to the Ephesians:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. (Ephesians 2:8)
The English Reformers expressed this need for the Spirit’s work in our hearts in Article XVII of our Articles of Religion:
Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God, be called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they though Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God’s mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.
That this change is the fruit of God’s word and of God’s Spirit ought to be a source of assurance for us. Consider his promise to his people in Isaiah 55:10-11.
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
God’s word does not return empty. It accomplishes that which he purposes. Again, the conversion of the heart is not something that lies with us, but with him. We preach the word and the Spirit brings life. And this shouldn’t just inform how we proclaim the good news, it should also be an encouragement for the Christian who lacks assurance of his own standing with God. Brothers and Sisters, if you’re worried about where you stand with God. If you’re concerned about holiness and troubled by your sin. That right there is evidence that the Spirit is doing his work in your heart. Maybe you’ve never repented and if that’s you, repent now and the Spirit will continue to do his work in your heart. If you have repented, keep repenting. If you’ve been baptised, remember God’s promise to you as you passed through those waters and continue each day to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil and to hold tightly to Jesus and the Spirit will continue to do his work in you. God’s promises are sure and his word and his Spirit accomplish what he gives them to do.
Finally, now, what does this change look like? Since I’ve stressed the work of the spirit in our lives so much today, I might as well start there. This change will manifest itself as we bear the fruit of the Spirit. The life transformed by the good news about Jesus will manifest love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—the values of the kingdom. We will grow to hate sin and to love holiness and we will do what whatever it takes to separate ourselves from sin and to attach ourselves to holiness. We will seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, trusting that he will take care of everything else. We will be on-earth-as-in-heaven people—not just committed to holiness in our own lives, but committed to bringing God’s love and mercy, his justice and peace to the world around us.
Second, we will have a hunger for God’s word. God works in us by his word and Spirit. As we immerse ourselves in his word he speaks and his Spirit then applies it to our hearts. Those in whom God has begun this great change, those who have known the love of God revealed at the cross in Jesus and who grow more and more to love him in return will desire to hear his voice and to know his will. If you don’t communicate with your spouse, you’ll struggle to every know him or her, you’ll never know what his or her desires are, and as a result you’ll struggle to please him or her. Just so, if we fail to let God speak to us through his word, we will never fully know him, will never fully know his desires for us, and will struggle to please him. If we are in Christ, if the Spirit lives in us, we will hunger for God’s word, we will submit ourselves to it, and we will let it shape and transform us.
And third, this change will give us a love for the Church. You cannot profess to love Jesus while despising and being apart from his body. There is no such thing as a loner Christian. The people of God are a community and as a community we walk together, we do life together, we work for his kingdom together. Here we exhort and teach each other, we learn to love and to forgive each other, we study the scriptures and grow with each other. Here we learn to bear each other’s burdens, to cry with each other and to rejoice with each other. Through the Church Jesus invites us to his Table where we participate each time in the mighty acts of God through which he has delivered us from sin and death. What the Lord did for Israel in the Passover meal, reminding them of their identity in him and shaping them as a people, he does for us in the Lord’s Supper. The great change does not happen apart from the Church.
Does this change happen instantly and all at once? No. Our culture is obsessed with shortcuts and instant gratification, but there are no shortcuts to holiness. God works in us by his Spirit and his Spirit works through these means of grace he has given: through his word, through his Church, through his sacraments. If we will eat the food he has given, his Spirit will put it to work to strengthen our faith and to grow us into the likeness of Jesus. As Paul wrote to the Philippians
I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)
It will take time—just as God’s work to renew the whole of creation is taking time—but because this work is the fruit of God’s word and God’s Spirit, it will surely be accomplished. When I was a kid we had a Polaroid. You’d take a photo, the camera would spit it out and then you’d have to wait what seemed an interminably long time for the image to slowly develop. We’d run around the room waving it in the air or putting it under the light thinking that would make the image appear faster. It didn’t. Everything the photo needed was there already. You just had to wait for the chemicals to do their work. And just so with the Christian life, Brothers and Sisters. We get impatient. Sometimes we try shortcuts. Sometimes we’re tempted to give up. Don’t. Rest in Jesus. Immerse yourself in his word. Come to his Table. Live this new life as part of his body. Pray. And his Spirit will make you the new creation God intends for you to be.
Let’s pray: Sovereign and gracious Father, we give you thanks that the power for our renewal lies not with us, but with you. If it were up to us, we would be dead in our sins forever, but by your grace we have been given the gift of faith, we have been forgiven, and we are being made new day by day. Teach us to trust in your grace. When we are tempted to think that we can do it, remind us of your grace so that we fall back to reliance on your word, on your Spirit, so that will never neglect the means of grace that you have given: your church, your sacraments, a life of prayer. We repent, we believe, we’ve passed through the waters of baptism to receive your promise. You have adopted us, your sons and daughters, and have filled us with your Spirit. Make us new by your sovereign grace we ask, so that we may truly say with Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Amen.
Mark Three: A Biblical Understanding of the Gospel by William Klock Faithful preaching of God’s word is the first mark of a healthy and faithful church. These last two Sundays we’ve begun to explore what that looks like. First, we saw that we must preach the word in such a way that we give it priority and let it be our guide, and that means that we commit ourselves to preaching expositionally. And last Sunday I talked about the importance of allowing the Bible, as we preach it and immerse ourselves in it, to shape and define our understanding of God. The Bible is, after all, his revelation of himself to us. We cannot know him apart from his word. And that leads us to today’s topic: A healthy church will have a Bible-informed understanding of the gospel. Now, no one ever sets out deliberately to preach an unbiblical gospel, but that doesn’t mean such things aren’t preached. Sometimes we unwittingly allow unbiblical cultural ideas, values, and philosophies to colour our gospel. Sometimes, when the Church is beset by controversy over gospel issues, we can over-react to one error by falling into its opposite. Sometimes the errors are small, but sometimes they’re great—to the point of apostasy. The antidote, Brothers and Sistes, is to preach God’s word faithfully and systematically.
So what is the gospel? Our English word “gospel” is from Old English god spel, literally meaning “good news”. The Greek word used by the New Testament writers and the ancient Jewish translators of the Old Testament is euangelion. Originally euangelion was the reward that was given to someone for bringing good news, but by the time the Bible was written it had come to mean the good news itself. The related verb, euangelizo, means to proclaim this good news. This is where we get the English word “evangelical”. We are people of the good news. This is a good place to start. The gospel is good news. For example, think back to the death of Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel. David mourned their deaths and the messengers came with the news, he said:
Tell it not in Geth, and proclaim it not in the exits of Ascalon…lest daughters of the uncircumcised exult. (2 Samuel 1:20 NETS)
In the Greek Old Testament, when it says “proclaim”, it’s using this word for proclaiming good news. The Philistines would take the death of Saul as good news. When the messenger brought this news to David, he thought it was good news, too. David’s enemy had been defeated. Now, for personal reasons David didn’t take it that way. To him it was bad news, but he knew that to everyone else it was good news—a victory had been won and that victory meant things were about to change. And, notice, the natural thing to do with good news is to proclaim it. The heralds were ready to do just that until David told them not to.
Or think of Isaiah. Israel had been defeated, but he saw a vision of Jerusalem as the herald of good news. The Lord would come and deliver his people from their exile.
Go on up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good news;
lift it up, fear not;
say to the cities of Judah,
“Behold your God!” (Isaiah 40:9)
And Isaiah uses this concept as he envisions the messenger, running across the mountains with this good news:
How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of him who brings good news,
who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness,
who publishes salvation,
who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isaiah 52:7)
Something was about to happen. The Lord was going to act and he would act in such a way that things would never be the same. God was finally going to take up his throne as King. This is exactly what Jesus had in mind when we read Mark’s account of him saying:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:15)
The Lord was about to act. Specifically, he was about to act as King in such a way that everything was about to change. And Jesus isn’t just saying that people in Judea needed to “believe” in the sense of giving their intellectual assent to some new theological truth. When “good news” happens, it’s a world-changing event. To “believe” means to change one’s life in order to take part in what’s about to happen and be part of its benefits. In Jesus, God was becoming king—as he had promised so long before. To refuse to believe, to refuse to recognise this change and this new reality is, at best, to be left behind and, at worst, well…it wasn’t good. Let’s look at how the Greeks and Romans used this term, “gospel”.
If you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra or Mankiewicz’ 1963 Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, you know something about the aftermath of the Roman civil war. On the death of Julius Caesar the Empire was plunged into conflict. On one side was Caesar’s heir, Octavian, and on the other his friend, Mark Antony. Octavian defeated Antony in a great naval battle at Actium. Antony fled to Egypt, where he eventually committed suicide with Cleopatra. Octavian was enthroned as Caesar Augustus and euangelion—the good news—was proclaimed throughout the empire. Augustus had defeated the enemies of Rome. He had brought peace at last and, with it, prosperity. He even started using the title “son of God”. He was the saviour of the empire.
Now, what did this good news mean to the people of the empire? Imagine if you’d been a local official or ruler and you’d been a firm supporter of Mark Antony during the war. The good news about Caesar Augustus meant that everything had changed and you had to make a choice. There was no continuing on supporting the losing side. That was treason and it would lead to only one thing: execution. This was the choice King Herod faced when this good news reached him. He’d backed Antony. He was no dummy. Hearing the news, he went straight to the new Caesar and pledged his loyalty. The world had changed and he committed himself to the side where he got to live—and keep his throne.
So, now, think about “good news”. It means that something has happened—or is happening or is about to happen—something that changes everything. Nothing will ever be the same again and, in light of it, everyone has got to make a choice. There’s no fence sitting. And there are consequences if you make the wrong choice. If Herod, for example, had continued to back Antony’s forces it would have meant the end of Herod. In Jesus, Israel’s God has become King and he calls for our allegiance—to him, to his kingdom, to everything it stands for. Sin and death are defeated and everything about the world that was shaped by them is being undone by Jesus and his act of new creation. The gospel calls us to make a choice, to announce our allegiance. Do we continue to give our allegiance to—as we say in our baptism—the world, the flesh, and the devil, or to Jesus, his new creation, and the Holy Spirit?
And this points to something else important about the gospel. Good news isn’t quietly whispered. It’s always proclaimed. It’s announced with great fanfare. The announcement that Jesus is Lord, that in him the God of Israel has come as King, that’s not some private truth to keep to ourselves or to whisper to our friends. But that’s not far off from how many people treat it. Something changed in the first half of the Twentieth Century and we started talking about “sharing” the gospel. Christians had never used that kind of language before. But it goes along with a shift that slowly took place over the last two hundred years or so. Instead of seeing the gospel as good news, we started treating it instead like good advice. We’ve made this shift subtly in how we do evangelism. We often present the gospel—the good news about Jesus—as if it’s just another offering on the religious or philosophical smorgasbord and suggest that people give Jesus a try. Maybe they’ll like him and believe—or maybe they won’t, which would be sad, but…whatever. But, Brothers and Sisters, the gospel is not good advice. It’s not like a stock tip or a life hack or a new recipe. It’s good news. It’s not just a message that will change your life. It’s a message that will change your life, because it’s a message that in Jesus the whole world has changed.
Consider Peter’s sermon on Pentecost, recorded in Acts 2. He starts out:
“Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. (Acts 2:14)
I think we pass over this introduction too quickly in order to get to the meat of his sermon, but notice how he proclaims this good news like the royal herald that he is. This isn’t a good piece of advice. It's not a pro tip. It’s not something that might be worth giving a shot. It's good news. It demands action. And Peter goes on, reminding the people of the promises the Lord had made to Israel—promises to set things to rights by sending his King. He tells them:
“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. (Acts 2:22-24)
“You killed him,” Peter says, “but God raised him up.” What does that mean? Peter, again, looks back to the promises God had made to Israel—particularly through David. For Peter, Jesus’ death was vitally important, but the crucifixion of Jesus wasn’t the thing that changed the world. Ultimately, it was his resurrection from the dead that did that. In his resurrection, Peter says, God has loosed the pangs of death. By his resurrection, he says, Jesus has been exalted at the right hand of God and given to his people the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has fulfilled all the Lord’s promises. But Peter ends with the most powerful note of all in verse 36:
“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and [Messiah], this Jesus whom you crucified.”
By raising Jesus from the dead, God has declared him to be Lord and Messiah—to be not just any king, but to be the King—the one who will set all to rights—not just his people, but eventually the whole of this broken creation.
The crowd, Luke says, were cut to the heart and asked Peter what they should do. In other words, they knew this good news meant that the world has changed and they wanted to know what they had to do to in response. And Peter says to them in verses 38-39:
“Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”
Luke says about three thousand were baptised that day. But what did Peter mean by “repent and be baptised”? To repent is to turn around. The good news is the announcement that in Jesus the world has changed, there’s a new King, and God’s kingdom is breaking in. The good news calls us to turn aside and to leave behind the old regime, the old order—our rebellion, our sin, our idolatry—and to take hold of the new King and his kingdom in faith. In Jesus, God has become king. Peter’s sermon is incredibly important, because in it he reminds us of what the Lord had promised to Israel, and then he explains that it has all been fulfilled or is in the process of being fulfilled by Jesus—and those promises point to what the good news is all about. The promises remind us that what Jesus has done is far bigger and all-encompassing than what we often think. It’s about all of creation being set right and made new. It’s about Jesus binding the devil and triumphing over the powers and principalities that have corrupted this world. It’s about the old gods being cast down and the true God being raised up. It’s about humanity being made right with God to finally live in his presence and to take up our vocation again—the one that Adam and Eve rejected—to be his image-bearers, the priests of his temple, as we steward his creation. It’s about heaven and earth, about God and man finally being reunited.
Jews knew that one day God would set things right and that when he did so he would judge—and destroy—everything and everyone who was opposed to him. They called that day “the day of the Lord”. Throughout his ministry Jesus warned that it was coming—and soon. When he warned about the easy way that leads to destruction and urged people to follow him on the hard and narrow way that leads to life, that’s what he was talking about. He was pointing to the events we read about in our study of Revelation when Jerusalem and the temple were thrown down by the Romans as an act of judgement by God on his unbelieving people—much as he’d done six centuries earlier, although that time it had been the Babylonians. Jesus wasn’t warning about some event thousands of years in the future. He was warning of a judgement that was just around the corner. That judgement certainly foreshadows that last great day of final judgement when every last enemy of God will be wiped from creation. But Jesus—and Peter—were focused on Israel and her near future. Again, Peter’s hearers were cut to the heart, because they realised that this is what Peter was talking about too. They wanted to know how to escape the coming judgement and to be part of God’s new people in the age to come.
If people thought the victory of Octavian over Antony was a world-shaking event—so much so that King Herod went to grovel before the new emperor that he might have a place in it, imagine how much greater, how all-encompassing this good news about Jesus is. If the Lord was going to come with both salvation and judgement to set Israel to rights and to deal with the unrepentant in her midst, one day he will surely do the same for the whole world.
This ought to put our attention on another aspect of the good news. Herod could only speculate about where he stood with Octavian. He could very easily have gone home headless. By his resurrection Jesus has inaugurated God’s new world, and Brothers and Sisters, by his death he has shown his mercy. We need but repent—to turn aside from the old gods, the old ways, the old systems—to believe—to take hold of him in faith and to give him our allegiance, and we can be sure of where we stand before him. The first step we take after repentance is to be baptised. The waters of baptism hold his promise of forgiveness and new life and as we pass through them in faith, he washes us clean and fills us with his Spirit. He makes us his own. As St. Paul writes in Romans:
For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” (Romans 8:15)
Jesus’ Father becomes our Father and he loves us as he loves his own son.
But speaking of Paul… How do the Gentiles find a place in this good news. Jesus was Israel’s Messiah. He came in fulfilment of the Lord’s promises to Israel. Even in his death by crucifixion, he died the very death that the unbelieving Jewish rebels would suffer a generation later when God’s judgement fell on Jerusalem. Jesus and the good news are integrally tied to Israel and to Israel’s story. How is it good news for the rest of the world? We see the struggle in Acts. The Spirit all but summoned Peter and John to Samaria. The good news had reached people there and they believed, but—a mystery to the apostles—they did not receive the Spirit. The apostles had to go and lay hands on these new non-Jewish believers. It was a not-so-subtle hint from the Spirit that the good news was for everyone. An angel directed Philip to his meeting with a man from Ethiopia. The Spirit had to convince Peter, against everything he thought he knew was right, to go to the home of Cornelius, a gentile centurion. And what was to be done with these gentile converts? Did they have to become Jews first? Be circumcised, keep the law, and all of that. And then along came Paul. Or, more precisely, along came the risen Messiah to meet Paul on the road to Damascus.
Maybe more than anyone else, Paul realised just how much the resurrection of Jesus changes everything. C. S. Lewis famously wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” The resurrection of Jesus was just like that for Paul. And Paul realised that if the Lord’s promises to Israel were fulfilled in Jesus, in his resurrection, and in the outpouring of the Spirit to create this new people of God called the Church, then all of this was for the gentiles too. Israel had always been called to be a light to the nations and so too must this new Israel. Paul thought back to the Lord’s deliverance of Israel in the Exodus—something that shaped Israel’s identity and is there behind so much of Paul’s writing. The Lord delivered his people from their bondage and in doing so, he made his might and his glory known to the nations—especially to Egypt. Her king and her gods were exposed for the powerless frauds they were. And yet there was no mass conversion of the Egyptians in the wake of the Exodus. The whole thing was an embarrassment that they expunged from their records so that they could continue in the idolatry.
But Paul recognized that in Jesus and in this new exodus, there was a new element that had been missing in the old and that was the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Paul knew that this good news about a crucified Messiah was, as he writes to the Corinthians “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). A crucified Messiah was blasphemy to the Jews. And it was just stupid nonsense to the gentiles. Paul knew this first hand. The Jews stoned him for the things he said and the Gentiles threw him in jail. “But,” he goes on in that same verse, “to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, the Messiah—the power of God and the wisdom of God.” That was the key—those who are called, those in whom the Spirit of God is at work.
How does the Spirit work? It seems like it’s different for everyone. For Paul it was the realization that Jesus really had risen from the dead and that that truth changed everything he’d ever known. He had to go off by himself for a few years to work it all through, but work it through he did. For others it was simply the realization that in Jesus the God of Israel was truly at work. This time the Gentiles saw the God of Israel in this mighty act of redemption that proved his faithfulness to his promises and instead of forgetting about it like the Egyptians had so long ago, they recognized the living God and they threw all their idols away. For others it was the fact that in Jesus, God drew near. By his Spirit they somehow knew him and experienced him—something that never happened with the pagan gods. Paul recognized that this good news was for everyone. As he wrote to the Galatians:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Jesus the Messiah. (Galatians 3:28)
This time the gentiles saw the mighty and saving deeds of the God of Israel and they believed—because of the Spirit—and they were welcomed into this new people of God to share in the forgiveness and the new life and the future hope that Jesus had given them.
But, in closing, what’s the significance? Where does the good news take us? What are we supposed to do with it? If we understand that the death and resurrection of Jesus give us a place in the renewed people of God and that Jesus is setting everything to rights, that itself should point us in the right direction. The problem is that in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, liberal Protestants largely turned the gospel into a message of good works—and then, gradually, those good works became more and more like the values of secular culture and Leftist politics and Jesus became nothing more than an example. In response, fundamentalists and evangelicals rightly re-emphasised the personal and spiritual nature of redemption and the forgiveness of sins, but often over-reacted when it came to the good works. We’ve made the gospel a message very narrowly of forgiveness of sin and restored fellowship with God. Salvation should result in a changed life and good works, but we’ve stressed—wrongly—that those good works are the fruit of the gospel, but not the gospel itself. So on one side the gospel is proclaimed as a message of public welfare and on the other as a personal or private spirituality. Then, throw into that mix the misconception that the end goal of all of this is someday to leave this world behind so that we can live a kind of disembodied spiritual existence in heaven, and we make a right mess of the gospel.
Brothers and Sisters, this is why we’ve got to preach the scriptures—so that we remember the big story. This is what Peter did on Pentecost. And when we do that we find that this faithful God we spoke about last Sunday has been working all along not to give us a plan to escape this fallen Creation, but rather a means to set this fallen creation to rights and us along with it. We’re creation’s stewards—or at least that’s what we were created to be—but we rebelled and made a mess of everything. And so the Lord has called a people through whom he will work, and he’s sent his Messiah to set us to rights, to fill us with his Spirit, and to get us back on task: to make him known, to do justice and mercy in this world, to bear the fruit of the Spirit, and to proclaim his King in the knowledge that the same Spirit who is in us, is also working in the hearts of men and women around the world, men and women just waiting to hear our proclamation of the good news about Jesus. Men and women read to believe, to repent, to be baptised, to join in the life and work of the kingdom—they simply need to hear our proclamation of this good news. It is a stumbling block and it is foolishness to many, but to those who are called, to those in whom the Spirit is at work, it is the power of God—for our salvation and for the salvation of the whole world.
As we’ve seen recently in Revelation, Jesus has prepared the way. He has bound the devil and brought low the principalities and powers that once held this world captive. This is the good news: that Jesus died for our sins and was raised by God, victorious over sin and death. He is the Messiah—the Lord, the King—and he is making all things new. This new creation, our hope is summed up in those words of the Lord’s prayer: on earth as in heaven. Those words ought to shape us as gospel people. Don’t just pray them. Live them. For the sake of the world, lift the veil and show the world a glimpse of God’s new creation. And while you do it, remember that we are royal heralds of the King, commissioned to proclaim this good news to everyone around us.
Let’s pray: Merciful Father, we thank you this morning that you have made Jesus your King. By his death you give a means of forgiveness and reconciliation and by his resurrection you’ve restored to us the life we had once rejected in our rebellion against you. We thank you for those in whom you have worked by your word and Spirit who proclaimed this good news to us. And we pray that your word and Spirit will now be at work in us to make us the gospel people you desire us to be. Renew our hearts. Turn them ever more towards you. Strengthen our allegiance to Jesus and fill our heats with love for you. Make us a people full of life and of hope, a people of mercy and love and grace, a holy people—an on-earth-as-in-heaven people eager to show the world your kingdom and to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord. Through him we pray. Amen.
Mark Two: A Biblical Understanding of God by William Klock Last week we looked at the subject of expositional preaching as the first mark of a healthy church. It’s the central component of a word-centred ministry. And, at least in theory, if we get biblical preaching right, everything else should follow naturally—although it will take some time. But that doesn’t mean we’re done. It’s not just how we should approach and preach God’s word, but we need to spend some time looking at what the content of biblical preaching is. So today I want to begin with a look at how biblical preaching should be giving us a biblical understanding of God. That’s the second mark of a healthy church: a biblical understanding of God.
Now that might seem like a no-brainer. We’re Christians, so of course we’re going to be committed to a biblical understanding of God. But if you start looking at what’s going on around us, it doesn’t take long to see that it ain’t necessarily so. The song of that title written by the Gershwin brothers for Porgy and Bess, highlights the problem. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a litany sung by a drug dealer, casting doubt on the stories of the Bible. He ends, “They tell all your children/The Devil he’s a villain/It ain’t necessarily so”. That drug dealer thought that maybe it’s God who’s the villain. He’s always spoiling everyone’s fun, after all—or at least that’s how it seems to a lot of people. Maybe the devil’s actually the good guy. Some people think that way, although it’s usually more subtle. More often than not what it seems we’ve done is to swap their roles. Ask someone on the street—or one of your non-Christians friends—who God is and they’ll describe a non-judgemental man in the sky who just wants you to be happy. Ironically, this has more to do with the lies the devil routinely tells than it does the God we meet in the Bible.
It used to be “liberal” Protestants who rewrote the God of scripture. Like the Jesus Seminar folks who wrote that all the warm and fuzzy stuff in the gospel is what Jesus really said, but all the stuff about sin and judgement—that was added later by men who had forgotten who Jesus really was. But it’s not just liberals. Many parts of Evangelicalism, particularly amongst younger people, have come to be dominated by a belief system that’s come to be called “Moralistic therapeutic deism”. In short, it’s the belief that God wants people to be good—although the bar is pretty low; that God wants us to be happy and to feel good about ourselves; that he’s distant, but available when you’ve got a problem; and that if you’re good, you’ll go to heaven when you die. Brothers and Sisters, this is not the God of the narrow way that leads to life; this is the devil of the wide gate that leads to destruction.
This is what you get when you stop preaching the word and, instead, preach pop-psychology, current events, and feel-good fluff. It’s what you get when you preach human-centred sermons instead of God-centred sermons. We’ve shifted the culture of the church. John 3:16 used to be the best known and most oft quote verse of the Bible: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”. These days that pride of place goes to Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” quoted loudly by folks who have no idea about its context or what Jesus meant when he said it. They just don’t want anyone telling them what to do and have embraced a false god who indulges their every desire. Our culture, like the pagan cultures of old, and not a few within the Church, have recreated God in our image. The antidote is the faithful preaching of God’s word.
And the culture will not be happy with it. Post-modern culture hates meta-narratives. Meta-narratives are those big stories that give meaning to life, the universe, and everything. And today such things are said to be oppressive. And being “oppressive” is the absolute worst thing anything can be in post-modern culture, where everything is about the individual and the individual being whatever he or she or they or them or ze or zir wants to be. But if we believe the Bible is God’s word to us, then we can’t escape the Bible’s meta-narrative, its grand story running from Genesis to Revelation with Jesus at its centre, the story that does, in fact, give meaning to life, the universe, and everything. And so it makes sense, then, that the God who has given this great narrative that runs from beginning to end describes himself as the Alpha and Omega. Get the story right and you actually get to know the God behind it all from beginning to end.
So we can’t cover every aspect of a biblical understanding of God in a single sermon, but we can hit some high points—and especially the points that are often so challenged by our culture today. So what does the biblical story tell us about the God behind it?
Well, let’s start at the beginning. The story starts with Creation. “In the beginning, God created…” is how Genesis begins. St. John opens his gospel with those familiar words reminding us that it wasn’t just “God” in some generic sense that was there in the beginning, but the Triune God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Right at the beginning, the first thing the story teaches us about this Triune God is that he is a creator. He is the great initiator. There was nothing and it pleased him to make something of it. And not just something, but a world. And not just a world, but as Genesis 1 shows us, a word that is good because it is suitable for human life. And God finishes his great creative act by creating human beings—and he does so for a purpose. He created us to be his image bearers—to act as his regents, his stewards, his priests in this world he created.
But notice that God’s creative acts don’t end there. As I said last week, his word gives life and so he continues to speak. Humanity rebelled and sinned. We gave up the vocation for which we were created and had to be removed from the garden-temple. And things went from bad to worse. It took only a single generation before the first murder happened and only a few generations later we have men boasting of slaughtering their enemies. The Lord causes a flood to wipe sinful men from the earth and he speaks, calling forth Noah so that he can spare him, start over with him. But again, human rebellion goes from bad to worse and so the Lord speaks again into the darkness and calls forth Abraham and from Abraham he makes a people for himself. And as we read the story of that people, it’s full of ups and downs, of faithfulness and rebellion—mostly rebellion. But the Lord repeatedly speaks his word and sustains the life of that people and at its lowest points he promises new life in the future. And then we meet Jesus, the word incarnate, who fulfils those promises himself and creates a new Israel. The god of the great biblical narrative is a creator.
That God is the creator also tells us that we can’t pick and choose the parts we like from this great story. The first major heresy in church history was that of Marcion, who cut the Old Testament out of the Bible so as to dump all the things about God he didn’t like. And this problem crops up repeatedly. A couple years ago, popular pastor Andy Stanley preached that the Church must “unhitch” itself from the Old Testament. Again, people want the warm-fuzzies, they want the welcoming message of forgiveness, but not the judgement or the wrath or the call to repentance. But the grand biblical narrative shows us that it’s all connected. The story doesn’t make any sense if you hack it up. Forgiveness loses meaning when there’s nothing to be forgiven. It’s all connected and biblical preaching reminds us of this truth.
But, too, there’s more to God’s creating than just speaking and creating. In the story of his people we begin to see something we first saw a glimpse of with Noah. For the Lord to create is also for the Lord to call and to choose or to elect. He chose Abraham out of all the people on earth. And, again, he chose Isaac over Ishmael and Jacob over Esau. When it came time for a King, he would choose young David over his older brothers. And Jesus chose twelve out of all his followers from which to build God’s new people. And we look at that and we think, “Wait, that’s not fair!” Brothers and Sisters, that’s when we need to go back to the story and remember that the Lord didn’t have to create anything at all. He created in the first place to manifest his glory and to show his love. And when we rebelled against him he didn’t have to begin this great act of new creation that would eventually cost his own Son. But he did. Because he is good. Because he loves. Because he is wise. The big story reminds us repeatedly that he is all these things, and that reminds us that when things don’t make sense or when they seem unfair to us—with our limited perspective and knowledge—we can trust him. This also reminds us—against the popular view of things today—that God does not exist to serve us, but we to serve him—and knowing his goodness assures us that this, too, is good.
Second point: The great narrative of the Bible reminds us again and again that God is holy. Most people like to ignore this, because for something to be holy means that there really are things called “right” and “wrong”. It means that if God is holy, then he also has expectations for us. Post-modern culture is built around that idea that we’re each the centre of our own universe. We make our own truth and we each define our own happiness. You can do whatever you want and be whatever you want. If you want to do drugs or have promiscuous sex, that’s your truth and your happiness. If you’re a man, but you want to be a woman—or a cat—woe to anyone who says you can’t or that there are objective standards. And this is why our culture has created a false god that just wants us to be happy and is never judgemental.
But there at the beginning of the story we’re reminded that Adam and Eve were forced to leave the Lord’s presence because they rebelled against him, they sinned. And then we see throughout the story this theme of holiness. Humans do what they want and everything goes from bad to worse. We like to say that it’s okay to do what you want as long as you don’t hurt other people, and that may be our only political option in a pluralistic, modern society, but the big story shows us that this doesn’t work in the end. And so when the Lord created a people for himself, he not only delivered them from a life of slavery, he also gave them a law—a way of life that not only included all the dos and don’ts, but a system of offerings and sacrifices, means of atonement for their sins, so that they could live in his presence and he in theirs. The tabernacle in the midst of Israel was a reminder of the holiness of God and the need of sinners for redemption. There it was, the Lord’s dwelling place in the centre of the camp. The Lord lived in the midst of his people. It was a powerful reminder of how things are supposed to be—as they were when Adam and Eve lived in the Lord’s presence in the garden-temple. But it was also a powerful reminder that even in Israel, things were not as they should be. The Lord dwelled in their midst, but he dwelled in a place they could not go. The holy of holies, glorious and beautiful and filled with the cloud of his glory resting on the ark of the covenant, was off limits. The relationship between God and human beings was still broken—and the brokenness was not on his part, but theirs. Again, we see his love and his grace and his mercy. Through the law and the sacrifices he gave the people a means of drawing near, of truly being his people, while at the same time reminding them of the seriousness of their problem, of the sinfulness of sin, and that something greater was needed to finally restore full fellowship with him. The tabernacle (and later the temple) was an abattoir where continual animal sacrifices were offered to atone for sin. Those weren’t the only offerings. The people came to offer their thanks to the Lord as well. But the blood sacrifices overshadowed everything else—a reminder that the problem of this broken fellowship is on our end, not God’s; that it is not his holiness that is the problem, but our sin. They were a reminder for Israel of the mercy of the Lord—that he desires to be reconciled with sinners—but also that sinners must come to him on his terms and not our own, and that there is a great gulf between holiness and sinfulness. And so the story of Israel and her covenant with the Lord prepared the people of God for Jesus. Every Sunday you and I come to his Table and are reminded that the son of God gave his life as a once-for-all and perfect sacrifice for sin, his blood given in place of ours, to bring atonement, to restore us to the presence of the Lord—because of his great love for us. And again, that reminder is there that we come to God on his terms and not our own, because he is holy and apart from him we are not.
And here the God of Scripture clashes with the false god we so often create for ourselves. We’re like petulant children who get angry when our parents lay down rules. “You don’t love me if you won’t let me do whatever I want,” we shout at them. But they know better. Our parents know things that we don’t, and so they give us rules when we are children, not because they’re mean, but because they love us. As adults with hindsight we see our foolishness. We knew other kids whose parents let them do whatever they wanted and we’d foolishly think that those kids’ parents loved them more. Now we’re adults and know better. Brothers and Sisters, we do the same thing with God. He created us out of love in the beginning, he delivered Israel from her Egyptian bondage out of love, he lived in her midst out of love even when she was so often unfaithful. He taught her how to be holy. He gave her instructions for sacrifices as a means of atonement. And like petulant and ungrateful teenagers Israel went after other gods instead. But the petulant and rebellious teenager is a modern phenomenon, not the one used by the Lord when he spoke to his people. When he spoke to them of their relationship with him, she was his beautiful and beloved bride who turned to adultery and unfaithfulness. That’s a much darker and troubling image then the rebellious teen. But as we read Israel’s story, we see that the Lord never abandons his bride. The prophecy of Hosea may be one of the most profound witnesses of the Lord’s love for his people, despite their unfaithfulness. Hosea wrote:
“In that day, declares the Lord, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.’ For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more. And I will make for them a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land, and I will make you lie down in safety. And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord.” (Hosea 2:16-20)
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, as Jeremiah wrote, and his mercies never end (Lamentation 3:22). And we see this as the great story eventually leads us to Jesus, who, as St. Paul writes:
…though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)
And St. John reminds us so poignantly:
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins…We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:9-10)
The great story reveals the faithlessness of human beings to the one who has loved us from the very beginning. No matter how great our rebellion, our idolatry, our sin, our unfaithfulness to him, he has loved us from the beginning and he will love us to the end and has given his own life to restore us to his presence and fill our hearts with love for him. Again, we love because he first loved us. The God of the Bible is a God of love.
Now, there are lots of things we can say of the God of who reveals himself in the Bible. He is patient, for example. Or he’s sovereign. The list is long and all of these things are interrelated. He is patient, because he is loving. The fact that he is a creating, calling, and electing God means that he is also a sovereign God. We have confidence in prayer, because we know that he is sovereign and has the power to answer. And we have confidence in his answers, because we know he is wise and good and loving and so on. But I want to close on a different point and that is that the God of the Bible is a faithful God. More than anything else, this is the aspect of God we need to grasp as we struggle to trust him.
The great story reminds us of God’s faithfulness from beginning to end. We see his faithfulness in that he didn’t give up, wipe everything out, and start over when we rebelled. Instead, he has lovingly, patiently, graciously, and mercifully stuck with us. If it weren’t for his faithfulness he wouldn’t have called Abraham, he wouldn’t have rescued Israel from Egypt, he wouldn’t have given his law or a king, he wouldn’t have disciplined his people, he wouldn’t have spoken through the prophets. He wouldn’t have made promises—or might have, but he wouldn’t have kept them. If he were not faithful, he’d be like the gods of the pagans—fickle, unreliable, unknowable. And, of course, we see the faithfulness of God fully revealed in Jesus. In Jesus he shows his faithfulness to us, even when we are unfaithful. In Jesus he fulfils his promises. As St. Paul wrote to Timothy:
If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:13)
It’s who he is. God cannot be anything other than faithful and we know it because of the Scriptures. In the Bible we have the record of his character—of his goodness and wisdom and righteousness and holiness and everything else that comes together and culminates in his faithfulness. One of the things I like best about the Psalms is their repeated acclamation of the faithfulness of the Lord to his people, to his covenant, to his promises. They sing out his mighty deeds for Israel and remind the people not only that they have every reason to trust in him, but that they would be fools not to. And if that was the case for Israel in the Old Testament, how much more is it the case for us, his new Israel. We have known Jesus and the Spirit as the fulfilment of all that he promised. We have been plunged into this life in our baptism and we come, week after week, to his Table. We bear in our baptism his mark—the gift of his own indwelling Spirit—and here at the Table we participate again and again in those events—the death and resurrection of Jesus—through which God has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death and made us his own. Brothers and Sisters, this is the God whom healthy churches proclaim, this is the God whose mighty and saving deeds we sing, this is the God whom we make known to the world. This the God in whom our future hopes rest. As St. John wrote:
Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)
As I say so often, in Jesus and the Spirit—at the cross and in the upper room at Pentecost—our God did the hard part. His word tells us and our baptism and the Lord’s Supper serve as perpetual reminders of his faithfulness. He is the Alpha and Omega, the one whose faithfulness knows no bounds and is as long as eternity itself. It is in him we trust and it is him we preach.
Let’s pray: Holy, loving, sovereign, patient, faithful Father, we give you thanks for revealing yourself to us in your word—for who you are, for what you have done, for showing us that you are worthy of our love and worthy of our trust. By your word and through your Spirit you give us the gift of faith. We ask that as we continue in your word and as we share in your sacraments, as our knowledge and experience of you grows, that our faith will deepen. Purge our hearts of fickleness we pray, that we might set aside every idol and every false idea we might have of you. Give us your great grace, that we might ever more each day trust in you and love you more as we steep ourselves in your word and each Sunday as we come to your Table to be reminded of the great love you have shown to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of your Spirit. Amen.
Marks of a Healthy Church Mark One: Expositional Preaching by William Klock We just confessed in the Creed that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. These are historically known as the “marks” of the Church. Despite our various differences and schisms, the Church is one. Whether Anglican or Mennonite or Coptic or Baptist, we’re all part of the one Church. It’s holy. Jesus has called us, set us apart, washed us clean, and filled us with the Spirit. It’s catholic. It is universal and it is complete in and of itself. And it’s apostolic in that it continues in the teaching, in the gospel, that was given to us by the apostles. These identifying marks of the Church have served us well since the Fourth Century—and it’s not like they were new ideas when they were written into the Nicene Creed back then. But they are fairly abstract—in the sense that these things describe the Church in the broadest sense. So how do we identify the church at the local level? When you look at a local congregation, what sorts of things should define it? Or we could ask what makes a local church a church as opposed to a social club or a group of do-gooders or even a cult? Or we might ask what makes for a healthy church? These issues became of paramount importance at the time of the Protestant Reformation. If the Church is “broken”—as the Reformers observed—what needs to happen to set it right? For the Reformers, whether German or Swiss, French or English or Scottish, the identify marks of a true local church, of a church faithful to Jesus and the teaching of the apostles, distilled down to two things: the preaching of God’s word and the administration of God’s sacraments. This principle was written, in one way or another, into all of the Protestant confessions of faith, but here’s how it comes to us in ours, in Article XIX of our Articles of Religion:
The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.
Anglican and Lutherans, Baptists and Presbyterians, we have our differences, but we are united in these two core marks of a church: we preach the word and we administer the sacraments. Faithfulness to these two things—and whether or not we do these things with deliberate faithfulness to Scripture—is what determines the health of a church. Not attendance and numbers, not programs, not activities, not vibrant fellowship, but faithfulness to preaching God’s word and administering his sacraments. All those other things can be good—and sometimes they come out of faithfulness to word and sacrament, but it’s the word and the sacraments that create this community called the church. We can build community around all sorts of other things—and churches often do. We build community around programmes. We build communities around styles of worship, whether a grand pipe organ and a choir or a rock band and fog machine. We even build community around celebrity preachers. But those things should not and do not define a church—let alone a healthy church. Faithfulness to word and sacrament do. We visited this topic almost thirteen years ago and it’s my plan to revisit it again between now and Advent. My own views have evolved and refined a bit in the last decade, but I think the key principles I preached back then are still basically the same. So I want to start these first several weeks with that first mark, faithful preaching of the word. The first four principles derive from our preaching. From there we’ll move onto the principles that are connected to or derived from our administration of the sacraments.
So a faithful church, a healthy church is a word-centred church. Such church should be characterised by people who take God’s word seriously and who understand that it speaks with authority. We should expect such a church’s members to be committed to reading and studying the Bible for themselves. We should expect that they will probably gather in groups to read and study the Bible together. But at the centre of all of this should be a pulpit ministry devoted to and centred on the Bible. Virtually every church includes some kind of sermon in its worship, but not every sermon is Bible-centred. So we need to be very explicit about this. The first mark of a faithful and healthy church is not just preaching, but what’s usually called expositional or expository preaching. Now, what is expositional preaching? Expositional preaching is what I do virtually every Sunday. Expositional preaching takes a text from the Bible—maybe given by the lectionary or maybe as we work through a book of the Bible verse by verse or chapter by chapter—expositional preaching takes that text, explains what it means, and applies it to the congregation—it tells you what to do about it. In contrast there’s topical preaching. That’s what I almost never do—but I am doing it right now. In a topical sermon, the preacher preaches not about a Biblical text, but about subject—and hopefully what the Bible has to say about that subject, whether it's prayer or justice or holiness or expositional preaching. There can be some crossover. A topical sermon can be expositional as it explains what a certain text has to say about a certain topic. But a steady diet of topic preaching isn’t healthy for a church, because it’s not driven by the word. Topical preaching is driven by the preacher. And if a congregation only ever hear what their preacher wants to preach about, they’ll never grow beyond where their preacher is at. And he won’t grow either, because he’s always digging into the Bible to find support for his ideas. In contrast, expositional preaching is driven by the word. The Bible’s agenda becomes the preacher’s agenda—and he’s therefore always learning and often surprised by what he finds—and the congregation grows by hearing God’s word. Brother and Sisters, my ideas—no preacher’s ideas or pet topics—will not transform you into the people God intends you to be. Only his word will do that.
Expositional preaching also requires and builds a commitment to God’s word. Many of us came from the Anglican Church of Canada. How did a church go so badly awry, how did it stray so far from orthodoxy, and how did so many people just sit and let it happen? It happened because the church lost her commitment to the word. Her pulpit ministry failed. The great expositional sermons preached in Anglicn pulpits from the Reformation through the 19th Century were replaced by ten or fifteen minute homilies—often topical, but typically paying only lip-service to God’s word. And that created a people with no passion for the word and that, in turn, created a people with little knowledge of the word—people ready to be carried about by every wind of doctrine.
Brothers and Sisters, God’s word creates God’s people. Many of us have seen what happens when you take it away or water it down. God’s people become lax in faith and lax in discipline. Instead of conforming to the word, they conform to the culture around them. And eventually they simply stop being God’s people altogether—they apostatise. And it’s not just “liberal” churches. Evangelicals at large are facing their own crisis, because so many of our churches are failing to preach the word. Our preachers are preaching pop-psychology or they’re preaching topically and preaching their own ideas—and even as they affirm the authority or inerrancy of Scripture, their churches are often looking less and less like the people of God and more like the culture around us. Dear Friends, our churches must, first and foremost, by centred on God’s word and that begins with our pulpit ministry. If we look at the history of the Church we see a lot of ebb and flow, high points and low points, and one thing we see consistently is that the high points in Church history always align with those times and places where her people and especially her preachers were committed to preaching God’s word. People like to say that the great revivals of history were brought about by prayer. That’s only half the story. Those periods of great prayer were brought about by periods of great biblical preaching. Again, God’s word creates God’s people. It won’t happen any other way.
Let’s go back to the very beginning of the story. Genesis 1. What was God’s agent of creation? “God said…” He spoke and the cosmos and everything in it came into being. When Adam and Eve sinned, they were cast from his presence, but the word of the Lord remained. He spoke, cursing the serpent and giving them hope in a promise of restoration. When all humanity had lost the knowledge of God, he spoke again, this time calling Abraham out of Ur and leading him to the promised land. And when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, the word of the Lord came again to Moses, and through him to the whole people—even to Pharaoh. By his word he brought down a pagan king and created a people for himself. At Sinai he spoke again, establishing a covenant with his people and giving his life—the means of life in his presence. God’s word creates and gives life.
Over and over the Lord spoke to his people. That phrase “the word of the Lord came” or something similar occurs more than 3,800 times. By his word he created a people and by his word he sustained them. By his word he made himself known. By his word he created faith amongst them. I was reading an article this week about literacy in ancient Israel. Hardly anyone in the ancient world knew how to read and write—just a tiny handful of scribes. But in ancient Israel and Judah the literacy rate may have been as high as fifteen or twenty per cent.[1] Why? Because they were a people of the word, particularly as the ancient oral traditions were recorded and became scripture. They knew that God’s word is life.
Think of Ezekiel’s vivid vision of the valley of dry bones. This is one of my favourite passages in all of Scripture because it so often gives me hope as a preacher. The Lord took Ezekiel to a valley full of dead, dry bones. The Lord asked him how those bones could live again. Ezekiel had no idea. It looked hopeless. Here’s Ezekiel 37:4-6:
Then [the Lord] said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”
And look at what happened when Ezekiel began preaching God’s Word to those bones:
So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army. (Ezekiel 37:7-10)
The Lord explains to Ezekiel that the bones are Israel—her hope is gone. But he will not leave his people dry and hopeless. He promised in verse 14, “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.” What’s the Lord’s means of giving life—of imparting his Spirit—to his people? As in the beginning, his word, this time spoken through the prophet. It’s an amazing thing. As a preacher it gives me hope. Israel was dead. Lots of people had lots of ideas about how to bring her back to life. The nation certainly wasn’t interested in listening to Ezekiel. But preaching was the Lord’s solution. If he could speak into the pre-creation chaos and bring life, he can certainly speak to a lost, sinful, rebellious, and hopeless people and bring them back to life—giving them faith anew. Brothers and Sisters, that’s why the Church exists: a people created by the word and called to preach that word to the world. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to Ezekiel. The Lord promised to speak to Israel and to give her his Spirit. Through the prophet he promised, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26)
And the Lord did just that. Think of the opening verses of John’s Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. (John 1:1-4)
The word incarnate. God’s creative power, there in the beginning, now incarnate, one of his own people, that he might bring the dry bones to life. And what did the word incarnate do? He preached, of course.. His was the ministry of a prophet, the word of the Lord proclaiming the word of the Lord—announcing judgement, but also calling Israel to repentance so that when he died for the sins of his people and rose from the grave, they would understand this fresh and mighty work of God and believe. And when it was accomplished, what did he do? He ordained apostles to proclaim this word to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and to the whole world. We cannot know this God, we cannot know this Saviour, we cannot know this gospel apart from the word and without its proclamation. It was like this for Israel and it is like this for the Church. There’s a reason, again, why Christianity and Christian missions have promoted high literacy rates—why missionaries spend years learning the languages of pre-literate peoples, developing alphabets and grammars for them, so that they can then translate the Bible—the written word—so that those peoples can have it in their own languages. There are folks today who think that preaching—a monologue by a single man at the front—is passé, but it has been the norm for both Jews and Christians from the beginning, because we are a people committed to the word of God, knowing that it is the only source of true life.
We cannot know God apart from his self-revelation of himself. We see this in Genesis as things go from bad to worse in those first chapters, as fallen humanity loses all knowledge of God. They grasped for heaven at Babel, but did so in an act of unbelief. Humanity was utterly lost. But then, in his grace, the Lord spoke and called Abraham and faith sparked to life in the darkness of the world—because God spoke, because a man heard the word of the Lord, believed, and obeyed. As St. Paul writes in Romans 10:17, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word”—and specifically he adds—“the word of Christ.”
There are all sorts of philosophies of church growth today. People argue for building churches around programmes. People argue that you’ve got to find your niche and build it around that. When I was visiting my parents I saw that someone had started the “Cowboy Church” not far from where they live. When I was first ordained in the REC a friend gave me a manual for traditional Anglican church planting. It was all about building contacts with anglophiles by getting involved in clubs and societies centred on all things English. Other people build churches around a worship experience or a youth programme. It’s not that God can’t or won’t use some of those things, but Brothers and Sisters, a healthy church will always be built around the proclamation of the word of God, modelled in the pulpit and lived by the people. Nothing else will last. Someone once asked Martin Luther about his accomplishments. He answered saying, “I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing….The Word did it all.”[2] That’s the mindset the Church needs.
But the word does more than create. The word also sustains and sanctifies. It is the water that causes us to grow and we will not grow without it. When he was tempted by the devil Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Or think of the Words of the Psalmist, who wrote, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105). Without the word we will lose our way and starve. We only have to look at Israel to see this. Go back to King Josiah’s day in 2 Chronicles 34. After years of neglect, Josiah ordered a renovation of the temple and during that renovation the book of the law was found. The word of the Lord had been lost—buried in a pile somewhere in the temple and forgotten for generations. Josiah recognised the significance of that find. He tore his clothes in grief and repentance and then gathered the priests and the elders of the people. In their presence, he the King, read out the Lord’s word and led the people in a covenant renewal ceremony. God’s word sanctifies his people.
Jesus prayed this for us in his high priestly prayer in John 17: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” And St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Ephesus, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word” (Ephesians 5:25b-26). Brothers and Sisters, without immersing ourselves in God’s word we will not hear him. There are no shortcuts. Only his word gives life and only his word sanctifies. This is why topical preaching—where the preacher drives the agenda—cannot be our main diet. Occasionally a topical sermon it’s necessary, but it cannot be our staple food. This is why regular personal reading and study of the Bible is necessary. We must be confronted by word to know God and to grow into the people he has called us to be. And, of course, it goes without saying that we don’t hear merely to hear or merely to read, but we immerse ourselves in God’s word, we hear him speak, so that we can submit to his will and his ways. And there’s the Spirit at work, renewing our hearts and making fertile soil for the word to take root. A healthy church not only proclaims God’s word, but listens and is daily remade and sanctified by it.
Timothy was St. Paul’s young protégé. When Paul wrote to him to give him advice as to how to shepherd the flock, it’s worth noting that he gave him none of the advice that is common today. He didn’t advise Timothy to start a new program, to buy a fog machine, to hire a paid choir, to take a poll to find out what people want to hear. He didn’t do any of that. He wrote to Timothy and said emphatically, “Preach the Word!” (2 Timothy 4:2). Or think of the early Jerusalem Church. When the apostles were struggling to keep up with the day-to-day tasks of the church, they ordained deacons to carry on that ministry and declared, “We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). They knew that God’s word is life.
One day we will see God face to face and know him perfectly, but until that day we live, not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from his mouth. As a church named “Living Word” my prayer is that we will be a people known in our community for our commitment to the life-giving and sanctifying word of God. That we will be a people who value and love God’s word, who put it at the centre of our ministry and of our lives, and who not only recognise its authority, but who are also seeking to submit to it and to be transformed. I pray that we will be a people so full of God’s word—this water of life—that as in John’s vision of the New Jerusalem, it will overflow from us to carry God’s life—the good news about Jesus—to the world around us.
Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, you have sent your word, incarnate in Jesus, to deliver us from our bondage to sin and death, and you have given your word written through the inspiration of your Spirit. Remind us always that without your word there is no life. As we go about the work of your kingdom, let us keep your word at the centre, that we might be always shaped by it and declaring it’s life-giving power to the world. We ask this in the name of Jesus our Lord, the word incarnate. Amen.
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78416/more-people-were-literate-ancient-judah-we-knew
[2] Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), 51:77.
Come, Lord Jesus! Revelation 22:6-21 by William Klock
So here we finally are at John’s epilogue to Revelation. You can’t stay on the mountain overlooking the New Jerusalem forever. At some point the vision of God’s glorious future has to end so that we can get back to the business of getting there—being the “on earth as in heaven” God has called to make his kingdom known in the present. God has a wonderful future in store for his people, but he’s given us Jesus and the Spirit so that we can be his people in the present, so that we can fulfil his mission that will eventually bring about his new creation. And so in these final verses John finds himself back on Patmos, still in exile for the sake of Jesus. But it’s not over. His angel guide is still with him. And the angel speaks. Look at Revelation 22:6.
“These words are trustworthy and true. And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place.”
John knew that all of this was trustworthy and true, but this is for the benefit of those seven churches to whom Revelation is addressed—and to all the other churches that would read his letter down through the ages. These words are faithful and true, because they proceed from the one who is faith and true. Remember back to John’s vision of Jesus, riding out on a white horse to conquer, the sword of gospel truth proceeding from his mouth. John wrote there that he is faithful and true and if he is faithful and true, so is his word.
The angel takes us back to the very beginning. It’s not just John in exile. The whole purpose of this vision was to show the churches in his care what was to come and, in doing that, to exhort them to stand firm in faith and to hold tightly to Jesus as the storm came. Tribulation. Perseverance. Kingdom. Those are the key themes of Revelation. The angel reminds John that the very God who spoke to his people through the prophets of the old covenant, now speaks to him—to show them what must soon take place. In verse 7 the angels speaks the words of Jesus himself:
“And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”
What does that mean? “I am coming soon.” What does he mean when he says that these are the things that “must soon take place”? We discredit the one who is faithful and true when we twist his words to say that he was talking about events that would take place thousands of years in the future. Such a prophecy would do little to encourage the beleaguered saints of the first century. What John has seen here is what was barrelling down on them as he wrote: persecution and tribulation, but also judgment on their persecutors—on apostate Jerusalem and pagan Rome. They would know the storm, but they would also know God’s vindication. This is what it looks like for Jesus’ people to take up their crosses and to follow him. They would know their own calvary, but because their Lord was with them, they would also know their own Easter.
And, through the angel, Jesus repeats the blessing with which the whole vision started:
Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near. (Revelation 1:3)
What does that mean? How do you keep the words of this prophecy? I think we struggle with how to keep the words of John’s prophecy, because we so often forget what a biblical prophet is. We too often think of a prophet as being one who foretells, when the fact is that a biblical prophet is really one who forthtells. In other words, the biblical prophets proclaim the counsels of the Lord. Sometimes that includes future events. But whether it does or not, the real concern is always faithfulness and obedience to the Lord here and now. So John’s vision of the future isn’t meant to give Christians merely a future hope, as if today doesn’t matter. You know, just circle the wagons and wait for Jesus to come. That’s not keeping the prophecy of this book. Jesus point in coming to John was to reveal the true nature of the battle between the beast and the lamb, between Babylon and the New Jerusalem. It's to remind us that as God has vindicated his son, so he will also vindicate those who are in his son. And it’s to remind us that what God has done in Jesus and the Spirit, he will bring to completion through Jesus and the Spirit. To keep the words of this prophecy is to stand firmly for Jesus in the face of opposition—even martyrdom. It’s to be a people characterized by the fruit of the Spirit and by the Beatitudes. Ultimately, it’s to be a people who not only pray “on earth in heaven,” but to be a people who live out the values and life of heaven here on earth—a people who are new creation in the midst of the old and give witness to their—to our—faith and hope in Jesus, what he has done, what he is doing, and what he will one day complete. It’s to be those people charging out into the world to conquer the nations with the gospel, the good news about Jesus.
And then something that might seem odd at this point. Look at verses 8 and 9:
I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me, but he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God.”
This is the second time John falls down to worship his angel guide. Why would he do that? How would he not know better? John knew that only God is worthy of our worship. The angel speaks the words of Jesus, but after just having seen a glorious vision of the lamb, there’s no way John could mistake this angel for Jesus. What’s going on? I think the problem is in our translation. The Greek word translated “worship” sometimes does mean just that, but specifically it means to prostrate oneself before another. You can do that as an act of worship, but throughout Scripture we also see it done as an act of reverence or submission. When the angels came to visit Lot in Sodom, this is the word used to describe his falling down before them. It’s the word used when Joseph’s brothers fall down before him, as well. And back in Chapter 3, Jesus promised the Christians in Philadelphia that the Jews would do the same before them. So John isn’t necessarily falling down to worship the angel. He knew better than that. The angel pronounces a blessing and in response John falls before him in reverence—not in worship, but acknowledging a superior. And it’s at this point that the angel rebukes him. Giving such reverence to an angel may have been appropriate in the old covenant, but Jesus has changed everything. The angel reminds John, “You and I are fellow servants”. The angel isn’t worried that John is taking away from the glory of God, but that John is giving his own honour as a son of God to an angel. Jesus has elevated the status of fallen humanity. He has made us his brothers and sisters and, in his ascension, has raised our humanity to God’s right hand. The angel is sort of reminding John of those wonderful words in the book of Hebrews: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace.” Brothers and Sisters, there is no longer anyone between us and the throne of grace if we are by faith in Jesus the Messiah.
In verse 10 Jesus, through the angel, exhorts John:
And he said to me, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.
The angel contrasts John’s vision with Daniel’s. Repeatedly the prophet Daniel was told to seal up his vision, because his vision was “for days yet to come”. The events that Daniel saw were not soon to take place, as the events that John saw were. Daniel was seeing things that would not happen for several hundred years. This highlights again that what John saw was not a vision of events thousands of years in his future. He certainly wasn’t seeing events that still haven’t happened yet in our time. Consider that what Daniel saw was a few hundred years off. He wasn’t told, “these things are soon to pass”. He was told that they were for days yet to come, so he should “seal them up”. Why would the angel tell John that the events he saw were soon to come and that he shouldn’t seal them if they were to happen thousands of years in the future. That doesn’t make any sense. No, what John was seeing was—except for these last couple of chapters—the events that were shortly to unfold as the Lord’s judgement fell on Jerusalem and then on Rome in order to vindicate his people and prepare the world for the spread of the good news about Jesus. “Don’t seal it up. Send it to the churches, because this is the encouragement they’re going to need in the days soon to come.”
We get a sense of urgency in verse 11, too:
Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy.”
Jesus is saying, “The time is so short, there’s hardly time for repentance!” Of course, there is always time for the sinner to repent, but Jesus’ point here is the imminence of his coming in judgment. It’s a last call to the unrepentant in Jerusalem and Rome: I’m coming so soon, the evildoer might as well keep doing evil and the filthy might as well remain in his filth, because there’s hardly any time to repent.” Again, of course there is, but (first) reminding them just how urgent things are might finally move them to repentance and (second) we need to remember that John wasn’t writing to the unrepentant, to the unbelieving Jew or the pagan Greek, but to the Christians suffering under their unrighteousness. It wouldn’t be forever. They would be vindicated. The short time has implications for them: let the righteous still do right and the holy still be holy. Remember, many of John’s fellow Christians were facing a crisis. Some would be tempted to think that maybe they’d made a mistake in choosing to follow Jesus. Maybe the mainstream Jews had it right all along. Or maybe Caesar and his gods were really where the power was. They’d be asking, “If Jesus really is Lord, why is he letting these awful things happen to us?” And so Jesus is saying, “Don’t give up! I will vindicate your faithfulness. This is what it looks like to take up your cross and to follow me. And as he vindicated me in my resurrection, so God will vindicate you.” And he says it yet again in verses 12 and 13:
“Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
Jesus says it so many times—not only here, but throughout the Gospels—that I’ve just never understood how so many folks try to push what he says into the far future. Brothers and Sisters, if we believe Jesus and if we trust that the Spirit has given us his words faithfully through the Evangelists, we discredit our Lord when we try to make his words mean what they so clearly do not. “I am coming soon,” he says yet again. Remember the audience: those little churches of Asia Minor being harassed by unbelieving Jews and pagan Greeks and Romans—and behind them the great dragon, the old serpent, the devil. Jesus exhorts them to stand firm in the midst of the storm, because he is coming soon. He will judge the enemies of his people and he will vindicate them for their faith. The devil’s days were numbered. Those little churches will be that multitude that no one could count, from every tribe and nation, standing before the throne and before the lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, crying out, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10) They are not us. They are the saints of the apostolic Church, martyred for their faith in Jesus and resurrected. John calls it the first resurrection. When John saw them and asked who they were, he was told, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14). They live before the throne as a witness to you and me of the faithfulness of God and the lamb, that we might, ourselves, wash our robes in the blood of the lamb and carry on the faith they witnessed so profoundly.
And Jesus follows this with the statement in verse 13:
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
Jesus reminds his people of who he is. When he introduced himself in the first chapter of the book he ended that introduction with similar words:
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:8)
The title is applied both to God and to Jesus, highlighting their unity, but it’s spoken there and then again twice here in Chapter 22 as an announcement of his authority. The Lord was there in the beginning and everything that exists, exists by his grace and is sustained by him; he shares his power with no one; and as the end of all things, his sovereignty over all will never end. John had the witness of the Scriptures, the long story of the Lord and his people, as evidence of the sovereignty, the power, the authority, and the faithfulness of the Lord. That itself was reason to believe and trust his promises even as the storm was about to break over him, but here Jesus appeals to his very being: “I am the beginning and the end. I am responsible for it all, I sustain it all. Couple that with my record of faithfulness and you have every reason to trust me.”
And so Jesus issues his last and final benediction here in verses 14 and 15:
Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates. Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
John reminds his readers of that earlier vision, back in Chapter 7, of the martyrs gathered before the heavenly throne. They had washed their robes in the blood of the lamb. They may die in the storm to come, but they bear the name of Jesus on their foreheads, they are marked as his own by baptism and by the Spirit, and they have the right to pass through the gates of the New Jerusalem. Even as they face death, they do so in hope. In contrast are those on the outside—those without hope: dogs and sorcerers, the sexually immoral and murders, idolaters and liars.
Aside from “dogs”, that’s all pretty straightforward. In John’s day dogs weren’t cute pets, they were feral beasts that roamed the city after dark looking for garbage to eat. They were disgusting and unclean and the rabbis compared gentile idolaters to them. That might be the sense here. But “dog” is used specifically in Deuteronomy to refer to homosexual prostitutes. The profit from their work was not permitted to be brought into the temple and, given that John is talking about a similar context, it makes sense that this is what he means by “dog”. John echoes the words of St. Paul written to the Church in Corinth:
Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-11)
Brothers and Sisters, this is a call to repentance and faith—again, to stand firm in the face of opposition. Through John, Jesus is urging these Christians not to give up and not to give in to the forced around them. They have been washed by Jesus and he will care for them, even as they are martyred for their faith. They will be tempted to turn back, but they have every reason to stand firm, to remain holy, to witness Jesus and his death and resurrection knowing that one day it really will be on earth as in heaven.
Continuing, look at verses 16 and 17:
“I, Jesus, have sent my angel to testify to you about these things for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.”
The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.
Again, these are the words of Jesus and again he gives his credentials—he gives reason to trust in him. He is the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy that a root shall grow out of the stump of Jesse. He is the bright morning star. In other words, as Paul would say, “The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Romans 13:12). And then Jesus gives a final invitation. The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come”. Here is the water of life for the thirsty—water given without price, the water of life by the grace of God. I like the way Tom Wright explains this:
“It is the spirit that enables the bride to be the bride. It is the spirit that enables the martyrs to keep up their courage and bear true witness. It is the spirit that inspires the great shouts and songs of praise. The spirit goes out from God’s throne and, breathing into and then through the hearts, minds and lives of people of every nation, tribe and tongue, returns in praise to the father and the lamb. This is as trinitarian as it gets, and the bride is caught up in that inner-divine life, so that when she says, ‘Come!’ to her beloved we can’t tell whether this is the spirit speaking or the bride, because the answer is both. The spirit of the Messiah enables his bride to be who she is, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”[1]
Brothers and Sisters, this is the longing of faith, full of hope because the bride knows the faithfulness of the groom.
And then the end. First John gives a warning:
I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.
To modern sensibilities, it’s kind of an odd way to end things—and not a little harsh. But John knew these were the words of Jesus and he was sending this letter to the churches expecting it to be read as scripture. John may have been looking back to Deuteronomy. When Moses gave the law he also stressed that it was to be preserved without addition or subtractions—and he holds out the slaughter at Baal-Peor as a warning or curse against anyone would would tamper with God’s words. So John is on firm footing in giving his warning. This is a message of hope given by Jesus himself and it needs to stand as it is. It’s power and authority do not rest with us or with any translator or copyist who might think it'll go down easier or serve its purpose better with this or that changed. It’s power and authority rest with Jesus who spoke these words and with the Spirit who uses them to create and to build faith in us.
That’s the end, but John can't leave us on that note. He reminds his readers again of Jesus’ promise:
He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen. (Revelation 22:20-21)
John reminds them of Jesus’ promise: “I am coming soon.” And he adds his own “amen”. “Truly,” he writes. He trusts Jesus’ promise and he calls out himself, “Come, Lord Jesus”. And there’s no sense in John’s last prayerful summons that he is doubtful or fearful. He knows the days ahead will be difficult, but he knows that Jesus will fulfil his promise. And, Brothers and Sisters, he did. As we’ve made our way through this book, we’ve seen the faithfulness of Jesus to his promises in the historical record. He came in judgement first on Jerusalem and then on Rome. He vindicated the martyrs. He prepared the nations to hear the gospel. And ever since, his people have been riding out in the world to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection and wherever it goes it conquers. We have seen his faithfulness at work. We have seen with our own eyes the power of his word and of his Spirit. And so we carry on the mission he has given, knowing that the promises of his new creation, his promises of that day when the gospel will finally conquer all, when all will be set to rights, when every tear will be wiped away, we carry on in faith knowing that those promises will be fulfilled just as surely as the promises he made to the Chrisitians of Ephesus and Smyrna, Pergamum and Thyatira, Sardis and Philadelphia and Laodicea were fulfilled. And with them we offer our own “Amen” and we offer our own prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus”, knowing that he will surely finish what he has begun.
But in the meantime, Brothers and Sisters, we gather together and he comes to us today in both word and sacrament. He speaks to us as we read his word, to teach and to exhort and to encourage us to stand firm in the face of the world’s storms. And we meet him at his Table as we eat the bread and drink the wine. Here he reminds us that he is with us as we recall and participate in the events of that great exodus from sin and death accomplished by his death on the cross and his rising from the tomb. Here he reminds us that we are his covenant people, his lovely bride, his New Jerusalem. Here he exhorts us to stand firm in faith as the “on earth as in heaven” people—a people full of hope, a people full of new creation, and awaiting the day when that new creation will be fulfilled—when the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. Until then, knowing that Christ has died and that Christ is risen, we look forward to the day when Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you have given your Son, who died on the cross and rose from the grave to deliver us from sin and death, and you have given us your Spirit as a down payment on the life of the age to come. You have made us your temple and you dwell in our midst. As we recall your mighty and saving deeds, as we recall not only your faithfulness, but the faithfulness of the martyrs, may we too be faithful. Fill us with your grace, strengthen our faith, and teach us to live in hope so that we can be the kingdom people you call us to be as we await the fulness of your new creation. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.
[1] Revelation for Everyone (London:SPCK, 2011), 206.
Its Lamp is the Lamb Revelation 21:22-22:7 by William Klock
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5)
So begins the great story. And it goes on. The Lord speaks and the land appears and brings forth every kind of plant. The Lord speaks and creates the heavens, then fills them with the sun, the moon, the stars. He fills the sea with fish and brings forth animals to roam the earth. And finally he creates human beings, male and female, to bear his image—to be the priests of his temple and to have dominion, to steward, this good cosmos that he made. They were to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth, and by implication to expand the Lord’s temple until it encompassed all of Creation. And it was good.
The Lord planted a garden and in it he placed the man, and later his wife, to share in his fellowship. In the middle of the garden was the tree of life and from that garden-temple we’re told flowed streams of water to nourish the earth. How long it lasted, we’re not told. If we’re meant to take it literally—which we really don’t know—it wasn’t very long, seeing as Eve’s first child was born outside the garden. The two bought the lie of the serpent and rebelled against the Lord. They broke the one rule they’d been given and, in doing so, grasped for divinity themselves. In that state, having access to the tree of life and the immortality it gave, would have been cruel and disastrous, so they were cast out and as the story unfolds in the chapters that follow, things went from bad to worse.
But the Lord did not abandon that which he created out of love and grace. Creation itself and the human beings that corrupted it were created good and the Lord would not only make them good once again—he would forgive and restore and renew these rebellious creatures and bring them back into his presence, to live at the headwaters of the river and under the leaves of the tree of life. Abraham. Isaac. Jacob. Joseph. Moses. Joshua. David. Israel. All signposts in the great story, reminding us that not even the worst of human sin and rebellion can ultimately derail the Lord’s plan for his cosmos. In the midst of this broken world the Lord created a people for himself. He claimed a land for himself, he delivered them from Egypt and placed them in that land, and he dwelt in their midst in the tabernacle and later the temple—the greatest of the Old Testament signposts, pointing to a future in which he will set everything to rights and restore humanity to his presence. Creation cries out to be delivered from corruption and to have its stewards set right and restored to their rightful place.
The Old Testament prophets, living in the midst of Israel’s troubles, looked forward to that day. The very existence of Israel as the people of God was a reminder that he’s working to set things to rights, but Israel herself became emblematic of humanity’s problem. Sin. Idolatry. Compromise. Worldliness. Unfaithfulness. The very people whom the Lord had redeemed and claimed as his own needed, themselves, to be set right. And so the prophets rebuked Israel, but they did so in hope. We’ll get to our text from John’s Revelation in a bit, but first those prophets. We’ve seen how John draws constantly on their imagery and here, at the end, in Revelation 21 and 22 John riffs on Isaiah 60 and Ezekiel 47 and uses their imagery to show us the faithfulness of God revealed in the end as the great project begun in Genesis 1 and 2 is finally fulfilled.
Isaiah saw a day in which the glory of God would outshine the sun in a renewed Zion:
The sun shall be no more
your light by day,
nor for brightness shall the moon
give you light;
but the Lord will be your everlasting light,
and your God will be your glory. (Isaiah 60:19)
Isaiah also writes of the Lord’s city:
And nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your rising…
Your gates shall be open continually;
day and night they shall not be shut,
that people may bring to you the wealth of the nations,
with their kings led in procession. (Isaiah 60:3, 11)
It would be worth reading the whole of Isaiah 60, but that would take longer than we have this morning. Needless to say, it’s a vision of both creation and God’s own people set to rights and in that renewal God’s glory is powerfully manifest. It was a vision that inspired hope in Israel. It was a vision that shaped the ministry of Jesus. And in Revelation 21 John reinterprets that vision in light of the risen Jesus. Look at Revelation 21:22-27.
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
At this point we shouldn’t be surprised that the whole city is the Lord’s temple. We saw last week saw that it’s filled with his glory. And John described the city symbolically as an enormous cube—it’s so large that it fills the earth, or at least sort of the known world of John’s day—and it’s a cube, a giant holy of holies. That was the part of the tabernacle and later the temple that held the ark of the covenant and the Lord’s presence, the glory cloud, rested on the ark. All along, this is where the temple and the ark and the cloud of glory were pointing: to a future day when, even despite human sin, the project into which the Lord had called Adam and Eve is completed and his glory fills the earth as the waters cover the sea, as Habakkuk put it. It should have happened through the faithfulness of Adam and the faithfulness of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but instead it has come through the faithfulness of a second Adam, through Jesus, and through the proclamation of the gospel by his Spirit-empowered new Israel.
And it’s not just the temple that is no longer needed, but even the sun and the moon become redundant. Does that mean there will literally be no sun and moon in God’s new creation? I think, like John’s statement that there was no sea, this is symbolic language. That’s the nature of his revelation. I could be wrong. Maybe in this new creation the laws of physics and biology and the very structure of the cosmos itself will be transformed. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. But the point is that this new creation, this restored temple, is full of the glory of the Lord and his brightness outshines the sun. As John recorded these words he would have had the end of Exodus in mind—that awe-inspiring scene of the Lord’s glory descending to fill the newly-completed tabernacle, his brightness in the midst of Israel’s wilderness camp. It’s the conclusion of a story of human blood and tears, but there at the end the love and the grace and the mercy of God triumph as his people gather around to worship. And yet, if we’re paying attention to the bigger story, Exodus can’t be the end. As glorious as it is, Israel’s camp and even the tabernacle were a little thing, a tiny spot of brightness, in the midst of a vast world of darkness. Israel’s camp still included sinners and uncleanness, despite the law. And the nations hardly took notice of any of it. Something more, something bigger had to happen. Exodus, like Moses and Israel and the tabernacle were signs pointing to something greater. And now John sees it. Finally, here’s the fulfilment of the story. The great thing so amazing that John can only describe it by piling up symbols and metaphors. It’s like this and it’s like this and it’s like that, too—oh, and also like that and that and that!
The city is full of the glory of God and the lamp—the centre and the source of that glory is the lamb—the one who was slain, whose blood and tears bought humanity’s redemption from our own blood and tears. Isaiah had seen something similar, and yet I have to think that Isaiah was left in wonder as to how it all would ever happen. All he could say was that the Lord would do something so amazing that the nations would finally take notice and recognise him, coming to him in submission and to give him glory. And John sees it now. The amazing thing the Lord has done is Jesus himself, the Lamb. It is his light that outshines the sun. St. Paul, in Romans, writes of grace abounding because of sin and here we see that as nowhere else. Adam new the light of God in perfection, and yet he didn’t know it like this. The amazing thing, the Lamb who humbled himself to become incarnate and to die for the sake of his sinful people, reveals the glory of the Lord in a way Adam could never have dreamed of.
Are you familiar with the Japanese art of kitsugi? Broken pottery and ceramics are glued back together with lacquer and then the lacquer repairs are covered with gold. A bowl or a teapot can be a thing of beauty, they don’t usually attract much attention. But break it and repair it with gold, and it becomes a thing of even greater beauty that everyone suddenly notices. That’s the best thing I can think of to illustrate what John’s getting at. Creation was glorious, but God’s repairing of his Creation through the sacrifice of the Lamb is infinitely more glorious, just as Jesus is more beautiful for the nail scars in his hands and feet. He reveals the love and the mercy and the grace of God like costly gold highlighting the repairs of a piece of broken pottery. And, key here, no one can help but be caught by this vision of glory, of what God and the Lamb have done. They’re captured by it. The only response anyone can give—you, me, all the nations of the earth—is to bow down and to offer ourselves in return, giving him the glory he is so clearly due. By the incarnation and by the death and resurrection of Jesus, that scene of glory, of the Lord descending to be present with Israel in the wilderness as the people gather around to worship and to live in his presence, that scene is multiplied a hundred thousand times over. Because of Jesus, the entire world now takes notice and gathers to worship in the light of his glory and to live and work in his presence.
So the darkness of human sin and rebellion, prompted a response from the Lord that is indescribably glorious. It shines so brightly that there is no night. And its light has gone out to the nations through the proclamation of the gospel and Isaiah’s vision is fulfilled. This is a vision to inspire those little beleaguered and persecuted churches—and the church today—to stand firm and to continue to proclaim the good news about Jesus even in the face of martyrdom. By the light of the Lamb and his gospel the nations walk and come to the city to bring their glory and honour. This is what Israel was meant to be—a light to the nations—only more so and greater than any king or prophets could ever have imagined. Solomon’s glory is but a shadow of King Jesus. The tribute of the Queen of Sheba is but a shadow of what the nations will bring to the Lamb. And, finally, the people of God is set fully to rights. Sin, evil, rebellion have been wiped from creation. Nothing unclean or false is present. There are no lying, stealing, greedy Achans to bring judgement on the people of God.
John sees Genesis 1 fulfilled through Isaiah’s imagery and then he sees Genesis 2 fulfilled in the imagery of Ezekiel’s prophecy. Ezekiel was writing during the Exile. The temple had been destroyed, but in his vision he saw it restored, and more importantly, he saw the glory of the Lord return to it. When Israel returned from her exile, she did rebuild the temple, but Ezekiel’s vision of the return of the Lord’s glory was never fulfilled—not until Jesus created a new Israel, a new temple, and filled it—us—with his Spirit. And yet even that is a shadow of what is to come. But what John draws on here is Ezekiel’s vision of the temple as a new Eden. In Ezekiel 47 the prophet sees a river flowing from the temple—from the garden—and the further it flows the deeper it gets until it’s so enormous it couldn’t be crossed and at that point it flows down into the Judean wilderness and down into the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is dead. It so full of salt and minerals nothing can live in it. Its water is useless for irrigation. But Ezekiel saw the life-giving water of the temple make even the Dead Sea come to life. In his vision it swarms with fish and trees grow on the banks, bearing fresh fruit. Ezekiel writes:
Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing. (Ezekiel 47:12)
John now sees the fulfilment of Ezekiel’s vision. Look at Revelation 22:1-5.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
Ezekiel saw a restoration or a rebirth of Creation’s state as we see it in Genesis 2, but John sees that renewal even more explicitly. Ezekiel saw a river bringing life to the dead. John sees that river irrigating the tree of life—the very tree that stood in the middle of the garden, the very tree that imparted the life of God to Adam and Eve, the very tree from which they were barred because of their sin. John sees it restored. He sees twelve kinds of fruit, deliberately calling back to what Ezekiel saw, but also showing us a multiplication of the tree. As the river flows down the main street of the city, so the tree grows and flourish all down both banks of the river—not just a single tree of life, but tree after tree after tree. And it’s not just to give life to Adam and Eve. The tree is there for the healing of—to give life to—the nations. What does that look like? I think the specifics are beyond the scope of John’s vision. His point is just that the nations whose armies we’ve seen warring with each other throughout the book, the nations who were once enticed by the beast, his prophet, and the great prostitute, the nations that had once given themselves over to idolatry and every kind of wickedness, John now sees those nations transformed by the power of the gospel and faith in Jesus the Messiah. They’ve been brought into this new world, and the abundant fruit of the tree of life—this tree symbolic of the life of God—heals them. Like divine kintsugi, God’s life heals the hurts, the griefs, the hatred, the tears.
From the holy of holies the river flows—the water of life—bringing healing and life to the nations. But John also sees that in response, the nations bring their worship to the city. What other response can we have to the love and mercy and grace so freely poured out to forgive, to redeem, to restore, to make new? But there’s a difference between this temple and the temple of the Old Testament. In the old temple no one saw the face of God. In Exodus and again when Solomon built his temple, the people saw the cloud of glory descending into the holy of holies, but apart from that, the vision of divine glory was off-limits. The unholy cannot enter the presence of the holy to look upon it. Everyone in the Bible who ever had a glimpse fell on his face in fear. But here the redeemed nations of God’s new creation worship in his presence. John says they see his face. Why? Because the name of the Lamb is written on their—on our—foreheads. Because Jesus has marked us out as his own. Brother and Sisters, when we come to him in faith, submitting to him, and giving him our allegiance in baptism, by that water he marks us as his own. The minister may mark you with a cross on your forehead, but what Jesus does in that act is far more profound: he fills you with his Spirit and in doing that he’s given each of us an earnest, a down payment on the life of God’s new world—a life in which we, his people, become his very temple, a life where he lives in our midst, and we see him face to face, finally able to give him the fullness of worship of which our worship today is only a dim shadow.
But John doesn’t stop there. We’re not just set right; we’re set right to fulfil the purpose for which we were created. John really does see Genesis fulfilled. “They will reign for ever and ever,” he writes. The Lord said to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over it.” We see every day what a mess we’ve made of that vocation. St. Paul writes in Romans about Creation groaning in eager longing as it awaits our renewal and restoration and here, finally, John sees it. What exactly that will look like, he doesn’t say. In this new world things have evolved beyond their original state in Eden. The Lord doesn’t simply reboot the programme. Somehow he redeems what is good in human history and human development. The garden has become a great city, but the garden is still there. And, I think, our vocation will have grown and evolved in the same way. But at its core it remains the same: serving the Lord as the priests of his temple and working as stewards of his Creation.
Brothers and Sisters, it’s not just pie in the sky when we die. John brings everything back to the present. Again, he was writing to those little churches full of persecuted and often fearful Christians bracing for a tidal wave of opposition. He writes to them of perseverance in the midst of tribulation and reminds them that Jesus and his kingdom are real. Real today and giving hope for the future. He writes in verses 6 and 7:
And [the angel] said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true. And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place.”
“And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”
Stand firm. This is not all there is. Jesus would vindicate his faithful people. Judgement would fall, first on Jerusalem and then on Rome. And John saw that glorious vision of Jesus riding out on a white horse to conquer by the power of the gospel—and his church riding with him. It’s a battle, but the outcome is already certain. And here at the end we see the fruit. We see the victory celebration that await. And the angel says, “Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.” Blessed is the one who stands firm in faith. Blessed is the one who gives his allegiance to Jesus. Blessed is the one proclaims to the world the death and resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus. And blessed is the one who, filled the Spirit of God, lives out his or her priestly stewardship today—living today in light of the new creation to come. For Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Lord God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity Romans 6:19-23 & St. Mark 8:1-9 by William Klock
The Old Testament prophet Hosea called Israel back to the Lord. The people had turned their backs on him, they were worshipping idols, and even offering their children as sacrifices on the altars of pagan gods. Instead of trusting the Lord to take care of them as he had promised, they had thrown themselves into the game of geopolitics and had put their trust in horses and chariots and made alliances with their pagan neighbours—all things that the Lord had forbidden. Through Hosea, the Lord call his covenant people back to himself. He did it by turning Hosea’s life into a series of living object lessons, the best known of which took place when the Lord told Hosea to take a prostitute named Gomer for his wife. Repeatedly Gomer left him, going back to her life of prostitution, and repeatedly and lovingly, Hosea sought her out, bought her out of her slavery, and brought her back to his home to be his wife.
People thought Hosea was crazy. What kind of idiot would take a prostitute for his wife and keep buying her back out of that life as she was continually unfaithful to him? But through the prophet the Lord eventually says to them, “I’m that ‘idiot’ and you’re the prostitute! I brought you out of Egypt, I loved you and fed you in the wilderness, I conquered the Canaanites for you and gave you homes that you didn’t build and an abundant harvest that you didn’t plant, and yet you continually turn your back on me and play the harlot with false gods and with the nations of the world.” And having given them that dramatic object lessons, Hosea calls the people back to their God:
Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Take with you words and return to the Lord; say to him, “Take away all iniquity; accept that which is good and we will pay with bulls the fruit of our lips. Assyria shall not save us, we will not ride on horses; and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’ to the work of our hands. (Hosea 14:1-3)
Israel continued to struggle to be faithful to the Lord. That’s why Jesus came. Israel’s God, himself, taking on human flesh and being born of Mary. He humbled himself, becoming one of his own people. And as if that wasn’t enough, he was despised, rejected, and killed. But in that, as the perfect Israelite, Jesus took on himself the death that Israel deserved. He brought a means of forgiveness, a means of restoration, and in his resurrection he brought a means and a promise of life to people who were dead. And each of us, though Gentiles, have been called into the redeemed life of Israel through Jesus. Our God is a god who gives his life out of love for his people—the very people who reject and despise and rebel against him.
And yet even as Jesus’ people, given his life and his Spirit, how often are we like Hosea’s wife Gomer? How often do we turn our backs on the Lord? Consider our priorities in life. All too often we put everything else first, and feel good about ourselves if we’re willing to give him an hour or two on Sunday morning and maybe a few minutes of prayer during the week. Instead of devoting our time, our talents, and our treasures to the one who gave them to us, we squander them on the things of the world. We profess with our mouths that Jesus is our Saviour and Lord, but we fail to put our trust in him and instead trust in the ways and systems of the world for our security. Through the prophets the Lord condemned his people for their false view of worship. They thought that they could live their lives however they wanted as long as they came to the temple to offer the Lord the sacrifices he required—even thinking they could worship other gods on the side. Jesus paraphrased God’s response to that when he told the people, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” True worship involves our whole selves given over to God for his use all of the time.
Think about the vow we took or that our parents took for us when we were baptized. The priest asked: “Do you renounce the devil and all his works, the empty display and false values of the world, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that you will not follow them and be led by them?” In our Baptism we renounce the powers of the present evil age and we take hold of Jesus and the new age he has ushered in. In our Baptism we are consecrated to the Lord. But what does it mean to be consecrated to something or someone? Notice that in our baptismal vows we don’t promise to renounce the world the flesh and the devil when it’s convenient or when it doesn’t cut into our own plans or our own enjoyment or sense of security. In our vows we give ourselves over to the Lord entirely. We put ourselves firmly in his kingdom and renounce everything that stands opposed to it. Like the Israelites, we’ve been called by the Lord to a new life. They were slaves to the Egyptians and he brought them to a new life of freedom. We were slaves to sin and he does the same for us spiritually. Look at Romans 6:19-22. St. Paul says:
I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.
For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
When it came to conveying the depth of our total devotion, first to sin and then as redeemed men and women to Jesus, Paul chose to compare it to slavery. A slave is literally owned by his master and is expected to be totally devoted to him in body and soul. For Paul, to serve Jesus was everything—it was his life. Remember that a slave’s life belonged to his master, and so while the analogy isn’t perfect—the negative side of slavery isn’t what Paul has in view here—it illustrates the level of devotion that the Christian has to God. He has bought us out of slavery with the blood of his Son, and we serve him; not out of fear or slavish obligation, but out of gratitude for what he has done for us. Think again of Israel, delivered from her Egyptian slavery to be the Lord’s people. There’s no way we can pay him back for his sacrifice, but we do the best we can and he gives us the Holy Spirit to enable us to do more than we can ever do on our own.
At one time each of us was a slave to sin. That’s a point where all the negative connotations of slavery are appropriate. Oddly enough, though, when we were slaves to sin most of us didn’t really see the negative side of it. Read some 19th Century American history and you’ll read about slaves that ran away from their masters. They didn’t want to live that miserable life. But before Jesus found us, how many of us tried to run away from the master of sin? We were slaves to sin and we enjoyed it. Like the drug addict who is a slave to his drugs that get him high, all the time ignoring the harm the drugs do to his body and mind and the life of crime those drugs often lead him to, the sinner is slave to the momentary pleasures of sin, oblivious to or ignoring the deathly consequences of that sin. In our natural and fallen state each of us is a slave to sin. We have absolutely no desire to get away from it and no way to master its temptations if we did want to get away, and so we serve it body and soul.
By contrast, as redeemed men and women we are called to serve the Lord with the same level of commitment we used to have to sin. We used to seek sin out. We left no stone unturned in a search for pleasure and gratification. Brothers and Sisters, we need to put at least the same amount of effort into serving Jesus that we used to put into serving sin. Where our wills were once submitted to unrighteousness, we are now to submit them totally to righteousness. That’s the total consecration that has its beginning in our baptismal vows.
And note that there’s no middle state and there’s no compromising. You can’t say you’re no longer a slave to sin and at the same time not be a slave to righteousness. Just like a real slave, God bought us from our old master, sin, with the blood of Jesus, who has become our new master. In a very real sense we’ve gone from one form of slavery to another. It’s not uncommon to hear people refer to someone as a “carnal Christian”—someone who professes to have made Jesus his Saviour and Lord, but doesn’t really live out that faith. St. Paul doesn’t leave any room for someone like that. Either you’re a slave to sin and serve the world, the flesh, and the devil, or you’re a slave to Jesus, serving him with body and soul. St. James reminds us that faith without works is a dead faith. You can’t be a Christian, you can’t have experienced the amazing grace of God in your life, and at the same time not be wholly driven to serve Jesus with everything you’ve got!
Do you ever notice how non-Christians usually don’t want to have anything to do with Jesus? I know a lot of people who take a big interest in God, but they don’t want to talk about Jesus unless it’s their own distorted version of him. A distant and non-interfering God is okay, but a Saviour who comes into our lives and calls us to account makes people uncomfortable. This is why churches that teach pop-psychology and self-help, that affirm people in their sin or in their spiritual immaturity, and that don’t hold their members accountable are often so popular. Nobody likes to be convicted of sin. We’d rather have a religion that makes us feel warm and fuzzy and comfortable. St. Paul makes the point that the problem isn’t that man doesn’t want God—what we don’t want, he says, is Jesus. We want God and the good things he has to offer, but on our own terms. Jesus, however, reminds us that we are sinners and can only come to God on his terms—that we have to give up our sin and acknowledge his lordship. Paul tells us that when we were ruled by sin, we didn’t want to have anything to do with Jesus—he only convicted us of our sin. Our redemption flips things: now that Jesus rules us, he must be our master and we should have no desire for sin.
St. Paul’s slavery analogy drives home the absoluteness of our duty under Jesus. Some translations render the word as “servant.” That misses the point of the absoluteness of what St. Paul is saying. We are to have a total devotion. Our love for our master changes our desire. How much of a chore is it to sin? In our natural state we love to sin. Our desire to serve Jesus should be like that. Serving him isn’t a chore, it’s a pleasure because we love him.
If we go on and look at verses 22 to 23, Paul shows us the contrast made between the wages of sin and the wages of Christ:
But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:22-23)
Sin may give us pleasure today, but it only has one end. The only place it ultimately takes anyone is death. Genesis tells us about Adam and Eve living in the presence of the Lord, their Creator, and under the branches of the tree of life. They were made of dust, the point being that they were mortal creatures. But he brought those two mortal creatures into his presence and in the presence of the Lord is life. In choosing to sin, in choosing to rebel against their creator, Adam and Eve chose to be outside his presence. They chose mortality, they chose death over life. Brother and Sisters, God is the source of life and each and every sin we commit widens the gulf that stands between him and us. Each sin takes us further away from the life found only in God’s presence.
In contrast, in return for serving Jesus we are daily brought closer and closer to God’s life. I think a lot of Christians sit around and passively wait for the life of eternity. A lot of Christians look at the problems of the world around us and take an escapist attitude. We want out. “Come, Lord Jesus!” And yet too often in just looking for escape, we miss out on the life that God gives us right now. When we’re grafted into his vine we start bearing fruit—that’s his life manifested in us right now. Sin has its own fruit, but it’s like a cancer that gradually kills the vine. God, on the other hand, nourishes us and makes us grow. That’s the sanctification that St. Paul writes about—it’s the journey we take as we travel the road to eternal life, each day getting closer and closer to God.
Paul also notes that God’s gift of eternal life is free. It’s free because the life of the Christian isn’t the result of his own goodness—it’s in spite of his sinfulness. Every one of us has earned the deathly wages of sin—it only takes one time, one sin. Each of us deserves death, but life in God can never be deserved or earned. It’s God’s gift. And as we follow our new master we will find his sustaining grace will grow; our yoke will become easier, our burden will become lighter, our peace will become deeper, and our hope will become more and more assured.
Our Gospel lesson gives us the assurance we need as we put on Jesus’ yoke and carry the burden he’s given us. In our lesson today we read St. Mark’s account of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes for the crowd that had gathered to hear him preach.
Jesus expects us to follow him just like those people followed him into the country where there was nothing to eat. He didn’t cut his sermon short thinking, “Hmm, some of these people came a long way and I’d better let them go early so they can go home to dinner.” He preached for three days. But all the time he understood what they’d given up to be there. He said,
I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way. And some of them have come from far away. (Mark 8:2-3)
Jesus demands our all, but in return he gives us all the grace we need to follow him. When he calls us to seek him first, he knows what we’ve left behind to follow him. He knows how far we’ve travelled to be with him and to sit at his feet. As he cared for the Israelites in the wilderness, he will take care of us too. The Gospels tell this story more than once, and each time they tell us how everyone ate until he was satisfied and that there were still plenty of leftovers. God isn’t stingy with his blessings. These accounts of his generosity ought to confirm our faith in him.
Brothers and sisters, God has promised this all along. Go back to our Old Testament lesson from Hosea. This is what he promises in verses 4-8:
I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them. I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily; he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon; his shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive, and his fragrance like Lebanon. They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow; they shall flourish like the grain; they shall blossom like the vine; their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon. O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols? It is I who answer and look after you. I am like an evergreen cypress; from me comes your fruit. (Hosea 14:4-8)
It’s easy to be wholly devoted to Jesus and to stay away from sin when we’re surrounded by our brothers and sisters as we worship the Lord on Sunday morning. But when we step out of the church door and into the world it’s not always easy to take that little pocket of the Kingdom of God with us. God’s promise to us is that he will give us the grace necessary to follow him—and we know from what he’s done in the past that he’s never stingy with his grace. Too often we foolishly go off into the world and try to “be good” on our own. It doesn’t work that way, because without the Lord’s life sustaining us we have no life of our own. We make the mistake of focusing on eternal life as a reward we’ll get after we die. Our hope lies in the life of the age to come, but Brothers and Sisters, life is also God’s reward to the faithful every day, right here and right now in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has pulled the life of the age to come into the present and he pours it into us in our Baptism. All we have to do is take our collect for today and make it our daily prayer and our daily commitment:
“Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things, graft in our hearts the love of your Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and so by your mercy keep us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
A Thousand Years Revelation 20:1-6 by William Klock
As we get into the final chapters of the book of Revelation it becomes increasingly important that we keep our attention on the broad strokes of John’s painting. It’s easy to get bogged down in the details and speculations, while losing sight of what’s really important. And it’s important to keep the big story, the one that begins all the way back in Genesis, to keep it in mind and to read Revelation in light of it. It’s important to remember the context—the situation in which John was writing and the people to whom he wrote. Revelation isn’t an easy book, but that historical context and that big biblical narrative make it a lot easier to understand and steer us clear of a lot of interpretive pitfalls. As I’ve been saying, the book is about tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom. It was written to little churches, small groups of early Christians, living at the turn of the ages. Persecution was coming—and had already hit some of them. It was going to get worse. Many would question whether they’d made the right choice in following Jesus. They’d wonder whether he truly was Lord. Jewish believers might be wondering: Were the Pharisees or the Zealots right all along? And others had believed that Caesar was a cheap imitation of Jesus, but when persecution came, when Nero was feeding Christians to the lions, they’d be wondering whether or not they’d got it wrong. Maybe Caesar really was Lord. Maybe Caesar’s gods were, in fact, greater than the God of Israel.
And so, through John, Jesus urges these believers to stand firm. Judgement will come. First on unbelieving Jerusalem and then on the whole Greco-Roman world. As we saw last week in our look at Revelation 19, Jesus assured them that he would triumph. The decisive victory was won at the cross, and now his Spirit-empowered Church—which looked so small and weak in John’s day—would go out and conquer the nation for Jesus by proclaiming the gospel—the word of truth, the sword proceeding out of the mouth of Jesus, the word of God.
When we remember that context—and when we look back on history and see that Jerusalem really did fall and that Rome really was conquered by the gospel—most of Revelation is actually pretty straightforward and you don’t need a bunch of complicated charts to make sense of it. But now with Chapters 19 and 20 we start to move beyond the events that were about to take place. John and the people to whom he wrote were living at the turn of the ages. With Chapters 19 and 20 we move beyond their immediate horizon and into what was for them still the age to come. This is, I will argue, where we stand today and with the last couple chapters of Revelation still ahead of us. One of my favourite commentators explains this with a parable, saying that Israel was like a great ship. On that ship, everything was a mess. The crew and passengers were fighting with each other. The captain and officers were corrupt. And while everyone squabbled she sailed into a storm. A few prophets tried to snap the people out of it, pointing to the storm ahead and urging the crew to do their jobs, but few would listen to them. The last of those prophets they angrily killed. But a few heeded his warning and as the storm was about to break, they got into a lifeboat and lowered it into the stormy waters. They rode out the storm. They watched as the great ship sank. Those in the lifeboat barely survived. Some starved. Some were injured. Some fell overboard and drowned. Along the way they picked up survivors of other ships—Gentile believers—who struggled through the storm with them. But eventually they made it. The storm passed. And their little boat washed up on a new shore. Now it was time to make a new life for themselves. This was the beginning of a new age.[1] Brothers and Sisters, we’re the descendants of those people, living in that new age and carrying on their mission. That, I think, gives us a sense of the broad brush strokes of John’s painting. I think the smaller details all made sense to John and to most of his reader, but with our distance from the original context, some of them can be a struggle for us. Christians disagree on many of them. But that’s okay. As long as we’ve got the bigger picture in our minds, I think we can be reasonably sure that we’ve got the important things right. So let’s look at the first part of Revelation 20. We’ll look at verses 1-6 today and I’ll just read them all at once here.
Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.
Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.
In the last two chapters we’ve seen the fall of Babylon—John’s symbolic name for Rome, tying her to that evil empire that had for so long persecuted Israel and that was traced all the way back to the tower of Babel and humanities opposition to God. The prostitute—Rome herself—has fallen, the beast and his false prophet—the Emperor and his cult—have been cast into the lake of fire. The demonic power behind the great pagan empire has been defeated and Jesus and his Church now stand poised to ride out to conquer with the gospel. But what about the enemy behind all of this? The victory will be short-lived if the one who inspired it all from the beginning is still out of control, as St. Peter wrote, prowling around like a roaring lion. So now John sees an angel descend from heaven. This is Jesus himself, just as in Chapters 10 and 18. He brings with him a chain and the keys to the abyss. Back in Chapter 9, those keys were given to the devil so that he might open the abyss, release the forces there, and do his worst. And now John stresses that the devil’s worst wasn’t good enough. Jesus has defeated him and taken back the keys that rightly belong only to him. He binds the satan—John uses all those words—dragon, serpent, the devil, the satan—he’s used before to describe this embodiment of evil. Jesus binds him up, casts him into the abyss, and locks its gate.
What is the abyss? It’s different from the lake of fire. The lake of fire is a place of final destruction—a place that removes whatever is cast into it from Creation for good. If by his act of creation, the Lord brought order to chaos—which is what the ancient Hebrews saw as the heart of the creative act—then the abyss is sort of that one part of the original chaos that remains, from which evil and opposition to God and his good order can still emerge. It’s not a major theme in the Bible, but here and there it pops up—in Job for example. But when it does, we always find that even the abyss and its denizens are in the Lord’s sovereign control. And so he casts the satan, bound in chains, into that prison and locks its door. For a thousand years, John writes. Then, he says, the satan must be “let out for a little while”.
Now what about this “thousand years”? This is where the idea of the millennium comes from—millennium is Latin for one thousand. And it’s an interesting thing that when we talk about the different schemes for interpreting biblical eschatology, most of them are named based on how they view this millennium—and specifically how it relates to the return of Jesus. Pre-millennialists believe Jesus will return before the millennium. Post-millennialists believe he will return after. Amillennialists, well that’s a little more complicated, although many would line themselves up with the Post-millennialists—sort of. And, of course, is John envisioning a literal thousand years or just a really long time? The millennium is one of those things that’s only mentioned once in the whole Bible, but ends up commanding a disproportionate amount of our attention. Modern pre-millennialists often make holding a pre-millennial view a test of orthodoxy—which itself is odd, considering the modern pre-millennial view has been around less than two-hundred years—and has had wide-spread acceptance for only about half that time. Many of the new denominations that arose from the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversies of the early 20th Century wrote pre-millennialism into their confessional statements. Bp. Nicholson, one of the early bishops of the REC, pushed for this when he re-wrote the Articles of Religion for the REC in 1874. It’s a reminder that we need to keep our focus on the big picture, rather than getting dogmatic about speculations over the details that are often much less clear. There’s a reason why the Creed requires our belief in Jesus’ return to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom, that will have no end. Those are the essentials, the non-negotiables of eschatology. How exactly the millennium relates to that is not something to which anyone should be binding the consciences of other Christians or using to drive a wedge between believers and churches that differ. We can faithful to the Scriptures and disagree on these points. That’s okay.
As far as the duration of the millennium goes, in a book full of symbols and symbolic numbers, I simply can’t see any reason to insist that suddenly here John means for us to take this number absolutely literally. The point is that this period of time will be long, but also just as long as it needs to be. This is the age of the gospel—of the people of Jesus riding out on our white horses into the world with his word of truth, conquering by the gospel. Pre-millennialism tends to produce the sort of ideas I talked about last Sunday—the idea that Jesus can’t return until some bare minimum has been redeemed from every tribe and tongue. It’s a pessimistic view of things. In that way of thinking, the ages have not yet turned. The satan still claims the world as his, the Church fights an uphill battle with the gospel, we will win some, but ultimately things will get worse and worse and worse and finally Jesus will return, bind the satan, and usher in the millennium—a perfect age for a thousand years.
I have trouble with that. It just doesn’t square with the larger narrative of Scripture. It doesn’t square with what Jesus has established in the Church. In us, he has established a new Israel. Our mission is the same as the old, to bring the nations to the Lord. But he has given us his gospel and empowered us with his Spirit. He has commissioned us to go out to the nations and Jesus told Peter that the gates of hell will not prevail. When the people were amazed at Jesus’ power over demons, Jesus told them it was because he had broken into the strong man’s house and bound him. The binding of Satan isn’t something future. It’s something Jesus did even before died and rose again. Jesus has won the battle and he calls his church to join him in it—and as surely as he has conquered the satan, so have and so will we.
The problem may be that we expect perfection. If the satan is bound, we think, how does he still have power in the world? How, if he is bound, does he prowl around like a roaring lion? This millennial kingdom thing must, then, be something future. But, again, we miss John’s use of symbolism. At no point in his ministry did Jesus ever physically grab the devil and bind him in literal chains, and lock him in a literal prison. There’s no literal abyss somewhere out there with a gate to which Jesus—or the Church—hold literal keys. But Jesus bound the devil nevertheless—by his very presence. If we believe Jesus and take him at his word, we have to believe that he bound the satan in the time of his earthly ministry. The Church now bears Jesus’ authority into the world, meaning the devil has no power over the Church. We are filled with God’s own Spirit and when we go out to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection, it is not we who make that preaching effective, but God himself.
So is the devil still out there? Is he still opposing? Sure. But his rule over the nations has been broken and the nations have been handed over to Jesus. Something happened that the people alive in the first century recognized—something I don’t think a lot of modern Christians are even aware. We don’t pay enough attention to history. The Greek philosopher Plutarch noticed it and wrote a treatise, trying to explain why the gods of the Greeks suddenly went silent in the First Century—their oracles ceased to speak anymore. Athanasius wrote about the same phenomenon in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word of God—but, of course, he knew the answer. It was Jesus. The power of the devil to deceive the nations was broken. The satan is still at work, but his kingdom has been taken from him and given to Jesus and the progress of the gospel means for him an ever-shrinking circle of influence.
I think this expectation of perfection cuts the other way too. We often think that in this age, either the Church itself should be perfected or that our mission should be one of unimpeded advance, always onward and upward. The reality is that the Church is not perfect—often far from it—and the advance of the gospel is not always linear. There was time in the early centuries of the Church that Eastern Christendom extended from the Middle East across central Asia and all the way to the frontiers of China. Now, apart from small pockets here and there, Christians are almost unheard of in those lands. The same goes for North Africa. And, of course, Europe was the seat of Christendom for fifteen-hundred years, but is now almost entirely secular. And here in North America we don’t seem far behind that same curve. The gospel advances in some parts of the world, but contracts in others. Why? Well, the Church functions much as Israel did. Even though we manifest the kingdom of God in the world, we are not perfect. The difference between the old Israel and the new is that we are united to Jesus and empowered by the Spirit. But, like Israel, the Lord will accomplish his work through us, perfect or not, and in the process he will not only accomplish the mission of gospel spread, but of the purification of his Church. Think, for example, of Christian conquistadors violently invading Meso-America in search of gold. It’s hardly the Church at her best hour, and yet the Lord used their actions to bring judgement on the Aztecs and an end to their evil regime of idolatry and human sacrifice—not unlike the pagan nations bring down Rome in Revelation 18 and 19. The gospel, however imperfectly, advanced and transformed a new part of the world and its people. Eventually the Lord’s rebuke fell on those who had murdered and plundered in his name. The Lord disciplines and prunes his church and continues to use her to accomplish his purposes, even in her ugliest hours—just as he did Israel. He takes us into periods of exile, just as he did Israel, because his goal is to make us ever purer. Brothers and Sisters, consider that if Jesus’ gospel mission required a perfect Church, it would have been doomed to failure from the start. We accomplish our mission even as the Lord accomplishes his mission in us.
But, then, why does John say that at the end of this millennial age the satan must be released for a little while? I think it fits with the way God works when he comes in judgement. He allows those who oppose him to condemn themselves. And, too, as at the cross and in the first century setting into which John was writing, God allows evil to rise to its full height, in order to strike it down in defeat. When the Lord’s judgement comes to a person or to a people—or even the devil himself—it comes in such a way that there is never any doubt of its justness and it is always complete.
Meanwhile, John writes in verse 4, the martyrs rule with Jesus in the heavenly court. John sees those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus. We know he’s talking specifically about those brothers and sisters to whom he wrote, those who were about to face a time of tribulation and to die for their faith, because he writes that these are they that refused the mark of the beast—who refused to bow to the emperor or to participate in his cult. John says that they were raised—resurrected—to reign with Jesus throughout the thousand years. We might be tempted to pass over this quickly, but it’s the heart of what John’s been getting at all along and it’s why he wrote this book to those churches. Think back to those seven letters he wrote to them. He exhorted them to stand firm and to conquer because a time of persecution was coming. To the Christians in Smyrna he wrote, “The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death” (2:11). It’s the same thing he promises here: “Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power”. Now he sees them vindicated. These are the martyrs who “conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name”. And we see them fulfilling the role of redeemed humanity—back to the vocation that Adam rejected: they’ve been made priests of God and of Christ, seated on thrones to reign with him.
This, John says, is the “first resurrection”. There will be another, but this first resurrection is for the martyrs who shared in the sufferings of Jesus at the turning of the ages. They stand in a unique position amongst the saints. John writes that the rest of the dead will have to wait until the thousands years are complete—until Jesus and his Church have completed their mission. What does that mean for the rest of us? Scripture says very little about the state we are in between death and our eventual resurrection. That hasn’t stopped us from latching onto passages that have little or nothing to do with this subject and forcing them to say things they don’t—and then becoming very dogmatic about our conclusions. Scripture says little about this intermediate state simply because it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things. What we can know for certain—and we’ll see this in the coming chapters of Revelation—is that when the time is right—when Jesus has put every last enemy under his feet—the Lord will raise us just as he has Jesus and the martyrs, and he will restore to us what we lost when Adam sinned. If we are in Jesus, then we share in his life and in his inheritance. What belongs to him belongs to us! In the meantime we know that the Lord does not forget us. Those martyrs John saw in his vision, restored to their role of priesthood, are our assurance of that. What he has done for them he will just as surely do for us.
Now, what should you take home from all of this today? Brothers and Sisters, remember where we’ve come from and look forward to where we’re going. John’s vision gives us needed and encouraging perspective. I’ve said before, I think at present the Lord is taking the Church in the West into a time of exile. Christendom went wrong. Consider those conquistadors slaughtering under the banner of the cross or the carnage Christians nations wrought on each other in the First World War. Even as the North American church has engaged in gospel mission as in no other time in history, our churches have become absorbed by the anti-gospel philosophies of our day—by consumerism, by materialism, by individualism. We are imperfect vessels. The Lord graciously uses us, but like Israel of old, we need reformation—and if we do not reform willingly, the Lord will discipline us. He will either remove our lampstand or he will purify us that our lamp will one day shine brightly. These times are discouraging for many. At the very least we are culturally out of favour. Opposition is growing. We may face actual persecution in our lifetimes. Brothers and Sisters, stand firm. Jesus and his kingdom are worth it. Our first parents in the faith stood firm until death and now sit with Jesus in the heavenlies, coheirs and sovereigns over this kingdom. And for all its imperfections, what has been built by their heirs here on earth, this kingdom pushing the devil ever away, building churches in corners of the earth where once he reigned supreme, robbing him of his territory, ought to fill us with hope and faith for the future. Dear Friends, the future belongs to Jesus and he has given us the privilege to have a part in making it so. He has chosen us, he has called us, he has washed us clean with his own blood and filled us with his Spirit and he has not done so in vain. So go out in peace to love and to serve the Lord. To proclaim his good news. To spread his kingdom until it fills the earth. For Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
[1] See Andrew Perriman, The Coming of the Son of Man (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2005), 224ff.
Hallelujah! Revelation 19 by William Klock
When I was an undergrad I had the chance to hear a lecture given by a missionary Bible translator. There was a lot about that lecture that was fascinating and encouraging. Up to that point it wasn’t a subject to which I’d given much thought, but when I left, for the first time, I’d started thinking about the possibility of studying biblical languages. It was encouraging to hear about people working to preach the gospel and to provide the Bible in their own languages—even sometimes going to all that effort when only a tiny handful of people speak that language or dialect. What didn’t sit well with me that night was the way this missionary talked about eschatology. Why do we have to hunt down unreached people groups—even tiny groups—to proclaim Jesus to them? Because if we don’t, Jesus can’t come back—and we really, really want Jesus to come back, because the world is an awful place and it’s just getting worse and worse. Revelation 7 describes a multitude of every tribe and tongue, after all. The impression we were left with that night is that all we have to do is make contact with every tribe and tongue on earth and win at least one person to Jesus from each and when someone believes from the last unreached people group it’ll be like flipping a switch. Jesus will come back and we can all finally get out of here! As if what matters is that there be at least one person from every tribe and tongue in heaven, not that what’s really at issue is Jesus’ conquest of the present age through the preaching of the gospel. “That’s pessimistic,” I thought that night. And years later I discovered a term has actually been coined to describe much of contemporary Evangelical eschatology: “pessimillennialism”. The point of John’s bit about every tribe and tongue is summed up well in Isaac Watts’ well-known hymn:
Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Doth his successive journeys run;
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall was and wane no more.
Jesus shall reign wherever the sun shines. Not, Jesus shall win at least a few converts. But that pessimistic view of things has been the norm in a lot of Evangelical eschatology for the last century or so. This idea that sort of says, “Things are just going to get worse and worse, but as soon as at least one person in every tribe and tongue believes the gospel, then Jesus can come, get us out of here, and take us to heaven.” It wasn’t always like that. As Abraham Kuyper famously said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” Historically, Christians have tended to have a much more optimistic view of the future of the people of God and of Jesus’ kingdom and, as we come to Revelation 19, I think we finally see this.
Revelation began with that wonderful vision of Jesus as risen Lord, before he spoke directly to those seven churches in John’s part of Asia Minor. Jesus exhorted and warned them. Tribulation was coming—and in some cases had already come—but he exhorted them to persevere, because his kingdom was come—because he has claimed every square inch of life and of this world as his own. And then John saw God’s judgement fall first on rebellious and unbelieving Jerusalem and then, these last several chapters, on Rome and its empire. These were the two sources of opposition and tribulation and both have fallen—or from John’s perspective, were just about to fall. Now in Revelation 19 God’s people rejoice. You might say that John gives a tale of two women and then a tale of two feasts. Look at 19:1-5.
After this I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out,
“Hallelujah!
Salvation and glory and power belong to our God,
for his judgments are true and just;
for he has judged the great prostitute
who corrupted the earth with her immorality,
and has avenged on her the blood of his servants.”
Once more they cried out,
“Hallelujah!
The smoke from her goes up forever and ever.”
And the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God who was seated on the throne, saying, “Amen. Hallelujah!” And from the throne came a voice saying,
“Praise our God,
all you his servants,
you who fear him,
small and great.”
We’re back in the heavenly throne room with the elders and the living creatures gathered around the throne, worshipping God. We met them all back in Chapter 5 as they celebrated the entrance of the lamb, the only one who could unseal the scroll of God’s judgement and set everything finally to rights. Now they cry out “Hallelujah!” That’s Hebrew for “Praise Yahweh!” “Praise the Lord!” It’s interesting that as often as hallelujah is used in the Old Testament, this is the only place it’s used in the New. But maybe that’s fitting, because here we finally see the victory of God in Jesus. “Salvation and glory and power belong to our God,” they sing. Why? Because his judgements are true and we’ve just seen his judgement on the great prostitute. Remember the woman John saw in the last chapter, to all appearance, beautiful and regal, but in reality her chalice was full, not of wine, but of unimaginable filth and with the blood of Jesus and the saints. She represented Rome, backed by the power and authority of the devil, and she had enticed the nations to join her in her wickedness—especially in her idolatry. But praise the Lord! He has thrown her down. Again, the heavenly court cries out, “Hellelujah!” Because “the smoke from her goes up forever and ever”. She’s done. Forever. As I said when we looked at Chapter 18, the point is not that the city of Rome or even her empire and the institution of Emperor are gone, but that the power of the beast manifest in her has been broken. The Lord has ordained earthly governments to maintain order and justice—to punish those who do evil and to reward those who do good. It’s not the way it was supposed to be, but it’s what must be as a result of humanity’s rebellion against God. So the wickedness of Rome has been judged and the demonic power behind it broken. We’ll come back to this in a bit, but for now and in short it means that the gospel, the good news about Jesus, can advance. It will conquer Rome and the nations. And in response a voice from the throne calls the heavenly court again to praise: “Praise our God, all you his servants, you who fear him, small and great.”
The whore who personified everything wrong with humanity, backed by the power of the devil, has been cast down. She and her lovers, the pagan nations, were a parody of the marriage to come. So in verses 6-9 the scene shifts—in stark contrast—from the prostitute to the bride.
Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,
“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
it was granted her to clothe herself
with fine linen, bright and pure”—
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.”
Now the voice of a multitude sings out in praise. This is the 144,000 of Chapter 14, those who have been “redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb.” These are they who kept themselves pure and remained faithful to the point of death and in doing so conquered “the beast and its image and the number of its name” (14:4-5, 15:2). In 12:10 John wrote that it was through the faithfulness of their testimony that the “salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come”. The whole Church is the bride of the lamb, but what has made her ready, what has made her marriage to the lamb possible, is the faithful endurance of those men and women who persevered even in the face of persecution and death. The bride stood up to the prostitute and maintained her integrity and her virtue. The Church is pictured as a virgin bride, dressed in white—bright and pure and faithful.
This marriage imagery goes back to the Old Testament to the story of the Lord and Israel. He rescued her from Egypt, wooed her in the wilderness, married her at Mount Sinai. She was repeatedly unfaithful, but the prophets—Isaiah in particular—looked forward to a day when the Lord would woo her again.
In overflowing anger for a moment
I hid my face from you,
but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,”
says the Lord, your Redeemer. (Isaiah 54:8)
For the mountains may depart
and the hills be removed,
but my steadfast love shall not depart from you,
and my covenant of peace shall not be removed,”
says the Lord, who has compassion on you. (Isaiah 54:10)
Isaiah looked forward to a day when the Lord would redeem his people and renew his covenant with them. But this time it would be different. Not only would he set fickle and unfaithful Israel to rights, but with her all of creation. And this renewal would be celebrated with a feast. Here’s what’s written in Isaiah 25:6-10:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,
of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.
And he will swallow up on this mountain
the covering that is cast over all peoples,
the veil that is spread over all nations.
He will swallow up death forever;
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,
and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
It will be said on that day,
“Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.
This is the Lord; we have waited for him;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain,
and Moab shall be trampled down in his place,
as straw is trampled down in a dunghill.
Of course, Jesus drew on this imagery too, looking forward to the day of this great banquet. It’s what Israel had been waiting for ever since her exile to Babylon. It’s what the world had been waiting for when St. Paul wrote about creation groaning in eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. Finally, the satan’s power is broken. The shockwave of new creation that went out with Jesus from that empty tomb outside Jerusalem on Easter morning has finally hit Rome and new creation is set to take over the word after its long sad story of rebellion, sin, and death.
This is all so wonderful, John is overcome. Look at verses 10.
Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God.” For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.
Usually it’s “Don’t shoot the messenger,” but in this case the news is so wonderful John has to be told, “Don’t worship the messenger!” It’s an odd thing considering John’s just seen the heavenly courts and the bride herself worshiping God and the lamb, but it serves as a transition to the second half of the chapter. Don’t worship the angel; worship Jesus! And now we see Jesus and we see again why he’s so gloriously worthy of our worship. Look at verses 11-16:
Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.
The prostitute has been overthrown, but the beast remains. The background for this lies back in Chapters 16 and 17 where we saw the assembly, the alliance of the “kings of the whole earth”. The beast and the ten kings allied with him brought down Rome and whether the battle—described with that language about Armageddon—is literal or symbolic, the point is that this alliance stands opposed to the Lord. They will “make war on the lamb,” but they will also be defeated by him “for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those with him are called and chosen and faithful” (Revelation 17:14). So Rome—her demonically inspired heart, at any rate—was judged and has fallen. That judgement—which first fell on unbelieving Jerusalem, then Rome—now extends to the pagan nations who have stood watching all this happen. That description of Jesus from Chapter 17: Lord of lords, King of kings, called, chosen, and faithful is echoed here as he rides out to battle. He is faithful and true and on his thigh is written his name: King of kings and Lord of lords.
John’s vision also highlights Jesus’ victory over death. He is “faithful”—even as the powers of evil rose to their full height and put him to death on the cross. He was faithful to the end—and because of that what everyone thought was the end turned out to be the beginning! His robe is dipped in blood—the blood he shed in faithfulness at the cross. And the “name written that no one else can learn” links him with the 144,000 on whose foreheads is written the name of the lamb and who sing a new song no one else can learn (14:3). As he charges out to war on his white horse, he’s accompanied by an army “arrayed in fine linen, white and pure” and also mounted on white horses. It’s the same description used to describe the bride clothed in white. The bride rides out to war with the lamb. These are they who conquered—who persevered in the face of tribulation—and have overcome death just as the lamb has.
John’s vision of Jesus also highlights his sovereignty, drawing on the language of Psalm 2—the bit about ruling the nations with a rod of iron. Here’s what we read in Psalm 2:
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”
I will tell of the decree:
The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”
Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
With the defeat of Rome, the fulfilment of the psalm begins to unfold. The nations will be brought into submission to Jesus, the powers that have opposed his people will be judged, and the saints themselves will be vindicated. We’ll come back to the sword proceeding from his mouth, but first let’s look at the rest of Chapter 19, beginning at verse 17:
Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly directly overhead, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.” And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against him who was sitting on the horse and against his army. And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had done the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. And the rest were slain by the sword that came from the mouth of him who was sitting on the horse, and all the birds were gorged with their flesh.
It's impossible to miss the violent way Jesus’ victory over the nations is described. The reason for that is that John uses language drawn from the Old Testament prophets to describe all of this and he does that not to say that Jesus and the Church are going to literally go out and slaughter the nations, but to highlight that in this victory, Jesus is fulfilling the promises the Lord made through the prophets. In keeping with those images, we see another feast. As the bride stood in such stark contrast to the great prostitute, the glorious marriage supper of the lamb is now contrasted with this horrific “great supper of God”, in which the corpses of the kings of the earth and all their minions are fed on by the birds. The beast and his false prophet—the spiritual powers that stand behind this opposition to God—they are captured and thrown into “the lake of fire that burns with sulfur”. That’s imagery drawn from Daniel, where a beast symbolic of Rome “was killed, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire” (Daniel 7:11). The beast’s power is no more. But, John writes, the rest were slain by the sword that issues from Jesus’ mouth.
It's that sword that makes sense of everything here. John writes that it’s with this sword that Jesus will strike down the nations. It’s not a sword held in his hand, but rather issuing from his mouth. What John’s getting at with this vivid imagery is the victory of the gospel, the good news of Jesus crucified, risen, and Lord, over the false gods, the false ideologies, and kings of the earth. The imagery of devastation and carnage drawn from the prophets points to the total victory that will be had by Jesus—over every square inch of human life and of creation—but the sword issuing from his mouth tells us that this victory comes not by the literal sword, not by military might, but by the proclamation of the good news by the Church—by that host clothed in white and with the name of Jesus written on their foreheads. B. B. Warfield writes about this text:
“What we have here, in effect, is a picture of the whole period between the first and second advents, seen from the point of view of heaven. It is the period of the advancing victory of the Son of God over the world, emphasizing…the completeness of the victory. It is the eleventh chapter of Romans and the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians in symbolical form: and there is nothing in it that was not already in them—except that, perhaps, the completeness of the triumph of the Gospel is possibly somewhat more emphasized here.”[1]
The sword was Caesar’s means of conquest and it was through the sword that he imposed his false and fragile peace and made his claims of divinity. In contrast, Jesus wins his victory by allowing Caesar to do his worst. Jesus conquers by the cross and his bride, his Church, conquers by the proclamation of that good news and, following in Jesus’ steps, even with its own blood. The poet Robert Southwell wrote:
With tears he fights, and wins the field,
his naked breast stands for a shield.
His battering shot are babish cries,
his arrows made of weeping eyes.
His martial ensigns cold and need,
and feeble flesh his warrior’s steed.[2]
I think we often need this reminder that Jesus won his victory at the cross and that we win our victory by means of the gospel and even as we may face opposition, persecution, and even death ourselves. Caesar can be our friend—even our brother—as history shows—when he is himself conquered and captured by the gospel. But sometimes we forget that it is by the gospel that the world will be won for Jesus and the gospel’s victory often comes through persecution of the Church as we see in Revelation. Tertullian famously—and rightly—said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. But the day after I wrote this, a friend posted some quotes on Facebook that were excerpted from Nate Wilson’s podcast this week. Wilson made a good point that’s very apropos here. He said, “When empires compost it is really rich soil. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, but the rot of empires is the soil in which those seeds grow.”[3] That was certainly true of Rome and has been true of so many other empires, kingdoms, and countries. Brothers and Sisters, we of all people ought to have an optimistic view of the future. Jesus has won and the truth of his gospel has been advancing ever since. It’s not always linear. As Israel was in the Old Testament, the Church is God’s means of making him known and sometimes we need his discipline. He may, at times, lead us into exile, that we come out the other side restored, purified, and ready to accomplish our task. I think we here in the West are in one of those periods right now. But that the Lord disciplines his people is all the more reason to be optimistic. He does not and has not given up. Jesus has won and he will continue to win. Our mission is not to accomplish some bare minimum of evangelism to trigger deliverance from an ever-worsening world by Jesus. Dear Friends, we are the means of the world’s transformation. Jesus has defeated the powers that stood behind the pagan empires of the past. He has brought them down and created the rich soil in which the gospel grows and we can be sure—we can live in faith and hope—that his Church, proclaiming the gospel and empowered by the Spirit, will accomplish the mission he has given. Not some bare minimum carved out of a wicked people and a wicked age, but every square inch. One day the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. We are sure of this for Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Grant, O Lord, that the course of this world may be peaceably governed by your providence; and that your Church may joyfully serve you in confidence and serenity; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
[1] “The Millennium and the Apocalypse”, Princeton Theological Review, v. 2, 1904, p. 603.
[2] From “New Heaven, New War”.
[3] https://mycanonplus.com/tabs/search/podcasts/309
A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity Romans 8:17-23 by William Klock
There are a lot of times when I hate my cell phone. There are other times I’m thankful for it. We were on Mayne Island this week. On Wednesday morning I went for a bike ride. You wouldn’t think it’s possible to get lost on a twenty square kilometre Island—but you’d be wrong. I took a wrong turn. I didn’t know it at the time, but my bearings were all wrong. At least on Mayne, no matter where you go you end up at back at the ocean and with a beautiful view. I got to the end of the road—much faster than expected—and was surprised to be looking across Active Pass at Sturdies Bay on Galiano. I was expecting to be on the other side of the island, looking out at Point Roberts and Tsawwassen and Mount Baker. I was disoriented. I’d been absolutely certain I was riding east when, in fact, I’d been riding due north. What road had I been on? There aren’t that many, after all. So out came my phone. I opened “Maps”, and there I could see the whole island in front of me on that little screen. And almost instantly I could see where I’d missed a turn, where I’d ended up, and I knew exactly where I needed to go from where I was. I was confused, but seeing the lay of the land, the big picture, sorted it all out for me.
The same thing happens with the Bible. It starts when we’re children. We read books full of disconnected “Bible stories”—a bit like a kid who’s only ever ridden his bike up and down his own street or had his dad load the bike in the car so he can go ride on his friend’s street or at a park far away. But he’s got little or no idea how those places are connected. We end up knowing Adam and Abraham and Moses and Jesus, but we struggle to know how their stories are related and part of the bigger story. As adults the most common approach to reading the Bible—when we read it!—is the cover-to-cover, Genesis-to-Revelation approach. Don’t misunderstand; any type of Bible reading is good Bible reading, but the order the books of the Bible are arranged in isn’t chronological and doesn’t always help us see the “big picture”. Even Bible scholars and theologians aren’t immune from missing the big picture. They’re often so focused on the individual trees that it becomes easy to inadvertently forget the shape of the forest.
I say this because our Epistle from Romans 8 this morning is one those wonderful, short passages that bring us back to the big picture of the Good News, of God’s redemption and renewal of humanity and of his entire Creation. But even here we might miss it. Many Christians reading through Romans miss the big picture here because they aren’t expecting Paul’s language of God subjecting his Creation to futility and bondage and of that Creation waiting in with eager longing. And yet our Epistle this morning is St. Paul leading us right to the climax of his letter to the Romans. It’s the hill from which we can see the lay of the land, where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and how it all fits together.
We don’t have time this morning to get into the details of Paul’s line of reasoning in the first half of Romans, but what he does in those chapters is to work his way through the story of Israel and all her ups and downs—and for Israel things were mostly “down”. And now in Chapter 8 he begins talking about the life in the flesh versus life in the Spirit and the law of sin and death versus the law of the Spirit. This is where, in verse 11, he famously writes that if the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us, the One who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies—if we are in Christ Jesus we live in hope of the same resurrection he has experienced. But even more than that, Paul goes on to write, through our union with Jesus we are children and heirs of God, fellow heirs with Christ—that means sharing in Jesus’ inheritance. But what is that? Paul writes in verse 17 that it means to suffer with him so that we can be glorified with him. The Christian life—life with Jesus—for Paul means two things: suffering and glory. Suffering is a given as we long for glory.
What does that mean? What does Paul mean by “glory”? And what about suffering? Most Christians living through the last two thousand years have understood that suffering is part of our calling as we follow Jesus. Jesus promised it. The New Testament writers talk about it often—and most of them faced it themselves and were martyred for proclaiming the lordship of Jesus. Many of our brothers and sisters today are persecuted for their faith in various parts of the world. And yet in the West—probably in part because we haven’t faced persecution for such a long time—many Christians have no place for suffering in their theology. Many even go so far as to say that if you’re experiencing suffering—sickness, poverty, rejection or anything else negative—it’s due to a lack of faith. But that’s just the opposite of what Jesus taught and it’s just the opposite of what Paul teaches here. The inheritance we share with Jesus is one of suffering that leads to glory. What this means is at the centre of our Epistle and Paul goes on in verse 18:
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
Paul says, “For I consider…” That doesn’t mean this is his opinion. Paul uses the same Greek word several times as he builds his argument in Romans. Other translations say “I reckon”. The sense of it is, “This is how I work it out”. Knowing the Scriptures, knowing Jesus, working under the Spirit’s inspiration, this is the only conclusion he can reach. He’s been building this argument for eight chapters in Romans and here he reaches the inevitable conclusion: those who will be glorified will first face suffering, but that this suffering can’t begin to compare with the glory to be revealed.
Think about what a powerful statement that was when Paul wrote this. When he writes that word “suffering” most of us probably read into that whatever our own trials and tribulations are. That’s fine. But what did Paul have in mind? Later in the chapter, in verses 35-36 he writes that nothing will separate us from the love of Christ—nothing—and then he goes on to detail the sorts of suffering that he and other Christians were facing—things people might think mean that God doesn’t love them, things they might think show a lack of faith, things that might separate them from Jesus. Here’s his list: hardship or distress, persecution or famine, nakedness or peril or sword. And he quotes from Psalm 44: “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted sheep to be slaughtered.” These things are far worse than the sorts of suffering any of us are likely to face. And as horrible as this suffering was, none of it could compare with the glory to be revealed—no amount of suffering could make the glory not worth it.
But what is the glory Paul’s writing about? Our translation says that this glory is to be revealed “to us”, but that makes it sound like we’re going to be spectators to this glory. What Paul writes in Greek has the sense of this glory revealed towards us or into us. It’s a sense of this glory being bestowed on us as a gift—and this makes perfect sense when we remember what Paul said before: that if we are in Christ, then we will share in his inheritance—we will participate in his inheritance.
And what’s the inheritance? Well, who is Jesus? He is Lord. His glory is revealed or it’s unveiled in his glorious and sovereign rule of Creation and Paul is saying here that the glory we wait for with eager longing, the glory that is the basis for our hope as Christians is not glory in the sense many people often think. We often think of “glory” as a place or a state of being. When a Christian dies we often hear people say that he or she has gone on or been promoted to “glory”. Brothers and Sisters, “glory” isn’t going to heaven when you die. As Jesus’ glory is his sovereign rule over Creation, so the glory to be revealed in us is our participation, our sharing in the sovereign and saving rule of Jesus. And this is why he says what he does in verse 19:
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.
If our hope, if our glory—as it is so often wrongly portrayed—was for the destruction of this world and an eternity of disembodied existence in heaven with God, then the Creation would have no reason to eagerly long for that glory to be revealed. What Paul describes here is the opposite: God’s Creation is waiting for the great day when its true rulers are revealed, the sons of God, and when it will be delivered from corruption. Look at verses 20-22:
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
This is where we need to stand back and look at the big picture. Everything Paul’s saying here is dependent on that. It’s the big picture the Bible gives of us of God’s Creation, from beginning to end. We read in Genesis that God created and that everything was good. We even read there that when he created human beings he looked at his handiwork and declared us not just “good”, but “very good”. But we look around us now and have to wonder what happened. War is always raging somewhere, there’s violence everywhere, there’s greed and corruption everywhere. Justice is in short supply and so are the basic things that people need to survive—maybe not in our part of the world, but for billions of others. And yet even if we don’t pay attention to the big evils that play out on the international scene—or even on the local scene, for that matter—we only have to look at the struggles that we have ourselves and that we share with our family and friends to keep away from sin and to do good. Hate is easy; love is hard. Paul knew it. The Roman Christians knew it. We know it.
Paul tells the story of Creation in the book of Romans, but he tells it as Israel’s story. We don’t have time to run through the whole book this morning obviously, but Paul’s point is that the whole Creation is enslaved in the same sort of way that Israel was in Egypt. And right there we get a glimmer of hope. Remember, when Israel went down to Egypt—we read about that in the story of Jacob and Joseph—it was all according to the Lord’s plan. The Lord arranged for Joseph to become a slave in Egypt so that through him he could rescue his people. Egypt started out good for Israel. When things turned around under a new king who enslaved Israel, it wasn’t because the Lord had ceased to be good and it wasn’t because the Lord was no longer in control. No. We learn later that the Lord allowed the Israelites to become slaves in Egypt so that he could then manifest his glorious sovereignty to everyone—to Israel in rescuing her and to the Egyptians by showing his power over her false gods and over her mighty horses and chariots. In the Exodus, the Lord marked Israel forever as the people he had freed from slavery, people to whom he had given a new life. That became their national identity, celebrated every year in the Passover.
In all of that Paul is working up to his point here. As the Lord allowed Israel to fall into bondage to Egypt, so he has allowed his good Creation to be subjected to death and decay. We may look around and wonder if things are hopeless. Every time one war ends and we see peace break out another war begins somewhere else. We work hard to lift this group out of poverty, but then that group over there falls into it. We cure one disease only to have two new ones crop up. Isaiah wrote about a day when the lion would lie down with the lamb and we look around us and wonder if that’s ever going to happen.
And Paul assures us: Yes, it’s for real. This is God’s promise. No matter how bad things are, this is still his good Creation and he has promised to put everything to rights. Even as he cast Adam and Eve from the garden he was promising them that he would one day overcome sin and restore everything to the way it should be. Genesis shows things going from bad to worse. It shows us humanity losing even the very knowledge of God and sinking into paganism and idolatry. But then it tells us how God came to Abraham and established a covenant with him. The Lord promised that through Abraham and his family he would restore not only humanity, but all of Creation and here Paul reminds us what that means, what it looks like and why the Creation itself would long for it to happen.
Again, we need the big picture—we need to remember where things started. In Genesis we read that the Lord created human beings to be his image bearers. Theologians have argued for two thousand years over what exactly that means, but in the last century, as we’ve been able to read the Old Testament in light of other Jewish and Ancient Near Eastern literature that’s been unearthed we’ve realised that the language of Genesis is temple language. Israel’s pagan neighbours built great stone temples and then places images of their gods in them. Those images represented the gods’ rule or sovereignty over the land and people. And Genesis uses the same languages and imagery, except that in Genesis it’s the Lord himself who builds his own temple—the cosmos—and instead of placing an image of himself carved in stone or gold in it, he creates human beings, to live in his presence in the temple, but also to rule his creation justly and wisely—to have dominion and to subdue Creation in the Lord’s name. That’s what it meant for humanity to bear God’s image: to be his stewards, the priests of his temple. But then we chose to rebel. As Paul writes in Romans 1, we chose to worship the Creation instead of the Creator. We subjected the Lord’s good creation to corruption.
Now, in light of that, it should make sense that Creation is longing for the day when our inheritance is revealed. That’s the day when Creation will be set free from the corruption we brought on it. That’s the day when we, Creation’s stewards will be restored and renewed and put back in charge, reigning with Jesus. Again, think back to Israel. He chose and called her, he rescued her, he made her his people, he sent her to the nations to bring healing and restoration. But she rebelled and she rejected her mission. And yet the Lord didn’t give up and he didn’t change his plan to redeem his Creation through Israel. He simply sent a faithful Israelite—he sent Jesus. And Jesus not only redeemed Israel by dying in her place, he established a new Israel in his own person, a new people to be a light to the nations—this time equipped by the Holy Spirit.
This is what Paul is getting at in verse 23. It’s not just the Creation that groans in eager longing:
And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
The Lord hasn’t given up on his Creation any more than he gave up on Israel. Creation is eagerly waiting for its rightful stewards to be set right. On that great day the Lord will make all things new and restore his redeemed people to their rightful place as good, wise, and just rulers of Creation—as the faithful priests of his temple. This is what it means for our glory to be revealed. The big picture, the story of redemption, reminds us that this was how it was supposed to be from the beginning. And so we groan and we wait eagerly too. We live in the mess we’ve made here in the world. We live with sin and with sickness and with death, and yet we live in hope, knowing that what God has begun in Jesus he will one day complete.
And we can hope because our God has given us the firstfruits of his new creation. He’s given a down payment on what he has promised. The present age and its rulers have been decisively defeated by Jesus at the cross and the empty tomb and God’s new age has been inaugurated. Jesus is Lord. He truly is God’s King. He’s given us his Spirit—Paul describes the Spirit here as the firstfruits—and that’s because we live in the overlap between these two ages, these two kingdoms. The Jews brought the firstfruits of the harvest—usually sheaves of grain harvested at the very beginning of the season—as offerings to God. They offered them in good years and even in bad years in faith that God would provide the rest of the harvest. And so the Spirit is the sign of hope for us. The life he gives to us here and now is a reminder that encourages our faith and hope in the resurrection and the new creation to come. We groan and we sigh, we wait longingly in eager expectation, but our hope is certain because God is faithful and keeps his promises. The prophet Habakkuk wrote that one day the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea. Brothers and Sisters, when that seems impossible, we only need remember the cross of Jesus, his empty tomb, and his gift of the Holy Spirit.
But our faith is not a complacent faith. We haven’t been redeemed by Jesus and given the gift of the Spirit so that we can retreat into a sort of personal holiness or private piety while we wait for Jesus to return. Not at all. Jesus has inaugurated this new age in his resurrection and somehow someday the making new that began in his resurrection will encompass all of Creation and you and I are called, in the power of the Spirit, to embody that renewing work here and now. How is Habakkuk’s prophecy going to be fulfilled? How does the knowledge of the glory of the Lord spread to cover the earth? Brothers and Sisters, that’s our mission. We’re called to proclaim to the world the Good News that Jesus is Lord and that his kingdom is here and now. Our mission is to call the world to repentance and faith. But don’t forget: We are also called to live out repentance and faith in our lives in such a way that we lift the veil on the kingdom and that we give a glimpse to the world of what heaven on earth looks like. So far as we are able to do so today, we are called to exercise the good dominion that was given to Adam—we are called to be stewards of God’s temple, of his Creation. Jesus has led the way for us here, the second Adam. In his earthly ministry he made his Father’s new creation known in practical ways to the people around him and so should we. In a word full of sin we should be visible in seeking after holiness. In a world full of war and injustice, we should visible and at the forefront working for peace and justice. In a world full of hurting and sickness, we should be seeking to make the healing ministry of Jesus known. In a world full of anger and hate, we should be working for forgiveness and reconciliation.
If you’re like me you might get discouraged thinking about the mission Jesus has given us. When I think of these things I think of things that we as Christians can do to bring Jesus and his glory to the world in “big” ways. I think of Christians—and there are so often so few of us—working on the big international scene or I think of missionaries going to far off countries. And then I get discouraged. That’s far away. It’s bigger than me. But Friends, never forget that for every St. Paul or St. Peter, there were thousands of ordinary saints manifesting Jesus in their ordinary lives, proclaiming the Good News, and building the kingdom right where they were. We fulfil Jesus’ calling to us as we raise covenant children to walk with him in faith and to live the values of his kingdom. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we work for peace and reconciliation with our neighbours, in our workplaces, and in our schools. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we forgive as we have been forgiven. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we love the hard-to-love people around us, knowing that we ourselves are hard-to-love too, but that Jesus loved us enough to die for us. We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we sacrifice ourselves, our rights, our prerogatives, our time, and our treasure in order to make Jesus and his love known. In everything we do, we should be seeking to give the world signs and foretastes of God’s new creation.
Let us pray: Heavenly Father, as we asked earlier in the collect we ask again for grace that to pass through the trials of this life without losing the things of eternal importance. Remind us that the suffering we experience cannot begin to compare with the glory to be revealed to us. Remind us always of the suffering that Jesus endured for our sake that in love and gratitude we might suffer too for the sake of making him known. And as we think of Jesus’ death and resurrection and as we live the life given by your Spirit, fill us with hope and faith, knowing that the glory inaugurated in us today will one day be fully accomplished in our own resurrection and the restoration of all your Creation. Amen.
Fallen is Babylon Revelation 18 by William Klock
Sometimes gospel—good news—isn’t what we expect. The gospel is a multifaceted message, but the church in every age has a tendency to focus on one part of it, while deemphasising or even ignoring others. John wrote his letter to the churches of Asia in part to get them straight on this kind of problem. We do the same thing in our ways. We modern, western Christians have a tendency to emphasise the personal aspects of the gospel over the corporate. We tend to view the gospel as a primarily spiritual thing. And we emphasise those parts of the gospel that are most likely to make people feel good, while down-playing or ignoring what might make them feel bad. Some aspects of the gospel just confuse us—so we sort of pretend they aren’t there. Such is our passage today, which continues—and more-or-less—concludes John’s vision of God’s judgement on Rome.
So what do we do with judgement in the Bible? I don’t think we have a problem with judgement itself—maybe we don’t, but some do. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the Canadian prayer book, which butchered the Psalter, because its revisers back in the 1950s concluded that the imprecatory psalms have no place in Christian worship. But it’s not just the Psalmist who pleads with the Lord for the judgement of the wicked and then praises their fall. From the Israelites joyfully singing about the victory of God over Egypt while they watched the dead bodies of Pharoah’s army float on the waters to Isaiah singing “Fallen is Babylon and shattered are her gods!” to Mary’s song in which she praises the Lord for throwing down the mighty from their seats, Brothers and Sisters, God’s people have always and still ought to plead for his judgement on the wicked then praise his victories. We plead for deliverance and we pray for an end to evil and for his justice to prevail. When he answers our prayers, we shouldn’t be squeamish about singing joyfully in praise that he has defeated his enemies. But for some reason we are. I know Friday’s Supreme Court ruling in the States isn’t much consolation for Canadians. I’m not inclined to get overly enthusiastic about what it means for the US. It’s a return to Federalism on the issue of abortion and it remains to be seen what the States will do in light of it. But it’s a victory, it’s a big one, it’s and answer to fifty years of prayer, even if only in part. And Christians ought to rejoice and to praise God. But if you’ve done that on social media in the last few days, there’s a good chance you got rebuked for it by other Christians. Why? Because we’re squeamish about judgement and about praising God when he defeats his enemies. But the Lord defeating his enemies and the enemies of his people is good news, it’s gospel. Back in Revelation 14 John wrote about the angel who came declaring gospel—good news—and that the good news was a proclamation of judgement and a summons to repentance: “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water” (14:7). It’s an echo of the gospel St. Paul proclaimed to the men of Athens: “Turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them” (Acts 14:15). Or, as we sing from Psalm 96 in Morning Prayer, “For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth; and with righteousness to judge the world, and the peoples with his truth.” So our passage today, Revelation 18, is timely. Let’s look at verses 1-3.
After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was made bright with his glory. And he called out with a mighty voice,
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
She has become a dwelling place for demons,
a haunt for every unclean spirit,
a haunt for every unclean bird,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.
For all nations have drunk
the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality,
and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.”
The great prostitute John saw in Chapter 17, the woman deceptively clothed in fine garments and expensive jewelry, whose chalice of wine contained only filth and abominations—who invited the nations to join her in her fun—fun which consisted of rank idolatry, the murder of the Lord Jesus, and the persecution of his people—the great prostitute has fallen.
And John’s imagery, borrowed from the Old Testament prophets, gives us another lesson—some important insight into how biblical prophecy works and how we ought to read it. I’ve spent quite a bit of time explaining that when John wrote of “Babylon”, he was writing about Rome. But not everyone reads the text that way. Others will tell you that “Babylon” was Jerusalem. And there are others who will tell you that “Babylon” is Rome, but not historical Rome, but some Rome of the future—maybe the Roman Church or some future European empire. I don’t know if it’s still a popular theory, but back in the 70s and 80s, a lot of people saw here the European Union—especially when it had only ten nations—ten horns and all of that. Now, if we just read the text and if we read it with the big biblical narrative in mind, it’s really obvious—inescapable, I think—that John was speaking of Rome in his own day. The problem for a lot of folks is that they don’t know how to read biblical prophecy and if John was talking about historic Rome, then it all looks like a failed prophecy. Rome didn’t cease to exist. It wasn’t demolished to leave a barren wasteland as the angel’s song describes. Some interpreters then turn to Jerusalem. That is, more or less, what did happen to Jerusalem—although not in a.d. 70. John describes the fall of Jerusalem in terms of the events that were soon to unfold, and yet things settled down quickly after the war with Rome and Jewish life returned to a kind of normal in Jerusalem, albeit with the temple gone. It wouldn’t be until after the Bar Kokhba Revolt, a little over fifty years later, that Jerusalem really would be wiped out and the Jewish people scattered. That right there gives us a hint at how we ought to be reading things. But, similarly, since these things didn’t literally happen to Rome, others respond by pushing it all into the far future. They try to save John’s prophecy, but in doing that they undermine the clear teaching of Jesus and the apostles that judgement was soon to come. It helps if we look at how John uses the Old Testament prophets. Here he draws from the passage from Isaiah 21 that I read earlier:
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon;
and all the carved images of her gods
he has shattered to the ground.”
Babylon, in the Old Testament, embodied opposition to the Lord. It all went back to the Tower of Babel and only got worse from there. And Babylon wasn’t satisfied to keep her idolatrous harlotries to herself. For centuries she afflicted Israel, eventually conquering Jerusalem and taking God’s people into exile. One of the keys for understanding Revelation is to remember that the prophets—like Isaiah—had warned Israel that her conquest by pagan armies was judgement for her own adulteries. This the historical pattern given meaning by the prophets: Israel, the Lord’s bride, is rebellious and plays the harlot with foreign gods. The Lord is patient, but she continues to be unfaithful. So the Lord judges Israel by allowing her to be defeated by her pagan neighbours—in this case Babylon. Judgement brings Israel to repentance—at least for a while—and the Lord vindicates her by then judging the pagan nations that had oppressed her. That’s the pattern we see in Revelation. First the Lord uses pagan Rome to bring judgement on rebellious Jerusalem. Through it he spares and vindicates his people. Then he comes in judgement on Rome herself. This is why John uses Babylon as an image of Rome. Isaiah writes that Babylon would be a haunt of jackals and hyenas—and demons, too, in the Greek OT (Isaiah 34:13-14).
Jeremiah writes:
Babylon was a golden cup in the LORD’S hand,
making all the earth drunken;
the nations drank of her wine;
therefore the nations went mad. (Jeremiah 51:7)
And the prophet Nahum wrote:
And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute,
graceful and of deadly charms,
who betrays nations with her whorings,
and peoples with her charms. (Nahum 3:4)
John also draws on Ezekiel’s oracle against the city of Tyre:
When your wares came from the seas,
you satisfied many peoples;
with your abundant wealth and merchandise
you enriched the kings of the earth. (Ezekiel 27:33)
So, like Babylon (and like Tyre), Rome will fall because of her idolatry, because of her wickedness, and because she has spilled the blood of Jesus and the saints. But did Babylon fall? If we take Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets literally, we have the same problem we have with John. John writes later, in verse 21, that Babylon (Rome) will “be thrown down with violence and will be found no more”—which certainly didn’t happen literally. Rome has had its problems, it would even be defeated and the city sacked by enemies, but there’s a reason it’s called the “Eternal City”. And despite Jeremiah writing that Babylon would be “a wilderness, a dry land, and a desert”, “her walls…thrown down”, “overthrown like Sodom and Gomorrah, no one will live there”, it was many centuries before the city of Babylon eventually declined. Babylon was defeated, as the prophets said it would be, by the Medes, but they didn’t destroy the city. They diverted the river and sneaked into the city while its people were having a holiday. The Medes and the Persians made Babylon their capital and it flourished for centuries. What this shows us is that prophetic language of judgement isn’t necessarily literal. It’s dramatic and over-the-top. It often speaks of judgement in terms of de-creation: the sun ceasing to shine, stars falling from the sky, the ground itself falling apart and opening up to swallow armies and cities. The key point of the Old Testament prophets and of John in Revelation, is that the oppressors and persecutors of the Lord’s people will face his wrathful and righteous judgement in repayment for their deeds. Nebuchadnezzar was defeated and his kingdom destroyed, leading to the restoration of Israel in Judea, even though Babylon remained under different management. Similarly, Rome will be defeated in such a way that the Christians martyrs would be vindicated and the way paved for the triumph of the gospel over this once pagan empire. The gods of Rome will be shattered and Caesar’s claims of divinity will be exposed in the light of the gospel, which proclaims Jesus as the true son of God. Caesar will be defeated and Jesus will reign—and the world would see the birth of “Christendom” as we called it for centuries. Why does is it work this way? Because even though God did not create man to govern man, but to live under his kingship, he has ordained earthly kings and governments to curb the chaos of the fall. As St. Paul writes, governing authorities are established by God to reward those who do good and to be a terror to those who do evil. But when that gets reversed, particularly when those authorities persecute God’s people, he will bring his justice and take them down. Nebuchadnezzar was taken down and the Medes took his place and Cyrus return the Israelites to Judea. Good rules—or less bad ones, at any rate, will replace the wicked. And just so with Nero and his ilk.
At this point a second angel joins the first. Look at verses 4-8.
Then I heard another voice from heaven saying,
“Come out of her, my people,
lest you take part in her sins,
lest you share in her plagues;
for her sins are heaped high as heaven,
and God has remembered her iniquities.
Pay her back as she herself has paid back others,
and repay her double for her deeds;
mix a double portion for her in the cup she mixed.
As she glorified herself and lived in luxury,
so give her a like measure of torment and mourning,
since in her heart she says,
‘I sit as a queen,
I am no widow,
and mourning I shall never see.’
For this reason her plagues will come in a single day,
death and mourning and famine,
and she will be burned up with fire;
for mighty is the Lord God who has judged her.”
In light of the coming judgement, the angel warns Jesus’ people to get out—not necessarily literally, but not to have anything to do with the wickedness and the idolatry of the pagans. This echoes the warnings to the churches at the beginning of Revelation. The great prostitute is, again, deceptively attractive. Her wine looks appealing and everyone else is drunk on it. Rome and all the nations submitted to her have the appearance of wealth and security. In contrast, those little groups of Christians were facing opposition—and it was soon to get worse—and all because they proclaimed Jesus as Lord instead of Caesar. They were the ones willing to openly say that the emperor had no clothes—or that the harlot’s chalice was full of filth—but that’s not what anyone wanted to hear. Compromise was so enticing and so easy. A pinch of incense offered to Caesar, a meal in the temple of Aphrodite—never mind the orgy going on—and everyone would accept you. But Israel had tried that, offering sacrifices to the Lord in his temple, but also erecting altars to Baal and Asherah. It never works. You cannot serve two masters. Either Jesus is Lord or he isn’t. And Babylon is a graphic testament to what happens to those who worship false gods—and soon Rome will be, too. So, “Come out of her my people, lest you take part in her sins,” calls the angel.
Her sins are heaped high. In other words, her judgment is overdue and coming soon. She will be paid back. In fact, she’ll be paid back double for her deeds. The angel echoes Jeremiah’s prophecy against Babylon:
Repay her according to her deeds; do to her according to all that she has done. For she has proudly defied the LORD, the Holy One of Israel. (Jeremiah 50:29)
Now, the long middle section of the chapter shows us the response of the nations as they stand watching Rome’s fall. They were once drunk on the prostitute’s wine, but the Lord’s judgement sobers them up quickly—as the one in whom they had invested everything now falls. Look at verse 9 and following:
And the kings of the earth, who committed sexual immorality and lived in luxury with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning.
John echoes Ezekiel’s prophecy of Babylon’s fall:
The merchants among the peoples hiss at you;
you have come to a dreadful end
and shall be no more forever.’” (Ezekiel 27:36)
One of the thing that stands out here is that this isn’t the end of the world. This is a judgment that happens in history as the nations watch. Continuing…
They will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say,
“Alas! Alas! You great city,
you mighty city, Babylon!
For in a single hour your judgment has come.”
And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels, pearls, fine linen, purple cloth, silk, scarlet cloth, all kinds of scented wood, all kinds of articles of ivory, all kinds of articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour, wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls.
Slavery is what made the ancient world turn, and especially Rome and it was the sanctifying influence of the gospel that eventually brought it to an end, as with so many other things: human sacrifice, gladiatorial games, and abortion and infanticide. Jesus spoke about being salt and light and that’s just what those first Christians were and by the gospel they taught the pagans mercy and the value of life. But in the meantime, the nations mourn. The prostitute and her chalice are gone. The party is over. And the angel’s imagery draws very closely on Ezekiel’s prophecy of Tyre’s destruction:
At the sound of the cry of your pilots
the countryside shakes,
and down from their ships
come all who handle the oar.
The mariners and all the pilots of the sea
stand on the land
and shout aloud over you
and cry out bitterly.
They cast dust on their heads
and wallow in ashes; (Ezekiel 27:28-30)
This is key, because the reason Ezekiel says that Tyre was judged was because it’s king had boasted: “I am a god, I sit in the seat of the gods” (Ezekiel 28:1). Now it’s Caesar’s turn to be brought low for his blasphemies. In the meantime the nations continue to mourn:
“The fruit for which your soul longed
has gone from you,
and all your delicacies and your splendors
are lost to you,
never to be found again!”
The merchants of these wares, who gained wealth from her, will stand far off, in fear of her torment, weeping and mourning aloud,
“Alas, alas, for the great city
that was clothed in fine linen,
in purple and scarlet,
adorned with gold,
with jewels, and with pearls!
For in a single hour all this wealth has been laid waste.”
And all shipmasters and seafaring men, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea, stood far off
and cried out as they saw the smoke of her burning,
“What city was like the great city?”
And they threw dust on their heads as they wept and mourned, crying out,
“Alas, alas, for the great city
where all who had ships at sea
grew rich by her wealth!
For in a single hour she has been laid waste.
Rejoice over her, O heaven,
and you saints and apostles and prophets,
for God has given judgment for you against her!” (Revelation 18:9-20)
The suitors of the harlot mourn, but notice that the angels calls out to God’s people: “Rejoice!” Specifically, “Rejoice over her—over fallen Rome—because God has judged her.” And not just that, notice the angel makes the point, “God has given judgement for you against her!” This is the vindication of the saints. God has judged the wicked on behalf of all those saints in those little churches in Asia Minor and across the empire—the saints who were mocked, maligned, and even martyred, the saints who watched as their brothers and sisters died in the arena or were crucified and lit on fire to light Nero’s garden parties. For you God has judged the harlot. Brothers and Sisters, the Lord hears the cries of his people. He heard the Hebrews crying out from their bondage in Egypt. He heard the Israelites crying out from their captivity in Babylon. He heard his Church crying out from their persecution by Rome. And for the Lord to hear is always for the Lord to answer. And the natural response is for the song of praise sung by the redeemed to be even louder than the lament of those wailing over their judgement. In Proverbs we read the truth that “when justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous” even as it is “terror to evildoers”. Brothers and Sisters, rejoice and praise God for his triumph, even as the wicked wail and lament.
Finally, now, verses 21-24. The joyful song of the saints is contrasted with the deathly silence of the judged city.
Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying,
“So will Babylon the great city be thrown down with violence,
and will be found no more;
and the sound of harpists and musicians, of flute players and trumpeters,
will be heard in you no more,
and a craftsman of any craft
will be found in you no more,
and the sound of the mill
will be heard in you no more,
and the light of a lamp
will shine in you no more,
and the voice of bridegroom and bride
will be heard in you no more,
for your merchants were the great ones of the earth,
and all nations were deceived by your sorcery.
And in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints,
and of all who have been slain on earth.” (Revelation 18:21-24)
Jeremiah wrote:
When you finish reading this book, tie a stone to it and cast it into the midst of the Euphrates, and say, ‘Thus shall Babylon sink, to rise no more, because of the disaster that I am bringing upon her, and they shall become exhausted.’”
The description of the musicians being silenced is straight from Ezekiel’s oracle against Tyre:
And I will stop the music of your songs, and the sound of your lyres shall be heard no more. (Ezekiel 26:13)
The bit about Rome deceiving the nations by her sorcery calls back to Nahum’s denouncement of Nineveh:
And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute,
graceful and of deadly [sorceries],
who betrays nations with her whorings,
and peoples with her [sorceries]. (Nahum 3:4)
I don’t think anyone amongst John’s readers would have struggled to rejoice at these words of judgement, but the angel does drive home the point one more time in verse 20. He reminds us that in her was the blood of the prophets and saints. He even goes a step further, saying that the bloodguilt of all who have been slain lies with her. Rome wasn’t guilty of every murder that ever happened, but remember that behind the prostitute and behind the beast lies the dragon, the Satan. Rome was the current embodiment, the height of human wickedness, all fed by the lies of the devil. The devil and all the world’s wickedness rose up to its full height at the cross when Jesus was put to death. Evil, concentrated all in one place, did its worst and was dealt a death blow by God. And, once again in Rome and with the persecution of Jesus’ people it rose up again, and yet again God would strike it down. That’s the promise here. Remember John’s three themes: tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom. The saints are not walking anywhere that Jesus has not gone before them and the Lord will vindicate them just as he vindicated Jesus. They would know mourning, but judgement was coming. It was a sure thing. And not too far in the future they would have reason to rejoice as the millstone that was Caesar and Rome was cast into the sea to make way for the gospel of Jesus the Messiah.
Brothers and Sisters, there’s a word here for us, too. We will know new Romes and Babylons before the Lord returns. We will know opposition and maybe even persecution, tribulation, and martyrdom. Persevere. Know that Jesus is Lord. Do not be enticed by the harlot and her chalice. Pray for her downfall, for her downfall, as it always has been, will open the way for our proclamation of the gospel. When that day comes—and it always does—praise the Lord for his righteousness and his faithfulness, and go forth with the good news. For Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: O Lord God, the unfailing helper and governor of those whom you bring up in your steadfast fear and love: Keep us, we pray, under the protection of your good providence and give us a continual reverence and love for your holy name, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Babylon the Great Revelation 17 by William Klock
You’ve all seen Pinocchio, haven’t you? It wasn’t by any means my favourite kids’ movie. I think I must have been about seven years old the one and only time I saw it. I don’t remember much about it beyond the general idea of the puppet who wanted to be a real boy. But that was because one scene terrorised me and has stuck with me all these years. Do you remember “Pleasure Island”? An evil character called the Coachman rounded up bad little boys with a promise of fun and took them to an amusement park on Pleasure Island. There they could eat and drink and smoke and indulge themselves in all the things that bad boys like to do but usually get in trouble for doing. It was the ultimate good time. But there was a catch, as there always is with that sort of “fun”. Once they boys spent enough time on Pleasure Island, they’d start growing ears and tails, they’d lose the ability to talk, and they’d eventually turn into donkeys. Then the Coachman would sell them to work as slaves, hauling carts in the saltmines. The moral of the story was simple: act like a jackass and you become a jackass! The book of Proverbs says something very similar—but Proverbs never gave me nightmares! Der Struwwelpeter, the famous German moralising storybook for kids, wasn’t half so terrifying. At least in Der Struwwelpeter the bad kids died. That wasn’t nearly as bad as being turned into a donkey for life.
As I began last week to think about today’s text, I couldn’t help but think of Pinocchio, having a good time and suddenly horrified to discover he’d grown donkey ears and a tail. When Carlo Collodi wrote the story, he had an age-old lesson in mind. It’s one that goes back to Proverbs—and to Jesus and to St. Paul and to St. John. Sin is enticing because it is so often deceptively attractive, but in the end it will eat us alive and spit us out. It brings us inevitably to judgement—and we see this in Revelation 17 and 18 as the Lord’s judgement falls on Rome. It’s yet another warning against the deceptive attractions of sin and of worldliness. But it’s also, along with the rest of the book, an exhortation to the Church. Keep the themes of Revelation in mind: tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom. Jesus’ people will find themselves opposed—even to the point of martyrdom—by the wicked of the world, by its corrupted values and its sinful systems. And the situation may look hopeless. Back in Chapter 13 the nations marvelled at the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” Those silly Christians? What did they think they were doing? What do they think they’d accomplish standing up the beast? And yet Revelation was the promise to those people—even as they were fed to the lions—that Jesus is Lord, that he has and he will defeat the beast, and that his people will be vindicated. It’s, as St. Paul wrote, foolishness to the gentiles. But if you’d heard and believed the good news that Jesus was crucified and rose again, conquering death itself, it all makes sense. We just need to be reminded now and again to keep this gospel, this cross-centred, this Easter perspective.
And so John goes on at length about the judgement about to fall on the enemies of Jesus and his people. It begins with Jerusalem, but when Jerusalem has been judged, the Lord’s justice then confronts the Greco-Roman world. It goes hand in hand with the commissioning of the disciples by Jesus: You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). God’s judgement pave the way and goes before the powerful proclamation of the gospel. In Chapter 15 John saw the beast’s judgement prepared as heaven sang God’s praises—just as Israel had sung his praises at the fall of Pharaoh, his false gods, and the Egyptian army. In Chapter 16 we saw the bowls of judgement poured out on beast. This language of the “beast” is drawn from Daniel, where four ferocious beasts represent various empires, so we know the beast here represents the current great empire of John’s day. The beast is, on the one hand backed by the power and authority of the dragon—of Satan—and himself backs the second beast who causes the nations to worship him. John, in his symbolic language, made it clear that this beast is Rome, headed by its Emperor who claims divinity and has an entire cult devoted to spreading his false gospel. John has already given us a sense of why judgement had to fall on Rome, but now he goes into detail. Look at Chapter 17.
Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk.” And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations.” And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.
Pleasure Island was an age-appropriate—well, almost—story for kids about the deceptive attractiveness of sin. John writes to adults—and adults who lived in a world as of yet untempered by the gospel. He writes far more graphically. The debauchery of the ancient world is, I think, hard for us to imagine. Today’s decadent, debauched, and obscene celebrations of “pride” begin to come close to daily life in the pre-gospel world. The Romans were the moralistic prudes of the Mediterranean world, but even in Rome prostitution and sodomy, sexual abuse of children and slaves, infanticide, and even sometimes human sacrifice were the rule of the day. As much as we grieve the moral sewer that our culture has become, the ancient world was far worse.
And Rome sat on top of it all. One of the angels from the last chapter whisks John away to the wilderness to show him the subject of the judgement that has been poured out. John sees a woman arrayed in fine clothes. Purple and scarlet dyes were very expensive to produced and usually reserved for royalty and the very wealthy. She is beautifully and extravagantly adorned in jewellery. Everything about her has the look of success, of wealth, and most of all, desirability. And she’s ready to party. She holds a chalice and reels drunkenly. But her chalice doesn’t hold wine. Her wine, the wine with which she entices the nations, the wine with which she makes them drunk, John writes, is sexual immorality. John says the cup is full of “abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality”. Our English versions are somewhat restrained in their translations here. “sexual immorality” is the Greek word porneia. It’s the word for illicit sex and for prostitution. The words for abominations and impurities refer to things and to acts that are deeply vile, disgusting in every way, that defile and degrade, and that not only merit, but cry out for judgement and condemnation. Inside the cup the cup are filth, excrement, disease—to tip it would be to release a sewer, both literally and metaphorically.
The woman is stunningly beautiful to look upon, she is fabulously weathly, and she is full of promises. But it’s all a lie. She sits astride the beast—seven heads and ten horns, the servant of Satan, whom John earlier identified as the Emperor and his emprie—and, he writes, despite her appearance, she is really “Babylon, the mother of prostitutes and earth’s abominations”. It’s imagery from the Old Testament. Babylon was not only the place were the great tower was built in humanity’s attempt to reach heaven in our own power, but the city that would became the enemy and eventually the conqueror of Israel. Babylon represents everything that stood opposed to the Lord and to his people. And this new Babylon is even worse. She sits astride the dragon, reeling, drunk on the blood of Jesus and his people. Again, she is beautiful and sits there welcoming the nations with a promise of wealth and a good time, but it’s all built on wickedness. The underlying reality—strip off the make-up, the jewellery, the expensive clothes, pour out the cup—and what you find is vile, disgusting, utterly stomach-churning.
There’s a reason John uses this imagery of a prostitute to depict the enemy of God’s people. Revelation is about God and his people, whom we see at the end as the lamb and his bride. The story culminates with the marriage of the lamb—husband and wife are joined and their relationship is characterized by faithfulness. The prostituted represents the polar opposite.
This imagery goes back to the Old Testament and to Israel and the Lord. Israel was his bride, but she was repeatedly unfaithful. Think of the prophet Hosea, who used his own marriage to a prostitute, as a prophetic image of Israel’s rejection of the Lord as she ran after foreign gods and idols. Babylon was the epitome of idolatry in the Old Testament, but now the Greco-Roman world has taken up that torch. The nations worship false gods, whose idols and temples are beautiful and full of promises, but who cannot deliver. And now, Caesar himself, claimed to be divine and with that claim, has gathered the peoples and tongues of the earth under his banner. The devil had deceived the nations and now empires like Rome and kings like Caesar enticed the world away from God. Babylon all over again.
And, of course, prostitution is a fitting metaphor for every form of statism. Rome—not to mention our own contemporary nations—offer us security, well-being, and wealth—only submit, and it’s all yours. And just as certainly as one is trapped by the false promises of prostitution and pornography, so Caesar traps, ensnares, and enslaves. And the foolish would rather go along with the lies than walk away from what they’ve already lost. I can’t think of a better real-life illustration than what the Finance Minister said this week with regard to more government spending on more programs in an attempt to save us from the results of the previous two years’ government spending and programs. The only way out of our economic predicament is austerity, but the State has promised prosperity and prosperity she must deliver. The cup is full and inviting, but inside is abomination and impurity—or, at least in this case, stagflation and all the misery that comes with it.
These systems, whether Babylon, or Rome, or Washington, or Ottawa derive their power from the beast. John goes on in verses 7 and 8:
When I saw her, I marveled greatly. But the angel said to me, “Why do you marvel? I will tell you the mystery of the woman, and of the beast with seven heads and ten horns that carries her. The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to rise from the bottomless pit and go to destruction. And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come.
Again, John is reminded not to be deceived by the woman. She is backed by the beast. But then the beast itself. John was clear before that the beast represents the Roman Emperor—that was currently Nero at John’s time of writing. This bit about “was, is not, and is about to rise…and go to destruction” isn’t the easiest thing to parse out, but seems, I think, to be referring to the chaos into which the imperial throne was soon to fall with the suicide of Nero and the “Year of the Four Emperors” that followed. However we work out the specifics, the angel’s point is that the Emperor stands under God’s judgement and he warns: Even as the empire descends into the chaos of this judgement, the people of the earth—at least those who do not belong to Jesus and whose names are not recorded in the book of life—instead of seeing what’s happening, repenting, and turning to the Lord, they will double-down on their commitment to the beast. They would rather continue in their idolatry than admit that the Lord is God. And Jesus’ people need to be prepared, because this is why the beast goes after the saints: They are the only ones who stand as witness to the falsity of his claims at divinity and the truth that Jesus is the risen Lord. This is why the woman who sits astride him has made herself drunk on their blood.
Now, in verses 9-18 the angels explains all of this further.
This calls for a mind with wisdom: the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated; they are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come, and when he does come he must remain only a little while. As for the beast that was and is not, it is an eighth but it belongs to the seven, and it goes to destruction. And the ten horns that you saw are ten kings who have not yet received royal power, but they are to receive authority as kings for one hour, together with the beast. These are of one mind, and they hand over their power and authority to the beast. They will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those with him are called and chosen and faithful.”
The angel’s explanation probably seems more cryptic than helpful to us. To John and his readers it would have been clear. Not all of it is difficult for us, though. That this woman is seated on seven mountains or hills would have been, to anyone in the First Century and still today, an unmistakable reference to the city of Rome. The seven horns of the beast are relatively clear, too. The angel says they represent seven kings—or seven different caesars. At the time of writing there have been five. That would be Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius. One is. That’s Nero. The seventh who must remain a short while could refer to Galba, who reigned a short seven months after Nero, but probably sums up the year of chaos in which there were four rival claimants to the throne, none of which lasted. That would make the eighth, who is like the seven, Vespasian, the founder of the Flavian Dynasty that followed. He was enough like the earlier emperors that he was just as deserving of destruction. I think there’s something fairly obviously symbolic about these numbers as well. The seven emperors give to the empire a false appearance of and the eighth, parodying Jesus who rose on the eighth day, will have appeared to have cleaned up the mess, dealt with the chaos, and led the empire into a new and better day, when the fact is that, just like his predecessors, he is leading the empire straight into the Lord’s judgement. I think this is the real message those early believers needed to hear. Again, they were mocked. “There is none like the beast! Who would be foolish enough to rise up against him?” And here, again, John is reminded that even though the beast and his empire have the appearance of might and perfection, even though they appear impervious to defeat, it’s all going to come falling down under its own corrupt weight. Look at verses 15-18:
And the angel said to me, “The waters that you saw, where the prostitute is seated, are peoples and multitudes and nations and languages. And the ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the prostitute. They will make her desolate and naked, and devour her flesh and burn her up with fire, for God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by being of one mind and handing over their royal power to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled. And the woman that you saw is the great city that has dominion over the kings of the earth.”
Again, the details here point unmistakably to the city of Rome as the prostitute. She had dominion over the kings of the earth. Nothing else fit that description in John’s day. The ten kings represented by the beast’s ten horns seem to refer to kings or other rulers within the empire—rulers of the nations over which she has dominion. But in the end, Rome will devour itself. The great prostitute will be stripped naked, her flesh devoured, and finally burned with fire. The rulers whom she robbed blind in exchange for false promises will turn on their mistress and destroy her. That said, even as they bring justice to the prostitute, they are part of the same system represented by the beast. They may be through with their mistress, but they are just as intent on making war on the Lamb—as John writes in verse 14—as the beast ever was. If nothing else, John's vision here and the angel's explanation sounds an awful lot like Nero’s burning of Rome—setting fire to the city so that he could build his new palace on top of the devastation—and then blame the fire on Christians.
But verse 14 is, again, an exhortation to persevere in the midst of tribulation. The Lamb will conquer, because he is, after all, “King of kings and Lord of lords” and those who are with him are called “chosen and faithful”. Again, it all looked like so much foolishness to people invested in the beast’s system, but to those who knew the reality of the cross, it all made sense. They just needed to be reminded. Jesus has conquered by his blood and the Church—those whom Jesus called to take up our crosses and to follow him—will conquer through our own self-sacrifice, as we give our all—even sometimes our own blood—for the sake of the gospel.
Brothers and Sisters, that’s the heart of the lesson here. The who’s who of the symbolism is important too and we need to get it right, because it’s important to our understanding of the story we tell and our place in it, but I think the really important, the critical truth for us here is much the same as it was for those Asian Christians in the First Century: Don’t fall prey to the lies of the prostitute. The systems and philosophies of the world make us promises galore: promises of wealth, promises of security, promises of self-discovery and identity. But those promises are empty snares and behind them all lies the dragon, the devil, who has been telling lies to humanity from the beginning. He tempts us to give ourselves over to wealth. He tempts us to submit ourselves body and soul to the State. He temps us to find our worth in material goods. He entices us to satisfy our appetites with gluttony and with illicit sex. He tells us that we will find satisfaction in identity, whether that’s race or sex or sexual orientation. He undermines marriage and the family and then holds out the State and sexual immorality as substitutes. His agents in this world hold out a golden chalice, to all appearances filled with wine, but inside is abomination and filthiness. Inside is idolatry that ensnares, entwines, corrupts—and ultimately leads us away from Jesus and straight to destruction. Brothers and Sisters, stand firm and look to Jesus for your security and for your identity. We will find ourselves caught up in the battle and when we do, John reminds us that this is no accident. We are soldiers of the Lamb, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and we will conquer by his blood and by the word of our testimony. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Our Father, in the Collect we acknowledged that we are weak and that you are our source of strength. Again, we ask for the help of your grace that we might stand firm in faith against the enemies of the Lamb, and as your Church advance the cause of the gospel to the ends of the earth. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Blessed is the One Who Stays Awake Revelation 16 By William Klock
There’s an old story of a clergyman, who out of concern for a parishioner who had been absent for some time, went to visit her at home. He saw her car in the driveway. The drapes were drawn, but he could see the lights were one. He could hear the faint sound of the TV. She was clearly home. He knocked on the door and waited. No answer. Then he heard the TV go silent. He knocked again. Still no answer. He waited. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a faint movement of the living room drapes, as if someone had peeked around the edge. Still no answer. He rang the doorbell and waited again. Still nothing. He sighed, pulled one of his cards from his pocket, and slipped it into the front door’s weather stripping. Then he had an idea. If anyone needed to read her Bible, it was she. So he took the card back, pulled out his pen, and wrote on the back “Revelation 3:20”—“Behold, I stand at the door and knock”—and slipped the card back into the weatherstripping. “She’ll have to look that one up,” he thought, “and maybe she’ll keep reading while her Bible’s open.” He rang the bell one more time, waited again, and left.
On Sunday morning he was pleased to see that the woman was in church, but she left too quickly for him to greet her. Then, as he was getting ready to leave the church, one of the wardens approached, holding a little card. “It was in the offering plate,” the warden said as he handed it to him. The priest took the card and saw it was one of his own. He turned it over and saw the Bible reference he’d written: “Revelation 3:20”. Underneath it the woman had written another: “Genesis 3:10”. He laughed. That’s Adam’s answer to the Lord, “I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
Revelation 16 continues with the Lord’s judgement on Greco-Roman world. We looked at Chapter 15 two weeks ago and saw the announcement of seven plagues, carried by seven angles in bowls like those used for drink offerings in the temple. In Chapter 16 we’ll now see those plagues poured out—the wrath of God revealed. And in the middle of the plagues John stops—in verse 15—to give a warning to God’s people:
“Behold, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays awake, keeping his garments on, that he may not go about naked and be seen exposed!”
It’s a warning from Jesus for his Church to stay alert and on guard—not to be distracted, but to be diligently about the work he’s given. He gave similar warnings to the churches at Sardis and Laodicea. The reference is to an officer in the temple in John’s day, who was tasked with making sure that the men on watch stayed awake. He would make the rounds of the temple and if he caught anyone asleep, he would beat him. If he found the same man asleep a second time, he would strip the man naked and burn his clothes.[1] One commentator writes, “The danger is of being caught not momentarily but habitually off guard—not, to put it crudely, with trousers down, but without trousers at all.”[2]
Consider Jesus’ warning to the Christians in Sardis:
Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. (Revelation 3:2)
Brothers and Sisters, it is easy to become complacent. Either we become complacent and neglect our calling to proclaim and to live out the good news about Jesus and to declare the mighty works of God. Or we become complacent in that we become worldly. We live in the world and it’s easy to be unconsciously influenced by it when we keep our guard down and neglect to feed ourselves on God’s word and to share in the means of grace found in the Church. It’s also easy to become complacent through wilful compromise with the world. We face opposition and instead of standing firm, we compromise in the hopes that the world will oppose us less—maybe that they’ll even like us. We see an awful lot of this today. Churches looking to attract “seekers” structure ministry and worship around what is attractive to unbelievers—which can be great when done thoughtfully and carefully, but disastrous when, as so often happens, we end up looking more like the world than the church. Or we cozy up to the world’s system, especially to politics—Left or Right—it can go either way. When we allow ourselves to be overtaken by the world’s ways of thinking, whether that be commercialism and materialism or expressive individualism, the sexual revolution, and post-modern gender theory. Or—I think most appropriate in light of our text today—we water down our message. Large parts of the Western Church today are hesitant to talk about sin and about the consequences of sin, about the wrath of God and of judgement. H. Richard Niebuhr famous described the gospel of much of modern Christendom as: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”[3] Such a faith is worthless—for those who believe—and for the world to which it is proclaimed. The Church that preaches such a message is no church at all and when God’s judgement does come, such churches will be swept away with everything else not of the kingdom—caught naked and asleep at her post. It’s important that the Church be clear about the difference between the things of God and the things of the world, the difference between godliness and sin, and knowing the kingdom of God, and be able to persevere in the midst of tribulation—that, to use John’s metaphor, we stay awake and keep our pants on.
As John announces the judgement that was soon to come on the pagan world of Caesar, using the language of cataclysmic plagues, the Church was expected to recognise the judgement of God in the same way that Israel had seen, recognised, and praised the judgment of God on Pharaoh, the supposed god-king, and on his pantheon of false gods. John saw those who had conquered the beast, like Israel of old watching Pharaoh’s army drown, singing the praises of their victorious God. Brothers and Sisters, God’s people are called to singing of his victory for the sake of the world and, in doing so, we glorify him. Now look at Chapter 16. John writes:
Then I heard a loud voice from the temple telling the seven angels, “Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God.”
Remember that in the last scene, John saw the heavenly tabernacle filled with smoke—so full that no one could enter. And out came seven angels bearing bowls. The image is of the priests of the old covenant bearing their drink offerings at the conclusion of the daily service. Since no one could enter the heavenly tabernacle because of the smoke, this must be the voice of God directing the angels. John then goes on:
So the first angel went and poured out his bowl on the earth, and harmful and painful sores came upon the people who bore the mark of the beast and worshiped its image.
The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing died that was in the sea.
The third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of water, and they became blood. (Revelation 16:2-4)
Just like the plagues poured out on rebellious Jerusalem, the plagues poured out on the pagan nations are meant to remind us of the plagues the Lord brought on Egypt. First, painful sores reminiscent of the boils that afflicted the Egyptians. Second, the sea turning to blood and then, third, the fresh waters turning to blood as well.
In contrast to the plagues poured out on rebellious Jerusalem, these plagues are universal in scope. The earlier plagues were limited—a third of the water, a third of the people. I think the idea in this distinction is that when God disciplined his rebellious children, there was an opportunity for the pagan nations to see, to take heart, and to repent of their wickedness themselves. Now that opportunity has passed. The wine of God’s wrath has been tread out in the winepress and the wicked peoples who drank the blood of the saints are now—metaphorically—left with nothing but putrid blood to drink.
That raises another question? Are these plagues meant to be understood literally? I think it’s fairly clear, given the context, that they are not. The imagery draws on the Lord’s past judgement on the nations that afflicted his people, first Egypt and then, we’ll see, Babylon. The point is that the Lord is now going to judge Rome. Remember the point of Revelation: tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom. Jesus’ main purpose in giving John this vision is to encourage the saints to persevere in the midst of tribulation. The great New Testament scholar, George Caird, puts it this way: “The theme of the whole series [i.e., the plagues] is neither the collapse of the physical universe nor the punishment of individual men for their personal contribution to the world’s iniquity, both of which come later when the record books are opened…but the ending of persecution through the removal of the persecutor.”[4] The angels underscore this when they sing out between the third and fourth plagues. Look at verses 5 to 7:
And I heard the angel in charge of the waters say,
“Just are you, O Holy One, who is and who was,
for you brought these judgments.
For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets,
and you have given them blood to drink.
It is what they deserve!”
And I heard the altar saying,
“Yes, Lord God the Almighty,
true and just are your judgments!”
The Lord’s judgement vindicates his saints and brings justice on their persecutors. The songs of the angels and of the altar—I assume these are the martyrs we saw earlier under the altar—the song is a needed reminder of the goodness of the Lord’s judgement. We modern Christians have often become uncomfortable with judgement—Niebuhr’s God without wrath and kingdom without judgement. One morning this week I left my prayer book at home. I had left a Canadian prayer book on my desk—the 1962 edition—after looking up something in the lectionary last week, so I picked it up for Morning Prayer. And I was jarred by the changes they made in the Psalter. Wherever they could, they eliminated or watered down the passages that speak of or call for the Lord’s judgement. Whole psalms were removed. Because modern Christians have—to our shame—become exceedingly uncomfortable with the topic of the wrath and judgement of God. And yet, the angels sing here, it is God’s justice which reveals his holiness. Do we consider that when we sing “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty”? And do we consider that it is the Lord’s justice that is our consolation as we face a world that opposes us because it opposes him? Brothers and Sisters, we need to remember that the Lord is revealed to be true and just because he judges wickedness and, in that, he deserves our praises. There is no reason to preach the gracious mercy of the cross, if there is nothing from which we need deliverance.
Now the fourth plague—verses 8 and 9:
The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire. They were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues. They did not repent and give him glory.
The fourth of the trumpets that announcement judgement on Jerusalem heralded a plague of darkness. Now the fourth bowl brings the opposite. It metaphorically highlights the Lord’s vindication of his saints. The martyrs we saw under the altar back in Chapter 7 were consoled with the words:
They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore;
the sun shall not strike them,
nor any scorching heat. (Revelation 7:16)
In contrast, the wicked are exposed to the full justice of the Lord. And yet, even as they experience his wrath, like Pharaoh, their hearts are hardened. They know the source of their affliction, but rather than repent, rather than turn from their evil and give him glory, they curse him.
With the fifth bowl, the judgement narrows from the wider pagan world of the Greeks and Romans to its throne—to the heart and embodiment of its wickedness.
The fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and its kingdom was plunged into darkness. People gnawed their tongues in anguish and cursed the God of heaven for their pain and sores. They did not repent of their deeds. (Revelation 16:10-11)
The Lord’s judgement now falls on the beast, on Caesar, on Nero himself. Darkness—political chaos—descends on the empire. In a.d. 69 the Senate declared Nero a public enemy. He fled and committed suicide. A year of chaos—referred to as the Year of the Four Emperors—ensued. Galba became emperor. He was murdered by Otho. Meanwhile, Vitellius popular for his military victories in Germany, vied for the throne and won the support of the imperial guard. Otho committed suicide. But Vitellius had his own rival in the general, Vespasian, who was besieging Jerusalem. In the end, Vespasian’s supporters in the military outnumbered those of Vitellius, who abdicated and was promptly lynched by a mob in Rome. It was a year of chaos and civil war. But again, even as the beast was toppled from his throne, there was no repentance. Nero, who had initiated the empire’s persecution of the saints, was cast down, but in quick succession four others seized his throne and made the same blasphemous claims to divinity that he had.
And the sixth bowl. Verses 12-16:
The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, to prepare the way for the kings from the east. And I saw, coming out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs. For they are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty. (“Behold, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays awake, keeping his garments on, that he may not go about naked and be seen exposed!”) And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.
John has referred to Rome symbolically as Babylon—historically the great enemy of the people of God. And now the symbolism of the judgements recalls the fall of Babylon, while at the same time conjuring up the great fear of Rome at that time. Ancient Babylon fell to the Medes when the invaders diverted the Euphrates River so that they could enter the city. Now it’s Rome’s turn to fall. Rome’s great enemy to the east was the Parthian empire—on the other side of the Euphrates. In the midst of Rome’s political chaos, war was coming. John writes of the kings of the nations assembling to battle at a place called in Hebrew, Harmageddon—the Mount of Megiddo. It’s a little interesting in that there’s no Mount Megiddo. Megiddo is a valley between the mountains—the route from the coastal plain of Palestine to the interior, to Syria and Damascus. For that reason it had a been a place of many battles. Deborah and Barak had won their victory there in Judges. It was the place where King Josiah met his Waterloo, so to speak. And that’s precisely how John uses “Megiddo” here. That there’s no actual Mount Megiddo suggests strongly that John isn’t using this location literally. When we say someone has met their Waterloo, we don’t literally mean that they’ve gone to Waterloo to lose a battle. Waterloo is a metaphor for defeat and John uses Megiddo in a similar way here. Rome will meet her enemies and she will fall. The beast’s own wickedness will catch up with him both at home and abroad and he will be toppled from his throne.
But in the middle of all this there’s that warning. “Stay awake,” warns Jesus. Hearkening back to the plague of frogs in Egypt, the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet spew forth demonic spirits imaged as frogs. These unclean spirits perform signs that deceive the kings of the nations and summon them to the battle. Jesus warns his people not to be conned by the false prophets and their lying signs. Pharoah’s magicians had once mimicked the Lord’s miracles and the prophets of the dragon and the beast will do the same. God’s people must be alert, he warns, that they not fall prey to the enemy’s propaganda.
And in verses 17-20 the seventh and final bowl is poured out.
The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple, from the throne, saying, “It is done!” And there were flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, and a great earthquake such as there had never been since man was on the earth, so great was that earthquake. The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell, and God remembered Babylon the great, to make her drain the cup of the wine of the fury of his wrath. And every island fled away, and no mountains were to be found. And great hailstones, about one hundred pounds each, fell from heaven on people; and they cursed God for the plague of the hail, because the plague was so severe.
The final judgement is poured out into the air, the space between heaven and earth, and the only language John can employ to describe the result is the language of de-creation used by the Old Testament prophets. Zechariah had once described the fall of Jerusalem using this metaphorical language—the city being split in two by an earthquake. Now Rome is metaphorically split in three in the chaos of lightning, thunder, and earthquakes. I think it’s very possible this is a reference to the civil war that was about the rattle Rome to its core, but it was a civil war that would topple the beast who had persecuted the saints. And yet, still, the wicked continue to curse God. The men who took Nero’s place on the throne did not continue the persecution of the saints, but they continued with their blasphemous claims to divinity. Nevertheless, John says, “God remembered Babylon the great”. This is our lead-in to Chapters 17 and 18. The great city will be revealed as the world’s whore. But in that revelation, the faithfulness and the beauty of the Lord’s bride will also be revealed.
John saw the end of pagan Rome. Or it might be better to say that he saw the beginning of the end of pagan Rome. As Caird also rightly points out, Israel’s prophets had always used this kind of apocalyptic language “to give theological depth and urgency to this historical crisis which he and his people were facing at the moment. John, too, had his vision of the End, but because he had learnt his theology at the foot of the Cross, he knew that an end could also be a beginning.”[5]
The Lord’s judgement would cast down the beast, break his empire, and in time the good news about Jesus, proclaimed by saints and witnesses by the blood of the martyrs would transform the world. And, Brothers and Sisters, it will continue to do so. Throughout history the power of the gospel has brought transformation, but it’s never as simple as we might like: Okay, the gospel has conquered here, now the Church can go over there or over there to conquer and forget about here. The Church triumphs there, and then wanes here, only to triumph again here, later. We in the West are experiencing what it’s like to live in a post-Christian world—the waning of the gospel here—to fall out of favour, to experience opposition. If John were here today he would warn and exhort us as he did the Christians of his own day: “Blessed is the one who stays awake, keeping his garments on, that he may not go about naked and be seen exposed!” Don’t give up. Don’t succumb to the spirit of the age. Don’t be swayed by the lies of the unclean spirits. The gospel will triump here again and it will do so through the witness of faithful Christians. So live in deep community with your church family. Drink deeply at the well of grace provided by the sacraments. Steep yourself in the word of God. Don’t be afraid to be different—to be holy—and to proclaim the sinfulness of sin, the gracious mercy of God revealed at the cross, and the lordship of Jesus over all things. Be shaped by faith-filled hope for Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Almighty God, we thank you for the exhortation you have given us through John. You judge the wicked and deliver your people. Your gospel is powerful and transforms the world. Strengthen our faith and fill us with hope in these truths, so that we can live courageously for Jesus in the face of hatred and opposition. Renew us by your Spirit and make us faithful witnesses of the transforming power of your word. Judge the wicked, we pray, vindicate your people, and set your fallen creation to rights. Through Jesus we pray, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, new and for ever. Amen.
[1] Philip Carrington, The Meaning of Revelation (London: SPCK, 1931), 265.
[2] J. P. M. Sweet, Revelation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979), 249.
[3] The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 193.
[4] The Revelation of St. John the Divine (London: A & C Black, 1966), 201.
[5] 210
A Sermon for Whitsunday Acts 2:1-11 by William Klock
Last Sunday we recalled the Ascension of Jesus and remembered it’s significance—that it offers a powerful visual confirmation of his lordship over creation. And yet many Christians fail to make that connection. For many, the ascension just means that Jesus isn’t physically present with us anymore. And I think this has happened because we as the Church have too often neglected to understand the events of Jesus’ life and the life of the early Church within the context of the big story of God and his people. When we do that me miss the deeper significance of pretty much everything. For the last century or so, Evangelicalism has been dominated by a theological system that understands Jesus’ kingdom essentially to be an entirely future reality. And that leaves the Church spiritually impoverished. Think of our study of Revelation and themes it stresses: tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom. But if the kingdom is only a future reality, perseverance in the face of tribulation becomes impossible—or something we must do soley on our own strength. Now Pentecost. Something similar has happened with Pentecost. Not necessarily in the same way, but nevertheless, we’ve allowed a cheapened view of things to downgrade what Pentecost actually means. In the case of Pentecost, a lot of Christians have turned it into little more than a personal experience. And as much as the reality of Pentecost is a personal experience for us as Christians, when that becomes our main focus, we tend to lose the bigger picture, the big picture of redemption.
So let’s back up to the Ascension for a moment to get some perspective before we head into Pentecost. Again, the point of the Ascension is that Jesus has taken his throne and that he will reign from there until, as St. Paul says, every last enemy is put under his feet—until every enemy of God and his people, of his kingdom and his new creation has been conquered. And if Jesus is reigning, that means that his kingdom is here and his kingdom is now—even if its full consummation is still future. This is what the Old Testament points to throughout its pages. It’s what the New Testament affirms about Jesus and his coming and his mission. Kings don’t take their thrones without their sovereign rule being inaugurated and that’s as true of Jesus as it is for earthly kings.
As I’ve thought about this I’ve come to suspect that one of the major reasons we’ve missed the reality of God’s kingdom is that we haven’t fully grasped the mission of the Church—of God’s new creation here on earth. We pray every day, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” but we never fully grasp just what we’re praying in those words. And that’s what I want to talk about this morning. And that brings us back to Pentecost. What’s the significance of Pentecost? Why is Pentecost important?
The best place to start is our Epistle from Acts 2 this morning. St. Luke tells us there of this amazing thing that took place as the Holy Spirit came in a rush of wind and fell on the disciples in something that looked like tongues of fire. Suddenly they were praising God in other languages. Jews from all over the empire were there and heard these Galilean men telling of the mighty acts of God in their own languages. None of these visitors was quite sure what was going on. Some of them thought the disciples were drunk. And that’s when Peter stood up and gave his first sermon. He began with Joel’s prophecy as he walked the people through the Old Testament and then explained how Jesus, in his death and resurrection and then in his ascension not only fulfilled those prophecies, but how Jesus actually fulfilled Israel’s failed mission. As he says in verse 36, “Therefore let the whole house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
It’s an amazing picture Luke gives us, but as we read it we probably missed the really significant little note he gives us right at the beginning. In verse 1 Luke begins by telling us that all this happened “when the day of Pentecost arrived”. And we think, “Well, of course…this is why we refer to that day as Pentecost!” What a lot of people don’t realise is that it wasn’t Luke or the Church that decided to call that day Pentecost. That day was already called Pentecost. That’s what the Greek-speaking Jews called the day fifty days after Passover—“pente”, “fifty”. In Hebrew it was called the Feast of Weeks—specifically, seven weeks after Passover. And the connection between this Jewish festival and what happened on that day Luke tells us in Acts when the Spirit descended on the disciples is important.
Passover and Pentecost go all the way back to the beginning of Israel’s story in the Exodus. Remember back to the first Passover. The Lord sent his angel to take the lives of the firstborn of all Egypt. But he made a provision to spare the firstborn of Israel. He gave Moses instructions for the people: Each family was to slaughter a lamb. They were to eat the lamb and they were to paint its blood on the doorposts of their home. When the angel of death saw the blood of the sacrificed lamb he would literally “pass over” that home and spare those inside. The next day the Lord led his people out of their bondage in Egypt. He rescued them again as he parted the waters of the Red Sea so that they could escape Pharaoh’s army and he led them to Mt. Sinai in the wilderness where he gave them his law. The law he gave to the people through Moses was the charter of his covenant. To be God’s people is to manifest his glory and his faithfulness to the world. “On earth as in heaven,” as we pray. That was Israel’s calling and it had been ever since the Lord had called Abraham: to be a light to the gentiles so that the nations might know the glory of the Lord and be drawn to him. The Lord wrote his law on tablets of stone so that Israel would know what to do to fulfil her mission and ministry—that she would know what it is to live in covenant with the Lord. God rescued his people, leading them in an exodus from their bondage to the Egyptians and on the fiftieth day he met them and gave them his law. That was the origin of the feast of Pentecost. And that was its significance for Israel down through the years. At Passover they remembered how God had rescued them. Year after year they sacrificed lambs and painted the blood on their doorposts to remind them of the way in which the Lord had saved them. And every year, fifty days later they commemorated and celebrated the giving of the law that taught them how to live as the Lord’s people.
All of that’s packed into that statement Luke makes in Acts 2:1 about the day of Pentecost having come. And that points to the meaning of Pentecost as we remember and celebrate it as Christians. On that last Passover of the Old Covenant era, Jesus went to Jerusalem. He and his friends ate that age old covenant meal in the upper room, but as they did so, Jesus gave it new significance. Now the Passover bread was his body. Now the wine was his blood. The next day, Jesus gave his body and blood for the sins of his people. And on that first Easter morning he rose from the grave, not only conquering sin and death, but leading his people in a new exodus. This time is wasn’t an exodus from human slavery, but an exodus from slavery to sin and death and into the new promised land of the long-awaited age to come.
For forty days Jesus taught his people from the Law and the Prophets, showing them all these connections. He gave his people a new mission. And yet it wasn’t a completely new mission. It was the same mission that Israel had had all along: to manifest the glory of the Lord to the nations and to call them into covenant with him. But this time the Lord was equipping his people as he never had before. He had promised through the prophet Ezekiel: “I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19). This is what humanity needed all along. The law was external—written on stone tablets. What humanity needed was a new heart, a new life, given and made possible by the indwelling Spirit of God. And so, at his ascension, Jesus gave his disciples their mission: go out into the world, proclaim the good news—the message that Jesus is Lord, that there is a new and eternal King, make disciples of the nations, and baptise them into the God who loves and redeems his rebellious people. Once again, “On earth as it is in heaven.” But this is also why he told them to go to Jerusalem and wait. The exodus made Israel God’s people. In fact, we see throughout the Old Testament that it was in the Exodus that the Lord adopted Israel and called her his firstborn. But being adopted is different from being given the tools needed to actually live as part of the family and to carry out the mission.
Think about that. Imagine being adopted into a family, but not being told the house rules or the family expectations. That was what Israel needed to live the Lord’s adoption. And that’s the purpose that the law served when it was given at Sinai. It was the family rules. And just so with Jesus’ disciples. Jesus is now the Lord’s firstborn. He has taken Israel’s role on himself and as we pass through the waters of baptism in faith—our own Red Sea experience—we are adopted as Jesus’ brothers and sisters into the Lord’s family. But we need to be equipped to live as members of the Lord’s family. And so, on the fiftieth day after their exodus, after their rescue from slavery to sin and death, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to his people. Instead of external tablets of stone, he gave his life-giving and empowering Spirit to breathe life into his sons and daughters that they—that we—might truly live as his people, as his family. Instead of an external law pointing us to God, God comes to us himself, pours himself into us, and turns our hearts to him. “On earth as it is in heaven.”
That day was a commissioning too. Pentecost mirrors Jesus’ own baptism. Think back to the beginning of the story of Jesus’ ministry. He was baptised by John and as he came up out of the waters of the Jordan River the Holy Spirit descended on him and the Lord spoke from heaven: This is my beloved Son; in him I am well-pleased. At Pentecost the Lord did the same thing for the Church. He sent his Spirit not only to indwell us, but to commission us to carry out the mission that Jesus began. On Pentecost the Lord declared to his Church, to all those who are in Christ: These are my beloved sons and daughters; in them I am well-pleased. And as Jesus was sent from his baptism into the wilderness to suffer Satan’s harassment and to triumph over him in the power of the Spirit, so from our baptism at Pentecost, the Church is sent out into the wilderness: to charge into the darkness with the light of Christ, to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord and that he has conquered sin and death and Satan. We’re not called to go timidly into the world to offer people a new option on the smorgasbord of world religions. No, we’re to charge into the territory of Satan and of Caesar to proclaim that there is a new Lord, that the kingdoms and systems of this old age are coming to an end and that Jesus is Lord. In Jesus and then in the Church, heaven and earth are coming back together, the fracture caused by our rebellion is being healed, all things are being made new, and this corrupt and broken world is being set to rights under the power and authority of the King. Our message is one that we should be proclaiming not with timidity and fear, but with power and authority. Ascension and Pentecost give us the assurance we need that Jesus reigns, that his kingdom is here and now, and that however bad things may look today, he will with absolute certainty subdue every enemy and return on the clouds the conquering king at the end of the age.
No matter how bad things look. No matter how bad things get. As we’ve seen in the message of Revealtion, there’s no reason to be afraid. There’s no reason not to have confidence in our mission. Ascension and Pentecost should be reminders of that. Last week we sang those words of the old hymn “See the Conqueror”:
Thou hast raised our human nature
In the clouds to God’s right hand
There we sit in heavenly places
There with Thee in glory stand
Jesus reigns adorned by angels
Man with God is on the throne
Mighty Lord in Thine ascension
We by faith behold our own
We by faith behold our own
In his Ascension Jesus gives us assurance. He in his resurrected and exalted humanity has raised our humanity and this earthly realm to heaven. That’s one half of his final promise to restore heaven and earth. And Pentecost embodies the other half of the promise: In sending the gift of the Holy Spirit to indwell his people, the Lord has sent heaven to earth. Humanity has risen to heaven with Jesus and heaven has descended to earth with the Holy Spirit and so we know that heaven and earth cannot remain sundered and separated forever. One day they will be restored. All that remains is for Jesus to subdue his enemies.
In the meantime, Brothers and Sisters, we the Church have been made the temple of the living God. Think about what that means. In the beginning God created a garden temple where he and his people lived in fellowship with each other. Human beings lived in the presence of God. Our sin broke that fellowship. Sin and death drove us from the garden. Sin and death forced apart earth and heaven. The tabernacle and the temple were built as models of that garden temple in miniature. They became the centre of Israel’s life, because in the temple God and human beings could find fellowship, even if it was a limited and broken fellowship. Then Jesus came and he became the temple himself. In his incarnation he united humanity to God and in giving his Spirit to us, to the Church, the Lord has made us his living temple. In us, thanks to Pentecost, God is made known to fallen and broken humanity. In us the new creation has begun. And in us the Lord is working to restore his fallen and broken world to himself. As ancient Israel caught a glimpse of heaven in the temple, so the world is meant to catch a glimpse of heaven in us, in the Church—a view of humanity and God once again set to rights through the mediating work of Jesus.
And how do we do that? Brothers and Sisters, just as Israel was given a new set of “family rules” to show her how to be light in the darkness, we as God’s new Israel have been given the same. Not a legalistic set of dos and don’ts—although it does certainly involve that—but a call to live the law of love exemplified first in the Lord’s relationship with Israel and then brought to full fruit in the ministry of Jesus. We’re called to manifest faith and to manifest hope and, most of all, to manifest love to a world with no faith and no hope, to a world filled with fear and hate. We’re called to live out the manifesto, the charter given by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount: hungering and thirsting for righteousness, showing mercy, making peace. We’re called to show the world that Jesus has given us a new way of living. In fact, it’s not a new way. It’s the old way that was lost when we fell into rebellion and sin, but now it’s back and it’s possible because this time it’s not just a set of rules carved on stone; it’s a new being and a new life imparted to our hearts by the very Spirit of God living in us and giving us his new life.
Brothers and Sisters, there’s an awful tendency to forget all of this when we turn Pentecost into a private experience as often happens. Pentecost is about the people of God being equipped by the Spirit to live as his people, not just privately, but publicly—not for the sake of ourselves, but for the sake of the world. Pentecost is about the Spirit bearing fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, it’s about the people of God being changed and renewed in our hearts that we might proclaim that Jesus is Lord. And we do all this as heralds of his kingdom, proclaiming its good news. That’s the idea of “gospel” or “good news”. The New Testament brings together two meanings in that word meaning “good news”. For the Jews “good news” brought to mind the language of Isaiah. “Good news” meant a messenger coming to a people languishing in exile; a messenger sent to tell them that their enemies had been defeated and that the Lord had returned to Zion. To Greeks and Romans, “good news” brought to mind an imperial herald, sent to the far reaches of the empire with the message that a new Caesar had ascended to the throne. In Jesus both of those meanings are brought together. In Jesus we have a new and eternal King; in Jesus the Lord has returned to Zion to dwell in the midst of his people. The power of Pentecost is the power and life of the Spirit given to us to proclaim his kingdom and to live it before the eyes of the world. “On earth as it is in heaven.”
Let us pray: O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Song of Moses and of the Lamb Revelation 15 by William Klock
There is a long history of songs sung by the people of God in praise of his faithful deliverance. His people experienced the problems of life, they knew that this is not how things are meant to be, they knew also the promises of God to set things to right, and that sang out his praises. Sometimes it was in response to his mighty and saving deeds. Other times it was in faithful anticipation of what they knew he would do, because of his past history of faithfulness. These songs often begin with the big picture of the Lord’s deliverance of Israel, then they narrow their focus. If the Lord has such love and shows such care for Israel, he will also show his love and will care for me. Hannah, for example, sings of the greatness of the Lord, she alludes to his past faithfulness to his people, and then praises him for meeting her own need, for giving her a son, before singing again of the Lord’s judgement, which extends to the ends of the earth. Or Mary’s Magnificat, in which she too sings of the Lord’s faithfulness, this time beginning with herself—“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.”—and then expands as she sees what he has done for her as part of his faithfulness to Israel: “He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel; as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed, for ever.” The Bible is full of these songs that praise the Lord. They praise him for his faithfulness, but they see that faithfulness manifest in his judgement—in his vindication of the righteous and his punishment of the wicked.
These songs give us a sense of the plight of God’s people and of what justice looked like for them. Poor Hannah not only bore the shame of barrenness, but also the daily contempt of her husband’s other wife. Mary’s song gives us a general sense of the difficult state in which Israel found herself: The humble and meek under the boot of the prideful and strong. The rich full and satisfied, while the poor hungered. Both songs echo the words of many of the psalms. Think of the final words of Psalm 96 we sing each day in Morning Prayer: “For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth; and with righteousness to judge the world, and the peoples with his truth.”
Think of the daily injustices that people like Hannah and Mary and the people of their villages faced. This man’s property marker was moved by his neighbour. Another man’s sheep was stolen in the night. An old woman was taken advantage of by a shady workman. One of the merchants in the market had two set of weights and was ripping off people who didn’t know better. These were all things the provincial judge would set to rights when he made his rounds and held court in the village.
But then there were the things the judge would not fix, because he was part of the system that itself was the problem: The tax collector who took and took and took, far above what was actually owed. The Roman soldier who raped a local girl. The rich man who manipulated the poor to put them in debt, then took their land in payment knowing that the jubilee would never be observed or enforced, so he’d never have to give the land back. The Romans and their rich and powerful friends just took and took and took, all while mocking the God of Israel. It wasn’t right. The world wasn’t supposed to be this way.
But it wasn’t just in Israel. John has given us a good view of the plight of the people of God, in these little churches, trying to get by and be faithful to Jesus in the midst of the wider world of the Greeks and Romans. Even far away from Jerusalem, on the west coast of Turkey, they found themselves at the mercy of local Jews who rejected Jesus. As Jesus warned in our Gospel today, “They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God” (John 16:2). First it happened in Jerusalem, but even in the Greek cities, Christians were facing tribulation. If they were lucky it was just being kicked out of a trade guild for refusing to worship false gods. At worst they were dragged off to the arena to be eaten by lions. Again, it wasn’t right. The world wasn’t supposed to be this way.
But the Lord is God and justice will be done. Someday Jesus will set everything to rights and wipe away every tear. We know it, because he was raised from the dead and set the wheels of re-creation in motion. We’ve tasted this new world ourselves in the pouring out of God’s Spirit on us. It’s begun, the hardest part has been accomplished, so we know that God will finish what he’s begun—and we live in hope and faith because of that. Last Sunday, in Chapter 14, we saw those First Century Christians, the ones who had been through that time of great tribulation, standing before the heavenly throne singing a song that only they could sing. They were the blameless ones, the firstfruits of the redeemed, who had refused to compromise with the beast. They had remained faithful to Jesus, because they, too, knew that what Jesus had started he will surely finish, they had tasted it, and they wanted to be part of it. Three angels announced their vindication and the judgement to fall on Babylon, on Rome. This morning we’re looking at Chapter 15, where this scene continues. In verse 1 John writes:
Then I saw another sign in heaven, great and amazing, seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is finished.
In Chapter 14 the announcement was made. One angel proclaimed the message: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made the nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality.” Another announced that anyone who had drunk of that wine “also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger.” The wickedness of the nations has been put into the Lord’s winepress and the angels have trod it. Now the wine of wrath is prepared: seven plagues. Seven seals and seven trumpets have announced the wrath of the Lord so far. Now there are seven plagues. John writes that this is the culmination of God’s wrath. That doesn’t mean God won’t ever act again to bring judgement and justice. Revelation shows us the early church vindicated over against unbelieving Israel and the pagan Greco-Roman empire. That’s the context here. And the plagues call back to the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt—the prototype for his deliverance and salvation. That gives us a sense of what’s going on and we’ll come back to it in a few verses. First, there’s more imagery borrowed from the exodus. Look at verse 2:
And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mingled with fire—and also those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands.
The martyrs, the faithful people of Jesus who had faced the great tribulation and stood firm, now appear again. In Chapter 14 John saw them before the throne singing. Here they are again. These are those whom the world despised. The gears of wicked Jerusalem and corrupt Rome had ground them up and spit them out and their enemies had declared, “Good riddance!” Just like the wicked people who had crucified Jesus and thought they’d won, these people thought they’d done away with these weirdos, these deviants who refused to worship the beast. But anyone who was paying attention that first Easter morning knows that’s not how it ends for the God of Israel, for his Messiah, or for his people. Now they stand before the Lamb and, writes John, beside “a sea of glass mingled with fire”. What does that mean?
I think there’s a two-fold explanation to this imagery. As these saints stand there, they sing and in verse 3 John says they sing the song of Moses. Remember Moses and the Israelites praising the Lord after he led them through the Red Sea and drowned the chariots of Pharaoh? Something similar is happening here. Like Israel in the Exodus, these saints have been delivered by the Lord. He's led them through their own Red Sea waters and now they stand on the far side, and even though they’ve died, they have experienced the deliverance of the Lord—like Israel did in the Exodus, but in an even more spectacular way. This is the exodus for which the old Exodus was merely a type and shadow. This is the exodus towards which all of redemptive history had been moving. They stood firm. These men and women have conquered the beast. The Lord has delivered them. And now they stand by sea and sing his praises.
But, too, the word for “sea” is the same one used in the Greek Old Testament for the laver, the basin in the tabernacle and later the temple, where the priests would purify themselves. In the tabernacle it was fairly small, but in Solomon’s temple it was a massive basin of water that sat on the back of four great bulls. That sea in the temple was symbolic of the Red Sea, through which the Lord had purified his people and purchased them for his own. And something similar has happened here with these saints who have passed through this great tribulation. Here they have been purified and made God’s people. I think, too, that there’s some sacramental imagery going on. Repeatedly in Revelation, the Lord has paused before acting out his judgements, paused so that he can mark out his people. A Passover of sorts, as when the Israelites marked their homes with the blood of the lamb so that the Lord’s judgment would pass over them. Repeatedly, too, John uses the imagery of the beast’s mark—an anti-sacrament, which marks out the wicked as belonging to the beast. So here, the saints are marked by their baptism as belonging to the Lord and judgement passes over them. They have passed through a baptism of fire, and just as Pharaoh’s army was destroyed by the same sea through which Israel was delivered, the fire through which the saints have been delivered is about to be poured out on Rome in judgement.
Look now at verses 3 and 4:
And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying,
“Great and amazing are your deeds,
O Lord God the Almighty!
Just and true are your ways,
O King of the nations!
Who will not fear, O Lord,
and glorify your name?
For you alone are holy.
All nations will come
and worship you,
for your righteous acts have been revealed.”
The saints here don’t literally sing the same song that Moses sang, but they sing something that gets at the same themes as the song of Moses and the Israelites in Exodus 15. You all know the song of Moses—or at least parts of it. “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider he has thrown in to the sea” (Exodus 15:1). The first half of that song is all about God’s defeat of the Egyptians. That’s the part we sing in Sunday school. It’s the—for lack of a better term—the “theological” part that follows that we don’t know as well, which is ironic, because that’s what explains the whole thing.
The second half of Moses’ song highlights two important things. The first is that the Lord does these things because he is holy and just. “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” sings Moses. The Lord cannot and will not allow injustice to continue forever and to go unjudged. Second, the Lord does these things and his people proclaim them so that the nations will take note. So that the nations will fear the Lord, and come to him in repentance and faith. Moses sings, “The peoples have heard; they tremble; pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia. Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed; trembling seizes the leaders of Moab; all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away. Terror and dread fall upon them, because of the greatness of your arm.”
Brothers and Sisters, the Lord’s purpose in calling Abraham out of the pagan nations and then, through him, creating a people for himself, was that through that people, he would make himself known to the world. In everything he did with and for his people, whether it was blessing or judgement, deliverance or discipline, the Lord’s goal was to draw the nations to himself. And the song of the saints here in Revelation 15 is full of these same themes. “Great and amazing are your deeds,” they sing. “Just and true are your ways, O King of the nations.” “All nations will come and worship you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.” That’s always been the Lord’s purpose—when he acts and for his people. He desires to make himself known. And the purpose of his people, whether the old Israel or the new, has always been to witness his mighty deeds. It’s interesting that it was on the other side of the Red Sea, at Mount Sinai, that the Lord gave his people instructions for building the tabernacle, the place where they would witness or meet with him. Now, with that in mind, look at verses 5-8.
After this I looked, and the sanctuary of the tent of witness in heaven was opened, and out of the sanctuary came the seven angels with the seven plagues, clothed in pure, bright linen, with golden sashes around their chests. And one of the four living creatures gave to the seven angels seven golden bowls full of the wrath of God who lives forever and ever, and the sanctuary was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power, and no one could enter the sanctuary until the seven plagues of the seven angels were finished.
The heavenly tabernacle which the earthy tabernacle and temple were but a shadow now opens. Seven angels emerge and they carry with them seven golden bowls containing seven plagues. These bowls are the heavenly counterpart of the bowls used in the earthly tabernacle to present and pour out drink offerings. As John wrote in the last chapter, the wicked were to “drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger”. In the next chapter the angels sing, “For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink. It is what they deserve!” (16:6).
In the daily service of the tabernacle, just as here in John’s vision, the trumpets are blown and then the bowls containing the drink offering were poured out. It was the last ritual act that completed the service of the altar. And, again, I think John has the imagery of the sacraments in mind. The sea, an image of the Red Sea, before which the saints stand recalls the deliverance of Israel and now their baptism into Jesus and the Spirit, into the life of God. But it also recalls the reversal of those saving waters to drown the army of Pharaoh. Now I think we also see the Lord’s Supper in the bowl or chalice that carries the drink offering—the blood of Jesus given for the redemption of the world, but which, when poured out, also bears the wrath of God for the wicked who have unjustly spilled the blood of both the saints and of Jesus.
And then John sees this awesome image of the glory of the Lord as the heavenly tabernacle fills with smoke. It was this awesome cloud of glory that consumed the sacrifices. It was this awesome cloud of glory that led the Israelites in the wilderness. It was this awesome cloud of glory that descended to fill the tabernacle and later the temple. And it was the sign of the Lord’s presence with is people—a source of comfort and of hope—but in its awesome terribleness it was also a reminder of his absolute holiness—a holiness to make sinners tremble before it. No one could bear the weight of that holiness when it was present. So, once again, the Lord is here, he is present, for his people in the midst of their tribulation, but he is also present to pour out his wrath and judgement on sin. Brothers and Sisters, if we sinners, broken by the fall, can so easily look at the world and know that things are not the way they should be, how much more is the one who created all things and grieves its corruption aware of the problem? He who loves his creation and loves his people, he who gave his only Son for our sake, he who is supremely righteous, will surely see that justice is done and that all is set to rights.
For those saints living in the First Century, who knew first-hand the persecution of both Jerusalem and Rome, many who died rather than renounce the Lord Jesus, vindication and justice were coming. The heavenly tabernacle was opened. And just as the Lord’s righteousness was once poured out on Egypt, it was once again about to be poured out on the nations. As they sang: His righteous acts were about to be revealed” with the result that “all the nations would come and worship him”. And, once again as we’ve seen before, the church has an integral role to play in all of this. Christians do not simply sit by—me, my Bible, and Jesus—while God does his mighty deeds. As Israel before, the Church is part of those mighty deeds. We experience the wickedness of the world—from the neighbour who robs us in the dark of night, the shady workman who rips us off, the acquaintances who mock our faith, the central bank with its unjust weights and measures that debases our currency, to the government that rules the proclamation of the gospel to be “hate speech”. God’s people are in the thick of the world’s injustices. We are meant to know by our own mournful experiences that this is not how the world was meant to be. And so, like those saints before the throne, we can declare to the nations the mighty acts of God—the acts that have brought both judgement and deliverance, both wrath and hope—from the Red Sea to the Cross and the empty tomb to the fall of wicked Jerusalem and the conversion of an empire and the nations. Brothers and Sisters, we know the fallenness of the world and we know ourselves the Lord’s saving hand. We are his people and he has filled us with his Spirit. We are now the tabernacle in which he dwells. May the smoke of his holy presence now arise from us as we proclaim the good news of his justice and mercy, his wrath and his grace, to this world so desperately in need of the hope of the good news. We do so in sure and certain faith, knowing that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Follow the Lamb Revelation 14 by William Klock
A few weeks ago we observed what’s often called “Good Shepherd Sunday”, the Second Sunday after Easter. We read the Gospel from John 10. That’s where Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me” (John 10:14). Later he says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:27-28). The good shepherd knows his sheep, but because he knows us, we grow to know him in return. “My sheep hear my voice,” he says. It’s the image of a shepherd, not driving his sheep from behind, not corralling them with sheep dogs, but going ahead, leading the way. And because the sheep know him, they follow. They know they are secure. Throughout the Gospels that is Jesus’ call: “Follow me.” To the fisherman tending their nets, he calls out, “Follow me.” To Matthew, sitting in the customs house counting his money, he calls out, “Follow me.” When his friends ask him stupid questions or complain that they don’t know what the future holds, Jesus sets them back on track and says to them, “Follow me.” That’s what it’s all about: following Jesus. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me.”
In contrast, the last couple of chapters in Revelation have shown us the dragon and his beasts. The first beast boasts blasphemously, claiming to be divine. His pet, the second beast, compels the people of the nations to worship him. In contrast to the Israelites, who were to bind God’s law to their heads and hands—to meditate on it and to live by it—the nations are similarly marked by the beast with a parody of the Lord’s exhortation. They devote themselves to the beast, to his values, and to his system. And those not devoted to the beast and his worship become outcasts and are persecuted. In the midst of all this, John is exhorted: “Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.” This is the valley of the shadow of death, but keep following the good shepherd. And now as we begin Chapter 15, we see Jesus leading those who endured in faith. Look at 14:1-5.
Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven like the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, and they were singing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins. It is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are blameless.
Picture the good shepherd as he makes his way up to the mountain top, to the sheepfold, and behind him follow his sheep—a multitude of them. It may have seemed as though the entire world was bowing before the beast, capitulating to the empire, offering their pinch of incense to Caesar. As we read in 13:4, those who saw the power and authority of the beast cried out, “Who is like the beast and who can fight against it?” To oppose the beast was hopeless. And yet it wasn’t. And this multitude following Jesus, this 144,000, this number symbolic of completeness, they prove otherwise. Rather than bearing the mark of the beast, these are marked on their foreheads with the name of the Father and of the Lamb. These are those who had been baptised into Jesus.
The heavenly orchestra accompanies them as they burst into a new song in the presence of the Lord. And it’s a song that they and they alone can sing. Why? Because this is a unique people. Who are they? In addition to being marked out by God, John says that these “have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins”. This is symbolic language. It doesn’t mean that they were all men. It doesn’t mean that they were literally all virgins. It's a symbolic picture of faithfulness. In Old Testament imagery, Israel was depicted as a pure virgin and, of course, the Lord was the groom. This was the ideal that Israel repeatedly failed to keep. Over and over she prostituted herself to foreign gods. And so this group of people stands in contrast both to unbelieving Israel, but more immediately, they stand in contrast to the nations from which John says they have been redeemed. The nations had become drunk on the wine of Babylon—on the wickedness of Rome and her false gods. In contrast, these have kept themselves pure. “It is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes,” John writes. And they followed even to death. Jesus called to them, “Follow me,” and they followed him. They followed him through rejection, through persecution, through tribulation, even through death, because Jesus had already died for them and they had no reason to fear and every reason to be faithful. Tribulation. Perseverance. Kingdom. That’s what Revelation is about and we see the kingdom bit here. John draws often on Psalm 2. These saints stand on Mt. Zion with Jesus. The Psalmist writes, “I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill” (2:6). This is the king who will “break the nations with a rod of iron and dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel” (2:9). This is the same Psalm that Jesus used when he gave John the letter to the Christians in Thyatira:
The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron, as when earthen pots are broken in pieces, even as I myself have received authority from my Father. (2:26-27)
As messed up as some of those churches were, John also sees them here having stood firmly for Jesus. They have “conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name,” he writes in the next chapter. They have followed Jesus in faithfulness and they now share in his reward. They have been “redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb”. If you’ve been reading ahead, these are that special group who make up the first resurrection of the dead that we read about in Chapter 20. The beast built his world on a lie, just as the devil did in the beginning. These are they who refused the lie for the truth of God. These are they who took the mark of the Lamb rather than the mark of the beast, even though it meant they would stand out, ripe for persecution. Brothers and Sisters, that’s what it means to follow Jesus.
Now that the saints have been marked by God, judgement on the wicked is finally unleashed. From here to the end of Chapter 18, John describes the Lord’s judgment as it was to fall on the Greco-Roman world. Look at verses 6-13:
Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.”
Another angel, a second, followed, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality.”
And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.”
Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus.
And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!”
John draws on the prophecy of Isaiah now. The middle part of Isaiah was written to Israel in exile, to Israel on the verge of losing hope. The Babylonians had defeated Israel, they’d destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, and they’d taken all but the poor back to Babylon and into exile. “Where is our God?” the people asked. By all accounts the Lord appears to have been defeated by the gods of the Babylonians—and that made him a god not worth following, not worth worshipping. And so Isaiah prophesied. He prophesied about the covenant faithfulness of the Lord. He reminded Israel that the Lord is the one who created heaven and earth and that he had not and will never be defeated by the false gods of the nations. He had no more been defeated by the gods of Babylon than he had been defeated by the gods of Egypt a thousand years before. When the time was right, the Lord would, as he had in the past, manifest his power and authority. He would deliver his people, renew his covenant with them, and set all to rights. And the Lord, Isaiah prophesied, will do all of this through his servant—the servant whom we meet in the New Testament as Jesus. Babylon will fall—and Isaiah has no shortages of oracles about Babylon falling. And this is where we read that well-known passage about the beautiful feet of him who brings good news. That’s the imagery and language John is drawing on here when he writes about this angel, this herald carrying an “eternal gospel”—good news.
Brothers and Sisters, what is the gospel? We too often have a narrow and truncated view of the gospel. We often make it very self-centred: God loves me, God forgives me, God saves me. All of that is true, but the gospel is a lot bigger than that, too. Think of St. Paul writing in Romans. There the gospel is about Jesus’ the king descended from David and recognized as the son of God in his resurrection. It’s about the fact that he is lord of all and that he will not only set us personally right, but that he will set all of creation to rights. The gospel is big—far bigger than we often give it credit. And so, drawing on Isaiah, especially Isaiah 52, John has three things in mind when we writes about the preaching of this gospel.
First, the Lord reigns. However things may look, the God of Israel is in control—over the gods of Babylon, over Israel’s defeat and exile, and over everything—which means it will be okay (52:7, 9). Second, Isaiah reminds the people that the Lord will return. The temple was destroyed, the Lord’s presence was no longer there, but he will return and everyone will see and know it (52:8). And, third, the Lord has rolled up his sleeves—he’s “bared his arms”—to deliver his people and all the world will see it (52:10). And yet, when Babylon eventually did fall and Israel returned to the land and rebuilt the temple, the Lord remained conspicuously absent. The glory cloud never returned to the temple. Not until Jesus did the Lord return to fulfil these promises once and for all.
John also draws on lengthy passages of judgement from Jeremiah. Jeremiah, too, experienced the defeat of Israel by Babylon, the destruction of the city, and the aftermath of exile. The last seven chapters of his prophecy are announcements of judgement on Egypt, Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Syria, and finally Babylon. These were the nations that fought and oppressed God’s people and Jeremiah announced the judgement that was to come on them. And that sets up the judgement John writes about. The gospel is good news on two fronts. It’s good news that the Lord is setting this fallen world to rights and it’s good news that this also means the enemies of God and his people will finally be judged and dealt with—their corrupting influence removed and the saints they oppressed vindicated. The angels announce, Babylon who forced her immorality on the nations and made them drunk, has fallen, and in verses 9-11, the Lord’s judgement will be both just and thorough. It's not just the beast; it’s not just Babylon. Those who have drunk her wine will drink the full cup of the Lord’s wrath. John borrows this image from Isaiah 34, where the destruction of Edom is compared to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Again, the Lord’s judgement on the wicked will be just, it will be thorough, and it will be complete. And, note, John describes this judgement and destruction as happening in the presence of the Lamb. First, Jesus does not turn away and leave others to carry out justice. Second, it’s also a reminder to us that justice on the wicked—however much it may grieve him—is also pleasing to the Lord. The Lord is just and bringing justice to Creation reveals his glory.
But here’s the key: this announcement of judgement once again becomes a call for the endurance of the saints, just as we saw in the last chapter. Hold fast to Jesus! “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,” John is told to write. Here they are, standing with the Lamb on Mt. Zion having endure and overcome. For the saints, death it not the end. The wicked fear death. It is their final wage. But for those who belong to Jesus, death has been defeated and is no more to be feared. Now verses 14-20:
Then I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and seated on the cloud one like a son of man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand. And another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to him who sat on the cloud, “Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.” So he who sat on the cloud swung his sickle across the earth, and the earth was reaped.
Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over the fire, and he called with a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, “Put in your sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe.” So the angel swung his sickle across the earth and gathered the grape harvest of the earth and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the winepress, as high as a horse’s bridle, for 1,600 stadia.
The vision shifts from the lamb and his people on Mount Zion to one like a son of man seated on a cloud. This is an image from Daniel 7 of the coming Messiah and his crowning as God’s king. But the imagery of the harvest and the winepress is from Joel 3:
Let the nations stir themselves up
and come up to the Valley of Jehoshaphat;
for there I will sit to judge
all the surrounding nations.
Put in the sickle,
for the harvest is ripe.
Go in, tread,
for the winepress is full.
The vats overflow,
for their evil is great. (Joel 3:12-13)
In his resurrection and ascension the Messiah has taken his throne, he has judged Jerusalem, now he judges the nations. The image of the wine and winepress highlights the justice of the Lord’s judgement. In verse 10 John wrote that the worshipers of the beast would drink the wine of God’s wrath and now we see that it is their very wickedness that angels tread in the Lord’s winepress. The wickedness of the nations is poured back on them. The measure they have given is pressed down, shaken together, and running over is measured back to them. They reap what they have sown and once again God is glorified because his faithfulness is revealed.
And that’s the message we need to hear. I want to be clear that John was writing to a specific people in a specific time and specific place about specific events that were about to take place. All of it, at least so far, is in our past. It happened long ago. And yet what we see in Revelation about these themes of tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom reverberate down through the ages to us. John reminds us, as he writes in the prologue to his Gospel, that the light has come into the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. Just the opposite, in fact. You and I bear that light today. The darkness still hates the light, but still, the darkness has not and will not overcome it. God will vindicate his people. He always has and he always will, and in that we find out faith and our hope. We look to the cross and know that we are forgiven, we look to the empty tomb and see that death has been defeated, and then we look up and see Jesus ascending to his throne and know that he reigns and always will. That’s the good news and the world needs to hear it. So we go out and we proclaim Jesus. We proclaim the cross. We proclaim the empty tomb. We proclaim his ascension. We proclaim the mighty and saving deeds of God to the world. And the light drives the darkness away. Sometime fast. Sometimes slow. But the light drives the darkness away. And yet we know it’s not always easy to be that light. The darkness will not overcome it, but that doesn’t stop it from trying. And so we need John’s words of encouragement and exhortation in our own age. And again that points us to Jesus. The light shined its brightest when the darkness thought it had snuffed it out. And sometimes so too with us. Tribulation, opposition, persecution, and even martyrdom are part of the Lord’s plan to bring salvation to the world. There could be no empty tomb without the cross. There could be no ascension if Jesus had not first humbled himself. And so with us and with our life, mission, and ministry, Brothers and Sisters, as he entrust ourselves to Jesus and give ourselves for the sake of the gospel. That 144,000 stands today in the heavenly throne room, praising the Lamb, and witness to us that it is worth following Jesus. He truly is the good shepherd. He is faithful to his promises and he cares for his sheep. We can trust him. For Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will surely come again.
Let’s pray: Gracious Father, by the death and resurrection of your Son, you have made us an Easter people. Keep his cross and empty tomb and throne ever before us that we might follow in faithful obedience wherever he leads, and fulfil the good purpose you have for us, through him who reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
A Call for Endurance Revelation 12-13 by William Klock
John’s Revelation has prompted innumerable speculations over the last two millennia, ranging from the reasonable to the bizarre to the downright goofy. The most fruitful root of such speculations is, without a doubt, this character John calls the “beast”. Who is he? The Protestant Reformers pretty universally identified him with the Papacy for understandable reasons. Luther even wrote to Leo X and accused him directly of being the antichrist. Napoleon was accused of being the beast, mostly because he antagonized the Church—and if you finessed his name and title the right way it adds up to 666. Ditto for Hitler. Then there’s JFK and the 666 votes he took in the electoral college—and his death from a head wound. I remember as a kid people speculating about Henry Kissinger, whose name adds up to 111, which is 666 divided by six. But Kissinger quickly gave way to Mikhail Gorbachev. I never heard anyone work up a 666 scheme, but the birthmark on his forehead was surely the “mark of the beast”, or so people said. Never mind that a lot of the same people in those days were telling us that the mark of the beast was somehow also credit cards or barcodes. Then there was Ronald Wilson Reagan—each of his names contains six letters. And Barack Obama. The day after he was elected, the Illinois Pick Three lottery numbers in his home state were 666. And, of course, Saddam Hussein, who some folks claimed was setting out to rebuild ancient Babylon. More recently there have been schemes to connect Bill Gates with the beast and COVID vaccines as his “mark”. Even Barney has fallen victim to these schemes. Not only was he corrupting our children, but “CVTE PVRPLE DINOSAVR”—yes indeed, it adds up to 666.
All these attempts to identify John’s beast really highlight the folly of unhitching the biblical text from its context. No one seems to take seriously Jesus’ promise that these things would take place in the lifetime of his disciples. And no one seems to consider that John was writing to a cluster of churches in Asia Minor in a specific time and setting in order to encourage them to stand firm in faith as all hell was about to break loose around them. How would any of these identifications have made sense to the people of those churches? And how would knowing an obscure connection between the devil and Leo X or Henry Kissinger be any kind of exhortation to them? Context is everything and what John wrote to them had to make sense to them in their situation. So far, John’s vision has revealed the climax of the story of God and Israel, culminating in judgement on the old, faithless Israel and the vindication of the new. These are the events that Jesus warned of in his ministry. But that’s not the end of things. The gospel was not for Israel alone. Israel’s ministry had always been to the nations; they simply never fulfilled it. Last week we saw the witness of the Jewish Church, fulfilling what Elijah and Moses had never been able to do: to cause the nations not only to notice the God of Israel, but also to stir faith in them. The judgement of the old Israel and the vindication of the new now broadens the horizon and, as I said last week, John’s vision now begins, itself, to broaden. From Jerusalem, it now turns to the nations.
With Chapter 12 John’s attention is turned the sky. Imagine being out on a dark night and looking up into the depths of the sky and seeing the constellations. And as you look they come to life and you see a story unfold in the stars. That’s, I think, the sense of what John sees now. Look at 12:1-6.
And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days.
John sees a woman, a dragon, and a child. The woman is in the pains of childbirth and the dragon poises itself to devour the newborn child. The child is where we should begin. This is the Messiah. John uses the language of Psalm 2. That’s the song where Israel sang about the Lord’s anointed King who would rule the nations with a rod of iron. It’s the psalm where the Lord says of this Messiah, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you” (2:7). With that in mind we shouldn’t take the birth of this child as his literal birth. In other words, this isn’t Mary giving birth to the Baby Jesus. The signs John sees in the sky point to the resurrection of Jesus. Paul writes in Romans 1:4 that Jesus was “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.”
And while John draws on the symbolism of Daniel to describe the dragon with his ten horns and seven heads, he tells us outright in verse 9 that this is the devil. The dragon is poised to devour the child, but the child—the Messiah—is rescued by God himself. At the cross the devil was sure of his victory, but at the empty tomb and in the ascension, his prize was snatched from him. With Jesus out of his grasp, he goes after the woman instead. Who is she? This is where it’s crucial to remember to whom John is writing and why. Remember that Revelation is about tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom. It’s meant to encourage the Church to stand firm even as the dragon pursues. God has rescued and vindicated his Messiah and he will do the same for his Church. For three and a half years the enemy will rage against Jerusalem as we’ve already seen, but God will prepare a place for his own. Using the language of the Exodus John describes the woman being cared for in the wilderness. But why does the dragon go after the woman? John goes on in verses 7-12:
Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. Therefore, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”
John’s vision sort of reveals what’s going on behind the scenes—or in heaven or in the spiritual realm—at the cross. As much as Michael is traditionally seen as an archangel, I think there’s good reason to equate him with Jesus himself and with the “angel of the Lord” in the Old Testament. His description in Daniel is similar to the description of Jesus in Revelation 1. And in Daniel, the angels are unable to overcome the demons until Michael comes to their aid. Whatever the case, the key to this victory is the blood of the lamb, and the devil himself is thrown down by the saints. This is interesting and encouraging. As much as it is Jesus who defeats the devil by his blood, John says that the saints win their own victory over the devil by his blood and by their testimony. Jesus said something very similar on the return of his disciples early in his ministry. He sent them out to proclaim the kingdom and they came back excited and saying, “Even the demons submit to us!” And Jesus said to them, “I saw satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority…over all the power of the enemy. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:18-20). Notice that it’s by the victory of the saints that “the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come” and that the accuser has been thrown down. This is a victory that, again, was won by Jesus, but the Church, especially in her persecution and witness, has a share in the victory of Jesus. And that’s because it’s the proclamation and witness of Jesus’ people that carries his authority to the nations. To put it in terms of Daniel’s prophecy, this is the coming of the son of man to receive authority and to bring judgement on the nations.
But the defeat of the devil in “heaven” means tribulation for his enemies on earth. This is the warning that John has been giving to the churches, but it also comes with a word of encouragement. Look at 12:13-17.
And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time. The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, to sweep her away with a flood. But the earth came to the help of the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had poured from his mouth. Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And he stood on the sand of the sea.
The imagery here and in the first part of the chapter identifies the woman with Israel. Amongst other things, the twelve stars, the sun, and the moon at her feet is the language of Joseph’s vision of his family. And, of course, it’s Israel that metaphorically gives birth to Jesus. He is the culmination of her story. But in Revelation, Israel stands judged because of her unfaithfulness. So the woman’s identity is narrower than just all of Israel. She represents the faithful of Israel, those who have kept covenant with the Lord and, more specifically now, the Jewish Church. They have seen the Lord’s Messiah and they’ve embraced him in faith. And failing to defeat Jesus, the dragon now goes after this “woman”.
John uses the language of the Exodus here. In Exodus 19:4 the Lord says to Israel, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” Here, again, he rescues his people on eagles’ wings. The serpent pours out water—calling back to the Red Sea—but the Lord causes the earth to swallow it. And as we read in verse 6, like Israel, the Lord feeds the woman in the wilderness. For three and a half years the dragon wars against her and for three and a half years the Lord protects and cares for her. And this, more or less, reflects what happened in those days. The Romans warred against Jerusalem for three and a half years, the city was destroyed, thousands up on thousands were killed, but the Christians of Jerusalem heeded the warnings of Jesus, fled eastward into the wilderness, and were spared. So the dragon has been foiled twice and now the dragon goes off to make war on the rest of the woman’s children, on those “who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus”—on the fledgling gentile churches of the empire. This is where John’s vision reaches out to encompass those little churches scattered across Asia Minor.
Now, Chapter 13. Look at verses 1-4.
And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. And the beast that I saw was like a leopard; its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority. One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth marveled as they followed the beast. And they worshiped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”
This beast rises from the sea, an image that tells us we’re not talking about Israel anymore. In fact, from this point on John changes the source of most of his Old Testament imagery. Up to this point he’s been drawing on images that speaks of judgement on Israel. Now he starts drawing on imagery that speaks of judgement on the pagan nations. This beast with its seven heads and ten horns is related to the dragon. It’s part leopard, part bear, and part lion—three of Daniel’s beasts representing the pagan empires that oppressed Israel, and that identifies it as yet another pagan empire, in this case Rome. This is made explicit later, in Chapter 17, where the angel tells John that the seven heads are the “seven mountains on which the woman is seated” (17:9), which can’t be mistaken for anything but Rome.
To this beast the dragon gives his authority to rule the nations. And, yet, remember that even the dragon operates within the sovereignty of God. And as the dragon reaches for divinity, the beast parodies Jesus. Jesus died and rose again. The beast—or one of its heads—is mortally wounded (verse 14 says by a sword, for what that’s worth), but the beast survives and the world marvels. The nations worship the beast and, in doing so, unwittingly worship the dragon who stands behind it. They marvel at his power and authority declaring, “Who is like the beast? Who can fight against it?” And, of course, that’s just what we see in the historical record with regard to Rome. Rome conquered the known world, its emperors grasped at divinity, calling themselves sons of God, and even when the emperors fell, the empire itself recovered. The mortal wound may be a reference to the assassination of Julius Caesar, the first Emperor, or to the suicide of Nero, which would take place not long after John wrote. Whichever it refers to, many expected the empire to fall into chaos, but both times it recovered and became stronger.
Think of those Caesars who demanded the worship of the people, making blasphemous claims at godhood, as we read verses 5-10:
And the beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and it was allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months. It opened its mouth to utter blasphemies against God, blaspheming his name and his dwelling, that is, those who dwell in heaven. Also it was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them. And authority was given it over every tribe and people and language and nation, and all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain. If anyone has an ear, let him hear:
If anyone is to be taken captive,
to captivity he goes;
if anyone is to be slain with the sword,
with the sword must he be slain.
Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.
The Emperor Nero was the first emperor to actively persecute the Church, and at Rome his persecution lasted three and a half years. To this evil king the dragon gives authority over every nation—the very authority won by Jesus in his resurrection and ascension. This is the set-up: The dragon and the beast have stolen what rightly belongs to Jesus. They and their worshippers will be judged and thrown down and those who belong to Jesus—those whose names are in the book of life—will be vindicated. John quotes words of warning from Jeremiah 15:5-9, this time aimed at Jerusalem and apostate Israel: Jesus will set everything to rights. And so John says to the churches: “Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.” As Jesus said, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Even when it doesn’t look like it, Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has won.
But that’s not all. John then sees a second beast. Look at verses 11-18.
Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence, and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound was healed. It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in front of people, and by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived. And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain. Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.
This is an unholy parody of the Trinity. The dragon tries to claim the position of the Father, the first beast tries to take the place of the Son, and the second beast tries to take the place of the Holy Spirit. If the first beast represents the emperors of Rome and their false claims of divinity, the second beast represents the imperial cult and its priests. Through a network of temples—temples that were particularly popular in the cities of Asia Minor to which John wrote—the people were forced to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor and to worship him. Sometimes it was an obligatory and patriotic pinch of incense that everyone was required to offer to Caesar. Sometimes it was the expectation to set out a personal shrine to Caesar on the feast day that had his priests processing through the city. But every day it was dealing with the interweaving of this false religion with the social and economic life of the city. The law instructed the Hebrews to bind God’s law to their forehead and to their hands. Some did it literally and still do, but the point was that they would remain faithful to the Lord and his covenant by meditating on his law with their minds that it might work out practically in their actions. Earlier we saw that Jesus marks his people similarly in baptism with the Holy Spirit. In contrast the people who worship the beast have centred themselves on him. The “mark of the beast” isn’t a literal mark—as some have speculated, like a barcode, a computer chip, or a vaccine. It’s simply the parody of the law in Israel and the Spirit in the Church. John prompts those brothers and sisters in First Century Asia Minor to ask: Who is our God? Who do we worship? What will we do when push comes to shove and we’re forced to choose? Will we stand firm and give Jesus what we know he is due, or will be bow to pressure and give to the beast what belongs to Jesus?
Now, I don’t think there was any doubt in the minds of John’s hearers what any of this symbolism pointed to, but at the end of Chapter 13 John makes it clear in saying that the beast is a man and that this number is 666. What’s that about? Well, ancient peoples didn’t have separate numbering systems like we do. They had various ways of using the characters of their alphabets to represent numbers, which means that you could add up the numerical values of the letters in a name and come up with a number. In this case 666. John most likely wrote it this way in case the Romans got hold of his letter. They weren’t stupid and would know that he was point to someone’s name. His trick is that he wasn’t adding up the numbers of a Greek or Latin name, but of that name transliterated into Hebrew. Neron Kaisar in Hebrew letters works out to 666, if you add the values up. It doesn’t match up with Nero’s name in Greek or Latin, which any imperial censor would have assumed. The early church Fathers recognized this. And we even have one early variant textual tradition that changed the number to 616—the sum of Nero Caesar in Latin—a change made for the benefit of readers who didn’t know Hebrew. Now, that said, I don’t think John meant that the beast is Nero and Nero alone. The beast represents the emperors of Rome and Nero happened to be the current emperor at the time John wrote. It already would have been obvious that John was writing about Rome, but just in case there was any question, the 666 bit makes it clear.
But what do we do with this? Well, first, Friends, it means there’s no reason for Christians to be wringing their hands or getting worked up about accidentally receiving the mark of the beast—or, for that matter, accusing other Christians of having received it. We’re talking about events that happened almost two thousand years ago, but even then, there was no way any faithful Christians was going to be tricked into receiving the mark—into worshipping Caesar.
That said, John’s exhortation to stand firm in the face of opposition is still as relevant today as it was then. Because of the witness of the Church, the gospel conquered Rome and brought down Caesar and the dragon’s demonic parody of the Trinity. I don’t think we realise just how different the world is today because of the power of the gospel. The world has been radically transformed and even today’s post-Christian world that is often hostile to us continues to thrive on the capital of a world once transformed by the gospel. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t surrounded by opposition and hostility. We need to hear Revelation’s exhortation to stand firm in faith, Brothers and Sisters, and to remember that we do so not on our own strength, but as we stand on the victory that Jesus has won at the cross, remembering that we are an Easter people, following a resurrected Lord and living in expectant hope of our own resurrection and of the renewal of all things.
And we stand firm, not for our own sake, but because even though it is Jesus who has won the ultimate victory, John reminds us here that we have an essential part to play. Jesus doesn’t save us from sin and death to then sit out the war behind the line while he fights the battle alone. God has called and created a people for a reason: to carry the good news to the world. And in that, as Jesus’ people, we have a part in the victory of the gospel over sin and death. So stand firm. Fight the good fight. Go out in the power of the Spirit and with the word of God to proclaim the good news, for Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the many and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Kingdom of Our Lord Revelation 10-11 by William Klock
This morning we return to our study of the book of Revelation. You’ll remember—or I hope you do—that the book is a letter from God to the churches of Asia Minor, given through Jesus to John. It began with a vision of Jesus himself in all his glory and continued on to a series of seven letters to the churches. In those letters, Jesus praises the churches where they have been faithful, rebukes them where they have not, and exhorts them to stand firm in the face of coming tribulation. Revelation is about tribulation, about perseverance, and about kingdom. It’s a reminder that Jesus is Lord, that his kingdom has come, that he judges sin and that he will, with absolute certainty, vindicate his people.
The rest of the book is a vision meant to show those churches what was coming and so far what John has seen has been a fleshing out of the prophecies that Jesus told against Jerusalem and unbelieving Israel. These—at least so far—have been past events for us, but events about to or just beginning to unfold when John wrote about them to the churches. These, so far, are the things that Jesus warned would take place in the lifetime of those who were alive during his ministry. And in the vision these events began in the heavenly throne room with the delivery of a sealed scroll, given to Jesus. Its seven seals have been broken and, with the last seal a sequence of seven trumpet blasts has begun. With each, unbelieving Israel’s judgement and doom have been revealed. Just as there was an interlude before the seventh and final seal was broken, there’s now an interlude between the blowing of the sixth and seventh trumpets. Look at 10:1-4.
Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. He had a little scroll open in his hand. And he set his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land, and called out with a loud voice, like a lion roaring. When he called out, the seven thunders sounded. And when the seven thunders had sounded, I was about to write, but I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down.”
The description of the mighty angel is similar enough to the description of Jesus at the beginning of the book, that I think it’s safe to conclude that this is Jesus. He is clothed in symbols of glory here and he stands with one foot on land and one on sea—an image of his lordship over all of creation. And his voice roars out. Meredith Kline describes it vividly: “It is the noise of war, the trumpeting of signal horns and the din of battle. It is the thunder of the storm-chariot of the warrior-Lord, coming in judgements that convulse creation and confound the kings of the nations.”[1] And in response to his voice sevenfold thunder echoes back. This is the voice of Psalm 29, the voice that breaks cedars, shakes the wilderness, and strips everything before it bare. John stood in awe, both of the thundering voice and of what it said, but when he went to write it all down another voice from heaven stopped him. Something even more important was about to take place. The most important thing here is the scroll carried by the mighty angel—presumably the scroll that had been handed to Jesus, the seals of which he has broken. He now holds the opened scroll. Continuing at verse 5:
And the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven and swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that there would be no more delay, but that in the days of the trumpet call to be sounded by the seventh angel, the mystery of God would be fulfilled, just as he announced to his servants the prophets. (Revelation 10:5-7)
Jesus raises his hand and swears by his Father, he gives a pledge and the pledge is that there will be no further delay. The seventh trumpet is to be sounded and with it the “mystery of God would be fulfilled”. What mystery? The one “he announced to his servants the prophets”. And what’s that? Well, this is exactly how St. Paul describes God’s calling forth a new people for himself—a people neither Jewish nor gentilic, but both—one people, drawn from the nations, and unified in Jesus the Messiah. Paul uses this language particularly in Ephesians and Colossians. This is how Paul puts it in Colossians 3:3-6.
How the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.
The mystery, revealed to the prophets and made clear in the ministry of Jesus, that the Gentiles will be fellow heirs with the faithful of Israel, is about to be fulfilled. But what’s that got to do with the seventh trumpet? Well, so long as the temple stood in Jerusalem, the life and systems of the old covenant remained, the temptation to look for hope in the temple and in the land, the temptation to find one’s identity in torah—in circumcision, in diet, in sabbath—the temptation to require Gentiles to come to Jesus, to become part of the people of God, through torah, would remain. The Lord had to send a clear and unmistakable message to everyone that the old covenant was finished and a new one had been established. The seventh trumpet would signal that the days of Jerusalem and the temple were over. The Lord’s promise to Israel have been finally and once-and-for-all fulfilled in Jesus.
And remember the opened scroll held by the mighty angel, held by Jesus. Look at verses 8-11:
Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me again, saying, “Go, take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.” So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll. And he said to me, “Take and eat it; it will make your stomach bitter, but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey.” And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it. It was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter. And I was told, “You must again prophesy about many peoples and nations and languages and kings.”
John draws this imagery of the scroll from Daniel and Ezekiel. Daniel is told to seal his scroll, because the events it relates are not for his own day, but relate to what will “happen to your people in the latter days” (Daniel 10:14). This doesn’t mean John’s scroll is the same one. It could be. But the key point of the imagery is that the Lord is now fulfilling his promise given through the prophets. But what is that promise? That’s where the Ezekiel imagery comes in. Here's what Ezekiel writes:
And he said to me, “Son of man, eat whatever you find here. Eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me this scroll to eat. And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey. (Ezekiel 3:1-3)
Sound familiar? John, too, is told to eat the scroll. And like Ezekiel’s scroll, it is sweet to taste, but bitter, hard to stomach. Ezekiel writes a few verses later:
The Spirit lifted me up and took me away, and I went in bitterness in the heat of my spirit, the hand of the Lord being strong upon me. (Ezekiel 3:14)
This bitter-sweetness is the nature of the Lord’s judgement. Ezekiel was addressing the capture and destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 b.c. And now the Lord is about to bring about something very similar. Judgement will once again fall on faithless Israel. And it’s bitter-sweet. It is sweet in that the faithful will be vindicated. Those martyrs we saw earlier, the ones under the altar, will finally have an answer to their prayers. Those who persecuted them will be judged, they will finally get their comeuppance, and the righteous will rejoice. But the judgement and destruction of the wicked is bitter and the Lord takes no pleasure in it. To quote from Ezekiel again:
As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel? (Ezekiel 33:11)
And so, as Jesus had promised, the Lord gave Israel forty years to repent, to turn from their unbelief and to embrace his Messiah. He is merciful and slow to anger, but the Lord must deal with the stubborn rebellion of his people. If Creation is to be set to rights, the wicked who perpetuate its corruption must be removed. And so John not only sees the Lord’s judgement on Israel, but he tastes it, he experiences the full reality of both its sweetness and its bitterness, so that like Ezekiel, he can prophesy from the heart. This is the culmination of Israel’s story—the old Israel at any rate. John is told that this is about many people, nations, languages, and kings. This is how the nations will see the works of the Lord, how the nations will know his faithfulness, how the nations will come to the new Israel, hear the good news about Jesus the Messiah, believe, and become a part of it themselves.
But first, remember that this happens in an interlude between the sixth and seventh trumpets sounding. This is the second interlude. The first was between the opening of the sixth and seventh seals. In that first interlude the 144,000 were counted and sealed by the Lord—they were marked out that they might be spared from the coming judgement, much like the Hebrew homes marked with the blood of lamb and spared by the angel of death as judgement fell on Egypt. This second interlude serves a similar purpose. Look at 11:1-2.
Then I was given a measuring rod like a staff, and I was told, “Rise and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for it is given over to the nations, and they will trample the holy city for forty-two months.
Again, this is an echo of Ezekiel and Daniel. The periods of time that John writes about in the coming chapters are drawn from Daniel’s imagery: forty-two months, 1260 days, and three-and-a-half days. The forty-two months and 1260 days are the same period of time equaling three-and-a-half years. This was the duration of the war against Jerusalem that brought about the fall of the city and the destruction of the temple. Daniel wrote about the time of the “shattering of the power of the holy people” (12:7). The sanctuary would “be trampled underfoot”. In other words, judgement is coming on Jerusalem and the temple.
The imagery of measuring the temple is drawn from Ezekiel. In Ezekiel’s vision, he was given a measuring reed and given the task of measuring an idealised temple. For seven chapters we read in detail every measurement and at the end of Ezekiel’s task, the glory of the Lord fills the temple and he promises, “I will dwell in the midst of the people of Israel forever” (43:2-7). For Ezekiel—and for the people of his day—this meant that the Lord would restore the temple and the priesthood and that his presence would remain with his people. For John this imagery means that despite the coming crisis and disaster, despite the gentiles trampling the city and the temple for three-and-a-half years, despite the end of faithless and unbelieving Israel, the Lord has established a new temple and will remain with his people—with this new Israel. The more immediate promise, as with the sealing of the 144,000, is that the Lord will spare the faithful amidst the coming destruction. The long-term promise is that this people, the Church, is the new temple, this one not made with hands and with Jesus its cornerstone.
John goes on in 11:3:
And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.”
Scripture requires two witnesses before anyone is condemned. Here they are and they will witness against the city, its temple, and its people for the full three-and-a-half years. Who are they? John goes on in verse 4:
These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. And if anyone would harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes. If anyone would harm them, this is how he is doomed to be killed. They have the power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire. And when they have finished their testimony, the beast that rises from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them, and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified. For three and a half days some from the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb, and those who dwell on the earth will rejoice over them and make merry and exchange presents, because these two prophets had been a torment to those who dwell on the earth. But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood up on their feet, and great fear fell on those who saw them. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here!” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, and their enemies watched them. And at that hour there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city fell. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the rest were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven.
So who, again, are the witnesses? The imagery and the powers ascribed to them call back to the two great prophets of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah—who also happen to represent the law and the prophets—the totality of Israel’s life and ministry. And so what we see here is the ministry of the old Israel taken up by the new, by the Church in Jerusalem. The city, the city where their Lord was crucified—which tells us that these witnesses represent the Church—is condemned like Sodom and Egypt—condemned and marked for judgement and destruction. As the Romans trample the city for three-and-a-half years, these witnesses will testify against it. John draws on Jeremiah in describing them:
Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of hosts:
“Because you have spoken this word,
behold, I am making my words in your mouth a fire,
and this people wood, and the fire shall consume them.
Those words, too, were spoken by the prophet in the lead-up to Jerusalem’s capture by Babylon. The imagery recalls Elijah, calling down a famine on the land for three-and-a-half years and of Moses calling down plagues on Egypt—and points to the fledging Church being led out of Egypt to escape in the wilderness as Israel did.
The witnesses, John writes, will be killed by the beast who ascends from the bottomless pit. John’s language of the beast making war on them is straight from Daniel and helps to identify the beast, otherwise we might be tempted to think that the beast represents the unbelieving Jews of Jerusalem. In Daniel the beast that makes war on the saints is Antiochus Epiphanes. The beast here represents another pagan gentile empire making war against the saints—this time Rome—and as when Jesus was crucified, the Jews and Rome once again combine forces against Jesus’ people. The witnesses are killed and their bodies are left in the street. That expression “dead bodies” is here three times, but in the first two it’s singular: “their dead body”—which suggests that the number “two” is symbolic and that it’s a larger group that makes up the witnesses—maybe even the whole church. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets rejoices over the dead witnesses and in doing so only confirms the truth of their witness against her.
And yet the Lord is faithful to his people. The witnesses are raised three-and-a-half days later. “A breath of life from God entered them,” and as the city watched they were carried into heaven. Whether this is literal or symbolic isn’t clear. It may well be that the Lord resurrected two or more Christians in those days in Jerusalem and carried them up to heaven. But whatever the case, the language John uses parallels the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. It is language of vindication. If this book is about tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom, here are all three. Not only are the saints vindicated before their watching enemies, but at the same time the Lord gives the city a precursor of the judgement to come—an earthquake that kills a tenth of the city—a tithe for the Lord, marking the remainder out for destruction. But notice the result. Those who saw and hear of these events were terrified and gave glory to God. We don’t have time to get into the details this morning, but I think there’s good reason to interpret this as an act of belief, not of rebellious Israel, but of the nations. Rome has finally been brought into the story, to take part in the persecution of Jesus’ people, and that gets the attention of the pagan nations finally. And through these witnesses we see God’s promises and Israel’s calling to the nations finally fulfilled. What Elijah and Moses, what the old Israel was never able to do, to bring the nations to faith in the Lord, this new Israel by the power of God finally accomplishes.[2] And with that, as I said, the story now begins to shift.
Let’s quickly finish Chapter 11. John continues in verse 14:
The second woe has passed; behold, the third woe is soon to come.
Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.” And the twenty-four elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying,
“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty,
who is and who was,
for you have taken your great power
and begun to reign.
The nations raged,
but your wrath came,
and the time for the dead to be judged,
and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints,
and those who fear your name,
both small and great,
and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.”
Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple. There were flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail.
The seventh trumpet is finally blown—remember, no more delays—and with it heaven rejoices: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.” Remember the little scroll at the beginning? The one that contained “the mystery of God…just as he announced to his servants the prophets”? John’s language of the kingdom of “our Lord and his Christ” is reminiscent of the language of Psalm 2, where the rulers of the earth take counsel “against the Lord and against his anointed”. Psalm 2 is a psalm about the rule of Israel’s king over the nations:
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (Psalm 2:8-9)
The judgement against unbelieving Israel and on Jerusalem has happened. The prophets and saints have faithfully witnessed Jesus and their witness has won the victory. The flag of Jesus’ kingdom has been firmly planted. Even as the nations rage, the Lord has made them Jesus’ heritage and is preparing to break them with a rod of iron. The focus of John’s vision now shifts from Jerusalem to the nations.
Brothers and Sisters, the Church that Jesus has established and filled with his Spirit will accomplish its mission. He has placed us here to witness the faithfulness of God and to proclaim the good news about Jesus: that he has died, that he has risen, that he is Lord, and he is making all things new. We, ourselves, are a testament to the power of God to forgive and to renew. As Jerusalem did and as the nations did in John’s vision, the world around us will rage, but the Lord will prevail. This week, south of the border, we’ve seen the ungodly raging over the prospect that there may be restrictions on their ability to murder their own children. The barbarians are at the gate. In their raging, Jesus and his people have been called out as Public Enemy No. 1. As it did came for the saints of old, tribulation will sure come to us. We will face pressure to conform, to give up, to bow to the gods of this wicked age, to give up hope in the promises of our Lord and to forget all that he has done in the past to confirm his faithfulness. Brothers and Sisters, let St. John’s vision of the triumph of the Lamb be your encouragement. And hear St. Paul’s exhortation to the people of that First Century church who stood against the tide of that tribulation:
Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. (1 Corinthians 16:13)
Those are no empty words, my Friends. Our Lord himself stands behind them, for Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Almighty God, you show to those who are in error the light of your truth, that they may return to the way of righteousness: Grant to all those who are admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, that they may reject those things that are contrary to their profession, and follow all such things as are agreeable to the same; through our Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] Images of the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), 101.
[2] For the details, see Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 273-283.
A Sermon for the Feast of St. Philip and St. James St. John 14:1-9 by William Klock
Today the Church remembers the Apostles Philip and James. As she was planning our song and hymn selection for today, Kathy asked what I’d be preaching on, would I continue with Revelation or would it be the lessons for Saints Philip and James? I said it would be Saints Philip and James, because in all my years preaching, I haven’t had the chance. May 1st has fallen on Sunday several times, but the feast day has always been bumped to a weekday by the First Sunday after Easter or by Rogation Sunday, which both take precedence. And the more I’ve pondered the day’s lessons, the more it occurs to me that it really is providential that this is the year these two saints finally get their due on a Sunday. Let me explain.
First, Philip and James. Who were these men who get such short shrift in the calendar? Well, both were amongst the Twelve, both were apostles. That’s really all we know for certain. We know pretty much nothing about them. It doesn’t help that they’ve often been confused with other Philips and Jameses. Unlike today, when everyone wants to give their children unique names, Jews, like everyone else in the First Century and down through history until today, were deliberately unimaginative. They valued naming their sons and daughters after parents and grandparents and heroes and heroines of the Scriptures. But that also means there weren’t a lot of names in use. There were lots of Philips and Jameses, Johns and Josephs, a lot of Marys, and even Jesuses. There are several Philips and several Jameses in the New Testament and it’s not always easy sorting out which is which and even if some of them are the same or different people.
There was a Philip in the book of Acts who became the Church’s first deacon, probably the same man who met and baptised the Ethiopian eunuch on the road to Gaza. But that’s a different man. Philip the Apostle, our Philip here, is mentioned by Mathew, Mark, and Luke only as a member of the Twelve. John mentions him a few times. He tells us that Philip brought Nathanael to Jesus, another of the Twelve. In John 6 (our Gospel for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, you might remember), where a great (and hungry!) crowd had gathered to listen to Jesus, Jesus turned to Philip and asked where he thought they might buy bread to feed the crowd. Philip had no idea. “Jesus, two hundred times a day’s wage wouldn’t buy bread for all these people,” he protested. At another point John tells us that Philip brought a group of Greek-speakers to Jesus. He was probably their translator. Then there’s John 14, which we’ll get to shortly. This selection for the Gospel goes back to the ancient church—one of this handful of passages where Philip has any role at all and one that fits with the themes of Eastertide, since that’s usually when this feast day falls. Tradition—which may or may not be reliable and may have the two Philips confused—says that he travelled to Phrygia as a missionary where he was either crucified upside-down or beheaded.
And James. There are several Jameses in the New Testament, too. There’s James the son of Zebedee, the brother of John. He’s often called “James the Greater”. We know a fair bit about him, because he was part of Jesus’ inner circle: Peter, James, and John. And then, in Acts, we meet James the brother of Jesus. He was one of those to whom the risen Jesus appeared. That made a believer of him. He ended up becoming the leader, or bishop if you will, of the Jerusalem Church. He’s likely the author of the Epistle of James. We know quite a bit about him. But neither of those men is the James we remember today. Today we remember James the son of Alphaeus. Sometimes he’s called “James the Lesser”—although even there, that may be yet another, fourth James. Of James, we know nothing but his name and the name of his father, Alphaeus, at least so far as the Bible goes. Tradition says that he was stoned while preaching outside the temple in Jerusalem, but again, tradition often had our James confused with James the brother of Jesus, who is said to have died the same way.
Even the origin of their feast day is kind of an accident. James and Philip are never paired together in the Gospels. It’s always Philip and Bartholomew who are paired together. But in the 6th Century the Basilica of the Holy Apostles was dedicated in Rome and the relics of James and Philip placed there—on May 1st—and ever since then they’ve been linked together in the Calendar of the Western Church. Both men laboured for the Gospel in obscurity. They were Apostles, and yet all we really know of them is their names. And because their names were so common, they’ve often been confused with other men down through the ages. Even their commemoration on the calendar is an accident of history. And yet we have no reason to doubt their faithfulness to Jesus, to the Church, and to the gospel. When I think of them I can’t help thinking of that famous line of Nicolaus von Zinendorf, one of the Seventeenth Century bishops of the Moravian Church. He wrote, “Peach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.” How’s that for some perspective? Again, “Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.”
And I think it’s some perspective we need today. Last week I sat with a brother pastor from another faithful, local church that has been decimated by current trends and events. First it was sheep-stealing by other churches, drawing people away, not by the gospel, but by gimmicks and excitement. Then the pandemic hit and some people just sort of evaporated. They just never came back and disappeared from the radar. And just when everyone thought we were through that, churches were hit with pandemic politics raised by some to the level of gospel. And it blew things apart. More people gone. And it’s not just my friend. It’s happening everywhere. We’ve been fortunate that none of these things has hit us as badly as they’ve hit a lot of other churches, but it’s a real source of discouragement for pastors and others who have been seriously drained these last couple of years.
Rob and I met this week and had a similar conversation. So-and-so gone. And So-and-so gone. If only that family would come back. If only such-and-such sort of people would come. And I had to check myself. Church growth is good, but not if it comes with a loss to another gospel-preaching church. Yes, there are times when receiving believers from another church that’s gone off the rails is a legitimate rescue operation, but generally speaking, that’s not growing the church; it’s just playing musical chairs. Church growth is what happens when you preach the gospel and people it hear it, believe, are baptised, and become disciples. But it’s easy to forget this, because today everything everywhere is about numbers. We’ve turned the gospel into a business and the church into a product to be marketed. Brothers and Sisters, it’s not about numbers and the gospel is not a commodity. We are not salesman. We are preachers. But Christians today have become obsessed with numbers. We’ve been influenced by the consumerist culture that surrounds us. And so no one wants to preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten. Everyone wants to make a name for themselves—a name they make by using the gospel as a ladder—as if we can make ourselves known to the world and to posterity as we stand on the shoulders of Jesus. No one wants to be a Philip or a James, lifting high the cross and proclaiming the gospel no matter the cost, no matter how small their following—even as it leads to martyrdom. Because they knew that it wasn’t about them; it was all about Jesus. Because their hope was not in this age, but in the age to come—the age they saw inaugurated in the risen, resurrected Jesus. They had had a glimpse of God’s new creation. They put their faith in him, their lives and their futures in his hands, and they became faithful stewards of his gospel and his sheep.
Our Gospel today begins with Jesus saying, “Let not your hearts be troubled.” This is in the middle of what’s often called his Upper Room Discourse. Jesus has washed his friends’ feet and they’ve shared that last Passover supper together, then Jesus tells them what’s to come: betrayal by Judas and denial by Peter. He tells them, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And he promises them the gift of the Holy Spirit who will make that possible. He’ll speak of the opposition and hatred they will face on his account, but he’ll also give them those assuring words, “Take heart, I have overcome the world.” And this is where he announces that very soon he will be leaving them. None of this was easy for them to hear. But first, here, he says these words to them. Look at John 14:1-6.
“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
“Fear not!” he says to them. “Trust in God—and trust in me, too.” Their trust in God was a given, but in light of the events that would happen soon, it’s natural for Jesus to urge them to trust him too. He’s the Messiah—the one sent by God. He knows that they’ve struggled to understand just what that means. Most people had a messed up idea of who the Messiah would be and what he would do—and even the disciples hadn’t sorted it out yet. Things were about to happen that would cause them to question whether Jesus was the Messiah. He was crucified as a false Messiah, after all. But Jesus urges them to trust him, just as he knows they’ve always trusted God. Dying and being absent from them for a time is part of his messianic ministry.
And in verse 2 he says those words that are always so popular at funerals. “In my Father’s house are many rooms.” These words are a source of comfort, but because we’ve lost the context in which Jesus spoke them, we tend misunderstand just what he’s getting at. We tend to think of him going to prepare a place in heaven where the faithful dead escape the world and go to live in God’s presence. The living in God’s presence part of that is right on the money. But what does Jesus mean when he talks about his Father’s house? We just kind of think about a house in heaven or, thanks to the King James, we think of a heaven full of golden mansions. But when Jesus talks about this Father’s house he’s talking about the temple. The temple in Jerusalem was the one place where heaven and earth—sundered by our sin—it wa the one place where they still overlapped, where human beings could go to be in the presence of God.
What Jesus is getting at here, what he’s hinting at is new creation. He’s just told them to trust in God—the one who has a plan to set this fallen world to rights—and this is exactly why he’s got to go away. It’s part of the plan. His death will forgive sins and heal the breach between God and man. His resurrection will set the renewal of all things in motion and eventually bring heaven and earth back together. So these words aren’t really about making a place for us to live in heaven when we die. It’s about Jesus doing the work to bring heaven and earth, God and humanity back together. But we can still see why they’re such popular words at funerals. At a time when everything seems dark. When we’re feeling hopeless. When loss overwhelms us. When we feel the weight of sin and death at their worst. Jesus assures us that he’s already there. We may not understand. We may feel lost. But he’s there already. While we do the work of the Church here on earth, he’s at his Father’s side doing the heavenly part of this business of renewal. And one day he'll bring it all back together: heaven and earth, God and man, new creation, the world set to rights, every tear dried, and human beings living once again in the presence of God. Not “up there”, but in this new temple that will encompass all of creation. That’s where Jesus was going when Judas betrayed him, when the authorities crucified him, when they laid him in the tomb. And it’s also where he was going after his resurrection from the dead when he ascended to his throne to send us the Holy Spirit.
And then Thomas. He blurts out, “But how? We don’t know the way! We don’t even know where you’re going! We don’t know the way there!” Brothers and Sisters, the words that really strike me there is that bit, “How can we know the way?” Thomas really had no idea what Jesus was talking about. We live on this side of the cross and empty tomb, this side of the ascension and we’ve got a better idea. We understand—or I hope we do!—that Jesus was going to his death and we understand why. Maybe we still struggle with the ascension. But we’ve got a much better grasp on these things than Thomas did in the Upper Room. But so often we still don’t know the way. Or we once knew it, but we took that path and it didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere, so we’re trying another one. Once we knew it, but we’ve been distracted along the way. Once we knew it, but that path led to hardship or opposition so we’ve decided to try a different route.
Brothers and Sisters, think again of the two men we commemorate today. Philip and James were surely just as lost as Thomas as they sat around that Passover table listening to Jesus. But when they met the risen Jesus, just like the other disciples, they understood. And they set out on the path laid before them and they walked it faithfully, even though it led to their own deaths. They trusted in God and they trusted in Jesus, too.
I’ve been thinking of the conversations I’ve had this last week or so. How does the church navigate these difficult times? My pastor friend talked about the people who had left his church to go to another. Why did they go? Almost always it’s because they’re looking for a program or for something new and exciting. That church has a program that our church doesn’t have. Or that church has better musicians, better singers, better mood lighting, better coffee. Again, it’s the consumerist minds of our culture creeping in to how we think about church. No one seems to ask the really important question: Is that other church really centred on Jesus and the good news? And am I leaving a Jesus- and gospel-centred church for one that isn’t? Am I being driven by a consumerist mindset instead of a gospel one? We talked about other folks we know leaving churches because they were afraid of getting sick during the pandemic or others who left over political issues surrounding masks and vaccines—some for and some opposed. And all we can see is people losing sight of Jesus—putting other things and other issues ahead of him and ahead of the gospel. Neither fear nor politics will lead us where Jesus has gone, to that place he’s preparing for us.
And, as churches, it’s often tempting to forsake the path that Jesus has called us to walk. Maybe it’s that we Christians were, for almost two thousand years, the driving force in our culture, and now that’s all gone. Increasingly it’s not even a neutral thing to be a Christian anymore. Now we’re haters and bigots on the wrong side of history. No one wants to be in that position. And so whole swaths of the Church have begun to cave to cultural pressure—especially on issues of identity, whether that’s sex or race, on issues of sex and sexuality, or the uniqueness of Jesus and the gospel to save. Don’t get me wrong. As Jesus’ people, we need to be squeaky clean. If we’re guilty of sin. If we’ve harboured sinful ideas. If we haven’t acted out of love. We need to repent of those sins. But the standard for right and wrong has to be the Scriptures, not the winds of culture—and especially not a culture that has forsaken the gospel and God’s word. In our post-Christian culture, trying to gain the world’s approval will never lead us to Jesus—it will inevitably lead us down a different path. And if we go down that path, we’ll never bring the culture to Jesus either. The same goes for politics. I don’t care which political side or party it is, if we make politics our agenda, it may attract people, but will not lead us—or them—to Jesus.
And it’s tempting to lose our focus on faithfulness and to get carried away with numbers. People will come if we add this program or that activity. What can we do to make things more exciting and to attract more people—nevermind the people we’re attracting are coming from other churches. Brothers and Sisters, that’s not church growth; that’s just sheep stealing.
What do we do? We don’t know the way? Look again at what Jesus says in verses 6 and 7:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
Brothers and Sisters, Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life. Our lives as his people and our life as his Church need to be centred on him. That’s how we get where he’s gone. That’s how we will one day find ourselves in the age to come—and how we will, with the help of the Word and the Spirit, get the world to that day. This is the truth that must have hold on us. This is the truth that has to shape everything we do. Everything is about Jesus and everything we do centred in him. And knowing that, we must be utterly devoted to that, remembering that he is the one who gave his life for our sake. He is our life. He is the driving force and motivation for everything. We love him because he first loved us. And now we preach him, proclaim him, live him because we can do nothing else. That’s the path.
It's at this point that Philips blurts out that question in verse 8:
Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
I’ll close with this. Philip had Jesus. He had the way the truth and the life, but he didn’t fully understand. He still wanted the Father. Wanting the Father was good. But he still wasn’t grasping that Jesus was the way to the Father—that he and the Father were one. And I think as the Christians and as the Church we can find ourselves in a similar place. We want the Father. But we forget that the way lies with Jesus. We forget that Jesus is the one who reconciles us to God by the cross. We forget that it is he, the word of God who reveals the Father to us. We forget that it is his gift of the Spirit that empowers us to live for him and to go out in the world in his name. We forget and we start turning to all sorts of other things. Again, we think a program will bring people to Jesus. We think more exciting worship will bring people to Jesus. We think that bowing to the pressure of culture and being nicer than Jesus will bring people. Brothers and Sisters, it won’t. Jesus leads people to Jesus. Our faithfulness to him and to his word and to his calling, coupled with the work of the Spirit in their hearts is what will bring people to Jesus and grow his church.
We’re like Philip asking for Jesus to show us the Father. “Jesus,” show us the way!” And Jesus has been saying all along, “I am the way. Just commit yourselves to me. Plodding along in faithfulness beats cool and exciting. Earning the hatred of the world beats earning its praise. Jesus calls us to forsake the wide and easy way. That way leads to destruction. Instead, he calls us to walk the narrow way, the hard way, that even though it may lead to death, will ultimately lead us—and the world—to him and to life on the other side. Like Philip and James: Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten. And if we are remembered, may it be only for faithfulness to Jesus and his gospel.
Let’s pray: Almighty God, to truly know you is eternal life: Grant us perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life; that, following in the steps of your holy apostles Saint Philip and Saint James, we may steadfastly walk in the way that leads to eternal life, through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter 1 St. John 5:4-12 & St. John 20:19-23 by William Klock
Last Sunday we read St. John’s account of how he, Mary, and Peter discovered the empty tomb that first Easter morning and we saw how John frames the story as an act of re-creation. His whole Gospel, in fact, is shaped by the account of creation in Genesis, in the first book of the Bible. John knew the big story—the story of Israel and of Israel’s God and of the place the story of his own people had within the bigger story of God and humanity, of Creation and Fall, of life lost to death, and now how Jesus had by death defeated death and set in motion an act of re-creation. Just as God had begun to bring order to chaos on the first day of week by calling light into existence, he now calls forth his son from the tomb, bursting forth with light and life, to set to rights what human sin and rebellion have corrupted. But this morning’s Gospel also shows us that our place, the place of the people of God, in that story. In the ancient church this was the Sunday the men and women baptised on Easter would set aside their baptismal robes after a long week of baptismal rites. Now they were ready to go from the Church out into the world to be the people Jesus had made them. At Rome, in ancient times, they would do this at the basilica of St. Pancras, a church named after a young martyr who had become the patron of oaths and vows. It was a fitting place to remind the newly baptised of the commitment they had made. Now they were to go out into the world to live it.
Our Gospel today picks up a few verses after last Sunday’s and continues in John 20. And our Epistle takes us to John’s first general epistle. Both passages drive at the same point, which is that in rising from death, Jesus had not only set new creation in motion, but that he has also created a new people, a new Israel, centred in himself to enact this new creation and carry it to the world. The big story reminds us that this was always God’s plan. It was the reason he called and made himself known to Abraham, through him creating and commissioning a people to make him know to a world lost in darkness. And while this Easter people created by Jesus is a new people, it’s also in a sense the same people. Jesus himself was an Israelite, his ministry was to Israel, even in his death he died the very death on a cross that so many of his people would die a generation later as they doubled-down on their rejection of him. And those who followed him first, those who first became this new people, were all of the old. It was both a re-creation and a renewal. The children of Abraham called to make God known—and as they did so, making a people no longer bound or defined by nationality or ethnicity, by circumcision or sabbath or diet—not by law—but by gospel—by faith in the good news about Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord.
But John doesn’t leave it there with the calling of this new people. He doesn’t leave it with a mere commissioning—with Jesus imparting this task to take the good news to the whole world. Because that wouldn’t really get us much beyond where the old Israel stood—the old Israel that failed in her mission. The key here is that as the new Israel, Jesus’ people aren’t just called and sent, we’re also transformed and equipped. And that’s really the theme of this Sunday after Easter. As we stand overwhelmed by the task in front of us, John assures us that if we are in Jesus by faith, there are two vitally important new realities for us. The first is that we have been made part of his new creation. We have a share in Jesus’ resurrection from death. Yes, there’s more to come. We haven’t been resurrected yet. That will come some day at the end of the age when the gospel, through the Church, has accomplished its purpose and brought the world to Jesus. But in the meantime, Jesus’ resurrection has freed us from our bondage to sin and death and given us new life. And, second, that if we are in Jesus, he has given us God’s own Spirit. He’s made us his temple, the place where he dwells. The Spirit’s not something to be earned when we’ve become holy enough. He’s not some later experience or second blessing, as if we can be in Jesus, but not have a share in the Spirit. Jesus’ gift of the Spirit is the very thing that fulfils God’s promise through the prophets and that defines us as his new covenant people. And as Jesus forgives and frees us by his death and resurrection, the indwelling Spirit empowers and equips us to live the new life Jesus has given. The Spirit’s life in us is a foretaste and a down payment on the resurrection and the life of the age to come—and most importantly in light of today’s theme, the indwelling Spirit is the one who makes the task set before us by Jesus possible. He’s the one who equips us to fulfil the vows we made in our baptism.
In our Gospel, again John 20 beginning at verse 19, John tells us:
On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
We shouldn’t pass over these words too quickly. It’s the first day of the week. It’s still the same day that Mary went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body and found it empty. It’s the same day she went running to tell Peter and John. The same day they went running to the tomb to see for themselves. The same day when John says none of them—except, it seems, for him—understood what had happed. John says he “believed” and I think that means he believed Jesus had risen, but that was crazy and he was still working it through so he hadn’t said anything to the others yet. This is that same day. Now it’s evening. And the disciples have locked themselves into someone’s house. The doors are locked. I expect the windows tightly shuttered. There was no cooking fire. Nothing that might make the house look occupied—nothing to give them away. Maybe one little lamp, just so they could barely see each other in the darkness. They were afraid. Four days before, the Jewish authorities had arrested Jesus. Three days before he’s been crucified as a dangerous revolutionary. Soon, they figured, the authorities would come for the rest of them. Best to lay low until things blew over. Maybe in a few days they could sneak out of the city. And so they sat there in the darkness, some silently pondering what all this meant, some still weeping for their dead friend, maybe a couple of them arguing in low tones about what had happened to Jesus’ body and what they’d do next. But whatever they were doing, a palpable sense of fear filled that dark room. Again, John echoes the beginning of the story: “Darkness was over the face of the deep.”
And then Jesus is suddenly there. John wrote about the Incarnation back in his prologue saying that in Jesus the light had come into the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it. That was an echo of Genesis. The first day of the week God called light into being, driving away the darkness. And now the Light Incarnate appears in that dark, fear-filled house and I have to think that somehow and in some way it was filled with light—a light that drove away every last vestige of darkness. And to these frightened men, Jesus announces, “Peace be with you!”
Imagine their surprise. And there must have been some disbelief or some doubts. Or maybe, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they simply didn’t recognise him. Something about his resurrection had brought a transformation. Same Jesus, same body, but in some way just different enough in appearance that they didn’t recognise him. Of course, it wouldn’t have helped that they simply didn’t expect to see him again either. So Jesus holds out his hands for them to see. One at a time he lifts a foot out so that they can see. There were the marks left by the nails. And he lifted his tunic to show them the wound left by the spear that had been plunged into his side, the wound that had gushed forth blood and water, evidence to the soldiers that he was genuinely dead. And here he stood alive. They were shocked. How could it be? I’ve said before, the reason resurrection wasn’t on anyone’s mind was because this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. This wasn’t a story Jews would have made up, because all the Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead knew how it would work—and it wasn’t supposed to work this way. At the end of the age the Lord would raise all the faithful at once. There was plenty of disagreement about some of the specifics, but they all knew one thing for sure: It would be everybody all at once, not just one person, even if that one person was the Messiah. This just wasn’t on their radar. Not at all. But now it is and they’re confused and, it seems, even though John says they were glad, they were still more than a little afraid. And so Jesus says to them again, “Peace be with you!”
And Jesus doesn’t waste any time as John tells it. “Peace be with you,” he says, calming their fears. Jesus is alive. And immediately he gets down to the very practical aspects, the real-world implications of his resurrection. Jesus doesn’t waste any time. He says in verse 21:
“As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”
Here they are, hunkered down for fear of being rounded up and executed themselves. Here they are, afraid to even show their faces in Jerusalem. Here they are, giving it a few days before they try to sneak out of town without being noticed. And Jesus says to them, “I’m sending you. As the Father sent me to you, I’m now sending you: to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria…to the ends of the earth.” In other words, “You’re not going to go slinking out of the city under cover of darkness. No, you’re going out in Jerusalem with boldness—the same way I went out into Galilee, through Judea, and eventually to Jerusalem at the head of a parade, hailed by the people. You’re going to go with the same boldness out into this city and you are going to declare what God has done. Everyone is going to know who you are. You’re going to declare to Jerusalem that this Jesus who they crucified died and has been raised from the dead, that he really is the Messiah, God’s King, and that his kingdom, God’s new creation has come.”
Think again of John, just beginning to wrap his head around the idea that Jesus had been raised from death—but still hunkered down with the others, afraid. John couldn’t even tell his friends what he thought had happened. The last thing on his mind was telling it to Jerusalem—and Jesus isn’t talking about mere “telling”—you know, whispering it to a few people who might be safe to tell. No, he’s talking about proclaiming this news—to everybody. Brothers and Sisters, think about that for a minute. Think about how most of us are so afraid or at least hesitant to proclaim the good news about Jesus. We have no reason to fear for our lives like Jesus’ disciples did. The worst thing that happens to us is we offend someone, make them think we’re weird. They faced martyrdom—and all but John were, indeed, martyred for their proclamation. We have so little to fear, but we’re afraid anyway. We’ve even stopped speaking in terms of proclamation—the Bible’s way of speaking about evangelism. Instead we talk about “sharing” our faith—watering it down, as if it’s just another option on the religious smorgasbord that someone might want to try out for themselves. We’ve lost our confidence in the good news and in the God who raised Jesus from the dead who stands behind it. No, Jesus calls us to declare the good news like royal heralds, sent out into the world to declare the mighty deeds of God, that he has raised Jesus from the dead, and made him Lord of all.
But, again, consider John. Confused, afraid, just beginning to understand. And then consider the confidence of his words, written decades later in our Epistle:
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God…. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 St. John 5:1, 4-5)
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ—that he is the Messiah—has been reborn as part of the people of God. And that belief changes everything. That belief transforms the fearful John hesitant to even tell his friends about the dawning realization that Jesus had been raised from death, it turns him into the courageous apostle, exiled for his proclamation of that truth, and writing boldly to the churches to stand firm in that same faith even though great tribulation was about to hit them like a storm. There is everything to be feared out in the world: rejection, mockery, persecution, even martyrdom, but by faith the people of God overcome and stand firm in our witness. It’s not because faith changes reality. It’s because this faith recognizes the new reality born that first Easter when Jesus rose from the grave, the new reality that he is victor over sin and death, the new reality that new creation has begun in him, and the new reality that he is Lord of that creation. By faith we are united with him. By faith we share in his inheritance. And by faith we share in his calling and ministry—his Church, taking up the mantle of prophet, priest, and king.
Like John, we are called to boldly testify about Jesus:
This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus the Messiah; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree. If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son.
John points back to Jesus’ ministry. He came by water. That was the start of it. He went to John and was baptised in the Jordan and as he walked up out of the river, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and his Father spoke, “This is my Son in whom I am well-pleased.” That was Jesus’ initiation into his messianic ministry. And that ministry—at least in its earthly phase—ended in blood, at the cross, where he died to conquer death and to provide forgiveness of sins. Jesus’ baptism testifies to his being the Messiah. Jesus’ blood, shed on the cross, testifies to his being the Messiah. And, too, John writes, so does the Spirit. And, he says, consider all the things we believe, in which we trust, based on the testimony of mere men. How much more, Brothers and Sisters, ought we to trust this testimony about Jesus backed up by God himself? And not so much just receiving and believing ourselves, but in light of the fact that this is the truth, this is the good news that literally changes the world, is changing the world, oughtn’t we to be proclaiming it to that world? Through Jesus and the Spirit God has given us the light. The light that will transform the darkness that sin and death have cast on the world. The light that the darkness cannot and will not ever overcome. Dear Friends, don’t hide it under a basket. Hold it high. Proclaim it. Show it to everyone. Don’t be afraid.
Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. (1 St. John 5:10)
But that’s not where John leaves us in the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t just send his disciples out into the world. That would be an impossible task. I met with another pastor this week to talk, to pray, and to encourage each other and one of the things that came up in our conversation was the all-too-common failure in preaching to tell people what to do without telling them why—the problem of preaching good works, without preaching Jesus as the source and reason and motivation for them. Preaching good works without Jesus is just setting people up for failure and discouragement. It’s law, not gospel. And so in our Gospel, Jesus doesn’t just send his friends out to do the impossible. He also equips them. Look at verses 22-23 of John 20:
And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”
As the Lord breathed life into Adam in the original creation, Jesus now breathes on his disciples. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says. I don’t know that it was literally by his breath that the Spirit was imparted. Luke tells this part differently in his Gospel and in Acts—that whole event with the dramatic coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as they gathered at the temple to hear Peter preach and to be baptised. But notice there, too, that the Spirit comes with a wind—in both Hebrew and Greek, wind, breath, and spirit are all the same word. Jesus was good at acted-out prophecy and I think that’s what he's doing in this case in John’s Gospel. He is—or he soon will be—imparting God’s Spirit to this new people of God, to those who believe, and he illustrates just what this gift is by an act that they couldn’t help but connect to God’s giving life to Adam. But this is new life. And this is what will equip them to go out, despite the threat of death, to proclaim with boldness the good news. Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit does a lot for us, but here Jesus makes sure we know what his primary purpose is. It’s not to give us radical experiences, although that certainly might happen. It’s not to make us holy, although he certainly does that as he turns our hearts and our affections away from self and sin and points them towards God. No, the primary purpose of the Spirit is to equip us to do the impossible: to do for the world, what Jesus did for Israel. To go out in the world in his name and to proclaim what God has done through him. “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”
And then those words that have so often been misunderstood and abused: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” Remember I said that by faith we have a share in Jesus’ inheritance and ministry. By faith the Father adopts us and makes us his sons and daughters, so we share in what belongs to Jesus. And that means that as he is King and Prophet and Priest, so are we as his Church, his people. And Jesus gets here at two of those things. Here he reminds his friends and he reminds us that when we go out into the world to proclaim his Lordship, to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection, to proclaim that new creation has come, we do so as both prophets and as priests.
Our message is two-fold. I think the priestly role comes most naturally to us. This is the part of our proclamation where we announce the forgiveness of sins. Think of the priests of the Old Testament, offering sacrifices. That was one of their primary duties: to facilitate and to mediate God’s forgiveness to the people. Think of Jesus. He is both priest and sacrificial lamb. He offers and presents himself to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins. And, as priests, we proclaim to the world the forgiveness he offers through that sacrifice. But that is not our only role. We also share in Jesus’ prophetic office—and that’s the part that doesn’t come as naturally to us, at least not as things currently are. But consider what the prophets did. Consider what Jesus did in his role as a prophet. He called out the sins of his people, he summoned them to repentance, and he announced the judgement to come on those who remained unrepentant in their sin, unbelief, and faithlessness. In contrast, much of the Church today is afraid to take on this prophetic role, to name sin, to even use the word. Some parts of the Church have given up altogether and have embraced sin and called it virtue—leaving folks nothing to repent of and with nothing for which they need forgiveness. They’ve gutted the gospel. But these two things, the priestly and the prophetic go hand in hand. Our prophetic office, announcing judgement, is without hope if we do not also fulfil our priestly role of announcing forgiveness. But our priestly office, our message of forgiveness lacks any real meaning if it is not also accompanied by the prophetic announcement that sin is sin and that God will judge it. Brothers and Sisters, this is the good news: that we are sinners, that our holy God judges sin and that the penalty is death, but also that Jesus has died as a perfect sacrifice for sins, and has risen, victor over death, inaugurating God’s new creation and giving a sure and certain hope that what he has begun he will finish. One day all things will be made new, every bit of sin and evil will be swept from creation, and all will be set to rights. And by faith in Jesus we have a share in that new world.
Brothers and Sisters, do we believe that? I trust that we do. We affirm this belief every week as we come to the Lord’s Table. We recall the story. We confess our sins in repentance. And we come to the Table in renewed faith to participate again in those events that set us free from sin and death, in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But maybe we’ve forgotten the real power behind what we confess here at the Table. Friends, think this morning on what the cross and the empty tomb mean. Think on what the blood of Jesus means. Think on what his gift of the Spirit to you means. And then take seriously those words of dismissal we’ll hear later: “Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.” Consider that in those words Jesus is saying to us, to you and to me, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”
Let’s pray: Almighty Father, you gave your only Son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification: Grant that we may put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, and always serve you in purity and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for Easter Day Colossians 3:1-4 & St. John 20:1-10 by William Klock
St. John writes in today’s Gospel:
Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark…
John is a brilliant story-teller and he’s a brilliant story-teller because he knew the story so well. Not just the story he tells of his time with Jesus, but the whole story, the big story of God and Israel—a story that leads straight to Jesus. But, even more, John knew that the story of God and Israel was even bigger. It was part of a story that involves the whole human race and all of creation. And so there are echoes here in his Gospel—deliberate echoes—that recall that big story, of Israel and Israel’s God, of his beloved creation that our fallen race has corrupted, and the story of his love, his mercy, and his grace that are at work to set it to rights.
Mary went to the tomb while it was still dark. Jesus had been crucified. He was dead. End of story. Jerusalem was ready to carry on with life as usual. If they’d had water coolers in the First Century, the events of that Passover might have been the topic of discussion that first day back to work. But it was over. Or so everyone thought. But while Jerusalem slept, Mary went to the tomb. John writes specifically that it was the first day of the week. He didn’t need to tell us that. Jesus’ body wasn’t placed in the tomb until late on Friday. Saturday, well, that was the sabbath. No one would go to the tomb on the sabbath. So we’d know it was the first day of the week, Sunday. But John tells us anyway and he tells us in such a way to remind us of the opening words of his Gospel: “In the beginning…” You know those words. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”
But when John wrote those words, he chose them carefully, because in introducing Jesus, he wanted to remind us of another beginning. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. He tells us that Mary came to the tomb while it was still dark. Again, remember the first words of Genesis, the very beginning of the story: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.” As John opened his Gospel with words suggesting that the story of Jesus is going to be a story of new creation, so even as he tells us about Jesus’ resurrection, he again frames it in terms of new creation, filling his story with echoes of Genesis. John writes that the word became flesh and dwelt among us. On the sixth day, Pilate presented Jesus to the people and announced, “Behold the man!” Hanging on the cross, Jesus used his last gasp of breath to declare, “It is finished.” Again, an echo of Genesis. Any normal person who counted himself a friend of Jesus would have considered that first Good Friday a very, very bad day, but that echo from Genesis reverberates through John’s account. When God had finished the work of creation he declared that it was all very good. Jesus was laid to rest in the tomb for the sabbath—another echo of Genesis. Death is not the end, but the beginning of new creation. As Mary went to the tomb that first Easter morning, the first day of the week, the word of God was poised to burst forth in an act of new creation.
At the time no one understood any of this. Mary went to the tomb expecting that, like every other person in history who has died, Jesus would still be there, stone cold and lifeless. She went to mourn and to meet her friends to finish the work of anointing Jesus’ body. She found the tomb was open, the great stone door rolled away. It was dark, so there was no point poking inside for a look. But that didn’t matter. The open tomb meant only one thing: Jesus’ body was gone. John doesn’t reveal Mary’s thoughts, but resurrection would have been the last thing on her mind. No, the open tomb meant someone had taken the body, maybe grave robbers, maybe Roman soldiers playing a joke on some silly Jews, adding insult to injury. So she ran. She ran to Peter’s hiding place in the city and beat on the door. Peter went running with John to the tomb. John’s the one who describes himself as the one whom Jesus loved.
John tells us that he outran Peter and got to the tomb first. The sun was rising and as he peered into the tomb he saw the linen strips that had wrapped Jesus’ body. That was an odd thing. Mary, John, and Peter could think of a few reasons why someone might have taken Jesus’ body, but that anyone would first unwrap him was inexplicable. Peter arrived and headed straight into the tomb. If Jesus’ tomb was like others that have been found, his body was likely placed on a shelf to one side of the small, low entrance. If his head had been oriented towards the door, it would have been difficult to see without at least putting head and shoulders into the tomb as Peter did. And what a curious thing Peter found. Not only was the body gone with the wrappings left behind, but the wrappings appeared to be undisturbed, as if Jesus had simply passed right through them. And the cloth that had been on his head, probably a piece of linen tied around the head to keep the jaw closed, it had been moved and neatly placed nearby.
For comparison, it hadn’t been that long before that Jesus had raised Lazarus from death. The disciples had watched as Lazarus stumbled out of his tomb. He was still tightly wrapped in linen, probably not unlike a Hollywood mummy. His friends scrambled to tear the linen cloths away, making a mess in the process. Lazarus was all sticky and oily from the various liquids used to anoint his dead body. In contrast, everything about Jesus’ tomb spoke of calm and order, even the face covering was neatly set aside.
John tells us that at this point he squeezed into the tomb beside Peter. He saw and believed, he writes. But believed what? John goes on to tell us in the next verse that “as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” They did not yet understand, but he believed. Some argue that John merely believed Mary’s report of the missing body, but this seems like a pretty trite detail in amongst everything else John has told us here. Peter and Mary believed Jesus’ body was really gone, too. What would seem to make the best sense of this passage is to understand that John is saying that this was the moment when he realised that Jesus had been raised from death. He said nothing to Peter or to Mary. He and Peter returned home. Mary remained at the tomb weeping. They, the others, didn’t know what to make of the missing body, because they did not yet understand the implication of either Jesus’ claims or of the scriptures. But John was beginning to put two and two together—and he believed.
You can’t really blame John for not saying anything. He, himself, must have been struggling to understand and to make sense of it all. But there it was. The tomb was empty. I expect John ran through the handful of reasons that the body might be gone and realised that none of them really made that much sense. The Romans had no reason to take it. Neither did the Jewish authorities—especially after they’d released Jesus’ body to his friends for burial. Grave robbers? What would they want with a poor man’s grave? And the empty, but undisturbed linens? Who in their right mind would unwrap the body? Suddenly all the things Jesus had said, things like his statement that he would tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days, it started to come together and to make sense. John’s brain started reaching back into the scriptures that he thought he knew so well, and new connections started to form. He started hearing those old words afresh in light of Jesus—and especially the empty tomb. And he began to understand.
I think that, again, the contrast with Lazarus must have stood out. John had seen a sort of resurrection before, but Lazarus was resurrected to a life still subject to death and decay and emerged from the tomb still wrapped in his graveclothes. Something different had happened to Jesus. The undisturbed graveclothes spoke of something greater. Resurrection—something God’s people longed for—had happened, but not as expected. Resurrection was supposed to happen to everyone all at once at the end of the age, but—what if, John started to think—Jesus was raised first—raised to inaugurate and to lead the way into the age to come. And that meant that Jesus really was the Messiah and that somehow this meant that God really was going to set everything to rights. New creation had begun that morning, but it would take some time—and a meeting with the risen Jesus—before John would be able to sort out for himself what it all meant.
But if new creation was born that morning, it also had to have implications not only for Jesus, but for his people too. John doesn’t elaborate at this point. The wheels in his head, after all, were just starting to turn. But that’s where St. Paul and our Epistle pick up, written decades later after he and so many other had had the time to think it through and work it out—rethinking everything they’d ever known in light of the risen Jesus. Let me read those four verses from Colossians again. Colossians 3:1-4.
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
What are the implications of the resurrection of Jesus for his people? St. Paul wrote Colossians, at least in part, to address what seems to have been a common problem in the New Testament churches: legalism. Jewish Christians struggled with the place of the law in the new covenant and many gentile believers were told that they needed first to embrace a form of Judaism before they could really be followers of Jesus. In Colossians 2:20-23 Paul asks such people why they continue to live as if they were still enslaved by that old way of life. Sure, the law has “an appearance of wisdom” in helping a person to attain an outward appearance of piety, but that’s just it: it’s an outward appearance, an outward conformity to holiness. It’s not that this is necessarily a bad thing in itself, but that true holiness is something that wells up out of the heart—or, at least, it should. It’s not hard to hear Paul’s frustration in these words. Jewish converts should know better. This had been Israel’s struggle since the beginning and Jesus, in his death and resurrection, had finally fixed it. Jesus gives his people new life by giving us new hearts—turning them away from sin and self and rebellion and back to God. But it’s easy to talk about the new life Jesus gives. It’s often a struggle to atually live it. New life is the starting point when it comes to defeating sin, but all too often we forget and start thinking that new life is the result of first having tackled sin ourselves. Paul knew all too well that’s not how the gospel works.
Jesus has led us in an exodus from sin and death. In his resurrection he has given us new life. We are no longer slaves. This is the basic truth of the Christian life and if we don’t get this right, we’ll get everything else wrong. As the Lord led the Israelites out of Egypt through the sea and freed them from their bondage to Pharaoh, Jesus sets us free from sin’s bondage when we pass through the waters of baptism. It’s a truth. A fact. A done deal. We have been redeemed. Even if we don’t feel it, Jesus and the Spirit have transformed us: we were slaves to sin and death and now we are free; we were in bondage to the world and are now citizens of the kingdom of heaven. This is what we mean when we speak of “regeneration”. This is what Paul gets at in our Epistle. He writes in 2:20 that we have died with the Messiah and now he writes in 3:1 that we have also been raised with the Messiah. Again, we may not feel it, but if we have truly taken hold of Jesus in faith, he has carried us through death and out the other side into a new kind of life. What he did for the Israelites when he delivered them from their Egyptian slavery through the waters of the Red Sea he has just as surely done for us in delivering us from sin and death through the waters of baptism. It’s a done deal. It’s a sure thing.
And yet, there’s more to come. What we have today in the Spirit is the down payment of the life that awaits us the other side of resurrection. What Paul is saying here is one of those “already-but-no-yet” truths. Jesus has been raised to the sort of real life and true humanity that we lost through our sin. We look forward in faith and hope to the day when we will be raised as he was, but in the meantime we have God’s own Spirit living in us as an earnest on that day. We await the resurrection, but even today the Spirit makes that future resurrection a reality for us. Maybe this is what makes life in Jesus a struggle. If we could appear in locked rooms and never know sickness or decay again—as is true of Jesus—it would be easier to remember who and what we are. Instead, we are called today to live by faith, not by sight. One day the promise will be fulfilled. One day the things of the present age will be gone for good and God’s new age will come in all its fulness, heaven will descend to earth and man will live with God. But until then we have God’s promise and we have his Spirit and we have the empty tomb to remind us that our hope is sure and certain.
And so we begin with first principles: If we have died with the Messiah, we have been raised with the Messiah. We need to get this truth into our heads and when we do, we’ll remember that our life and everything about it that matters, is in the heavenlies where Jesus sits at the right hand of God. Our true lives are hidden there with Jesus, Paul says. It’s a kind of mystery, this “already-but-not-yet” life we have in the Messiah. But even though it’s stored away in the heavenlies along with the rest of the age to come and God’s new world, Paul wants us to understand that it’s still very much who and what we are right now. The new age dawned that first Easter morning when Jesus rose triumphant over death and if we are in him by faith, we really are part of that new age. It may be hidden from the world around us, but it’s not hidden from us, because Jesus and the Spirit have made it our reality. We live today in faith-filled hope and in hope-filled anticipation of the day when Jesus returns to rejoin heaven and earth, God and humanity, and to bring the new age in all its fullness. And as difficult as it may be some days to live this reality, Paul urges us to do so in faith-filled hope, knowing that Jesus, who is our life, will return to finish what he has started. On that day we will know glory in all its fullness. Our hope is not merely that Jesus will return, but also that when he returns he will reveal who we really are in him. Resurrection will vindicate and reveal the faithfulness of God’s people, just as Jesus was vindicated and glorified in his resurrection. As we struggle against sin and as we labour for God’s kingdom we may feel inadequate or insignificant, but the resurrection of Jesus ought to be a source of encouragement to live the truth of who we are in Jesus even as some aspects of it are still hidden with him. Now, back to our Gospel: St. John reminds us of those words “In the beginning…” The story has begun. Now we wait for the end. But we await the ending in hopeful anticipation, because what our God has begun, what our God has so invested with his love and with the sacrifice of his own Son, our God will surely finish. Brothers and Sisters, glory awaits.
Let’s pray: Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant us by your grace to set our minds on things above; that by your continual help our lives may be transformed; through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for Good Friday Hebrews 10:1-25 & St. John 19:1-37 by William Klock
Last night we remembered Jesus and his disciples in the Upper Room. We were there with them as Jesus washed their feet and showed them what it means to be a servant. They were bickering over who would have to lower himself to washing all their feet. And as they argued and were overcome by pride, Jesus—who was unquestionably the one man there who deserved to have his feet washed by someone else—Jesus stripped down to a towel, knelt on the floor, and washed their dirty feet. He even knelt in front of Judas and washed the dust and mud from his feet—the dirt accumulated from his trip to the high priests to betray his master and friend. We saw St. Peter draw back from Jesus—“No Lord! You can’t wash my feet! If anything, I should be washing yours.” And yet Jesus insisted. If he couldn’t be a servant, he couldn’t redeem these men at the cross.
Jesus turned everything upside-down. After washing the disciples’ feet—something totally inappropriate for a teacher to do to his disciples—he took the bread and the wine of the Passover meal and started referring to them as a new sacrifice. These men knew all about sacrifices. They knew all about bulls and goats and lambs sacrificed for sin, their bodies broken and their blood poured out before the altar. And yet Jesus took the bread and wine and said that it was his Body broken and his blood poured out—that it was him making a sacrifice for sin. From what the Gospels tell us, the disciples didn’t understand. They really did want to follow Jesus, they wanted what he had to offer, but they didn’t understand yet what it was he was offering. When Jesus had tried to wash Peter’s feet, Peter had indignantly refused, but Jesus explained that he needed it—that if we wanted any part in his master, this washing was essential—then Peter wanted it—even wanted more of it (“Wash my whole body, not just my feet, Lord!”)—but he still didn’t understand what it meant. He just trusted Jesus and wanted what he was offering.
After supper Jesus took his friends to the garden of Gethsemane to pray. Even after the foot washing and that last supper and all Jesus’ talk about servants and sacrifices, they still didn’t understand. They had no idea what was going to happen. They knelt among the olive trees as Jesus went off a little way away to pray by himself. And as Jesus prayed like he’d never prayed before, the disciples drifted off to sleep. They had no idea what was happening. Jesus woke them up in time for Judas to return, leading a pack of Jewish soldiers who had come to take him away. Peter drew out his sword, ready for the attack, and cut off the ear of one of the soldiers. Maybe he thought that now was the time Jesus, the conquering Messiah, was going to throw off his clever disguise of humility and start the revolution that all the Jews expected. Now was his chance! But it didn’t happen. In fact, Jesus actually healed the soldier and told Peter: “I can appeal to my Father and he’ll send twelve legions of angels. But if I did that, how would the Scriptures be fulfilled?”
The disciples ran away as the chief priest’s soldiers took Jesus away in chains. They figured it was over. Chalk Jesus up as yet another failed Messiah. But Peter wasn’t ready to give up on his friend, so he followed along to the high priest’s house to see what would happen. He watched the sham trial they put Jesus through. They condemned Jesus, and as the priests and soldiers spit on him and struck him, Peter gave up just like the other disciples had done a few hours before. Three bystanders noticed Peter in the crowd and recognised him: “Hey, you! You were with him. You’re one of his friends. You’re one of his followers.” And each time Peter denied knowing Jesus: “I don’t know what you’re talking about! You must be blind! I’ve never seen this man before!” Jesus was betrayed by even his closest friends.
When it was morning, the Jews dragged Jesus to the court of the Roman governor. The Jews weren’t allowed to execute anyone; the Romans had to do it. And so Jesus went through another sham trial before Pilate who caved in to pressure from the Jews. He didn’t want a riot on his hands and the Jews were crying for blood—and not just blood—they were crying out for a Roman crucifixion. Pilate asked them, “But this man is King of the Jews?” And they shouted back, “No he’s not! We have no king but Caesar!” The crowds who had hailed their Messiah on Sunday, turned against him on Friday. They wanted a conquering Messiah who would raise an army and drive out the Romans, but instead this wanna-be Messiah was talking about the Kingdom of God in men’s hearts. He even talked about becoming a sacrifice himself. On Sunday they had thought that his humility was a clever disguise to put the Romans off their guard. Today they realise that it isn’t a disguise—Jesus really is a humble servant, ready to die. The crowds weren’t ready to accept someone like that as Messiah.
The Roman soldiers, the whole battalion, took Jesus to be scourged. They spit on him, they put a reed in his hand and a crown plaited of thorns on his head and mocked him as king, and then they beat him senseless. They led him away with two violent thugs to a nearby hill. They held him down on a cross while they nailed him to it with big spikes through his wrists and through his feet, then they raised the cross up and dropped it heavily into the ground. His mother and his friends watched as the blood poured from his hands, his feet, and his head. For three hours he hung there. Roman crucifixion was known for its agony. The shoulders were dislocated. Hanging, you couldn’t breath. So you pushed yourself up, putting all your weight on the spike through your feet to gasp for air—alternating between the agony of asphyxiation and the agony of being nailed to a piece of timbre. After three hours Jesus cried out in anguish to his Father, “It is finished.” And just to make sure he was dead the soldiers pierced his side with a spear to see the blood run out followed by a gush of water.
The clouds darkened the sky. The earth shook. The curtain in the temple that closed off the holy of holies, the place of the Lord’s presence, was violently torn in two. The graves gave up their dead, who went walking through the streets of Jerusalem. Something remarkable had happened and everyone noticed, but no one understood—except maybe that centurion who confessed, “Surely this man is the son of God!” The city was shorty back to its business. Jesus’ friends wept in sadness or in anger, and they went home to lay low lest the authorities come after them next.
That evening Joseph of Arimathea went to Pilate to claim the body of Jesus. They took it down from the cross, wrapped it in linen, placed it in a tomb, and sealed it up.
Maybe now the disciples started to ponder what Jesus was talking about last night when he had talked about his body and blood being given as a new—as a perfect—sacrifice. In our epistle lesson from the tenth chapter of Hebrews, we read some more about the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice. The Law and the old sacrifices were but a shadow of the good things to come. “It can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1-4).
The blood of bulls and goats, sacrificed over and over, could only convict the people of sin as it pointed to the perfect sacrifice of Christ that had not yet been made. And so Hebrews 10 says that Jesus came to do “away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that…we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”(Hebrews 10:9-10). The writer of Hebrews goes on to give us a vivid picture contrasting the old and the new: “Every priest [and he’s talking about the priests of the old covenant] stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sin. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God…for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:11-14).
Jeremiah wrote, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds…I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.” And Hebrews reminds us, “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:16-18).
When Jesus breathed his last and cried out, “It is finished,” it was finished. Whereas in the old covenant the priest laid the sins of the people on the bulls and goats sacrificed repeatedly on the altar, Jesus, our great High Priest, took our sins upon himself and died the death that we deserved. The old sacrifices were imperfect. They were just dumb animals, but consider too that those animals didn’t offer their lives willingly. That’s the difference between the old sacrifices and the once-for-all new sacrifice made by Jesus. In the shed blood of Christ we find perfection—God Incarnate shed his own blood and he did so of his own free will. For that reason, there’s no longer any need for more sacrifices. Again, Jesus did it once and for all. The old covenant called for the sinner to humbly lay his sins on that animal sacrifice, but that bull or that goat on the altar of the Temple was a sign given by the Lord—it was his finger pointing to Jesus Christ—pointing to the Cross. Brothers and Sisters, because God has been faithful to his promises, no more do we bring an annual sacrifice to the Temple. Now the humble sinner need only trust in the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.
When Jesus breathed his last and gave himself up to his Father, the Temple served its last function in redemptive history. Under the old covenant the Holy of Holies—the Most Holy Place—was where the presence of the Lord resided visibly for the people, resting on the Ark of the Covenant. And yet the people weren’t allowed into that place—into the direct presence of the Lord. Only the High Priest was allowed there and then only once a year. No sinful human being could enter the presence of the Lord and the priest only did it to make an annual sacrifice for sins—and he did so only after a series of purification rituals for himself. Nobody went there, because sinners can never enter the presence of a holy, just, and righteous God.
But when Jesus made his perfect sacrifice on the cross that day—as he breathed his last and pronounced, “It is finished”—the heavy veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the people was torn in two. By his death, Jesus opened the way into the presence of the Father. Through Jesus sinners now find perfect forgiveness and are welcomed into the presence of his Father.
On the cross Jesus stretched out his hands; he stretched out one hand to all those who had trusted in him, seeing the future and coming Messiah as they made their sacrifices at the Temple. And with his other hand Jesus reached out to us, reaches out to the Gentiles, to the nations who had never heard of the Messiah. On the Cross he reaches out with both hands, uniting both peoples to himself, establishing his body by giving new life to dead and paralysed limbs through his shed body and blood. Jesus said, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). That’s exactly what he did. In fact, it’s exactly what he still does. He stretches out his hands to draw us in, to unite us to himself. Through his perfect sacrifice he offers perfect forgiveness of sin. Through his body and his blood he offers new and eternal life. Through his Holy Spirit he renews and regenerates hearts and minds and leads us on the path of holiness. And through his cross, he leads us through the torn veil and into the Holy of Holies—into the very presence of God.
A Sermon for Maundy Thursday St. John 13 by William Klock
In our Gospel this evening we read about Jesus and his disciples in the Upper Room at Passover. John picks up the story after they had eaten, but our Epistle from First Corinthians reminds us of that strange Passover meal Jesus shared with his friends. He took the Passover bread and told them that it was his body, broken for them. He took the Passover wine and told them that it represented a new covenant that would be established in the pouring out of his own blood. The disciples knew that something holy and profound was happening, but they wouldn’t understand what it was until a few days later. But Jesus illustrated what it was all about after dinner, as we read in the Gospel, when he humbly washed his disciples’ feet. Washing feet was a normal, everyday thing, but it wasn’t a normal, everyday thing for the master, the rabbi to wash the feet of his students and disciples. Washing feet was a job for servants, or if there weren’t any servants, it was the job for the person of lowest status in the group. But Jesus humbled himself to the embarrassment of his friends. Peter tried to stop him, but Jesus insisted: If you won’t let me wash you, you can’t share in me—in my life, in my kingdom, in my mercy.
What’s interesting is that even Judas had his feet washed by Jesus. At the beginning of the chapter John sets up Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. The devil had entered him, John says, and had put it in his heart to betray Jesus. The amazing thing is that Jesus knew. Jesus declared to Peter, “If I’ve washed you, you are clean through and through—but not all of you.” And John says that Jesus was referring to Judas. Jesus had washed his feet too, but Judas wasn’t clean. Again, Jesus knew. As John continues later in the chapter, Jesus tells them outright: One of you will betray me. One of his friends with whom he had shared this last supper, one of his friends whose feet he had humbly washed.
Bothers and Sisters, that says something about the nature of the Cross. It says something about the nature of Jesus’ love. It says something profound about the way in which God’s strength is made perfect in weakness. At the Cross, sin and death rose up to do their worst, human evil was concentrated in one place. As Lord of Creation, legions of angels were at his command. But Jesus let human wickedness fall on him with its full weight. For the sake of love—love for his enemies, love for those who rejected and reviled him, for those who scourged him, for those who drove the nails into his hands. Jesus took our sin and gave back love. Jesus washed the Betrayer’s feet. And then, after giving such a dramatic illustration of this love, Jesus goes on to tell his disciples—and if we are Jesus’ disciples, he’s saying this to us too: As I have loved you, you are to love each other. This, he says, is how people will know you are my disciples. It’s interesting that of all the things that we think of that mark us out as Jesus’ disciples—going to church, praying, reading the Bible—the most important thing Jesus highlights here is our love for each other. Without that all those other things are meaningless.
But, again, think of Judas. Jesus washed Judas’ feet. Jesus loved Judas. Brothers and Sisters, love is vulnerable. Love can be abused. Love can be betrayed. And—here’s the thing—if our love can’t be vulnerable, abused, or betrayed, then it’s not really love. Think of the Cross and think of how Jesus got there. The crowds hailed him as King on Palm Sunday, but by Friday they were shouting, “Crucify him!” And it was one of Jesus’ closest friends who betrayed him to the authorities. But everything in this last supper, including Jesus washing his friends’ feet, points to the Cross. Jesus spent his ministry teaching and telling stories so that people would understand the kingdom of God, but here, when it comes to his very last day, in these last moments when Jesus knew he had to drive home the meaning of the Cross and the meaning of his death so that his disciples would understand what he was doing and why it was important, Jesus didn’t give them a theology lesson or an atonement theory. No. He gave them a meal and he washed their feet. We so often turn that around. We think of it all in terms of atonement theories and theology and then we tack on the meal. One of the things I love about the liturgy is that the Lord’s Supper isn’t just tacked onto a service once a month or once a quarter. It is the service. And it’s integrated into our hearing of the word, our prayers and confessions, our praises. It’s the lens through which everything else is seen and understood. Jesus gave us a meal so that we would understand what he was about to do.
Think about the meaning of a meal. We can celebrate friendship with a simple meal and we can throw great banquets to celebrate important events—something like a wedding. And so it’s for good reason that the Jewish people looked forward to the Lord’s kingdom and his deliverance in terms of a great banquet. The world was a mess because of sin and rebellion and idolatry, but the Lord’s Messiah would come and would set it all to rights. This is where that idea of “on earth as it is in heaven” comes from. The Messiah would restore Creation to the way the Lord had made it in the first place and that meant no more pain, no more sorrow, no more fighting thorns and thistles to grow food. It meant a return to the Garden. As the prophets said, grapes would be so plentiful you could tie your donkey to a vine and not worry that he’d eat the grapes. Wine would be so plentiful that people could wash their clothes in it. When the King finally came, his kingdom would be like a great banquet—everyone would celebrate and everyone would have their fill. And so as Jesus prepared to go to the Cross, as Jesus prepared to let evil and sin and death do their worst so that he could defeat them on Easter morning, he shared a meal, a banquet with his disciples—a meal that we still share today as his disciples, as we look forward to his kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven, as we look forward to the Lord setting everything to rights.
But this wasn’t just any meal. It was the Passover. It was the great festival where, each year, the Jewish people sacrificed lambs and ate unleavened bread as a way of remembering who they were as God’s people and how he had rescued them and made them his own. In the Passover they remembered that they had once been slaves and how they had cried out to the Lord and he had delivered them. They remembered the blood on the doorposts, they remembered the Red Sea. They remembered being set free to serve the living God. And now here in this last Passover meal Jesus points his friends to the Cross. This is a new exodus. But this time God isn’t just bringing physical deliverance from Egypt; he’s bringing deliverance from bondage to sin and death.
And then the foot-washing. We might think that we can just sort of show up at the meal—slipping in anonymously and then leaving, not really having a personal interaction with the bride or the groom. Some friends and I did that once when we were living in the dorm at Vancouver School of Theology during the summer. There were lots of weddings in the chapel and sometimes there would be a reception in the lounge. One of my friends suggested we crash the reception and see if anyone would say anything. No one did. The bride’s friends and family assumed we were with the groom and the groom’s friends and family assumed we were with the bride—and we managed to avoid the bride and groom. Some people think they can come to Jesus and to the kingdom that way, but in washing the disciples’ feet Jesus reminds us that he didn’t humble himself, he wasn’t beaten, he didn’t die in some big, general sense for all humanity. He did. But he also died very specifically each of us—for you and for me. The disciples were embarrassed. The master isn’t supposed to wash his disciples’ feet. God isn’t supposed to humble himself and die. But that’s how it has to work, because that’s the nature of love. And if we will let Jesus wash us he will wash every part of us clean: the proud parts, the angry parts, the rebellious parts; and the sad parts, the lonely parts, the confused parts, the sick parts and all the parts we wish with all our hearts could somehow be made right. They can be. And so Jesus invites us: Eat this bread. Drink this wine. My body and my blood given for you. Let me wash you clean.
And there was Judas. Jesus didn’t just offer himself to the eleven friends he knew wouldn’t betray him. Judas was there too. And Jesus washed even his feet, not grudgingly, not any less thoroughly than the feet of the others, but with the same humble love with which he washed the feet of John, his best friend. Brothers and Sisters, that’s love. Again, love isn’t love unless it is vulnerable, unless it’s open to abuse and betrayal. The world doesn’t understand this kind of love. The world tells us to love the people who will love us in return. The world tells us that if someone doesn’t appreciate us, we should write them out of our lives. The world tells us not to give ourselves to people who will only take advantage of us. A while ago I came across a whole Facebook page devoted to memes expressing this sort of thing. “Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm,” said a banner across the top of the page. But Jesus gives us a very different model of love. Jesus shows us real love at the Cross as he gives his very life for the people who cried out, “Crucify him!” St. John says that Judas went out. He went out betray Jesus. He went out and Jesus knew that the wheels were in motion. Nothing would stop his death at that point. And John says he started to speak. And he didn’t speak about what a jerk Judas was. He didn’t complain about how this friend whose feet he had washed had gone out to stab him in the back. He didn’t warn his disciples not to make the same mistake he had in befriending Judas. No. Judas went out and Jesus began to speak, saying, “Now the Son of Man is glorified. Now God is glorified in him.” Now the world will see what real love looks like and in that love God is revealed. In the Cross, as sin and death do their worst to Jesus, we see the most profound example ever of “on earth as it is in heaven”. This is love.
And then Jesus says to his disciples—to them and to us: I’m giving you a new commandment. Love one another. Just as I have loved you, so you must love each other. Don’t love the way the world says to love. Love the way I have taught you to love. And by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, because you love each other as I have loved you.
Let us pray: Gracious and merciful Father, your Son Jesus Christ girded himself with a towel and washed his disciples’ feet; grant us the hearts to be servants to one another as he was a servant of all, who gave his life and died for us, yet lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever. Amen.
A Sermon for Palm Sunday Philippians 2:5-11 & St. Matthew 21:1-17 by William Klock
Two Gospels in one service! We began this morning reading St. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. It wouldn’t be Palm Sunday without that Gospel, without waving our own palms as we sing “All glory, laud, and honour”. This is the Sunday we hail the King. And then St. Matthew’s Passion narrative. That long reading that we all join in. The one time of the year when we literally put ourselves in the biblical story. (Did you know that tradition goes back to the Middle Ages? Choristers would sing the various parts that today we hand out to members of the congregation. That tradition was carried on in the Lutheran churches of the Reformation and gave us the great Passion oratorios by the likes of Bach.) Today’s Gospels powerfully show us Jesus and, even if we miss the other services and lessons of Holy Week, they lead us right to Easter. But they do not stand alone. As powerful as the readings from St. Matthew are, our Epistle today, the lesson from the second chapter of Philippians, is the lens through which we read the Gospel. St. Paul tells the same story, but in a very different way. What’s remarkable to me is that what took Matthew two long chapters to tell—we only read the second of those two chapters this morning—what took Matthew two long chapters to tell, St. Paul summarises in a mere thirty-six Greek words as he tells us about the servant-king. Most scholars think that verses 6-11 of our Epistle were actually an early Christian hymn, maybe even written by St. Paul himself. Whatever the case, this poem brilliantly and succinctly sums up who Jesus is as it draws on both Israel’s story and the story of the whole fallen human race. It opens the Passion narrative of the Gospel-writers and shows us the theological cogs and gears inside—and, I think most importantly, it tells us what to do with it.
In today’s Gospel Matthew shows us the King. For most of us Christians, we know the story, we know that Jesus is a different kind of king than earthly kings, but Palm Sunday comes around every year and makes sure we don’t take that for granted. The lessons ought to prompt us to think about what a king is, because, as St. Paul reminds us today, who Jesus is says something powerful about who we are as his people and what sort of life and character ought to be manifest in us.
So what is a king? What’s a king like? Today we might think of some of the modern kings of the world—or queens. Today they’re mostly figureheads and public servants. Five years ago, when our own Queen turned ninety, the Bible Society published a commemorative book titled “The Servant Queen and the King She Serves”. In it the Queen spoke of her faith and how it shapes her role as monarch. But the title highlights the role we expect of modern monarchs. Today’s kings—or their viceroys—may open Parliament, but they make no decisions. That’s for the legislators. When there’s a war modern kings stay home and work to bolster the morale of their people. Politicians make declarations of war, generals plan strategy, and soldiers go off to fight. But ancient kings—kings in Paul’s day were very different. Alexander went off at the head of an army and conquered most of the known world. The Emperor Augustus headed an army that ended the Roman civil war and brought peace to the empire. Alexander and Augustus did great things—and because of what they’d accomplished, both believed they had a right to divinity. They didn’t serve God; they were gods. They claimed that right because they had taken charge, destroyed their enemies, and wrestled whole empires into peace with the threat of further violence. Why was Rome at peace under Augustus? Because he’d destroyed his enemies once and any would-be future enemies knew he could probably do it again. Kings and emperors grasped at divinity, men like Pharaoh and Alexander and Caesar. Even many of Israel’s own leaders in the Old Testament, in Jesus’ day, and in Paul’s grasped for power—even for divnity in all but name. Jewish leaders knew better than to claim divinity like the pagan rulers did, but they grasped at the same power that Caesar held and they sought to control the reigns of empire in the hopes of one day climbing to the top of the heap.
And yet this was not just the problem of kings or would-be kings. Brothers and Sisters, this is the problem of the whole human race. Ever since Adam believed the serpent’s lie and grasped at divinity for himself, we humans have been doing the same in one way or another. We fight, we kill, we steal, we cheat, we do whatever we can get away with to look out for ourselves, to get what we want, to climb to the top of the heap.
Look at the book of Genesis. Adam rebels and in a single generation brother is murdering brother. Noah comes along in Chapter 6 and his story is introduced by the announcement that the earth was filled with violence. Noah was the only righteous man left. And so the Lord destroyed all but Noah and started over. But even the righteous bear the seed of humanity’s fall. Only a single chapter separates the story of Noah from story of the Tower of Babel. Once again the human race lost all knowledge of God and sank into pride, idolatry, and sin. And yet this time the Lord did something different. Out of the darkness the Lord called Abraham. The Lord’s solution to humanity’s problem was to call forth a people for himself, a people who lived in his presence for the life of the whole world, a nation of servants. Long before Isaiah’s song of the Suffering Servant was claimed by Jesus, Israel understood this to be her unique role.
But, of course, like Noah in his day, Israel suffered from the same problem as the rest of humanity and so Paul uses this hymn in our Epistle, in Philippians 2, to show us the solution. Look at Philippians 2:6-8 where Paul writes these words about Jesus.
Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)
God humbled himself. Jesus, who the hymn says was in the form of God, who was in some way God himself, emptied himself to take on Adam’s flesh and Israel’s servant role. Paul is clear that this doesn’t mean that Jesus ceased to be God or that he gave up his divinity in some way. Just the opposite. Jesus actually shows us what true divinity looks like. It doesn’t look at all like Adam’s grasping or Pharaoh’s grasping or Alexander’s grasping or Caesar’s grasping at power, authority, or divine prerogative. Instead, true divinity is revealed as God humbles himself for the sake of his rebellious people and offers himself as a sacrifice for their sins. It’s utterly backwards to anything humanity ever expected. Humans are supposed to offer sacrifices to the gods to placate their anger, but this God—the one, true God—instead offers himself as a sacrifice on our behalf and he does so out of love.
Think of today’s Gospel. Jesus was rejected. At the time, almost no one could accept that this is what divinity looks like, that this is what God would do. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the people may have thought it weird that he rode a humble donkey, but they expected him to finally start an uprising—to bash some Roman and Herodian heads and to set things right. When later that day he flipped the tables in the temple and drove out the merchants, people were sure that this was it. Jesus was ready to clean house. But then it didn’t happen. He got the people’s hopes up. Here, finally was the Messiah. But—apparently—not. At least that’s how most of Jerusalem took it. Jesus’ own people, in anger, cried out for his crucifixion. As far as they were concerned, he was a blasphemous impostor. He rode into the city as the Messiah, but then he let everyone down. Even the servant people themselves could not understand the serving God.
And yet, it was there all along in Israel’s Scriptures. Matthew tells us that Jesus’ entry into the city on a donkey fulfilled the prophecies of Isaiah and Zechariah. He cites Zechariah 9:9, but what’s interesting is that it’s the next verse, Zechariah 9:10 that points to the significance of the donkey. Matthew’s first readers would have known this. Not knowing the Old Testamant like they did, we probably don’t. Here’s what Zechariah writes:
I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.
The Lord’s King would not come in might, but in humility. He would not come with the cavalry or an army of chariots. He would not come with a bow, ready to do violence. Just the opposite—and just as we see in the Gospels. By humbling himself he would take his throne and bring peace to the nations. His rejection and death would qualify him for the role and by his resurrection alone would he defeat his enemies and take is throne. It’s right there, but almost no one could see it.
But, of course, God knew this and so the hymn turns on verse 9.
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)
The people crucified Jesus as a false messiah and God overturned their verdict against him. Precisely because Jesus had humbled himself and taken on the role of the suffering servant for the sake of his people, God raised him from the grave and exalted him to his right hand—God declared Jesus to be the world’s true King so that in time every knee will bow and every tongue confess—that one day everyone will acknowledge that Jesus is creation’s Lord—and that in this God will be supremely glorified. This is how God sets creation to rights, this is how God sets fallen humanity to rights: Not by charging in with a sword, but by submitting himself to the cross—by allowing evil and death to do their worst, by dying himself, so that he can pass through to the other side and leave them powerless over him—and then powerless over all those with him. This is the new exodus that leads, not through the Red Sea, but through death itself to the life of God.
Now, back to verse 5. Paul doesn’t simply tell us this so that we better understand who Jesus is and what he’s done. That’s important, but Paul has a very practical reason for writing this to the Philippian Christians. Remember that who Jesus is, what kind of King he is, tells us what sort of people we are or should be as his subjects. He writes:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus…
“Have this mind among yourselves.” Jesus’ people are to “have this mind among yourselves”. That’s why he’s done what he’s done, to solve the problem that began when Adam grasped at divinity for himself. As we identify with Jesus, we become a part of the renewed servant people of God. We are forgiven our past grasping, our past selfishness, and are filled with God’s own Spirit. As the Spirit turns our hearts and minds to the self-giving God, we become a people whose chief characteristic is self-giving humility. As we pass through death to ourselves we come out the other side alive to God. The Spirit works a miracle in our hearts, he purges us of selfishness, of that powerful desire to grasp at whatever we can for our own benefit, and places in us a desire for God, a desire to please God, a desire to do the things that please God. In Jesus and the Spirit we finally become that servant people.
What does that look like? Well, it looks like the fruit of the Spirit. We’re the people who should be characterised by love, by joy, by peace, by patience, by kindness, by goodness, by gentleness, and by self-control. There are all sorts of things that ought to mark out the people of God, but first and foremost, it’s these seven fruits of the Spirit by which we should be known. They don’t grow all at once. The Spirit plants them, but they require cultivation by the means of grace—by the sacraments, by immersion in the word, by prayer, and by fellowship with each other. They grow. And the more we put them into practise the more they grow and multiply in us and in our brothers and sisters. It starts here in the Church. Brothers and Sisters, Paul wrote these words as an exhortation to the Philippians to be that servant people God has created for the life of the world. We can’t be that people for the world when we aren’t first the people for each other in the Church.
Here’s how he put it to the Ephesians:
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Ephesians 4:1-3)
Even in the Church it’s easy to forget who we are in Jesus. It’s easy to act out of selfishness or anger or fear. It’s easy to be impatient with each other. So, Friends, remember the Servant King. When you’re tempted to act out of anger or fear, when you’re tempted by impatience with a brother or a sister, when you’ve been wronged and all you can think about is righting the injustice, think of our King riding on the donkey, our King mocked and scourged, our King on the cross—for our sake. There we see humility and gentleness and patience as he bore with his sinful people out of love, eager to reconcile us to himself, eager to establish a new people united in the Spirit. And it’s in that that we see God glorified as never before or since.
Let’s pray: Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Nor Did They Repent Revelation 9 by William Klock
As Israel was about to enter the promised land, the Lord summoned his people to a covenant ceremony. Moses divided the people, six tribes on Mount Gerizim, a symbol of blessing, and six on Mount Ebal, a symbol of cursing. The Levites recited the curses of the covenant and the people responded, “Amen”. At the end of the ceremony, Moses was clear that when the people swore their oath that day, they were swearing not only for themselves, but for the generations of Israel to come. The heart of the ceremony is in Deuteronomy 28. Verses 1-14 list the blessings of obedience. Versus 15-68 list the curses for disobedience. The events of the Jewish War, which lasted three-and-a-half years between a.d. 66 and a.d. 70 work through the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 28 almost verse by verse—the war, the great tribulation, the fall of Jerusalem, and the scattering of the Jewish people fulfilling the curses of the covenant. When the Good Friday mob cried out “Crucify him!” to Pontius Pilate and answered him, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:25), they invoked the curses of Deuteronomy 28. Moses warned that if Israel was unfaithful she would become like Sodom and Gomorrah—that she would become a monument to the Lord’s judgement. That monument would be a testament to the nations of the faithfulness of God. Here’s what Deuteronomy 29:24-28 says:
All the nations will say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land? What caused the heat of this great anger?’ Then people will say, ‘It is because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt, and went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods whom they had not known and whom he had not allotted to them. Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land, bringing upon it all the curses written in this book, and the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger and fury and great wrath, and cast them into another land, as they are this day.’
I think we’re happy to think of the Lord’s faithfulness in terms of the covenant blessings, in terms of Jesus and the cross, the forgiveness of sins, and the creation of a new Israel. But we forget—or choose to ignore—the flip-side of that. We don’t like to think about God also revealing his faithfulness in unleashing the covenant curses on those who broke it. In both cases the Lord’s faithfulness if revealed to his people and to the nations.
So John’s vision announces this judgement on Israel once and for all for her breaking of the covenant and for the idolatry at the root of it. It comes after Israel’s God has sent his Messiah, after Israel’s God has created a new people, after Israel’s God has poured out his Spirit and sent apostles and prophets to declare what he has, in his love, mercy, and grace done for his people, after Israel’s God has given the nation forty years to repent of their idolatry, their unfaithfulness, their rejection of him. Now John hears the trumpets blowing for Jerusalem as they once blew for Jericho. At the end of Chapter 8 he wrote of the eagle, crying out, “Woe, woe, woe.” And now in Chapter 9 the fifth and sixth trumpets are sounded. Look at 9:1-2.
And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
During Jesus’ ministry the devil was defeated. Jesus speaks of him falling from heaven and here he’s given the key to the bottomless pit. In Greek it’s the “abyss”, that place in the Old Testament symbolic of chaos and distant from both the Lord and his heavenly realm. The abyss was the source of the waters of the great flood. It was a metaphor for the place of the dead. It was where devils were held prisoner. And the Devil is given the key. Note: he does not take it; it is given to him. He was defeated at the cross. No matter how bad, how awful, how destructive things get, everything that John sees here happens under the Lord’s sovereign hand. So the abyss is unlocked, smoke rises, and an army is unleashed. John goes on:
Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torment them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torment was like the torment of a scorpion when it stings someone. And in those days people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them.
Again, a bunch of images from the Old Testament converge here. The plague of locusts means that Israel, because of her idolatry is now in the position of Egypt and under divine judgement. But John reports this vision in precise language drawn from the prophet Joel. The blowing of the trumpet, the air darkened, the locusts having the appearance of horses prepared for battle, their teeth like lion’s teeth, these all parallel Joel’s prophecy of judgement to come on Israel.
The five months here refers to the period between May and September when locusts normally made their appearance. What’s unusual in this case is that these locusts stay the whole five months. This may be a reference to the beginning of the Jewish War, which began in May of a.d. 66 when Gessius Florus slaughtered 3,600 of Jerusalem’s citizens. His reign of terror lasted five months, until September. But this had probably already happened by the time John wrote this, so I’m inclined to think that this is probably a reference to the final months of the siege of Jerusalem, which ran from April to August of a.d. 70. Either way, the point here is that Jesus had spent three years casting demons out of the house of Israel. Jesus had spent three years cleaning house, preparing his people to receive him. But instead they crucified him. Think back to the parable Jesus told about the house swept clean—we read Luke’s version as our Gospel this morning, now let me read Matthew’s, from 12:41-45.
The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.
“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.”
Jesus had swept the house of Israel clean, but in rejecting him they brought on themselves the curses of the covenant and became a generation possessed by devils. John goes on in verses 7-11:
In appearance the locusts were like horses prepared for battle: on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; they had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails and stings like scorpions, and their power to hurt people for five months is in their tails. They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.
Josephus’ description of the violent and murderous Zealots who rampaged through Jerusalem is remarkable for its similarity to John’s description of these demons. Josephus says that the Zealots terrorized the people more than the Romans did.
“With an insatiable lust for loot, they ransacked the houses of the wealthy; the murder of men and the violation of women were their sport; they caroused on their spoils, with blood to wash them down, and from mere satiety unscrupulously indulged in effeminate practices, plaiting their hair and attiring themselves in women’s apparel, drenching themselves with perfumes and painting their eyelids to enhance their beauty. And not only did they imitate the dress, but also the passions of women, devising in their excess of lasciviousness unlawful pleasures and wallowing in a brothel in the city, which they polluted from end to end with their foul deeds. Yet, while they wore women’s faces, their hands were murderous, and approaching with mincing steps they would suddenly become warriors and whipping out their swords from under their dyed mantles transfix whomever they met.”[1]
For good reason does John describe the king of these devils as “Abaddon” and “Apollyon”—the Hebrew and Greek words for destruction. But John is clear that despite the authority given to them to wreak havoc, their destruction was limited to the apostate nation. Both the earth and those who had been sealed by the Lord as his own, those who bore the mark of baptism, were spared. Hell was unleashed on unbelieving Israel, but John writes in verse 12:
The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.
The sixth angel steps forward. Look at verses 13-19:
Then the sixth angel blew his trumpet, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar before God, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.” So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month, and the year, were released to kill a third of mankind. The number of mounted troops was twice ten thousand times ten thousand; I heard their number. And this is how I saw the horses in my vision and those who rode them: they wore breastplates the color of fire and of sapphire and of sulfur, and the heads of the horses were like lions’ heads, and fire and smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths. By these three plagues a third of mankind was killed, by the fire and smoke and sulfur coming out of their mouths. For the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails, for their tails are like serpents with heads, and by means of them they wound.
A voice speaks from the horns of the altar before God. With these words John encourages the faithful caught up in the midst of this time of tribulation. We’ve seen them worshiping and praying. The Lord hears them. The horns of the altar were projections at the four corners. Under the old covenant, when the nation—not just a person, but the nation—was guilty of sin, that sin was atoned for with a sacrifice made on the altar. The blood of that sacrifice was then then smeared on the horns of the altar of incense—the place here in the heavenly temple, where the prayers of the saints are received. The point here is that, first, the prayers of the faithful for both deliverance and for judgement on the wicked have been heard and, second, that their sins have been atoned for. The Lord will answer their prayers.
The voice cries out for the release of four angels, until now held back. They cross the Euphrates, the symbolic northeastern border of the promised land. The fifth trumpet unleashed the forces of hell on Jerusalem. Now the Roman armies—the 10th Legion and maybe others—are let loose on Judaea. The Greek literally says they number myriads of myriads, an idiomatic way of saying “many thousands”. And yet, again, we’re reminded that all of this is happening under the Lord’s sovereign hand. As I said last Sunday, it may have been the General Titus who defeated Jerusalem and pulled down the temple, but he did so as the Lord’s agent and in answer to the prayers of the saints for justice and vindication. John says that this army had been prepare down to the year, month, day, and hour. The description of the army is terrifying, drawing on various images from the prophets. David Chilton, I think, sums up the passage very aptly:
“An innumerable army is advancing upon Jerusalem from the Euphrates, the origin of Israel’s traditional enemies; it is a fierce, hostile, demonic force sent by God in answer to His people’s prayers for vengeance. In short, this army is the fulfillment of all the warnings in the law and the prophets of an avenging horde sent to punish the Covenant-breakers. The horrors described in Deuteronomy 28 were to be visited upon this evil generation. Moses had declared: You shall be driven mad by the sight of what you see (Deut. 28:34).”[2]
And maybe that’s just it. We like to think that the damned, when confronted by the reality of the Lord’s judgement and given the chance, would fall on their faces before him in repentance. We might think that, but we would be wrong. As Moses says, the terror of the covenant curses brings not repentance but deeper madness. Theologians have a term for this: reprobation. Rebellion to deep that repentance is no longer possible. Without the grace of God, the wicked who reject him dig in their heels, doubling down on their idolatry, rebellion, and wickedness. The people of Jerusalem and Judaea in those days witnessed horrors we can only imagine: famine, mass murder, cannibalism, crucifixions of their fellow Jews at the rate of five-hundred a day, and instead of turning to the Lord, they devote themselves to the demonic pronouncements of false prophets and false messiahs who promised them victory. Josephus writes:
“Thus it was that the wretched people were deluded at that time by charlatans and pretended messengers of deity; while they neither heeded nor believed in the manifest portents that foretold the coming desolation, but, as if thunderstruck and bereft of eyes and mind, disregarded the plain warnings of God.”[3]
The invading army killed a third of the people. The ESV translates the Greek incorrectly as “a third of mankind”, but it’s just “a third of the men”. This is a judgement on Israel. The Lord must discipline his own children before he judges the nations. John goes on in verses 20-21, writing:
The rest of [the men—not “mankind”], who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.
Jesus warned that before the day of judgment came on Jerusalem, “there will be terrors and great signs from heaven” (Luke 21:11). Josephus writes of multiple signs that took place at the beginning of the war. First, there was a blinding light that enveloped the altar on the Feast of Unleavened Bread in 66. What should have been a sign of warning was, instead, taken as a good omen. At the same feast the gates of the temple, despite being secured by iron bolts, were opened of their own accord—a sign of the temple’s coming doom, but one the people again chose to take as a good omen, despite several warnings. At the close of the Passover that year, at sunset, a host of chariots was seen in the sky, armed battalions in the clouds, circling the city. Fifty days later, at Pentecost, when the priests entered the temple, a great voice like a host cried out, “We are departing hence!” And later that year, a star hung over the city like a sword for an entire year. Josephus says that those who were wise interpreted the signs and concluded that Jerusalem was no longer the dwelling place of God.[4] In a long denouncement of his fellow Jews for their idolatry, sins, and general unfaithfulness to the Lord, he said, “My belief…is that the Deity has fled the holy places and taken His stand on the side of those with whom you are now at war. Nay, an honourable man will fly from a wanton house and abhor its inmates, and can you persuade yourselves that God still remains with his household in their iniquity—God who sees every secret thing and hears what is buried in silence?”[5] Josephus failed to grasp the significance of Jesus, but he understood very well the covenant Israel had with the Lord and the judgement she stood under for breaking it.
The Psalmist sums up the problem of idolatry. This is what Psalm 115:4-8 says:
Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear;
noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel;
feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat.
But then the terrifying thing about idolatry comes in verse 8:
Those who make them become like them;
so do all who trust in them.
“When a civilization turns idolatrous, its people are profoundly changed by that experience. In a kind of reverse sanctification, the idolater is transformed into the likeness of the object of his worship. Israel ‘went after worthlessness, and became worthless’ (Jer. 2:5).”[6] Hosea gives the grim warning: Israel’s idolaters “became detestable like the thing they loved.” (Hosea 9:10).
Our own world is following the same path. We think we’re sophisticated because we no longer believe in gods like Mars and Venus, but we still make idols of the things they represented. And with our idolatry we’ve become increasingly decadent, foolish, and mad. The faith of Jesus, which for almost two millennia shaped out society is laughed at and rejected. Christians face, albeit to a lesser extent, the same rejects and pressures to conform that the people of those churches in Asia faced. Will it get worse for us? I think that’s inevitable, even if it doesn’t get as bad as it was for them. But whatever happens, Brothers and Sisters, we must remain faithful. We must reject idolatry wherever it turns up, and keep hold of Jesus with both hands. Revelation is about tribulation and perseverance and kingdom. It’s a call to faithfulness in light of faith and hope—faith and hope in his victory at the cross and ascension to his throne, faith and hope in the knowledge that he is King and always will be. As he has always cared for his people, he will care for us and one day we will know the age to come, the world finally set to rights, and the presence of the Lord in all his glory. Friends, love the Lord. We were his enemies, but he so loved us that he gave his own Son for our sake. In our baptism he has united us with Jesus, forgiven our sins, plunged us into his Spirit, and made us a people—a new people, freed from sin and death, a holy nation and a royal priesthood—a people for himself. Set aside every idolatry and every sin and embrace him. And go from here into the world as priests, mediating his kingdom and it’s blessings, and as prophets, proclaiming the good news that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and that Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, it is fitting that in your providence you have brought us to these passages of judgement during Lent. I pray that as we think on our baptismal vow to reject the sinful and idolatrous influences of the world, the flesh, and the devil, John’s words of warning and encouragement, his announcement of the judgement of the wicked and the vindication of the righteous, will prompt us to set aside everything else and to trust in you and you alone, knowing that you are our only source of hope and life and that you have called us to proclaim that hope and life to the nations. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.
[1] The Jewish War IV.ix.10 (Loeb ed.)
[2] The Days of Vengeance (Fort Worth: Dominion, 1987), 251-252.
[3] The Jewish War VI.v.3 (Loeb ed.)
[4] Ibid V.i.3
[5] Ibid V.ix.4
[6] Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and its Confrontation with American Society (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983), 295.
The Prayers of the Saints Revelation 8 by William Klock
Silence is a powerful thing and especially so in liturgy. Maybe it’s the influence of our culture which is constantly on the go that in contemporary worship we feel that we’ve always got to be building. Even when we’re given a pause to reflect and to pray in our worship and liturgy, the piano or the organ or the band still plays quietly, either to set the mood or because real silence is just something we find uncomfortable. That makes silence, when we do experience it, all the more powerful. Sometimes we need times of silence so that we can take stock and reflect on what’s happening and come out the other side of it more conscious of God’s glory or of our own sinfulness and of his great mercy. Sometimes we come out of the silence more conscious of the need for our prayers.
John has been given a vision of the heavenly court, he’s been invited into the Lord’s throne room, to be let in on the deliberations of his council, so that he can take back a message of hope to a church on the verge of great tribulation. The redeeming lamb has taken his place, the angelic hosts and the earth-bound church have joined their voices in his thunderous praise. And the lamb has broken the seals on the scroll containing God’s plans. And judgement has been announced on Jerusalem. Four terrifying horsemen ride out and the winds are poised to blow, all bringing destruction on apostate Israel for her rejection of the Messiah and her persecution of his church. At the same time, John sees an angel sent out to seal the faithful—to mark them out as belonging to God and to the lamb. They will be swept up in this great tribulation as well, but God will preserve them and see them through to the other side. The old Israel will be judged. The new Israel will be vindicated. And the nations will stand in awe to see the mighty deeds of the God of Israel who is faithful to his promises. And as John wrote, these events were already unfolding in Judaea. Within about a year, they would reach their climax. John’s vision is building. And now, suddenly, the action stops, the thunderous praises of heaven cease, and a dramatic silence falls. We’ll pick up with Revelation 8:1-6.
When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Then I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them. And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne, and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel. Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to blow them.
When they were opened, the first six seals on the scroll announced judgement on Israel and Jerusalem and so, now that the faithful have been sealed and marked out as Gods’ own, we might have expected hell to break lose with the seventh seal, but instead silence falls over heaven. Probably not what we expected. I think there are two things in view here, two bits imagery of the Old Testament that are being drawn on, and I don’t think it has to be one or the other. Revelation is packed full of imagery drawn from throughout the Old Testament and especially the prophets, and it’s often the case that one bit of imagery calls back to multiple passages or events in the Old Testament, creating a composite or multi-faceted image here.
First, that this silence is kept as an angel ministers this offering of incense takes us back to the tabernacle and the temple. Think of Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father. Luke describes him going into the temple to make the daily incense offering at the altar. And while he’s in the temple making this offering, Luke writes that “the whole multitude of the people were praying outside” (Luke 1:10). The 19th Century Jewish scholar, Alfred Edersheim describes the incense offering this way and saw that our passage here was shaped by that action in the tabernacle and temple:
“Slowly the incensing priest and his assistants ascended the steps to the Holy Place, preceded by the two priests who had formerly dressed the altar and the candlestick, and who now removed the vessels they had left behind, and, worshipping, withdrew. Next, one of the assistants reverently spread the coals on the golden altar; the other arranged the incense; and then the chief officiating priest was left alone within the Holy Place, to await the signal of the president before burning the incense. It was probably while thus expectant that the angel Gabriel appeared to Zacharias. As the president gave the word of command, which marked that ‘the time of incense had come,’ ‘the whole multitude of the people without’ withdrew from the inner court, and fell down before the Lord, spreading their hands in silent prayer.
It is this most solemn period, when throughout the vast Temple buildings deep silence rested on the worshipping multitude, while within the sanctuary itself the priest laid the incense on the golden altar, and the cloud of ‘odours’ rose up before the Lord, which serves as the image of heavenly things in this description.”[1]
We’ve seen already the prayers of the saints ascending. In the midst of tribulation, the Lord hears the prayers of his people. And he not only hears. The church, as she worships is united with the heavenly courts. Seven angels stand before the Lord and are given seven trumpets and it’s difficult not to draw a connection between the seven angels John has shown us already, the angels that represent the seven churches to which he wrote, and those here. Exactly how that connection works I can’t say, but part of what John reveals is that there really is something to our prayer, “on earth as in haven”. Our worship is the thin space where heaven and earth overlap and we, filled with the Spirit and united to Jesus, are drawn up into the heavenlies. Our prayers rise as incense and the Lord responds, but first the churches blow the trumps that herald the judgement to come. Brothers and Sisters, there’s amazing consolation in this. In those times when it feels our prayers are bouncing off the ceiling, in those times when it can feel as though the Lord doesn’t hear us, in those times when we gather with each other to worship and just aren’t “feeling it”, John reminds us that our prayers really do rise as incense—not just any incense, but an incense that is immensely pleasing to the Lord. He hears. He will act, even if it’s not as we expect. And his people, his church, have a share, we have a hand in bringing heaven to earth through our prayers and worship.
The other inescapable imagery here is Israel’s siege of Jericho. I expect we all remember the story. On the seventh day of the siege, Israel marched around the city with the Lord’s ark leading the way. They marched those circles all day in silence, and after the seventh time round, they sounded their trumpets and judgement fell on the city. The walls came crashing down and the army of Israel, the host of the Lord, swept over the city putting everyone to the sword.
So the prayers of the church in the midst of tribulation arise to the Lord and become the offering of incense on his altar, but the angel then pours his censer out on Jerusalem—the prayers of the saints mixed with the fire of God. “Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.” John’s description of the thunder and earthquake should sound familiar. This is the glory cloud that manifests the Lord’s presence. Think of the Lord descending onto Mount Sinai:
On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled…Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly. (Exodus 19:16, 18)
Now, consider that when the people made their burnt offerings on the Lord’s altar, it was he who provided the flame. They laid out the sacrifice, but the fire that consumed it would descend from heaven. To kindle any other fire in the tabernacle, what Leviticus calls “strange fire”, meant death, as Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, discovered. But the Lord’s fire was kept kindled by the priests and was used wherever flame was needed for some holy purpose. This is important here, because the Lord commanded that when the Israelites destroyed a city, it was to be burned with fire. In Deuteronomy 13:16 Moses instructs the people, “[B]urn the city and all its spoil with fire, as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God.” If a defeated city was to be made a burnt offering to the Lord, it would have been burnt with that divine fire from the altar. And just so here, but this time it’s not Jericho or some pagan Canaanite city, but Jerusalem itself, judged and cast down for her idolatry and wickedness. The Lord returns to his people, his glory cloud descending on Jerusalem, but this time in judgement to pour out the fire from his altar.
Brothers and Sisters, the saints cried out and their prayers—just as our prayers do today—they rose to the Lord’s throne. He hears. And from his altar he pours out judgement on the wicked and vindicates his own. Let me read from Psalm 18. Hear the prayer of David and pay attention to the Lord’s response. This part of Revelation follows the pattern of the psalm.
In my distress I called upon the Lord;
to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.
Then the earth reeled and rocked;
the foundations also of the mountains trembled
and quaked, because he was angry.
Smoke went up from his nostrils,
and devouring fire from his mouth;
glowing coals flamed forth from him.
He bowed the heavens and came down;
thick darkness was under his feet.
He rode on a cherub and flew;
he came swiftly on the wings of the wind.
He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him,
thick clouds dark with water.
Out of the brightness before him
hailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds.
The Lord also thundered in the heavens,
and the Most High uttered his voice,
hailstones and coals of fire.
And he sent out his arrows and scattered them;
he flashed forth lightnings and routed them.
Then the channels of the sea were seen,
and the foundations of the world were laid bare
at your rebuke, O Lord,
at the blast of the breath of your nostrils. (Psalm 18:6-15)
Now the trumpets sound and the Lord’s judgement is unleashed. The trumpets follow a pattern similar to the seals on the scroll, with the first four separated from the final three by an interlude. And these images of judgement connected with the seals and trumpets aren’t necessarily in any kind of chronological order, one following the other. They’re meant, all together, to give us a sense of just how cataclysmic the Lord’s judgement on Jerusalem is going to be. Jesus wasn’t exaggerating when he said to his disciples, “[L]et those who are in Judea flee to the mountains” and, “[T]here will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be” (Matthew 24:16, 21). The remarkable thing is that we have the historical witness of Flavius Josephus, which not only shows us that events unfolded just as Jesus and John said they would, but also that neither was exaggerating just how horrible those days would be.
If the image of the trumpets and their heralding of doom puts Israel in the place of pagan Jericho, the announcements that come with the first four trumpets put her in the place of Egypt and Babylon. Look at 8:7.
The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, and these were thrown upon the earth. And a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up.
The Lord had visited Egypt with plagues to deliver his people and now those plagues are visited on Jerusalem. Unbelieving and apostate Israel has become like Egypt, an unrepentant, hard-hearted enemy of God and his people. Josephus describes the aftermath of the Roman’s scorched earth policy:
“Pitiful was the aspect of the country, sites formerly beautified with trees and parks now reduced to an utter desert and stripped bare of timber; and no stranger who had seen the old Judaea and the entrancingly beautiful suburbs of her capital, and now beheld her present desolation could have refrained from tears or suppressed a sigh at the greatness of the change. For the war had ruined all the marks of beauty, and no one who knew it of old, coming suddenly upon it, would have recognized the place, but, though beside it, he would have looked for the city.”[2]
John goes on in verses 8-9:
The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood. A third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.
Not being as steeped in the Old Testament and its imagery as John’s hearers were, we probably find this confusing at first glance—right along with Jesus’ saying, “Even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen” (Matthew 21:21). What we need to recognise is that in biblical imagery kingdoms are often described as “mountains”. Ps 46:2, for example expresses faith in time of such trouble, “Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea.” Or consider the words of Jeremiah speaking judgment on Babylon:
Behold, I am against you, O destroying mountain,
declares the Lord,
which destroys the whole earth;
I will stretch out my hand against you,
and roll you down from the crags,
and make you a burnt mountain. (Jeremiah 51:25)
For years I found that saying of Jesus about casting a mountain into the sea confusing. Sure, with faith all things—at least so long as they’re in accord with Gods will—are possible. But why would casting a mountain into the sea be God’s will? Well, in ordinary terms it wouldn’t be. But then you read the Old Testament and you draw the connection with this announcement of judgement in Revelation and it makes sense. When Jesus said that he was still talking about the judgement to come on Israel and his words make perfect sense in light of this vision of the prayers of the saints in the midst of persecution rising to the heavenly courts, crying out for deliverance and for judgement on her persecutors. The prayers of the saints are offered to the Lord in faith, and he hears—and, most importantly, he now acts. The “mountain”, apostate Israel, is cast down. Brothers and Sisters, consider again the power of prayer. It was the Roman General Titus who defeated and destroyed Jerusalem, but ultimately Jerusalem was brought down by the saints, because they cried out in faith for deliverance and the Lord heard and acted.
So the image isn’t literal, as if Mount Zion itself were scooped out of the earth and cast into the Mediterranean or something like that. In biblical imagery the sea often represents the nations. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, torn down stone from stone, and the people scattered—forced into exile amongst the nations. But, again, the imagery is that of the plagues that fell on Egypt: the water turning to blood and the creatures living in them dying as a result. Because of unfaithfulness, Israel has become like pagan Egypt. And, importantly, the prayers of Jesus’ people were an integral part of it. How often do we think of our prayers in that light?
Now verses 10-11:
The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water, because it had been made bitter.
Now the reversal of Israel’s position before the Lord becomes even clearer. The image of the star falling from heaven comes from Isaiah’s prophecy against Babylon (Isaiah 14:12-15), but the name of the star, wormwood, takes us again back to the Exodus from Egypt. When Moses led Israel from the Red Sea into the wilderness, they came to a place called Marah, which means “bitter”. The water there was bitter and undrinkable. But the Lord showed Moses a piece of wood. When Moses threw the wood into the water, the water became sweet. Now, here, it’s all reversed. This star named wormwood, which means “bitter”, makes the sweet water bitter, leading to the death of many.
The Lord used that episode during the Exodus to make a point to his soon-to-be covenant people. He says to them in Exodus 15:26:
“If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, your healer.”
The Lord’s promise to Israel was that if she kept his commandments, he would heal them, but the flip side of that was that should they not keep his commandments, he would deal with them as he had just dealt with the Egyptians. The Lord was patient with his people. When they followed after Baal rather than the Lord, rather than rain down plagues, he gave them wormwood to drink as a reminder and a call to repentance. Jeremiah warned the people and their false prophets repeatedly, using this image of bitter wormwood. So did Amos, warning Israel, saying: “O you who turn justice to wormwood” (Amos 5:7). Consider that’s just what the leaders of Israel did in crucifying Jesus. Think of the sponge dipped in vinegar held to his lips. Justice turned to wormwood.
Now the fourth trumpet, which is as far as we’ll go today.
The fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, and a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of their light might be darkened, and a third of the day might be kept from shining, and likewise a third of the night.
Then I looked, and I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice as it flew directly overhead, “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!” (Revelation 8:12-13)
Again, this imagery is symbolic. We see this imagery of heavenly bodies going dark, being eclipsed, or falling from the sky throughout the Prophets and it’s used to depict the fall of nations and kings. Frederic Farrar in his book on the early Church sums up the fulfilment of what John sees in his vision: “[R]uler after ruler, chieftain after chieftain of the Roman Empire and the Jewish nation was assassinated and ruined. Gaius, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, all died by murder or suicide; Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Herod Agrippa, and most of the Herodian Princes, together with not a few of the leading High Priests of Jerusalem, perished in disgrace, or in exile, or by violent hands.”[3] But, again, the cataclysmic imagery here also calls back to the penultimate plague the Lord visited on Egypt: the darkening of the sun.
And then John sees an eagle overhead and as it flies, it cries out “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blast of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!” This is a transition from the first four trumpets to the final three, each of which announces a “woe” that will come upon Jerusalem, but it’s also another image drawn from the Prophets to remind us that this is all about the judgement of unbelieving Israel. Hosea 8:1 reads:
Set the trumpet to your lips!
One like an eagle[4] is over the house of the Lord,
because they have transgressed my covenant
and rebelled against my law.
Hosea’s concern was Israel’s faithlessness and idolatry. The Lord’s bride had prostituted herself to foreign gods and stood condemned. Judgement was coming. And John now here sees First Century Israel standing under the same judgement. She not only rejected the Lord’s Messiah and put him to death, but she has also rejected, persecuted, and even killed his people. As Jesus promised, she had a generation to hear the preaching of the apostles and of the early church, she had a generation to repent and to embrace Jesus the Messiah. And while many did, the nation and her leaders refused and continued to follow the same policies, the same philosophies, the same politics that Jesus had condemned forty years before. Israel had broken the covenant. The Lord was patient. But finally the sanctions of the law were visited on the a nation of covenant breakers. The kingdom was being taken from the old Israel so that it could be handed over to Jesus the Messiah and to his new Israel. The old temple, long apostate, had to be cast down so that the nations could be brought to Jesus’ new temple, his church, so that the everyone, Jew and gentile alike, would see that the promises of the covenant are fulfilled in Jesus himself.
That’s as far as we’ll go in Revelation today, but what does it all mean for us? How does something that took place in the First Century shape our faith and practice today? Brothers and Sisters, I think the most significant take-away from Chapter 8 is what it shows us of the position of the saints and their prayers before the Lord. In particular, think of what Jesus tells us to pray in light of what we read here. Jesus tells us to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven” and I can find no better illustration of what that looks like than what we see in Revelation. The Church in tribulation cries out to the Lord. She cries out as a suffering and persecuted people, pleading for the Lord’s deliverance—and notably pleading for the Lord’s judgment on her enemies. There’s an imprecatory element to the prayers of the Church in Revelation and that’s something that contemporary Christians struggle with, but those imprecatory prayers calling for judgement on the unrepentant wicked are there throughout Scripture, especially in the Psalms. But the Church doesn’t cry out in desperation alone; she cries out in faith and in hope, because she knows the faithfulness of God. This is where those imprecatory prayers calling for judgement fit in. God’s people know that even as he redeems and makes new, he also judges evil. To pray, “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven” is a call for both deliverance and judgement. The two go hand in hand. But most of all, consider how we see here our prayers rising to the throne of God. Sometimes it may feel like our prayers are bouncing off the ceiling. Sometimes we may feel unheard. But John shows us that our prayers do, indeed, ascend to God’s throne and that they are the offering made on the heavenly altar of incense. Brothers and Sisters, as we who have been united with Jesus and filled with God’s Spirit pray, our prayers cannot but be heard, for it is Jesus himself, our high priest, who brings them before his Father. So pray, Friends, “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven,” and do so in faith knowing that Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again and that he now stands in the heavenlies to present our offerings to God.
[1] The Temple (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994), 127-128.
[2] The Jewish War, vi.i.1 (Loeb Ed.)
[3] The Early Days of Christianity (New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1882), 453.
[4] LXX ἀετός
Out of the Great Tribulation Revelation 6-7 by William Klock
Tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom. These are the key themes of Revelation. John, himself living in exile for the sake of the gospel, was given seven messages for the nearby churches of Asia. Those messages rebuke and exhort, they call the churches to repent where they have failed, but most of all, through these letters, Jesus calls his church to persevere. The days were already difficult for them. They struggled to be faithful to Jesus as Christians always have, but they were also facing persecution by the Jews and the Romans and, Jesus warns, it was going to get worse. And so most of all his message to those churches was to persevere—to stand firm on the gospel in faith, to conquer—and he assured them that on the other side of his victory over these dark forces, they would be vindicated and share in his dominion.
And now John’s been swept up to the heavenly courts so that he can be privy to the counsels of the Lord. The divine plans are contained in a scroll and John, longing for the fulfilment of Jesus’ promises, wept when no one could be found worthy to open it and to set God’s plans in motion. But then, in Chapter 5, the Lion of Judah entered the court, the King who is also the lamb who gave his life for the sake of his people, he is worthy, and first the heavenly court, and then all creation thundered out his praises. He is creation’s hope and the hope of his people. He will set the world to rights. We’ll pick up with Chapter 6 and, moving fairly quickly, working through to the end of Chapter 7. John continues:
Now I watched when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say with a voice like thunder, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a white horse! And its rider had a bow, and a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering, and to conquer.
When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.
When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a black horse! And its rider had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and wine!”
When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth. (Revelation 6:1-8)
Jesus breaks the first four seals on the scroll and one of the four living creatures, each time, thunders a summons: “Come!” And four horsemen ride forth. Remember that I said last week, everything about the scroll’s description links it with the scrolls described in the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel—scrolls concerning the judgement of faithless and apostate Israel. The Day of the Lord is finally coming to Jerusalem. The first, on a white horse, rides out “conquering and to conquer”. He wields a bow and has been given a crown, which mean he represents the empire about to fall on Jerusalem like a ton of bricks. The second rider on a red horse represents the unleashing of war. The third, on a black horse and bearing a scale, announces the economic disruption and famine that accompanies war. His announcement, “a quart of wheat for a denarius,” represents something like 1000% inflation on basic and essential foodstuffs people needed to survive. An entire day’s wage for quart of grain. And with war and famine come death and hades on the fourth horse. Hades, in Greek mythology was the abode of the dead and was borrowed by Greek-speaking Jews to use in place of the Hebrew “sheol”, the grave. A time of great tribulation was about to come on Jerusalem and Judaea: strife and war, famine and disease, and death on a scale never before seen.
The imagery of the horsemen comes from Zechariah, where four similar horsemen ride out in judgement on Israel, but the nature of what they bring is straight from Jeremiah 15 and Ezekiel 5. Ezekiel writes:
A quarter of you shall be dispensed by death, and a quarter of you shall be finished off by famine in your midst, and a quarter of you, to every wind I will scatter them, and a quarter of you shall fall by the sword around you, and a dagger I will unsheathe after them. (Ezekiel 5:12 NETS)
The nation would be defeated and scattered. Ezekiel was told to eat the scroll containing all this, and it was bitter. Jeremiah asks:
Who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem,
or who will grieve for you? (Jeremiah 15:5)
But, more importantly, what John describes here is an obvious fulfilment of Jesus’ prophetic words in the Olivet Discourse recorded by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Jesus describes war, international strife, famine, pestilence, persecution, and expresses the great calamity of it all in the symbolic prophetic language of de-creation: the sun going dark, the moon turning red, the stars falling from heaven. And Jesus was clear that these weren’t events of the far future, but that he was describing the judgement that would come on apostate, unbelieving Israel within the lifetime of the generation then alive.
The Jewish historian Josephus lived through those events and vividly describes them. In his book, The Jewish War, he writes:
“It was then common to see cities filled with dead bodies, still lying unburied, and those of old men, mixed with infants, all dead, and scattered about together; women also lay amongst them…you might then see the whole province full of inexpressible calamities, while dread of still more barbarous practices which were threatened, was everywhere greater than what had been already perpetrated.”[1]
He writes, too, about the severity of the famine:
“As the famine grew worse, the frenzy of the insurgents kept pace with it, and every day both these horrors burned more fiercely. For, since nowhere was grain to be seen, men would break into houses, and if they found some they mistreated the occupants for having denied their possession of it; if they found none, they tortured them as if they had concealed it….Many secretly bartered their possessions for a single measure of wheat if they happened to be rich…Then they shut themselves up in the darkest corners of their houses; in the extremity of their hunger some even ate their grain unground….Nowhere was a table laid—the food was snatched half-cooked from the fire and torn to pieces.”[2]
Jesus goes on to open the fifth seal on the scroll and reveals those vindicated by the Lord’s judgement. Look at verses 9-11:
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.
These martyrs dwell symbolically under the altar, like the blood of the sacrifices that poured out and pooled at its foot in the temple. But who are they? That they are given white robes, whereas others we’ll see in just a bit wash their robes in the blood of the lamb, points to these being martyrs of old covenant Israel. They could not wash their robes in the blood of Jesus, but for their faithfulness they are given robes of white. These are the men and women Jesus speaks about in his denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees. Matthew records it for us this way:
Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.
These are the Jews who were persecuted and even killed at the hands of sinful, unfaithful, apostate Israel down through the ages—all the way back to Abel, murdered by his brother Cain. They have cried out through all those ages, looking for their vindication by the Lord and knowing that he is faithful to his promises. Now that vindication finally comes as judgement falls on Jerusalem.
Jesus then breaks the sixth seal. Look at verses 12-17:
When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”
This is that symbolic language of de-creation, of cosmic catastrophe used by the Old Testament prophets and by Jesus. The idea is that greater than the catastrophe of war and famine and death, is that behind it lies the Lord’s judgement—as if he’s removed his sustaining hands from creation itself and brought it all crashing down on all those who bear his wrath. This is the wrath of God and of the lamb. The specific imagery here echoes the judgement announced by Hosea, Joel, and especially Isaiah on the house of Jacob:
And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled,
and the lofty pride of men shall be brought low,
and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day…
And people shall enter the caves of the rocks
and the holes of the ground,
from before the terror of the Lord… (Isaiah 2:17, 19)
It’s important, then, that what so frightens the kings and generals, the rich and powerful, and everyone slave and free, isn’t so much judgement falling on them. They stand in awe of the catastrophe brought down on Israel by the Lord. The people who worship impotent gods of wood and stone see the one, true God not only in action, but fulfilling his promises as he judges his unfaithful people—and they stand both awed and terrified. “Who can stand before the wrath of God and of the lamb,” they ask. They stand as witness to the mighty deeds of the Lord.
And now as we get to Chapter 7, there’s an interlude. “Who can stand?” We’ve seen the catastrophe unleashed on unbelieving Israel, but what of the faithful? The martyrs of the old covenant are safe, symbolically under the altar, but what about the Church in the middle of all this. What about Jesus’ promises that those who overcome will conquer and share in his dominion? Look at 7:1-4.
After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, that no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree. Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.” And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel…
John goes on to list 12,000 from every tribe, which I’ll skip since our time is short. In Daniel, the beasts of empire arose from the sea. Something similar is about to happen again, the winds poised to unleash their violence and destruction, but another angel bearing the seal of the living God, holds them back. Ezekiel 9 describes something similar. The Lord sends executioners to destroy the people of Jerusalem, but he first commands a scribe to pass through the city and to place a mark on the foreheads of all “who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed”. With the seal the Lord marks out the faithful who belong to him so that they will be spared in the coming judgement. One old commentator puts it this way, “The purpose of the sealing was to preserve the true Israel of God as a holy seed. It was not designed to save them from tribulation, but to preserve them in the midst of the great tribulation about to come and to glorify them thereby. Though the Old Israel be cast off, a new and holy Israel is to be chosen and sealed with the Spirit of the living God.”[3]
Specifically, here, the angel seals the Jerusalem church, the Jewish believers in Jesus. The number 144,000 is symbolic, but still not necessarily far off the mark. We’re told that at this time there were tens of thousands of believers in Jerusalem. But the point of the symbolism, 12,000 from each tribe, shows an idealized Israel, now manifest in the church and organized for battle. A thousand represented a basic military division and here there’s one from each tribe. The angel seals the Jewish believers and musters them as an army—those appalled by the abominations of their nation, those prepared to stand for Jesus and the gospel.
But once again John hears one thing and sees something different. He heard the lion, but saw the lamb. Here he hears the 144,000, but in verse 9 he turns to see a multitude. He hears the number of those seals from Israel, but he turns to see a multitude from every nation, tribe, and people.
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?” I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. (Revelation 7:9-14)
Who are these people? What’s their relationship with the 144,000? Again, we go back to the prophets. Remember Daniel’s scroll? He was told to seal it up until a time of “great tribulation”, specifically, “a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time” (Daniel 12:1). Jesus uses almost exactly the same phrase to describe the coming time of great affliction. And I think this tells us what’s going on here. Daniel writes in Chapter 11 of his book, that the wise amongst the people—amongst Israel—will suffer sword, flame, captivity, and plunder, but that through this persecution they will be “refined, purified, and made white, until the time of the end” (Daniel 11:33, 35). But, Daniel says, they will “make many understand”. In 12:3 Daniel writes, “[T]hose who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”
I think this is the best explanation for what John sees here in these two groups. Consider that Israel’s calling was always to be a witness to the nations—to bring them to the Lord. And here we have the faithful remnant of Israel who follow Jesus in faith through this time of great tribulation, through this catastrophe of judgement that has fallen on the nation, and through them this great multitude is gathered from every nation, tribe, and tongue. The multitude is made up of those who have been witness to awesome and terrifying judgement unleashed by the Lord, but also his preservation of the faithful—both testimonies of his faithfulness that have brought these gentiles to faith. They aren’t martyrs. There’s too many of them, but, too, history tells us that the Christians of Jerusalem—the symbolic 144,000—heeded Jesus warning and fled the city. They survived the destruction of Jerusalem. It’s important what the elder says to John: These are the ones who have come out—or made it through—the great tribulation. In other words, these are the ones the Lord has preserved from judgement? Why? Because their robes have been washed in the blood of the lamb. They have known the faithfulness of God and the saving power of his Messiah and so they praise him: “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And the heavenly court, hearing their praises, follows with their own praises, giving glory to the God who both delivers his people and judges wickedness.
So this is the Church that John sees. But is the church in heaven or on earth? Let’s finally look at the elder’s song in verses 15-17:
“Therefore they are before the throne of God,
and serve him day and night in his temple;
and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence.
They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore;
the sun shall not strike them,
nor any scorching heat.
For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd,
and he will guide them to springs of living water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
The elder’s song draws on a passage from Ezekiel 37, which in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, uses similar language. The elder says that God will “shelter them” and through Ezekiel the Lord says, “My dwelling place (my place of shelter) shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (37:27). He goes on to say, “Then the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore” (37:28). As Ezekiel holds up Israel as the Lord’s temple and witness to the nations, so John now holds up the church—the faithful remnant of Israel plus the multi-national multitude drawn to Jesus by that remnant—John holds up the church as the new temple of God in the midst of the nations—fulfilling what has always been the mission and calling of the people of God.
Verse 16 is a quotation of Isaiah 49:10, which tells how the servant of the Lord will restore Israel and become a light to the nations. Those whom he sets free will neither hunger nor thirst, neither sun nor scorching heat will touch them, for he will guide them like a shepherd by springs of living water. And it’s worth noting that it’s John who, in his gospel, tells us that this living water is the Holy Spirit.
All that tells us that both the 144,00 and the great multitude are not in heaven, but on earth. This is the church shepherded by lamb, filled with God’s own Spirit, who have now become the Lord’s temple. This is his promise to see them through the coming time of tribulation. It’s also his promise that they will, indeed, make it through. They will be the holy nation of priest and kings that he promised to make them. Jesus assures them that tribulation—even though some would die for his sake—that tribulation is not death, but birth. The catastrophic judgement to come would establish the kingdom and Jesus shows his people not only the victory to come, but the celebration that came with that victory.
Brothers and Sisters, what John describes is in our past, but in it we see the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus and the Church. What God has promised he always accomplishes and you and I stand here in this church today as proof. We face our own time of trial as we enter a post-Christian age. But we are now Daniel’s “wise”, called to shine the light of Jesus into the darkness of the world, and trusting that by our witness the Spirit will turn many to righteousness. It’s now our turn to declare the mighty deeds of the Lord to the nations, that they might stand in awe and fear of the God who both judges and delivers, of the God who loves his enemies so much that he who is the lion become the lamb who gave himself as a sacrifice for their—for our—sins.
In a.d. 37 the Emperor Caligula erected an obelisk in the great circus in Rome. It was dedicated to the Divine Augustus and the Divine Tiberius. Standing at the centre of Nero’s circus, it stood witness to the martyrdom of many men and women who stood uncompromisingly for Jesus and paid for that testimony with their lives. That witness brought an entire empire to submission to Jesus. Today the Nero’s circus is gone, replaced by St. Peter’s, the largest church in the world. The obelisk still stands, now in St. Peter’s Square. But it has been inscribed with the words of the martyrs:
CHRISTUS VINCIT
CHRISTUS REGNAT
CHRISTUS IMPERAT
Brothers and Sisters, the Messiah conquers, the Messiah reigns, the Messiah rules over all.
Let’s pray: Almighty Father we praise you for your faithfulness, revealed first through St. John and then through your mighty deeds in history. As you promised, you brought down the wicked and you have delivered and raised up your people. You have redeemed us from sin and death, you have filled us with your Spirit, now give us grace to fulfil the calling you have given, cause our gospel light to shine brightly into the darkness of the world, drawing the nations and ever increasing this great multitude, until the knowledge of your glory fills the earth as the waters cover the sea. Through Jesus our Lord we pray. Amen.
[1] The Jewish War ii.xviii.2
[2] Ibid, v.x.2
[3] Milton Terry, Biblical Apocalyptics (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1898), 336.
To the Church in Philadelphia Revelation 3:7-13 by William Klock
Forty-five kilometres further inland from Sardis lay the city of Philadelphia. It was not nearly as ancient as the other cities addressed by Jesus in Revelation. At the time John’s courier arrived it was just a little more than two-hundred years old. The city had been established by Eumenes II, King of Pergamon, and was named for his beloved brother, Attalus II Philadelphus, with whom he shared his throne. Eumenes built the city strategically on the main route between Greece and the barbarian east. It was to be a missionary city, carrying Greek culture and civilisation to the country of Phrygia. Sardis had been a similar outpost centuries before and had been so successful in Lydia that the people there had all but forgotten their native language. But if Philadelphia was a door through which Greek culture would be spread, it failed. The obstinate Phrygians held tightly to the culture and to their language. That door was shut.
Keep that in mind as we look at Jesus’ message to the Christians in this city, beginning at Revelation 3:7:
“And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: ‘The words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens.
“ ‘I know your works. Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.
Through Philadelphia the Greeks had tried to spread their gospel to the barbarians, but those barbarians had shut the door. The gospel of the Greeks had failed. Not so the gospel of Jesus. Jesus places before these faithful brothers and sisters a door and a promise.
Jesus comes to them as the one who is holy and true, who has the key of David. He is the one who can promise that when he opens a door, no one can shut it. Throughout these letters to the churches of Asia, Jesus uses images that draw on both the identities and histories of these cities and, at the same time, on the story of Israel. That’s true here. The people of Philadelphia, knowing their own history, would think of Eumenes’ plan for their city—a doorway to the east, a mission of Greece to the barbarians. And now this little church in the middle of a wide pagan world, given the task of proclaiming the gospel. It might seem impossible, but Jesus assures them that this time he’s opened the door. This is his mission to which he’s called his church, the mission for which he’s empowered that church with his own Spirit. This door won’t be shut by the opposition. But Jesus also quotes from Isaiah’s prophecy when he says this.
In Isaiah’s day a man named Shebna served as royal steward to King Hezekiah. Scripture doesn’t spell out precisely what his failure was, but what we do know is that he was unfaithful in carrying out his duties—some kind of shady double-dealing, maybe he was a traitor. But he was a rich man and very sure of himself. He built a grand mausoleum in Jerusalem, to preserve his name forever. And through Isaiah the Lord spoke to him:
Behold, the Lord will hurl you away violently, O you strong man. He will seize firm hold on you and whirl you around and around, and throw you like a ball into a wide land. There you shall die, and there shall be your glorious chariots, you shame of your master’s house. I will thrust you from your office, and you will be pulled down from your station. (Isaiah 22:17-19)
Shebna’s days were done. He would die in a foreign land, leaving his grand tomb for others. The door was closed for Shebna. The Lord would put a faithful servant in his place. The Lord goes on:
In that day I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and I will clothe him with your robe, and will bind your sash on him, and will commit your authority to his hand. And he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. And I will fasten him like a peg in a secure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his father’s house. (Isaiah 22:20-23)
Notice the Lord’s promise to faithful Eliakim. He will give him the key of David. What he shuts will remain shut. What he opens will remain open. And, too, the Lord’s promise is that he will be firmly established in this position, not of his own accord, but by the Lord.
So Eliakim becomes an Old Testament pointer to Jesus. He holds the keys of David. What he shuts remains shut. What he opens remains open. Why? For a lot of reasons, but here Jesus come to the Christians in Philadelphia as the one who his holy and true. In other words, he is the one who has been set apart—he is the Messiah, the King, the Lord—and he is the one who is true. The sense of “true” here is that he will fulfil his word, that he will do what he promises. I’ve said that Revelation is about tribulation, about perseverance, and about kingdom. Clearly the Philadelphian Christians already knew that Jesus is faithful to his promises, but in light of the difficult situation in which they lived, he comes to them anyway as the one who is ultimately faithful. It’s as much a promise to them as it is an exhortation and praise for their faith in him.
Jesus says to them in verse 8:
“ ‘I know your works. Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.
Jesus knows their works. That was bad news for the church in Sardis. They were proud of themselves. They were doing all the right things. Their church was alive—or at least it was to all outward appearances. But Jesus said to them, “I know your works,” which meant, “I see what you do, but I know your hearts and your hearts aren’t in the right place. You look alive, but the reality is that you’re dead.” Again, we don’t know the specifics. Jesus’ doesn’t condemn them for idolatry or sexual immorality as he does some of the other churches. They weren’t doing anything overtly wrong, but at the same, because their motives were wrong, everything they did was wrong. Brothers and Sisters, I said last week that Jesus has to be our motive for everything. His cross stands behind driving us forward full of love and thankfulness for his mercy and grace. And his kingdom stands before us, drawing us forward in hope and in joy. Jesus is our centre. Jesus is our reason. Jesus is our motive. For everything. That wasn’t the case in Sardis, but it was in Philadelphia.
Jesus says four things about the church in Philadelphia. First, again, he knows their works. They’ve done well. They’ve been faithful. Second, he acknowledges that what they have done, they’ve done despite having little power. Third, they’ve kept the Lord’s word. And finally, they have not denied Jesus’ name. They’ve faced opposition, persecution, and tribulation and despite having little power—consider that this church was probably no bigger than ours and likely smaller, despite being social outcasts for the sake of the gospel, despite perhaps many of their number being slaves—they’ve accomplished something. We don’t know what, but Jesus uses the same language he does of Sardis. They were known for their works, even though those works were dead. It sounds as though the Philadelphians have accomplished something comparable, but they have done so in weakness—and they’ve managed this through their faithfulness of Jesus. Think of Paul’s words to the Corinthians:
For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:10)
Or the Lord’s word to Zerubbabel through the prophet Zechariah:
Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts. (Zechariah 4:6)
Brothers and Sisters, the work of the church is not about numbers, it’s not about money, it’s not about cultural or political clout. We don’t accomplish our gospel calling through pragmatic, worldly, or human means. The faithful church accomplishes its calling by God’s Spirit and by faithfulness to Jesus and Jesus alone. It’s very easy to forget. It’s easy to think we can’t accomplish anything without money or lots of people or cultural and political clout. And when we forget, these other things inevitable become our concerns and Jesus is no longer our centre, no longer our reason for being and our motivation for doing.
This is important for the church—any church—to remember in difficult times. Persecution puts pressure on the church and, as we’ve seen through these two chapters, it often leads to compromise. We take what looks like the easy way out rather than trusting Jesus and staying faithful to him. The church patting itself on the back for a long list of works isn’t really alive if those works aren’t centred in Jesus and faithfulness to him. Brothers and Sisters, don’t trust in appearances. Don’t take the easy way. The wide and easy way leads to destruction. If the Scriptures teach us anything, it’s that God is faithful to his promises—that Jesus is the one who is true, who does what he says and will accomplish God’s purposes for both his church and for the entirety of his creation. We are fools to disregard his promises.
The main source of persecution in Philadelphia seems to have been the Jews. Both Sardis and Philadelphia had large Jewish communities. It wasn’t just an issue of there being a big synagogue across the street from the church and causing trouble. The Jews were part of a large community with ties into social and trade circles. It’s more than likely that, as in other cities, they shut out Christians from the life of the city and were more than happy to rat them to the Roman authorities when the opportunity arose. Jesus addresses them in verse 9:
Behold, I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not, but lie—behold, I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will learn that I have loved you.
Jesus’ words here about the Jews are harsher and take things further than in his letter to the church in Smyrna. Who was and was not a true Jew was topic of great controversy in the First Century. The Pharisees condemned everyone who didn’t keep the law as they did. The Essenes—the community that preserved the Dead Sea scrolls—took an even more extreme view of things. They were the only true Jews and they left and built their own little community in the desert to preserve themselves from defilement. Jesus makes it clear here that those who are truly of Israel are those who have aligned themselves and who have trusted in Jesus the Messiah. Anyone who claims to follow the Jewish scriptures, but denies that Jesus is the Messiah—well—that person has completely missed the point of the Jewish scriptures. Anyone who claims to be a Jew, but denies that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus says quite bluntly is a liar. A synagogue that denies Jesus and persecutes his people isn’t a synagogue at all. It’s a synagogue of Satan.
And where the Christians in Smyrna were facing similar persecution at the hands of the Jews and Jesus urges them to stand firm as it intensifies for a short while, he assures the Christians in Philadelphia that in short order he will be compelling those same people to bow at their feet as they acknowledge that Jesus loves his church—that Jesus will bring these Jews to acknowledge that it is Jesus’ people who are the true heirs of the covenant and of Israel’s promises. The very Jews who had persecuted them will, in the near future, be bowing before them—not in the sense of worship, but in awe of what God has done for them and maybe even with a measure of remorse.
Those words of Jesus, “I have loved you,” are loaded with meaning. They speak of God’s election of his covenant people quoting the Lord’s words through Malachi: “I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau.” In other words, the Lord had chosen Jacob and his family to be his people, not Esau and the Edomites. This was core to Jewish identity, but that promise is now inherited by the church, by those who are in Jesus the Messiah.
Jesus’ words here are also an ironic reference to the Lord’s promise through Isaiah, where God makes a promise to his covenant people who were being persecuted by pagan nations.
The sons of those who afflicted you
shall come bending low to you,
and all who despised you
shall bow down at your feet;
they shall call you the City of the Lord,
the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.
Jesus classes apostate Israel with the pagans who once persecuted her. She has been pruned from covenant tree while those who trust in Jesus the Messiah, whether Jew or Gentile, have been grafted in. But I can’t help but wonder if what we see here in these Jews bowing before the Christians of Philadelphia is another ironic play, this time on Zechariah 8:23.
In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’”
And here we see the apostate Jews, now more like the nations in their rejection of the Messiah, coming to the Church as they see that in Jesus, the Lord is with them.
Jesus promises further:
Because you have kept my word about patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell on the earth. I am coming soon. Hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your crown.
Because these brothers and sisters have been faithful to Jesus’ call to perseverance, he promises to keep them from the “hour of trial that is coming on the whole world”. Jesus isn’t saying that he’s going to rapture these folks out of the world before things get bad—which is what a lot of popular modern theology teaches. No, he’s looking forward to a time of trial soon to come—soon from their perspective. Apostate Israel is soon to be judged, destroyed, and exiled. Rome will be thrown into tumult and an evil emperor who thinks of himself as a god will lash out at the Church with the help of the Jews. The devil, through his Jewish and Roman minions, will do his worst to destroy Jesus’ people—and they will be tempted to give up, to compromise, to deny their Lord. And so Jesus gives them a promise that he, himself, will see them through this time. He will be with them. He will strengthen them. And they will persevere and come through this short hour of trial into a reign of a thousand years, wearing crowns, and sharing in the kingdom rule of Jesus. Jude gives a similar a promise:
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.
Tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom. Brothers and Sisters, we cannot do it on our own. Jesus is the one who will keep us from stumbling, who will present us blameless to the Father, and in whose dominion we have been promised and given a share.
Jesus finishes with another promise to the one who conquers. Look at verses 12-13:
The one who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God. Never shall he go out of it, and I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’
Jesus’ promise here draws again on images familiar from both the history of Israel and the history of the city. The temple in Jerusalem was fronted by two pillars, one named “He shall establish” and the other “In him is strength”. That temple stood condemned and in a few years it would be destroyed. By his death and resurrection and the sending of the Spirit, Jesus has established a new temple—this one not built of stones, but of his people indwelt by God’s Spirit. And here, as they face persecution he promises to those who conquer that they will stand firm in this new temple like those pillars in Jerusalem. The names are key. They remind us that the church stands firm not on our own strength. Jesus is our strength and he shall establish us—he and he alone. Once again Jesus promises a name to his people who overcome, meaning that we have a share in him, in his life, and in his dominion.
I said this imagery draws on the history of Philadelphia as much as it does the history of Israel. Hearing these words the Christians there would have been thinking about the reality that their city was built in the middle of a volcanic plain. Earthquakes were common and a massive on had destroyed their city just fifty years earlier. The great temples of the city had fallen. And so Jesus promises them something better. This new temple of which they are a part will stand firm. When he says that he will make them pillars in the temple and inscribe his name on them, I think they’d have been thinking of a common practise in many Greek cities like theirs. Having done many years of faithful service to the gods, priests and sometimes civic leaders, would be honoured with a pillar in a temple, inscribed with their names. And as Jesus speaks of giving them the name of the new Jerusalem, come down from heaven, I suspect they may have been thinking about their own history. When the earthquake destroyed Philadelphia, the Emperor Tiberius, had waived their taxes and even contributed funds for the rebuilding of the city. To honour him the city renamed itself Neocaesarea. The name didn’t take and not long after, Neocaesarea was once again Philadelphia. A couple of years later I think these brothers and sisters would be remembering this promise as the city fathers once again renamed the city, calling it “Flavia”, to honour the Emperor Vespasian (“Flavius” was his family name). This name wouldn’t take either. Fickle names to honour earthly kings and their false claims at divinity. In comparison Jesus’ promise stands out all the more, “I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven.”
Brothers and Sisters, tribulation, like an earthquake, exposes the shaky and worthless foundations of earthy kings, earthly gods, and every other earthly source of security. But it also exposes both the faithfulness of the people of God and reveals his faithfulness to us. The letter to Sardis we read last week reminded us that everything we do must be about Jesus, his cross behind us and his kingdom before us. But this letter to the Philadelphians assures us that if we do keep Jesus at the centre, we can be sure of his faithfulness to us—to his church. It is he who has called and chosen us, it is he who has given us our calling to go into the world to baptise and to make disciples, and it is he who has given us Gods’ own Spirit that we might be his temple that stands forever and his people who accomplish his purposes. He has opened the door that no one can shut. Stand firm in Jesus, Brothers and Sisters, remembering that in him the faithfulness of God is revealed. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, keep your household the Church continually in your true religion; that those who lean only on the hope of your heavenly grace may always be defended by your mighty power, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
To the Church in Thyatira Revelation 2:18-29 by William Klock
Revelation is about tribulation, about kingdom, and about perseverance. Jesus calls us to single-minded commitment, but that kind of commitment often puts his people at odds with the world and the temptation is to compromise. Brothers and Sisters, we can’t persevere in faith if we’re compromising.
I was thinking this week of a man who came by the church years ago. Jack and I were sitting upstairs in my study when he came in. He started the conversation by handing me a crack pipe and bottle full of crack and then asking me to get rid of them for him. He was down from a lumber camp on the north end of the Island and had been on a bender the night before. He wanted a place to sleep it off. He stuck around all day, sleeping and talking. He told me he was a Christians—or, he said, at least he was supposed to be one. But he’d been working for years in the logging camps and they were full of drugs and porn. He knew it was just a matter of walking away, but the money was good. But he’d woken up that morning and knew he had to get out. He was headed back to his wife in Nanaimo and was already lining up a job that would keep him at home, even though the money wasn’t as good. He said he just couldn’t be a Christian and live and work in that kind of environment. He was out. He didn’t want to compromise anymore. I’ve heard similar stories over the years, whether from the logging camps up-Island or the oilfields in northeastern BC and Alberta.
Aometimes it’s more than just negative influences. Some jobs just aren’t possible for faithful Christians to perform. There was a man in our church in Portland who came to me shortly after he started attending and said, “Father Bill, I need to ask you not to publish my name on anything to do with the church. I used to work as high-level drug distributor for the Mafia. I quit when I became a Christian, but there are people who want me dead. I just want to let you know that if they ever connected me with this church, they wouldn’t have any qualms about barging into a service and dragging me out to kill me.” (When I was ordained I never expected a conversation like that!) But it’s not just illegal jobs. Another friend from our church in Portland managed the mortgage division of First Interstate Bank. When he became a Christian and began reading the Bible he was convicted. It wasn’t just that he was daily helping people get into debt up to their eyeballs—something that doesn’t square with the Bible—but he also knew that the whole fractional reserve banking system was little more than legal fraud. As a Christian he couldn’t be part of it anymore. He quit. And he eventually wrote a book applying the Bible’s teaching on debt and money to help people steer clear of and get out of debt.
In many ways these sorts of situations are present-day manifestations of a problem faced by Christians in Thyatira, the fourth city that Jesus addresses in Revelation. It wasn’t by any means a unique problem to the people in that city, but it does seem that the pressure there was greater than it may have been in other places.
So Thyatira. Some people think that the order in which John addresses these seven churches follows on old postal or courier route. We started at Ephesus and moved up the coast to the north, passing through Smyrna to Pergamum. From there we now travel inland about 50 kilometres to Thyatira in the region of Lydia and on the Lycus River plain. It was not nearly so grand and glorious a city as the three to which John has already written. By all accounts, Thyatira was known for its trade guilds and, especially, for the production of copper and bronze—which probably has something to do with how Jesus addresses himself to this church. In order to work in a trade, you had to belong to the appropriate guild. The problem was that there were religious aspects to membership in these guilds. Pagan religion permeated everything in Greece and Rome and that meant that guild meetings and membership were usually tied to the cults of the gods who oversaw and prospered their work and business. Meetings were often held in temples. And this brings us back to the two specific problems we’ve seen in the last two churches: eating meat offered to idols and sexual immorality. If you worked in a craft or trade and you were a Christian, you were faced with a choice: either you were faithful to Jesus and refused to compromise or you lost your livelihood and might not be able to feed your family. History records that many of the early Christians were poor. We read in the book of Acts about they ways they shared with and cared for each other. This is why.
The major local deity of Thyatira was Apollo Tyrimnaeus, said to be a son of Zeus and patron of the local bronze trade. Coins from Thyatira show Tyrinmaeus on one side and the Roman emperor—as far as the Romans were concerned, the “son of god”—on the other. With all this in mind the imagery Jesus uses in addressing the Christians there is fitting. Look at Revelation 2:18:
“And to the angel of the church in Thyatira write: ‘The words of the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze.
Jesus exhorts the church at Thyatira be reminding them that he, not Caesar, is the son of God. And while the pagans might think that Apollo Tyrimnaeus is the one who shines like the son—Apollo was a solar deity—and oversaw the bronze trade, Jesus is the one with feet of bronze and eyes “like a flame of fire”. Jesus knew that his people in Thyatira were being challenged by the pagans and so as he comes to this struggling church he issues his own challenge to the pagans and to their gods and kings.
Jesus begins by affirming his people for what they’ve done right. Look at verse 19:
“ ‘I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works exceed the first.
He’s seen their love, their faith, their service, and their patient endurance. A better translation of the last part of the verse would be something like, “Your deeds more recently are greater than they were at first” or “Your works have been more impressive lately than they once were.” This church has been in the crucible of pagan opposition and instead of the pressure causing them to back off their good works, it’s actually inspired them to do better. Their love has grown. Jesus uses the word agapé, the sort of humble love that puts others first. Their faith has been stretched and has grown in the process. And their service—Jesus uses the work diakonía. That’s where we get our work “deacon”. They not only love each other, but they serve each other, they care deeply for each other in practical ways. This is good.
But it’s not all good. Jesus goes on:
But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality.
The problem in Thyatira is the opposite of the problem in Ephesus. In Ephesus they’d been faithful in holding the line against false doctrine and sinful practise, but they’d lost their love, they’d lost their agape. In Thyatira, the people had great love for each other, but the elders—with the support of many of the church members it seems—were tolerating false teaching and sinful practises. Jesus rebuked the church in Pergamum for tolerating the teaching of the Nicolaitans and compared that teaching to that Old Testament villain, Balaam. He couldn’t curse the Israelites so that they would lose in battle to the Moabite king, so he instead encouraged the king to send out the women of Moab to entice the Israelite men into idolatry and sexual immorality. Here Jesus highlights the awfulness of this sin by comparing its teachers to another Old Testament villain: Jezebel. Do you remember her? Jezebel’s story is told in 1 Kings 16-22. She was the wife of King Ahab. He was a bad guy and probably would have been a bad king without her—he made the foolish choice to marry a Phoenician, a pagan—but Jezebel’s influence only compounded his wickedness. The writer of Kings says that he did more to provoke the anger of the Lord than all the kings who were before him (1 Kings 16:33). Jezebel led the covenant people into idolatry. 2 Kings 9:22 describes the actions of the people under Jezebel’s influence as “whorings” and “sorceries”. The word for “whorings” is one that’s always used metaphorically for idolatry. It’s rooted in the idea that Israel was the Lord’s bride. He’d rescued her from Egypt, he’d provided a good home for her, he’d loved her tenderly, but rather than worship him, she prostituted herself to foreign gods. At its root, idolatry is unfaithfulness to the Lord. But in Israel it wasn’t an outright rejection of the Lord. The people tried to have it both ways. They’d worship in the temple, they’d pray to the Lord, but they’d also go out to the “high places” and worship and pray at the altars of the pagan gods too. In Judah the worship of the Lord continued in the temple, but pagan altars were erected in the temple precincts and the priests and people would worship both the Lord and those foreign gods. But in the end, that’s not true worship of the Lord, it’s not true love of the Lord. Just as you can’t claim to love your wife while you cavort with prostitutes, you can’t claim love of the Lord, while practising idolatry or engaging wilfully in sin.
But that’s just what was going on in Thyatira. It wasn’t the whole church as we’ll see in a bit, but a significant number of the people there were comprising with paganism. It was always a temptation in the pagan world. Rome pressured its citizens to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor as a show of patriotism. Pagan religious practises were integrated into just about every aspect of life in the Greco-Roman world, so there was constant pressure to compromise. Reading between the lines in Thyatira, it seems that it was the trade guilds that put pressure on people. If you wanted to keep your job, so to speak, you had to take part in this or that ritual, whether a feast to some god or even ritual sex.
What was the justification here? It’s hard to say, but even if it’s not what these folks would have admitted, the root cause was almost undoubtedly the pressure to conform in order to get by in a pagan world. But, of course, hardly anyone ever gives that as the reason for their compromise. They always come up with something that sounds spiritual—even mature. Jesus says that this woman claims to be a prophet. This is often the cover of people who introduce error into the Church. They claim the status of prophet or apostle, they claim to be speaking the words of God himself. That’s always a bad sign. At the time Revelation was written, God was still in the process of delivering his word through the Apostles and Evangelists. And so the Lord gave legitimate prophets to his church. But we have his word in full today. And that word is sufficient. It is our authority. And in my nearly fifty years I have yet to ever hear someone preface their words with, “I am a prophet” and not go on to say something at odds with the authoritative word of God. Again, in John’s day there were real prophets, but there were plenty of false ones too. They needed to be particularly cautious about anyone claiming to speak the word of the Lord. They needed to weigh their words against the scriptures. And the Thyatirans weren’t doing that. Back then they had their own version of today’s justifications to compromise. If there’s only one true God, then whatever path you take will get you to him. It’s okay to dabble with sin, just don’t cross the line. You’ve got to get down and dirty with sinners if you’re going to evangelise them. Better to compromise and live, than to be a hard-liner and die.
I think, however, that we get a big hint in that Jesus notes their love for each other. Love for each other in the Church is good. It’s necessary. If we don’t love each other, we’re not being the Church. Remember how Jesus rebuked the Ephesians for their lack of love even though they’d held tenaciously to the truth of the faith. But our love for each other often becomes the justification for tolerating heresy and sin—and I daresay that this is the single most common justification in today’s church. Love and unity are stressed above everything else. But, Brothers and Sisters, when this happens, love ceases to be love. It’s like people who refuse to discipline their children in the name of love, but the reality is that if we really do love our children, we do discipline them—just as the Lord disciplines us, just as he disciplines his church. Jesus rebukes his church here in Revelation because he loves his bride with all his heart and he desires her purity. And if that’s what love looks like to Jesus, it ought to look that way to us, his people, too. Love does not tolerate those who lead the sheep astray. David Chilton writes:
“Orthodox, Biblical Christianity is intolerant. A church that tolerates evil and false doctrine is a church under judgment; God will not long tolerate her. This is not to say that Christians should be intolerant of each other’s mistakes, idiosyncrasies, and differences over nonessentials. But when it comes to clear violations of Biblical law and orthodox doctrine, the government of the church is required by Scripture to put a stop to it before it destroys the church.”[1]
Now, all that said, the Lord is also patient. Jesus says that he has given this “Jezebel” time to repent. We see his love in this as well. But she has continued to impose on that love and has continued in her immorality and her corruption of his bride and so he goes on in verses 22-25:
Behold, I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her works, and I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am he who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you according to your works. But to the rest of you in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call the deep things of Satan, to you I say, I do not lay on you any other burden. Only hold fast what you have until I come.
This false prophetess was encouraging idolatrous sexual immorality. People were, metaphorically speaking, getting into bed with her—or maybe they were literally—but whatever the case, Jesus is saying: “Her bed is a sickbed and if this is the direction you insist on going, if you don’t repent, I will come in judgement and you will die along with her! Your elders may tolerate this kind of heresy and sin in my bride, but I do not and I will make sure that everyone knows that I’m paying attention and that I will purify my bride.” Brothers and Sisters, God is the judge. Revelation is about his coming in judgement on unbelieving Israel, it’s about his coming in judgement on the pagan world of the Greeks and Romans, but it’s also about him coming in judgement on his church where it has forsaken him. He always puts his own house, his own children in order, before coming in judgement to others.
To everyone else in the church in Thyatira who hasn’t fallen prey to this false teaching, Jesus gives a message to persevere. Remember Revelation is first and foremost about three things: tribulation, kingdom, and perseverance. These brothers and sisters have demonstrated their love for each other, their faith is strong, and they’ve committed themselves to serve one another—and their theology is orthodox. Jesus lays nothing more on them. They’re doing what he expects of his Church. They’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. They’ve held the line, even as the elders in the church have failed to do so. And so Jesus exhorts them: Hold fast until I come. Jesus knows the trials they face, but in faith they know that he is with them and they’re standing firm. And so he reminds them: I’m coming. I will judge the faithless. I will take care of Jezebel and everyone who has assisted her in her wicked agenda and everyone who remains unrepentant in following her. I will purify my church.
And Jesus says further to the faithful:
The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron, as when earthen pots are broken in pieces, even as I myself have received authority from my Father. And I will give him the morning star. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’
Jesus speaks all these things with authority and he quotes from Psalm 2. This is one of what’re called the “royal psalms”. In Psalm 2 the Messiah is given authority to rule the nations. Here’s what verses 8 and 9 say:
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”
Jesus bears this authority, but now he exhorts the faithful in Thyatira saying that they will share in this royal authority with him. The kingdom has been inaugurated and one day Jesus will bring it in all its fullness—and that will happen through the ministry of a faithful church proclaiming the lordship of Jesus to the ends of the earth and bringing his dominion to bear on the world. Today God’s people face persecution. Psalm 2 opens with the question:
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed… (Psalm 2:1-2)
The gods and kings shake their fists at the Lord, they make plans against his anointed—as they did against Jesus—and against his people. And yet the Psalmist gives us a glimpse into the heavenly throne room and writes:
He who sits in the heavens laughs. (Psalm 2:4)
Their plans are pathetic. They will not succeed. The forces of evil did their worst on Good Friday. They even killed the son of God. And he rose victorious three days later. Even death itself, the greatest enemy of humanity is powerless before Jesus—and it has no more hold over his people than it does him.
And that leads us to the last bit here in verse 28. Jesus says he will give to the conquerors the morning star. In Chapter 22, Jesus himself is identified as the morning star and, I think, what he’s getting at here is a promise of his presence with his people. He will share his authority with them—with us—but he shares with us, too, his very identity. The morning star, literally, is the planet Venus—one of the brightest objects in the sky just before dawn breaks, and in that it’s symbolic both of Jesus and of the vocation of his people and, especially, those persevering in the face of tribulation and in the midst of others who are compromising the faith. Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has set us apart as a people to witness his kingdom to the world. As St. Paul wrote to the Romans:
The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. (Romans 13:12)
The Church is the sign to the world of the breaking kingdom dawn—of God’s new world in which love, faith, service will be defining characteristics, where idolatry and immorality will be gone forever, and where the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea—through the glorious reign of Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, stand firm and persevere in faith for Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities; and in all our dangers and necessities stretch out your right hand to help and defend us, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
[1] The Days of Vengeance (Ft. Worth: Dominion Press, 1987), 113.
To the Church in Pergamum Revelation 2:12-17 by William Klock
John’s vision recorded in Revelation begins with a vision of Jesus himself. He appears as both Daniel’s son of man and ancient of days. He’s clothed as the high priest. His word appears as a two-edged sword. As we saw last month, the vision is packed full of imagery from the Old Testament. Jesus announced that he was the first and the last, the one who died and rose again, the one who holds the keys of death and hades. And he urges John to write, to exhort the churches of Asia as they face the difficult times to come. Jesus holds them in his hand. They’re like the lampstand in the temple and as the high priest, he will tend them to ensure their flame does not go out.
And in the seven letters that follow, sent to all the churches, but each in turn addressed to a specific church, Jesus exhorts and, in most cases, rebukes them. He sustains them, but to survive the coming time of trial, they also need to pursue faithfulness to him, to pursue holiness, to hold to his word with single-minded devotion. To each church he begins by reminding them of a bit of that awesome vision of himself. To the Ephesians he comes as the one who holds the stars in his hand and who walks amongst the lampstands. To the Smyrnaeans he is the first and last, the one who died and rose again. And to each church he gives a promise. In 2:7 he exhorts them saying, “To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” In verse 11 he says, “The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.” Each is tuned to the unique situation of the church being addressed, but each speaks also to the other churches—and to us.
This morning we’ll continue with verses 12-17 of Chapter 2. These are Jesus’ words to the church in Pergamum, a city some 70 kilometres up the coast and north of Smyrna. Jesus says:
“And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write: ‘The words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword.” (Revelation 2:12)
Do you remember the three things I’ve said Revelation is about? It’s about tribulation, it’s about kingdom, and it’s about perseverance. Jesus’ people live in the midst of tribulation and it’s only going to get worse for them, and so Jesus addresses them first by reminding them who he is, again drawing on the imagery we saw in Chapter 1. Think on how he came to the Smyrnaeans in the last passage we looked at. He exhorted them in the end that the second death will not hurt the one who conquers. And he can only say that because, as he came to the people of that church, he is the one who died and was raised to life. He is the conqueror of death and so his people need not fear death. Things are hard, but Jesus exhorts his people to persevere. But he doesn’t just give them platitudes. He reminds them that he is with them. The kingdom is now. The kingdom is here. As his church, they are his kingdom and their king is with them. They’re not walking through territory that is unknown to their Lord. Jesus has travelled this path before them and he stands with them now.
This is what he’s getting at now when he reminds them he is the one who bears the “sharp two-edged sword”. This takes us back to 1:16: “from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword”. Jesus’ word isn’t just any word, because Jesus himself is God’s word incarnate. His word is the truth that brings life. But his word also comes with both authority and judgement. We’ll see this as we work through the passage and as we learn a little bit about Pergamum.
To compare things to our world, if Ephesus was the Toronto or Montréal of the Roman province of Asia, Pergamum would have been Ottawa. It was sort of the administrative capital of the Romans in Asia. And while the imperial cult was big in both Ephesus and Smyrna, Pergamum boasted the oldest temple in the province devoted to the divine Caesar. Pergamum was a seaport and, towering above the port was the acropolis—a 400 metre high mountain topped by a great temple dedicated to Zeus. If you were approaching the city from the south, it’s said that the acropolis had the appearance of an enormous throne towering above it. Of course, Pergamum was known for its worship of other gods too. Asklepios, the god of healing, was extremely important to the city.
The church in Pergamum would struggle for centuries. Pergamum was a place of deeply entrenched paganism, and while the land and cities around it gradually submitted to Jesus as Lord, the people of Pergamum did not. The people of the city worshiped Zeus as “Saviour”. They had a library of great renown. Parchment was invented there and, through Latin and French, “Pergamum” is where our word “parchment” comes from. They had the famous healing work of the priests of Asklepios who bore long lists of their god’s miracles. And over-arching all of that was the rule of Caesar, the divine saviour and peacemaker of the empire. So the pagans of Pergamum had a whole system to care for body, mind, and soul. They were proud of it. In fact, even as the Roman emperors themselves came to faith in Jesus, it would be through Pergamum that the devil would strike, one last attempt to halt the conversion of the empire to Jesus. You may have heard of Julian the Apostate. He reigned as emperor from 361 to 363. About fifty years after Constantine began the process of bringing the empire to Christ. A dynasty of Christian emperors followed him. But the devil got hold of Julian and, it seems, he did so in large part through the paganism of Pergamum. Julian’s person physician was from the city and a devotee of Asklepios. It was the Neoplatonism of this teacher that pushed Julian into apostasy and, as emperor, he did his best to restore the empire to paganism. Thankfully his reign was a very short one. Pergamum was a very dark place and would continue to be for many years to come. If there was ever a place where the church needed an exhortation to persevere in the face of tribulation, it was Pergamum.
Now let’s look at the heart of Jesus word to them, beginning at verse 13:
“ ‘I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you hold fast my name, and you did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my faithful witness, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells. But I have a few things against you: you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality. So also you have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Therefore repent. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.’ (Revelation 12:13-17)
Jesus knows their situation. The Satan has his throne in Pergamum. It’s not easy to say exactly what that means. The Satan is a title, literally “the accuser”. In Revelation 20:2 John refers to him as “the ancient serpent”. And that may be one clue. The symbol of the god Asklepios was a serpent. But, too, there was that great acropolis, which towered over the city like a giant throne with its temple of Zeus on top. Zeus was another false saviour. And, too, Pergamum was Rome’s administrative capital in the East and a major centre of the imperial cult. But I think it’s worth noting that John never identifies Rome with the devil. What John understood was that the devil had captured the heart of Rome and was using the empire to accomplish his own purposes and, especially to attack the Church.
At the same time, we saw in the last letter, the one to Smyrna, that Jesus associated the Satan with the synagogue of the unbelieving Jews there—the Jews who, themselves, had an exemption from worshiping the emperor, but who were only too happy to rat out the Christians in the city when they refused to worship the emperor as lord. I think the key point here is that the Satan was working to attack and undermine the church of Jesus, whether that was through the influence of false gods with rival claims to be saviour and healer, the imperial cult that pressured everyone to acknowledge Caesar as divine, or unbelieving Jews collaborating with the Roman authorities to arrest and even execute Christians. In some places the opposition was worse than others, but in Pergamum all of these things were happening at once and it was easy for the Christians there to lose hope. It was as if the Satan was up there on the acropolis looking down, spotting Christians, and sending his Roman or Greek or Jewish minions after them.
It was a truly difficult situation, but Jesus exhorts them. “Yet you hold fast my name, and you did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my faithful witness, who was killed among you.” Despite all the pressure they have held fast to Jesus, they have not denied his name and they have not denied their faith in him. The Romans insisted they offer a pinch of incense to Caesar, the world’s lord, and they refused. Jesus is the true Lord. The Greek’s laughed at them for worshipping Jesus instead of Zeus or for calling the elders of the church to pray for the sick instead of taking them to the temple of Asklepios. But, again, the Christians knew—and were absolutely sure—that Jesus is Saviour. The Jews threatened to rat them out to the Romans, but again, they stood firm in their faith in Jesus. And these weren’t idle threats. They stood firm even as their brother, Antipas, was martyred for this faith in Jesus.
We don’t know anything about Antipas other than what’s written here. It seems fitting that his name means “against all”. Everything in Pergamum was against him and so he stood against everything in Pergamum, holding fast to his faith in Jesus. He became a true witness. And the other Christians in the church there, instead of giving up the faith after seeing Antipas killed, had only grown in faith because of his witness. Jesus praises his people for all of this.
But. There’s a big but. Jesus says he’s got two things against them. First, there are some in the church who hold to what Jesus calls the “teaching of Balaam” and, second, that there are some who hold to the “teaching of the Nicolaitans”.
Jesus mentioned this second group, the Nicolaitans, before in his letter to the Ephesians: “You hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate”. Who were the Nicolaitans? No one’s really sure. The Second Century Church Fathers wrote about a heretical gnostic sect called the Nicolaitans, but it’s not clear that John is talking about the same people. Most commentators think that the two groups mentioned here are the same—and that the followers of “Jezebel” in the next letter to Thyatira are all one and the same. The first group follows the teaching of Balaam and the second the teaching of Nikolaus. It seems like there’s some wordplay going on here, because Balaam, in Hebrew, means “conqueror or destroyer of the people” and Nikolaus means the same thing in Greek. The leader of this movement was almost certainly someone named Nikolaus, and here he’s connected with Balaam, the Moabite prophet we read about in Numbers. Let’s go back to that.
It was during the Exodus. The Israelites were on their way from Egypt to the promised land. Balak, the King of Moab, saw them and was afraid. He summoned the elders of Moab and Midian for a conference. They decided that there were far too many Israelites to risk battle, so they decided to first send the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites. If Israel were cursed, then the Moabite army might defeat them. But the Lord would not let Balaam curse Israel. And so, instead, Balaam encouraged King Balak to put a stumbling block before Israel (cf. Numbers 31:16), and in Numbers 25 we read that Israel “began to whore with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to Baal of Peor. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel.”
As Balak put a stumbling block before the people of Israel and enticed them into apostasy through sexual immorality and meat offered to idols, just so the Satan, through this false teacher Nikolaus and his false apostles and prophets, has placed a stumbling block before the Christians of Pergamum—one that involved the idolatry of the pagan city.
In Acts 15 we read that the apostles met together to address the issue of Gentile believers. Up to that point, almost everyone in the Church was Jewish and what to do with the torah wasn’t a big issue. But when Gentiles began coming to Jesus it raised the question of how the law related to them. Did they first need to become Jews through circumcision? Did they have to obey the torah? And the apostles concluded that, no, they didn’t. Here’s what they said:
For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. (Acts 15:28-29)
Why these things specifically? Well, sexual immorality and meat offerings to idols were a common and integral part of pagan life. Ritual prostitution was a regular part of pagan religious life and so many animals were sacrificed to the pagan gods that their temples were the de facto restaurants and butcher shops pretty much everywhere. It also wasn’t a big step for many former pagans to go from eating that meat at home to eating it in the temples where it was sacrificed and then getting dragged back into the often debauched ceremonies and rituals of those temples. So contrary to the Spirit-inspired teaching of the apostles, the Nicolaitans—whose apostles and prophets the local church was permitting—were undermining the apostles and saying that these things were actually okay.
Nothing here tells us why these false teachers were permitted in the church in Pergamum. Maybe no one knew quite what to do with them. Maybe no one wanted to take responsibility. Maybe they liked what they were hearing. They were holding firm and not denying the name of Jesus in the face of the pagans around them, but doing that would probably have been a lot easier if they weren’t turning down the invitations to feast in the temples. People might think it was weird that you worshiped a crucified Jew, but if you still took part in the fertility rites at the temple like everyone else, well, whatever—this Christianity stuff apparently wasn’t as subversive or as counter-cultural as they’d heard.
Brothers and Sisters, compromise and immorality are tempting. The people around us tody think of Christians, at best, as judgemental killjoys, and at worst, as haters and bigots. And they do that because they know what the Bible and Jesus and Christianity stand for and, just like the pagans of Pergamum, they don’t like it. Our faith challenges their gods, their sins, their selfishness. Or at least it should. But tt’s easy to cave to the pressure. Sometimes we’re tempted to partake of the world’s corruption so that we can avoid its anger and hatred. Everyone else at work is cheating and the pressure is on, so we cheat too lest everyone be angry with us or mock us for being goody-two-shoes. Like I said last time, the world has bowed to sexual immorality and Postmodern, Marxist theories of identity and sexuality and if you don’t go along with it you’re labelled a hater or a bigot, so we go along to make life easier. And, increasingly in Evangelical circles, it’s justified in the name of “witness”. We compromise whatever it is about the faith that brings the hatred and scorn of the world—as if we can somehow be nicer and more gracious than Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, we can’t. That path leads only to compromise and apostasy.
But it’s often not the pressure to conform to avoid opposition. It’s often just that sin is fun and when everyone’s doing it, we think we might as well join in and we find ways to justify it. Everybody’s watching those smutty shows on TV, so why shouldn’t I? All the other kids are having sex, so why shouldn’t I? Everybody else has made a god of their job or their politics or their RRSP, so why shouldn’t I? Everyone else has bought into the selfish, commercialistic, materialistic ethos of the age, so why shouldn’t I? And pretty soon you’ve got a church that names the name of Jesus, but in practise is nothing like the church. Whether that’s the churches catering to felt needs and our self-centred culture by preaching pop-psychology and putting on rock concerts instead of worship services or the Anglican and Episcopal churches from which many of us came that still look very churchy and traditional in terms of worship, but have embraced sexual immorality and all the other ideological idols of our day. They confidently name the name of Jesus, but there is no obedience to him, there is no call to holiness, there is no call to sacrifice. Brothers and Sisters, it means little to stand firm on the name of Jesus if we are not also going to stand firm on his gospel—if we are not going to repent, turning aside from every false god and every false way, and not only naming his name, but following in his way.
And Jesus makes it clear here that he means business. In verse 16 Jesus says, “Repent! If you don’t, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth.” The Angel of the Lord met Balaam with a sword and Jesus will meet these folks with a sword too—the false prophets and apostles, but also the leaders of the church who permit their influence. This isn’t about the “second coming”. This is about an imminent judgment that was about to take place in history. It’s a judgement that has come on church after church after church for the last two thousand years whenever false teachers are indulged by their people and leaders. Jesus is jealous of his church and he will come in judgement with his word to purify it where it persists in heresy and immorality despite his calls to repent.
But, Jesus goes on, “To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.” Throughout the New Testament the Church is compared to Israel in the wilderness. It’s hostile country with little food and enemies all around, but Jesus promises to those who “conquer”—to those who stand firm in faith, not just in word, but also in deed—he will give the hidden manna. He will care for us, he will feed us as he cared for and fed his people in the wilderness as he led them from Egypt to the promised land. Whatever we need to persevere, he will provide and first and foremost that is himself. He is the one whom John calls the bread of heaven. Remember that he is the one who walks in the midst of the lampstands like the high priest in the temple, keeping them filled with oil and trimming the wicks that their flame never go out. Jesus has created his church, he has filled it with his own Spirit, and he will sustain it no matter how bad things get. Our duty is to trust him and to walk in obedience.
Jesus says, too, that to those who conqueror he will give a white stone with a new name written on it. This one’s difficult. There are several different interpretations and I don’t know that we can be certain of any of them, but the most likely meaning seems to be rooted in an ancient custom of guests to a feast being given a stone with their name on it as a kind of ticket to get in. The kingdom is often portrayed as a feast at the end of the age, a feast where God comforts and feeds his people in his presence. And Jesus is the one who brings us into the feast, into the presence of the Father. He has died for the sins of his people and his risen to life as conqueror of sin and death. If we will hold fast to him in faith as he exhorts us to do here, he will give us his name usher us into the presence of his Father, into that great feast, into the very life of God. He says he will give us a new name. Through Isaiah the Lord made this promise:
The nations shall see your righteousness,
and all the kings your glory,
and you shall be called by a new name
that the mouth of the Lord will give. (Isaiah 62:2)
We who were not a people, will through Jesus, become the children of God. We who were God’s enemies, through Jesus, will become is beloved sons and daughters. We who belonged to the satan and were in bondage to sin and death, will be set free and ushered into the life of God bearing the name of Jesus himself. I think this explains the bit about no one knowing the name. The point isn’t that the name is secret. This is a Hebrew idiom and the idea is that the name is known in the sense of owning it. The Nicolaitans claimed the name of Jesus, they called themselves Christians, but as so many have done down through the ages and as so many do today, they never truly owned it. The name of “Christian” belongs only to those who overcome. They and they alone, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, have a share in the feast.
So, Brothers and Sisters, come this morning. The Lord invites you to his Table. Here, as we eat the bread and drink the wine, we recall the sacrifice of Jesus for us, we recall his resurrection, and we participate, ourselves, in those events by which Jesus has formed a new people for himself. Know again the depth of love, the depth of grace, the depth of mercy that God has shown for sinners in Jesus, and in return be exhorted to commit to him not just in name, but in deed—in life and every part of it. Bear the name of Jesus faithfully and boldly no matter the cost. For Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Lord, in the Collect we asked you: govern all things both in heaven and on earth: “Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace.” Grant us your peace Lord, even as we walk in the midst of tribulation. Remind us that your kingdom is here and that Jesus sustains us and walks with us. Grant us your peace that we might stand firm in our faith in your promises, that we might stand firm in Jesus without compromise, that we might be faithful in bearing his name and being his witnesses. Through him we pray. Amen.
To the Church in Smyrna Revelation 2:8-11 by William Klock St. John’s second letter sees us travelling up the road, about fifty kilometres north of Ephesus to the city of Smyrna. Ephesus may have been the chief city of the Roman province of Asia, but Smyrna was more ancient and a close competitor. It was a beautiful port city that the Greek geographer Strabo dubbed “the glory of Asia”. On the waterfront, at the bottom of Golden Street, the main thoroughfare, was the Tempe of Cybele. If you were a tourist and made your way up the street through the city, you’d pass other grand temples dedicated to Apollo, Askelpios, and Aphrodite. And at the end of the street, where it met the foothills, was the great Temple of Zeus. The Christians of Smyrna lived surrounded by the glory of the gods of Greece.
But those weren’t the only temples in Smyrna. The city fathers of Smyrna prided themselves on being forward-thinking and wisely pragmatic. Theirs had been the first of the cities of Asia Minor to align itself with Rome. In 197 B.C they appealed to the Senate for aid against Antiochus III and two years later, proving their loyalty, built the first temple in that part of the world to the goddess Roma. Through the Roman civil wars, they’d always managed to choose the side of the victor. Smyrna knew which way the wind was blowing. For their loyalty, the emperors granted Smyrna the status of “free city” and the construction of an imperial temple—and two more to follow in the years after the time period of Revelation. The citizens of Smyrna were loyal Romans. And that posed a problem for the Christians there as well.
Look now at our text, it’s just a short four verses beginning a 2:8. Jesus says:
“And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: ‘The words of the first and the last, who died and came to life.
As I’ve said before, Revelation is about tribulation, kingdom, and perseverance. Jesus’ people live in the midst of tribulation and it’s only going to get worse for them, and so Jesus addresses them first by reminding them who he is. As he speaks to each of these seven churches, Jesus calls to mind the image that John gave of him in Chapter 1. For the Ephesians he reminded them that he is the one who holds the seven stars in his hand and who walks in the midst of the lampstands. He sustains his church. For the Smyrneans he reminds them that he is the one who is first and last, the one who died and came to life. In each case, Jesus is urging his people to persevere in the midst of tribulation and he doesn’t just say, “I know it’s hard, but just do it.” He reminds them that he is with them. The kingdom is now. The kingdom is here. As his church, they are his kingdom and their king is with them. They’re not walking through territory that is unknown to their Lord. Jesus has travelled this path before them and he stands with them now.
That’s what he’s getting at in reminding them that he is the first and the last. He is the Lord of history. It was by Jesus—the word—that God created all things in the beginning and it is by him that God is now making all things new. And he is the one who was crucified and rose from the grave. Not only is that how he inaugurated his kingdom, not only is it how he broke the chains of death and sin and is making all things new, it’s an apt exhortation in light of what the Christians in Smyrna are facing. They are united with Jesus—yes, in his suffering, but that also means they are united with him in his resurrection and have no reason to fear death. As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54).
Now look at Jesus’ message itself, verses 9-11:
“‘I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich) and the slander of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.’
The first thing we should note is that Jesus has nothing bad to say about the people of this church. We can gather from the other letters that had there been a serious problem in Smyrna, Jesus would have mentioned it. These brothers and sisters were faithful. And that’s just what’s getting them into trouble. Jesus tells them that he’s fully aware of their tribulation and their poverty—although he quickly adds that despite their poverty, they are in reality rich. This is in contrast to the Laodiceans who are materially rich, but whom Jesus condemns for being poor in faith. It’s because of their faithfulness that the Smyrnean Christians are facing opposition. The immediate cause of the problem, he says, is that they’ve been slandered by “those who say that they are Jews and are not”. He goes so far as to call them a “synagogue of satan”.
What does that mean? Given what we know of the historical situation in Smyrna, it’s not too hard to piece together. At this point in time, the Romans weren’t really the immediate problem. Until about the time of the Emperor Nero—during whose reign John wrote to these churches—Christians enjoyed a certain amount of freedom. Everyone in the empire was required to offer at least nominal worship to the emperor, but the Jews had made such a fuss over this and caused the Romans so many problems, that they’d been granted an exemption. They agreed to pray for and to offer sacrifices for the emperor and that allowed them to live in a somewhat uneasy tension with Rome. And for some decades Christians were seen as a Jewish sect and enjoyed the same privilege. But during Nero’s reign that began to change. The empire didn’t approve of new religions and the Jews about that time not only started distancing themselves from Christians, but were only too happy to insist that Christians weren’t Jews and to point them out to the Roman authorities.
Why would Jews do this? Some Jews were angry that many of their brethren along with Gentile god-fearers were becoming Christians. As far as they were concerned, Jesus was most decidedly not the Messiah. He was a criminal who had been crucified and anyone claiming he was the Messiah was a blaspheming heretic. They were also angered at the Christian approach to the law. And the idea that unclean Gentiles could become Jews apart from total obedience to the law, well, that just had them fuming. Think of Paul telling his story to Agrippa in Acts 26:
“I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And I did so in Jerusalem. I not only locked up many of the saints in prison after receiving authority from the chief priests, but when they were put to death I cast my vote against them. And I punished them often in all the synagogues and tried to make them blaspheme, and in raging fury against them I persecuted them even to foreign cities.” (Acts 26:9-11)
Jesus words to the Smyrneans about Jewish slander leading to Roman imprisonment fits with what we know from the historical record. Repeatedly in Acts we see unbelieving Jews working with the Romans and other Gentiles to persecute Christians. Paul refers to this in 1 Thessalonians and we read about it in Tertullian and in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, who was Bishop of Smyrna and martyred about ninety years later.
Remember that people like Paul, when they became Christians, wouldn’t have thought of themselves as having converted to a new religion. They were Jews and they continued to be Jews. It was simply that in fulfilling God’s promises, Jesus had created a new and better way of being Jewish. So the Jews would go to the Romans to report Christians and would argue that these Christians, contrary to their claims, weren’t actually Jews and their claims to be so were disturbing the status quo. Worse, they’d argue, these Christians were only use Judaism as a cover for their refusal to recognise the divinity and lordship of Caesar. And, particularly in a place like Smyrna, that sort of accusation could be disastrous, because the Smyrneans were zealous patriots of Rome and loyal worshippers of Caesar.
In Smyrna the imperial cult permeated everything. Everyone, rich and poor, was required by law to offer sacrifices to the emperor. In Smyrna, the city fathers thought this so important, that they actually provided the citizenry with money from the treasury to purchase their offerings, just so no one would have an excuse not to. And so to have any real part in public life, in government, in trade, in a guild, in various social circles you had to take part in the imperial cult and from the time that John wrote it only got worse for Christians. The empire demanded its citizens proclaim the lordship of Caesar, but for the Christians that was impossible. Jesus is Lord. They knew it and they could not betray him. And that faith was the basis for their perseverance in the truth.
This is just how it went down for Polycarp, one of the most famous martyrs of the early Church. At one particular festival, a Christian name Germanicus was thrown to wild animals in the arena and told to renounce Jesus. He refused and was killed, but seeing his faith only made the crowd angrier. They called for Polycarp, the bishop, to be brought next. He was seized and brought to the arena. He fearlessly confessed that he was a Christian and he was given the choice: Worship the divine Caesar or die. The Jews of Smyrna shouted, “This is the teacher of Asia, the father of the Christians, and the overthrower of our gods, he who had been teaching many not to sacrifice or to worship the gods.”
Polycarp would not renounce his Lord and was sentenced to death. The account reports that despite being the Sabbath, the Jews were foremost in gathering wood for the fire to burn the bishop. And as the fire was laid, Polycarp said, “It is well. I fear not the fire that burns for a season, and after a while is quenched. Why do you delay? Come, do your will.” And as he was consumed by the flames he prayed, “I thank thee that thou has graciously thought me worthy of this day and of this hour, that I may receive a portion in the number of the martyrs, in the cup of thy Christ.”
The mob that martyred Polycarp echoed the Good Friday mob that shouted to Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar! Crucify him!” Is it any wonder then that Jesus would appeal to his own death and resurrection as the root of faith and source of perseverance for these Christians? They were truly to share in the same suffering that he did, and so he reminded them: I am the one who died and came to life. And in the same way that the unbelief of those Jews who cried out for Jesus’ crucifixion exposed them as false Jews by their rejection of the Messiah, so these Jews in Smyrna exposed themselves as false in rejecting the Messiah’s people. That’s where the “synagogue of satan” part comes from. And in accusing Jesus’ people falsely, these unbelieving Jews show who they really belong to. It’s much like Jesus statement in John 8:
If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. (John 8:42-44)
The Church is the true synagogue—the kingdom of God and the temple in which his Spirit dwells—and because of that Jesus’ people need have no fear of tribulation. Jesus urges his people to persevere even as they are thrown into prison. That didn’t quite mean the same thing then as it does now. Prison itself wasn’t a punishment. Prison was where you were held pending trial or execution, which usually came swiftly. The devil would see them thrown in prison. For many of them, release from prison would mean execution.
“For ten days you will have tribulation,” Jesus says. That’s not so much a literal statement about how long this time of persecution will last. It’s a reference to the first chapter of Daniel. Daniel and his three friends were tested for ten days as they went without eating the king’s food. The point of the test was to see if they would come out the other side as healthy as the young men who at the king’s choice food. The temptation was to compromise with pagan gods by eating from the king’s table, eating meat that had been offered to idols. To eat at the king’s table was also a symbolic act of loyalty—and remember that the king claimed to be divine. These young Jewish men just couldn’t do that. What Jesus is saying is that this time of tribulation will test his people’s loyalty to him in the same way that Daniel and his friends were tested. But it’s not just a warning; it’s also an exhortation. They will come out the other side of this time of testing vindicated, even though it may mean their deaths—because they have already been united with Jesus in his resurrection. “Be faithful unto death,” Jesus tells them, “and I will give you a crown of life….the one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.” The “second death” is a rabbinic expression. John uses it again in Chapter 20. And if you look at the Targums, the rabbinic commentary on the Old Testament, it means exclusion from the resurrection. As St. Paul wrote in First Corinthians, Jesus it the firstfruits of the resurrection of the dead. Where he has gone, his people will surely follow if they are steadfast in faith. He has triumphed and holds the keys of death and hades. There will be tribulation, but we must persevere, following where Jesus leads and knowing that we face nothing that he has not faced himself.
Now, what does this mean for us? There is a general application here for Christians everywhere. No matter how good times are for Christians, we will always face some kind of opposition. The empire and the Caesars that once persecuted and murdered the saints would, several hundred years later be conquered by the gospel and Caesar himself would bow his knee to Jesus. That part of the world over which Caesar had claimed his pagan lordship would gradually be transformed by the gospel into “Christendom”. And yet even then, there were pockets and times of resistance. Jesus reminds Christians everywhere in all times of the need to stand firm in faith. We are his kingdom and we not only must persevere, but we have every reason to do so. And it is by our perseverance, even to death, that our proclamation of the kingdom is validated—that it becomes credible in the eyes of the world and spreads.
But, Brothers and Sisters, “Christendom” is no more. In our post-Christian world we face ever-increasing resistance and opposition. And whereas a few decades ago—I think of growing up during the Cold War—we tended to think of opposition in terms of Communism and an authoritarian government shutting churches and kicking in doors to search our houses for Bibles and march us off to prison, things have gone in quite a different direction—a direction I think even more troubling, in part because it’s far more subtle and insidious.
The Smyrnean Christians faced ostracism, imprisonment, and sometimes martyrdom because they refused to offer that pinch of incense to Caesar. In our day the pressure comes from a post-modern culture in which objective truth has been forsaken and replaced with whatever a person feels to be true. We have become our own gods, creating our own realities and truths. Nevermind that those truths are, in reality, false. And along with that—in combination with it—we’ve made everything about the therapeutic and about the self. The worst thing that can happen to a person is suffering. And this worldview is everywhere and permeates everything. If you struggle with same-sex attraction, you don’t fight it; you embrace it. Anyone who tells you otherwise be damned, because not embracing it brings suffering, shame, and oppression. A man can claim to be a woman because who’s to say he isn’t—not biology, not genetics, not reality. Science is no longer the basis for truth, feelings are—and if you say otherwise, you’re labelled a bigot and oppressor. In one of the latest applications of Critical Theory, a doctor who tells an overweight patient that his diabetes or heart disease is because he’s overweight becomes an “oppressor”. If science makes us feel bad, well it’s wrong—it’s labelled “oppressive”. Once we allow our feelings to define our truth, there’s no limit to how absurd the claims become. And we not only make our truths; we put ourselves at the centre of them. Our relationships are increasingly centre on self rather than others. Fix a relationship? Sacrifice for a relationship? No way. If someone is difficult or unpleasant—nevermind that we might be at least part of the reason for that—you cut them off and cut them out. As they say, “You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life.” No, you’ve got to take care of yourself. In fact, we’ve now got a term for this obsession with self, “self care,” and it’s fast becoming as idolatrous a cult as anything the pagan Greeks and Romans did.
But all of this isn’t just “out there”. The western Church has increasingly embraced what’s been dubbed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—the general belief that God wants nothing more for us than to be happy and good—however you define good. How we “do” church, how we worship, everything about the church is increasingly becoming centred on the self. Worship has been turned into an experience to be judged by how good it makes me feel. Biblical sermons have been replaced by pop-psychology and self-help. Commercialism increasingly dominates how we do things. We stop asking if what we do will please God and instead ask how it will increase our marketshare. And without any deep biblical and theological anchors, Christians are increasingly compromising the good—and truth and everything else—because it’s easiest just to go with the cultural flow. The Church is leaving people utterly unprepared for the cultural tide that’s now breaking over us. Rod Dreher wrote last year, ““Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.” If you have a chance, find a copy of his book, Live Not by Lies, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it.
And there’s a flood of Christians now capitulating to the culture, offering their pinch of incense to the gods of post-modernism. It’s become so common we now have a term for it: Deconstruction. And it grieves me to see friends and colleagues going through this process, sliding down this slippery slope that inevitably ends in apostasy. Once orthodox Christians face the pressure and the conflict between Church and culture and they begin to “deconstruct” their faith, pulling it apart piece by piece and then rebuilding it after reconsidering the pieces. It’s so often presented as a faithful, mature, intellectual and spiritual exercise, but it’s telling that in the end the result is the same very time. You end up retaining whatever bits of Christianity you can without being in conflict with the culture, and whatever is at odds, whatever causes conflict is cast aside. It’s always the same bits discarded. The uniqueness of Jesus? Gone. A biblical sexual ethic? Gone. The reliability and authority of Scripture? That’s gone too. Justice? Oh, they held on to that, they say. But the version of justice they’ve got after deconstruction is no longer the biblical understanding of justice; it’s a post-modern concept of justice that has far more to do with Marxist ideology than it does the Bible. At least as often as not, you’ll find that the person who has gone through this process has a close family member, often a child, who has “come out” as “gay” or “trans”. That’s a difficult situation to be in. If you stand firm in faith, there’s going to be conflict. But after deconstruction the conflict is gone. You can once again be at peace with yourself and with the world—and most importantly, no one out there can call you a hater or a bigot or whatever the insult of the month is.
I’ve seen it happen over and over again. I’ve watched friends slide down this slope. I’ve watched pastoral colleagues slide down this slope. I’ve watched churches that slide down this slope—listening to one acquaintance locally whose last few sermons have been full of apologies for the sexist and patriarchal language of the Bible. Brothers and Sisters, if you find yourself apologising for the Spirit-inspired words of Scripture, stop. Now. Something’s gone wrong. But this is the problem. Our culture values niceness and the therapeutic. The worst thing you could do in Smyrna was to be disloyal to Caesar. In our culture it’s to make someone feel bad—even if they should. Shame, which until now we’ve always understood to be a positive in that it discourages us from doing things we know we shouldn’t, well, now shame is a dirty word. And almost as bad as making someone else feel bad is to feel bad ourselves—to be in conflict with the mainstream, to be called out as a hater. Oddly enough, in the incoherence of post-modernism, the one time it is okay—and not just okay, but necessary—to shame someone is when they aren’t on-board with the spirit of the age.
And Brothers and Sisters, if you think it’s hard to be called a hater or a bigot or intolerant, consider how difficult it is for our children. Especially if they’ve live in the environment of government schooling, they’ve been immersed in this culture to an extent you and I may struggle to grasp. This is why we need to be diligent and faithful in teaching them the faith, in discipling them, in ensuring they know what’s true and what’s false, and making sure they are not overcome by our therapeutic and self-centred culture. We need to recover a deep sense of the sinfulness of sin and of the holiness of God. We need to grasp the deepness of the love and grace and mercy of God and to recover a sense of the costliness of the sacrifice that Jesus made to show us that love and grace and mercy. And we need to know that if we are going to identify ourselves with Jesus, it means that we will walk with him in his suffering—in conflict with the gods and kings of this age—but that we do so in faith and in hope—even in joy—knowing that in doing so we are carrying his kingdom to the world and knowing that our kingdom hope is for life and for a world set to rights—truly set to rights by God’s standards, which are far higher than those of our culture. It’s not just about perseverance in the face of tribulation. We persevere—we will only persevere—because we know the deep truth of the kingdom: Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: O Lord, come among us, we pray, with your power and strengthen us with your great might; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness we are grievously hindered in running the race that is set before us, your bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, to whom with you and the Holy Spirit, be honour and glory, now and for ever. Amen.
To the Church in Ephesus Revelation 2:1-7 by William Klock
The first church to which John is instructed to write is the church in Ephesus. John’s attention must have been captured when he heard Jesus say that name. According to tradition, John was for many years the bishop of the church in Ephesus.
If you were to travel to Ephesus today you’d find only a ruin—an impressive ruin, but nevertheless, just a ruin. In John’s day it was already an ancient city and the most important in the province of Asia. It was a hub of trade, culture, and politics situated on an important harbour. Ephesus now sits about six kilometres inland. Deforestation and agricultural activities led to the silting up of the harbour. The harbour was dredged repeatedly in ancient times. But there was no stopping the inevitable and as the seaport declined, Ephesus shrank into a small village and, by the Fifteenth Century, ceased to exist entirely.
But in the First Century, Ephesus was a bustling city with as many as a quarter million people—one of the largest cities in the world and the largest in Asia. From the busy port, Harbour Street made its way through the city, ending at an impressive theatre. Along the way a traveller would pass the public library, the gymnasium, bathhouses, the market, and the public brothel. But Ephesus’ real claim to fame was its Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the world. The local form of Artemis was a fertility goddess and protectress of the city. Her statue was kept decorated with symbols of fertility and on her head she wore a mural crown, representing her guardianship of the city walls. We don’t know much about the specifics of her cult in Ephesus, but it’s safe to assume it involved all the usual perversions associated with fertility cults in the ancient world. Ephesus was a city of art and science and commerce, but it was also a city of idolatry and witchcraft and perversion—all done in the open. Christianity has had such a sanctifying influence on Western Civilisation that even knowing the perversions of our own decadent, post-Christian era, it’s very difficult for us to really understand what life was like in the pagan world of the Greeks and Romans. But there, in the midst of that idolatry and perversion, holding high the light of Jesus in the surrounding darkness, was a church.
And Jesus speaks to the Christians in Ephesus. Look at Revelation 2:1.
“To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: ‘The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands.
We don’t know how large the church in Ephesus was at this time, but however large it may have been, these people were a tiny minority living in a morass of paganism. Even without overt persecution, in standing for Jesus, they stood in opposition to everything around them. And so Jesus reminds them from the outset: “I’m the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand and I’m the one who walks in the midst of the lampstands.” We saw this imagery in last Sunday’s passage from Chapter 1. The lampstands represent these seven churches and the stars their “angels”. There are differing ideas on what exactly is meant by “angels”, possibly heavenly beings with some kind of oversight of the churches, but more likely they’re the presbyters or bishops of these churches. And Jesus begins by reminding them that he holds them in his hands. He sustains the “angels” and, like the high priest tending the lampstand in the tabernacle, he stands in the midst of the churches and tends to them that their light not go out. It’s an image of reassurance. These brothers and sisters have been called to be light in the darkness and Jesus reminds them that they do not do so alone and that they do not do so on their own power. He sustains them.
Do you remember what I said last Sunday? Revelation is about three things. It’s about tribulation and it’s about kingdom and it’s about perseverance. On account of the testimony of Jesus, on account of the good news that he is Lord, the Church will face tribulation. The gods and kings of this present age will oppose the Lordship of Jesus and the spread of his kingdom. But Revelation also assures the Church that the kingdom is now. By his death, resurrection, and ascension Jesus has inaugurated his kingdom and he will reign until he has put every enemy under his feet, which means his people can face tribulation with faith and hope. That also means that Jesus expects his people to persevere. We do not walk an easy path, but we know where we’re headed and he assures us that he walks the path with us. Jesus’ words remind us of the Lord’s promise to Israel in Leviticus 26:11-12:
I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people.
He who has died to make us his own will not abandon us to the darkness. He who has called us make disciples of the nations will surely prosper our work.
Now, having reminded them that he is the one who sustains them, Jesus moves on to the heart of his message for the Ephesians. Look at verses 2-7.
“‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.’
Jesus gives them great praise coupled with a serious rebuke. On the positive side, he praises these saints for toil and their patient endurance. If we look at the Greek words that Jesus uses we get a deeper sense of what he’s getting at. The toil he’s talking about is the sort of toil that wears one to the bone, the sort of blood-sweat-and-tears toil that leaves you ready to drop to the ground when it’s over. We don’t know the specific details of their situation, but to follow Jesus has truly cost the Ephesians and Jesus knows it. Second, they’ve not only toiled long and hard, but they’ve patiently endured. This isn’t a hide-until-it’s-over kind of patience. This is a stand-your-ground-and-defend-the-walls-until-the-reinforcements-arrive kind of endurance. This is the endurance of people who fight an awful battle, confident of the outcome. Christ has died. Christ is risen. And because of both of those truths, they knew that Christ will come again and they lived and fought and ministered and preached accordingly.
Jesus does mention two specific things that have been part of the Ephesians’ battle. First, in verse 2 he praises them because they “cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false”. Second, in verse 6, Jesus praises them saying, “you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” The sense we get here and elsewhere in Scripture is that the Ephesians were people who took both doctrine and practise very seriously. It’s worth noting that in his letter to them, Paul didn’t have to take them to task over these sorts of matters. Paul warned them in Acts 20:
Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears.
The Ephesians took Paul’s warning and exhortation to them seriously and stayed on the alert. About forty years after John wrote Revelation, Ignatius wrote to them, praising them for their zeal for gospel truth:
“Truth is the rule of life for all of you, and heresy has no foothold among you. The fact is, you have nothing more to learn from anyone, since you listen to Jesus Christ who speaks truthfully…. I have heard of certain persons from elsewhere passing through, whose doctrine was bad. These you did not permit to sow their seed among you; you stopped your ears, so as not to receive the seed sown by them…[You are] Christ-bearers and bearers of holiness, with the commandments of Jesus Christ for festal attire.” (Ephesians 6:2, 9:1, 2)
False apostles showed up in Ephesus and the church, weighing their teaching against what they had been taught, turned them out and refused to listen. Specifically, at the time of writing, they’ve been resisting the teachings of the Nicolaitans. We don’t know a lot about this group. Irenaeus says they were followers of Nicolas of Antioch, one of the first seven deacons, but one who went wrong. This false teaching comes up three times in these letters to the churches. In verse 14, as Jesus speaks to the church in Pergamum, he refers to a group called the “Balaamites”, whose teachings were the same. Jesus warns the church at Pergamum that these people, like Balaam in the Old Testament, enticed God’s people to eat food sacrificed to idols and to engage in sexual immorality. Both of those things are noteworthy, because they were part of the short list of things gentile Christians must avoid that the apostles drew up at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15.
Jesus refers to this heresy a third time in the letter to Thyatira, where he rebukes them for tolerating “Jezebel”, a false prophetess enticing the people into sexual immorality and to eat food offered to idols. So this heresy was making the rounds of the Asian churches in one form or another and, to their credit, the Ephesians have rejected it entirely. In contrast, the church at Pergamum has tolerated this heresy amongst some of her members and, worse, the Thyatirans have allowed at least one prominent proponent of this heresy into some sort of leadership or prophetic teaching position.
So this is all wonderful. These brothers and sisters know the gospel and the scriptures and they’re well-taught in the faith. Not only that, they have been faithful in discipline and giving no quarter to false teachers, false doctrines, or sinful practises. They not only know the wolves when they see them, but they’ve faithfully fought them off. But, not everything is wonderful. Jesus says to them, “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.”
In her zeal for gospel truth in a battle with heretics and false prophets, the Christians at Ephesus had lost their love. From our perspective it may seem that some of the other seven churches are guilty of greater failures—tolerating a false prophet who promotes sexual immorality, for example—but only two of the churches are actually threatened with destruction for their failings and Ephesus is one of them. “But we’ve kept the gospel pure, Jesus! We’ve cast out the idolaters and the sexually immoral, Jesus! We’ve preserved orthodoxy, Jesus!” And Jesus responds, “I hate the works and false teaching of the Nicolaitans just as you do and I appreciate your zeal, but where is your love? Without love you are nothing.”
Think of the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian Christians:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:1-7)
And Paul finishes a few verses later, writing:
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)
There’s the key. Even if we’ve got everything else right, if we lack love, we fail to be the Church. But what exactly does Jesus mean when he says they’ve abandoned the love they had at first? If you read the commentaries, some will say that it’s simply love of Jesus. They’re so focused on doctrine, that they’ve forgotten Jesus. Others say that their battles with false teachers and apostles have left them inwardly focused and that they’ve lost the love that had once motivated them to engage in mission, proclaiming the gospel, and caring for people both inside and outside the church. Others say that the battle for orthodoxy has left them cold, angry, bitter, and suspicious towards others.
Brothers and Sisters, from my personal experience living through the “Anglican realignment”, I can’t see any reason why Jesus mightn’t have all these failures to love in mind. I have observed that as we hunker down doing battle with apostates, those fights can consume all we’ve got to the neglect of other critical aspects of ministry. And, when the fight’s over, it can be terribly difficult to stop fighting. Many in the Anglican Church and the Episcopal Church fought valiantly for the gospel against men and women who held it in contempt and had abandoned the faith. They fought a life and death ecclesiastical struggle. And that battle is largely over, a new orthodox province has been established, but some just can’t stop fighting. And after fighting for so long, it’s often easy to forget that the smaller battles we now face within our own church are not with the enemy, but with brothers and sisters who love Jesus and are trying to be faithful to Scripture. They may be wrong on some issues. And some of those issues are gravely serious: “Three Streams” theology, women’s ordination, Critical Theory, language relating to sexual identity. But these are brothers and sisters, not the enemy. We need to be zealous for gospel truth, but we also need to be equally zealous to love.
We need to pray for wisdom and discernment to know where to draw the lines between friend and enemy and to know how to love in each case—because we are called to love our enemies. It’s not easy. I struggle with this myself. I hate going to meetings of the local ministerial because they leave me so discouraged. There are mainline churches that have forsaken the gospel and that, much as the Nicolaitans, are fine with sexual immorality. There are churches that have mixed the prosperity heresy with the gospel. More recently Marxist social theories that are antithetical to the gospel are being promoted. There are churches that promote false prophets and teachers—not too many years ago we even had a pastor making bogus claims to be an apostle. And, Brothers and Sisters, it discourages me and it makes me angry. And I sit there thinking that I’m doing Jesus a disservice being there and pretending that I share the same faith with some of these people—because in some cases I really don’t. And I ask, what do truth and love demand of me here? How, in my desire to preserve and even fight for gospel truth, do I love the folks who call themselves Christians, but have forsaken the faith. How do I love the folks whom I know are brothers in Christ, but with whom I have serious disagreements and grave concerns? I don’t always know. I tend to err on the side of love and then I’m frustrated, because I know that I’ve sacrificed truth.
It’s not easy, but it’s vital that we be both zealous for truth and love. If the love is lacking, it becomes a cancer that will destroy the church from the inside out. A zeal for truth coupled with a lack of love, I’ve observed, first makes us a very unattractive community, and second, it kills our mission. We circle the wagons and start shooting at everyone on the outside—and sometimes on the inside, too—and forget that many out there need our gospel ministry. Jesus warns the Ephesians, “I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.” Honestly, I’m not sure that such a church actually needs Jesus to come and remove its lampstand. When we forsake love, we kind of kick over the lampstand ourselves—or like Israel in Jesus’ parable, we hide it under a bushel.
St. John, I think, had it figured out. Consider that on the one hand, John was known as a “son of thunder”. Peter was the “rock”—the apostle who was solid and unmoving. John—and his brother, James—preached the good news about Jesus with power like thunder. He took it seriously and he wasn’t afraid to speak and act on the truth. There’s a story that has come down through history about John’s time in Ephesus. John entered a local bathhouse only to be informed that the heretic, Cerinthus, was already inside taking a bath. John ran outside, forgoing his bath, lest he share even a public space with a false teacher.
At the same time, this same John is sometimes called the “apostle of love”. This is the man who wrote to the churches:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:7-8)
A second story that has come down to us from John’s time in Ephesus is that as he approached old age, he distilled all of his preaching into a one-sentence sermon that he would frequently repeat, “Little children, love one another.” John, I think, had an equal zeal for both gospel truth and gospel love. I don’t want to say he found the “balance”, because I don’t think it’s a matter of balance. Balance means you end up compromising, giving up some measure of the truth in the name of the love, for example. What we really need is to learn how to be equally zealous for both, compromising neither.
“Hear what the Spirit says to the churches,” Jesus says. “To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” I think the Ephesians thought they had conquered. They’d fought the good fight against false teaching—and were continuing to fight it—and by all accounts they were winning. But their vision of obedience to Jesus, their vision of what the Christian life entails had become too narrow. They’d won the battle on one front, but were losing it badly on another—and weren’t even aware of it. Love is just as important as truth.
But to those who do hold the course in faithfulness to Jesus, he promises the tree of life, paradise restored, the life of the age to come lived in the presence of God.
Brothers and Sisters, the good news is that the Christians in Ephesus did take Jesus’ warning here to heart. Again, we have that passage from Ignatius’ letter to them from some forty years later in which he praises them. They continued to be zealous for the truth, but he also notes that they are a holy people who wear the commandments of Jesus as their festal attire. Ephesus remained the centre of Christianity in that part of Asia for many centuries. Ephesus hosted the Third Ecumenical Council. The church in Ephesus only ceased to exist, hundreds of years later, because the city itself ceased to exist as its harbour silted up. But I think it’s worth something that while the name “Ephesus” disappeared from the map, the name “Ayasuluk” replaced it in Turkish. The name comes from the Greek Hagios Theologos, the name of the great basilica built in Ephesus and named after St. John, whom they called “Theologian”. Not even the name of the city survived the march of the ages, but the name of the church in Ephesus lives on.
So Brothers and Sisters, persevere, firm in the knowledge that Jesus holds us in his hands as we walk this difficult path. But remember, too, that perseverance isn’t limited to the sometimes obvious struggles—the ones over doctrinal and practical orthodoxy. It’s true, we cease to be the Church when we fail to uphold those gospel truths. But remember that love is just as important. Come to the Table this morning and experience once again who we are as the people of God, set apart to holiness, but set apart by the one who gave his life for us. The one, who on the cross, shows us not only the importance of love, but also what it looks like. Little children, love one another.
Let’s pray: Lord Jesus, in the collect we asked you to grant that we, like John the Baptist, might be faithful ministers and stewards of your mysteries, preparing the way for you by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just. We prayed that in doing so, you will find us an acceptable people in your sight. We ask specifically for zeal for gospel truth and equally for love. Give us wisdom that we might never compromise one for the other, but stand firmly for both in equal measure. Amen.
In the Midst of the Lampstands Revelation 1:9-20 by William Klock
We’ve all heard that old statement, “Consider the source,” haven’t we? When I was a kid, someone would insult me and I’d get upset and say something about to my mom and she’d say, “Consider the source.” In other words, “Why would you take what someone like that says seriously?” If someone you know to be an inveterate liar tells you something, you probably won’t believe it. For a number of years someone was sending me thick envelopes stuffed with poorly made, oddly shaped photocopies of newspaper clippings and weird, barely coherent explanatory letters claiming to be from a prophet. The person who sent them was obviously a lunatic, it showed, and they went straight into the trash. But other things we take seriously. A letter from Revenue Canada? The stationery itself demands we take it seriously. An order from the Provincial Health Officer? Bonnie Henry may be fairly unassuming, but we know that behind those orders stands the authority of the Province of British Columbia. Or maybe you’re experience something difficult. Someone you love has just died. Or you’re going through a crisis of faith. Someone comes alongside you, someone sends you an email or a letter, someone calls you. And that person offers encouragement—maybe some advice. And we all know that it means a lot more coming from someone who has walked the same road or from someone whose great faith we respect. When a mature Christian offers a bit of spiritual advice or, maybe even a rebuke, it carries a great deal more weight than similar words coming from a brother or a sister who is worldly or immature.
As I said last week, Revelation is a letter and Chapter 1 is the introduction. We’ll be looking at verses 9-20 this morning. John is the author of the letter, the one who penned the words, and sent it off with a courier to be read in the churches, but as we saw last week, this is Jesus’ revelation. God has given it to him and he has given it to John. Jesus is the one who speaks with authority in this book—he’s the source, he’s the authority behind it—and here John gives us a glimpse at who it was who spoke to him. Here John shows us just who this Jesus is and the picture he paints with his words tells these churches—and us—that we’d better pay attention and take this seriously.
So, verses 9-11:
I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, “Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea.”
John, first, tells them his own situation. He is their brother and their partner—he is their sharer—in three things: in tribulation, in the kingdom, and in patient endurance. He, himself, is living in exile on the island of Patmos, a little island about fifty kilometres off the coast of what’s now Turkey. It had a military garrison there, but we don’t know if John was literally in prison or if he’d just been forced into exile. He had an apostolic role when it came to these churches and, presumably, someone hoped that by removing their leader, this movement of Jesus-followers would flounder, maybe even die off. We don’t know who exiled him, whether it was local or Roman authorities, but what’s important is that John says he’s there “on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” Notice that he doesn’t say he’s there because of his own testimony, because of his own preaching, because of his own witness to Jesus. No, he says that he’s there because God has spoken and because Jesus has given testimony. Jesus, by his death, resurrection, and ascension has borne testimony against the gods and kings of this age, and they have lashed out in retaliation against his apostle. And not just against John. They have lashed out at the Church.
Brothers and Sisters, there are three things that are a certainty for the believer. The first is tribulation. There is no escape. Jesus warned his disciples in John 15:20, “A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” First the Jews, then the Romans went after the fledgling Church. Those early believers suffered great tribulation, but they had faith in the words of Jesus, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). In Acts 14 Luke writes that Paul and Barnabas travelled, visiting these churches, “strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.” They knew that Jesus had inaugurated his kingdom and that tribulation was the prelude to its consummation. Their suffering was in union with the suffering of Jesus. Paul wrote to the Colossians, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).
And that’s the second certainty: the kingdom. We can face tribulation because Jesus has already inaugurated the kingdom. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians, Jesus reigns “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet” (Ephesians 1:21-22). The battle with the kings and gods of this age wages on, but Jesus has been given dominion over all. John draws on the language and imagery of Daniel 7. The Prophet writes:
Behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7:13-14)
The Church faces tribulation precisely because Jesus’ kingdom is here and now, because it stands in conflict with the gods and kings of the present age. But that means that the Church—Brothers and Sisters, that we—can pursue the mission Jesus has given us with confidence. Jesus won the decisive battle at the cross; his kingdom shall not be destroyed.
That leads us to the third certainty: perseverance. This is the heart of the book of Revelation. The individual letters to the churches highlight this. Where they have done well, they must persevere in well-doing. Where they have compromised, it is critical that they return to Jesus and persevere. And the rest of the book goes on to reveal the faithfulness of God to strengthen faith that they might persevere. But notice, all these things are centred in Jesus. We face tribulation because we are united with Jesus and because of his witness against the present age. But we have confidence because we are united with Jesus and know and are part of his kingdom. And we persevere as we are united with Jesus—sharing in his life and empowered by his Spirit—and knowing that what he has begun he will surely complete. In the incarnation and at the cross, God has invested his beloved Son in the redemption of his creation from sin and death and we can be sure that no matter how bad things may get, God will never cut his losses. The resurrection of Jesus was the decisive victory over the present age. He will continue until he puts every enemy under his feet.
Now, John goes on to say that he was “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day”. The Lord’s Day is a reference to Sunday. I think, too, that there’s some intentional symbolism here, drawing on the Old Testament idea of the Day of the Lord—the day when God would come in judgement to vindicate his people and to destroy their enemies. And being “in the Spirit” is language drawn from the Old Testament prophets to certify John’s status as a prophet. Throughout the Old Testament the prophets speak of being in the Spirit as God speaks through them. Prophecy is not a gut feeling, an impression, or a vague idea. Prophecy is the distinct and clear word of God, delivered to man, through the mediation of the Holy Spirit. This is why prophecy is taken so seriously in the Bible. God’s word is true and because of that his people can have confidence in it. That trust, however, is undermined by false prophets and so to prophesy falsely is a grave offense. It’s an offense against God and against God’s word. The test is simple. Does the word spoken come to pass? Does it jibe with what God has already revealed about himself? In the Old Testament, if it didn’t, the false prophet was sentenced to death. The equivalent in the New Testament would be excommunication. It’s something that, sadly, the modern church does not often take seriously with the result that we’ve cheapened prophecy and have a multitude of false prophets running around leading people astray and undermining faith in God’s word.
But, John, truly in the Spirit, hears a voice like a trumpet—a clarion call and a summons—and he is instructed to record what he is about to see and to send that record to seven churches: Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea. This is a cluster of churches in western Asia Minor, western Turkey—churches where John’s ministry was well-known. If it were today we could say that he was their bishop.
First John hears that great voice and then he turns to see who it is. Look at verses 12-16.
Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.
Who is it that speaks? Why should we care what he has to say? Does his word carry authority? Well, his summons to John was like the summons of a trumpet—imagine the sound of trumpets blown by royal heralds. And now, turning he sees this awe-inspiring image. If it’s hard to wrap your head around John’s description, that’s because it’s a composite of a bunch of different images drawn from all over the Old Testament, but especially—again—from Daniel. Whatever John saw, this was the best way he could describe it.
So, first, John is drawn into a sort of heavenly analogue to the holy place of the tabernacle or temple. That was the place where, in Israel, the lampstand stood, burning always and filling the tabernacle with its light. But here there are seven—a connection with the seven churches to which John writes—but united in Jesus. Jesus stands in the midst of them. The long robe and the golden sash around his chest show him as the high priest. He’s the one who tends the lamps, trims their wicks, keeps them burning. These churches were struggling through difficult days, but the Lord Jesus sustains them.
And John describes him as one like a son of man—that’s a figure from Daniel 7—but he also uses imagery to describe him that draws on Daniel’s description of the Ancient of Days. The son of man—and I read the passage about him from Daniel just a bit ago—was the representative of Israel, of the people of God, to whom the Ancient of Days gave dominion, glory, and kingdom forever. This is Jesus. But what’s really interesting is that John’s physical description of him is that of the Ancient of Days, of the one who gives the son of man his dominion, of God himself. Here’s Daniel 7:9-10.
As I looked,
thrones were placed,
and the Ancient of Days took his seat;
his clothing was white as snow,
and the hair of his head like pure wool;
his throne was fiery flames;
its wheels were burning fire.
A stream of fire issued
and came out from before him;
a thousand thousands served him,
and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him;
the court sat in judgment,
and the books were opened.
So this isn’t just a description of Jesus as majestic and awe-inspiring. John uses this description to equate Jesus with God himself. It’s a remarkable testimony to the divinity of Jesus that does so drawing on the Old Testament. And that’s not all. There just isn’t time this morning to get into every detail. The flaming eyes, the bronze feet, again the gold sash, are all drawn from Daniel 10. And while his call was like the sound of a trumpet, when he addresses John, it’s like the overwhelming sound of rushing waters, which is how Ezekiel describes the sound of God’s glory returning to the temple.
Jesus holds a constellation of seven stars in his hand. This one’s pretty cryptic, although John does tell us in verse 20 that these stars are the angels of the seven churches—possibly heavenly beings with some kind of oversight of these churches, but I think more likely referring to their bishops or elders. It’s not an easy bit of imagery to sort out. The sword proceeding from Jesus’ mouth, however, is much more obvious. This is his word. In 2:16 we read that by it he will make war against his enemies and in 19:11-16, by it he will conquer the nations.
Even to trace all the pieces of this image of Jesus back to their Old Testament sources is overwhelming. It’s good to do so, but I like George Caird’s warning not to “unweave the rainbow”. He writes, “John uses his allusions not as a code in which each symbol requires separate and exact translation, but rather for their evocative and emotive power. This is not photographic art. His aim is to set the echoes of memory and association ringing.”[1] That’s a good way to understand the imagery of Revelation and, especially, passages like this. It’s something like look at a rainbow—or it should be. The rainbow is made up of bands of colour as this imagery is made up of allusions to the Old Testament. But as the rainbow itself is more than just sum of its colours, so John’s images are more than just the sum of all these biblical allusions. Our problem is that we lack that memory and association those first Jewish Christians had. I think the image, which seems so “weird” to us, would have been far less weird to the original audience and would simply have inspired a natural awe. They saw the rainbow, where we see the bands of colour and struggle even to put names to them.
And natural awe exactly John’s response. As I was reading this I was thinking of a recent conversation I had with Rob. He was talking about visiting anther church here in Courtenay and said he could understand why people went there. I think the words he used to describe it were “fun” and “party”. I know, the services there—as is increasingly common—are modelled on rock concerts. It’s not just them; it’s symptomatic of our culture. We have lost a sense of the holy. We have little space left for reverence. We’re increasingly familiar and casual with everything and everyone—including God. And yet that’s just not what we see in the Bible when people encounter God. Throughout the Scriptures, the people who encounter God are overwhelmed with awe and fear. Even Peter, who was comfortable to argue with Jesus as the rabbi who got into his boat and told him to row out into the lake, fell to his knees and begged him to leave—his exact words were, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”—when the understanding of just who Jesus was sank in. Even meeting an angel inspires fear throughout the Scriptures—with the odd exception of Jacob’s, who decided to start a fight. No one with a real sense of who God is—or who Jesus is—walks casually into the presence of holiness. Here’s what John has to say about his own response in verses 17-20:
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades. Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this. As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands, the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.
Like everyone else who has ever had a real encounter with God, John prostrates himself. But human fear in the presence of the holy is only half the story. Like every other time God’s servants fall at his feet this way, Jesus says those wonderful words, “Fear not.” The fire will not consume those whom the holy One calls into his presence. This is language drawn from Isaiah. “I am the first and the last,” Jesus says. He identifies himself with the God of Israel and he does so again with those words we find across the Old Testament, “I am the living one”—a title closely tied to God’s very name, the I AM. But in Jesus this title takes on new meaning. He is the one who died—who was crucified—and whom God raised from death. He is the firstborn of the resurrection, the firstborn of God’s new creation. He’s not only alive forevermore, but in conquering death itself, he now holds the keys to death and hades—he holds the keys that will release humanity from bondage.
And in a scene that recalls Isaiah, Jesus commissions John. There is no purifying coal held to John’s lips as there was to Isaiah’s. The old Israel was an unclean people in need of redemption, but the new Israel, John and the people, the seven churches to whom he is commanded to write, have already been purified by the blood of the lamb. They have already been made holy—now they’re being exhorted to persevere.
And, Brothers and Sisters, that brings us back to where we started. That whole thing about “consider the source”. Jesus speaks to the Church and John shows us our Lord as he speaks. And on the one hand we see the God of Israel, the Ancient of Days, the living God, the great I AM. We enter in the presence of the holy. This is the God before whom we can only fall on our knees and sing out with the greatest of reverent fear, “Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty.” But he is, at one and the same time, the Son who has lovingly humbled himself for our sake, who has taken upon himself our flesh, who has submitted himself to hatred, to abuse, to torture, and to death to redeem a people for himself. He is the Ancient of Days, but he is also the one of whom we can sing, “The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want.” He is the good shepherd who has given his life for the sheep and who now draws us near.
Here’s the heart of this revelation. Here are those three certainties: tribulation, kingdom, and perseverance. We struggle to reconcile the joint presence of tribulation and kingdom. How can God’s kingdom be present when we face tribulation? But this is just it. Jesus took his throne, he established his kingdom, he won the victory over sin and death through suffering. And now, Brothers and Sisters, he exhorts his people to follow the same path. The Church will be victorious, the Church will see the consummation of Jesus’ kingdom one day, but it will triumph over the would-be gods and kings of this present age ultimately through tribulation. It is not an easy path, but the purpose of this Revelation of Jesus the Messiah is to show us the way and to assure us that our Lord is with us every step we take.
Let’s pray: Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning—and in particular the Revelation of Jesus that you gave to St. John: help us so to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word, we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] The Revelation of St. John the Divine (London: A & C Black, 1973), 25.
The Revelation of Jesus the Messiah Revelation 1:1-8 by William Klock The book of Revelation has, I think it can very safely be said, produced more useless commentaries than any other book of the Bible. Every generation churns out books, almost all of which are quickly and mercifully forgotten. That said, our generation has turned writing and preaching nonsense about Revelation into an art form, but no generation in Church history has been immune. In the last few years I’ve been invited to pick through the libraries of several retiring clergymen and have found a number of “gems”. A book from the 70s about computerised credit systems and how they were connected to the “mark of the beast”, one outlining how Khrushchev is the antichrist—and another doing the same for Henry Kissinger, and yet another for Saddam Hussein. Oops. And one little book titled “88 reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988”. Oops again. That author went on to pen another tract titled “89 reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1989.” And there were some more recent—but already past-their-expiry-date—books about blood moons heralding the end. And, of course, more recently there are so-called “Bible prophecy” folks finding the current pandemic in Revelation. I had a phone call from a woman, nearly hysterical, who was convinced mRNA vaccines are the mark of the beast, that they’ll mess with your genes, erase your soul, and leave you eternally damned. Revelation is for far too many people, at best, a book of doom and gloom, picked apart and explained and expounded by pessimists, and all too commonly at worst, a fertile ground for kooks and outlandish prognostications. G. K. Chesterton quite accurately wrote, “Though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creatures so wild as one of his own commentators.”[1] These sorts of things end up undermining faith in God’s word and faith in God’s church. And, Brothers and Sisters, if there’s anything you take away from these forthcoming sermons on Revelation, I hope it’s the opposite: that Revelation reveals the faithfulness of God in Jesus and is meant to strengthen our faith, enliven our hope, and embolden our mission.
Now, part of the problem is that Revelation is a notoriously difficult book. It wasn’t meant to be. The Christians to whom it was written, it’s safe to say, had no trouble understanding what it was that the Spirit was communicating to them through the pen of St. John. It has become difficult for us thanks to our distance from the original context. And because of this difficulty—and because all of you have, over the years been exposed to so many different ways of approaching Revelation, some better and some worse than others—I think it’s important to talk about these approaches. That’s not something I normally do when I’m preaching, but bear with me this morning as I swap my surplice for an academic gown and play professor rather than pastor for a few minutes.
There are four basic approaches to Revelation. And, of course, within each of those approaches you’ll find plenty of variation, but this is just an outline so that we can have some interpretive bearings.
The first approach is what we’ll call the “Futurist”. I put it first because you may or may not be familiar with the other three, but I guarantee that everyone here has been exposed to this one. While it’s not the dominant view historically, it is the dominant view today in North American Evangelical circles and it’s also the one that gets all the popular attention, because it’s the one that purports to tell the future. This is the approach behind the sensationalist best-sellers and Bible prophecy teachers on TV. Simply put, this approach to Revelation sees most, if not all, of the book’s events as taking place in the future. This was the dominant view of the Church in the Second Century and well into the Third. We don’t have many details of how they parsed everything out, because this view pretty quickly fell out of favour. In part that was because the “future” came and events didn’t happen as these folks had thought they would. (When “88 reasons Jesus is Coming Back in 188” didn’t pan out, they were smart enough not to write another tract on why he would come back in 189!) Like our own era, it did produce some sensationalist and goofy predictions, but unlike our era, when those predictions failed this approach to Revelation simply fell out of favour. But it also fell out of favour because, in the Third Century a new approach to interpreting the Bible arose that gave allegory primacy of place. Futurist interpretations pop up here and there in Church history, but usually amongst weird or cultic sects. That’s exactly what happened in the 19th Century. That century was a breeding ground for odd, new approaches to biblical interpretation and numerous cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, which put a lot of emphasis on weird eschatology. The Plymouth Brethren, generally orthodox despite some odd beliefs, developed their own system—something now called “Dispensationalism”—but due to a number of factors, it didn’t die out like so many others. It was there in relative obscurity for almost a century when three things happened: First, in 1909, a guy named C. I. Scofield published the first modern study Bible and incorporated Dispensationalism into its notes. The Scofield Reference Bible quickly became wildly popular. Second, in 1906, the Pentecostal movement began and quickly latched onto Dispensationalism’s claim that the “last days” were about to begin as an explanation for why the Spirit had suddenly returned miraculous gifts to the Church. And, third, in the heat of the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversies of the early 20th Century, Dispensationalists’ claim—a dubious one, but that didn’t matter much—it’s claim to be a consistently literal means of interpreting the Bible became very popular. And within a couple of decades this odd, obscure, and very recent approach to the Bible became the dominant view amongst many Evangelicals—even to the point that anyone who doesn’t hold to it has often been viewed with suspicion or accused of being a “liberal”. This is the school of interpretation behind the vast majority of “end times” and “Bible prophecy” literature since World War II. But as prominent as it is, it’s not the only evangelical approach. It took hold in many of the new Evangelical churches and denominations, but the older Evangelical traditions—Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterian and Reformed, and some Reformed Baptists—already had confessions of faith and established theological traditions that are at odds with Dispensationalism and especially its key defining feature, which is that it maintains a distinction between Israel and the Church. Dispensationalists claim that when the Bible speaks of Israel, it refers and can only ever refer to ethnic Jews, and that the Church is a specifically gentile body. Dispensationalism not only divides the people of God into two distinct groups, denying the continuity between the old and new covenants, but it also teaches that God essentially has two plans of salvation. The Church is for gentiles and he’s got another plan for the Jews. The entire Dispensational approach to Revelation is uniquely built around this belief, which makes it distinct from all other approaches. For this reason classical, confessional Protestants have rejected Dispensationalism. In the last few decades, I think mainly as a protest against Dispensationalism, there has been a movement to revive a more historical Futurist reading of Revelation. It’s produced a number of very good, serious commentaries, but hasn’t gained much traction at the popular level. The general problem with most Futurist approaches to Revelation, Dispensational or otherwise, is that they leave the book largely irrelevant to the people to whom John wrote it in the First Century. It also ignores the overwhelmingly imminent and urgent nature of John’s message. And that’s not to mention that this approach has an utterly abysmal track record of ever getting anything right.
The second approach is one we’ll call the “Idealist” approach. This approach, in one form or another, has dominated the Church’s approach to Revelation from the Third or Fourth Century until the Seventeenth or Eighteenth and continues to dominate both Roman and many confessional Protestant circles. It began as the Church Fathers placed emphasis on interpreting the biblical text allegorically instead of literally. There have often been elements of this approach that have been Futurist, but the trend has been towards flattening the biblical narrative into sort of universal and timeless truths. There have been some positives that have come out of this approach and it’s often been seen as the best way to let Revelation speak both to the original audience and to people today, but it falls short in that it largely ignores the original context and, as I said, in that it flattens out and often fails to account for the big biblical narrative.
Third is what we’ll call the “Historicist” approach. This is often combined with various Futurist approaches and understands Revelation to be describing the history of the Church from beginning to end, so for example, while the seven churches addressed by John in Chapters 2 and 3 were real churches in Asia Minor, they represent progressively the Church from Acts up to the return of Jesus. The rest of the book plays out the same way. The major problem with this approach is that it accounts only for the church in the West and that every generation that uses it finds itself at the very end and has to massage the details to make them fit the new timeline. Every few years it has to be scrapped and reconstructed. Like the Futurist approach, this may appeal to people today, but it leaves the book largely meaningless to the original audience and simply ignores most of global Christianity in its artificially constructed timeline.
The fourth and last approach is what’s usually called the “Preterist” approach—“preter” meaning “something past”. This approach has been around since at least the Eighteenth Century. It understands most or all of Revelation to be describing events which took place in the First Century, typically centring around the fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 and reads Revelation in close connection with the apocalyptic teaching of Jesus. Again, there are plenty of variations, but most Preterists hold that at least the last few chapters of the book remain in our future. There is an heretical variant of Preterism holding that all of the events of Revelation have already taken place, but this isn’t very common. The common criticism of Preterism is that while it makes a great deal of sense of the book for Christians in the First Century, it doesn’t leave much for us today. This is, however, the approach that I’ll be taking here and I think it makes the best sense of the book within the context of the bigger biblical narrative. I think this approach does the best job of reading Revelation as First Century Jews would have done with their deep grasp of the Old Testament and I think it takes account of what Revelation actually is—something we’ll get to shortly. It’s also really the only approach that takes seriously the language of imminence we see both here in Revelation and in the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus. When John says “soon” and when Jesus says “before this generation passes”, Preterists believe they really meant “soon” and “before this generation passes”! I think, too, that Preterist and some Idealist approaches are commended by their optimism. They see the Church, commissioned by Jesus and empowered by the Spirit, actually succeeding in the mission we’ve been given, rather than whisked—or “raptured”—away just as everything turns for the worst.
So, off with the academic gown and back on with the surplice, let’s look at the first Chapter and St. John’s introduction. Revelation 1:1-8.
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.
John to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
This is the revelation—in John’s language it’s the apokalypsis, an unveiling, making something known. Specifically, it’s the revelation of Jesus the Messiah. John writes that God gave this revelation to Jesus to reveal to his servants—to his Church. What does that mean? Well, first, we know that these early Christians were struggling. These were people who had heard the good news about Jesus, that he had died and risen and that he is Lord. Some of them may even have witnessed those events first-hand. And they believed. In Jesus, the God of Israel was fulfilling his promises. In Jesus, the God of Israel was making all things new. In Jesus, the God of Israel had defeated sin and death and inaugurated new creation. They saw the promises fulfilled. They saw and experienced first-hand the transformation brought by Jesus and the Spirit in the Church. And yet they struggled. The good news was spreading. Little churches were springing up all over the world. But they faced opposition, persecution, and sometimes even martyrdom. They proclaimed: “Jesus is Lord”. And they believed it. They saw the evidence first hand. But Caesar’s claim to lordship was only growing stronger and his cult was spreading fast—and Christians were facing pressure to acknowledge him. Great temples were being built in some of these cities. And back in Jerusalem, as much as Jesus had denounced the unbelief of his own people, as much as he had pronounced judgement on them, they too were violently persecuting the Church. What did it mean? What was God’s plan? Was their hope misplaced? Was Jesus really Lord?
In those desperate days, God spoke to his Church. Now, consider that in the days of the old covenant, the temple has been the place where earth and heaven met, the place where men and women went to meet God—often to pray and to wait for his revelation. But now there’s a new covenant. Now we meet God in Jesus the Messiah. He is the new temple. He is the one in whom earth and heaven, God and man have been brought together. God gives his word to Jesus and we come to him to receive it. There’s some deep covenantal truth in this first verse.
God’s revelation in Jesus is delivered by an angel to John. It’s the angel who comes to him and acts as a kind of tour guide and expositor of the things he sees. Briefly, who is John? This has been debated since the Second Century and I don’t know that the question will ever have any ultimate resolution this side of the New Jerusalem. The majority view has always been that the John who wrote Revelation is the same John who wrote the Gospel and the three epistles that bear that same name. That’s John the Son of Zebedee or John the Apostle and Evangelist. There may have been another well-known figure in the early Church known as John the Presbyter or Elder. Some have said that he may be the author. Some who don’t want to commit refer to St. John the Divine—the namesake of the parish down the hill on Fifth Street—who was maybe one of these two or maybe a third person. At the end of the day I don’t think it really makes much of a difference and I’m happy with the evidence for John the Apostle—the author of the Gospel and epistles—also being the author of Revelation. He describes himself as the one “who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw” and I think that certainly sounds like the man who was Jesus’ close friend and who wrote the Gospel. That he could introduce himself to these churches as simple “John”, not “John This” or “John That”, I think also points to his being the well-known John the Apostle.
“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy,” John writes. He’s not talking about reading Revelation as if it’s some kind of talisman—just pick something at random and read it and you’ll be blessed. Again, he’s addressing these churches where it will be read aloud to the congregation—where God will reveal himself in Jesus through the reading of his word—and in that these people full of question and maybe even fears and doubts, will be blessed. The word of God will strengthen their faith, their hope, and their joy. It will prepare them for the difficult days to come. And it will remind them of the faithfulness of God.
Brothers and Sisters, this is true about God’s word in general. Read the Bible and be blessed as God reveals himself through his word to you. But I encourage you to let God speak to you this week through the uniqueness of Revelation and to be blessed as your faith, hope, and joy are strengthened. It takes about forty-five minutes to an hour to read the whole book and I guarantee that there are plenty of things you’ll do this week that take longer that won’t leave you as blessed as God’s word will. As John writes, Jesus loves us, he has freed us from our sin by the shedding of his own blood, he has made us priests to God his Father. And even after all of that, if we’re left wondering or left troubled by our situation, come to him and be reassured. John writes at the outset to these churches: “Jesus is coming with the clouds…every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes on earth will wail on account of him.” John draws on the language of the Prophet Zechariah (12:10-14) to say that Jesus will vindicate the faith of his people. As the Father has revealed his faithfulness to do what he has promised and as he had done so in Jesus, Jesus himself will be faithful to do what he has promised and to finish what he has begun. Have faith. Read his word—his self-revelation—and have even greater faith.
And the last line there in verse 8 points us to the ultimate purpose of everything that has happened and everything that will happen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Jesus has come so that the world will know the Lord God, the one who is both the source and the goal of all of history. That’s what “Alpha and Omega” is getting at. The first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet. Rebellious humanity has rejected and forgotten him, but Jesus has come to make him known—in judgement on those who persist in their rebellion and for salvation to those who believe. For he is the Almighty, the pantokrator, the Lord of hosts, whose dominion encompasses the cosmos.
So clearly Revelation is important. But as I said, it’s not an easy book to understand. What can we do that will help us understand beyond just being careful and prayerful as we read? Brothers and Sisters, in these first verses John tells us just what kind of a book this is and that’s a good starting point. First, it’s a letter. And not just any letter. Like the epistles, it’s a letter written to a specific, real, historical people. In the case of Revelation, it was written to a cluster of seven churches in Asia Minor—Western Turkey. It was God’s Spirit-inspired word directly to them and only indirectly to us. That means it had to make sense to them. When we don’t understand something, we often make the mistake of reading it through our present situation and cultural lens, but we can’t do that with the Bible. Before we can start talking about how a text relates to us, we first have to ask what it meant to the people to whom it was originally addressed.
Second, John writes that this is a prophecy. And as we read it, we see that John not only writes in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but that he is constantly drawing on those prophets and their language and imagery. This is, I think, the biggest obstacle we face in understanding the book. John’s readers were steeped in the Old Testament (and in a certain way of reading it) that very, very few people are today. The average Christian, at best, knows the Old Testament only as disconnected Bible stories and struggles to string them together into a full narrative. Many know familiar passages from the Prophets, but don’t know anything of the context or history those prophets were addressing—and then just assume that the prophets speak directly to us or to current events. In contrast, for the early Christians the Old Testament was their culture and many knew large sections by heart. We’re not nearly so steeped in the scriptures and so we miss the connections and we misunderstand—or we try to understand them through categories that we do know and make a mess of things. We read about weird astronomical happenings and instead of looking back to the use of such imagery in the prophets, we look to literal events in our own day—like the “blood moons” fiasco of a few years ago. We hear about weird grasshoppers or scorpions and instead of looking to the Old Testament, we try to see how their descriptions fit with modern military hardware and interpret them as tanks and helicopters.
Third, and this follows closely on the last point, we need to read Revelation with the big narrative of God and his people constantly in mind. Getting back to my earlier example, an interpretation that divides the people of God in two rather than stressing the unity and continuity of the people of God between the old and new covenants, can’t be right because it simply doesn’t fit the narrative. Of course, this assumes we’ve got a good grasp of that big story—which is why I so often put the stress I do on exactly that.
Finally, Brothers and Sisters, as we read Revelation we need to keep our eyes on Jesus. He is the central figure through whom the Father reveals himself and his faithfulness. In his death and resurrection he has accomplished the purpose of God. In him we see not only the love of Jesus, but also the love of the Father for sinners. The Father gave his Son and that Son gave himself for the sake of his rebellious creatures. He is the firstborn of the dead. He is the king. And there’s an obvious promise there as we look around us and see that the work of his kingdom has yet to be fulfilled. The God who has proved himself to be faithful has more work to do and in that we can find faith and hope. In that we find reason to worship the King both for what he has done and for what we know he will do. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
Let’s pray: Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] Orthodoxy (Hendrickson, 2006), 13.
Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent Jeremiah 23:5-8 & St. John 6:5-14 by William Klock The Prophet Jeremiah, author of today’s Old Testament lesson, lived in Judah about six-hundred years before Jesus was born. His ministry spanned the years between the reign of King Josiah and the defeat and sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Josiah was a good king. He introduced reforms and called the nation to repentance and to faith. He renovated the temple in Jerusalem and purged pagan worship from the nation. He had altars to Baal torn down, pagan priests executed. He even dug up the bones of pagan priests and burned them on their pagan altars as an act of desecration. He restored the regular observance of the Passover. But Josiah’s reforms would not last. He died fighting the Egyptians and was followed by a fairly brief series of kings who did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. The same went largely for the people of Judah. Josiah desired reform, but his people did not share his desire. Jeremiah’s prophecy announced the Lord’s coming judgement, which would culminate in a final curse of exile from the promised land. Jeremiah rebuked the kings and people of Judah for their idolatry, for their pride, for their failure to keep the Sabbath, but above all, he rebuked Judah’s unjust social, political, and economic structures. Jerusalem, announced Jeremiah in 5:1-9, had become worse than Sodom. There wasn’t a just person to be found to give the Lord a reason to spare the city from judgement.
Our lesson begins at 23:5, but we get a sense of the problem if we look at the first four verses of the chapter:
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people: “You have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds, declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:1-2)
The kings of Israel should have been faithful shepherds looking after the flock of Israel. Jeremiah calls to mind David, the shepherd-king. The king after God’s own heart, who, despite his great failures, still sought the Lord and his will for his people. In contrast, the leaders of Judah in Jeremiah’s day did the opposite. They abused the sheep and led them into idolatry. “Thus says the Lord,” prophesies the Jeremiah ominously, “You have not attended to the sheep, so I will attend to you.” The failure of Judah’s kings would result in the scattering, the exile of the people. Israel was called to be the people who lived with the Lord in their midst, but as we’ve seen in our study of Exodus, to live in the Lord’s presence, meant living according to his way, his law. Israel, from the king down, had failed. They were called to be a light to the nations, but instead, the nations mocked her saying, “Where is your God?” Judah would be judged. But it won’t end there. Look at verses 3-4:
Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord.
The Lord will restore the faithful remnant of the flock and will provide faithful shepherds to care for them. Specifically, Jeremiah goes on in today’s Old Testament lesson beginning at verse 5:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’ (Jeremiah 23:5-6)
The Lord will not leave his people without a just and righteous king forever. He will “raise up for David a righteous branch”. What does that mean? It’s the same imagery we recall at Christmas from Isaiah’s prophecy:
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. (Isaiah 11:1)
The line of David, the kings who had descended from him were like a tree. It had rotted and withered and the Lord was forced to cut it down, but from the stump that, to all appearance was dead, the Lord would raise up a fresh, healthy, new shoot, a branch. He would not only be a faithful shepherd of the Lord’s flock, but like David, he would rule with wisdom, justice, and righteousness. In him the people of God would be saved. And the Lord sets this king in stark contrast with Zedekiah, the last, sorry king of Judah. The name Zedekiah means “the Lord is our righteousness”. Zedekiah made a joke of his own name. Zedekiah was a puppet king setup by the Babylonians. He was an evil and faithless man. The Lord had called his people to trust in him and never to compromise. Zedekiah represented the utter failure of Judah and her kings to trust in the Lord. They trusted in horses, they trusted in chariots, they trusted in espionage and forbidden alliances with foreign nations, and, yes, they prayed to the Lord, but they hedged their bets with sacrifices to pagan gods. But this branch of David’s line whom the Lord promised to raise up, he would truly be what the kings of Israel were called to be. He would be one who would exemplify that statement of faith, that proclamation that “the Lord is our righteousness”. He will deliver the people of God, he will restore them to the Lord’s presence, and he will set everything to rights. In fact, what this new king will do will be so dramatic, it will become the defining event in the life of the people of God. Look at verses 7-8:
“Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when they shall no longer say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but ‘As the Lord lives who brought up and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ Then they shall dwell in their own land.”
The coming king will deliver the Lord’s people. Where the old kings led them into judgement, in the coming king the faithful remnant will be vindicated and declared to be in the right. The coming king will gather the scattered people of God from the nations and restore them to his presence. And we see here that this is more than a homecoming. The deliverance and restoration brought by the coming king will redefine the people of God. Whereas the exodus from Egypt had been, for the better part of a millennium the event that defined Israel, the event in which she was formed as a nation and gained her identity, in which she was declared to be God’s beloved, firstborn son, this new exodus will come to define this restored people. No longer will the people of God be defined by the exodus from Egypt. In future they will be defined by this new exodus by which the great shepherd-king will establish a new people gathered from the nations.
Brothers and Sisters, our Old Testament lesson today reminds us of Israel’s calling and Israel’s failure. And in the midst of Israel’s faithlessness, it reminds us of the Lord’s faithfulness. Nothing will stop his plan to set his fallen creation and fallen people to rights. When his people fail, he will send a king to set them right.
In the Old Testament we hear the promise. In the New we see the fulfilment. In today’s Gospel we read the familiar story of the feeding of the five thousand. Let’s read it again. John 6:5-14.
Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?” Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number. Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted. And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!”
The lectionary omits the first four verses of the chapter. Because of that we miss two important details. The first is the time and the second is the place. John tells us in verse 4 that “the Passover was at hand”. Remember what the Passover was all about. Passover was the annual festival in which the Jews recalled the events of the Exodus—those events that Jeremiah points to as defining the very identity of Israel as the people of God. In the Exodus the Lord had delivered them from their Egyptian slavery, he had defeated Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt, he had given them his law and the tabernacle and had taken up his dwelling in their midst, and he had led them through the wilderness. Each new generation of Jews, as they took part in the Passover meal, became participants in the events of the Exodus, in the establishing of the Lord’s covenant. This is one of three places in his Gospel, where John identifies events in the ministry of Jesus with the timing of the Passover. The other two are his cleansing of the temple and his death and resurrection. These are the events in which the Lord fulfilled his promise through Jeremiah of a new exodus and the formation of a new Israel, a new people.
The other important detail in those first verses is the place. This took place on the far side of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus has led the people into the wilderness and he’s taken up his seat on a mountain. Again, John stages the story using the imagery of the Exodus. We have a great crowd of people in the wilderness. They’re hungry for supper, but there’s no food to be had. The only thing missing is the grumbling, but these people were simply hungry to hear Jesus. This time it’s Jesus who realises the people’s need, seemingly before they realise it themselves.
Jesus turns to Philip and asks what’s to be done to feed all these people. Now, Philip—a good Jew whom I’m sure knew his people’s story—should have recalled the manna in the wilderness, but he wasn’t thinking of Jesus on that level just yet. Andrew, on the other hand, shows a bit more faith. He’s met a young boy who happens to have brought a sack lunch: a few fish and a little bread. It might as well be nothing in light of the size of the crowd. But I don’t think Andrew would have bothered telling Jesus about this boy if he hadn’t thought that Jesus could make use of it somehow. What could Jesus possibly do with so little? The situation seemed totally impossible, and yet the Lord had provided for his hungry people in the wilderness all those centuries before. Why not again? And so Andrew gives us a hopeful sign.
Brothers and Sisters, this is how the people of God are called to respond in hopeless situations, not like the faithless kings of Jeremiah’s day, who were disobedient and put their faith in horses, chariots, foreign kings, and pagan gods. As I read of Andrew bringing that little lunch of fish and bread to Jesus, surrounded by that huge crowd and thinking of our earlier lesson from Jeremiah about the wicked kings of Judah, I’m reminded of one of Judah’s faithful kings, Hezekiah.
Hezekiah found himself in another hopeless situation. The Assyrians had besieged Jerusalem. The messenger of the Assyrian king called up to Hezekiah’s men on the walls of the city that he would destroy them and that it would be because Hezekiah had purged Judah of its altars and shrines to the Assyrian gods. The Assyrian king sent a message to Hezekiah, warning him that the Lord would not be able to deliver him. Hezekiah no doubt had advisers who saw the situation as hopeless. Some would have advised him to surrender to the Assyrians and to bow before their gods. Others would have urged him to form an alliance with the Egyptians, which would have involved their gods as well. To many, it would have seemed that Hezekiah was out of options. He knew better. The King took the message from the Assyrian king and went to the temple. There he prayed. And the Lord sent Isaiah to Hezekiah with a message of reassurance: The king of Assyria will not enter Jerusalem. “I will defend this city to save it for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David” (Isaiah 19:34). And that very night an angel struck down 185,000 men in the camp of the Assyrians.
Andrew now, like Hezekiah taking Sennacherib’s letter to the temple and not knowing what to do, only that the Lord would do something, Andrew now brings the boy and his lunch to Jesus. The Lord will provide. Somehow. In some way. And Jesus does just that. He took the bread, gave thanks to God, and started breaking it into pieces and somehow there was still bread in his hands as the baskets began to fill. And the same with the fish. And everyone had their fill. Just like they did in the wilderness after they’d left Egypt. And yet there’s an element of the story here that points to this new exodus that’s taking shape being even greater than the first. In the first exodus, there was no manna left over. There was always enough to satisfy the needs of the people, but if you tried to gather extra and to keep it, it rotted away and produced worms. Jesus feeds these people in the wilderness and there are twelve basketfuls left over—presumably food the people took home with them to eat and to be reminded the next day of what the Lord had done.
Now, Hezekiah’s faith came to mind as I read about Andrew, but as Jesus divided up the bread and fish, what I think would have come to the minds of the people was a different Old Testament character. John, I think, tells the story to deliberately recall the prophet Elisha and, in particular, the events of 2 Kings 4. There was a famine in the land and Isaiah had a band of followers to provide for. A man brought them twenty loaves of bread and a sack of grain, but it wasn’t nearly enough to feed Elisha’s men. That didn’t concern Elisha. He gave the sack of bread to his servant and commanded him to give to the men so that they could eat. His servant balked at that. “How can I can set this before a hundred men?” he asked. Elisha commanded him again to take it to the men and said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’” And, somehow, the men ate their fill and, just as the Lord had promised, there were leftovers remaining (2 King 4:42-44).
Now, back to our Gospel: The people on that mountain with Jesus put the pieces together: Passover, wilderness, bread from heaven, baskets of leftover bread. And they declare that Jesus is “the prophet who is to come into the world.” Jeremiah’s new exodus is somehow underway, with Jesus at its head. Their acclamation is taken straight from the Lord’s promise to Moses in Deuteronomy 18: “I will raise up a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I commanded him” (Deuteronomy 18:18-19). The new exodus has begun. Jesus is the prophet who was promised, a prophet like Moses, a prophet like Elisha—and yet a prophet even greater. Verse 15 says:
Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.
“King” means “messiah”. Now, did the people really understand who and what the messiah was to be? No, not really. Almost no one fully understood that until after the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection. But that doesn’t mean the people that day, filled miraculously with bread and fish, didn’t recognise the messiah in Jesus. All the pieces were there. Here was the good shepherd who cared for the sheep when no one else would. Here was the prophet who would lead the people like Moses in the long-awaited exodus. If Jesus was those two things, then he also had to be the long-awaited branch that Jeremiah had prophesied would come from the root of David. Jesus saw the recognition dawn in their eyes and he withdrew. The time wasn’t right. This wasn’t how the Messiah was to come into his crown or to take his throne. Nevertheless, as we draw the lines that connect the promises of God in Jeremiah to their fulfilment in John’s Gospel, we should be overwhelmed by the faithfulness of God. He does what he promises.
Brothers and Sisters, the Lord invites us to his table this morning and here we again recall his faithfulness. Here, like the Jews participating in each new generation in the events of the Exodus and finding their place in the people of God, we find our manna in the wilderness, we recall and participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and are reminded that we are his people and that, just as was promised so long ago, he has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death. The sheep that were scattered, have been drawn together by the God of Israel. You and I have heard the story of God’s faithfulness. We have come to Israel’s king and submitted ourselves in faith. And now, here at the table, we experience his faithfulness ourselves as we eat the bread and drink the wine. Here is our manna in the wilderness. Finally, having known the faithfulness of God, we’re summoned ourselves to walk in faith, trusting that the Lord will finish what he has begun, that he will do what he has promised.
In our Collect we asked the Lord to “stir up our wills”. We may have come to the end of another Church Year, but the story is hardly over. Advent is almost here and with it the reminder that Jesus is coming and that as we wait for him, he’s given his Church a mission and his own Spirit to ensure that mission is fulfilled. He has made us stewards of the good news that he is this world’s true Lord. We have our own parts to play in this story. And so we petition the Lord in faith, knowing that he is faithful to fulfil his promises. Whether it takes a hundred years or a hundred thousand years for the world to answer the king’s royal summons to faithful allegiance, he will be with us and he will equip us for every good work.
Let’s pray: Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people; that we may produce abundantly the fruit of good works, and receive your abundant reward, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity St. Matthew 9:18-26 by William Klock How do we respond to Jesus? Our Gospel today is taken from Matthew 9. It’s a part of the Gospel story that we need to take in context. If we were to go back a chapter we’d see Jesus repeatedly issuing a call. When Jesus calls, you can’t not respond. Everyone responds. Some people responded in faith and followed Jesus. Other people responded by turning and walking away. And in between Jesus’ calls and the responses of the people, Matthew intersperses a sequence of miracles. They remind us of the big picture. Jesus wasn’t just a good teacher. He wasn’t just a prophet. He wasn’t just a miracle worker. He was the Messiah and he had come in fulfilment of God’s promises. Human sin has made a mess of the world. Jesus came in response and to fulfil God’s promise to set Creation to rights. The miracles remind us that the gospel isn’t just good advice—another good teaching to help get your life in order or another miracle-worker to temporarily fix your problems. The gospel isn’t just another idea or philosophy on the smorgasbord. Again, the gospel is not good advice. The gospel is good news. Something to sample—as if it might be right for you, or maybe not. The gospel is the good news that in Jesus, Creation’s true Lord has come. God has sent his king—the King—and that makes the gospel a royal proclamation that God’s kingdom is coming and it makes the gospel a royal summons to submit in faithful obedience to King. How do we respond to that royal summons, Brothers and Sisters?
One man came to Jesus and said, “I will follow you everywhere,” but when Jesus explained what it meant to follow him—“Foxes have holes”, he said, “and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” The man decided it was too much. He walked away. Another man said, “I’ll follow you, Jesus, but first I have to go bury my father.” Jesus said, “No…if you’re going to follow me, follow me. Let the dead bury the dead.” The man wasn’t willing to make that kind of commitment. Brothers and Sisters, repentance is the first step in following Jesus—setting aside everything and committing to the King and to the King alone. That’s a hard thing to do. But that’s the nature of it. A few years ago Tom Wright published a book about all of this and titled it The Day the Revolution Began. I like that title. It captures that fact that in coming as God’s King, Jesus has established a new order. The old kings, the old gods, the old philosophies, the entire old regime was defeated at the Cross. It’s all passing away. And so to take hold of Jesus really does require letting go and turning away from everything else. Now, Matthew follows this immediately with an account of Jesus calming a storm on the Sea of Galilee and casting out a legion of demons. Matthew reminds us that in Jesus, God was fulfilling his promises. Repentance is hard, but when you see the evidence that God’s King has come and that God’s promises are being fulfilled, the decision is an easy one even if it means following a difficult and narrow path.
In contrast, Matthew then tells his own story. He was working his job as a toll collector when Jesus called him. Talk about being invested in the old regime! But Matthew recognised the King, he left his job and followed. And, right away, Matthew tells another story about Jesus fulfilling God’s promises and setting right what sin and death corrupted—about Gods’ new world breaking in through the Messiah. Look at Matthew 9:18-19.
While he was saying these things to them, behold, a ruler came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” And Jesus rose and followed him, with his disciples.
Mark and Luke tells us this man was a ruler of the local synagogue and that his name was Jairus. All of this happened after Jesus returned from his short trip across the Sea of Galilee and Matthew implies that Jairus was practically waiting for Jesus’ boat on the beach.
Knowing who he was and showing him respect, the crowd let him through to Jesus. He was desperate and sought out Jesus in faith. He also came in humility, falling at Jesus’ feet. He begs Jesus to come and heal his daughter who is sick and at the point of death. A lot of the Jewish leaders rejected Jesus. A lot of them were looking for dirt they could use against him. But not all of them. Back when Mary first heard that she was going to bear the Messiah she had sung out:
He has brought the mighty down from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate. (Luke 1:52)
The Gospels show us a lot of Jesus exalting the humble. Mary’s prophetic line about bringing down the mighty from their thrones is mostly in expectation of future judgement, but here we see one of the mighty humbling himself before Jesus. His daughter was dying and he had a sense of what Jesus could do. He’d heard about the healings Jesus had performed. He’d probably heard about Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain. He could see God’s future in the present wherever Jesus went. And so he begs Jesus to heal his daughter. Notice that he doesn’t come, like the people of Nazareth, to insist that Jesus work a miracle because he deserves it. He comes in humility. That’s the sort of request that Jesus responds to. Matthew doesn’t tell us anything about a conversation between the two men. Jairus humbly asked and Jesus went with him.
But as they head off to Jairus’ house, Jesus is stopped. Again, Mark and Luke tell us that they he was overwhelmed by a crowd. And in the midst of the choking crowd, a woman approaches Jesus. Look at verses 20-21:
And behold, a woman who had suffered from a discharge of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his garment, I will be made well.”
To modern people this woman simply sounds like a sick person in the crowd. For First Century Jews she represented a lot more than that. What Matthew describes is a menstrual disorder of some kind that caused her to bleed perpetually. And he highlights just how long this has been going on: twelve years. She’s been bleeding for as long as Jairus’ little daughter has been alive. In his Gospel, Luke also highlights the physical seriousness of her problem. At one point she’d had money, but now she’s destitute. She spent it all on doctors and none of them had been able to help her. But it’s not just that this woman has a medical problem that no one’s been able to heal in twelve years. This woman’s biggest problem is that she’s unclean.
Menstruation, according to the torah rendered a woman unclean. It also rendered anyone who touched her unclean until sundown. We don’t have time this morning to get into why that was the case. It wasn’t a sin issue, at least not in the way we normally think about sin. It was an issue of ritual purity, something vitally important to the system of temple and sacrifices and what that meant for this woman is that she’s been unclean for twelve years. She was shut out of the temple, shut out of the sacrificial system, shut out of the synagogue, and because contact with her brought uncleanness, she was shut out of society. She might as well have been a leper.
This now gives us a sense of the risk she was taking that day. The crowd was pressing in on Jesus and this woman was working her way through the crowd to get to him. Everyone she touched was rendered unclean, even if they had no idea who was bumping and jostling into them. And by touching Jesus, she rendered him unclean too—or she should have. But she catches up to him, touches his robe. At this point Luke slows the story down to give us some insight into what’s just happened. She’s been healed. She got what she wanted. Now she tries to quietly slip away through the crowd. But Jesus stopped everything. The crowd quickly goes quiet. Here’s what Luke writes:
And Jesus said, “Who was it that touched me?” When all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the crowds surround you and are pressing in on you!” But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.” (Luke 8:45-46)
Imagine what’s going through that poor woman’s head at this point. “Ack! Somehow he noticed!” And so she hunches a little lower and shrinks back further into the crowd. She’s afraid. If Jesus exposes her the crowd of people she just rendered unclean is going to be really angry. Jesus might be angry. She made him unclean too. Imagine the crowd going dead silent. No one knew what was happening, but something was wrong. Jesus was asking who had touched him. “Maybe,” they thought, “Jesus just realised that someone had picked his pocket.” Peter reminds us of the crowd pressing in on Jesus. “Master, Anyone could have touched you. What’s the big deal?” No one says a word and the woman shrinks back even more in fear. What if she’s found out?
But Jesus explains: “No. It wasn’t that someone bumped into me. Someone came in faith, touched me, and power went out from me.” It might sound like Jesus is talking about some kind of magic, but that’s not it. God was at work through Jesus. The woman had touched Jesus and somehow God had done something through that touch. Jesus knew someone had been healed, but he also knew that there’s more to healing than physical wellbeing. It wasn’t enough for this woman’s bleeding to have stopped. That was only the physical manifestation of the problem. For there to be full healing, for there to be shalom, there was a spiritual problem to be addressed too. Ritual impurity was transferred by contact. That woman had made a lot of people in that crows ritually impure—but they had no idea. They just felt a bump or a jostle as the woman passed. But when she touched Jesus in faith, he felt something. It wasn’t her impurity being transferred to him, but his purity being passed to someone else. And that was something—somehow—he could sense. Luke doesn’t say how long the silence lasted, but finally the woman realised there was no escape. She came trembling. Her faith was weak and being choked by the fear of the crowd, but even her weak faith finally brought her forward. Again, from Luke’s account:
And when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling, and falling down before him declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. (Luke 8:47)
Trembling the woman confesses what she’s done. The people around her would have been furious. They would have been outraged. If Jesus hadn’t been there they might have stoned her. This woman had no business there. Everyone around her was now unclean. But Jesus forces her out into the open to reveal his ministry and to reveal what real, saving faith looks like. She was an outsider. She lived apart from everyone. She was an outcast. But more importantly, because she was unclean, she didn’t even have access to God through the normal channels of the torah. She might have been thinking that Jesus was just as angry as the rest of the crowd. She might have been afraid he was going to do something awful. But her faith was more powerful than her fear. And in response to her faith, Jesus says in verse 48:
“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”
Jesus understood her real problem even if she didn’t. She just wanted to be healed physically. Once the blood stopped she was ready to go home. But Jesus knew that her bigger problem was being an outsider. She was an Israelite by birth, but her physical disease had essentially forfeit her membership in Abraham’s family. And now Jesus, as the king and representative of God’s kingdom, addresses her, comforts her, calling her “Daughter”. He welcomes her into the kingdom. He assures her of her inheritance. That’s what she needed most of all. And Jesus not only tells her, but tells the whole crowd that it’s her faith that has made her well. It wasn’t some magical force that she connived out of Jesus. It was faith in this man she’d heard about. It was faith in this one who was so obviously by his preaching and by his miracles the Lord’s Messiah who had come to set the word to rights. And so she came to Jesus the Messiah in faith, knowing that if he could set Israel to rights, if he could set the world to rights, he could surely set her to rights too. She trusted enough to risk the crowd. And her faith overcame the fear of public exposure and public shaming. And because of that faith, Jesus sends her off in peace—he sends her off not only physically healed, but spiritually restored, and spiritually restored because she’s been welcomed into the kingdom.
All this is wonderful, but what about Jairus’ daughter? As Mark and Luke tell it, the situation is even more desperate and discouraging. When Jairus came to Jesus his daughter was at the point of death—not quite dead yet—hence emphasis on the crowd and the delay it caused. Luke tells us:
While he was still speaking, someone from the ruler’s house came and said, “Your daughter is dead; do not trouble the Teacher any more.” (Luke 8:49)
It’s too late. While the crowd and the sick woman delayed Jesus, the girl had died. Maybe the servant hadn’t seen what had just happened. That, or he just plain didn’t understand Jesus—who he was and what he was about. A woman had just come to Jesus in faith knowing that he was the Messiah and Jesus now shows that her faith was well-placed and justified. Luke says that Jesus addressed Jairus and the messenger:
But Jesus on hearing this answered him, “Do not fear; only believe, and she will be well.” (Luke 9:50)
Matthew then carries on and writes:
And when Jesus came to the ruler’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” (Matthew 9:23-24)
Jesus goes to Jairus’ house anyway. When they arrive they discover funeral mourners are already there and getting things started. Jesus sends them packing. Matthew says “They all laughed at him”. “Jesus, We’re in the funeral business. This is how we make our living. We know a dead person when we see one. Faith, shmaith—she’s gone!” But consider that the woman in the crowd could have said the same thing. “Faith? I’ve spent my life savings on doctors and none of them could heal me. And maybe the Lord could heal me—but I’d have to find some way to get into his presence first and I can’t because I’m unclean. It’s hopeless!” But that’s not what she believed. She had faith. And Jairus has faith too. That he came to Jesus in the first place shows that he had faith, but that faith was strengthened by what he saw in the crowd and that faith was demonstrated as he invited Jesus home, even after his servant had told him that it was too late. And so as the crowd laughs at him, Jesus goes into the house.
But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl arose. And the report of this went through all that district. (Matthew 9:25-26)
People—including the disciples—doubted. They lacked faith. And Jesus responds to them not only by working miracles, but by specifically working the miracles that the Old Testament prophets had said the Messiah would work. Isaiah had prophesied that he would preach good news to the poor and that he would give life to the dead. And that’s just what Jesus does. The woman in the crowd: Jesus gave her life her back—physically, socially, spiritually. She was a daughter of Abraham, but because of her sickness she was unclean, an outcast, and shut out from the presence of God. She was doomed. But because of her faith, Jesus gave her new life and restored her to the fellowship of God’s kingdom. If there was ever a case of good news being preached to the poor, that was it. And from there he goes to Jairus’ daughter and literally raises the dead to life. He confirms the faith of Jairus and his wife. Jesus doesn’t tell them to go in peace as he did the woman. He doesn’t call Jairus “Son”—he didn’t need that specific reassurance—but, nevertheless, their faith has brought them into the kingdom too.
Jesus is ushering in the kingdom. He’s giving healing and restoration and calling people into that kingdom. And at the same time he’s establishing his identity. Think about it. There were two common things that the average person ran into fairly regularly that would render them unclean: death and blood. Both were common and both were things everyone avoided. And both are here. The unclean woman comes to Jesus, touches him, and instead of Jesus turning to the crowd to ask who just made him unclean, he does just the opposite: “Who just caused power to go out from me?” The uncleanness couldn’t touch Jesus. Just the opposite, in fact. Jesus’ cleanness, his vitality, his life flow to those who come to him in faith. And it’s for that reason that he didn’t hesitate to go and lay hands on the dead girl. He made a point of touching the dead so that everyone could see that it’s death that has to worry about coming into contact with Jesus, not the other way around. There’s a joke: When the Bogey Man goes to sleep, he checks under his bed for Chuck Norris. Brothers and Sisters, when Death goes to sleep, he checks under his bed for Jesus—or something like that. When Jesus comes, demons flee, disease is undone, sin is forgiven, and even death runs from his life-giving touch.
Brothers and Sisters, Jesus foreshadows here what he’ll do at the cross. He doesn’t flee from our sickness and our sin. No, just the opposite. He embraces us as sick and unclean and as tainted by death as we are in our sin. At the cross he took our sin upon himself. He suffered death for our sake. He suffered and died, taking our punishment on himself, but even the grave couldn’t hold him. On the third day he burst forth full of life, having conquered sin and death. The revolution had begun. And so we come to him in faith and he embraces us. He takes our sin himself and releases us to go in peace, cleansed and made whole, and welcomed into his kingdom. And he fills us with his Spirit, his Sons and Daughters, and he sends us out to proclaim the Revolution and to make it known.
Remember, God sent his Son into the world to redeem us from sin and death, from sickness and pain. These are problems that we human beings have brought on ourselves because of our sin. In the midst of suffering I’ve often had people ask why God is punishing them. Friends, that’s not how God works. Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16-17).
Jesus didn’t come to heap more misery and judgement on us. He came to heal and save because we were already suffering from the consequences of our sin, because we already stood condemned and judged. Remember, the Jews were suffering—they were living miserable lives in a sort of exile—they were supposed to be the people who lived with God in their midst, but when they returned from exile and rebuilt the temple, the divine cloud of glory never returned—and so their prayer and hope was that God would return and that when he did he wouldsmite all the pagan gentiles causing their misery. Brothers and Aisters, in Jesus God did come to visit his people, but in Jesus we see that our real problem isn’t the evil people around us, the people persecuting us or causing our misery. The real problem is our own subjection to sin and the death that our sin has brought into the world. Not one of us is free from the corruption of sin.
If God had come to visit his people as the Jews expected it would have meant judgement and damnation for us all—Jew and gentile alike. But instead, in his lovingkindess, God visited his Creation by sending his Son to take our sin upon himself, to die the death we deserve, to make us clean and to set us free. He sent his Son so that when he does come at the end of history to judge the living and the dead, those who have believed in Jesus, those who have repented, submitted to his lordship, and trusted in his victory over sin and death, those who have become a part of the revolution, those who live in hopeful faith of God’s new world, will be spared the punishment of sin. Jesus came to forgive and to welcome us into the kingdom he is establishing and which will be consummated on that last day. And so remember, God doesn’t afflict us. Just the opposite. He so desires to help us out of the trouble brought by our sin that he spared not his own Son.
And as he welcomes us into his kingdom, he sends us out into the world. As Jesus shared in our suffering in order to make us clean, he now sends us out to embrace those still subject to sin and death. Friends, Jesus had no reason to fear uncleanness because he was full of life. And we have no reason to fear uncleanness either. Jesus has washed us clean. He’s filled us with his own Spirit. He’s given us his own life. And now he calls us to go out into the world to preach good news to everyone else mired in and suffering the consequences of sin—to proclaim the good news that in the Lord Jesus sin and death are defeated and creation is finally being set to rights. As we once came to him in faith, trusting in his victory over sin and death, let us go out in that same faith, trusting that through his church—through us and in the power of the Spirit—he will make his saving and redeeming victory known to the world.
Let us pray: Gracious Father, thank you for sending your Son into the world that we might be forgiven our sins and restored to life. Strengthen our faith that we might always trust in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus, that we might always remember that he has conquered sin and death, and that we might go forth into the world in power to share his victory and to share his life. We ask this in his name. Amen.
A Sermon for All Saints’ Sunday St. Matthew 5:1-12, Revelation 7:2-17, and Wisdom 3:1-9 by William Klock The Feast of All Saints is one of oldest feasts on the Church’s calendar. We have evidence of sermons preached on this occasion as far back as the Third Century. Those early Christians observed it to commemorate the many martyrs of those early centuries—brothers and sisters who gave up their lives, rather than deny their faith in Jesus. As the empire eventually converted and martyrdom became less common, the feast gradually came to encompass all the saints, all our brothers and sisters who have gone before us, not just those who were martyred. But the theme of martyrdom—and of the Christian hope held so tightly by those martyrs—lies at the heart of our lessons today. Jesus has inaugurated the age to come, but it has not yet fully displaced the old evil age—and that old evil age continues sometimes to grind down the faithful. The world shouts, “Good riddance.” In the words of our Old Testament lesson from the Wisdom of Solomon, “In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died” and “in the sight of men they were punished”, but the reality is that their hope was not in vain, “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will touch them…They will govern nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever.” Apocryphal that text may be, but it highlights the truth of God’s kingdom and its conflict with the world. The kingdom of God seems upside-down—but only because the values of fallen humanity were upside-down already.
This is what lies behind our Gospel lesson, the Beatitudes, the first part of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”. Jesus begins his famous sermon with a list of people who are “blessed”. That’s language straight from the Lord’s covenant with Abraham. Remember, the Lord called him and promised not only that he would bless Abraham, but that through him he would bless the nations. To be “blessed” isn’t so much about being happy or prosperous, but about being the people God had called his people to be, about being the people who live with God in their midst—it’s about being kingdom people. Israel had mostly failed at this, but there was always a faithful few who really did have a sense of what God had called them to do. We see them in people like John’s father, Zechariah, in Mary and in Joseph, in Simeon and in Anna. But the thing was that none of these people were the sort most people expected to be exemplifying the kingdom of God. Sure, they were faithful in their simple ways, but they weren’t important, they weren’t rich, they weren’t powerful—they were nobodies. They were the people being ground up in the gears turned by the bigshots, whether that was the Romans or the Herodians or the corrupt Sadducees who controlled the temple and the priesthood. And yet it says something that it’s with these people that the good news begins. And it’s with these people—and the people like them to whom Jesus had been ministering in Galilee—that he begins his most important sermon on the kingdom. Jesus says:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)
I think we have a tendency to read this and think that what Jesus is saying is that if we behave a certain way—in this case, if we’re poor in spirit—then we will somehow earn or be worthy of God’s blessing. But that’s not it at all. Again, think of Abraham. In Genesis 12 God calls Abraham and he says to him, “I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great.” The Lord reiterated and renewed this promise to the generations that came after Abraham. This was his promise to Israel, “I will bless you” and this was at the core of Jewish identity. To be blessed was to be part of the covenant people of God. When Jesus talks about people who are blessed, he’s answering the question of who belongs to the people of God. But here’s where he turns things upside-down—at least that’s how it seemed to so many of the people who heard him. Most people just assumed that because they were descendants of Abraham, were circumcised, ate the right food, observed the Sabbath, and stayed away from Gentiles that they were “blessed” because they were God’s people. But here’s the thing: the Lord’s blessing wasn’t blessing for the sake of blessing. There was more to the promise. He said to Abraham, “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing.” A blessing to whom? The Lord says to all the families of the earth. Israel was to be like salt, preserving the earth. Israel was to be a light, shining in the darkness and leading the nations back to the knowledge of God. In fact, after these Beatitudes, that’s the next thing Jesus goes on to preach about: salt and light. If you’re not being salt and light, you’re not blessing and are not blessed—you’re not part of the kingdom.
This is what blessing is about. The people Jesus describes here are the people through whom God makes his kingdom known. They’re the people who already understand and are already living the life of the kingdom. He starts with the poor in spirit. I can’t help but think of Mary. When she finds out that she’s going to be the mother of the Lord’s Messiah she doesn’t get full of herself. There were plenty of people who would have. No, she bursts out into a song of praise and the first things she sings is, “My soul doth magnify the Lord…for he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.”
Most people expected God to usher in his kingdom by coming to the important people, the wealthy people, the powerful and politically connected people. Most people expected the Messiah to ride into Jerusalem like King David in a chariot with a sword and with an army. Instead he came to a poor young girl. And it was people like Mary, people who were poor in spirit who came flocking to Jesus and in and through them the kingdom of God burst into the world. The humble came to Jesus in faith and he opened their blind eyes, he healed their paralysed legs, he healed their diseases, he cast out their demons, he even raised their children from death. Meanwhile many of the powerful people, like the Sadducees, fumed that Jesus was offering forgiveness of sins without sending these people to the temple to offer sacrifices. Meanwhile, many of the Pharisees, people who thought of themselves as righteous, were fuming because Jesus was welcoming the unclean and the sinful. But Jesus says that the kingdom won’t be found with the powerful or the self-righteous, but with those humble enough to follow the king born in a stable.
The rest of the Beatitudes go the same way. Jesus says:
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:4-9)
Israel was in a sort of exile and the people longed for consolation, but most wanted that consolation to come in the form of a Messiah who would put their enemies to the sword. Jesus says that, no, those who will be comforted, those who will show the kingdom, are those who mourn the sins of Israel and who are ready to repent and turn back to God. Israel wanted to inherit the earth, but Jesus reminds them that their inheritance will come not through those who are full of pride, not through those who think they’re better than everyone else because of their descent from Abraham or their circumcision or their diet, but it will instead come through those who are meek. Israel longed for justice—which is probably a better translation than “righteousness” in this case, but the justice Israel wanted had more to do with vengeance on her enemies and Jesus is saying, again: No. Your hunger for justice will only be satisfied when you are willing acknowledge your sins and to set aside your rights in favour of humility and gentleness. Israel longed for mercy. She longed for deliverance. But Jesus warns that mercy is only for the merciful, not the vengeful. Israel longed to see God, but Jesus warns: You will never see God so long as your outward acts of piety are a cover for sin. The kingdom is manifest by those who aren’t just outwardly pure, but who are pure of heart. And, of course, Israel saw herself as God’s son. The people longed for God to vindicate them by establishing them once again as a nation over their enemies, but Jesus warns: If you want to be God’s sons you need to show the peacemaking character of your Father. You’re out for vengeance, you’re calling for the blood of your enemies, if you had the chance you’d kill them in their beds and then tell the world that you were acting out the justice of God on the enemies of his people. But people like that will never be sons of the God who seeks not vengeance on his enemies, but offers them mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation. The violent will never be sons of the God who seeks to make peace, even offering his own Son as an atonement for their treason.
Everything Jesus describes here was aimed at Israel’s failure to be God’s people, to be salt and light, as he says in the verses that follow. God had blessed Israel to be a blessing, but they wanted to keep his blessing to themselves, which is why he’d taken it away and sent them into exile. And most still hadn’t learned. But there was this remnant: again, people like Mary and Zechariah and Simeon who were already showing the world what the kingdom was like, people who were already living out the character of God. People like rough-and-tumble Peter the Fisherman, tax collectors like Matthew and Zacchaeus whom everyone hated, even a Roman centurion or two. People whom the world saw as nobodies—or worse as undeserving a place in the kingdom—but who were in reality already sharing the Lord’s blessing to the world. This is what John the Baptist had been about: calling the people of Israel to repentance, calling them to turn aside from their sin, their folly, from their false views of the kingdom so that they would be prepared for the Messiah.
But, Jesus warns, if you are faithful in being the sorts of people who carry God’s blessing to the word, be prepared for trouble. In verses 10-12 he goes on:
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
I expect Jesus was anticipating where his own ministry was headed when he preached these words. He’d already experienced the anger of his own people. When he preached in his hometown of Nazareth the people tried to throw him off a cliff. He knew that most people were not going to receive what he’s saying here and he knew that he was going to be rejected and that he would suffer and be killed. And he knew, too, that the people who chose to follow him would be persecuted and many would die. At the Cross the present evil age was dealt a death blow. In rising from the grave Jesus inaugurated the age to come. The present age is passing away and the age to come is breaking in, but Jesus knew that his people would live in the overlap. God brought salvation and renewal this way for a reason. The people of Jesus’ day wanted it to come all at once, but God chose to bring it slowly. People today have the same sort of expectation. They ask how a good God can allow so much evil in the world. But in asking that question, in asking why God doesn’t come and deal with evil we’re showing the same sort of self-righteous mindset that dominated Israel. We’re forgetting that for God to come and deal with evil means that God will not only have to deal with our enemies and the people who cause us grief, but that he’ll also have to deal with us. We’re all sinners. We’re all responsible for the mess this world is in—some more, some less—but we’ve all contributed to it. And so God sent Jesus to deal with that sin and to inaugurate his kingdom, but he also delays, and in that he gives sinners a chance to repent and turn to him. It also means that those who, in this in-between time, insist on revealing the kingdom, those who insist on confronting the sinful systems of the old age through their poverty of spirit, through their meekness, through their mercy, through their peacemaking will face the same backlash that Jesus faced. As God’s people pull his future into the present and lift the veil on Creation set to rights, those invested in the way things are will fight back. When God’s people declare that Jesus is the world’s true Lord, the Caesars of this age and their supporters will lash out to silence the challenge.
The martyrs are a testimony to Jesus’ promise. And when you see your brothers and sisters being carted off to die—whether by the Jewish authorities, or the Roman, by Communists or Fascists, by Islamic or Hindu terrorists or pagan tribesmen, it’s easy to fear. Are we really blessed when we are persecuted for the sake of righteousness? This was the purpose behind St. John’s “revelation”. The church was on the verge of being plunged into violent persecution—a time of trial and tribulation. Would their faith hold? And what about those who died for the sake of faith in Jesus? And so God gave John a vision. Just as Jesus had promised, judgement was coming, first on unbelieving Israel and then on the pagan word of the Greeks and Romans. The scroll of judgement is brought forth—this in the fifth and sixth chapters of Revelation—sealed with seven seals, which only the lamb—now come as the lion of Judah—can open. As the judgement is unleashed on Jerusalem, the saints are reminded that God is in control. The judgement plays out here just as Jesus had said it would. And, too, the Lord marks out his own. That’s where our lesson today from Revelation picks up. The winds of judgement are poised to bring destruction to Jerusalem. This is the great day of the wrath of God and of the lamb. But what of the faithful? The opening of the scroll is stopped for their sake. Look at Revelation 7:2-3.
Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.”
The imagery here is drawn from Ezekiel. The prophet was shown a vision of Israel’s idolatry and then a vision of a “man clothed in linen” who was directed by the Lord to “put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it” (Ezekiel 9:3-4). Immediately after, the Lord sent six other men through Jerusalem, beginning at the temple, to slay men and women, young and old, but they were to “touch no one on whom is the mark” (9:2, 5-6). What the Lord did in Ezekiel’s day is about to happen again, but the Lord will spare the faithful. Those who are sealed by the angel are announced in verse 4:
And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel.
The text goes on to list specifically twelve thousand from each of the twelve tribes. This is the remnant of faithful Israel, much like those marked out in Ezekiel’s vision centuries before. This is the Jewish church of Jerusalem and Judea, those Jews who heard the good news and embraced Jesus the Messiah. Those Jews who were appalled by Israel’s abominations. Those who were about to face violent persecution at the hands of their fellow Jews. The Lord will not abandon them, even though they die. He places his mark on them and seals them as his own. And their faithfulness to Jesus the Messiah is the means by which the nations are brought to the cross. They are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, and they know blessing as a result, because it is through their faithfulness to Jesus that they fulfil the Abrahamic covenant’s call to be a blessing to the nations.
John hears the announcement of the sealing of the Jewish church, and then he sees a vision of a multitude that could not be numbered, drawn from the nations:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10)
And jumping down to verse 13:
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?”… And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. (Revelation 7:13-14)
John’s vision now draws on the imagery of the prophet Daniel, who wrote of another time of great distress through which the Lord saw a faithful remnant of his people. The wise amongst them were refined through persecution that they might “shine like the brightness of the sky above” (12:3) so that they would “turn many to righteousness”. Faithful Israel, through her unwavering allegiance to Jesus in this time of trial would serve as the witnesses—witnesses to the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus—witnesses that will bring the nations to faith in the Lord. The faithfulness of the 144,000, of the Jewish martyrs, their robes soaked in their own blood, brings that multi-ethnic multitude to Jesus that he might wash their robes in his blood and make them part of his people. As Zechariah had prophesied, ten men from the nations, of every tongue, will take hold of the robe of a Jew and say, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you!” (8:23)
Jeremiah says something very similar. Jeremiah 31:7 cries out for the Lord to save the remnant of Israel and in response, the Lord will bring a great multitude from the farthest parts of the earth. John’s vision here draws on Jeremiah’s imagery. There the Lord will keep Israel “as a shepherd keeps his flock. They shall “come and sing on the height of Zion”. They “shall hunger no more” and God will “turn their mourning into joy”. He will “comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow”. And here John sees this new, multi-ethnic Israel, gathered from the nations, “before the throne of God” where they “serve him day and night in his temple.” He will “shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:15-17).
Brothers and Sisters, as they remind us of the witness of those Christians who have gone before us, today’s lessons call you and I to faith and to hope. We’re reminded today of the way in which the faithfulness of the people of God, their faithfulness to Jesus as Lord, their faithfulness to his kingdom, even in the midst of persecution, was the means by which God brought the nations to Jesus. It’s also a witness to the faithfulness of God, who gathers his people to himself. He gives his own Spirit to his people that they—that even we—might face persecution in faith. Today we see him embracing his people and wiping away their tears. Revelation tells us the story of our brothers and sisters who lived in the First Century—of those Jewish believers who faced persecution and martyrdom at the hands of unbelieving Israel and of that multitude drawn because of their witness from the pagan Greco-Roman world. They, too would face persecution at the hands of an empire that would, because of their witness, eventually be brought in submission to the lordship of Jesus. And yet there’s obviously more to the story of Jesus’ people. What we see in John’s vision is intermediate and temporary. The martyrs held close by God as saints on earth and in heaven await the consummation of history, that day when the faithful will follow Jesus in his resurrection, when all things are made new, when heaven and earth are rejoined, and when men and women once again dwell in the presence of the Lord.
Brothers and Sisters, we don’t know what will happen between now and then. We may face our own time of great tribulation one day, but even if we don’t, we continue in the ordinary fight of Christians in every generation against the world, the flesh, and the devil. We face the ordinary troubles of life in an imperfect world and the difficulties of being faithful witnesses of Jesus in a culture that worships its own versions of Caesar and Mammon, Mars and Aphrodite. Let us, like the saints who have gone before, stand firm in faith as stewards of the good news of Jesus and his kingdom, knowing that our God is faithful to his promises. Let us be the people blessed to be a blessing, living out the life and values of Jesus’ kingdom, pulling God’s future into the present and lifting the veil on Creation set to rights, even though it may mean opposition and persecution. Jesus has promised to hold us close, even in death, until that day when he makes all things—including us—new.
Let’s pray: Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those inexpressible joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.